What an amazing historical document. I had not intended to watch the whole thing, but I did, with rapt attention. It recalls deep, vague, long-forgotten memories in me. Perhaps I saw this very episode in 1979, when I was seven; perhaps it is just that Col. Sanders speaks exactly like the elderly people in my American childhood used to speak. I knew Americans from the 19th century, worshipful Americans with their very own pastors who spoke with regional accents uncorrupted by mass media. It's hard to believe now, but I did.
There is so much here! Jim Bakker's sidekick's awful doggerel in praise of the Colonel (19'38''); the delightful finale with the giddy KFC regional managers distributing chicken to the PTL crowd, as the Colonel himself enjoys a wing; the squirm-inducing story of the polyp in Col. Sanders' colon and the 'plunk' sound he heard in the commode after his post-op enema (8'40''); Col. Sanders's own creepy pastor who denounces the 'Jewish attorney' (sic) who performed the operation on the Colonel and failed, in his Jewishness, to realize that God himself had already begun his own operation on the chicken-magnate's colon (9'47'').
What is most stunning, of course, is the way this epitomizes so vividly the conspiracy of religion and entrepreneurship in American history. Col. Sanders is 'saved' not nearly so much when his pastor first prays for him, as when the Colonel forks over his first tithe. The simple-minded money-maker and the crafty man of God make a perfect pair. The whole history of the place is a history of duplicity, unctuousness, and unremitting hustling. I miss it.
Once a year or so I permit myself to be alarmed by the maneuverings of Bob Avakian, the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States. Some years ago I was invited onto the radio show of one of Avakian's principal porte-parole, whose name escapes me now, but who is a well-known fixture at the lower end of the radio dial.
The subject was some uncontroversial thing, the indefensibility of the US invasion of Iraq or the like. At some point, when it came to discussing the propaganda operation leading up to this invasion, I invoked the name of Stalin, which stopped my host cold, and triggered a spontaneous defense of the Ossetian caudillo, who, I was told, might have had to take some extreme measures, but was sure nonetheless to end up 'on the right side of history'.
This got me Googling the radio program I had innocently agreed to be on, which landed me after a few clicks on the website of the RCP-USA, learning all about the elusive Chairman Bob. A veteran of the '60s student movement in Berkeley, Avakian is now the leading Maoist figure in the US. Fine. that's his thing, and surely there's a place for it. There is a legitimate debate to be had about the historical legacy of the great leap forward. I am a pacifist, and I think that it was not worth it; I understand however the arguments of those who draw to our attention the fact that, through the bloody violence of it, China really did effect a great leap forward, and that therefore I should be interrogating myself about the ways in which my own flaccid pacifism helps maintain the interests of the imperialist lackeys, the paper tigers, etc.
That's all exciting stuff to debate. But what I can't go along with is the conscious cultivation by Avakian and his enablers of a cult of personality around this rather unexceptional Californian. It's remarkable to see them working at it (Avakian has even said, in response to the criticism that there is such a cult: "I certainly hope so— we’ve been working very hard to create one."). This does at least help me to put Maoism in perspective. When I've read Mao, and been utterly put off by the cultic aspect of it, I have sometimes tried to tell myself that this must be something deeply rooted in Chinese culture, and that cannot but come across as odd when translated into English and presented as a universalizable revolutionary doctrine. Why, after all, even if I ultimately judge that the great leap forward was worth it, should I give the slightest shit about Mao the guy? Why should I care about that stupid face of his? It must have something to do, I've often told myself, with ancestor worship, with cultural legacies I simply can't understand, just like I can't understand pangolin worship or couvade.
But the RCP has managed to duplicate precisely the tone of the unbelievably deadpan party-line correctness we know from the Little Red Book, yet transplanted into familiar American situations. Consider this testimonial about Chairman Avakian from a certain Carl Dix, entitled "Traveling with Chairman Avakian: A Determined Revolutionary Leader, and a Fired Man, for Decades." Dix was a member of the Black Workers' Congress from Baltimore, who was hosted by Avakian during a visit to New York. They had a discussion about some minor points of doctrinal difference between the BWC and Avakian's own group, after which, so Dix testifies, the "discussion I had with Bob Avakian was a very important turning point in my life. It is no exaggeration to say that because of it I was able to stay on the revolutionary path." Dix goes on:
The carrying forward of this line struggle is a testament to the correctness of the line that Bob Avakian has led the RCP in forging from the months leading to its formation down to the present. And it is a testament to the importance of us all learning from the approach and method he has brought to the revolutionary struggle for all of the more than three decades that I've known him.
Avakian keeps out of sight these days, and we are not told by Dix when this meeting took place, so we are left with the impression of a mythical encounter, of something fable-like that takes place outside of history but that serves as a seed for the beginning of history: like the Buddha's first witnessing of poverty. Notwithstanding his reclusion, the RCP website assures us that Avakian has an "irrepressible sense of humor" (just the other day I was irked by the assurance from Jobbik, the extreme right-wing Hungarian political party, that their leader Gábor Vona "is perhaps most notable for his disarming sense of humour, which frequently causes members of the audience at Jobbik public forums to be doubled-up with laughter." Why do political leaders who advance themselves through the threat of violence always feel the need to explicitly insist upon their own good humor?)
And now the RCP has a campaign underway that they're calling 'BA Everywhere', which is "aimed at raising big money to project Bob Avakian’s voice and works throughout society—to make BA a household word." It's being supported by something they're calling "The BAsics bus tour" (sic). Sunsara Taylor participated in one of these tours, and explained its importance as follows:
[T]he more that we are promoting Bob Avakian as who he actually is and what he is actually indispensible to (revolution aimed at the emancipation of all of humanity), the more we will be drawing forward and engaging the biggest questions of this revolution and bringing growing numbers into it.
In short, hail Bob.
Some of us of a certain age and from a certain part of the world will have trouble suppressing the memory of a different Bob, the fictional idol of the satirical Church of the SubGenius. Here the name 'Bob' was evidently chosen precisely for its uramerikanisch sonority, for its quintessential regular-guy sort of American anonymity. Bob is himself completely non-descript; he is to be worshipped not because he is exceptional, but precisely because he is a cipher.
Now the Church of the SubGenius was described by at least one of its prominent members as a 'very serious joke'. This is an approach to life that makes sense to me, which explains my at least tangential affiliation with the SubGenius crowd at an earlier stage of my development.
A serious joke is still a joke, and it is for exactly this reason that I would still contend that anyone loyal to this latter Bob, who does not exist, is leagues more sophisticated intellectually (and, I would argue, politically) than a follower of the Bob with whom we began. The Church of the SubGenius is trying to penetrate to the essence of mass movements, is exploring, through irony, what it means to line up behind some image of a head. Here there could be no real talk of 'correctness', and the literal mind that knows only correctness and incorrectness can only fear and hate the mind that works at another level. I have no doubt that Avakian would send the frivolous pranksters behind the SubGenius to the fields if he ever gained power.
Of course, the thing is, he most certainly won't, and it's in this connection that the intentional cultivation of a cult of personality seems so ridiculous to me. In order for such a cult to work, there it has to have the power of coercion behind it. Show me a single example, anywhere in world history, of a cult of personality that is not backed up by threat of force. It's a straightforward contradiction. Without such a threat, Chairman Bob is literally just a chairman, like the chairman of a school board, or of a Future Farmers of America milking competition. Even if the RCP were to seize power, its coercion could really only be exercised after the shit's already gone down. In the meantime there is simply no way that Chairman Bob could reasonably hope his dimly glowing personality might have sufficient purchase on (say) my attention to be able to bring about the cult he desires. How could it, when I've got the other Bob to amuse me?
Bob Avakian could become an important figure in my life, when, after the revolution, he sends his thugs to arrest me for this here display of gross incorrectness. I guess that's a chance I'm willing to take. Until then, as the other Bob says, give me slack.
There has been some interesting discussion at the NewAPPS blog, about the idea of 'academic passing', initiated by a thoughtful guest post from Kristie Dotson. It has been unclear to me throughout this discussion, since Dotson's initial post, whether what is being proposed is an expansion of approaches in philosophy to include sources, from whomsoever they might come, of philosophical insight that are usually not considered legitimate, such as non-Western philosophical traditions and popular and oral traditions (Western or non-Western); or whether, by contrast, what is being proposed is that philosophers ought to be more free to bring their individual background motivations, stemming from their autobiographies and the complex ways in which their identities took shape, to bear in their philosophical work. One thing that is clear is that by implication, if it is the latter aim, it is those philosophers who have backgrounds that are underrepresented in the discipline whose personal narratives are hoped to bring the most benefit.
As I've said to one NewAPPS contributor in another venue, I think these two possible proposals must be separated. By background I, for example, appear, like it or not, to be a chip off the old hegemon, and many would suppose that for me to incorporate personal narrative into my philosophical work would just be heaping on more of the same (though here I take it one of the great fruits of disability studies has been to drive home the point that many of us are marginal in ways that may not be evident on first meeting us, or perhaps even after knowing us for quite a while).
But whether or not I am to the manner born, it is a fact about my philosophical temperament and inclinations that I love to seek out unusual, broadly unrecognized, and easily dismissed sources of philosophical insight, including but not limited to poetry, mythology, oral traditions, folk culture, ethnotaxonomy, premodern and non-Western applied sciences, etc. In this respect, I too have found myself struggling to 'pass', e.g., when I conceal the fact that it was a book I read about the folk beliefs of a certain New Guinean highland tribe concerning the sociocosmic meaning of various bodily fluids that first got me interested in the metaphysics of generation in 17th-century European philosophy.
I tend to read Descartes, Malebranche, et al., ethnographically. For example, I see their views on the formation of the fetus as heavily inflected by commonplaces of contemporaneous European midwifery, and I see these commonplaces as bearing interesting parallels to folk beliefs around the world. Moreover, this fact is not for me a count against Descartes and Malebranche; it is rather in large part what makes them interesting to me. So my own work on the representatives par excellence of the dead-white-male tradition is not, for me anyway, a reinforcement of this tradition's hegemonic status, but rather an attempt to place these dead white males in a larger community, indeed the largest community possible: that of human beings who come up with sundry ways of accounting for the nature and origins of humanity and for humanity's place in nature.
I often suppress these background interests for the sake of what I have long thought of as academic passing (though less often, as my status becomes more secure). For many fellow philosophers, it's bad enough that I am principally concerned with ideas in history, let alone with ideas about soft and squishy things like the problem of animal generation, and let alone, again, in a way that conceives these ideas as investigable in the same way that we might investigate Papuan folk beliefs about menstrual blood. But now I am told that my academic passing can't really pass as passing, since my public identity as a white male ensures that my marginal interests can be preserved intact all the way through the tenure process, whereas if my identity were different I would find the systematic exclusion of the questions I value more prohibitive to my continued pursuit of academic philosophy. If this is what is at issue, however, then it seems we aren't talking about academic passing at all, but simple old-fashioned passing, where it is not beliefs and philosophical inclinations that have to be suppressed, but identities. It is a very serious issue that such suppression occurs, but it is a different issue from the one I at times thought Dotson was discussing.
My philosophical approach does not flow in any easy or obvious way from my background or my identity, but it is not clear to me whether Dotson's intervention can be read as an incitement to me (for example) to continue to pursue it anyway. In any case I find very worrisome the suggestion that only or primarily those people with (recognized) marks of identity difference should be charged with the task of diversifying and broadening the range of acceptable sources of philosophical insight. But again I think I may still be confused about which of the two points is being put forward, or perhaps this is a confusion that remains for Dotson to work out herself. But either way the two must, I think, remain separate.
Amateur neo-Kremlinologists will by now have heard of Pussy Riot, a league of masked anarchist feminist punks who, until recently, could be spotted around Moscow performing their music, uninvited, in public spaces. Their career was cut short when two of their members were detained by Putin's security forces. Here is a clip of what appear to be various performances, to the tune of their best-known song, "Kropotkin-Vodka":
As far as I know, no one has yet attempted to translate the lyrics into English, so let me give it a try:
Occupy the city with a frying pan Go out with a vacuum cleaner, reach orgasm; Seduce the battalions of police virgins. The naked cops rejoice at the new reforms.
Cunt to the sexist fucking Putinites!
Kropotkin-Vodka floats in their stomachs You're doing fine, and the Kremlin bastards Are having a rebellion of the johns, poisoning is fatal Blinkers won't help, meet Kennedy.
Cunt to the fucking cop stooges.
I must have slept, the day again is for oppression, Brass knuckles in my pocket: feminism, that is, Carry your soup to eastern Siberia, So that [Pussy] Riot can be sufficiently vulgar.
Cunt to the sexist fucking Putinites!
If I were to attempt an analysis, I would point out that on one level it appears that something is getting lost in the translation of a certain species of Western anarchist feminism into the Eastern European context. The formula here seems to be the assertion of a radical political stance through straightforward, in-your-face vulgarity-- something that I think is rather foreign to Western feminism. But I also think it's a mistake to try to interpret this as a borrowing or a derivation from the West: in fact it connects up with a long history of political dissent in Russia, and more broadly in Eastern Europe, through the public assertion of sexuality, most of which has not traditionally been overtly feminist. Most recently, we had the case of Voïna (War), an artists' collective that was brutally supressed by the KGB, or whatever they're calling themselves these days, after painting a giant phallus on a drawbridge that rises right next to the security forces' headquarters in Moscow. Banksy rushed to their support, though one suspects that he would have considered graffiti like this rather less interesting if it were to appear in London or Los Angeles.
More distantly, we have the pornographic novel-cum-memoir It's Me, Eddie, written in the 1970s by Eduard Limonov during his sojourn as an impostor Refusenik in New York City, long before he became a mercenary in Serbia and, finally, returned to Russia to found the so-called 'National Bolshevik Party': a bizarre mix of hateful fascist ideology with subversive street theater and clever manipulation of 20th-century political iconography. (To the right is a photo of me speaking, but not agreeing, with said fascist pornographer, circa 1996). More distantly still, we find the work of the Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev in the late 1960s and early '70s, who, like the Russian examples cited, seems to have been excited by the idea, which can be traced back to the 'Freudo-Marxism' of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s --before Stalin's imposition of socialist realism as the only legitimate form of aesthetic expression--, that true political liberation can only come with sexual liberation, or as Wilhelm Reich put it, and as Makavejev aggressively reminded us in his film about the apostate German psychoanalyst and communist: 'Fuck freely, comrades!'
So Pussy Riot, I mean to say, joins a distinguished lineage. But one thing is different this time around: the oppressive state against which the avant-garde is recalcitrating has grown more sophisticated, adaptable. In the West, this adaptability takes the form of 'greenwashing'; in China (as that one Slovenian guy is always mentioning), the state has figured out that it is better off not suppressing Buddhism altogether, but rather putting forth its very own, party-approved Dalai Lama to undermine the authority of that Western media darling in exile in India. The Putin regime, in turn, has responded to the Pussy Riot problem not only by brutal suppression (though that too), but also by propping up its very own aggressively sexual, masked, subversive, avant-garde-ish answer to Pussy Riot. As reported recently at Snob.ru (I haven't quite figured out what Snob is all about; all I know is that it is a consistently interesting source of news and information coming out of Russia, and, perhaps not unrelatedly, its servers are currently down), and as confirmed by a simple YouTube search, there is now a character going by the name of 'Dick Riot', roving around Moscow, making an ass of himself.
He claims to be an independent journalist who happens to support Putin, and protests rather loudly when he is asked whether his stunt is being supported directly by the Putin regime. To be honest I can't really figure out what he is on about in the YouTube clips of him, but he seems like a rather unpleasant person. Anyway what is of interest about him is that in today's Russia such a man as Dick Riot could be one of the derivative products formed in reaction to the hybrid of Eastern European sexual-political subversion with Western feminism that is Pussy Riot.
Putin is no Stalin, and the fact that he has been able to consolidate power in the era of YouTube is in part a result of his ability to coopt the forces of would-be subversion, forces that to which a tyrant like Stalin could respond only through utter suppression. Usually, this cooptation is simple Berlusconi-style media manipulation; surely the most vulgar example of this was the 'Tear Something Up for Putin' campaign, in which nubile young women could win their very own iPad2 by submitting a video of themselves sexily tearing something up that, it was understood, represented Putin's cowardly enemies. One of the most favored submissions featured a Playboy-ready young woman tearing up a pile of US dollars.
But the reaction to Pussy Riot, perhaps, shows a new sort of cooptative sophistication. It responds to the avant-garde not with more, louder, sillier, glossier air-brushed nonsense, sustained by the hope of a new iPad, but rather with a figure that supposedly emerges from the fringes himself, bearing a mask, pulling stunts, playing the merry prankster. Of course, there is nothing at all avant-garde about Dick Riot, and in fact the substitution of 'dick' for 'pussy' is deeply, literally, illustratively reactionary, exactly like the disgruntled proposals we often hear in the United States for the creation of a 'National Association for the Advancement of White People'. The very first lesson of feminism, learned by pretty much all non-australopithecines in the West a long time ago, is that feminist and 'masculinist' perspectives on one and the same thing are not, so to speak, enantiomorphs of one another. They are different because the feminine is always the marked category; everything is a dick unless otherwise specified.
So in that respect Dick Riot is not just reactionary but also redundant. That the Putin regime would be able (directly or indirectly) to produce such a creature, as its pseudo-avant-garde response to a genuinely subversive phenomenon, makes sense when we recall what a dick Putin himself is. I sat at a desk across from that morose little man in 1990, when he was consigned by the Gorbachev regime to a sinecure watching over foreign students at Leningrad State University. I swear I'm not making it up when I say this: I remember thinking, this guy's got a problem. But he's managed to do a lot with his problem, and again I think much of his success has to do with his adaptability. Stalin squelched the avant-garde. A tyrant with any hope of sticking around in the age of YouTube will take a different, more supple approach.
Anton Wilhelm Amo was the first African philosopher active in Europe in the modern period (there were plenty in antiquity, but this was before 'Africa' and 'Europe' meant what they do today). He was a member of the Nzema people, born in 1703, and kidnapped into slavery around 1706. He came into the service of Herzog Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel shortly thereafter as a Kammermohr, a 'chamber Moor'.
His trajectory seems very similar to that of Abram Petrovich Gannibal, who was taken from Africa (long thought to be Ethiopian, more recent evidence traces him to Cameroon), sold at a slave market in Constantinople to Peter the Great, educated and raised as the Tsar's own son, eventually to pursue a distinguished career in engineering, military science, and diplomacy (he was also Aleksandr Pushkin's great-grandfather, and the subject of the author's unfinished novel, Peter the Great's Moor, of which I've translated an excerpt here).
Gannibal is quite a bit better known than Amo, though his distinctions as a general and as an engineer are rather less interesting to me, anyway, than Amo's career as a philosopher. I don't know all that much about the role of the Kammermohr in the Enlightenment, but one certainly gets the whiff of a perhaps well-intentioned paternalism, if not a more straightforward racism, in the project of taking non-Europeans and 'training them up' in European manners (and sometimes sciences and letters too). The virulent racist Voltaire, for example, was not prevented by his racism from searching for l'étoile noire des Lumières (he thought he had found it in Gannibal). But this doesn't negate the fact that in some cases the result of these experiments was the cultivation of interesting people who accomplished interesting things.
Amo is fascinating to me for a lot of reasons, and right now I am resisting the temptation to run the idea of writing a biography of him past my editors. He is of particular interest to me as a philosopher though, because he was working in Halle in the decades immediately following the death of Leibniz (whom he probably met in Wolfenbüttel when he was a small boy and Leibniz was an old man), in a context where Leibnizianism was hotly contested, with the Wolffians speaking in his defense, and Georg Ernst Stahl and his Pietist cohort working against the influence of Leibniz's philosophy. From what little analysis I've been able to find of the philosophical import of Amo's 1734 dissertation, De humanae mentis apatheia, there seems to have been no recognition so far that his central thesis, that the soul is not the locus of sensory experience, could be a parti pris against the Stahlian view that the soul is directly implicated in the workings of the body. I have yet to work through the dissertation in any detail, but I suspect it could be a somewhat shrouded defense of Leibniz (whose name is mentioned only once in passing in the entire work).
The work as a whole is rather dull and scholastic (with a small 's'), the sort of thing Kant had in mind when he spoke of the dogmatic slumbers of German philosophy in the century preceding his own critical turn. But there may be more of interest in Amo's work than others of the same tradition. For example, in a subsection of a lengthy enumeration of varieties of irregular syllogism, Amo mentions a type of argument he calls 'crocodilitis', "a sort of captious questioning," in which "the person who asks intends to demonstrate two contrary propositions by means of fictitious reasons... affirming the one by negation, and denying the other by affirmation."
I haven't been able to find any reference to crocodilitis anywhere else, and I'm inclined to suspect that Amo was inserting a bit of levity into this tedious exercise of taxonomizing syllogisms by playing on perceptions of his own exoticness; coming from a land stereotyped since antiquity by its strange animals (see, e.g., Aristotle's Historia animalium), Amo inserts a joke into his dissertation by naming a type of syllogism after a notoriously dangerous African beast.
The 'captious questioning' deployed in crocodilitis, moreover, is rather sinister; it suggests betrayal and uncertainty about who one's real friends are. No doubt I'm reading too much into it, but until someone can show me another author using the term 'crocodilitis', I'm going to suppose Amo is somehow trying to insert an autobiographical allusion here.
I've translated his account of it here. If anyone knows of an established meaning for this term in the history of logic and rhetoric, I would be very interested to know.
§8. Crocodilitis
Crocodilitis is not, strictly speaking, a sort of argument, but rather a sort of captious questioning. In this question, the interrogator intends to demonstrate two contrary proporsitions by means of fictitious reasons, yet in anticipation of the response that is to come: he affirms the one by means of negation, and he denies the other by means of affirmation; he does so in alleging, in both cases, premeditated fictitious examples.
Example: Mental Propositions
I. I am not your friend.
II. I am not your enemy
Question
Do you believe I am your friend? If the interlocutor responds in the affirmative, the other thus reacts immediately: Whence do you have this conviction? And he continues: If I were in fact already your friend, I would already have given you, long ago, the favors of friendship, and I would not have burdened you with this question.
If by contrast the interlocutor responds in the negative, the other promptly reacts: Whence do you have the evidence that I am your enemy? If I were already in fact your enemy I would not have asked the question: I would have been intent on harming you without saying a word. You can thus see that I am not your enemy.
*
Amo returned to Ghana in 1747 after a conservative shift in German politics made his career as a university professor impossible. Having arrived as a slave, and then against all odds managing to thoroughly insert himself into a German form of life, he eventually found himself squeezed out of the place to which he was initially brought by force. It's as if the Germans caught him in a long, drawn-out game of crocodilitis.
Soon I'm going to translate the various bits of front matter in the De humanae mentis, such as the multiple dedicatory letters, that deal with Amo's identity as a 'son of Africa' who has been initiated into European philosophy.
Having grown tired of my own shtick, of the endless me-centricity of this here project at www.jehsmith.com, I got it into my head that perhaps I should instead be channeling my energy into a more collaborative effort. To that end I decided to create a group blog.
The first thing I did was to register a new domain name: www.thehinternet.com (some time ago I had registered www.clinamen.net, but I forgot to pay my annual fee, and the address was taken back by ICANN or whomever; and in any case neo-Lucretianism had just grown too fashionable for me to want to associate myself with that old idea of 'the swerve').
I learned after registering the name that the term 'hinternet' is already in use, evidently mostly among conspiracy-mongering off-the-grid types who worry about 'the government' 'shutting down' the Internet, to describe some anarchic assemblage of ham radios they've put together to simulate the workings of the Internet. I thought when I first learned this that we would do better to change our name. I decided to stick with it, though. Let 'hinternet' be polysemous. Let us see what the primary meaning of the term will be a decade from now.
The Hinternet is going to be developed into a group blog, one that will be like a great many other such blogs before it, with this one noteworthy difference, that it will not be stultifyingly boring. It will draw on the interests of the artists, academics, critics, and scientists who contribute to it, but there will be absolutely zero shop talk: no moaning about performance reviews, the tedium of grading, parental leave, &c. Just ideas, discussed with elegance and conviction. I am envisioning something like Cabinet Magazine, transported into the format of, say, The Daily Beast.
I am not yet sure this will even be possible. Certainly, there is not much else on the Internet that aspires to this end. That's why it's called 'The Hinternet': we're going behind and around the established conventions in this venue, acknowledging that we've moved into a post-paper world, but seeking nonetheless to preserve something of the non-evanescence, the feeling of relative permanence, that one used to get from ideas discussed in print. We will also differ from existing blogs in that we will try to be self-contained, also somewhat like an old-fashioned magazine. A post that provides a link to a post somewhere else with a sentence or two of commentary will not cut it here.
It will take a while yet before we begin with our regular stream of posts. For now, we would like to ask you to help us out by spreading the word about The Hinternet. 'Like' us on Facebook, for example, and encourage your friends to do the same. The more readers we have, the greater the incentive will be to write good stuff, which will get us more readers, and so on, in an unending virtuous circle.
We already have most of our bases covered, with excellent writers ready to hold forth regularly on architecture, cognitive science, the history of science, linguistics, literature, &c. We would be interested in hearing from an aspiring music critic interested in gaining some exposure. Someone who lives it and loves it, and who knows how to write.
But what, you are no doubt asking, will come of jehsmith.com? Don't worry, I'm only branching out, and you can continue to expect regular doses of variously pessimistic, haughty, underground-man-like meditations; out-of-place Gallicisms, obsessive-compulsive preoccupation with language, and hints of religious fervor shrouded by over-loud protestations of non-belief here in my regular space. But I've grown a bit tired of these various personae, et j'ai le goût de faire autre chose. I think it will do me good to blend into a collective effort (of which I am the supreme controller, of course).
I don't mean to boast, but there's also no reason to hide from the fact that I am read by some very important people. Since I began this blog in 2005, I have been contacted by dozens of editors, producers, and other movers and shakers in the entertainment and literary worlds. Take this, for example:
Dear Justin Smith,
With your permission, I would very much like to reprint your article [on mushrooms and literature] in the newsletter of the Long Island Mycological Club, the LI Sporeprint, of which I am editor. Full authorial credit would be given, and you would be furnished with both hard copy and pdf. The article may have to be shortened somewhat due to space restraints, and if so, your approval would be sought, if you so desired.
Thanks for any consideration you can give this request.
Best,
H.
For a long time I thought it could not get any better than this, but just the other day I was proven wrong, when I received a message with the subject heading: 'Animal Planet Show'. Though I had long been of interest principally to literary types, it looked like I was finally going to make the move into television! I opened the e-mail without delay, stars shimmering before my eyes. "Hello Mister Smith," it read,
I apologize immediately for contacting you out of the blue for something you might find silly and mundane. However, I have to ask (as it is my job), and I'm hoping you might have some insight.
I work on a show for Animal Planet called "Bad Dog" and my job is to find "cute" and "funny" animal clips to license and air on our show. I came across a video where a 'Dove Annoys A House Cat' (you can see it on Youtube) and the owner of the clip is named "Shlarl". Or, it's his handle.
Either way, I've been trying to track down this "Shlarl" (so far with no luck). I know he has commented on your articles (which I have read briefly, and find interesting). I am wondering if you know this person and/or have any way to contact him. I just want to ask if he would be interested in talking to me about licensing the clip. I believe he's French Canadian, and unfortunately I only understand half of his commentary.
Again, I hope I am not disturbing you. If you wouldn't mind letting me know your thoughts, I would greatly appreciate it.
I hope to hear from you. And thank you for your time and your blogging insights.
K.
K.'s message filled me with questions. Like, how on earth could there be a show on the air, in 2012, such as this 'Bad Dog'? Isn't this precisely the sort of thing the Internet has obviated? What was America's Funniest Home Videos, after all, but a YouTube avant la lettre, like a shadow play, circa 1890, just before the dawn of cinema? What is the point of 'licensing' a video and showing it once on television, when you can just 'share' the video on your website and show it as many times as your audience wishes to see it?
But these were trivial matters. The important thing was that I was going to be on TV! Or at least that, as a result of my behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, a video of a dove annoying a cat was going to be on TV! Maybe I could cut a deal with this 'Shlarl' and we could co-license the video, or whatever it is people do to derive money and fame from the cultural effluvia they cast off. This was going to be the start of something big.
But then I started to have second thoughts. Maybe I should just accept my fate as a blogger and share the dove-annoying-a-cat video here, for you to watch, for free and at your leisure. It really is delightful, by the way. See for yourself:
[P.S. I would like to extend a sincere thanks to K. at 'Bad Dog', a consummate professional who gamely agreed to allow me to cite our correspondence here. May his career in television, or whatever replaces it, go far.]
It has been unclear to me throughout this discussion, since Dotson's initial post, whether what is being proposed is an expansion of approaches in philosophy to include sources, from whomsoever they might come, of philosophical insight that are usually not considered legitimate, such as non-Western philosophical traditions and popular and oral traditions (Western or non-Western); or whether, by contrast, what is being proposed is that philosophers ought to be more free to bring their individual background motivations, stemming from their autobiographies and the complex ways in which their identities took shape, to bear in their philosophical work. One thing that is clear is that by implication, if it is the latter aim, it is those philosophers who have backgrounds that are underrepresented in the discipline whose personal narratives are hoped to bring the most benefit.
