[This post is a continuation of the previous one. Click to read it.]
It seems that Lakoff & Johnson's notion of "flesh" is limited to neurons and synapses. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whom they explicitly follow, used the same word to refer to the space between, the connectedness, the out-there of our perceptions. It is the folding and unfolding of our consciousness — which usually perceives outside our bodies — in play with other consciousnesses, in a social and environmental space so far from the cogito. Consciousness exists in open space, not enclosed in our brains.
Lakoff & Johnson have no sense of the social on this level. Instead, there's depends on the objectivism of the natural sciences. While I realize in the last chapter they qualify their dependence on cognitive science, Philosophy in the Flesh is overwhelmingly a book that uses science as its foundation. In so doing they sidestep the very critique of science made implicitly and explicitly in Merleau-Ponty's notion of flesh: for him, flesh is a primal way of being, that which we forget we forget, the very space and possibility of perception. Science is a self-consciously developed way of thinking and explaining that is many steps abstracted from this notion of flesh.
Objectivity is a construct distant from the flesh of the world.
Lakoff & Johnson would agree with the last sentence. However, that doesn't mean that their work isn't deeply dependent on science, rather than Merleau-Ponty's flesh, as the origin of its thought.
What it comes down to is that I am still, over a century after its inception, most sympathetic to phenomenology as a philosophy. This means that I feel Lakoff & Johnson's critique of science does not go far enough.
It does not account for the perception before the perception that we happen to notice. Instead, it uses cognitive science as an explanation for this subconscious.
But in Merleau-Ponty's hands, this subconscious must always remain part mystery, can only be approached in part, can never be fully explained.
Monday, September 29, 2014
Sunday, September 21, 2014
Philosophy, Flesh, & Metaphor: On George Lakoff
by Jefferson Hansen
George Lakoff is best known for his books on progressive politics. But he is also a philosopher. He has cowritten a number of books that explore the place of metaphor in our thinking. Lakoff, in his most thorough work, Philosophy in the Flesh, uses cognitive science to argue that metaphorical thinking is instantiated in the neurons and synaptical pathways of the brain. This brain matter is the flesh of most thinking, including philosophy. Language emerges from it.
Lakoff and his co-author, Mark Johnson, make no apologies for basing their philosophy on cognitive science. While they have a sophisticated view of science and consistently argue that it is impossible to objectively account for reality using language, mathematics or anything else, they nevertheless believe that science points to some fairly stable truths. They use the example of our knowing the earth is round; that's not going to change, they claim. While I am less convinced of this than they are, we'll let it go for now.
Using the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John Dewey, they argue that there are some human universals. However, they are not based on anything transcendental. Rather, they are based in our shared bodily experience in the world. For instance, the metaphorical connection between proximity and intimacy stems from our experience of being held as a child. Neural pathways begin to be formed at this infant age, before language emerges, and these pathways remain throughout life.
This type of metaphor Lakoff and Johnson term "primary." This is a metaphor that almost all human beings share simply because we live in a body in a society on the planet earth. Indeed, they claim that almost all human languages contain the proximity equals intimacy metaphor. There are a whole host of such primary metaphors, including up equals good and down equals bad and so on. From these primary metaphors, languages develop secondary metaphors particular to themselves. For instance, we use the word "horses" as a metaphor for many things: "hold your horses," "get a rein on that," "pull back on our proposal," and so on. The authors argue that, since many of us now have little experience with horses, the metaphor remains useful because we see it on TV and in the movies.
Lakoff and Johnson, therefore, can be understood as building a tree-like philosophy. Subconscious, embodied metaphors serve as our primary way of being in the world and thinking. The trunk, branches, and leaves are the more conscious aspect of language, and it is composed of secondary metaphors. Any sort of subject-object distinction is derived from these metaphors, and is not in any way there in the world. Some languages develop it, and others don't. What is universal is the way certain metaphors instantiate themselves in the flesh of the brain through our shared, embodied experience in this world.
I have yet to read Lakoff's book on literary metaphors, More Than Cool Reason, which he co-wrote with Mark Turner. I will do that soon. However, I like the following about his philosophy:
• Experience, not language, is primary. Language is derived from our shared bodily experience in the world. This is counter to much Postmodernism, which posits language as the repository of all human meaning.
• His philosophy implies that literary language, rather than being a mere construct, a mere language game, instead ripples back into a pre-linguistic bodily orientation. In other words, good literature shakes us, stirs us, ripples through us at our most basic, fleshly level, one outside language.
• He does away with subject-object duality and replaces it with a notion of "embodied realism," one that emphasizes how the world is composed, primarily, of our interactions. We form a world because of our primary metaphors and their derivations, and that is where we live, not in an object world that is separate from our minds. What is most basic is relationship: between people, between individuals and society, between the ways the earth works and our brains and bodies.
This is what I don't like about their philosophy:
• They build a scaffolding of primary metaphors as a foundation and secondary metaphors built on top. Somehow, this seems too stiff to me. I feel a little claustrophobic as I read them. I wonder if there is another way to show how language reaches back to attach itself to our basic bodily experience. There is something too structured about their thinking. While I realize that this is hardly a rigorous critique, it is nevertheless something that I instinctively feel is right.
• At least in Philosophy in the Flesh, they place too much faith in science. As cognitive science shifts and turns, waxes and wanes, so does their philosophy. I wonder why they couldn't use it as a sort of parallelism to their philosophy, as a kind of musical counterpoint, rather than as a foundation. They create a philosophy that is deeply skeptical of "objectivism," yet they seem to unquestioningly accept the conclusions of an "objectivist" science. I realize that they are quite aware of this criticism, and they do address it, but I am not satisfied with the way they do. No, we will not go back to believing the earth is flat. But as science changes with the times, our whole understanding of what it means for the earth to be "round"—as they put it—will so wholly alter that the very "roundness" will change. Science is in constant flux, I believe.
That said, I appreciate the way the authors open up a way out of the "language-contains-all-meaning" school of thought. I also deeply appreciate that they have opened a way of thinking that allows literary language to do more than merely construct games out of words. With them, there is a way that language shudders into the very flesh, not because our flesh is made sense of through language, but because language emerges from and returns to the body.
[See a continuation of this post here.]
George Lakoff is best known for his books on progressive politics. But he is also a philosopher. He has cowritten a number of books that explore the place of metaphor in our thinking. Lakoff, in his most thorough work, Philosophy in the Flesh, uses cognitive science to argue that metaphorical thinking is instantiated in the neurons and synaptical pathways of the brain. This brain matter is the flesh of most thinking, including philosophy. Language emerges from it.
Lakoff and his co-author, Mark Johnson, make no apologies for basing their philosophy on cognitive science. While they have a sophisticated view of science and consistently argue that it is impossible to objectively account for reality using language, mathematics or anything else, they nevertheless believe that science points to some fairly stable truths. They use the example of our knowing the earth is round; that's not going to change, they claim. While I am less convinced of this than they are, we'll let it go for now.
Using the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John Dewey, they argue that there are some human universals. However, they are not based on anything transcendental. Rather, they are based in our shared bodily experience in the world. For instance, the metaphorical connection between proximity and intimacy stems from our experience of being held as a child. Neural pathways begin to be formed at this infant age, before language emerges, and these pathways remain throughout life.
This type of metaphor Lakoff and Johnson term "primary." This is a metaphor that almost all human beings share simply because we live in a body in a society on the planet earth. Indeed, they claim that almost all human languages contain the proximity equals intimacy metaphor. There are a whole host of such primary metaphors, including up equals good and down equals bad and so on. From these primary metaphors, languages develop secondary metaphors particular to themselves. For instance, we use the word "horses" as a metaphor for many things: "hold your horses," "get a rein on that," "pull back on our proposal," and so on. The authors argue that, since many of us now have little experience with horses, the metaphor remains useful because we see it on TV and in the movies.
Lakoff and Johnson, therefore, can be understood as building a tree-like philosophy. Subconscious, embodied metaphors serve as our primary way of being in the world and thinking. The trunk, branches, and leaves are the more conscious aspect of language, and it is composed of secondary metaphors. Any sort of subject-object distinction is derived from these metaphors, and is not in any way there in the world. Some languages develop it, and others don't. What is universal is the way certain metaphors instantiate themselves in the flesh of the brain through our shared, embodied experience in this world.
I have yet to read Lakoff's book on literary metaphors, More Than Cool Reason, which he co-wrote with Mark Turner. I will do that soon. However, I like the following about his philosophy:
• Experience, not language, is primary. Language is derived from our shared bodily experience in the world. This is counter to much Postmodernism, which posits language as the repository of all human meaning.
• His philosophy implies that literary language, rather than being a mere construct, a mere language game, instead ripples back into a pre-linguistic bodily orientation. In other words, good literature shakes us, stirs us, ripples through us at our most basic, fleshly level, one outside language.
• He does away with subject-object duality and replaces it with a notion of "embodied realism," one that emphasizes how the world is composed, primarily, of our interactions. We form a world because of our primary metaphors and their derivations, and that is where we live, not in an object world that is separate from our minds. What is most basic is relationship: between people, between individuals and society, between the ways the earth works and our brains and bodies.
This is what I don't like about their philosophy:
• They build a scaffolding of primary metaphors as a foundation and secondary metaphors built on top. Somehow, this seems too stiff to me. I feel a little claustrophobic as I read them. I wonder if there is another way to show how language reaches back to attach itself to our basic bodily experience. There is something too structured about their thinking. While I realize that this is hardly a rigorous critique, it is nevertheless something that I instinctively feel is right.
• At least in Philosophy in the Flesh, they place too much faith in science. As cognitive science shifts and turns, waxes and wanes, so does their philosophy. I wonder why they couldn't use it as a sort of parallelism to their philosophy, as a kind of musical counterpoint, rather than as a foundation. They create a philosophy that is deeply skeptical of "objectivism," yet they seem to unquestioningly accept the conclusions of an "objectivist" science. I realize that they are quite aware of this criticism, and they do address it, but I am not satisfied with the way they do. No, we will not go back to believing the earth is flat. But as science changes with the times, our whole understanding of what it means for the earth to be "round"—as they put it—will so wholly alter that the very "roundness" will change. Science is in constant flux, I believe.
That said, I appreciate the way the authors open up a way out of the "language-contains-all-meaning" school of thought. I also deeply appreciate that they have opened a way of thinking that allows literary language to do more than merely construct games out of words. With them, there is a way that language shudders into the very flesh, not because our flesh is made sense of through language, but because language emerges from and returns to the body.
[See a continuation of this post here.]
Saturday, September 13, 2014
Bill Yarrow's THE LICE OF CHRIST
by Jefferson Hansen
Bill Yarrow's slightly blasphemous The Lice of Christ puns on the goal of all the Christian gospels, which is to present the life of Christ. But it also comes from a quotation by Adolphus of Smyrna, "I call Poet he who picks the lice off Christ." Somehow, that quotation, however startling, seems less blasphemous. And the tension between blasphemy and reverence appears and reappears throughout this book. But it's not, for me, what the book is about. It's about poetic form.
Yarrow divides it into three sections. In the first he writes poems that rely on quick and surprising juxtaposition and are held together by a seemingly innocuous detail—in the following case, food:
Janet and I
had the tilapia
fish tacos and
talked about God
God ordered the veal
cutlet and was rebuked
by the vegetarian Politburo
The beer had a divine odor which
attracted the wasps of mortuary remorse
The first two stanzas of this poem, "Theorizing Salsa," begin by positing someone or someones eating a specific, but also seemingly random piece of food. They both then move to a surprisingly disconnected final word, in one case "God" and the other "Politburo." The third stanza connects beer to remorse. We are left wondering about the connection between God and tacos, Politburo and the act of rebuking, and beer and "mortuary remorse." But that's not what is most essentially happening here, I think. Yarrow has set up three stanza that rely on a seemingly random, but somehow fitting, final word or two.
This poem says nothing about life. Instead, it enacts randomness. Its form stuns and surprises, three times, and strikes out in a fine way.
In the second section Yarrow precedes each line with a bullet point. These poems tend to be longer than those in the first section, and they do say things. In fact, they read like a string of related aphorisms:
• God is man squared. That is to say, God is man raised to a higher power.
• Man is the root, the square root, of God.
• We believe in the ideal (truth, wisdom, justice, honor, integrity, selflessness, sacrifice,
compassion, goodness) and God is the name we give to that ideal.
• What else is God but a heuristic for what we want to do with our lives?
Later in the same poem, Yarrow addresses jealousy, but then returns to his concern with God:
• Jealousy is a cocktail made of equal parts insecurity and possession.
• Before we can be jealous, we must make our mate our thing.
• Our God is a jealous God. What an unfortunate idea.
These poems work by stringing together aphorisms through the repetition of certain words or ideas. They spin around several axes—in this case God, Agnosticism, Jealousy, Vengeance, Prayer, Religion in general, the Devil, Genetics, even Vegetables. One axis sticks around for the whole poem: God. The others appear for a section, then disappear. It is as if the word "God" has a series of dance partners, until the very end—when he drops out, and the axis becomes the Devil.
Here again, the poem is about the form. We are left, yes, to ponder Yarrow's statements about God. But it seems to me the poem is more about the act of juxtaposition, the way statements, words, and ideas can be strung together, like popcorn dyed multiple colors and strung up, and the string is God.
In the third section, Yarrow usually tells stories. But these stories have a way of turning on themselves, in becoming not-stories. Most telling is "This Is Not a Poem," which concerns the story of a preacher's dog tracking motor oil in a hotel lobby and the journalist who was going to win the Pulitzer for reporting on it. In the end, however, we learn that none of this did, or can happen. "No preacher. No dog. No town. ... No [reporter]. Just the viral thought of him."
These knot-stories almost always contained a note of absurdity. Again, they are about the form. The form of narrative. What we choose and choose not to tell. How any narrative, even a true one, runs into and rubs up against a type of fiction.
It doesn't matter, so much, what Yarrow says, even when he is blaspheming. It matters what he does.
Bill Yarrow's slightly blasphemous The Lice of Christ puns on the goal of all the Christian gospels, which is to present the life of Christ. But it also comes from a quotation by Adolphus of Smyrna, "I call Poet he who picks the lice off Christ." Somehow, that quotation, however startling, seems less blasphemous. And the tension between blasphemy and reverence appears and reappears throughout this book. But it's not, for me, what the book is about. It's about poetic form.
Yarrow divides it into three sections. In the first he writes poems that rely on quick and surprising juxtaposition and are held together by a seemingly innocuous detail—in the following case, food:
Janet and I
had the tilapia
fish tacos and
talked about God
God ordered the veal
cutlet and was rebuked
by the vegetarian Politburo
The beer had a divine odor which
attracted the wasps of mortuary remorse
The first two stanzas of this poem, "Theorizing Salsa," begin by positing someone or someones eating a specific, but also seemingly random piece of food. They both then move to a surprisingly disconnected final word, in one case "God" and the other "Politburo." The third stanza connects beer to remorse. We are left wondering about the connection between God and tacos, Politburo and the act of rebuking, and beer and "mortuary remorse." But that's not what is most essentially happening here, I think. Yarrow has set up three stanza that rely on a seemingly random, but somehow fitting, final word or two.
This poem says nothing about life. Instead, it enacts randomness. Its form stuns and surprises, three times, and strikes out in a fine way.
In the second section Yarrow precedes each line with a bullet point. These poems tend to be longer than those in the first section, and they do say things. In fact, they read like a string of related aphorisms:
• God is man squared. That is to say, God is man raised to a higher power.
• Man is the root, the square root, of God.
• We believe in the ideal (truth, wisdom, justice, honor, integrity, selflessness, sacrifice,
compassion, goodness) and God is the name we give to that ideal.
• What else is God but a heuristic for what we want to do with our lives?
Later in the same poem, Yarrow addresses jealousy, but then returns to his concern with God:
• Jealousy is a cocktail made of equal parts insecurity and possession.
• Before we can be jealous, we must make our mate our thing.
• Our God is a jealous God. What an unfortunate idea.
These poems work by stringing together aphorisms through the repetition of certain words or ideas. They spin around several axes—in this case God, Agnosticism, Jealousy, Vengeance, Prayer, Religion in general, the Devil, Genetics, even Vegetables. One axis sticks around for the whole poem: God. The others appear for a section, then disappear. It is as if the word "God" has a series of dance partners, until the very end—when he drops out, and the axis becomes the Devil.
Here again, the poem is about the form. We are left, yes, to ponder Yarrow's statements about God. But it seems to me the poem is more about the act of juxtaposition, the way statements, words, and ideas can be strung together, like popcorn dyed multiple colors and strung up, and the string is God.
In the third section, Yarrow usually tells stories. But these stories have a way of turning on themselves, in becoming not-stories. Most telling is "This Is Not a Poem," which concerns the story of a preacher's dog tracking motor oil in a hotel lobby and the journalist who was going to win the Pulitzer for reporting on it. In the end, however, we learn that none of this did, or can happen. "No preacher. No dog. No town. ... No [reporter]. Just the viral thought of him."
These knot-stories almost always contained a note of absurdity. Again, they are about the form. The form of narrative. What we choose and choose not to tell. How any narrative, even a true one, runs into and rubs up against a type of fiction.
It doesn't matter, so much, what Yarrow says, even when he is blaspheming. It matters what he does.
Friday, September 12, 2014
Three Poems After Bill Yarrow’s THE LICE OF CHRIST
by Jefferson Hansen
Bill Yarrow divides his latest book, The Lice of Christ (MadHat), into three sections, each of which
explores a specific poetic form. Indeed, it could be argued that the book is
about form itself, but we will leave that discussion to tomorrow’s post, which
will review the book. Today, I will write an imitation of each of the three
forms Bill posits in the book.
1.
If You
for Bill Yarrow
if you work away in Omaha
you may think of the dales of Wisconsin
and wonder what happened to Houdini
and if you go to outer Antwerp
you may consider the many roads and routes
to get you to a cherished place in Rome
and if you end up in Nevada
you may forget to gamble and whore
and go to artsy movies at the cineplex
and if you titter away the hours in Paris
you may chomp on escargots
and wish you were eating a hairy burger
and if you drop down in New York
you may wish you tried Trenton instead
the history is more circumscribed
and if you stop in Washington, D.C.,
your eyes may bug out and burn
as they look up at the absent tall buildings
and if you rip and laugh in Mongolia
you may consider chomping cheese
Italy makes it strange, and sometimes best
you may simply not be where you are
like Johnny Cash singing “Big River”
on the outskirts of Tel Aviv
2.
Composition
for Bill Yarrow
•The composition may demand more than it ought.
•The composition rests on a cushion of thought and
prereflection. Tradition also plays a role, but we won’t talk about that now.
•A composition may or may not matter, but sometimes matters
some.
•The matter of a composition is inert marks on a paper or
computer. The composition lives in hearing or seeing it in air, or e(i)ther.
•Sometimes energy does not equal mc2.
•Human beings are not compositions. We are more variable and
complicated than than the most layered and discontinuous collages. We are not
what we are.
•The intent of a composition always matters, at least.
•Snowstorms can blind the trajectory of a composition.
Compositions can otherwise lose their way, and sometimes those are the most
interesting ones.
•Some prefer compositions that get away from themselves.
•A list is a form of a composition, although often not a
particularly interesting one.
•Interest is in the ear of the beholder, to a justifiable or
unjustifiable extent. There is always also indifference.
•Compositions may wish against their very arc.
•Some compositions don’t arc, they sway and shimmy, shatter
and scatter, size up and sizzle. Others just do what they are supposed to.
•A composition cannot be simply boring unless it wants to.
•Sometimes, simple matters more than complex.
•A composition may be layers of pulses, each shaking and
shimmying to its own beat, that occasionally match up, creating for a moment of
magic, only to then fall back to not being typically sized up.
3.
The Guy Wished
—for Bill Yarrow
The guy wished for a different kind of day, one with
turquoise skies and leaves of fragile, budding green.
Instead, he got the day he realized he had arthritis
in his left knee. The word came not from a doctor.
In fact, there was no word at all, just the realization
that was months in the making. In winter he thought
the stiffness and pain resulted from some ill-fitting boots
he had stupidly just bought. It went away. When it
came back in the spring he thought it came from the
way he favored his ankle for a week after twisting it.
In the summer he chalked it up to the relentless heat.
One day in the fall he suddenly just knew that it was
arthritic, and that he had a decade of sodium naproxen
in front of him, before he had to face the knife, as
his dad did, as his older buddy Frank did, as
many must.
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
feed the map
by John M. Bennett
letters wind bleak sword be
came running water writing ma
chine sock feast’s melted hoe
out on the beach half one tex
t half the other’s roof hair
sleight of mind turns the page fr
ame on conveyer belts floo
ding future explicatic blood
spheres of perfection two halves
of human organ ism vacuum
scissors litter ,dead fish st
ench head is heavy spits out
books door cramps future sac
rificial rites plays and poems
maps foetid chance on bed
of mown grass feed into the
machine roots doors weather
fangs worn from heaving in
visibly in the pages of their
own sweat’s ocean word-rinds
passing language time half
dead leaf juxtaposition choice
genuine chant absorbs the d
arkening flight darkening f
light darkening flight pro
vides the result’s embedded
proportion of diagonal suck
tides beneath the sm
all white pebbles shifts
the result milk in a few
minutes
aloft
- window rotting at the far end of creeks -
- William S. Burroughs
Hack of Jim Leftwich, Six Months Aint No Sentence,
Book 83, 08.11.14; Ivan Argüelles, “orphic cantos”, 95,
2014; and William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That
Exploded, “writing machine”, Oliver Harris edition, 2014.
letters wind bleak sword be
came running water writing ma
chine sock feast’s melted hoe
out on the beach half one tex
t half the other’s roof hair
sleight of mind turns the page fr
ame on conveyer belts floo
ding future explicatic blood
spheres of perfection two halves
of human organ ism vacuum
scissors litter ,dead fish st
ench head is heavy spits out
books door cramps future sac
rificial rites plays and poems
maps foetid chance on bed
of mown grass feed into the
machine roots doors weather
fangs worn from heaving in
visibly in the pages of their
own sweat’s ocean word-rinds
passing language time half
dead leaf juxtaposition choice
genuine chant absorbs the d
arkening flight darkening f
light darkening flight pro
vides the result’s embedded
proportion of diagonal suck
tides beneath the sm
all white pebbles shifts
the result milk in a few
minutes
aloft
- window rotting at the far end of creeks -
- William S. Burroughs
Hack of Jim Leftwich, Six Months Aint No Sentence,
Book 83, 08.11.14; Ivan Argüelles, “orphic cantos”, 95,
2014; and William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That
Exploded, “writing machine”, Oliver Harris edition, 2014.
Friday, September 5, 2014
Baudrillard's SIMULACRA AND SIMULATION followed by "1491" by Charles C. Mann
by Jefferson Hansen
Jean Baudrillard begins Simulacra and Simulation by discussing maps, and this is an apt introduction to his theory. "Simulation" applies to topographical maps, ones that use symbols to provide a representation of geography. The land comes first, and the map becomes something that helps us to better understand that geography. "Simulacra" refers to the representation literally becoming reality. In this case, the map becomes applied to the geography itself, like a blueprint. City streets at right angles are a classic example: the map, as blueprint, precedes the real and ultimately becomes it. When we walk the city streets, we walk in a plan, not a natural topography. In a sense, geography comes to represent the map, rather than the other way around. As Baudrillard puts it in relation to a story by Borges, "cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly" (1).
The example of the simulacra map can be applied to other areas of experience: the plan precedes what we might call reality. For instance, self-help books aim to form us in their image. And the law creeps further and further into our lives, legislating how we are to be psychologically: Eccentricity becomes understood as pathological. For instance, a man who chooses to isolate himself in his room in order to create art becomes not a little odd, but an agoraphobic, one who is afraid of the open spaces outside his room. The definition of agoraphobia becomes applied to him, he is understood according to its terms, and professionals attempt to heal him. The idea precedes reality and forms it, completely, point by point. "Healing" occurs when the former agoraphobic conforms to what is understood as health.
This can also be applied to academic disciplines such as literary criticism and history. In criticism, the ideas the critics develop forms the literary work, overwhelms it, to becomes more real than the art work itself. Educational institutions use English classes to encourage and even force students to understand works according to the critical consensus of the time. Commentary, therefore, precedes the work itself.
Similarly, in history the paradigms, techniques, and assumptions of the discipline are used to form the past. It is the discussion of historians that come first, not the past itself, and the areas where they reach consensus become handed to students as the reality of the past. Commentary precedes and forms reality rather than creating a simulation, or representation, of it.
I read 1491 by Charles C. Mann immediately after Simulacra and Simulation. In it, Mann argues that the Americas were heavily populated by well-developed civilizations at the time Europeans contacted them. Not only the Incas of South America, but the mound builders of North America, whose culture stretched from the Mississippi valley throughout what is now known as the American South, had developed into populous, highly structured, and stratified civilizations. In the Northeast of North America, the so-called Iroquois had developed a much different, more egalitarian and somewhat matriarchal civilization.
These civilizations remade their environment. Through controlled burning, the Native Americans created the prairies of the Midwest and West, thereby increasing the bison herds. Soil was created in the Amazonian valley to develop a way to farm amid a natural soil that was less than fertile. Mound builders formed cities that were home to tens of thousands of people who were dependent on sophisticated agricultural practices that made created more food than nature in its pure state.
Mann shows that the Europeans did not encounter a wilderness populated by small groups of hunters and gatherers. What generally happened was that European diseases, such as smallpox, preceded contact. The diseases wiped out sometimes 90% of the population, so that the Europeans encountered not the civilizations at their peak but groups of people reeling from destructive epidemics. Their ability to transform the environment toward their needs was profoundly affected.
As I read 1491, I noticed how Mann repeatedly referred to the heated discussion among archaelogists and historians about the degree to which the Native Americans could be understand as civilized, with large cities and developed agriculture.
And here I returned to Baudrillard. Mann documents two different simulacrums in the discipline of history: one sees the Americas as a pristine wilderness inhabited by sparsely populated hunters and gatherers before and after contact with Europeans. The second sees the Americas as a place that fell from its civilized, pre-contact formations into dissolution and chaos following the introduction, not of Europeans, but of the germs they brought over which preceded contact.
I reflected on how Mann was creating a simulacra of the past and attempting to make it the consensus among historians. This was a Nietzschean moment: archaelogists and historians fight among themselves to see which version of "reality" wins. It is will to power. And it is won by the group who marshals the data using the accepted techniques, assumptions, and paradigms of the discipline of history in the most convincing fashion.
Does this mean that I disagree with Mann, and that history is simply a self-enclosed game that has little to teach us about the world outside it? Hardly. I am sympathetic with Mann's simulacra, and prefer it over the one I, and most of us, were taught during our schooling. This is because we live in the era of simulacra: we cannot escape it or turn our backs on it. Academic disciplines seem to me the area of modern experience that most closely adhere to Baudrillard's theory.
Where Baudrillard falls short, I think, is in his considerations of particularity and the body. His theory is so all-encompassing that he would have a hard time accounting for unusual and alternative singularities. For instance, how would he describe the way a single utterance can splay, doubling and tripling on itself, as it is interpreted and understood by listeners or readers? There is a way that particular utterances are, to an extent, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. This opens a possibility for freedom outside the simulacra, in happenstance and unpredictability.
Baudrillard also doesn't account for the body, and I think this is a weakness of much of Postmodern theory. Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes a convincing case in The Phenomenology of Perception, a book published just after World War II, that the way we are in our bodies, the way we experience the world about us, forms our perceptions to a large degree. And, in my reading of the book, this bodily experience precedes language. If this is so, then any theory that claims language organizes all experience suffers from a weakness: the way human beings, as embodied creatures, necessarily are in-the-world forms us as much as languages. In other words, if something either precedes or accompanies language as the basis of our engagement with the world, Baudrillard, and most Postmodern theorists, becomes less all encompassing.
A contemporary book that explores this very possibility, using metaphor as a key, is Philosophy in the Flesh, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. I believe their theory, which names Merleau-Ponty as an important precursor, provides a useful, but not fatal, critique of much of Postmodernism, including Baudrillard.
That said, I believe Baudrillard is most convincing in describing how academic disciplines, such as history, study the very artifact they create, that they create a simulacra that they mistake for "reality." This seems inevitable, and, while it does not create a fatal blow to such disciplines, provides a means to approach them with a degree of skepticism.
Jean Baudrillard begins Simulacra and Simulation by discussing maps, and this is an apt introduction to his theory. "Simulation" applies to topographical maps, ones that use symbols to provide a representation of geography. The land comes first, and the map becomes something that helps us to better understand that geography. "Simulacra" refers to the representation literally becoming reality. In this case, the map becomes applied to the geography itself, like a blueprint. City streets at right angles are a classic example: the map, as blueprint, precedes the real and ultimately becomes it. When we walk the city streets, we walk in a plan, not a natural topography. In a sense, geography comes to represent the map, rather than the other way around. As Baudrillard puts it in relation to a story by Borges, "cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly" (1).
The example of the simulacra map can be applied to other areas of experience: the plan precedes what we might call reality. For instance, self-help books aim to form us in their image. And the law creeps further and further into our lives, legislating how we are to be psychologically: Eccentricity becomes understood as pathological. For instance, a man who chooses to isolate himself in his room in order to create art becomes not a little odd, but an agoraphobic, one who is afraid of the open spaces outside his room. The definition of agoraphobia becomes applied to him, he is understood according to its terms, and professionals attempt to heal him. The idea precedes reality and forms it, completely, point by point. "Healing" occurs when the former agoraphobic conforms to what is understood as health.
This can also be applied to academic disciplines such as literary criticism and history. In criticism, the ideas the critics develop forms the literary work, overwhelms it, to becomes more real than the art work itself. Educational institutions use English classes to encourage and even force students to understand works according to the critical consensus of the time. Commentary, therefore, precedes the work itself.
Similarly, in history the paradigms, techniques, and assumptions of the discipline are used to form the past. It is the discussion of historians that come first, not the past itself, and the areas where they reach consensus become handed to students as the reality of the past. Commentary precedes and forms reality rather than creating a simulation, or representation, of it.
I read 1491 by Charles C. Mann immediately after Simulacra and Simulation. In it, Mann argues that the Americas were heavily populated by well-developed civilizations at the time Europeans contacted them. Not only the Incas of South America, but the mound builders of North America, whose culture stretched from the Mississippi valley throughout what is now known as the American South, had developed into populous, highly structured, and stratified civilizations. In the Northeast of North America, the so-called Iroquois had developed a much different, more egalitarian and somewhat matriarchal civilization.
These civilizations remade their environment. Through controlled burning, the Native Americans created the prairies of the Midwest and West, thereby increasing the bison herds. Soil was created in the Amazonian valley to develop a way to farm amid a natural soil that was less than fertile. Mound builders formed cities that were home to tens of thousands of people who were dependent on sophisticated agricultural practices that made created more food than nature in its pure state.
Mann shows that the Europeans did not encounter a wilderness populated by small groups of hunters and gatherers. What generally happened was that European diseases, such as smallpox, preceded contact. The diseases wiped out sometimes 90% of the population, so that the Europeans encountered not the civilizations at their peak but groups of people reeling from destructive epidemics. Their ability to transform the environment toward their needs was profoundly affected.
As I read 1491, I noticed how Mann repeatedly referred to the heated discussion among archaelogists and historians about the degree to which the Native Americans could be understand as civilized, with large cities and developed agriculture.
And here I returned to Baudrillard. Mann documents two different simulacrums in the discipline of history: one sees the Americas as a pristine wilderness inhabited by sparsely populated hunters and gatherers before and after contact with Europeans. The second sees the Americas as a place that fell from its civilized, pre-contact formations into dissolution and chaos following the introduction, not of Europeans, but of the germs they brought over which preceded contact.
I reflected on how Mann was creating a simulacra of the past and attempting to make it the consensus among historians. This was a Nietzschean moment: archaelogists and historians fight among themselves to see which version of "reality" wins. It is will to power. And it is won by the group who marshals the data using the accepted techniques, assumptions, and paradigms of the discipline of history in the most convincing fashion.
Does this mean that I disagree with Mann, and that history is simply a self-enclosed game that has little to teach us about the world outside it? Hardly. I am sympathetic with Mann's simulacra, and prefer it over the one I, and most of us, were taught during our schooling. This is because we live in the era of simulacra: we cannot escape it or turn our backs on it. Academic disciplines seem to me the area of modern experience that most closely adhere to Baudrillard's theory.
Where Baudrillard falls short, I think, is in his considerations of particularity and the body. His theory is so all-encompassing that he would have a hard time accounting for unusual and alternative singularities. For instance, how would he describe the way a single utterance can splay, doubling and tripling on itself, as it is interpreted and understood by listeners or readers? There is a way that particular utterances are, to an extent, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. This opens a possibility for freedom outside the simulacra, in happenstance and unpredictability.
Baudrillard also doesn't account for the body, and I think this is a weakness of much of Postmodern theory. Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes a convincing case in The Phenomenology of Perception, a book published just after World War II, that the way we are in our bodies, the way we experience the world about us, forms our perceptions to a large degree. And, in my reading of the book, this bodily experience precedes language. If this is so, then any theory that claims language organizes all experience suffers from a weakness: the way human beings, as embodied creatures, necessarily are in-the-world forms us as much as languages. In other words, if something either precedes or accompanies language as the basis of our engagement with the world, Baudrillard, and most Postmodern theorists, becomes less all encompassing.
A contemporary book that explores this very possibility, using metaphor as a key, is Philosophy in the Flesh, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. I believe their theory, which names Merleau-Ponty as an important precursor, provides a useful, but not fatal, critique of much of Postmodernism, including Baudrillard.
That said, I believe Baudrillard is most convincing in describing how academic disciplines, such as history, study the very artifact they create, that they create a simulacra that they mistake for "reality." This seems inevitable, and, while it does not create a fatal blow to such disciplines, provides a means to approach them with a degree of skepticism.