What is Hermeneutics and why is it important?

Hermeneutics is the study of the way texts (in every sense) come to be manifest for us, particularly as this is created and effected by interpretation, but just as importantly how manifestation is influenced by social-historical materialist and epistemic pressures. This study is important because unlocking the way we perceive and are in the world is the way of properly inhabitating, and inasmuch as is appropriate for us, overcoming the blindness of man, who is like the fish and does not ask “how is the water”, because he cannot conceive of how the basic conditions for his life would be otherwise.

Resolutions for the New Year (or at least the 51 weeks that remain)

It would appear a bit late for New Years resolutions – the year is more than a week old, and I’ve already been back at school for a week – taught 2 classes, given a test, and an assignment.

But my housemate Ketan has a sign in his room which says, “It’s never too late to start early”, and that seems as good a saying as any. And it’s true with respect to the future in which you haven’t started at all – you always could have started earlier retrospectively, so the present past-of-the-future is always the place where a start is an early start, or at least earlier than “now”.

So with that temporality in mind, I’m making a few resolutions for the new year, some of which have to do with this blog. The first is to post more photographs, my photographs, on the blog, and the second is to post content daily. I will post photographs daily, with a short description. And, I want to post written content at least every other day. I have plenty to write about, I just need to make a priority of writing it down.

As for my other resolutions, one is to keep a dayplanner, and to write something for my thesis every day.

These resolutions all come into effect the day when classes should have started at York, and the day they actually start at U of T – Jan 9th.

Review: “Israel Without Zionists” by Uri Avnery

Uri Avnery’s book Israel Without Zionists, written in the early aftermath of the ’67 war, tells the story of Israel’s formation and first period of existence. It comprises personal histories and character profiles of major figures such as Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan, along with accounts of how Israel and its neighbors stumbled into war in ’56 and ’67. It also provides a frank account of the Nakba, and proposes a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which still feels relevant today.

Avnery’s book excels as a history by using facts and narratives to distill themes and cycles in Israeli-Arab relations. In part one of the book, entitled “The Vicious Circle”, he in various ways advances the case that the history of zionism in Palestine is caught in a viscous circle of violence and mutual non-recognition with the Arab nationalist movement. The palestinian nationalist movement, according to Avnery, has never recognized that Zionism was not simply a puppet of western imperialism but rather a legitimately self-motivated movement which used western imperialist forces for their own gain. And on the other hand, zionists refuse to recognize arab nationalists in palestine as genuinely palestinian, or as anything other than an inconvenience - fundamentally zionism believes Palestine to be an empty country, and any rootedness Arabs feel in the land can therefore not be seen by zionist politiciens. This disjunct repeats itself in an Israeli leadership unwilling and uninterested in making peace with its Arab neighbors, and Arab neighbors unwilling to recognize Israel’s existence on borders which Israel found acceptable.

In the book’s second half, entitled “breaking out”, Avnery finds a contradiction in contemporary (well, contemporary in the 1960s) Israeli society, and finds in its possible resolution a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The idea, roughly, is that Zionism is a failed idea because as it turns out there is no “Jewish Nation” in the way Zionism traditionally held. However, Zionism has, through the creation of the state of Israel, created a nation – the Hebrew nation. The solution to the conflict, therefore, is to erode the centrality of Jewishness to the state of Israel, and instead emphasize Israelis common Semitic identity as speakers of a Semitic language – something they share with the rest of the Arab world. The problem of the refugees, he believes, can be solved by offering Palestinians the free choice between compensation and repatriation, and a Palestinian Republic should be set up on the territory occupied in 1967, eventually to be united with the State of Israel in a federation, perhaps named “The Federation of Palestine”.

It’s quite amazing to read this proposal from a book written in 1968, just moments after the land now know as the Palestinian territories were occupied. I wonder how feasible this proposal is today – I certainly haven’t heard of this kind of thing advocated by any strong political movements within Israel. The idea of a two-state settlement has largely been co-opted by zionists who want to use it to preserve the Jewish (i.e. not Hebrew) character of the state of Israel, and has been bought into by Palestinian politiciens willing to sell out the refugees. According to his wikipedia page, apparently Avnery has written plenty more since 1968, and I look forward to reading some of his more contemporary work.

On Leaving

Toronto’s Pearson Airport is an ideal place from which to leave on a journey. Terminal 1 is shaped like a wing, and if you are flying international, you can enjoy Richard Serra’s Tilted Spheres. At the moment I’m sitting inside Tilted Spheres, enjoying my time before boarding a flight to England. The work is about air travel – the curved flanks of metal suggest the tubular frame of a jet, or its wing. It is wonderful, and at the same time terrifying.

This journey is the longest I have ever embarked on – I will be gone more than 2 months. Most of that time will be spent in the historic region of Palestine in a city which is claimed as capital by Israel and the State of Palestine (neither claim is internationally recognized). But before I arrive in that contested region I will spend time in the Republic of Ireland, the province of Northern Ireland, and France. I will attend a week long summer school, visit friends, and perform at a wedding. There is a lot to anticipate, to prepare for, and to write about.

I think the beginning of a trip is a good time to reflect on the goal and purpose of writing about such a trip. On the one hand, it is to convey to friends and family what I’m up to. It’s also a kind of journaling – an exercise in self-clarification where one is forced by the act of writing to impose narrative structures on felt experience. One worry I do have, however, is my tendency to put too much effort into public writing, such as this blog, and less into academic and private writing. Different forms of writing, for different audiences, play a different role in experience. I can write things in a private journal that I would not write here, for instance. And if I write up philosophical ideas here, they do not seem to develop into formal academic work (although, this may be simply a problem of follow-up on my part). So, while I will still try to provide frequent updates, if are not be as long or extensive as on previous trips it is because I’m concentrating on other forms of writing alongside blogging.

Also, this is not simply a writing trip – it is a photography trip as well. And perhaps more so than any trip I have been on before. On this trip I will try to move beyond “taking nice pictures”, to using photographs to convey meaning. In that vein, I will be changing the colours and header photo relatively often to reflect where I am, and what has been happening.

What is “Twitter”

This isn’t a joke. Of course, we all know what Twitter is. It’s that smartphone thing, where you say short things, and other people say things, and you read the things that other people say who don’t necessarily read the things you say.

But seriously, what is Twitter? Twitter is an asymmetrical social media site. That means that instead of having “friends” you have followers, and the amount of followers you have is in no way limited by the amount of friends you could conceive of having, or wish to interact with online. Facebook has a natural upper limit of the number of friends a person someone can acquire. I don’t mean the actual limit (some people have hit it – I think it’s a few thousand), but the limit in terms of the content streaming down your wall which you don’t want to deal with. Or the hundreds of people messaging you everyday when they click “message entire list”.

Where is the (cultural) production?

A protest photograph is forwarded on facebook. An Egyptian tweet comes through on the Aljezeera or Guardian twitter-live-feed. Where do these “come from”? The easy answer is of course “the photographer” or “the city square” or “the author of the tweet” (as if tweets had authors like Moby Dick). The problem with the easy answer is that it’s wrong, another problem is the difficulty of explaining how it is wrong.

Take, for instance, any form of cultural production. Take sculpture, take pottery, take essay-writing, take photography, take architecture. Where is the work produced – what is the location of production/instantiation of a/the new artifact? It is not when the photograph is taken, or when the sculpture is planned or conceived - it is rather when a decision is made to show this photograph rather than another. Or, to construct this sculpture at full scale rather than one which is intuited as less potentially successful (I’m thinking of Serra’s workflow here). The cultural production is, in other words, in the decision to put forth the work. Not the making of the work, but the setting it into the cultural location, produces its reality and the infinite (but not incoherent) potential connections, effects, excrements, alienations.

The Internet and Social (Network) Conflict

The Egyptians worshiped the open eye because they knew attention was redemptive – if you pay attention to things you can understand them and make things better. This resonates with us – we generally believe that paying conscious attention to things is the best way of achieving an objective grasp, a full understanding of what a thing is from itself, rather than simply from our perspective. We improve on this by establishing perspectives which are, in principle at least, repeatable – and we call these “experiments”. This way of bringing ourselves to the world has fared us well, at least so far. We have cell phones, cars, the internet, trains, and all manner of wonderful technological innovations which would not be possible without the value of directed attention, objectivity, and work.

Sociological research which I’ve been informed of, but can’t cite at the moment, shows an interesting corollary to this: when we converse with people on the internet, we tend towards divergence. We characterize their view as an object which we pay attention to and discover its defects, and then oppose it. This makes sense – it conforms with the value of paying attention to things to make them better. The problem is, the views of others are not objects but perspectives (like our own), which are constantly shifting, and which exist in a complex network of values which, in a sense, characterize them as the people that they are.

Unsurprisingly we are much less likely to treat the views of people we speak to in person as objects. In fact, that same research I’m referring to (but not citing – if someone knows it feel free to comment below) (Also feel free to comment if you think I’m full of it and making this up – it’s the internet after all!), demonstrates that the same people who diverge on the internet are much more likely to converge when in dialogue in person. This difference is confirmed by my personal experience – discussions in person tend towards emphasizing what you hold in common with others, and also towards compromise on those issues where you differ, whereas the more objective and reasoned internet discussion tends towards endless conflict about fundamental values.

If this difference is true, and I’m not just making it up by referring to imaginary research, it reveals something essential about humans and something essentially terrifying about facebook and the blog-sphere. It is perhaps not accidental and random, and not a result of “people being jerks” (at least not in the normal way), when internet discussion tends either towards insular communities where everyone agrees, or towards trolling and nasty debates with no middle ground. We may have simply evolved (culturally and/or genetically) to treat the “absent”, i.e. a rock or a sentence in a book or on the internet, with much more distance and tendency towards rejection than the word spoken by other people.

This idea – that we treat speech from people in person fundamentally differently than writing in books or on the net, converges with a recent thesis which has become popular in Cognitive Science by people like Alva Noe and Evan Thompson, although it is also Chomsky’s recent position – that language is mostly not communication at all. Rather, most talking is something like stroking each others hair, something quite common for many mammalian species (wouldn’t it be quite strange if we hadn’t developed a replacement for this social practice?).

This idea encourages us to think about internet communication with a great degree of restraint – we perhaps have no grounds for assuming that it is anything much like debate in person. It may appear highly reasoned and objective to debate analytically and deductively on the internet, and it may in fact be highly intellectual – but – it may be that when we do this in person we are doing something much less like analytic debate than we are capable of on the internet. And, the corollary to this – we as humans may be much less capable of pure, hard-reasoning as we believe we are. In fact, when we read statements that diverge with our values and there is no human behind it to recognize as a person-like-me, I may simply be much less capable than I believe of carrying on any sort of meaningful communication at all.

What I don’t want for Christmas

I like Christmas – as someone who grew up secular-Christian within a dominantly white and protestant society, it’s always been the dominant holiday of the year. And it’s a good holiday for largely the same reasons its predecessor, Saturnalia, was a good pagan holiday – it revolves around food, drink, the exchange of gifts, meaningful rituals, time with family and friends, and time removed from the normal calendar which enables a kind of reflection absent during the rest of the year. Christmas isn’t just “Christmas” – it’s “Christmas Time”.

Julian Assange on Crowd Sourcing, Values and Journalism

This morning I was watching a panel discussion from the Logan Symposium at UC Berkley, (in six parts, find part 1 here). The panel is interesting in general, especially because it includes both Assange’s activist position, and more traditional journalistic opinions. But what stood out for me were Assange’s comments on why Cablegate was being pursued differently than the War Logs or Afghan Diaries. Specifically, whereas those leaks were published all at once, as a dump of source material on the internet, CableGate is being released slowly and with privileged access to specific press institutions. Here’s why:

Our initial idea, which never got… our initial idea was “look at all those people editing wikipedia”. Look at all the junk they are working on. Certainly if you give them a fresh classified document on the human rights atrocities in Fallujah, that the rest of the world has not seen before, you know it’s a secret document. Certainly all those people working on articles in art history, maths, and so on, and all those bloggers who are busy pontificating on the human rights disasters… who are complaining they can only respond to the NY times because they don’t have sources of their own. Surely those people will step forward, given fresh source material, and do something. No, it’s all bullshit. All bullshit. In fact, people write about things in general, if it’s not part of their career, because they want to display their values to their peers who are already in the same group. Actually they don’t give a fuck about the material, that’s the reality. So we understood from very early on that we would have to at least give summaries of the material we were releasing. At least summaries to get people to pick it up, to get them to dig deeper. And if we didn’t have a summery to put the thing in context, it would just fall into the gutter. And in cases where the material is more complex especially military material which has lots of acronyms. It’s not enough to do a summery. You have to do an article, or liaise with other journalists on an exclusive or semi exclusive basis, to get them to extract it into semi understandable human readable form.

But unlike other organizations we always release the full source material at the same time. Everything we do is like science, it is checkable, because the material that informed our conclusions is there. Just like scientific papers based on experimental data must make that data available to other scientists and to the public if they want their papers to be published. So our philosophy is raw source material must be made available so conclusions can be checkable.

We are an activist organization. The method is transparency, the goal is justice, part of the method is journalist. Our end goal is to achieve justice, and our sources goals, usually, is also to achieve justice. So when they give us material what we promise is not just that we’ll protect them, but that we’ll get maximum impact from the material.

This passage is interesting for a number of reasons. First because it diagnoses the need for print, or at least paid journalism in the age of the high internet – yes people will do things for free, but they won’t necessarily do the difficult work. And the work they will do tends to be because it is in conformity with existing values, thus subject to confirmation bias.

Secondly, it is interesting because it stresses the difference between raw and interpreted material – of couse all material is always interpreted, but if you don’t have the skills to read something (i.e. something which doesn’t make sense outside of context, or something which uses acronyms you don’t understand), then it won’t mean much to you, and you won’t be able to say anything meaningful about it- moreover, you won’t want to say anything meaningful about it; you’ll want to move onto the next thing. This means it is perfectly possible for evidence of crimes to be out there in the open, on the War Logs servers for instance, and yet no one will say anything about it because no one who would want to say anything about it has both the time to read through it, and the skill to know what they are reading.

Third, it’s interesting because it is plain about its bias, goals, allegiances and method. It’s actually elsewhere in the talk where Assange explains that the primary allegiance of wikileaks is not to its readers (or, as in the case of capitalist media, its investors), but its sources. But here those allegiances are brought into the larger context of the goals and methods of the organization: the goal is justice, the method is transparency. And, moreover, the value is effectivity; their aim is to use the material they have to maximize the amount of justice they can effect on the world. I think this is basically the right way to go about things – be transparent about your values and goals, rather than pretending not to have any. The journalistic ideal of neutrality, of “unbiased reporting” is a blatantly absurd – everyone has goals; if you were “unbiased”, technically speaking, you would be clinically depressed and unable to get out of bed in the morning because you wouldn’t feel any reason to live.

I’d be interested in hearing the opinions of others on the wikileaks journalistic project, and the implications of the claims made above on citizen, crowd-sourced journalism.

de Sousa on Emotional Truth

Ronald de Sousa‘s “Emotional Truth” seeks to expand the realm of truth from its restriction to belief and belief-like states to include emotions and emotional states. On DeSousa’s view, an emotion can be “true”, or “false”, but not in the sense of being “flat-out” true or false, rather in some matter of degree. To use one of DeSousa’s favorite distinctions: whereas the truth of beliefs or belief-like states is “digital” (something is either true or not true), he contends that the truth of emotional states is analogue. Analogue truth is the realm of “more or less”; we feel that something is true not (generally) with certainty, but with degrees of confidence. Aside from the analogue/digital difference, emotional truth differs from the truth of beliefs in that its satisfaction conditions are not semantic, but evaluative:

Emotional truth, then, refers not to semantic satisfaction, but to success. I follow widespread practice in saying that fear’s assessment of p or t as dangerous consist in some sort of evaluation of p or t. Success is tied to the correctness of that evaluation.

We might also remark that emotional truth is less “cognitive” than epistemic truth – the truth of an emotion is not simply “in my head”, but in my engagement with the world  (“Success” refers to transformations which really happen to me, resulting from the play of the relation between the emotional states I bring to the world and how the world fulfills them or fails to fulfill what they intend).

The claim I wish to make here is to argue that “emotional truth” in DeSousa’s analysis is taking up the same theoretical space as Heidegger fills with the notion of truth as “unconcealing” or “revealing” – as the wider circle which grounds and makes possible traditional truth as correctness or correspondence:

To say that a statement is true means that it discovers the beings in themselves. It asserts, it shows, it lets beings “be seen” (apophansis) in their discoveredness. The being true (truth) of the statement must be understood as discovering. Thus, truth by no means has the structure of an agreement between knowing and the object in the sense of a corresponding of one being (subject) to another (object). (Being and Time, German pagination 218-19)

According to Heidegger, truth as disclosedness, (alithea, literally un-covering-up) is the basis for our modern understanding of truth as “the agreement between things objectively present” (225). Despite many reader’s perceptions that Heidegger is “against” traditional theories of truth, his framework actually allows for both to co-exist. The negative emotion towards traditional truth has a real motivation, however – from the fact that this conceals the originary nature of truth, and obscures the question of the meaning of being in general. Since correspondance truth buries over the nature of truth in general, we come to understand truth as agreement between objectively present innerworldly things, and therefore to assume that Being itself is simply objective presence (225).