Walter Pater - Conclusion to _ The Renaissance_

The thing that fascinates me about the Conclusion to The Renaissance is that it seems like the sort of thing that shouldn't be any good - the text that led to the foundation of a widely criticized faddish movement among youths well over a century ago.  And yet. . .


"To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without --our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But those elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them -the passage of the blood, the waste and repairing of the brain under every ray of light and sound-- processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us: it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven in many currents; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them-- a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flame-like our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.

"Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. There it is no longer the gradual darkening of the eye, the gradual fading of colour from the wall --movements of the shore-side, where the water flows down indeed, though in apparent rest-- but the race of the midstream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought. At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions --colour, odour, texture-- in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step further still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight;that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in to, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off --that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

"Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren. vivificiren. The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, --for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the sense, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy, of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve --les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passion, the wisest, at least among "the children of the world", in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion --that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake."

Creating God with One's Own Hands

I just had to very quickly introduce a friend to Zizek, highlighting his more absurd characteristics, so I found this article for her to read.  I am not sure what I should feel about it (I suspect the author is being somewhat uncharitable), but in reality mostly it just makes me think happy, loving thoughts about Krelian.  I suppose this should not surprise me; I have associated Zizek with Krelian more or less ever since I first heard about Zizek.  It's not even all that nonsensical an association.

This Amuses Me

Apparently Nina Barnes is a Zizek fan. This would probably amuse me more if it were Kevin Barnes, but it's still pretty good. I think that means that any Lacan references I find in of Montreal lyrics can be taken as deliberate, which, given my propensity for finding Lacan references, is probably convenient ;-)

Not Evil, Just Misguided

Me: "I don't think that I think that fictional characters are real, after all."

Headfinger: "Imaginary people are no less 'real' or 'true' than real people like you and me."

Is this a disagreement (this is an important question because Headfinger is someone I intellectually respect quite a lot and with whom, consequently, I would, in general, rather not disagree)? I am not really worried about this, as there are several of levels on which this is clearly not a disagreement. For one thing, Headfinger's statement is an assertion about the world. Mine is an assertion about my thought patterns. Both of our statements could clearly be true without any contradiction whatsoever. Moving up a level, Headfinger's statement is one of certainty - mine clearly is rather tentative. "I don't think that I think. . .?" This sounds alarmingly like that time that I told someone that I didn't think I was a solipsist. Thus, it seems to me that my statement makes it fairly clear that I'm not fully certain about my stance on this issue and thus could potentially be persuaded to Headfinger's side, even if it's not my initial intuition (all of which is true). On yet another level, Headfinger himself qualifies his assertion in his next sentence as follows: "Imaginary people are (or represent in our models, if you feel more comfortable with that) people in alternate universes (AKA independent causal domains)." Since I do, in fact, feel much more comfortable with that, I find this reassuring. Headfinger starts out his comments on this topic by stating: "Imaginary people are like imaginary numbers in a lot of ways." Therefore, just as one can take a realist or non-realist view of math, so one can take a realist or non-realist view of fiction.

The question is whether the nonexistent factual disagreement in fact masks a significant moral disagreement. Because if Headfinger believes that it really is legitimate to call fictional characters real, then isn't he calling me a demiurge? And if Headfinger is calling me a demiurge, then this is one of the rudest things I have ever encountered in my life. I don't particularly find it comforting that he is also calling himself and almost everyone else a demiurge too - that actually kind of makes the problem worse, rather than better. But Headfinger seems to see his theory as uplifting and positive, not hopeless and dismaying.

Luckily, I think I am able to resolve this dispute, as well. Because to the degree that I am extremely bizarre given my complete obsession with theodicy despite having been raised in an atheist family, it's theodicy in a specifically Christian context (despite having been raised in an atheist Jewish family). And by a Christian context, I mean that I am most interested in theodicy in the context of assertions that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. If I tend to think that demiurges are deeply morally faulty, my main reason for believing this is the idea that they are omnipotent and omniscient, and therefore evil must be caused by their not being omnibenevolent. If the demiurges are not omnipotent, or not omniscient, then, on the one hand, I wouldn't say that I can comfortably call them God, but, on the other hand, I feel far less inclined to blame someone who is not omnipotent, or not omniscient, for causing suffering. After all, if you're not omnipotent, you might not be able to prevent suffering from happening. If you're not omniscient, you might not be aware of suffering that happens, or you might discount as insignificant suffering that is in fact significant. Therefore, if either or both of these characteristics apply, perhaps you should think twice before you create people, but you're not directly to blame for being the sole reason for those people's pain, which it would be easy for you not to have caused. In other words, sufficiently advanced aliens are not evil, just misguided. God, otoh, has to be evil.

Now, it's possible that Headfinger is saying that I am God, in which case he is still calling me evil. However, although Headfinger may feel comfortable calling the sufficiently advanced aliens God, coming as I do from my weird Christian theodicy background, I am not comfortable with this terminology. In other words, whenever I start out with my theodicy argument, I accept by definition that God is omnipotent and omniscient. Someone who is not omnipotent and omniscient must, therefore, not be God (maybe they are a god, but they are not God). And, given that I am not omnipotent and not omniscient (and, well, not omnibenevolent, either, but I'd prefer to believe that I'm not actively evil), I am therefore not God, and thus misguided at worst, certainly not evil.

As comforting as I find this, I realize that I need to support my assertion that I am not omnipotent or omniscient (I probably don't need to support my assertion that I am not omnibenevolent). It is obvious that I am not omnipotent or omniscient in my present universe. However, if I create an alternate universe, isn't it potentially true that I might be omnipotent and omniscient in that one? Look at what I've already written: "This seems to be even more true of the characters I make up - in an odd sort of way, the very way they "come to life" in my brain, the way I have to check the actions I posit for them against the actions I can actually accept them performing, the way I don't even have to make up the plots for their stories because they make them up themselves, seems to underline their lack of independent existence from me - I think it's the way they exist so fully within the confines of my brain. They can't possibly have independent consciousnesses of their own - they don't need them! Real people can surprise me - the characters in my brain never can, because I only ever can expect them to do exactly what they would do." This seems to highlight the problem. If I know all there is to know about these people, then, to the extent that they are real, doesn't that mean that I am omniscient insofar as they, in a separate universe from my own, exist? As for omnipotence, if the things that these characters do, the obstacles they face, etc., are entirely determined by me, doesn't that make me omnipotent in their universe?

Okay, so here goes my response to those questions: the reason why it would be fair to call me omnipotent in my fictional universe is because the limits to my abilities, manifold as they are, are completely irrelevant to my fictional characters. This is despite the fact that these limitations strongly shape my fictional universes - for example, if I am unable to imagine certain possibilities, even very logical ones, I cannot create those possibilities in my universes. Nonetheless, if my limitations exist on a different metaphysical plane from my characters, they therefore cannot prove them. From a Positivist standpoint, as there is no possible experiment they could do outside the universe to test these limitations, the very concept is meaningless for them.

Okay. Now, imagine that my fictional characters develop the ability to transcend their universe (that, by the way, is what I'd call a consummation devoutly to be wished). Were this to happen, obviously they would see that I was not in fact omnipotent in my universe. But it would also change the meaning of the boundary between the two universes. Two places are metaphysically distinct only if there isn't a route from one to the other. Thus, it would no longer be meaningful to speak of their universe as one separate from mine. Instead, it would be more accurate to speak of their universe as a subset of mine, in the same way that the solar system is a subset of the visible universe. However, in this case, I am only locally omnipotent in a subset of this universe, which doesn't really count as genuinely omnipotent. After all, while one can legitimately say, "Planets are common in the solar system," this intrinsically does not equate to "Planets are common everywhere" - the solar system is not everywhere. Thus, common planets simply isn't an omnipresent phenomenon - it's just a phenomenon that's present in one particular place. Similarly, "Grace has complete power over Dogville [to give a fictional universe a name]" does not equate to "Grace has complete power over everything" - Dogville is not everything, and, not only do I know this, but the Dogvillains [ed: not a typo, just a. . . joke] are also capable of knowing this, so I simply am not an omnipotent person - I'm just a person with total power over one particular place. Thus, if suffering exists in their universe, although I may well have been misguided in choosing to create a universe, I am not evil for creating one with suffering when the alternative was in my power - because it may well be legitimate to say that, as the product of suffering myself, I am unable to create a universe untainted by suffering.

Okay, so what if, then, my characters cannot transcend their universe? Then that universe really is metaphysically distinct, and I really am omnipotent! But, in that case, I think it's meaningless/contentless to say that they are actually real. For Positivist reasons, as explored in David Deutsch's Fabric of Reality, I actually am not a solipsist - if it seems as though there are other people who are separate from myself performing various actions, then we might as well call them other people who are separate from myself performing various actions. The only way I could possibly prove that they were all in my head would be to do a little transcending of my own, wake up, and realize that it was all a dream. But the only way I could do that is if there were something outside of myself to transcend to - thus, the only times that it's meaningful to make a distinction between other people being in my head and other people being outside of my head are the times that I wake up to something outside of my head anyway, and there must be something outside of my head. If there is nothing outside of my head, then I might as well use the term "universe" to mean my head - it has basically the same meaning. But for these same Positivist reasons, if my fictional characters can't come out and interact with me, if they have no reality outside of my omnipotence, then we take away the obvious pragmatic distinction between "real" and "fictional" when we describe them as real. We might as well call characters who are in the self-contained, metaphysically distinct minor universe "fictional" and the characters in my universe "real," since there is a genuine difference between the two - whereas calling the minor universe characters "real" needlessly erases this pragmatic distinction. If we want to describe the evident and meaningful similarity between the fictional characters and the real ones, rather than erasing this distinction, we might as well just call both kinds of people "people." I think this clarifies the ways in which they're the same, but keeping the binary between "fictional" and "real" clarifies the way in which they're different.

This is important because I don't believe in philosophical zombies, and, in consequence, I think that anything that acts enough like a real person to convince me that it is real does experience suffering. However, I am more skeptical about things that don't convince me that they are real people. For example, I have nearly 100% confidence that my father is capable of experiencing suffering. I have nearly 100% confidence that my rabbit is capable of experiencing suffering. I have, although Headfinger may disagree with me, a lot less confidence that my cell phone is capable of experiencing suffering - though this is not to say that I am 100% confident that it isn't! If I created a computer program that, no matter what you typed into the prompt, simply responded, "I am full of overwhelming suffering at the sorrow of the universe," I might think it was acting like a person, but it certainly wouldn't be acting like a real person, and I would be similarly uncertain as to whether the program was genuinely experiencing suffering. As described above, if there is an inviolable metaphysical barrier between my universe and that of my fictional characters, then I do not think it is meaningful to call them real people, although they are people. This does not mean that I therefore believe that they don't experience suffering - they may. However, it does mean that I am at least skeptical about it. But if I am skeptical about their capacity for suffering, this means that I do not know whether or not they suffer, any more than I know whether or not my cell phone suffers. And this means that I am not omniscient in their universe, even if I am omnipotent. Thus, I am perhaps misguided for creating people who I believe may suffer, but I am not evil for knowingly creating people who I am certain will suffer.

But have I just proven that, by my definition, there is no God - that God, at least as I define It, is in fact logically impossible? I don't think so, but I have made an interesting discovery about my own theology - evidently I believe that God must be immanent somewhere, by definition. Any purely transcendent God would just be a god/alien to me. I can believe in the existence of a being that knows everything there is to know about everything it controls, and has complete power over everything it knows about. This being, who is omnipotent and omniscient in every universe of which it is aware, would count as God to me. Now, you could consider that God to be transcendent to some universes - for example, if there are gods in God's universe, these gods might well create other universes that are subsets of God's universe. But It has to be immanent in the most inclusive universe. If It knew about a universe where It didn't have power, or had power over a universe It don't know about, then It is not God by my definition. I suppose I can't speak to anyone else's.

Meta-Random Thought

Why is it that, when I have a random thought, it so often tends to be about Jesus?

Yet Another Actual Thought I Have Actually Had

"I really wish I understood the Christian concept of the Trinity. It might help me understand Please Save My Earth better. . . ."

Another Ambiguous Utopia

Most Arrogant Blog reader Abangaku writes here about "social utopias," a term which seems to enter his post by way of an article by Cristoph Tannert and Theo Altenberg entitled "Paul McCartney: Reverses and Other Advances"). I am now going to go off on a completely tangential topic to his post, but it is inspired by it, because I found the conjoining of these two terms ("social" and "utopia") to be kind of thought-provoking. I think it's partially because it almost struck me as redundant - mustn't a utopia be social, in order to be a utopia? How could one have any other kind of utopia? This is where I feel like I'm missing Abangaku's point (and probably Tannert and Alternberg's, as well), but I do want to think about utopias and society.

When I was younger, the first couple of years after I graduated from college, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I suppose you might call a social utopia, in that it was a utopian society. I was thinking about this for entirely individualist reasons, however. My basic premise was that, given that I was stuck in a menial job and wasn't sure where to go with my career, which I needed to have in order to earn money, I should first think about what I would do if I didn't need to have a career in order to earn money and then try to come up with the career that was as close as possible to that. Therefore, I tried envisaging what my life would be like in a sort of utopia where there wasn't any money or obligation for careers. I think my vision of the utopia was somewhat based on Anarres in The Dispossessed - I'm not sure what that means about me.

Ultimately, I came to realize that my imaginations about what kind of life I'd live in this utopia ultimately failed to show me much truth about the life I wanted to live without restrictions - because the social utopia itself functioned as a restriction for me. My ideal life, or at least the one that seems to appeal to me as I am the most, wouldn't be lived in my imagination of the perfect society. Rather, it would be spent flitting from society to society throughout a multiverse of infinite possibilities, always as an outside observer, never as a part. Better than any life I could imagine staying put in one place would be making a life out of traveling from place to place.

But this raises the question: does my concept of the ideal life therefore intrinsically rest upon the denial of social utopia?

Well, in answering that question, it's important to note that my vision of the perfect life is not exactly anti-social. In fact, my perfect daydream doesn't involve traveling from society to society all by myself - I would like to travel as a member of a little mini-society, one that would ideally be extremely small indeed but would nonetheless exist - and we members of this little mini traveling society would not group together out of mere convenience but would actually enhance the experience of our travels by sharing them with each other. In other words, society would be intrinsic to the experience just as much as anti-society would - ours would be a mini-society premised on our exclusion from the larger societies to which we travel but equally premised upon the existence and coherence of our mini-society.

So could you then call our little mini traveling society a utopia, a vision of the perfect society? That would solve my problem neatly - I do in fact have a vision of a social utopia, just not the one I thought I did five years ago. Unfortunately, I don't think I can straightforwardly answer this latest question with a simple "yes" - my mini-society, it seems to me, can be considered a utopia if and only if it does not depend on the existence of other societies that are not utopias. If it does depend on such non-utopian societies, then it can't be a utopia, because I think we all have a natural feeling that a society that intrinsically requires oppression for its existence, even the oppression of people outside that society, is far from perfect, no matter how nice it might be to be one of the oppressors (ESPECIALLY if it's actually the majority that's being oppressed by the minority, as in this case).

So the next question that needs answering is whether or not my mini-society does require oppression in order to exist. The easiest way to answer this in the negative would be to suggest that, even if not everybody in all of the societies could join my mini-society, they could all join some similar mini-society. Obviously, it wouldn't work for everyone to be traveling all the time, because then there would be no societies to which to travel. However, it could be feasible to imagine a situation sort of like Anarres where everyone paid the price of being in a non-traveling society sometime and spent the rest of their time traveling - everyone puts in the work of creating a society, but everyone also gets to reap the rewards of being able to travel from society to society.

I don't think, however, that this would be feasible, for the simple reason that I fear that too much traveling would ultimately destroy the coherence necessary to make all the societies the mini-societies travel to into societies in the first place. This isn't to deny that one can travel and still be very much a part of one's society. I'm clearly an American despite the fact that I spend some of my time touring other countries and have even lived in Scotland and China. But I also don't spend nearly enough of my time traveling to make it seem like an integral part of my life in the way I imagine it, and, for that matter, I already am more distant from my society than many other people who live in it. This suggests to me that either the traveling would be rather superficial and not a key part of people's lives, or else it takes up enough time and mental thought that it would lead to the blurring of societies in a way that would ultimately turn into precisely the kind of social utopia in which I wouldn't be able to achieve my personal dream. Thus, even if everyone from every society is free to travel some of the time, to take short vacations throughout the multiverse, we must still envision a division between mini-societies like mine, which spend the majority of our time in such traveling and try to do our best to minimize the influence of any one larger society and preserve our outsider status, and everyone else, who remains a solid part of their own societies, making them cohere as societies - although I should probably point out here that I don't envision some kind of bizarre stasis wherein societies never combine or diverge. I just don't want all the societies to completely cohere so that everything becomes bland and boring - change is not in and of itself undesirable, as long as it doesn't lead to a complete erasure of all distinctions everywhere.

This does not, however, intrinsically mean that I'm positing a non-utopian situation. After all, it's entirely possible that not everyone wants or needs to travel the way that I do. It's also entirely possible that there are actually an infinite variety of potentially utopian societies, especially if we posit that people are free to choose which society they live in such that utopias can thrive to encompass a variety of different ideas about what societies should be. If this were the case, it would mean that no repression would be necessary, and there would be no invidious distinctions between people. People who wanted to spend their whole life traveling could go off and form mini-societies like the one I imagine, and the people who preferred not to travel quite as much could go and form their own manifold utopias for us to travel between. This would seem to solve my problem quite nicely - no repression would be necessary, and I would still be able to fully realize my dream.

And yet I still can't help but wonder if it's really that easy, if the manifold utopias would really fulfill my dream. The reason why I wonder is, of course, because I draw on a number of different sources in coming up with my own vision of the ideal life. Part of it is because I love traveling, especially traveling in good company, in the real world, of course. But that's not all it is. I'm also drawing on all sorts of models in the fiction that impressed me as a child, whether it be The Lives of Christopher Chant or Hyperion or even The Myth Adventures of Aahz and Skeeve. But I'm also drawing on the very nature of reading fiction itself, the feeling of exploring all sorts of other societies (whether that's in speculative fiction, historical fiction, global fiction, or whatever) from a very personal standpoint. I have to admit that I love the kind of book that Farah Mendlesohn describes as immersive fantasy, where part of the pleasure of reading comes from the sense of figuring out the puzzle of where you actually are. But I also love the way that you get stakes in the fictional world through following the struggles of a character. And then I'm also drawing on the pleasurable experience of the imagination at its best - of creating new worlds - which, again, so often involves pain for the characters you create. And the experience of dreams, where often you're involved in a new society that you at once have and haven't created. And where, once again, conflict and suffering are involved.

In other words, ultimately, I'm not sure that traveling from perfect society to perfect society is really enough to fulfill my dream. I mean that sometimes, sure, all I want is the tourist experience where learning about the customs of a new place and the perhaps violent history that has been transcended now is satisfying. But I'm not sure that's all I want. I'd also like to briefly drop in and get involved in the politics of a new world (and maybe I can't believe in a utopia with politics). I'd like to see the mythical stories I read about in books or made up myself come to life. I'd like to see all kinds of events and situations that simply wouldn't happen in a utopia. My wishes ultimately seem to involve at least occasionally being a tourist, a slummer, in the problems and sufferings of others. And so I go right back again to wondering if maybe my vision is intrinsically anti-utopian.

And yet, there's a very simple answer to this particular anxiety, contained in the way I described the problem itself. Because, after all, if my model is books and video games and tv shows, dreams and the creative process - well, books and video games and tv shows and dreams and the creative process can't be anti-utopian, can they, because they're not real? If Witch Week or the Word quartets or Xenogears do a good enough job of fooling me into thinking they've created a new society, then surely I don't actually need real new societies to be traveling to? All I need is something that seems convincing enough to do the job for me as an outsider. If I never really want to be a part of any society, just to look at it from the outside, then this hardly seems to require real pain, real suffering, real non-utopians. Fake societies, fiction, ought to do the job.

But I have to admit that it still makes me nervous - that my pleasure should depend on pain, even fake pain. There's this guy, Rich Puchalsky, who is a frequent commentator on The Valve. Back when I used to read The Valve a lot, I used to find him extremely irritating, although this was now long enough ago, and I have purposefully blanked out enough of those memories, that I don't exactly remember why. He also was a frequent commentator on Hitherby, where he was much less annoying and actually usually fascinating. Anyway, Rich Puchalsky made many comments (for all I know, he's still making them) about a theory of the author as demiurge (here's an example). The theory always bothered me. A real demiurge, if such a beast exists, would be responsible for a heck of a lot of pain and suffering. But authors aren't - there's a difference between my suffering or your suffering and the suffering of characters in books. So authors must be intrinsically better than demiurges and have no reason to think of themselves as demiurges, given that demiurges are such exquisitely terrible things to be. And yet I still find myself haunted by Rich Puchalsky's theory, on a level I can't fully explain.

I don't think that I think that fictional characters are real, after all. There seems to be a big difference between what it means to be me and what it means to be Charles Morgan or Kadie or Fei Fong Wong. Surely they don't have consciousness. This seems to be even more true of the characters I make up - in an odd sort of way, the very way they "come to life" in my brain, the way I have to check the actions I posit for them against the actions I can actually accept them performing, the way I don't even have to make up the plots for their stories because they make them up themselves, seems to underline their lack of independent existence from me - I think it's the way they exist so fully within the confines of my brain. They can't possibly have independent consciousnesses of their own - they don't need them! Real people can surprise me - the characters in my brain never can, because I only ever can expect them to do exactly what they would do. That must mean they don't have minds outside of mine. And since I don't suffer when they suffer - in fact, I often take quite a lot of pleasure in it when they suffer - surely there's no mind where any suffering can be occurring? The problem seems even less in dreams. One of my best dreams ever kind of epitomizes for me the perfect dream experience. On the one hand, I was the girl who had to run away from her father and was trying desperately to escape in the secret basement and was in a panic as she listened to find out whether or not her father was chasing her. And on the other hand, I was also the writer of the story about the girl running away from her father who was carefully analyzing whether I was putting the right clues in the narrative and chuckling about the way that I had made aspects of the story that the girl herself might not have noticed potentially guessable to the reader. I was both at the same time - and so there was clearly no real suffering going on. The suffering that the girl - I - was feeling, the anxiety, was really just a tactic for heightening my experience of suspense, and an extremely effective tactic, at that. I woke up from that dream with a sense of pure pleasure.

So I'm not sure what it is about Rich Puchalsky's theory of fictional worlds as Gnostic maya that so bothers me, what it is that makes me feel awkward about my proposed solution to the problem of how to combine my vision of a dream life with my vision of utopia. Maybe it's just the psychology of it - that my happiness as a person should seem to depend on the pleasure I take in suffering, even if that suffering isn't real. I mean, I think - I hope - I enjoy the suffering, am able to enjoy the suffering, because I know it isn't real, because it's a narrative device - and yet for all that I can't get away from the psychological truth that I enjoy the suffering, that I want my worlds to suffer through problems, that "human struggles" really do equate to "narrative," to "story" after all.

And so I return to my image of narrative as "a makeshift bandage on a giant seeping wound." The reason why narrative works as a bandage for the wound is precisely because narrative and the wound are both made possible by the same fundamental fact of individual consciousness. Without individual consciousness, there is no need for narrative. But, of course, without individual consciousness, there is no need for utopia, either. Because utopias are social. Utopias are about how to better improve experience through developing societies. And "A society is a body of individuals of a species, generally seen as a community or group, that is outlined by the bounds of functional interdependence, comprising also possible characters or conditions such as cultural identity, social solidarity, or eusociality." But, as practicing Jews like to remind themselves, this is irrelevant to transcendence because God is One.

And so. . . well, I always think of myself as being on the side of those who imagine utopias, because I feel like thinking that all utopias are dystopias must be a sign of despair. Because I believe that we are far from the perfect society and that improvement is possible. Because I have an odd tendency to read societies intended as dystopias as better than our own [umm, brief completely irrelevant sidenote. . . not only is Alex Proyas directing The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag but he is also directing The Tripods trilogy?!?!?!]. Because I do believe that societies have huge effects on individual lives and that societies can change for the better and that this is an effort worth making.

But I'm still an agnostic Gnostic utopian. And that means that I need to remember that utopia, too, can only ever be a makeshift bandage on the giant seeping wound. I'd like it to be a good bandage, as good as we can make it. But there is no perfection achievable in this world.

Zizek and Laibach

Here is something I wonder - does knowing more about Slovenia than I do (something which ought to be achievable with great ease) actually provide one with a useful context for Zizek and Laibach. I feel like it ought to - largely because I feel like there has to be some kind of context for Zizek and Laibach - but I know so little about Slovenia that it's hard for me to understand how it would.

I have been listening to Laibach songs today on YouTube and occasionally catching glimpses of the videos. You know it's going to be a good Laibach video if the lead singer shows up in his headdress thingy. Their cover of "Across the Universe" is really disappointing, though.

ETA: Apparently, Slovenia is the highest-ranking Slavic country on the United Nations Human Development Index. Did you know that? I totally did not know that. Watch me learn more about Slovenia!

I Go on an Anti-God Rant

Stanley Fish on Paradise Lost:

"To say that a 'mortal taste' brought death into the world is to say something tautologous; but the tautology is profound when it reminds us of both the costs and the glories of being mortal. If no mortality, then no human struggles, no narrative, no story, no aspiration (in eternity there’s nowhere to go), no “Paradise Lost.”"

The phrase "the glories of being mortal" seems to edge awkwardly close to theodicy. In being mortal, we give up "eternity," but we accept in return the glories of. . . well, it isn't immediately obvious that "human struggles" are a source of glory, I should hope, so let's go with "narrative," "story," "aspiration," and "'Paradise Lost.'" Except I'm going to leave out "aspiration," too, because it seems like a different issue. So, anyway, this seems to me to be a distillation of a fairly common theodicy - we have "free will," whatever that means to the theodicer (I guess that's not a word, but it should be), because the possibility of evil somehow allows for more satisfactory narratives. If there was no evil, no struggle, no aspiration, there would be no stories, and this is the moral justification for our incredibly imperfect world.

Now, instinctively, it seems to me that this assertion is actively offensive - who could possibly assume that we can take "narrative," "story," and "'Paradise Lost'" as an acceptable replacement for all of the holes in the world? And yet how can I reconcile my instincts with my strong sense that I am alive purely and solely because of art and to a large degree because of narrative art? When I'm asked what I would do if I were certain of never again being able to enjoy art (imagine God coming down and telling me that that was it, I had my fun and now it's over), I reply simply enough - I'd die. There wouldn't be any point anymore. Nothing else I know of has made life worthwhile in the way that art does.

But, although on the surface this may seem like an interesting question, I'm not sure to what degree there's really a contradiction involved. Obviously, as someone who didn't create the world or my outer circumstances, I've decided that the world that I found myself in is worth living in despite its massive imperfections (actually, "decide" isn't really the right term there, as I haven't made an active choice - it's more a basic, inarguable premise of my consciousness. But I suppose in not committing suicide I at least passively make a decision to live every waking moment of every day.). But that doesn't mean that it's morally right of someone else, some theoretical God, to put me in a position to have to make the awkward choice between continued flawed existence or throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A Kantian and a utilitarian might disagree on the accurate moral choice to make when the evil supervillain threatens to kill everyone in the world if you refuse to kill five innocent people. But I think they can both agree that the evil supervillain is both evil and a supervillain. Both of them would prefer to live in the happy shiny world without supervillains, where we can academically discuss these choices without actually having to, you know, make them.

And so, oddly enough, despite my the primacy of my love for narrative, my sense that it's what's keeping me alive, I feel as though this is merely a makeshift bandage on a giant seeping wound. It works, and it keeps me alive, but it's much better not to be wounded in the first place. Honestly, anyone who creates a world that incorporates consciousness shouldn't make it so that any one, separable, distinguishable pinpoint, not even something so lovely and beautiful as art, is necessary for consciousness's acceptance of life. Conscious beings should, in the ideal world, accept life as a good in itself. If mortality makes this impossible (as Fish suggests when he admits that being mortal has "costs" - you're already making a moral mistake when you're imposing costs on people, because then you're setting them up in a position where they have to choose between either living with the costs or else missing out on the glories) then there shouldn't be mortality - I'd rather be consistently happy with no literature than happy for a brief time with literature. And what if consciousness cannot be happy with literature, and literature cannot exist without mortality? Well, in that case, we're accepting the premise that consciousness in and of itself implies lack, that consciousness itself is the wound, that consciousness and satisfaction are mutually incompatible. In that case, you know what, it's not worth it to create consciousness.

Quick Question-I-Had-at-Work Post

It's kind of a commonplace of discussion about the history of Western thought that we have this religious/Platonic idea running throughout it that consciousness precedes the external world - an idea that has had many permutations of varying levels of interest. However, leaving aside the truth or falsehood of the concepts that consciousness in general precedes the external world or some form of Platonic/Wordsworthian barely-remembered reincarnation exists, surely our actual experience of our individual consciousness that we can actually remember tends to suggest that this one thing does, in fact, come after the external world. Like, there's this big world with a lot of stuff in it that seems to have been around for a while, and, while our experience of consciousness is obviously guided by various mental constraints that allow us to learn, surely every actual experience is new to the individual mind (and it's not like we have memories of some other experiences that are no longer happening to us). So why is the idea that consciousness comes first so prevalent? Does Freud talk about this?