Daisy Dixon is an artist and philosopher. I am neither. On the other hand, Daisy does look a lot like me- indeed, for a moment, I thought I was looking at my own profile pic. She is a lot whiter and, well, girly- but fundamentally, it wouldn't be racist at all for anyone to mistake her for me. To be clear, I am not accusing this estimable savant of cultural or aesthetic appropriation. It may be that both her parents glimpsed the splendor of my visage and, willy nilly- being blindly possessed by the Schopenhauerian Will- stochastically sought each other out to but mindlessly rut till they had incarnated something approaching the perfection of my physiognomy in the miroir sans tain of their carnal concupiscence. Obviously, when I speak of mirrors, I don't mean the tawdry and meretricious stuff they sell at John Lewis or Ikea but the classy and expensive sort of looking glass for which I am saving up and in which more than Emmy Noether symmetries will be conserved in the phantom curves of my flabby phiz.
Daisy's expensive education, quite criminally, didn't tell her that Art is distinguishable only by an uncorrelated asymmetry. She assumes it is something which can be conserved. But Noether's theorem only applies to non-dissipative systems. Certain types of entropy, negentropy and Parrando games can't exist in her ontology.
Suppose this were not the case. Then, Daisy is the face I look at in the mirror. It is the darts of my eyes she adorns futilely burnishing her own gaze of bronze.
In mathematical terms, we might say that 'precomposition' is the source of Daisy being my 'pullback' in this respect. However such an assertion is a trifle ad captum vulgi. I urge Daisy to turn her back on the rubbish she has been taught at Cambridge and investigate the more arcane cohomological groups in which such may be the case. I say this entirely for her benefit. She has disgraced herself by getting a PhD from Cambridge. I got a 2.2 from the LSE and followed it up with a NVQ (level 3) in Hospitality Technology. Well, I didn't actually get that NVQ because my experiments in carrying dishes on both sides of the tray were sabotaged by the other waiters at the Tandoori Restaurant where I had managed to secure employment. The other employees were Sylhetis- i.e. Aryans- and it is an indisputable fact that Aryans have oppressed and ethnically cleansed Dravidians like myself for thousands of years.
I see that Daisy has a paper on 'lies in Art' which
aims to show that any account of how artworks lie must acknowledge (I) that artworks can lie at different levels of their content—what I call ‘surface’ and ‘deep’—and (II) that, for an artwork to lie at a given level, a norm of truthful communication such as Grice’s Maxim of Quality must apply to it.
The problem here is that works of art are likely to be high in implicature or what us Hindus call 'dhvani'. But, if reverberation is semantic, Dialethia is ontic. Thus Grice's maxims can't apply. In particular, the comic mode (hasya) using rasabhasa (inappropriate affect) has been shown to be the root of all other modes in Sanskrit poetics. The accumulation of 'suggestio falsi' is a truthful if self-puncturing afflatus of Maya's epistemic bubble.
If 'surface' vs 'deep' distinctions exist then Daisy's profile pic could really be my profile pic's mathematical 'pullback'.
Obviously, since I'm much older than her and we descend from the same ancestral Eve, there is bound to be some biological 'homology'. But, ask yourself, is a theory which might incline you to kiss me rather than Daisy really a useful theory? It throws away too much information. Grice died before it became obvious that wherever there is a coordination game, then- so income and hedging effects can arise- there will also be a discoordination game. Otherwise, there will be no game. The thing isn't worth its candle. There won't be any 'channelization' or 'capacitance diversity'. There won't be enough volatility to drive liquidity. The Chichilnisky 'Goldilocks' conditions for language or trade (local arbitrage) won't be met.
From the time of King Rituparna, the Saivite artist who must celebrate Smarahara- the Lord as the destroyer of Memory, of Love- knows that there is a skill similar to that of the Vedic poet or expert charioteer which permits us to be the baby who longs to sleep between Mummy and Daddy but can't because Vatsalya is 'Ardhnarishvara'. Parental affection involves an utter fusion of gender and reversal of the very gender dimorphism required for reproduction. Elder bro, Ganesa, says sleep between Everyman, Everywoman. Hence, Muruga is the God of even the Tamil Atheist.
Art lies in the very real places where kiddies lie happily between their Mum & Dad or where elderly losers, cowering 'fore COVID, cuddle their duvet for lying so ineffectually 'twixt Life and Death.
There is only surface- no depth. Samsara is Nirvana.
For Mathematical logic, we know 'univalent foundations'- i.e. computer proof checking- is always possible for any given partition of intensional from extensional. But for any given mathematician's proof of a conjecture- e.g Mochizuki- there are more such logics than there are mathematicians. This is equally true of poetry or other self-consciously artistic work. There is a choice sequence which maximises amphiboly with respect to embedding in 'absolute metaphors'. It is this we are attentive to. It is here that we have 'dhvani' reverberations of allusion and inchoate emotion. Of such is the Schopenhaurian Music which outlasts Time. This is the silence of the nightingale in which the rose shreds its cloak.
A corollary is that it’s harder than you might think for artworks to lie: Quality is not automatically ‘switched on’ during our engagement with art. However, I show how a work’s curation and genre-membership can ‘switch on’ Quality, allowing artworks to lie at different levels.
So, Daisy is putting in a type theory. Nothing wrong with that. But why not look at recent developments in Martin Lof?
One answer may be that Daisy, as a relatively elderly philosopher (my reading age is at least half hers), has succumbed to the temptation to more categorically repeat what Nietzsche called Kant's joke — Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the whole world, that the whole world was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in favor of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people” Replace 'scholars' with 'epistemically privileged Whites' and 'people' with fat, old, black cunts like wot I iz and you can begin to understand my animus.
Daisy has an essay in Aeon on which I left a typically rebarbative comment. Foolishly, she responded. Was it coz I iz bleck? No. It was just a generalized sort of noblesse oblige. Yet such genuine oikeiosis as grounds Grievance Studies responds only to the Socratic 'palinode' of the 'Directed Graph' which alone can provide deontic logic a method of incorporating information re. uncorrelated asymmetries and thus makes it immune to 'Jorgensen's dilemma' by reason of not being utterly useless and a waste of fucking time.
Daisy is an artist as well as a philosopher. I know a lot of people wot weren't either and had it rough growing up down this neck of the woods. Galley slaves, tied to no mast, they heard the Sirens' song and yet, mere flotsam and jetsam, they survived. An antidosis between Daisy and such like is possible. Why do I say this? She is young. I am old. I am a Gerontion who, after getting broadband and Wikipedia and thus getting up to speed on stuff I wasn't smart enough to pursue at Uni, saw that the face of the Universal Constructor of Mathesis, if not revealed, had already been conceived. I am ready to depart. But, if I am right, this also means there is an infinite 'pullback' to the haecceity of our every gratuitous- id est 'artistic'- truth as lie.
Sin as individuation. Metanoia as doing what the God of Agathon could not- viz. abolish the Past- Wilde was ahead of Frege. The fact is Time's arrow can be reversed if a computable function can grow exponentially faster than the domain it maps from.
Granted this aint the sort of guff they should teach at Cambridge. We trust that place to provide us with bureaucrats and lawyers- not exponents of Henry More's 'fourth dimension'.
Daisy's very polite reply to my comment is as follows-
I think that while different approaches to the art-censorship problem will offer varying insights and practical guidance, philosophy is an indispensable tool to gain a clearer and deeper understanding of the subject, and in this case, understand *why* and *how* an artwork can be dangerous in the first place.
The problem here is that philosophy does not now, nor has it ever, supplied 'bright-line' criteria in this regard. Law & Econ has. Those conjoined disciplines have found Applied Math an indispensable tool. But philosophy has fallen by the wayside. It gave up on Math. Then everybody else gave up on Philosophy. I suppose you could say, Regina v Shivpuri had a 'philosophical' ratio. But it was bad law. Or was it? Occam's razor, like Rudy Narayan, suggests that it wasn't Utilitarian philosophy but Shivpuri's dark skin which got him sent to jail.
As an elderly black man who had to quit Education at 19- and who WAS THE VICTIM OF RACIST AND SEXIST abuse in this country by, firstly, Mum & Dad, and then my ex-wife and so forth- I resent being told that 'philosophy is an indispensable tool' to understand why Rushdie's shite harmed India by telling stupid lies about the founder of his own Religion.
Daisy won't condemn 'Satanic Verses' . I will. A Hindu bureaucrat banned the import of that noisome filth into India. But India did not try to harm Rushdie in any way. He crossed a line, but the moment he said 'I'm an atheist', Indian Law gave him perfect equality and immunity from prosecution for any atheistical statement he might make.
Why is the law superior to philosophy? The answer, obviously, is that it isn't just protocol bound, it is buckstopped in a manner Kripke could not conceive. Not permanently so, obviously, but there is a clear 'directed Graph' which corresponds to the Socratic palinode. This is the essence of Art.
Acquiring this sharper grasp of the problem illuminates new and existing solutions.
Daisy offers no new solutions. She merely observes that 'bystander supported' denunciation of trespass is effective in establishing Sociological 'thresholds'. But that bystander support must be of a non-philosophical, 'overlapping consensus', wholly pragmatic type. The thing is entirely extensional, not intensional at all. There is a 'reverse mathematics' project here which we could say is philosophical, but Daisy has been brainwashed by her, no doubt, very expensive paideia into positing the opposite.
That is, philosophical analysis can reveal new strategies to manage hateful art, but it can also explain why existing approaches are so effective.
No. Game theory can do so because it looks at strategy at its most abstract. A parsimonious Philosophy would simply be the reverse mathematics of the folk theorem of repeated games. But we already have that through a notion of directed graphs which capture all the information pertaining to oikeiosis. In other words, all uncorrelated asymmetries are available for Muth Rationality's 'bourgeois strategy'. That ensures 'buckstopping'. Law & Econ has better Math behind it than Cambridge's daisy chain of decline and fall from Russell.
E.g. even the somewhat haphazard rolling of Colston through Bristol streets shouldn’t be overlooked in its significance, in its sonic aspects of re-curation - it was scraped and banged all the way to the harbour and then plunged into murky water.
The thing was a disaster for black peeps- just like the British suppression of the Slave Trade was a disaster for the great people of the Congo. They lost the ability to buy guns to protect themselves. King Leopold's statue deserves all it gets. Colston was a local philanthropist who never touched a hair on the head of any person of my colour. By contrast, Grotius justified the practice of kidnapping Tamils like me to labor in Ceylonese plantations till they died within six months. It was cheaper to kidnap more from across the Palk Straits. Some of our women were raped by Dutchmen whose fat and jealous wives then took pleasure in whipping these 'Kanagis' to death. Yet a lot of Indian Diplomats and Academics drone on about Grotius as the founder of 'International Law'.
Every black person currently in the UK has ancestors who came here in the full knowledge of its history but also a faith in the 'palinode' embedded in English's being wholly embedded in the Gospel of Lord Jesus Christ- foreshadowed, it may be, by the 'Greek speaking Druids' who, Sir Edward Coke said, laid the foundations of our Common Law. William Blake, not bleck, it is true, but like me a Sarf Lunnon nudist- what?- Baby used to piss and shit on me so I was unclothed, save for swimming trunks to keep my nut-sacs safe, during that long, hot, Stockwell summer when I was happiest.
Blake said, and us elderly, ill educated, blecks say,
He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.
Daisy is an artist. Her music features 'minutely organized Particulars'. By contrast, my Tik Tok videos feature me lip-synching and twerking to Beyonce. Whom would you rather have at your hen do? Not me. I gotta tiny package.
This kind of re-curation or even dramatic/artistic performance can be seen as a distinctively aesthetic way to disable the harmful speech acts performed by the statue in its original location.
This was a piece of metal which birds shat upon. It wasn't a speech act at all till some bureaucrat decided Bristol should have a 'History month'. But, Bristol has a fucking horrible history. Also, those cunts tend to look down on peeps without posh accents and yachts and shit. They got their comeuppance- right? Wrong. They got to look like Southern Cavaliers rather than Cits whose sole representation within Anglo-Celtic paideia was the vast vacuity of Clifton College. Them guys had good commercial and tech ed. But they resisted Civilization till 1862. They could have had a University at any time from the Seventeenth Century. They were too smart, or too successful, to do anything so stupid.
By disabling the illocutionary force of an artwork like this we can, as active viewers,
How is Daisy the same sort of 'active viewer' as me? The answer, obviously, is that this homotopy arises from the fact that she looks just like me- except maybe a trifle more macho. I tend to exhibit a disarming and obviously denture supported grin. She gazes unsmilingly at the camera like a coiled serpent ready to strike with krav fucking maga.
disarm its power whilst revealing the harm it was causing/constituting in the first place - something which in itself has often been overlooked for decades, even centuries.
Wow! Us black peeps overlooked for centuries the fact that we were being fucked over. But, we- or our parents or grandparents- came here coz we knew that the British and Irish working class, too, had been fucked over. We were productive. They were productive. Would they like us or tell us to fuck off? For men of African heritage- there was one answer. Women wanted to have their babies. For men of Indic heritage- there was another answer. Employers wanted us to keep our heads down and work and thus were delighted to give us a couple of weeks off to go back to the old country and get married.
It was the women and kids who bore the burden. But this was equally true of Catholic Irish or, even now, 'pikeys' and so forth.
There is scope here for Art. But, as if obedient to the dhvani theory of Abhinvavagupta, that Art is comedic. It involves 'rasabhasa'- inappropriate affect or scholasticsm- but the thing is only funny if done by a guy who looks to you like me- not Daisy.
You now understand why I began this post in the way I did. The fact is wage and service provision discrimination, to be a cheap way to extract surplus, must work upon costly to change 'uncorrelated asymmetries'. Econ ran with this discovery- because, at the margin, it has to pay for itself. Philosophy didn't. African American economists, jurists and political scientists did the donkey work. By the end of the Nineties they had won the intellectual argument. Pigford v Glickman was a game changer. Obama saw that 'consent decrees'- i.e. ideographic mechanism design under a juristic mandate- was the way forward. That's what made him electable and re-electable. Now his Veep is Prez.
So, I think I respectfully disagree that philosophy can only weigh in after the event with merely anodyne reflections.
Daisy's art may be a little cerebral and avant garde for the likes of me. What she says may be true of her project in toto. Sadly, it can't be said of her Aeon essay. So what? She is young. She will do better.
I think, rather, philosophy can offer us a valuable and deeper understanding of the moral/aesthetic issue,
this valuable and deeper understanding is what is severely lacking not just in Daisy's essay but her instructors' entire oeuvre.
which, as well as being intrinsically valuable knowledge, will also serve as justification for practical decisions and policymaking by government and councils, as well as inform and guide the law.
Economic and Legal and Strategic arguments justify stuff. Philosophical arguments have never done so in this country. Why pretend otherwise?
There is no philosopher alive today who is not considered an ignorant, ultracrepidarian, fool. The Math moved on too quickly. David Lewis ended up babbling about 'megethology'. Kripke is alive. Voevodsky is dead. But, from the point of view of conceptual evolvability, or backward induction based begriffsgeschichte, the reverse is the case.
As for the difference between public and private space - there do appear to be significant differences.
Very good of you to say so, Daisyji, I'm sure. I was worried you were doing potty in the street. I'm not saying I don't do the same- when of strong drink taken- but, honestly, young peeps should be discouraged from a practice which causes many of us older blokes to slip on a turd and fracture our stink bone.
In the case of art, a racist work that sits in the home of its maker will still possess those immoral properties, but it may not incite violence (for it isn’t being viewed by anyone else).
Sadly, this is not the case. Violence will occur if it pays to posit some objectionable work of art or instrument of heretical science to exist within a private space. The great Gandhian Vinobha Bhave's followers would raid the huts of their equally abject victims in the hope of finding porn. To be clear- I'm not a refugee from India because my family had porn, but rather a porn seeking immigrant of the best and most philosophically accomplished type- e.g Amartya Sen whose Capabilities approach is its own masturbatory Mathesis Universalis.
My focus on public art displays was, I suppose, because the problem of harmful art and censorship seems to arise most pertinently in public contexts, for the groups targeted by the artwork are being directly harmed by the public pronouncements of harmful content.
Daisy, Daisy, Daisy- this is a terrible sentence. You are an artist. Why did you perpetrate it? The truth is you didn't focus on shit save getting some shite published because you are pushing Thirty and are stuck in a shite discipline.
Do your Art and then find justifications for it, not in obsolete shite, but contemporary advances in Math. Logic is just the crutch Maths kicks away as it burgeons in utility.
Wagner was an artist. His foray into Philosophy was by no means contemptible by the standards of the day. But, we remember him as an artist.
There is of course much more to be said, but I do hope my response was still helpful.
It wasn't at all. It was polite. It was considerate. But its content was bureaucratic.
I 'do' Philosophy because that's a discipline which keeps Poetry honest. True, my poetry is as ugly as shit. Still, shit is a fertilizer- or so I tell those who complain about the gifts I send them on their birthdays.
I shouldn't have mentioned that last. Sometimes I embarrass myself.
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