Creating one's own being

Father's Day seems like as good a time as any to break the blog silence, especially since child-related severe sleep deprivation has been a major factor in that silence. Also, the topic is children and philosophy.

In a recent post at Larval Subjects, Levi Bryant writes the following:

My daughter, who is now three and a half, has precipitated a true revolution in my thinking about the world. Prior to the arrival of my daughter, I think, deeply influenced as I am by Foucault, Bourdieu, and Lacan I was unconsciously a sort of behaviorist in my understanding of human nature. I think I advocated a strong environmentalist thesis to the effect that persons are simply products of the environment in which they’re individuated. What my daughter has taught me is the withdrawal of objects from their relations. This is best thought in terms of my recent post on Luhman. What I’ve discovered through my daughter is that all substances are abyssal black boxes. They are influenced by their surroundings, but they relate to their surroundings through their own internal structure or organization, generating deeply surprising responses to the world around them. She quite literally constitutes and creates her own being. I can’t make her be anything and each way in which I influence her will be structured or transformed into states of her being through her own organization. When McLuhan says that “the medium is the message”, this is, I think, what he meant. The medium, the object, organizes the message that it receives in its own terms.

I've blogged a lot about how I've come very late to the reading of philosophy. This late-coming is both irksome and instructive: I'm annoyed that I have so much to catch up on, but on the other hand, I'm not already unduly influenced by any one or two philosophies or schools or whatever. I bring my 40 years of life to the reading of philosophy. What has struck me as I read has been the almost total absence of women and children, certainly the dearth of anything intelligent said about women or children. It has occurred to me that the history of philosophy would look radically different if philosophy had not been generated almost exclusively by men off on their own doing Important Work. (Not least because the most important work that is done is in fact the raising of children.) Because it seems to me that one cannot help but have one's philosophy radically affected by what children actually do in the world, if one actually watches them, at all. That is, something like what Levi Bryant has concluded in observing his own daughter should be readily apparent to any one who observes children. This ought to have deep implications in many areas of life, not just the development and writing of philosophy.

Placeholding thoughts on science and philosophy and politics, etc

A few things have been on my mind, jostling for position amidst the fog, angling for inclusion in essays. A longer post or two may come out of these, but no promises or threats.

1. I may have missed the best time to acquaint myself with the language of philosophy, but this is not altogether a bad thing. My perspective on things is different for not having already immersed myself in it. For example, in reading blogs such as Levi Bryant's Larval Subjects and Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Philosophy, I have learned that being a realist means that one holds that the world exists--objects exist--independent of man's relation to them (but not necessarily those traits that we perceive); I have further learned that this runs counter to the main currents of continental philosophy. I find this astonishing (assuming I understand things correctly). In the deleted iteration of his blog, Harman suggested that "this results from the combined fear & boredom with which most humanities types face the natural sciences". No doubt this is true. I find myself more interested, by far, in continental than in analytic philosophy, yet it would never occur to me to doubt the independent existence of external objects. (This Larval Subjects post helps clarify the realism thing for me. His casual use--not at all unique to him--of the word knowledge bothers me. Something else to return to here.)

2. Science, it follows, is very important. This sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, but I say it to make it clear that I personally value science very highly and am aware that some of my posts in recent months might give one the impression that I do not. I come out of that utilitarian, empirical, Anglo-American mode which I have elsewhere decried. Part of that is a strong devotion to science (which is not to say that I have been specifically trained in any of the natural sciences). So science is unquestionably important, but I have some political, philosophical, and ethical questions for it, some which I've always had, if largely unarticulated, some of which have come to mind more recently. In my view, science is too often seen as this pure mode of inquiry, independent of political and economic concerns, untainted by prejudice or point of view or money, unrelated, in its historical development, to other historical arcs. Of course it is not. Worse, the history of science and of technological change is seen as inexorable, inevitable, as if it were not heavily implicated in the history of capitalism (which, recall, requires continual technological and organizational change in order to maintain the rate of accumulation).

3. Allow me, then, to use this theme as an excuse to once again refer to Graham Harman and two posts he wrote (one, two) reporting on a lecture he attended in Ireland given by James Lovelock. The topic, of course, is climate change and how we're basically fucked. Harman makes the lectures and Lovelock's books sound both fascinating and frightening (there is nothing about climate change that is not finally frightening, if one pays the least attention to the science and isn't simply trying to make excuses in order to avoid massive change), but there is one thing in particular I want to highlight here. Among the points Lovelock makes, according to Harman, is this:

Guilt is unhelpful. We got to this point because we all naturally struggled to survive and flourish, farming and industrializing for this reason. Anger at energy companies is misplaced. They only produce so much carbon dioxide because we all demand energy in our own lives.

Similarly, in this article at TomDispatch, Chip Ward, while arguing correctly that perhaps we should not be trying to "recover" the economy as it was because of its inherent ecological untenability, says this:

Believing that we are unbounded by nature's limits or rules, we built an economy where faster, cheaper, bigger, and more added up to the winning hand. Then -- until the recent global meltdown at least -- we acted as if our eventual triumph over anything from resource scarcity to those melting icebergs was a foregone conclusion.

He goes on for a bit longer in this vein. Who is this "we" of whom he and Lovelock speak? We did not build the economy. While we do certainly all naturally struggle to survive and flourish, there is absolutely no reason to believe that industrialization was necessary to that struggle--meaning both that there is no reason to assume that industrialization necessarily occurs out of that struggle, nor that industrialization has aided us, for humanity as a whole, in that struggle. And in no sense can it be said that we merely "got to this point" because of decisions we made. Capitalism was imposed and resisted. Industrialization was imposed and resisted. This imposition and resistance continues.

4. This post at Voyou Désœuvré, on Andrea Dworkin and Joan of Arc and Machiavelli and constructions of masculinity, reminds me, yet again, that I've been wanting to read Dworkin and other radical feminists for some time. To my mind, the way forward must be radically feminist, which to me means that at minimum change must be woman-focused, which itself inevitably means focusing on issues surrounding pregnancy and birth and childcare and other things of immediate importance to mothers. That is, the larger conception of feminist politics should focused less on "the workplace" (the right to work being on the one hand largely redundant, since most women have no choice, and on the other hand normalizing highly dysfunctional male work values) than on childcare work and on health issues for women and children--i.e., issues affecting most women. Anyway, Voyou isn't talking about this here but ends by making use of Wendy Brown's criticisms of Catherine MacKinnon and "the doomed attempt by some feminists to achieve feminist ends solely by appealing to the very liberal legal structure they themselves recognize as irredeemably patriarchal". Good stuff.

5. More science pointers, to finish up. I have found a few more recent Larval Subjects posts about neurology utterly fascinating, full of all kinds of stuff that I know is absolutely right, but which also raise in me the germ of objection at a certain basic level. This one has me wanting to read books by neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, for example his A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination, discussed in the post. Late in the entry, LS makes this crucial observation: "philosophers all too often privilege the standpoint of the adult and the 'healthy', ignoring childhood development". And this post about the "bidirectionality of causal relations between different levels" of different kinds of systems, such as DNA and the environment, has me nodding along, yes, yes, yes, yes. A longer quote to spell more of it out (since I have not described it at all):

[Biologist Gilbert] Gottleib is pointing out the manner in which the environment (not to mention RNA, cells, networks of cells, and organs) can actualize and activate DNA in a variety of ways producing very different outcomes. Pause and consider that for a moment. Rather than an inexorable unilateral development from DNA to structure and function, we instead get bidirectional feeding forward and backward producing an aleatory outcome that can only be described as a genuine creation. Factors such as environmental temperature, light and darkness, the presence or absence of particular nutrients and chemical substances, the presence or absence of dampness, the presence of various predators, altitude, caregivers, etc., all make important differences in the final actualized individual or phenotypical outcome. But to speak of a phenotypical outcome is already to speak poorly, for ontogenesis is a lifelong process for the organism that doesn’t simply end with maturity. But in addition to all of this, all things being equal, cultural formations, social relations, social encounters, etc., as environmental factors, feed back all the way to the genetic level as well. I am not simply a product of my culture at the level of my mentality, my subjectivity, but at the level of my cells and my DNA as well. Were I born in the 18th century, my DNA and my cells would be actualized differently as a result of a variety of different environmental factors ranging from diet to how I am brought up. My phenotype, my mature organism, would not be the same.

It's nice to see the adaptationists (who, as LS notes, end up "naturalizing and essentializing human practices, social organizations, and forms of subjectivity in ways that can only be described as reactionary") taken to task, and those steeped in cultural studies and social sciences should indeed be chided for ignoring out of hand neuroscience and evolutionary biology (as they have also been chided by, for example, Marxist anthropologist Chris Knight, who in his brilliant and important book Blood Relations, recall, called the general leftwing response to modern evolutionary theory a disgrace). To my mind this is all blindingly obvious (note, also, that in my post about patterning texts I effectively make part of the same argument). Or, more charitably, it's a more detailed version of the nature and nurture argument. Anyone who has a child, or indeed as ever watched children with any attention, can see that the child both has its own personality, distinct from those of his or her parents, and is always learning, always figuring things out. Nature versus nurture has always been a false dichotomy, one that's always bothered me, since before I understood the first thing about evolution.

This post was going to be even longer and include stuff about literary and more explicitly political stuff on my mind of late--including Blanchot's communism, Heidegger, the bourgeois novel, genre--but they'll have to wait as it's time to close this one out.

Truth of the Situation

Inifinite ThØught is suffering from an illness, origin unknown:

In these situations I long for a kind of Enlightenment of illness: there is a truth of the situation. Something specific genuinely caused the sickness, and yet I have no way of measuring it, no way of finding out. It's a similar feeling when you lose something and you know that it is somewhere in the world, except that you can't see the world in that total way. But why not? I know we're not supposed to like totalities and technology after the twentieth century, but you know, we can't actually measure very many things at all. Heidegger's fears about calculation seem premature, and his alternative even worse. One of my least favourite academic tropes is the anti-technology paper, where someone sits their with their laptop, their vaccines, their antibiotics, their clothes and their hospitals bemoaning the lack of authenticity of modern life. The hypocrisy is profoundly irritating. I want to say 'Go on then! Live in a stupid hut with no running water! Lie there moaning in agony when your teeth start hurting or your heart plays up! Go and skin rabbits with your flints! Never speak to anyone who isn't directly in front of you! Think that the stars are anthropomorphic reflections of your own lack of curiosity!'

I highlight this because I often come dangerously close to posting this kind of anti-technology screed myself. I usually pull back, not wanting to be misunderstood, not wanting to be too blatantly hypocritical. But there are reasons why the tendency exists. I am increasingly doubtful about the viability of modern life, of civilization even. What drives my thoughts? Dissatisfaction, yes. But also fear. I admit that I fear the downfall of civilization. I fear the ugliness of a financial collapse. Civilization, as Derrick Jensen reminds us, means, at its root, cities, and cities, by definition, survive, exist, by extracting resources, life, from the periphery. Civilization at large can be seen as one giant city, one huge megalopolis extracting living material from parts unknown (unknown to most of us), where people are unable to hold onto what life they know.

In the second and last paragraph in IT's short post she bemoans that now we have "measurement of the very worst kind (house prices, incomes, school fees) coupled with an embodied phenomenology of the most banal type" and concludes:

No one apparently gives a fuck about proper science, and our horizons barely extend past our front door. We don't deserve the cosmos. I hope nature destroys us all for not bothering to understand it properly.

This is just it, isn't it? Proper science? Science is supposed to be about understanding the world; it's become about controlling it, is subsumed to power, to money. Science has been replaced by scientism and by faith in technology; science is supposed to undermine the appeal to authority, but now we're supposed to trust the experts. Things have long since gone off the rails. Is it any wonder that some of us feel some measure of dismay? Is it possible to question the authenticity of modern existence, while at the same time knowing full well how dependent I am on my car, my refrigerator, on electricity? (In full knowledge of the wireless networked laptop in front of me?) Is it possible to feel that there is something ethically wrong about the existence of cities, while also loving cities?

Related: I read this post at You Are My Minions with interest and unease (via). The post is about the recent federal finding decidedly against petitioners claiming a causal link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism (extensive detail here; decision summary: "The evidence was overwhelmingly contrary to the petitioners’ contentions"). As a new parent, I appreciate the report. I have been uncertain in the face of the various vaccines Mirah has had to receive. We have opted for spreading them out. Even so, I have been disturbed that there are so many of them, many more than I received when I was a child, more even than were given to infants just a few years ago. I am disturbed that there is a vaccine for chicken pox, that it is required in order for children to attend the first grade in Baltimore. I can't shake the sense that such public policies have more to do with keeping children in school, rather than home sick, because of the needs of working parents, which is to say the arbitrary needs of their employers. I have felt disturbed by much of this, yet I have also observed that those who forgo vaccines essentially are free-riders on the vaccination system. Except in those cases where entire communities have avoided certain vaccines, the relative health of these children relies on the nonexistence of the diseases in question. The community of children at large does not get these diseases, therefore yours are safe unvaccinated.

Anyway, I appreciate the report. It's good to see the autism case so apparently decided. Alas, I have no trouble believing that some unscrupulous types have taken advantage of parents' fears, manipulating data. I am also well aware that the anti-vaccine crowd is often extremely shrill and impossible. Once such a belief is instilled and is accompanied with the certainty of a righteous cause, it can be all but impossible to dislodge, as is proving to be the case. Unfortunately, and here comes my unease with the post, I also had had no trouble believing it plausible that there might be a causal link. Many people have lost trust in the very institutions they are told exist in order to facilitate their health. There are perfectly valid reasons for this. Industrial waste has been linked to cancer, to various other environmental illnesses. Big pharma is implicated in countless crimes. Our healthcare system is broken. We should take seriously the fear and confusion people often feel at the hands of industrial science and medicalized care. A repaired health system would have to work overtime to repair this trust, and it would require a lot more than just legal decisions and mountains of research data.

Wake Up

In Everyday Blessings, the book about mindful parenting which I mentioned previously, there is a chapter called "Live-In Zen Masters". In it, co-author Jon Kabat-Zinn talks some about his Zen training: "It's all about mindfulness and non-attachment, knowing who we are at the deepest levels, and knowing what we are doing, which paradoxically includes both not knowing and non-doing." He compares Zen training to parenting: "They both appeared to be about waking up to life itself. . ." and sees babies as akin to "live-in Zen Masters":

Zen Masters don't explain themselves. They just embody presence. They don't get hung up in thinking, or lost in theoretical musings about this or that. They are not attached to things being a certain way. They are not always consistent. One day does not necessarily have to be like the next. Their presence and their teachings can help us break through to a direct experiencing of our own true nature, and encourage us to find our own way, now, in this moment. They do this, not by telling us how, but by giving us endless challenges that cannot be resolved through thinking, by mirroring life back to us in its fullness, by pointing to wholeness. More than anything Zen Masters embody wakefulness and call it out of us.

Children are similar in many ways, especially when they are babies. The older they get, the harder it may be for us to see it. But their true nature is always present, and always mirroring our own, if we are willing to look, and to see.

Children have what might be called "original mind"--open, pure, unencumbered. They are undeniably and totally present. They are constantly learning, developing, changing, and requiring new responses from us. As they grow, they seem to challenge every place that we might be holding an expectation, a fixed opinion, a cherished belief, a desire for things to be a certain way. As babies, they so fill our lives and require so much attention to their physical and emotional needs that they continually challenge us to be present totally, to be sensitive, to inquire into what is actually happening, to risk trying something, and to learn from their responses to our attempts. They teach us how to be attuned to them, and to find joy and harmony in our connectedness with them. There is little time for theory, and it doesn't seem to help much anyway unless it is connected to practice.

Of course, children are not really Zen Masters. Children are children and Zen Masters are Zen Masters. But if we are able to look at our children with openness and receptivity, and see the purity of life expressing itself through them, at any age, it can wake us up at any moment to their true nature and to our own.

I read this passage last night, and a few things struck me about it. For one thing, the language about "knowing" and "not knowing and non-doing" reminds me specifically of Thomas Merton's essay titled "Love and Solitude", collected in Love and Living, an essay I had particular trouble with. Here, for example, is the opening paragraph of "Love and Solitude":

No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. These pages seek nothing more than to echo the silence and the peace that is "heard" when the rain wanders freely among the hills and forests. But what can the wind say where there is no hearer? There is then a deeper silence: the silence in which the Hearer is No-Hearer. That deeper silence must be heard before one can speak truly of solitude.

I remember having trouble with this essay and that it reminded me of those kinds of writing that have given me the most difficulty--the kind of writing I've been struggling with recently, for example writing by Blanchot and Heidegger. It strikes me now, in copying out the passage above, that another pass at this Merton essay may be helpful to understanding Blanchot's "essential solitude". And words in the Kabat-Zinn passage, words like "fullness" and "presence" and "wake us up", also remind me of Blanchot and Heidegger (in my admittedly limited experience with each).

Of course, many people in the West have been drawn to Eastern traditions, such as Zen Buddhism, because they are dissatisfied with the spiritual life of the West. The West is often seen as spiritually bereft, as overly analytical or "rational", and so on. I'm sympathetic to this charge, though I am neither inclined nor prepared to enter into a detailed treatment of the topic in this space. As someone about to become a father, I am thus far persuaded that there is great wisdom in the approach to parenting described in Everyday Blessings (how well I will do it remains to be seen). What interests me here, however, are the ways in which the language at times reminds me of that language used in the writing I find difficult (but which in this context I do not find difficult), and what that might tell us about the philosophical and literary project of these writers--which matters to me because of how I conceive of its importance in the grand scheme of living in the modern world, including the ongoing project of living my own life, and the importance of art, literature in particular.

It seems to me that, among the reasons Blanchot and Heidegger are difficult, is that they are writing about ideas and concepts for which we lack either the sufficient vocabulary or the sufficient kinds of experience, or vocabulary for noting experiences, which perhaps amounts to much the same thing. It could be that we lack the vocabulary because we have been, for centuries, falsely employing concepts carelessly borrowed from our ancient predecessors. And it could be that the vocabulary we do use is confusing because it is unable to properly express the concepts under discussion (much as, in English, we lack a word sufficient to express the French jouissance).

I know I've made some claims that are both vague and grandiose, but I hope to be able to make at least some headway in future posts in articulating what I mean, along the way towards my understanding of it myself. I'll finish by saying that I hope it will become clearer why I insist on writing posts that are about some combination of babies and writing and philosophy and politics, and why most of those posts that seem unconnected are in fact connected, and in certain ways about the same thing.

The possibility of being self-propelled

Back in March, at his Black Mirrors site, Lloyd Mintern posted a fascinating piece called “Bridle” in which he writes about Piaget and the necessary egocentrism of children. Here's just part of it, towards the end:

Everyone was a child. There is a universal. What the child does not understand at first is just how incomparable life is; that is what he has to learn, why he wants constant explanations. The big discovery is that he is a person on his own. He does not start with himself, but finds himself among the others. He does not start out with the idea that he [is] unique, and adapt to a disappointing reality in which he is only one among others, all equally downtrodden and dull. No, he starts out believing others are more real than him, totally interesting, knowledgeable, and he has to find himself among this group. He has to disassociate from the others, who are threatened, it seems, by dullness, for after all, what do they know? It is like they are all children! So they should, and must, cooperate with his exciting adventure of creating a self–it is vital that he, the discovered center of attention, thrive! He grows more and more vivid to himself and excited by the prospects of a unique existence. In fact the building of a self is the consummate unselfish activity. He is astonished if adults accuse him of being self-centered. In fact, he is doing it for them, and they should be pleased with his progress. The child sees the possibility of being self-propelled, but he does not arrive in life with it, he finds it in the world that is a novelty. Babies come into the world prepared from afar, supplied, they are not weak, they are not undeveloped, but they are vessels . . .

Earlier in the post, Lloyd writes that "the child is in the middle of something when he is born, not at the beginning". He's not really talking about the same thing, but this line reminds me of the Bernhard passage that gives this blog its name:

No one ever cast a more damaging light on his relatives than Wertheimer, described them into the dirt. Hated his father, mother, sister, reproached them all with his unhappiness. That he had to continue existing, constantly reminding them that they had thrown him up into that awful existence machine so that he would be spewed out below, a mangled pulp. His mother threw her child into this existence machine, all his life his father kept this existence machine running, which accurately hacked his son to pieces. Parents know very well that they perpetuate their own unhappiness in their children, they go about it cruelly by having children and throwing into the existence machine, he said, I thought. (The Loser, pp. 43-44)

It isn't necessary to hate our parents as Wertheimer did for us to recognize the truth of what is said here. We learn how to behave in the world, we learn what is "acceptable", how to be, through the actions and non-actions of our parents and the other adults in our lives. This much is obvious. But what does it mean? Maybe our parents were simply very busy and were unable to be attuned to our needs, moment-to-moment. Enough of this and perhaps we learn that no one will listen to us if we cry, so perhaps we learn not to cry. Or we learn some other way of avoiding the practice of allowing our true needs to become known. We might learn this about ourselves, that we tend to be emotionally distant, or that we tend to avoid expressing emotions. We might be able to take steps to overcome this in ourselves. Yet, still, when we have children of our own, how easy is it to fall back on what was done when we were children? And then to rationalize it away! ("This is what my parents did, and I turned out ok." Sure you did.)

It will come as no surprise that, along with the Proust and Beckett, Josipovici and Blanchot, I've been dipping into a variety of baby books and parenting books. (It may be more of a surprise when I say that I find the latter related to the former.) But before I get to a couple of those, let me talk a little about this matter of being born. We are born! What the hell! Where do we come from? There are the basic natural facts of it, of course, but then we have our own experiences and consciousness and we are here. Being. A calamity! A calamity? Why is this a calamity? This idea--that being born might be a calamity--is relatively new to me, on the face of it. And yet, when I identified something true in Bernhard's "existence machine", was I not to some extent recognizing this? I think so.

One of these books I've been reading is called Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting by Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn (Myla, incidentally, is Howard Zinn's daughter). (The idea of a parenting guide or book is an odd one. Parenting is hard enough as it is without having to hear from some strangers the right way to do something. This book isn't really like that, but the mere existence of such a book, as valuable as I'm finding it, somehow nags at me.) The argument is that the best way to approach things is through mindfulness--being mindful of our own responses to situations, mindful of the child's actual needs. Easier said than done, to be sure. One of the key concepts is "sovereignty"--recognizing the child as a sovereign being with his or her own "way". Anyway, they ask us to imagine what it is like for the child, from the beginning:

We might start by imagining what it is like in the uterus, in a place that is warm, wet, and protected, with constant, rhythmic sounds, a feeling of being contained, held, rocked . . . a world of undifferentiated wholeness, where there is nothing wanting, nothing missing. [...]

When we are born, we leave this harmonious world and emerge into a new and totally different one. There might be harsh light and cold air. We may hear loud, unpredictable noises and feel roughness or hardness against our skin. We feel hunger for the first time. All of this is occurring as raw, pure experience, with no filters of knowing anything. Imagine being thrust into this foreign environment, where you depend entirely on the inhabitants' ability to understand your language and to be sensitive and responsive to your whole being, and to what you may need in any given moment.

What might that be like? How do we, as parents, approach this situation? How are our possible approaches constrained by the amount of available time we have? How do we understand this other being? Given that we have problems of our own, how do we avoid perpetuating them through the child?

I imagined this post, as I unfortunately tend to imagine all posts, as a massive, wide-ranging one, in which I try to fit in everything on my mind touching the topic at hand. But that's not possible. There is much to say; there are implications. But I will close here by noting that, in my view, this basic situation--the fact of being born, of being (oh! how I throw this word around, as if I understood it!), and what that really entails for the child and the parents--this situation suggests a certain political response. And a literary one.