Quoth Peter DeVries: “”My secret ambition is to sell a million copies of every book, and then also have a small, select cult of aficionados who look down on my mass audience.”
Waggish
David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.
Page 74 of 148
Okay, let’s do this. Here’s the first sentence in the book:
An excerpt from “The Part About the Crimes” first appeared in Vice.
And with that preview, let’s begin. When I reviewed The Savage Detectives, I said that it was not Bolaño’s best or tightest work (I rate By Night in Chile and the stories in Last Evenings on Earth as his best), so I was curious to see what he would do in his other large work. It’s told in pretty much the same sprawling, episodic manner as the earlier book, but at least in the first section, which I just finished, Bolaño sprawls within tight boundaries, detailing the quest of four scholars to locate the target of their studies, the mysterious writer Archimboldi. 160 pages later, after three of them have taken a long trip to Santa Teresa, Mexico, they have not found him.
Note that Bolaño is using a similar mechanism to the one of The Savage Detectives, in which the two poets central to the narrative (one of whom was Arturo Belano, Bolaño’s surrogate) never spoke for themselves during the major part of the book and were left only to be elucidated upon by a host of figures who had interacted with them over their lives. Here, though, Archimboldi remains wholly elusive, as Bolaño gives only tangential information on him and his work, using him as a MacGuffin for the drama that plays out between the scholars. The four of them, each of whom hails from a different country, are all seeking something in their obsessive search for the man, but whatever it is, it is subordinated to the quest narrative itself, and the romances that develop among the scholars.
So the Archimboldi mythology so far reads to me as a mostly generic mythology, except for the great specifics given to his supposed final location, Santa Teresa, where the hundreds of murders to be detailed later in the book (and partly in Vice) have already taken place. I connect this to the greater reality given to the first and last sections of The Savage Detectives, the parts narrated as a real story rather than as hearsay, and whose second part ends in Santa Teresa as sort of a culmination of a youthful poetic pilgrimage. And thus the first part of 2666 reads as a tentative return to a place outside the civilized world which Archimboldi has fled, a place that is more real or at least more alive as literature. When the scholars meet the less refined translator and Chilean exile Amalfitano in Santa Teresa, their priorities are summed up:
“Exile must be a terrible thing,” said Norton sympathetically.
“Actually,” said Amalfitano, “now I see it as a natural movement, something that, in its way, helps to abolish fate, or what is generally thought of as fate.”
“But exile,” said Pelletier,” is full of inconveniences of skips and breaks that essentially keep recurring and interfere with anything you try to do that’s important.”
“That’s just what I mean by abolishing fate,” said Amalfitano.
So, onto the abolishing of fate. Following this section, which reads as prelude, the next part is about Amalfitano.
[One other thing: some people asked me why I thought Bolaño didn’t do female characters well, and now I cite Liz Norton in 2666 as evidence. She serves too much as a Deus ex machina, sleeping her way through the characters without ever becoming more than an enigmatic cipher. (Her somewhat interminable letter at the end of the section is weak and offers no explanations that elaborate on her character.) She reminds me of a similar woman-as-other character, La Maga in Hopscotch]
This impression of a difference between the ideals
of a scientific vocabulary and a philosophical is only
deepened by observing that many of the greatest
philosophers, especially those who by common consent have written well in addition to thinking well,
have used nothing that can be called a technical
vocabulary. Berkeley has none ; Plato none, if consistency of usage is a test; Descartes none, except
when he uses a technical term to point a reference
to the thoughts of others ; and where a great philosopher like Kant seems to revel in them, it is by no
means agreed that his thought gains proportionately
in precision and intelligibility, or that the stylist in
him is equal to the philosopher.A general review of the history of philosophy
compared with the equally long history of mathematics, would show that whereas exact science has
from the first been at pains to build up a technical
vocabulary in which every term should have a rigid
and constant meaning, philosophy has always taken
a different road: its terms have shifted their meaning
from one writer to another, and in successive phases
of the same writer’s work, in a way which is the
exact opposite of what we find in science, and would
justify the assertion that, in the strict sense of the
word technical, philosophy has never had anything
that deserved the name of a technical vocabulary.
Before concluding that this is a state of things
calling for amendment, it may be well to ask what
technical terms are, and why they are needed in the
expression of scientific thought.Technical terms are terms not used in ordinary
speech, but invented ad hoc for a special purpose,
or else they are borrowed from ordinary speech but
used ad hoc in a special sense. They are needed
because it is desired to express a thought for whose
expression ordinary speech does not provide. Hence,
because they are essentially innovations in vocabulary,
and artificial or arbitrary innovations, they cannot
be understood and therefore must not be used unless
they are defined: and definition, here, means ‘verbal’
as distinct from ‘real’ definition.It has sometimes been maintained that all language consists of sounds taken at pleasure to serve as
marks for certain thoughts or things : which would
amount to saying that it consists of technical terms.
But since a technical term implies a definition, it isimpossible that all words should be technical terms,
for if they were we could never understand their definitions. The business of language is to express or
explain; if language cannot explain itself, nothing
else can explain it; and a technical term, in so far
as it calls for explanation, is to that extent not language but something else which resembles language
in being significant, but differs from it in not being
expressive or self-explanatory. Perhaps I may point
the distinction by saying that it is properly not a
word but a symbol, using this term as when we speak
of mathematical symbols. The technical vocabulary
of science is thus neither a language nor a special
part of language, but a symbolism like that of mathematics. It presupposes language, for the terms of
which it consists are intelligible only when defined,
and they must be defined in ordinary or non-technical
language, that is, in language proper. But language
proper does not presuppose technical terms, for in
poetry, where language is most perfectly and purely
itself, no technical terms are either used or presup-
posed, any more than in the primitive speech of
childhood or the ordinary speech of conversation.Thus the technical element in scientific language
is an element foreign to the essence of language as
such. So far as scientific literature allows itself to
be guided by its natural tendency to rely on technical
terms, scientific prose falls apart into two things:
expressions, as a mathematician speaks of expressions, made up of technical terms, which signify
scientific thought but are not language, and the
verbal definitions of these terms, which are language
but do not signify scientific thought.Philosophical literature shows no such tendency.
Even when, owing to the mistaken idea that whatever is good in science will prove good in philosophy,
it has tried to imitate science in this respect, the
imitation has been slight and superficial, and the
further it has gone the less good it has done. This
is because the peculiar necessity for a technical
vocabulary in science has no counterpart in philosophy.
Technical terms are needed in science because in
the course of scientific thought we encounter concepts which are wholly new to us, and for which
therefore we must have wholly new names. Such
words as chiliagon and pterodactyl are additions to
our vocabulary because the things for which they
stand are additions to our experience. This is possible because the concepts of science are divided
into mutually exclusive species, and consequently
there can be specifications of a familiar genus which
are altogether new to us.In philosophy, where the species of a genus are
not mutually exclusive, no concept can ever come
to us as an absolute novelty; we can only come to
know better what to some extent we knew already.
We therefore never need an absolutely new word for
an absolutely new thing. But we do constantly need
relatively new words for relatively new things: words
with which to indicate the new aspects, new distinctions, new connexions which thought brings to lightin a familiar subject-matter; and even these are not so
much new to us as hitherto imperfectly apprehended.This demand cannot be satisfied by technical
terms. On the contrary, technical terms, owing to
their rigidity and artificiality, are a positive impediment to its satisfaction. In order to satisfy it, a
vocabulary needs two things: groups of words nearly
but not quite synonymous, differentiated by shades
of meaning which for some purposes can be ignored
and for others become important; and single words
which, without being definitely equivocal, have
various senses distinguished according to the ways
in which they are used.These two characteristics are precisely those
which ordinary language, as distinct from a technical
vocabulary, possesses. It is easy to verify this statement by comparing the scientific definition of such
a word as circle with the account given for example
in the Oxford English Dictionary of what the same
word means or may mean in ordinary usage. If it
is argued, according to the method followed elsewhere in this essay, that since technical terms are
used in science something corresponding to them,
mutatis mutandis, will be found in philosophy, the
modifications necessary to change the concept of a
technical term from the shape appropriate to science
into the shape appropriate to philosophy will deprive
it exactly of what makes it a technical term and
convert it into ordinary speech.The language of philosophy is therefore, as every
careful reader of the great philosophers already
knows, a literary language and not a technical.
Wherever a philosopher uses a term requiring formal
definition, as distinct from the kind of exposition
described in the fourth chapter, the intrusion of a
non-literary element into his language corresponds
with the intrusion of a non-philosophical element
into his thought: a fragment of science, a piece of
inchoate philosophizing, or a philosophical error;
three things not, in such a case, easily to be dis-
tinguished.The duty of the philosopher as a writer is therefore to avoid the technical vocabulary proper to
science, and to choose his words according to the
rules of literature. His terminology must have that
expressiveness, that flexibility, that dependence upon
context, which are the hall-marks of a literary use
of words as opposed to a technical use of symbols.A corresponding duty rests with the reader of
philosophical literature, who must remember that
he is reading a language and not a symbolism. He
must neither think that his author is offering a verbal
definition when he is making some statement about
the essence of a concept—a fertile source of sophistical criticisms—nor complain when nothing resembling such a definition is given; he must expect
philosophical terms to express their own meaning
by the way in which they are used, like the words
of ordinary speech. He must not expect one word
always to mean one thing in the sense that its meaning undergoes no kind of change; he must expect
philosophical terminology, like all language, to be
always in process of development, and he must
recollect that this, so far from making it harder to
understand, is what makes it able to express its own
meaning instead of being incomprehensible apart
from definitions, like a collection of rigid and therefore artificial technical terms.R.G. Collingwood, “Philosophy as a Branch of Literature” (1933)
The habits of any formal scientist, like those of the mathematician in particular are tautology-habits. We can urge their adoption;
we can point to the practical consequences of not adopting them. The same is
true of justification. Thus, a “justification of induction” is either a tautology
in pragmatics; or else it is a recommendation of a set of tautology-habits for
“law,” “confirmed-to-degree-n,” “evidence,” etc.“Are you not saying that, after all, the pragmatist has the last word?”, I
shall be asked. In a sense this is true. But the pragmatist must take the bitter
along with the sweet; for the “last word” is not a philosophical proposition.
Philosophy is pure formalism; pure theory of language. The recommendation of
formalisms for their utility is not philosophy. Hume’s scepticism was a consequence of his mistake in supposing that the philosophical questions he asked
in the study were sweeping questions of fact, and that therefore outside the study
he took an unquestioning attitude towards factual propositions questioned in
the study. The truth of the matter, and I speak in the tradition of Hume, is
very opposite. There are no factual statements which become philosophical
in the study (though there are non-factual statements which are philosophical
outside the study); and in philosophy, scepticism is a self-contradictory position.Wilfrid Sellars, “Pure Pragmatics and Epistemology” (1947)
Though seemingly in opposition, aren’t the two of them effectively making the same point about technical discourse in philosophy?
Here he selects a couple American stories that he adores and picks a particular passage filled with sine qua non inspiration:
Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge. From a small number of A-plus stories I have chosen half-a-dozen particular favorites of mine. T list their titles below and parenthesize briefly the passage– or one of the passages– in which genuine afflation appears to be present, no matter how trivial the inspired detail may look to a dull criticule.
John Cheever’s “The Country Husband” (“Jupiter [a black retriever] crashed through the tomato vines with the remains of a felt hat in his mouth.” The story is really a miniature novel beautifully traced, so that the impression of there being a little too many things happening in it is completely redeemed by the satisfying coherence of its thematic interlacings.)
John Updike’s “The Happiest I’ve Been” (“The important thing, rather than the subject, was the conversation itself, the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of these Panama baskets shaped underwater around a worthless stone.” I like so many of Updike’s stories that it was difficult to choose one for demonstration and even more difficult to settle upon its most inspired bit.)
J. D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (“Stopping only to sink a foot in a soggy, collapsed castle . . .” This is a great story, too famous and fragile to be measured here by a casual conchometrist.)
Herbert Gold’s “Death in Miami Beach” (“Finally we die, opposable thumbs and all.” Or to do even better justice to this admirable piece; “Barbados turtles as large as children . . . crucified like thieves . . . the tough leather of their skin does not disguise their present helplessness and pain.”)
John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” (“What is the story’s point? Ambrose is ill. He perspires in the dark passages; candied apples-on-a-stick, delicious-looking, disappointing to eat. Funhouses need men’s and ladies’ rooms at interval.” I had some trouble in pinning down what I needed amidst the lovely swift speckled imagery.)
Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” (“. . . and the fatal merciless passionate ocean.” Although there are several other divine vibrations in this story that so miraculously blends an old cinema film with a personal past, the quoted phrase wins its citation for power and impeccable rhythm.)
I have a copy of Gold’s The Man Who Was Not With It lying around unread. I first picked it up after seeing a very mythic photo of Felt’s Lawrence in the early 80s reading it. The book seems to have had multiple great covers, all with the title in huge, imposing type.
Still, the choices seem almost archaic today, or all reminiscent of a time in American short fiction that only has devolved remnants remaining.
It should be noted how Kant’s proposal for connecting the
sensible and the conceptual, though superficially straightforward, is at another level extremely
perplexing. Is a transcendental schema a thought about time, or is it time as thought in a certain
way? Our ways of referring to transcendental schemata inevitably assimilate them, it would
seem, to one side or the other of the concept/intuition divide. Moreover, it appears necessary to
do exactly this, if we are to answer the question of what they are, or say anything contentful
about them. The cost of the assimilation, however, in either direction, is to make them
apparently unfit for their designated mediating role: if they are either concepts with a special
relation to intuition, or intuitions as formed conceptually, then they seem to presuppose the very
possibility of connecting the sensible and the conceptual which transcendental schematism is
invoked to explain.Kant may declare that transcendental schemata are irreducibly sensible-and-intellectual, and
that this is how the question of their identity should be answered. If so, Kant’s original division of
our representations into intuitions and concepts is not exhaustive, for there is a third class,
about which we can say very little, other than that it is dependent on and somehow derivative
from the others. We can specify it in terms of the transcendental role to which the problem of
relating concepts and intuitions gives rise, but the manner of its derivation, and the nature of
schemata, we cannot specify. Note, it is not just that we can say relatively less about schemata
than we can about intuitions and concepts, and that we cannot identify their ultimate source; we
are equally ignorant of the grounds of our faculties of sensibility and understanding.
Transcendental schemata remain in a special sense hard to grasp, because they are required to
combine in themselves two kinds of property, or representational functions, the seeming
immiscibility of which is precisely what made us introduce them in the first place. That this is
nevertheless Kant’s own view of the matter is, plausibly, what is suggested by his statement that
schematism is ‘an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity
nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover’ (A141/B180-1).Sebastian Gardner
I’ve been accused of obsession with the schematism, but the intuition-concept gap is for me the core problem that Kant runs into, and I have never been able to find an adequate solution in Kant for it. Here’s Paul Guyer’s unsatisfactory explanation:
Thus, in the case of
the categories our concepts are not “homogeneous” with our objects, and
some intermediary has to be found in order to make them so.
But this is
not the case with our other concepts, which are inherently homo-
geneous with their objects. A pure mathematical concept like circle is
homogeneous with our experience, because it describes its object in terms
of properties that can be directly presented in experience – that something
is a curved, closed line every point of which is equidistant from its center
is the kind of thing we can observe because the pure form of all our outer
intuition is spatial. And an empirical concept like plate or dog is already
homogeneous with its object because it includes predicates that correspond immediately to observable properties of objects, whether those
properties are pure, like the circularity of a plate, or empirical, like its non-
porousness or like the furriness or noisiness of a typical dog.
If you’re willing to accept that Platonic concepts like “plate” and “dog” have exact referents in the real world, then fine. But Kant doesn’t (since he thinks the application of all concepts is normative and prescriptive and subjective) and his whole project is to figure out a way to salvage conceptual mental content out of a non-conceptual world.
Anyway, I mention this because I was just thinking about how much of modern philosophy grows out of exactly this particular problem. Kant wasn’t the first to come up with it, but I think it’s his formulation of it and failed solution to it that echoes in Russell (who tries to pull the same trick solution), Heidegger (who tries to punt the problem away), and many others.
And ultimately there’s something a little pleasing in Kant’s ceding of this problem to “art,” which is a rare concession on his part.
My Tech-Lit-Philosophy Book
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