eyes and the look

Dear Zsa Zsa,

I'm an eye man. What most immediately and decisively attracts me are your eyes. It's not the color or the shape of your eyes, and it's not your eyebrows or lashes (I sometimes don't even notice any of that). It's the look in your eyes.

I've been reading a lot of phenomenology lately. In the French tradition, Sartre's famous account of "the look" (or "the gaze") has been deeply significant and problematic. Sartre seems to most interpreters to be saying that when a subject/consciousness fixes a look upon an Other, the look reduces the Other to the status of an object. The look sees the other as something.

There are some obvious examples. The cis-hetero-masculine-chauvinist-misogynist look objectifies a woman as a sex object, even as nothing but some part of her body. He sees her as, e.g., "a piece of ass."

One of my favorite academic philosophers, Geraldine Finn, wrote some terrific stuff about the masculine look ("gaze") that, along with stuff by other feminists, has made this a serious personal issue for me, for the last 25 years or so now. I am acutely aware of the power of the c-h-m-c-m gaze in our visual culture, and how it affects me as a basically cis male. I do objectify others' bodies (I think all of us do, really), but I stop myself in it whenever I find myself doing it. I feel extremely awkward and guilty about it too. It's a constant effort to undo the effects of patriarchy on a cis-male body, if that's something you're wanting to do.

Despite the troubles with looks, I'm still looking. Most of the time, I look others in the eyes. (I believe I make "eye contact" more than most people. I'm not sure why I do that.) It's looking others in the eyes that almost always first attracts me to them.

What I see is not your eyes, but, I'd say, your look -- the "look in your eyes." Now, if I can actually see the look in your eyes, that suggests that what I see is your looking -- your looking at me. So I see in your eyes the expression of your perception. I see your intentional directedness toward me, the "ray" of your attention. To some degree, I see your looking, I enter into a dialogical intertwining that is characteristic of all visual perception, per Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (And it's interesting that he discusses the way "things" enter this dialogue, like the way painters are addressed by landscapes or bowls of peaches or whatever, and does not discuss the way we enter dialogue by looking each other in the eye. At least, I can't recall any passage where he does.)

My attraction is so often allured by that look in your eyes. I see, as though in a reflection, an attraction that is like mine. And sometimes I see a "light," a "glint," or a "sparkle" in your eyes. That expresses the affect of your intention, and your passion, or at least addresses me as passion would.

I could be wrong. You could be deceiving me. I suppose you can fake passion, play-act the shining eyes of an attraction you only want me to believe you have -- for whatever reason you might have. But I can never be entirely wrong. Your eyes shine or they don't, and when I see that look in your eyes, it tells me something, even if it is still inarticulate or inchoate, and even if I read more into it, or if it is fleeting.

(I could similarly write about other looks in others' eyes: the dull look of incomprehension or boredom, the empty look of antipathy, the abyssal look of sociopathic contempt, for instance. But that look is a lot more fun to contemplate, and fits well with the phenomenological/existentialist tradition of interpreting our looking as sexual maneuvers.)

all fun and games until somebody loses an eye

Dear Zsa Zsa,

So far, I've written about play as though it can only be good. That's obviously not true. Play can harm people, because what is play to one can be deadly serious to another, and because play can be destructive. Children are tremendously destructive, after all.

A story of my childhood often comes to mind whenever the subjects of play or games come up. It's a story I tell in my classes, to provide an example to consider the merits and limits of game-playing as a model of various other activities (including ethical conduct of a  professional).

In fifth grade, my cis-male-gendered friends and I played a game during recess, based on a common game boys play, where a “runner” tries to run from one base to another while two “basemen” try to tag out the runner. Basically, it’s two people playing catch, while someone else runs between them trying to avoid being tagged. It's fun for a while, but we started to get a little bored with it. What kids do when that happens is innovate.

We got to thinking: In baseball, a base runner struck by a ball is out. We had already incorporated this rule into our base-running game, so it was a simple matter to extrapolate from this rule, and come up with a game in which seven or eight of us would stand in a line against the brick wall of the school, and one or two would throw a baseball at us trying to hit us and thus tag us “out.” Sometimes we used a tennis ball, or a softball, and a couple times even a hockey puck, but for the most part we threw baseballs at one another.

The line of targets was permitted to jump, duck, or turn to one side or another. The more of us were lined up against the wall, the less space there was for evasive action, so more of us were tagged out in the first few rounds. The last man unstruck by a baseball was the winner, and the prize was the option of being a "pitcher" for the next round.

After some trial and error, we added a rule that the ball had to be aimed at the knee or lower.

I want to emphasize: No one with any supervisory responsibility ever tried to stop us from playing this game. We only stopped playing after the terrible incident when Ted Saleh struck Mark Brebberman with intent to injure. It was somehow related to the Hundred Days War, believe it or not.

(My loveliest Lauren's favorite part of this story is that we were the misfit and castoff kids. While the cool and athletic kids got to use the grassy field to play football or whatever during recess, we were relegated to the asphalt slab and the thin strip of lawn by that brick school wall. So while the supposedly tough kids played touch football on grass, we supposedly wimpy and dorky kids played on blacktop. My shins were permanently black with bruises and I always had scabs on my knees.)

There's a lesson in that, I guess. I also remember it fondly, which tells us all a thing or two about my sense of play and its limits.

play and desire

Dear Zsa Zsa,

It was Jürgen ("Mad Dog") Habermas' 90th birthday last week. This morning I read a news item about Festen for him. The story noted his insistence on an abstract, idealist position on the requirements of reason and justice. Against his critics who denounce his position as based on a counterfactual hypothesis, Habermas has always basically asserted that the point is to understand how far our real conditions of existence fail to be rational or just. The article affirmed my admiration for Habermas.

That affirmation shot directly to my desires in general (admiration being a kind of desire, after all). It is a curious emotion I am feeling: that my desires, whatever they are, are good. Well, in any case, in as much as they are desires, they're just fine. They don't hurt anybody, as desires.

Play and desire are complexly intertwined. [Insert psychoanalytic account here.]

I introduced you to my readers, Zsa Zsa, as my anonymized and shifting audience, and announced that my audience is usually someone I write to to flirt with. Just writing that it was Habermas' birthday, dropping in my joke nickname for him, and reporting that feeling affirmed for admiring him led me to feel affirmed in my desires generally, and then connecting desire to my continuing topic of play -- that's all flirtation.

None of that is to say that there's anything intellectually disingenuous about what I have written. In fact, this was the course my thoughts took this morning.

Let's accept that play has a libidinal element, and that when I play I often show off, and that when I show off it's often to flirt. What follows? Dissatisfyingly, the answer is that what follows is what follows.

Reason and justice are the big flirts in Habermas' thought. That is how Habermas incites desire, for me. That would likely seem perverse to many people, but I like it that way.

play, a first approximation: creative activity, breaking toys, giggling, and joy

Dear Zsa Zsa,

I want to play.

Play has some extremely different and heavy connotations in different lexicons. I'm not sure how many of those I'm excluding, but I do know I have a general meaning in mind that has something like a core to it.

Let me contrast play to creative activity as a first approximation. Play is not primarily directed toward producing something, even its own effects. It is for its own sake. Creative activity, as I'm using the concept here, produces something and is directed toward that production. Here's one place where the boundary becomes blurry, and where I get into trouble. What I do for play can become a creative activity. The effect of play can turn into an object for appropriation and production -- in a word, work. This happens gradually.

In fact, my so-called career as a so-called philosophy instructor is due to play becoming creative activity becoming work. I count my entry into this biz as the afternoon I spent quite innocently getting TREMENDOUSLY PISSED OFF AT IMMANUEL KANT, and developing a set of questions about the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that took three class sessions for the professor to address (thanks, Dr. Pressler). That was when, for lack of a better expression, I started taking this play seriously.

I have a tendency to that, it seems. Playing the guitar became something I took very seriously for a while, and I started teaching myself finger-picking and practicing until my hands were exhausted. Somewhere along the way, I fixated on the notion that I would play gigs, in front of other human beings. I was always thinking of playing as practicing for these future gigs. It became a chore. I didn't get very far before Ménière's Disease stopped me, and that might be lucky for me in a way, because, in the moments that I can play, I am no longer able to sustain the same degree of self-criticism. I know it's not feasible for me ever to play any gig. I'm fortunate when I get to play at all.

In short, a major problem I have is turning play into work. Some of my models of play require virtuoso skill, which you can only acquire with a ton of practice - i.e., work. (Practice is more or less breaking down playthings into pieces and then rebuilding them, over and over again. I am Hegelian to my bones.^*)

I know, for instance, that I play with words as much as I do because I already have a lot of skill developed, through endless iterations. This is my secret as an academic writer, too. While many of my friends and colleagues complain about the pain and suffering of writing, I never do. Whenever it doesn't feel like fun, I don't bother. I write a lot, I take very little of it very seriously, and even when I present it as a "product" of my "work," I (try to) suppress a giggle.

A major effect of play would seem to be joy. The giggles I suppress when I bring something I've written into a class are not because I'm so impressed with my own jokes (although they are brilliant), but because writing it was so damn much fun that I want to laugh out loud. I want to infect everyone with that enjoyment.

I know that part of what I'm doing is showing off while I play. Showing off might be ego-gratification on some level, and to that extent enter into a psycho-economy of symbolic exchange. Like the child at play, I often write things as though to shout "Look at me!" But notice the ambiguity of this shout: it is about "me," but is also a call to join in, if only as an observer. (Perhaps the adult called by the child counts as a kind of incomplete or incapable child, and the child notices that the adult's play is so attenuated they can only participate by observing.) Whether or not my writing floats your boat, you might still be able to appreciate that it floats mine. 

When I write in that free, joyful, giggle-inducing way, I am a Thelonious Monk song, and nothing can harm me, not even failure, because play is fail-safe. It can be started and stopped. It can be given life or death. But as long as it is, it can't fail to be play.

--




* G.W.F. Hegel wrote in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences that the most intelligent thing a child can do with their toys is to break them. I have always thought that was not only one of his keenest insights, and funniest lines, but also one of the best expressions of the heart of Hegel's philosophy. I'd love some day to write a commentary on Hegel and call it something like Broken Toys

resurrecting the blog to bare my soul to the world, again (and to Zsa Zsa)

I have let this blog thing languish. It hasn't been the right medium for me to do what I needed to do.

Everything I write that is in any way shared with others, I write to a specific audience, often of one, with whom I am generally, to some degree, flirting. So, to carry forward that feeling, and to protect both the innocent and the guilty, and those in between, I have decided that I will fictionalize the current audience with a phony name. I name my audience Zsa Zsa.

∞   ∞   ∞   ∞

Dear Zsa Zsa,

In what I shall call "normal times," I maintain tight control over my being, my emotions, my expressions, and my behavior. I am not wholly unemotional, but I express my feelings indirectly, often through wordplay and humor. Although I appear fairly collected and calm, anxiety and fear impel my every movement.

In normal times, I follow an invariable routine, focused on productive activity, until I can no longer be productive because of the tremendous expenditure of energy on staying alert. Then I break down, one way or another.

My favorite way to break down involves terrible Bacchanalia, which I shall not describe in this space but hint at in order both to avoid revealing too much and to further titillate by leaving it to your imagination. For now, I emphasize: terrible Bacchanalia.

Of course these "carnival times" are destructive. At the end of them, and as their consequence as much as due to the effort to control myself during normal times, I am exhausted, beaten, and empty. And the tension throughout my body and psyche is finally gone.

I don't remember ever living my life any other way, including in childhood -- although childhood Bacchanalia typically didn't resemble those of present day. If it is a dysfunctional way to live, it is a lifelong pattern of dysfunction, and those are the most difficult to change.

You see, I recognize the desirability of change. I do not want to face the consequences of the destruction of carnival times. Yet I want to continue to indulge in the intense delectation of carnival, and I want to be able to keep it in my pants, so to speak, as needed for daily life.

I recently came upon a book that reminded me of a thought from a few years ago, on the difference between play and creative activity. I think this is key to finding a way forward. Normal times lack any play. Carnival times are something beyond play, something atavistic and bestial.

Play is goalless, not directed toward production, certainly not economic exchange of any kind. It is done for its own sake. It is not destructive, but nor does it necessarily create something that fulfills a need for anything beyond play itself -- at least, that is not its purpose. Many of the examples of play I can think of immediately are musical: Thelonious Monk's songs and style on piano; Marc Ribot guitar solos; John Fahey's demented restructuring of old folk music.

Imagine living a life like a Thelonious Monk song. Who would need either the normal or the carnival?

Of this, my fair Zsa Zsa, more to come.

facts

[NB: I offer no explanation for my lengthy absence from this space, or for my return.]

I tried, and mostly failed, to exercise my honors class this spring about the topic: what is a fact? (Every handful of years, a cohort passes through this class with little enthusiasm for the course. This was the year.)

There is, of course, a current semi-academic discourse about the issue. Many critics disparage “alternative facts” as cherry-picked, phony, or simply lies. More strategic critics counterattack campaigns that enlist alleged facts in the prosecution of ideological warfare. Still more sophisticated critics debate the meaning of facts in what some call a possibly “post-fact” political era.

On the whole, the discussion is premised on the notion that facts are patent, objective, knowable truths that exist in the world. According to this notion, facts are discovered, as though they were mineral deposits simply to be found. They are the antibody of fabrication—any artifice or production rules out a thing being a fact.

This positivism is found in fringes of the fact discussion, where it crosses the border into academic discourse, and the demise of facts is blamed on one or another development of social, literary, and philosophical thought—“postmodernism” or “deconstruction” or even “feminism” or “gender studies.” Generally, this charge is made by academics who have not read the main texts attributed to these developments, but have the vague idea that they all spell doom for scientific knowledge, truth, and disciplinary method—if not also for cardinal direction, physical laws, and matter. (I used to try to educate my colleagues about these “movements,” even going so far as to suggest that they try reading Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, a report commissioned by the government of Québec and published in 1977. It would seem odd that it took 40-50 years for deconstruction and postmodernism to destroy facts, but perhaps the US is just that much in the intellectual rear-guard.)

The fact is, facts are produced. They are assembled from observation, hypothesis, theory, and, often enough, “common sense.” They are debated, using methods of inquiry, by experts in every discipline. They are never final, even when they are firmly established. Everyone who understands any form of respectable method of inquiry should know this.

Instead, the discussion of facts usually takes the treacherous shortcut of assertion: there are facts, there are no “alternative facts,” there are multiple versions of facts, there are no facts, there is no difference between facts and opinions, etc. None of these assertions acknowledges the complexity of facts themselves. That’s too bad, especially for critics of the current President and the “alt-right,” since it is precisely the lack of any reasonable methodology for establishing their assertions of fact that is most vexing. (Hint: someone saying it on Fox News does not count as a reasonable methodology.) The political left has its (smaller) share of those who seek to establish facts through bald assertion, too, and these people are not helping.

I don’t have a lot of confidence that an honest discussion of the construction of facts would improve the political situation. Too many people have been trained to react to the dog whistles of demagogues and advertisers. But the movement of high school students demanding that elected representatives enact legislation that would make schools safer from gun violence might make us optimistic. They have realized that thoughts and prayers are not making them safer, and they seem to want change based on what to many seems like a clear pattern of facts. They are much smarter than the dominating elite in the country credit them to be. Perhaps there is a larger interest in rational discussion of debatable facts, and debatable hypotheses to explain those facts.

On the other hand, that didn't move my students this term.

x

a disabled man riding a bicycle

I had to cancel class yesterday, at nearly the last minute. Symptoms from Ménière's came on, over a one-hour period, and I was unable to stand much sound or understand much speech. I wrote up a prompt for an online threaded discussion, based on the structure I had set up for the class session. Then I drove up to a fruit stand and bought some stuff.

That afternoon, we took a bike ride. I had intended to ride around 20 miles or so that afternoon anyway, but the loss of good hearing, and especially the differential head pressure from one side to the other, made it seem like that was a bad idea.

This morning, I have canceled my face-to-face class sessions for the day. I've again posted online discussions for the classes. My head is more evenly pressured and my ears are more equally hearingless, and that makes a longer bike ride more viable.

Cycling is the best thing I do for my physical and mental health. It reduces anxiety and depression -- a lot. Even when I have some symptoms, the change in my blood pressure while I'm on the bike reduces them, and usually for at least an hour or so afterwards. I am also trying to get stronger and faster. All good reasons to go.

I have a serious qualm about going, which is that a student in one of my classes might happen to see me, zooming by, apparently healthy. I might appear to be malingering.

In fact, I am struggling with an internal accusation that I am malingering. I'm not "sick" in a typical sense, after all. I'm not bed-ridden, debilitated by a vertigo attack. I believe I'm thinking fairly clearly. I can write and read -- hell, I've just read about 40 pages of Ernesto Laclau's On Populist Reason. If my mood wasn't so sour, I'd probably be capable of making jokes.

Yet, I am disabled, in the sense that my job normally requires vocal/aural interaction, or at least physical presence in a place where I am subject to people talking to me, crowd noise, and the various sounds of HVAC plants, landscapers' equipment, vehicles, and so on. (In fact, yesterday it was the HVAC system on top of the building housing our natural science departments that told me I wasn't teaching face-to-face. What is usually an obnoxious squeal and rattle was a screaming, percussive detonation.)

I've asked for, and have been granted, having my classes scheduled as "hybrid" in person/online courses, in order to inform students enrolling that this is part of what they'll be dealing with. And by posting the assignments and setting up the discussion fora I'll be reading and commenting on for hours later, I'm doing my job. Still, nagging at me, is the wonder about how this will be perceived.

Is that going to stop me getting on the bike? Not today.