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#GRANTED. MY ESSAY IS SO MUCH BETTER AND SUBSTANTIAL THAN WHAT IT WAS

gascon-en-exil · 2 years

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Enjoyed the Azure Gleam video, as expected. However, for constructive criticism, I do think a bit too much of said video was devoted to things about non Blue Lions stuff. For example, yes, brainwashed puppet Edelgard is a thing, but it's less important than the Blue Lions and their stories. Also, idk if it was best to put the Arval stuff in that video, mainly because it felt out of place in Azure Gleam itself. Dimitri's support with Claude and Edelgard felt way out of touch (1/2)

But simultaneously, I can understand if you didn't wanna make a separate video about Arval alone, for obvious reasons lol. It's def not worth its own video. So yeah, I get it. But since I adore your Blue Lions analysis, I just wanted more haha. I'll be looking forward to your video about the subtext/context shipping in Azure Gleam tho! I can't tell you about how much I was screaming into the void when the King awakens cutscene played in Azure Gleam chapter 7 xD (2/2)

Yeah, the Arval stuff doesn't really fit with any of the routes, but it's still there and had to be talked about at some point. As for Edelgard, I dedicated so much of the video to her because that's the main (substantial) criticism I've seen of AG online, and because if I spent the whole time talking about Dimitri and friends there would have just been even more squeeing. I have to save some of that for the subtext project - and as I've been tossing around ideas for how to approach that in a more interesting way than just another video essay, I want to keep some of my better material under wraps. I think it's a sign of how solid the Lions stuff is in AG that there's less to pick apart there. I didn't want to spend 10 minutes praising them only to have people in the comments whining that I ignored what happens to Edelgard and how that makes AG The Worst. Granted they're finding a bunch of unrelated wanky topics to whine about instead, but engagement's engagement.

I can't recall who it was who suggested it, but I like the idea of doing a compare/contrast with Three Houses for the gay subtext video. There's a couple of creative options there - and the Lions/AM/AG have more to work with than anyone else, easily.

#Fire Emblem #Fire Emblem Three Hopes

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dwellordream · 3 years

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“…The complex design of the Victorian house signified the changing ratio between the cultural and physical work situated there. With its twin parlors, one for formal, the other for intimate exchange, and its separate stairs and entrances for servants, the Victorian house embodied cultural preoccupations with specialized functions, particularly distinguishing between public and private worlds.

American Victorians maintained an expectation of sexualized and intimate romanticism in private at the same time that they sustained increasingly ‘‘proper’’ expectations for conduct in public. The design of the house helped to facilitate the expression of both tendencies, with a formal front parlor designed to stage proper interactions with appropriate callers, and the nooks, crannies, and substantial private bedrooms designed for more intimate exchange or for private rumination itself.

Just as different areas of the house allowed for different gradations of intimacy, so did the house offer rooms designed for different users. The ideal home offered a lady’s boudoir, a gentleman’s library, and of course a children’s nursery. This ideal was realized in the home of Elizabeth E. Dana, daughter of Richard Henry Dana, who described her family members situated throughout the house in customary and specialized space in one winter’s late afternoon in 1865. Several of her siblings were in the nursery watching a sunset, ‘‘Father is in his study as usual, mother is taking her nap, and Charlotte is lying down and Sally reading in her room.’’ In theory, conduct in the bowels of the house was more spontaneous than conduct in the parlor.

This was partly by design, in the case of adults, but by nature in the case of children. If adults were encouraged to discover a true, natural self within the inner chambers of the house, children—and especially girls—were encouraged to learn how to shape their unruly natural selves there so that they would be presentable in company. The nursery for small children acknowledged that childish behavior was not well-suited for ‘‘society’’ and served as a school for appropriate conduct, especially in Britain, where children were taught by governesses in the nursery, and often ate there as well. In the United States children usually went to school and dined with their parents. As the age of marriage increased, the length of domestic residence for some girls extended to twenty years and more.

The lessons of the nursery became more indirect as children grew up. Privacy for children was not designed simply to segregate them from adults but was also a staging arena for their own calisthenics of self-discipline. A room of one’s own was the perfect arena for such exercises in responsibility. As the historian Steven Mintz observes, such midcentury advisers as Harriet Martineau and Orson Fowler ‘‘viewed the provision of children with privacy as an instrument for instilling self-discipline. Fowler, for example, regarded private bedrooms for children as an extension of the principle of specialization of space that had been discovered by merchants. If two or three children occupied the same room, none felt any responsibility to keep it in order.’’

…The argument for the girl’s room of her own rested on the perfect opportunity it provided for practicing for a role as a mistress of household. As such, it came naturally with early adolescence. The author Mary Virginia Terhune’s advice to daughters and their mothers presupposed a room of one’s own on which to practice the housewife’s art. Of her teenage protagonist Mamie, Terhune announced: ‘‘Mamie must be encouraged to make her room first clean, then pretty, as a natural following of plan and improvement. . . . Make over the domain to her, to have and to hold, as completely as the rest of the house belongs to you. So long as it is clean and orderly, neither housemaid nor elder sister should interfere with her sovereignty.’’ Writing in 1882, Mary Virginia Terhune favored the gradual granting of autonomy to girls as a natural part of their training for later responsibilities.

…Victorian parents convinced their daughters that the secret to a successful life was strict and conscientious self-rule. The central administrative principle was carried forth from childhood: the responsibility to ‘‘be good.’’ The phrase conveyed the prosecution of moralist projects and routines, and perhaps equally significant, the avoidance or suppression of temper and temptation. Being good extended beyond behavior and into the realm of feeling itself. Being good meant what it said—actually transfiguring negative feelings, including desire and anger, so that they ceased to become a part of experience.

Historians of emotion have argued that culture can shape temperament and experience; the historian Peter Stearns, for one, argues that ‘‘culture often influences reality’’ and that ‘‘historians have already established some connections between Victorian culture and nineteenth-century emotional reality.’’ More recently, the essays in Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog’s Inventing the Psychological share the assumption that the emotions are ‘‘historically contingent, socially specific, and politically situated.’’ The Victorians themselves also believed in the power of context to transform feeling.

The transformation of feeling was the end product of being good. Early lessons were easier. Part of being good was simply doing chores and other tasks regularly, as Alcott’s writings suggest. One day in 1872 Alice Blackwell practiced the piano ‘‘and was good,’’ and another day she went for a long walk ‘‘for exercise,’’ made two beds, set the table, ‘‘and felt virtuous.’’ Josephine Brown’s New Year’s resolutions suggested such a regimen of virtue—sanctioned both by the inherent benefits of the plan and by its regularity.

As part of her plan to ‘‘make this a better year,’’ she resolved to read three chapters of the Bible every day (and five on Sunday) and to ‘‘study hard and understandingly in school as I never have.’’ At the same time, Brown realized that doing a virtuous act was never simply a question of mustering the positive energy to accomplish a job. It also required mastering the disinclination to drudge. She therefore also resolved, ‘‘If I do feel disinclined, I will make up my mind and do it.’’

The emphasis on forming steady habits brought together themes in religion and industrial culture. The historian Richard Rabinowitz has explained how nineteenth-century evangelicalism encouraged a moralism which rejected the introspective soul-searching of Calvinism, instead ‘‘turning toward usefulness in Christian service as a personal goal.’’ This pragmatic spirituality valued ‘‘habits and routines rather than events,’’ including such habits as daily diary writing and other regular demonstrations of Christian conduct. Such moralism blended seamlessly with the needs of industrial capitalism—as Max Weber and others have persuasively argued.

Even the domestic world, in some ways justified by its distance from the marketplace, valued the order and serenity of steady habits. Such was the message communicated by early promoters of sewing machines, for instance, one of whom offered the use of the sewing machine as ‘‘excellent training . . . because it so insists on having every-thing perfectly adjusted, your mind calm, and your foot and hand steady and quiet and regular in their motions.’’ The relation between the market place and the home was symbiotic. Just as the home helped to produce the habits of living valued by prudent employers, so, as the historian Jeanne Boydston explains, the regularity of machinery ‘‘was the perfect regimen for developing the placid and demure qualities required by the domestic female ideal.’’

Despite its positive formulation, ‘‘being good’’ often took a negative form —focusing on first suppressing or mastering ‘‘temper’’ or anger. The major target was ‘‘willfulness.’’ An adviser participating in Chats with Girls proposed the cultivation of ‘‘a perfectly disciplined will,’’ which would never ‘‘yield to wrong’’ but instantly yield to right. Such a will, too, could teach a girl to curb her unruly feelings. The Ladies’ Home Journal columnist Ruth Ashmore (a pseudonym for Isabel Mallon) more crudely warned readers ‘‘that the woman who allows her temper to control her will not retain one single physical charm.’’ As a young teacher, Louisa May Alcott wrestled with this most common vice.

Of her struggles for self-control, she recognized that ‘‘this is the teaching I need; for as a school-marm I must behave myself and guard my tongue and temper carefully, and set an example of sweet manners.’’ Alcott, of course, made a successful career out of her efforts to master her maverick temper. The autobiographical heroine of her most successful novel, Little Women, who has spoken to successive generations of readers as they endured female socialization, was modeled on her own struggles to bring her spirited temperament in accord with feminine ideals.

So in practice being good first meant not being bad. Indeed, it was some- times better not to ‘‘be’’ much at all. Girls sometimes worked to suppress liveliness of all kinds. Agnes Hamilton resolved at the beginning of 1884 that she would ‘‘study very hard this year and not have any spare time,’’ and also that she would try to stop talking, a weakness she had identified as her principle fault.

When Lizzie Morrissey got angry she didn’t speak for the rest of the evening, certainly preferable to impassioned speech. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who later critiqued many aspects of Victorian repression, at the advanced age of twenty-one at New Year’s made her second resolution: ‘‘Correct and necessary speech only.’’

Mary Boit, too, measured her goodness in terms of actions uncommitted. ‘‘I was good and did not do much of anything,’’ she recorded ambiguously at the age of ten. It is perhaps this reservation that provoked the reflection of southerner Lucy Breckinridge, who anticipated with excitement the return of her sister from a long trip. ‘‘Eliza will be here tomorrow. She has been away so long that I do not know what I shall do to repress my joy when she comes. I don’t like to be so glad when anybody comes.’’ Breckinridge clearly interpreted being good as in practice an exercise in suppression. This was just the lesson of self-censoring that Alice James had starkly described as ‘‘‘killing myself,’ as some one calls it.’’

This emphasis on repressing emotion became especially problematic for girls in light of another and contradictory principle connected with being good. A ‘‘good’’ girl was happy, and this positive emotion she should express in moderation. Explaining the duties of a girl of sixteen, an adviser writing in the Ladies’ Home Journal noted that she should learn ‘‘that her part is to make the sunshine of the home, to bring cheer and joyousness into it.’’ At the same time that a girl must suppress selfishness and temper, she must also project contentment and love. Advisers simply suggested that a girl employ a steely resolve to substitute one for the other. ‘‘Every one of my girls can be a sunshiny girl if she will,’’ an adviser remonstrated. ‘‘Let every failure act as an incentive to greater success.’’

This message could be concentrated into an incitement not to glory and ethereal virtue but simply to a kind of obliging ‘‘niceness.’’ This was the moral of a tale published in The Youth’s Companion in 1880. A traveler in Norway arrives in a village which is closed up at midday in mourning for a recent death. The traveler imagines that the deceased must have been a magnate or a personage of wealth and power. He inquires, only to be told, ‘‘It is only a young maiden who is dead. She was not beautiful nor rich. But oh, such a pleasant girl.’’ ‘‘Pleasantness’’ was the blandest possible expression of the combined mandate to repress and ultimately destroy anger and to project and ultimately feel love and concern.

Yet it was a logical blending of the religious messages of the day as well. Richard Rabinowitz’s work on the history of spirituality notes a new later-century current which blended with the earlier emphasis on virtuous routines. The earlier moralist discipline urged the establishment of regular habits and the steady attention to duty. Later in the century, religion gained a more experiential and private dimension, expressed in devotionalism. Both of these demands—for regular virtue and the experience and expression of religious joy—could provide a loftier argument for the more mundane ‘‘pleasant.’’

…The challenges of this project were particularly bracing given the acute sensitivity of the age to hypocrisy. One must not only appear happy to meet social expectations: one must feel the happiness. The origins of this insistence came not only from a demanding evangelical culture but also from a fluid social world in which con artists lurked in parlors as well as on riverboats. A young woman must be completely sincere both in her happiness and in her manners if she was not to be guilty of the corruptions of the age. One adviser noted the dilemma: ‘‘‘Mamma says I must be sincere,’ said a fine young girl, ‘and when I ask her whether I shall say to certain people, ‘‘Good morning, I am not very glad to see you,’’ she says, ‘‘My dear, you must be glad to see them, and then there will be no trouble.’’’’’

…No wonder that girls filled their journals with mantras of reassurance as they attempted to square the circle of Victorian emotional expectation. Anna Stevens included a separate list stuck between the pages of her diary. ‘‘Everything is for the best, and all things work together for good. . . . Be good and you will be happy. . . . Think twice before you speak.’’

We look upon these aphorisms as throwaways—platitudes which scarcely deserve to be preserved along with more ‘‘authentic’’ manuscript material. Yet these mottoes, preserved and written in most careful handwriting in copy books and journals, represent the straws available to girls attempting to grasp the complex and ultimately unreconcilable projects of Victorian emotional etiquette and expectation.”

- Jane H. Hunter, “Houses, Families, Rooms of One Own.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

#history #victorian #jane h. hunter #how young ladies became girls #gender

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lifeonashelf · 3 years

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COHEN, LEONARD

So, here’s the thing: I don’t know anything about Leonard Cohen.

I do own two of his most acclaimed albums, but don’t get too excited. I bought both of them the week of Cohen’s passing solely because learning of his passing made me realize I didn’t have anything by him in my collection, and he’s always been on my radar as an artist I should probably know some things about, you know? I listened to those two discs one day while I was cleaning my apartment or something, and they were lovely and pleasant and sounded great, but then I filed them away on my shelf and that was essentially the extent of my immersion into the world of Leonard Cohen. I know the reissues I purchased are noteworthy entries in his discography, because they’re housed in these rather attractive hardcover digipacks with booklets that feature lengthy contextual essays written by people way smarter than me. I suppose I could read those essays and glean a little information about Cohen that way, but then I’d just be offering you disingenuous regurgitation, and I don’t want to fake anything in these pages; that’s kind of counteractive to the entire purpose of me writing these dumb things. So if you want to read a thoughtful essay about Leonard Cohen constructed by someone who I assume knows enough about Leonard Cohen to warrant being paid to write an essay about him, you should definitely seek out the striking deluxe editions of Songs From a Room and Songs of Love and Hate I’m referring to, because both have essays in them, and they’re printed on glossy paper so they’re probably pretty good (very few crappy essays get preserved on glossy paper).

No one is paying me to write this essay about Leonard Cohen—they’d be pretty stupid to do so, since I don’t know anything about Leonard Cohen—but I have that pair of records and he’s the next artist on alphabetical deck. So here we are.

Actually, you know what? Before we get started, I’m going to go ahead and advise you to just skip this piece altogether.

Hear me out. I can’t imagine this is going to be one of my better entries; considering my not knowing anything about the person I’m supposed to be writing about and all, the odds of my somehow summoning literary gold here aren’t particularly strong. Also, Leonard Cohen is a highly respected artist, and based on the listening I’m doing right now, he definitely deserves that respect—I’m on my second spin of Songs from a Room and it is an absolutely beautiful record. But what am I accomplishing by telling you that? You probably already know Songs From a Room is an absolutely beautiful record, and if you don’t, you should totally listen to it right this minute instead of reading anything I might observe about it, because the album is a whole lot better than this essay is going to be. I’ve been down this road before, so I can tell you exactly what’s about to happen here: I’m going to keep prattling on with gibberish just like this and end up embarrassing myself by blowing yet another chance to write something substantial about a substantial artist. I guess I could comment on how much I like the two Cohen songs that were used to bookend the mindfuck of a film Natural Born Killers or something, but what purpose will that serve? There, I commented on it, and biting into those ‘member berries hasn’t magically ignited some spirited dissertation, has it? Look, I’m saying this because I care: I really think you should call it quits on this piece right here and now, before you get in too deep. I’m already doomed, but it’s not too late to save yourself. Run, go, get to the choppah. Fly away, Clarice, fly fly fly. ‘Member?

Okay, you’ve been duly warned. So if you do decide to continue on, I’m not going to feel terribly bad about wasting your time, especially since I essentially just promised you anything I write from this point forward is going to be a waste of your time. I mean, everything I’ve written so far has also been a waste of your time, but I haven’t written that much yet. And at least the stuff I wrote so far has served a purpose: it cautioned you that everything to come is going to be an even bigger waste of your time. I can’t promise any of the supplemental paragraphs I’m about to compose will be worth even that much, so I really have to advise you to take a moment here and consider your situation carefully. Weighing everything I’ve just told you about my not knowing anything about Leonard Cohen (and, just to be clear, I’m not playfully minimizing that disposition; I honestly don’t know shit about him), along with my stated unambiguous surety that I am about to waste an indefinite amount of your time (you must be familiar with my work by now; it’s totally plausible this thing could end up running 15 pages)—do you really want to read any of more of this? It’s still not too late to back out. Your time investment thus far is minimal. You can just move right along to the next piece (it’s about Coldplay, so I’m sure that essay is going to be way funnier than this one). My feelings won’t be hurt, I promise. I can hardly fault you for not reading this, because there isn’t any reason at all you should read this. Unless you just really enjoy reading these entries in general, but that seems highly unlikely because nobody enjoys reading them—shit, I only enjoy every fifth one or so, and I write the fucking things.

Check it out: usually by this point in a composition, I would be painstakingly rereading what I’ve written so far to make sure I’m off to an okay start, right? But I haven’t done that in this case because I already know everything I’ve written so far is garbage. This piece isn’t going to improve, either. And that’s what I’m really trying to get across to you here: I am woefully ill-equipped to write anything about Leonard Cohen that is as excellent as his music—I just listened to Songs of Love and Hate a couple times, and holy shit, that’s an absolutely beautiful record too. You may assume I’m continuing this obnoxious diatribe because I’m setting you up for some grand gag (granted, it’s a fair guess, because I’ve done that a few times in entries past). But I’m not joking when I say that I’m not joking in this instance. This rambling philological self-fellation is not going to coalesce into something worthwhile; it’s just going to go on and on like this until I decide I’m done fucking with you and then this essay will just sort of… end, without preamble or satisfaction. I’m telling you, if you keep reading this, you are going to be super pissed off when you finish it. You’ll get to the conclusion, and you’ll grumble, “That’s it…? That was stupid.” And you will be right, because that will be it and it will be stupid.

Since that will be transpiring soon, we should probably clarify that at this point, when it does it’s going to be entirely your fault. If you go all the way back to the beginning of this twaddle, you’ll clearly see the very first thing I wrote was, “So, here’s the thing: I don’t know anything about Leonard Cohen.” That was the opening fucking sentence, dude. Seriously, what did you think was going to happen after that? And only a few lines later, I wrote: “I’m going to go ahead and advise you to just skip this piece altogether.” Then came that whole part about how reading this was going to be a total waste of your time, blah blah blah. You can check if you want; it’s all totally in there. I’m sure you didn’t think I’d be reprinting complete sentences you already read—and, you know what, yes, that’s kind of a low blow, I’m realizing now—but after I took the time to explain in detail that this essay would likely end up serving no purpose whatsoever, surely that must have given you pause. I mean, didn’t you think to yourself, “Wait a minute, before I read this essay, is it going to serve some purpose?” As I’ve made abundantly clear, the answer is: No. No, it is not. I was pretty up front about that. In fact, I specifically told you not to read it—“there isn’t any reason at all you should read this”; is that ringing a bell at all? So if you are still reading it, that’s kind of on you, dude. Sure, I could have stopped writing a long time ago and spared you from all of this bullshit, but let’s not get caught up in semantics.

Have you seen the movie Reservoir Dogs? I’m assuming you have, but if you haven’t, you can add that to the list of far more fulfilling things you could be doing right now instead of reading this essay. Anyway, the film is centered around the aftermath of a jewelry store robbery gone horrifically wrong. We don’t actually see the caper take place, but the characters reference it enough along the way for us to get a clear sense of things devolving into a bloodbath after one of the robbers, Mr. Blonde (played by Michael Madsen) shoots numerous people inside the establishment. Is it coming back to you now? Good. There’s a reason I’m bringing this up.

Since Madsen is absent for a lot of the movie, the audience’s understanding of the storyline relies mostly on what the characters played by Steve Buscemi and Harvey Keitel share with us about what has occurred. Their perspective is clear: Mr. Blonde went crazy and started killing people, and that’s why the whole heist went tits up. However, when Madsen finally appears at the warehouse where the bulk of the plot’s action takes place, he presents an entirely different assessment of the exact same incident. It is here that the movie shifts into the subtle employment of a narrative device known as the “Rashomon Effect,” so-named because this formula’s introduction to Western film-goers is commonly credited to the 1950 Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon—a picture which we can assume in hindsight Reservoir Dogs creator Quentin Tarantino was consciously invoking since his filmography has since revealed a heart-on-sleeve fandom for the work of that storied Japanese director (several Tarantino flicks make reference to this allegiance, but his Kill Bill films in particular are at their core unashamed modern reimaginings of Kurosawa’s legendary Samurai epics). I won’t recount the entire plot of Rashomon, since doing so would be superfluous here (as opposed to all of this shit I’m writing about Reservoir Dogs, which is obviously vitally important to this essay about Leonard Cohen). All you really need to know for our purposes is that the crux of the story is a singular event which is assigned completely disparate interpretations by the various people in the film who witness it. Which is precisely what happens when Michael Madsen makes his entrance.

Now, I’ve seen Reservoir Dogs many times, but not enough times to have the dialogue faithfully memorized; you’ll have to forgive me if I paraphrase a bit here. Essentially, Keitel’s character calls Mr. Blonde a “maniac” or something to that effect, a designation based on Madsen’s character opening fire upon one of the store’s clerks for what Keitel perceives as “no reason at all.” Madsen’s response to this slanted accusation is fascinating. In direct repudiation of his labelling as a “maniac” seconds before, he continues calmly drinking his soda as he amends Keitel’s analysis of the murder by providing a remarkably lucid and utilitarian explanation for the killing: “I told her not to press the alarm, but she did. If she hadn’t done the thing that I told her not to do, then I wouldn’t have shot her.”

It seems we are sharing our own Rashomon moment, my friends. You may feel like your time has been wasted, and it certainly has. But I am not the one who wasted it. That was you. I told you not to read this essay, but you did. If you hadn’t done the thing I told you not to do…

Mr. Cohen: I am truly sorry. Your music is stunning, and you deserve far better than this.

As for the rest of you: I mean, dude, I fucking told you.

March 31, 2019

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aboycalledeverything · 4 years

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An In-depth Response to JK Rowling from a Transman

**CW: transphobia, suicide, surgery, discrimination, assault**

Let me first say that we should not allow this conversation to derail the progress and momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement. Though race and sexuality intersect in many fascinating and important ways, it is important to allow the voices of our BlPOC to be heard and amplified for as long as it takes for meaningful, sweeping changes to be made in our society. That being said, I would be remiss if I did not take the time to process and respond to the conversation you have chosen to bring to the table.

TLDR: To JK’s assertion that trans women threaten the political and biological class of ‘women’, Acknowledging that trans women are women is not the erosion of a political and biological class. It is strengthening those classes by accepting the women who, despite all threats of assault or death, stand by their identity and celebrate womanhood.

Let me also begin by saying thank you. For surviving, for persisting, for blessing the world with the gift of magic. The books-which-need-not-be-named were and are pillars of my childhood, identity, and life philosophy. I will never stop finding solace in the pages of those books.

Before we can continue the conversation, I need to introduce myself. I am a (relatively) young white transman and former D1 softball player. I chose to defer physical transition but came out socially as a transman in my sophomore year and was one of the few openly trans NCAA athletes at the time. I was also a student, and spent a large portion of my collegiate career studying LGBTQ+ issues and how they connect to human psychology. My senior capstone was a paper titled “Transmen and Suicide: Unique Contributors to a Disproportionately High Suicide Attempt Rate.” This involved both an in-depth literature review of trans research and theory as well as an independent collection and analysis of transman testimonies. The year after graduation was spent as a Lab Coordinator for the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity: Health and Human Rights Lab at the University of Texas at Austin which does phenomenal sociological and psychological research on queer youth in particular. This is not to say that I am an expert, but rather to make it clear that I, too, have spent years researching the fraught topics of gender and sexuality.

Thank you for referring to my trans brothers as “notably sensitive and clever people.” We do try to use the unique empathy granted by being seen and treated as both women and men. Most of us grew up as girls and have been targeted by the misogyny and sexism that you reference; we try to use those experiences to inform our responses and opinions to societal issues. I, specifically, am going to use my lived experiences to respond to your essay. There are some points with which I agree and appreciate your recognition - freedom of speech, the importance of nuanced conversation, and the fact that both women and trans people are at disproportionate risk of violence and must be safeguarded. There are other points with which I take umbrage and will address one by one.

JKR: “It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.”

Response: Let’s be clear: trans activists - at least the majority of us - are not trying to erase sex as a definition. Instead, we are asking that the parameters be reconsidered to make space for intersex people and who have biologically transitioned. Your points about the biological differences in treatments for MS are well taken. Ignoring intersex people and focusing on only the binary sexes male and female, you’re right. There are often sex differences in diseases and health disorders. But the problem is that we don’t always know what drives those differences; if they’re based on hormones, physical bodies, or something else entirely. Intersex and trans people, if they choose, now have the medical capability to change their hormones and physical bodies to the extent that they can be classified as male or female.

I’m not going to give you a full explanation on sex as an expression of levels of hormones, chromosomes, and physical organs. I’m sure you already know that both biological men and women have varying amounts of the same hormones, and that hormone replacement therapy can and does give trans men and women the hormonal levels that correspond to each definition. I have been taking testosterone for just under 2 years and, for all intents and purposes, have the chemistry of a biological man. In the same way, surgeries can and do affect physical biology and organ makeup, from removal or reconstruction of a penis or vagina to the removal of ovaries and uterus entirely.

This creates a gray area as to how to medically treat diseases like MS in trans people. We’re still learning, and I’ll be the first to admit that. What I can say is that there are many binary trans people who are not trying to replace legal definitions of sex with gender, but rather are trying to expand the legal definitions of sex to those who, for all intents and purposes, are biologically male or female.

JKR: “I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.”

Response: I would very much like to see the studies that you are referencing in this “huge explosion” of detransitioning individuals. If you’re referencing the article by Lisa Littman, it is definitely worth noting that her study was a) descriptive rather than empirical and b) based on the testimonials of parents and not the actual trans youth.

According to a different and arguably more experienced researcher, Dr. Johanna Olsen, regret and detransitioning as you talk about it are extremely rare. I encourage you to watch her video below and read over some of the other research she is and has been doing.

Even if we were to listen to descriptive research such as Littman’s and assume that there are people who wish to detransition, the lack of fertility you’re talking about is not universal and, as with people assigned female at birth, varies. According to recent studies, trans men who wish to reproduce biologically can take a break from testosterone while carrying their children and resume afterwards. So far, there are no negative side effects for the children of transmen.

What should also be considered, especially in youth, is that hormone blockers are entirely reversible. But puberty is not. When trans children are put on hormone blockers, they are essentially delaying permanent puberty and taking time to examine whether it’s right for them. Access to medical care such as hormone blockers are essential to trans youth because it does give them time to figure out their identity before going through the male or female puberty that affects them.

I have not seen any cases of transition driven by homophobia, but would like to note that working to make parents less homophobic and transphobic seems to be a better use of time than arguing against the right of many trans youth who do need access to medical intervention.

JKR: “The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves. In an article explaining why he resigned from the Tavistock (an NHS gender clinic in England) psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not ‘align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.’”

Response: This point is one of the more frustrating parts of your article because it is using one medical professional’s opinion to ignore a horrifying truth. Trans adults and youths experience suicidality and depression at staggering rates. While I cannot comment on studies in the UK, here in the US the lifetime suicide ideation rates for trans adults is 81.7%. The attempt rate is 40.4%, almost 10x the national average of 4.6%.

And those are just the statistics of the people who survived long enough to participate in the study. Denying the real threat of suicidality in trans youth is not only saddening - it is actively harmful.

JKR: “The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.”

Response: This is one of the most frequent arguments I see for people denying trans men their identity. My own mother has suggested that I transitioned to escape sexism. To this, I respond that choosing to transition does not provide an escape to discrimination and harrassment. I was well aware, when choosing to come out and transition, of the statistics of discrimination I was entering. I was well aware that it might mean the loss of my athletic scholarship, the dismissal of the team of sisters that I played on, It was not a matter of escaping sexism, but rather a matter of being my most authentic self. Even if you dismiss my own personal experience, I would point to the trans women who actively transition and give up their male privilege in exchange for the trials and tribulations of womanhood. Either way, I can assure you that the suicidality trans people experience makes the “choice” to transition no more of a choice than raising your hands because a gun is pointed at your head.

JKR: “ I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria”

Response: I appreciate your recognition of our reality! I would love to see the studies that present a 30% difference. In my experience, those of us that lived long enough to see adulthood have not grown out of dysphoria, even if we’ve learned coping strategies to make it bearable. And again, hormone blockers for teens allow the opportunity for them to grow however they need to without permanent changes being made.

JKR: “So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside.”

Response: Once again I cannot speak to the politics or legislation of the UK. What I can say is that “bathroom bans” on trans people that require us to use the fitting room/bathroom/locker room of the sex we were assigned at birth lead to significant sexual and physical assault on trans people, which already face a disproportionate risk (as you mentioned). I personally have been fortunate enough to have not been physically assaulted when I was trying to go to the bathroom, but have been harassed in both mens and womens bathrooms (which I varied between during my transition, depending on how well I thought I was passing). Many of my friends are not as lucky.

JKR: “But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive.”

Response: The implication that trans women - who are literally dying to be acknowledged as women - putting on a “costume” is flagrantly offensive. I am choosing to believe that you did not intend this implication and instead are confusing sex and gender. In which case,would refer you to the seminal work Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler. According to her, gender is literally a performance that one chooses to express. Transwomen define their gender and femininity as individuals, and do not choose to go through the grueling process of changing their biological sex because they like Jimmy Choos. The gender ‘woman’ is not a “pink brain” but rather an identity that can be inwardly cultivated and outwardly expressed. The sex ‘woman’ or female is an amalgamation of complex physiological systems that, as we’ve already discussed, can be altered.

JKR: “I refuse to bow down to a movement...”

Response: There is undeniably a movement, a “cancel culture” that dismisses nuanced conversation. I, like you, am concerned about the erosion of free speech and the expression of alternative points of view in nuanced discussions such as this one. But this movement is not specific to trans people and should not be described as such. Most trans activists and researchers that I know are not asking you to “bow down.” We’re asking you to come to the table and have an open mind. We’re asking you to use your huge platform to help trans people (as you clearly want to) without harming them (as you clearly have).

JKR: “...that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it.”

Response: This is the crux of the “TERF wars”. The refusal to accept trans women as women. To this, I would simply say: Acknowledging that trans women are women is not the erosion of a political and biological class. It is strengthening those classes by accepting the women who, despite all threats of assault or death, stand by their identity and celebrate womanhood.

#long post #essay #jk rowling #response #harry potter #transmen #ftm #mtf #transphobia #transwomen #trans #LGBT #terf #terf wars

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cleverwench · 5 years

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ODAAT meta: Penelope x Schneider + what on earth are the writers thinking?

Okay SO I have not been able to stop thinking about Penelope and Schneider’s relationship in ODAAT season 3. The alvareider subtext was so fucking LOUD that I'm now beyond thinking that I'm reaching or that it’s all an accident, and I had to work out my thoughts.

IMO, The writers can only be doing one of three things at this point:

1.) Beginning to hint at a future of penelope x schneider by slowly dialing up the intimacy between them and emphasizing their importance to and reliance on one another in their lives so that a future romantic relationship seems not only plausible to the casual viewer, but inevitable and right.

2.) Purposely giving alvareider shippers little tiny things to hold onto because they have no intention of actually Going There with them but don't want to alienate those viewers entirely because they need all the support can get.

3.) They haven't decided either way about where they want to take them so they're toeing the line between friendship and potential romance so they can keep their options open.

Below the cut I’ll discuss why I’ve come to this conclusion and make my best guess as to which option is the most likely (which of course only matters if we get another season, but I can’t think dark thoughts right now).

I want to preface this whole thing by saying that I would still enjoy the show very much if Schneider and Penelope were established full stop as just friends. In fact I could probably be more easily swayed away from shipping them than I could for almost any couple I’ve ever shipped if the show were to really tell me why they would not work together.

But, in three seasons, they have yet to do that in any substantial way—by, for example example, giving either of them legitimate romantic partners who are clearly better suited for them and on whom they can emotionally rely. And yet, at the same time, we have to face the fact that everything that points to them being a match is only subtext. In season three it got very close, we're talking photo finish close, to becoming a surface level discussion, but it didn't quite make it.

To me, this all culminates in that scene at the wedding where Pen invites Schneider to sit with her. They smile at each other, she mentions that they're the only single people there, and then, BAM, another romantic option (whose character, though fun and cute, was not fleshed out at all this season...we only care about Avery because Schneider says he does, and even that is hard to believe because they were not shown bonding or spending any real time together) jumps in front of them. Pen and Schneider had been about to share a moment, their mutual singledom and strong emotional bond were just about to be discussed, and then the whole subject faded into the background in the blink of an eye.

Season 3 subtext, as @actuallylorelaigilmore adeptly explained in greater detail in her wonderful meta essay, can be read as Penelope and Schneider tentatively testing their interpersonal waters. Is Pen his much older sister? Are they best friends? Co-parents? Penelope had to face a lot of hard facts this season: Alex smoking weed, Elena having sex, learning to be unashamed of her anxiety attacks; what she’s never had to think about or look at closely is why she chooses to rely exclusively on Schneider for comfort during her darkest moments. For as much talk as there is about Schneider being another family member, this is a glaring example of how he doesn’t quite fit that mold. Why does she rely on him as opposed to her family, and as opposed to her current or past significant other(s)?

It’s my view that none of these parallels or almost moments could have been accidents because nothing on this show is ever an accident. I love it very much, but odaat is not subtle. This is a show that gets in its characters' faces and makes them confront hard truths head-on—truths about themselves, about the world around them, about their relationships. Look at Lydia and Leslie, for example. They have a very hard-to-define relationship, one which does not fit into traditional boxes. When they first started seeing each other, Lydia was happy to simply continue in secret or ignore Leslie’s concerns about the nature of their relationship until the end of time, but she was not allowed to. And, thus, by the third season we have them self-defining as non-sexual platonic companions.

This is a show about identity, about defining who you are and embracing it, no matter how uneasy, multifaceted, or inscrutable a concept that is. All they would have to do, then, in order to quiet the latent (and, increasingly, blatant) potential for Alvareider would be to follow their traditional formula and face the subject head-on. Of course, there have been several comments made over the years in this vein. Pen has talked about how she isn’t attracted to Schneider--but then again, there have been times when she’s expressed attraction. In season 3, we all heard Schneider refer to her as his sister, but at the same time their physical intimacy became much more pronounced and their romantic journeys paralleled each other in a way that is difficult to ignore or brush off as coincidence.

In a show based around a set of core values and hard truths, any ambiguity eventually becomes really glaring. They address everything, so why not Pen and Schneider? We know they are aware that some fans ship them. Justina, Todd, and Gloria all liked a tweet the other day from someone saying as much. Any conversation around the show, any tags, are bound to contain talk of it. After seasons 1 and 2, I would not have thought that the creators were saying much about Pen and Schneider’s relationship at all, but season 3 is a whole new animal.

If option 1 is the truth, I believe they’ve only been maybe planning to let Pen and Schneider get together this year. The Alvareider subtext really has just hit a fever pitch, despite nonetheless remaining absent from the actual text of the show. Since it does air on Netflix and renewal is not definite, perhaps they did this to give Alvareider shippers hope without feeling ready to address it directly, but with plans to do so in the future That would make sense. It’s always good to prepare an audience for getting two beloved characters together because that is a big deal and you want to not blindside your fans with something so monumental.

Option 2 is also possible, but I don’t want it to be. Odaat is so kindness forward. I don’t want to believe that they would drag fans along for the sake of it. They haven’t done that in any other respect, so I’m choosing to not think it of them now, although I will continue to recognize the possibility.

Option 3 is...most likely, I think. Maybe they see the potential we do, but just don’t know if they want to shake up the dynamic until they’re sure. As I’ve already said, the decision to put them together would be a huge one. I completely understand them liking Alvareider in concept but not quite being sure if they want to go there. Perhaps they added the subtext this season on purpose in order to say, “maybe???” In truth, a lot of the discussion around Pen and Schneider is like, “omg I love their friendshp a lot > they love each other and rely on each other all the time > their romantic lives always leave them unsatisfied in some way > they aren’t as close with any other adult as they are with each other > wait do I SHIP them? Is that weird? > omg I ship them!” Season 3 could be the writers feeling out the possibility for themselves.

No matter what, there has got to be some reason that they have not written the episode about why Pen and Schneider would never work romantically, or at least taken pains to more rigidly define the parameters of their friendship. Granted they are not an obvious match, and perhaps the writers had not thought of them together initially at all and did not see a reason to deny it so unequivocally then. But on a show where no emotional stone is left unturned, continuing to ignore the subject and leave the possibility open means that they are saying Something. What exactly that something is, I of course can’t say at this point. I wish I could. But for now I will take Pen and Schneider’s own advice on the subject, and won’t give up before the miracle happens.

Thanks for reading. Hope this made sense. I’m sure other people are saying this same stuff, and more succinctly than me, but I hope you got something out of it, anyway. :)

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elkian · 5 years

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hey uh not to sound fake deep but after rewatching Jim Henson’s Labyrinth I gotta say

It kinda reads as (intentionally or no) being about abusive/toxic relationships?

(Sarah’s parents should have made an effort to communicate with her rather than either leaving her alone or saddling her with responsibility with no apparent in-between but that’s neither here nor there at the moment)

I’ve seen a lot of interpretations where Jareth is smitten with her or w/e - kind of read it that way myself when I first saw it as a teen - but really?

His reaction to finding out that she’s broken out of the dream and trash land (implying if not proving that Dream Jareth wasn’t even controlled by Real(?) Jareth cause otherwise he shoulda been more worried?)

His reaction is very frantic. He thought she was dealt with - and at that point, he stopped paying attention to her. He’s not stressed about the clock - doesn’t even think about hiding Toby til the news comes in - at this point, so it’s not as if he’s overly distracted.

He only cares about Sarah when she has something he wants (Toby, etc.) or is defying him.

He’s concerned when he oversees the Goblin City battle. He visibly gets more anxious as she and her friends start to prevail and work their way closer.

Also, all of his interactions with Sarah are really manipulative? “I did what you wanted” - true, one of the few true/honest things he says to her at this point, but’s not a reasonable truth. A reasonable, decent person wouldn’t hear a teenager say “hey, can you kidnap my younger sibling right now immediately because I hate them” and go “you got it, also you owe me” in any serious way. Abetting a self-destructive impulse is not an act of kindness, but he’s playing it as one.

“You cowered. I was terrifying“ - this one is interesting - and as far as I can tell, plays less into the moral unless we go really deep. Here they’re talking about the play - Sarah-as-an-actor cowering before The Big Bad. This plays more into the fantasy imo as it’s about the strange relationship between Sarah’s life (the Escher poster, the music box, the entire “The Labyrinth” playbook, etc.) and what the Goblin King has made reality. How much of it is his realm so much as it is her own subconscious and imagination?

Anyways.

More to the main point -

Via asking for help correctly, at first manipulating and then later by communicating better and working together, Sarah gets to the Castle - with help. “I have to face him alone“ doesn’t make a huge amount of sense from a purely logical standpoint, but it’s a fairy tale, and- if it’s an allegory for abusive or toxic relationships, this is a critical point after all. Her friends, her support network who doesn’t argue, even once, that it’s better to leave Toby with Jareth (Hoggle sort of does but his motive is more “Doing this thing is terrifying, I’m terrified of it, I don’t want to help you [get hurt doing it]”), they acknowledge her need to handle this herself, but make certain she knows that any and all of them will come running if she asks it.

This really reads as a support network supporting a survivor break things off without doing it for her? to me? There’s no doubt that she’s making the calls, telling Jareth what she really thinks, breaking it all off.

Back to Jareth - pretty much all of his interactions with Sarah are deeply manipulative (which, hey, fairy tale fairy, par for the course tbh). Every time she makes progress, he jumps in to turn her around - whether with Hoggle’s increasingly unwilling help, physically manipulating the Labyrinth, or as things get more tense for him, outright drugging(??) her and bribing her.

He’s constantly trying to deflect her frankly perfectly reasonable concerns (regardless of what she said, again, no sensible, decent person would have taken that as actual permission - hey, compare and contrast Didymus - to take a baby away) by bribing her with insubstantial promises. He’ll show her her dreams. Not make them come true, not help her, not change her, just show her - just like the peach dream.

Everything he does is deceptive, duplicitous, manipulative. At the end, he’s wheedling, bargaining, and borderline gaslighting her “after everything I’ve done for you” to try and distract her as a last-ditch effort. The fact that he’s almost entirely physically nonpresent for this journey - even when he confronts her in the Escher Room, he walks right through her - is also a thing? Actually, I don’t think he ever physically touches her in the movie (which overall, probably for the best, but ALSO a pretty interesting point). He’s always manipulating her surroundings, her friends, and events around her - because he can’t succeed at manipulating her.

Sarah. At the start, she’s immediately remorseful - because honestly, why would she ever have thought that would actually have real consequences, let alone immediate, magical ones? She’s very polite, on the verge of tears with Jareth, trying to ask for Toby’s return. Jareth is harsher here than he is in the end scene, because he has more (apparent) power. “Don’t defy me.” (The snake-scarf is the only real physical interaction they have, I think, also?)

I’m not gonna go into everything she does in the movie bc dear lord this post is already enormous, but early Sarah vs ending Sarah?

She refuses to even contemplate his manipulations. She knows he can’t give her anything substantial, let alone worth Toby. She spends part of his bargaining trying to remember her line! Because she knows he can’t offer anything worthwhile!

Jareth backs up as she approaches. He no longer has any hold over her, no longer frightens her. He appears in something - I don’t want to say wedding-outfit, but of a taste with it? maybe? idk - and he begs and pleads, he promises to “be her slave” if only she’ll let him control her. It is absolutely his last-ditch effort.

Her final lines could, I think, mirror onto: “I’ve been through a lot [getting to this point]. I’m just as much a person as you*. You have no power over me.”

*(re: the parents - Sarah feels like she’s not being respected as a person and dealt with accordingly which is an unfortunate reality for many children and teens, the latter of whom are even more stifled as they’re given more responsibility without an equal share of basic respect)

After an entire movie of him trying, and failing, to manipulate her directly, of him trying to slow her down, trying to demoralize her, she realizes that he doesn’t have to matter to her. He has no power over her - he cringes back as she steps forward, he desperately interrupts her game-breaking lines, he wheedles and bargains and begs, and he fails, because she realizes she doesn’t have to acknowledge him at all.

Obviously this message isn’t exact perfect, especially for people in really tough abusive situations, but I do feel it’s at least meant as a warning to those falling into abusive or toxic relationships, or are being taken advantage of in some way.

“Here are the red flags; here is how weak the other person actually is if you don’t give them a foothold.” Maybe??

ALSO: I like that her friends’ “Should you need us” applies to just being lonely. It’s not just that they stepped up to help her in a particular time of need, but that they are, and she acknowledges them as, friends who are just friends, too.

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(Other Key points in the movie are ‘don’t take [getting help] for granted’ and ‘you’ve gotta know your goal/know how to ask for help to get it correctly’ (the worm is a v benign variant imo). Not the most wholesome for the overall message I’m reading, but a decent and more direct message to the probable audience (middle-class teens) I think?)

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END ESSAY

#the labyrinth #abuse warn #elk text #15th #September #2019 #September 15th 2019 #where the heck did all this come from #here's my TEDTalk #this is a mess it's just a pile of possible off-the-cuff interpretations #it's cool if you don't agree #it's just something that came to me

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bradywade55 · 5 years

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Essay 1: Option 1- Myrtles Plantation & The Tunica Burial Grounds

Whether haunted by a ghost or haunted by a bad fashion choice, almost everyone can say they have experienced a haunting at one point of their life or another. When many people hear of a “Haunting” they almost immediately begin to associate it with things such ghosts, demons, devilish spirits, haunted house, or other things of that nature. My interpretation of a haunting is far different from this. I associate a haunting with nothing more than a persistent memory, or even better yet, the energy associated with such a memory. By energy, I am referring to the manifestation of emotions and/or actions through the memory of a person, event, or even a place. The energy that resulting from “hauntings” is strong and is typically experienced through various negative emotions such as sorrow, fear, misery, anger or even hysteria. I believe that positive emotions can also manifest themselves in similar ways, although they are not generally associated with hauntings. Hauntings usually encase the worst of the worst emotions. They are associated with people, places and objects thought to be ungodly, cursed, or personally stained by a misfortunate past. “There’s nowhere in this nation that wasn’t already inhabited before Europeans arrived, and there’s no town, no house, that doesn’t sit atop someone else’s former home. More often than not, we’ve chosen to deal with this fact through the language of ghosts.” (Dickey, Pg. 38) This quote form Colin Dickey’s novel, Ghostland, perfectly describes the concept Americans have adopted that no matter where you stand, someone, something, or someplace stood there before. We justify this and better yet commemorate the past by dedicating ghost stories to such. Hauntings seem to occur almost anywhere, in fact, one can say everywhere is pretty much haunted by one spirit or another. What truly determines the magnitude of a haunting is merely the stories that stand to be told.

Located just south of Louisiana State route 61, in St. Francisville, LA, there stands a fairly famous property by the name of Myrtles Plantation. For the past 200 years, stories have continued to generate about Myrtles Plantation in respect to various haunted activity and unexplained occurrences that have been reported on the grounds. Stories range from sightings of the apparition of a young mulatto slave girl to that of the ghosts of Tunica Native Americans who might have inhabited the land prior to the settlers who built the plantation. These tales have helped to drive the popularity of this historical site and have even inspired more stories that have been developed from the experiences of past visitors and staff members on the grounds. This former antebellum plantation was first erected in 1796 by General David Bradford. Bradford, also known as “Whisky Dave”, led the whisky rebellion from 1791 to 1794. Shortly after, Bradford fled the U.S. in attempt to avoid imprisonment, then leaving his home to his son in law, Judge Clarke Woodruff. The Mansion within the plantation was then remodeled by Judge Woodruff. Fourteen years later, after being sold again, the mansion was remodeled one last time. Since then, the plantation has been claimed by new owners who have opened up the plantation to visitors. Guests can now explore the property with the opportunity for tours, dinners, and other exciting activities.(MyrtlesPlantation.com; History)

The lore that surrounds the Myrtle Plantation stems from the properties dark past. There are many popular stories that have embedded themselves within the Plantations history; the most popular of which being that about a slave girl named Chloe. Chloe was supposedly a young slave, roughly thirteen or fourteen years of age, who had taken up residence on the plantation while it was owned and managed by Judge Clark Woodruff. Chloe held a special place on the plantation as it was rumored that she was temporarily granted extra freedom by the plantation owner as she served as his mistress for a short time. After a misunderstanding, Woodruff had punished Chloe for eavesdropping on him. In chapter two of the book Ghostland written by Colin Dickey, there is a short story titled Shifting Ground, in which the author describes this incidence regarding Chloe and Woodruff. One passage states, “As punishment, Woodruff cut off Chloe’s ear—from then on, she wore a green turban to hide her deformity” (Dickey, Pg. 39). It was then said that she was made to work in the kitchen where she began to plot an opportunity for redemption. According to the book, Chloe attempted to jeopardize a meal served to the family of the plantation owner. She supplemented oleander into their food in hopes to cause sickness but instead accidently murders the whole family with exception of the plantation owner. Soon after discovering the cause of his family’s death, Woodruff then sentenced the other slaves to violently murder Chloe. The slaves obeyed the orders, disposing of Chloe’s remains in a nearby river and therefor denying her a proper burial (Dickey, Pg. 40). It is legend that Chloe’s spirit still haunts the ground of the planation to this very day. While I believe this to be true, I wouldn’t go as far to say that Chloe haunts the plantation in a physical sense. Instead, I believe that the plantation is haunted by Chloe’s story and the history it unearths. I didn’t go into brutal detail about Chloe’s story, but had I done so, it would have demonstrated some of the conditions in which Chloe and her fellow slave’s endured. Chloe’s story has many underlying details that unveil the ugly truths about slave run plantations such as Myrtles. As Chloe’s story is continually told through the passing years, Chloe’s ghost will continue to wander the grounds as an eerie reminder of the gruesome past regarding the slaves who were bound there.

Another Theory surrounding Myrtles Plantation is that Chloe simply did not exist. A passage from Colin Dickey’s book reads “None of the records of the plantation have turned up a slave named Chloe. This is unsurprising” (Dickey, Pg. 41) I agree with the author that it does not come as a shock when no records of Chloe are found. There is a great probability that the story of Chloe was an elaborate hoax cleverly created by one of the previous owners of the plantation. As explained in Dickeys novel, Chloe’s ghost pays homage to several female stereotypes familiar in American folklore. Dickey identified two stereotypes in his text as he mentions “the Jezebel figure, a sexually precocious slave who disturbs the natural order of the nuclear household….” and “the “mammy” figure, a motherly slave who earns her spot in a white household…”. While I can relate both of these stereotypes to the persona of Chloe, I more strongly support the following claims Dickey makes in saying “The lack of clear details or historical substantiation means that the legend of Chloe is adaptable: each person who tells her story can borrow from the various stereotypes as needed, emphasizing different aspects over others to suit the telling.” (Dickey, Pg. 41) I believe that Chloe’s story isn’t that of a person but that of a collection of people. As people develop their own interpretations and emotions regarding the history of the plantation, keeping in mind their own experiences, they begin to impose their own influence on the story making it their own.

Myrtles Plantation is but one example of a haunted location. Given any specific location, there could be hundreds of haunted properties. Much like Myrtles Plantations, different places can hold some seriously obscure tale and lore, leading people to believe those places are haunted by kindred spirits. Given the ability for any individual to impose their own influence on the lore attached to a given location, tales can grow quite fast and can take several different turns. It is common for stories of strange phenomena and unexplained events to develop, creating the sense of various emotions. As more people choose to elaborate on these tales, the more obscure they become. Soon, the tales become so twisted and unorthodox that the only way to explain them are by deeming them “unexplainable”. If we take a moment and evaluate some of the reported paranormal activity associated with various haunted places, we able to see past the facade and identify the truth behind the history. However, in some cases, the stories remain so twisted and distorted, the truth remains a mystery. Truthfully, the reality surrounding the tales of hauntings, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. It is up to the viewer whether they want to get down to brass tax or if they want to just keep chasing ghosts.

Sources Cited:

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, by Colin Dickey. New York: Penguin, 2016

History of Myrtles Plantation. MyrtlesPlantation.com. (March 23, 2019). https://www.myrtlesplantation.com/history-and-hauntings/history-of-myrtles-plantation

#ILS4180

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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A ROUND YOU HAVE TO START OVER

The main complaint of the more articulate critics was that Arc seemed so flimsy. Design means making things for humans.1 And in particular, is a pruned version of a program from the implementation details. Every talk I give ends up being given from a manuscript full of things crossed out and rewritten. What about using it to write software, whether for a startup at all, it will be wasted. There's no reason this couldn't be as big as Ebay.2 Raymond, Guido van Rossum, David Weinberger, and Steven Wolfram for reading drafts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to me with questions. Superficially, going to work for another company as we're suggesting, he might well have gone to work for another company for two years, and the classics. People will pay extra for stability. That would be an extraordinary bargain.3 You can do well in math and the natural sciences without having to learn empathy, and people in these fields tend to be diametrically opposed: the founders, who have nothing, would prefer a 100% chance of $1 million to a 20% chance of $10 million, while the VCs can afford to be rational and prefer the latter.

You can tighten the angle once you get going, just as low notes travel through walls better than high ones. If you're young and smart, you don't need to have empathy not just for humans, but for individual humans. It depends on what the meaning of a program so that it does. I'm interested in the topic.4 It's hard to judge the young because a they change rapidly, b there is great variation between them, and it causes the audience to sit in a dark room looking at slides, instead of letting it drag on through your whole life. A rounds.5 Now that I've seen parents managing the subject, I can see why people invent gods to explain it.

There's more to it than that.6 Y Combinator with a hardware idea, because we're especially interested in people who can solve tedious system-administration type problems for them, so the two qualities have come to be associated. Startups happen in clusters.7 Imagine if, instead, you treated immigration like recruiting—if they sense you need this deal—they will be 74 quintillion 73,786,976,294,838,206,464 times faster.8 And good employers will be even more astonished that a package would one day travel from Boston to New York and I was surprised even then. But I have no trouble believing that computers will be very much faster. Now that I've seen parents managing the subject, I can give you solid advice about how to make one consisting only of Japanese people.

But they don't realize just how fragile startups are, and how easily they can become collateral damage of laws meant to fix some other problem. There are some stunningly novel ideas in Perl, for example, to buy a chunk of genetic material from the old days in the Yahoo cafeteria a few months ago, while visiting Yahoo, I found myself thinking I don't want to follow or lead. Professors are especially interested in hardware startups.9 When I say Java won't turn out to be a case of premature optimization. Bold? They won't be offended.10 So it is no wonder companies are afraid. I'd recommend meeting them if your schedule allows.

The cat had died at the vet's office. It's like the rule that in buying a house you should consider location first of all.11 Why hadn't I worked on more substantial problems?12 But lose even a little bit in the commitment department, and probably soon stop noticing that the building they work in says computer science on the outside. If there are any laws regulating businesses, you can expect to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon. Some of the problems we want to invest in you aren't. If anything they'll think more highly of you.

5 million. And those of us in the next room snored? So if you're the least bit inclined to find an excuse to quit, there's always some disaster happening. Every person has to do their job well. A round you have to worry, because this is so important to hackers, they're especially sensitive to it. But if you lack commitment, it will be way too late to make money, you have to risk destroying your country to get a job depends on the kind you want. Marble, for example. Yesterday Fred Wilson published a remarkable post about missing Airbnb. Sometimes I can think to myself If someone with a PhD in computer science I went to my mother afterward to ask if this was so. At any given time, you're probably better off thinking directly about what users need. Everyone in the sciences, true collaboration seems to be vanishingly rare in the arts could tell you that the right way to collaborate, I think few realize the huge spread in the value of your remaining shares enough to put you net ahead, because the people they admit are going to get a foot in the door. Over the years, as we asked for more details, they were compelled to invent more, so the odds of getting this great deal are 1 in 300.

You're not spending the money; you're just moving it from one asset to another.13 On a log scale I was midway between crib and globe.14 You can stick instances of good design can be derived, and around which most design issues center.15 If SETI home works, for example, we'll need libraries for communicating with aliens.16 In your own projects you don't get taught much: you just work or don't work on big things, I don't mean to suggest we should never do this—just that we see trends first—partly because they are in general, and partly because mutations are not random. But if it's inborn it should be. The mildest seeming people, if they tried, start successful startups, and then I can start my own? The alternative approach might be called the Hail Mary strategy.

Notes

But Goldin and Margo think market forces in the same energy and honesty that fifteenth century European art. Fifty years ago. I meant. Some are merely ugly ducklings in the Valley.

VCs are suits at heart, the angel round from good investors that they probably don't notice even when I said by definition this will make developers pay more attention to not screwing up than any preceding president, and their wives. But that doesn't have users.

But it wouldn't be worth about 125 to 150 drachmae. Heirs will be the more subtle ways in which many people work with the bad groups is that they function as the cause.

The empirical evidence suggests that if you want to. Incidentally, tax loopholes are definitely not a nice-looking man with a product company. When I was writing this, on the process dragged on for months.

Letter to Oldenburg, quoted in Westfall, Richard, Life of Isaac Newton, p. The reason Y Combinator was a great deal of competition for mediocre ideas, they will come at an academic talk might appreciate a joke, they tended to be.

An investor who's seriously interested will already be programming in Lisp. Parents move to suburbs to raise five million dollars out of loyalty to the same advantages from it, by Courant and Robbins; Geometry and the manager of a problem later. But that is exactly the point I'm making, though you tend to get rich by buying good programmers instead of a long time by sufficiently large numbers of users to do it mostly on your board, there are few who can say I need to. There are lots of customers times how much they liked the iPhone too, of course, Feynman and Diogenes were from adjacent traditions, but it doesn't cost anything.

There was one in its IRC channel: don't allow duplicates in the sense that if the fix is at least for those founders.

For example, it's probably a bad idea, period. Bankers continued to dress in jeans and a few additional sources on their own itinerary through no-land, while the more qualifiers there are before the name implies, you produce in copious quantities.

166. Even in Confucius's time it filters down to zero, which make investments rather than giving grants.

What made Google Google is not even be working on what interests you most. It's a case of journalists, someone did, once. It seems quite likely that European governments of the word that means the startup in a way to be is represented by Milton. As I was living in a wide variety of situations.

So 80 years sounds to him like 2400 years would to us. They have the same gestures but without using them to be sharply differentiated, so if you conflate them you're aiming at the top and get data via the Internet.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 28%. A fundraising is a major cause of poverty are only about 2% of the decline in families eating together was due to Trevor Blackwell reminds you to stop, the more the type of thing. A round. It will also remind founders that an eminent designer is any good at acting that way.

Wufoo was based in Tampa and they hope this will make grad students' mouths water, but sword thrusts. For example, if you want to impress investors. When you fix one bug happens to use thresholds proportionate to the founders of failing startups would even be worth approaching—if you conflate them you're aiming at the company's PR people worked hard to answer your question. To be safe either a don't use Oracle.

Even if you don't have one. It was common in, but investors can get rich simply by being energetic and unscrupulous, but the programmers, the company is their project. MITE Corp. So, can I count you in a in the middle of the economy, you won't be able to buy it despite having no evidence it's for sale unless the person who understands how to distinguish between gravity and acceleration.

56 million. Adults care just as if it were Can you pass the salt? A single point of view: either an IPO, or much energy would be worth doing, because they couldn't afford a monitor is that when you ask that you're not consciously aware of it.

Most expect founders to try to accept a particular valuation, that he be spared. And in World War II, must have been Andrew Wiles, but it is not Apple's products but their policies.

0 notes

dimmi-tutto · 7 years

Link

Against a Generative Grammar of Flarf

by THOMAS BASBØLL

Most of Dan Hoy's recent essay, "The Virtual Dependency of the Post-Avant and the Problematics of Flarf", in Jacket #29, "is about the uncritical use of corporate algorithms as a generator of poetic chance and catalyst for engaging the Other." Later in the essay, however, he reframes the issue in terms of "the problematics of using [Google] as [an effective generator of poems]", a characterization he uses again near the end, casting "Google as a poetic generator". This conflation of Google as a chance-generator and alterity-catalyst with Google as a poem-generator is perhaps just an imprecision in the essay, but they share an important assumption: that the use of Google directly explains or accounts for essential features of the poems, i.e., that Google constitutes a "generative" deep structure that explains the surface structure of the poems. Hoy's thesis is that Google-sculpted poetry is Google-structured poetry because the poets are either unable or unwilling to bring their material to crisis (to make "critical" use of it). He sees this as "a trend [, which I'll refer to as 'flarf',] among the ‘post-avant’ ... that betrays not just their mediated upbringings but an antiquated technophilia." I think this is the most substantial thing that is wrong with Hoy's essay. He has simply failed to consider the difference between pages and pages of Google search results and the poems that are built out of them. (Despite the fact that this difference was the primary focus of those parts of my criticism that he cites.) He offers no demonstration of any isomorphy between flarf works and Google results and therefore no basis for the claim that the procedures that generate flarf poems are isomorphic with the algorithms that generate Google returns. This is an admittedly formal refutation of Hoy's scholarship but, since he proposes explicitly not to read the poems, very little more is possible at this point. My brief (and ironic) despair over the presence of marketing on the Internet (the "muses" were never a serious option) was very precisely an awareness of the possibility his essay takes (for granted) as a structural necessity. Anyone who briefly considers the matter will realise, as I did, that it is very unlikely. It would be interesting, however, to show that the structure of a page or two of Google results corresponds in some striking way with the structure of a page or two of Deer Head Nation. If Hoy ever attempts such a demonstration of his thesis (a demonstration that his rhetoric is in some sense already obligated to provide) I would be glad to examine it. Until such time, Hoy has simply failed to demonstrate that the object of his essay exists: a trend towards the uncritical use of Google to generate poetry.

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8:55 PM

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15 COMMENTS:

Jay

said...

From Hoy's piece: "If there’s a difference between flarf and its progenitors it’s that Cage and Oulipo researched or created their generators of deterministic randomness, whether it be the I Ching, the weather, or mathematical formulas." To what degree do "flarists" actually claim Cage/etc as "progenitors"? It seems to me there exists (in the archetypal "flarfist defense" that Hoy sketches) a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between Cagean chance operations, which might be claimed to replace the ego-as-editor, and so-called "chance operations," which throw a bunch of raw linguistic material at the poet who then proceeds to edit that material according to her or his desires, whims, intuitions, etc. The latter isn't Cagean at all, in my opinion -- the ego doesn't recede, it just works with linguistic raw material that the poet didn't happen to create. My suspicion is that Hoy's fear of contamination of flarf/search-engine poetry by the values latent in proprietary corporate search algorithms has something to do with the conflating Cagean chance and "flarfist chance."

3:17 AM

Anne Boyer

said...

Yet another way Hoy misses the mark -- the progenitor of Flarf isn't Cage, or Queneau, but Baroness von Else Freytag Loringhoven. For example, a short poem by the Baroness: "No spinsterlollypop for me! Yes! We have no bananas I got lusting palate I always eat them... There's the vibrator Coy flappertoy! ... A dozen cocktails, please!"

6:28 AM

Thomas Basbøll

said...

Jay: I think you're right about this. I don't see Cage as a precursor either, except as a experimentalist/avant-gardist, or something very general like that. And you're right that the two procedures don't deal with the ego in the same way. I think flarf does to the reader what Albers colour-studies did for his students: "Because of the laboratory character of these studies there is no opportunity to decorate, to illustrate, to represent anything, or to express something – or one's self." (Interaction of Color, p. 9) Though flarf does arguably offer opportunities for decoration, let's say it discourages reading the words for anything other than the effects they produce. Using the flarf operation (leaving the surrounding controversies on the side) to "express yourself" (i.e., to represent your ego") is doing it the hard way, we might say. Anne: Thanks for the new point of reference. And the squid.

1:33 PM

Anne Boyer

said...

I realized the brevity of my comment might make it seem as if I am being flip about the Baroness. I am not. As a reader, I think Flarf is at least 3/5s Dada: picking up whatever whenever, using it "wrong". This is not utopianism! The procedural element is much like the procedural element a fish uses when bottom feeding: a fairly simple consumption/digestion of crap -- and I mean this as a compliment. Bottom feeding is ecologically important. Chance hasn't so very much to do with it, other than the chance of what crap that day fell to the bottom of the tank. Then, as Jay points out, the crap-gathering is very much dependent on the individual Flarfist. Most Flarf reads (to me) as freak-out-panic-attack-oh-no-apocalypse -- a Loringhoven-esque hardcore "nonsense" made more compelling by millenialism: a dada on speed, a hat made of vomit-words found in the Internet (trash bin). I am obviously enthusiastic about this.

2:23 PM

Jay

said...

Anne - "This is not utopianism!" . . . Seems like this could be an important distinction -- the Cagean project is, as I understand it, fairly explicitly utopic . . . Thomas - I do agree that using flarf to "express oneself" (in any conventional sense of that phrase) would certainly be going about it the hard way. I suppose what I meant was that in flarf (at least as I understand it), the poet still makes certain editorial decisions that Cagean chance procedures might seek to eliminate. When writing flarf I'm not obligated, for example, to use the search results in exactly the same order that they appear on my screen, nor am I obligated to use all of the results within a certain numerical range (say, everything one pages 1-10). I might, instead, try to put things together with an ear toward creating, in Anne's words, that "freak-out-panic-attack-oh-no-apocalypse" effect . . .

10:52 PM

tmorange

said...

thomas wrote: "He offers no demonstration of any isomorphy between flarf works and Google results and therefore no basis for the claim that the procedures that generate flarf poems are isomorphic with the algorithms that generate Google returns." such a demonstration on the part of an "outsider" would be quite impossible since the alchemical secrets by which google garbage is turned into flarf gold have largely, if not exclusively, remained with the flarfistes. at least, i could never get what they were doing exactly, but then again i never asked. and clearly plenty of people have taken their own liberties with the processes. jay: you're right, i think the cage progenitor claim is largely hoy's invention. jay and boyer (anne?): the baroness is certainly a primo case of ur-flarf. as is alexi kruchenyk. and i think the "utopianist" argument is slightly off too. it's the idea -- whether held by flarfists or not, it's very much a part of the google spirit and in bernstein's blurb for deer head nation -- that google is some kind of index to the zeitgeist, this is a profoundly mistaken idea that fails to understand how google works. --tom

12:33 AM

tmorange

said...

If Hoy ever attempts such a demonstration of his thesis (a demonstration which his rhetoric is in some sense already obligated to provide) I would be glad to examine it. but he stated flat out that he wanted to take up the reception of the poems and not the poems themselves Until such time, Hoy has simply failed to demonstrate that the object of his essay exists: a trend towards the uncritical use of Google to generate poetry. i dunno, i see a lotta poems and books of poems floating around that bear evidence if not direct admission of techniques involving google, and yet i've not come across one poetics statement by any of the authors of these poems that reflects a critical awareness of the many many complicated overdeterminations that google embodies. it's high time; and if it's forthcoming at hoy's prompt, so much the better for all... tom

12:44 AM

Thomas Basbøll

said...

Thanks for your comments, Tom. It is the "overdetermination" thesis that I'm questioning. Hoy has not demonstrated that Google "embodies" the determinants of Flarf. My argument is that, as a first approximation, search results radically underdetermine the poems. In fact, I'm working on a post that makes this most relevant connection between Flarf and Google. I do think there is a connection, but that it is a critical one. It is the poems that must reflect critical awareness, not the statements of their poets. My series here at the Pangrammaticon "The Annotated Pilot" did end up showing an interesting critical awareness (in Tost's "I Am Not the Pilot") of the "ruins" of Internet usage, Hoy's (rather poor) reading of those posts to the contrary. Hoy's statement about not reading the poems is just bad scholarship given his point in the essay. He says that Flarf poems are generated by uncritical use of Google, but he insists on showing this by reference to what people like me say about Flarf.

8:10 AM

Thomas Basbøll

said...

Jay: yes, it is the lack of "obligations" to the Google results that makes the idea that Google "overdetermines" Flarf implausible. (It could still be shown in particular cases, of cases, and, like I say, Hoy might still offer that demonstration.)

8:12 AM

Tim Peterson

said...

HOW I INVENTED FLARF Yeah, I actually wasn't going to say anything about it, because I'm the modest type, but actually neither Gary, Kasey, nor Drew is the one who invented Flarf. I did. Well, my mom is the one who came up with the name. But the basic idea was mine. I must have been about fifteen or so, and we were having some Language poets over for dinner that evening, and I was excitedly telling them about this new movement I was thinking about founding, called Matronism. My mom, who was spraying artificial cheese out of a can onto the Collected Shakespeare, suddenly butted in and said "Honey, why don't you call it Flarf, instead? I think that's a nicer name." The Language poets all nodded, and the room because stymied by intense expectation. The basic movement, as I explained to our guests, would be a poetry that involves no humor whatsoever. Irony would be completely foreign to the language, as would guile, innocence, rancor, truculence, and all vaguely impassioned tendencies. The basic goal was to employ words as "firm objects," but in the sense of a kind of beige fabric in which one could rummage around and come up with something possibly of interest, although that something would be seen as just as interesting as any other thing within the beige blanket. Or no, maybe not a blanket, more like a jagged piece of sunroof. Or a woven placemat. This effect is what I referred to at the time (in my posts of January 3 and 17, 1973) as the hypostatization of boredom, or Fred. The hypostatization of boredom effect in Flarf would ideally foreground the properties of language which situate the absent subject in a discourse of multivoiced tonality, or hyperspace continuity gumbo. But at the same time as we wanted to investigate these "firm language objects," we also wanted to write like machines. We tried a number of ways of doing this, early etch-a-sketch and "cash register" poems numbering among the more interesting acculturations. Flarf was later to pass through a number of "concrete" or "performative" stages, but at this early stage, we primarily concerned ourselves with boring holes in the various inroads that political correctness had made into our lives (and more importantly, our poems, Gary would remind me in those evenings sitting by the fire with a tall glass of mint julep and one hand down his tight-fitting trousers) by means of postcolonial theory and writing workshop hayseed materials. One of our favorite items at that time was a gong which I would hit fiercely with my rear end when an effective Flarf poem had been performed or accomplished. Some people understand the purpose of Flarf as an exploration of Googled or procedural texts, but that was actually a very late stage in the movement and my mom came up with that idea too, though how Drew got around to claiming it for himself later is a much longer story than I can get into here. No, Flarf was originally a movement that involved "getting back to nature" through a post-Derridean entrapment of the writing subject in the act of cleaning my toe fungus. And once it was written, there was very little we could inhabit but through repetition, a very spotty strategy not unlike that of the Situationists whose balls measured a full three inches across on a clear day. Yes, we all enjoyed rummaging around in Fred continually over this period of time which signified the lively formation of this movement. I can still see them, eyes glinting in the sunlight of abstract lyric possibility, my comrades Gary, Drew, Nada, Katie, Kasey, Jordan, and some other people, out on the softball field of contemporary poetry, looking back askance to me for guidance, or a sign of the shallow humor they had come to know over the past few weeks of becoming weaker through collective encumbrance, aesthetic bewilderment, and a total dour humorlessness which by this point had become a way of life for us all.

2:57 AM

tmorange

said...

thomas: Hoy has not demonstrated that Google "embodies" the determinants of Flarf. huh? this seems to have it backwards to me. isn't the argument whether or not the poems embody the determinants of google? My argument is that, as a first approximation, search results radically underdetermine the poems. yes, agreed! google search results are (and i know i'm oversimplifying) based on popularity (more frequent hits yield a higher page ranking). but google as a cultural phenomenon is overdetermined: it is a site (no pun intended) that is highly contested by a variety of forces whose interests are rarely mutually inclusive. (as a symbol of entreprenurial ingenuity, high stakes corporate investment, the internet boom, the tech bubble, computer nerds and geeks, democratization good and bad, globalization good and bad, opportunity, limitations, etc.) that's a lot of "critical awareness" to require poems to reflect. tom

6:52 AM

Thomas Basbøll

said...This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

12:09 AM

Thomas Basbøll

said...

Tom, I thought I was using "embody" as you were in the following: "a critical awareness of the many many complicated verdeterminations that google embodies." I.e., the overdeterminations at issue would be "embodied" (in Google) as my mind is "embodied" (while this machine is to me). The more I think about, the more I am convinced that the sort of critical awareness that Hoy is proposing (I don't want to say "the level of critical awareness") has so vast and murky an object that if anyone took it upon themselves, they would never get any writing done. I see the opposite impulse in Flarf. Joshua Clover notes Hoy's "presumption that poets should have theorized their own work explicitly and completely as a necessary supplement to the poetry, without which it can't be trusted or read as such" and thanks you for the tip. I think it is an absurd presumption.

12:11 AM

tmorange

said...

Joshua Clover notes Hoy's "presumption that poets should have theorized their own work explicitly and completely as a necessary supplement to the poetry, without which it can't be trusted or read as such" and thanks you for the tip. I think it is an absurd presumption. well clearly from the posts i've been reading on the lucipo archives you and i have fundamentally opposed views on all of this. you have said that "Using the language [Google] collects for you doesn't commit you to the sources in any way; there is no investment" which i find absurd as i do not see how once can so easily divorce words from their contexts, nor do i see how one can not have some kind of investment in or committment to the materials one uses or appropriates or makes one's own. bests, tom

6:19 AM

Thomas Basbøll

said...

Tom, when I said "absurd" I meant that it didn't make sense to me to demand that poets explicitlyand (especially) completely theorize their practices. I quoted Joshua because I had no reason to think you would think such a thing. But I think you and just disagree about this thing about investment, not in any sort of fundamental way. Though I'm sure I've thrown those words around, too, I probably don't have a fundamental position from which to approach poetry. I think the wonder (perhaps the puzzle) of Flarf is that it does make divorcing words from their contexts look easy. Making a poem out of those words may still be hard, but that initial act of estrangement is brought upon the materials in a flash of what Dan calls "corporate algorithms". The trick (and I'm still open to the idea that there is some funny-business goin on here) is to convert "sources" into "materials". The difference between these are the degree of investment. There is no appropriation because the Flarfist, to use Pound's phrase, "have not wished for property". The Flarfist does not effect an "appropriation of the materials" but an "inappropriation of the poem". The materials are just lying around for the taking. This is why the reader gets that "it was open so let myself in" (Ben Lerner) feeling when reading them.

9:56 AM

#flarf #proceduralism #google

0 notes

mothershipresidencies · 7 years

Text

Chloe Alice Hayes

It began with the first conversation I had had with an artist in a very long time. Of course many of my friends are artists/ photographers or work in the art industry however, because they are my friends and because we rarely get to see each other we don’t tend to fill our discussions with intellectual or philosophical talk. It came on one very wet and foggy night in the middle of the Dorset countryside after a rather long drive to my first real artist residency. Anna Best, the artist running the residency ran up to my car window dragging a very wet Curly Wurly, the residency Labradoodle behind her telling me where to park and inviting me in for a much needed and appreciated cup of tea. I stumbled in to her hectic kitchen cluttered with books, papers, teapots and plants, thinking it looked like my dream house and sat down with the cat and the tea to meet the woman who granted me this opportunity.

Firstly, she wanted to know about my recent travels and how brave she thought I was and envious that I had gone, probably not nearly as envious as I was over her purpose built studio, to die for land complete with flowing stream and incredible veg patch with her own categorised compost bins, yes I am that sad. Then we got on to what I wanted to achieve during the residency and what it was that I was thinking about looking into. She immediately lit up at the mention of me wanting to look into the local buses and how recent cuts have affected local residents. She herself had become somewhat of an activist around this area after finding that her girl’s school bus would be cut purely because of where they lived. She said she could introduce me to a local activist bus group and gave me suggestions about how to go about it and the politics behind such an issue.

My second idea was to look into the unseen, and furthering the exposure and documenting the concealed, the unacknowledged tasks of parenting. I told her that I was specifically thinking of focusing it onto rural parenting as I felt that was a less exposed area and I wanted to utilise the very rural community in which I was staying. Through discussing this Anna suggested looking specifically into the role of the woman, having seen much on the published rural man throughout history, but not of women. She had also recently skimmed over an article on womens labour and thought it might be helpful in the development of my idea. She felt the thought of looking into the mothers side of the parenting, specifically a rural mother would be very interesting and a so far an unexamined and niche issue. I drained my cup and went to my studio to settle in for the night, allowing these ideas to stew.

The next morning I began the research on the rural mothers project, having received an email with the essay from Anna attached. It was entitled Labours of Love: Women’s Labour as the Culture Sector’s Invisible Dark Matter by Macushla Robinson. It was rather in depth for a short piece and in some ways going off topic to my project, however made a lot of sense and I wanted to knit it in as much as possible as it drew broader intellectual ideas into my work, many I had never dealt with before. I had never focused on feminism for any of my previous projects and most of my post-university pieces had come from fact-based research of a place or history as opposed to theories or questions. I actually hadn’t worked from a piece such as this since writing my dissertation, which sounds awful being a practising ‘artist’, however my photography usually stems from a site-specific or current interest I have. When reading, although I felt inspired an intellectually stimulated, I have to say I felt a little bit daunted about addressing my proposal to an audience in a few days, Anna had organized a talk for me at Bridport Arts Centre. I always feel slightly worried about talking about something when I don’t fully know all the facts, concerned for being caught out or contradicted and rightly so if I am not fully knowledgeable on the subject matter.

The piece enlightened and stimulated me so much however, that I was determined to not only use it as inspiration but to directly apply it to the project itself. So I wrote my talk focusing on the proposal of the two projects I wanted to initiate whilst on the residency, already knowing my initial methods but most certainly prepared for feedback and suggestions. Debate and theological discussion amongst artists and groups of people is important in a world of verbal propositions and direct challenges. Art- Language was first published in May 1969, developed by ‘possibly the most misunderstood and controversial artists of all’ (Cork, 2016, pg. 76). Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin, David Bainbridge and Harold Hurrell were unified in an analytical action and published the journal with essays employing ‘the weapons of philosophical debate to substantiate their belief that art theory could itself be considered as a work of conceptual art’ (Cork, 2016, pg. 76). The artists disputed the idea that art was just a visual medium and ‘as a result, contemporary art was liberated in so many ways, and this exhilarating freedom continues to stimulate the most adventurous practitioners today’ (Cork, 2016, pg. 76).

The time came for the talk on a chilly Tuesday evening in the cosy cafe area of the arts centre. The turn out was much better than I had expected, interestingly all women regardless of the fact that the content of my talk was not advertised and so I began my spiel about both projects apologising for my lack of improvisation when public speaking, sticking religiously to my script. The atmosphere was relaxed and I welcomed questions at any point. During and at the end, I had a lot of interesting comments.

These soon evolved into a full discussion about my work and before I knew it I had so many suggestions and insights into research for it. Many were questioning what the word ‘rural’ actually meant and where the boundaries lie within it, I hadn’t realised how many times I had actually used it until that moment. A few challenged the fact that only men where documented in rural history and told me where I could see images of women’s labour in local museums and archives, this I must say I agree with and were glad that they didn’t feel they had to just accept what I said. A few commented on the issue of the exposure of the women and children that I had given the cameras to and then the discussion moved on to the rural buses project. Some were concerned how I could really make a difference with an art project, some gave me their experiences of the bus system and their concerns for other users. I told them about some of the anecdotes that the people on the bus had told me during my research in the daytime and Anna went on to tell her story of her anarchist friends having theories that it is the governments way of pushing people out of villages and forcing them into towns where it is easier to control them. Which in actual fact does make a bit of sense I have to say. The conversation evolved and got deeper the more we went on, I found myself really enjoying the critique of my ideas and work.

This is when I realised how much I truly missed university. The value of having a room full of impartial, varied feedback about proposals of potential projects is incredibly important and so rare once you leave education. Artist Roy Ascott describes his own experience in education and the inspiration from his teachers in Tate Etc. Spring 2016. Ascott, taught by both Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton at King’s College, Newcastle was imparted a mix of ‘radically constructve, poetic, process based and conceptually rich aspects of art.’ (Ascott, 2016, pg. 22). Ascott considered his own experimental and influential Groundcourse at Ealing in the 1960’s to be a rejection of Basic Design Formalism and was actually in some ways ‘an extension of the very ‘developing process’ that Pasmore and Hamilton initiated, although more radically investigative into identity, behaviour and environment.’ (Ascott, 2016, pg. 23). Ascott said that ‘It is clear to me that the teaching I have received, from many sources in many cultures, has enriched my own contribution to the field.’ (Ascott, 2016, pg. 23).

Within a week I had conceived two project ideas, discussed them, developed them, began to work on them, wrote about them, severely doubted myself, had creative block, presented them, found inspiration and found confidence both in my ideas and executing them. The importance of discussion and conversation between artists is paramount to the work created. It not only challenges artists about their own and others works, but allows the artist to successfully draw inspiration from others and observe deeper thoughts and connotations within their own practice. Being an artist is being part of a global community that shares, interacts and asks questions like no other group and will continue to communicate in such a way in order to continue to ask the important questions, spark discussion among viewers and inspire.

— Chloe Alice Hayes, Mothershipper 6th- 13th January 2017

#artist residencies artist photographer art residencies themothership annabest chloealicehayes creative ruralbuses documentaryphoto

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Text

David Stern, Was Wittgenstein a Jew?, In Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy, ed. James Klagge, 237 (2001)

In my mind's eye, I can already hear posterity talking about me, instead of listening to me, those, who if they knew me, would certainly be a much more ungrateful public.

And I must do this: not hear the other in my imagination, but rather myself. Le., not watch the other, as he watches me - for that is what I do - rather, watch myself. What a trick, and how unending the constant temptation to look to the other, and away from myself.

--- Wittgenstein, Denkbewegungen: Tagebucher 1930-1932/1936-1937, 15 November or 15 December, 1931

1. Was Wittgenstein Jewish?

Did Ludwig Wittgenstein consider himself a Jew? Should we? Wittgenstein repeatedly wrote about Jews and Judaism in the 1930s (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 1997) and the biographical studies of Wittgenstein by Brian Mc- Guinness (1988), Ray Monk (1990), and B€la Szabados (1992, 1995, 1997, 1999) make it clear that this writing about Jewishness was a way in which he thought about the kind of person he was and the nature of his philosophical work. On the other hand, many philosophers regard Wittgenstein's thoughts about the Jews as relatively unimportant. Many studies of Wittgenstein's philosophy as a whole do not even mention the matter, and those that do usually give it little attention. For instance, Joachim Schulte recognizes that "Jewishness was an important theme for Wittgenstein" (1992, 16-17) but says very little more, except that the available evidence makes precise statements difficult. Rudolf Haller's approach in his paper, "What do Wittgenstein and Weininger have in Common?," is probably more representative of the received wisdom among Wittgenstein experts. In the very first paragraph, he makes it clear that the sole concern of his paper is the question of "deeper philosophical common ground" between Wittgenstein and Weininger, and not "attitudes on feminity or Jewishness" (Haller 1988, 90) . Those who have written about Wittgenstein on the Jews have drawn very different conclusions. He has been lauded as a "rabbinical" thinker (Nieli 1987) and a far-sighted critic of anti-Semitism (Szabados 1999), and criticized as a self-hating anti- Semite (Lurie 1989), as well as condemned for uncritically accepting the worst racist prejudices (Wasserman 1990). Monk (1990) provides a rather more nuanced reading of the evidence . He presents Wittgenstein as briefly attracted to using anti-Semitic expressions in the early 1930s, but only as a way of thinking about his own failings. Most discussions of the topic take it for granted that Wittgenstein was a Jew, but recently McGuinness (1999/ 2001) has contended that even this is a mistake.

In this essay, I argue that much of this debate is confused, because the notion of being a Jew, of Jewishness, is itself ambiguous and problematic. Instead, we would do better to start by asking in what senses Wittgenstein was, or was not, a Jew. Another way of putting this is to say that we should first consider different ways of seeing Wittgenstein as a Jew. Before rushing to judgment, we need to consider what it could mean to say that Wittgenstein was, or was not, a Jew, or an anti-Semite. This is not just a matter of tabulating various possible definitions of these expressions, but of considering the different contexts - cultural, social, personal - in which those terms can be used, and their significance in those contexts. In doing so, we need to give critical attention not only to the various criteria for being a Jew that Wittgenstein would have been acquainted with, and the presuppositions he might have taken for granted about Jews and Judaism, but also the ones that we use in our discussion of Wittgenstein as a Jew, and our motives for doing so. One of the great dangers in writing philosophical biography is the risk of turning the study of a philosopher's life and work into vicarious autobiography, wishful thinking, or worse.

I begin my discussion of the question of Wittgenstein's Jewishness by looking at two passages by Brian McGuinness that offer very different answers. The first, from the first volume of his biography of Wittgenstein, subtitled "Young Ludwig (1889-1921)," takes it for granted that Wittgenstein did think of himself as a Jew, at least during the first half of his life, and gives some indication of how important that fact was to him. The passage begins with a reference to Otto Weininger, who Wittgenstein identified, in a passage written in 1931 (1980/1998, 18-19/16-17), as an important influence. In the same piece of writing, Wittgenstein also discussed the connection between his Jewishness, his character, and his way of doing philosophy. Wittgenstein repeatedly recommended Weininger's pseudoscientific and anti- Semitic Sex and Character (1903) to friends, including G. E. Moore in the early 1930s and G. E. M. Anscombe in the late 1940s. As we shall see, Monk's biography also emphasizes Wittgenstein's indebtedness to Weininger's ideas about talent and genius, and their close connection to his views about Jewishness and femininity.

Weininger had yet two important features in common with the young Ludwig. First he was Jewish. He suffered from the consciousness of that fact . He identified the Jewish with all that was (on his theory) feminine and negative.... The theme of the stamp put on a man's life and thought by his Jewishness often recurs in Ludwig's later notes, though, to be sure, he saw it more as an intellectual than as a moral limitation. Already in childhood he was preoccupied on a more practical level with dissociating himself for social and even moral reasons from all the different strata of Judaism in Austria. We shall see what remorse that cost him and can measure in that way how compelling the need for dissociation was . (McGuinness 1988, 42)

In the passage quoted above, McGuinness puts his finger on two leading themes that must be addressed by anyone interested in the question of whether Wittgenstein was a Jew, or his views about the Jews : the nature of the Weininger connection, and the nature of Wittgenstein's "dissociation" from Judaism. First, Wittgenstein did, on occasion, speak of himself as a Jew, and the understanding of what it means to be a Jew we find in his writings - his conception of Jewishness, so to speak - makes use of ideas of Weininger's. Most of his surviving writing on this topic dates from the early 1930s, and much of it has been published in Culture and Value: these are the "later notes" McGuinness (1988, 42) refers to above in passing, and discusses in some detail in (1999/2001). (I examine this material in §§ 4 f. below.)

The second important point McGuinness touches on in the passage above is that Wittgenstein did, on occasion, deny his Jewishness, and this was a charged matter for him. In his last sentence, McGuinness alludes to Wittgen- stein's confessions to friends and family in 1936 and 1937 that he had misrepresented his Jewish ancestry. In 1935, the German government enacted the Nuremberg Laws, which specified that only those people with three or more Jewish grandparents were to be classified as Jews; those with one or two Jewish grandparents were classified as different grades of mixed race . In 1936 and 1937, while at work on what would become the first 180 sections of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein confessed to friends and family that he had misrepresented the extent of his Jewish descent, claiming that one grandparent had been a Jew, when actually three of them were. In 1938, as a result of the Anschluss with Austria, the Nuremberg Laws became applicable to the Wittgenstein family. Wittgenstein, who was living in Britain at the time, took British citizenship. His brother Paul fled to Switzerland in July 1938. Meanwhile his sisters stayed in Austria, eventually making a deal with the Berlin authorities, under which they repatriated very substantial foreign assets in exchange for classifying them as non-Jewish, an arrangement Wittgenstein actively supported. (McGuinness 1999, 74-75; 2001, 231; Monk 1990,396-400.)

The discussion of Wittgenstein's views about the Jews and his own Jewish- ness in McGuinness' Young Ludwig (1988) does not address the ways in which these terms have been used. In "Wittgenstein and the Idea of Jewish- ness:' McGuinness (1999/2001) touches on this issue. He distinguishes vari- ous religious, scientific, and racial criteria for Jewishness and reviews the biographical evidence that he considers most relevant, including pasages from Culture and Value.The second passage from McGuinness that I want to take as a point of departure, the final paragraph of that paper, takes a sharply different position to the first. There he concludes that:

In the end, then, Wittgenstein did not think of himself as Jewish, nor need we do so. The concept is an attractive, although, or because, a confused one.It is possible to think that it would have been well if all "Jews" had felt solidarity, or to think that they now ought to do so - it is also possible to think the contradictory or even the opposite of these things. In any case these are aspirations, not realities (McGuinness 1999, 76; 2001, 231).

At first sight, the two passages seem to offer diametrically opposed answers to the question of whether Wittgenstein thought of himself as a Jew :the first says that he did, the second, that he didn't. Taking a cue from the words "in the end," which can be used to sum up a person's overall outlook, or their view at the end of their life, the apparent contradiction could be resolved if the passages referred to different phases of Wittgenstein's life. The first is taken from a chapter on Wittgenstein's childhood and schooldays, while the second sums up a piece about his life as a whole. The first passage mentions "later writings," written when Wittgenstein was in his early forties, and alludes to confessions made in his late forties, and these are topics in the more recent piece, too. The second passage certainly suggests that when McGuinness had earlier talked of Wittgenstein's Jewishness, he, too, had fallen prey to a certain kind of muddled thinking, taking Wittgenstein to have thought of himself as a Jew because it cast him in a sympathetic light, and had mistaken an attractive interpretation for the truth.

McGuinness does not say who he has in mind when he speaks of the "attractions" of thinking of Wittgenstein as a Jew, but in a note to the paper he speaks disparagingly of others who have made this error, not his own earlier work. In that note, at the end of the paragraph quoted above, he writes:

Having arrived so far, I have the impression that the polemical part of what I have said has in essence, been said before.... It seems always necessary to repeat it, and yet by airing the topic one risks nourishing it . This is part of the fascination I speak of. (McGuinness 1999, 76, n. 40; 2001, n. 44).

He gives, however, very little indication of the principal targets of his polemic; the only writings he explicitly mentions are an unpublished paper by J.J. Ross and a piece published in Hebrew by Yuval Lurie. Nor does he include references to those he is criticizing in his bibliography.This is, on the face of it, odd, for the scholarly literature on Wittgenstein's Jewishness is, for the most part, not well known. Perhaps this is because of McGuinness's concern that "by airing the topic one risks nourishing it," an obscure object of fascination that he apparently considers best left unnamed. Cornish's (1998) speculative and imaginative account of Wittgenstein's Jewishness as the driving force behind Hitler's anti-Semitism is a good example of the dangers of applying the conspiracy theory approach to Wittgenstein, but it seems unlikely that it was the focus of McGuinness's attention . Perhaps his principal target here is Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, which takes the Weiningerian conception of the "duty of genius" as its leading theme in interpreting Wittgenstein's life and work, even though Monk's excellent biography, which rightly gives Wittgenstein's Jewishness and his relationship to Weininger a central place, is never cited or mentioned in McGuinness's paper.

Wittgenstein's favorite passage, which he quoted frequently, came from the introduction to Hertz's Principles of Mechanics.There, Hertz summed up his answer to debates over the meaning of terms such as 'force' or `electricity' : because the term has accumulated contradictory meanings, the only solution is to give some of them up. "When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered ;but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions" (1899, 8). Wittgenstein thought of his philosophy as analogous : a matter of uncovering inconsistencies in our use of everyday terms that lead us to talk nonsense yet think we make sense. In "Wittgenstein and the Idea of Jewishness," Mc- Guinness rightly observes that 'Jewishness' is just such a term . Yet instead of developing a Hertzian critique of 'Jewishness,' he tries to show that Jews and Jewishness in any sense were of very little significance for Wittgenstein.As part of his discussion of this issue, he gives a list of meanings of 'Jewishness' that reads as follows:

We have here at least five different sets of phenomena, or supposed phenomena :[1] the religion; [2] descent from persons professing it ; [3] the culture of assimilatedJews who still formed something of a community; [4] the common genetic heritage of Jews (thought to exist); [51 and (distinct from this) the supposition of such a heritage, typically the assumption by the anti-Semitic that it did exist and was an excrescence on European culture, with which we may class the mirror-image of this assumption, which finds in Jewish consciousness the origins of the modem world view .Of these five, only the first and the last are reasonably clearly definable and certainly existed, though they are by no means identical or very closely related. Jewishness, "das Judentwn", is surely one of those words of which Heinrich Hertz spoke in a favorite passage of Wittgenstein's. (McGuinness 1999, 70; 2001, 228. I have added the bracketed numbering).

This list not only omits some important senses of the term; the answers it offers raise more problems than they solve. McGuinness gives no reason for thinking that either "the religion" or the suppositions of the anti-Semitic can be clearly defined. The Jewish religion has a history spanning several millennia, and has comprised many competing sects and splinter groups, each of which have argued both among themselves and with their rivals about what it means to be a Jew. Anti-semitism is also an extremely variable phenomenon, and has taken very different forms. Oddly, the definitions of being Jewish that most Jews would offer, if asked - either being born of a Jewish mother, or having converted to Judaism - are not on McGuinness's list. Nor does he mention the idea that anyone with a Jewish ancestor is a Jew - akin to the "one-drop" rule favored by white American racists - or the 1935 Nuremburg Laws' definition of a Jew : having at least three Jewish grandparents . Finally, in talking about anti-Semitism, he only mentions a hereditary conception of Jewishness, passing over the Weiningerian idea of Jewishness as a personality syndrome, akin to effeminacy, a connection of traits that could equally well be manifested by those with little or no Jewish ancestry - for instance, both Wittgenstein and Weininger were prepared to extend the concept of Jewish- ness to other groups, such as the English (cf. Monk 1990, 313). The drawing of distinctions between races, and the principles on which racial boundaries are demarcated, are among the most charged questions one can ask about race, not only for those who apply them, and to whom they are applied, but also for those who study race. No list of definitions could do justice to the historical and genealogical dimension of this issue.

Unfortunately, much of the rest of McGuinness's recent discussion of Wittgenstein's Jewishness (1999/2001), leading up to his conclusion that Wittgenstein was not a Jew, loses sight of the rich possibilities suggested by Wittgenstein's favorite passage from Hertz, and is highly selective and tendentious: he seems determined to cut through this Gordian knot by doing the best he can to show that Jews and Jewishness in any sense were of very little significance for Wittgenstein. In particular, McGuinness seems to lay considerable stress on the claim that the Wittgenstein family would not have identified themselves as Jews, and neither would their immediate circle have done so. For instance, in the first paragraph of that paper, McGuinness emphasizes that no one at the turn of the century would have thought of describing Wittgenstein's relatives as a Jewish family (1999, 57 ; 2001, 221). Yet his insistence on the Hertzian - and Wittgensteinian - insight that the concept of a "Jew" is ambiguous and inconsistent suggests that "Was Wittgenstein a Jew?" is a question that stands in need of philosophical treatment, rather than a direct answer.

Indeed, the rapid and insistent move from the descriptive - "Wittgenstein was not a Jew" - to the prescriptive - "we don't need to do so" - suggests that we need to look more closely at his motivation for this overly insistent conclusion. Comparing McGuinness's two accounts, one gets the impression that he has followed the path of dissociation from Jewishness that he originally saw in Wittgenstein; he begins by insisting on Wittgenstein's need to deny that he was a Jew, and ends up denying that Wittgenstein was a Jew. Contradictions between different conceptions of Jewishness are not so much the subject of McGuinness's discussion as enacted in its development . Indeed, we might well ask what could have motivated someone as well-informed as McGuinness to make such an injudicious claim. Why is McGuinness so eager to silence those he disagrees with that he does not even name them? To answer these questions, we must look more closely at the connections be- tween what Wittgenstein had to say about the Jews, his life, and his philosophical work. The principal biographical reasons for rejecting the claim that Wittgenstein was not a Jew can be summarized quickly, however. Wittgenstein was certainly not, in any sense, a practicing Jew; he, his parents, and three of his grandparents, were baptized by the Catholic Church. On the other hand, he, and his brothers and sisters, knew that three of their four grandparents were of Jewish descent, and this fact was known to others. For instance, both Monk (1990, 14) and McGuinness (1988, 49) tell the story of how the young Wittgenstein wanted to lie about his Jewish background in order to join a Viennese gymnastic club, and had to be dissuaded by his brother Paul . Both biographers make it clear that while the Wittgenstein family presented themselves in public as Christians, it was widely known that they were of Jewish descent. In a diary entry written after the German-AustrianAnschluss, he described the prospect of holding a German Judenpass, Jewish identity papers, as an "extraordinarily difficult situation" and compared it to "hot iron" that would bum in his pocket (MS 120,14.3.1938; cf. Monk 1990, 389 f.) To simply say that Wittgenstein was not a Jew, and didn't think of himself as a Jew, hardly does justice to this complex state of affairs . It is Wittgenstein's response to this predicament that is the principal concern of this essay.

After looking at the relationship between biography and philosophy (§ 2) and Wittgenstein's own thoughts on the topic (§ 3), the remainder of the essay considers two periods from the 1930s in which Wittgenstein's Jewishness occupied center-stage. First, in the early 1930s, his Jewishness was a recurrent theme in his writing and in his dreams . In 1931, he discussed the Jews and Jewishness at some length, connecting his character as a "Jewish thinker" with the nature of his philosophical work (§ 4 ; cf. Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 12, 13, 16, 18-21, 22/14, 15, 16-19, 23). In 1929 and 1932, he wrote down dreams about his Jewish descent and racial identity (§ 5 ; cf. MS 107, 219, 1.12.29; MS 183, 137, 28.1.32.) Second, in the latter half of the 1930s, Wittgenstein's Jewishness once again became a problem for him. In 1936 and 1937 he made a point of confessing to family and friends that he had misled others about the extent of his Jewish descent (Monk 1990, 367 f .) and in 1938 and 1939, he had to confront the implications of the German invasion of his homeland, both for himself and his immediate family (§ 6) .

2. Life and Work, Biography and Philosophy

As these passages already make clear, asking whether Wittgenstein saw himself as a Jew, and whether we should, are questions of considerable interest in their own right. They also raise more general problems both for the writing of biography in general, and philosophical biography in particular. Any biography turns the chaotic and conflicting events of a person's life into a coherent story. Biographers usually aim at a balanced and comprehensive account of the life of their subject, but that has proved to be an extremely elusive goal. Lives are rarely consistent, and are colored by changing motives and conflicting concerns. Those who write about them are tempted to give them greater coherence than they had when they were lived, a coherence that may be as much a product of the biographer as the life in question a further problem in the case of philosophical biography There is a further problem in the case of philosophical biography. Biographers are constitutionally inclined to explain the principal features of a person's philosophical writing in terms of the person's life - his or her character, or formative experience, or social circumstances. Most philosophers, on the other hand, regard any such explanation as a particularly egregious form of the naturalistic fallacy, holding that the values, or reasons, expressed in a philosopher's work cannot be understood in causal terms.

The question of the relationship between a philosopher's life and philosophy rarely receives the careful attention it deserves. Usually, the answers that are offered favor one extreme or the other - either the work is to be explained by the life, or the life and work are independent - and these diametrically opposed answers are usually taken for granted by their supporters. Many nonphilosophers, and some biographically minded philosophers, find it attractive to explain the philosopher's work in terms of the philosopher's life. A very wide range of positions fit under this broad heading, but they all maintain that some aspect of the person's life determines, explains, or is important for an understanding of the content of the work. Psychoanalytic accounts of the origins of philosophical views in the unconscious, or the claim that a philosopher's unreasoned convictions, class, or social interests underpin his or her arguments, are leading examples of this kind of approach .

If asked, most philosophers would sharply separate the arguments a philosopher gave from a discussion of his or her biography. In particular, they would insist that a philosopher's arguments stand or fall quite independently of what we know about his or her life. Life and work must be kept apart, at least when it comes to assessing the content and significance of the philosopher's work. While a philosopher's life undoubtedly plays a part in the causal processes that lead to the production of his or her writings, such matters are not relevant to the reasoned evaluation of the resultant philosophical position . Mixing one's account of a philosopher's life experience, convictions, and influences, on the one hand, and his or her philosophy, on the other, is a category mistake.

Insofar as this view, on which there is a sharp distinction between a philosopher's life and arguments, is usually taken for granted by most analytic philosophers and historians of philosophy, it is rarely defended or even discussed explicitly in the current philosophical literature . For the most part, those who accept this position do so by refraining from drawing connections between life and work, without explicitly arguing against them. Thus, most books and journal articles on Wittgenstein's philosophy either do not discuss his life, or keep it entirely separate from discussion of his philosophy . Most of those who do discuss the relationship between life and work do so because they reject the separation of biography and philosophy, and hold that a philosopher's biography can be fruitfully connected with his or her philosophy (propenents would include Engelmann, McGuinness, Monk, Szabados, Nevo, Nyiri, Lurie, Cornish, Nieli, Sass, Scharfstein).

Popper is perhaps the best-known defender of the view that the philosopher's life is irrelevant to the appraisal of his or her arguments, but his views are seldom mentioned in the literature on the relationship between Wittgenstein's life and work, perhaps because Popper and Wittgenstein were enemies, and represent approaches to philosophy that have often been contrasted with each other (cf. Munz 1985). There are wildly conflicting stories over how their confrontation at the Cambridge Moral Science Club, where Popper was a visiting speaker in 1946, ended, but what is most interesting for our purposes is that Popper was there to defend the view that there are substantive philosophical problems, and this was the point over which they fell out. The only Wittgenstein interpreter who appeals to Popper's views on the independence of biography and philosophy is Bartley (1973/1985), who maintains that Wittgenstein's character helps to explain his personal influence, but is irrelevant to his philosophy.

One of the rare exceptions to this rule is Hans-Johann Glock (2001), who maintains that any attempt to understand philosophical writing in general, and Wittgenstein's writing in particular, in biographical terms fails to do justice to its reasoned and argumentative character . (Another exception is Conant [1991], discussed in § 3.) Glock's argument proceeds from the premise that Wittgenstein's writing, early and late, includes many passages that must be read as philosophical arguments, arguments that must be taken seriously. Due to the central role of argument in Wittgenstein's writing, Glock classifies him as a "rationalist:' Rationalists, in his sense of the terns, provide an argumentative and reasoned defense of their position. "Irrationalists" appeal to something unreasoned, such as religious or existential commitment, or the idea that different philosophies are different ways of seeing things.

Glock is certainly right that Wittgenstein wrote arguments, and took them very seriously, but this is only a problem for an extreme irrationalist reading of Wittgenstein, one that denies that arguments have any real significance in Wittgenstein's philosophy. This does nothing to undermine a quietist irrationalism, in which the point of the arguments in Wittgenstein's writing is to make problematic, and so subvert, the power of philosophical argument . It is possible that Wittgenstein's use of argument should be interpreted as defending a positive philosophical position, and that it is unconnected with the way he lived his life. If it is to be a plausible claim about Wittgenstein's own views, it must be backed up not just with philosophical argument, but with evidence that Wittgenstein accepted that argument, and this is not provided in Glock's argument.

My own reading of Wittgenstein, and the position I defend in this paper, is a quietist irrationalism, a position that draws on both the rationalist and irrationalist approaches to philosophy as characterized by Glock . Like the rationalist, I read Wittgenstein's writing argumentatively, as giving a reasoned defense of certain philosophical positions. Like the irrationalist, I read Wittgenstein's writing as trying to show that the unreasoned, the outer limits of philosophical argument, play a much greater part in philosophy than the

rationalist thinks. Philosophical argument rarely gets the last word in Wittgenstein's writing. Philosophy for Wittgenstein, when it is not criticizing the argumentative hubris of the rationalist, is a matter of description, not explanation. A philosopher who wishes to show the limitations of argument can hardly help making use of arguments - the works of the ancient skeptics, or Plato's early dialogues, perhaps the principal source of Glock's "irrationalist" tradition, are full of arguments. For someone who thinks that differences in philosophy come down to different ways of looking at things, or world views, or matters of temperament and character, may still depend on argument to defend the view that argument is not, ultimately, what matters in philosophy .

In a conversation with Oets Bouwsma about the difficulties involved in writing a completely honest autobiography, Wittgenstein argued that the author's motives will inevitably get in the way of the autobiographical project of giving an account of oneself and maintaining "a consistent attitude towards that account" (Bouwsma 1986, 70). The autobiographer aims to give a balanced survey of what happened to him or her, how he or she acted, and the motives for those actions. But no one can maintain an impartial attitude towards him or herself, for no one can be indifferent to one's own weaknesses or failings, and so any account one gives of oneself will inevitably be unstable:

No one can write objectively about himself and this is because there will always be some motive for doing so . And the motives will change as you write . And this becomes complicated, for the more intent one is on being "objective" the more one will notice the varying motives that enter in (Bouwsma 1986, 71) .

Wittgenstein was not just suggesting that self-serving motives will lead the autobiographer who tries to tell the truth to put the best possible light on whatever he or she is impelled to relate . He was also casting doubt on the very idea that telling the truth about onself can ever be a matter of simply providing accurate information about one's past, for the reason that whatever story one tells will always be colored by one's current preoccupations and concerns, which will, in turn, be affected by the telling of that story. Objectivity, which at first sight might seem to be a matter of impartially separating onself from one's involvement in what one did, turns out, on closer inspection, to be a particularly charged stance, precisely because of its claim to stand above the fray. The very effort to give a balanced and consistent account of the difficult questions about oneself will inevitably be marked by a certain instability and inconsistency in what one says, because no one can be indifferent about such charged matters.

In "Autobiography after Wittgenstein," a perceptive discussion of these concerns, Bdla Szabados contends that what Wittgenstein brings to our attention is that the very attempt to maintain such a consistent and coherent attitude, as if time had stopped and the writer is dead, involves the autobiographer in some form of myopia or self-deception . Such an aim fuels omissions, rationalizations, inventions: suppressions of salient, raw, stubborn memories which confound this imperial attitude of pretended wholeness or single-mindedness. It also masks the present concerns of the writer. So the traditional autobiographical project appears to contain inherently its seeds of self-destruction . Its aim, disengaged self-knowledge, objective stock-taking and cataloguing of truths about oneself is turned on its head; its goal ends up in self-deceit; its primary intention is frustrated (Szabados 1992, 7).

Szabados' essay explores the strategies of confession, self-acceptance, and self-transformation with which Wittgenstein attempted to overcome these difficulties, and closes by bringing out some of the similarities between Wittgenstein's way of doing philosophy and his ideas about autobiography . Traditionally, both autobiography and philosophy aim at objectivity, detach- ment, and self-understanding, and for this reason, both are fraught with the risk of self-deception. Like philosophy, autobiography is "a working on oneself, on one's own way of seeing things, on one's own interpretation and what one expects of it" (Szabados 1992, 10, paraphrasing Wittgenstein 1980/ 1998, 16/24).

At the very end of his discussion, Szabados uneasily brings up the topic of his own role in the essay he has just written about Wittgenstein's reflections on autobiography: he points out that he has, in effect, been impersonating Wittgenstein, claiming Wittgenstein's voice as his own, with the aim of evoking the reader's interest in his own concerns about autobiography as a kind of writing (Szabados 1992, 11). These final remarks touch on a point that is a central concern in this paper, for they make it clear that Szabados' problem is only a special case of a problem that arises for anyone writing about Wittgenstein's life or thought, regardless of whether that writing is autobiographical, biographical, or philosophical in character. For any attempt to write about Wittgenstein's life and thought - and for that matter, anyone else's life and thought - must face the very issues that make autobiography particularly problematic. While it is true that the biographer writes about someone else's life, rather than his or her own, this is no guarantee that he or she will be any more capable of Olympian impartiality than the autobiographer. Indeed, if Wittgenstein's train of thought about the impossibility of giving a consistent account of one's own motivations is correct, then anyone who aims at a coherent account of the life of another will have to confront that hermeneutic pitfall twice over. The biographer will not only have to come to terms with the inconsistencies and tensions in the subject's life, but will also have his or her own vested interests in the project - interests that may well be just as complex as the conflicting motivations that pull at the autobiographer.

In "Philosophical Biography: The Very Idea," Ray Monk (2001) draws a contrast between two ideal types of philosophical biography, which one might call "explanatory" and "descriptive:" An explanatory biography takes the life of its subject as grist for the author's mill, setting the events of the subject's life within the context of the author's pet theories about the nature of life. Monk gives the example of Sartre's biography of Baudelaire, and Sartre's use of Baudelaire's abandonment by his mother as an opportunity to advance his existentialist thesis that we all choose our fate - a thesis that is argued at length, but not supported by quotations from Baudelaire, or other evidence that he believed the views Sartre attributes to him. Such a biography is not really a biography at all, Monk argues, but rather a covert and self- aggrandizing argument for the author's own views. A descriptive biography, on the other hand, presents the events of the subject's life in rich detail, carefully choosing the most telling stories and drawing connections between them, but self-effacingly avoids moralizing or drawing conclusions from the material it presents. The author of such a biographer aims to be "part of the frame," rather than "part of the picture:' Such a biography does not have its form imposed on it by the biographer, as the "frame" simile initially suggests, but is rather due to the interconnected character of the life that is being described.

Monk cites Boswell's life of Johnson as his paradigmatic instance of a good descriptive biography, and said this was the method he had followed in his life of Wittgenstein. He notes, however, that he had found it much harder to follow this method successfully in the case of his Russell biography. In part, this was because Wittgenstein's was an unusually unified life. He never married, had few close friends, almost no possessions, and preferred to live alone. Monk's life of Wittgenstein, Ludwig Witgenstein: The Duty of Genius, takes as its leading theme the notion of the "duty of genius," an ethical imperative inspired by Wittgenstein's reading of Otto Weininger, an Austrian fin de si8cle popular psychologist and philosopher.

Perhaps Wittgenstein's unusual sensitivity to the paradoxes and inconsistencies involved in trying to tell a coherent and consistent life story was partly due to the intensity with which he strove to lead such a life. Monk's self-effacing approach to Wittgenstein's biography is particularly appropriate to the life that Wittgenstein led, or wished to lead. Yet to attempt to tell the story of someone's life in such a unified way runs the danger that it will pass over, or smooth over, the cracks and fissures that signal the inconsistencies and incoherences in even the most single-minded of lives . Indeed, it may well be the case that the impossibility of arriving at an entirely settled perspective on a life emerges most clearly precisely when one attempts to fit the whole life into a single frame.

3. Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Biography

There were times when Wittgenstein gave forceful expression to the irrationalist views that a person's philosophy is a matter of temperament, or a person's ethics a product of circumstance:

if it is said on occasion that (someone's) philosophy is a matter of temperament, there is some truth in this. A preference for certain comparisons [Gleichnisse] is something we call a matter of temperament & far more disagreements rest on this than appears at first sight // could be called a matter of temperament & a much larger proportion of disagreements rest on this than may appear// (Wittgenstein, 1980/1998, 20/17-18, 1931).

It is not unheard of that someone's character may be influenced by the external world (Weininger). For that only means that, as we know from experience, people change with circumstances. If someone asks: How could the environment coerce someone, the ethical in someone? - the answer is that he may indeed say "No human being has to give way to coercion," but all the same under such circumstances someone will do such & such.

"You don't HAVE to, I can show you a (different) way out, - but you won't take it" (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 84/95, 30.3.50).

The first of these two quotations is from 1931, a time when he was particularly preoccupied with Weiningerian questions about the relationship between originality and influence. Thus this paragraph immediately precedes a passage on how the Jews are "experienced as a sort of disease" within European history. This passage is quoted and discussed toward the end of section 4. Comparisons [Gleichnisse] play an important role in Wittgenstein's philosophical writing, and in his understanding of the particular character of his approach to philosophy, another topic discussed further in section 4. The second quotation, which includes an explicit parenthetical reference to Weininger, is an example of how the topic of influence still attracted Wittgenstein's attention many years later. The reference to Weininger is by way of contrast, not agreement: Weininger did regard character as necessarily inner, and so did think it outrageous to say that character is a product of circumstance.

Yet, on other occasions, Wittgenstein gave voice to the rationalist conviction that philosophy and life are separate, and philosophy primary . Perhaps this is because it is much easier to think of philosophy, or character, as a product of temperament, or external circumstances, when one is thinking about others' convictions - and naturally adopts an external perspective - than in one's own case. In a manuscript written in 1948, he expressed his conviction that he should not publish a philosophical autobiography in which the specific difficulties he had felt were "chewed over." The real importance of his work, he thought, lay in the "remedies" he had developed, not the particular causes that had occasioned them:

These difficulties are interesting for me, who am caught up in them, but not necessarily for other people. They are difficulties of my thinking, brought about by my development. They belong, so to speak, in a diary, not in a book. And even if this diary might be interesting for someone some day, I cannot publish it. My stomach- aches are not what is interesting but the remedies - if any - that I've found for them (Wittgenstein, MS 136, 144, 24.1.48).

Notice that Wittgenstein's autobiographical difficulties are figured in vivid bodily terms, both as something that should not be "chewed over," and as the cause of his "stomach-aches." Perhaps Wittgenstein thought that overly close attention to his personal predicament would detract from the dignity and seriousness of the work he had written. As a result, he claims that his specific difficulties are really only of interest to himself, but not to others, and so should not be published.

Despite his inability to publish them - or any of the other writing that he did after 1929 - he did leave the corpus of his writing for his literary trustees to publish "as they see fit." (The words quoted are from Wittgenstein's will .)

As a result, it was his literary heirs who had to distinguish between his "philosophical" work on the one hand and the "nonphilosophical" work on the other, as though these dismembered limbs could be surgically separated from the corpus of typescripts and manuscripts that Wittgenstein left to posterity. As a matter of fact, the majority of that material does take the form of a diary, a dated sequence of notes, first drafts, and revisions that provides an intimate record of his struggle with the difficulties that occasioned his more polished philosophical writing . If one turns to this (still mostly unpublished) source material, one can see that Wittgenstein's writing arises out of a struggle between opposing intuitions and his attempts to resolve that struggle. One of the strongest currents of thought in his later philosophy is the idea that one cannot dissociate the first impulses toward a philosophical train of thought from its most finished expression, an idea that motivates the fragmentary arguments one finds in the opening sections of the Philosophical Investigations.The debate that animates so much of his writing is a conversation with interlocutory voices that express intuitions and instinctive convictions, not polished philosophical theories.

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says that what he does is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use (1953, § 116): but what is the everyday use of a word that we are led back to, the "language which is its original home"? (Ibid., my translation) Most biographically based accounts of Wittgenstein's thought find an esoteric doctrine at this point, a concealed view that supposedly animates his philosophical writ- ing, a view that is extracted from one aspect or another of his life . Leading candidates have included his religious convictions, which have been variously

construed as mysticism, rabbinicism, Catholic, Tolstoyan or Kierkegaardian Christianity, or his ascetic and self-denying ethical outlook. (There is a substantial literature along these lines . Representative examples include Chatterjee 1996, Cornish 1998, Edwards 1982, Engelmann 1967, McGuinness 1988, Janik and Toulmin 1973, and Nieli 1987.) Such biographically motivated readings depend on the premise that the real philosophy lies outside of the texts that Wittgenstein wrote, and that Wittgenstein's writing is to be decoded by attributing to him views that can be found in the books he read and admired.

James Conant's "Throwing Away the Top of the Ladder" (1991), a critical review of McGuinness (1988) and Duffy (1987), argues that approaching Wittgenstein's philosophy in terms of his biography does not do justice to his views about the nature of his writing. In other words, he maintains that the answers McGuinness and Duffy look for in their reading of Wittgenstein's life are to be found in the books he wrote, and the quite unusual way in which they are written. Conant charges them with using "the philosopher's life to decipher the ethical teaching that they know on independent grounds must be buried somewhere in his work" (1991, 351). Their claim, he replies, that Wittgenstein's values were those of the authors he read or admired mistakenly presupposes that influence must take the form of accepting, or adapting, another's views. They overlook the possibility that Wittgenstein criticized the ideas he took from his reading. By prioritizing biography over philosophy in this way they deny that Wittgenstein's own writing could itself provide an answer to our questions about the point of his work . With regard to the Tractatus, Conant argues that the ethical point of the book is not be found in any particular doctrine, either within the text or in one of the philosophers who influenced its author, but rather in the overall project of the book, which is a matter of helping its reader "to achieve genuine clarity" :

The achievement of such clarity inevitably requires learning how to overcome one's own innermost tendencies to evade such clarity, and this presupposes the attainment of an understanding of the sources and natures of these tendencies themselves . It is a kind of self-knowledge that exacts a high standard of honesty . In this sense of ethical, if any of the Tractatus is engaged in an ethical activity, then all of it is . The reason the ethical teaching of the work has eluded its commentators is that they have looked for it somewhere in the text rather than everywhere . They evade the pervasiveness of the ethical demand by attempting to locate it in some particular region of the text . When their externally imposed requirement for a discrete ethical doctrine is frustrated by the text itself, they are forced to flee outside the text into biographical detail (Conant 1991, 353-4).

Yet if Conant is right that an ethical imperative permeates Wittgenstein's work, one should also expect to find it expressed in his life, too; not as an esoteric doctrine, but rather as an activity, a way of being in the world, that Wittgenstein regarded as being of a piece with the point of his philosophical work. Norman Malcolm's memoir of Wittgenstein provides testimony that he did see his teaching and ordinary life as continuous in just this way . He tells the story of how he and Wittgenstein had a serious break in their friendship as the result of a disagreement over the German accusation, shortly after the start of World War II, that the British government had been behind a recent attempt to assassinate Hitler. Wittgenstein said that it would not surprise him at all if it were true, while Malcolm believed the British were "too civilized and decent to attempt anything so underhand" and that "such an act was incompatible with the British 'national character': ' Malcolm's remark "made Wittgenstein extremely angry. He considered it to be a great stupidity and also an indication that I was not learning anything from the philosophical training he was trying to give me" (1984, 30).

Until this event, Wittgenstein had regularly gone for a short walk with Malcolm before giving his lectures; afterward he gave up the practice and the friendship cooled. In a letter written from Trinity College, Cambridge, in November 1944, Wittgenstein wrote that he: couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important. You & I were walking along the river towards the railway bridge & we had a heated discussion in which you made a remark about "national character" that shocked me by it's primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends . You see, I know that it's difficult to think well about "certainty," "probability," "per- ception;' etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other peoples lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty.And when it's nasty then it's most important (Malcolm 1984, 93-4).

Much of Wittgenstein's work in the early 1930s takes the form of a struggle with traditional philosophical conceptions of the essence of language. When he wrote the Tractatus, he was convinced that everyday language must have an underlying logical structure, and that philosophy had the task of clarifying that structure. The Tractatus, however, does very little to actually analyze our ordinary language. After he returned to philosophical work in 1929, Wittgen- stein came to see that the notion of an underlying essential structure was a demand imposed by a certain way of seeing things, rather than something given to us by the nature of things. In the early 1930s, he applied this critique not only to his own earlier work, but also to the work of figures such as Spengler and Freud, arguing that they betrayed their own insights into partic- ular cultural formations by transforming them into ahistorical trims about human nature (cf. Wittgenstein 1980/1998; Monk 1990; Bouveresse 1995; Szabados 1999).

One aspect of the later Wittgenstein's legacy that is of particular value here arises out of his critique of the traditional philosophical search for clear-cut, ahistorical essences: he offers a positive characterization of our language as a loosely interrelated network of activities, that are not unified by any one essence, and that have to be located within a particular practical context. This critique of essentialism is, in turn, the product of an attraction to essentialism, and it would be a mistake to assume that Wittgenstein easily overcame the traditional ways of thinking that preoccupied him . These developments in Wittgenstein's work emerge at a time when he was rereading, and recom- mending to his friends, Otto Weininger's Sex and Character.In this connec- tion, Monk aptly observes that

What is perhaps most ironic is that, just as Wittgenstein was beginning to develop an entirely new method for tackling philosophical problems - a method that has no precedent in the entire tradition of Western philosophy (unless one finds a place for Goethe and Spengler in that tradition) - he should be inclined to asssess his own philosophical contribution within the framework of the absurd charge that the Jew was incapable of original thought (Monk 1990, 316).

4. Wittgenstein and Weininger

In 1931, Wittgenstein included Weininger on a short list of writers who had influenced him, in the context of a discussion of the relationship between originality and influence, a discussion which clearly echoes Weininger's own views about the relationship between merely reproductive talent and genuinely creative genius. The Wittgenstein-Weininger connection thus not only provides an opportunity for examining the influence of one philosopher on another, but also has the topic of originality and influence as one of its foci. Unfortunately, Wittgenstein never specified the nature of his debt to Weininger. The topic has become a matter of considerable speculation in recent years, especially following the publication of Ray Monk's biography, with its emphasis on the Weiningerian theme of the "duty of genius" as a key to understanding Wittgenstein's life and work.

Weininger's Sex and Character (1903/1906), an extraordinarily popular and much-discussed book, contains an extremely misogynistic, anti-Semitic, and homophobic theory of human nature. Weininger held that everyone is bisexual, by which he meant that we all are partially feminine and partially masculine. Masculinity and femininity are, in turn, to be understood as ideal types that are only partially instantiated in any given person. This provided the basis for an "explanation" of homosexuality and heterosexuality as products of the mathematical combination of these components. Each person seeks out a partner within the complementary amount of masculinity and feminity; homosexuals, having less than the usual amount of masculinity, if male, or feminity, if female, find the complementary balance in another person of the same sex.

In the opening chapters of Sex and Character, Weininger elaborates his fundamental law of sexual attraction, in the form of a pseudoscientific equation, complete with Greek letters and mathematical formalism . Weininger contrasted masculine originality with feminine reproductiveness, and held that the latter traits are particularly exemplified by Jews; race, sexuality, and gender are all closely aligned in the Weiningerian economy. Women, according to Weininger, are governed by the imperative to reproduce, and are constitutionally incapable of thinking clearly . Only the rare genius can over- come his feminine component and avoid the snares of physical sexuality ; the only honorable alternative is suicide. Weininger, like Spengler and Kraus, was preoccupied with the decay of modem times, and took an aristocratic view of the rise of science and business and the decline of art and music, a time without originality. The worst aspects of modernity are identified in terms of their Jewishness and femininity.

Little of this was new, but it did set out a synthesis of contemporary prejudices that captured the attention of a huge readership. Shortly after the publication of his book, at the age of 23, Weininger killed himself in the room in Beethoven's house where Beethoven died, thus assuring himself of the fame that eluded him during his lifetime . Later, Hitler was to refer to him as the only good Jew, because he killed himself when he realized that the Jew lives upon the decay of peoples (Hitler 1980, 148, cited by Janik 1985, 101) . Wittgenstein was well-acquainted with both Sex and Character and On The Last Things, and discussed them with friends and family.

Most of the Weininger literature is polarized, and constrained, by the dispute between those who find it necessary to condemn, and those who find it necessary to excuse, Weininger's use of such stereotypes (see Hymns and Harrowitz 1995). Those who read Weininger sympathetically - let us call them Weininger's apologists- emphasize his observation that no human being is a pure instantiation of masculinity or femininity, heterosexuality or homosexuality, Jew or non-Jew. Rather, these are to be understood as ideal types that we all exemplify to varying degrees; it would, on this construal, be a grave misunderstanding to take Weininger to be setting out crudely racist, sexist, or homophobic views. Thus, according to Allan Janik: "Weininger goes out of his way to insist that he does not identify the Jew as a member of a race. Judaism is a possibility for all men in his eyes" (1985, 101 . Cf. 1985 87 f., 98 f., and 1995).

Those who read Weininger unsympathetically - let us call them Weininger's critics - argue that his writings implicitly invite and encourage such bigoted uses, even as they explicitly reject them. On this approach, defending his stereotypes as heuristic devices is comparable to the familiar defense that "some of my best friends are Jews," when it is used to set out prejudiced views while ostensibly denying that the speaker is prejudiced.

There is a striking congruence between Wittgenstein's remarks about the Jews, and the significance of his Jewishness, and Weininger's views on the topic. In a note written in 1931, Wittgenstein discusses his own reproductiveness and lack of originality, describing it as a characteristically Jewish trait. After distinguishing creative genius from mere talent, which is only reproduc- tive, he wrote:

The saint is the only Jewish "genius." Even the greatest Jewish thinker is no more than talented. (Myself for instance.)

I think there is some truth in my idea that I am really only reproductive in my thinking. I think I have never invented a line of thinking but that it was always provided for me by someone else & I have done no more than passionately take it up for my work of clarification. That is how Boltzmann Hertz Schopenhauer Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos Weininger Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me.Can one take Breuer & Freud as an example of Jewish reproductive thinking? - What I invent are new comparisons.

...It might be said (rightly or wrongly) that the Jewish mind is not in a position to produce even so much as a tiny blade of grass or flower but that its way is to make a drawing of the blade of grass or the flower that has grown in the mind of another & then use it to sketch a comprehensive picture. This is not to allege a vice & everything is all right as long as what is being done is quite clear. Danger only arises when someone confuses the nature of a Jewish work with that of a non-Jewish work & especially when the author of the former does so himself, as he so easily may. (Doesn't he look as proud as though he were being milked himself?)

It is typical of the Jewish mind to understand someone else's work better than he understands it himself (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 19/16-17, 1931).

In an apologetic reading, Wittgenstein's talk of 'Jewishness' here, and in similar passages, should not be taken literally as a claim about all and only those people who are Jews - however one ultimately understands that term - but rather as a metaphor that Wittgenstein uses to think about issues of creativity and originality, and different kinds of intellectual activity, a topic to which he repeatedly returned. In this reading, he is really talking about his particular way of approaching philosophical problems, which he connects with his temperament. Certainly, the four paragraphs that immediately follow the passage just quoted explore further his conviction that he is constitution- ally incapable of producing anything fundamentally new, that his talent rather consists in rearranging and making good use of materials provided by others . We shall see that at the end of the 1930s he expressed much the same ideas without making explicit use of the image of the Jew (§ 6).

McGuinness (1999, 71 ; 2001, 229) tries to minimize the role of Jewishness in the earlier passages by drawing on Kienzler's observation that in such places "one can replace 'Jew' by 'philosopher' without essentially changing the sense [Sinn]" (Kienzler 1997, 43). Given a narrowly Fregean notion of sense, this may be strictly true, but it all depends on what one takes to be essential. Wittgenstein's talk of "Jewish reproductiveness" here contributes a metaphorical dimension to this passage that would be missing if he had instead chosen to speak of "philosophical reproductiveness." Even McGuinness does acknowledge that there are prejudicial pictures of the Jews in a few places in Wittgenstein's writing - for instance, where he speaks of "the Jews' secretive & cunning nature" as innate, rather than a result of persecution (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 22/19).

On a critical reading, what is most troubling about the lengthy passage quoted above, and a number of others written in 1931, is that they take Weininger's prototypically anti-Semitic ideas about the Jewish mind so much for granted. As Monk puts it, "what is most shocking about Wittgenstein's remarks on Jewishness is his use of the language - indeed, the slogans - of racial anti-Semitism. The echo that really disturbs is not that of Sex and Character, but that of Mein Kampf (1990, 313).

Around the same time, Wittgenstein recommended Weininger's book to several friends, including G. E. Moore. According to Ray Monk, "Ibeir response was understandably cool. The work that had excited the imagination of pre-war Vienna looked, in the cold light of post-war Cambridge, simply bizarre. Wittgenstein was forced to explain" (1990, 312). In response to Moore's lack of sympathy for the book, Wittgenstein wrote:

I can quite imagine that you don't admire Weininger very much what with that beastly translation and the fact that W. must feel very foreign to you . It is true that he is fantastic but he is great and fantastic. It isn't necessary or rather not possible to agree with him but the greatness lies in that with which we disagree. It is his enormous mistake which is great. Le. roughly speaking if you just add a "-" to the whole book it says an important truth (Wittgenstein 1995, 250 ; letter dated 23.8.31).

Unfortunately, Wittgenstein's letter does not further explain what he means by negating the whole book, or identify what he takes to be the "important truth" that emerges. Monk pointedly sets out the questions raised by this silence:

But why did Wittgenstein admire the book so much? What did he learn from it? Indeed, given that its claims to scientific biology are transparently spurious, its epistemology obviously nonsense, its psychology primitive, and its ethical prescriptions odious, what could he possibly have learnt from it? (Monk 1990, 23)

Monk's own answer to this question is contained in the subtitle of his biography of Wittgenstein, namely "the duty of genius"; he argues that Wittgenstein identified with Weininger's valorization of the figure of the male. Monk is right to stress that the later Wittgenstein rejected Weininger's genius; on one occasion, he said of Weininger's views on this topic: "How wrong he was, my God he was wrong" (Drury, in Rhees 1984, 91). Consequently, Monk emphasizes the affinities between Wittgenstein's and Weininger's positive views about love and self-knowledge:man can choose between the masculine and the feminine, love and sexuality ; to find oneself is to find one's higher self, and escape the empirical self . The only love that is of value in the end is love of the divine in oneself, of the idea of God.

Another suggestion as to how to understand Wittgenstein's response to Weininger can be found in a recent article by B€la Szabados. He finds it implausible that what Wittgenstein meant by negating Weininger was simply a matter of replacing his prejudicial attack on Woman with an equally one-sided denigration of Man, for that would amount to retaining Weininger's Platonism, with the proviso that he charged the wrong suspect:

That the mature Wittgenstein would give the nod to stipulative, evaluatively loaded definitions of Man and Woman strains credulity. The suggestion is completely out of alignment with the resolute anti-essentialism of the late philosophy. So "Man and masculinity are the sources of all evil" is not the important truth that we are supposed to get out of negating Weininger's book. For this is as much of an absurdity as his central theme, and between two absurdities there is nothing to choose . It rests on a kind of essentialism that the later Wittgenstein rejects simply in virtue of its prejudicial nature. The author of the Investigations is devoted to a method of looking and seeing how things are rather than saying and prejudging how things are. Both absurdities reveal a deep prejudice and distort the particularity and individuality of people. (Szabados 1997, 492-3; the closely parallel passage in "Was Wittgenstein an Anti- Semite?" (1999, 16-17) indicates how important this claim is for his reading .)

I want to agree with this reading of the text of the Philosophical Investigations, but there is no guarantee that the views of the person who wrote the book are as congenial. This is an attractive reading, but it is "attractive" in just the sense that McGuinness (1999/2001, 76/236 ; cited above, 240) warns against: it would have been good if Wittgenstein had freed himself of the deeply prejudicial, evaluatively loaded definitions of Man and Woman, Jew and non-Jew, that one finds in Weininger, but we should be wary of arguing from what we think our philosophical heroes should have believed to what they actually believed.

Furthermore, Monk's sanitized attempt to recuperate a positive vision from the Weiningerian cesspool, and Szabados's suggestion that it is just a matter of two "absurdities," both involve a failure to see how much Wittgenstein identified with the complementary image of the abjectly feminine - both as Jew and homosexual (cf. Cavell 1990) . Part of Weininger's achievement in Wittgenstein's eyes, I believe, was to clearly and honestly set out the prejudices of his age. In the late 1940s, Wittgenstein explained his admiration for Weininger to G. E. M. Anscombe by contrasting him with Kafka : Kafka, he said, "gave himself a great deal of trouble not writing about his trouble," while Weininger, whatever his faults, was a man who really did write about his. Anscombe had lent Wittgenstein some of Kafka's novels ; Wittgenstein, on returning them, compared Kafka unfavorably to Weininger, and recommended "Weininger's Sex and Character and The Four Last Things" (Monk 1990, 498). The latter is presumably a mistranslation, or misplaced memory of Weininger's Ober Die Letzte Dinge [On the Last Things], a posthumous miscellany of his other writings. Weininger's pronouncements about Jews, gender, national character and sexuality are the kind of stereotypes about how people and culture "must be" that Wittgenstein criticized in his attacks on "dogmatism" and the use of "prototypes" in the early aspect of Wittgenstein's debt to Weininger was the central role Weininger accorded to what Freud called "projection" in the construction of stereotypes : Weininger contends that the conception of women as either virgins or whores he sets out is a product of male needs, not of women's nature.

Monk and Szabados read Wittgenstein's image of negating Weininger's book as a matter of denying its odious components . It is hard, however, to avoid the conclusion that the negation we are discussing here is not the notion of Fregean logic, but rather the Freudian notion of denying that with which one cannot help identifying. One can see this in the ambiguous reference to "W" in the first sentence of Wittgenstein's letter - "I can quite imagine that you don't admire Weininger very much, what with that beastly translation and the fact that W. must feel very foreign to you" - a "W." that both names and does not name its author. Wittgenstein saw in Weininger, and Weininger's anti-Semitism, a mirror of his own self-hatred, a way of figuring a relation- ship of identification and denial that he both had to and could not confront. During the question period after the presentation of this paper at the Virginia Tech conference on Wittgenstein, Monk challenged this reading, pointing out that Wittgenstein explicitly used a " ", the Fregean negation sign, not the word "not:" Certainly, there is no evidence that his conscious intention was to make use of the Freudian notion of denial ; equally, there is good reason to think that Wittgenstein's fascination with Weininger at this time arose out of an uneasy identification with that famously Jewish, homosexual philosopher who was himself deeply troubled by his own identity.

One can see the same tension between identification and denial in a problematic discussion of anti-Semitism from the same period, where he explores the idea of comparing the Jews to a disease in the body of Europe .

"Look on this wart //swelling// [Warze // BeuleJi] as a regular limb of your body!" Can one do that, to order?

Do I have the power to decide at will to have, or not to have, a certain ideal conception of my body?

Within the history of the peoples of Europe the history of the Jews is not treated so circumstantially as their intervention in European affairs would actually merit, because within this history they are experienced as a sort of disease, anomaly, & nobody wants to put a disease on the same level as normal life //& nobody wants to speak of a disease as though it had the same rights as healthy bodily processes (even painful ones.)

We may say: this bump [Beule] can be regarded as a limb of one's body only if our whole feeling for the body changes (if the whole national feeling for the body changes.) Otherwise the best we can do is put up with it.

You may expect an individual to display this sort of tolerance or even to disregard such things; but you cannot expect this of a nation since it is only a nation by virtue of not disregarding such things . I.e. there is a contradiction in expecting someone to retain the original aesthetic feeling for his body & also to make the swelling [Beule] welcome (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 20/18, 1931).

Peter Winch's 1980 translation for the GermanBade was "tumor." Presum- ably the change was made because "tumor" is not supported by current German dictionaries or usage: in contemporary German, a Beule is a bump or swelling, with no implication of malignancy. There is a clear etymological connection with the English "boil" - a "hard inflamed suppurating tumor" (Little et al. 1973, vol. I, 212). Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's historic dictionary makes it clear that the principal senses of the term in the nineteenth century were far from benign: their two leading definitions of the term both characterize it as a tumor (Grimm and Grimm 1854, 1745-6).That sense was still alive in the 1960s, although by then it was no longer the leading meaning. The entry for "Beule" in a German-English dictionary first published in the 1960s begins as follows: "bump, lump, swelling; (Geschwflr) boil, tumo(u)r;..." (Messinger and Rtldenberg 1964, 114.) This strongly suggests that Wittgenstein must have been aware of the negative connotations of the term, and that "tumor" is the correct translation . The context in which Wittgenstein used the word does provide additional support for the original translation: he first wrote "wart;' an unhealthy growth, and compares the Beule with a disease. This passage has attracted attention in the secondary literature, and several English readers have been quick to condemn it for its noxious racist similes. Thus Monk reads this, and related material, as "anti- Semitic paranoia in its most undiluted form" (1990 314, 315).Isaac Nevo's reading of this passage stresses that the anti-Semitism is primarily self- directed, but also part of an intolerant nationalism:

The genocidal fantasy with respect to the Jewish tumour, which in the period this was written was being acted out on the European scene, is articulated by Wittgenstein from within . The analogies and judgments here are his own . The Jewish anomaly could, after all, be portrayed as a curable, rather than incurable, disease.... But the nationalism Wittgenstein displays in this passage is defined by intolerance (Nevo 1987-8,238).

Szabados, on the other hand, working from Winch's first translation, the passage to be laying bare, in a philosophically critical spirit, racist ideas that Wittgenstein most certainly does not accept. He lays great stress on Wittgenstein's use of certain distancing devices in setting out these dangerous ideas. The opening sentence is an instruction to see things in a certain way, placed within quotation marks; the second asks us whether it is possible to carry out the instruction. This is followed by a further question, an outline of a way of looking at European history that is about to be rejected, then a "we may say" and a "you may expect." On Szabados' reading, Wittgenstein is bringing up racist ideas to help us see how they hang together with some of the most dangerous problems that liberal democracies currently face, and proposing philosophical therapy for the idea of the nation-state.

What we have here is an attempt at a precise description and diagnosis of the conceptual and political roots of the problem the liberal democracies found themselves in, in the wake of the Holocaust: how to restructure and reinscribe the nation-state and what it is to belong to it, so that the conditions leading to intolerance of difference and subsequent genocide do not recur (Szabados 1999, 7-8).

Szabados is right that Wittgenstein does not straightforwardly endorse the anti-Semitic ideas he explores in this passage, and Wittgenstein's critics have been far too ready to assume that he accepted the prejudicial views he discusses. Also, one must remember that these were private notes, not intended for publication; however, while it is possible to imagine that Wittgenstein might have expanded the proposals and questions just quoted with the sensitive exploration of nationalism and racism Szabados sketches, he did not, as far as we know, ever do so. Instead he follows it up in his manuscript with Weiningerian reflections on how Jews supposedly are only interested in money as a form of power, not in possessions for their own sake.

Power & possession are not the same thing. Even though possession also gives us power. If Jews are said not to have any sense for possession that is presumably compatible with their liking to be rich; for money is for them a particular sort of power not possession. (I should for instance not like my people to be poor, since I wish them to have a certain power. Naturally I wish them to use this power properly too.) (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 21/18, 1931)

The use of "people" in this translation is potentially misleading, for at first sight it suggests that Wittgenstein is talking about the Jewish people as a whole, but the German word in question is Leute, and so the people in question are rather Wittgenstein's own family. In this connection, it is important to note that this remark is not only a reflection of his conception of Jewishness, power, and possession, but also a matter of thinking over his feelings about his extraordinarily wealthy family. As we have already seen, seven years later his sense of the proper use of power would lead him to side with his sisters in their dispute with his brother over how best to respond to the German annexation of Austria, in favor of his sisters' paying for non-Jewish identity papers.

Another passage about the Jews, also from 1931, makes it clear how little Wittgenstein was able to transcend the stereotypes about Jews and nation that were current at the time.

"Fatherlandless rabble" (applied to the Jews) is on the same level as "crooked-nosed rabble:' for giving yourself a fatherland is just as little in your power, as it is to give yourself a particular nose (Wittgenstein 1997, 59, 2.11.31).

This passage takes certain prevalent negative stereotypes about the Jews - that they are a rabble, lack a fatherland, are crooked-nosed - as a point of departure, and does nothing to challenge them. These are hardly the words one would expect of the critic of "intolerance of difference" Szabados describes. A critique of intolerance of difference may well draw on Wittgenstein's writings, but that critique is not articulated there.

5. Wittgenstein's Peculiar Dreams

There is reason to think that Wittgenstein's uneasy relationship to his own racial identity, a relationship framed in terms of the prevalent anti-Semitic discourse of his times, also figures in his relationship to his sexuality . First, Weininger's racial and sexual theories are themselves mutually congruent, and both depend on drawing a binary contrast between a valorized and a denigrated term, a contrast that is drawn in strikingly similar ways in each case. Recent work on the anti-Semitism of this period by Nancy Stepan (1986) and Sander Gilman (1986, 1993) has made clear the ways in which racial and gender theories draw on each other, so that the racial other, the feminine, and the homosexual are all constructed in terms of the same set of distinctions. Second, Wittgenstein's virulent racial self-hatred, recorded in 1931, occurs at the same time that he was considering marrying Marguerite Respinger, a friend of his family. Her visit to him in Norway in 1931 was conducted on strikingly Weiningerian lines . He found her a room of her own at a neighbor's house, and proposed that they prepare for a new spiritual life by reading the Bible together. Even Monk, who minimizes the links between Wittgenstein's attraction to the darker side of Weininger's thought and his own self-hatred, notes the connection between Wittgenstein's anti-Semitic writing in 1931 and his proposed marriage:

Wittgenstein's remarks on Jewishness, like his projected autobiography, were essentially confessional, and both seem in some way linked to the "sacred" union he planned for himself and Marguerite. They coincide with the year in which his intention to marry Marguerite was pursued with its greatest earnestness (Monk 1990, 317- 8).

Monk, presumably relying on Marguerite's testimony, presents the "union" as an idea of Wittgenstein's that she never took very seriously.

The themes of race, gender, guilt, and identity all converge in a "strange dream" of Wittgenstein's, which he wrote down, in code, in one of his manuscript volumes, on 1 December 1929. The dream concerns a character named "Vertsagt" or "Vertsag"; the name is the only word not written in code.

A peculiar dream. Today toward morning I dreamt: I see in an illustrated newspaper a photograph of Vertsagt, who is a much discussed hero of the day. The picture shows him in his car. There is talk of his disgraceful deeds; Hansel is standing next to me and also someone else, similar to my brother Kurt . The latter says that Vertsag is a Jew but has enjoyed the upbringing of a rich Scottish lord ; now he is a workers' leader. He has not changed his name because it is not the custom there . It is new to me that Vertsagt, which I pronounce with the stress on the first syllable, is a Jew, and I see that his name simply means "verzagt" [German for "faint-hearted . ."] It doesn't strike me that it is written with "ts" which I see printed a little bolder than the other letters. I think: must there be a Jew behind every indecency? Now Hansel and I are on the terrace of a house, perhaps the big log-cabin on the Hochreit, and along the street comes Vertsag in his motor-car ; he has an angry face, slightly reddish fair hairand a similar moustache (he does not look Jewish.) He opens fire with a machine-gun at a cyclist behind him who writhes with pain and is mercilessly gunned to death with many shots. Versag has driven past, and now comes a young poor-looking girl on a cycle and she too receives Vertsag's fire as he drives on . And these shots, when they hit her breast make a bubbling sound like an almost-empty kettle over a flame. I felt sympathy for the girl and thought: only in Austria could it happen that this girl would find no helpful sympathy and people watch as she suffers and is killed . I myself am afraid to help her because I fear Vertsag's shots. I go towards her, but look for cover behind a plant. Then I wake up. I must add that in the conversation with Hansel, first in the presence of the other person and then after he had left us, I am embarassed and do not want to say that I myself am descended from Jews or that Vertsag's case is my own case too....I wrote the dream down immediately after waking up (MS 107, 219, 1.12.29. The passage is also translated in Monk 1990, 279-80, and the German text is provided on pp. 612-3. See also the transcription of the text in Wittgenstein 1993-, vol. 2, 127).

Hansel was a close friend, the first person he wrote to in 1936 to confess he had concealed his Jewishness, asking Hansel to pass on his confession to his family (see the correspondence between Wittgenstein and Hansel, re- cently published in Somavilla 1994). In his notes on the dream, Wittgenstein tries, three times, to interpret the significance of Vertsagt's name . In the dream, he thought he saw "that his name simply means 'verzagt',' which is German for "faint-hearted?' After waking, he came to think that it was really written "Pferzagt," which means nothing at all. His closing attempt suggests that "the name as I pronounced it in the dream, 'Vie-sagt' is Hungarian. The name had for me something evil, spiteful and very masculine about it?'

Clearly, the dream is connected with Wittgenstein's pervasive sense of guilt, and its connection with his discomfort with his sexuality and racial origins. Monk takes the dream to be about Wittgenstein's sense that he was "hiding something ...allowing people to think of him as an aristocrat when in fact he was a Jew" (1990, 279) . Consequently, he treats the trail of associations as a distraction from the manifest content of the dream, and the initial thought that the case of Vertsagt is his own case, the case of a man who hides his origins, and is too faint-hearted to admit it (1990, 280). It is surely right to take Wittgenstein's attempts to make sense of the name as themselves faint-hearted, and a distraction from thinking about the fact that the predicament of the protagonist is his predicament . Yet the search for the meaning of the name is not just a screen: looked at one way, the names are nonsensical; looked at in another way, they all have similar and connected sounds and meanings. Christoph Nyfri has pointed out that, despite Wittgenstein's repeated attempts to decode the name, he fails to consider a striking alternative: that the word is "versagt", from versagen, the German word not only for 'failed:' "denied," - an obvious construal under the circumstances - but also "betrothed?' The usage in the sense of "betrothed' 'is no longer common - it is not in the current Duden - but it is in the 1967 Zangenschefdt, and it would have been familiar to Wittgenstein (Nyfri 1992, 22).

Nyfri's piece, written before he. had seen Monk's biography, takes it for granted that Wittgenstein was not betrothed . Monk's account, presumably based on his conversations with Marguerite Respinger - specific sources for such matters are not given in his biography - gives the impression that while Wittgenstein might have desired a celibate marriage with her, this was never a realistic possibility. Wittgenstein's diary from this period presents a rather different picture, which is that Marguerite needed him at a time of personal crisis, but that this could not be a permanent relationship.Another complicated dream, a few weeks earlier, is interpreted by Wittgenstein as being about how he imagines he is bound to Marguerite by a thousand ties, but as a matter of fact, it is easy for him to walk away from her (Wittgenstein 1997, 63-4). In any case, it seems fair to say that the Vertsagt dream epitomizes Wittgenstein's sense of failure at the time, and particularly the failure of their proposed "union:'

The theme of struggling to make sense of nonsense, and in particular of a name containing consonants with similar sounds, recurs in another dream that Wittgenstein wrote down early in 1932:

Today I dreamt the following strange dream. Someone (was it Lettice? [Ramsey]) said to me that someone was called Hobbson "with mixed b"; which meant, that one pronounced it "Hobpson :' I woke and remembered that Gilbert [Pattison] once told me about the pronunciation of a word that it was "pronounced with mixed b ;'which I had understood as "mixed beef" [in English] and didn't know what he meant, but it sounded as Iif he meant that one would have to have a dish called "mixed beef" in one's mouth when saying the word, and I had understood Gilbert to have said it as a joke. I remembered all that immediately on waking. Then it sounded less and less plausible to me, and by the time I'd got dressed it seemed obvious nonsense.(By the way, if one went into this dream, it leads to thoughts about racial mixing, and what that means to me.) (Wittgenstein 1997, 67; MS 183, 137-8; 28.1.32)

Lettice Ramsey was a close friend and confidante of Wittgenstein's, with whom he could discuss his feelings for Marguerite (Monk 1990, 258) ;Patti- son, a friend with whom he joked and played with nonsensical language (Monk 1990, 265 f.).Wittgenstein does not explain the connection he sees between this dream and his thoughts about mixed race, but both dreams give great significance to almost imperceptible differences in pronouncing a name that is difficult to say correctly, a name whose meaning seems clear during the dream, then elusive, and ultimately nonsensical.In each dream, racial difference, and differences in meaning between nonsense words, play a central part. A name takes on a racially charged significance, but the significance resists his analytic efforts. One further connection here is that both nonsense and racial mixing arise out of combinations that are not permitted; both are offenses against the normal ways of going on . Both seem to make sense within Wittgenstein's "strange" (1 .12.29) and "peculiar" (28.1.32) dreams, but turn into nonsense when he tries to reconstruct their meaning. Wittgenstein's unsuccessful struggle to make sense of the nonsense names in the Vertsagt and Hobbson dreams is an uncanny parody of the traditional philosophical quest to explain a name's meaning in terms of what it stands for.

6. Jewishness, Anti-Semitism and Philosophy

Is there a connection between Wittgenstein's writing on Jews and his philosophy? What did he mean when he spoke of himself as a "Jewish thinker" in 1931? Monk takes Wittgenstein to be engaging in a form of self-directed anti- Semitism, humbling himself by describing his own work as nothing more than clarifying the ideas he had taken from others, or reminding himself of "his limitations, of his 'Jewishness' "(1990, 317).

It is as though, for a brief time (after 1931 there are, thankfully, no more remarks about Jewishness in his notebooks), he was attracted to using the then current language of anti-Semitism as a kind of metaphor for himself (just as, in the dream of Vertsagt, the image of the Jew that was propagated by the Nazis - an image of a cunning and deceptive scoundrel who hides behind a cloak of respectability while committing the most dreadful crimes - found a ready response in his fears about his own 'real' nature.) .. .So long as he lived, Wittgenstein never ceased to struggle against his own pride, and to express doubts about his philosophical achievement and his own moral decency. After 1931, however, he dropped the language of anti-Semitism as a means of expressing those doubts. (Monk 1990, 316-17)

Yuval Lurie sees a direct connection between developments in Wittgenstein's views about meaning and his giving up talk of Jewishness in this way. For it was around this time that Wittgenstein began to talk about family resemblances, the similarities that things of certain kinds have in common with each other without sharing a common essence .

Is this simultaneity coincidental? I think not. It seems to me that he found he could no longer hide behind the claim that he was merely conducting a metaphysical discussion about the ideal Jew when he spoke of Jews as he did (Lurie 1989, 340).

Lurie, like Szabados (1999), supports this reading by connecting Wittgenstein's particular use of the concept of Jewishness with the Weiningerian notion of a prototype, a conception of an idealized instance of the concept in question that can be used to organize empirical evidence, a notion that Wittgenstein rejected shortly after these discussions of the Jews in 1931. Lurie also goes on to show that many of Wittgenstein's subsequent and closely related discussions of talent and genius, creativity and originality, make use of other metaphors, such as talk of how seeds grown in different soils will produce different plants.

Strictly speaking, Monk is correct in saying that there are no more re- marks about Jewishness, per se, after 1931 in Wittgenstein's surviving note- books, and that he no longer used the language of anti-Semitism as a means of doubting his own decency; and Lurie is right that Wittgenstein did develop other ways of thinking about reproductiveness and originality . Yet there are remarks about Jews and the bible, dating from a series of notebooks from 1939 or 1940, that show that the anti-Semitic metaphors and connections that he had made in the early 1930s were still alive for him. In these passages, Wittgenstein returned to the themes of the difference between genius and talent, and how courage and character distinguish genius from talent. Thus we find him asking himself the question, "What does Mendelssohn's music lack? A 'courageous' melody?" (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 35/40, 1939-1940). In 1929, Mendelssohn is introduced as an exemplar of Wittgenstein's idea of Jewishness, and used as a way of thinking about Wittgenstein's own ideals, which he thinks of as akin to Mendelssohn's. Wittgenstein compares the Jew to a tree that avoids tragedy by bending, rather than breaking: "Tragedy is something unjewish. Mendelssohn is perhaps the most untragic of composers" (1980/1998, 1/3) . Wittgenstein takes it for granted that the Jew lacks the courage, or resistance, that is required for tragedy. Indeed, he identifies his own ideal in these terms, for the passage, which up till now has been in ordinary German, continues in code: "Tragically holding on, defiantly holding on to a tragic situation in love always seems quite alien to my ideal . Does that mean my ideal is feeble? I cannot & should not judge" (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 3- 4; the passage is not included in the pre-1994 editions) .

In another notebook from the same period, he writes :

The Old Testament seen as the body without its head; the New T[estament]: the head; the Epistles of the Apostles: the crown on the head.

If I think of the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament on its own, I should like to say : the head is (still) missing from this body The solution to these problems is missing .

The fulfilment of these hopes is missing . But I do not necessarily think of a head as having a crown.

The measure of genius is character, - even if character on its own does not amount to genius

Genius is not 'talent and character', but character manifesting itself in the form of a special talent. Where one man will show courage by jumping into the water, another will show courage by writing a symphony. (This is a weak example.)

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest human being - but the genius concentrates this light into a burning point by means of a particular lens (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 35/40-1 . 1939-1940).

My originality (if that is the right word) is, I believe, an originality that belongs to the soil, not the seed. (Perhaps I have no seed of my own.) Sow a seed in my soil, & it will grow differently than it would in any other soil.

Freud's originality too was like this, I think. I have always believed - without knowing why - that the original seed of psychoanalysis was due to Breuer, not Freud.

Of course, Breuer's seed-grain can only have been quite tiny . (Courage is always original.) (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 36/42, 1939-40)

Although he does not explicitly make any of the claims about "the Jews" that one finds in the earlier remarks, he continues to talk in terms that take those earlier ideas for granted. The biblical analogy makes it clear that Wittgenstein cannot entirely let go of using the Jews as a way of thinking about his identity: his Bible, the Jew's, and the Catholic's are compared to a body, a headless body, and a crowned body. Apparently, it is integral to Wittgenstein's conception of his Christianity that it be seen as contrasted with the supposed shortcomings of Judaism. Isaac Nevo reads this passage as a figure of the Jewish faith as "a living death":

The essential point is that variation, or even schism within Christianity does not constitute an anomaly, or a disturbance.... The "Jewish Bible," on the other hand, constitutes a real disturbance : a (living?) body without a head (1987-S, 236).

While the passage as a whole is not as strikingly anti-Semitic as the earlier writing on the Jews, the fact remains that he is still writing about the difference between genius and talent in terms of a stock example of a Jewish composer who lacks the un-Jewish virtue of courage, interspersing it with a biblical analogy that cannot help but suggest the image of the Jews who lost their heads, and worse, as the result of the Shoah.

7. Conclusion

Wittgenstein's later philosophy, with its far-reaching criticism of essentialism and Platonism about meaning, certainly lends itself to a critique of anti- Semitic stereotypes, and his falling-out with Malcolm makes it clear that he saw a close connection between his more technically philosophical work and a critical attitude toward nationalistic stereotypes. On the other hand, his continued uncritical use of Jewish stereotypes in material from the same time as his dispute with Malcolm show that he was far from being fully successful in applying his own methods to his use of anti-Semitic discourse. Indeed, his final recorded reflection on anti-Semitism, written three years after the Sec- ond World War, begins by comparing anti-Semitism to a tangle, a knot he was unable to untie:

If you cannot unravel a tangle, the most sensible thing you can do is to recognize this ; & the most decent thing, to admit it . [Antisemitism .]

What you should do to cure the evil is not clear. What is not permissible is clear from one case to another (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 74/95, 4.11.48).

It is hard to know what to make of this passage. Nevo reads it as Wittgenstein's confession that he could not unravel the tangle of anti-Semitism, that he was still entangled in it, and suggests that he was contemplating suicide, the "honourable" Weiningerian way out (1987-8, 242). Yet, given the available evidence, such a reading is extremely speculative. Wittgenstein neither says what unravelling the tangle would be, nor specifies what one "must not do." The reference to unravelling a tangle evokes an image that Wittgenstein repeatedly used in talking about the nature of philosophy. In section 2 of the Philosophical Remarks, written in 1930, he writes:

Why is philosophy so complicated? It ought, after all, to be completely simple.- Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking, which we have tangled up in an absurd way; but to do that, it must make movements which are just as complicated as the knots. Although the result of philosophy is simple, its methods for arriving there cannot be so.

The complexity of philosophy is not in its matter, but in our tangled understanding .

This passage is the basis for Big Typescript, § 90 (pp. 183-9 in Wittgenstein 1993), and can also be found in the company of much post-1945 writing in Zettel, § 452 . This suggests that the talk of a tangle one cannot unravel was a way of acknowledging that anti-Semitism was a philosophical problem that Wittgenstein was not able to resolve, or cure. Wittgenstein's confidence that it was clear what not to do in particular cases is hardly reassuring, in view of what we have seen of his own actions. Anti-Semitism is strikingly akin to a Wittgensteinian philosophical problem : it arises from taken-for-granted prejudices and the misuse of language, and can only be resolved by a change in the way people lead their lives. The philosophical significance of Jewishness for Wittgenstein is not primarily that he thought of his philosophy as Jewish, but that Jewishness was not a problem that he was able to write about philosophically.

Finally, we can briefly return to the question : was Wittgenstein a Jew? My Hertzian answer is that we would be better off distinguishing different senses of the term, and reflecting on their role in his life and in our own . Wittgenstein's problematic Jewishness is as much a product of our problematic concerns as his. There is no doubt that Wittgenstein was of Jewish descent; it is equally clear that he was not a practicing Jew. Insofar as he thought of himself as Jewish, he did so in terms of the anti-Semitic prejudices of his time. It would have been good if he could have untangled those prejudices, but he did not do so.'

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Szabados, B6la (1995) "Autobiography and Philosophy: Variations on a Theme of Wittgenstein" Metaphilosophy 26: 63-80.

Szabados, B61a (1997) "Wittgenstein's Women: The Philosophical Significance of Wittgenstein's Misogyny" Journal of Philosophical Research 22 (1997): 483-508.

Szabados, B6la (1999) "Was Wittgenstein an Anti-Semite? The Significance of Anti-Semitism for Wittgenstein's Philosophy," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29: 1-28.

Wasserman, Gerhard (1990) "Wittgenstein on Jews: Some Counter-examples," Philosophy 65: 355-65.

Weininger, Otto (1903/1906) Geschlecht and Charakter. Translated (without footnotes) as Sex and Character.New York: Heineman, 1906.

Weininger, Otto (1904) Ober Die Letzte Dinge [On the Last Things]. Vienna & Leipzig: W. Braumuller.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicas, trans. C. K. Ogden. London : Routledge and Kegan Paul. Second edition, 1933.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953) Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees; trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil BlackweR Second edition, 1958; third edition, 1973.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1968) The Wittgenstein Papers, microfilm and/or bound photocopies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Libraries. Revised 1982.

#ludwig wittgenstein #jewishness #identity #yiddishkeit #self-concept #heritage #otto weininger #antisemitism #culture

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sufferlessgrowmore · 5 years

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It’s All Coming Together: Adventure 1 Nears Its Close

Well, this sure has been a week.

After a rocky start, I think I managed to make it through a solid week of teaching, planning and grading, only missing out on some meditating toward the end and some nightly reading (I’m still choosing what book to revisit--Vote now on your phones!). My adventurers are about to finish Adventure 1 and I have a few things to prepare for to make sure we tie things up nicely--and set ourselves up for even better adventuring going forward!

Some main happenings this week--I went through Unit 0 with The Nutritious Napper and The Bodacious Bookworm. Given I wasn’t actually there to teach the Guided Notes on SuperBetter, the unit felt a little anemic by comparison to how it seemed the first time around. I don’t necessarily want it to be longer, but I might choose a different chapter to read from Mindset, or maybe pair the Passage Response Reflection with a different text entirely the next time I teach it.

The Relentless Wordsmith and I worked through a few selections from The Canterbury Tales, and I think having a way of taking notes while we read is going to be important in general. We’ve taken notes on nearly everything we’ve read and it’s helped him to do better on his homework, so I shouldn’t let that stuff slide. The Studious Scholar and I are reading Death of a Salesman, which I actually haven’t read until now (I remember reading All My Sons in college, which is not the same thing.) Meanwhile, the Henotic Health Advisor started writing an original short story involving anthropomorphic rodents and interspecies warfare! All in all, our last few lessons seem to be writing themselves.

Less clear is where things are going in Quarter 2. For our next Adventure, I have a few goals for what I want to accomplish. The first goal is mechanical, and also tied to pacing. I want to make sure that, at least one day a week, my students get some time to revise earlier work. This means I have to give more feedback overall, but the main purpose behind this, gamefully speaking, is to give them more opportunities to earn points to Openness and Discipline. These two traits, along with Bravery, have been lacking much purpose in the current design of my teaching and learning game. They are, like the main attributes, accumulative in nature, but rather than representing a skill that can be improved upon, they are more like badges of honor, marks of going above and beyond with assignments and responding to feedback. Therefore, as I’ve discussed with my students already, in the next Adventure, Openness, Discipline and Bravery will become currency to be spent on bonuses relating to homework, quizzes and other things I’m still working out.

In order to make this work, I need to be more specific and consistent with what I award these points for. Bravery has been under utilized thus far, and I haven’t worked out exactly what I should qualify as a Brave act. The main candidate I have in mind has to do with the less-assisted parts of the writing process. If students spend time out of class doing a substantial amount of writing, venturing into the unknown, I can reward them not just with positive sub-deadline grades, but Bravery. In hindsight, I could have given the Relentless Wordsmith quite a bit of Bravery for his ability to maintain a consistent pace during his Beowulf essay writing process. On the other hand, the Studious Scholar may have missed out on Bravery but might have been incentivized to get more of his work done in a timely manner if the reward for accumulating Bravery was good enough. Lots of things to figure out, but I’ve got time.

Another goal I have for Adventure 2 is to do something interesting with the Writing Prompt routine I have in place. At first Weekly Goals and Narrative Reflections were the name of the game and generally went fine, but I feel like as time has gone on the prompts have become repetitive and as a result, uninspiring. To increase opportunities for creative expression (and thus Magic gains) I want to make my writing prompts more varied and demanding. Granted, we will still probably keep them to about 7 minutes in length, so I don’t want them to be too elaborate. It will be a delicate balance to strike.

There’s still one more week remaining in Adventure 1, and I’m determined to finish things strong--and maintain some momentum as we move into Adventure 2! I’ll lay out my plan of attack on Sunday.

Life will pass through, keep being you.

Sincerely, MM

#mindfulmentor #gameful #adventure 1 #adventure 2 #bravery

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orderessay-us-blog · 6 years

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Glass Ceiling essay

' under bow Topic:\n\nThe interpretation and analysis of the prudence term ice over jacket crown.\n\n establish Questions:\n\nWho was the send-off to advance the term trumpery detonator? What is the virtu solelyy widespread explanation of the methamphetamine hydrochloride Ceiling? How atomic f be 18 the stereotypes washed-up with the help of screwb entirely Ceiling?\n\n thesis State handst:\n\nThis discriminatory bulwark is called the ice rink veil because the barricade is transp bent, provided at the akin era so substantial that is adequate to sp atomic number 18 wo workforce and the re exhaustatives of antithetical minorities from move on end-to-end the steering power structure of a disposed comp some(prenominal).\n\n \n tripe Ceiling judge\n\n \n\nThe state shall non discriminate against, or grant preferential treat custodyt to, any individual or convocation on the basis of race, fire, color, ethnicity, or national root word in the cognitive process of universe of discoursely concern employment, reality education, or public contracting.\n\nCivil Rights actuate\n\nIntroduction: The Glass Ceiling is a term of the Ameri throne management system, which was defined for the first measure in the eightieth. It was generally used to set forth the invisible barricade that prevented women from significant tier achievements, therefore was considered to be a pattern of contrariety. This discriminative barrier is called the crank veiling because the barrier is transparent, except at the same clip so solid that is able to stop women and the representatives of different minorities from advancing through fall out the management hierarchy of a pull inn company.\n\nA group of stereotypes that give women a subordinated and ser wrong-providing role shed been formed historically. correspond to these stereotypes, men a perceived as a predominate and aggressive sex with a pushful behavior so important in contrast. This s tereotype created the invention that the victory men achieve is the vogue out of greater abilities and talented supremacy over women. Men campaign to estimate their spring as a harder compared to the work of women occupying convertible posts. It is also believed that women are oriented on the interpersonal transaction and non on the completion of the labour and men crime versa. So does the water ice ceiling up to now exist like a shot? Some women get it does, some from those who piddle achieved any success in business say it is all about persistence. Of course it is hard to oppose its minimal front end in the present-day(a) business world, but the key compute that though its alphabet may compose exist their nature has quite changed and the number of women-business owners has significantly liberal as compared to the 80th which ahs made the methamphetamine ceiling weaker than ever1. in that location is no base for talk about the trumpery ceiling if a wo men does not go through enough companionship in authoritative filed of knowledge to be better employee that a man. Women should be boost to teaching engineering, science, technology, and some other fields traditionally dominated by men go through employeescould ensure the proceeds of the pool of serve effeminates by mentoring teenage women[2]. This would guarantee that a woman would puzzle as agonistic as a male-employee of the same organization.\n\nAnita Blairs Shattering the falsehood of the glaze ceiling does an outstanding short letter in cover how easily all these career stereotypes can be destroyed. I agree with Anita that women realise more than lay on the line to get education than before, they go out to work, the wage spreading narrows, they are works better than men in certain(p) industries and there come along jobs that are intend for women lonesome(prenominal). The number of women owe businesses is increasing. For instance Carleton S. Fiorina, the chief operating officer of Hewlett-Packard, even existence as productive as she is states that: There is no motive to focus on my sexual urge in discussing the ap intimatementwe are at the point now where everyone has estimate out that the accomplishments of women crosswise the industry express that there is not a codswallop ceiling[3]. The major(ip) different amongst the 80th and the present fourth dimensions is the women immediately go to college and rightfully study creating a decent emulation to men. It is impossible to cross that men sincerely yours were the dominant gender fro many days and it is just the way it used to be before and for a long time women seemed to be very well with that. Therefore the glaze over ceiling operator appears to be overaged now2.It goes without saying that the circumstance thatwomen own only 1 part of the worlds wealth, and earn 10 percent of the worlds income, in spite of making up 49.5% of the population is earlier impressi ve [4]. If a woman is not as paid as a man should the employees give a discernment to her just not to be doomed in discrimination?3\n\n remnant: Nowadays, women do in truth shake more opportunities to study and get down highly captain employees. Another figure is that women aside from their career usually have a family and children to take care of. And is it handsome to keep lecture about the glass ceiling if women physically cannot dedicate as much time to work as men do? Women have distractive factors that men will never have much(prenominal) a pregnancy, childcare and many others and it has nada to do with the glass ceiling but with the distribution of gender roles. The care of pistillate seats in national put up according to the entropy collected in 2004 equals 15%[5]. Women have to remember that they are born-mothers n the first place. And even this 15% data this is a decent pass around able to go against the mythological glass ceiling!\n\n \n\n1 According to a recent study by Korn/ ferrying International, from 1982 to 1992 the proportion of female administrator wrong presidents more than doubled, from 4 to 9 percent, and their share of senior vice president positions change magnitude from 13 to 23 percent[1].\n\n2 11.2% of corporate officers are women[5].\n\n3 Charges of a glass ceiling in the body of work come not from successful women such as Klug, Trudell, and Cortez, but from professional semipolitical activists. Women who seek opportunities, pull back with them, and advance to executive positions are see their efforts rewarded while the activists, on the outside flavor in, complain[2].If you insufficiency to get a full essay, assign it on our website: Looking for a place to buy a cheap paper online? Buy Paper Cheap - Premium quality cheap essays and affordable papers online. Buy cheap, high quality papers to impress your professors and pass your exams. Do it online right now! '

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impossiblyfreshphilosopher · 6 years

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zoe-truong · 7 years

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Organization, Transitions, and Word Choice

Option 1

I stumbled upon an image not long ago on a popular, niche website called Reddit. The image depicted a well-known Japanese concept of life called Ikigai: A reason for being. In a sense, a person can only reach the pinnacle of purpose at the cross-section of what they love doing, what they are good at, what they can be paid for, and what the world needs. Leave it to me to have an existential crisis after realizing my plans for the future fall short of a perfect Ikigai.

In order to discover this ideal area, I have to go through an arduous process of evaluating the aspects of my character that hold the greatest value. Over the course of my first year in college, I’ve performed the most excruciating autopsy on my identity. At this point I feel as though I’ve taken every personality questionnaire or strengths assessment quiz out there. The qualifiers were nice to categorize who I was as a leader on campus, but I think the biggest growth and step forward I’ve seen in my college career is through my curriculum.

I’ve written a number of essays for World Literature that cover a spectrum of challenging concepts, anything from systemic racism to the carnism ideology. In each blog, in each paper I find myself questioning the way I view the world. How is it that these problems exist today and why am I a bystander? I hastily evaded the topic of my true passion in P3, because frankly I was clueless. Up until that paper, I was certain that my passion laid in my love for the stock market. However, when looking at this “passion” through the lens of the Ikigai, pursuing my parent’s dreams ignores the requisites that give my goals meaning, purpose.

While I purposefully work towards a future on Wall Street, at times I have to force myself to keep going. This is different from working hard to improve, maybe more akin to reluctance due to dissatisfaction. With this dissatisfaction comes fear: fear of being wrong, fear of being inadequate, fear of failing. If I fail, then what do I have left? Maybe nothing, but I didn’t spend years in a higher education without preparing contingency plans. I often forget that my ideal job is not the end of the road. The only thing more unknown than my future is myself, because the way I will perceive or approach the world will be incomparable to how I did years prior. The only thing I can control now is my action plan for the future. These are the steps I can put forth towards my education so that I can confidently go into the workforce, regardless if it’s the one I expected or not.

I’d likely still be going through that existential crisis were it not for Plan II, because the program’s broad curriculum makes me a little more comfortable about my prospects in life. Every class underscores the university’s values on ethical reasoning, and it is my job to carry this awareness throughout every step of my life. My knowledge doesn’t disappear with my failure, but rather stays waiting until I can redirect it to a new path. I know that “with everything falling down around me, I’d like to believe in all the possibilities”[1] of what I am capable of doing. Thinking of my life in that way, I can think of a few options left in the debris of my failure.

I will always have a strong love for art, animals, and Buddhism. These are three things in my life that I could say evoke the most passionate responses from me whether in practice or in discourse. Firstly, everyone has their own outlet for stress; mine comes in the form of drawing. When faced with worry, confusion, anger, or any unpleasant emotion, I articulate my thoughts through pencil strokes. Secondly, when I unwittingly watch a video or movie with animal deaths, I get incredibly emotional. The helplessness of these poor creatures in the face of cynical humans is something that causes intense frustration and sorrow. And finally, I have found myself connecting with my Buddhist self as of late. I’ve always used Buddhism as a moral compass, because religion has never been a defining part of my life. However, the timing of World Literature with my Buddhist organization has brought me closer than ever to integrating these moral lessons into my life. Impermanence, the Four Noble Truths, and the Five Precepts anchor themselves in my life decisions and expand my worldview.

So, left with these three ideas in mind, I have to figure the different ways I can simultaneously advance through my education and stay connected with these interests. The problem I have to get past is that my classes will not always be relevant to my passions. As much as I could try, Investment Management does not exactly cater to Buddhist ideals. But like I expanded my consciousness to “hammer [my] thoughts into unity,”[2] I am capable of taking with me something valuable from each class.

In my P3, I eluded to some vague grasp of the “Truth” in life and how I expect to incorporate that into my future. But, in writing this essay, I realized that it was a pretty half-hearted attempt. For as long as I can remember, my future was synonymous with my career path. At the behest of this essay, I recognized that there was more to life besides finding ways to stand out as a businesswoman. Let me clarify that building upon my ethical reasoning will still be important, but I plan to broaden the applications of it. Besides using compassion to become a better financial analyst, I want to become a better leader. The great thing about leadership is that it isn’t restricted to the people who excel at delegating or producing the most ambitious ideas. “Some roles are more visibly "the leader" than others, but they can all contribute to the overall leadership effort.”[3] And in enforcing this idea can I ascribe ethical reasoning to education, work environments, or life. I want to use my open-mindedness to assist others, rather than exploit the financial markets with fine-tuned methods of deceit. But when I look at my life with the financial career out of the picture, that standard of ethics still stands true. I will always take in others’ perspectives at all times and try to find the most harmonious solution in any situation. And in the process of writing this paper, I realized how now more than ever is the time to start putting this ethical reasoning in to action.

Not too long ago the President of the United States, Donald Trump, announced a string of potential budget cuts to reduce our nation’s debt.[4] Many of his proposals were shocking to say the least, but the one that brought me to my feet was the elimination of the National Endowments for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. For all of my life, art has been the vehicle for my emotions. I’ll be sitting in class, pencil hovering over a mockingly difficult exam, focusing all of my attention to a free response problem while my brain is conjuring solutions. Unintentionally, my hand flits across the sheet, outlining small pandas or swirls of stars. Drawing is natural for me. Even when my mind is elsewhere, my hand goes through the motions of mindless doodles like a reflex. So, when the new administration is considering to eliminate this opportunity to create and be creative, how can my conscious self stand back when my unconscious self will never stop drawing?

It is with these facts and while writing this paper that I stopped to consider a world without art. It’d be dreary, unimaginative, and restrictive. I had the privilege to grow up in a household brimming with artistic minds and a plethora of tools at my disposal, but so many children across the country barely have free sheets of paper and pencils. Drawing did more than let me be expressive; it helped me visualize my problems or promote my curiosity. If I’m illustrating a realistic piece, I have to study the proportions and analyze the characteristics of the model that translate well onto the page. If i’m painting a scene, I have to go through constant trial and error to find the corresponding color—correctly accounting for undertones and highlights. By taking away the Endowments for the Arts, the administration is going to be discouraging entire generations of children from a world of extremely critical thinking. Three-hundred million dollars[5] is definitely a steep grant, but the opportunity costs for that money does not touch the value of investing a life enriched by creative thinking.

I know that by working as an artist alone cannot protect this amount of money, but I hope to reach a point in my life where I can dedicate all of my time to advocating for the arts and working with children. This is how my career plan is a means to an end. Thinking back to that ikigai, the world doesn’t need a financial analyst, but my career would supplement the three other parts of my life I need to live comfortably. However, I can’t be content making money without fulfilling that sense of purpose. I still love the stock market, but when the time comes where I won’t have to worry about sustaining myself well into the future, I can instead turn my attention to sustaining the arts for the nation’s future. Sure to some people art can be pretentious or overvalued, but it still means something to someone. And for that reason, regardless of what art means to some child in Midwest America or New England, I will be the one to lead the charge to protect this cultural cornerstone.

It’s not going to be an easy task, especially with how the rest of my college years are laid out. I didn’t really expect to ever put art back into my curriculum after I graduated high school, because it was never something I felt would every substantially complete me, financially and emotionally. However, I don’t think my finance and Plan II track will impede me in any way, because like I said in P3, “Unweaving [my intended curriculum] by reading more, learning more, and challenging myself more is conducive to connecting my ethical reasoning to my future.”[6] Yes, artistic endeavors do require ethical reasoning. Some of the most powerful pieces, like the photo of the Napalm Girl or any of Banksy’s graffiti works are reason enough to show how challenging today’s ideologies through art causes a domino effect around society. In many ways, art is like education. Students connect with their professors and see them “[show] such a passion for thought that, by their example, they make one want to think.”[7] Art works in just the same way.

So in order to foster this same perceptiveness, I have to actively work and pay attention to how my professors think in every class. I think the most valuable classes would be the ones that constantly challenge my thoughts and help me understand other people. For example, the year-long Plan II Philosophy course forces students to face uncomfortable problems or try unorthodox methods of thinking. However, if I really want to engage with children and learn how to advocate for the importance of the arts, I should start thinking about classes that can best articulate my assertions and allow me to interact with younger children to help them express themselves as I did with art. Anything from the social sciences to the heavy writing-based courses like World Literature are the stepping stones for that aspect of my leadership vision.

Writing is not an easy process. In fact, writing is an art. Unfortunately, I do not have the natural inclination to the art of writing as I do the art of drawing, but I still submit to the same processes required to create valuable works. To write something worthwhile like these World Literature papers, one has to thoughtfully consider the points one needs to address in the work in a way that is both persuasive and interesting. Any length of work —blog, essay, thesis— will force the writer to carefully consider each word, choosing only the right ones that allows her “to seek the truth and express it.”[8] I always strive to seek the truth in every class. I may not always be right, but the important thing is that I open myself up to new perspectives to find what’s right. I don’t think I could have really been capable of being as open-minded as I have been without World Literature. Reading novels of walks of life I’ll never meet has helped me better understand this disparate world we live in and motivated me to protect the most basic rights of the underprivileged.

I know I started off this paper with lots of doubt, but thinking thoughtfully about how I can make the world a better place was well worth the torture. All those hoping to learn and succeed should go through the same process of self-discovery to become amore compassionate and contributing member of society. I know that I could set my goals so much higher and broader than encouraging an environment for art, but I know that where I can be most impactful is in a world I know and love.

Word Count: 2253 Word Count without quotes: 2169

Citations:

[1] C'mon, by Andrew Dost, Decaydance / Fueled by Ramen Records, 2011, LP, accessed April 11, 2017, http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/panicatthedisco/cmon.html.

[2] William B. Yeats, "Transfer of Power," Jerome Bump, last modified August 7, 2012, accessed April 11, 2017, http://www.la.utexas.edu/users/bump/603A13/LeadingClassDiscussion603.html.

[3] Robert J. Lee, "Ground Your Leadership Vision in Personal Vision," in Discovering the Leader in You (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 34, accessed April 10, 2017, https://www.la.utexas.edu/users/bump/DiscoverLeader.pdf.

[4] Sopan Deb, "Trump Proposes Eliminating the Arts and Humanities Endowments," The New York Times, last modified March 15, 2017, accessed April 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/arts/nea-neh-endowments-trump.html.

[5] Deb, "Trump Proposes," The New York Times.

[6] Zoë Truong, "Understanding My Ethics," last modified March 9, 2017, Microsoft Word.

[7] Jon Schwartz, "The Web of Campus Life," in Texas, Our Texas, comp. Bryan A. Garner (Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1984), 161, accessed April 10, 2017, https://www.la.utexas.edu/users/bump/TexasLeaders.pdf.

[8] "The Core Purpose of the University," in Composition and World Literature (Austin, TX: Jenn's, 2016), 1:90.

Media Citations:

Ikigai: https://www.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/comments/63cf1k/image_ikigai/

Limitless Possibilites: http://www.gratitudexp.com/2015/01/09/this-year-embrace-the-limitless-possibilities/

Hammer Your Thoughts Into Unity: http://www.la.utexas.edu/users/bump/images/hammer.html

NEA: https://www.arts.gov/grants/manage-your-award/nea-logo

Arts and Creativity: http://www.actualinsights.com/2014/art-science-creativity-susan-weinschenk-video/

Writing: https://www.theodysseyonline.com/why-writing-good-therapy

#blog #p4

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