tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post9127687887232180509..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: Raised Vulcan Eyebrows and Hopeless Human HopesDale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-27448612750749061752010-06-08T20:54:02.049-07:002010-06-08T20:54:02.049-07:00> There isn't much worse you could have bee...> There isn't much worse you could have been accused of at the<br />> time. . .<br /><br />Today, of course, we're quite tolerant not only of the<br />masturbation of intellectuals, but of intellectual<br />masturbation.<br /><br />;->jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-20740329742332872102010-06-08T20:51:07.738-07:002010-06-08T20:51:07.738-07:00Speaking of Nietzsche, I was hanging out in Barnes...Speaking of Nietzsche, I was hanging out in Barnes & Noble<br />a few weekends ago and I came across an odd book about the<br />relationship between Nietzsche and Richard Wagner:<br />http://www.amazon.com/Nietzsche-Wagner-Subjugation-Joachim-Kohler/dp/0300076401<br /><br />One of the strangest episodes recounted in the book<br />is that when Nietzsche began seeing a doctor on account of<br />his worsening health (recommended by Wagner? I can't remember),<br />the composer **took it upon himself** to correspond with the doctor<br />about the possible causes of his philosopher friend's<br />health problems. And the doctor cooperated fully in this<br />violation of his patient's privacy. But the purpose of<br />Wagner's letters to the doctor was to convince him of<br />Wagner's theory that the source of Nietzsche's difficulties<br />was that the latter was a chronic masturbator. There<br />isn't much worse you could have been accused of at the<br />time, and Nietzsche never forgave Wagner the humiliation.jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-5920039787934688722010-06-08T20:22:04.617-07:002010-06-08T20:22:04.617-07:00Joni in 2005, in NYMagazine:
"Nietzsche was ...Joni in 2005, in <a href="http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/music/pop/11888/" rel="nofollow">NYMagazine</a>:<br /><br />"Nietzsche was a hero, especially with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He gets a bad rap; he’s very misunderstood. He’s a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers."Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-33753995396717719362010-06-08T18:56:11.632-07:002010-06-08T18:56:11.632-07:00> In the Joni Mitchell lyrics, is the Lord on d...> In the Joni Mitchell lyrics, is the Lord on death row<br />> referring to Charles Manson? . . .<br />><br />> I suppose it could be interpreted more abstractly as the<br />> death of traditional religion. . .<br /><br />With possibly a glance at Nietzsche -- our Roberta Joan is<br />certainly sophisticated enough to have heard of him.jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-22534304203296433312010-06-08T09:56:38.051-07:002010-06-08T09:56:38.051-07:00I suppose it could be interpreted more abstractly ...<i>I suppose it could be interpreted more abstractly as the death of traditional religion in the late 60s / early 70s counterculture,</i> <br /><br />Definitely how I always heard it. And I think a slightly longer excerpt clarifies this impression: <br /><br /><i>Still I sent up my prayer -- Wondering where it had to go -- With heaven full of astronauts -- And the Lord on death row -- While the millions of his lost and lonely ones -- Call out and clamour to be found -- Caught in their struggle for higher positions -- And their search for love that sticks around</i><br /><br />Few would attribute to Manson a following of "millions of... lost and lonely ones" (although maybe the Beatles momentarily managed that feat).<br /><br />Are you a Joni fan? I enjoyed giving her a tangential nod, since this piece was so weirdly confessional for whatever reason and since Joni was almost as bone deep a formative influence on me as Spock!Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-51759532960349000232010-06-08T09:39:19.654-07:002010-06-08T09:39:19.654-07:00I suppose it could be interpreted more abstractly ...I suppose it could be interpreted more abstractly as the death of traditional religion in the late 60s / early 70s counterculture, but the reference to astronauts makes me think it's a more proximate cultural reference. Manson did claim to be God, and I believe he was originally given the death penalty, although the death penalty was abolished very soon after, so he ended up getting a life sentence and is still with us.adminhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01020701980607126113noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-43328383088639358412010-06-08T09:33:03.807-07:002010-06-08T09:33:03.807-07:00In the Joni Mitchell lyrics, is the Lord on death ...In the Joni Mitchell lyrics, is the Lord on death row referring to Charles Manson?adminhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01020701980607126113noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-54608378256002084392010-06-07T20:06:26.469-07:002010-06-07T20:06:26.469-07:00I'll see what I can do, Dale -- on several of ...I'll see what I can do, Dale -- on several of these fronts!Athena Andreadishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07650180659001228746noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-18899590950850046542010-06-07T13:41:47.032-07:002010-06-07T13:41:47.032-07:00> they have always spoken to me both in the iro...> they have always spoken to me both in the irony of their dry humor. . .<br /><br />KIRK: A boundary layer between what and what?<br /><br />SPOCK: Between where we were, and where we are.<br /><br />KIRK: Are you trying to be funny, Mr. Spock?<br /><br />SPOCK: It would never occur to me, captain.<br /><br />> and in the earnestness of their aspiration to radical empathy as<br />> exemplars of humanity and humaneness. . .<br /><br />McCOY: Suffer the death of thy neighbor, eh Spock?<br />Now, you wouldn't wish that on us, would you?<br /><br />SPOCK: It might have rendered your history a little<br />less bloody.<br /><br />(both from "The Immunity Syndrome")jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-47586940531926096732010-06-07T10:12:54.885-07:002010-06-07T10:12:54.885-07:00Hey, Athena -- you're right on all counts here...Hey, Athena -- you're right on all counts here. I was calling to mind the insect-likeness of the Tlic, so I'm going to change "insectivorous" to "insectoid." But your last comment that "Butler's work is a continuous exploration of the nuances of coercion, and the collaborations of the coerced" is definitely especially right on.<br /><br />For me what has always been so extraordinary about Butler's science fiction is that in it the conventional sfnal organization around the conceit of the Efficacious Man (so often, literally, a man, a kind of Macgyver figure, Scotty in Engineering, facing an external threat to be mastered through the application of his reason, reductively construed as instrumentality) is transformed instead into the effort to cope with unmasterable circumstances, usually incarnated and social, always involving costly transformations that bring the protagonist into a more flourishing mutuality, a more capacious understanding of efficacy which contains the first but includes more. <br /><br />It is hard for a rhetorician by training like me not to be moved by Butler's preoccupations -- while persuasion is traditionally figured as "an outside" to coercion, or the violent adjudication of disputes, it is also true that in order for persuasion to do its work parties must already share or find their way to a shared framework the force of which forecloses what might otherwise be deemed possible or important in a violence of a different kind. I don't think this gives the lie to those who would substitute discourse for violence (that's just a facile relativism), but I do think it means that those devoted to nonviolence have to attend to a kind of traffic between modes of violence. <br /><br />The reason rhetoric has seemed so attuned to the aspiration toward nonviolence -- which drew me to the study and teaching of it most of all -- is not that rhetoric concerns itself with persuasion (which can have its own subtle coercions, note the two senses of conviction), but that rhetoric concerns itself with the relation of literal and figurative language. The traffic between modes of violence to which those who would be nonviolent should properly attend seem to me subsumed within the traffic between the literal and figurative and it is the rhetorician's attunement to the latter that affords her the sensitivity to the former that makes rhetoric a space for a hope for nonviolence, not, say, the mastery of a rhetorical Method that masters violence (a rather absurd rather, violent conception of the nonviolent I've often thought).<br /><br />The reason I have gone into this rather long detour is that it seems to me Butler is really grappling with the generic conventions and conceptual frames of the science fiction she has taken up to work through her preoccupations. I've actually taught many of her novels and stories in my rhetoric courses over the years. <br /><br />I think that it is not only the figure of the Efficacious Man she takes on (in so many ways), but the underlying association of a project of reduction treated as indispensable to the instrumentality on which that Efficacious Man depends for sfnal agency, especially "Hard" sfnal agency -- the reduction yielding the cardboard qualities one ruefully discerns in so much sf but also yielding a productive aesthetic crisis for what is after all a literary genre dependent on the figural it would disdain for its valorization of literality. <br /><br />Butler seems to me to write in the belly of this beast -- her novel <i>Kindred</i> seems the clearest place where the quandaries of coercion and agency are connected most conspicuously to an anxious navigation of the distinction of the literal/figurative.<br /><br />I am definitely looking forward to your piece on Vulcans, Athena, but I hope you can write more about Butler too some time -- I keenly feel the lack of such good conversation!Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-57882962890771091612010-06-07T06:00:31.016-07:002010-06-07T06:00:31.016-07:00I plan an article on Vulcans myself, so I won'...I plan an article on Vulcans myself, so I won't steal my own thunder by long comments. An important correction, though: the aliens in Bloodchild are not insectivorous. They are carnivores who require warm-blooded live hosts to host their larvae -- a more benign, more complex version of Ridley's Alien. They do so to the humans who come to their world, and the accommodation the two species eventually reach is still asymmetrical.<br /><br />In many ways, Butler's work is a continuous exploration of the nuances of coercion, and the collaborations of the coerced.Athena Andreadishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07650180659001228746noreply@blogger.com