To Know is Not to Know

At first, I found myself writing that every moment overflows with information. But that's not right. Every moment has the exact right amount of information. What overflows is my capacity — and my will — to note it all, make sense of it all. To know the world is not to experience certain aspects of it.

This ignoring is not willful. Well, that's not quite right: everything you do is your will.  So, yes, it's willful. But it's not necessarily conscious. We don't actively select to heed this, ignore that. I mean, we may be discerning about certain things, choosing to ignore a lover's passive aggressive comment or a child's incessant babbling. But we don't even know how to see the infinite data of the moment.

We come to the world already not knowing aspects of it. To be this person is to ignore this information while that person ignores that information: we are a metabolic function of selection and distribution. Think about meeting someone new, someone from your work or family out of context. What do they consider something to know that you also consider something to know? This can be as explicit as Justin Bieber, Burning Man, "Deadwood." Wait, who? What? In this age of fracture and network, we are all adrift — and at home — in the cultural diaspora. We all know different things.

The world teems. Consider any moment — reading this right now, for instance. There are the words you're reading, of course. And then there's all the stuff around this post — lists and numbers and such. And each of these is part of a vast network of information that makes this data legible. On its own, "12.10.12" doesn't mean anything. And then there's the screen you're reading on. Besides the screen itself, the affect of its glow, the manner in which it presents data and the entire history of data presentation and the rise of screen culture, there are even more symbols and marks. I, for one, have a dock filled to the brim with a variety of images all trying to declare meaning. The circle with the music notation in it says more than, "I am iTunes." It says it in a certain way. And then there's the dissonance that iTunes is not just about music. In fact, I use mine mostly for interfacing with my phone. I like the word interface — it seems like an appendage for a post ego age. Not sure I like it as a verb, however. And yet I do like that we turn nouns into verbs — it makes a mockery of Heidegger: the moon moons, the screen screens (which it does! what a nice moment!). Which leads me, in its way, to all the information I have about Apple, about interfaces in general, about how product naming works. Which has me think about all my work projects — the things I am presently naming, the interfaces I am creating, the brands I am forging. I hear a siren. What kind? Fire truck, I think. Fire trucks are the first responders to 911 health calls as firemen are all trained as medics. I hear so many dogs, clearly all different sizes but to me they're just dogs. Oh, there's MUNI. I have yet to get to the sensations in my stomach, the nuances of my mood, the varied smells that waft about me — not  to mention the gin I'm drinking right now: St. George Dry Rye. I am knowing this gin in many ways, if you know what I mean. If I were to catalog the information of this moment — not make sense of it, just catalog it — it would a) be infinite; b) ignore another infinity of information; c) qualify me as insane; and d) make me insane.

In Borges' "Funes, the Memorious," Funes' memory is absolute: he retains everything that he sees, that he senses — every leaf, every shift of the clouds. He can't generalize — which is to say, he can't forget the differences between things. He becomes immobilized and dies at 19: "He seemed as monumental as bronze, more ancient than Egypt, anterior to the prophecies and the pyramids. It occurred to me that each one of my words (each one of my gestures) would live on in his implacable memory; I was benumbed by the fear of multiplying superfluous gestures." 

This is Nietzsche's argument, as well: to know is to forget, to ignore all the details, the differences, the divergences. We squint away the teeming flux in order to see categories, to see truth (see the perfect essay, "On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense"). Such is the very premise of our knowledge. The only way we can call a pit bull, a dachshund, and a german shepherd all dogs is that we ignore the differences between them.

I have had moments when I am overwhelmed by the sheer plenitude of information that abounds. And I've seen others in this state and it's disconcerting, to say the least. I've seen friends out of their minds due to this or that and become muttering and drooling souls, their eyes as big as the sky, their cognition all too human. It's not a pretty sight but it is exquisite. And humbling.

And yet, even uglier, is the glaring blindness to difference, the all too human will to brush aside the details, to ignore the wealth of information that abounds. Between the ugliness of propriety and the madness of delirium, which do we pick?

Fortunately, that's a false dichotomy. It's not a matter of knowing more or less — after all, we're talking about infinite information — but a matter of how you know. What distinguishes one knowing from another is not the quantity but the quality of knowing. He who knows well knows differently, knows vitally, knows tastefully. Rather than subscribe to the known ways of forgetting, he invests new ways of forgetting, new modes of knowing and not knowing, elaborate, exquisite architectures that recast experience, concept, categories, difference. He makes poetry of his knowledge. Nietzsche calls this the gay science. 

Knowing with Pleasure

There are certain facts that delight me. Starfish, for instance, are vicious predators that attack by inserting their stomachs into their prey —  mussels — and there and then digesting their catch. Or the etymology of the word doom (I thank the sophist and poet, Lohren Green, for this): what began as a way to signify justice became the annihilation of everything. Doom, alas, was doomed.

I love these facts. They're surprising. They open up worlds, generously giving a glimpse of a cosmos for which they are just one poignant moment. Suddenly, the oceans teem with a speed and madness I had not imagined as I see the history of the world in doom's demise.

But I want to talk about something else: I want to talk about how I know things. And I'm not talking about the sources of my knowing — documentaries on Netflix, books, articles on Yahoo. I am talking about the process I undergo as I come to know the world.

For the most part, I think it's safe to say that people don't usually consider how they know. They consider what they know (fly fishing! 18th century astrolabe makers! coffee varieties!). They might even consider the source of their knowing (Yahoo vs. "The New York Times" — as an aside, I'd take Yahoo). But they rarely consider their manner of knowing — what they consider as something to be known; how they distribute experience and category; their criteria for accepting something as true.

In college, I was a history major. This was partly because I had AP credit so placed out of some requirements (a good criterion for choosing a major — I'm serious). And because I'd had an excellent history teacher in high school (Robert Tucker —RIP, sadly).  But, holy moly, was history in college boring! Wars, treaties, presidents: who the hell cares?

I longed for something else, to know in a different way. What about everyday people? What were they thinking, experiencing, living? And then I read Michel Foucault and everything changed. He shifted the focus from official documents to the breadth of the archive — diaries, sketches, pamphlets, court hearings, architecture, etiquette manuals. Foucault considers things that were deemed irrelevant to knowledge, things that were not to be known.

And by shifting the focus, Foucault does more than shift the content of inquiry — he shifts the very mode of inquiry.  These different things demand a different way of knowing. Knowing tends to work vertically — working down from a category to an example (deduction) or moving up from the instance to the category (induction). But Foucault moves sideways. That is, rather than looking at this or that domain of knowledge — politics, military, philosophy —, he lets his eyes wander across domains and finds that piano legs, architecture, and the rise of sociology were all obsessively articulating sex. Vertical knowing no longer applies. Here, a different architecture of knowing is required.

What excited me when I read Foucault was not that I found it true. It's that I found it pleasurable.  I was downright giddy — and still am.  Oh, to run one's eyes over the voluptuous body of the archives, to find associations, connections and divergences, to recast the world: this is nothing less than an erotics of knowledge.

Foucault taught me the pleasure of knowing. I shifted my attentions from what we usually consider as things to know to things we consider unknowable — moods, architectures of the invisible, the speed and intensity of ideas. Figuring out how to know such things is in and of itself a delight. To weigh a mood and consider how it affects a space, people, myself; to let it drift and find concepts, books, moments; to not just react to a mood but engage it in multiple ways: this is an experience of delicate and resounding sumptuosity. The dance of mood, concept, and language is exquisite.

To know such things, I can't just apply categories — That's an ox! That's an asteroid! That's neo-noir! I have to be willing to move about, to sprawl laterally, diagonally, vertically, to go every which way making connections, creating categories, making new kinds of sense. And as I am not beholden to maintaining the integrity of a category, I can indulge inconsistencies, divergences, differences. Indeed, rather than excusing them as most knowing does — official knowledge disdains difference and exception — I relish them. My knowing is filled with qualifications, whispers and asides, nuance, uncertainty, even doubt, not to mention passion, pleasure, anecdote, delirium. 

In this way of knowing, I rarely take anything at its word — I don't care what the person's authority is. Unless, of course, I like what they say. So when I read that the American Medical Association considers abstinence from alcohol a risk for heart disease, I smiled. Do I think it's true? No. Do I think it's not true? No. I don't care either way. I just like that they said it. My criteria for truth do not involve truth at all. Facts either delight me, empower me, or enliven me — or I pay them no heed.

Do I jettison all aspects of truth? Of course not. I do certain things because I believe them. In fact, I do a lot of wacky stuff — mostly involving my health — based on certain truths that I have assumed.  For god's sake, I pour colloidal silver up my schnoz by the bucket. But I take these truths less as truths than as temporary solutions, moments of efficacy and delight, of wonder and healing.

Knowing with pleasure is not frivolous. It demands work. After all, I can't just listen to the doctor, my mother, to scientific studies. This mode of knowing is a full time job. I might say that my knowing is less about knowing per se than it is about living well. Indeed, my knowing is my living. So why not enjoy it?

Knowing Knowing

Every time I get sick, I have a theory as to how it happened. It was the disgusting woman on the bus sneezing. It was stress from work. It was the resurgence of some dormant malady. I've noticed this is true of people in general: they claim to know how they got this or that ailment.  And then everyone — and I mean everyone — has a remedy: Echinacea, zinc, colloidal silver, sweat, don't sweat, chicken soup, garlic.

How do we know these things?

Sometimes, our knowing comes from a doctor. After all, doctors are supposed to know about such things. Knowing means being told by someone else who claims to know — and who we believe for whatever reason. In some sense, we don't know; it's the doctor who knows.

Me, I rarely believe my doctor: she doesn't seem to understand very much about how the world works. And as for all the germ stuff, well, it seems like a conveniently belligerent model that recapitulates our state apparatus: kill the bad terrorist germs!  I see viruses and bacteria as a necessary but not sufficient condition of sickness.

How do I know this? Well, it's a complex process that's at once physical and reflective: I let the idea play through my body and mind, process it with what I know, my history, my experiences. And based on this elusive calculus, I tell myself: It's the stress! I go with the answer that just feels right.  But am I the best reader of my body? And does this count as general knowledge, as something that is true for anyone but me?

Sometimes, I read things on Yahoo! And while I may or may not enjoy the article, I rarely believe it. Who's Yahoo! anyway?  Once, I read an article claiming that men who masturbated often on their 20s were less likely to have prostate cancer later in life. Within weeks of that article, there was another one claiming that drinking alcohol was good for the heart. And I thought to myself: Now this is knowledge I can get behind!  Did I believe it? No. But nor do I not believe it. I do, however, like it.

How, then, do we know what we know?  And why don't we talk about how we know? We talk about what we know all the time. For instance, there is debate as to what students should be taught about Christopher Columbus: Is he a hero or a genocidal killer? And while these arguments focus on aspects of what we know, they never consider the way we know.

Knowing is not neutral or natural. We are taught how to know, albeit it unknowingly. Sure, we'll argue about Christopher Columbus but we never argue about how we know Christopher Columbus — or whether he's even worth knowing about. We know unknowingly.

Usually, those things we never consider as something to consider are the things ideology most wants to protect and should therefore be considered all the more. Indeed, one component of the way we know is that we don't consider the way we know, that we consider our way of knowing natural. Another way of knowing might know otherwise and consider the manner of knowing a critical component of a way of knowing: a self-reflexive knowing. 

Knowing demands a series of inter-related actions that are psycho-ideological. Which is a convoluted way of saying that how you know is constitutive of how you are in the world (psycho-) — and how the world wants you be (ideological). 

Knowing of course involves determining what counts as something to be known. This is different than the debate on Christopher Columbus in which the very premise of the debate is a common belief that Columbus is something even worth discussing. Indeed, it would be absurd to suggest otherwise. Such is the insidious way of ideology: to think otherwise is to be insane, absurd, or criminal (pace Foucault). Before we begin knowing, then, we already know. We know, for instance, that scientific studies are something worth knowing. We know that wars are something we should study. We carefully heed and parse presidential proclamations — we even make our children memorize them.

But the fluctuation and operation of moods? Nope — that's not a subject we can ever know about, not really. A doodle by an unknown person from 1863? Might be cool but it won't tell us anything — nothing as important as the Gettysburg Address. Everyone knows that, right?

A way of knowing distributes experience and category in its own way. For instance, there is deduction and induction: We begin with a category and deduce how an experience fits it. Or we begin with experiences and see what kind of categories we might make.

But there are ways of knowing that might have no categories, neither deduction nor induction, that move laterally rather than vertically. I co-founded a website many years ago, ArtandCulture, in which we presented a hierarchy of artists alongside an artist cloud. Pinback, for instance, was in Music > Indie but was also in a nebulous cloud that included Alonzo King Lines Ballet and Picasso — that is, a lateral association formed by affective resonances — horizontal associations rather than vertical hierarchies.  

And then there is how we decide something is true. Usually, we lean on authority: the doctor told me, the scientist told me, the teacher told me. But the criteria for truth can be elusive  — and may not involve truth. When I try to figure how I got sick, I look for an answer that works for me, not an answer that's true. Is this a kind of truth? Perhaps. But I'm willing to abandon it for a better working answer — and I'm not sure truth is something one can jettison.

I like to imagine a protean mode of knowing — a manner of taking up the world that shifts according to circumstance. And that doesn't need to be true. And, in fact, doesn't need to know anything at all — a non-knowing knowing. 

Teaching, Violence, Enticement, Performance

Teaching, at first glance, may seem simple: it's just a matter of moving the student from one state to another. Show the student a map, tell him how to get there, and voilà: the student is taught.

But, alas, the situation is much trickier — and much stranger — than that. Because it's not a matter of moving students from, say, San Francisco to Lima. It's matter of moving students from the very people and world they think they know to an alternate dimension of space-time that they not only never imagined but never could have imagined. And where what it means to be and the very ways of knowing the world are, well, different. There is no map teachers can give their students — at least not one that's legible. 

Learning is impossible and actual. It involves an infinite movement from one state of being to another. And yet this infinite space is traversed — maybe not all the time but often. I remember my son muttering nonsense and then, behind everyone's back, speaking words. It was a miracle of sorts — a miracle that happens for babbling human idiots, more or less, every day. Still, I am completely overwhelmed by this: how can "da da da da" become, "Dada"? One is a series of sounds; the other is a conjuring of concepts, history, human beings. (For the moment, I'll avoid the complexities of learning one's first language. I always found Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations smart on this subject.)

There are no clear steps that can lead the student from point A to point B. Sure, there are signposts along the way. But, at some point, signposts disappear and the student must take the leap — Carlos at the end of Tales of Power leaping off the cliff: "Then a strange urge, a force, made me run him to the northern edge of the mesa. I felt his arm holding me as we jumped and then I was alone."

And then I was alone: this is the requisite state of learning. It happens alone. You can only be lead so far before you have to make the jump on your own.  

What, then, is the teacher to do? What is his role? How does he have the student take this jump?

There is the so-called Socratic method. But Socrates had only one goal: to have everyone recognize that they know nothing. His method leads to zero. After all, his model is premised on a suspect assumption: that we already know everything and hence learning is just remembering. I, on the other hand, believe learning is overcoming oneself and one's knowledge to become — and know — differently. So let's put aside Socrates for the moment and look at teaching methods. 

Well, there is the common approach — violence. That is, force students to jump. Give exams. Pop quizzes. Try to make students take that leap. Scare them into it with police action: Learn or be punished!

Of course, this often backfires as students learn how to master the test without making any leap at all.  Just because you can pass a test doesn't mean you've learned a thing — other than how to take the test. Which is not a completely irrelevent skill. Nevertheless.

At some point in my college career — mid-junior year — I refused to take any more exams. I'd write papers, gladly. But I would not take any tests. When I was given tests in required courses, I'd flip them over and write essays. And, because there is such a fear of failing students at Ivy League schools, I'd pass. (I tried to fail a couple of times but, uh, failed.)

And then, when I became a professor, I refused to give exams — at least exams that tested students' ability to memorize facts. My exams, when I had to give them, asked things like, "In Phaedrus, is Socrates serious or not?" This drove a certain kind of student crazy. "What do you want, Professor Coffeen?" I want you to think differently, to think as you've never thought before. And, in the process, try to teach me something I've never known.

But the question remains: How does a teacher get students to move from their present state to a state of being they never could have imagined?

Well, I think believe there is always a certain violence to pedagogy. For me, violence took the form of repetition: I'd say the same thing over and over again as if, through sheer force, I could drill the ideas into their minds and bodies. And, come to think if it now, I may have used a kind of intimidation, putting students on the spot, taking their comments and questions to task in front of the class — a whiny Jewish version of John Houseman in "The Paper Chase" (in my no doubt megalomaniacal imagination).



But I believe there is another technique:  to make this new world look and sound and feel so tempting that students want to take the leap, want to leave behind their tired old ways of doing things. That is, to seduce them, to entice them. Now, I know I'm opening myself up to all kind of jokes, criticisms, and, were I still teaching, law suits. Please note, however, that I'm not talking about physical coitus. I'm talking about enticing students to take a leap — a leap that is scary, unsure, and disorienting.

So why make this leap?  Because there is the promise of something better on the other side. John Houseman, in his way, tries to entice students with the promise of nobility. When you know as I know, he implies, you too will be wise and grand. His teaching is more than an imparting of knowledge; it is a call to become otherwise — in his case, wise and noble.

But while we tend to think of knowing — of learning — as a duty, pedagogic enticement need not promise nobility. We tend to neglect the sheer pleasure of knowing — and, even more, the pleasure of modes of knowing.  It's not just the knowledge that delights us but the very manner in which we know. We imagine that knowledge is something we have rather than something we are. This is Nietzsche's great lesson: the way we know, the very manner in which we make sense of the world, is who we are. Knowing is not something extraneous to our becoming; it is constitutive of it.

And so rather than say, Come hither and be wise, as Houseman does, the teacher might say, Come hither and play. It's so sumptuous over here — to know like this, to live like this. To know in this way is so alluring, so delicious, so delectable, so pleasurable that students are willing to be confused and risk getting a C on a paper.

This no doubt demands something strange of teachers. They are no longer gatekeepers to a certain knowledge but proxies for a certain way of living.  Which is to say, the teacher is no longer a conduit of knowledge but is himself a body that knows — and hence lives a certain way. And teaching becomes a matter of performance, of living through a mode of knowing.  

In some sense, teaching is impossible as it turns on students learning — and learning is something done alone. Which leaves the teacher is a strange position. Try to make students learn. Or entice them to learn. And enticing in turns, demands the teacher to teach more than data: it demands he put on the life he promises.  

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

I grew up with a certain narrative of myself, of how I got from point A to point B, of why I'd made the decisions I'd made, of who I was and my motivations along the way.

This story changed radically, however, about 36 years into it. Which means I moved blindly along an accepted narrative trajectory for much longer than I should have. Frankly, it's rather humiliating.

There I was, cruising along with the same story playing through my head, a story told to me by my mother since I was a child. And it became a story I told myself. But it turned out this was really her narrative, the story she needed to tell herself to explain me to her. It had some to do with me but not a whole lot.

So why did I believe? Well, because she was my mother. And it was a nice story.  I wanted to believe it.

But it could not hold. Things started happening to me — ferocious things — that just didn't make sense, didn't sync, with my narrative.

You see, I was told I was a nice boy. I imagined I had friends, that despite my penchant for rude, dismissive, obnoxious rants, I was still somehow, well, charming and interesting. And while I may once in a while be "too much," I was still a nice boy so all was forgiven.

Oy, was I wrong. It turns out my know-it-all conceit and intellectual bullying combined with an aggressive propensity to offend social sensibilities was not charming or interesting. It was, and remains, assholish.

This was a startling fact to suddenly realize (yes, I brazenly split my infinitives): I am not, nor have I been, a nice boy. In fact, I've been an asshole for most, if not all, of my life. It was like the end of The Sixth Sense: he's dead all along! And you suddenly reread the entire film in light of this revelation and it all makes sense. This was me: I've been an asshole all along! And I found myself rereading my life, all those relationships and encounters, and it all made sense!

Now, please understand, this was not a harrowing moment — startling, yes, but not harrowing. And, in saying this, I am not asking for someone to say, "Oh, you're not really an asshole." On the contrary! I am relieved as my assholeness explains so much. I am grateful for this revelation. And, no, not because I can now mend my ways and become a nice boy. But because now I can embrace my asshole ways and adjust my readings of my place in the world accordingly. It's actually quite beautiful.

In any case, my point is not about whether I'm an asshole or not (what is an asshole? What do I mean by asshole? This is a matter for another time). My point is this: We tell ourselves stories to make sense of our place in this life, to explain what we should do, to explain others' reactions, to explain our own reactions. And we can forget that they are stories, that they are interpretations. At the risk of sounding like a pretentious douchebag, we are text.

Which is to say, we are other to ourselves. Our lives ask — demand — to be read. Now, I was about to say it demands to be read just as we read any text. But that's absurd. My life — all the things that have happened to me — and the latest Houellebecq novel are quite different.  But their difference is a matter of degree, not a matter of kind. Both are texts only they have different resonances — and different ways of resonating — with our bodies and ways of going.

(My reading of Houellebecq has reoriented my life in nearly as dramatic fashion as my reading of my own life — if not more. In fact, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the stories we read — in novels, philosophy, film, the media — begin to mix, to conspire into a common network of stories: a story of stories. Enter Debord, amongst others. So careful what you ingest — and how you ingest it.)

Since my revelation seven or so years ago, I have become a more active, vigilant reader of my narrative. And this is how it should be. After all, the past does not determine the future. I am tempted to say the contrary: our present recasts our past and, in so doing, reorients our future. And as the events of our present are always changing, necessarily, then our narratives are always changing. It's like a network of threads — a web — and how I toss it, cast it, gesture with it now reshapes the entire thing, backwards and forwards.

This reshaping — this reorienting — is relentless. We are constantly recasting ourselves and it's gorgeous.

Arguments Are Boring

Back when I was teaching, the first rule of my class was: There is no arguing with me. Now, this would promptly prompt a certain reaction from a certain breed of so-called good student: Coffeen is so conceited! He thinks he's right! Which is hilarious for multiple reasons, most notably, because, well, uh, I was the fucking professor so, yes, I think I'm right. (While I miss many things about teaching, the assumed self-entitlement of students is not one of them.)

What made my rule particularly alarming — and presumably disarming — to these students was that these were rhetoric courses. And, to this certain breed of student, rhetoric is about debate, the art of arguing an issue. But the thing is: I have a very different view of what an argument is. (And as I was the professor, I got to teach my world view, however unfair students found this.)

To argue about something, in the traditional sense of the word, assumes that there is an initial agreement about the issues at hand, that the debaters share a common ground. How could either party take sides if there was not a prescribed space with sides to begin with? 

And, in my class at least, how could we possibly share a common space? After all, the students haven't yet been introduced to the new space. That's what the class is for. So what's there to argue about? Nothing at all. So I asked students not to spend their energy understanding rather than arguing.  For my course — like any real course, I assume — not only introduced a new space but a different conception of space. 

Here, in this rhetorical space, there is no established common ground ever or anywhere. Yes, there is this world. But we necessarily know it — see it, think it, speak it — from our particular vantage point. There are no grand issues that stand outside time and space. Everything is historical. Everything is perspectival.

Everything, in fact, is an argument. This is not to say that everything is contentious — that is only one possible mode of an argument. No, an argument is the assertion of a perspective. And everything — every person, rock, idea, pixel, mood — is the assertion of a perspective. Each thing — visible or invisible, organic or inorganic — declares: I go like this! 

The world is an infinite proliferation of perspectives, each thing declaring in an impossibly complex baroque harmony — equal parts resonance and dissonance — I go like this! So what's there to argue about? 

Of course, there are some things that say: I go like this so you should go like this! We call these fascists or cancer or sanctimonious pricks or moral, faux religious douchebags. And they often need to be dealt with — but not argued with.

The thing is, students are often taught that a good student argues, giving the teacher a run for his money. We get this, I believe, from a crappy reading of Plato. Socrates seems to argue with folks and, at the end, they've learned! But that's not what happens in those dialogues at all. Socrates just nudges everyone until they're no longer sure of themselves — and then everyone walks away knowing nothing. That is, Socrates uses argument not as a way to know but as a way not to know.

Now, a contentious argument may be fun for some people. They enjoy getting all worked up, feeling like there is a right and wrong. And you know what? This can be a productive release for all of us at some point or another. But as an essential element of education? Egad, no!

Few things are as soul crushingly boring as a contentious argument. Both parties get all worked up, spewing this and that, each getting more pissed off at the other. The so-called debate around the so-called issue of abortion is a great example (I still can't get over that it's called "abortion" — the stopping of something in progress. Shift focus to the woman's menstrual cycle, for instance, and it's no longer an abortion but a renaissance. Anyway....). The so-called pro-life movement and the so-called pro-choice movement are not speaking to each other. From the perspective of each, the other is insane. What's there to argue about?

This is the reason for a structured legal system: it creates a common space that allows contentious argument to take place.  But outside of the courtroom? Arguments get everyone involved nowhere at all. If I don't like someone's way of going, if I find it destructive or ugly, I walk away. Indifference can be quite powerful — at least in maintaining one's well being. 

Are there situations in which an argument needs to be met head on, when waking away just feeds it? Of course. This is what political resistance is all about. To wit, Occupy's reaction to unfettered capitalist greed. Occupy didn't argue. It, well, occupied — which is to say, it went a certain way that interfered with the way capitalism goes (capitalism demands labor and unquestioned consumption; occupy refused both). 

Now, I never asked my students to agree with me or like me or adhere to my world view. I could care less either way. But I did ask that they understand what I was saying. And arguing doesn't lead to understanding — or to much of anything other than ruddy cheeks and sweaty pits while adding just a little more bile and banality to the world. 

On Language, Texting, & Being

I can speak some French. I took it all through school but learned it mostly when writing my dissertation which involved several French books that were, at the time, not yet translated. And for the books that were translated, I read the French not for accuracy per se but to get a sense for the writing — its style, its rhythm, its mode of being. 

Now, I love translations. I find the act of translation as amazing and erotic (such intimacy with another) as it is impossible (however actual). Nevertheless, the two books side by side — one in English, the other in French — are two different characters.

Anyway, at that point, my French wasn't terrible (this was 15 years ago).  But I refused to speak it. Uttering the words contorted my body, and my self, in ways that just never felt right. Even before hearing the words leave my mouth, as my mind and throat and mouth twisted and pleated to mutter, "Oui, et tu?" everything in me would begin to recoil as if I'd ingested some poison.

We imagine, perhaps, that language is a tool much as, say, a hammer is. I want to express myself so I grab this or that word and, voilà, I've communicated.

But that's not how language works. Language inhabits us, infiltrating our thoughts and bodies, coercing ideas and movements, choreographing our experiences. This is why William Burroughs calls language a virus: it lives in us, it needs us, it feeds on us.  No, language is not a tool: it is a miasmatic, hegemonic control force.

And each language is different, asks different things of us — the French tu wants something different from me than the German du and, in the process, makes something different of me. In college, my friend Matthew took the intro to several languages. In each class, students chose a name in the language of that class and Matt, to get in character, chose a different name for each. Walking through campus with him was strange as random students would address him alternately as Wolfgang, Wang, Esteban, Pierre, Achmed. 

When I was in grad school, I had to prove proficiency in two languages so, other than French, I chose classical Greek.  Or, rather, I tried to.

Berkeley has these language workshops over the summer. The Greek workshop is, in very small, nerdy circles, legendary.  The class meets six hours a day, five days a week, for 10 weeks. That's not so bad until you take into consideration the homework — it takes another 4-6 hours a day. I, of course, didn't believe them when they told me this. If they say 4-6, they really mean around two hours, maybe. I've always been fast like that.

Oh, was I wrong. Classical Greek is a beast of, well, mythological proportions, endlessly inflected with only general rules to guide you. So you simply have to memorize them all (simple, yes; easy, no — a crucial distinction). And it tore me asunder. In three days. At the end of which, I found myself on a curb, weeping. I'm not kidding. The language wanted all of me. It was literally killing me. So I took German — four hours a day, five days a week, eight weeks. And about an hour of homework. Really.

Now, after Greek, German was easy. Still, I found it exceedingly difficult to speak — not because it's a hard language but because I couldn't find myself in it. It wanted me to be something else, someone else. As the class involved a lot of conversation, this posed a particular challenge for me.

So I let the German wind through me until it found a voice. And what it found, to this day, surprises me: it found some fey, Weimar, proto-SS gay dude. All semester, I spoke German in this demented drawl verging on falsetto. My classmates, I assume, loathed me — and rightfully so. I'm not sure where it even came from — some distant memory of watching Cabaret?

Which brings me to textese — that language of abbreviation, icons, and emoticons: LOL, brb, ppl, diff, probly, u.  Now, I love much of this language. Or, rather, I love that this language exists, that one language has been distributed by a technology and birthed a new language, a language within the language. But of course that's all language is: lots of little languages (Deleuze and Guattari might call these "minor" languages).

There are people who mock and disdain textese as some sort of bastardization or dumbing down. That's absurd and, well, stupid. There is no such thing as "real" language. So much of the so-called grammatical rules are arbitrary or, rather, ideological. They try to keep subjects in their place and everything qualified just so with nothing left to dangle. So-called proper English is uptight, antiquated bourgeois English.  It's meant to be broken, tweaked, distorted for other ends and purposes. Enter textese.

And yet I refrain from "speaking" this minor language. I type out "you" and "people" and "probably." I don't write, LOL. I write, "That's hilarious."  At least usually I do.  I have found that occasion has demanded something different so I've been know to write, "Ha!" Which is my attempt at finding myself amidst these currents of SMS. 

My resistance is neither ideological nor aesthetic. I have no moral problem with textese and I find much of its patois charming. No, I can't do it for the same reason I can't speak French: textese wants me to be something, to be someone, I am not. A 23 year old girl? A high school dude from Fremont? I don't know. But I do know that it has yet to find a place within me.

And so, perhaps foolishly, I am left typing the language of textese's more formal forefathers. But such is my character: I like to sprawl, to whisper asides, to carry on in would-be purple splendor. And textese, for all its charms, will not have none of that. Alas, then, I speak what I am. And vice versa.