waking up.

i dreamed that i blogged, and now i feel the need to really do it so that my feeling that i did can attach itself to something in the world-- can have an actual object. here is a prompt from my schoolmate anthony diclaudio and my given response:

anthony: ...the only logically consistent ending to Lost is ______.

laura: i have a theory (by which i mean a cruel hope) that it's an extended mindfuck experiment in how long people will spend trying to make sense of a bunch of random and ever increasing information. it'd be like a cross between the experiment where you show toddlers three pictures of shapes in different places on the page, and they (the toddlers) attribute intentions to them (the shapes) and tell a story about what the shapes "doing" to each other, and that other experiment where you see how many pennies you can drop in a cup full of water before the surface tension breaks and the cup runs over.

on my current subject of choice:

'we’re in trouble — deeper trouble, i think, than most people realize even now.' p.krugman, in yesterday's new york times.

the following is from holland cotter's excellent ' the boom is over. long live the art!', featured in last week's new york times. it begins with a totally worthwhile analysis of american art in the american economy of the past fifty years.

"....Students who entered art school a few years ago will probably have to emerge with drastically altered expectations. They will have to consider themselves lucky to get career breaks now taken for granted: the out-of-the-gate solo show, the early sales, the possibility of being able to live on the their art.

"It’s day-job time again in America, and that’s O.K. Artists have always had them — van Gogh the preacher, Pollock the busboy, Henry Darger the janitor — and will again. The trick is to try to make them an energy source, not a chore.

"At the same time, if the example of past crises holds true, artists can also take over the factory, make the art industry their own. Collectively and individually they can customize the machinery, alter the modes of distribution, adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. They can daydream and concentrate. They can make nothing for a while, or make something and make it wrong, and fail in peace, and start again...

"Will contemporary art continue to be, as it is now, a fancyish Fortunoff’s, a party supply shop for the Love Boat crew? Or will artists — and teachers, and critics — jump ship, swim for land that is still hard to locate on existing maps and make it their home and workplace?

"I’m not talking about creating ’60s-style utopias; all those notions are dead and gone and weren’t so great to begin with. I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise. Crazy! says anyone with an ounce of business sense.

"Right. Exactly. Crazy"

sometimes i wish that philosophers were more like artists-- sometimes and partially supporting themselves and educating others through work in the academy, but with the larger and more vibrant world of philosophy happening out in the cities and in the minds of anonymous farm kids on their way to cities, as compelled as any young painters to keep "imagining the unknown and unknowable".

[and also, this.]

there are more than a million. there are more even than an infinity.

it sounds simple, i know. but it’s not. listen, there are a million worlds you could make for yourself. everyone you know has a completely different one - the woman in 5G, that cab driver over there, you. sure, there are overlaps, but only in the details. some people make their worlds around what they think reality is like. they convince themselves that they had nothing to do with their worlds’ creations and continuations. some make their worlds without knowing it. their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed soufflés and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are. but you want to make for yourself a world that is deliberately and meticulously personalized. a theater for your life, if I could put it like that. don’t live an accident. don’t call a knife a knife. live a life that has never been lived before, in which everything you experience is yours and only yours. make accidents on purpose. call a knife a name by which only you will recognize it. now i’m not a very smart man, but i’m not a dumb one, either. so listen: if you can manage what i’ve told you, as i was never able to, you will give your life meaning.

jonathan safran foer
a convergence of birds

(i'm reading about possible worlds again, and i'm always reading about agency of course, so i like to read this. but then it made me uncomfortable, too: i'm more and more skeptical all the time of what people call personal truths. i suspect that anything not common and available to us all might be something really good, but it isn't the truth.)

butterfly magic!

my little tucson visit has been so nice. it began raining at almost the exact moment that my plane touched down, and the sun hasn't showed its face since, which is just fine with me. i know it's some kind of travesty, but i like winter and was feeling unprepared to abandon my winter layers, which has turned out to be unnecessary. i'd like to write little portraits of my friends here, but i need to do a little metaphysics reading before my host is up. maybe tomorrow. in the meantime, i'll say this: j.s. knows just the kinds of adventure that i like, and also the kinds of adventures of which i will be skeptical/petrified of but then love so much. here are some little videos from the butterfly magic exhibit at the tucson botanical gardens:

;

[NOTE: i am not under the influence of any drugs in these videos, but dumb with wonderment! jerk.]

self-interest.

"OUR financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense. Obviously the greater the market pressure to excel in the short term, the greater the need for pressure from outside the market to consider the longer term. But that’s the problem: there is no longer any serious pressure from outside the market. The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest."

the end of the financial world as we know it
michael lewis & david einhorn


why does it have to be forced? this is just exactly what's been so hard for me to understand about nearly every aspect of this economic wreck, and every corrupt corporate meltdown that led up to it, and all the ones that just keep coming: where is enlightened self-interest? how the fuck (b.madoff is just one clear example) did all of these people think things would end? were they hoping that they'd just die before anyone noticed that there was no substance to their claims?

it's not that i trusted corporations and financial advisers to be virtuous-- to the contrary, i "trusted" them (wryly, implicitly) to look out for their own interests with a machiavellian precision. i thought they were self-interest experts, and they've turned out to be a bunch of fucking amatuers-- their "self-interest" so stupidly managed that they couldn't so much as sustain themselves-- their decisions based, apparently, on a conception of self-interest so simultaneously hollow and overblown that to call it sophomoric is to give it too much credit. (bah-dum, ching.)

all i can conclude about this bewildering mess, finally, is what i generally conclude on nearly every topic: pretense is so tempting, but it will fuck you in the end.

something, continued.

it's sometimes something more sinister (sinister?) than superstition or even solipsism that leads us to attribute ill-will and bad intentions to other people or the universe at large: we posit external enemies as a way of avoiding the seemingly unface-able truth that the problem is in us-- that the enemy is inside. and it must take elaborate psychological mechanisms to prop up this belief in external enemies, because isn't it obvious that we ourselves are the only common factor in all of our experiences and changing circumstances?

i don't mean to sound like some kind of republican or motivational speaker or anything like that. who we are is itself a part of the world, and a product of it, and our demons are so often an unfair fact of bodies and circumstances into which were brought without consent. and it's a nightmare-- a reoccurring human nightmare, told and retold in all our scariest stories: the alien is on our own ship; the parasite is in your own guts; they're not the ghosts-- we are. it's a powerful fear we carry. it's a powerful shame. and maybe it takes a kind of power to confront it that's greater than what we can reasonably expect of another person. that might be so.

and sometimes it really does work the other way around-- in the case of oppression, say-- and then, of course, the members of the oppressed group are made to feel (to deeply feel) that the problem is in them, written into their genetic code, when in fact they really are systematically confronting other people's bullshit. and they wonder 'am i crazy?'

note to self.

for further thought and attention post-metaphysics comp: religion! (as a moral motive)
i've added the two linked journal articles to my moral motivation-themed summer reading list.

and another thing.

the same actions which are responsible for and instrumental in the origin and development of the virtues are also the means of their destruction.

aristotle
the nichomachean ethics
book ii, part 3

aristotle famously posits the golden mean as the way to understand virtue-- courage, for instance, as the virtue standing midway between cowardice (a vice of deficit) and recklessness (a vice of excess). virtue is the target, standing at the balanced dead center of all manner of vice and moral compromise.

i wrote a little about virtue ethics over the summer-- not so much about the golden mean, but what the actual exercise of a virtue consist in. what i mean is, i was addressing not so much the question of how, in theory, we understand what courage is, but what it is to be courageous (or to be patient-- the example i used at the time). to actually be virtuous is to be someone whose behavior conforms to virtue time and time again. it has to do with a consistency that is the result of each action springing from the same firm character. and just as consistency depends on firmness of character, firmness of character depends on authenticity. if it's not really you, you can't sustain it. beyond that, the virtuous person explicitly takes herself to be striving for virtue, undertakes virtuous acts for their own sake (that is, for the sake of the ultimate end-- the good life) and not in pursuit of some extrinsic end (like money or something like that), and, in turn, gets a certain pleasure from acting in the way according with virtue.

so, i'm trying to finish a paper on all this. in the paper i try to come to some understanding of how we can make sense of extremists-- radicals, visionaries, ascetics-- in these terms. a lot of our moral heroes (religious saints in particular, but also secular figures like ghandi or john brown) fall into this category, and there are lots of other people (particularly artists) who make valuable contributions to society, although their value isn't explicitly moral, which seems to be generated by certain extreme or ultimately self-defeating character traits. on the surface, at least, it looks like these sorts of extreme characters are not conforming to any sort of "happy medium", and yet we revere them, either for their moral integrity, or some quasi-moral aesthetic integrity.

are creative highs and principled stands the elevated end of a seesaw-- dependent upon, caused by, or one part of a whole that necessarily includes a lowered end? does the golden mean leave us perfectly balanced at the fulcrum, the low end raised, and the raised end lowered? what do we lose, if anything, and is it worth it?

i seriously have to finish this paper.

something i've been thinking about.

attributing good faith to all other human beings-- particularly those who have done some harm to us-- is often considered naive. but it seems to me, given all of the complexities of circumstance, cognitive biases toward attending to our own interests rather than those of others, and the myriad ways in which people makes sense of (rationalize, perhaps) their own behavior, that the real naivete lies in attributions of bad faith or, more precisely, ill will. it strikes me as almost superstitious-- naive in the way that it's naive to attribute weather that scares or injures us to angry gods. we're harmed in some way by some movement in the world, and, in our pain and ignorance and self-absorption, we make sense of it by attributing some ill intention. this is not a new idea. but i don't mean to say that it's naive to attribute intentions to people in general-- i mean bad intentions in particular. i'm suggesting that bad intentions, despite all the wrenching harm that people manage to do, are relatively rare, and that making adequate sense of all that harm, even in terms of human agency, will require a more sophisticated analysis.

this sounds a little funny. on the one hand i'm trying to correct a certain misanthropic world view. on the other hand, my criticism is built on an understanding of human beings as vulnerable and ignorant and self-absorbed. but i don't mean these terms pejoratively. we're relatively small things with a lot of nerve endings (literal and metaphorical) and limited resources and just two eyes to see out of. to have contempt for a thing because it's that sort of thing strikes me as being ungenerous to the point of its being a kind of misapprehension. what's naive (though forgivably so) is to have ever believed that things were otherwise-- to have been operating on the assumption that we are more, or that our being good or worthy depends on such a thing.

more cut and pasted email.

(this one's from elissa j. do your part, creeps.)

Subject: the suburban needs your help

Hello all,

The Peter Coffin Studio and The Suburban Gallery, Chicago are working on a project called; "How to Sneak into Art Museums Without Paying". We'd like you to share any techniques you have acquired through your life/work experience to submit to this project. These instructions (of "How to...") from you should be hand drawn and scanned to reproduced in a booklet/zine that will be distributed for an exhibition at the Suburban and to participants.

These illustrated techniques should actually work and must be relatively current. The instructions you provide should not require doctored documents such as fake passes etc or fake uniforms/badges and should be relatively easy to understand so that someone on the street can enter without paying using the instructions you submit.

If you would like to submit a plan, please hand draw it on 8 1/2 x 11 white paper in black pen/or pencli and scan in on gray scale @ 200 DPI and send to; assistant.petercoffinstudio@gmail.com

Include your name/pseudonym separate from the drawing in the email, to be included in the credits of the booklet. All accepted participants will of course receive a copy of the booklet/zine. And remember to include in the drawing the museum's name and city.

These are plans that should actually work so stick to keeping them as clear as possible....including street entrances, descriptive markers or "what to say to a guard"... anything to make the drawing effective. I have included a sample of a plan to sneak into the KW museum in Berlin to show generally what we are looking for. Feel free to forward this to any sneaky pals you know anywhere, especially outside the US as this is for any major museum/institution across the globe.

Best,

-Jory

BEST EMAIL EVER.

from: matthew allen
to: me

i searched for "agency philosophy" in google images - hoping to find some obfuscatory diagram to wave at architects to my rhetorical advantage - and i came across an image of you! brightened my day! but no diagram...

M

(it's true! i'm on page 3!)
(also, soon i'll post real blogs again-- as opposed to cutting and pasting self-promotional materials.)

huh.

i want to read this ten times and say a hundred things about it, but i can't right now.

i'm all twisted up this semester-- contorted with work!  one result of this is that i've been sadly neglecting this blog, and probably you.  in the meantime i've taken to "micro-blogging"-- text-length blog posts-- which is probably just about as creepy as it sounds.  nonetheless, i share brief updates on my whereabouts and the direction of my thoughts via a service called twitter, which i can (and do) update via the web and (more often) my cellular telephone.  if the whole thing doesn't freak you out too much, if you aren't too fretful of your status as dasein, you might consider joining.  heidegger is dead, and won't feel a thing.

(note: spellcheck just tried to make 'heidegger' 'headgear'.  and by 'dasein', it suggests, perhaps i meant 'casein'.  god help us all.  no, wait, he's dead too.)  

despite all the ways there are to be human, the variegated range of culture, there's a lot we all have in common-- every culture on earth.  we're all tool-makers, gossips-- we all read each others faces, read for intention, and are consequently adept at making, masking and mimicking them.  we all have a word that means 'one' and a word that means 'two' (although not always a word for zero, or numbers more than several); we all tell stories, and we all pause in our storytelling for effect.  we all live, and we all die, and we all have rituals to honor and mourn the dead.  

my aunt died this morning, unexpectedly.  she died in her sleep-- complications from diabetes-- in the sort of voluntary mental health facility she'd lived in for as long as i can remember, the kind she'd been in and out of for most of her life.  in and out.  not just in and out of institutions, but of everything.  she'd be gone for days or weeks or months and come back with a man or a long coat or empty eyes.  my early memories are punctuated by her comings and goings.  she did a lot drugs, she made plenty of mistakes, and her life for the last twenty years seemed to me to consist primarily in smoking cigarettes on patios and some occasional crafting.  but you could fill a hundred books with all of the things that aren't what they seem to me.  she may have thought thoughts as deep as space, but i never knew them.  i have this sense, though, a common sense, that a special kind of thoughtful regard is due.  so while leah's at home signing all the papers, i wrote a brief obituary as an alternative to the antiseptic form announcements that the paper runs otherwise.  it's not revelatory or illuminating, but i hope it's not sentimental either, and i think it's true.

jill gillespie, 55, was born in january of 1953 to nancy and calvin gillespie, the third of three.  she was curious, artless, gentle on the whole, and utterly without malice.  she was interested to know what was out there.  jill passed away in her sleep early monday morning.  she is survived by her brother, sister-in-law, and two neices.

 

the most self-defeating post ever.

this is my second ever blog (that i can recall) about contemporary politics. it won't take very long: WILL EVERYONE PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT SARAH PALIN!

seriously, when i heard that john mccain had chosen her as his running mate, the only thing i felt was embarrassed for him. a guy whose only hope seems to hang on some vague perception of him as a maverick-- a man of integrity, who does what he thinks is right while everyone else is doing what's merely expediant-- has chosen a running mate whose only creditial seems to be that some political strategist of unsubtle mind thinks that choosing her would be tactical. there didn't seem to me to be any real risk that hordes of women would mccain over obama on the grounds that sarah palin was his running mate. no need for political analysts to explain anything-- the move could not have been more pathetically obvious, ineffective, and self-defeating. i still hold this to be true.

what i failed to anticipate was that reasonable left-leaning people-- particular women-- would flip the fuck out, start groups, fill my inbox with forwards and my mini-feed with their sarah-palin-related feelings! and in this, perhaps the mccain campaign was actually a step ahead of me. because the outrage amongst people who would never support mccain anyway has made this into an issue that actually MIGHT rally hordes of women to the mccain campaign. in a race between mccain-palin and obama-biden, mccain-palin doesn't have a shot in hell. but make this a race between palin and "women against palin", and those soccer moms that everyone's so fucking concerned about might pick palin. and i might not blame them! because in amidst the the valid criticism of her qualifications and policy positions, people in groups like "women against palin" will likely also say things that reflect a certain conscious or unconsious disdain, a certain tone of contempt which those soccer moms, whoever they are, might reasonably take to heart.

it's true that mccain's choice of a running mate is an insult to women who work hard, women who are qualified for the jobs they hold-- women who are overqualified-- and it's an (embarrassingly obvious) insult to our intelligence, and to everyone's, to think that anyone will vote for her on her initial merits. this, i'll admit, didn't immediately occur to me as noteworthy, because every one of mccain's stances on every issue is an insult to women (and to everyone else). but, frankly, i find it almost equally insulting that other progressive people think that i need mccain's move explained to me, or that anyone else does. and in the meantime we're just creating the thing that we feared.

[another thing: in a couple of months i'm going to have to make this blog private for awhile-- meaning you can only read it if your email address is on a list of email addresses that i submit. it's a bummer, but i'm going to be paying a lot of money to send applications out to various graduate schools, and i don't really want any investigative application reviewers to be able to read my extremely informal musings, philosophical or otherwise. if you're on my blogroll, i'll add you automatically-- if you're not, and you ever check this and might want to continue to, please please let me know and i'll add you.]

patience.

i haven't heard back yet about my comp-- i'm assuming that i didn't pass it.  so while i wait, i will post this apt little piece of the answer that i prepared for the question on virtue ethics. 

If an agent is patient, for example, she will be disposed to resist acting in haste, a disposition that consists partially in a particular set of feelings and desires that would make her inclined, under many circumstances, to wait rather than act—a sense of calm, say, a certain resistance to undue urgency.  It consists partially in a certain kind of judgment.  To possess a virtue is to accept certain features of the world as reasons, and to be sensitive to the presence of those reasons, which will sometimes be features of the external world, and sometimes features of one’s own psychological economy.  The agent who demonstrates patience will therefore be an agent who recognizes certain features of the various circumstances that confront her, and of her own mental state in those circumstances, as strong reasons to bide her time, to wait on further information, more auspicious circumstances, or a clearer frame of mind.  The possession of patience as a virtue also involves the practiced and competent managing of subtleties and exceptions.  A perfectly virtuous agent recognizes patience as a strong, but not necessarily an overriding consideration.  Just as the virtue of honesty also involves tactfulness and discretion, so patience also involves promptness, decisiveness and courage, lest it be mere paralysis (cowardly, irresolute, or procrastinatory).

[i passed.]  

marvelous!

most enjoyable new york times reading experience i've had in quite some time.

doing good. doing all right.

i'm taking a comp on friday, and i spent today reading about virtue ethics-- the ancient (most famously greek) notion that doing what's right is a matter of acting from good character.  it stands in some contrast to the deontological notion (most famously kant's) that doing what's right is a matter of acting on particular principles or maxims.  the theories have plenty in common, but here's where they contrast starkly:

according to most virtue theorists, perfect virtue consists in a flawless harmony between virtuous acts and the feeling and desires of the virtuous actor.  acting virtuously despite bad or conflicting feelings is (mere?) contingent virtue.  but according to kant, an act can only have moral worth when it conflicts with one's immediate desires.  it's not that our actions are necessarily bad if they happen to accord with our desires (if, say, we act generously because it feels good), but they aren't specifically moral-- if we act kindly because we feel like it, then the maxim that we're acting on isn't "act kindly" but "do what you feel like", which, kant says, is not a moral principle-- we certainly wouldn't want to make it a universal (moral) law that everyone in all circumstances should do what they feel like.

so is the more virtuous moral agent the one who has to wrestle with her own desires to do what she thinks is right, or the one who feels inclined to kindness and courage-- who is naturally or cultivated impervious to fear, envy, etc.?   here is a place where a disagreement in the philosophical literature seems to reflect conflicting notions in our everyday thinking about ethics and morality.  we count among our saints and heroes both sorts of agents.

i wonder what you think.  i'm inclined to agree with the virtue ethicists, but i'm conflicted.  haha.  fuck.

[dictionary.com word of the day:  AESTIVAL (es-tuh-val) of or belonging to the summer.]

nomadry, in earnest.

i'm homeless for one month.

i wonder what it will be like.

quickly.

kay ryan has been named america's poet laureate. it's a wonderful thing. she's been my favorite living poet since i was twenty-two and, lonesome and living sparely, read this:

Action creates
a taste
for itself.
Meaning once
you've swept
the shelves
of spoons
and plates
you kept
for guests,
it gets harder
not to also
simplify the larder,
not to dismiss
rooms, not to
divest yourself
of all the chairs
but one, not
to test what
singleness can bear,
once you've begun.

kay ryan
that will to divest