Substack has a good interview with Galen Strawson by J.P Andrew.
I extract the following-
Just to stave off any potential confusion, your view is not that consciousness itself evolves: You don't think that consciousness can evolve.
We are conscious beings. Sadly, we discover that our fitness landscape features an asteroid which is going to hit us next week. It will wipe out all life on the planet. We didn't use our consciousness to pursue scientific research to a point where we had an effective planetary defence against rogue asteroid. Our consciousness goes extinct. For all we know, this mean that no consciousness remains in the Universe till in a billion years from now, intelligent life emerges on a distant galaxy. Perhaps, its consciousness will be radically different from ours. It won't spend so much time thinking about sex but, instead, will only register such facts or theories as improve its ability to survive on an uncertain cosmic landscape.
Galen takes a different view. Consciousness just is or isn't. True, the fitness landscape may determine where or when it can exist. But it is not, in itself, determined in any way by anything outside it.
Oh, that's important. No, no, that's the whole thing: consciousness had to be there already for it ever to come into existence at all.
Is it a Platonic 'form'?
Put it like this: Evolution needs something to work on.
That something may be 'information'. There may be a law of increasing functional information which applies to inert matter just as much as it does to organic life-forms.
So, look: We've got these fantastic opposable thumbs to them that are meant to be what made us smart. Well, evolution had something to work on: It had matter and bodies. It couldn’t just make it out of nothing.
Consciousness is either made out of nothing or it is made out of things which aren't conscious or it creates itself. If it makes itself, it is what evolution does for it. If it is made by non-conscious things, perhaps it is evolution, working with those things, which creates it. If it is made out of nothing, it is supernatural in origin.
Your thought is that if consciousness is there so that natural selection has it as a resource,
In other words, if natural selection is itself conscious or has access to consciousness as a 'resource'
then it might create agents — because agents are able to solve all sorts of problems. And those agents are going to have a perspective that allows them to solve problems. But you can't get consciousness from non-consciousness.
because evolution by natural selection is itself consciousness.
Yeah, exactly. That's the key. You can find people throughout history holding the same view — but if you were to ask me, it's not as if I can give an argument for the view that consciousness can’t come from non-consciousness. That is, as it were, a fundamental commitment.
Like the doctrine of the eternity of matter. When I was young, there were still some people who preferred Hoyle-Narlikar's 'steady state' universe to the 'Big Bang' theory.
If someone just comes along and says, “Well why not?”, I don't know there is an argument you can give against it. But we don't appeal to this notion of radical emergence such as would be the emergence of consciousness from the utterly non-conscious. We don't appeal to that anywhere else in science.
But philosophy isn't science. It may be that no artificial intelligence could ever be truly self-aware like Marvin the Paranoid Android in 'Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy'. Equally, there may be AIs which pass every Turing test we can currently conceive by the end of this decade.
So, methodological naturalism tells us that we ought not appeal to it.
It also tells us to stick to the Natural Sciences and give Philosophy a miss.
You could sort of shift the burden of argument; it's almost the burden of embarrassment, as it were: “Why are you so desperately anxious to say that consciousness isn't down there in the fundamental nature of the physical? What is it? Just a great big prejudice, or what? Because you create for yourself an enormous problem.”
A problem avoided by giving Philosophy a miss. On the other hand, Theists may be desperate to show that consciousness must be the gratuitous gift of God. This also means that after death we will be reunited with Mummy and Daddy and Woofy the puppy dog.
People sometimes object that this all just depends on an intuition; they’ll say that you have this mere intuition that you can't get consciousness from non-consciousness — but (they’ll then say) we can't really trust our intuitions. What do you say to that?
I mean, where did they get the idea that matter is non-conscious?
They got that idea from the fact that scolding your chair, or even threatening to beat it, does not change its behaviour. Mummy told me that chairs aren't conscious. I should quit scolding them and go get a fucking job you fucking cretin.
There is zero evidence for it, apart from intuition.
I think the evidence for it is that smart peeps don't scold chairs or tables.
Now you've just triggered me, and I'm going to give you some quotations from some Nobel Prize winners for physics.
Okay, so first of all, Ernest Lawrence — you know, a famous guy — he says, I quote, “The mental and the material are two sides of the same thing.”
Lawrence had a material body. He also had a great mind. Giving him nice things to eat would enable his great mind to come up with useful discoveries.
Louis de Broglie, you know, another Nobel Prize winner, says, “I regard consciousness and matter as different aspects of one thing.”
But that thing is highly diverse. Some matter has consciousness, most doesn't.
Max Planck: “Consciousness is fundamental in the matter derivative from consciousness.”
Sadly no such fundamental particle has been found.
Okay. So, weirdly, it's the philosophers who've gone truly crazy, in my view, but physicists are not with them on that. I mean, some of them probably are, but they’re much more sensible.
Physicists get things wrong but shut the fuck up when a crucial experiment confirms this is the case. In Philosophy you can always find some way to keep a question open. Stupidity and Obstinacy and ipse dixit argumentation are helpful in this regard.
Since you're citing all these people from the past: Is panpsychism, as you understand it, a new view? Did you just come up with this in the 1990s?
Of course not. I mean, I'm not good on the history but there's a book by David Scribino called Panpsychism In the West which basically is just an amazing compilation of quotations, showing how persistent the idea is.
It is as persistent as the idea that my chair fucking hates me. That's why it makes farting noises when I sit down on it. The carpet and the curtains are in on the conspiracy. That is why a bad smell emanates every time my chair makes a farting noise.
Russell is on the verge of it, though he's never going to say it outright…From his famous 1912 book, The Problems of Philosophy: “Common-sense leaves us completely in the dark as to the true intrinsic nature of physical objects,
because sensible people do not commonly gas on about the intrinsic nature of things. They may say 'your chair is very naughty. It keeps farting and emitting a bad smell. Perhaps, it would be best if you went and sat on the toilet till your chair repents its misdeeds.'
and if there were good reason to regard them as mental, we could not legitimately reject this opinion merely because it strikes us as strange that the truth about physical objects must be strange.”
We aren't interested in the truth about physical objects. All we ask is that some of them prove useful to us.
Okay, more Russell fifteen years later — 1927: “We know nothing but the intrinsic quality of the physical world,
nonsense! Perhaps 'but' should read 'about'
and therefore we do not know whether it is or is not very different from that percept; percepts are mental occurrences.”
I think the correct quotation is
'As to intrinsic character, we do not know enough about it in the physical world to have a right to say that it is very different from that of percepts.'
And here's another one I particularly like (still 1927): “If there is any intellectual difficulty in supposing that the physical world is intrinsically quite unlike that of percepts, this is a reason for supposing that there is not this complete unlikeness.”
Cats are quite unlike the percept that there is a cat over there. You come closer and see it is just the picture of a cat.
And, of course, there is a huge intellectual difficulty in supposing that the physical world is quite unlike that of mental goings-on: It's called the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
It is the same difficulty as that of supposing the physical world is a hologram and only minds are real. This is the Hard Problem of Matter. The Hard Problem of my penis, on the other hand was that I'd get erections in Swahili class.
I would say that thoughtful commonsense supports panpsychism.
Consciousness uses up resources to sustain itself. Why would it exist in places where it could not 'pay for itself'?
I’m not saying there aren't problems with the theory. I'm sure you're going to mention one later. But it's the natural view.
Does panpsychism have anything to say about the potential for AI to be conscious?
I don't think for a moment that any current or foreseeable future machine could be conscious, and I obviously would resist the idea that something is conscious just in case it behaves in a sufficiently complex way. But I certainly wouldn't rule it out a priori. I just don't know.
Indeed. The thing is, we can envisage an AI devoting resources to get and maintain consciousness because the thing would pay for itself. Thus, if consciousness can arise from things which lack it, then sooner or later a conscious AI is a certainty.
We've got to touch on the one perennial objection to panpsychism: The Combination Problem. How do you get a single, unified subject-of-experience if that subject-of-experience is composed of countless little conscious bits?
Combining organisms to create a super-organism is feasible. Consider the slime mould. Single celled amoebae can combine into plasmodia which can move around and can form spore releasing bodies like fungi. They can even be kept as pets.
To flesh that out further: My brain is made up of about 100 billion neurons, and each of those neurons is composed of yet smaller conscious bits. All of those little conscious bits somehow, together, produce me — and I experience myself as a single subject-of-experience. How could that be the case, on panpsychism?
Perhaps neurons can be disaggregated and recombined. It is one thing to say that we may be able to create and combine organic molecules till we are able to produce a nice pussy cat. It is quite another to say every atom in the universe is a cat.
I mean the objection was put famously by William James in his 1890 book, The Principles of Psychology — and yet even in that book he basically thinks that panpsychism must be right.
It is one thing to say every atom potentially could be part of an organism but quite another to say that it has consciousness.
But yeah, the idea is you can't sum subjects; individual little blips or blobs of consciousness can't be fused into a single large conscious subject of the thought that you are.
We don't know that. The day may come when two brains can be fused together such that a new identity is created.
I think it must happen, but I don't know how. The picture of all the little bits isn't really right. We have to operate with a field theoretic conception of the nature of the physical, as in relativistic Quantum Field Theory.
If we do so, we blur the notion of consciousness. It is no longer what is inside one brain. It is what a bunch of brains, pursuing a common purpose, do. The Judiciary or the Army or the Scientific Establishment can be thought of as a 'super-consciousness'.
Now maybe there's a worry from the opposite direction: How do we get individuated subjects on this field picture, where it seems like the natural view might be that the universe is one big mind. But you and I experience ourselves as individuated subjects within that larger field. So, how does that work?
In the same way that we have selfish impulses which we nevertheless suppress- at least some of us do which is the reason we haven't gone extinct as a species.
Yeah, well, again I’m not saying any of it is easy!
The Vimalkirti gives us a 'field theory' of Buddhas in the same way that the Avatamsaka sutra gives us a monadology. Either way, you can have panpsychism but at the price of Occassionalism or Nihilism- i.e. either god is the only efficient cause or nothing truly exists- not even Time or Space.
However, there's some sense in which there is one single thing, the universe — and this is what I call Thing Monism. It's not Stuff Monism, or Substance Monism, that says there's only one fundamental kind of stuff. Instead, it’s the view that there's ultimately only one thing, and I think that's probably the right thing to say about the universe.
This is like the 'slingshot' by which all true statements stand for the same thing.
I would have partly to appeal to evolution. Things have evolved that move around, and have to survive in an environment, and consciousness has been wholly driven by that. I would quote Orgel's Second Rule: It says, “Evolution is cleverer than you are”.
The law of increasing functional information does not anthropomorphize physical or biological processes. It is part and parcel of a shift away from matter or energy towards information. This appears to be useful.
There shouldn't be any more problem about how there can be these seemingly isolated consciousnesses like yours and mine than there is about how there can be seemingly isolated things like tables and chairs and human beings. So, something along those lines.
Would a child brought up by wolves have consciousness? Yes. But it may not be able to acquire a language. But it's non verbal communication skills may be very good. I suppose one might say that I lack a certain type of consciousness- e.g. social tact or the ability to recognize that I am an insufferable bore- which most other people have. On the other hand, I have a unique consciousness of my own great beauty and wit.
Let me say again that it's not as if I know exactly what to say — and, in fact, I don't hold out any hope for, as it were, an interesting science flowing from this position. I don't think there's much that can be done. I just think that there are extremely powerful general metaphysical, philosophical reasons for thinking that panpsychism is, to paraphrase the economists, the least worst metaphysical view.
Belief in God is better because that way we can hope to be reunited with Mummy & Daddy & Woofy the dog.
Do you have any other things we didn't get to on panpsychism?
I just think it's very important to stress the point that it really was a commonplace a hundred years ago that physics tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature of the physical.
A thousand years ago, it may have been commonplace to hold that Scripture tells us everything that can be known.
That just got lost in analytic philosophy after the 1960s,
The subject had already turned to shit and had become adversely selective of imbecility.
so from then on everybody seems to think they can know for sure that the physical is in no way conscious in its basic nature, and so we went backwards.
There were mavericks- like Rupert Sheldrake- with 'woo woo' theories like 'morphic resonance'.
We went seriously backwards. And we haven't yet fully recovered.
What do you think the future holds? Do you think things are getting better in this respect?
I have no idea. I mean, we live in a world with sort of daily proof of monstrous irrationality and people believing anything as long as others in their gang believe it, in the way that Kahneman describes. And I find that profoundly sad and depressing.
Would humanity gain anything if a bunch of academics say 'Panpsychism rules!' rather than 'Panpsychism drools!' ?
So, who knows. I hope that we'll make some progress in getting back to the commonplace of a hundred years ago.
A discipline where Professors think making progress involves going backward is in deep trouble.
It seems to me that maybe the conversation has opened up a little bit in the last 10-20 years?
Indeed. The Universe might be a computer simulation or something yet more rich and strange.
Very much so. And, funnily enough, I suppose about 15 years ago when one of my students, Philip Goff, was applying for jobs, he would write to me asking, “Should I say on my application that I'm sympathetic to panpsychism?” And the view was you better not say that because you will not be taken seriously. I think we’ve moved on from there.
Goff says- 'The basic commitment is that the fundamental constituents of reality—perhaps electrons and quarks—have incredibly simple forms of experience.' But, equally they may have incredibly complex 14 dimensional forms of experience. If the latter hypothesis leads to cool new tech, we will happily embrace it.
A British woman, Ms. Vaughan-Spruce, has received 13,000 pounds in damages for wrongful arrest. She was charged with praying silently outside an abortion clinic which was closed. Had she committed a 'thought crime'? Was 'freedom of thought' no longer a fundamental right in the United Kingdom? The short answer is no. Parliament was seeking to prevent American style intimidation of those who work in, or use the services of, abortion clinic. The thing is a nuisance and should be curbed.
More broadly, is there any such thing as liberty of thought? No. It is like the liberty to dream or the freedom to imagine yourself as a leprechaun. Nobody can deprive you of it and pretending otherwise creates a nuisance.
John Stuart Mill wrote-
The disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow-citizens, to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others,
Mill is describing his own disposition. Plenty of rulers and fellow-citizens had no such desire.
is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint by anything but want of power; and as the power is not declining, but growing, unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against the mischief, we must expect, in the present circumstances of the world, to see it increase.
In other words, Mill was saying his contemporaries must expect him and his ilk to pose an increasing nuisance. But the barrier to this mounting nuisance wasn't 'moral conviction' or even convictions for gross immorality and indecency, it was ridicule or simply telling these cunts to fuck the fuck off.
It will be convenient for the argument, if, instead of at once entering upon the general thesis, we confine ourselves in the first instance to a single branch of it, on which the principle here stated is, if not fully, yet to a certain point, recognised by the current opinions.
In other words, after saying that what he was doing was a nuisance, Mill doubles down on committing that nuisance in an aggravated fashion.
This one branch is the Liberty of Thought: from which it is impossible to separate the cognate liberty of speaking and of writing.
Nobody knows what is going on in our minds though our employer may suspect we have let our thoughts wander rather than focus them on our work. We may be sacked if there is evidence that such is the case. Moreover, there are criminal offenses where evidence regarding our intention or frame of mind- albeit indirect and circumstantial- may yet secure our conviction. Speaking and writing are purposive and deliberate actions and may themselves be sufficient to convict us of wrongdoing.
It is only where nothing can be known about our thoughts and the context is not such that any law could be broken that we have an immunity. Otherwise, there is a test of 'reasonableness' absent which we may be convicted of a 'loitering with intent' type offense. In other words, the fact that we can think is enough by itself to reduce our immunity- id est liberty- in certain contexts and, moreover, there is an onus on us to be aware of this and to adjust our behaviour accordingly.
Although these liberties, to some considerable amount, form part of the political morality of all countries which profess religious toleration and free institutions,
political morality may condemn what is legally permissible and vice versa.
the grounds, both philosophical and practical, on which they rest, are perhaps not so familiar to the general mind, nor so thoroughly appreciated by many even of the leaders of opinion, as might have been expected.
Those grounds are familiar enough to us from early childhood. I may say 'you think I'm stupid!'. You reply 'I never said that. You did.' True, I may refuse to play with you but that is your look out. Neither jurisprudence nor political philosophy can further clarify matters.
Those grounds, when rightly understood, are of much wider application than to only one division of the subject, and a thorough consideration of this part of the question will be found the best introduction to the remainder.
Mill will pretend that intellectual creativity is linked to liberty of thought as though the vast majority of people weren't as stupid and boring as Mill himself. Moreover, intellectual creativity can find itself a market more particularly if it raises productivity. Otherwise, all that we have here is a nuisance.
Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion. The time, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any defence would be necessary of the “liberty of the press” as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government.
The time has indeed gone by when the press could be seen as anything but a prostitute. Almost a hundred years ago, Kipling supplied his cousin Baldwin with a line which went down in History- 'What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages'. As for tyrants, newspapers praise them to the skies if they genuinely are tyrants. It is only if they are no such thing that they will be termed so.
Let us suppose ...that the government is entirely at one with the people, and never thinks of exerting any power of coercion unless in agreement with what it conceives to be their voice. But I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government.
Then you deny the people the right to defend and govern themselves. But if they already have it, your denial is ineffectual whereas if they don't have it, your denial is an endorsement of oppression.
The power itself is illegitimate.
Only in the sense that a fart is the bastard child of well-born fart connected to the Bishop of Bath & Wells on the distaff side.
The best government has no more title to it than the worst.
Unless such title is expressly supplied by a fart which is not illegitimately connected with at least one senior Anglican clergymen. The problem with ipse dixit assertions is that one is just as good as another.
It is as noxious, or more noxious,
than an illegitimate Anglican fart
when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in opposition to it.
Even if the whole world thinks raping babies is wrong, the worst possible crime would be to condemn the practice.
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
Except in the sense that the whole of mankind would be justified by the law, the justice system, and the proper working of political democracy whereas the guy who likes raping babies wouldn't be justified in any way. Also, his head would have been kicked in by his fellow convicts.
Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is,
the same as the peculiar evil of silencing my farts by ejecting me from the premises
that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.
If only people could smell my farts, the tale of their smelliness would be passed down to posterity.
If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth:
No. If the thing has some intrinsic merit, somebody else will steal it or, in any case, it will be stumbled on by some one else.
If our real concern is truth and error, then we might want to subsidize bodies concerned with doing so. I suppose the patent office could work in this way as might the authorities concerned with licensing medicines or medical procedures and the like.
if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
It is enough to say 'this crazy dude has hit on something useful' for there to be an end to the matter. Utilitarianism can actually be a useful creed. It doesn't have to involve a noisome type of hysteria.
It is necessary to consider separately these two hypotheses, each of which has a distinct branch of the argument corresponding to it.
It is never necessary for us to waste our time.
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion;
We can't be sure of that. It is a mere opinion.
and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
But that evil may be a fairy who is secretly very good.
First: the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true.
Suppression may truly be possible if it is attempted by opinion. Alternatively, opinion truly may be possible suppression.
Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible.
But those who desire its truth may deny it to suppress the not infallible.
They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and exclude every other person from the means of judging.
Nobody has the authority to make such a claim.
To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.
No it isn't. It may merely be a case of having something better to do.
All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.
Or just a case of wanting a bit of peace and quiet.
Its condemnation may be allowed to rest on this common argument, not the worse for being common. Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical judgment which is always allowed to it in theory; for while every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be liable.
Why entertain a proposition whose truth or falsity matters little to us? As for fallibility, that is no reason not to attempt to do what is useful.
Absolute princes, or others who are accustomed to unlimited deference, usually feel this complete confidence in their own opinions on nearly all subjects.
No. They consult experts or delegate matters if it is worth their while to do so.
People more happily situated, who sometimes hear their opinions disputed, and are not wholly unused to be set right when they are wrong, place the same unbounded reliance only on such of their opinions as are shared by all who surround them, or to whom they habitually defer; for in proportion to a man’s want of confidence in his own solitary judgment, does he usually repose, with implicit trust, on the infallibility of “the world” in general.
No. People don't give a fuck about stuff which does not concern them. They may indicate this by sticking with an opinion which annoys others to such an extent that they fuck off.
Bertrand Russell was not insensible to the charms of highly wrought or euphuistic English prose. He says he wrote his 'Freeman's Worship' (which I thought a bit Pateresque) at a time when he was so 'steeped in Milton's prose' that 'his rolling periods reverberated through the caverns of my mind'. Yet, this is his advise to budding scribes-
First: never use a long word if a short word will do.
Sadly, short words tend to be taken as sharp words and your interlocutors are all too ready to be equally short with you.
Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences.
Or don't. Qualifications speak to your quality. Statements are swords naked of such scabbarding as permits discourse to flourish.
Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.
Think before you write.
Take, say, such a sentence as the following, which might occur in a work on sociology: "Human beings
Sociology knows nothing of such creatures. Russell was being either naive or, in the manner of a nobleman, negligently charitable.
are completely exempt from undesirable behavior patterns only when certain prerequisites, not satisfied except in a small percentage of actual cases, have, through some fortuitous concourse of favorable circumstances, whether congenital or environmental, chanced to combine in producing an individual in whom many factors deviate from the norm in a socially advantageous manner."
Let us see if we can translate this sentence into English. I suggest the following: "All men are scoundrels, or at any rate almost all. The men who are not must have had unusual luck, both in their birth and in their upbringing." This is shorter and more intelligible, and says just the same thing.
No. It is false in every specific. Few men are considered 'scoundrels' by their fellows just as few are considered 'clever' or 'good at math'.
Sociology is statistical. 'Tyche' or 'luck' is not required in its vocabulary. Scoundrels deviate significantly from the mean. But so do people very brainy people like Russell or his descendants.
But I am afraid any professor who used the second sentence instead of the first would get the sack.
Fair point. Elitists need to pretend they are egalitarian and that their hearts bleed for ignorant scoundrels like me.
Pakistan is facing an economic crisis. Its military needs to demonstrate that it is vital to the country. Whatever cuts are made, they must be no question of reducing the military budget. On the contrary, more needs to be spent both on internal security and on meeting the threat from India and Afghanistan. It is in this context that the recent terror attach and the Indian response must be seen. The Pakistan Army is interested in getting more money and power. It is not interested in triggering a South Asian Armageddon such that all the Jihadis go straight to Heaven and all the kaffirs and munafiqs are sent to Hell.
The Bush administration gave Pakistan about 100 million dollars to implement Permissive Action Links on its nukes. The fear was that a crazy Jihadist general might launch nukes so as to trigger the Day of Judgment. What is not known is whether Pakistan has in fact centralized control of its nukes. Even if it has, control would be with the Army not the Civilians. Hopefully, the chain of command will remain strong in the Pakistan Army and thus the risk of a Dr. Strangelove type first strike is reduced. However, Pakistan's nuclear doctrine remains ambiguous. We don't know what the 'threshold' for a first strike actually is. Currently it appears that in a nuclear exchange, much of India would remain unscathed whereas Pakistan, being the smaller country, would be obliterated. Thus a Pakistani first strike would be highly irrational. We just have to hope and pray that the Pakistani army commander doesn't go crazy and launch a strike because some Djinn or Pari told him to.
Is there a game theoretic component to the recent Indo-Pak clashes? I think there is an element of 'discovery'- i.e. both sides are probing each other's weaknesses and assessing the quality of their respective hardware. It appears that India's anti-missile system has done well. This reduces Pak's nuclear threat point.
It may be that Pakistan's Chinese jets have shot down India's French Rafales. If so, China may be taking the lead in fifth and sixth generation fighters. This has implications for Taiwan. Trump appears to have backed down in his Trade war with the Chinese. Perhaps, the two things are related.
Marginal Revolution has the following post by Tyler Cowan.
The game theory of India and Pakistan
Now that the dust has settled at least temporarily, a few readers have asked me for comment on the recent clash. The events are difficult to understand, in part because of rampant misinformation and also because of genuine continuing uncertainty as to what happened. Nonetheless we do know two things:
1. The two sides whacked each other a fair amount, more than usual.
2. Neither sides resorted to nukes.
So in its simplest terms, we now know/suppose that the threshold for nuclear use is higher than we earlier might have estimated.
The suspension of the Indus water treaty may at one time have been considered a threshold. I suppose Chinese action on the Brahmaputra has changed the picture as far as water sharing goes. Still, there are questions as to whether India could do very much in this respect- other than desilting- to harm Pakistan in the near future.
Arguably, climate change has made the Treaty irrelevant. The most recent flooding in Pakistan was rainfall based not riverine.
Since very little was settled, the rational, game-theoretic presumption is that the two countries, in the future, will whack each other some more.
The Indians believe that the Army is seeking to strengthen its hand. It has brought the Bench to heel (previously a Chief Justice had defied the Military Dictator) and gained greater popularity at a time when it faces opposition from Imran Khan's supporters. The fear is that Trump may suddenly remember his old pal Imran and demand his release. The question which now remains is whether the Army can also deal with its problems in Balochistan and with the Taliban. The Chinese want to get a return on their investments in Gwadar etc. and Pakistan must show Beijing that its Army is prevailing over secessionist and ultra-Islamist elements.
Yet there is a second-order effect. The more they whack each other with non-nuclear means, the more the weaker party (usually Pakistan, in this context) will feel tempted to lower the nuclear threshold, if only stochastically (this can be done, among other ways, by exercising imperfect control over factions in the armed forces).
I think something like this is already happening. Some army units ignored the cease-fire. Was this on orders or was it done independently?
One way to put this point involves the Lucas critique
in other words, the future won't necessarily be like the past. The problem with the nuclear option for Pakistan is that it means annihilation. What if Heaven hasn't enough Virgins to go around just when 100 million Pakistani men turn up?
— one instance of whacking never really establishes what the future nuclear threshold will be.
Nobody has ever known what Pakistan's threshold was or is or will be. At one time, it was suggested that the Taliban was under Pakistan's nuclear umbrella.
So there is more future whacking, and continuing and perhaps even growing uncertainty about where the nuclear threshold lies.
The big question is the effectiveness of the Indian anti-missile defence system. No doubt, there are ways to get around it, but nuclear doctrine has to take into account how many nukes get through and what percentage of the enemy's territory they can target. I suppose the Indians will learn lessons from this war. They should have tried to keep up with China. Perhaps- if it is true that Chinese made jets shot down Rafales- India will have to change its defence procurement strategy. Can this tie-up with 'make in India'? It must do. War is a numbers game. Moreover, as the world becomes less predictable, countries will have to rely more on indigenous production.
The other big question is about drones. Clearly, they have been changing outcomes in battlefields across the world. Pakistan can probably rely on both Turkey and China to become a first rate indigenous producer. Can India keep up? Perhaps, with Israeli help, it can.
An institutionally more detailed take is possible, but perhaps this “crude” game-theoretic analysis captures some of the essentials. If you want to enrich the analysis, I would consider the variable “what we learned about the reaction functions of America and China,”
China has always said that nuclear weapons are overrated. True, they are currently nuking up but then they are also massively expanding their navy and air-force.
although the full stories here are not yet out. The same is true for “what we learned about the possibly non-unitary nature of Pakistani governance.”
It is said that both the 1965 and the 1971 wars were engineered by Bhutto and cronies of his in the military administration. Moreover, the Army has often pursued its own path regardless of what the Civilian administration wants- e.g. the Kargil war. Indeed, it is believed that terrorist attacks are orchestrated by the Army to prevent a Civilian PM in Islamabad getting chummy with his opposite number in New Delhi.
One question remains. What if Rahul, not Modi was PM? Would India have repeated its 2019 tactics or would it have reverted to Manmohan's policy after the Mumbai attacks? Currently, Rahul has expressed full support for 'Operation Sindoor'. One factor is that Muslim leaders, like Owaisi, have strongly denounced Pakistan and demanded stern action against the terrorist bases on that country's soil. The other factor is that the US is no longer involved in Afghanistan and thus has little reason to protect the country which was, in fact, harbouring Osama Bin Laden.
The game theory of 'discovery' has to do with regret minimization (including FOMO- fear of missing out) rather than expected utility maximization. The aim is to get a clearer idea of the pay-off matrix rather than establish a 'reaction function'. However, 'discovery' can be misleading. Currently, Pakistan is in poor shape- politically and economically speaking. India, thanks to Modi, is in good shape. But that may change.
In 1917 two provincial boys joined Ripon College in Calcutta. Both would write autobiographical works which attained global fame. The more talented of the two, Bibhuti Bhushan, wrote the Apu trilogy cinematized by Satyajit Ray. The first of the films, which is faithful to the text, remains one of the highest grossing Bengali films of all time. Two other such films are based on Bibhuti's Rider Haggard type adventure stories set in Africa.
The other young student at Ripon to write a famous autobiography was Niradh Chaudhri. He came from a more prosperous family and his book succeeded because English men of letters like J.C Squires & E.M Forster considered it to be superbly written. It seemed the Bengali Babu, even one raised in a small village, could handle the language of Gibbon & Macaulay just as well as the Oxbridge Classicist.
I should mention that Niradh had begun publishing articles in Douglas Jerrold's 'New English Review' from around 1946. Jerrold was a crazy, corporatist, pro-Fascist, Tory for whom Indian independence was anathema. But Jerrold was the Director of a British publishing company. He had influence. Perhaps, that's the reason Niradh adopted such an utterly crazy persona and point of view. A jobbing journalist finds it pays to alter his views depending on who will pay to publish his work.
Jerrold was by no means untypical of his class. the Governor of Burma during the War was an equally mad neo-feudalist. His brother was an even bigger lunatic. He had been a Major General in the British Army before deciding to join the IRA. My point is that Niradh, perhaps by mere luck, had found a literary outlet in what can only be called the lunatic fringe of Grub Street. His entrepreneurial elan was such that, as more and more Indian doors were closed to him, he focused on serving a demented, but still influential, market in Britain.
I should mention that Calcutta in the Thirties did have a small ultra-Right wing intelligentsia. Asit Krishna Mukherjee, who had a Doctorate in History from London University, was the head of the Indian Nazi Party and published a magazines in Calcutta with the financial aid of first Germany and then Japan. His wife was Savitri Devi- the Franco-Greek nutcase who believed that Hitler was the last incarnation of Vishnu. Miguel Serrano, Chile's Ambassador to India from 1957 to 1963, shared this crazy belief. Allende got rid of him but under Pinochet he returned to Chile. Chaudhuri, to his credit, did not subscribe to this type of esoteric Right Wing ideology. Still, his views would have seemed congenial to them and they still retained pockets of influence in the Republic of Letters.
One final point. Chaudhuri had studied for his degree under R.C Majumdar- a Hindu Nationalist sternly critical of Gandhi- and Kalidas Nag- a Francophile whose Doctorate was from Paris. Given this background, his literary tastes and political views become unexceptional.
Edward Shils, who studied the Sociology of the post-war intellectual, may not have been aware of how and why Niradh wrote in so farcical a manner. Nevertheless, he was helpful to Niradh and wrote an appreciation of him titled 'Citizen of the world' for the American Scholar.
Mr. Chaudhuri's achievements are not those he sought at first.
Shils assumes that Niradh wanted to be what his son became- a professional historian and an acclaimed expert in his field. I imagine Niradh, like other young men of his age who had grown up during the Great War, wanted to be a military historian. Perhaps, a career as a foreign correspondent in Europe would have given him the opportunity to visit battlefields and consult the archives in combatant countries. I imagine, if his Sanskrit was good, he could supplement his income as a lecturer in that subject.
On the other hand, Calcutta in the Twenties might have seemed quite an exciting place to be for political reasons. Bose- a fellow Kayasth- had become the Chief Executive of the corporation in 1924 and would become the Mayor six years later. Chaudhuri may have felt he was wasting his time as a clerk in Military Accounts. Moreover, Tagore was world famous for his poetry and plays. Might not literature present a more rewarding career?
Sadly, Niradh's Bengali lacked soul. It had no lyrical undertones, no pathos and no spiritual depth. He might have been a Maupassant but was too much of a prude. Still, the writing of History does not require great literary artistry. Could Clio have been his muse? No. Like all Bengalis he was addicted to an ipse dixit style of argument supported by irrelevant or bogus erudition. Consider his ringing cry of 'civis Britannicus sum'. It is an allusion to a Roman Governor who looted Sicily. But the Brits had been beforehand in this matter. Both Clive and Hastings faced impeachment proceedings. It simply wasn't true that Governors or District Collectors extorted money from Indian 'subjects'. Moreover, Churchill was just as much a British subject- not a citizen- as Mahatma Gandhi or Niradh Chaudhri.
Would it have been better had he been able to follow the path which he originally laid out for himself ?
Only if he answered the questions on the examination paper properly. That would require quoting only relevant facts and formulating an argument which could withstand logical scrutiny. The fact that his father didn't think he could be a lawyer is suggestive in itself. Niradh was a Bengali blathershite.
Was it really such a misfortune for him have failed the examination for the degree of Master of Arts at the University of Calcutta, to have resolved that he would not attempt t examination a second time, and then to abandon his halfhearted efforts try again some years later - although that second try was what his father wished and what he himself decided to do and then decided not to do?
There is little point pursuing a profession in which you are required to support your arguments with factual evidence when you are wholly addicted to ipse dixit assertions of a deeply bigoted or wholly dotty type.
It is nonetheless interesting to speculate on what might have happened had he been as successful in the first or second examination for the Master of Arts degree as he had been in his examination for the baccalaureate.
If he topped the list, he'd have got a Government of India scholarship for three years.
Even if he didn't stand first, it is likely that his family would have scraped together enough money for him to get a PhD abroad. Germany and Austria were cheap places to study at that time. Indeed, the Rupee was actually rather strong at that time. Perhaps Niradh would have moved to the Left and ended up in Moscow along with M.N. Roy and Chatto and so forth. In that case, the safest thing was to get him a comfortable berth in Military Accounts.
Let us suppose that he would have been successful in gaining an appointment to the University of Calcutta
Dacca was newer and afforded opportunities for more rapid advancement.
or to a leading college in Calcutta - at best, at the Presidency College or at one of the superior missionary colleges, at worst at one of the many others, missionary or private, then not so numerous as they later became, and on probably a higher standard then than they observed during the years of the great expansion of higher education just after India became independent.
The Commies would have thought it worth their while to recruit him. They would have patiently explained that to understand History, you need to understand Economics. The Brits found it worthwhile to make Calcutta the capital of their Indian Empire for economic reasons. But, as A.O Hume had pointed out, the Permanent Settlement had to go for Bengal to regain a measure of economic dynamism.
Mr. Chaudhuri probably would have been a very successful teacher of the most intelligent students, gaining their devotion by his great learning and his own devotion to the life of the mind.
No. He would have been beaten if he said anything which annoyed them. Even Brits- like Edmund Candler- were running the fuck away from the bellicose Bengali student.
He would probably have attracted a small number of faithful, intelligent, and hardworking disciples.
No. Focusing on economic history would have been useful and that would have attracted 'disciples'. Writing tendentious bollocks wasn't useful, more particularly because the fellow was obviously making up the various authors he quoted. Chateaubriand is the name of a particular cut of beef. Niradh was pretending there was some French author of that name. Why not just say Professor Gulab Jamun wrote the Ain-i-Aurangazebi? I tell you, all these so called Kayastha scoundrels only pretend to speak phoren langwidge. Even they are not knowing Inglis gud.
Other students probably would not have liked him so much because he did not teach primarily with an eye to the preparation for the examination.
They would have beaten the fuck out of him if they suspected him of harming their chances to get their diploma.
The relations with his colleagues would have been strained by the superiority of his knowledge and his contentious disclosure of their mistakes.
He made too many mistakes himself. It would be a trivial matter to blow up his reputation. But that would involve actually reading his shite. Just ignore the cunt.
He probably would have drawn to himself much animosity from his colleagues, because he would not have hidden the light of his learning under a bushel.
Learning was and is ignored by the Indian Academy though it blaze like the noonday Sun.
Indian academics are even more given to intrigue and cabal than their European and American colleagues.
Niradh was a Kayasth. They look after their own.
His liberal nationalism
was meaningless. Muslims would dominate East Bengal. He needed to ingratiate himself with the West Bengalis or else head for Delhi.
and his critical attitude towards Gandhism, socialism and communism, fascism and nazism would have stirred the resentment of his colleagues against him.
He could have got a post in a Princely State or a Chieftain's College. The truth is, an eccentric auto-didact can make an excellent Prep School master.
He would also have by this time been thrust into the position of a reactionary by the Marxists who were more numerous among intellectuals in Calcutta.
They were more interested in infiltrating the Trade Union movement. Indeed, everybody was. There was money in that racket.
Would he have become the great scholar which he had wanted to be, a scholar who held before himself the ideal embodied in the achievements of Adolf von Harnack,
Niradh wasn't a philologist. Hemanta Kumar Sarkar, who was the same age, was a very promising comparative philologist who gave up a three year Government of India scholarship in order to go to jail as part of the freedom movement. He moved to the Left. Niradh simply wasn't in the same intellectual class as Sarkar or, his best friend from school, Subhas Chandra Bose.
Eduard Meyer,
had shat the bed with his stupid book on English politics which was published during the War
Theodor Mommsen, Charles Seignobos, Albert Sorel, Ernest Lavisse,
Charles Darwin, William Shakespeare, Elvis Presley
and other great scholars of that order? The probability is not high that he would have done so.
The fucker couldn't pass the M.A exam that too in a low IQ subject like History! Still, the fact is, he liked reading books rather than fucking whores which is why he lived to a great age. The lesson here is that, if you marry a sensible woman, she can ensure you succeed in life one way or another.
Indian colleges and universities have never been congenial places for research, outside of Indological studies.
Actually, they were doing well in STEM subjects back in the Twenties.
Mr. Chaudhuri's views on India, as they developed in the direction which was necessary for him, given his values, his own research, and his fearlessness, would have closed the ranks of the European and Indian Indologists against him.
No. His ignorance disqualified him from contributing to Indology or Philology of Philosophy of any type. He might have been able to do good enough archival work- e.g. Regimental histories or Dynastic chronicles for the Princes or bigger Zamindars. Nothing wrong with a belles lettrist engaging in hack work of that type.
To do research on European or ancient classical civilization would have been
easier for Niradh than it was for Morris Ginsberg who was 8 years older than Niradh. He spoke only Yiddish when he arrived in England at the age of 15. He worked in a factory and went to Night School so as to learn Latin, Greek, French, English etc. Hobhouse, Professor of Sociology at the LSE- to which institution the Tatas had just given 10,000 pounds- took him under his wing. Ginsberg's 'evolutionary sociology' proved popular. That's the sort of thing Niradh could have done if he had the ability. True, his path would have been much smoother because he already had a degree. True, his life in London would have been rather austere to begin with but he would soon have supplemented his income through journalism.
extremely difficult, even if his teaching burden did not take up all of his time and energy;
If he had been smart enough to get hired as a College lecturer , he'd have been smart enough to get a travelling fellowship of some type. If Niradh's Sanskrit was good, he could 'add value' by comparing Greek or Hebrew with similar Indic texts.
he could not afford the time or the more to travel to Europe to work there in archives and libraries,
there were grants available for such things. Like Ginsberg, Niradh could have started off as a research assistant. Sociology was Shils own field. He knew there were grants available from American and other Foundations which helped people like Ginsberg.
so the scholarly productions would have had to be based on published sources and on those available in the Imperial Library and in the library University of Calcutta; hence he would not have met the standards of scholars in Western countries.
Yet, if he'd done well in his MA and, like Sarkar, got a GoI scholarship, no such obstacles would have barred his way. I suppose the truth is, the romance of doing research in the archives does not correspond to the reality of that species of drudgery.
(There was also a reluctance of the in those years before the independence of India to take any Indian scholar, especially if he did not write on Indian subjects, at all seriously.
Nobody took 'scholars' seriously unless they were making useful discoveries in STEM subjects or, like Radhakrishnan, had jumped on to the right political bandwagon.
He would have been further handicapped by his disregard for departmental and disciplinary boundaries.
Not at new Institutions like the LSE or SOAS. The plain fact is, Niradh was like Ranajit Guha. Both liked writing high falutin' bollocks but were too stupid to get proper academic qualifications from Calcutta Uni. In Niradh's case, it was an M.A. In Ranajit's, it was a PhD. What both should have done if they really cared about history was to master the intricacies of the Permanent Settlement and its subsequent trajectory. This would require knowledge of Persian to examine the land records, sanads, etc. People who did this would also be able to make a lot of money as lawyers or, if that was beneath them, lawyers would have bought their books or called them as expert witnesses. Understanding the fiscal basis of the Raj would be useful in itself. But, it would also be the sort of knowledge which was valuable to the Government. A Professor who had worked in this field- whatever else he might waste his time on- would be given a seat on Commissions of Inquiry. He might be nominated to the Legislative Council. He would have a seat and a voice amongst the great and good.
Ranajit and Niradh were stupid and wrote nonsense. Both emigrated to England. Indeed, Ranajit ran away from India first- in 1959. Niradh followed at the end of the Sixties. But he had family in England and his English was always very readable. Perhaps, writing talks for Radio broadcasts had improved his prose style.
Ranajit was posing as some sort of Communist sleeper agent. Because Ranajit knew no history whatsoever, he gained acclaim as the head of the 'Subaltern School' of Historiography. This was very funny.
Decadence
means 'moral or cultural decline as characterized by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury.' This was a fitting description of the life-style of some of the Indian princes and big landlords. It had no application to British officialdom or the Indian political class.
for Mr. Chaudhuri is cravenness, lack of individual and collective self-respect, lack of dignity, a deficient sense of honor, no appreciation of national greatness.
This is not decadence. It may arise from a superior moral intuition. It may simply be a recognition that one's power has declined irretrievably. After the Great War, none could be under any illusion that War was the sport of King. It was more a matter of artillery than chivalry. The side with the bigger and better munition factories would prevail.
An individual or a collectivity with the courage, the willingness to exercise power and to take the responsibities incumbent on its exercise is not corrupt.
It is if it can be bought or sold.
He adapts Acton's max into "loss of power corrupts, and loss of absolute power corrupts absolutely" to describe or account for British decadence.
There was some decadence. The Governor of Madras stole money from the Red Cross to settle his gambling debts during the Second World War. But, by and large, the Brits had been steadily improving in morality since the time of the Nabobs. What changed was their military doctrine. They decided to give priority to their air force. This was sensible enough. It doomed the Empire, but the Brits had, in any case, wanted the colonies to become self-administering and self-garrisoning. Otherwise, there would be a 'Thucydides trap' such that every emerging power would feel the British Empire stood in their way. What was preferable was that outposts made their own deals with the rising neighbor- e.g. Australian appeasement of Japan in the late Thirties. The worst possible outcome would be England having to squander blood and treasure to keep some barely profitable territory safe.
It was in this unwillingness to live up to the responsibilities imposed by national greatness that the decadence of Great Britain can be best seen.
Churchill did expend English blood and treasure defeating the Japanese. Atlee ensured that India, Pakistan, and Ceylon entered the Commonwealth as free and equal members. Admiral Mountbatten remained a close friend and advisor of Nehru to his dying day.
It is lack of self-respect in the powerful that Mr. Chaudhuri despises. He no unqualified condemner of empires; he admires the builders and rulers of empires and great generals. Churchill he admires above a political figures of the twentieth century for his courage and his sense historical greatness. It is not power as such that Mr. Chaudhuri admires.
It is bombast. Churchill doomed the Empire when, as Chancellor, he took a shilling off Income tax instead of spending it on the Navy.
He admires the virtues which are often necessary for the acquisition an exercise of power. He esteems the courage which leads to great achievements
like those of Stalin and Mao?
and the pride in such achievements - individual and collect intellectual, political, and military.
Britain has far greater achievements to its credit than the fact that it once got some bunch of darkies to start prattling in English to each other.
Mr. Chaudhuri sees the decadence of Great Britain in the present state of British manners and speech;
Everybody should wear a top-hat and say 'Tally ho!'
the frivolity of public amusements,
Queenji should not be drinking Gin and playing Bingo. It is most unseemly.
the triviality of interests and indecorous conduct are part of this decadence.
As is sodomy. Ted Heath may kindly desist from taking it up the arse from the TUC. During the Seventies, both India and the UK had a state of Emergency. The British one failed. The head of the Civil Service took off all his clothes and rolled around screaming hysterically on the carpet of Number 10. Meanwhile, Indira Gandhi crushed her opponents with insulting ease.
Niradh lived long enough to believe Nehru's dynasty had ended with the assassination of Rajiv. Sadly, he did not live to see his dream of European rule restored in India in the person of a nice Italian lady.
A Culture may affirm that it has a 'fundamental code'. This may be taken from Religion or from a political event- e.g. the American declaration of Independence and the signing of its Constitution. However, this affirmation is mere puffery. There is no 'code' to which everything in the culture can be reduced or related.
Foucault, in 'the order of things' assumes an impossibility- viz that a fundamental code for culture exists
The fundamental codes of a culture - those governing its language,
if there were a fundamental code governing a language then an 'i-language' would exist. Perfect machine translation would have been achieved long ago.
its schemas of perception,
if there was a code for this, then it would be easy to change how a particular person perceives things. I could look in the mirror and see a handsome young man- not an elderly sack of shit.
its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices - establish for every man, from the very first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home.
This is nonsense. The computational cost of such a thing would not be affordable even for a Galactic Civilization. It may be that at some future time, a robot of this type could be constructed. But what it would be able to do would be very limited.
At the other extremity of thought, there are the scientific theories or the philosophical interpretations which explain why order exists in general, what universal law it obeys, what principle can account for it, and why this particular order has been established and not some other.
This is only possible in the Physical sciences. It isn't true of the Humanities or the Social Sciences.
But between these two regions, so distant from one another, lies a domain which, even though its role is mainly an intermediary one, is nonetheless fundamental:
why stop there? Why not say that there is a superfluous zone which nonetheless is essential? Also there is a pig which is only a pig because it flies around the place shitting on people.
it is more confused, more obscure, and probably less easy to analyse.
Telling stupid lies is not analysis.
It is here that a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it by its primary codes,
there are no such 'empirical orders'. What we experience is what is empirical for us. But this depends on what we have been drinking or thinking or were expecting to experience.
instituting an initial separation from them,
If a thing can separate itself from a code, that code can't be 'primary' to it. If my computer separates itself from its 'machine language', it would cease to function. On the other hand, I could erase the operating system and replace it with a different one.
causes them to lose their original transparency,
how? By magic?
relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers,
and its ability to pull rabbits out of hats
frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones; this culture then finds itself faced with the stark fact that there exists, below the level of its spontaneous orders, things that are in themselves capable of being ordered, that belong to a certain unspoken order; the fact, in short, that order exists.
How does this culture find things? Does it exist separately from the people in it? If not, nothing prevents any of those people thinking 'the fundamental codes' of their culture are shit. Look at country X. They are rising up much more rapidly than us. If we don't follow their example, we risk being conquered or being reduced to client status.'
Perhaps, Foucault means that a culture might discover that its ideas about Physics are wrong. Consider the moon landing. Apparently, there was an elderly Saudi cleric who said it must have been faked. Only Prophet Muhammad could reach the Moon. What was granted to the impeccable one could not befall some ignorant kaffir. However, the younger generation of Saudis had studied Physics and Engineering at School and College. They were anxious to use modern technology to improve the lives of their people. Economic forces and National Security considerations 'reinforced' their decision to pursue Scientific learning while continuing to follow the ethical and spiritual teachings of their religion.
As though emancipating itself to some extent from its linguistic, perceptual, and practical grids,
all of us can achieve such emancipation by dropping acid or just day-dreaming.
the culture superimposed on them another kind of grid which neutralized them, which by this superimposition both revealed and excluded them at the same time, so that the culture, by this very process, came face to face with order in its primary state.
We haven't come 'face to face' with anything 'primary'. If we had, we would have a 'Theory of Everything'.
It is on the basis of this newly perceived order that the codes of language, perception, and practice are criticized and rendered partially invalid.
No. Every culture possesses some members who are aware that other cultures do some things differently. Should they be emulated or excoriated?
It is on the basis of this order, taken as a firm foundation,
No. Science seeks only a useful enough foundation. True, there may be philosophical work to make those foundations 'firmer'- i.e. more consistent and complete. Sometimes this is useful. Sadly, no truly firm foundation- based on absolute proofs or atomic propositions is possible.
that general theories as to the ordering of things, and the interpretation that such an ordering involves, will be constructed.
If this is done by clever scientists there are likely to be very valuable technological spin-offs. If it is done by Professors of useless shite, these general theories will be paranoid nonsense.
Thus, between the already ‘encoded’ eye
e.g. the eye of the Khoi-San in the Kalahari seeing different colours from Europeans?
and reflexive knowledge
eyes can see themselves- right?
there is a middle region which liberates order itself:
Only in the sense that it grants the vote to flying pigs and releases giant cats from their bondage to teddy bears.
it is here that it appears, according to the culture and the age in question, continuous and graduated or discontinuous and piecemeal, linked to space
because people live in space
or constituted anew at each instant by the driving force of time,
because people live in time
related to a series of variables
because people are related in various way to variable things
or defined by separate systems of coherences,
Systems of coherence don't define shit. People do. Sadly, their definitions are seldom coherent. It is best to leave the key term in a discourse undefined as a 'Tarskian primitive'.
composed of resemblances
identity classes. There may be no resemblance
which are either successive or corresponding organized around increasing differences, etc.
identity classes may be purely functional.
This middle region, then, in so far as it makes manifest the modes of being of order, can be posited as the most fundamental of all:
or it can be posited as some shite Foucault pulled out of his fundament.
anterior to words, perceptions, and gestures, which are then taken to be more or less exact, more or less happy, expressions of it (which is why this experience of order in its pure primary state always plays a critical role); more solid, more archaic, less dubious, always more ‘true’ than the theories that attempt to give those expressions explicit form, exhaustive application, or philosophical foundation.
I suppose a pretentious prose stylist might describe his mental operations in this way. But useful research does not work that way.
Thus, in every culture, between the use of what one might call the ordering codes and reflections upon order itself, there is the pure experience of order and of its modes of being.
There is no such 'pure experience'. There are people who claim to have experienced the harmony of the cosmos or the infinite love of God. But even those who praised the feudal social order or the Maoist social order, never claimed to have experienced it in its pure form.
The present study is an attempt to analyse that experience.
You can't analyze that which is incompossibe and thus can't exist.
I am concerned to show its developments, since the sixteenth century,
What changed in the late Fifteenth Century was the final disappearance faith in an unchanging social order. Protestantism began to rise in France from about 1520 onward.
in the mainstream of a culture such as ours: in what way, as one traces against the current, as it were - language as it has been spoken, natural creatures as they have been perceived and grouped together, and exchanges as they have been practised; in what way, then, our culture has made manifest the existence of order, and how, to the modalities of that order, the exchanges owed their laws, the living beings their constants, the words their sequence and their representative value; what modalities of order have been recognized, posited, linked with space and time, in order to create the positive basis of knowledge as we find it employed in grammar and philology,
the French academy was created in the Seventeenth Century
in natural history and biology,
Eighteenth century
in the study of wealth and political economy.
Seventeenth century. But different countries in Western Europe followed different trajectories. It wasn't till the Nineteenth century that there was significant convergence. However it now appears that 'the great divergence' between Western Europe and the rest of the World might have commenced in the Thirteenth century.
In the case of England, we can see evolutionary progress, with some setbacks due to Civil War, from the time of Henri Beauclerc. France wasn't very different. Indeed, economically, it was ahead in several respects till the Nineteenth Century.
Quite obviously, such an analysis does not belong to the history of ideas or of science:
because it is nonsense- a just so story told by a maniac.
it is rather an inquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible;
Knowledge and theory became possible thousands of years ago. What mattered is whether they could 'pay for themselves' by raising total factor productivity.
within what space of order knowledge was constituted; on the basis of what historical a priori,
None was needed. A priori shite is always false or mischievous.
and in the element of what positivity, ideas could appear,
Positivity just means utility.
sciences be established, experience be reflected in philosophies, rationalities be formed, only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards. I am not concerned, therefore, to describe the progress of knowledge towards an objectivity in which today’s science can finally be recognized;
In other words, Foucault was not concerned with doing anything useful. He merely wanted to publish his pedantic, paranoid, ravings.
what I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological field, the episteme
i.e. stuff this cunt pulled out of his arse.
in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms,
i.e. knowledge envisaged as stupid shit Foucault pulled out of his arse.
grounds its positivity
if a thing makes testable predictions, it is positive. Not otherwise. If Foucault could say something positive about episteme, we would have a way of predicting which research programs will be reinforced and which will run out of resources and be abandoned.
and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility;
money and smart guys doing research. That's the condition.
in this account, what should appear are those configurations within the space of knowledge which have given rise to the diverse forms of empirical science.
What gave rise to those 'diverse forms' was utility. Biology burgeons because there is a market for medicine and agronomy and animal husbandry and so forth. Chemistry is equally useful as is Physics. Astrology wasn't useful, though a few people can still make a bit of money doing it.
Such an enterprise is not so much a history, in the traditional meaning of that word, as an ‘archaeology ’.
It is nonsense pure and simple. Archaeology is scientific and relies on things like carbon dating.
Now, this archaeological inquiry has revealed two great discontinuities in the episteme of Western culture: the first inaugurates the Classical age
In England this is the period from the 8th century BC to the 5th century AD,
(roughly half-way through the seventeenth century)
We would say this was the Enlightenment- though there is too much continuity in English intellectual history for this category to be universally recognized.
What drove scientific progress was the need created by trans-oceanic commerce for better astronomical charts and methods of mathematical computation.
and the second, at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
the late eighteenth century when industrialization based on burning coal in steam engines became the driver for technological innovation.
marks the beginning of the modern age.
Every age is its own modern age.
The order on the basis of which we think today does not have the same mode of being as that of the Classical thinkers.
Nope. It is the same. One may speak of a Copernican Revolution. After that everything was incremental.
Despite the impression we may have of an almost uninterrupted development of the European ratio from the Renaissance to our own day,
or from Hammurabi to our own day
despite our possible belief that the classifications of Linnaeus,
who built on the work of Tournefort, though John Ray is more highly regarded. Why did Professors of Botany exist? The answer is that Botany is useful.
modified to a greater or lesser degree, can still lay claim to some sort of validity, that Condillac’s theory of value
can be traced back to the school of Salamanca. But Condillac does not greatly matter
can be recognized to some extent in nineteenth-century marginalism,
this was useful, though it must be said English 'Political Arithmetic' was able to calculate price elasticities by the end of the Seventeenth Century.
that Keynes was well aware of the affinities between his own analyses and those of Cantillon,
because of Jevons who rediscovered his 1730 essay. However, it is Malthus who was most important.
that the language of general grammar (as exemplified in the authors of Port-Royal or in Bauzee) is not so very far removed from our own
General grammar doesn't matter. Still, nutters like Chomsky think it licenses their own paranoid ravings.
— all this quasicontinuity on the level of ideas and themes is doubtless only a surface appearance;
says every paranoid nutter who ever lived. It merely appears that the postman is delivering letters. Actually he is a spy whose brain is being controlled by the neighbor's cat.
on the archaeological level, we see that the system of positivities was transformed in a wholesale fashion at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century.
Because Napoleon had super-powers?
Not that reason made any progress: it was simply that the mode of being of things, and of the order that divided them up before presenting them to the understanding, was profoundly altered. If the natural history of Tournefort, Linnaeus, and Buffon can be related to anything at all other than itself, it is not to biology, to Cuvier’s comparative anatomy, or to Darwin’s theory of evolution, but to Bauzee’s general grammar, to the analysis of money and wealth as found in the works of Law, or Veron de Fortbonnais, or Turgot.
Anything may be related to any other thing- more particularly by a crazy person. What related Botany to 'Political Economy' to 'Grammar' or Philology was that there was an expanding market for their applications. Europeans were crossing oceans and learning new languages- like Tamil or Japanese- and they were finding and bringing back different plants and animals. Meanwhile, Governments needed more tax money to maintain a standing army and a trans-oceanic navy.
Perhaps knowledge succeeds in engendering knowledge, ideas in transforming themselves and actively modifying one another (but how? — historians have not yet enlightened us on this point)
Sure they have. Knowledge costs money. If it can 'pay for itself' it burgeons. Markets matter. An enlightened despot can kick-start things but after that what matters is incentive compatible 'mechanism design'. If the taxes you pay are used to solve collective action problems the burden of taxation tends to fall- at least for the more enterprising and productive- because real income rises more than proportionately.
one thing, in any case, is certain: archaeology,
is unnecessary where relevant facts are easily available from books. Still, archaeologists may discover that a particular innovation- e.g. the flush toilet- was introduced at an earlier date than was previously supposed. But Fuckall wasn't an archaeologist. He was a cretin with little knowledge of European history.
addressing itself to the general space of knowledge,
which is just the world and the people who live or lived in it.
to its configurations, and to the mode of being of the things that appear in it,
either they are real or they are imaginary. That's the only two modes of being a thing can have. Thus 'the current French monarch' is imaginary whereas the British monarch is real.
defines systems of simultaneity,
Which is done by Historical records and the fact that Europeans used the same calendar and gave the same dates for things.
as well as the series of mutations necessary and sufficient to circumscribe the threshold of a new positivity.
Innovations are not 'mutations'.
In this way, analysis has been able to show the coherence that existed, throughout the Classical age, between the theory of representation and the theories of language, of the natural orders, and of wealth and value.
No. Nothing of the sort has been achieved. People in the Seventeenth century were aware that their 'theory of representation' was inconsistent and incomplete. The notion of a 'natural order' was very much in flux. New sources of wealth and value were being created which few fully understood. Some thought that some great disaster impended by reason of a dramatic break with the 'highly correlated' systems of a legendary past. Cervantes, representing the School of Salamanca, suggested there had been no such golden age.
It is this configuration that, from the nineteenth century onward, changes entirely; the theory of representation disappears as the universal foundation of all possible orders;
No. The theory of representation became mathematical. It has to do with representing the elements of abstract algebraic structures as linear transformations of vector spaces. During the nineteenth century you could still have polymaths like Hermann Grassmann who could move from translating the Rg Veda to laying the foundations of vector analysis. By the end of the nineteenth century, what could be achieved in mathematics and physics greatly exceeded any contribution a genius could make in any other field. Frank Ramsey made some good contributions to Philosophy and Economics. But lesser mortals could have achieved the same results. What he did in mathematics is simply astounding.
language as the spontaneous tabula, the primary grid of things,
it is no such thing. Language simply doesn't matter very much.
as an indispensable link between representation and things, is eclipsed in its turn; a profound historicity penetrates into the heart of things,
only in the sense that the heart of things is an asshole which likes getting penetrated.
isolates and defines them in their own coherence, imposes upon them the forms of order implied by the continuity of time;
also it gives them the power to turn into pigs and fly around shitting on tourists.
the analysis of exchange and money gives way to the study of production,
Fuck off! Financial Econ & Actuarial Science burgeoned.
that of the organism takes precedence over the search for taxonomic characteristics,
Botanists stopped saying 'this plant belongs to such and such genus'. They would say 'what a pretty flower! It's name is Daphne and it wants to give me kisses.'
and, above all, language loses its privileged position
money talks, bullshit walks. But this has always been the case.
and becomes, in its turn, a historical form coherent with the density of its own past.
rather than the past of a rent boy.
But as things become increasingly reflexive, seeking the principle of their intelligibility only in their own development, and abandoning the space of representation, man enters in his turn, and for the first time, the field of Western knowledge.
Aristotle would say 'what a charming flower!' whenever he bumped into Alexander.
Strangely enough, man — the study of whom is supposed by the naive to be the oldest investigation since Socrates
Naive peeps think Socrates was Greek. He was actually a Siamese cat which belonged to my Aunty Mathilde. Wake up sheeple! There's no such thing as Greece. There was a film called Grease which starred John Trattoria as a beautiful Australian blonde.
- is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things,
caused by the incessant penetration of the asshole of the heart of things.
or, in any case, a configuration whose outlines are determined by the new position he has so recently taken up in the field of knowledge. Whence all the chimeras of the new humanisms, all the facile solutions of an ‘anthropology’ understood as a universal reflection on man, halfempirical, half-philosophical.
Anthropology truly is shite. Lots of social anthropologists nowadays are Foucauldian.
It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.
If studying Man can improve outcomes, there will be money available to do it. Sadly, money is also available to get sheepskins for paranoid cretins.
I am concerned ... with a history of resemblance:
which reflects what a particular milieu found functionally equivalent- e.g. a portrait which could become the basis of a treaty of marriage between a King and a princess he had never set eyes on. Sadly, in the case of Henry VIII, the resemblance between Anne of Cleves and her portrait (done by Holbein) wasn't good enough.
on what conditions was Classical thought able to reflect relations of similarity or equivalence between things, relations that would provide a foundation and a justification for their words, their classifications, their systems of exchange?
The answer was utilitarian. Two plants may look alike but one might be useless or harmful while the other might be very useful. It was worth paying savants to study such matters. Equally, why did a word with the same etymology have a different meaning in different languages? Even if there was no answer to such a question, it might be worthwhile to pay scholars who were aware of such cases.
What historical a priori
There was prior scholarship. But it did not involve any a priori proposition. Foucault was mis-using Kant's term because he was stupid and concerned with trying to write like a smart dude.
provided the starting-point from which it was possible to define the great checkerboard of distinct identities established against the confused, undefined, faceless, and, as it were, indifferent background of differences?
All this is nonsense. Utilitarian research burgeoned because of new economic opportunities created by trans-oceanic commerce.
The history of madness would be the history of the Other
not if it was written by a person who had personal experiences of spells of lunacy. But this is a matter of degree.
of that which, for a given culture, is at once interior and foreign,
actually, mad people often seem more indigenous and natural than the more cultivated amongst us.
therefore to be excluded
if they keep trying to kill you.
(so as to exorcize the interior danger)
that is done by burning witches or heretics or whatever.
but by being shut away (in order to reduce its otherness) ;
or left to wander the streets reliant on charity.
whereas the history of the order imposed on things
which things? Sheep? The history of that order involves shepherds and sheep-dogs.
would be the history of the Same - of that which, for a given culture, is both dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be collected together into identities.
Sheep form an identity class. Speaking generally, their meat and wool are pretty much of a muchness.
And if one considers that disease is at one and the same time disorder — the existence of a perilous otherness within the human body, at the very heart of life
it may be congenital. Moreover, everybody may have it to some degree.
— and a natural phenomenon with its own constants, resemblances, and types, one can see what scope there would be for an archaeology of the medical point of view.
If you have a disease which is causing you a lot of pain, you won't want to see a Doctor or go to the Pharmacy. You will seek out an archaeologist of 'the medical point of view'.
From the limit experience of the Other
Why were these stupid fuckers so obsessed with alterity? We may pretend to care about others, but we don't really. Also, when we meet somebody with whom we share nothing in common- as I did on my honeymoon night when I discovered somebody had cut off my bride's dick- we don't scream loudly and shit ourselves unless such behavior is habitual for us.
to the constituent forms of medical knowledge,
like Foucault's Psychiatrist giving up lithium salts
and from the latter to the order of things and the conceptions of the Same, what is available to archaeological analysis is the whole of Classical knowledge,
Foucault didn't understand that knowledge much of which was mathematical or jurisprudential.
or rather the threshold that separates us from Classical thought and constitutes our modernity.
Foucault was mad, not modern.
It was upon this threshold that the strange figure of knowledge called man first appeared
Did you know that Hippocrates only treated birds? If you asked him to treat a man, he would say- 'what is this strange wingless bird? I can't cure it of any disease. Indeed, I don't even know what sort of creature it is.' Similarly, medieval lawyers only dealt with cases involving pigs.
and revealed a space proper to the human sciences.
The 'human sciences'- medicine, law, economics, etc.- have existed in every civilization ancient or modern. Fuckall was pretending that some White dudes invented human beings a couple of centuries ago. Sadly, they had neglected to specify that Man must devote himself to shoving pineapples up the butt of 'the other' while the Sun King and the Pope, dressed in a gimp costume, stand around laughing maniacally.
In attempting to uncover the deepest strata of Western culture, I am
handicapped by the fact that I am ignorant, stupid and mad.
restoring to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts, its instability, its flaws; and it is the same ground that is once more stirring under our feet.
because the Pope is refusing to shove pineapples up our butts.
Foucault writes of Velasquez's Les Meninas-
we are looking at a picture in which the painter is in turn looking out at us.
No. He is looking at the King and Queen who are reflected in a mirror. Velasquez is paying a compliment to his patron who had given him a high position at Court. We are seeing the painted through the eyes of the monarch. But nobody from that age can see us because they died long ago.
A mere confrontation, eyes catching one another’s glance, direct looks superimposing themselves upon one another as they cross.
It is quite usual for portrait painters to ask their subjects to look them in the eye. But we would need to be very stupid to think that the subject was looking at us rather than the painter.
And yet this slender line of reciprocal visibility embraces a whole complex network of uncertainties, exchanges, and feints.
No. There is the infanta and dwarf and some ladies-in-waiting. In the mirror the Royal couple are faintly visible. This is a world of great certainty, strict etiquette, and a rigid hierarchy.
The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself.
Foucault thought that John Wayne was looking at him from the movie screen. Would Wayne shove a pineapple up his bum? That would be super-cool.
But, inversely, the painter’s gaze, addressed to the void confronting him outside the picture, accepts as many models as there are spectators; in this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange.
Which is how come you can ask Velasquez to lend you a tenner. Don't bother with Rembrandt. That fucker wouldn't lend his own widowed mother a farthing. Fuck you Rembrandt! Fuck you very much!
No gaze is stable,
ours is. It is a good picture. We like looking at it.
or rather, in the neutral furrow of the gaze piercing at a right angle through the canvas, subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles to infinity.
Foucault confuses the mise en abyme of mirrors reflecting each other with a painted picture. He truly was as stupid as shit.
And here the great canvas with its back to us on the extreme left of the picture exercises its second function: stubbornly invisible, it prevents the relation of these gazes from ever being discoverable or definitely established.
No. We get that the canvas will be the one we see. It is not the case that Velasquez was actually painting cows rather than the Infanta and her ladies in waiting.
The opaque fixity that it establishes on one side renders forever unstable the play of metamorphoses established in the centre between spectator and model.
No. We can be certain that the canvas we can't see is same one that we see. Did Velasquez use a mirror? Perhaps. The compliment he is paying the Royal Couple is by showing them to be the 'mirror' of excellence in Art. I suppose one could say his painting is also a 'mirror for princes' in so far as it encourages them to patronize excellent painters- perhaps even giving them high positions at court.
Because we can see only that reverse side, we do not know who we are, or what we are doing. Seen or seeing?
We are seeing. We can't be seen by painted figures. They are not alive.
The painter is observing a place which, from moment to moment, never ceases to change its content, its form, its face, its identity.
But he fixes it for all time. I suppose Velasquez did a lot of work on the canvass when his subjects were not present. Indeed, he may have been able to do the whole thing just from memory and imagination.
But the attentive immobility of his eyes
all eyes in paintings are immobile. Foucault thought they often blinked or winked.
refers us back to another direction which they have often followed already, and which soon, there can be no doubt, they will take again: that of the motionless canvas upon which is being traced, has already been traced perhaps, for a long time and forever, a portrait that will never again be erased.
Unless it is erased by an elderly Spanish lady who thinks it could do with a bit of brightening up.
I have previously written about Foucault getting Borges wrong in an earlier passage of this very book. The truth is, he was a stupid, uncultured, man who did not understand good literature or great art or anything at all.
But the relation of language to painting is
a matter of literary craftsmanship and aesthetic and descriptive skill. It is not
an infinite relation.
A short essay on a painting may be illuminating or valuable in itself. Infinite verbiage is not valuable at all.
It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate.
Some people have literary skill. Their ekphrastic essays may be valuable in themselves. Sadly, Foucault was stupid and wrote like a demented pig.
Neither can be reduced to the other’s terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.
It may do so well enough for some useful purpose.
And it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying; the space where they achieve their splendour is not that deployed by our eyes but that defined by the sequential elements of syntax.
This stupid cunt doesn't get that the place where 'splendor' is achieved is in the brain whose deep mysteries our scientists are only now beginning to plumb.
And the proper name, in this particular context, is merely an artifice:
it is a 'rigid designator'. It may also be the solution to a coordination game, in which case it is useful for making progress on collective action problems.
it gives us a finger to point with,
we already have fingers.
in other words, to pass surreptitiously from the space where one speaks to the space where one looks;
They are the same space. You can talk while looking at stuff. There is nothing 'surreptitious' about this.
in other words, to fold one over the other as though they were equivalents.
Things are equivalent for some purposes, not others.
But if one wishes to keep the relation of language to vision open,
it is already open if you can see and can tell other people what you see.
if one wishes to treat their incompatibility as a starting-point for speech instead of as an obstacle to be avoided, so as to stay as close as possible to both, then one must erase those proper names and preserve the infinity of the task.
In other words, if you want to do stupid shit you should first do some other stupid shit. Wake up sheeple! Stupid shit won't just do itself, you know. We need Professors of stupid shit to ensure more and more stupid shit is done.
It is perhaps through the medium of this grey, anonymous language, always over-meticulous and repetitive because too broad, that the painting may, little by little, release its illuminations.
Not if Foucault is talking. On the other hand, I would be thankful to the dude who said to me 'you know what look nice on your drawing room wall? Velasquez's 'Les Meninas'. It don't got no naked ladies, but believe me, it will grow on you. '
Perhaps there exists, in this painting by Velazquez, the representation as it were, of Classical representation,
i.e. the painting is a painting.
and the definition of the space it opens up to us.
It does not open any space to us. It isn't a worm-hole to a different dimension.
And, indeed, representation undertakes to represent itself
because a picture is actually a picture- wow! You are blowing my mind, Fuckall dude!
here in all its elements, with its images, the eyes to which it is offered, the faces it makes visible, the gestures that call it into being. But there, in the midst of this dispersion which it is simultaneously grouping together and spreading out before us, indicated compellingly from every side, is an essential void:
There is no void. There is a great King and his Queen. There is also the Queen's chamberlain who was also named Velasquez. Was he a relative? Perhaps. If so, the painting is asserting something about Velasquez's social position. He is in the favor of the King and a kinsman stands high in the Queen's regard.
the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation
the King and the Queen can be made out in the mirror. There is no disappearance- not even that of the artist who has managed to include himself in the picture.
- of the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance.
A painting is only a painting for everybody save a maniac.
This very subject — which is the same - has been elided. And representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form.
A guy uses a mirror so as to include himself and the subject of his painting. But a good artist could do this just by using his imagination. Suppose you are painting the Last Supper. You could put yourself in as a waiter or something of that sort. I suppose if you paint yourself 'warts and all', you might say your representation was 'purer'. But, it might be objected, a pure representation would exclude you because you weren't present in ancient Palestine in the time of Christ.`
Back in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, there was a question as to whether representation was 'substantive' or 'relational'- i.e. was directly related to what it represented or whether it related to other representations. But this was not a very pressing question. Useful discoveries could be made in an ad hoc manner. Greater Empires than Alexander or Caesar could have dreamed off, were being soldered together. Europe could either fight wars of religion or it could convert hundreds of millions on other continents to one of its creeds.
Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture.
Very true. A statue resembles a person. Many people in Europe used to get married to statues. This was very constructive because their babies were made of marble.
It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts;
No. Knowledge of Greek and Hebrew had sparked a 'Humanism' which also contributed to the Reformation. But what was really significant was the discovery of the New World and the circumnavigation of the globe.
it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them.
This was overthrown by the Copernican revolution half way through the sixteenth century.
The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man.
Perhaps this was the case for a few savants who also dabbled in magic and alchemy. But there was also an incipient Baconian empiricism. European metallurgy and mining techniques were improving. But it was in shipping and navigation that they took a growing lead.
Painting imitated space.
No. It depicted it. But so did Persian and Chinese painting.
And representation - whether in the service of pleasure or of knowledge was posited as a form of repetition: the theatre of life or the mirror of nature, that was the claim made by all language, its manner of declaring its existence and of formulating its right of speech.
This was still on the Classical model. The Reformation and Counter Reformation built on the Renaissance. What changed over the course of the sixteenth century was the increasing importance of vernacular language and literature. This reinforced a move from scholasticism to empiricism.
What exactly does resemblance mean for Foucault?
The semantic web of resemblance in the sixteenth century is extremely rich: Amicitia,
which does not mean resemblance. It means friendship. A tall guy may be the pall of a short bloke.
Aequalitas
equality does not mean resemblance. Two officials may be equal in rank even though they look nothing like each other
(contractus, consensus, matrimonium, societas, pax, et similia) Consonantia, Concertus, Continuum, Paritas, Proportio,
none of which mean resemblance
Similitudo,
Bingo!
Conjunctio, Copula .
Wrong!
And there are a great many other notions that intersect, overlap, reinforce, or limit one another on the surface of thought.
Similitudo is resemblance. None of the other words are. What Fuckall is talking about is 'Renaissance Magic'- which was merely a way to pass the time.
It is enough for the moment to indicate the principal figures that determine the knowledge of resemblance
which arises of seeing that two things look alike
with their articulations.
which arises from saying 'these two things look alike'.
There are four of these that are, beyond doubt, essential.
Only seeing a likeness matters. Nothing else does.
which means agreement, fitness, conformity, appropriateness or aptness. It has nothing to do with resemblance. We may agree that it would be nice if I resembled Beyonce. But I don't. Sad.
First of all, convenientia.
This word really denotes the adjacency of places more strongly than it does similitude.
I suppose one might say 'this house is conveniently located for the shops and public transport. But this has nothing to do with resemblance.
Those things are ‘convenient’ which come sufficiently close to one another to be in juxtaposition; their edges touch, their fringes intermingle, the extremity of the one also denotes the beginning of the other.
This is not required for 'convenience'. If you want adjacency, say so.
In this way, movement, influences, passions, and properties too, are communicated. So that in this hinge between two things a resemblance appears.
When you stand on the road, you start to resemble the road. That's why people try to drive over -
...Resemblance imposes adjacencies
Which is why everybody who looks like Beyonce is standing next to her.
that in their turn guarantee further resemblances. Place and similitude become entangled: we see mosses growing on the outsides of shells,
but we know that moss is not a shell. Similarly when we sit down on grass, we don't start to look like grass.
plants in the antlers of stags, a sort of grass on the faces of men;
Foucault did not know about beards.
It must be said that there was a 'natural magic' tradition which mingled mysticism and alchemy with some empirical work of a useful type- e.g. Giambatista della Porta's work on the telescope- but this was also true of China and India and the Islamic world. What is indisputable is that countries that went in for useful inventions did better than those which chose to trust in magic and astrology and alchemy. As for witchcraft and wizardry, it could be left to village hags.
There is still a market for books on magic and astrology and UFOs and so forth. Moreover, half the movies being made are about zombies or vampires or werewolves or shape shifting aliens. Yet ours is a scientific, because deeply utilitarian, age. Sadly, all ages have to be utilitarian. The alternative is extinction.
