the value of human life -- some offhand phenomenological musing

It's odd I ended up writing about this. I went on a bit of a walk to try to solve a problem about whether I could meaningfully say I am or have a body, and just what that sense of a unifying whole, apparently delimited notion of lived experience would mean. Instead.....

**

We think rather highly of consciousness. We presume that it is the most significant — not to say the most valuable — trait of ours.

There is a massive ongoing problem in ethics related to this, concering the moral value of human and non-human life. Every attempt I have seen to distinguish these two on the morality scale has involved a commitment either to a humanist or theological position. In other words, it is under the presumption of the specialness of human being, and of human beings, that all this ethical discussion takes place. For now, I’m going to let ethics off easy, for instance on the point that, for most world religions, the sacredness of individual human lives has proved “negotiable” (as George Carlin put it): a human life is valuable pending certain qualifications.

In phenomenological philosophy, the certitude of the centrality of consciousness is also taken for granted. This appears to be so even when phenomenologists are trying to account for something more basic, like affectivity, or desire, or being vulnerable. In From Affectivity to Subjectivity*, Christian Lotz argues that the basic ethical value is connected to this kind of affect and vulnerability. [Think a minute how this plays out in terms of Carlin's jab: if chickens can be vulnerable (to pain, e.g.), then what exactly is our negotiation? Do they somehow deserve it? Are chickens secretly commies? Or do they deserve it just because of their irritating clucking and flapping-wings behavior, and because they happen to be tasty and nutritious? Talk about negotiation!]

Where does that affect come from? How is it that we can be affected? Lots argues that for anything to affect our senses and draw us to attend to it, there must be, prior to that attention, some valuing of what draws us. He says that attention is directed by a structure of “being-able-to,” meaning, I would say, a core valuing-activity: attention is directed by some subjective determination of what is valuable — ultimately calling on Levinas’ notion that every experience is held together by the equation of life and happiness. “Being-able-to,” as a source of valuing, implies intentionality, hence consciousness in the way we’re accustomed to considering it, to wit: human consciousness. (The reference to Levinas — a deeply theological thinker — is a giveaway.)


It’s a terrible argument, but leaving that aside, there’s nothing obviously related to consciousness, intentionality, or our being human, that we can demonstrate is the final source of moral value. Without the presupposition that affectivity is connected to intentionality we also cannot finally deny that vulnerability as an attribute of non-human life, especially non-human animals. If it matters that we are vulnerable, then how can consciousness be our definitive characteristic, at least, as it comes to moral value?

*The original title was not From Here to Eternity. I looked it up.

   

what is normal?

Lately, I feel like I've been led ineluctably to this question, all of my life. Most recently, I've been led there by the confluence of what I've been reading about what is normal, abnormal, or otherwise than either, in our perception, our desires, and our ways of being -- in queer theory, transgender studies, phenomenology, and post-structuralism. But I've been thinking about it today, and I realize that the normal/abnormal/pathological issue has been fundamental to my life, just about all my life.

Given who tends to read these posts, I'm probably preaching to the choir on this point. That's as may be.

I have never felt myself to be normal -- socially, physically, psychologically, or in almost any other way. (Including syntactically! The first version of that sentence read: "I have never felt myself -- socially, physically, psychologically, or in almost any other way -- to be normal


In the astoundingly brilliant -- and, I would argue, thoroughly readable for non-experts (see, I've done it again!) -- The Normal and the Pathological, Georges Canguilhem critiques several medical concepts of normal and pathological as defined by physiologists, medical doctors, biologists, and so forth, over time. Canguilhem divides the kinds of definitions into two basic, fairly rough categories, that I consider to be "statistical normal" and "normal as equilibrium."


I won't go into depth. I want to give you the provocations, and let you fume.

Statistically, if you're outside the range of data points of 68.26%* of the population for some characteristic, it's time to ask questions, because you could be abnormal. Fun upshot of this: It's possible that you have a normal non-fevery temperature of 100 degrees, but there's only a 14% likelihood that you do, absent fighting an infection.

Think of the implications of this for such phenomena as: (1) your likelihood of weeping during a performance of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2, (2) how much you might potentially enjoy having sex in public, (3) whether you're left-handed, (4) your likelihood of having seen The Sound of Music more than four times. I know! This is a main reason I love philosophy.

Equilibrium-wise, consider someone who grew up in the east, especially the northeast, where there are frigid winters, a lot of rain, humidity up the [omitted -- Ed.], and you move to a hot dry place (in, I dunno, central California). A normal body will come to feel that this is in some way normal for the climate, and, upon returning to that northeastern clime, have much less tolerance for it.

So, is the body attuned to dry hot central California normal? Is the person with a daily temperature of 97.6 degrees normal? Is the person who used to prefer extremely vanilla sex who is now building a dungeon normal?

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* 68.26% is the number Canguilhem takes from Gauss to describe the average of a population, in contrast to the more familiar mathematical average.

sex, sweat, taste, flesh

This summer, I've been tracking down ideas of normal and abnormal, as ways of describing bodily experience. This is inspired, as I've said repeatedly, by a very good book called Queer Phenomenology, by Sara Ahmed, who has still not paid me a nickel for this. Anyway.

Theory sometimes gets in the way. This happens, for instance, when an apparently earnest trans-gender/sexual writer (name omitted politely) spends tons of ink on theorizing about bodies, sexuality, gender, and the politics and academic understanding of all that, in an attempt to get at the experience of gender and sexuality.

Let me be blunt: sexuality and gender are not the same thing as the interpretation of sexuality and gender.

Because I present/pass as a straight man, I don't have street cred to say a lot of this. It is clearly suspicious for me to claim to have direct access to sexual embodiment in its most carnal and un-gendered, un-disciplined, un-enforced manifestation. I'm going to claim it anyway.

The problem with all the theorizing about sex/gender/identity/orientation/etc. is the way it departs from the carnal experience of, for lack of a better word, flesh. By flesh, I don't mean some theoretical concept. I mean that stuff I can touch and smell and taste. I mean the stuff whose sweat I can see, feel, smell, taste, and that makes me sweat in return. I mean the stuff I desire without will or thought.

There's too little sweat, too little smell and taste, in the discourses of feminism and queer theory. As far as I'm concerned, if you want to know about sexuality and gender, that's what you need to know about: whose flesh, whose sweat, do you long to taste?

Thus my <300 word rejoinder to this 200 page book I'm slogging through.

orientation, habituation, passivity

My favorite stuff Husserl wrote was about what he called "passivity," which is not as passive as it sounds -- it's about the basic receptivity we have through our sense perception. Our sense perceptions, Husserl contends, are not just a collection of data, but are already "given" in a unity -- a unity that we do not actively constitute, hence given by "passive synthesis." In other words, our sense perceptions give us a sort of whole world already, and our conscious, attentive, thinking egos root around in this given world and make judgments about it.

One big-time implication of this is that our perceptual orientations to the world -- what we tend to pay attention to, what we put together as "objects" of perception, what we return to again and again as objects we ought to pay attention to -- are also built up "passively." That is to suggest that we are, as it were, primally orientated to the world in certain ways.

To take this beyond Husserl, and to give a concrete example, I'll recall my first experience of eating Swiss chard. It was in a very strange social setting, and a friend was whipping up a (vegan) stir-fry that included Swiss chard as an ingredient. Never had it before. It was deep green, cooked up quickly, tossed with the rest of the stuff, tossed onto brown rice, and set in front of me.

From the first taste, I liked it. How? The taste attracted me. As we say, it tasted good. How? How did I undergo the experience of it tasting good? At first, I couldn't say what about it I liked, or even identify the Swiss chard itself very clearly out of the mishmash of stuff.

The second time I had it, I was able to start to taste it. There was a dark greeniness, an earthy taste, a rooty bitterness balanced with a clean sweetness. I was developing a taste for it, as we say. I was learning how Swiss chard tastes, learning how to taste Swiss chard, and -- most intriguingly for me -- learning how to enjoy it.

From Husserl's perspective, what's happening here is, I am forming predicative judgments ("I like Swiss chard"; "Swiss chard tastes earthy, and a little bitter if it's undercooked"; etc.), but at the same time, those predicative judgments are forming and shaping my perception of Swiss chard. It's way more complicated than saying that if I tell myself I like it, I'll start to like it. I already was predisposed to it, before I'd ever had it, without knowing it. My first taste revealed that I had a "tendency" toward it. The more I experienced it, the more I followed out this tendency, the more I developed my affinity, and my acknowledgment of my affinity, for chard.

This has by now led me to have a chard-orientation toward the world. If there's chard around, my eyes are drawn toward it instantly. I look at it, and I almost taste it. I want it. I don't even think about it. I have a Swiss chard habit.

In stages:

1. My passive receptivity toward Swiss chard (my being able to taste it) and passive tendency toward enjoying it.
2. My conscious attention to Swiss chard, and my repetition of experiences and alert, deliberate attention to the taste of it... leading to judgments about it (like, "Swiss chard is really good wilted, then steamed, then buttered and seasoned").
3. My orientation toward Swiss chard, my habit of desiring it.

The first and third stages are two stages of passivity, it turns out. This is the cool thing: habituation is a "secondary passivity," where conscious attention fades away. I don't think about it, I just do it.

imaginary and actual worlds

It makes no sense, e.g., to ask whether the Gretel of one fairy tale and the Gretel of another are the same Gretel, whether what is imagined for the one and predicated of her agrees with or does not agree with what is imagined for the other, etc... Within the same tale I can certainly ask such questions, since, from the beginning, we have a single imaginary world...

In the actual world, nothing remains open; it is what it is. The world of imagination "is," and is such and such, by grace of the imagination which has imagined it; a complex of imaginings never comes to an end that does not open the possibility of a free development in the sense of a new determination.        -- Husserl, Experience and Judgment, p. 173

Most of the chapter I read today was about the temporal unity of objects and worlds that is necessary for relation and comparison to take place -- which I won't get into here. But this page, and especially the reference to imagined worlds, caught my eye, for a couple reasons.

The first connection was to something I'm cooking up as another writing experiment for NaNoWriMo this year. We can ask questions within the same tale, Husserl says, of whether Gretel is the same Gretel. Sure: and in fiction, you can strain realism to the breaking point, or past it, by making these questions the center of the story. I was working on that, in a way. (I promise I haven't written a word of the novel; I have some notes on how I want it to go.)

Now I'm wondering how that kind of problem in fiction could be turned around by having two different stories taking place, with two characters with the same name. Especially if the stories each raised questions about whether the character was the same character within the story, what would happen if both stories, with a character of the same name, each raised those questions? (Comedy of Errors does this to some extent, if you take the two plots as two stories in this way. And obviously, The Bald Soprano knocks this mutha out of the park.)

The other connection I drew is to the notion, in fanfic, of writing within a particular "universe."

There's an important difference. For fanfic writers, as I understand it, "universe" refers to the basic characters, the presupposition of that universe being founded upon what has been written by the originator(s), and the basic furniture of that universe (i.e., if they have space ships, they have space ships; if soap is unheard of, then, to quote Husserl, "it is what it is," and there's no soap).

These ideas aren't so far apart, though. What Husserl means by nothing remaining open in the actual world is that, for there to be any relation and comparison of objects in the actual world, there has to be an objective, unified time to that world -- it simply must be in the same actual world. It's ambiguous: does that mean this world is like a story? Or is this world more like the fanfic concept of a "universe"?

stars, constellations, experience and judgment

I tried to come up with a good analogy to help explain to my non-phenomenological-philosopher friends why reading Husserl's account of meaningful perceptual experience is so exciting to me. I started to write it out, drawing out all the little teeny micro-analogies that make the overall analogy so excellent. That meant I was writing in and explaining technical Husserlian phenomenological jargon.

So I'm not going to share the whole analogy, just the broad outline. We can talk about the rest.

Husserl's goal is kind of like this: Why do we see constellations, and not just stars? (To get even closer, what he's asking is more like: why do we see stars, and not little weird imperfections in the black velvet night sky? -- but constellations will work better.)

Constellations, physically speaking, aren't out there. For one thing, we perceive them from a viewpoint that places stars in close relationships or groupings that have no astronomical basis at all. Besides which, from the stars' standpoint, there aren't constellations, because they're just big balls of fiery gas (but enough about Newt Gingrich).

And yet, from our terrestrial spot, and from our various cultural spots, there are constellations. Why do we see them? Or, to put it a little closer to Husserl without getting too technical, why are we led from our seeing stars to make the judgment that they're grouped into constellations? What goes on, from mere awareness on up through active perception, to imbuing with cultural significance, such that we end up with constellations?

(At this point in Experience and Judgment, Husserl is dealing with some not very heavenly examples, like a red ball, or a pen in a penholder next to a pencil. In terms of the phenomenological investigation of meaning, those are still very interesting examples, but I realize constellations are a lot groovier.)

Where this is going in this book is pretty cool, too. Not only do we see constellations, but our seeing them becomes the basis for our saying things about them that can be true or false:

"Hey, look," (I could say to you), "it's the Big Dipper!"

"You doofus," (you could reply), "that's the Little Dipper."

Or:

"Ah, there's lovely Cassiopeia," (I could say). "I forget, was she one of Zeus' illegitimate kids he had pretending to be a goat or something?"

"No, no, no," (you could say), "she's Cepheus' wife, the one who pissed off Poseidon because she was hotter than the sea-nymphs."

why I love reading philosophy

Today I've picked up Edmund Husserl's Experience and Judgment for the first time in many years. It's crazy as hell.

The book has two main topics: why and how is it that we have not only experience, but also judgments about experience -- i.e., something that we could call truth-claims; and why and how it is that our judgments come from something or are about something. Husserl is not for everyone, not even for every academically trained philosopher, but when he's at his best, he deals with stuff like this in a thrillingly without-a-net fashion.

I know, it doesn't sound that exciting, especially when Husserl writes things like:

What is thus apprehended has, accordingly, its own empty horizon of familiar unfamiliarity, which is to be described as the universal horizon "object," with particular indications or, rather, prescriptions -- namely, prescriptions of a style of expectations to be realized, with explicates corresponding to them.

Trust me, though, this is incredibly sexy. By implication, people who read this and are excited by it are also incredibly sexy.

shazam, I think

After much hand-wringing and angst, I believe I have successfully revised "the goofy paper," per the occasionally-apposite reviewers' comments and a decidedly excellent conversation with the journal's guest-editor for this issue. It's still approximately 62% loony, and still contains three absolutely egregious puns, so I think, on the whole, this is a win.... presuming they actually publish the damn thing and anybody reads it.

My favorite pun is the most brutal. I compare phenomenological description to "extraordinary rendition," and suggest that certain ways of conducting phenomenological description are violent, and even that they commit vivisection. Nasty, eh? And do you know who'll get that? My loveliest, who read the whole damn goofy paper, and to whom I've read this version, maybe two or three friends of mine to whom I've sent this abomination, and, almost literally, nobody else.

(Here's a secret about academia nobody wants you to know. In the humanities, the so-called "discussion" taking place through publication is a crock. Of the 40 papers I've presented at conferences, and the half-dozen or so peer-reviewed articles I've published, people have contacted me to discuss them almost three times. I have emailed several folks whose articles I use in my classes, and every time, the authors are thrilled and somewhat startled that I've responded in any way.)

(I digress.)

Makes ya wonder why I do it, eh? Answer's in the question, bub. If they can't be bothered to read and respond and carry out this alleged conversation, rather than just throw bombs, then, I say, screw these people.

And that's my fundamental attitude toward academic publication and the big time conference circuit. And that's likely why I'm so rarely invited to join in.

(For instance, has anyone else noticed that Jacques Derrida never had any pants?)

update and unbearably adorable kitten pic

This morning, Alexander lay on my lap, seeming comfortable, for about an hour while we watched the Tour de France on the tube (sucks to be Janez Brajkovic the last couple days). Then he crawled up into the kitchen chair he's basically lived in for a week.

But then, when Lauren made pasta salad, and started making apricot jam, Alex was roaming the kitchen with her, perched for a bit on the step-stool, scored a piece of pepperoni, and then he and Valentine took off after a fly. A few minutes later, once Valentine had successfully bounced himself head-first off the front window trying to nab the fly, Alexander chirped at it excitedly.

That's more like it.

This is Alex and Arthur as kittens.

cat anxiety

We've brought Alexander to the vet twice now since Sunday. He's lost hair on his abdomen and backs of his hind legs. On Sunday the first vet (one I don't particularly care for) told us it was just stress or anxiety related. We had already been giving Arthur an herbal anxiety remedy, because for several weeks the cats have gotten more hostile to one another, and have spent less time playing. The herbs seemed to be working. The vet suggested we give it to everyone, to calm them all down.

Yesterday morning Alexander didn't look right to me. I called and got him a late afternoon appointment, with a vet we do like. I fretted all day about Alex.

Finally the appointment came, and the vet concurred with the prior diagnosis, but I asked for blood tests anyway. That came back negative only a few minutes after we got home. The urinalysis may take another day, given the holiday today.

Last night I lost it. I was terrified. Alexander seemed wrong - lethargic, less affectionate, and not talkative and drooling on me, as usual. By the time we got to bed, I was overwhelmed. I thought Alex was going to die last night.

This is what Alexander is supposed to look like (he's the one on the right).

You have to add the drool to the picture for yourself.

We still don't know what's wrong. Maybe he is just depressed and anxious. 

publication provision: revision

Last time I heard back from a journal about a submitted paper, it was the Journal of Academic Ethics asking me to revise and resubmit my paper on the decline of the professional status of college faculty and the lack of opportunity or authority to follow our professional ethics. The blind reviewer earned this name in a way he or she probably didn't mean to, by clearly not reading the paper for its actual argument. Instead, the revise and resubmit letter said I should basically write an entirely different paper on a topic that this reviewer would find more agreeable: how university administrations constantly seek meaningless public image advancements.

(I emailed the JAE editor back and said I would not be resubmitting to a journal so obviously lacking ethical commitment to the principle of peer review.)

Just last week, while we were down in LA, I finally received word back from the journal of the Romanian Society for Phenomenology, Studia Phaenomenologica, saying that my paper had been accepted pending revisions. The revisions listed by their reviewer seem to miss the basic ironic stance in my paper, and the reviewer seems unfamiliar with the pursuit of phenomenology of the body in French existential phenomenology, in particular Merleau-Ponty, Henry, and Marion (and more recently Barbaras), despite my having quoted Ricoeur freaking explaining it in precisely the same terms.

So I've added voluminous footnotes citing dozens of sources to show that, indeed, there is a pretty constant and still ongoing phenomenology of the body. My criticism of this is, briefly, that this fetishizes the body in a way that does two things phenomenology shouldn't do: (1) presupposing that there is a theoretical level of analysis that we must go to in order to explain experience, and (2) relating phenomenological description to a specific metaphysical problem - the mind/body problem Descartes gave us - despite the avowed intent of phenomenologists from Husserl onward to dispense with that metaphysics.

There are some quite valid and difficult criticisms. I write very elliptically at times, and this does not help. I blame Merleau-Ponty. (Obviously, I can't get away with it, because he's Merleau-Ponty, and I'm not.) Plus, the version of the paper I sent to them was edited down to 5000 words from a 8000 word screed I wrote last summer, which I ended up calling "the goofy paper," to express my total disgust with Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion. Minus some of the screedy elements, the argument is not very explicit (whereas, with the screedy elements, the language would have been all too explicit for a family journal like Studia Phaenomenologica).

(I curse at my food when I cook, and I curse at my books when I read. Mostly in good fun. I am far more forgiving of disobedient foodstuffs than disappointing philosophers, so some of the cursing at books is a little less joyous and collegial.)

I'm having a very hard time keeping the gumption up for this task - hence this post. I have until 15 July.

pleasure, motion, rightness

I’ve been on two bike rides today. The first was on an errand: we went to the pet store to buy some anti-anxiety drops for Arthur. The second was a junket, up to and through the campus, into the environs thereof, and back down home, much of it at high speed. It feels good to fly. Why? Glad you asked!

Another example of the phenomenon of pleasure in moving comes from dance. Much of dance involves moving in a way that “feels right,” that gives one a sense of bodily pleasure. What type of pleasure is this? One aspect of a dancer’s pleasure in movement seems to be shared with the athlete, for dancers enjoy that simple ineffable pleasure of movement as well. But professional dancers also seem to enjoy a more cognitively enriched pleasure, a pleasure that arguably could be classified as aesthetic. Perhaps athletes have a similar experience… (Cole and Montero, “Affective Proprioception,” Janus Head, 9:2, p. 303)

Undoubtedly there is a “right” feeling to hauling ass on my bike. (A student once commented on seeing me cycling to school: “You ride so fast!” I said, yes, I do everything with maximum possible intensity — which is more or less true.) Their connection of dancing to athletic movement makes a great deal of sense to me — playing guitar fluidly and harmoniously feels good physically and proprioceptively in the same ways as riding very fast or cooking when I have the moves. I see no reason to interpret this experience as necessarily aesthetic. I don’t dance, but I can relate: when I’m playing well, I feel as if my hands move beautifully. And yes, those movements have an additional cognitive dimension when it’s a series of movements I know produce something beautiful. But for me, the affective core of this experience is erotic, rather than aesthetic. My food, and sometimes my guitar playing, is gorgeous, I won’t be falsely modest. The pleasure of the movement is more visceral — which is not the right word. They awaken and open my erotically, fulfill and perpetuate a desire, to do it all again (I know we should).

One significant aspect of this experience is the feeling of effortlessness, of the body moving almost on its own without any need of conscious direction. When absorbed in movement there may even be what might be described as a loss of self, a feeling that, at least as a locus of thought, one hardly exists at all. And of course the best performances are those where one is not thinking about the steps at all but is rather fully immersed in the experience of moving itself. (Cole and Montero, 304)

There’s a phenomenological technique called “free imaginative variation,” the purpose of which is to help identify the essential core of some experienced object. One way to do this is to consider how adding to or subtracting from the object would alter its being perceived and meant as the object it is. If Cole and Montero had been better phenomenologists, they would have noticed that the feeling of effortlessness is not an essential characteristic. On the contrary, it is sometimes the very feeling of effort that gives us pleasure. Now, as to the movement overtaking us and needing no conscious directing, they could be on to something.

When I’m on my game, cooking, I bound around the kitchen, merrily swearing at my food, stirring four pots without a thought of the spoon, the room, the place, the time — and my mind is in a creative space, in the spice rack, in the garden, in the spinach, even. Beyond even immersion in the experience of moving, the moving carries itself out through me. It is no longer my own moving, that is, I am no longer moving myself, but the movement is moving me. Sometimes the movement demands more effort than I think I can give, and somehow do. And meanwhile, I’m cussing out the basil.

So, does the body “disappear” in these experiences, as Gallagher and Leder have suggested? Here, Cole and Montero miss Gallagher’s point. It’s not that the body fails to be present, it’s that it fails to be present in an objective way. It is no longer “the body,” but has become the movements themselves. 

bunnies (and phenomenological ontology)

 Lauren knit this object. What is this object? Why and how does it appear as this object? Phenomenologically, two things are going on here. First of all, my perceptual experience intends this object: it is the focus and the correlate of my conscious activity of perceiving. Secondly, my perceptual experience means this object: it is a specific, typical thing of a particular sort.

(1) As intended, this object is the synthetic unity of series of adumbrations, whose unity is achieved, mainly passively, by the contiguity, concatenation, internal referentiality (self-sameness) of the presentation of these adumbrations. It can appear as the one, single, object of several acts of conscious perception through its constitution as that same thing, through the harmonious, unbroken interconnection of perspectives.

(2) As meant, this object is far more complex. It is not merely a synthetic unity of perspectival perceptions, but also a specific thing — in this case, a thing called Walter Bernhard Bunny. That is to say, I do not perceive this thing as “plushy white soft fibrous blob” but as a stuffed knit representation of a bunny. (Possibly more remarkably, given the stylistic representation here, is that I can also recognize this as “Walter Bernhard Bunny.”)

The problem of normal and abnormal is raised significantly here. For, it is normal that I or anyone would (1) intend a selfsame thing through the harmonious unity of ongoing perception. It would be abnormal to fail to experience this synthetic unity; that failure would suggest that my consciousness or my senses are inhibited by something. But then, the big question in phenomenological ontology is, how much does (2) the meant object foretell that perceptual unity? That is, does to what extent does the unity of the intended object, as the correlate of a harmonious, ongoing series of perceptions, depend upon the meant object, as the typical thing recognized as something-or-other?

Imagine someone who has not seen a stuffed, knitted representation of a bunny. Even better, imagine someone who has not seen a bunny, either. What does this object appear to be, to that person? Clearly, not “a stuffed bunny,” and decidedly not “Walter Bernhard Bunny.” But is that somehow necessary for this object to appear as anything at all?

In my opinion, the phenomenology of constitution lets us down at this point. That kind of analysis is concerned with how meaning and objectivity are built up from subjective, indeterminate, individual percepts. It helps us account for how this bunch of stuff can come to mean “Walter Bernhard Bunny.” But it doesn’t let us know how much of the unity of the stuff depends on the meaning, and how much of it depends on the synthetic, passive synthesis of perception. That’s why Husserl said we needed genetic/generative phenomenology. Agreed. But that only tells me there’s another level of analysis to go: it does not tell me that the passive synthesis accounts for the appearance of “something” without there already being “Walter Bernhard Bunny,” or at least “stuffed, knitted bunny” to hold the object’s unity together.

This was Hume’s problem, wasn’t it? He asked his readers to suppose someone had seen every shade of blue but one. That one missing shade of blue could be analytically and imaginatively filled out, but the authentic and vivid idea of that shade could only come from experience. My question is whether, for this object to appear as a unity, I don’t need the experience (the cultural experience) of some things being stuffed knitted representations of bunnies.

If you think all that’s complicated, imagine what it would be like to try to unpack the cultural concept of “cute”!

zany madcap food post

My loveliest made kick-ass Russian food on Friday: mushroom, potato, and ground beef peroshki (the ground beef is local, grass fed - HAH!), Russian cole slaw, a cucumber salad. Yummers.

I had to double-down. So yesterday, while Lauren was knitting in public, I put together a little repast of my own.

A couple years ago, as part of my bi-annual innumerable-course, birthday blowout, I made a savory mock-tiramisu - turning construction of the dessert into a truffle and gruyère bizarro-world entrée. Over tiramisu at the best Italian restaurant in Turlock, Villa Napoli, I remembered that, and started thinking about reversing the field.

Hence, last  night's dessert: blueberry and cream cheese "ravioli" in lemon cream sauce.

In place of the ravioli pasta, I made pie crust, but deliberately mistreated it, so it built at least some gluten - and thus behaved a little more like pasta dough. The filling is blueberries, cream cheese, an egg, powdered sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom, lemon juice, flour, and love. The sauce is lightly whipped cream, lemon zest, lemon juice, triple sec, sugar, vanilla, and more love. In place of grated parmigiano reggiano, the tops are sprinkled with grated white chocolate. In place of fresh ground pepper, that's more nutmeg and cinnamon. In place of chopped parsley, that's mint. And love.

If you leave me alone in a kitchen for long enough, something like this is going to happen. (That's not fair: I just about kicked Lauren out of the kitchen in order to do all this in secret.)

normal, abnormal, queer theory, and phenomenology

I figured out what I want to write this summer. Last year I did a ton of stuff on the phenomenological concept of normal, in part responding to Sara Ahmed. I'm going to try to turn that into some kind of reasonable essay, but more excitingly, I'm going to work on contrasting it with other ways of looking at normal.

So, here's a start. I hope some of this is intelligible. It's just notes on the fly.

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I’m going to use the term “queer theory” to name a broad category of perspectives on numerous academic and scientific disciplines that are generally linked by a common interest in critiquing and undermining the cultural and political status quo, in which LGBTQ folks are, in the main, excluded. That’s pretty rough, but I don’t care.

Queer theorists often deploy the term heteronormativity to call out and problematize what they regard as the exclusionary and oppressive status quo with regard to sexual orientations, identities, practices, social and political expectations, etc. Implicit in the use of the term is a concept of normal, which is a central target of queer theory critique. To me, this requires a careful determination not only of a definition of normal, but also of to what ontological domain we assign a particular definition of normal. That is, what is normal in a cultural sense could be defined in terms of limits of social acceptability of traits, behaviors, etc. On this level, heteronormativity is losing a lot of ground in many areas of US culture and society: even to raise the question of same-sex marriage and have it seriously considered and debated shows this. This sense of normal is grounded in institutions that are at least somewhat dynamic.

What Sara Ahmed seems to do in Queer Phenomenology, in part, is to let this concept of normal into the domain of phenomenology of experience. Does it belong there? What is the phenomenological concept of normal? I believe it will turn out that there are several layers to it, and that there will be no causal relation, and at times only a resemblance, between the phenomenological and cultural concepts. Drawing from Husserl, I would say that the most basic phenomenological encounter with normality is perceptual, and that further investigation of perceptual experience will discover a pre-perceptual level of normality that, at least Husserl says, cannot really be investigated further.

One chief difference: heteronormativity has to be defended as a political and cultural practice, and is being defended today with vehemence and violence, because it is increasingly clear that it’s only based on an accrual of practices. Normal cultural interpretation of the practices in question has shifted rapidly, such that it is harder and harder to define what normal sexual orientation or identity is. Phenomenologically, I believe, we would have to say that it is normal that in our perception of the world we become attuned more toward some objects than others. In short, I don’t believe the so-called normal experience of sexual attraction could ever mean “heterosexual attraction” from the phenomenological standpoint. It would simply suggest that the normal experience of sexual attraction is to perceive certain others and objects as appealing to a person as a sexual subject.

The cultural concept of normal relates to a social and political determination of something or other as within bounds, of being included or accepted. The phenomenological concept of normal relates to an attempt to understand how it is that we experience anything at all as being something of a certain “kind” or having a certain meaning or value.

The two have something to do with one another. Merleau-Ponty discusses the history of human visual perception obliquely as he discusses art history, for instance: cultural norms make a difference in how we perceive. But that’s consistent with the phenomenological idea of perception as being a transcendence into the world. Our perception is of the world in two senses: it is a perception that takes in the world, and is a perception that is founded upon and needs the world to support its transcendence.

gender, orientation, normality

I'm jut getting into my summer philosophy reading list, on the broad themes of orientation and the "normal." In November, a couple friends and I are presenting a panel on orientation, disorientation, and being in and out of place. My own approach to it has come from reading the very good, and often delightfully exasperating book Queer Phenomenology, by Sara Ahmed.

So I'm paging through articles about experiences of orientation, disorientation, gender, sexuality, sex, and other stuff. I've just read a provocative piece from a while back by Kate Bronstein that includes some lists of questions having to do with the experience of gender (and she means gender, as differentiated from sex and sexuality and transexuality). They were appealing questions for me.

In part, what they made me consider, and remember, is the ways I - how shall I put this - the ways I don't do masculinity "right," in the culturally normative sense round these parts. There are some obvious things I don't do right, including insisting on wearing very bright colors, having long hair, sometimes in braids, and, as my loveliest says several times a week, being "an eight-year-old girl" (viz. the tiara and princess wand).

It's not that I consider myself particularly "liberated" from the constraints of compulsory masculinity and heteronormativity. It may seem odd, but I don't think I'm in the right position to judge that. All my life, I've been white and male, and the presuppositions about me that accrue to those characteristics have made my own gender, sexuality, and identity unproblematic. That is, I can always pass,* and I almost never have been subjected to assault because of someone else's perception of my gender, sexuality, or identity -- not since high school, at least.

It's obviously not only an academic philosophical interest driving me. A recent acronym groups people as LGBTQQ, where the first Q stands for queer, and the second for questioning. The lesson I've learned from reading queer theory, feminist philosophy, and related stuff, is that anyone who's self-aware really ought to be questioning, on one level or another. I forget who wrote it: Why don't we ask for an explanation of someone being "straight"? (This assumes, falsely, that everyone is either "straight" or non-"straight," and I'm not sure I can tell what that distinction means in the first place.)

This all means I'm a good philosopher. No one who is a good philosopher should take presumed definitions of sex, sexuality, gender, or identity for granted. They are some of the most violently defended pieties of our day - and there's nothing better for a philosopher to question than pieties.


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* This is why I say "partner" or "mate" to refer to my loveliest, and also why it confuses my students. It's also why, despite having been "shotgunned" by the State of California, I avoid using the m word, the h word, or the w word.

no deal

For as long as I know, the California Faculty Association has bought time from the CSU administration, and used that time to allow faculty to do work for the union. Not any more.

After weeks of delays, we finally got word at Cow State Santa Claus that the chancellor is hereby forbidding campus administrations from allowing this arrangement any more. This is due to one of three possible motives: (1) the administration does not know how much stress and undue pressure CFA activists endure as faculty and union reps, or (2) the administration does not care, or (3) it is the express intent of the administration to stop CFA from being able to defend the contract, or (4) they hope to cause faculty activists grievous harm. I am inclined to believe 3 and 4.

I plan to change my class assignments to reflect the undue pressure that five courses, let alone additional unpaid work on campus for the university, let alone union work. I'm going to give my students less of my time, energy, and effort.

I'm also going to have to give less of my time and energy to faculty rights work, but I'm going to try not to reduce my effort. I haven't even begun to work out details of that.

on not going to Canada

Each of the last several years, my Loveliest and I have gone to a conference at the end of May in Canada. It's part of the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences, held each year, as thousands LC Canadian academics descend upon the same college town.

This year, I am scheduled to give commentaries on two papers, and to co-coordinate a workshop on phenomenology. I shall do none of these, at least, not in person.

We are instead holed up in Holland Ohio, visiting my folks. The reason for this is that my passport expired in February, which fact I did not know until packing my passport the day before our trip.

There followed several hours of searching for information on whether I could enter and exit Canada with an expired passport, what would happen if I couldn't, what options there might be for renewing a passport in 24 hours, and thinking up other options. The official rule seems to be the following: you may enter Canada with an expired passport and a valid driver license, but you cannot re-enter the US.

My pal Dave "Dave" Koukal called the border patrol and talked to an actual human border patrol officer, who said I could re-enter with an expired passport, driver license, and birth certificate. The state department begs to differ.

I considered this briefly. If I was not permitted to re-enter the States, I would likely languish in Canada waiting forthe US consulate to expedite a passport renewal. Expited renewal means two to three weeks. It wasn't worth the risk, not after I spent a night in the hospital following a panic attack.

Thus Plan B: fly to Detroit as planned, spend the evening and night with Dave and Sharon as planned, but then catch a lift to Holland and spend the week here, hanging out.

So far, so good. It was 97 here yesterday, rained this morning, is now 86, and tomorrow it will be 70. Lauren has an infected bug bite or sting. We're going to visit my brother , whose birthday is tomorrow. We're going to walk through the park I frequented as a lad, along an old Erie Canal split called Side Cut, to allow boat traffic into Maumee (my home town).

diagnosis: chest pain

Here's how I ended up spending 24 hours in Emanuel hospital.

Tuesday morning, after Lauren drove off to work the day in Modesto, I started my bike ride to campus, right around 10:15. Going up Del's Lane, I started to notice it was taking more effort than usual, riding into a gusty headwind. By the time I reached the philosophy department, I was sweating heavily and a bit more out of breath than normal (I usually ride at high intensity and velocity, as many on campus can attest).

After maneuvering my bike into my office, I mopped the sweat from my forehead and drank some water, cooling down as usual. I didn't feel right. My heart was still beating fast, and the tightness in my chest seemed worse. I sat, made final minor preparations for my 11 o'clock class, added a couple short paragraphs to something I've been writing, and then headed to class. I had to mop my brow again.

I walked over to my classroom, a hundred yards, if that, from my office, upstairs in the Bizzini building. The stairs were very hard to climb, and I was overheated when I got to my class.

Class was short. I had a spell of lightheadedness about halfway through, but while discussing the whodunnit portion of Aristotle's Ethics and students' term papers due on Thursday, I felt okay.

By the time I returned to my office, I was having trouble catching my breath, and the chest pain was still worse than before. I sat, trying to calm down, trying to let myself cool down, but it seemed like my heart was racing. I decided I needed help. I told our department assistant I was going to the health center, and set off for it.

I was unaware that, for liability reasons, the health center will only see students. I tried to say it was an emergency, and the receptionist referred me to same-day care across from the hospital. I said I couldn't get there, because I rode my bike. Eventually, the doctor on call saw me in an exam room, "as a courtesy," he said, and took vital signs. He did a lot of frowning, and said he thought I should go to ER.

While he called for an ambulance, a nurse took my blood pressure a second time, did some more frowning. The doctor came back in and told the nurse to give me an aspirin and a sublingual nitro tab.

It seemed like this was taking forever. Finally two campus police came in, and asked me, like the doctor had, what was going on, and my basic stats - name, age, etc. Then two firemen came in and did the same thing. They took my bp and asked more questions. Then the ambulance came, and the EMTs asked me the same questions all the others had, hooked me up to a portable EKG and an electronic bp monitor. They didn't frown, but they looked very concerned. I couldn't see the EKG, but when I glanced at the bp monitor, it said 155 over 110 or something like that, with a pulse of 105. I overheard them radio in that the EKG was irregular - I think.

Off to the ER. The EMT placed an IV line, gave me another aspirin, asked me about the nitro tab, declared that the health center's nitro was no longer potent, and so he gave me another.

We reached the ER, where a series of nurses, technicians, and doctors all came and went, asking exactly the same questions, frowning, and so on. At 1, I felt like I could try to call Lauren at work (at her former boss' house, actually), and proceeded to find that I didn't have the number. Eventually I reached Lauren, and she came down.

While she was on her way, a cardiologist arrived, looked at my EKG, and told me I was not going to die of a heart attack, because he was pretty sure it wasn't a heart attack. He wanted me to stay overnight, because, it turns out, to rule out heart attack definitively, you have to have three clean EKGs six hours apart, and three blood draws that test negative for a particular enzyme, also six hours apart. The cardiologist ordered a stress test and echo-sonogram thingy for this morning.

The pain in my chest had waned considerably, especially after Lauren arrived. By the time I was in a room, the pain only felt bad when someone asked me how the pain was.

This morning, after a good 3 hours of sleep, I reported for the stress test. The nurse got me all hooked up, and said she didn't like the bp reading at all: it was 137 over 95 or so. I told her I was anxious, have anxiety and depressive disorder, and that being around anything medical was my major phobia. Yet another doctor arrived. I did ten minutes on the treadmill, reaching 4.2 miles per hour (around my typical walking pace on the jaunt to school), at 14% incline, before I reported I was getting a little tired.

I got off, and within five minutes my bp was 130 over 79. I did not say, "told ya!"

The echo was just an echo.

We waited back in my room for another doctor to free me. I got to eat something. We watched an episode of "30 Rock" on my iPad (it was our "unchallenging, unlikely-to-mention-medical-stuff" choice for entertainment, plus neither of us had seen more than 2 minutes of any episode).

Whatever happened, it was not a heart attack. My official diagnosis is, in fact, "chest pain." I am 99% certain it was the worst panic attack I've ever had, and about 91% certain it was the worst physical experience I've ever had. The echo turned up a slightly dilated aorta they think I should check on yearly. Otherwise, aside from being a basket-case after this academic year, I'm fine.

And now all I have to do is grade 120 term papers, approximately 60 additional short papers, and write two conference paper commentaries, before we head off to Canada on 27 May.

blog post topix - where to start?

This morning the LA Times site offered me this: "State's swelling deficit will bring painful cuts. Where to start?"

This is a story I've had keen interest in, for obvious reasons. I thought, good, analysis, maybe an op-ed. Instead, the post repeats the basics of Jerry Brown's preview of the May revised budget doom, then asks readers to offer their no doubt marvelous ideas for cutting the state budget.

This is the genius of contemporary capitalism in capsule form: paying subscribers are now providing the content they read from the LA Times site. (It's also another brilliant tool for undermining information exchange and giving social approval to the uninformed opinion of what Schütz called "the man in the street.") Eventually, the LA Times won't need to hire reporters, editorial writers, editors, or anybody else but technical support staff!

Interesting concept. So, readers, let me know what topics should be covered in this space in future posts! Increase the chances your post idea will be selected by writing it yourself!