Category: Theory

Erotics of Interpretation

Mark Davis1 Comment

I reread Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” yesterday. Amusing and challenging at turns, the essay calls for an erotics of art in the final sentence, rebuking the need for analysis—interpretation—of what art really means. But how can we proceed with this sensual understanding of art? How can we write about it?

Modernism was plagued by form cut away from content, leaving open how exactly any given piece of art fit against our expectations, the semantic churn of meanings that we want to apply to a work of art. There must be a framework but the depth of analysis is really what Sontag is questioning. Take the examples she gives, like Auerbach’s The Scar of Odysseus. In it, we are scanning around a particular event in The Odyssey, namely the recognition of a scar on Odysseus’s thigh. The author asks us to understand how Homer uses the scar as a focus in the verses, then takes us back to the events in his youth when he was injured. The narrative form is then contrasted and compared with the Old Testament, which might have been compiled around the same time frame as Homer’s work. But what might rise to erotics rather than interpretation? Take the following:

The separate elements of a phenomenon are most clearly placed in relation to one another; a large number of conjunctions, adverbs, particles, and other syntactical tools, all clearly circumscribed and delicately differentiated in meaning, delimit persons, things, and portions of incidents in respect to one another, and at the same time bring them together in a continuous and ever flexible connection; like the separate phenomena themselves, their relationships—their temporal, local, causal, final, consecutive, comparative, concessive, antithetical, and conditional limitations—are brought to light in perfect fullness; so that a continuous rhythmic procession of phenomena passes by, and never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths.

… Read the rest

Quivering Towards Warmth

Mark Davis1 Comment

I was not surprised when death came for Cormac McCarthy. It had to come, dragging along, cross, a tatterdemalion through the sagebrush and panicgrass. Cormac was a creator of a literary West that was both recognizable to those of us who, like him, lived in the sparsities of New Mexico, wrenched from indigenous hands and corralled by the quilted fencing for overshot missiles and sandfusing bombs in the atomic age, and also a construct of an unfamiliar language that relinquished authenticity for a kind of topological liturgy. What I am surprised by is how distant the literary works of his era seem now: Joan Didion’s reckless and shapely California; Don DeLillo’s fetishized consumerism; Thomas Pynchon’s endless array of clauses slouching towards sentences. Each produced shockwork against the conventions of modernism. There were so many others, too, from Hawkes to Plath to Roth to Amis. But the aloof distance is what hits me now. The striving to construct an artifice. I want to go back to before vernaculars loosely re-encoded, before the scandal of showing-without-telling, to where the writer was explaining his or her thoughts the way we all think them, with insight and articulation, with depth and that incomplete glow of everyday awareness. Even Mr. Sammler’s Planet, in the stern assumptions in gray-toned introspection, seems hard and callous here in the 21st century.

There was an unexpected reduction in crime across America and Western Europe in the 1990s. No one is sure why. But there is a sense in the literature that predates that change that people were perhaps less civilized on average, more prone to instrumentalize one another, more willing to exact revenge. Cold warriors debated realpolitik.… Read the rest

Follow the Paths

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There is a little corner of philosophical inquiry that asks whether knowledge is justified based on all our other knowledge. This epistemological foundationalism rests on the concept that if we keep finding justifications for things we can literally get to the bottom of it all. So, for instance, if we ask why we think there is a planet called Earth, we can find reasons for that belief that go beyond just “’cause I know!” like “I sense the ground beneath my feet” and “I’ve learned empirically-verified facts about the planet during my education that have been validated by space missions.” Then, in turn, we need to justify the idea that empiricism is a valid way of attaining knowledge with something like, “It’s shown to be reliable over time.” This idea of reliability is certainly changing and variable, however, since scientific insights and theories have varied, depending on the domain in question and timeframe. And why should we in fact value our senses as being reliable (or mostly reliable) given what we know about hallucinations, apophenia, and optical illusions?

There is also a curious argument in philosophy that parallels this skepticism about the reliability of our perceptions, reason, and the “warrants” for our beliefs called the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). I’ve previously discussed some aspects of EAAN, but it is, amazingly, still discussed in academic circles. In a nutshell it asserts that our reliable reasoning can’t be evolved because evolution does not reliably deliver good, truthful ways of thinking about the world.

While it may seem obvious that the evolutionary algorithm does not deliver or guarantee completely reliable facilities for discerning true things from false things, the notion of epistemological pragmatism is a direct parallel to evolutionary search (as Fitelson and Sober hint).… Read the rest

Entanglements: Collected Short Works

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Now available in Kindle, softcover, and hardcover versions, Entanglements assembles a decade of short works by author, scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor Mark William Davis.

The fiction includes an intimate experimental triptych on the evolution of sexual identities. A genre-defying poetic meditation on creativity and environmental holocaust competes with conventional science fiction about quantum consciousness and virtual worlds. A postmodern interrogation of the intersection of storytelling and film rounds out the collected works as a counterpoint to an introductory dive into the ethics of altruism.

The nonfiction is divided into topics ranging from literary theory to philosophical concerns of religion, science, and artificial intelligence. Legal theories are magnified to examine the meaning of liberty and autonomy. A qualitative mathematics of free will is developed over the course of two essays and contextualized as part of the algorithm of evolution. What meaning really amounts to is always a central concern, whether discussing politics, culture, or ideas.

The works show the author’s own evolution in his thinking of our entanglement with reality as driven by underlying metaphors that transect science, reason, and society. For Davis, metaphors and the constellations of words that help frame them are the raw materials of thought, and their evolution and refinement is the central narrative of our growth as individuals in a webwork of societies and systems.

Entanglements is for readers who are in love with ideas and the networks of language that support and enervate them. It is a metalinguistic swim along a polychromatic reef of thought where fiction and nonfictional analysis coexist like coral and fish in a greater ecosystem.

Mark William Davis is the author of three dozen scientific papers and patents in cognitive science, search, machine translation, and even the structure of art.… Read the rest

The Rafferty Toffs Show covers ¡Reconquista!

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I got on the Rafferty Toffs Show out of Tennessee to discuss ¡Reconquista!. I had never heard of the show but it is extremely popular on the ‘Chans according to many people. Some of the claims made by the guests are a bit questionable to my mind, but I love seeing critical thinking and a passion for literature!… Read the rest

Gimmicky Nonfictional Fictional Futures

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Salman Rushdie’s new collection of essays, The Language of Truth, begins with an ecstatic celebration of the magical tales of old worlds—wonder tales as he would have it. As the foremost magical realist of the East in the West, Rushdie has thrived on collecting his own dreams against the literary trends of the times (realism/formalism/transgressivism/whateverism). Sage advice from a master: “Don’t write what you know unless it is really interesting” or just dream better dreams. Having myself drifted away from reading fiction in recent years (a known trend in the publishing industry) and towards more and more detailed nonfiction, from the mind-control capabilities of cat shit to the mathematical learning algorithms embedded in the universe, I am certainly guilty of exactly what Rushdie rails against (a damned philistine of sorts), though I am equally skeptical of the Knausgård-style auto-fiction that is recently idealized as a contemporary answer to the vexing question of what new literary hell we deserve.

Still, magical realism or Rushdie-an wonder tales are essentially gimmicks for conveying sometimes lofty (say the shaping of thinking by modernity in Gabriel García Márquez or the effects of colonialism in Rushdie’s own works; Devapriya Roy suggests all “global novels,” which is code for New York/American, are idealizations of liberalism that work towards world peace in some suffused sensibility), but also often trivial observations about ancient human traditions. Calling this a cornerstone of truth begs a deeper question about what truths are being exposed. Is it this universality of the desire for power or the vanity of men and women? Is it the threat imposed by female eroticism to the stability of society? Rushdie likes to think these are answered by these olden forms but a most modern mind begs for explanations of a different sort when trying to map them to our most modern experience of society.… Read the rest

The Twin Earth Dissonance Conspiracy

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I came of age with some of the mid-to-late 20th century literature that took conspiracies as truss work for calculated paranoia, from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Philip K. Dick’s identity shuffling, and on to the obscurely psychedelic Illuminati books by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. They were undoubtedly influenced by the dirty tricks and mind control fantasies and realities of the Cold War, from thallium and LSD poisoning plots against Fidel Castro to the Manchurian Candidate and John Birchers; from Dr. Strangelove to ratfucking in the Nixon-era Republican Party.

The fiction paralleled and mimicked those realities but it was also infused with a kind of magical realism where the ideas permeated through the characters in a nexus of paranoia and fantasy. The reader was admitted to eccentric ways of structuring the history of the world and the motives of unseen forces acting through organizations, governments, and powerful people.

While endlessly fun, the fictional forms were also an inoculation: no mundane conspiracy could possibly capture that pulse of inside knowledge of a mystic firmament of lies and outlandish goals canopied above our earth-chained heads.

But here I am again, though much less amused and more fearful.

I think I read ten different reporting and opinion pieces today on the topic of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the shock-curiosity of the day who amplified QAnon, Jewish space lasers, political assassination fantasies, and likely a range of yet-to-be-discovered subjects of scorn and ridicule. Most analysts agree that such fantastical and angry ideas are methods for manipulating gullible people. They are tools for the acquisition of power over others.

The whole project feels like an alternative reality so late in America’s evolution, like we’ve transitioned to a Counter-Earth or Bizarro Htrae or Nabakov’s AntiTerra.… Read the rest

Fiction in a Preeminent Reality

Mark Davis1 Comment

Young Adult fiction almost always has a simple theme. The hero or heroine is slowly unveiled as a unique and salutary figure, special by birth or heritage, and ideally suited to save the world. Their coming of age is a progression of minor crises, often spread out over multiple volumes, and the reader identifies herself with the protagonist thus lifting her thoughts from the humdrum life of school and social expectations that crowd in from daily life. It is escapism in the most earnest sense, but it is also a form of narcissistic manipulation through fantasy and play. Think of Harry Potter, the Twilight books, the Lightning Thief, Katniss. There isn’t anything to learn as the characters pinball around and the onion’s layers are peeled back to reveal the primary conflict that is finally resolved with a grand confrontation. It’s anesthetizing in the grandiose fulfillment of teenage hopes for being desired and special. And it sells and sells, and with plenty of merch, too.

Literary adult fiction can have a similar anesthetic effect. In this case there is the solemn effort to draw out characterization until the reader identifies parts of themselves in the personas. Katy Waldman at The New Yorker takes on the du jour authors Naoise Dolan and Sally Rooney, both earnest young Irish writers claimed to represent the souls of millennials, in a recent review of Dolan’s Exciting Times. But the books come across as dull counterpoint to YA fiction in most ways. Where Harry Potter is on a journey to confront his familial nemesis, this literature has characters nodding to class struggle while “reflexively” (per Waldman) engaging in self-awareness about that struggle. There is no revolution going on because these bourgeois women and men are rebelling only cognitively to the Sturm und Drang of crusty Hong Kong life.… Read the rest

Originality, History, and Twee Cliché

Mark Davis1 Comment

The American composer John Adams recently complained during a stay-at-home streaming interview from his composing shack on California’s Lost Coast that Baroque composers had it easy. Their compositions had to conform to about four patterns. But for a modern composer every single piece has to be an original invention. It is daunting, intellectually and emotionally. I’ve noticed this in my own search for new voices in writing, whether my own or those of others.

I’ve been an enthusiast in the past, from the crystalline inward revelations of Goethe in translation to the angry unreliable narrators of 90s transgressive fiction. I reveled in Nabokov’s multilingual estrangement and in Pynchon’s anachronistic dialect in Mason & Dixon. In essays there are the hollowed-out abstractions that form an evocative background in writing about art and architecture, the verbose polysyllabic scrums of political writers at the fringes of liberalism and conservatism who are trying to trace out a living intellectual history, and even the conceptual ambiguity of Continental Philosophy that seems to purposefully undermine its own analytical efforts at clarification.

Martin Amis, in his collection of essays, The Rub of Time, has one central message: don’t do cliché. His second message is don’t write memoirs because they are just crude weapons for attacking your historical enemies, from family to critics. Yet there is a feeling, in retrospect, that the reverse-time narration of Time’s Arrow or the end-reveal of London Fields are a bit gimmicky. The writing is more accessible than a Pynchon, but the mechanics are more akin to short stories from 60s sci-fi, just labored at with greater literary travail.

So, yes, I’ve been an enthusiast in the past but am a critic now.… Read the rest

The Inevitability of Cultural Appropriation

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Picasso in Native HeaddressI’m on a TGV from Paris to Monaco. The sun was out this morning and the Jardin de Tuileries was filled with homages in tulips to various still lifes at the Louvre. Two days ago, at the Musée de quai Branly—Jacques Chirac, I saw the Picasso Primitif exposition that showcased the influence of indigenous arts on Picasso’s work through the years, often by presenting statues from Africa or Papua New Guinea side-by-side with examples of Picasso’s efforts through the years. If you never made the connection between his cubism and the statuary of Chad (like me), it is eye opening. He wasn’t particularly culturally sensitive—like everyone else until at least the 1960s—because the fascinating people and their cultural works were largely aesthetic objects to him. If he was aware of the significance of particular pieces (and he might have been), it was something he rarely acknowledged or discussed. The photos that tie Picasso to the African statues are the primary thread of the exhibition, with each one, taken at his California atelier or in Paris or whatnot, inscribed by the curators with a dainty red circle or oval to highlight a grainy African statue lurking in the background. Sometimes they provide a blow-up in case you can’t quite make it out. It is only with a full Native American headdress given to Picasso by the actor Gary Cooper that we see him actively mugging for a camera and providing weight to the show’s theme. Then, next, Brigitte Bardot is leaning over him at the California studio and her cleavage renders the distant red oval uninteresting.

I am writing daily about things I don’t fully understand but try to imbue with a sense of character, of interest, and even of humor.… Read the rest