SR prehistory: Scheffer vs. Goodman

In the 80s, Israel Scheffer and Nelson Goodman engaged in a long polemic about Goodman’s anti-realist claims. Goodman was a robust relativist, Scheffer, a pluralist-realist. Scheffer asked how it was possible, in Goodman’s schema, to account for stars, for instance, which long preceded the existence of man. Did men make up stars? Goodman, in “Starmaking” replied:

“Let's begin by acknowledging that a right version and its world are different. A version saying that there is a star up there is not itself bright or far off, and the star is not made up of letters. On the other hand, saying that there is a star up there and saying that the statement "There is a star up there" is true amount, trivially, to much the same thing, even though the one seems to talk about a star and the other to talk about a statement. What is more important, we cannot find any world-feature independent of all versions. Whatever can be said truly of a world is dependent on the saying - not that whatever we say is true but that whatever we say truly (or otherwise present rightly) is nevertheless informed by and relative to the language or other symbol system we use. No firm line can be drawn between world-features that are discourse-dependent and those that are not. As I have said "In practice, of course, we draw the line wherever we like, and change it as often as suits our purposes."

And a few paragraphs later: “Scheffler contends that we cannot have made the stars. I ask him which features of the stars we did not make, and challenge him to state how these differ from features clearly dependent on discourse. Does he ask how we can have made anything older than we are? Plainly, by making a space and time that contains those stars. By means of science, that world (indeed many another) was made with great difficulty and is, like the several worlds of phenomena that also contain stars, a more or less right or real world. We can make the sun stand still, not in the manner of Joshua but in the manner of Bruno. We make a star as we make a constellation, by putting its parts together and marking off its boundaries.”

I’ve always loved Goodman’s insouciance. He is touching here on a hidden semiotic that, as a matter of fact, has much to do with the human limit: one of the crucial binaries in the life of the educated class in the West is that of making/discovering. Discovery, as I have mentioned before, oddly escaped the epistemic grid that Foucault uncovers in early modernism. Goodman is, of course, correct that science is made. But science is made to discover. The realism of the scientists is the realism of the Atlantic voyagers – it is the realism of discovery. Goodman’s notion that the star in the sky or the movie star on the screen is relative to the frame of reference is, I think, easy to mischaracterize. We are drawn by tradition into thinking that making comes entirely from the maker – but this is not Goodman’s idea. Indeed, the maker is continually resisted in the making, which is why we can talk of right versions, of rightness with regard to the frame of reference. A frame of reference will forever be both made and beyond the power of the maker. It doesn’t refer to any particular cogito – geometry is not Euclid’s secret autobiography.

Scheffer, in an essay entitled Plea for Plurarealism (2000) – so many kinds of realism! – returned to this controversy. Goodman, he claimed, was strongly motivated by the idea that there are many worlds. He was in revolt against the idea that all worlds could be reduced (theoretically) to the picture given by physics. Scheffer contends that this is not a feature that is intrinsic to realism (and confesses that he has been influenced, on this point, by Goodman). And he brings up the example of the arche-fossil:

“In a third anti-realistic argument, Goodman denies that there can be perception without conception, concluding as follows, "Although conception without perception is merely empty, perception without conception is blind (totally inoperative). Predicates, pictures, other labels, schemata, survive want of application, but content vanishes without form. We can have words without a world but no world without words or other symbols". Now the final sentence just quoted seems paradoxical as it stands. For it seems to imply that there was no world prior to human speech or symbolism.” And, taking this a step further:

“In defending the "no world without words" doctrine, Goodman argues that "talk of unstructured content or an unconceptualized given or a substratum without properties is self-defeating; for the talk imposes structure, conceptualizes, ascribes properties". But if we assert the existence of trees in the primordial past, we are affirming trees after all, not a bit of unstructured content or an unconceptualized given. Those ancient trees that we now describe by using the word "tree" surely did not require this word in order to have arisen and flourished. It is of course self-defeating to call something a wordless word or a non-descriptive description, but it is not self-defeating to describe something in words which neither contains nor is a product of words.”

It is interesting to see how this dispute – without, as far as I can tell, being specifically referred to – has been recoded in the continental idiom recently by the Speculative Realism school. There, the key binary (independence vs. dependence) is, again, an idiom that returns us to the trans-atlantic world in which one nation “made” itself through a declaration of independence. I’ll do another post about the role of 'independence' in the SR discourse.

From the foot of versus

“Yes reader countless are the mysterious handwritings of grief or joy which have inscribed themselves successively upon the palimpsest of your brain; and like the annual leaves of aboriginal forests or the undissolving snows on the Himalaya, or light falling upon light, the endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness But by the hour of death, but by fever, but by the searchings of opium, all these can revive in strength They are not dead but sleeping.” - De Quincey, Suspira de Profundis

The palimpsest section of Suspira de Profundis operates according to the dysfunctional logic, the white mythology, that Derrida finds in Plato’s Phaedrus. There are two series of terms, here, in which writing finds its tenement, its power. In one series, the tenement is cursed – literally, this is the series of the witch’s portion, and potion. Like the contract that is written in blood and signed by Christoph Haitzmann, the painter who was the object of Freud’s essay, writing here misuses its fluids, its graphemes, it is the bad counselor, it is the evil vizier, it undermines memory, it is a voodoo-ed copy of the living word (half dead in the dead media to which it is assigned, stone, wax tablet, sheet of parchment, sheet of paper). But another series makes writing the good counselor, the wise vizier, the repository of memory, and, indeed, memory’s natural metaphor. Writing as pharmakon here creates the very power that distinguishes the animal from the vegetable: the animal has a past. The presence of the past – the present within the past – is, metaphorically, just this writing, this inscription. In the vaults of history, we take history to be a matter of records, a matter of leaving a trace.

Derrida is often read as a defender of writing against its accusers, from Plato to Rousseau. This reading comes about so automatically because, I think, philosophy has come to mean automatically taking a side. But I don’t read Derrida as ascending to the summit of some great “versus” – rather, he stands at the foot of it. Of the versus itself, of forward and backward, of the wolf going down the path of pins and the girl in the red hoodie going down the path of needles (“Le loup se mit à courir de toute sa force par le chemin qui était le plus court, et la petite fille s’en alla par le chemin le plus long, s’amusant à cueillir des noisettes, à courir après des papillons, et à faire des bouquets des petites fleurs qu’elle rencontrait.). And it is my contention, of course, and in fact my single insight into universal history, that these are the same paths, one going to, one coming from – eternally the same and different path. In this, I am unoriginal in the extreme. I follow Red Riding Hood, Michelet’s witch, Derrida, the Dao. The good counselor writes the social contract, and his brother, the evil vizier, writes the sealed message carried by Bellerophon – as you love me, kill the messenger.

Your options tonight

You should simply skip from Limited Inc tonight to News From the Zona, where I'm proud as a little peacock of my Leskov post. Since I said what I wanted to say there. And, campers, it is all about SEX! (which I hope brings in the punters).

Otherwise, go here and listen to Mudhoney.

Sick of Happiness II

“Not the opium-eater, but the opium, is the true hero of the tale.” – De Quincey, 148

“When addicts desire to give up their drug use and change their lives, they frequently are confused about what they should do instead. This confusion is especially dramatic for those who have been deeply immersed in the world of addiction for long periods of time. They may see themselves as having nowhere to turn, having burned their bridges with family and ordinary friends.” – Peter Biernacki (1990)

It is exactly this – the confusion about what to do – that defines the liminal space between one world and another. I have been focusing on the literary addict as a figure who both decodes all too perfectly the flow of commodities in the artificial paradise, and the one whose sickness is made out of happiness.


Long before there was any notion of addiction, there was a keen sense that potions can create transformations that were intrinsically irreversible. By no act of will could Odysseus’ men return to their humanity from the pig’s life that Circe’s potions had made out of them – only by a counter-drug. This confusion about what to do is a world making confusion - that is, it gets more acute as one reaches the limit of the particular routines that define a particular world The poetry of addiction, the attraction of the poet to addiction, has always been about transcendence. This is often spelled out in terms of the body - the too too mortal flesh, from which we go up. But I'd like to spell this out in terms of the world and the things that we do there. The moralistic trope that there is nothing ‘artistic’ about drugs – that the fun in them soon runs out, that they kill rather than stimulate the imagination – revenges that moment when the routines stop, when the lines around normal – around that world – vanish. For it does happen. And yet, using a routine - the taking of a drug - to transcend routine, transcendence does give way to the round of getting and taking. And so the addict becomes the victim of this narrow circulation of the commodity. With the difference that this commodity cannot be substituted. The gift stands at one end of the commodity defined system of exchange, and addiction at the other.

The artificial paradise views the addict with untender eyes because the addict knows that it is an artificial paradise. He has taken the imperative of the routine into his very cells.

That swallowing of routine, of the drug, brings us back around to the bifurcation, so sweetly and swiftfootedly traced by Derrida, between writing as that which exists in the register of simulacrum and that which exists inside as the privileged metaphor for memory and truth itself. In the first, the references take us, inevitably, back to the witch – in the second, the references take us back to the original commerce between the sense organs and the world. In De Quincey, we see this in his notion - or rather, in his routine - concerning the palimpsest.

SICK OF HAPPINESS I

“So I am a public agent and don't know who I work for, get my instructions from street signs,newspapers and pieces of conversation I snap out of the air the way a vulture will tear entrails from other mouths.” – William Burroughs, Soft Machine

Public agent, public rememberer, public confessor, a comedian of all trades in the artificial paradise. Like all comedians, a great weaver of routines. Self conscious routines are the keynote of the artificial paradise – industrially organized, or privately obsessive. The ritual, here, is quietly put to death in somebody’s kennel. All of which takes us to later threads. Still, one can go from De Quincey’s frenzied style, undercutting itself at all turns – which casts up texts concerning the connoisseurs of murder, the company of women in Suspira, the murder of Kant – with Burrough’s great period, from Junkie to Soft Machine, and see a community of spirit, peering through a dilated eye.

As we orbiters expect and dread – our training at the instrument panel has not been in vain! - the pharmakon here must find its mate in writing – writing as the internal relation of the subject to the world, in radical dissymmetry with writing as the world’s original poison. In the palimpset section of Suspira de profundis, we have an elaboration of that old image, but rebooted in terms of the phial of instant happiness. Remember, remember – it is the junkie’s special place and fate to be literally sick of happiness.

News from the Zona post

If you feel like it, go to my News From the Zona post, which I would have put up here - it has to do with trees! - except I didn't.

Or you can go to this.

his chaos I comprehended by the darkness of my own

When De Quincey turned twenty, he jotted down a memoranda for himself that listed the twelve constituents of happiness. Happiness was always a strong word for De Quincey – he had an almost cultic devotion to it that made him suspect to more robust natures like Wordsworth’s; it is certain that he truly meant it when, in the Confession, he calls opium happiness in pill form. Whenever, in his writing, we are in the neighborhood of the word “happiness”, the prose will be charged with a certain incantatory quality. The twelve constituents include such things as, education of a child, and a rather sad, ‘a personal appearance rather tolerable.” De Quincey was conscious of his small stature – and had been reproached for not being overly clean or kempt.

What is as interesting as the contents of the list is the enumeration of the constituents of happiness. For throughout De Quincey’s career as an opium eater – England’s premier drug geek – the number of drops was always of primary importance to him. He was not, at the age of twenty, acquainted with opium – except as anyone was in 1805, when opium was already a common ingredient in a number of medicinal cordials. According to Martin Booth, the years that pretty much span De Quincey’s writing career – between 1831 to 1859 – saw a massive increase in opium imports and use, from 91,000 pounds to 280,000 pounds, mostly from Turkey. As with sugar, so with opium – Britain was in the forefront of its use. But he was, at the age of twenty, already an enumerator. He was already trying to find some exterior, conceptual form to which he could attach his energies.

Enumeration – a drugged specificity – is on the other side of incantation. I understand the links – when I was a child, I would rock and count when I was in bed, in order to get to sleep. For I was never a good sleeper. With a more psychoanalytically sharpened eye, I suspect this rocking and enumeration had something to do with wanking – although I can’t really remember masturbating until the age of about 12, by which time my great struggle against wakefulness had ceased. I can feel that rocking motion in De Quincey’s writing. And of course, never far from the incantatory quality of happiness was its opposite, misery. The ‘portable ecstasies’, the commodified form of happiness that could be ‘carried in a pocket’, was, on De Quincey’s account, a vacation from life, his “Saturday’, for years. Oh vexed question of addiction, a word not in the dictionaries of either medicine or everyday life in De Quincey’s day! That we can create a thing that operates upon us as a parasite, forcing us to renew its life with our body – this idea was in the air of course by 1820, when the Confessions appeared. Frankenstein was on the horizon. De Quincey, willing to make his life work that of making his life transparent, was his own monster.

It was not obvious to De Quincey even in 1820, however, that his portable ecstasies could not be shuffled off, and that he would have to experience, as though he had no means to stop it, their slow, seemingly autonomous change to nightlong miseries. The thrill darkened.

In drug geekdom, every kick produces an equal and opposite kick. In De Quincey’s case, the kick was that opium was also the very basis of his career. The constituent of happiness that consisted in an independent income was undermined by De Quincey’s more expensive addiction to buying books. It was really this which caused all the miseries of his early twenties, because, of the amount of money left to him by his father that wasn’t frittered away in bad investments by his guardians, most of it went to paying off debts accrued to purchase rare volumes. Thus, his first great hit, The Confessions, was also necessary to sustain himself and his family. His writing life was then marked – he became a public character as an opium eater, which, in turn, gave him license to develop an antic prose long after the romantics gave way to the disapproving Victorians. And that style he was continually turning upon himself. He played his own miseries and memories for the crowd.

By 1844, a five thousand drop a day year, the basis was eating through the coherence. He wrote a friend about his newly published book on political economics:

“With respect to my book … which perhaps by this time you and Professor Nichol will have received through the publishers, I have a word to say. Upon some of the distinctions there contended for it would be false humility if I should doubt they are sound. The substance I am too well assured is liable to no dispute. But as to the method of presenting the distinctions as to the composition of the book and the whole evolution of a course of thinking, there it is that I too deeply recognise the mind affected by my morbid condition. Through that ruin and by help of that ruin I looked into and read the latter states of Coleridge. His chaos I comprehended by the darkness of my own, and both were the work of laudanum. It is as if ivory carvings and elaborate fretwork and fair enamelling should be found with worms and ashes amongst coffins and the wrecks of some forgotten life or some abolished nature. In parts and fractions, eternal creations are carried on, but the nexus is wanting and life and the central principle which should bind together all the parts at the centre with all its radiations to the circumference are wanting. Infinite incoherence, ropes of sand, gloomy incapacity of vital pervasion by some one plastic principle -- that is the hideous incubus upon my mind always. For there is no disorganised wreck so absolute so perfect as that which is wrought by misery.”

Truly a cry from the heart, and not just from De Quincey – for a big dream, be it a theory, a plot, a poem, or simply gathering together the elements of one’s days and ways, is always one in which the peculiar terror is just that the vital nexus will be wanting.