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2003-10-03 16:01 (UTC+1)
From the Ig Nobel prize
awards:
This year's medicine prize went to a team from University College
London, UK, who wrote a report in the journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences showing that taxi drivers have a larger
hippocampus compared with other people.
This is a part of the brain associated with navigation in birds
and animals.
The scientists also found part of the hippocampus grew larger as the
taxi drivers spent more time in the job.
I thought the Ig Nobels were meant to be for rubbishes, and that
research wasn't at all a rubbish, ack-chew-erly it was jolly
good, and was previoused previously.
I'm now going to go and take my body clock away and get it very drunk
and see if that helps, and I'll be back Monday.
[Permalink]
2003-10-03 10:36 (UTC+1)
Wikipedia seems to be coming
of age, considerably helped by the information-hoarding business model
that their competitors employ. Not only do Wikipedia results enjoy
Google's patronage (and if Google can't find you, can you really be
sure you exist?), the articles are often quite helpful, and the
internal hyperlinkage is exactly what it should be, rather than the
more usual retrofit.
Here, then, for my future referencing convenience (my future self
is often my intended audience here - it's like time travel, only less
so) are some excerpts from their article on Edward Bernays:
Born in Vienna, Bernays was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, the father of
psychoanalysis, and his public relations efforts helped popularize
Freuds theories in the United States. Bernays also pioneered the PR
industry's use of psychology and other social sciences to design its
public persuasion campaigns. "If we understand the mechanism and
motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment
the masses according to our will without their knowing it," Bernays
argued. He called this scientific technique of opinion molding the
"engineering of consent."
[...]
Bernays defined the profession of "counsel on public relations" as a
"practicing social scientist" whose "competence is like that of the
industrial engineer, the management engineer, or the investment
counselor in their respective fields." To assist clients, PR
counselors used "understanding of the behavioral sciences and applying
them?sociology, social psychology, anthropology, history, etc." In
Propaganda, his most important book, Bernays argued that the
scientific manipulation of public opinion was necessary to overcome
chaos and conflict in society: "The conscious and intelligent
manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an
important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this
unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which
is the true ruling power of our country. ... We are governed, our
minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by
men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in
which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human
beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a
smoothly functioning society. ... In almost every act of our daily
lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social
conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively
small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and
social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which
control the public mind."
It's that and the orbiting mind control lasers, of course. (But
remember: There Are No Black Helicopters. Please return to your
homes.)
Also, I can't resist this from the always fair and balanced
Fox News:
Adolf Hitler once observed that it was easier to convince people of a
"big lie" repeated often enough than it was to deceive them with a lot
of small ones.
In their frenzied bid to displace President Bush in 2004, leading
Democrats have evidently taken to heart this tip from one of the
world's most successful propagandists.
Fox News, we salute you! (No, the one-fingered kind, silly.)
The slogan "A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth" is usually
attributed to Mr Goebbels, of course, but the doctrine of the
Big Lie [Wikipedia
again], which is also often attributed to Goebbels, really was his
boss's. The theme of repetition does seem to be Goebbels's:
"The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we
imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and
repetitious."
-Joseph Goebbels - Nazi Minister of Propaganda
"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success
unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly . . . it
must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."
-Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda
but it would appear that the final polished form of the maxim
owes much to the communal meme-mixer of the masses. Is it World Irony
Day, by any chance?
[Permalink]
2003-10-02 16:33
Dronning Margrethe of Danmark, who was after all presumably once a
prinsess, gives an interview to Point de Vue this week (in French, and
who bets her French is better than Prinshenrik's Danish? I bets for
one!) about her new exhibition of painting. And the interview is
actually quite interesting, and the art is substantially better (to my
eyes) than the usual celeb watercolour bollocks (McCartney, Prince
Charles, etc.)
But I don't have the magazine to hand to transcribe any of it for you,
and the
web
preview doesn't do justice to the art, and the Knudella saga and
jet lag have probably softened my spicy brain to the point that you
should take no notice of anything I say anyway.
[Permalink]
2003-10-02 11:56
From the New! York! Times! in a rare outbreak
of fitness to print
There have been a number of fine books on consciousness in the last
dozen years, starting with Daniel Dennett's ''Consciousness
Explained,'' which was written from the standpoint of a philosopher
well versed in cognitive sciences and evolution. I am also fond of
''The Feeling of What Happens,'' by Antonio Damasio. Like Zeman,
Damasio is a neurologist steeped in both literature and
philosophy. But Zeman's ''Consciousness'' is the broader book, the one
that could be used in an undergraduate humanities or psychology course
to fill in the neuroscience background for readers coming to it for
the first time. Indeed, Zeman first introduces his subject and then
spends a hundred pages on neurobiology and human evolution before
returning to consciousness. Readers impatient for consciousness per se
can skim these chapters without losing the thread, though they are
relatively painless introductions to what consciousness is built atop
of.
(The reviewer is a neurolobiologiste too, so he's entitled to his
public displays of fondnesses.)
And why not wash it down with a draft of not-quite manifesto
by Francisco J. Varela, untimelilly late father of neurophenomenology?
[NYT linkage via PF]
[Permalink]
2003-10-01 14:14
It was of course king Knud ("Canute") who was unable to resist the
power of the tides, but today the tables are turned: there's a wave of
Knudella (probably no relation) fever that the whole of Denmark that
is powerless to resist!
A hotdog van named Knudella,
how romantique!
The only trouble is they're having a little bit of
trouble
with her name:
�Kronprinseparret�, der er p� en hemmelig rejse kommer hjem i n�ste
uge, siger Frederiks hofchef Per Thornit. Han siger ogs�, at Frederiks
folovede, der hedder Mary Elizabeth Donaldson, ikke skal kaldes sit
m�ske mere kongelige navn, Mary Elizabeth, men slet og ret Mary, som
det udtales p� engelsk.
[The "Kronprins couple" who are on a secret trip are coming home next
week, says Frederik [Fred]'s courtboss Elisabeth Tarras-Wahlberg Per
Thornit. He also says that Frederik [Fred]'s fianc�e, who is called
Mary Elizabeth Donaldson, isn't going to be called by the perhaps
more regal name of, Mary Elizabeth, but plain and simple Mary, as it's
pronounced in English.]
But I thought she wasn't Officially Officially his Official Fianc�e until a
week today (which is which the 8th is). I could almost have forgiven
them not calling her Knudella if everyone promised to pronounce "Mary"
with their broadest Comedy Strine accent, but it doesn't look like
they're even going to do that.
The upside is that she is going to be a prinsess (we like prinsesser!)
and marry a prins in a big big church and ride in a carriage with
horses and wear a really posh frock and (probably) live in a castle
and everything. And we're going to get lots of Danish practice
along the way, for sure. (BT is certainly rising to the occasion,
well done them!)
[Permalink]
2003-10-01 9:44 (UTC+1)
The revolution will be synthesised.
386 DX (a speech synthesiser) sings California
Dreamin', Anarchy
in the UK, more.
[via Uncle
Jazzbeau]
[Permalink]
2003-09-30 13:50 (UTC+1)
The Grauniad has an extract
from Terry Eagleton's new book:
The golden age of cultural theory is long past. The pioneering works
of Jacques Lacan, Claude L�vi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes
and Michel Foucault are several decades behind us. But there can be no
going back to an age when it was enough to pronounce Keats delectable
or Milton a doughty spirit. If "theory" means a reasonably systematic
reflection on our guiding assumptions, it remains as indispensable as
ever.
I've actually always thought "theory" meant half-arsed philosophising
by persons who would rather wibble on about Keats or Madonna (yeah,
well, my experience of "theory" was an late 80's/early 90's thing, by
which time the Keats people had finally twigged to Madonna) than do
the work of reading Heidegger or Kant. (And after all we should
first perhaps problematise the system of cultural practice involved in
such a construction of philosophical seriousness, is it not?)
And there follows plenty of perfectly good satisfying Eagleton fare.
I know it's rather pass� - although to be honest I don't really keep
up with the scene these days - but I am still partial to a bit of
Eagleton: I simply adore the way he accessorises his
(faux-or-real?) earnest post-colonialist Marxist sermons with random
bits of Shakespeare read in a style that's just pure vintage
Heideggerian intrinsic finitude of the necessarily embodied subject
and authentic Being towards death:
In the course of the drama, Lear will learn it is preferable to be a
modestly determinate "something" than a vacuously global
"all". [... This] is because he [King Lear] is forced up against the
brute recalcitrance of nature, which terrorises him into finally
embracing his own finitude. [...]
[...] Only when this paranoid monarch accepts that he stinks of
mortality will he be en route to redemption.
This is all straight out of Heidegger 101, but there is no explicit
shout out to our ugly and politically suspect German acquaintance at
any point in the piece. Possibly it's the whole ex-Nazi thing, or
possibly the H-ster's notorious prematurely post-ironic nouveau-na�ve
bopping to Gerry and the Pacemakers in lederhosen (I mean,
really!) on the post-conference clubbing scene that counted against
him, one never knows. But aside from this glitch Eagleton remains a
solid brand - a brand you can trust:
Postmodernism is obsessed by the body and terrified of biology. The
body is a wildly popular topic in US cultural studies - but this is
the plastic, remouldable, socially constructed body, not the piece of
matter that sickens and dies. The creature who emerges from postmodern
thought is centreless, hedonistic, self-inventing, ceaselessly
adaptive. He sounds more like a Los Angeles media executive than an
Indonesian fisherman. Postmodernists oppose universality, and well
they might: nothing is more parochial than the kind of human being
they admire.
Heh.
It probably reflects poorly, though, on my critique of the social
practices of my own construction of philosophical seriousness that I
think Eagleton could afford to find a more challenging pond in which
to be a fish of sizefulness. (Oh, what shaming magno-piscocentricism!
But I must be "true" to "myself"!)
No, but really, I don't get it, and given some time and effort I could
probably have a go at not getting it from a Marxist perspective.
Roughly, I think the moral shallowness and intellectual inanity that
typifies so much of American "Cultural Studies" (and I have to focus
on my centering mantra of "Bourdieu, Baskets, Bourdieu..." to even
type that without sneering) is precisely because the American
intellectuals are irrelevant to American politics, and irrelevance
breeds irresponsibility. (Lack of power can also corrupt as is less frequently remarked because, frankly, who cares?)
French and German intellectuals operate
within a tradition that expects and allows them to have an influence -
Dominique de Villepin (the French foreign minister noted for his
eloquent savaging of the US's war resolution at the UN) recently
published a well-received critical study of his favourite verse (which
is all, like, Mallarm� and stuff) and the education minister Luc Ferry
is also a philosopher noted for his critiques of most of Eagleton's
gallery soixante-huitard, while in Germany serious newspapers give
space to Surgin' J�rgen Habermas, and note is taken of what he has to
say.
In the FBRUSA, meanwhile, Fox News is setting the political agenda and
a nation of semiotically self-sufficient voters has problematized the
cultural practices that assign political gravitas to pointed-headed
intellectuals to its own satisfaction (and those of the Forces of
Darkness, for sure) if not that of said intellectuals. And what's
worse, many of those voters (and Darknessistes) are as resolutely
convinced of their own moral seriousness as anyone could possibly hope
for.
As for me, the contempt I have for elites is fairly evenly matched
with that I have for the mob, but as a British citizen my birth-right
includes an exquisitely nuanced sensitivity of irony. (No, it doesn't
help much, thanks for asking. What have you got?)
[Permalink]
2003-09-30 10:37
Or not. This may be official, even officially official, but it isn't Officially Official:
"I can't give a firm date for the marriage yet, but it will take place
next year," the prince's private secratary Per Thornit told Reuters
news agency.
Queen Margrethe is due to formally approve the marriage on 8 October
when the couple publicly announce their engagement.
On the one hand it is very sweet of them to delay the Official
Officialities until I got back from the FBRUSA*, but on the other
hand, what is with this Official Announcement of Official
Announcements? If this gets any more recursively self-referential
there's a serious risk of my stack overflowing, and believe me, Varied
Reader, this is not a thing you would want to witness.
The announcement was timed
[dk] to stitch the sladdebladen up a treat, and I am also treating it
as suspicious.
Other announcementing:
[no]
[se] and Kronprinsfred's web site's shiny new
Knudella
page [en, bizarrely].
I was going to ask where all the photos of Knudella's new
jumbo-sparkly were (royalty isn't supposed to be elegantly understated
in jewellry, for sure - vulgar and ostentatious juxtaposes ever so
nicely with Consummate Regal Poise), but now that I know that this
isn't Officially Official I won't bother. I will bother to
remark that this can't possibly be anticlimactic, since (a) it hasn't
actually happened yet, and (b) en f�rlovning partakes not of the
climax-nature, but is in fact the cue for a gradual crescendo of
excitement and anticipation which culminates in the br�llop
itself. I'm all tingly now, goodness knows what kind of a shape I'll
be in come the 8th of October Official Display of Sparklitude and
Beatific Smilage...
[Many thanks to the guestbladeteers for filling in in this difficult and
sensitive time - all links are from their efforts, hurrah!]
* It's now the "Fair and Balanced Republic". 'Nuff said.
[Permalink]
2003-09-30 09:41
For a long time Anglophone philosophers held that Heidegger was an
ugly, fat Nazi with a prose style that would make a dog laugh and a
blatant philosophical charlatan, while continental philosophers held that
Heidegger was a homely, well-built chap with an idiosyncratic turn
of phrase who made some unfortunate political choices under difficult
circumstances and probably the most important philosopher of the 20th
century.
So, one important advantage of this introduction for the politically
anxious reader is that its author was French and Jewish and spent time
at the wrong end of the Gestapo's hospitality before escaping to
America and is therefore fairly unlikely to be a fellow traveller of
the less admirable tendencies in Heidegger's thought.
The book was published in 1997 but based on reconstruction from
students' notes of a course Wahl gave on Heidegger's philosophy based
on notes he himself had taken in a course the latter gave in the
winter semester of 1928/9. (The reconstructed notes of the original
German course have now also been published, and if I read German I
would probably want to compare them.) So not only do you get Wahl's
version of Heidegger, you get intermittent patches of critique and
comparisons to other, better-known philosophers like Bergson and
Kierkegaard, and you get Wahl's French translation of
Heidegger's terminology. (There are more than enough notes to allow
comparativeology.)
To the reader with some familiarity with orthodox phenomenology the
first half (on the relationship between philosophy and science) looks
a lot like a Husserlian investigation of the essence of personhood in
everyday life, but to a Heideggerian it would probably look like a
critique of the Husserlian transcendental subject. I expect I'll end
up converting to a Heideggerian viewpoint eventually, but certainly
not on a first date, good heavens, no.
En somme nous ne pouvons pas dire que la th�orie de Heidegger sur les
rapports de la philosophie et de la science puisse se comparer, pour
la profondeur, en g�n�ral, et la pr�cision, aux grandes th�ories des
rapports de la philosophie et la science. Mentionnons, par exemple,
celle de Platon, celle de Descartes, celle de Kant et celle de
Bergson.
[All in all, we can't say that Heidegger's theory on the relationship
between philosophy and science can be compared for profundity in
general and precision with the great theories of the relationship
between philosophy and science. For example, we may mention those of
Plato, Descartes, Kant and Bergson.]
Part two concerns the relationship between philosophy and "world-view"
(vision-du-monde/weltanshauung) and this is much newer
to me. I like it a lot because parts of it happen look on first
reading as though they align with some of my most deeply held
prejudices: I have been looking for a long time to find an excuse to
announce that philosophy is mythology scandalised by an encounter with
its historicity, and there are patches of the second half that look
close enough. (I was too drunk on the plane to be bothered to note
down which, though - hurrah for BA and gin and tonicses! - and I can't
find them just now.) And I like the whole
thrownness/geworfenheit/�tre-jet� thing (carelessly, the
fact that persons always find themselves in the middle of a situation
which is very not necessarily that of disinterested reflection). And
all this ties in well (I think probably better than Wahl admits) with
the finitude and circle of openness (Umkries) that were most
novel (to me) in the first half.
I may not be a Heideggerian yet, and now that I'm sober and jet-lagged
I may not be especially clear about what I read when I was tired and
drunk, but I certainly feel introduced, and that's all the title
promised, and it's all I was really looking for at this stage.
[Permalink]
2003-09-29 13:35
One San Diego trolley bus, one double-decker Amtrak, 3 LA metro trains, one
airport shuttle bus, one 747, one overpriced Heathrow Flyer, one
clumpy old Great Western train to Bristol and a taxi back to the
ch�teau later, I am home, hoorah!
Or not - the bank at the station wouldn't give me any more money, and
when I got in the (key-meter-driven) electricity had run out and
anyway the shops were closed. So I groped my way to the candles and
drank the last of my Interstate 5 plonk from a San Diego zoo souvenir
plastic cup and crashed out again. (I slept on the plane also. Sleep
is good!)
The Bristol train did what the LA plane did, which is the most
annoying thing possible: it got to the end of its journey and then
stopped and waited for ages for a free space to dock. This is much
much worse than any other kind of delay, for sure, and especially so
at the end of a long trip.
I'll catch up with the Knudellabr�llopsaga shortly.
[Permalink]
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