Harry Redner’s account of aesthetic life in his book of the same title is one to which the classic dictum of Lichtenberg applies: Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. Replace “good taste” with the more awkward “sense of aesthetic value” and you have Redner’s guiding insight in a nutshell: giving an account of what art is means avoiding all artful pleas for one’s own taste. It means submitting taste to multi-dimensional critical scrutiny on the highest intellectual level. Redner, in short, always has his reasons at his disposal. In Aesthetic Life he is never tempted to evade careful explanation of his whys and wherefores with picturesque rhetorical gestures or baroque theoretical artifice, or by sprinkling the names of the classics across the page.
The book’s subtitle, “the history and present of aesthetic cultures”, gives further clues to his intentions. The key to Redner’s aesthetics is the idea that aesthetic life is historically and socially formed - thus pre-formed, reformed and deformed – in ways that can be generalised about. The present becomes something like a necessary perspective on these socio-historical travails; aesthetic history for Redner cannot but be the history of the present, which for him means a tale told from the point of view of a time, our own, when the coherence and indeed the practical survival of aesthetic life are radically in question. The argument follows the pattern of Ethical Life (2002), which culminated in the claim that contemporary ethics is subject to a number of painful and historically unprecedented paradoxes, in large part because of the way free markets and the activities of modern states have displaced and rationalised (often rationalised away) the multiple ethical ideals of the past.
In each of the major divisions of this new book, Redner deploys a suite of basic aesthetic categories. They provide the machinery of his view of aesthetic life and his method in large part is to explain what he means by them, put paid to associated theoretical misconceptions, then deploy the machinery in his own account of how art works. The latter he does with some flair and considerable intellectual afflatus.
In Book 1 he presents what he calls the elementary aesthetic qualities, as well as a three-fold division between the constitution (composition, construction, fabrication), presentation (performance, exhibition) and reception of art. The aesthetic qualities include, among others, humour, beauty, form, design, expression (musical and dramatic) and verisimilitude. Redner thinks of them as something like the raw material of our experiences of art, anthropological universals which play a part in everyday life but are also aesthetically elaborated in line with the guiding ideas of individual cultures. (Simplifying considerably, jokes are the source of comedy; daily sing-song develops into honed musical art; speech-making and yarn-spinning flow over as epic narratives and novels; proverbs and the metaphorical tidbits of day to day speech take on definite aesthetic form as poetry; and they each do so in ways that fit with the evaluative interpretations that dominate a culture’s view of reality.) A highlight of this part of the work is the swift and effective overhaul Redner performs on the problem whether aesthetic qualities are subjective or objective, roughly – is beauty (or humour or any basic dimension of aesthetic value) in the eye of the beholder or in the beautiful object itself? The answer is neither and both. Beauty is not statically either in the beholder or the object, it comes to inhere in the beholder and the object because of the way social norms and aesthetic standards are absorbed by individuals, then subsequently transformed and sent into social circulation again. Another way of putting it would be to say there is no fundamental subjective (inner, psychological) or objective (outer, material) grounds to which to reduce judgments about whether something is beautiful, funny etc. Aesthetic judgment is intersubjective, taking place within a framework of evaluative interpretations that are supplied but not mechanically determined by a wider culture. So at last that old chestnut has been plucked from the fire of philosophical wrangling. . .
Book 2 makes a categorial distinction between art, high art and great art – forms between which Redner intends to make no invidious comparison. By “art” pure and simple he means the aesthetic life of tribal peoples, as well as the folk and popular arts of historical cultures. “High art” is the product of literate civilisations which do things like create cities, form states and found elaborate social institutions. “Great art” is high art raised to a higher power of self-consciousness and loosened from its traditionalist moorings. The great art traditions, among which Redner includes those of Greece-Rome, China-Japan, India, Islamic Persia and modern Europe, are the traditions which develop a sense of their own historicity and a self-reflexive language of aesthetic criticism, together with a strong sense of the individual artistic personality. (In cultures that support a great art tradition the notion of artistic personality begins to shape what it means to be an individual in the first place.)
Book 2 takes us right up to the threshold of the present, with the aesthetically fateful twentieth century just closed. The main fact of recent aesthetic history for Redner is that the great art tradition of modern Europe has been brought to a (somewhat definitive) end, having been subject in the course of the twentieth century to a severe devaluation of its highest aesthetic values; though multiple threads of the tradition are still there to be grasped, by century’s end no strong sense of art’s purpose or direction remains intact. Here is where Redner sees a role for criticism, which, as the argumentative apparatus of Book 3 tells us, is the concerted artful practice of analysis, interpretation and evaluation. Great criticism comes into existence – at least it did so at the height of the European great art tradition - when critics formed the vital point of interconnection between practicising artists and academic scholarship. A re-vitalised criticism is what aesthetic life is crying out for today given the pervasive sense that aesthetic value judgments have nothing but a flimsy subjective basis and the enormous question mark posed by the dominant cultural institution of our times – a homogenised culture industry of elephantine global proportions.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
The art of having something to say: Part 5 - Nestroy
For followers of the ongoing debate about the VCA taking place on this page – can anyone hear echoes of Sharman Pretty in the little interchange between A and B I’ve got down as my first quote from Nestroy? It seems the Melbourne University breadth agenda was invented in mid-nineteenth century Austria. If only the Dean of VCAM could be as clear in her fatuousness as this. Charming!
For those of you not in on the joke, Nestroy (1801 – 1862) was an actor-cum-satirist, who’s never caught on in English because half his characters speak a picturesque essentially untranslatable Austrian German. Everyone who’s studied German knows the tremendous verb “durchwursteln” which denotes the Austrian national trait of “muddling through” (literally “sausage-ing through”, or, if you like, “getting by in the shape of a sausage”. You know how when things go wrong in English they go “pear shaped”, well, in the glory-days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when they went right they went sausage-shaped.) Well, there are a whole lot of silly sausages sausage-ing through and coming out with some fairly porky untranslatable pronouncements in Nestroy.
Nestroy’s favourite two kinds of play are Possen (farces) and Travestien (travesties). Most come with songs – think Keating The Musical, but with more dialogue and the full range of comic plot devices that would probably be considered artificial and lame nowadays – servants insinuating themselves into balls by putting on disguise moustaches, Biblical heroes being seduced by men dressed up as women, clothes-baskets with stolen babies in them being mistaken for clothes-baskets with washing in them, etc etc.
For more of an idea, you need only have a look down a list of titles:
“Banishment from the Realm of Magic, or: 30 Years in the Life of a Lump”
“Freedom in a Cultural Backwater”
“There’s No Cure for Stupidity”
“The Girl from the Suburbs, or: Honesty Keeps You Keeping On”
“The Confused Magician, or: The Faithful and The Fickle”
“The Magic Journey into the Age of Chivalry, or: Embarrassing High-Spirits”
“Theatrical Tales of Love, Intrigue, Money and Stupidity”
“Big Chief Evening-breeze, or: The Gruesome Banquet”
“The Miller, The Collier and The Furniture Removalist, or: The Dream of the Shell and the Kernel”
Anyone who wants to try Nestroy out in English should look up “A Man Full of Nothing”, “The Talisman” and “Love Affairs and Wedding Bells”, translated – and “fondly tampered with” – by Max Knight and Joseph Fabry for Ungar in the 1960’s.
***
A: I’m a product of the school life. My education is tenuous but extremely widespread: a smattering of geography, a fraction of mathematics, a molecule of physics, just an idea of philosophy, a germ of medicine, and a pinch of the law.
B: How charming! You have learned much but not lost yourself in details. The mark of the true genius!
A: Ah, this explains why there are so many geniuses in the world!
Is there a better opportunity to make someone you hate unhappy than to marry him?
Man is a being who occupies the highest stage of creation, who even claims to have been made in the image of God – but God is probably not very flattered. Man is an insect, because he stings, bites, bugs you, gives you the creeps and is often for the birds. He’s also a fish, because he gets into deep water and does horrible things in cold blood. No less is man a reptile, for he’s a snake in the grass. He’s a bird, too, because he lives in the clouds, often makes a living out of thin air, and gets upset when he cannot fill the bill. And, finally, man is also a mammal, because he’s a sucker.
This is the moment I’ve anticipated and dreaded at the same time. I face it, if I may say so, with knee-shaking bravado and bold trembling.
It’d be great to be Fate. You could sit round picking your nose doing nothing all day and still get the credit for everything.
In a castle in the air even the janitor in the basement has a view of heaven.
It’s probably a will-o’-the-wisp, but I find it entertaining all the same.
It’s really a matter of the heart but all the heart does is flutter and dump problems into the lap of the head even if the head is up to its neck in trouble. I’m done in.
If you’re a man with seventeen diplomas on your wall, a science at the tip of each finger, five languages at the tip of your tongue, and an extra helping of ambition between your ears, you can expect fate to present you with a fat slice of the good life on a silver platter – that’s commonplace. But if your only diploma is from reform school, you have nothing at the tips of your fingers but your prints, no language but what you were born with, and your only ambition is to be unemployed – and you still haven’t given up the idea of getting rich . . . there’s something grandiose in that. To face Lady Luck like a cross between a pan-handler and a freedom fighter, to hold out your hand when you haven’t a leg to stand on, that is noble gall, an enviable itch. I appreciate myself – and why not?
For those of you not in on the joke, Nestroy (1801 – 1862) was an actor-cum-satirist, who’s never caught on in English because half his characters speak a picturesque essentially untranslatable Austrian German. Everyone who’s studied German knows the tremendous verb “durchwursteln” which denotes the Austrian national trait of “muddling through” (literally “sausage-ing through”, or, if you like, “getting by in the shape of a sausage”. You know how when things go wrong in English they go “pear shaped”, well, in the glory-days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when they went right they went sausage-shaped.) Well, there are a whole lot of silly sausages sausage-ing through and coming out with some fairly porky untranslatable pronouncements in Nestroy.
Nestroy’s favourite two kinds of play are Possen (farces) and Travestien (travesties). Most come with songs – think Keating The Musical, but with more dialogue and the full range of comic plot devices that would probably be considered artificial and lame nowadays – servants insinuating themselves into balls by putting on disguise moustaches, Biblical heroes being seduced by men dressed up as women, clothes-baskets with stolen babies in them being mistaken for clothes-baskets with washing in them, etc etc.
For more of an idea, you need only have a look down a list of titles:
“Banishment from the Realm of Magic, or: 30 Years in the Life of a Lump”
“Freedom in a Cultural Backwater”
“There’s No Cure for Stupidity”
“The Girl from the Suburbs, or: Honesty Keeps You Keeping On”
“The Confused Magician, or: The Faithful and The Fickle”
“The Magic Journey into the Age of Chivalry, or: Embarrassing High-Spirits”
“Theatrical Tales of Love, Intrigue, Money and Stupidity”
“Big Chief Evening-breeze, or: The Gruesome Banquet”
“The Miller, The Collier and The Furniture Removalist, or: The Dream of the Shell and the Kernel”
Anyone who wants to try Nestroy out in English should look up “A Man Full of Nothing”, “The Talisman” and “Love Affairs and Wedding Bells”, translated – and “fondly tampered with” – by Max Knight and Joseph Fabry for Ungar in the 1960’s.
***
A: I’m a product of the school life. My education is tenuous but extremely widespread: a smattering of geography, a fraction of mathematics, a molecule of physics, just an idea of philosophy, a germ of medicine, and a pinch of the law.
B: How charming! You have learned much but not lost yourself in details. The mark of the true genius!
A: Ah, this explains why there are so many geniuses in the world!
Is there a better opportunity to make someone you hate unhappy than to marry him?
Man is a being who occupies the highest stage of creation, who even claims to have been made in the image of God – but God is probably not very flattered. Man is an insect, because he stings, bites, bugs you, gives you the creeps and is often for the birds. He’s also a fish, because he gets into deep water and does horrible things in cold blood. No less is man a reptile, for he’s a snake in the grass. He’s a bird, too, because he lives in the clouds, often makes a living out of thin air, and gets upset when he cannot fill the bill. And, finally, man is also a mammal, because he’s a sucker.
This is the moment I’ve anticipated and dreaded at the same time. I face it, if I may say so, with knee-shaking bravado and bold trembling.
It’d be great to be Fate. You could sit round picking your nose doing nothing all day and still get the credit for everything.
In a castle in the air even the janitor in the basement has a view of heaven.
It’s probably a will-o’-the-wisp, but I find it entertaining all the same.
It’s really a matter of the heart but all the heart does is flutter and dump problems into the lap of the head even if the head is up to its neck in trouble. I’m done in.
If you’re a man with seventeen diplomas on your wall, a science at the tip of each finger, five languages at the tip of your tongue, and an extra helping of ambition between your ears, you can expect fate to present you with a fat slice of the good life on a silver platter – that’s commonplace. But if your only diploma is from reform school, you have nothing at the tips of your fingers but your prints, no language but what you were born with, and your only ambition is to be unemployed – and you still haven’t given up the idea of getting rich . . . there’s something grandiose in that. To face Lady Luck like a cross between a pan-handler and a freedom fighter, to hold out your hand when you haven’t a leg to stand on, that is noble gall, an enviable itch. I appreciate myself – and why not?
Thursday, October 15, 2009
The art of having something to say: Part 4 - Kraus
Seeing that the fifth of the four reader comments that The Great Stage has elicited so far was spoken in praise of the Karl Kraus quote at the top of last month’s big VCA piece, here, mid-week, are some more Kraus translations, with the promise of reams more if someone can find me a publisher:
The aphorism never coves itself with truth, it is either half true, or one-and-a-half times true.
Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution.
Why does many a man write? Because he does not possess enough character not to write.
Ethics is running up against the limits of language.
Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.
The world has been defeaned by deadly intonation. It is my conviction that events no longer come to pass, that instead clichés do the entire work of their own accord. Or if events are supposed to come to pass all the same, without being scared off by clichés, then they will cease once the clichés are shattered. The matter is befouled by the language. Our time stinks of its phraseology.
Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper, from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts of our machines.
Where will I find the time not to read so much? . . .
Nationalism – that love which binds me to the numbskulls of my nation, to those that p*ss upon my ways and desecrate my language.
For the first time in the world SHE wants it all and HE wants nothing but her, the gulf between the sexes widens, making room for a whole lot of misery and moralism.
There are metaphors in the language of love too. Those who are illiterate call them perversions and abhor poetry.
Sex can be brought into connection with everything in heaven and earth, with holy religion and sweaty armpits, with the music of the spheres and hurdy-gurdies, with prohibitions and lumpy skin, with the soul and with corsetry. One gives these linkages the name perversions. They have this to be said for them – that they put you in possession of the whole thing when you only have part at your disposal.
The greatest ill in the world is the force impelling one to fritter away one’s inner vitality on material things that are supposed to serve that inner vitality.
If you’re getting panicky in the slaughterhouse of middle-class life, maybe you should grasp the opportunity and desert to the war.
If someone steals something from you, don’t bother going to the police, who won’t be interested, nor to a psychoanalyst, who will only be interested in one thing, that it is actually you who have stolen something.
The egghead who can’t pass by a single one of the riddles of the world without re-stating the riddle as if it were nothing but his humble opinion wins a reputation for modesty. The artist who turns his thoughts ecstatically to something as inconspicuous as a trellis or a cobblestone is considered a smartarse.
The report’s distortion of reality is the truly faithful report on reality.
Journalism, which has driven Spirit into its own stall, has in the meantime taken command of its pastures. The hack would like to be a full-blown published author. Selections of occasional pieces appear. One is stunned that the book-binders don’t find them going to pieces in their hands during production. Bread is baked out of crumbs. What is it though that makes the hack hope for attention from posterity? Continued interest in the material he “selects”. When a man blabs on about eternal themes shouldn’t he merit being heard for all eternity? This fallacy is journalism’s living element. It always has big ideas within its reach; in its hands eternity itself becomes topical; if it weren’t that eternity just as easily becomes an anachronism too if you let a journalist near it. The artist gives shape to daily events, to the very hour and minute. The occasion for his work may be as limited and conditioned as you like by time and place, his artwork is all the more limitless and free the further it bears itself beyond that occasion. It ages confidently in the present; it rejuvenates itself over decades.
Language is the divining-rod that discovers the well-springs of thought.
The thought is out there but it doesn’t occur to anyone. The prism of material life has diffused it, it lies scattered about in its linguistic elements: - the artist binds them together in the thought.
Woe betide an age in which art doesn’t make the earth less cocksure of itself, in which the artist and not mankind faints before the abyss separating the artist from mankind!
Culture comes to an end when barbarians erupt out of its midst.
The aphorism never coves itself with truth, it is either half true, or one-and-a-half times true.
Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution.
Why does many a man write? Because he does not possess enough character not to write.
Ethics is running up against the limits of language.
Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.
The world has been defeaned by deadly intonation. It is my conviction that events no longer come to pass, that instead clichés do the entire work of their own accord. Or if events are supposed to come to pass all the same, without being scared off by clichés, then they will cease once the clichés are shattered. The matter is befouled by the language. Our time stinks of its phraseology.
Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper, from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts of our machines.
Where will I find the time not to read so much? . . .
Nationalism – that love which binds me to the numbskulls of my nation, to those that p*ss upon my ways and desecrate my language.
For the first time in the world SHE wants it all and HE wants nothing but her, the gulf between the sexes widens, making room for a whole lot of misery and moralism.
There are metaphors in the language of love too. Those who are illiterate call them perversions and abhor poetry.
Sex can be brought into connection with everything in heaven and earth, with holy religion and sweaty armpits, with the music of the spheres and hurdy-gurdies, with prohibitions and lumpy skin, with the soul and with corsetry. One gives these linkages the name perversions. They have this to be said for them – that they put you in possession of the whole thing when you only have part at your disposal.
The greatest ill in the world is the force impelling one to fritter away one’s inner vitality on material things that are supposed to serve that inner vitality.
If you’re getting panicky in the slaughterhouse of middle-class life, maybe you should grasp the opportunity and desert to the war.
If someone steals something from you, don’t bother going to the police, who won’t be interested, nor to a psychoanalyst, who will only be interested in one thing, that it is actually you who have stolen something.
The egghead who can’t pass by a single one of the riddles of the world without re-stating the riddle as if it were nothing but his humble opinion wins a reputation for modesty. The artist who turns his thoughts ecstatically to something as inconspicuous as a trellis or a cobblestone is considered a smartarse.
The report’s distortion of reality is the truly faithful report on reality.
Journalism, which has driven Spirit into its own stall, has in the meantime taken command of its pastures. The hack would like to be a full-blown published author. Selections of occasional pieces appear. One is stunned that the book-binders don’t find them going to pieces in their hands during production. Bread is baked out of crumbs. What is it though that makes the hack hope for attention from posterity? Continued interest in the material he “selects”. When a man blabs on about eternal themes shouldn’t he merit being heard for all eternity? This fallacy is journalism’s living element. It always has big ideas within its reach; in its hands eternity itself becomes topical; if it weren’t that eternity just as easily becomes an anachronism too if you let a journalist near it. The artist gives shape to daily events, to the very hour and minute. The occasion for his work may be as limited and conditioned as you like by time and place, his artwork is all the more limitless and free the further it bears itself beyond that occasion. It ages confidently in the present; it rejuvenates itself over decades.
Language is the divining-rod that discovers the well-springs of thought.
The thought is out there but it doesn’t occur to anyone. The prism of material life has diffused it, it lies scattered about in its linguistic elements: - the artist binds them together in the thought.
Woe betide an age in which art doesn’t make the earth less cocksure of itself, in which the artist and not mankind faints before the abyss separating the artist from mankind!
Culture comes to an end when barbarians erupt out of its midst.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
The Science and Politics of Global Warming: Actualities and Possibilities
Two Public Lectures – no.’s 11 and 12 in the series “Global Warming: Science and Politics in Troubled Times”
Delivered, Trades Hall, Carlton, June 8 and 15, 2009
***Lecture No.11***
In which are set out more and more far-reaching considerations about modern society’s faith in science. The grim actualities of the relationship between science and politics summarised.
***Lecture No.12***
In which further grim climate change realities are painted in vivid chiaroscuro.
(To be followed shortly by:
***Lecture No.13***
In which the manifold possibilities for change in Australian society’s response to climate change and in the relationship between science and politics are canvassed.)
There were, you’ll remember, to be two parts to the penultimate section of the course dealing with climate change contrarians, the first revolving around the issue of knowledge and authority, the second revolving around the whole issue of faith in science – whether it’s right to say there is an element of quasi-religious faith involved in doing science, whether, as many of the contrarians say, climate science is particularly faith-based and whether the attitude to the deliverances of climate science in society at large is worryingly (pathologically) faith-based. It’s that last aspect of the problem I want to turn to begin with today – whether the attitude to the deliverances of climate science in society at large is worryingly (pathologically) faith-based. It brings us back to the very start of the course, to the man who, I said right at the beginning, sets out the problems of science and politics as they relate to global warming in a wide-ranging and incisive way, John Lanchester. Here he is again, you’ve already heard this and probably you’ve read the article it comes from in the meantime:
“When we come to sum up how we got to this point, there is one other factor to add to the politicisation of science and the reporting of science. It is a deeper, murkier consideration, and it bears on the way our society is in thrall to science and at the same time only partly understands it. Our material culture is based on science in a way so profound that our attitude to it approaches a kind of faith. Arthur C. Clarke said that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ This is a remark beloved of sc-fi fans, and endlessly quoted in discussions of what might happen if there were ever to be contact between humans and aliens (or time travel etc.) Its real sting is that it is a description of the world we already inhabit. Electric light and power, and tv, and computers, and fridges, not to mention cars and planes and lasers and CD players and dialysis machines and wireless networking and synthetic materials, are things we take on trust: we don’t know how they work, but we’re happy to benefit from using them. We may have a rough understanding of scientific method, and even a rough Bill Brysonish sense of some of the science involved, but that is about it; our attitude contains significant components of faith and trust and incomprehension, while at the same time we are grateful for the wonders modern science has brought us.
Our faith-based contentment with science has been challenged before, most particularly by the invention of nuclear weapons. But with global warming, science is bringing us catastrophic news, and is doing so, moreover, on the basis of predictions. . . about the future which demand urgent and radical action in the present. It’s not like being told about some scientific breakthrough, waiting a few years, and then having the breakthrough manifest itself in the form of a technology that gradually becomes more useful over time. The issue of global warming is the opposite of that: we are required to act on the basis of the faith in science which is one of the fundamental underpinnings of our society, but the faith has never been made quite so explicit before, and the need to act radically, urgently and expensively on the basis of scientific models is testing that faith to the full and beyond." J. Lanchester, “Warmer, Warmer” London Review of Books, March 22, 2007
There are several very simple points in there which are useful in seeing how contrarians get the wrong end of the stick when talking about global warming as the source of a new religious dogmatism, as well as a point about how the specialised, theory-bound, rarefied world of science relates to the wider social world. The first point is that the attitude you might take towards the content of climate science (or any science) – the amount of faith involved in your attitude to it – will differ markedly depending on whether you’re a climate scientist or not, and probably it will differ depending on whether you’re a scientifically educated or a non-scientifically educated member of the general public. The further you get from the field itself, the greater the element of faith involved. Nor is the faith of the non-scientifically educated members of the general public unwarranted: it’s a consequence of the fact that we live in a scientifically and technologically advanced society which has a certain division of labour, between scientific experts and non-experts. Unless we want to junk the idea of scientifically and technologically advanced society and unless we want to take the trouble to educate everyone to the point where they have a robust scientifically-independent mind of their own, then faith in the deliverances of science is going to be a cultural given. That’s a point that Lanchester is making in this passage and in the article at large. But there’s an equally great point relating particularly to climate science – the point that the faith we as a society are implicitly being asked to show in its deliverances is not something separate from the belief (amounting sometimes to no more than passive acceptance, sometimes to active appreciation) that we manifest in our everyday dealings with the ensembles of equipment. The faith we as a society of non-experts are being implicitly asked to show in the deliverances of climate science is, Lanchester is saying, the darker side of a quite ordinary everyday faith.
Can we get a bit further with this issue of faith in science? Let me at least say something briefly about the issue of faith in science among scientists – the issue of whether scientists themselves, or “the scientific enterprise” as you might loosely call it, requires any noteworthy manifestation of faith. Rather than saying something myself, I let Oreskes, who in a way has been another of the heroes of this course, say something, and I’ll see what I can get out of it:
“No scientific conclusion can ever be proven, and new evidence may lead scientists to change their views, but it is no more a ‘belief’ to say that earth is heating up than to say that continents move, that germs cause disease, that DNA carries hereditary information, and that HIV causes AIDS. You can always find someone, somewhere, to disagree, but these conclusions represent our best current understandings and therefore our best basis for reasoned action.” - Oreskes, “How do we know we’re not wrong?"
The first thing she says there may seem rather surprising: “No scientific conclusion can ever be proven.” Isn’t the hallmark of scientific conclusions that they’re proven – you might ask. Or that they’re backed up with rigorous experimental evidence? Perhaps Oreskes would be better off saying “no scientific conclusion can ever be definitively proven.” Let’s take it that that’s what she means. Why can’t scientific conclusions be definitively proven? Because of what she says next – because new evidence could be discovered or new theories developed which put the old theories in the shade or put old evidence in a new broader context. All of you who are versed in the history of science will know that that’s how paradigm shifts in the sciences often occur – by re-contextualising old theories and old evidence. Classically that’s what happened in the twentieth century in the switchover from classical to post-classical physics, from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics. The old Newtonian laws weren’t abandoned, abrogated or declared invalid. Instead they were recognised as limit cases of more general laws, applicable to some – a very large number but not all – the phenomena of physical reality.
Why is it important for us that scientific conclusions can’t ever be definitively proven? Because it means that there is an element of something that might, with qualification, be described as faith in science that’s native to the enterprise itself. And it means that the contrarian argument that “climate science is based on quasi-religious faith” contains a grain of truth, unfortunately just not the truth the contrarians think it contains. All science, I’m saying, contains an element of faith, so naturally climate science does too – though it would be putting it far too strongly to say all science is based on faith. The question then becomes what this element of faith is? And answering that question clearly is important or else the contrarians can get away with the argument that the element of faith in operation in climate science because it’s a science like any other is actually a sign that’s it’s a corrupt science or a pseudo-science that’s been hijacked by political agitators who believe religiously that Western Civilisation is evil. (Even more generally, answering the question what the element of faith is is important because without a clear answer Christian naifs the world over are going to be able to argue that, if what they believe on faith is essentially the same as what people believe on a scientific basis, then there’s no difference between taking the Bible literally and taking the facts of Nature literally. (In fact the Christian naifs I’m thinking of usually go further than that. Having purportedly established that the scientific evaluative standpoint is just as faith-based as their own evaluative standpoint, they assert the superiority of what they believe on faith, because their faith-based belief system gives the world a coherent and striking metaphysical and ethical meaning, which other purportedly faith-based belief systems like the sciences can’t generate and which they in general don’t see it as their job to generate.)
I ask the question again: What is this element of faith that becomes manifest in the fact that scientific conclusions can never be definitively proven? A large part of it is the faith that science is usable, precisely faith in science’s application to practical situations in spite of its non-definitive nature – the faith namely that our assessment of the scientific facts is not going to be completely overthrown any time soon and that our assessment says enough about the way the world is in reality to enable us to act in the world.
Friday, October 9, 2009
The art of having something to say: Part 3
Proverbi Napoletani
Working on another thumping climate change piece this week, so instead of a huge wall of interpretation, here are some more short sayings, this time from magnificent sordid Naples, city of mother-love, false priests and sympathetic animals. CS
Ammore sincero dura na vita e renne allere.
Love that is sincere lasts a lifetime and fills the lover with high spirits.
Chi tene mamma, non chiange.
If you have a mother, you have no need to cry.
‘E figlie so’ piezze e’ core.
Sons are like pieces of the heart.
‘O figlio muto ‘a mamma ‘o ‘ntenne.
A son who holds his tongue is understood by his mother.
P’ ‘a sora zita ‘o frato è nu miezu marito.
To a sexy sister a brother is already half a husband.
Quann’ ‘e figlie fottono ‘e pate so’ futtute.
Once the children are f*cking, the parents are f*cked.
‘O parlà chiaro è fatto pe l’amice.
Clear speech was made for friends.
Si nun vuo’ perdere l’amico, nun ‘o mettere â prova.
If you don’t want to lose a friend, don’t put him to the test.
È viecchio sulo chi more.
Don’t say you’re old till you’re dead.
‘O viecchio ha da murì, ‘o giovane pô murì.
An old man must die, a young man can die.
‘A monaca d’ ‘e Camaldole muscio nun ‘o vuleva, ma tuosto dice che la faceva male.
The Camaldolean nun said she didn’t like it floppy, but when it was hard it hurt.
Cazzo ‘ntustato, sempe rispettato.
A stiff pr*ck is always respected.
‘A vita è n’affacciata ‘e fenesta.
Life is short, like a glance out the window.
Dicette ‘a morte: - Se ‘n Catania vaie, ‘n Catania vengo.
Death said – If you’re going to Catania, I’ll come to Catania.
Casa accunciata, morte apparicchiata.
An orderly house is a mortuary waiting to happen.
Chi ‘int’ ‘a chiesa s’ammacca ‘o pietto ‘e ponie, è fauzo e demonio.
He who beats his breast in church is false and is a demon.
Chi nun rispetta ‘o Criatore, nun pô rispettà ‘a criatura.
He who has no respect for the Creator has no respect for His creatures.
Dicette Dio ‘nfaccia a Dio: - Lasammo fa’ a Dio.
Even God sometimes turns to God and says – Bah, leave it to God.
Working on another thumping climate change piece this week, so instead of a huge wall of interpretation, here are some more short sayings, this time from magnificent sordid Naples, city of mother-love, false priests and sympathetic animals. CS
Ammore sincero dura na vita e renne allere.
Love that is sincere lasts a lifetime and fills the lover with high spirits.
Chi tene mamma, non chiange.
If you have a mother, you have no need to cry.
‘E figlie so’ piezze e’ core.
Sons are like pieces of the heart.
‘O figlio muto ‘a mamma ‘o ‘ntenne.
A son who holds his tongue is understood by his mother.
P’ ‘a sora zita ‘o frato è nu miezu marito.
To a sexy sister a brother is already half a husband.
Quann’ ‘e figlie fottono ‘e pate so’ futtute.
Once the children are f*cking, the parents are f*cked.
‘O parlà chiaro è fatto pe l’amice.
Clear speech was made for friends.
Si nun vuo’ perdere l’amico, nun ‘o mettere â prova.
If you don’t want to lose a friend, don’t put him to the test.
È viecchio sulo chi more.
Don’t say you’re old till you’re dead.
‘O viecchio ha da murì, ‘o giovane pô murì.
An old man must die, a young man can die.
‘A monaca d’ ‘e Camaldole muscio nun ‘o vuleva, ma tuosto dice che la faceva male.
The Camaldolean nun said she didn’t like it floppy, but when it was hard it hurt.
Cazzo ‘ntustato, sempe rispettato.
A stiff pr*ck is always respected.
‘A vita è n’affacciata ‘e fenesta.
Life is short, like a glance out the window.
Dicette ‘a morte: - Se ‘n Catania vaie, ‘n Catania vengo.
Death said – If you’re going to Catania, I’ll come to Catania.
Casa accunciata, morte apparicchiata.
An orderly house is a mortuary waiting to happen.
Chi ‘int’ ‘a chiesa s’ammacca ‘o pietto ‘e ponie, è fauzo e demonio.
He who beats his breast in church is false and is a demon.
Chi nun rispetta ‘o Criatore, nun pô rispettà ‘a criatura.
He who has no respect for the Creator has no respect for His creatures.
Dicette Dio ‘nfaccia a Dio: - Lasammo fa’ a Dio.
Even God sometimes turns to God and says – Bah, leave it to God.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
The art of having something to say: Part 2
19 proverb-like utterances from Herr Nietzsche. Work them into conversation at your own risk. Commentary is surely superfluous.
Cynicism is the only form in which mean souls touch honesty.
In declining cultures only the actor arouses great enthusiasm.
That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
An animal which could speak said: Humanity is a prejudice of which we animals at least are free.
He who possesses little is so much the less possessed. Praised by a moderate poverty.
Whosoever has at some time built a new heaven has found the strength for it only in his own hell.
All truth is simple: Is that not a compound lie?
Without music, life would be a mistake.
To have to combat one’s instincts – that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one.
He who despises himself still nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.
We are from the very beginning illogical and thus unjust beings and can recognise this: this is one of the greatest and most irresolvable discords of existence.
He who cannot find greatness in God will never find it. He must either create it or deny it.
Terrible experiences make one wonder whether he who experiences them is not something terrible.
The golden fleece of self-love is proof against cudgel blows but not against pinpricks.
Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; however, if the melody has not reached its end, it would also not have reached its goal. A parable.
A joke is an epitaph on an emotion.
We possess art lest we perish of the truth.
In every religion, the religious person is the exception.
The same drive which calls art into life as the completion and perfection of existence, which seduces the living into living on, also brought into being the Olympian world in which the Hellenic "will" holds up before itself a transfiguring mirror. So the gods justify the life of men be living it themselves - the only adequate theodicy!
Cynicism is the only form in which mean souls touch honesty.
In declining cultures only the actor arouses great enthusiasm.
That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
An animal which could speak said: Humanity is a prejudice of which we animals at least are free.
He who possesses little is so much the less possessed. Praised by a moderate poverty.
Whosoever has at some time built a new heaven has found the strength for it only in his own hell.
All truth is simple: Is that not a compound lie?
Without music, life would be a mistake.
To have to combat one’s instincts – that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one.
He who despises himself still nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.
We are from the very beginning illogical and thus unjust beings and can recognise this: this is one of the greatest and most irresolvable discords of existence.
He who cannot find greatness in God will never find it. He must either create it or deny it.
Terrible experiences make one wonder whether he who experiences them is not something terrible.
The golden fleece of self-love is proof against cudgel blows but not against pinpricks.
Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; however, if the melody has not reached its end, it would also not have reached its goal. A parable.
A joke is an epitaph on an emotion.
We possess art lest we perish of the truth.
In every religion, the religious person is the exception.
The same drive which calls art into life as the completion and perfection of existence, which seduces the living into living on, also brought into being the Olympian world in which the Hellenic "will" holds up before itself a transfiguring mirror. So the gods justify the life of men be living it themselves - the only adequate theodicy!
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Review: Corinne Grant at the Comic's Lounge
To one side of the conformism of public and workaday life, Australians are capable of much wry fun. They acknowledge many of the better jokes made at their expense, not just the cheap ones made compulsively by ferrets like Rove. At the Comic's Lounge in North Melbourne the better jokes can be heard. Last night I felt as if I heard some of them, told by Corinne Grant and Adam Richards, the secret of whose art seems to me to be in positioning themselves to one side, though never too far to one side, of the comic and workaday conventions to which comedians and the rest of us conform.
On the tram north from the city, two likely lads tried out some malign humour of their own on me. Were they speeding? Not in the literal sense of the word. The no. 57 tram to West Maribyrnong was taking them to the showgrounds for a party at that slow speed Melbourne trams like best, somewhere between walking and cycling pace. With a druggy nonchalance, one of them asked me what my name was. When told, he informed me I was lying: with a nose like mine my name had to be Pinocchio. I told him it was a dud of a joke and asked whether he had another. His friend did, but it turned out to be worse: was I some kind of f*cking emo? If not, why was I wearing all that black? My nemeses had bright knitted tea-cosies on their numbskulls, the ones with the long dangly bits at the side – ideal for hanging them with, I thought; I said – couldn’t they see the blue shirt beneath my inky cloak and – two substandard jokes on the trot did they want to have one last try or quit without further disgracing themselves? Next, something interesting happened. They realised I was ready with half-decent comebacks and wasn’t going to pretend to ignore how obnoxious they were being like everyone else on the tram. A little wave of universal bruverhood rippled across the scene. For the rest of the trip we played a game of ethnic 20 questions (I tried to guess what part of the world they came from, they tried the same out on me); they complimented me and my date on our respective choice of companions for the evening; they even asked for invitations to the wedding. I said they’d only be getting invites if they could guarantee they wouldn’t wear woolen bonnets. Not to be outdone, the lovely CW (my date) chimed in – maybe they should promise that they would wear the knitwear, so the wedding guests would know when the Moroccan village idiots had arrived. The village idiots doubled over with laughter, acknowledging they’d been dealt a couple of palpable comic hits. I shook CW’s hand, then theirs, told them not to f*ck too much sh*t up at the Showgrounds and got down in front of the North Melbourne Townhall. As the tram rounded the corner into Abbotsford St, village idiot no. 1 was hanging from the handrails and swinging his feet up into the faces of those around him.
We enter the Comic’s Lounge and head upstairs. Our names are crossed off a list and we push out into the lounge bit – a red carpeted space with some couches, a bar and lots of mirrors. The comedy takes place through some swinging saloon doors, in a room with a low ceiling big enough to host a big Greek wedding. There are trestle-tables at the back and round numbers for more intimate gatherings up the front. On all of them there’s plenty of Comic’s Lounge paraphernalia. About the only annoying thing about the place is the way it spruiks itself before, during and after the show.
. . . Enter Corinne Grant. She opens with a routine about "LOL" – don’t stick it at the end of a text message saying you heard your friend’s grandma died. Grant has already extracted from someone in the front row the confession that they thought LOL meant “lots of love”. Clattering pearls of laughter. Grant is clearly pleased – she hunches forward as though she’s got stomach cramps, a deliberately forced grin on her face – the compulsiveness of public laughter itself seems to be getting a grilling. Before handing over to Gab Rossi for his bracket, she’s up on the comic heights twice more. The first thing in her sights up there are aging hippies who make their own soap (out of squeezed together leftovers, creating what she calls “a pube sandwich”). Then it’s the turn of school-age white gangsta rappers on PT (whom she forces herself not to laugh at in case their fragile adolescent d*cks drop off). Let’s not say Rossi lowers the tone – the tone isn’t that high to start with. (One of his opening gags is “I woke up this morning and saw a great pair of tits – and I thought – I gotta lose some weight.”) But Grant is in another league. She’s the unpretentious wise-cracking blonde, unbuttoned on most topics, straight-laced about a few – the girl-next-door raised to the power of 10. Rossi by contrast is the patriotic male slob, the sub-normal bloke whose one character trait – not necessarily a redeeming one – is that once he’s poured out the slop-bucket of his mind in public, he has the rudimentary honesty to own the contents. Half-way through his bracket he regales us with his reasons for being a tea-totaler. The first is that he doesn’t need to drink to get himself to the point where he’ll flop his chop in public – give him $2 and he’ll do it anyway. As funny as that is, it’s a touch too consciously low-brow. (A paradox for Australian humorists: though obscenity is one of the most powerful kinds of subversiveness, what are you subverting if you’re playing that card to an audience for which obscenity itself is de rigueur?)
On the tram north from the city, two likely lads tried out some malign humour of their own on me. Were they speeding? Not in the literal sense of the word. The no. 57 tram to West Maribyrnong was taking them to the showgrounds for a party at that slow speed Melbourne trams like best, somewhere between walking and cycling pace. With a druggy nonchalance, one of them asked me what my name was. When told, he informed me I was lying: with a nose like mine my name had to be Pinocchio. I told him it was a dud of a joke and asked whether he had another. His friend did, but it turned out to be worse: was I some kind of f*cking emo? If not, why was I wearing all that black? My nemeses had bright knitted tea-cosies on their numbskulls, the ones with the long dangly bits at the side – ideal for hanging them with, I thought; I said – couldn’t they see the blue shirt beneath my inky cloak and – two substandard jokes on the trot did they want to have one last try or quit without further disgracing themselves? Next, something interesting happened. They realised I was ready with half-decent comebacks and wasn’t going to pretend to ignore how obnoxious they were being like everyone else on the tram. A little wave of universal bruverhood rippled across the scene. For the rest of the trip we played a game of ethnic 20 questions (I tried to guess what part of the world they came from, they tried the same out on me); they complimented me and my date on our respective choice of companions for the evening; they even asked for invitations to the wedding. I said they’d only be getting invites if they could guarantee they wouldn’t wear woolen bonnets. Not to be outdone, the lovely CW (my date) chimed in – maybe they should promise that they would wear the knitwear, so the wedding guests would know when the Moroccan village idiots had arrived. The village idiots doubled over with laughter, acknowledging they’d been dealt a couple of palpable comic hits. I shook CW’s hand, then theirs, told them not to f*ck too much sh*t up at the Showgrounds and got down in front of the North Melbourne Townhall. As the tram rounded the corner into Abbotsford St, village idiot no. 1 was hanging from the handrails and swinging his feet up into the faces of those around him.
We enter the Comic’s Lounge and head upstairs. Our names are crossed off a list and we push out into the lounge bit – a red carpeted space with some couches, a bar and lots of mirrors. The comedy takes place through some swinging saloon doors, in a room with a low ceiling big enough to host a big Greek wedding. There are trestle-tables at the back and round numbers for more intimate gatherings up the front. On all of them there’s plenty of Comic’s Lounge paraphernalia. About the only annoying thing about the place is the way it spruiks itself before, during and after the show.
. . . Enter Corinne Grant. She opens with a routine about "LOL" – don’t stick it at the end of a text message saying you heard your friend’s grandma died. Grant has already extracted from someone in the front row the confession that they thought LOL meant “lots of love”. Clattering pearls of laughter. Grant is clearly pleased – she hunches forward as though she’s got stomach cramps, a deliberately forced grin on her face – the compulsiveness of public laughter itself seems to be getting a grilling. Before handing over to Gab Rossi for his bracket, she’s up on the comic heights twice more. The first thing in her sights up there are aging hippies who make their own soap (out of squeezed together leftovers, creating what she calls “a pube sandwich”). Then it’s the turn of school-age white gangsta rappers on PT (whom she forces herself not to laugh at in case their fragile adolescent d*cks drop off). Let’s not say Rossi lowers the tone – the tone isn’t that high to start with. (One of his opening gags is “I woke up this morning and saw a great pair of tits – and I thought – I gotta lose some weight.”) But Grant is in another league. She’s the unpretentious wise-cracking blonde, unbuttoned on most topics, straight-laced about a few – the girl-next-door raised to the power of 10. Rossi by contrast is the patriotic male slob, the sub-normal bloke whose one character trait – not necessarily a redeeming one – is that once he’s poured out the slop-bucket of his mind in public, he has the rudimentary honesty to own the contents. Half-way through his bracket he regales us with his reasons for being a tea-totaler. The first is that he doesn’t need to drink to get himself to the point where he’ll flop his chop in public – give him $2 and he’ll do it anyway. As funny as that is, it’s a touch too consciously low-brow. (A paradox for Australian humorists: though obscenity is one of the most powerful kinds of subversiveness, what are you subverting if you’re playing that card to an audience for which obscenity itself is de rigueur?)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
