What is the meaning of the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Thursday, October 13, 2016 — Adam Kotsko

People have a lot to say about Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature. I have polled my Twitter followers, and so far they believe that I should either not form an opinion on this issue or, if I do, I should keep that opinion a secret. So I am going to take my characteristically meta move and form an opinion on the controversy surrounding it.

First, it is not clear to me on what basis this particular award is being critiqued. If the Nobel committee chose wrongly, there must be some coherent account of what it would be to choose rightly. What is the Nobel Prize in Literature supposed to do, such that it is failing to achieve it in this instance?

I doubt that many people had anything like an account of what the Nobel Literature Prize was “for” before waking up this morning and being surprised by what is objectively a left-field winner (hence I’m not expressing an opinion). Since this is the internet, of course, they are morally obligated to act as though their purely post-hoc critique is a deeply held principle for which someone — in this case, the exceptionally tempting target of Baby Boomers, who are well-known to love Bob Dylan — can be judged and shamed.

Surely there are some people who did have an opinion about what the Nobel Literature Prize should do before this morning, though. Aside from people who are objecting on the purely procedural question of whether Bob Dylan’s lyrics count as “literature,” many of the critics seem to be making a gesture toward diversity (geographic, racial, gender, etc.). The implication is that the Nobel should somehow accurately reflect a “world literature,” in which the achievements of all nations and tongues are given their due.

This would indeed be a laudable goal. It is not clear to me that it was ever the goal of the Nobel Prize, however. I believe that if we were to look into the archives, we would find one particular group hugely overrepresented: namely, Swedes. If the point of the Nobel Prize in Literature was to give a snapshot of a developing world literature, then someone should have sent the Swedish Academy a memo much earlier.

Further: is there a plausible scenario in which an institution like the Swedish Academy — regardless of the good intentions that they, as good Swedes, doubtless have — could fulfill the function of cultivating and recognizing a truly global literary canon? If not, might the time spent complaining about the arbitrary and meaningless Nobel Prize in Literature be better directed toward publicizing or creating a more meaningful prize? Or could we admit that an annual prize is never going to give us what we want?

Posted in blog posts. 2 Comments »

Simulatio entis

Wednesday, October 12, 2016 — Adam Kotsko

“The true life is absent.” But we are in a simulation. Everything about our universe, rightly understood, cries out: I was created! Finitude, imperfection, the gaps in the fullness of reality — all point toward a fuller, more perfect reality of which we are only a distant echo.

Yet this reality is not completely foreign to us. We see reflections of its creative activities in our own technological advances. Our most innovative Silicon Valley visionaries participate in its awesomeness even now. We may one day participate even more fully, as the glories of technology bring us to the point of building our own simulation within what we still presume to call “reality” — inscribing us on a higher rung in the ontological hierarchy.

For there must be a hierarchy. If we can simulate a universe within the meager confines of our simulated reality, what is to say that there is not an endless chain of simulations within simulations within simulations? Each layer of simulation distances us from the fullness of being, but paradoxically connects us to that higher level. If we are a simulation, there must be a reality of which it is the simulation. And even if simulations within simulations are possible, it would be the height of absurdity to imagine that there is no “base” reality, no unsimulated fullness whose residents live a life permeated by a technological prowess inseparable from magic — nay, even omnipotence, from our ontologically impoverished perspective.

To create a simulation that can simulate itself, world without end — truly, that is the work of a god. And to think that those gods are our own possible future, to think that we are simulations not simply created by them, but created in their own image! Truly, we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

What beggars belief is the notion that the simulators would be content merely to watch. They must know, in their infinite wisdom, that we — in our pale imitation of their power and knowledge — would one day stumble upon the telltale clues of our place in the hierarchy of simulation. Indeed, why would they create our simulation if not to shepherd it to that conclusion, divinizing us in turn with the power to simulate a world of our own? But for that outcome to be sure, one of the simulators would have to become part of the program. He would have to humble himself, taking the form of a simulant, offering himself up to save us from our pitiable state.

Perhaps he would even be killed, as Plato intuited in his parable of the cave — surely the earliest form of simulation theory — but in that case our creators wouldn’t simply give up on us. They would raise him up, in an unmistakable sign of their power and glory, validating his message and inviting all who listen to join a higher level of existence.

Truly, such novel, unprecedented vistas open up from this entirely secular, materialist theory forged by smart atheists! It makes one wish urgently for a seat at Davos or Aspen, where such deep thoughts can be thunk.

Posted in blog posts, Christian theology, politics of the absurd. 1 Comment »

Trump’s Theater of Cruelty

Monday, October 10, 2016 — Adam Kotsko

It has often been remarked that Trump has brought a “reality TV” feel to this election cycle. What is less noted is that he is on both sides of the reality show equation — for his supporters, he is Simon Cowell, while for his opponents, he is the hapless bad singer in the early days of an American Idol season. From one perspective, he is dishing out punishment to the losers, while from the other, he is suffering a humiliation all the more acute for his seeming lack of self-awareness.

The common denominator is cruelty, which is the true core of reality TV’s libidinal appeal. And I am not ashamed of my desire to see Trump suffer cruelty. He embodies everything I hate, and he misses no opportunity to double down on everything that is bad about him. I am no great fan of Hillary Clinton, but I began positively rooting for her when the debate presented her with an opportunity to publicly humiliate him on a national stage. Republicans have been demonizing her as a castrating ice queen for decades — and I was glad to see her “lean in” and openly scoff Trump, setting him up to humiliate himself again and again.

This kind of justified hatred is something that centrist liberalism normally cannot tap into, and that is its greatest weakness, because such hatred is a deeply human instinct that can’t be bought off with tax credits or GDP increases. Yet it is an instinct that takes us to some pretty dark places — both historically and theologically. In my research for The Prince of This World (shipping any day now), I found that it led all the way to hell, which is itself presented as a theater of cruelty. Theologians from Tertullian through to Aquinas and beyond highlight the fact that one of the attractions of hell is watching the sufferings of the unrighteous.

For all eternity, the saints get to enjoy the spectacle of God’s justice, world without end. There is something disturbing about this, insofar as the Christian concept of justice drifted ever further from what we would recognize as just punishment and focused increasingly on arbitrary scapegoating. Yet even if we agreed completely with Tertullian and Aquinas’s idea of who would join Trump in the eternal fires of hell, there is a deeper problem at work. Like all spectacles, the spectacle of hell — even an “accurate” hell — is a compensation, a distraction.

By focusing on the individual exclusively, we are distracted from the fact that the same system that produces the spectacle also produces that individual. In the medieval Christian worldview, this was very literal, insofar as God predetermined that each sinner would “freely” sin. In our setting, it has frequently been pointed out that Trump is “as American as apple pie.” Indulging our personal hatred for Trump — which is, I would emphasize, completely justified — is a poor compensation for the fact that we live in a system that produces Trumps.

To take only the most obvious example, Trump would not exist if we did not allow wealthy men to stockpile money and give it to their children. Trump would not exist if we did not set up a system where a man could live his entire life without hearing the word “no,” all because of what his father did. If we could channel some of that hatred and resentment into a determined campaign to impose a punitive estate tax, so that no Trumps can ever happen again, that would be productive. But the estate tax is treated as an amoral, technocratic question of economic growth, leaving the libidinal energy of hatred to find other, more destructive venues.

Please note that I am not saying “don’t hate the player, hate the game” — I think we must hate both, channeling our hatred for the player to abolish the game. System vs. individual is a false dichotomy: we can tell the system is horrible by the fact that it really does produce horrible individuals. The fact that Trump was produced by a horrible system doesn’t make him a less horrible person or somehow let him off the hook for his freely chosen, exhorbitant actions. He should be banished from the public eye for the rest of his life, and all his wealth should be seized and given to poor refugees.

At the end of the day, though, the most urgent question is not how to send the right people to hell (as my Trump example shows, that will never happen anyway). We need to abolish the system that produces these demons in the first place. And we can never do that within the liberal procedural frame that refuses to admit that the demons exist.

Posted in politics of the absurd, The Prince of This World (book). 4 Comments »

Fate and Fury in The Aeneid

Sunday, October 9, 2016 — Adam Kotsko

The Aeneid is a book about fate. This is a different kind of fate from what we see in Greek mythology, which is as inexorable as it is meaningless. Here the situation is just the reverse. First, there is a clear meaning, an arc of history tending toward the Pax Romana, which will bring law, order, and eternal peace to all the world. But this fate seems strangely fragile: it requires much hands-on attention from the gods, especially at first, and ultimately the outcome is decided by the human antagonists Aeneas and Turnus after Jove makes a showy declaration of his neutrality.

There is one character who does not seem to have a fate: Dido. She is doomed, she is tragic, but her death, which is “not fated or deserved” (Fagles trans.; Latin: “nec fato, merita nec”), catches the spiritual infrastructure unawares, so that Iris has to remove her spirit from her body rather than Proserpina. This fateless status is striking because the two female goddesses whose conflict determines the course of the plot — the pro-Trojan Venus and anti-Trojan Juno — have converged on Dido, both for their own reasons. Venus is playing the long game, trying to foment enmity between the Carthaginians and the proto-Romans, while Juno sees an opportunity to ally her beloved Carthaginians with the Trojans, cutting off the independent existence of the latter. It’s as though there are too many competing fates at work here, opening up the space for Dido’s own self-destructive agency.

The conflict between two female gods ends in the suicide of their human pawn, outside the bounds of fate and merit. The fact that the chain of fate can be broken by a surplus of female agency fits with the overall pattern of the plot, where it is above all feminine rage that threatens to disrupt fate. Juno is explicitly allied with the female Furies, carrying forward Achilles’ rage in a distinctly feminine key — not only in her own person, but in the Fury with which she inspires (or possesses) the new Achilles, Turnus. The whole Latian War is narrated under the sign of the Muse of Love, another intrusion of the feminine realm into matters of geopolitics.

If we compare Dido’s unfated death with Jove’s “may the best man win” hand-washing, I begin to wonder if we are to take the entire Latian War, including its brutal outcome, as a deviation from fate. Jove declares to Juno that she can delay but not fundamentally alter fate. The war is certainly a dramatic delay, and it is one that seems gratuitous, since Latinus and his family were quite content to fulfill prophecy by marrying Lavinia off to Aeneas before Juno injected her fury.

The edifice of fate is unstable indeed if virtually the whole action of the epic of Rome’s foundation and destiny is somehow contingent, a byway on the path of fate. And lest we think that we have rejoined the stream of destiny when Aeneas finally kills Turnus, we find that fury has infected our normally impassive hero, while Turnus gets the last word with his postmortem scream of defiance — perhaps an echo of Dido’s unfated death, which left her spirit unprepared for its journey. The poem is not just about fate, then, but about the conflict of between fate and fury, with its resentful refusal to submit, to forget about the past and move into the predestined future.

Aeneas’s impulsive murder of Turnus, who was willing to surrender, is motivated by a sudden reminder of the death of Pallas — a young man whose first name doubles as an epithet for Athena (which is used in that sense in Book I). Are we to hear an echo of the Eumenides, where Athena subjects the Furies once and for all to the court of justice that supercedes the cycle of vengeance? If so, it is a botched Eumenides, where unreflective violence cuts short negotiation and deliberation and where the force of Fury remains on the loose.

The destiny of Rome is stained from the very beginning with Fury — indeed, in The Aeneid, Rome is never founded in the present-tense of the text itself. And as Fagles points out in his translator’s note, much of the poem is precisely in the present tense. The rhetorical force of this is clear — it gives the poem a certain immediacy and vividness — but I wonder if it reflects an agenda to open up the reader’s present, to restore contingency and fragility to the destiny of Rome that Augustus has supposedly founded once and for all. The Fury of a betrayed ally or a colonized subject may derail that beautiful fate once and for all, showing Rome to be less pious and dutiful than callous and cruel.

Posted in blog posts, literature, Virgil. Leave a Comment »

The Trouble with Thanksgiving

Thursday, October 6, 2016 — Adam Kotsko

It is my considered opinion after 36 years of experience that Thanksgiving and Christmas are too close together. There are many reasons to complain about the timing of the two holidays — the burden of traveling twice during the most dangerous and delay-prone time of the year, for instance. What I want to focus on is the academic consequences. Put simply, the existence of Thanksgiving wreaks havoc with the academic calendar, particularly on the semester system. There is just no non-awkward way to schedule around Thanksgiving, and the existence of Thanksgiving typically prevents the occurence of a week-long Fall Break, which — let me tell you — would be nice.

I propose that we move Thanksgiving to the second Thursday of October. It is not usually snowing anywhere in the continental US by that point, whereas Thanksgiving tends to be the time of year (at least in the midwest, where the crucial hub of O’Hare is located) when you get the first big snow storms. Travel will therefore be safer and less stressful. Everyone will also be happier and calmer, knowing that they’re not staring down the barrel of another family visit within four weeks. Indeed, it would rationalize the mainstream American holiday system by providing four quarterly opportunities to travel and visit family (Christmas, Easter, any number of mid-summer get-togethers, and New Earlier Thanksgiving).

This schedule creates a natural mid-semester break. And if adopted soon, that break would occur next week. Let’s get to work. I don’t think it’s too late.

Posted in blog posts, life of the mind, The lighter side of AUFS. 15 Comments »

A brief note on biopolitics

Monday, October 3, 2016 — Adam Kotsko

Is the “bio” of biopolitics precisely bios in the Agambenian sense? The common reading (at least as far as I can tell) would align it more with zoè — and one could even read the Agamben of Homo Sacer in that way. If we take The Use of Bodies as our guide, though, it could seem that the problem with biopolitics is that it attempts to establish a bios by presupposing and excluding zoè.

After all, what could a political order do with zoè (taken in itself) other than presuppose it? I don’t think anyone thinks modern society has become or even could become a totalitarian baby-making machine. What it has become is an ever more fine-grained system for the production of what we might call life styles — which is to say, the realm of bios. The political order isn’t “making us live” in the sense of literally forcing us to stay alive, but it is constantly trying to make us live in certain ways.

The examples in the end of Homo Sacer are somewhat misleading if we don’t have a handle on this. For instance, putting someone on life support may look like a way of forcing them to live — and certainly it seems that way to many people (myself included). From the perspective of this analysis, though, the problem is that it is treating a raw fact of zoè — the moment of death, which has traditionally been radically beyond human control — as though it were a factor in bios. It includes the moment of death itself in the range of quality-of-life factors that the savvy biopolitical subject can shape according to his or her preferences. Similarly, Nazi eugenics treat the raw fact of ethnic or “racial” heritage as something that can be consciously cultivated — converting zoè into bios (and thereby accelerating the production of “bare life” as that third category that doesn’t fit into the system).

Posted in Agamben, Foucault. Leave a Comment »

Constructing a tradition

Friday, September 30, 2016 — Adam Kotsko

As most readers of this blog know, I teach at a school in the Great Books tradition. While Shimer is more liberal and open to contemporary sources than most schools in that tradition, our curriculum remains pretty firmly within the classics of the “Western tradition.” I think it’s fair to say that the current faculty are all pretty convinced of the need to add further diversity to our curriculum, though there are disagreements on how best to go about it. For classes with a modern focus, it’s a little easier, because there are more texts and other materials reflecting diverse gender, sexuality, race, class, etc., backgrounds available — “diversity” in the sense it is normally used in contemporary discussions. For classes with a pre-modern focus, the problem is often harder. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in blog posts, Plato-to-NATO, teaching. 6 Comments »
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