ID v. ID

. . . and let's not forget the abbreviation thereof: ID. Follow the metonyms and . . . identity, right? Easy enough, but is that sort of semantic connection as contentless as the "science" it leads away from (or straight towards, depending on your reasoning)?

Maybe.

Intelligent Design is a kind of identity politic in that it attempts to gird the whispy strands of our acids with concrete purpose. We were "designed" with purpose, after a certain image, therefore towards an end, or at an end even at the moment of that end's beginning. It counters the counterintuitive, sort-of-anarchic-but-not-really-when-you-think-about-it, trial by fire survivalism of Darwin, but not without, of course, introducing its own kind of anarchy.

As philosopher Daniel Dennett points out, ID is not really a science so much as a rhetorical tactic; this much is clear even to people like me, who don't know much about science - like pornography, I'd like to think, "I know it when I see it." The Wedge Strategy supports the rhetorical nature of the whole schema in its own weird, brilliant, scary way. Dennett also notes the way that ID wedged its way into public discourse was by somehow conjuring a "controversy" out of thin air: misunderstand a theory, provoke real scientists into arguing with you about it, then claim that, since there was an argument, there must be a controversy. The moment when rhetoric displaces evidence (and it's been a long fucking moment) is the same moment ideas cease to matter in and of themselves, or in the work they do as ideas. Ideas, evidence, rigor of any kind become the middle balls in a Newton's Cradle sitting on the desk of a Washington puppet grovelling after Special Interest campaign contributions. Political force uses them simply as carriers to cover up the source of momentum. Maybe this is why powerful men play pool in the movies.

ID's pathways are hardly circuitous, barely covered up: we want our identity, we want our God-given sense of purpose, we want to feel like we were made by Michaelangelo, not John Cage. And so many are willing to pay the price not by lowering the standards, but by changing the standards of standards (to steal a move from Louis Menand). We no longer want to look at ugly, messy, complicated evidence - we don't want to induce. We want to deduce - to find the truth we "feel" is right and hammer a pivot there in order that we might stay anchored, stable, able to claim our identity, rebuilding the streets around us to bring it all within our minute radius, leaving it all, everything, in excess of our grasp.

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EPILOGUE

I had a roommate once. We got into a dispute because he didn't "feel it was right" that I let my girlfriend stay with me for a couple of months. She had nowhere else to go and she didn't have the money for a place of her own. Or a job. I told him that I covered her rent, and I paid her share of the bills, and she gave us a couch, a stereo, etc. Why, I asked, did he feel it was wrong? I asked him to express to me his reasoning. "Don't you ever feel anything?" he asked. I told him I did, but that I wouldn't necessarily expect other people to understand that, and if I wanted them to understand, I would inevitably have to explain to them some sort of line of thinking for why I felt the way I did, or it would make no sense. Explain it to me, I said again. He told me to close my eyes. I did and, while my eyes were closed, he pinched my arm. "What just happened?" he asked. "You pinched me," I said. Then he gave me a look of smug satisfaction, like we had solved the problem. Because he "felt" something and I also "felt" things (though not necessarily the same things he felt). He has a feeling, therefore it should be treated with the matter-of-factness of, well, a fact, treated as evidence that there was something wrong. I walked out of the room.

Life Kinks: Fundamentalist Conservative Jerk-Offs

Cut your jeans off at the thigh and flex your track marks, it's time to go to NYC for a few days. But before I take off, I would like to note that Pat Robertson is now and always has been a fucking asshole. And he looks like a Planet of the Apes cast-away. Go back to your ape planet, you ape asshole! And take the Kansas State School Board with you. You can all go hang out in the icy nether-regions of space and not evolve together. Me, I'm working on evolving myself a third middle finger just for you guys.

EDIT: If anybody misses the sound of Trent Lott's voice, here's the Grand Dragon himself spinning his wheels on Iraq. How do we stop terrorism, Mr. Lott? "Let's hope [the terrorists] choose a different lot in life." "Hope" as a defense strategy? [Slow, Solemn Clapping]

Life Kinks: Cliche

Recently a (now former) co-worker of mine let fly with the old bromide, "Great minds think alike," as we both washed our hands after using the restroom. While I imagine the comment would have carried with it a different weight had the situation been different (like say if we spontaneously began washing each other's hands), in context it was, regrettably, a cliche. I found myself sort of furious afterwards, moreso than usual, and I realized there was no good response. After thinking about it a bit more, I think it's because there actually is no good response to any cliche, which is ultimately what makes them so horrible.

If you're the kind of person who isn't into confrontation, and somebody mutters "One in the hand is worth two in the bush," you either force out a chuckle while restraining a vomit (which, by the way, is a superb display of precise muscular control if you can pull it off - if not, it's awkward but appropriate), or simply nod your head in assent. The only other option is say nothing, or go off on some sanctimonious tirade about the stupidity of cliches (and nobody wants to hear about that). And then, once attaining your consent that, yes, in fact the ancients were right, one in the hand is worth two in the bush, the other person walks off feeling all superior and smart (if they're one of those assholes who really believes that cliches mean anything) while you sit there slack-jawed. Or you vomit on them.

Unfortunately, this also grants cliches an unseemly and cheap rhetorical power - suddenly the debate is reconfigured into the cliche's terms and you have to argue your way out of a pre-fab "universal truth," or at least something that is true in the way that things that don't die are considered true simply because they're alive, which is to say they are self-evident in the most irreducible way - I see them and unless you want to get into some kind of pseudo-phenomenological debate about perception or Matrixy "How do you know this isn't the dream?" bullshit, they're real. What I'm trying to say is that cliches have not only lost the kind of specialness that comes with originality, wit, creativity, & c., but that they've also lost, in a strange paradox that you may or may not believe, despite they're being, at base, metaphors, and therefore always in the realm of abstraction, too concrete for language and devoid of that multi-valent translucence that makes words and strings of words special and good. Which I guess is why I've always sort of bristled at them (while sometimes trying to ironize them): they're like the crusty old neocons of language, which is reason enough to stick your finger down your throat.

Breaking News for Dorks

Mark Z. Danielewski, author of House of Leaves, has announced, er, something. In what looks like a real, honest-to-God post on the House of Leaves message board, Danielewski is apparently soliciting ideas from his notoriously obsessive fans (myself among them) for inclusion in his latest project to be entitled That. Maybe. The man is pretty enigmatic in general, though, so this could all be a hoax or just a bored whim. But if not . . . I'm so excited, I'm practically eating the pig off the spit.

Reading: Harry Potter

(Obsessively) reading Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince over the course of the last few days, I've often had pause to stop and think about what makes it so good, and in what ways it is good. It's not the kind of good that requires the use of the OED, or that entangles you in an elegant matrix of intertextual references and allusions, or even that will teach you any kind of important lesson, but the reading experience itself takes hold with the savage urgency of an addiction. So much of the pleasure (for me, anyway) seems to come from an almost physiological reaction to the text - I read HPHBP as soon as I can, whenever I can, feel annoyed and irritable when I am deprived of it before I'm ready to stop reading, and immerse myself in it as a kind of fantasy that just doesn't take shape with other books, even those I genuinely love.

Much of this pleasure simply comes from the amount of space J.K. Rowlings devotes to plot: the book is almost completely plot-driven, with probably 80% of the narrative devoted to exposition or to "first-order" plot advancement. In that way it's more like Hollywood cinema than a traditional novel: very little time given to the philosophical implications of the characters' decisions, setting descriptions are brief and utilitarian, and character behavior is, more often than not, goal-oriented (and, in a kind of delightful move, Rowlings has included more and more uncommon words in each subsequent Potter novel, forcing its masses of addicted adolescent fans - and, at least once, me - to expand their vocabularies).

The effect of all of this is that actually putting the novel down in the middle feels odd. On the level of the sentence, there's not much happening - no virtuoso displays of wordsmithery, no elegant, heartbreaking turns of phrase, just sheer narrative muscle. When a phone call interrupts your reading the entire point of reading a Harry Potter novel has also been suspended; you haven't got anything out of it because the only thing worth getting out of it is getting everything it has in it out of it; it's much more about the story than the discourse.

And of course it's very satisfying when you finish because what you've finished is the long, tortured thought that is the book in its entirety. Each sentence is a building block, unimportant without a picture of the entire structure. The teleology of reading such a novel is the drive to hammer home the keystone and erect the edifice in its totality. It's weird - this is not the type of novel I usually prefer to read.

The other thing, I think, that makes it so satisfying is how the magic in the novel functions. Magic in Harry Potter, in some sense, is the same as the writing that writes it - magic accomplishes tasks, and stands in for technology (that "magic" is just one of several elements in referential economy with the real situates Harry Potter in the realm of quasi-historical allegory anyway - but that's a different post). Magic is goal-oriented in much the same way as the characters and plot - all three can function as narrative pathways to a visible end. But the thing that makes it so absolutely satisfying is that it quantifies and "makes real" certain traits that usually have no concrete articulation. Words like "determination," "concentration," and the like usually, in my experience, simply mean "try harder." If I'm told that I'm not concentrating hard enough, or that I'm not determined enough, usually the person who is telling me to do those things is simply telling me to do whatever it was that I was doing before, only moreso. In the world of Harry Potter, though, it's different. Apparition, for example, is a verb as well as a noun in the world of the novel. To "apparate" is basically to teleport from one place to another. One of the things you have to do is "determine" where you want to apparate - that is, determination is a force you exert mentally. Now, usually this would mean "determine where you want to go, and use some other tool to get there," but in the case of Harry Potter determination itself, fierce concentration on a destination, will get you there. There is no medium through which determination moves - it is the agent of change in no abstract sense.

Going back, this seems to be another clue as to the reason why I personally feel so sucked in by the novels (aside from a few political reasons). The magic in Harry Potter, one of its biggest draws, is a code word for the unmediated realization of intellectual potential. Of course it is mediated is certain other ways, but by and large I get the sense that magic is a kind of metaphysical meritocracy whereby those who are born with natural talent excel, but those without are given the necessary tools to bring themselves up to snuff. Imagine, then, if among the multivalent meanings of "magic," one of them is in fact technology - imagine how we would live if we were forced to create that technology on our own, if, in some sense, its existence were predicated on whether or not it could be reproduced from the ground up by the individual. In a way Harry Potter itself builds and rebuilds this alternate technological model with each novel, suggesting that technology is not, in fact, an accumulation of better, faster, cleaner machines that come clunking to us through history; rather it may be the case that technology is the story we tell ourselves in order to organize our own moments of creation around a sleeker narrative, one clearly defined and teleological, totally rational, and not in the least magical.

Aphorism v. Slogan

The difference between an aphorism and a slogan is about six words or one punctuation mark.

How To Disappear Incompletely

Let's say you work in the business district of a very large city. And let's say that, though you have no emotional investment in that sort of thing, you end up working in one of its many corporate offices because you're new to the town and you need a paycheck to balance out your financially reckless recent past. Inevitably you wear the bare minimum uniform: white, button-down shirt, "slacks," black leather shoes, & c.

And inevitably you find that certain kinds of people who would maybe give you a second glance if you were walking around in what you normally wear (which outfit is really no big deal, but does set off certain signal flairs as to probable tastes in music, film, books, sex, and casual dining), regard you as a kind of pervasive, fine mist.

We've all had to do it, to a greater or lesser degree, and with a greater or lesser degree of enthusiasm. It's vaguely discomforting at best and completely shattering at worst. You feel as if a certain structure of which you have become a nodular automaton has bent you into an elbow in its pipework. So you get depressed and drink too much when you get home, and try as best you can to make the most of that suppressed impulsiveness you have to stifle.

But this sort of atmosphere IS conducive to some other thing, which you wouldn't really quite expect, and that is a kind of freedom afforded the invisible. In other words, you start your stint at this corporation sort of whistling to yourself on the elevator to pass the time, pausing to swallow hard as you ascend and the pressure inside your skull bulges out against the thinning pressure in the elevator. And then, as weeks pass and you get more comfortable, you suddenly find yourself humming, then half-singing, and then practically belting as you walk down the halls because, well, who the fuck knows who you are anyway? And what difference does it make? And why not wear the same thing every day, week in and week out? These are sort of nihilistic freedoms, sure, but freedoms afforded by committing yourself to the anonymity so necessary to that corporate dimension in which you are stranded, starving, a throbbing, pink brain in a remote-controlled body.

Tips for Drinking

How to transmogrify cheap, plastic bottle, Winner's Cup-grade vodka into something somewhere between Absolut and Grey Goose:

1) Buy one (1) handle of cheap, plastic bottle, Winner's Cup grade vodka.

2) Pour contents of bottle into Brita pitcher filtration system. Allow contents to filter.

3) After filtration, pour contents of Brita pitcher into a separate container.

4) Pour contents of container BACK through Brita pitcher filtration system.

5) Repeat filtration upwards of twenty (20) times.

6) Enjoy a delightful, smooth, cheap vodka. And some weird-tasting water.

The things you lose of course (besides some memories of large portions of the evening) are the peripheral pleasures of drinking good vodka - the pleasure of the liquor store guy nodding his head in approval, the pleasure of removing a cork instead of a screw-off cap, the pleasure of casually mentioning to friends that you drained a bottle of Belvedere the previous evening like "What, that's how I roll." & c.

Paradoxically, it seems almost ludicrous NOT to blow your fucking lid when telling everyone within drunken rambling distance that you practically bootlegged some top shelf shit, pulled some frog/prince magic, and with one pass through the charcoal guts of your very own home purifyin' machine produced the frosty life-blood of Russia right in your very own kitchen. Good vodka is just expensive. Brita vodka is magic.