A Sensitive Man

Typed with my tears.

[asensitiveman]

Two rather different things to say about proper names, presented without analysis

"The single main requirement for understanding a use of a proper name is that one thinks of the referent."

- Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference

"Perhaps names are no more than frozen laughter, as if evident nowadays in nicknames - the only ones that retain something of the original action of namegiving."

- Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment

[asensitiveman]

Roses are red//Violets are blue//There is nothing outside of the text//So let me inside you.

[asensitiveman]

Professor Foucault in the garb of a priest.

[asensitiveman]

Internet Start-Up

This is where the money is nowadays, so I am launching my own internet start-up. This will be a top investment opportunity for all of you people reading this. My company, Grotesque Machinations, will launch a top new app that will re-define the way we think about the internet.

A small child (source: every single newspaper in the world) has recently designed something called Summly, which uses an algorithm “based on evolution” to summarise parts of the internet as you search for something. Instead of having to click on a webpage and expend any of your valuable time sifting through all the information that the machine deems non-essential, you can use Summly to make it into a short series of bullet points. Exactly how this works, I don't know, but it sounds like if people actually started using it for things they needed information about then everyone would start talking like and having the opinions of a group of clumsy robots.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that the general trend in what apps do, what the internet makes us do, how it makes us engage with the world, is exemplified by this Summly thing: it is to make everything smaller, faster, more convenient and, ultimately, stupider. And lazier. (indeed, this thing was apparently invented by homeboy in order to help him revise for his History GCSEs, which btw I really hope he failed)

Whereas, my app, will be designed to do precisely the opposite. Where Summly contracts, Xpandr (for, that is the name of the app!) will expand; where Summly glosses over, Xpandr will obsess about the minutest details; where Summly allows you to quickly digest and move onto the next thing, Xpandr absorbs you in such impossible depth that you can do nothing else all day.

The internet is in fragments, but no fragment can ever grasp the whole. Summly only shatters these fragments still further, making the life-world even more damaged and cracked. Xpandr seeks to stick it back together, by moving all web pages closer to the whole. It uses a complex algorithm based on Schellingian organicism to take the bare, brief content that adorns your average website like earrings on a corpse and expands it outwards, giving you what the algorithm tells us is the related information, written in full and excellent prose, in order to move the original content closer towards the whole.

The app can be stopped at any point (in beta versions), but if you leave it, it will just keep running and running. The disadvantage of this is that no version I have yet designed of it has actually been able to move the content towards anything we might common-sensically recognise as 'the whole' (which I would take to be: the sum of all facts available everywhere on the internet): rather, entropy seems to set in, and nonsense is allowed to enter the system. Once it does this, the app ends up riffing on its own nonsense, spiralling further and further away from the whole until eventually we are just left with an infinite string of meaningless letters and other, increasingly alien symbols, which cannot be stopped without shutting the computer off manually.

One possibility is that this in fact is the whole that we are aiming for, and thus the entropy Xpandr allows in is precisely the desired effect. However, more research will be done, both computer-scientific and philosophical, in order to fully establish this.

This is a top investment opportunity and I am currently selling shares in Grotesque Machinations at £2000 a pop. Consider investing today.

[asensitiveman]

Everybody knows that Ed Miliband loves struggling rare based Labour leader mixtape

[asensitiveman]

On Thomson and Thompson, as Politicians

As with everything in and about Tintin, Thomson and Thompson are really interesting characters. They are a lot of things: as well as being identical (but not genuinely twin) idiots, they are: a) police and b) (at least in translation, idk about the original French, where they have different names) English: the only explicitly English characters out of the most frequently-recurring in the Tintin books (that is, Tintin, Snowy, Haddock, Calculus, the Thomsons).

Now, I have nothing at present to say about them being police, and I have only something rather biased about them being English: rather, what I want to bring out in this short piece is how to read Thomson and Thompson as being politicians, or rather, how to read politicians as being like Thomson and Thompson. Especially, perhaps, English/British politicians (this thought I have in this piece, primarily emerges from my meditating on their Englishness), but also, really, politicians generally at this moment (no more will be said on the question of nationality, but everything I have to say refers to my own national context, and who knows, maybe this idiotic Thomson-like mindset really does stretch back further for the English than it does for the Belgians, or the Germans, but I am not a cultural historian of this sort, and have nothing in particular to refer to, beyond perhaps Husserl's sarcastic use of 'common sense' in the original English).

Two starting points: the world is in deep crisis at the moment, and the Thomsons are blithering, unbelievable idiots (they always get everything wrong, they always get hurt, they always make everything more difficult for everyone else). I want to show that politicians are like the Thomsons, and thus explain (in part) the global crisis as being a result of the blithering idiocy of those responsible for running it, idiocy indeed that is analogous to that displayed in the Tintin books by the Thomsons.

What does the Thomsons' idiocy consist in? It is, I think, largely a result of their obliviousness. This obliviousness has two dimensions. Firstly, external: the Thomsons, when engaged with the world, continually do so in a way that is, without exception, incorrect: they continue down this incorrect path, with complete certainly, unreceptive to evidence, usually until they receive a physical injury of some sort (which, regardless of evidence, is usually enough to make them switch lanes). A typical example of this is in Land of Black Gold, where they immediately decide (p.4) that the epidemic of exploding car engines is due to the Autocart company doctoring the petrol (a not totally implausible hypothesis, of course, though it does in fact prove to be false) and proceed to get jobs with company to 'investigate', which eventually (amongst other escapades) results in them being thrown out of the shop when they accidentally explode their boss's tyres as they listen in on him (p.6).

Secondly, internal: in part symptomatic of their external obliviousness (of course, the two cannot be totally distinct, just read Kant's Refutation of Idealism), the Thomsons are primarily concerned with/caught up in issues resulting from their own misunderstandings in interpreting the 'state of play' in reality, misunderstandings that only they share. Thus, in Explorers on the Moon, when the engineer Wolff reveals himself as a mole, responsible for smuggling aboard the moon rocket a former foe of Tintin's, Colonel Jorgen, the Thomsons declare to everyone that they have “a vital question” and, rather than asking anything remotely intelligent, ask Wolff if he was “the skeleton” who the Thomsons (having been frightened by a model skeleton) arrested in Destination Moon (p.46): something that is not only totally ridiculous, but also something that only they care about (and more than this, despite being in a rocket on the moon that is slowly running out of oxygen: the only thing they care about). A further manifestation of this is their frequently-used “to be precise,” an apparent clarification that always makes whatever the other one just said more nonsensical, “A real stroke of luck hitting this road.” “To be precise: we've really had a stroke!” (Land of Black Gold, p.29)

(incidentally, Land of Black Gold features a whole long sequence where the Thomsons continually draw the wrong conclusions as to whether or not the phenomena they see in the desert is a mirage and end up diving into the sand one moment before kicking an Arab up the arse or driving their jeep into a lake the next; finally they even initially refuse to help Tintin at one point on the ground that he is a mirage, before realising that “mirages are seen but not heard” (p.33); perhaps the best Thomson mirage moment though is when the one exclaims: “Goodness gracious! A mirage!” and the other replies: “A mirage? Really? I thought they'd been abolished.” (p.19) – a perfect send-up of their ludicrous legalism)

Now, it does not take too much of a genius to see that this is really how the politician operates. The contemporary party-politician is not somebody who is engaged, properly speaking, with the world. They are simply not interested in the actual outcome of what they do, but rather are interested in what they do as moves in language-games in the politico-media 'chess board' (or a less lame image than that, or whatever). A particularly profound example of this is the recent Labour decision to endorse austerity. It is clear to anyone who understands anything about the world that 'austerity measures' are not a valid thing to pursue, economically. If we didn't already know that they would, theoretically, fail in the conditions of a recession (which by the way we did) then we know, empirically, now, that they will. They have failed, wherever they've been applied. And yet it is clear from recent Labour remarks like the famous ones by Ed 'pissing himself' Balls and these from Douglas 'stained with Cameron's piss' Alexander that at least the Labour party, and outside them 'the media' generally (being, the London-based print media) think/assume that in order to be 'credible on the economy', one must be seen to in some measure endorse austerity.

But it is only in the context of the language-game of parliamentary politics that such remarks could possibly make sense. People in the media, and people involved directly in Westminster politics, asssume, thanks to the 'terms of the game' that the Tories have set, internally of Westminster, that in order to be 'credible' on the economy, one needs to endorse austerity, and that up until now Labour have seemed 'not credible' because they have failed to do this. But in fact all the evidence out there in the world tells us – not even merely suggests, in fact tells us for certain – that austerity is not a good idea, even if you are 'the markets' (we often get “the markets are telling us” as an appeal to abstract authority) because the economy is hollowed-out and ready to collapse completely not just in part but in fact directly because of (as if even with the banking crisis it ought ever to have got this bad) government austerity measures. But every politician – Labour and Tory the same, only seperated by a mere brustling of the moustache and a lack of 'p' (as in Venezuela) – fails to recognise this because all they understand is their own particular set of coherence-norms in relation to the isolated Westminster community. And this is all the media, really, understands too. And this will, as with the Thomsons, persist until every politician physically falls down the stairs, or into a wall (i.e., the economy actually collapses and no one has any money and everyone is laid off).

(it is also not to be forgotten that whenever the Thomsons try to fit in, they fail abjectly. So, in The Blue Lotus they try to look like 'Chinamen' and dress up in ludicrously stereotyped early Qing dynasty outfits that lead to them being ridiculed by everyone (p.45); in Land of Black Gold they try to disguise themselves as sailors and dress in insanely anachronistic outfits complete with 'Titanic' written on their hats (p.7); in Destination Moon they appear in Byron-style 'Greek' outfits having asked the man in the costume shop for Syldavian outfits and apparently being cheated (p.19); this should of course remind us of the many attempts by 'the politician' to fit in with anyone ever, which they almost always fail at, William Hague in baseball cap)

(as a final note, we should comment that Herge took the Thomsons' 'look' from his father and his uncle, who were twins. The politician is, of course, always already a quite ridiculous father figure, who makes us want to cry: “No Dads!”)

[asensitiveman]

On Why The Orang-Utan Did It

So I recently read an article ('Nature's Book: The Language of Science in the American Renaissance' by David Van Leer, in Cunningham and Jardine (eds), Romanticism and the Sciences, 1990) which in part addressed the relationship between Edgar Allan Poe and natural science. And this got me thinking about 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue'. As every schoolboy knows, it is in this story that a) Poe invented modern detective fiction, and b) the murder – the first in modern detective fiction, let's just dwell on this for emphasis – is committed by an orang-utan. And the question that I'm particularly interested in is: why an orang-utan? Why is it that here, at the birth of one of the most fertile and fascinating forms of genre fiction, did Poe choose to have a psychotic ape do the killing? And I think it is by examining Poe's – and the detective story more generally's – relationship with/attitude towards the discourse surrounding Galilean natural science, i.e. the science that mathematises nature, that we can find a satisfactory solution to this mystery.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', for those who aren't familiar, takes place in Paris, and concerns the 'detective' (he's not actually a detective, he's a rather scruffy bookish fellow of some sort of lapsed noble origin who the narrator, apparently Poe himself, meets in an “obscure library” in Montmarte) C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin is possessed of a “peculiar analytic ability” much like that of Sherlock Holmes: in fact, since the story is narrated by someone (the fictionalised Poe) who lives with him, always impressed at his abilities, and since the character is similarly 'rational', 'unemotional', detached from the rest of humanity, always outsmarting the police etc it is pretty much clear that Arthur Conan Doyle just xeroxed the character and transferred him to London.

The murders themselves are of a mother and daughter, who have been brutally killed in their apartments, in a crime of no apparent motive: the mother has had her throat cut and is found on the ground outside (the head falls off when they try to lift it) and the daughter is strangled and stuffed in the chimney; a large sum of money has been left in the house. At the time of the murder, two voices were heard: one gruff, of a Frenchman, saying words suggesting astonishment; another shrill and incomprehensible, it is always presented by the witnesses (the accounts are gone through one-by-one, 'from the newspaper') as being of a foreigner, though never a foreigner whose language they speak.

The police (being the police) don't seem to have a clue, but anyway they arrest a clerk named Adolphe Le Bon, who is apparently a friend of Dupin's. So he resolves to work out using his analytical abilities what really happened. After a lengthy exposition, he concludes (based in part of the size of the hands needed to produce the marks on the daughter's neck) that the crime must have been committed by an orang-utan, and places an advert in the newspaper claiming to have caught an escaped orang-utan. When the owner shows up, his testimony confirms Dupin's reasoning: he is a sailor who has brought the ape back from a voyage to Borneo, hoping to sell it. The sailor tells of how he returned home the night of the murders to find the ape escaped from his cage, lathered up in shaving foam, preparing to shave (in imitation of his owner). Upon being discovered, the orang-utan escapes out the window, razor still in hand, and finds his way to the house of the murders. The sailor, chasing the orang-utan, climbs up the lightning-rod and sees the ape kill the women: the ape kills the mother in the act of trying to imitate a barber, and then kills the daughter apparently to cover up the accident.

The Detective as Scientist

In detective stories, what is it that detectives do? I have already said on this blog before that I think it is the role of detectives in detective stories to describe reality. Detective stories are about interpretation. We are presented with a mystery. We can (usually) never solve this mystery ourselves (sometimes you're meant to be able to, but we'll leave that aside because I think it's kind of bullshitty). The detective appears (sometimes he is already there, Poirot for example is almost always near the scene of the crime, this is very suspicious). Eventually, the detective pronounces his exposition, interpreting reality via whatever method (sometimes truly analytical, sometimes really just intuitive) and giving us the correct solution, which we know to be correct (usually it draws out a confession). It is comforting for us, because all the events fit together neatly into a 'symbol' (see previous post) and we know that justice is done (even if it is sometimes done to a character we like, although more usually it is done to someone totally anonymous).

(it is of course interesting to me that in my beloved Tintin books, Tintin the 'reporter' – a reporter, indeed, who never files any copy – is often compared by characters to Sherlock Holmes, but himself is never in the powerful epistemic position of the detective, rather he achieves his victories through acting rather than pronouncing)

Now, who else describes reality? In the real world, we are always looking to the scientist. Indeed, just as in the detective story we are comforted by the detective coming to an 'objective' reconstruction of events, so in our everyday existence we are comforted by the scientist being able to describe the world in an 'objective' way. The appeal of the detective story is, I would posit, very much a product of a scientised modernity, as these stories in some way allegorise the process of scientific investigation.

Poe's Critique of Science

This is why it is so interesting to examine Poe's attitude towards natural science. The general thrust of the Van Leer article is that: for Poe, science was just a particular form of discourse, with truth held to consist in coherence with the norms of the discourse-set rather than any sort of correspondance to an outlying reality. Insofar as this is relevant to Poe's detective fiction, Van Leer says that Poe, certainly compared to later detective writers “emphasizes the logical, even mechanical, nature of detection,” though with the “hyper-rational language” this entails being (as Poe of course intends) a mere “pose”:

“The success of these stories depends less on their content than on the form in which they present it, not on what they deduce but on their faith in logical analysis itself. As Poe admits to a friend, 'their method and air of method' make them seem more ingenious than they really are: 'where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling?'”

There is certainly something to this idea that in his stories Poe emphasizes the 'mechanical' nature of detection via ratiocination. Aside from the mind-numbingly dry 'The Mystery of Marie Roget', which holds all the romance and thrill of the average article of 'analytic philosophy', and in which Poe talks of method of detection as involving “the Calculus of Probabilities” which is “in its essence, purely mathematical,” there is a particular scene early on in 'Rue Morgue' where Poe describes himself and Dupin taking a walk together during the course of which, fifteen minutes after they had last conversed, Dupin replies out loud to the exact remark that Poe had come to think in his head. Poe is fascinated by this, and Dupin describes the process by which he had come to realise he would be thinking what he was, saying that “it was the fruiterer, who [brought you to the conclusion you did that I replied to]”: an encounter with a fruiterer who tripped Poe up begins, for Dupin, an apparently unavoidable causal sequence that unfolds mechanistically as they stroll through Paris together. Spinoza, eat your heart out.

However, I find it odd that, in an article about Poe and natural science, Van Leer fails to give more mention to 'The Purloined Letter'. This, the third, final, and by far best-written of the Dupin stories, concerns a letter stolen from an important woman by a scheming minister who is using it to blackmail her: the police have searched his apartments up and down looking for the letter, but they cannot find it; Dupin works out that it is hidden in plain sight.

It is this story, of all the Dupin stories, that presents Poe's critique of natural science in I think the clearest way. The policeman in it, Monsieur G-, is a rather common-sensically minded person (of the sort who would nowadays without any further reflection lazily identify the mind with the brain, or think a science degree was worthier than one in the humanities). At one point he remarks (of the thieving minister) that he is:

“Not altogether a fool... but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool.”

(Dupin, following this, humours him, but later explicitly disagrees, to Poe)

The police in the story are portrayed as being unthinkingly mechanistic in their reasoning. Believing the letter to be in the minister's apartments somewhere, they go through them methodically with a mechanical thoroughness, searching in every conceivable hiding-place, even unscrewing the tops of tables to see if it is rolled-up in a whole drilled in one of the table legs (or similar). But to no avail. Dupin however finds the letter by realising it has not really been hidden at all: it has simply been turned inside-out and given a different seal, and is in the minister's card-rack.

The police are looking for what we might call a 'deep' solution to the problem: and, so convinced they are that there must be such depth involved, they fail to bother to look at the surface-level phenomena at all. This is point number one about natural science: science, in its quest for explanations, ends up forgetting the human-level, 'phenomenological' elements of experienced reality (see eliminativists in the philosophy of mind for a particularly striking example, thinkers – thinkers! – who deny the existence of consciousness, as being a mere fiction).

As far as their quest for depth goes, Dupin cannot fault the police: “the measures adopted were not only the best of their kind, but carried out to the absolute perfection. Had the letter been deposited within the range of their search, these fellows would, beyond a question, have found it.” But the reason they failed was, Dupin makes clear, because of the sort of man they were dealing with.

The minister, you see, is not just a poet (which is the reason the police suppose him to be a fool), but also a mathematician. This is what makes him such a sophisticated reasoner. “As poet and mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all, and thus would have been at the mercy of the prefect.” Arguing for this, Dupin then proceeds to embark on a lengthy rant against the 'algebraists' who have “insinuated the term 'analysis' into application to algebra.” This is wrong because “mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth,” as the algebraists misakenly suppose. They are, rather, idealisations: Poe does not use the exact term himself, but his polemic against the algebraists is basically identical to Husserl's critique of Galilean natural science (the natural science that mathematizes nature and tells you that mathematics is describing nature in all its complexity) in The Crisis of European Sciences, and this is Husserl's gloss on it.

This is what Poe thinks good science consists in: the coincidence of poetry and analysis. In this sense, he is a firmly 'Romantic scientist': that is, Poe's attitude towards science is in the tradition of the Naturphilosophie of Friedrich Schelling, which most of the articles in the Cunningham and Jardine collection in which Van Leer's article is found directly relate to. Naturphilosophie involves an organicist view of reality which many find metaphysically indefeasible but, more interestingly, it implies a view of nature in which there is no Cartesian chasm between 'mind' and 'body': value is something that inheres in the world, an object for science. Imagination and poetry are, for the Naturphilosophen, an important part of doing science well.

According to Van Leer, the universe was for Poe 'the plot of God', and so the investigation of such is always in some sense literary: “in making literature an imperfect form of natural history, [Poe] makes science a perfect form of storytelling.” Hence, poetic faculties are needed to do science well. And how better to illustrate this by inventing a properly scientific form of literature? Namely: the 'tale of ratiocination', the detective story.

Why Did the Orang-Utan Do it?

In short, the orang-utan did it because of Poe's particular critique of natural science. There is no way that anyone could get to the conclusion that an orang-utan was responsible via a 'mathematical' sort of reasoning alone. Rather, a leap of imagination is required. This is what Poe is concerned to suggest: an orang-utan has, I think, been chosen because it is a totally alien element (even coming, literally, from about as far abroad as it is possible to imagine) that seems completely ridiculous, even after it is explained how it got there (the orang-utan trying to shave, and acting as a barber in committing the murder).

Science for Poe is not an objective, value-free task (Dupin helps Le Bon because he is his friend; he is motivated to steal the letter from the minister because he once did him some unspecified wrong), and mathematical science is (as I have noted above) a mere idealisation. But Poe is, as Van Leer is keen to emphasise in his article (and like Husserl in his Crisis), not 'anti-science'. After all, Dupin invariably finds the right answer (his findings are not confirmed in 'Marie Roget', but then his theory is never investigated in the real-world there). It is just that he does this with a method that is, in the properly Romantic holistic, not reductionist: the reductionist, seeking to exclude aspects of experience (i.e. value experience, human psychology, the imagination) rather than incorporate them, would never have thought of an orang-utan doing it, and would never have figured out where the letter was. In Poe's detective novels he thus presents us with a different, (I would say) better way of 'doing science'. And he illustrates this via an orang-utan doing the murders in the first-ever detective story.

[asensitiveman]

Remarks concerning Ed Balls and Labour's inability to offer an alternative to 'Piss-Cameron'

Ever since I heard about Cameron's 'full-bladder' technique, in relation to the EU veto, I have been unable to look at him without imagining a long-retained stream of thick yellow piss working its way down his trouser leg onto the floor. There is something horribly appropriate about the man's piss-retention, grotesque but banal, just like his plastic mask of a face. He is a man who would feel empowered by exercising the most basic infantile control over his own body, who probably times his shits based on digestive intensity so that he is always ready to grasp the real utopian telos of the bum egg whenever he pulls his cheeks apart and squats gurning over the bowl. In short: an 'anal character' (as much as I don't care for Freud).

It is not hard to make the leap from this characterisation of Cameron's psychology to that psychology operating behind his cuts. Here is a really disasterous economic policy – austerity – one so dangerous in a recession that its acceptance by first the coalition and then apparently the whole world can only be motivated by something beyond economics, I mean actual mental illness. Austerity, and support for austerity, is nothing less than a form of psychosis, and it is exemplified by weird little incidents like the time Cameron told (or, almost told, but then even he realised it was so stupid he didn't) people to pay off their credit card bills rather than spending money to stimulate economic growth: essentially his economic policies are those of an 'anal character' running a household. There they make a sort of modest sense, admittedly, but this is not a household, it is a government.

Either way, this simple little working-through helps us understand why the image of Cameron retaining (and then, inevitably releasing) his piss is a genuinely political one as well as to do with Cameron The Man (if he is even, really, worthy of the dignity of manhood): he thinks we must cut (he thinks he must retain his piss) but he also exercises a perverse pleasure from doing so (he wants to boast about his piss, he tells people about his technique like a proud child would, in doing so we are presented with the image of it dribbling down his leg).

Today, Ed Balls has revealed to the world that he, too, likes to retain his piss. There he was, in the Guardian, on the TV, telling everyone about how he has come to the realisation that it is fun to retain your piss, that it helps you focus your mind, that his less frequent toilet visits have made his office run more efficiently as less water is consumed (flushing). There he sat in front of the anchor, sodden trousers. The pages of the newspaper, crinkly, as they had all been splashed with a bit of Balls's piss before being sent to the shops.

And the oddest thing is, of course, that this is somehow supposed to help him look electorally credible. Anchors have been pressing Labour for over a year now: “when are you going to start admitting you need to retain your piss?” “How can you be considered credible on the economy if you visit the toilet as and when you need it?” “Wouldn't the public be reassurred if they saw your bladder reaching full pressure on TV and then it all trickling out as you carried on talking?” There is this perception that the public really like their politicians to be psychotic piss-retainers with damp trousers. And Ed Balls, to his credit, stood up for the sane man who isn't covered in piss, and said well no, that's stupid, every single serious individual thinks these piss-freaks are dangerous lunatics. But no more, alas. And I am sure the right wing of Labour will think it is A Good Thing that he is now taking this horribly incorrect approach to piss.

I am struggling, really, to work out why it might be that electoral credibility is associated so intimately with piss retention. Either a) it is a right-wing piss conspiracy between the Tories and the media or b) the public actually like their leaders to have that urine tang on them. We are reminded here of Ballard, who in his faux-focus group write-up 'Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan', explained the genital nature of Ronald Reagan's face (“a penile erection”) and notes that in sexual fantasies involving Reagan, “the preferred mode of entry overhwlemingly proved to be the rectal” (as opposed to the vaginal). In the ideal sex-death of Daz Caz, perhaps he is releasing a long-stored stream of urine all over you? It seems that for the average Englander, something like this must be the case, as else we could not explain his electoral success and continued credibility as Prime Minister.

[asensitiveman]

Police Poem

A poem constructed of various bits from the astonishing PolicePoems.com

Policeman is a special man, he rates above the rest,

A man that wears a silver star on his chest,

'A Guardian Angel' dressed in blue,

A mixture of Heaven & Earth.

***

Policeman is your dad, a hero,

While you sleep, he is watching,

My mom the cop she is a true blue,

Finding things with very few clues.

***

Policeman is the loss of a blue ribbon,

Tears of a cop: my prayers are many, and most are the same,

“To lose his life and lose his freedom,

For the rest of his life.”

***

Policeman is the cemetery ground,

A police funeral conducted in a military fashion,

Family notification... death,

Was it worth a joy ride, boys?

***

Policeman is guarding the gates of heaven,

So please, do not call us “prison guards”,

The death, the blood the uncaring folk,

I would take the brightest stars from the heavenly skies.

[asensitiveman]

Supposing Truth Isn't A Woman... Comments on the Gender Controversy in Last Night's Episode of Sherlock

I often come across people on the internet complaining that Stephen Moffat is pretty off-message about gender/sexuality in his work, and last night's Sherlock ('A Scandal In Belgravia') was a particularly good example of that. Basically (for those who don't want this spoiled, look away now, although frankly the episode had all the dramatic tension of someone opening a window, so you can still enjoy it just as much not knowing what happened imo) a beautiful, sexually aggressive, dangerous and irrational young lesbian, who works as a dominatrix and is known in her professional life simply as 'The Woman', is foiled in her criminal (but, it is important to note, apparently unmotivated by any sort of clear interest) schemes because she accidentally fell in love with Sherlock Holmes.

So obviously this was quite problematic for a lot of people, who were offended by the notion that this powerful lesbian would turn straight and weak-kneed basically just because she saw the big male detective swing his dick around some, and thus everything she planned came to nought. And I'm not denying that on the surface, it looks bad (not that I especially care either way, I have bigger priorities when watching TV than political correctness). But I do want to elaborate a way in which this event, and the gender/sexuality associated with it, was important to what the episode presented us with. What we end up with is no more 'correct', as far as the feminist, LGBT ally party line goes, but it is certainly I think more interesting, so if you're going to get mad about something, I would argue that you should get mad about this instead.

From a dramatic perspective, last night's episode of Sherlock never really accelerated past third gear, but it is interesting in a way, not necessarily to watch but rather to analyse. What appeared to be the central mystery, something about some pictures on a cameraphone and then a plane the government has stuffed with dead bodies, turned out to be a complete MacGuffin, because the real investigation Holmes undertook was into Irene Adler, the dominatrix lesbian, 'The Woman', and this was why the mystery culminated in him unlocking her phone, on the final try, with the first four letters of his name (as she had fallen in love with him, so obviously he himself was the password). This ultimately made for kind of boring entertainment, because it was basically a complex psychological drama that wasn't (partly due to the constriants of the medium) done all that well. But it is interesting to analyse nonetheless.

This is because: what do detective stories do? Detective stories are ultimately about interpretation. But whereas in real life, most of us can only at best hope to offer one valid interpretation among many, the detective's interpretation always fits exactly with all the clues he is offered, is unquestionably the correct one. This imagery of 'fitting' is pointed: in literary theory (I get this from Jeremy Tambling's 2010 book on Allegory) there is a distinction drawn between 'symbol' and 'allegory'. To be brief: the etymology of the word 'symbol' from the Greek 'symballein', 'to throw together, to bring together, to collect, to compare'. What we can call a 'symbolic' theory of meaning is that meaning we can find 'fits' with the metaphysically real world. By contrast in allegory “anything can stand for anything else”, there is no such symbolic fit between meaning and the world, so in an allegorical theory of meaning, meaning functions like this, there is no explanation for why any particular meaning might be applied to any bit of the metaphysically real world, no fit. The detective in the stories navigates the world searching then for what we might call 'the symbolic' as opposed to the 'the allegorical', the perfect fit of the fragments left to the mystery to the real event. And, in the stories, he almost always of course finds them: this is what detective stories offer us, really, the comforts of symbol.

So with this in mind, I want to explain how last night's episode of Sherlock was in fact an allegory (in the other, more everyday use of the word 'allegory', not implying meaning functioning like an allegory) for this search for symbolic meaning that the detective undertakes. In this allegory, the Irene Adler character stands for the threat of meaning being undermined, that is: the absence of symbolic meaning. Nothing Adler does in the episode particularly made sense, or at least there was no higher motivation for any of it beyond sensual pleasure: to her life is just some sort of nihilistic game. This is up to the point where she 'falls in love' with Sherlock. Until then Sherlock cannot make any sort of meaning he might apply fit with her. This is why he cannot open her cameraphone. Each time he thinks he has the trick figured out, but fails to unlock the phone. He even tries to trick her into revealing herself with a false phone, but she is wise to that. And there is also a code that would make the phone self-destruct, hence the lack of discernable meaning is presented as dangerous. But finally he does discern the meaning, it is her love for him that is the one thing he can pin down, and then anything is solved, the phone unlocks, symbolic meaning has been found.

It is at this point that the gender/sexuality issue becomes interesting/important. Irene Adler stands for the threat of the breakdown of meaning. She is a woman. Apparently, she is an intelligent woman. She is also sexually confident and aggressive and, more than that, sleeps with both men and women (and tells Watson she is “gay”). And she is an irrational libertine. Sherlock, by contrast, is male, rational, virginal, unemotional. It is actually Adler's emotions that end up trapping her into the very context of meaning she is apparently trying to void. Incidentally, the other thing that traps her is her body: near the start Sherlock figures out the keycode to her safe from her measurements.

So essentially, Moffat chose, in allegorising the process of the search for meaning in the The Detective Story Itself, to use a woman (in fact, literally, 'The Woman') to portray the possibility of the breakdown of symbolic meaning. This is why it might be troubling from a gender/sexuality point of view. But it does make sense of why Adler should have been a lesbian who then falls for a man. The whole episode is about someone wilfully denying the 'male', 'rational' context of symbolic meaning: if she were not a lesbian, she would still appear to be participating in this context from the off, she would not be a threat, she could just be controlled by some dude right from the start. By falling for Sherlock she ends up being brought into this 'male' context. This why she had to be a lesbian who ends up falling for a man. The episode wouldn't have worked as well without it.

Of course, just to make clear, absolutely if you want to say Stephen Moffat is off-message about gender, I am willing to agree with you. I just want to elaborate how what he is doing is off-message in a more *interesting way* than he might otherwise be given credit for. For example, we can learn much about the way patriarchy functions in contemporary society from Doctor Who's triumvirate of idiot eunuch male Rory, who precisely due to his lack of testicles is allowed to fuck 'strong, sexy' Amy; both controlled by the all-powerful male Doctor who controls them/reality (but that's a different blog post).

[asensitiveman]

[asensitiveman]

My BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year Prank

Obviously, we all spent tonight huddled round the television in families watching the awards ceremony for the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year competition, excited for the result. Who would it be? Would Andrew Strauss's gurn be deemed more characterful than Mo Farah's significant medal? It is now known.

And of course they also run a competition parallel to the adult sports personality of the year competition for Young People. Mostly, Tom Daley wins. I think this year he didn't? But anyway, the great thing about this competition is that members of the public can nominate just about anything.

So I nominated my best friend, Tristan, who in real life neither fits in the age category nor is a world Parkour champion, but I was convinced this wouldn't be too much of a setback. Anyway, it started out with downloading the form from the BBC's website and filling it in: the Tristan of the form lived in Ilkley (the irl Tristan is actually from there), and was a member of the West Yorkshire Parkour & Free Running Association. Here is the bit which doesn't contain either his contact details or those of my friend Laura, who was the person officially 'nominating' him:

I sent this form off under a pseudonymous email account that I'd previously used to submit articles to the student paper when I was at university, which was attached to the name 'Alex Meinong', but to be honest I didn't really expect them to reply. So imagine my surprise when Laura texted telling me that they'd sent her and someone she didn't know named Alex this:

(Hello Alex/Laura.

Thanks for nominating Tristan for the BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year award.

Would it be possible for you to send me two photos of Tristan, to use in the information pack that we use in our judging sessions? If Tristan made the Top 10, these pics would be used subsequently for publicity, eg BBC Sport Website.

Ideally, we need a head and shoulders shot, and a photo of Tristan in action.)

Now, obviously after having received this from them, I had to reply with pics, but this presented me with a problem: Tristan does not do Parkour. I therefore have no pictures of him doing Parkour. So I had to make some. Here is what I came up with:

I sent the second one (genuinely because I thought it was the more convincing: at this point I really did think he was in with a chance), along with a picture of him from when he was about 17. A couple of days later, I received this back ('Thomas' is I think someone else at the BBC):

(Hi Alex,

To me, the 'action' shot look [sic] like it's been Photoshopped on. Do you have a proper picture because there's no way we could use that one in any publicity etc.

We will also be researching Tristan's achievements, so any other details you can add would be gratefully received.

Andy)

"Oh shit," I thought. "What will I do now? They have found me out. They can't really punish me, probably, because this is only a fake email address, but I gave them Laura's real contact details, even used her university address. What if they kick her out because of me? If I persist with this, I will just be digging myself further into the same hole, but if I admit it's been a prank... what hell will the BBC unleash on us?" I turned it over and over in my mind, hoping against hope that I could think of a way out of this impasse... and, a few days later, I sent them this:

(Thankyou for bringing this matter to my attention. I can't pretend, however, that it hasn't been a tough day-and-a-bit here at the West Yorkshire Parkour & Free Running Association since you did. This action shot was one Tristan's parkour coach (who lives abroad and we don't actually know that well), sent us, ostensibly of him practising his moves on an off-day in Coimbra, where (we thought) he took the Silver Medal at an event earlier this year. It had not occurred to either myself or my colleague Ms [removed] that it might have been tampered with in any way. When you pointed out that it might have been, I called Tristan's coach to double-check, but he was very evasive, and did not answer clearly. This fired up my suspicions. Inspecting the photo again, it seemed to me that you might have been onto something. We were able to get Tristan himself into the club this morning in order to discuss the photograph. The full details of what emerged in that meeting we would prefer to keep private, however I can confirm that, as it turns out, the photograph was indeed photoshopped, and, further to this, I cannot secure for you a photograph of Tristan performing parkour that has not been. A full internal enquiry will be carried out at the club, in which we will be assessing the precise nature/credibility of the achievements that Tristan, we thought, has racked up over the past few years, but we are not at present optimistic that he (or rather, his coach) has been telling us the exact truth. This is very difficult for all of us at the club, as Tristan has been our star performer, and his success has in fact been integral to getting lots of other young men and women involved in our activities. Until such time, I have no choice but to ask that Tristan's name be withdrawn from consideration for the Young Sports Personality of the Year, and both myself and Laura are deeply sorry for (and embarrassed about) having wasted any of your time. Yours,

Alex Meinong)

To which they replied with this:

(Perhaps 'West Yorkshire Parkour Exponent of the Year' is more within Tristan's grasp?

Make sure he doesn't break his specs doing all those crazy jumps.)

It seems that after all that I had escaped without punishment. But, believe me: I will not be so quick to prank the BBC, ever again.

[asensitiveman]

Morte's story from Planescape: Torment

This is an amazing little fairy story that Morte (who is a talking skull) tells at one point in my favourite computer game of all time, Planescape: Torment.

'An elderly man was sitting alone on a dark path, right? He wasn't certain of which direction to go, and he'd forgotten both where he was travelling to and who he was. He'd sat down for a moment to rest his weary legs, and suddenly looked up to see an elderly woman before him. She grinned toothlessly and with a cackle, spoke: "Now your *third* wish. What will it be?"

"Third wish?" The man was baffled. "How can it be a third wish if I haven't had a first and second wish?"

"You'd had two wishes already," the hag said, "but your second wish was for me to return everything to the way it was before you had made your first wish. That is why you remember nothing; because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes." She cackled at the poor berk. "So it is that you have one wish left."

"All right," said the man. "I don't believe this; but there's no harm in wishing. I wish to know who I am."

"Funny," said the old woman as she granted his wish and disappeared forever. "That was your first wish."'

[asensitiveman]

Feminist Danny Alexander

[asensitiveman]

Boatswain Higgs

1655. The Golden Age of Piracy. Whilst sailing the Spanish Main, boatswain Lemuel Higgs, of the Hispaniola, is thrown overboard. His crewmates assume him dead, but later in Port Royal they hear rumours of his presence. He is said to have become shadowy, quieter. He does not eat, or drink, or sleep, and from him there appears to emanate a great *power* of some sort, not associable with mortal men.

Thus begins a search. His crewmates seek him across the Caribbean, but no luck. They begin to hear rumours he is back in London. Setting sail for England as soon as they can, they sweep the capital. Suddenly Boatswain Higgs is turning up in this tavern here, in this brothel there, in this butcher's, in that baker's. All the time he is doing *something*, but no one is quite sure what, and all the time he is always already somewhere else.

Eventually, most of the crew begin to despair of the search, and either give up, or go mad. Except for one. This man is David Walcott, later Sir David, formerly first mate on the Hispaniola, a great friend of the boatswain (or, *what had used to be* the boatswain), and a practical man, a man of learning. A man of science.

It was Sir David's express belief that it was through the methods of modern science – and through the methods of modern science alone – that the boatswain could be found. And around him he drew a society of men of learning, like himself, committed to the use of the new experimental method in natural philosophy as applied to finding the boatswain. A society that in 1660 would receive royal patronage. The Royal Society.

And so it has been that for the last 350 years the whole of modern science – and thus the whole of modern life – has been committed to finding boatswain Higgs. Of course, it is now the opinion of our greatest scientific minds that when boatswain Higgs fell overboard, he did die. Or, for all intents and purposes, as far as there is anything that makes anyone a man, he died. As in, he lost his humanity. But he was transformed. Or, to be more precise, he begun a process of transformation. A process that would eventually lead him to become the particle that underlies all reality.

The Higgs Boson.

***

Where are you, boatswain Higgs? Will you return to us? Why are you so elusive? Why do you not want to be found?

[asensitiveman]

Hey remember those dumb atheist buses? They never went with this original design because it was deemed too 'problematic' but imo it works better.

[asensitiveman]

"Slippers are designed to be slipped into without help from the hand. They are monuments to the hatred of bending down." ~ Theodor W. Adorno