But it’s true: ‘Nazi’ is short for ‘National Socialist’. So there’s that.

There are (at least) three foundational myths of contemporary liberalism. One is that John Kennedy’s assassination was instigated by the rank intolerance and hatred of the American people. A second is that of “upsouth”: the assertion that Northern racism was and is every bit as pervasive, if more subtle, than that of the Old South. The third is that the American popular culture of the 1950s was stifling not only in its “Donald Duck” banality but also in a subtle form of fascism that constituted a danger to the Republic. In this view, the excesses of the 1960s were a struggle to free America’s brain-damaged automatons from their captivity at the hands of the lords of mass culture.

At this AEI event, Fred Siegel will address this third myth. For all the bile directed at the 1950s, it was the high point of American popular culture, a period when many in the vast middle class hoped to elevate their tastes. The attack on mass culture, a mix of Marxant theorizing and aristocratic instincts, paved the way for a new form of status competition based on supposedly elevated consumer and cultural preferences.

Part of me likes best the faux-scrupulosity of the parenthetical “at least”, utterly undone by the second paragraph revelation that the first paragraph was two-thirds grumping around and he’s not even going to talk about the Kennedy assassination. (I have written abstracts in my time, but it has never occurred to me to start one, in effect: ‘Damn kids, get off my lawn!’ But, now that I think about it, there’s really no reason why an abstract should not be angrily digressive. Why not?) Part of me loves the idea that somewhere, someone is writing a book about how the inner life of American liberalism is, I guess, Theodor Adorno. That’s thinking outside the box, innerly-speaking. Part of me loves the image of all these liberals whispering ‘upsouth’ to each other constantly, in that knowing way.

OK, I guess he could be winding up to take a swing at Dwight Macdonald. But does Dwight Macdonald talk about Donald Duck, in particular?

That’s why it’s a values question. Even so, wouldn’t it be better to conjoin this values dog whistle with some non-dog whistle questions in the topical vicinity? I mean: obviously yes. More is better. But more specifically: it would be interesting to try to determine to what extent people actually think, practically, about their own lives and those of others, in such extreme, total voluntarist-or-fatalist terms, when not dog whistled into picking one or the other extreme. To what degree, and in what cases, do people believe themselves, and others, to be in control of the course of their lives? My empirically unsupported suspicion is that people would turn out to be pretty similar in their beliefs, across partisan lines and cross-culturally, if you took care not to blow the dog whistle.

What do you think?

It makes no sense for conservatives like Jim Geraghty to express this sort of concern about the booing of Stephen Hill at the GOP debate. (Hill is, as you probably know, the gay soldier who asked about DADT):

Rereading the transcript of last night’s debate, I am struck that Rick Santorum did not thank Stephen Hill, a gay soldier in the U.S. Army currently in Iraq, for his service. Nor did anyone else on that stage.

Whatever you think of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” or homosexuality, Hill is risking his life on behalf of his country.

And for sure it doesn’t make sense for Santorum himself to have responded to subsequent questions about the booing, like so:

I condemn the people who booed that gay soldier. That soldier is serving our country. I thank him for his service to our country. I’m sure he’s doing an excellent job; I hope he is safe and I hope he returns safely and does his mission well.

I have to admit I seriously did not hear those boos. Had I heard them, I certainly would have commented on them. But, as you know, when you’re in that sort of environment, you’re sort of focused on the question and formulating you answer, and I just didn’t hear those couple of boos that were out there. But certainly had I, I would’ve said, “Don’t do that. This man is serving our country and we are to thank him for his service.”

Why does it make no sense? Because everyone on stage, except Huntsman and Johnson (correct me if I’m wrong), is on the record as saying that DADT - or something quite like it – should be reinstated. According to Santorum, Stephen Hill should ideally be dishonorably discharged in the not-too-distant future. If you think that, it obviously makes no sense to say you are sure he is doing an excellent job and wish him a safe completion of his tour of duty. [UPDATE: As pointed out by Sebastian in comments, you didn’t technically get a DD if forced out under DADT. You got an involuntary general discharge or involuntary honorable discharge. However, unlike those discharged for mental illness, discharged gay service people didn’t get any post-discharge compensation, obviously. Now, apparently, there’s an undecided issue as to whether service people forced out under DADT can re-enlist, post-DADT. All this is significant, for accuracy’s sake, but, pace Sebastian, I don’t see that it affects the logic of the post. It doesn’t make sense for Santorum to think BOTH that the soldier should be involuntarily discharged without compensation (which I’m sure is his position) AND to believe Hill is doing an excellent job AND to hope he finished out his tour successfully. An involuntary discharge is still worse than a boo.]

Suppose Stephen Hill had confessed to any other thing that might get him a double D (again, I ain’t talking about Daniel Davies) an involuntary discharge. Suppose he said he was always drunk on duty [severely schizophrenic] and was worried that eventually he might be severely disciplined [discharged] for that, and wanted some verbal assurance from the candidates that they would see to it he wouldn’t be. Would conservatives be lining up to say, sorry, you will have to be disciplined [discharged], but we thank you for your heroic service to your country and are sure you have been doing an excellent, drunk [schiozphrenic] job? I think not.

Getting back to Geraghty’s post, it makes no sense to say that, whatever one thinks of DADT, one should be opposed to booing gay soldiers. No. Because if you are in favor of DD’ing [involuntarily discharging] gay soldiers, just for being gay, you think a few boos is too good for him.

What’s going on here? Well, for sure it’s cognitive dissonance. On one level, all these conservatives are ‘operational’ liberals. Confronted with an individual, gay soldier, their instinct is to say that it doesn’t matter what his private life is like, so long as he’s doing his duty. Booing the soldier is shameful, because he’s done nothing that deserves being booed. These conservatives are ‘closet tolerants’ about homosexuality, would be another way to put it. Even Santorum. On some level. Hence his nonsensical response to Hill’s question, to the effect that re-instituting DADT would be simply a means of assuring that homosexuals don’t get special sexual rights. That is, Santorum is at pains to make it sound as though, in the eyes of the law and military regulations, homosexuality and heterosexuality must be regarded equally. (Of course, Santorum is not actually in favor of dishonorably discharging heterosexual soldiers who ‘out’ themselves as such by getting straight married, for example. Yes, he’s talking complete nonsense. But he’s doing so because he feels obliged to make certain ‘liberal’ assumptions in making his case.)

So saying Santorum is an ‘operational’ liberal is half the story at best, even operationally speaking. He – and everyone else on the stage who might have a shot at the Presidency – is perfectly prepared to take the necessary steps to ensure the ruination of Stephen Hill’s professional career. So Stephen Hill should take zero practical consolation from the thought that, personally, Santorum thinks Stephen Hill is doing an excellent job. At this point the pretzel logic moral psychology gets pretty complicated and, as a result, necessarily speculative. Trying to guess what Santorum is ‘really thinking’ will ultimately get us nowhere. I doubt Santorum knows what Santorum is ‘really thinking’ when he emits something as nonsensical as the response he gave to the soldier’s question. He probably thinks what he is saying makes sense. Would be my guess.

Let me try to outline a coherent view of the psychology here (I’m not really defending the view now, just sketching it). American conservatives tend to be ‘philosophical’ conservatives but ‘operational’ liberals. (Let’s keep in mind that all generalizations need to be modified by ‘some’. There are no exceptionless universal generalizations hereabouts. There are only general tendencies.) That is, American conservatives like conservative slogans – conservative rhetoric – but, in practice, they don’t like the implications of those slogans, if they were to be taken literally and seriously. This produces ‘get your government hands off my medicare!’ type attitudes. And candidates who do things like write books in which they imply that Social Security is unconstitutional; then, when called on the practical implications of that proposition, pull back. But there’s another dynamic, which is related but even weirder. Conservatives seem to like liberal premises – in the eyes of the law, straights and gays should be treated equally – but conservative conclusions to arguments from those premises – gays should not be treated equally. Hence Santorum’s official argument. Which pretty much consists of that one liberal premise, leading to that conservative conclusion.

It’s hard even to describe Santorum as a ‘closet tolerant’ at this point. After all, he’s publicly said that he thinks Stephen Hill is doing an excellent job and should not be booed. He’s publicly committed to the proposition that what we need is equality – no ‘special’ rights for any one sexual orientation. And yet, ‘philosophically’, he’s a conservative, so ‘ideally’, the likes of Stephen Hill should be dishonorably involuntarily discharged. Only what’s the status of this ‘ideal’, given that the actually existing Stephen Hill should not even be boo’ed, let alone DD’ed [involuntarily discharged]?

It’s a bit like the question about letting the uninsured die. Conservatives who say we should do this, in principle, would like to think that upholding this principle would lead to a world in which – due to the magic of private charity and strong economy and strong families and rugged individualistic so forth – in practice no one would die. In an ideal world, awkward cases wouldn’t arise (or so much more rarely than now that we could tolerate them.) So, for advocates of this sort of libertarian ideal, confronting the ideal picture with the awkwardness of actual world awkward cases seems to miss the attractions of the ideal. I”m not sympathetic to the specifics in this case, but I don’t think it’s an incoherent way to think about ideal political philosophy.

But this sort of thinking gets much weirder when we are thinking not about some unfortunate person lacking health insurance, but rather about a gay soldier like Stephen Hill, worrying about DADT. I think it’s probably safe to say that Santorum thinks that, in an ideal world, there wouldn’t be people like Stephen Hill. Not because we’ve killed them all. (I don’t think Santorum is a closet eliminationist, by any means.) But, somehow, in a healthy society, this sort of case would cease to arise, so embarrassingly. So therefore it doesn’t feel (to Santorum) like the sort of case that really demands that he rethink his ideals.

No doubt many of you will think I’m overthinking this. Maybe so. But I persist in thinking there’s a strong, quite stable, and really quite distinctive cognitive dissonance that has characterized American conservative thought since at least the 1960’s. I don’t think anyone – including me – has ever really pinned down it’s distinctive characteristics. It’s not right to say it’s just hypocrisy, or lying. (There is that, of course. But it’s not just that.) It’s self-serving double-think, to be sure, but its double nature is of a fairly high philosophical order. The self that is consistently served illegitimate double-portions is not just the electoral self, that wants to win or get paid, but the philosophical self, that wants to be right, in principle. It’s a status thing. An amour propre thing, in Rousseau’s sense. But I for sure don’t have time to talk about that today.

I just pledged $40 to kickstart LINDA, ‘a hollow earth retirement adventure in 23 singing, illustrated installments’. I am very far from saying you should do the same. Daniel Davies, just for instance, is sure to find the artist’s vocal and instrumental stylings intolerably twee. He will prefer to spend his money on Budweiser. But if none of you do as I do, I am perhaps going to keep my money and not get any adventure or singing. But it’s up to you. (The story is going to run on hilobrow.com, whose editors are my friends. They aren’t your friends, I assume, so that may weigh in your calculations.)

In related news, I see on boingboing that someone else is trying to Kickstart “a huge 20-foot-tall kinetic sculpture with a 25-foot long spinning painting in the center, which include a zoetropic animation.” I think I might chip in $11 so I can get the coloring book.

But this is unrealistic, you say. In the sense that it is not a model for a barter economy based on ukelele covers and giant zoetropes (which would, after all, make using giant stone discs with holes in them as your currency seem comparatively sensible.) No no no. This is just the first stage. Next, we build a kind of cross-kickstarting platform on which the people trying to kickstart their crazy art follies do so via complicated latticeworks of artistic cross-commitments. ‘I’ll cover a song of your choice on the ukelele, and knit you a badge, if you build a 20 foot tall zoetrope in Michigan, and send me a coloring book.’

Next, we get Wall Street hipsters to pool all the Kickstart projects, slice them into tranches, resell these collateralized aesthetic obligations to … oh wait.

UPDATE: Obviously feel free to discuss Joly’s ideas more generally. The argument against a perp walk, because it is inconsistent with presumption of innocence, is cogent. And obviously famous/powerful people like IMF directors are the people who risk losing their presumption of innocence in this way. So we have that rare case in which formal equality amounts to effective bias in favor of the weak and powerless. But it seems like a big mistake to say it is all just Big Apple barbarism – or, rather, Rome-style triumphalism, the defeated Gaul chief paraded in chains for the populace to see! The wealthy and powerful are not exactly without power and wealth, after all, so the prosecutor’s office, in a town full of rich, influential people, should ideally have effective general strategies they pursue, as a matter of course, to make sure they aren’t steamrollered by that. What do you think?

First things first: if you can’t access the LRB version, there’s a free, longer version available from Moretti’s own lab.

Right, the whole thing reminds me of that memorable scene in the play in which Hamlet puts on a PPT presentation, representing social networks in The Marriage of Gonzago nudge nudge wink wink. (Apparently he’s been working on this stuff at school for years.) And Ophelia doesn’t really get it and Hamlet helpfully explains: “Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief.”

But seriously, folks. I like the paper, and I don’t like it. On the one hand, I wholeheartedly endorse this bit. Or at least I would very much like to be able to.

One day, after we add to these skeletons the layers of direction, weight, and semantics, those richer images will perhaps make us see different genres – tragedies and comedies; picaresque, gothic, Bildungsroman … – as different shapes; ideally, they may even make visible the micro-patterns out of which these larger network shapes emerge. But for this to happen, an enormous amount of empirical data must be first put together. Will we, as a discipline, be capable of sharing raw materials, evidence – facts – with each other? It remains to be seen. For science, Stephen Jay Gould once wrote, fruitful doing matters more than clever thinking. For us, not yet.

But on the other hand, I quite disagree with this earlier bit:

I am discussing Hamlet, and saying nothing about Shakespeare’s words – but also, in another sense, much more than it, because a model allows you to see the underlying structures of a complex object. It’s like an X-ray …

Bill Benzon puts it even a bit more strongly, causing me to disagree even more: “One has objectified an underlying mechanism.”

One objection to this would be the classic one: “That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once.” That is, you’ve left out all the poetry, Moretti. But that’s not what bothers me. The problem is that the structures we are seeing in these visual presentations of the play’s social networks are not plausibly anything like skeletons, or underlying anythings, least of all underlying mechanisms. The structures the diagrams capture are superstructural effects, caused by the underlying events in the play itself. For example, royal courts tend to have certain structures, so if you have a story about a court, your networks will tend to go a certain way. The action and events and characters of the play explain the network. The network doesn’t explain – let alone cause – the play. This isn’t to say that there is nothing of potential interest here, but it would help to have a better metaphor than ‘skeleton’. I’m honestly a bit at a loss, but let me suggest something a little weird.

Suppose you studied the human face like this. You plot only the highest points. The nose. The forehead and cheekbones, but only if they are particularly prominent, relative to nose length. The chin, if it happens to stick on pretty far. You view faces not as faces but as a few peaks, jutting above the clouds. Would there be any interest? Possibly none whatsoever. To some degree the results would be predictable. But possibly you would discover something surprising. Some faces that don’t look like each other, ordinarily, might turn out to be similar, by this measure. And maybe that would correlate with something else. Prettiness. Ugliness.

I pick this example precisely because it sounds pretty much like a shot in the dark. But what it wouldn’t be, even if it turned out to be somehow interesting, would be an X-ray of the underlying structure of the face. It’s much more a case of just trying an odd-angle view of the object, to see if anything shows. Or, more specifically, an experimental covering up of everything except x, for some value of x that is thought to be an interesting thing. (Hey, people talking to other people is interesting.)

Anyway, the fact that I don’t really believe in the skeleton, per se, makes it harder for me to applaud the noble, gravedigger work of piling them up for all to see. But I think Moretti is pretty honest about it. He’s publishing negative results. And we know that’s a good thing, from another recent Kieran post. Here’s Moretti’s conclusion:

It is never easy, realizing that one has reached a dead end, pure and simple. But this is what it was. Using networks to gain intuitive knowledge of plot structures had played an important role – but we had now reached the limits of its usefulness. Better turn away from images for a while, and let intuition give way to concepts (network size, density, clustering, betweenness …), and to statistical analysis. And so, the dead end of this pamphlet, was the beginning of Rhiannon Lewis’s work.

That’s a promise of some further research forthcoming from Moretti’s group, apparently. Here’s hoping it’s interesting.

Getting back to the bit I would like to believe in. It seems that there is a bit of slippage between the desire for sharable results and the desire to x-ray through to the skeleton. In literary studies, the qualitative quality of the research makes rigorous apples-to-apples comparisons a bit hard to achieve. I admire Moretti for his ambitions in this regard. But it would be better to admit upfront that the interchangeable currency may not be something ‘underlying’, exactly. We can turn Hamlet into a social network, and Bleak House into a social network, and thereby make them rigorously comparable, without it having to be that the axis of comparison is something like a ‘skeleton’. Of course, without that solid assurance of bone, the interest of the exercise is thrown in question. But here we are.

Basically the first part of the argument goes like this.

1) Americans think it’s fair to reward merit and hard work.
2) Americans think merit and hard work are in fact rewarded in America.
C1) Americans think it’s unfair to redistribute income. (from 1 & 2)

3) Obama’s proposal would change the way income is distributed (i.e. would be redistributive).
C2) Americans don’t agree that Obama’s proposal is fair (from C1).

This part of the argument is boringly bad. If you want to know whether Americans think it would be unfair to raise taxes on the wealthy, you can ask them, rather than trying to get your answer in this round-about deductive fashion. My distinct impression is that ‘tax the rich’ polls pretty well. Be that as it may, the argument now gets interestingly bad, as Brooks tries quietly to patch the logical badness of this first bit. The above argument is absurdly all-or-nothing. There is, after all, no contradiction – not even a tension – in believing 1, 2 and the denial of C1. All you have to believe is that reward for merit is imperfect, as things stand, and that changes to the existing rules would make the system a bit less imperfect. Brooks avoids considering this obvious possibility, proceeding to a sort of noble lie argument that addresses it indirectly.

Since equality of opportunity is not universal, doesn’t this invalidate — or at least weaken — the romantic notion of meritocratic fairness? Of course not. You’re living in a dream world (or you have tenure) if you really believe merit doesn’t matter. Everyone can think of times when things went well as a direct result of hard work. We can also come up with cases in which we were punished at work or in life for laziness, incompetence, free-riding or stupidity.

And even if only a portion of the outcomes in life were due to merit, we should still gear our system to the part that is under our control. Otherwise, we have no incentive to be industrious, honest, innovative and optimistic — and there’s no reason to teach these values to our kids, either.

Most important, if we reject the ideals of opportunity and meritocratic fairness, we will end up with a system where outcomes are simply based on luck or political power — it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In a 2005 study published in the American Economic Review, economists at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied 29 countries and showed that a belief in luck over merit was strongly linked to the level of taxation and spending on social programs. Furthermore, they showed that the more citizens believed in a merit-based system, the more their public policies produced such a system.

In contrast, when populations believed that outcomes are a product of luck, birth, connections, or corruption, the people demanded more distortions to the free-enterprise system and ended up with a system that only affirmed their anxieties.

This is a variant on the old ‘some see the glass as half-empty, some see it as half-full’ adage. Some people see the half-full glass as completely full. And: we should be those people. If there is any element of meritocracy in the system, the system ought to be regarded, simply, as a meritocracy. It’s important that people think of America not as a half-functioning meritocracy but simply as a meritocracy. Otherwise (now finally we get to good old perverse consequences, for the first time without benefit of laffer curve) people will ask that the rules of the game be changed. And that’s a bad way to think. What we want is for people just to play the game as hard as they can.

Since this is an argument that belief that the system is perfect as it stands is a good belief for people to have, since it is regulatively healthful, whether it is true or not, one immediate and obvious consequence of Brooks’ argument is that one of the biggest threats to the health of the free-market system is … Arthur Brooks. If you keep telling people that Obama is a socialist, or is putting America on the road to European-style social democracy, you are attempting to convince them that Obama is introducing unfairness into the system. You are convincing Americans that the glass is only half-full, meritocracy-wise. But Brooks’ whole point is that people should not be encouraged to have that attitude.

So why not be truer to the flip-side terms of this noble lie-side economic argument? Why not tell people that Obama’s proposals to redistribute income will produce a perfect keyboard on which the invisible hand can play its tune? There is no perverse counter-efficiency problem (no Laffer curve here), and no psychological problem. If everyone believes Obama’s proposal is fair, no one will ‘go Galt’, out of a resentful belief that the system is unfair. (A pernicious tendency to ‘go Galt’, i.e. not work hard out of belief that meritocracy has been compromised, is what Brooks is warning against.) People will be heartened by the thought that the system is fair, will work hard.

We’ll all get richer! (At least, that’s the theory.)

The world is so messed up these days that I feel I should be publicly expressing my opinion about that. But instead I’m escaping into an old, wonky-academic philosophy-literary criticism essay that I’ve never managed to get published anywhere. It’s been out of, then back into, the ‘reject’ pile for years. Title: “Ways of World-Breaking and Ethical Escapism”. The question: is there morality fiction? That is, fiction about morality itself being different than we take it to be. No, no, not whether people can disagree about morality, or write about immoral people, or seek to shock, or any of that obviousness. Does anyone write fiction in which they imagine that the world works, morally, a different way than they (author and anticipated audience) take it to work? Or is it rather the case that when we find a ‘deviant’ moral perspective in fiction we either reject it or accept it. And if we do the latter, we export it to the actual world, as part of an expanded moral horizon? So our actual moral horizon and our fictional moral horizon never mutually deviate? Or they sometimes go their separate ways? That’s the question. I say they go their separate ways all the time, so it’s interesting that some folks have denied it. I am responding to some analytic-type philosophers – Kendall Walton, Tamar Gendler, and our own Brian Weatherson – who have taken various positions on this question, the so-called ‘puzzle of imaginative resistance’.

I’ve got the latest draft posted here, for the edification of the interested. I’ll just post one bit from it. I call it “Morality Tale”. I guess I just missed the Hugo Awards nomination deadline. But you can tell me whether you like it. Certainly it goes a long way towards explaining why I can’t publish the whole essay. (Who do I think I am?)

The 22nd Century was the Age of Time Travel, as the 21st Century had been the Age of FTL Drive. In the 24th Century travel to possible worlds opened up; in the 26th, commerce with physically—then logically—impossible worlds became physically possible (not advisable.)

By this point, dear reader, the human race had changed in its essentials, past the point of recognition by the likes of you. But, for purposes of my story, go right on imagining I am speaking of strong-jawed men in ships like long, silver cigars.

By the 27th Century, thanatonauts reported back from the afterlife, which proved less interesting than had been hoped. Of greater—some say greatest—consequence was the fall, in the 30th Century, of what had long proved the most stubborn barrier.
What ushered in the so-called Age of Ethical Perfectionism was the prospect of travel, by deontonauts, to possible worlds whose moral fabric differs from that of the actual world. Worlds in which right and wrong, good and bad, are different than in ours.
I hear your sigh of disappointment. You think I am referring to some mundane, anthropological consideration about pluralism or relativism. You see me winding up to some terrifying report of how these ‘deontonauts’ entered finally into a world so strange that there it was considered socially acceptable not to wear pants. I assure you: if you keep thinking like that, you will not understand my story.

In the light of the dawn of the Age of Ethical Perfectionism it became apparent that the wisdom of, say, Romans 3:10—’there is none that is righteous, not even one’—was impaired by lack of technical ambition. Another ancient thought came to be regarded as more prophetic: he who would improve himself, must first change his world. This is why, in the central atrium of the offices of the Deontonautics Division of the Modal Avionics Corporation, above the sound fixture and flower arrangement, there hangs a tremendous illuminated board. (At this writing I look up to see it reads: ‘there are 1,132,206 that are righteous, not even 1,132,207.’)

The typical occupant of a berth on a standard ‘Goody Two-Shoes’ class, twin-drive deontonautic freighter—such as MA Corp’s Indulgence, Dispensation, Practice, or Damned Spot—is a wealthy, fare-paying, elderly private citizen. Pilots are another matter. It is an unfortunate fact that travel to deontically possible worlds can only transpire via ‘Nietzsche Space’—beneath good and evil, as the mathematicians say. Only a human mind can navigate; the abyss does stare back. Deontonauts are drawn from the ranks of the worst of the worst: criminals, consigned to AV Corp. by the Rehabilitation and Compulsory Moral Uplift Department.

Every human being has a deontic ‘signature’, a set of moral stains, smears and smudges, as a unique function of the actions and events of a lifetime. (This signature is not merely verifiable and reproducible but—since Patel v. State of Mississippi—legally admissible as evidence of personal identity.) To every possible signature there corresponds a possible moral world in which the commission of just that unique range of actions, in which involvement in just that set of events, constitutes the pinnacle of moral perfection. Worlds like our own in all respects save that there—Oh, it is just plain good to kill female infants. For example.

In the words of John Henry Newman: “A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault.” This line appears in MA Corp. promotional brochures. For, indeed, the passengers do nothing—are suspended, unconscious, in a state of moral indefinition, insulated from the abysses of Nietzsche-space—as they wait for their pilot to find for each a perfect world on which, due to its ‘uniquely you-fitting deontic contours’, no one will be able to find fault with them.

They stride forth, testaments to our age’s fanatical devotion to rigorous moral self-improvement.

No reputable offer of academic publication opportunities will be refused.

The note is: Beckett’s 1930 poem, “Whoroscope”, seems like an interesting work to think about.

It also seems worth chicking and eggsamining how Beckett and co. came close to satirizing, avant lalettre, Gernsback’s glorious goose egg of a golden coinage, ‘scientifiction‘. But I see that Gernsback actually proposed the term a few years earlier, in 1926. So that would be upsetting the eggcart before the chicken. And we wouldn’t want to do that o no.

Why am I thinking these thoughts? In part because I’m reading Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd [amazon] – on the iPad! It’s interesting. And it’s just what I wanted my iPad to do for me. Old good books re-released in inexpensive e-book format.

Couple quick thoughts about that. First, the thing has tons of typos and really quite serious transcription errors. Obviously an OCR effort, from a paper, pre-e-text. It’s not just that it’s got no page numbers, as noted in a previous thread. It’s really textually kinda sloppy. Not better than a Gutenberg text, certainly. But still it is more useful to a scholar than a better-edited scholarly paper edition would be. Because I feel that now, for the first time, I can be a good note-taker, which has always been my weakness. I loath the transaction costs of interrupting my reading to scribble stuff and this bad habit has been compounded by being an obsessive polisher. I don’t like taking notes that are sloppy enough. I end up just plain writing. And then I stop reading. So my reading-writing life has, my whole adult life, lacked that solid, note-taking middle. But now my iPad, with its functional – but only just – keypad is encouraging me to hit that sweet spot of sending myself telegraphs, in suitably telegraphic style, that I will receive from me in the future, for memory’s sake. Obviously your mileage may vary, but I feel that this device will be what it should be: a crutch for my mental weakness, not just more stimulant to fuel the ADD that I, like everyone else, suffer from. The iPad encourages efficient note-taking and discourages the dissolution of the mind into the candysugar shards of multitasking, i.e. reading blogs all day.

Haeckel Haeckel everywhere and such a lot of ink.

If you don’t know Woodring’s work, the new Weathercraft [amazon] book is pretty good, and cheap. But what you really want is the The Frank Book. Which, it turns out, is crazy expensive. Gads. When did that happen?

But you can watch this animated version for free, anyway:

Oh, and here’s an animated version of the bit that really bothers Belle, really gives her the cold robbies. Whim (he’s the half-moon-headed guy) and his head-altering egg-beater device. Apparently it is called a ‘whim-grinder’.

The Exterminating Angel (hey, Criterion Collection has it out since last year! good!)

Groundhog Day

Being John Malkovich

In each case, it’s not hard to think of other films that are clearly sf or fairy tales/ghost stories, but that are more or less the same story, in terms of set-up, general mood and themes. Exterminating Angel is a bit like Dark City, maybe. Groundhog Day a bit like many an sf time-travel scenario. Anyway, time travel in general is not far from A Christmas Carol. Whether you use a machine to travel into your past and/or future, or a ghost; or whether it is just, bizarrely, unclear when the out-of-joint times you are in are is relatively incidental to the style of storytelling. Donnie Darko, for example? Being John Malkovich is a lot like various memory-implant/identity-swap sf scenarios, at least in terms of the set-up. It’s also like Freaky Friday, if it comes to that.

I call these ‘Metaphysical McGuffins’ – MacGuffin, if you prefer – (a term I’ve used elsewhere in a related, but distinct sense.) Quoting Hitchcock’s definition:

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh that’s a McGuffin.’ The first one asks ‘What’s a McGuffin?’ ‘Well’ the other man says, ‘It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ and the other one answers ‘Well, then that’s no McGuffin!’ So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.

It might be that the McGuffin traps lions by magic. Or it might be some advanced technology, left by aliens. Since the point is, in a sense, that how it works isn’t the point, it hardly matters, does it? What is important is everything it sets in motion. It’s the beetle in the box of story. A ghost beetle or a robot beetle or a plain old beetle or Gregor Samsa or any old thing. Or nothing. You can divide through by the difference between sf and fantasy.

A lot of thoughts converge on this point from different directions: good old ‘sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic’ and all that. With the caveat that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from life as we found it. But, to repeat: for now I’m looking specifically for more examples of films that scrupulously abstain from saying how it works. They don’t commit to a nominal sf or fairytale frame. They just let it be that the thing is.

A few more slightly twisty examples.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a nice case because, although it’s nominally sf – the memory eraser – the element of metaphysical repetition and its resolution, the true Metaphysical McGuffin (‘Montauk’) is semi-distinct. So it’s really not clear whether the fictional state of affairs that really matters to the characters is ‘scientific’. Also, obviously this sort of story bears a certain resemblance to, say, It’s A Wonderful Life. (Which, by the way, goes down a treat as a Kirby Kracklin’ By An Open Fire sf story.)

Classing Eternal Sunshine as sf is a bit like classifying The Wizard of Oz as sf, on the grounds that balloons are examples of technology, so really it’s more like steampunk. (Well, not quite. But you see the point.)

Finally, Unbreakable. My personal fave superhero film of all time, despite M. Knight’s ever-sinking artistic stock (hey, The Sixth Sense was great – a very solid entry in the ‘it turned out he was a robot’ sweepstakes. But I don’t want to give away the ending.) It’s not clear whether superhero stuff is properly sf, or what. For that very reason, Unbreakable is nice for the McGuffinish way that it gives us no explanation of the hero’s powers. They are.

Oh, and Lost.

Final thoughts: an obvious consequence of calling the whole lot ‘metaphysical mcguffin fiction’ – mmf – is no longer seeing such importance in the distinction between sf and fantasy and just plain old … fiction (not a new thought, obviously, but derived in perhaps semi-novel fashion). If Dark City is just Exterminating Angel is just Waiting For Godot … then a lot of things end up going in the pot together. As, probably, they should.

Zombie Economics

Kraken

But I’m thinking about quoting our John in something I’m writing (yes, on Zizek). But I can’t footnote a Kindle edition. No pages. What will the world come to? Bibliography has gotten a bit old and odd in the head in the age of the internet, but the existence of pages themselves is kind of a watershed. On the one hand, there’s really no reason why a text that can be poured into a virtual vessel as easily as it can be inspirited into the corpse of a tree should have to have ‘pages’. Still, it’s traditional. Harumph. I suppose I’m going to have to use Amazon’s ‘search inside’ or Google Books and pretend I read the paper version, as a proper scholar would. Or just email John Q. and ask.