Death and Originality
by rsbakker
Definition of the Day – Literature: the genre that dare not speak its name.
Sometimes I crack me up.
Sometimes I feel so damn provincial, sitting here in a snow-buried London junior, taking the hypothetical piss out of these London senior literary types. I mean, just who do I think I am. I don’t even have ‘author photos’ for Christ’s sake.
I almost always feel hypocritical. I should, I think. As should anyone pompous enough to think their interpretative cartoons have captured some real socio-cultural dynamic. Lord knows mine are certainly flattering enough.
But then I think I have the virtue of running a real risk.
It was the second year of my philosophy PhD., I think, when I finally realized that despite all the rhetoric, most everyone was really only interested in dead originalities. If you came up with a new spin, well then your grade point average did just fine. But if you brought a new top to the table, well then, you were in a heap-load of trouble.
The problem, aside from our myopic psychology, is that the world is filled with cranks and crackpots, with people who want to say something new without having gone through the trouble of understanding the old. The problem, in other words, is that originality is just too fucking easy. What we want is a special kind of originality, the kind that we can hail as visionary, transformative – in hindsight, of course.
Quite literally, what we want is dead originality.
Originality is literally the name we give to a very special kind of popularity contest. So much of what we value is a function of social proof bias. Steal a chapter from DeLillo and pitch it as your own, and I guarantee you the rejection letters will come flooding in. Thus the paradox. Thus the risk. You will only be acknowledged as original in this special sense, when you are acknowledged as original. Everyone literally sits around waiting to see what everyone else will do. Is this cool? Is this… could it be… original?
And we all know, at some level, that this is what makes those in the know so jealous of what they know, so intent on repeating dead originalities, and claiming the triumphs of dead risk-takers as their own. The well of rednecks has no bottom, so it’s easy to pretend that you are messing with someone, somewhere – confronting hypothetical audiences with something ‘new.’ So you pitch the same ‘ol same ‘ol to the same, closed-circuit culture, you rig your ideology to make the confusion of art with fashion and commodity as seamless as possible, and everyone comes away feeling as though they earned their authorial scarves.
So, I may be a hypocrite, but at least you can’t call me a coward. No crackpot is.
Coming up: Ten Question to Fuck up your English Professor.
The problem with philosophy, I feel, is that it has ceased to be a discipline in which thinkers are encouraged to formulate their own thoughts and musings upon the world, and focus almost entirely upon picking apart the work of those who have gone before. To paraphrase a historian whose name escapes me, you are not receiving a.degree in philosophy; rather a degree in Nietzsche, Kant and Ayer (or whoever is the flavour of the month at that particular department).
It seems to me that the differentiation between disciplines in the humanities is ultimately harmful, my personal inclinations being that the truth is often obscured beneath a perceived need for originality.
I’m confused.
I don’t understand if you think these “dead originalities” are good, bad, or just *are*. I’m don’t understand, moreover, what these dead originalities are. I can’t decide if you think that by knowing what came before you are hopelessly committed to the kind of insularism you rail against; or if you think that this is part of problem, but only instrumental to the bigger problem of that in learning the history (I agree with Dan, though—philosophy has become more the history of philosophy, though I don’t think that we *shouldn’t* know the history of philosophy) we get inculcated into this bullshit game of riffing off the old, rather than using our knowledge of the old to try and head somewhere new.
I can get behind the latter, but the former seems incoherent to me. Surely people who don’t know anything about where they have culturally come from as just as much posers as those who do but end up selling repackaged history as “culture.” Talk to a libertarian for 30 seconds and marvel at how Smith and Mill seem to get mindlessly re-appropriated as libertarian icons, when both would have puked blood on the shoes of most any libertarian today. Or that Nozick gets his natural rights theory plugged, but his theory of initial appropriations conveniently forgotten. It seems that being a hack surely isn’t limited to the etablishment: there is a lovely counter-establishment of so called revolutionaries out there who, by virtue of ignoring human failures end up running the facades of long-dead theories as something they thought up themselves. Which they may have, or it may just be some cultural meme they picked up somewhere. If we don’t know something about where we’ve come from, we risk thinking we are ever actually original, rather than almost completely being re-runs of our shared conceptual history.
I’m not sure if I’m even close to understanding what you just said. I sometimes become a little baffled at the vitriol—I don’t know where the old kind of cynic gets sucker punched by the new kind.
Nick, I think you and Dan nailed one point with the “history of philosophy.” It seems to be how the establishment circumvents the [i]power[/i] of philosophy and, I think, this is one of Bakker’s major gripes, which he works in here into the idea of dead originalities. The only “original” thing philosophy does any more is make new connections between dead opinions. Which is to say, wank.
Academia isn’t interested in new, [i]revisive[/i] ideas. That might mess with the stat quo. However, there seems no harm in, say, two philosophers who never had anything to do with each other making some “new” point through a academics comparison of their works: dead originalities here, imo.
To do list: Attempt to fuck with existing psychological and philosophic academia and watch much needed new, evolving ideas disseminate and revise our “consensual objectivity.”
Hi Mike! Meeting people on blogs is fun, especially when they have cool (though, as we are all dealing with, not necessarily new) ideas. So, disclosure first: I’m due to submit my PhD in Applied Ethics and the History of Physics in a month. That said, I’m at that stage in a postgrad’s life when one cannot look at their field without feeling stabbing hatred for it, because they’ve spent the last four months holed up in an office screaming and typing. So no particularly hard feelings.
Also, after the time I’ve spent looking at typesetting code like LaTeX, I find is amusing that despite Scott’s comment page not turning your BBCode italics into actual italics, my brain doesn’t so much register that fact as just tells me “italics go here”
Now. I’m gonna go ahead and say that as *statements of statistical trends,* I’m more or less on board with you. But that’s as far as I’ll go. Otherwise, your claims become a) ludicrous or b) devoid of any bite they bear against philosophy. I’m okay with either one, but just so we are clear, there are people attempting, more or less unsuccessfully, to move philosophy and academic past the ideas of the past. I mean, just reading the afterword (sorry, I don’t have my copy on it, was it an afterword or an epilogue?) of “Neuropath” has to tell you that. The fact that Cordelia Fine gets mentioned sporadically in this blog and in the back of “Neuropath,” not to mention (I think it was him) Dan Dennett, is telling. I mean, Cordelia is a psychologist and a philosopher. No, I’m not claiming she’s a philosopher because of her popular work, I’m claiming she’s a philosopher because of her pretty super work in scholarly (i.e., the peer review mechanism of the academy) metaethics, most recently taking on John Haidt’s recent work. Dan is a self-described philosopher. I think they take a good attempt at attacking some of our ridiculous conventions, at least as much as anyone can. They are just two examples, but I’m willing to give more.
Moreover, I’m still not clear on whether or not we are saying that originality is good because we actually have a reason to believe it, or if it just one of the axiomatic statements of the 21st century. I’m not even sure if we should be ascribing any evaluative mechanism to originality. A homeless guy on the street could ruminate on the key to good living being the number of fish one can molest. That’s certainly seems original—is it valuable? I have no freakin’ idea.
Further, I’m not even sure if originality as we seem to be taking it, something completely novel, is as valuable as it seems, or if it just something we are fetishising (I’m not even sure if I’m still in the ball park of what Scott was getting at). Scott’s work with Prince of Nothing and what we’ve seen of Aspect Emperor was—is—some Epic Shit (in need of title case for its Epicness), but hardly some form of a priori originality that sprang fully formed on a clamshell from Scott’s mind. Those books got *history*. I mean, *anything* new about prince of nothing was some tasty frosting on some tasty-ass cake. The rest was, must surely be, new connections between dead opinions. Hell, you can make a game out of trying to figure out where that bit came from. If anything, for me that is one of the things that makes them the Epic Shit that they are. But then it seems like we are beating on philosophy just because it is fun to do so. And don’t get me wrong: IT IS FUN. But surely we’re looking for something that goes with the fun, rather than just the idle passtime of bemoaning how stupid the humanities are.
It is late and I’m rambling. The short version: let’s beat on philosophy, the literary community, the academy and the rest of society as much as they so rightly deserve. But let’s not go *crazy*. Otherwise, we risk becoming those assholes we love to hate, or will have to find an orderly system of psychic curb stomping so we all get as appropriately beaten as the rest of the world we find it so fun to mangle.
There is no reason for academia to change because the current system allows for infinite thesis.
the hidden meaning behind Roland Barthes “Death of the Author” is that it means the “Rise of the Analyst”. The goal is to rip the original author to shreds and wrap it up in the gauzy fabric of one’s own florid analytical prose. Make it about how awesome a writer YOU are, and do as much as possible to impress the audience with yourself, the academic, the amazing person who did the close reading and revealed all those hidden subtexts and meaning and conspiracies that the centuries dead author obviously embedded in the text and that no one has ever noticed before.
To go on a tangent of sorts, what are the release dates for The White-Luck Warrior?
Amazon.ca has the Penguin version as going on sale March 29th; amazon.com has the Overlook version as going on sale March 31st and amazon.co.uk has the Orbit version as going on sale May 5th.
So,
Canada March 29th
USA March 31st
UK May 5th
Is this right?
I agree with everything Nick posted.
Also, if it seems like philosophy is just an endless wank, it’s because (gentlemen, get ready for it…) philosophy is HARD. When you’re doing good philosophy, you are basically fighting every single cognitive bias you have simultaneously, and constantly failing. Every ambiguous turn of language becomes the enemy, and dear god… there are endless enemies.
Worst still, when you do philosophy right (and add a new top to the table), you’re gonna get assaulted. It’s just the way it works.
I almost always feel hypocritical. I should, I think.
It’s funny how you feel one ‘should’ is hypocritical, only to add another ‘should’ after it instead. ‘Should’ is a funny word…I think twice when it slips the leash of my lips, these days.
Anyway, what is this ‘new’? I mean in actual practical terms? Like can it help create a food production system for people in need? Or something actually physical like that?
I dunno – it’s like in one hand you’ve got this mono focus on ‘new’ and in the other hand ‘facing real risk’. I could imagine practical applications arriving from the dual (yet not connected) focus, but more as a side effect than by trying to.
I’ll try and raise you on crackpot status with a hypothesis: Ever see doco’s on peguin colonies and how in the freezing cold, they all stand in a cluster?
It’s like your trying to leave the cluster, but whilst walking backwards, face thoroughly toward the cluster. Your concentrating real hard on what’s there – so hard you step back for a wider view…’new’, ‘risk’, looking real hard at these parts of the penguin colony, but not considering the practical, physical effects involved – that your stepping back. That you are headed in a direction, just one undecided except in some convoluted way tied to someones ideas of ‘new’ and ‘risk’.
It’s kind of like navigating purely by other peoples minds, rather than by raw physical dimensions.
Just thinking yesterday, before reading this, that hypocrisy is a good thing. How else can I aspire to improve myself? When did faking it become a bad thing? Having said that I must say: if you want to make it don’t let them know you’re gonna fake it. It’s really the knowledge that we’re faking it that people recoil from. Hypocrisy is (or can be) a virtue, especially when the whole world is a lie – So while you are ‘running a real risk’ I’ll be over here pretending to do the same thing. By the way, one the Greek form of hypocrite is hypokrisis – apparently one of this words meanings is coward. Sorry:(.
Well, in all things, regardless of the endeavor – originality is subject to ridicule. Even the discussion of this act is not original in itself. I’m sure the title of the Chinese aphorism from the I-Ching for “Chaos” speaks on many levels towards this discussion:
“Where brilliant dreams are born. Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos. Before a brilliant person begins something great, they must look foolish to the crowd.”
Sounds like a pretty concise, if not original, view of this topic.