Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Let's Merry? A Note on the Uses of Adjectives

Some Indo-European languages rely heavily on neuter singular adjectives to express abstraction, or something approaching what is conveyed by the English suffixes -ness or -hood. Significant work is done by this form of inflection in ancient Greek, where, as many have noted, the possibility of speaking of to kalon ('the beautiful'), for example, strongly suggests that beyond all the various beautiful things, there is a beautiful itself. The neuter singular adjective facilitates abstraction, it turns a word for a property of things into the concept of things themselves, and thus into the ultimate substantivized form, somehow leaping right over the intermediate quasi-substantial thing to which the property might attach.

This possibility is there in German as well (one of the features of German that caused Heidegger to believe it had some particular affinity with Greek), making it a challenge to capture all the subtlety of this otherwise very familiar language in English. Thus das Spannende has to be rendered as 'the exciting thing', and not 'the Exciting'; das Wichtige as 'the important thing' and not 'the Important', and so on.

Yet a new possibility has appeared in the American English of the most recent years, and while I would like to be able to say that this possibility is opening up to us the richness of the Helleno-Germanic thought-worlds, in fact I fear that it is a symptom of what appears to me, in my more pessimistic moments, to be the ongoing impoverishment of our expressive power. When I am visiting the more bourgeois wing of my family, and thus the wing most susceptible to channeling forms of speech they hear in trendy TV ads and other fragments of mass culture that subtly serve to instruct that class as to how to be, I have begun to notice  a troubling new habit. One person will say something like (and I have picked what is likely the most annoying adjective in the English language, just to drive the point home): 'Be careful, these sticky buns are really sticky', to which the other will reply: 'Oh good. I like sticky'.

Now this looks on the face of it like a substantivization of just the sort we see in German or Greek. But does the speaker mean to say that she likes, as it were, 'the Sticky'? I doubt it, and if I might speculate as to the metaphysics behind this bit of peculiar grammar, I would say that whoever says this is likely only capable of conceptualizing sundry sticky things, and has no idea of the Sticky itself beyond these. This is convergent grammatical evolution, then; it looks the same as the abstraction-facilitating device of other Indo-European languages, but, to the extent that it is really just a contraction for the expression of a desire to get one's hands on this or that bun, it is underlain by an entirely different ontology.

And it gets worse still. I have just been to a Starbucks in New Jersey, where I saw a new advertising slogan, something for the 'holiday season' (why, I ask, is this season always at the avant garde of musical, linguistic, and aesthetic awfulness?), that attempts to make an adjective into a fucking verb. Let's merry, it actually says. As in, let us be merry. Plainly, we are not getting any closer to the essence of merriment by letting the real verb drop out. We are just being compelled to thoughtlessly buy shit. The adjective is now degraded in the process of transformation from one part of speech to the other, whereas in Greek and German it had been lifted up and made to do even more conceptual work than the part of speech for which it stood in.

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Our Animals, Ourselves

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, November 27, 2011. To read the entire essay, go here.

When I was very small I lived on a defunct chicken farm. There was a house with a yard, and these together took up half an acre. To the north there was a long, thin chicken coop, empty of chickens, and behind it lay the back pasture, which occupied one acre. Perpendicular to this, to the west, there was the side pasture. Steers dwelled in the back pasture, ate hay, shat, sculpted odd forms on the salt lick (until we had them shot and butchered). As far as I know, these were actually existing steers. But the side pasture was inhabited, I imagined for a long time, by a fox. When I went there by day, I felt I was entering upon its territory; and when I lay in bed at night, I was certain it was out there, in its burrow, dwelling. It lived there like a human in a home, and was as real as any neighbor—except that I had myself brought it into existence, likely by projecting it out of a picture in a book.

The fox did not need to exist in order to function in my imagined community, one which must be judged no more or less real than that of, say, Indonesians, or of humanity. It was enough that there be foxes at all, or creatures that fit that description, in order for me to conjure community with the imaginary fox in the side pasture. And it was no mere puerile phantasm that caused me to imagine this community, either. It was rather my thinking upon my own humanity, a condition which until very recently remained, over the course of an entire human life, embedded within a larger community of beings.

These days, we are expected to grow out of that sort of thinking well before puberty. Our adult humanity consists in cutting off ties of community with animals, ceasing, as Lévi-Strauss put it, to think with them. When on occasion adults begin again to think about animals, if not with them, it is to assess whether animals deserve the status of rights-bearers. Animal rights, should there be such things, are now thought to flow from neurophysiological features and behavioral aptitudes: recognizing oneself in the mirror, running through mazes, stacking blocks to reach a banana.

But what is forgotten here is that the animals are being tested for re-admission to a community from which they were previously expelled, and not because they were judged to lack the minimum requirements for the granting of rights. They were expelled because they are hairy brutes, and we learned to be ashamed of thinking of them as our kin. This shame only increased when Darwin confirmed our kinship, thus telling us something Paleolithic hunters already knew full well. Morality doubled up its effort to preserve a distinction that seemed to be slipping away. Since the 19th century, science has colluded with morality, always allowing some trivial marker of human uniqueness or other to function as a token for entry into the privileged moral universe of human beings. "They don't have syntax, so we can eat them," is how Richard Sorabji brilliantly reduces this collusion to absurdity...

Cultural Lycanthropy

I've been rethinking n+1's 2010 intervention, "What Was the Hipster?", which I continue to take as some of the best amateur sociology of recent decades. It alludes explicitly to Anatole Broyard's 1947 "Anatomy of a Hipster," but the real antecedents are works like William Foote Whyte's 1943 Street Corner Society. It is a serious analysis of phenomena that don't exactly make their own case for being taken seriously.

One thing that did not strike me on my first reading of it a year or so ago was the description of a shift, circa 2003, I think, from a sort of Phase 1, which was entirely based upon appropriation of symbols of American whiteness, to a Phase 2 that might be called 'lycanthropic' (in the broad sense in which we understand 'clinical lycanthropy' today, to include not just werewolfism, but any human adoption of the physical or behavioral traits of an animal, cf. T. A. Fahy, "Lycanthropy: A Review,"  J R Soc Med 82, 1 (January, 1989): 37–9). This involved both a new animal-centered totemism that was somewhat continuous with the old irony (the howling-wolf-before-the-full-moon t-shirt might be seen as straddling both Phases), as well as a more literal becoming-animal (to speak with Deleuze, which I try not to do) that involved the growing of thick beards, a sort of coming-out as hirsute beings.

Not since the Sexual Revolution has so much hair been left to grow, laissé pousser, as they say. Even if this time around the additional hair does not provoke conservative outcries about the decline of civilization (perhaps there are too many other symptoms of that for the old and hairless to notice), and instead is immediately taken up into the system of commerce and advertising --thick beards suddenly appearing on the models in the vitrines of FCUK and Stüssy, mere frozen photographs, yet somehow blowing like weathervanes--, even if things are different this time around, I say, to the extent that capitalism has developed quite a bit since 1968 in its ability to swallow whatever comes along, still, this new hair must be seen as pointing beyond itself, as significant.

I don't want to get into what that might be. I suspect that it has something to do with the rise of ecology as a rallying point for the post-political youth in search of something to be earnest about. It also, perhaps, and perhaps relatedly, has something to do with a historical shift in the way we think about our community with animals.

But here is what I did want to get to: those who have been around me for the last month or so have noticed that I am having trouble shutting up about bears. I wrote a review for the Chronicle of Higher Education of a book about the history of the bear as a symbol in medieval Europe. It was an excellent book, and it fit nicely with my current broad interest, both scholarly and belle-lettristic, in the importance of animals in the constitution of human social reality.

Puzzlingly, when I arrived in Brooklyn a month ago, I quickly noticed that everyone around me was on about bears as well: the lad at the café would have one tattooed on his forearm; at least one restaurant would feature a bearskin rug, as if this were some hunting lodge; the names of bands I'd never heard of would bespeak the resurgence of the sort of ursine cult that the Church was supposed to have stamped out by the 11th century.

But here too, perhaps, the cult was waning: the kids had already started regretting their tattooing priorities of 2008; the bands with the ursine names were in close-out bins (bins full of recordings made in the last days of the history of the recording as a material object); and so on. And here I was, a middle-aged man arriving from the far provinces, just getting on to this bear thing!

And the question this has caused me to ask is one that is more Bourdieuian than Deleuzian: is everything, in the end, trickle-down, or do I actually care about bears? Am I like some mom on Facebook trying to use teen lingo? Or is my own 'animal turn', which expresses itself in books and essays and reviews (and blog posts too), rather than in tattoos and t-shirts and new directions in facial hair, something that has arisen quite independently?

In the end it doesn't matter; I'll write about them one way or another. And in a way it is heartening to see such intimate confirmation of what I have long suspected: that there is, so to speak, a regnum in regno, a kingdom within a kingdom --not grace within nature, but ideas within culture-- and intellectual trends might very well track those of fashion, without for that reason being any the less worth pursuing.

In a subsequent post I will attempt to say more about what I take to be the deeper causes of this cultural lycanthropy, and perhaps to make some sense of why I have become swept up in it.

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Ecce Homarus

[This is a short excerpt from my current book project, Language and Animals, about which you will be hearing more soon. --JEHS]

Some decades after M. F. K. Fisher, following Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, implored us to 'consider the oyster', David Foster Wallace asked us do the very same thing with a lobster. It was not at his request that I first did so, and neither was he the first to make the request. In the Essay on Classification of 1851, the Swiss zoologist Louis Agassiz also asked us to consider the lobster, but what he really wanted was something rather more radical: he wanted us to consider the lobster alone, to consider the world as if the lobster had no relatives, no exoskeletal cousins next to which we might be able to make some sort of sense of this odd creature:

[S]uppose, for instance, that our Lobster (Homarus americanus) were the only representative of that extraordinarily diversified type [the 'Articulata'], --how should we introduce that species of animal into our systems? Simply as a genus with one species by the side of all the other classes with their orders, families, etc., or as a family containing only one genus with one species, or as a class with one order and one genus, or as a class with one family and one genus? And should we acknowledge, by the side of Vertebrata, Mollusca, and Radiata, another type, Articulata, on account of the existence of that one Lobster, or would it be natural to call it by a  single name, simply as a species, in contradistinction to all other animals? (Agassiz, Essay on Classification, London, 1859, 5).

If you think the lobster is peculiar, just imagine how peculiar, how utterly non-pareil, it would be if it were the only articulate (i.e., exoskeletal) animal in existence? How could we even begin to say what it is if there were nothing else like it?

We might ask something more radical still: Ecce homo. Consider the human. Next, consider the human alone, without any animal relatives, endoskeletal or otherwise. What would such a creature be like? Standing in relation to nothing that is like it, and at the same time not it, how would we know what sort of being we were beholding?

Agassiz wanted to say that without other articulates --without, so to speak, articulacy in the world-- we could not make any sense of the lobster as an articulate being. Now obviously Agassiz had in mind a very special sense of articulacy, but I am going to permit myself to extend this notion back to its ordinary usage, and to propose that, for us too, it is our existence alongside beings that are like us, but not us, that makes us articulate. We would not know ourselves if we did not know the animals; they are mute (it is said), but they give us voice. Language and animals are of a pair.

The connection I am proposing is sufficiently well attested historically for me to feel little need to argue for it. It is there in the naming ceremony in the book of Genesis, when Adam zaps into the very essences of the brutes and gives them the names, the real, proper, singular names, that match these essences; it is there in the medieval bestiary, where the emerging idea of the 'book of nature' seems to presuppose that if nature is a book, the animals are its lexicon, its thesaurus (which sounds like a lizard but in fact suggests treasure). It is there in Claude Lévi-Strauss's famous claim, to which we will be returning on multiple occasions, that the 'concrete logic' of 'primitive' peoples is based on a 'thinking with animals'; and it is there in Charles Darwin, who argued that it is our recognition of our kinship with animals, including the cognate nature of our mental faculties with theirs, that enables us to recognize that we are natural beings at all, whose capacities emerge over time, just like those of everything else in the world:

If no organic being excepting man had possessed any mental power, or if his powers had been of a wholly different nature from those of the lower animals, then we should never have been able to convince ourselves that our high faculties had been gradually developed (Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, [1871], Princeton University Press, 1981, 34).

If it were not for animals, we would misunderstand our higher faculties; we would take them to have popped into being suddenly and miraculously. We would take ourselves to be angels, and we angels would be deprived of the bulk of our metaphors, which is to say of the bulk of our language, as well as of any bearings or sense of situatedness within any broader community of beings. We would be lonely, inarticulate angels. Instead we are animals that won't shut up ('rational animals', is how this has sometimes been put), and, whether we care to admit it or not, we are not alone.

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A Few Notes on Writing

I am spending much of this month working a number of esquisses of academic articles on animals, which for various reasons I never published, into a non-academic essay that I will publish as a non-academic book. How does one transform academic writing into non-academic writing? For the most part, I find I just have to delete those stupid guiding phrases like, "In this section, I will show that...", or "Consider the following sentence..." (a vulgarism about which Ted Cohen once brilliantly commented: "What the hell else did you think I was going to do? Get to that point and then start reading backwards?!"); and I am nixing those tiresome appeals to authority, like, "As such-and-such authors have shown..." I find this re-working a true pleasure; I am finally saying what I wanted to say about animals in the way I wanted to say it.

I surprised some friends recently when I told them that I never write anything entirely new. Every time I begin writing I do it by cutting and pasting some chunk of old writing, and then I set about re-working it, and expanding it, until it becomes something new. I compared this at the moment to planting a twig from an old tree, but in fact I think it's something more like that cooking practice in certain traditional cultures, where the same pot is used, unwashed, for generations of stews. A 'new' stew is begun upon the film and dregs of the old one, and the flavor of each stew is produced from thousands of such iterations. In any case if I were absolutely obliged to write something that had no pre-existence at all, I would have to give up and confess my illiteracy.

The Bestiary: Table of Contents

i. A world without animals

ii. The imagination of animals

iii. G. E. Lessing and the profundity of the animal fable

iv. Order: Natural or Alphabetical?

*

1. The Ass

2. The Bear

3. The Cephalopod

4. The Dog

5. The Elephant

6. The Fawn

7. The Gorgon

8. The Hybrid

9. The Insect

10. 'J' Is Not Even a Proper Letter, But if It Must Have Its Own Entry, This May as Well Be the Jackalope

11. The King of the Beasts

12. The Lycanthrope

13. Meat

14. The Nosehorn

15. The Orang-Outang

16. The Pig

17. The Quagga

18. The Rational Animal; or, If You Prefer, The Roughie

19. The Scapegoat

20. The Two-Backed Beast

21. The Unicorn

22. The Varmint

23. The Weasel

24. 'X': No Serious Bestiary Would Include an Entry for 'X'

25. The Yolk

26. The Zoophyte

*

[More information forthcoming. Please be patient.]

Playing the Bear

In The Bear: History of a Fallen King (tr. Harvard University Press, 2011), Michel Pastoureau relates that in a famous capitulary of 852-853, "Archbishop Hincmar of Reims... vigorously denounced, among other practices, 'vile games with a bear' (turpia joca cum urso) and demanded that the bishops of his province not tolerate such turpitudes under any circumstances. He provides no details about these 'vile games', but it can be imagined that they were dances or mimes performed at carnival time and still containing, in the late ninth century, powerful remnants of paganism, perhaps even simulations of copulation. A few decades later, Bishop Adalbéron of Laon, despite his strongly ursine name, also denounced games and masquerades in which men disguised themselves as bears or danced with bears. It was a wasted effort. The bear was the quintessential animal for disguises... and until the end of the Middle Ages, and even later, many prelates reeated, although they were not really obeyed, that a good Christian should not 'play the bear'" (83).

Below is a video, one of many available on YouTube, filmed in modern-day Romania. It features a traditional dance in celebration of New Year's Day, that bears nearly the same name as the activity denounced by Hincmar of Reims: from the Latin jocum cum urso, we still have today a Latinate remnant in the Carpathians, jocul ursului, or 'the game of the bear':

 

I've held forth on the theme of the incompletion of the project of depaganization visible in certain features of Balkan and Carpathian folk culture (see, e.g., this footage I took of a Christmas-Day goat dance). As an outsider I'm treading on sensitive territory here, and over the years I've learned not to make broad generalizations from fleeting glimpses of cultural exuberance (even if the thesis of an Unterschicht of pagan folk culture overlain by Orthodoxy is one that scholars such as Eliade readily accept).

But anyway today I just wanted to note how newly fascinating the idea of Christianization as an ongoing project --one that was by no means completed in the Middle Ages and one that still has more difficulty taking root in mountainous regions than in valleys (see also, in this connection, Sergei Paradjanov's masterpiece, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors)-- now seems to me in light of Pastoureau's treatment of the cultural history of the bear.

His argument is that until around the 10th century in Europe --and moreso the further one moved from the Mediterranean and Roman-dominated zones-- there was a vibrant cult of bear worship. Bears were not just ordinary animals, but were in nearly every respect doubles of human beings. They were presumed to be interfertile with human women, and half-bear offspring were held to be particularly virile and heroic. In the 12th-century Gesta Danorum, Saxo Grammaticus casually notes that the Danish king is descended from a bear, an observation that is repeated as late as the 16th century in the work of Olaus Magnus, even if by this time Viking raiders had long since ceased the practice of going berserk, i.e., putting on the 'bear shirt' before battle and transforming themselves into their ursine doubles.

Pastoureau argues that the sexuality and violence of the bear made it a naturally suspicious creature for the church, and that by the high Middle Ages the ecclesiastical authorities had succeeded in deposing it, reducing it to the status of a chained curiosity, of a pathetic circus performer, while enthroning the lion in the bear's former place in the iconography of heraldly and more broadly in the medieval symbolic imagination. The lion was a safe king of the beasts in large part because it was entirely extinct in Europe; it was no longer phenomenally salient in the daily lives of European folk, and there was no threat of dangerous effects from consuming its parts, from wearing its hide, or from having sex with it.

The bear was already more or less extinct in France (and England, and the Low Countries), other than in parts of the Alps and the Pyrenées, by the late Middle Ages. The worship of it seems to have diminished in rough correspondence to its geographical disappearance over the centuries. Romania has by far the highest concentration of bears in Europe (thanks in part to Ceauşescu's promotion of bear fertility-- a policy derived entirely from his personal interest in accumulating hunting trophies), and is also the place you are most likely to see vestiges of the jocum cum urso that was already on the decline in France by the 9th century. 

I'm inclined to think, along lines spelled out by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State (and also in Malinowski's description of folk customs in his native village in the Polish Carpathians), that both the endurance of the brown bear as well as the endurance of what look like pagan customs are in the end just a corollary effect of geographical circumstances: mountains have different cultural histories and different ecologies, and neither can be fully understood without consideration of the other.

Cephalopod Semiotics

Jaron Lanier, of virtual-reality fame, was permitted to hold forth a few years ago in a Discover blog space on the topic of 'morphing' in molluscs.

The result is messy: Lanier introduces the analogy between cephalopod intelligence and extraterrestrial intelligence three times, each time as though it is the first. He says that cephalopods offer "the best standing example of how truly different intelligent extraterrestrials (if they exist) might be from us," only to go on a few paragraphs further to wonder, "if cephalopods someday evolve to become intelligent creatures with civilizations, what might they do with their ability to morph?" Well are they morphing already because they are intelligent, or aren't they? Is morphing just a preadaptation that might someday facilitate a different kind of communication than we are used to, or is it already a self-evident sign of intelligence?

Lanier wants to suggest, evidently not in the interest of paradox-mongering, but simply as an account of what he thinks is going on, that the ability of certain marine invertebrates to radically transform their shape, color, and pigmentation is a variety of 'post-symbolic communication'. He imagines that if we ourselves could communicate through morphing, we might 'simulate' our own transparency when we are hungry, so that our friends could see our empty stomachs and be given to know of our condition. But just the vaguest familiarity with the semiotic tradition would have dissuaded Lanier from calling the display of the empty stomach an instance of non- (because post-) symbolic communication.

On C. S. Peirce's influential view, for example, molehills are secure in their standing as signs of burrowing moles, as smoke is of fire. A fortiori, if one intentionally flashes an empty stomach to a friend in the interest of pressuring that friend into serving as restaurant accompaniment, one is not communicating directly the message 'empty stomach', in which case the sign and the object would be identical (but even here I don't think the message would be non-symbolic). One is rather using the empty stomach as a sign for communicating something like 'let us get something to eat'. (Compare in this connection the familiar male primate gesture of flashing an erect penis. Surely the message there is not, or not just, erect penis. Rather it's what might possibly be done with the primate male member that makes this an eminently symbolic display.) Since moles make molehills, molehills signify moles; and since hunger depletes the contents of the stomach, an empty stomach signifies hunger. There's nothing post-symbolic about it.

We're left with the possibility that cephalopod morphing is either a non-symbolic preadaptation to what might someday evolve into a visual-corporeal language, as opposed to an oral-aural one (which Lanier seems to believe when he imagines what cephalopods might someday become); or that it is already a language in the proper sense (which Lanier seems to believe when he identifies cephalopods as 'the strangest smart creatures on earth'). In deciding between these two, it's worth noting that the range at least of a cuttlefish's morphing options seems rigidly determined by the features of the environment in which it evolved. If placed in an environment with unfamiliar color patterns --as, for example, on top of a chess board-- it will do its best to take on these patterns, but clearly performs better when in its own natural element.

 

This footage suggests that there's nothing at all like the infinite recursiveness that characterizes human language in the limited range of transformative options of which a cuttlefish can avail itself. In this respect, to call its transformations 'intelligent' is to take a leap of faith. Once one has conceded that the activation of a cuttlefish's chromatophores by changes in its environment might be the result of intelligence, there is no good reason not to suppose that any stable phenotypic feature of a species that has appeared gradually across generations through natural selection is not also a mark of intelligence. This is what is known as 'Intelligent Design' --the idea that organisms have the features they do because there is some intelligent concern, in them or in an external agent, to accommodate their interests in the universe--, and it is universally despised in respectable company.

Judging from his most recent cri de coeur, I gather that Lanier is a skeptic about all varieties of techno-utopianism, and has gravitated towards something that feels like its opposite and that might be called a species of primitivism. It looks to the animals and to nature to give us what technology and human innovation turn out to have falsely promised. In this Lanier is joining up with a long tradition, one that vastly precedes his own coming-to-consciousness of the limitations of the Internet, &c. This tradition is exemplified by Zhuangzi in the 4th century BCE, who, as if to offer an anticipatory rebuttal of Thomas Nagel's claim that you cannot know what it is like to be a bat, for example, insisted that he himself could clearly apprehend wherein a fish's happiness consists. And it consists, not surprisingly, in swimming around and doing what comes naturally to a fish.

To the extent that happiness and rationality are two sides of the same coin, this perspective is taken up again in early modern European libertine thought, as in Girolamo Rorario's 16th-century treatise, Quod animalia bruta ratione utantur melius homine (That Brute Animals Make Better Use of Reason than Man). The idea here, and then later even more prominently in the work of the Baconian philosopher John Bulwer, is that animals seek out what is in their natural interest directly, without the mediation of language (in Bulwer's terms, the animals' language is the language of the body; we slow ourselves down when we rely on the language of the mouth). Nature is rational, so action directly in accordance with nature is a direct expression of reason. Human exercise of reason-through-language is already mediated, distantiated, or cut off from the realm of reasons itself. It is approximative, whereas animals, lacking speech, are able to have directly what humans only approximate.

Rorario and Bulwer would surely have been enthusiastic about the cuttlefish (and probably knew ancient anecdotes about octopus intelligence via Aelian and Aristotle's Historia animalium). Lanier's interpretation of what is going on in the animal realm has a long history. This is a venerable history, and one the claims of which I myself find very compelling. But these claims rest on philosophical commitments that don't simply flow from the self-evidence of a cephalopod's corporeal transformations, or from facile comparisons to the world of virtual reality.

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Reading Ada, or Ardor

I am only now realizing the extent to which I was indirectly caused to buy into the party line as concerns Vladimir Nabokov. When I say 'party line' I mean nothing other than the Soviet Communist Party, which of course took his work to fall entirely outside of anything that might be considered a part of the history of Russian literature. He was a White Russian, an aesthete, and a bit of a pervert. What's more, he wrote mostly in English. And this was not as when, say, a grudgingly exiled Brodsky makes forays into English; this was a full métamorphose américaine, as he described it at some point. For Nabokov, English had the phonetics and the vocabulary to make it --again, in his words-- the most valuable linguistic treasure at his disposition.

So when I was a student of Russian literature Nabokov was certainly not on the list of required reading. They had us reading Sholokhov and Gorky and crap like that just because, at least at the time, the syllabi of American university courses on Russian literature continued to echo the Soviet conception of the canon. So we had the most dreary and predictable sotsrealizm, stuff that may be of interest to the political historian but with absolutely no value as literature, rather than the most talented Russian author of the 20th century, whose language of choice was only one, I think relatively minor, reason for his exclusion.

It strikes me now that in fact Nabokov was drawing more on the richness of the Russian language when he was writing in English than the party-sanctioned authors were when they were writing directly in Russian. Ada, or Ardor, in particular, is a trilingual novel (French being the third, and certainly lesser of the three components), and to say that it was written in English doesn't really do justice to Nabokov's project. It was written through English, mostly, but there would be nothing left of the endeavor if the Russian and French vocabulary, along with the interlinguistic jeux de mots that straddle more than one of the three languages, were to be eliminated. It is through English, but it is about the way different natural languages connect up or fail to connect up with one another. It is about the way language limits expression, and it is an attempt to push through those limits.

One thing Nabokov makes me think is this: it is ridiculous that I, myself, should continue to attempt to string words together at all. I can't even tell a story, but to write an entire novel in which every single word seems simultaneously to be playing the role of vehicle for moving the narrative along as well as being exquisitely selected for its poetic qualities and its multiple layers of signification: that's quite as far beyond my reach as advanced mathematics.

There is a well-known, perhaps apocryphal story of the advice given by Nabokov to a Cornell student who sought tips on how to become a good writer. Learn the names of trees, Nabokov said. This makes me think that Nabokov is writing through English, but that what he's really after is something like what in the early modern period was conceived as 'the Adamic language': the original, perfect system of words, words that zapped right into the essences of the things they named. The cross-linguistic play of a novel like Ada is a sort of exploration, to see which corrupted language brings us closer to the original Adamic one. If there is one thing that Nabokov loves more than language it's the world itself: the proliferation of instances of nature's infinite variety of kinds. As, for example, butterflies.

Working back to the world through the perfection of language: that's real realism for you, and I would be willing to impose it, if I could, as the party line for literature.

But of course in Nabokov there is also the famous work of synaesthesia, which doesn't seek the real names of things, but instead makes private connections between things, connections that we can't expect other people to see. We all do this, most of us more in childhood than later on (I still place Thursday, the color brown, and the state of Tennessee in the same private drawer), but Nabokov cultivated it and built complex worlds out of it throughout his life (coding colors with letters, for example). This seems impossible to square with the realism I just identified, but I think Nabokov may have believed that he, himself, was getting at the genuine correspondences between things, that his private synaesthesia was at the same time a recovery of the Adamic language. Again, the multilingualism of the project is just part of the method of recovering the 'right' word through cross-linguistic comparison. Repeatedly, Nabokov offers examples of the process of corruption in action, of the rate of drift from the Adamic essences of things as we move carelessly from one language to the other (rather than with care, as he moves). Thus for example he has Ada say:

--the nuance of willows, and counting the little sheep on her ciel de lit which Fowlie turns into 'the sky's bed' instead of 'bed ceiler.' But, to go back to our poor flower. The forged louis d'or in that collection of fouled French is the transformation of souci d'eau (our marsh marigold) into the asinine 'care of the water' -- although he had at his disposal dozens of synonyms, such as mollyblob, maybubble, and many other nicknames associated with fertility feasts, whatever those are.

I suppose that Nabokov saw Russian very differently than I do; for him, Russian, English, and French were familiar already in the crèche; for me, they are the impossible objects of an adult learner's struggling. They are too late. 

Cross-linguistic playfulness with Russian seems particularly difficult to me because Russian continues to appear as an entirely closed system. Even to see it transliterated into the Latin alphabet is to see something that ought not exist, an impossible adaptation. One of the jokes of Ada, which takes place in another possible world that is mostly like ours except with respect to certain of its geographical, chronological, and linguistic features, is that the Cyrillic alphabet was abandoned at some earlier point in history, and now Russian speakers are unable to so much as read old texts with the backwards 'R's and the letters that look like beetles, such as the one that begins the very word for beetle in Russian: Жук.

The transliteration scheme of this fictional Latinized Russian is based on English orthography; thus, я хочу comes out as 'ya hochu', rather than as 'ja hotschu', as it would be in a German-based system, or 'ia hotchou', as it would be if one's starting point were French (and there's no good way of handling the aspiration there, so for all intents and purposes one may as well write 'ia otchou').

Russian, I mean to say, cannot be transliterated, at least not without anchoring it to some other language that can have no claim to authority over an unrelated East Slavic tongue. But to the extent that it is not transliterated, it cannot really be made to play with English or French. Nabokov does his best, but I wonder if he had any sense of this barrier to cross-fertility, or whether it's just my own problem.

Perhaps my favorite Anglo-Russian play on words, as being the most successful, involves the name of the title character, which in the nominative case (Ada)  is identical to the genitive of the word, a masculine noun, for 'hell' (ad). One possibility that Nabokov declines to pursue here arises from the fact that ad also has an unusual ending in the prepositional case, an -u rather than the more usual -e. Thus 'in hell' is v adu, which as it happens is identical to the accusative construction v Adu, which is to say, 'into Ada'.

I don't know what work this might have done for Nabokov in the novel, but he could have made it work if he wanted to.

Let me finish with a long and stunning sentence that to my mind summarizes all of the points I've been making here. In it, Nabokov urges the return to nature's richness through the mastery of language, he moves through several languages, and the only moments at which this motion seems to stall are, I think, at those clunkily, Anglocentrically transliterated fragments of Russian:

The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I'm all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact-- that among these billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperatorskaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes.

Elephant Wars, Part II

A year ago I posted a short piece about human-elephant conflict in response to a review by Tim Flannery in the New York Review of Books. I have just been reminded of this, as I read this morning of Bob Parsons, the CEO of GoDaddy, and his obscene, pith-helmeted, pseudo-macho romp in Zimbabwe, which yielded a trophy in the form of a YouTube video showing famished natives, all wearing GoDaddy caps and feasting on the flesh of the beast that the great white savior Parsons had felled for them.

I believe as strongly as when I wrote the post last year that on the basis of solid scientific evidence it is perfectly reasonable to ascribe moral personhood to elephants. This is not to say that they are human beings, but not all persons are. One reason for withholding this status might be their apparent inability to take responsibility for their actions, to be suitable targets of reward and punishment, etc., and evidence of their inability might be the fact that they do not respect the boundaries of Zimbabwean farms. But note: we don't respect their territory either; we don't even recognize them as having any. So it is closer to the truth to say not that we are all persons in a single system of justice, but rather that we are two groups of persons at war, who do not recognize each others' claims. On this account, then, a Zimbabwean farmer who kills an elephant looks just like any other desperate warrior around the world; Parsons comes out looking like a smug Blackwater mercenary who deserves to be placed in the dock.

As the illustrations I've pulled up for this post remind us, however, in the history of human-elephant warfare, cross-species alliances are not unknown. As I go about divesting my own several domain names from GoDaddy (what a stupid name, by the way), I confess that these images suggest to me a suitable fate for Parsons as well (his crime was almost certainly far greater than whatever the poor saps in the illustrations stood guilty of).

Most shocking of all, perhaps, is Parsons' attempt to shroud his adventure in politically correct terms of sustainability, ecological balance, and so on. It is true that elephants intrude upon Zimbabwean farms, but that is only because Zimbabwean farms have intruded upon the elephants' habitat in the first place. So the thing to do now is to find the terms of a peaceful coexistence, and not to indulge primal fantasies of hunting in the false terms of eco-sensibility. (Parsons' gesture is not so different from Vladimir Putin's passion for shooting Siberian tigers with tranquilizer darts; he is doing it, technically, in the name of conservation, but what he really wants to be seen to be doing is shooting tigers. At least, however, Putin's machismo does not tear tightly knit social units apart (at least not in Siberia; Chechnya is another story).)

Some people with a reduced conception of personhood --one that indexes it rigidly to all and only post-natal homo sapiens, and utterly refuses it to every other being (the default ontology of modern liberal humanism)-- will find this comparison deeply offensive, but I note that it is almost certain that Julius Popper's hunting misions in Patagonia in the late 19th century were accompanied by the era's available rhetoric of 'natural balance' and of 'hygiene' and 'order', from which the sort of eco-apologetics conjured up by a man such as Parsons differ but little. Popper's preferred quarry was the Ona, a subvariety of human being, who once inhabited the Tierra del Fuego. Popper did not conceptualize his hunting as 'murder'. He didn't have to, because murder is by definition only that sort of killing that is perceived as deserving social sanction.

The rhetoric of human rights has brought us to the point where all killings of all post-natal homo sapiens is worthy of such sanction, is worthy of being classified as 'murder'. There is no good reason, however, to think of the boundaries of the human species as coextensive with the boundaries of the community of morally relevant beings. This is not to say that all beings belong on the same side of the boundary, and it is to allow oneself to be sucked into pointless casuistics to listen seriously to the anthropocentrist who tells you that if you care about elephants, you must care about eels, and so on.

What is certain is that elephants mourn their dead; they are traumatized by the loss of loved ones; they cannot rest until the corpse of a loved one receives its proper funereal rites. They are, in sum, the kind of being that can be murdered. Or kill or be killed in war, for that matter.

G. E. Lessing, "On the Use of Animals in Fables" (1759)

I had wanted to use just one passage from Lessing's short essay in an article I am supposed to be writing on the way our moral commitments, or lack of them, towards animals flow from an ungrounded folk-ontology that equates kinds with individuals. I ended up translating the entire essay, and in doing so I've both stalled and complicated my own project. It was Lessing's final point, the one he arrives at through his 'sensibility' rather than through logical conclusions, with which I disagreed most, and wanted to use as a foil. But the middle paragraphs, with the various substitutions of, e.g., 'Nero', 'wolf', and 'priest', I think are very interesting, and do not leave much to object to. Anyway, the article is still to come. Here is Lessing's essay.

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The great majority of fables feature animals, and still lesser creatures, as acting persons. What is to be learned from this? Is it an essential feature of fables, that the animals in them are elevated to the status of moral beings? Is this a device that shortens and eases the author’s intended point? Is it a usage that in fact has no real purpose, but that has been conserved in honor of the person who first invented it, if only because it is funny—quod risum movet? Or what is it?

In brief: that animals and other lesser creatures have language and reason is presupposed in fables. It is assumed, and should not at all be understand as miraculous. When I read in scripture, “Then the Lord opened the donkey’s mouth, and she said to Balaam…” etc. (Numbers 22:28), I am reading something miraculous.  But when I read in Aesop, “Back in the days when animals still spoke, the sheep said to its shepherd….,” it is quite evident that the fabulist does not wish to relate anything miraculous; but much more, rather, something that he supposes, with the permission of his reader, to have been perfectly in accordance with the common course of nature at that time.

And this is so easy to understand, I mean, that I should be ashamed to say anything more on the subject. I shall come rather at once to the true reason --or which I take to be true, anyway-- why the fabulist often finds animals more convenient than humans for his purposes. I place it in the widely known constancy of their characters.  I suppose that it would also be easy to find an example in history in which this or that moral truth makes itself known. [But] will it be able to be recognized in the example by everyone, without exception, even by those who are unfamiliar with the cahracters of the people of interest here? Impossible! And how many people are so widely known in history that they need only to be mentioned so that at once the notion of the way of thinking that is particular to them, as well as of their other properties, is immediately awakened in everyone? In order thus to avoid circumstantial characterization, in which it is never more than doubtful whether it calls forth the same ideas in everyone, it was necessary to confine oneself to the reduced sphere of those beings about which we reliably know that even for the most ignorant people this [or that] idea corresponds to the mention of them, and no other. And since these creatures are in their nature completely unable to take on the role of free beings for themselves, we preferred to expand the boundaries of their nature, and made them able [to take on the roles of free beings], under certain presumptions of probability.

We hear ‘Britannicus and Nero’. How many of us know what we are hearing? Who was this one? Who the other? In what relations do they stand to one another? But then we hear: ‘the wolf and the lamb’, at once we all know what we are hearing, and we know in what relation the one stands to the other. These words, which straightaway awaken within us their particular images, convey the perceptual knowledge that is prevented by those names [Britannicus and Nero], through which even those to whom they are not unfamiliar nonetheless certainly do not think exactly the same thing. If here the fabulist is not able to rustle up any rational individuals who portray themselves in our faculty of imagination through the mere naming of them, it is still permitted to him, and he has recourse and right, to seek out their equivalents among the animals or among lesser creatures still. If in the fable of the wolf and the lamb we were to place Nero in place of the wolf, and Britannicus in place of the lamb, the fable at once would lose what had made it a fable for the entire human race. But if we put the giant and the troll in place of the lamb and the wolf, it already loses somewhat less, for the giant and the troll are also individuals whose characters are alreadly largely explained without further additions by their being mentioned. Or we can even transform it into the following human fable (2 Samuel 12): “A priest came to the poor man of the prophet and said: ‘Bring your white lamb before the altar, for the gods require a sacrifice’. The poor man replied: ‘my neighbor has a great herd, and I have only this one lamb’. ‘But you made a vow to the gods’, the priest replied, ‘for they blessed your fields’. ‘I have no field’, was the answer. ‘But that’s how it was before, when they healed your son of his illness’. ‘O,’ the poor man replied, ‘the gods took my son himself as a sacrifice!’ ‘You godless man!,’ the priest scolded, ‘You blaspheme!’ And he tore the lamb from his arms…” etc. And if in this transfomation the fable has lost still less, this arises simply from the fact that the character of avarice is unfortunately even more quickly associated with the word ‘priest’ than the character of blood-thirstiness with the word ‘giant’; and through the poor man of the prophet the idea of oppressed innocence is more easily awoken than through the troll.

Indeed, I would like to venture to ascribe yet another purpose to animals and other lesser creatures in fables, to which perhaps I never would have come through [logical] conclusions, if my sensibility had not brought me to it. The fable has as its aim our clear and vital recognition of a moral principle. Nothing obscures our recognition more than the passions. Consequently, the fabulist must avoid the excitation of the passions as much as possible. But how else can he avoid, for example, the arousal of sympathy, than by making the objects of it less perfect, and by putting animals or lesser creatures in place of men? Let us recall again the fable of the wolf and the lamb, as it was transformed above into the fable of the priest and the poor man of the prophet. We sympathize with the lamb, but this sympathy is so weak that it has no noticeable impact upon our intuitive knowledge of the moral principle. How is it by contrast with the poor man? Does it only seem so to me, or is it really true, that we have so much sympathy with him, and we feel much too much indignation against the priest, for the intuitive knowledge of the moral principle to be able to be nearly as clear as it is in the other case?

For Salt, a Cricket: Notes on Folk-Taxonomy and the Hindu System of Reincarnation

Here, from the 2nd-cenury BCE Laws of Manu, is the most explicit elaboration I'm aware of of the system of Hindu reincarnation: that is, the specification of which sort of soul ends up in which species of womb:

A priest-killer gets the womb of a dog, a pig, a donkey, a camel, a cow, a goat, a sheep, a wild animal, a bird... A priest who drinks liquor enters the womb of a worm, bug, or moth, of birds who eat excrement, and of violent creatures. A priest who is a thief is reborn thousands of times in spiders, snakes, and lizards, aquatic animals, and violent ghouls. A man who violates his guru's marriage-bed is reborn hundreds of times in grasses, shrubs, and vines, in beasts that are carnivorous or that have fangs, and in people who engage in cruel actions. Violent men become carnivorous beasts; people who eat impure things become worms; thieves become animals that devour one another; and men who have sex with women in the lowest castes become ghosts...

The rhythm of the list grows more rapid and staccato as it moves on to the crime of theft:

For stealing grain, a man becomes a rat; for brass, a goose; for water, an aquatic bird; for honey, a stinging insect; for milk, a crow; for spices, a dog; for ghee, a mongoose; for meat, a vulture; for marrow, a cormorant, for seseme oil, an 'oil-drinker';  for salt, a cricket; and for yogurt, a crane; for stealing silk, a partridge; for linen, a frog; for cotton, a curlew; for a cow, an iguana; for molasses, a bat; for perfumes, a muskrat; for lettuce, a peacock; for cooked foods, a porcupine; for uncooked food, a hedgehog.

There appears to be a system of correspondences here, as clearly in the pairing perfume/muskrat. Each theft seems, though often in a very cryptic way, to be followed by a transformation into the sort of animal associated with the object stolen, an association either in virtue of a property of the animal itself, or in virtue of the animal's characteristic activity (what Leibniz would call its officium). But then the system grows more straightforwardly just, in a poetic sense, when the sort of theft in question involves the taking of another living being:

[For stealing] a deer or an elephant, [he becomes] a wolf; for a horse, a tiger; for fruits and roots, a monkey; for a woman, a bear.

Presumably, stealing these sorts of animals (or plants) is akin to preying on them, even if one does not in fact eat them as a real predator would; and presumably there is something bearish in the ravaging of a woman.

Far worse than theft or even murder is to fail in the carrying out of the innate activity (the officium?) of one's social class. For this one becomes not an animal but some variety or other of ghost. Thus:

A priest who has slipped from his own duty becomes a comet-mouth ghost who eats vomit; a ruler who slips from his duty becomes a false-stinking ghost who eats impure things and corpses. A commoner who has slipped from his own duty becomes a ghost who sees by an eye in his anus, eating pus; a servant becomes a moth-eater ghost.

This is all very vivid material for the imagination, but what interests me most are the correspondences between animals on the one hand and the theft of various objects on the other. Following a lead from Zimmermann (1982), it seems that in this system we have a basis for claiming that Indian folk-taxonomy is embedded not just in therapeutics and pharmacy (Zimmermann's focus), but also within its system of justice. This would provide grounds for claiming that a text such as the Laws of Manu leaves a rich trace of a science of nature, in much the same way that Leviticus does with its dietary prohibitions: which have to do with morality, hygiene, and taxonomy all at once.

The difference is that the Hindu system of justice is an explicitly cosmic system, where the consequences of moral transgression are projected into a future life that begins through a radical species transformation. Because it is such a bedrock principle of Western natural philosophy that species transformation must involve the eradication of one individual and the generation of another (even lycanthropy in Europe is almost universally explained as a taking on of the outward appearance of a wolf, while maintaining the human species essence), it might be harder to see that what the Hindu system of reincarnation is doing is not only trading in metaphysical impossibilities, but also saying a great deal about the nature of various kinds of social action and about certain salient features of the natural environment. And again, like Leviticus, it is doing this by a single motion. 

I'll be writing on this more in the future, towards an eventual article. But for now I have to keep working on my Sanskrit, and keep reading...

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See Francis Zimmermann, La jungle et le fumet des viandes. Un thème écologique dans la médecine hindoue, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1982.

See also my earlier post on Zimmermann here.

Herodotus and the Naturkinder

In the 18th century, the figure of the Naturkind was the source of much speculation, the most well-known product of which is, perhaps, the tale of Kaspar Hauser. Philosophers supposed that if a child were to grow up without any exposure to human society, the resulting adult would be a living model of what it is a human being is most purely or naturally. One of the most pressing questions such a child would be able to answer, it was thought, was the matter concerning the origins of language: would it be able to speak at all? And, if so, what sort of words would it use?

Somewhat earlier --peaking as a topic, I think, in the mid-17th century-- there was an intense debate as to which language, if any, was the language spoken prior to the fall of the tower of Babel. The most common candidate was Hebrew, but Chinese, Egyptian, and others are also mentioned. Some argued that the Hebrew of which we have traces was not the real Hebrew, and that there is an earlier, 'Adamic' language that, if rediscovered, would disclose divine knowledge to humans.

Interestingly, in Herodotus, there is a sort of combination of these two varieties of speculation. In Book II of the Histories we are told of the Egyptian king Psammetichus, who wishes to determine whether or not his nation is in fact the oldest on earth. He sets up the following experiment:

He gave a shepherd two new-born infants to rear, from ordinary families, and told him to bring them up among his flocks in such a way that no one ever spoke in their hearing; they were to lie in a remote hut by themselves, and he was to bring them she-goats from time to time, give them their fill of milk, and do whatever else needed doing. Psammetichus made these arrangements because he wanted to find out what the children's very first word would be, once they were past the age of meaningless whimpering. And so it happened. One day, when the shepherd had been carrying out this programme for two years, he opened the door and went into the hut, and both children rushed up to him, reaching out their hands, and said 'bekos' (II 2). 

It turns out, as Herodotus explains, that 'bekos' is the Phrygian word for 'bread', and that from this it may be concluded that it is the Phrygians, and not the Egyptians, who are the most ancient of all people. By this peculiar reasoning, the oldest language is the language that one would naturally speak if not pushed off course by another, newer language. No explanation is given of language change, but presumably Herodotus, or the person who told him this tale, would suppose that all non-Phrygian words for 'bread' are in fact deformations or corruptions of 'bekos'.

This does not seem to imply any special status among languages for Phrygian, or any indication of a need for a return to the natural way of saying things. In this respect, early modern speculation about the origins of language --both the language acquired by an individual over the course of a lifetime, as well as all the natural languages of the world and the relations between them-- could not have been more different. So far as I know, the search for the first language and the speculation about what a Naturkind would be like were never brought together into a single line of questioning.

This is because, unlike Psammetichus and Herodotus, the early moderns supposed that whatever language a Naturkind might end up using, it would not be the original, primordial language of humanity; when the debate as to what that primordial language was was at its peak, moreover, a century before Rousseau and other speculated about children of nature, it was universally assumed that this was not a 'natural' language, that it would not congeal spontaneously over the course of a childhood suckling at the udder of a she-goat. Instead, it had a divine source, and so all subsequent 'natural' languages, like Latin and French, were corruptions of it not in the way that Egyptian was a corruption of Phrygian, but in a way that implied a loss, or, to put it in more overtly theological terms, a Fall.  

On Seeing a Deer: A Postscript

I failed to mention in my recent reflections on the possibility of a cervidocentric theology that there is in fact a very important precedent for this approach in the history of philosophy. I am referring of course to Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, a 12th-century Andalusian Arabic treatise describing the ascent of a human orphan raised on a deserted island by a motherly doe. The primal experience of her solicitude, the observation of the wisdom inscribed in her parts and in her actions, leads the boy gradually to certain knowledge of the truths of Divine creation.

Now as I've already said I'm wary of the need for such an ascent: I am perfectly content to simply stop and admire the doe. Yet I do think it highly significant that the author chose to start with precisely this animal. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the very word 'deer', cognate to the German 'Tier', may be understood to mean simply animal as such. There are animals that don't quite qualify for this generic status, in view of exceptional, often negative traits on top of their animality: they are loud, they eat meat, they eat garbage, they copulate in human view. But the deer is the silent plant-eater of the forest: elusive but without a trace of evil. God's perfect creature.

If Ibn Tufayl's orphan had been raised by an elephant, say, or a mongoose or a tapir, the God he ended up coming to know in the end might have looked very different indeed.

On Seeing a Deer

In a number of posts recently I've attempted to convey the difficulties I face in connection with the question of belief in God. I have said that my answer to the question is generally context-dependent, and that I find that most contexts require the hardest Russellian line possible: namely, that not only is it naïve to answer in the affirmative; it is already naïve to accept the question as meaningful.

Now I have been living for a little while in a wooded region of central New Jersey, where there are many wild animals, including many deer (human inhabitants now speak of 'overpopulation'). Sometimes when I am driving I spot a deer in the woods along the road, and I slow down, and I stare at her, and she stares back at me.

What I am thinking in these moments is something like this: Hail, creature of God. The last two words of this silent salutation are strictly speaking redundant: to pick a being out as a creature is already to ground its being in a creation, performed by a creator. This is why 'creature' is not a scientific term. Now I have railed at length and on record against what is called 'creationism'. But when I meet a deer in the forest, it remains the case that this is an encounter with a creature. There is no other word for it.

Some might take this point as a version of the teleological argument for the existence of God. But I hate arguments for the existence of God, and I think the teleological is probably the worst of the lot. I have no interest in moving up from the deer to something supposedly better than it. But nor am I prepared to abandon the category of creature in favor of quadruped, vertebrate, etc. To this extent it is in encounters with wild animals that I get a full blast of just how much religion is left in me.

Let's Talk about Hair

All I ever wanted to do was to write, but my Cabinet colleagues think writing is better in combination with events. So if you are in the New York area next week please do come to the Brooklyn Flea to hear me, along with a wonderful panel of distinguished speakers, speaking about hair. Well, not so much hair, really, as the idea of hair, but of course you already knew that. 

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"Fair for Knowledge: Hair"

Featuring Laurel Braitman (historian of science), Barbara Cassin (philosopher and philologist), Cécile Guilbert (essayist), Justin E. H. Smith (philosopher), John Strausbaugh (author), and Sophie Wahnich (historian), seated at special tables designed by artist Gareth Long

An event organized by Cabinet and co-presented as part of Villa Gillet's "Walls and Bridges" series

Date: Sunday, 30 January 2011, 2–6 pm
Location: Brooklyn Flea, 1 Hanson Place (at Flatbush Avenue; map and directions here)
FREE. No RSVP necessary.



Designed to encourage an informal, social, and open mode of learning, Cabinet's series of "fairs for knowledge" aims to create bridges between specialists and the general public by providing unusual venues for short one-on-one discussions between an expert and a member of the general public. In this first installment, six writers will be seated at special tables placed between the regular stalls of the Brooklyn Flea and be ready to engage the public in conversation on a topic that occupies our minds a great deal but is considered too lowly to be worthy of serious reflection—hair.

Come and brush up on “hair plucking” among anxious captive animals; Mary Magdalene’s hair as described in the Bible; fashion, hairdos, and underwear; hairlessness as a signifier of rationality in the history of philosophy; the exceptional hairstyles of rock stars; shaved women and the symbolic loss of power in the French revolution; and more!

To read more about Villa Gillet, click here. To read more about the Walls and Bridges program, click here.

This event has been supported by Villa Gillet and Conseil de la Création Artistique. Special thanks to Eric Demby and the Brooklyn Flea.

The 'Catalog of Meats' vs. the Historia Animalium; Or, Why There Is No Sanskrit Zoology

Francis Zimmermann's 1982 work, La jungle et le fumet des viandes. Un thème écologique dans la médecine hindoue [The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine] is a remarkable thing. Ostensibly, it is a study of Ayurvedic medicine by a student of the great ethnographer Louis Dumont, but it would be more correct to describe it as a contribution towards the anthropology of natural science, and in this respect to be an important precursor to works such as Scott Atran's Cognitive Foundations of Natural History of 1991.

While Atran focuses on an explicit comparison between folk-taxonomical systems, on the one hand, and on the other the Linnaean system at the foundation of scientific taxonomy, Zimmermann instead seeks to explain why there is nothing like zoological taxonomy in the Indian tradition. His answer is that zoology is effectively edged out by pharmacy, but that pharmacy, in turn, needs to be understood as implying both a cosmology and an epistemology based on 'qualities' (guṇa) and 'savors' (rasa). Understood this broadly, it is not surprising to find 'meats' among the things listed in the Indian pharmacopoeia, nor to find that it the 'cataloguing of meats' comes to play the role in the Indian tradition that the classification of animals would play for Aristotle.

There is, Zimmermann writes, an "exclusion of even the possibility of a botanical or zoological classification: the beings themselves are no longer of any interest, only their dietetic and therapeutic qualities" (130-31). This divergence is surprising, given the tremendous overlap between other aspects of Greek and Indian life science: "From a comparative point of view, in the domain of physiology the theory of vital breaths and the theory of the humors constitute remarkable points of convergence between Indian medicine and Grek medicine; nevertheless, a deep divergence separates the two when it comes to methods of classification. On the one hand, in the Greek tradition, natural history; on the other hand, in the Ayurvedic tradition, the inclusion of taxonomy in pharmacy and the subordination of pharmacy to a complex interplay of savors and curative properties, which envelops the inventory of the flora and fauna in a welter of synonyms, redundancies, enumerations, division, and cross-references" (132-33).

The richest catalog of meats given in the Sanskrit corpus is found in the Suśrutasamhitā, or Suśruta's corpus, which dates most likely from the 12th century of the present era. This text, Zimmermann writes, "represents a corpus of knowledge about... fauna, knowledge not set out as such bult slipped into the mold of discourse intended for the use of medical practitioners" (98). One particularly vivid passage of the corpus illustrates how, from an initial distinction that appears taxonomical in an Aristotelian sense (as between plants and animals), we are quickly diverted into a potentially infinite branching of sensible qualities (and insensible too, since in the Ayurvedic tradition a 'savor' need not be detected in order to exist; it is something closer to an 'essence' actually inhering in the world):

Food is seen as a single category from the point of view of its object, the category of what can be eaten; byt from the point of view of its sources, it is double since it is composed of both immobile and mobile beings; it is also double from the point of view of its action, if one makes a distinction between beneficent and harmful effects. It is quadruple with regard to its mode of employment since it can be drunk, chewed, crunched or sucked; sextuple with regard to its savors, since there are six savors; vigesimal with regard to the qualities which are, successively, heavy/light, cold/hot, unctuous/dry, sluggish/lively, solid/liquid, tender/hard, dessicant/lubrifying, smooth/rough, subtle/crude, viscous fluid. They are innumerable in respect of its varieties because there exist a multitude of possible combinations and preparations for all these substances.

Etymology from Memory, #7

The Jackalope

Born, as I am, of the high desert of Nevada, for most of my childhood I supposed that the mythical horned rabbit featured on so many postcards and t-shirts in truck stops throughout the Mountain Time Zone was entirely an American invention. I carried on in this assumption, which came to the front of my mind only with the greatest infrequency, until a visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna in December, 2008, introduced me to the figure of the horned rabbit in medieval European tapestry. In the gift shop, to which I repaired from the main exhibition after only a half hour or so (my legs weaken in museums), I discovered a fine, glossy volume on the history of this mythological figure in European art, with a coda on its appearance in Renaissance natural history, including the illustration here from Joris Hoefnagel's 1575 Animalia quadrupedia et reptilia (featured also, regrettably, on Wikipedia). Still more recently, I have been informed that a standard way of signaling in Buddhist logic that an argument has arrived at a contradiction is to invoke the horned rabbit (with the furry tortoise as a variation). Thus we are taught in one of the early-eighth-century Śūraṅgama Sūtras that the mind, to the extent that it is identified with the 'discriminating nature', cannot survive the death of the body, by the following comparison:

The objects are not permanent, and when they pass out of existence, such a mind would be like hair on a tortoise or horns on a rabbit. In that case your Dharma-body would be extinguished along with it. Then who cultivates and attains patience with the non-production of dharmas?

Now, why is the figure of the horned rabbit so widespread? Here is where etymology might provide at least a bit of help. If you've ever been to Berlin's Tiergarten, you may have noticed that it is not a garden of tears, as one eighties goth band intimated, but rather the home of the city's zoo. The Tiere in question are just animals, and their name can be shown, by a simple application of Grimm's Law, to be the very same as the name for the English deer. In a number of 17th-century texts I have come across a distinction between 'large deer' and 'small deer', the former being generally hooved, horned, mute beasts of the forest, and the latter, rodents. In other words, rabbits are a kind of deer. Seen in this way, one might easily suppose that they are the sort of creatures from which we should expect to see antlers emerging, and if we do not see them on this or that rabbit-deer, this tells us nothing about the essence of cunicity.

But the Buddhist texts raise a number of questions, which perhaps some reader might help me to resolve. Is the jackalope a pan-Indo-European creature, which might have figured in other South Asian lore already before it found its way into the sutras? Could the assertion of its impossibility in the sutras be not so much (perhaps in contrast with the furry tortoise) an invocation of a conceptual impossibility as it is an anti-mythological rejection of a familiar fantastical beast? 

Edward Tyson's Orang-Outang

Like the embalmed carcass of Jeremy Bentham on the other side of town, this skeleton is, to use the great utilitarian's own expression, a sort of auto-icon. 

It belonged to one of the most influential apes in modern history, a one-year-old male chimpanzee brought from the Angolan coast on a ship to London in 1698, who died shortly after arrival of an unknown illness, and was subsequently the subject of a lengthy anatomical study by the Royal Society physician Edward Tyson, entitled Orang-Outang, sive Homo sylvestris, Or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie, compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man.

Although the description provided by the London Museum of Natural History portrays Tyson as one of the 'forerunners of Darwin', in fact his anatomical study is meant to prove a thesis he believes an a priori grounds, that inter hominem et non-hominem tertium non datur: there is nothing between man and non-man. Tyson's Orang-Outang is so influential because it serves, from the late 17th century until well into the 19th century, as the single most exhaustive account of the anatomical difference between apes and humans. In fact, this account of difference is identical in its content to an account of similarity, and as an accurate describer of natural things in the details of his work Tyson inevitably subverts his own a priori commitment to an absolute separation between humans and animals.

By ‘orang-outang’, Tyson has in mind a chimpanzee (pan troglodytes), while ‘homo sylvestris’ is simply a Latin rendering of the Malay term ‘orang utan’, which means ‘man of the forest’. ‘Pygmie’ is for Tyson a generic term meant to designate any of what we would describe as the ‘great apes’, and has nothing to do with the current ethnonym ‘pygmy’ (the first occurrence of the term is found in Homer’s Iliad, where a battle is described between the mythical pygmaioi and giant cranes).  By ‘monkeys’ Tyson means any primate species other than ‘orang-outangs’ and human beings, including what we today would describe as the lesser apes, including Barbary apes and gibbons.

The African chimpanzee was only marked off taxonomically from the Asian orangutan in the 1730s, and remarkably the existence of the reclusive gorilla was not firmly established until 1847.  Yet what changes by the end of the 16th century is that a growing concern develops to verify the reliability of reports about wild men of the forest, even if the finer-grained taxonomic distinctions between the apes would take some time to fall into place. By the time Tyson writes his treatise at the end of the 17th century, he has over a century of modern observations to draw on, though for the most part he is unsatisfied with all of them.  Tyson’s work is different from earlier writing on the topic of apes from early modern authors --such as Samuel Purchas, Conrad Gesner, Louis Le Comte, Olfert Dapper, Nicolaus Tulpius, and Jacobus Bontius-- in that it is firmly devoted to the extraction of a core of empirically based facts from the mountain of myths and rumors that had accumulated since the ancient period.  Tyson’s “chief design,” as he himself describes it, “is the Improvement of the Natural History of Animals; so I have made it my Business more, to find out the Truth, than to enlarge Mythology; to inform the Judgement, than to please the Phancy.”  

 
Tyson had a long career in comparative anatomy, and he approached each of the objects of his study with passion and wonder.  He makes a telling debut with his study of the “Scent-Bags in Poll-Cats” in 1676.  In 1682-83, Tyson performs a great number of dissections, most of which take place in front of members of the Royal Society and the results of which are subsequently published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.  Noteworthy among these are his anatomical studies of an American rattlesnake, and numerous species of worms and insects.  In 1680, he published the Phocaena, an anatomical study of a porpoise in which he argued that its fin bones are modified hooves, and thus that some aquatic animals are descended from terrestrial quadruped.  This work is followed by a roughly 18-year hiatus in which he appears to have been engaged primarily in medicine, only to return to comparative anatomy in 1698 with the “Carigueya, seu Marsupiale Americanum, or The Anatomy of an Opossum,” followed by the Orang-Outang a year later.  The Orang-Outang is the culmination of Tyson’s life work, and certainly the most detailed and exhaustive anatomical study he made in his career.  It is also the most philosophically interesting, as it serves for him as an occasion to enter into early modern debates about human nature and human uniqueness among other creatures. Though the author of the Orang-Outang is not mentioned by name, his work provides important evidence for Leibniz in his 1704 refutation of Locke's nominalism in the Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain.

After writing a short article on Tyson's Orang-Outang a few years ago, I got it into my head that the world could stand to know a lot more about this creature. I proposed to edit a critical edition of the work for the Penguin Classics series, but was told that the text could not garner sufficient interest among readers to warrant publication. I put the project on hold for a few years, but now, after making a pilgrimage back to see this auto-icon of the difference --or, depending on how you look at it, the similarity-- between humans and apes, I am once again convinced that the Orang-Outang's story must be told.

Broody, Baba Yaga? A Note on Palindromes

Why are palindromes so far down on the hierarchy of literary genres? Roughly speaking, they seem to stand at the same distance from the rigorous formal experiments of an author like Georges Perec as bawdy limericks stand to Shakespeare's sonnets. This may be due to their own inherent tendency towards bawdiness, which I think can be explained by the fact that one must make use of concise, monosyllabic grunt-like words, and these words tend, at least in English, to be both part of our core Anglo-Saxon heritage, and generally to denote less than lofty things.

At the same time, the formal restrictions imposed in palindromy do exactly what Perec's did, exactly what makes restrictive rules of composition interesting: they force you up to the boundary of meaninglessness, and so challenge you to find that acceptable level of near-nonsense that nonetheless seems to say something.

To speak for a moment not of palindromy but of homonymy, years ago I heard the spoken sentence, "A strict syntax limits semantics," but understood by this that "A strict sin tax limits some antics." As it happens, both are true. Now I think orthography is a sub-syntactic feature of sentences (perhaps someone can fill me in here), but the principle is the same: it limits the range of things that can be said. 

On a plane yesterday, I passed the time tapping palindromes into my iPhone, having been struck, not for the first time, by the strangeness of many French abbreviations, in which the cropped part of a word leaves what's left with a terminal vowel: thus collabo, resto, déca, etc. I've always bristled when I've seen or heard the last of these, in fact a contraction of décaféiné, perhaps because it looks so much to the learner like some non-existent compound adverb formed on the model of au-delà, and also, perhaps, because I like the fact that decaf backwards gives us faced. With this in mind, I started tapping:

Face deep? Pee decaf.

This seems to make some intuitive sense. In general, though, the longer the palindrome runs, the further one veers into nonsense. Thus:

Faced foes? O, hose of decaf!

I've faced foes on a nose of decaf, Evi.

In the second of these, one would very much like to drop that terminal vocative, addressing a person whose name barely exists, or at least is not in our usual registers. But rules are rules.

It's possible of course to lengthen and shorten, by paying attention to the double effect of an addition on both sides of the sentence. Thus, from

Marc's face-deep in a milk tub. But, Kliman, I pee decaf. Scram! 

we can obtain

Marc's won, face-deep in a milk tub. But, Kliman, I pee decaf. Now scram!

Some palindromes veer towards nonsense in a useful and intriguing way. Others veer and seem to run aground, even though it would be hard to say what it is, formally, for a palindrome to 'not work', given that what we are talking about is nonsense. Thus

Wonk? I gut a tuba! But a tug? I know!

and

Klima got a tuba, but a toga? Milk!

seem to be failures, though my palindrome-critical ability leaves me unable to say exactly why. Here, though, is one with which I'm particularly pleased:

Broody, Baba Yaga? A gay? A baby? (Door B.)

It seems to tell a story, and a good one. Much of the narrative flow of it, such as it is, depends on the punctuation, and a palindrome purist might argue that the best sort of palindrome is one in which even that reads backwards the same as forwards. But as I've already confessed, I'm an amateur.

My all-time favorite palindrome is one that I did not think up myself. Here it is:

A man, a plan, a butt tub: anal Panama!

I like it because it is properly bawdy; it tells a story even as it balances on the brink of nonsense; and, most importantly, its story is a meta-story, riffing on that tired old palindrome about Teddy Roosevelt's designs for a certain canal, which I believe has largely been responsible for the Reader's Digest-ification of this otherwise promising genre.