Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Even Tierra del Fuegans Do It

The Uncashed Metaphor of Natural Selection

Justin E. H. Smith

1.

In their classic 1979 article, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm," Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin fault the adaptationist program for its failure to distinguish current utility from reasons for origin; its unwillingness to consider alternatives to adaptive stories; its reliance upon plausibility alone as a criterion for accepting speculative tales, and, as they put it, for "its failure to consider adequately such competing themes as random fixation of alleles, production of non-adaptive structures by developmental correlation with selected features… the separability of adaptation and selection, multiple adaptive peaks, and current utility as an epiphenomenon of nonadaptive structures." They announce that in the critique they are offering, they are proceeding in the spirit of "Darwin's own pluralistic approach to identifying the agents of evolutionary change."

Spandrels, or the tapering triangular spaces formed by the intersection of two rounded arches at right angles, are, as they explain, "necessary architectural byproducts of mounting a dome on rounded arches." In other words, you can't have an arch without a spandrel, and you need an arch in order to support a roof. If you ask the architect why he put the spandrel there, he will tell you you don't understand architecture.

Quaeries Medical and Chirurgical

Justin E. H. Smith

To all those men of science who have occasion to attend a beheading: we have heard that the head remains conscious and agitated for up to thirty seconds after separation from the body. Won't you kindly make an arrangement with the prisoner (and, as needed, the executioner), so as to measure its inevitable loss of vitality? You might agree with the head's owner upon a system of signaling by blinks, at intervals of, say, five seconds, until such a time as the head can blink no more. We would not recommend that you get rough with the head and slap it about. This was tried by an earnest physician during the Reign of Terror, who only wanted to sustain the quickness and apperception of a woman's severed caput for as long as he could by means of a few harsh blows to the cheeks. She was affronted, and gave him a bitter scowl, and would no doubt have lashed him harshly with her tongue, had she still lungs to bellow. Yet what, we would like to know, is so offensive about a few bracing and inquisitive strikes when one has, after all, just had one's head sliced off?

Clinton and Obama in Anthropological Perspective

Why Race and Gender Are Separate Issues

Justin E. H. Smith

Will there be no end to this tiresome "national conversation" as to whether a black man trumps a white woman, or vice versa, on our nation's list of the wronged? One possible end might arrive, of course, when another white man is elected in November and American politics returns to business as usual. In the meantime, I would like to join the conversation, if only in order to bring to light the inanity of the relevant comparison, based as it is on a presumption of analogy between two social groups that are distinguished, conceptually and in reality, from the dominant group for entirely different reasons: in the one case, the distinction is based on a relatively short, 500-year history of economic subordination; in the other, it is a consequence of an evidently universal structural feature of human societies.

Judith Warner Is in My Head

Justin E. H. Smith

Judith Warner is in my head, and she won't leave. She's been in there for three weeks. Now I don't mean I've been thinking intensely about Judith Warner for three weeks. I mean she is actually in there, perceiving the world through my eyes, seeing everything I see, peeing standing up when I pee standing up. Seeing it all.

Let me explain. This is not like Being John Malkovich, where the parasitic consciousness takes over control of the host body. I need to make this clear: Judith Warner has no control whatsoever over my sensorimotor system. She has to sense whatever I sense, and do whatever I do, whether she wants to or not. She doesn't like Ravioli-O's? Tough.

How did this come to pass?  Those who know me will know that I suffer from obsessive-compulsive symptoms, including the irrepressible desire to swallow whenever I see the letter 'A' and to feign a sort of half-spitting, half-vomiting motion whenever I spot an 'F'.  I'm out of my gourd, but we knew that already. The question now is: How did Judith Warner get into my gourd?

 

Sveta

[Originally published in Pod znamenem radosti, 1998]

Sveta, you are a witch,
darting no sly come-hither stares,
still fewer bold geh' unten dares,
but only humid, earthen glances
concocted out of dew, and pitch.

Before you there was nothing,
only bluest sky, and bluer sea,
'til you took me to the night-dark forest,
at sea and sky's black boundary.

We came into a backward place,
God's other creation, life's travesty.
We were welcomed by a viscous race.
'Twixt plant and brute, not flesh nor leaf,
they bade us stay in their rotten fief.

And how the elegant stink-horn stunk,
as the velvety earth tongues lapped!
Let us lie in the humus, you said, just to nap.
And bearded tooth, and hairy parchment,
beamed with joy, in stalk and cap.

What else could I expect from life?
To slink like Grendel back to my mother,
and die where I was born?
Under the sea, a thermal vent my wet-nurse,
and sundry invertebrates the succession of  my sitters.

No.

The future lay on the forest floor,
among the mushrooms, your natural kin,
the smiling greeters at death's door,
whose form is just congealed sin;
whose love would gently guide me in.

(Kola Peninsula, 1997)

The Woman: It Is Also Person!

Leading Minsk Newspaper Endorses Candidates in US Presidential Race

Justin E. H. Smith

In what spokespeople for both parties are calling an act of "unprecedented interference," a strongly pro-government newspaper in the authoritarian republic of Belarus has offered its own endorsements in the US presidential primaries.  Analysts contend that this operation was likely directed by president Aleksandr Lukashenko himself, and was meant to serve as a critical response to the international community's past efforts to monitor elections in Belarus.  The US government and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe strongly denounced as illegitimate the 2006 Belarus elections, in which Lukashenko received more than 80% of the vote and opposition parties were not permitted to campaign.  As of press time, the Belarus embassy in Washington has refused to offer any comment on the endorsements. 

Divers Quaeries

By Justin E. H. Smith

To those travellers departing to Nova Zembla: Please confirm for us whether the snow there gives off its own light, or only reflects that of the moon with unusual intensity.

Hi-ho, to all those expert in the arcana of Finno-Ugric inflection: Won’t you kindly let us know how the vocative case is faring in Samoyed?

To the hardy citizens of Brasov (Kronstadt): We have heard reports of a bear that descended from the mountains right into the medieval city center, and savagely mauled an American woman hoping to take its picture.  Can you please tell us whether, firstly, the victim was targeted in view of her nationality, and, secondly, whether the Carpathian bear population has exploded in consequence of Nicolae Ceausescu’s bear-fertility policies, or some other reason?

Translation

Stefan George
from the Buch der hängenden Gärten (1895)

Speak not always
Of the leaves ·
Violent breeze ·
Of the smashing
Of ripe quinces ·
Of the coming
Of destroyers
At year's end.
Of the quiver
Of the darters
In bad weather
And the lights
With the flicker
Transient.

Warsaw

Race and Music in America, Part II

By Justin E. H. Smith

MC Hammer once boasted: "You're '87 and I'm '89."  With time, the force of this taunt has weakened considerably, and it should serve as a lesson to anyone who associates too strongly with the Zeitgeist.  Yet, whenever Hammer's lyric replays in my mind, I find myself protesting: No, no, I too am '89.  Then, or around then, is when everything more or less came together, when potentials became actual, when my fate became sealed. It was also then that those surrounding me, and the intensity of everything they took seriously, appeared at the peak of their immortality.

Shostakovich for his part declared that all of his symphonies are, in the end, epitaphs.  He did not mean, in the spirit of a hip-hop toast, that through his music he would 'bury' his enemies and dance on their graves.  He meant that his friends were buried quite against his wishes, and that through his music he hoped to commemorate them.  Now I am not a composer of symphonies, but only, however much I resist the title, a composer of 'posts'.  Nonetheless, I have recently developed the sense that no matter what topic I'm treating, everything I write comes out as a sort of obituary, even if the subject happens not to be dead (yet). 

Are Twins Birds?

What Philosophy Can Learn from Anthropology

By Justin E. H. Smith

I have gradually become convinced that historians of philosophy --my colleagues, and by training myself-- are going about a cluster of very interesting questions in entirely the wrong way.  These questions, I think, may be much more adequately answered from an anthropological point of view.

According to one widespread account, modernity came into being as a consequence of the sacrifice of nature.  The Scientific Revolution literally killed nature by transforming it from a living and holistic system of interconnected entities, human and non-human alike, acting intentionally in accordance with their natures, into a dead system of atomic particles being moved about, without intrinsic purposes, but only as a result of extrinsic physical forces.  This new scientific cosmology would also bring with it, the story goes, a new philosophical anthropology, as humans came to see themselves as radically separate from, and opposed to, a natural world in which they as thinking intelligent agents could have no part.  The world, which now operated according to entirely different laws than those that governed our own thinking, was 'disenchanted', as Max Weber would later put it, literally gutted of any cosmological significance --where cosmology is understood as some model of the interrelatedness of the heavens, the earth, animals, humans, super-human spiritual entities, and perhaps also God-- and reduced simply to extended particles endowed with mass, figure, and motion.