On Human Plasticity, DNA Data Storage and the Singularity

Imagine an individual, says Nietzsche, who could embody the entire history of mankind; assimilating all that was once strange and alien and accessing knowledge and experience long forgotten. Such plastic power would make him a god, would it not?

Well, thanks to the possibilities opened up by new techniques and technologies, including DNA data storage, perhaps we might all one day have the opportunity to carry around within us every book, every image, every piece of music, every memory, every possibility ...    

Scientists at the European Bioinformatics Institute have already converted digital data into the four nucleobases found in DNA and then successfully stored and retrieved the text and audio files - which included Shakespeare's sonnets - with between 99.99 and 100% accuracy (i.e. with an extremely low rate of data loss).

Obviously, there's still some way to go before we might use a little finger as a flash drive, but the future is fast approaching at an ever-accelerated rate and rather than fear it, perhaps we should go with the flow and ensure that artificial superintelligence also belongs to us and not just our machines in a posthuman world ...

Note: Just to provide some idea of how pressing the problem of data storage is and why DNA is such a potentially fantastic solution ... In 2020, it's estimated that we'll need to store 40 trillion gigabytes of data. That requires 2.6 billion hard drives, or 42 billion USB sticks. However, just a single gram of DNA can also do the job.   

Watching the World Turn Day-Glo: Notes on Plastic Eating Bacteria

Image: Shutterstock / Wikicommons / Big Think

In the above picture we can observe Ideonella sakainesis happily feasting on a plastic bottle;

 breaking down polyethylene terephthalate into terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol - 

two delicious and yet environmentally benign substances.

Another good news story from the world of science and serendipity ...

After the discovery in 2016 of a bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic at a Japanese waste dump, researchers have now (accidentally) created a mutant enzyme that accelerates the break down of polymeric materials by around 20%.  

The international team were initially attempting to determine the exact structure of the enzyme produced by the bug, which, like all enzymes, is basically a large protein molecule composed of a long chain of amino acids. For this they used an intense beam of X-rays that is 10 billion times brighter than the sun and capable of illuminating individual atoms that might otherwise withdraw into darkness.

It looked as if the structure of the enzyme was very similar to one evolved by many bacteria to digest cutin - a waxy, water-repellent substance used by plants for protection. By slightly tweaking it, however, they discovered that they had inadvertently made the enzyme even more efficient at breaking down PET (the plastic most commonly used to make soft drink bottles). 

The new and improved enzyme takes only a few days to start the process of disintegrating the plastic; if left to degrade in the oceans, in comparison, it can take hundreds or even thousands of years. What's more, researchers are hopeful that this process might be significantly speeded up still further and thus play an important part in tackling the problem of what to do with the one million plastic bottles that are sold each minute around the globe.

One way they might possibly optimise the performance of the mutant enzyme is to transplant it into extremophile bacteria that enjoy living at temperatures over 70c. At such heat, PET changes from a hard to a viscous state, making it liable to degrade between 10 and 100 times faster.

It has to be said, this new research into enzyme technology is, to me at least, incredibly exciting and must hold out promise for the future. For not only are enzymes non-toxic and biodegradable, but they can be produced in large quantities by micro-organisms.

Having said that, it still remains crucial to reduce the amount of shit we produce and throw away in the first place. But this is surely a positive development - though not as astonishing as the fact that plastic-eating bugs evolved in the first place ... 

Note: those interested in reading the published research for themselves should see Harry P. Austin et al, 'Characterization and engineering of a plastic-degrading aromatic polyesterase', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2018): click here.  

Musical bonus: to listen to the X-Ray Spex track from 1978 that inspired the title to this post (and to see the band fronted by the inimitable Poly Styrene performing on Top of the Pops), click here.

Freud in the Age of Neuroscience

Image: Alison Mackey / Discover (2014)

As a matter of fact, although Freud is often described as the father of psychoanalysis and credited with discovering the unconscious mind, he didn't invent the term Unbewußte.

It was coined, rather, by the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling and was first used in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800); a work that some regard as a precursor to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1899). One of Schelling's readers happened to be the influential poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and it was he who introduced this concept into the English-speaking world.

I think it's important to be reminded of this. Reminded, that is to say, of the metaphysical and romantic origins of Freudian analysis. For whilst it has always liked to present itself as a modern science, this is highly contestable and I don't think it coincidental that many of its concepts have continued to exert their strongest appeal amongst philosophers, literary critics, film theorists, and those working in the arts, such as the Surrealists.    

This is not to belittle the huge cultural impact of psychoanalysis, nor deny that Freud was a true founder of discursivity, to use Foucault's phrase, establishing an almost infinite number of new ways to think and speak the self, the non-self, and other. But, psychoanalysis isn't - and never has been - a legitimate science.

For one thing - as Karl Popper pointed out - its theories have either not been tested or are unable to be tested and so can neither be verified nor shown to be false. Other well known figures, including the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker and evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould, have also criticised psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience. The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman even went so far as to dismiss practitioners of psychoanalysis as witch doctors.              

And then there are eliminative materialists, such as Paul and Patricia Churchland, who deny the mental states and structures that those subscribing to Viennese folk psychology accept as realities. For them, there are brains and we should stick to talking about brain activity and neural networks when putting forward any theory of  mind. Thus, there is no unconscious that we can locate and which is home to all kinds of horrors and oedipal desires (let's not even mention mythological archetypes).       

I have to admit, I'm certainly sympathetic to this way of thinking and - push comes to shove - I can't help seeing recent developments in neuroscience as fatal to psychoanalysis; making it look not just obsolete and irrelevant, but, simply, wrong - and at times laughably so (I'm thinking of Freud's ideas concerning psychosexual development, for example).

Finally, be it noted that Freud's notion of psychic determinism - which posits that any and all mental processes have significance (even those things that seem arbitrary or banal) - also appears to be a lot of phooey. For research has shown that a large amount of what goes on in the brain can be regarded as ephemeral cognition and perceptual junk. And this includes our precious dreams - described by Allan Hobson as randomised imagery that has nothing to do with unconscious desires or dramatised wish-fulfilment.*

So where now and what next for psychoanalysis? Well, it seems that in order to survive in this age of neuroscience it is having to adapt and evolve into a hybrid discipline known as neuropsychoanalysis.

Adherents to this new movement - led by the South African neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms - fully support modern brain research, but, on the other hand, they're appalled by eliminativism and argue that the mind and the subjective laws that determine mental life are real and thus deserve be taken seriously.

It seems to me, however, that they mostly want to rehabilitate their master's name; thus their constant reminding us of the fact that the young Freud was a qualified medical doctor who spent many years working in the area of natural science as a neuropathologist. For Solms et al, it seems that no matter how much he got wrong, Freud remains worthy of respect - and not just in the humanities and social science departments.   

*Interestingly, this was also D. H. Lawrence's position in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), where he writes that most dreams are purely insignificant; just "heterogeneous odds and ends of images swept together accidentally". It is, says Lawrence, "beneath our dignity to attach any real importance to them". Indeed, to imagine them loaded with meaning is simply a sign of our narcissism. Readers interested in the chapter on 'Sleep and Dreams' can read it free online thanks to Project Gutenberg by clicking here. 

This post grew out of discussion with Dr Simon Solomon to whom I am grateful. 

On the Romantic Conception of Childhood

Suffer little children and forbid them not - 

for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven

I.

If there's one child in modern philosophy and literature who should have been aborted, it's Jean-Jacques Rousseau's fictional offspring Émile (1762). For this immaculate conception fatally shapes the ideal of childhood not just in the Romantic and Victorian period, but well into the twentieth century.

Indeed, in some quarters, there is still an ideal insistence on the essential moral superiority of an individual child over the collective corruption of adulthood. To grow up - I was recently informed - is to fall into complacent mediocrity, accepting of your own limitations and all the evils of the world (i.e. to grow up, is to give up).

Those who believe this - whether they know it or not - are giving credence to the opening li(n)e of Rousseau's book which asserts that each and every child is perfect at the point of their divine creation - Rousseau rejects the notion of Original Sin - but quickly degenerates within a social system designed to erode their natural goodness.   

According to Voltaire, when not fantasising about the noble savage, Rousseau likes to imagine himself as part-educator, part wet nurse to an infantalised humanity. 


II.

Thanks, then, to Rousseau and his novelistic treatise Émile, from around the middle of the 18th century many cultivated and otherwise perfectly intelligent people began to view childhood in a more sentimental light; i.e., as an authentic state of innocence and freedom.

The traditional idea - that children were born sinful and therefore required moral instruction and setting on the path to righteousness with discipline and punishment - was thrown out with the bath water. Perhaps, it was argued, what children really needed was love and affection. And perhaps they should be encouraged to express themselves and develop their healthy instincts and natural creativity.

If Rousseau was right, then, it was hoped, his method of education would preserve the special attributes of childhood and this would result in well-adjusted adults and model citizens.     


III.

Rousseau's ideas rapidly crossed the Channel - Émile was first published in English in 1763 - and disseminated by Romantic poets, including Blake and Wordsworth, who fully bought into the idea of childhood as something blessed. After all, hadn't Jesus told his disciples that in order to enter God's Kingdom they too had to become as children [Matthew 18: 1-5].

This new idealised version of childhood became (and remained) an immensely powerful myth; in all kinds of literature and art, the innocence and purity - and, yes, even the supposed wisdom - of the pre-pubescent was promoted as something that adults should cherish and learn from. Children, it was now thought, were not only our future, they were our salvation too - And a little child shall lead them!

But, of course, these weren't actual children - snot-nosed brats who like to pull the wings off flies - they were, rather, imaginative representations. Even artworks that appeared realistic were underpinned by cultural understandings of childhood and reflected the values and desires of the artist; usually male, usually upper-middle class, and with little knowledge of children living outside the nursery and no direct experience of what day-to-day childcare involved - Nanny takes care of all that.

IV.

By the mid-19th century, the so-called Cult of Childhood arguably reached its nauseating and slightly pervy peak. Lewis Carroll, for example, wasn't simply content to celebrate the childhood of Alice Liddell and her sisters in his writing (and nude photography), but liked to confess his longing to return to a state of infancy himself. A poem entitled 'Solitude' closes with the following lines:

I’d give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life’s decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer-day.

Now, it's one thing to gaze upon the world with childlike wonder - and perhaps the struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play. But it's another thing for a man to actually want to be a child and give an obscene literal rendering to Christ's words. This, says Lawrence, is an extreme form of decadence; a sheer relaxation and letting go of all adult pride and responsibility. 


V.

When not dreaming of regression like Lewis Carroll, there were other men, with darker fantasies, conceiving of ways in which adolescence could be deferred and children kept in a state of eternal childhood. Thus it is that in some of the best-read and most-loved Victorian fantasies we discover a sinister tendency for child characters to die and thus, in this way, remain forever young.

So it is we arrive at a fatal conclusion: idealism ends in murder - for each man kills the thing he loves most. This is why child worship is a form of cruelty and abuse. Place a child on a pedestal, fetishise their virgin purity, and you'll soon find you've built a sacrificial altar ...

See: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom, (Basic Books, 1979).

In My Secret Garden

Bust of Epicurus against a background of wild flowers 

One of the very few consolations of living in isolated exile here in Essex is having a small garden in which to sit, drink wine, and listen to the birds sing whilst the Little Greek tends to her plants and battles with the snails.

One suddenly feels a real sense of kinship with Epicurus, who, famously, established his school of philosophy in a beautiful garden on the outskirts of Athens, c.307 BC. This green oasis - not far from the site of Plato's Academy, but far enough and of such a contrasting character as to suggest it belonged to a very different world - symbolised the idyllic yet worldly nature of Epicureanism.

Inscribed above the garden gate was a sign that read: Welcome dear guest - please stay a while and discover for yourself that the highest good is happiness. Men - and women - came here to practise and cultivate an ethics immanent to existence that valued reason, pleasure, friendship, and flowers.  

Modern scholars are not quite sure of the exact location of the garden, but, given the fondness amongst early Christians for building churches upon ancient sites of learning and pagan temples - and considering the hostility that many medieval theologians exhibited towards all forms of material hedonism - it's very possible that the Byzantine Church of Haghios Georgios [St. George] was erected upon it.     

That's a shame. Because no matter how beautiful the church or magnificent the cathedral, the sky above and the earth below remain more beautiful and more magnificent. This is something that even the devoted Christian Will Brangwen is forced to accept in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow:

"He listened to the thrushes in the gardens and heard a note which the cathedrals did not include: something free and careless and joyous. He crossed a field that was all yellow with dandelions, on his way to work, and the bath of yellow glowing was something at once so sumptuous and so fresh, that he was glad he was away from his shadowy cathedral.

      There was life outside the Church. There was much that the Church did not include. He thought of God, and of the whole blue rotunda of the day. That was something great and free. He thought of the ruins of the Grecian worship, and it seemed, a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs." [Ch. 7] 

Epicurus would, I'm sure, thoroughly endorse this passage by Lawrence, which promotes belief in the ruins and affirms the joy of living amidst the natural world having seen through the false promise of the Absolute.

And Nietzsche too would approve. For, as Keith Ansell-Pearson reminds us, there was nothing Nietzsche loved more during his mid-period than the thought of strolling in a peaceful garden:

"He wants a new vita contemplativa to be cultivated in the midst of the speed and rapidity of modern life; we need to [...] go slowly and create the time needed to work through our experiences. Even we godless anti-metaphysicians need places for contemplation and in which we can reflect on ourselves and encounter ourselves. However, we are not to do this in the typical spiritual manner of transcendent loftiness, but rather take walks in botanical gardens [...] and look at ourselves 'translated', as Nietzsche memorably puts it, 'into stones and plants' (GS 280)."

Ansell-Pearson concludes, in an absolutely crucial passage for those who would understand Epicurus-Nietzsche-Lawrence and their non-idealistic (in fact, counter-idealistic) Naturphilosophie:

"We free spirits have more in common with phenomena of the natural world than we do with the heavenly projections of a religious humanity: we can be blissfully silent like stones and we have specific conditions of growth like plants, being nourished by the elements of the earth and by the light and heat of the sun."

Notes

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 141-42. Note that GS 280 refers, of course, to section 280 of Nietzsche's The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974).  

Epicurus, The Art of Living, ed. and trans. George K. Strodach, (Penguin Books, 2013).

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).  

For a sister post to this one on the notion of ataraxia, click here. 

Musical bonus: click here to play a much under-appreciated track by Madonna, from the album Erotica (Maverick Records, 1992), which supplied the title to this post. 

Ataraxia (Notes on the Ethics of Pleasure with Reference to the Work of Epicurus and Nietzsche)

Serenity Now - Print by D. Waechter 

DWaechterArt / etsy.com

I. Serenity Now

Ataraxia is an ancient Greek term [ἀταραξία] that refers to an accomplished state of equanimity in which the body is free from pain and the mind is free from any anxiety or distress. 

To achieve this highly valued state of serenity was a desideratum among several schools of philosophy. Sceptics and Stoics alike cherished the concept of ataraxia; as did the followers of Epicurus - and it's the role of ataraxia within the latter's thinking that I wish to discuss here.


II. Two Types of Pleasure

For Epicurus, ataraxia was a crucial component of the good life. It had, therefore, ethical significance as well as psychic import. And the good life? Well, as everybody knows, for Epicurus this is a life that promises happiness. Thus, for Epicureans, ataraxia is understood in relation to a concept of pleasure, which they thought of as either kinetic in nature, or katastematic.

Kinetic pleasure is pleasure that results from an instinctive action and satisfies a need or provides some form of relief; such as eating a bacon double cheeseburger, for example, or engaging in an act of masturbation. The joy that these things produce - which is as much (if not more) mental as it is physical in character - is kinetic.

The problem with such joy is that it's unstable or temporary in character. Thus it's soon followed by new discomfort; one feels a bit sick after eating the bacon double cheeseburger, for example, or perhaps full of guilt after succumbing to a shameful sexual fantasy.    

Katastematic pleasure, on the other hand, was regarded as superior by Epicurus because, once achieved, it was stable and enduring and involved the complete absence of any physical suffering or mental anguish. Those who lived free of the former were said to be a in a state of aponia [ἀπονία], whilst those who lived free of the latter were said to be in a state of ataraxia.

To be free from all pain and to experience uninterrupted pleasure was the key to happiness for Epicurus and thus, as said previously, it had great ethical import. For whilst Christ would later preach Be good and you will be happy, Epicurus understood that this was putting the cart before the horse.

Thus, for this reason if no other, the eudaemonic philosophy of Epicurus is superior to the mistaken moralising of Jesus. Certainly Nietzsche - who would later develop his own joyful wisdom - thought so.


III. Nietzsche and Epicurus

Perhaps not surprisingly, Nietzsche has his own unique take on Epicurus. He agrees that happiness is likely to result in ethical behaviour, but, for Nietzsche, what makes happy is not ataraxia (the absence of any inner turmoil), but the feeling of power [Machtgefühl]. And that's saying something quite different to Epicurus who conceived of power in purely negative terms.

Further, Nietzsche isn't buying into the idea that pleasure can ever be stable and enduring, or the future rendered pain-free. As a tragic philosopher, Nietzsche needs to hold on to a notion of suffering. One of his fundamental insights is that without sickness, violence, and chaos to shake us out of our all-too-human complacency we can never realise our potential as individuals and as a species.

And so whilst he acknowledges that Epicurean happiness is certainly worth struggling for and hard-won, he insists it remains precarious and is ultimately inseparable from the disturbances and discomforts that it seeks to eliminate. The sea of existence may look calm and have sunlight sparkling on its surface, but there's always for Nietzsche a storm over the horizon and monsters of the deep to contend with ...

Note: For an excellent discussion of many of the ideas above, including the influence of Epicurus on Nietzsche's mid-period writings, see Keith Ansell-Person, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018). Chapter 6: 'On Nietzsche's Search for Happiness and Joy', is particularly relevant, pp. 135-50. 

See also: Epicurus, The Art of Happiness, ed. and trans. George K. Strodach, (Penguin Books, 2013). 

Note: for a sister post to this one on the garden of Epicurus, click here. 

Ian Bogost: Play Anything (2016) - A Review (Part 3: Chapters 5-7)

Dr. Ian Bogost: bogost.com 

I have to admit, four chapters and 120 pages in, I'm a bit bored with this book by Bogost. The assertiveness and the repetitiveness I can deal with, but I have real trouble with the folksy Americanism of the writing style and the overly-familiar - overly-familial - character of the book. It's certainly not philosophy as I conceive of it. However, as Magnus Magnusson used to say, I've started so I'll finish ... 

Ch. 5: From Restraint to Constraint

Is abstaining from a material modern lifestyle really the answer to the paradox of choice?

It's an interesting question. But as much as I approve of a certain degree of asceticism, I don't think the answer is yes. And neither does Bogost, for whom restraint is a type of fashionable narcissism that only leads to irony - and irony, as we have seen, is Bogost's great bugbear.

Further, as a strategy for living better, restraint also connects to the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the values that lie at the foundations of the global economy (Bogost seems to take it as a given that both these things are highly suspect). Ultimately, he says, the feeling of any restraint results in "a terrible sensation" [130] and can even prove fatal (don't tell that to my friends in the BDSM community for whom orgasm denial is so delightful). 

What then? The answer, says Bogost, is to accept the world's constraints, rather than attempt to impose your own restraint upon it. Embracing constraint doesn't mean embracing asceticism (which is an expression of anxiety): "Rather, it means inventing or adopting a given situation as a playground in which further exploration is possible." [143]

In other words, for Bogost, there's a very real and important connection between constraint and creativity. He writes:

"Artists and designers have long known that creativity does not arise from pure, unfettered freedom. Little is more paralyzing than the blank canvas or the blank page. At the same time, the creative process is not driven by restraint either; one does not paint a painting or write a novel or form a sculpture or code an app by resisting the temptation to do something else. Rather, one does so by embracing the particularity of a form and working within its boundaries, within its constraints." [146]

But it's important to realise that Bogost is using the term creativity in a rather special (philosophical) sense derived from Whitehead. For Whitehead, creativity refers to a process (inherent to the universe) of generating novelty or newness; i.e. it's a fundamental feature of existence and not something unfolding exclusively within the sphere of human subjectivity and experience.

To mistakenly think man is central to the process of creativity, rather than peripheral, is what Bogost calls the fallacy of creativity. In the end, we don't speak, write, or sing the world - it speaks, writes, and sings us. Art emerges from a negotiation between the artist and a set of material conditions that impose certain limits. Graham Harman regards this as the culminating insight of Bogost's book and he might well be right; though, to be fair, it's found in Whitehead - as Bogost acknowledges - and we also find it in Heidegger, who famously declared Die Sprache spricht and that man is the poem of being (not the author).

The artist's job, then, is not to express his own desires, ideas, or fantasies. It is rather to allow the gods and demons to enter from behind and below; Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!, as Lawrence puts it.

Ch. 6: The Pleasure of Limits

Bogost picks up on this idea of inspiration in the context of ancient Greek poetry and the Muses. For the Greeks, of course, poetry was a worldly rather than a personal activity; one that was tied to a long cultural tradition, to myth, and to the divine. What he really wants to stress, however, is how structured it was - almost unimaginably so, for those raised into the idea of free verse in which almost any text "with unusual white space and line breaks" [158] qualifies as poetry. Bogost notes:

"A sonnet is not a poem even though it has to spill language across fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, but because it does. It takes the surplus of language and offers a rationale for structuring a portion of it in a particular way." [161]

I suppose that's true. But I'd still rather read one of the great modernist poets than Shakespeare. And besides, free verse - if it's any good - isn't really free in the way implied by Bogost. Other than idealists who believe in an individual's right to total freedom of expression and the dissolution of all form, all structure, all rule, etc. no one in their right mind thinks art is anything other than a discipline.

There might be pleasure in transgressing limits - be they aesthetic, moral, or physical in nature - but this is still, of course, a pleasure reliant upon limits. This isn't to say we should therefore fetishise limitations and constraints or regard rules as written in stone (though some do), it's simply to acknowledge that they're necessary.

Indeed, they're not only necessary, but ontologically crucial. For as Bogost points out: "A thing is not only what it appears to be, but it is also the conditions and situations [i.e. the constraints] that make it possible for it to be what it is." [174]

Or, put another way: "Limits aren't limitations, not absolute ones. They're just the stuff out of which stuff is made." [203]     


Ch. 7: The Opposite of Happiness

"Fun is the opposite of happiness" [216], says Bogost. For fun "doesn't produce joy as its emotional output, but tenderness instead" [217].

And so we arrive at a quasi-Lawrentian conclusion; playful encounters with another being - whether it's human, animal, vegetable, or artificial in nature - result in affection and warmth and sympathy. The German's have a word for this: Mitleid.

Thus, OOO - as an ethic or art of living - rests on the presumption that the essence of morality can be defined in terms of purely selfless actions that ask for and expect nothing in return. Nietzsche, of course, was highly critical of this; he'd regard it as laughably naïve, lacking as it does any appreciation of man's ethical complexity and the fact that there are multiple forces at work within every urge and every action.

Ultimately, if Bogost wishes to save his work from falling into warm soft fuzziness, then he needs to spend a little less time watching babies sleep and either subject it himself to a little coldness and cruelty, or find an editor who will read it with steely intelligence and a sharp pencil.   

Notes

Ian Bogost, Play Anything, (Basic Books, 2016). All page numbers given in square brackets refer to this hardback edition. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Song of a Man Who Has Come Through', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 

To read Part 1 of this review - Notes on a Preface - click here.

To read Part 2 of this review - Chapters 1-4 - click here. 

Ian Bogost: Play Anything (2016) - A Review (Part 2: Chapters 1-4)

Basic Books (2016)

Ch. 1: Everywhere, Playgrounds

For someone keen to live in the world and not inside his own head - an admirable goal, that every post-Lawrentian must surely approve of - Bogost thinks and writes a lot about himself, his young daughter, and his lawn. He justifies this, however, by crediting his child with showing him how to transform the boredom and misery of everyday life into fun and the grass with teaching him to work with the world on its own terms.

Not that fun is Bogost's ultimate goal; that would be meaning. For whilst he wants to find novelty in familiar situations - his definition of fun - mostly he longs for meaningful experience. And that, he suggests, involves an immersive realism that counters the pervasive irony of today. Once we discover not only what things do and how they work, but what they "obviously and truly are" [9], then we'll be better able to thrive and flourish in an ultimately indifferent universe.       

I have to say, I like this idea of not retreating further and further into the self and of replacing mindfulness with worldfulness. But, on the other hand, I have problems with his definition of irony as a method for keeping reality at bay that is born of a fear of the world and the world's "incompatibility with our own desires" [10].

That's certainly not how I understand irony. It allows perspective on the world by creating a certain pathos of distance, that's true. But irony is born of sophisticated critical intelligence, not fear, and it's irony that allows us not only to gain perspective but, ultimately, make distinctions and give value to things within - to use another Nietzschean phrase - an order of rank.

I know that the OOO authors like their notion of a flat (democratic) ontology in which all things are equally things. But that doesn't mean that all things are equal. Or - come to that - that we can play anything.

For contrary to what Bogost asserts, I believe there are things "impervious to manipulation" [12] by human beings. He wants to meet the world, "more than halfway" [20], but it's still simply so he can make it ready-to-hand as Heidegger would say: "Living playfully isn't about you, it turns out. It's about everything else, and what you manage to do with it." [26]     

Ch. 2: Ironoia, the Mistrust of Things

Bogost develops his critique of irony, which he describes as a "prevailing aesthetic in popular culture" [33], as well as an affliction and the "great error of our age" [34]. He doesn't like it, 'cos he can't quite read it's meaning; it's like receiving a wink from a sexbot "you think you know what it means, until you realize the signal you took for meaning emanates from a source for which meaning is meaningless" [36].

That's a nice line; but it fails to convince me to reject irony and embrace sincerity. I have no problem with the seductive deception of the sexbot. Nor does her wink instill in me a general mistrust of things - or ironoia, as Bogost calls it. I don't use irony as a kind onto-prophylactic to make me feel safe. And if, as Bogost claims, irony ultimately fails to protect us from the reality of the world and becomes a "death march into nihilism" [42] and nostalgia - well, isn't that ironic?    

And what does Bogost propose in place of irony? It seems to be something very much like the myth and the metaphysics of presence! He wants to know (and to touch) the world directly. Derrida must be spinning in his grave at this new demand for immediate access to meaning and an end to all indeterminacy and différance.

Even Graham Harman, who, by his own admission, has never been a great fan of Derrida and thinks the French philosopher's attempt to deconstruct presence follows a profoundly mistaken path, agrees with Heidegger that being is not presence and that the latter has, therefore, to be countered as an idea within any school of philosophical realism worthy of the name, including object-oriented ontology.

In as much as things are always withdrawn at some level and vacuum-sealed, we can only ever really know the world in translation, as it were. Or metaphorically. Or ... ironically.


Ch. 3: Fun Isn't Pleasure, It's Novelty

Fun isn't pleasure, says Bogost, it's novelty. I'm not sure, but I think Freud said something very similar; that whereas children are perfectly happy to repeat things over and over, adult enjoyment requires novelty as its precondition.

But what Roland Barthes taught us is not to mistake the mere stereotype of novelty for newness. It's only the latter, newness, in its absolute and often most shocking form, that results in bliss.

But what is bliss? For Barthes, it's more fatal than fun; it imposes a loss of some kind and brings the subject to a point of crisis. For Bogost, on the other hand, it means "giving yourself over to the structure of a situation" [83]. Somehow, that doesn't quite sound as sexy to me. 

Nor does the claim that in order to find the secret novelty hidden in the heart of the everyday object or experience (and thus produce the fun), one must give things one's solemn attention and not treat them in a disrespectful and superficial manner. Fun requires persistence and seriousness and dignity. Bogost writes:

"So long as we are unwilling or unable to consider a set of actions as serious and intentional, even when those actions are mustered in the service of a seemingly absurd, foolish activity or end, then we will never be able to experience fun." [88]

And that's unfortunate, because fun is the antidote to irony:

"If irony represents the crack in the universe through which distrust and anxiety about living in a world full of surplus arises, then fun offers a glue with which we can seal those cracks and restore dignity to all the things we encounter - including ourselves." [89]

Here then is one more difference between Nietzsche and Bogost; whilst the former offers us a vision of the Übermensch, the latter fantasises about some kind of moral Sekundenkleber in a desperate and laughable attempt to put poor Humpty Dumpty together again. Has he not heard that all life is a process of breaking down ...?


Ch. 4: Play Is in things, Not in You

In play, then, for Bogost, we draw ever closer to things until we ultimately "meld with them" [92] in a big sticky unified mess. I suppose that's a goal for those who want it. But I don't want glued-together wholeness; I prefer cracks and fragmentation and if I believe in anything, then I believe in the ruins.

And so, whether play is an experience had with things, or, as Bogost claims, a property of things themselves, the more I hear him mention the idea, the more set against it I feel. It may well be impossible "to fully separate ourselves from the things that surround us" [101], but we can surely try not to be overly-intimate.

Just to be clear: I'm not saying I want to keep things at arm's length - which would make me an ironoiac according to Bogost - but I don't want to be forced to embrace everything and experience the world in obscene close-up. This isn't due to some kind of pathological phobia; discretion and reserve are signs of sovereignty as far as I'm concerned.         

The strange thing is that Bogost himself promotes an ethic of respectful letting-be, that I would quite happily endorse. Rather than attempting to subsume objects, events, and other people into our own sphere of being and influence - or our system of values - we should, he writes, let them play in their own manner.

Only "by addressing each thing for what it is, while all the while acknowledging that [nothing is] ... ours to address in the first place" [119], can they (or we) find freedom and fulfilment; or pleasure and meaning as Bogost insists on calling these things. 

Notes

Ian Bogost, Play Anything, (Basic Books, 2016). All page numbers given in square brackets refer to this hardback edition.

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Hill and Wang, 1998), pp. 40, 14.

Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, (Pelican Books, 2018). For a discussion of Derrida (in relation to OOO), see pp. 198-209. For a discussion of Bogost - with particular focus on Play Anything - see pp. 222-227.

To read the third and final part of this review - covering Chapters 5-7 - click here.

To read the first part of this review - notes on a Preface - click here.

Ian Bogost: Play Anything (2016) - A Review (Part 1: Notes on a Preface)

Photo of Ian Bogost by Gregory Miller

Preface: Life Is Not a Game

Ian Bogost describes himself as a philosopher who also happens to be a game designer. But I've heard it said that he's more of a game designer with pretensions of being a philosopher. Either way, he's not stupid. But he is badly in need of a haircut.  

His Alien Phenomenology (2012) was a book that I enjoyed, so I've been looking forward to reading his most recent work, Play Anything, since its publication in the autumn of 2016 (apologies to readers who expect this blog to always be bang up to date).

From what one gathers from the Preface, Play Anything promises to be a work of object-oriented ethics; one that offers a perspective on "how to live in a world far bigger than our bodies, minds, hopes, and dreams, and how to do it with pleasure and gratitude" [x].

Bogost doesn't think life is a game. But he does think that games teach us an important life lesson. And it's a lesson concerning the pleasure of limits. To play, he says, is to accept things on their own terms. And to generalise this notion of play is to see structures constrained by their own limitations at work everywhere.

This doesn't sound all that much fun. But Bogost assures us that if we learn how to play anything, our lives will be "better, bigger, more meaningful, and less selfish" [x] - a line that could have been lifted straight from an overly-optimistic self-help book. Or off a bottle of snake oil.   

Our mad obsession with the ideal of freedom, argues Bogost, has made us "miserable and bored" [xi]. We need to understand that real freedom is the chance to find fulfilment by operating within and exploring the implications of "a constrained system" [xi] - i.e., the actual world as is.    

Further, according to Bogost - never one to shy away from the chance to project his own anxieties onto his readers - we are marked by a profound fear; not just of ourselves (our desires and dark fantasies) or our mortal fate (that great shipwreck into the nauseous), but also of the world and its contents - objects and events alike.

Whether confronted by a pickle jar with a tight lid, or the prospect of an illicit love affair, "we worry that it might harm or disappoint us" [xi] - or that we might fail to live up to the challenge that all things present. What we need to do, says Bogost, is "slough off all these false fears that keep us from truly living" [xii].

What he doesn't say is why these fears are false; I have to admit they seem pretty genuine and perfectly legitimate to me. Nor - in the Preface at any rate - does he instruct us how to "replace them with a new sense of gratitude" [xii] towards all the miraculous opportunities the world affords us.  

Well, that's not quite fair - he does suggest that play is the key. Though it's not play in the ordinary sense of the word; Bogost wants to convince us of the need for a radical form of play that is profound and deliberate and "bores through boredom in order to reach the deep truth of ordinary things" [xii].

One suspects that Bogost has the Heraclitean line about man only becoming himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play in the back of his mind. Or maybe he's thinking of Nietzsche's playful vision of philosophy conceived as a gay science. But if he is, he's not going to give the game away as there's no mention of either philosopher in the index - something I regard as a bad sign ...

Still, let us read on and see where Bogost takes us ... Click here for Part 2 of this post on Chapters 1-4 and here for Part 3 on Chapters 5-7.

See: Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, The Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games, (Basic Books, 2016). All lines quoted are from the Preface, pp. ix-xii. 

Morgenröthe: Nietzsche's Red Dawn

Alicia Dunn: Red Dawn No. 5 (2017)

aliciadunnart.com

I. If Passion Ends in Knowledge then Nietzsche is the Best-Read Man in Town

According to Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's 1881 work Morgenröthe - usually translated into English as Daybreak or Dawn - is the most neglected of all his texts.*

If that's true, then it's a real shame. For it's a brilliant and beautiful book which illustrates how philosophy is, first and foremost, a form of erotics. For what is the pursuit of knowledge if not a passion, suggests Nietzsche; an intense desire to shatter established patterns of thinking and abandon the fears and consoling fictions that have for the greater part of history reduced man to the status of a herd animal.

Nietzsche anticipates "a new dawn in human existence" in which individuals are free to "cultivate their lives in a manner that is conducive to themselves and beneficent to others" [44]. He proposes ways of becoming who one is that involve thinking differently and, just as importantly, thinking critically with regard to the self. It's philosophy as a playful and experimental practice; what he'll term in his next work die fröhliche Wissenschaft.


II. Say Yes to a Single Joy and You Say Yes to All Woe

Nietzsche completed Daybreak in the Italian city of Genoa. He had by this time retired from his professorship at Basel University due to ill health and was living on a very modest annual pension in an unheated garret. His diet was as restricted as his income and consisted mostly of porridge and risotto, followed by more porridge.

Not only did he have to endure extreme cold and isolation, but Nietzsche spent a lot of his time suffering with blinding headaches that lasted for days at a time and caused him to vomit. His only relief was provided by that solitary vice much favoured by Diogenes, but condemned by Kant as an unnatural form of self-abuse. "And yet", writes Ansell-Pearson, "it was under these harsh conditions that he wrote over the course of a year one of his 'sunniest' books" [65].

And this is why one loves Nietzsche: for the fact that he says Yes to life in all circumstances and under any conditions; affirms, in other words, life as an economy of the whole and gives even the most terrible aspects of existence his blessing. It takes an almost inhuman degree of courage to affirm even a single moment or joy, when it's in the knowledge that by so doing we affirm all eternity and every pain, every sadness, every evil.

In sum: Nietzsche constructs a harsh philosophical ethic not only beyond good and evil, but, as Ansell-Pearson argues, beyond solitude and compassion as well; one that rests upon endurance and cruelty. Free-thinking, as he conceives of it, "will, initially at least, plunge people into despair and grief" [111]. But it results at last in happiness and in greatness.

Obviously, this isn't a philosophy that everyone might choose to live by, or be capable of living by: 

"I think it is clear, both from hints he gives in Dawn and says in other texts, that Nietzsche thinks the tasks of free-spirited thinking are ones reserved, and perhaps best reserved, for a few individuals who will constitute what we might choose to call a moral (or 'immoral') avant-garde." [112]


*Note: Ansell-Pearson reminds us that the original German title literally means 'morning redness' and specifies "the precise but fleeting moment at which the sky is aflame with colour and before the red yields to the customary blue or grey. It suggests a time of possibility, invention, inspiration and renewal, in which the freshness of the day augurs a new way of life." [67] 

See: 

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018). All page numbers given in square brackets refer to this book. 

Nietzsche, Dawn: Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality, trans. Brittain Smith, (Stanford University Press, 2011).