Greenwich Village

So I was totally in love with Midge, in Mad Men. It probably helped that I didn't know her name was Midge. Who needs to know people's names? When she returned in the fourth season I was so happy. Then it turned out she's addicted to heroin now. I actually cried.

It's her look (4:38). It's her mixture of freedom and... dependency? Carelessness and, maybe, insecurity. But most importantly the carelessness. She seemed to live. Maybe I just want to be bohemian.

Irony and Identity

There are two aspects of the problem of irony, its existence and prevalence creates two forms of confusion. One is confusion of reception. How do we know whether to experience or interpret things ironically, or to what extent? There are social consequences to this confusion: 'mis'-interpretation causes disconnection, dissonance; it exposes disparities between viewpoints that seem 'fundamental' because they usually go silently assumed, and it also exposes those viewpoints themselves, as held by others and ourselves.

If the confusion of reception creates some conditions for self-questioning in that way (what are my silent assumptions? Do they match those of others?), the second type of confusion is still more self-oriented. This is confusion of intention. We could call it just a type of confusion of reception: i.e. self-reception, our own understanding of ourselves. Irony-saturated culture habituates us to ironic modes of expression. But when we have the irony habit, it sometimes seems hard to know when even we ourselves are being literal.

I find myself saying things, and then being unsure if I meant them ironically or not. So not only am I isolated from others by the potential for confusion of reception, I am isolated from myself as well. I don't know any longer what I really mean, or what I really think, or what I really am. I am now radically uncertain. So where do I go from here?

Snippets

1.

[From a conversation with James Harding.] There are two types of neurotic person. People who walk quickly: they're constantly being held up by slow-walkers, tourists, etc., they can never go as fast as they like, they can never relax or be free. People who walk slowly: they're always being overtaken by fast-walkers, people whose lives seem to have an urgency and meaning that theirs don't, they're anxious about getting in the way. There is nobody who walks 'at an average speed'. Dialectics of neurotic walkers: it takes both types to make each other.

2.

There's pleasure in the gaps between things: making them line up, or closing them, although you never can. The pleasure of sport is about the gap between vision and its accomplishment. To be a good sportsman (I was thinking of tennis: "chess on the run") you have to know what you're trying to do, at tactical and strategic levels: you have to have vision - comprehension, prediction, imagination; but you also have to be able to do it, it's no good saying I want to hit it there if you can't. Some people are better at one than the other, but you have to do both (that's why chess is not a sport). The way I've described it seems Cartesian: mind + body. But it's really the opposite: sport needs the whole of you, the pleasure comes from making yourself whole.

Virtue and Social Control

This morning and early-afternoon I was reading a book that was egregious in many ways. But towards the end it led me to a mini-breakthrough. It's this:

I'm interested in how republicanism and liberalism relate to social control. I think they (especially liberalism) represent an alternative to patriarchalism where invisible, structural control takes the place of overt, active control. The concept of 'virtue' is central to this because it contains an implied structure of (invisible) social control: the virtuous man has 'self-control,' he willingly submits to 'legitimate' authority, sacrifices his 'immediate interests' and so on. The important source of my thought on this has actually been Robin Hanson's discussion of self-discipline.

But my realisation today was that there's a way of linking virtue to social control far more directly, using eighteenth-century thought itself. The Founders (as well as people like Adam Smith and David Hume) were believers in the 'spur of fame' - that men will find it in their 'interest' to do things that will make them look good to others and posterity. "The love of it [i.e. of fame, in this sense] is the love of virtue," said Smith. But acting in this way is really about acting according to social norms and structures (or acting in ways that aren't in your clear and present interest), doing what others expect and value: that's how you achieve 'fame'. Patriotism, self-sacrifice, obedience: virtue is social control.

Singularly Unuseful

Let's combine some recent themes. Here is David Foster Wallace on irony (via):

Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything it debunks. …The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.” … Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. [from E Unibus Pluram]

Play Talking

Robin Hanson adds still more to my understanding of irony:

With a little indirection, however, even play talk can communicate on serious important topics. For example, while social rules might forbid directly propositioning others for sex, people often communicate an interest in sex by joking about it in the right way. As long as there are other plausible interpretations of their words and actions, it can be hard for others to accuse them of violating the social rules...

Humans thus developed sophisticated capacities for using play talk to indirectly communicate on serious topics. We became very adept at and fond of playfully talking on two levels at once, especially when the more hidden level talks about or embodies rule violations. We are so fond of this sort of activity and ability, in fact, that we often consider a surplus of it the main reason we like or love someone, and a deficit of it almost a definition of being inhuman. 

But I would add, the saturation and complexity of play talk in our culture is (necessarily) at the edge of our discernment. Sometimes we don't know if other people are play talking or just really talking. Sometimes we don't know if we're play talking.

Something Pathetic About It

When I was a little way into Infinite Jest I was thinking the interesting thing about it was that it didn't seem to be about love at all. And most of the books that I read and like really do seem to be about love. Or at least, I suppose, they have an easy way in for me to make it about love. Like for example, the novel I read before Infinite Jest was Dostoevsky's The Devils. Pretty much about love. You might say madness, or something about the nature of politics and revolution and utopia and hope (like, it's all mad), but for me it was mainly really about love (the maddest thing of all, eh?).

Then I got a bit further through Infinite Jest. In fact I was pretty near the end. I think I might even be able to pinpoint the moment when I had this sort of revelation. When Gateley's lying in hospital after the fracas with the Canadians and he's sort of immobile and thinking, and he's thinking about Joelle and fantasising about their maybe future love. Incidentally there are a few lines there that are appear almost word-for-word at the beginning of The Finkler Question - which makes you think, Gately and Treslove are such different characters, or maybe DFW and Jacobson such different authors, this must be real, here. Let me quote at length (it's all at length) from Infinite Jest:

If a halfway-attractive female so much as smiles at Don Gately as they pass on the crowded street, Don Gately like pretty much all heterosexual drug addicts, has within a couple of blocks mentally wooed, shacked up with, married and had kids by that female, all in the future, all in his head, mentally dandling a young Gately on his mutton-joint knee while this mental Mrs. G. bustles in an apron she sometimes at night provocatively wears with nothing underneath. By the time he gets where he's going, the drug addict has either mentally divorced the female and is in a bitter custody battle for the kids or is mentally happy still hooked up with her in his sunset years, sitting together amid big-headed grandkids on a special porch swing midofied for Gately's mass, her legs in support-hose and orthopedic shoes still damn fine, barely having to speak to converse, calling each other 'Mother' and 'Papa,' knowing they'll kick within weeks of each other because neither could possible live without the other, is how bonded they've got through the years.

...Having Joelle share personal historical snapshots with Gately leads his mind right over the second's wall to envision Joelle, hopelessly smitten with the heroic Don G., volunteering to bonk the guy in the hat outside the room over the head and sneak Gately and his tube and catheter out of St. E.'s in a laundry cart or whatever, saving him from the BPD Finest or Federal crew cuts or whatever direr legal retribution the guy in the hat might represent, or else selflessly offering to give him her veil and a big dress and let him hold the catheter under the muumuu and sashay right out while she huddles under the covers in impersonation of Gately, romantically endangering her recovery and radio career and legal freedom, all out of a Liebestod-type consuming love for Gately.

This last fantasy makes him ashamed, it's so cowardly. And even contemplating the romantic thing with a clueless newcomer is shameful... Gately sees it's probably no accident that his vividest Joelle-fantasies are coincident with flight-from-Finest-and-legal-responsibility fantasies. That his head's real fantasy is this newcomer helping him avoid, escape, and run, joining him later in Kentucky on a modified porch swing. He's still pretty new himself: wanting somebody else to take care of his mess, somebody else to keep him out of his variou cages. It's the same delusion as the basic addictive-Substance-delusion, basically. His eyes roll up in his head at disgust with himself, and stay there. [pp862-864]*

That passage was really powerful for me when I read it, and I guess I felt a bit ashamed too, I guess I felt like Gately. Shall I do a trite line here? We're all "drug-addicts" really. We just have different drugs. And that's what I take DFW to be saying, one of the things he's saying in the book: life's big, and there are lots of drugs, lots of obsessions, and love's one of them. It's not something more special than that. Because all sorts of drugs are pretty special for different sorts of people. But it's just part of that bigger thing, it's part of this (which line I took to be the motto of the novel):

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. [p900]

That's- I don't know, that's hard for me.


* Here's the line from The Finkler Question:

When a woman of the sort Julian Treslove found beautiful crossed his path it wasn't his body that took the force but his mind. She shattered his calm... He no sooner saw the woman than the aftermath of her - his marriage proposal and her acceptance, the home they would set up together, the drawn rich silk curtains leaking purple light... only for every wrack of it... to come crashing down on him in the moment of her walking past. [p3]