Many scientists don’t know what they are doing. That is, they are so immersed in science, that they often do not step outside it for a wider philosophical perspective on what it is they do, while remaining convinced that science is somehow more correct than other ways of doing things. For example, a scientist might argue that she can treat malaria better than a witch doctor can. The witch doctor, of course, will say the opposite. If you ask the scientist why she thinks she is right, she will say that she can demonstrate her efficacy with an experiment: a large sample of cases of malaria which are treated by her method as well as with the witch doctor’s method (and maybe even a control group), after which she will perform a sophisticated statistical analysis on the data that she collects on all these cases, thus showing that her method is better. Now, if you object that her reasoning is circular, after all, she has just used the scientific method to show that the scientific method is correct (thereby only really showing that the scientific method is self-consistent), and don’t allow her to use science to prove science right (if the scientific method of proving something right were already acceptable to you, you wouldn’t be questioning her in the first place), she will tend to start getting desperate and try to make appeals to common sense, or even question your sanity (“Are you crazy? It’s obvious that witch doctor is a thieving fraud, taking people’s money and pretending to help them with his wacky chants,” etc.) And she will have a lingering suspicion that you have somehow tricked her with some sneaky rhetorical sophistry; she will continue to think that of course science is right, just look at what it can do!

So what’s going on here? I am not claiming that witch doctors (or astrologists, or parapsychologists, or faith-healers, or Uri Gellar, or Deepak Chopra, or other charlatans) are just as good as scientists, or even that they are right about anything at all (they are not); what I am saying is that there is no neutral ground on which to stand, and from the outside, as it were, proclaim the supremacy of science as the best avenue to truth. One must learn to live without such an absolute grounding. Even as clear-headed and careful a thinker as Richard Dawkins can sometimes get confused about this. At the end of an otherwise fascinating and inventive essay entitled “Viruses of the Mind” (Dawkins’s contribution to the volume Dennett and His Critics) in which he uses viruses as a metaphor for the various bad ideas (or memes) that “infect” brains in a culture (particularly the “virus” of religion), and also makes a parallel analogy with computer viruses, Dawkins asks if science itself might be a kind of virus in this sense. He then answers his own question:

No. Not unless all computer programs are viruses. Good, useful programs spread because people evaluate them, recommend them and pass them on. Computer viruses spread solely because they embody the coded instructions: ‘Spread me.’ Scientific ideas, like all memes, are subject to a kind of natural selection, and this might look superficially virus-like. But the selective forces that scrutinize scientific ideas are not arbitrary or capricious. They are exacting, well-honed rules, and . . . they favour the virtues laid out in textbooks of standard methodology: testability, evidential support, precision, . . . and so on.

Daniel Dennett spares me the need to respond to this very uncharacteristic bit of wishful silliness from Dawkins by doing so himself (and far better than I could):

When you examine the reasons for the spread of scientific memes, Dawkins assures us, “you find they are good ones.” This, the standard, official position of science, is undeniable in its own terms, but question-begging to the mullah and the nun–and to [Richard] Rorty, who would quite appropriately ask Dawkins: “Where is your demonstration that these ‘virtues’ are good virtues? You note that people evaluate these memes and pass them on–but if Dennett is right, people (persons with fully-fledged selves) are themselves in large measure the creation of memes–something implied by the passage from Dennett you use as your epigram. How clever of some memes to team together to create meme-evaluators that favor them! Where, then, is the Archimedean point from which you can deliver your benediction on science?”

[The epigram Dawkins uses and Dennett mentions above is this:

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes. The avenues for entry and departure are modified to suit local conditions, and strengthened by various artificial devices that enhance fidelity and prolixity of replication: native Chinese minds differ dramatically from native French minds, and literate minds differ from illiterate minds. What memes provide in return to the organisms in which they reside is an incalculable store of advantages — with some Trojan horses thrown in for good measure. . .

Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained

Below, Dennett continues his response to Dawkins…]

There is none. About this, I agree wholeheartedly with Rorty. But that does not mean (nor should Rorty be held to imply) that we may not judge the virtue of memes. We certainly may. And who are we? The people created by the memes of Western rationalism. It does mean, as Dawkins would insist, that certain memes go together well in families. The family of memes that compose Western rationalism (including natural science) is incompatible with the memes of all but the most pastel versions of religious faith. This is commonly denied, but Dawkins has the courage to insist upon it, and I stand beside him. It is seldom pointed out that the homilies of religious tolerance are tacitly but firmly limited: we are under no moral obligation to tolerate faiths that permit slavery or infanticide or that advocate the killing of the unfaithful, for instance. Such faiths are out of bounds. Out of whose bounds? Out of the bounds of Western rationalism that are presupposed, I am sure, by every author in this volume. But Rorty wants to move beyond such parochial platforms of judgment, and urges me to follow. I won’t, not because there isn’t good work for a philosopher in that rarefied atmosphere, but because there is still so much good philosophical work to be done closer to the ground.

Now I happen to agree more with Rorty on this, but that is not the point. What is important is that Rorty, Dennett and I, all agree that there is no neutral place (for Archimedes to stand with his lever) from where we can make absolute judgments about science (the way Dawkins is doing), or anything else. We must jump into the nitty gritty of things and be pragmatists, and give up the hope of knowing with logical certainty that we are right.

So how do scientists go about their business then? How do they know when they are onto something? These are questions that many sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers of science, and scientists themselves have tried to answer, and the answers have filled many books. One thing comes up again and again, however, and especially when scientists themselves talk about what they do and how they do it: the importance of beauty. Scientists don’t just sit there dreaming up random hypotheses and then testing them to see if they are true. There are too many possible hypotheses to work this way. Instead, they try to think of beautiful things. This intrusion of the aesthetic into the hard, cold, austere realm of science is unexpected to many people, but it is surprisingly consistent. When Albert Einstein was asked what he would do if the measurements of bending starlight at the 1919 eclipse contradicted his general theory of relativity, he famously replied, “Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct.” What he meant was that the theory is far too beautiful to be wrong. How do you tell when something is beautiful? That, I’m afraid, is a question too big for me. (Though if that kind of thing interests you, you may wish to have a look at this recent Monday Musing essay by Morgan Meis and the ensuing discussion in the comments area.) For now, we’ll have to make do with some you-know-it-when-you-see-it notion of beauty. (Kurt Vonnegut once said that to know if a painting is good, all you have to do is look at a million paintings. I can only mimic him and say that if you want to know what is beautiful in science, all you have to do is look at a lot of science.)

Yes, yes, I am slowly coming to my subject. (Hey, it’s my Monday Musing and I’m allowed to ramble on a bit!) We are now approaching the first anniversary of 3 Quarks Daily. The very first day that 3QD went online, July 31, 2004, I posted the sad news of Francis Crick’s death. Crick, of course, along with James Watson (and Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins), was the co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA. (In possibly the most coy understatement ever published in the history of science, at the end of the momentous paper in which Watson and Crick detailed their discovery of the double helix–which can be unwound, each strand then re-pairing with other bases to form a new double helix identical to the original–thereby solving the problem of DNA replication, they wrote: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”) Crick won a Nobel for this work, but this is not all he did. He spent the latter part of his life as a distinguished neuroscientist, publishing much in this new field, including the book The Astonishing Hypothesis.

The years following the discovery of the structure of DNA were busy ones, not just for molecular biologists, but also for physicists and mathematicians (Crick himself had come to biology after obtaining a degree in physics), and specialists in codes, because the code instantiated in the double helix took some time to understand. George Gamow made significant contributions, and other physicists also took a crack at the problem, including a young Richard Feynman, and even Edward Teller proposed a wacky scheme.

Let me now, finally, attempt to deliver on the promise of my title. At some point in time, this much was clear: the molecular code consisted of four bases, A, T, C, and G. These form the alphabet of the code. Somehow, they encode the sequences of amino acids which specify each protein. There are twenty amino acids, but only four bases, so you need more than one base to specify each amino acid. Two bases will still not be enough, because there are only 4², or 16 possible combinations. A sequence of three bases, however, has 4³, or 64 possible combinations, enough to encode the twenty amino acids and still have 44 combinations left over. Such a triplet of three bases which specify an amino acid is known as a codon. So how exactly is it done? What combinations stand for which amino acid? Nature is seldom wasteful, so people wondered why a combinatorial scheme which allows 64 possibilities would be used to specify a set of only 20 amino acids. Francis Crick had a beautiful answer. As we will see, it was also wrong.

What Crick thought was something like this: suppose you have a sequence of 15 bases (or 5 codons) which specifies some protein (remember, each codon specifies an amino acid), like GAATCGAACTAGAGT. This means the codon GAA (or physically, whatever amino acid that stands for), followed by the codon TCG, followed by AAC, and so on. But there are no commas or spaces to mark the boundaries of codons, so if you started reading this sequence after the first letter, you might think that it is the codon AAT, followed by CGA, followed by ACT, and so on. It is as if in English, if we had no spaces and only three letter words, you might read the first word in the string PATENT as PAT, or if by mistake (this would be easy to do if you had whole books filled with 3 letter words without spaces in between) you started reading at the second letter, as ATE, or starting at the third letter, as TEN, etc. Do you see the difficulty? This is known as the frame-shift problem. Now Crick thought, what if only a subset of the 64 possible codons is valid, and the rest are non-sense. Then, it would be possible that the code works in such a way that if you shift the reading frame in the sequence over by one or two places, what results are nonsense codons, which are not translated into protein or anything else. Again, let me try to explain by example: in the earlier English case, suppose you banned the words ATE and TEN (but allowed ENT to mean something), then PATENT could be deciphered easily because if you start reading at the wrong place you just end up with meaningless words, and you can just adjust your frame to the right or left. In other words, it would work like this: if ATG and GCA are meaningful codons, then TGG and GGC cannot be valid codons because we could frame shift ATGGCA and get those. Similarly if we combine the two valid codons above in the other order, we get GCAATG, which if shifted gives CAA and AAT, which also must be eliminated as nonsense. This kind of scheme is known as a comma-free code, as it allows sense to be made of strings without the use of delimiters such as commas.

Now, Crick worked out the combinatorial math (I won’t bore you with the details, Josh) and found that with triplets of 4 possible bases, one has to eliminate 44 of the 64 possiblilities as nonsense codons, to make a comma-free code. Voila! That leaves 20 valid codes for the 20 amino acids, saving parsimonious Nature from any sinful profligacy! This is what beauty in science is all about. Now, Crick had no evidence that this is indeed how the genetic code works, but the beauty of the idea convinced him that it must be true. In fact, the exact elegance of this scheme was such that all attempts at actually figuring out the genetic coding scheme for the next many years attempted to be compatible with the idea. Alas, it turned out to be wrong.

In the 60s, when the actual genetic coding schemes were finally figured out in labs where people managed to perform protein synthesis outside the cell using strings of RNA, it turned out that there are real codons which the comma-free code theory would have eliminated, and this nailed the coffin of Crick’s lovely idea shut forever. In fact, more than one codon sometimes codes for the same amino acid, while other codons are start and stop markers, acting as punctuation in the sentences of genetic sequences. It is now understood that nature is not prodigal, and uses this redundancy as an error correction measure. Computer simulations show that the actual code is nearly optimal when this error correction is taken into account. So it is quite beautiful, after all. Still, why did so many scientists think for so long that Crick must be right? Because in science, as in life, beauty is hard to resist.

Have a good week!

My other recent Monday Musings:
The Man With Qualities
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

The dirty little suspicion in the heart of every aesthete is that he is no better than a tourist. The appreciation of art and the activity of sightseeing are as old as culture, and their relationship is a lot closer than any of us would like to admit. There have been “art tours” to Florence since the Renaissance; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water is all at once a sight to see, an art experience, and a tourist destination; art museums increasingly become sights one visits for their intrinsic artistic merit, whatever objects they might contain (Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao comes to mind); and then there is Land Art, wherein the artist chooses a remote area or deserted suburb (a “site”), “works” it in some way or another, and returns it to us (or invites us to come see it) as a sight which is itself, after the artist’s intervention, a work of art.

Distinctions between the tourist and the traveler notwithstanding, the trajectory I have traced above, from art tourism to tours as art, recapitulates the trajectory of art in the 20th century from its Representational to its Conceptual phase. One of the pieces of baggage that art was supposed to have lost along the way was the “aura” that objects carried. They went from being singular, authentic objects that were invested with the individual artist’s genius, which was itself invested with and an expression of Nature, or Truth, or the Sublime, to becoming everyday objects or representations of the same that were at times indistinguishable from objects we see every day: a snow shovel, a brillo box, graffiti scrawled across a broken wall, an inflatable flower. If you want to experience one of the last, great examples of Auratic Art, stand in front of one of Jackson Pollack’s giant canvases. The paint on those things is still wet, still dripping and pooling; they shimmer and shiver; they pulse; they emanate aura. When asked if he painted nature, Pollack famously replied, “I am nature.” He was the apogee and, in a certain sense, the end of the auratic in art.

The Robert Smithson retrospective currently at the Whitney, which is a “must-see” for the art tourist, turns this history on its head. One of the earliest practitioners of Land Art, Smithson began by transforming sightseeing into site-seeing, which then became blind-spot-seeing (Patterson, New Jersey) and in turn, finally, seeing sight. His early work is about making you “see” your sight. Mirrors are framed as sculptural objects in such a way that, looking at them, you can’t tell whether you are looking at the thing itself or at the reflection of the thing. These are uncanny, mind-bending works. In a single move, Smithson makes material the assault that Duchamp led, conceptually, upon the retina. Smithson gets behind the lines and forces the collapse of the eye. The entire structure of art as something-one-sees falls in a frenzy of reflections, and one is catapulted into the realm of the conceptual. Language not being up to experience, the only thing one can say at this point is, “Aaaah… now I see!”

After working you over with these mirrors that reflect the frames in which they are placed, thereby creating things that do not exist(!), Smithson introduces an organic element. Now he incorporates seashells, earth, rock salt and stone, so that there is a crossover and a junction between absolute nothingness (the mirror, the surface that only reflects) and elemental matter. I grew giddy at this point. I suddenly realized that I was standing in a room of Robert Smithson’s works, but he hadn’t made a single one of the pieces at which I was looking. They had been assembled not by Smithson (who died in 1973), but by the artslaves of the Whitney. The idea (Pour ten bags of basalt crystals on the floor. Bury a mirror in each one.) was of course Smithson’s, but the objects I was studying had been “made” in that space by someone else. Smithson had not placed each one of those tens of thousands of pebbles there and he had not left diagrams for where each one of them were to be placed in the pile. These were purely conceptual works; and since ideas are immaterial, they prohibit the auratic. Ideas are not wet and nothing sticks to them, neither genius nor nature nor intent—therefore, no aura. Ideas are atemporal. They neither accumulate experience nor decay in time. They escape entropy: hence, the third stage in Smithson’s oeuvre.

At a certain point in his career, Smithson was sponsored (by Yale, I think) to go to Mexico and look at some of the Mayan and Aztec monuments and do something down there. Make some art. What he returned with (and here the difference between the tourist and the traveler makes all the difference) was a series of slides of an old hotel, still functioning but in an advanced state of decay. Smithson had discovered entropy as an idea worthy of aesthetic exploitation. The most famous of the works he would create from this conceptual field, before his tragic death, was Spiral Jetty.

With Spiral Jetty, Smithson does something that I haven’t seen any other artist, anywhere, at any time, do: he renders a concept material, without loss or compromise either to the concept or to the materiality of his art. (The piece that comes closest would have to be van Gogh’s Sunflowers, which are like—but not yet—material sunlight.) I don’t know how Smithson is able to achieve this. It might be because he is not dealing with just a concept but with a universal law; but Spiral Jetty—the object itself—is not just a representation of entropy. It is entropy. It is the very thing it points to. Spiral Jetty is one of those sites (and artists are creating more and more of them) where one can go as witness to and celebrant of a universal sacrament: in this case, the second law of thermodynamics. And in these secular-sacred places, to which all and sundry tourists are invited, the aura, undeniably, returns and abides.

Not a postscript: Some of us have been having a very interesting little discussion as a result of Morgan Meis’s delightful, compelling post on Jeff Koons last Monday. Check it out; leave a note. We’re at over 9,000 words already (scroll down to the comments).

It’s been a while since I’ve indulged my fascination with how the Internet allows us to glean some insights about ourselves.  In the past I’ve posted about the research of Edward Castranova, who has done studies of trade and norms in the worlds of massive multiplayer online role playing games. I was then taken by the work of the linguist who used “Hot or Not” to test if names added to whether we find someone attractive or not.

I was reminded of these uses of the net recently when reading an article about Edward Klein’s The Truth About Hillary Clinton.  The book, by all accounts, is a shrill screed about the deviousness and radicalism of Hillary Clinton, and takes as one of its main charges that she’s either a lesbian or infused with the culture of lesbianism (whatever that may mean). “To Arkansans, she walked like a lesbian, talked like a lesbian, and looked like a lesbian.”The book itself sounds uninteresting, and may be so over the top that prominent conservatives have distanced themselves from it.

The article mentioned that an amazon.com search reveals that those who purchased the book also purchased Unfit for Command and How to Talk to a Liberal, and books with titles like Treachery and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, which, by the way managed to revolt The Weekly Standard. My first reaction to the list was to echo Wilde and think, “Wow, patriotism really is the virtue of the vicious.”

But my second reaction was curiosity.

About a year ago, I posted about an APSA [American Political Science Association] panel on blogs and mentioned the concern that Cass Sunstein raised in Republic.com.

“See only what you want to see, hear only what you want to hear, read only what you want to read. In cyberspace, we already have the ability to filter out everything but what we wish to see, hear, and read. Tomorrow, our power to filter promises to increase exponentially. With the advent of the Daily Me, you see only the sports highlights that concern your teams, read about only the issues that interest you, encounter in the op-ed pages only the opinions with which you agree. . . . Is it good for democracy? Is it healthy for the republic? What does this mean for freedom of speech?”

A dystopic future, resulting from personalization?  Maybe.

I did a similar search on Michael Oakeshott, to see what people who’d purchased Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, specifically, had also purchased. While there was a lot of Leo Strauss, there was also Hannah Arendt, Richard Rorty, John Rawls, Sheldon Wolin, and Alasdair McInstyre (though I’m never clear where to put McIntyre on the political spectrum, save far away from me, that’s for sure).

Trying Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom produced an even wider spectrum of thinkers—from Marx, to Sen, to Heilbroner, to Keynes, Schumpeter, Bhagwati, Smith and Ricardo, before hitting Thomas Sowell and von Hayek on the right. (Incidentally, people who purchased The Communist Manifesto also purchased Freidman, Keynes, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Darwin and Hobbes.)

Now, while I didn’t think it, I did have to see whether it was possible that people on the Left—using as a proxy popular books on the Left rather than things like A General Theory of Exploitation and Class—read more broadly than those on the right, as long as the books weren’t a screed. So I decided to see what people who were reading Arundhati Roy’s Power Politics were reading. Unsurprisingly, lots of Chomsky, lots and lots of Chomsky.

I decided to try Michael Moore—I was one anti-war, lefty who really, really didn’t like Fahrenheit 9/11. Amazon returned a lot of Al Franken, as well as Molly Ivins, Craig Unger. My first reaction to this was, “well, but these aren’t screeds,” before I decided that my own ideological dispositions made me more tolerant of them. I still think they’re more reasonable than their equivalents on the other side, but I’ll also acknowledge that the fact that they validate and echo more of my beliefs may color my judgment.

One thing was for sure, below some threshold of intellectual “seriousness”, people weren’t exposing themselves to a diversity of opinion.  This was clear. In so much as they were exposing themselves to information from the other side, it was filtered.

Not too long ago, Eszter Hargittai posted the findings of some of her research on Crooked Timber. She and her collaborators were testing Sunstein’s hypothesis, at least as he laid it out in Republic.com.

“Our work has focused on addressing two questions. First, we are interested in seeing the extent to which liberal and conservative bloggers interlink. Second, we want to see what kind of changes we may be able to observe over time. Sunstein’s thesis suggests that we would see very little if any cross-linking among liberal and conservative blogs and the cross-linking would diminish over time. We go about answering these questions using multiple methodologies. We counted links and calculated some measures to see how insular the conversations are within groups of blogs. We also did a content analysis of some of the posts in our sample. We continue to work on this project so these are just preliminary findings.”

Their preliminary conclusion:

“Overall, it would be incorrect to conclude that liberal bloggers are ignoring conservative bloggers or vice versa. Certainly, liberal bloggers are more likely to address liberal bloggers and conservative bloggers are more likely to link to conservative bloggers. But people from both groups are certainly reading across the ideological divide to some extent.”

But whether liberal bloggers and conservative bloggers, or liberal writers and conservative writers for that matter, are ignoring each other is not the question.  It’s clear that they’re not. Chomsky’s read a lot of Kissinger, and Al Franken has read a lot of Rush Limbaugh, just as Nozick thoroughly read Rawls. Rather the issue is whether, as readers, we get our information about what the other side thinks filtered through those who we agree with and look up to. Arguing with someone does require that we have an open enough mind to change our positions in the face of goods reasons.  You don’t have to sign on to whole of the Habermasian project to recognize that.

The very sad thing is that discussions have become almost entirely strategic and less communicative, as it were.  That strategy may solidify one’s base and insulate it from being convinced of anything else. But these reading habits point to increasingly entrenched ideas and outlooks (though there are exceptions), and sadly to a world in which people argue less and less, in that real way where we can hope to change each other’s minds.

This short essay is inspired by a comment made by our own Timothy Don in his wonderful Negotiation of June 13th. As I wrote in the comments, Timothy is one of the few people writing on art at the moment I truly enjoy and profit from reading (Arthur Danto being another).

And let’s be honest, friends, art criticism is a foul business. Most people engaging in it would get a punch in the nose if they tried to write that way somewhere else. For the most part, it’s pretentious, jargon-obsessed junk. As Clement Greenberg once mentioned, “The fact is that most art writers are cold; they’re usually people who wouldn’t be able to survive writing about anything else.” And I’m glad I brought up Clement Greenberg here. The man could write very clearly about what are often difficult ideas. I love the guy. Love to read him, love to think about what he had to say. But it ought to be mentioned here that he was wrong, completely wrong. And Timothy Don is a wonderful writer on art, and he has many Greenbergian impulses and he’s sometimes wrong too.

He’s not wrong in his impressions and much of his analysis. He’s generally hitting the nail on the head with that. But he’s wrong in his aesthetic judgments. He’s wrong, as Greenberg might have put it, in his taste. Now that’s not to say that Timothy Don has bad taste. I know the man and I can tell you that his taste is impeccable. The more important point is that he thinks there is taste at all, which is why, after a great reflection on why he began to appreciate Basquiat despite himself, he still feels he has to draw the line at Jeff Koons. But there is no such line. The Greenbergian moment is over. It’s over. The Kantian argument lost. All there are now are many things and the struggle is to figure out what they are and why they are interesting. And because of that fact there is no reason to be so hard on our little friends like Mr. Koons. Mr. Koons was trying to liberate us from our Greenbergian fetors.

We must learn to love Jeff Koons.

Indeed, I would say that the thing that was first being called postmodernism a couple of decades ago is only really coming into its own now. Partly that’s because it isn’t so ‘post’ anymore, its just the way we apprehend the world. More and more, it is simply natural. You could call this a new naturalism, though it’s a naturalism so thoroughly interfused with the artificial that the distinction just isn’t interesting anymore. And this allows for a new immediacy, a new sincerity.

In an elegant little essay by Douglas Coupland of Generation X fame, something of this same point is made about Jeff Koons. One of the things that probably infuriated people so much about Koons was the way that he came off as such the glib ironist. It seemed like he was sneering at everyone and everything even as he made a killing off the 80s art boom.

But Coupland suggests that that really wasn’t Koons’ attitude at all.

To watch Koons speak in interviews, he is always maddeningly espousing warm, gooey, puppy love for his creations – and he answers every pointed question with the same beatific smile, like the Pope playing poker. While the work can sometimes appear dazzlingly, shamelessly shallow, he himself tells us that it possesses untold hidden depths – the polar opposite of Warhol. Koons’ work is detached yet also sentimental. Or… is it? He has never, as far as one can tell, presented any evidence of ironic detachment from his source material and its spawn. Which means that he is either a very cool cucumber – cooler than Warhol – or he’s the Rain Man of the art scene. Is his work deep? Is it shallow? Is he for real? Is he a shaman? Is he an idiot savant?

When he made his stupid giant puppies and his annoying little porcelains he loved them, he thought they were important and meaningful. And he was confused by the rancor directed his way. “My puppy is so beautiful,” he was saying. “Why don’t you love my puppy?” But we didn’t listen. We were so smart. There was no way we were going to fall in love with his dumb fucking puppy.

The fact is he was right. He was teaching us how to live aesthetically in this world, sort of like Warhol tried to do before him but one step further along. If you can love the puppy you’ve achieved a certain kind of freedom. You’ve achieved a new level of sensibility adequate to a situation of absolute aesthetic pluralism (Arthur Danto). Now that makes certain kinds of distinctions impossible, it ruins the capacity for taste in the way Greenberg meant it, but it’s immensely liberating as well because it puts you right back squarely in this world, the one we’re actually inhabiting now. It allows a hell of a lot of the things that are out there to become beautiful again. Beautiful not as the authentic object with its aura from times past. Beautiful in a new way. Beautiful like a porcelain figurine of Michael Jackson and his frickin monkey. If you can love that little figurine, really love it, no pretending, than you’re going to be OK. You’re going to be better than OK. You’re going to be in love with the world again because an almost infinite array of potential aesthetic pleasure is going to open up to you.

Now those of you out there committed to criticism in its more robust sense, to Greenbergian attitudes or others, are having a hard time here. You’re disgusted maybe. But I don’t think you should be. Because the most liberating aspect of Koons’ work is that it just doesn’t impose an aesthetic criterion beyond itself. One can still like abstract expressionism and the fact is such things are still being produced. In a way, Gerhard Richter is a version of Jeff Koons. He also realized that there is little reason in the aesthetic world of the present to confine yourself to any one trajectory of taste or to this or that aesthetic criterion. Richter was just a lot more uptight about than Koons. And hey, that’s OK if you still want to be uptight about art. There’s lots of uptight art out there for you.

But if you’re willing to give it a go, Koons can be interesting therapy. Clement Greenberg was talking about Donald Judd one day and he said, roughly, ‘these boxes are OK, but they just don’t have the right proportions. If they were more interesting as boxes they would be better’. Now that’s a man, God love him, who is unwilling or unable (or both) to allow the possibility of another criterion. Judd wasn’t thinking about his boxes that way. And Jeff Koons’ Puppies are not meant to be looked at as Judd’s boxes are. According to Koons, his puppies are meant to be a symbol of ‘love, warmth, and happiness’. I don’t know, I think that I’m prepared to believe that they are symbols of exactly that. In a funny way, it took a lot of balls to make cuddly art. You have to tip your hat to the man, the little bear has a button in its hand that says ‘I Love You’. Damn.

Here’s a last shot. Coupland puts it this way and I find the comment persuasive. Enjoy.

Most older artists have chosen to opt out of the ironic/post-ironic discourse (‘Let the damn kids figure it out’), but for the young, the irony/post-irony discourse is as common as oxygen, and to ignore it is to will irrelevance onto oneself. But the consensus seems to be mounting in both the art and literary worlds that, in order to jump dimensions, one has to play with all polarities of irony: heartfelt confession morphing into old sitcom punchlines morphing into Serzone blankness. In other words, being Jeff Koons.

In a recent article in The New Republic, Rochelle Gurstein argues that those who find formal aesthetic appeal in ‘postmodern art’ are ‘comically’ mistaken, since they are mistakenly looking for beauty in objects whose intent is solely conceptual. Therefore, she writes, an art dealer who admires a smudged Warhol silkscreen for its aesthetic qualities is giving in to the ‘obdurate yearning for beauty.’ He doesn’t get the joke. This argument, derived and oversimplified from the magisterial philosopher of art Arthur Danto, wrongly treats all contemporary art as though it belonged to a specific historical category, that of conceptual art. More significantly, it freezes the category of the aesthetic, as though the associations between it, beauty, and taste made by Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater were still operational. But the aesthetic (and with it, what counts as beautiful) is defined contingently, not transhistorically: today, Warholian silkscreens are used as visual shorthand to advertise fifteen-minute train service to Heathrow airport. The aesthetic field is a recursive phenomenon, one that incorporates its own critiques; the story of culture is one of endless reappropriation and transformation.

To me, the latest such transformation is being made by street art, if I can loosely apply that term to envelop the work of many artists in many mediums in many parts of the world (thanks to Antlered Girl for introducing me to some of these artists, and for the photo at left of a piece by Os Gemeos). From the subway canvases of the graffiti artists memorably chronicled by Martha Cooper to the paintings and drawings of Jean-Michel Basquiat to Barry McGee’s pieces and installations to the folkloric beauty of Os Gemeos, artwork that begins outside the framing of galleries and museums has begun to refine our sense of where to look for aesthetic objects. Simply walking around New York City, with your eyes open and the right guides, reveals a diverse array of works, painted and drawn, on walls and paper. Not that New York is the only place where such things are happening: check out the London Police. Much of this, like much art since modernism, challenges traditional realist perspectives, substituting for it a more elastic, hieroglyphic, totemic geometry. But it doesn’t stay inside. That these artworks ask no price and sit unprotected by archival storage, reminds one of Pierre Bourdieu’s dictum that the modern aesthetic field refuses or reverses the economic logic that pervades social life.

One of the recognized functions of art is to visualize new possibilities, not only in the aesthetic arena, but for our social arrangements themselves. Perhaps the predominant movement of the last hundred years of art history has been the importation of objects from worlds beyond the salons of high culture: African masks and Duchamp’s urinal being the exemplars. Street art, if I may attempt a spontaneous philosophy of it, does the reverse: what joins together the artists I am grouping is their exportation of the artwork outside the sanctioned space of the gallery. In their embrace of the transience of city life, these artists also challenge an accepted order: our acceptance of the state’s right to sell off our daily visual field, our public space, to advertisers, while expunging the markings of its citizens from view (except for the often patronizing efforts of ‘public art’ initiatives). Thankfully, in all vital cities, the impulse to write back remains healthy, as the dialogues scribbled on any subway platform billboard will tell you. An infinitely more accomplished example would be the artist Swoon, who makes paper cut-outs and detailed, expressionistic drawings. While they make conceptual points about enlarging the sphere of art, the importance of everyday reality, and the dignity of urban life, they are also, to put it simply, radically beautiful.

A few years ago, a space in the Times Square subway station was cleared for the installation of a mural by Roy Lichenstein, the sanctified Pop artist. What his work replaced was an ancient surface, stratified with layers of grime and thousands of scraps of bygone wheatpaste. Though lacking aesthetic intent, perhaps that doomed surface, in its complexity, more faithfully rendered New York experience than the official art that succeeded it. This lingering sense, combined with the drive to mark one’s landscape with signs of individuality, of subjective uniqueness as opposed to the productions of the culture industry, is what drives street art.

Not all public artistic incursions need be imposed by an artist whose power to do so was delegated by a foundation, a state, or a corporate body. The wheat-pasted urban collage recalls Walter Benjamin’s studies of modernist urbanity, in which he focused on the ephemera, the flotsam, of a culture in order to interpret the many ways in which a society’s past, present, and emergent future can be glimpsed in candy wrappers and discarded fliers, street swindles and Parisian arcades.  Today’s street artists have absorbed and expressed Benjamin’s insights by making works that both refer to and are part of the jumbled proscenium of urban modernity. Wheatpasted surfaces like the one I remember have been brilliantly recalled by the artist Jose Parla (also known as Ease), whose recent works recreate the visual density of subway walls and other marked territories. I can think of no better contemporary visualization of ‘porosity,’ the image Benjamin and Asja Lacis developed to name the colliding complexity of urban semiotics, than these works. In its autonomy, in its generosity, in its authentic aesthetic complexity, street art reminds us that we are the social, and we must continue to impinge upon its representations of itself. In this world, in multiple ways, we must remember the utopic truth that: we make it up.

Eastern Kentucky is one of the most accidentally beautiful places I have ever been. Being there, one feels as though God knocked over his cereal box one morning and Kentucky spilled out. The place is a jumble and a tangle, off-kilter and slightly askew: a world whose axis is tilted a few degrees further than that of the one to which we are accustomed. The land is ravaged by gorges and pock-marked with hollers; mountains make their way across it with jagged, sideways movements, like crabs. The sky seems to be warped in reflection of the terrain, and while I was there I had the distinct sense that one of my legs was longer than the other, which meant that I spent a lot of time leaning against crooked timbers to gain my equilibrium. If I were a Creationist, I would have to argue that eastern Kentucky is evidence not for Intelligent but Cockeyed Design. God had a hangover when He made this place.

The human element expresses a dialectic between this spilled and crushed landscape and the crushing poverty of its inhabitants. (The county I visited has the highest child poverty rate in the nation—40 percent—which means the 5,000 inhabitants of said county are consigned to a nightmare Thoreau never imagined: here men live their lives not in quiet desperation but amidst a desperate quiet.) Still, these are hard men whose families have been on the land for five and six generations; they will not submit to fate, and they keep their land tidy and well-ordered, pulling corn in neat rows from the soil with the same commitment it would take you or I to quarry granite from a mountainside with a pick and a shovel.

This dialectic between land and human life achieved its material synthesis, in my eyes, in a series of barns I passed on Route 191, between Grassy Creek and Campton. Still functioning, they had become torqued and twisted with age and environmental punishment, their metal roofs sliding off into the dirt like ice cream slipping from a cone in the sun. Their walls had shifted without giving way, and structures that had once been square had gone feral, turning rhomboid and parallelogram. Most were engaged in an agon with a riotous vine that held them in a death grip while waiting for a nearby tree to drop a limb and deliver the coup-de-grace.

My curiosity was piqued at first, but by the sixth of these barns my aesthetic sensibility was fully aroused and I began naming them as I passed: “Entropy: 1, 2 and 3.” “Time’s Arrow.” Squaring the Circle.” “Elvis Has Left the Building.” “A Practical Application of Non-Euclidean Geometry.” “In Advance of a Broken Neck.” “Waiting for Damocles.” “Unintentional Consequence.”

It was as though I had tumbled down a rabbit-hole to find myself in a world that was the result of a collaboration between Marcel Duchamp and Robert Smithson. These barns were Found Installations, pure and simple. In reality, of course, they were the result of a collaboration between an extreme environment and extreme poverty; but if one makes the effort to shear off one’s social conscience and experience them as accidental art objects, they are beautiful, haunting and tragic.

When Duchamp went to an International Industrial Exposition in the early part of the 20th century, he is said to have declared to his companions while standing before an airplane propeller that painting was dead. Pointing at it, he asked them, “Could anyone make a thing so perfect by hand?” Looking at these barns in Kentucky, I found myself asking a similar question: Could any intent produce these objects? A dainty little work in a precious Chelsea gallery is like a bit of Art Kitsch in comparison, dry and dessicated and dreadfully weak. Duchamp would have loved these barns; but as he knew, being an artist has less to do with what one manufactures than with how one sees.

Sahabzada Yaqub Khan is the father of one of my closest friends, Samad Khan. He is also probably the most remarkable man I have ever met. All Pakistanis know who he is, as do many others, especially world leaders and diplomats, but to those of you for whom his name is new, I would like to take this Monday Musing as an opportunity to introduce him.

The first time that I met Sahabzada Yaqub Khan about six years ago, he was in Washington and New York as part of a tour of four or five countries (America, Russia, China, Japan, etc.) relations with which are especially important to Pakistan. He had come as President Musharraf‘s special envoy to reassure these governments in the wake of the fall of the kleptocratic shambles that was Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif‘s so-called democratic government. Samad Khan, or Sammy K as he is affectionately known to friends, invited me over to his apartment to meet his Dad. I had heard and read much about Sahabzada Yaqub and knew his reputation for fierce intellect and even more intimidating, had heard reports of his impatience with and inability to suffer fools, so I was nervous when I walked in. Over the next couple of hours I was blown away: Sahabzada Yaqub was not much interested in talking about politics, and instead, asked about my doctoral studies in philosophy. It was soon apparent that he had read widely and deeply in the subject, and knew quite a bit about the Anglo-American analytic philosophy I had spent the previous five years reading. He even asked some pointed questions about aspects of philosophy which even some graduate students in the field might not know about, much less laymen. Though we were interrupted by a series of phone calls from the likes of Henry Kissinger wanting to pay their respects while Sahabzada Yaqub was in town, we managed to talk not just about philosophy, but also physics (he wanted to know more about string theory), Goethe (SYK explained some of his little-known scientific work, in addition to quoting and then explicating some difficult passages from Faust), the implications of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and Urdu literature, of which Sahabzada Yaqub has been a lifelong devotee.

I left late that night dazzled by his brilliance, and elated by his warmth and generosity. Sahabzada Yaqub listens more than he speaks, but when he does speak, he is a raconteur extraordinaire. Since then, I have been fortunate enough to get to know him well, and have spent many a rapt hour in his company. On my last trip to Islamabad, he and his wife and Sammy K had me and my wife Margit over for dinner, where upon learning that Margit is from Italy, Sahabzada Yaqub spoke with her in Italian. Then, realizing that she is from the South Tyrol (the German-speaking part of Italy near the Austrian border), he spoke to her in German, giving us a fascinating mini-lecture on German translations of Shakespeare. I can picture him now, emphatically declaiming “Sein oder nicht sein. Das ist hier die frage.” (The picture on the right with Sammy K and me is from that night.)

Sahabzada Yaqub Khan has done and been so many things, that it is hard to know where to begin describing his career in the short space that I have. An aristocrat from the royal family of Rampur, he has served as a soldier, statesman, diplomat, and chairman of the board of trustees of Pakistan’s finest university, among other things, and has excelled in each of these roles. In 1970, he was a Lieutenant General in the Pakistan army, and governor of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) when he was ordered by the military dictator of Pakistan at the time, General Yahya Khan, to have troops forcibly put down the mutiny there, which had spilled out into the streets. It is a testament to Sahabzada Yaqub’s moral courage that he refused, and resigned instead. Yahya, of course, found less-conscientious generals to do his dirty work, and the result was a massacre of Bengali civilians before a humiliating defeat in war when India stepped in on the side of the insurgents, and ultimately the dismemberment of Pakistan. This is a dark chapter in Pakistani history for which the government has yet to apologize to the Bangladeshi people. Sahabzada Yaqub Khan is, however, still celebrated as a hero in Bangladesh. (His moral convictions haven’t changed, either. The last time Sahabzada Yaqub visited New York in July, 2004 he came over for drinks and pizza–he is a man of sophisticated tastes who still enjoys simple things–and more than anything else, that day he repeatedly expressed his shock and dismay at the behavior of U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib. What particularly galled and appalled him was that the troops took such delight and pride in their torturous abuse that they felt compelled to record it on film–as if they wanted to be able to relive it. The lack of shame was what disturbed him the most.)

Soon after the debacle of 1971, when a properly-elected civilian government had taken power in Pakistan, Sahabzada Yaqub was offered, and accepted, several diplomatic appointments, serving as Pakistan’s ambassador to France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Let me illustrate his reputation as a cold-war strategist with a quick anecdote: one day Sammy K and I were searching through some old packed boxes of Sammy K’s for a 70s punk rock record, when I came upon an official looking document, with the seal of the President of the United States on it. On examination, it turned out to be a letter from Nixon to Sahabzada Yaqub, written while Nixon was president, and (I am quoting from memory) this is roughly what Nixon had to say: “It was a pleasure meeting you and spending some time talking to you. Alexander Haig had told me that you are probably the most astute geopolitical thinker alive today. Having met you, I believe this was an understatement. Call me anytime.” Or words to that effect.

From 1982 onwards, Sahabzada Yaqub Khan served as Pakistan’s foreign minister in various governments. He was a central figure in the UN negotiations to end Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. From 1992 to 1994, Sahabzada Yaqub was also the United Nations Secretary General’s Special Representative for the Western Sahara. And in November 1999, as I have already mentioned, Sahabzada Yaqub traveled to various countries as President Musharraf’s special envoy. While Sahabzada Yaqub was in America as part of that tour, William Safire wrote an editorial in the New York Times in which, amongst much else, he said that for clarification about the situation in Pakistan he turned to “the most skillful diplomat in the world today: Sahabzada Yaqub Khan.”

Though he has always been fiercely protective of his privacy, politely refusing to write his memoirs despite great public demand (including entreaties over the last few years from me), Sahabzada Yaqub Khan has recently allowed some of his writings to be collected into book form: Strategy, Diplomacy, Humanity, compiled and edited by Dr. Anwar Dil, had its launch earlier this month at a ceremony at the Agha Khan University in Karachi. Here is a description of the book from the AKU website:

…the book Strategy, Diplomacy, Humanity contains Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan’s selected writings, with photos spanning his entire life, culled from his lectures, articles and speeches between 1980s and the present day. They describe his thoughts on national strategy, diplomacy, world affairs, education and his vision of a world of dialogue and peace for all of humanity. In the foreword, Shaharyar M. Khan, former foreign secretary of Pakistan, describes the book as “essential reading for the student of modern history, diplomatic strategy, and the art and craft of negotiations. They reflect the outpourings of a brilliant analyst whose immense talent was applied towards achieving pragmatic objectives in Pakistan’s national interest.”

I have been unable to obtain the book, but even without having seen it yet, I can safely urge you to get a copy and read it if you can. I also hope that Sahabzada Yaqub overcomes his reticence soon and writes the detailed memoirs that history demands of him.

Among other things, Sahabzada Yaqub Khan is a true polyglot: he can speak, read and write somewhere between 6 and 10 languages. While he was governor of East Pakistan, he learned Bengali and delivered public addresses in it, which went a long way toward assuaging their concerns of cultural dominance by West Pakistan. He is also a stylishly impeccable dresser (he was voted best-dressed several years in a row by the Washington diplomatic corps). My greatest joy in his company, however, remains his inimitable explications of the deeper philosophical implications buried in Ghalib‘s couplets, of which he has been a longtime and enthusiastic student. In short, he is a man with many and diverse qualities.

Have a good week!

My other recent Monday Musings:
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

Not to feed this blog’s obsession with Hitchens, but the article that Abbas posted on and Josh responded to brought to mind the Soviet Union, in general, and Soviet literature, in particular. It wasn’t simply (or even primarily) the image and use of the word “gulag” by Amnesty International, or even the discussion of and apologia for Terrorism in the Grip of Justice, which seems like a descendant of Stalinist show-trials. It was rather the remarkable contortions of language which seem to increasingly accompany the discussions of the war, from all corners.

Much has been said of the current war as a new kind of war on a new kind of enemy under new conditions, and with different stakes and different psychologies. Yet, for all its newness and difference, the partisans of this war have “anxiously conjure[d] up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new [or at least this] scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.” This is no less true of their opponents.

It was precisely the “borrowed language” aspect of the war that reminded me of 20th century Russian literature. Nearly 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we can think of many things that happily came to an end with it. The prominence of Russian and East European literature is not one of them. Since the 1950s, there was always some Russian writer—Bebel, Pasternak, Bulgakov, Sinavsky, Solzhenitsyn, to take the most prominent witnesses of that experiment/nightmare—whose moral and political insights made him a justified teacher of the human condition. That fascination ended with the Soviet Union.

Perhaps it was a cultural disposition, but what came through in their writings was the use and abuse of language as part and parcel of the project, and the creative use of language as both a defense against the pretensions of the system as well as a tool for exposing it.  (I have learned this far better from the Russians than from Orwell.)

I regularly reread the books of my earlier education—I was a Russian language and literature student for years—but I was pleased to recently find a post on Andrei Platonov (over at normblog), whose The Foundation Pit happens to be one of my favorite short stories, though I hadn’t read it years. (Here’s a excerpt from “Dzhan”.) The post made me pick it up off of my shelf.

Platonov often wrote in inverted grammar and his surrealism was a counter-surrealism of language—the natural reaction to a system whose stranglehold on its subjects was mimicked in its stranglehold on their language. I would like to think that this literature, not simply Platonov, but writers like Daniil Kharms, Yvegeny Shwartz, and Joseph Brodsky, in addition to those I mentioned above, taught me something about the corruptions of language that accompany utopian projects that begin to feel like dead-ends. And it is when I think of this lesson that I become convinced that the loss of prominence of this literature and all that it taught us–about the dangers of clichéd promises of better worlds, the complexities of human psychology and madness, and about how to salvage decency in the face of easy and easing stories about ourselves and our enemies–has been tragic.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

We have touched down in Karachi and are reacquainting ourselves with the city through rituals that we religiously repeat every six months: in the afternoon, we get into our ‘97 Corolla, turn up the AC, turn on FM 89 (that plays Duran Duran’s “Wild Boys” and “Taste of Summer” back to back with Nazia Hassan and our new generations of rockers, Noori, EP and Jal), pick up a copy of the Friday Times from our man at PIDC (who asks us how we’ve been and inquires about the political climate in the US), drop our dry-cleaning at the Pearl, get a shave and olive oil massage at Clippers (where we are informed of the reflexology treatment that they have recently introduced), get a beer for the road at the Korean restaurant (which nestles between our legs), and then by the evening, meander through Saddar, passed paan–wallahs, underwear-wallahs, open-air gyms, tea houses, Empress Market, the Karachi Goan Association building, to get a shirt altered, buy some DVDs (Carlito’s Way, Aurat Raj and Disco Dancer), and have fresh falsa juice as the sun warms our back and the sea breeze wafts through the city, portending the monsoon. On Thursday nights we will attend qawwalis at moonlit tombs of saints, on Friday nights we will attend the rollicking Fez disco at the Sind Club, on Saturdays, head to Burns Road for a plate of killer nihari (a hot, soupy dish prepared with calves’ calves), and on Sunday, chat with old friends over Famous Grouse and Dunhills about the way things are and will be. Here, we are ourselves and we are alive.

William Dalrymple, however, an insightful commentator on India, writes, “Karachi is the saddest of cities…a South Asian Beirut.” The analogy, of course, is incorrect. Looking at a map of Karachi he writes, “The pink zone in the east is dominated by the Karachi drug mafia; the red zone to the west indicates the area noted for the sophistication of its kidnapping and extortion rackets; the green zone to the south is the preserve of those specializing in sectarian violence.” Ladies and gentlemen, we have lived in Karachi and can tell you with great certainty that this take on Karachi is facile. It is as if we were passing through New York in the early ’90s and were to comment: New York is today’s Sodom. Down Atlantic Avenue, across Brooklyn, in areas such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, and Brownsville, gang warfare and the crack epidemic have transformed traditionally middle-class cantons into a no-man’s land. Bullet holes and crushed needles mark and mar desolate facades and streets. But urban decay is not simply a peripheral phenomenon. In Manhattan, whether north or south, Harlem and Manhattan Alley or Hell’s Kitchen and the Bowery, ethnic warfare plays out on the streets: Blacks, Hispanics, Irishmen, Italians, Chinese pitted against each other, daggers drawn.

Dalrymple has written a number of brilliant books on India (and lives there) but neither his view on Karachi nor ours of New York is complete and consequently, is inaccurate. There is more to New York than bullets and needles. But Karachi gets short shrift: outside observers are able to reduce Karachi to a few facts and artifacts. Since we don’t control our own discourse, others are able define, in fact, redefine the city, see what they want to see. Take Tim McGirk’s ludicrous article in Time in which he perceived Karachi through the eyes of a “hit-man.” That’s like perceiving Los Angeles through the eyes of a 7th Street Crip! This variety of analysis is not only poor but wrong. Karachi’s murder rate, in fact, is at par with Delhi’s (and DC’s). And in Bombay, mobsters not only run the movie industry but become politicians and politicians stir murder and champion rape! Of course, Bombay is not merely the sum of squalid facts. Neither are other megacities like Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Lagos and Jakarta (even Lahore), although they share many similar problems.

The problem with reportage is not simply one of dominant discourse but of the news infrastructure in this part of the world. Unlike other cities, Karachi (and indeed all of Pakistan), is typically covered from another country: the South Asian bureaus of major newspapers are based in Delhi. Naturally, then, the worldview of reporters like Barry Bearak, Celia Dugger, David Rhode and Amy Waldman (all of whom, incidentally, can’t hold a candle to the knoweldgeable Dalrymple) are colored by local prejudice. On the other hand, former US Consul General John Bauman, an insider – somebody who has lived in Karachi for many years, not just passing through on a ten day junket – says “there are so many good things being done in this city. The city is a lot more complex than the single image people get in the United States.”

Take our word for it: Karachi is wonderfully vibrant. There are dimensions of Karachi not often appreciated by outside observers (foreign reporters and disgruntled expatriates alike): Karachi’s vibrant cultural life comprises open-air pop concerts, classical dance shows, art exhibits, independent film festivals and coffee houses; there is great dining, street-side or indoors, and a throbbing nightlife. Karachi is very similar to New York; the same frenetic rhythms beat under our feet.

‘Literary critic James Wood called him the “demented magus of the sentence”; John Walsh suspected him of genius, writing: “He can outgun virtually any writer in England.”‘

Why then, if this Guardian profile/interview rings true, don’t more Americans know who Iain Sinclair is? His new novel, Dining on Stones, isn’t yet available in the States, although some of his previous titles can be found here and there. The Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries describes Sinclair’s style:

‘…Hemingwayesque, sometimes sinuously poetic sentences, verb-free zones, clipped gags. On the first page of the new novel, for example, we read: “Pass sixty, sixty-five, and you can’t sustain an erection beyond eight and a half minutes. So I read. Is that a promise? Eight and half minutes, of the right intensity, sounds good. Novelists have managed books on less.”‘

I don’t think I have read better contemporary nonfiction than Sinclair’s books Rodinsky’s Room and Lights Out for the Territory, both about the topographical ghosts of London. One of the reasons for Sinclair’s American obscurity is his London mania: shorthand references to minor celebrities and thumbnail sketches of East End gangland history which probably require (and deserve) a whole apparatus of annotations.

I have a few more notes on Sinclair here. Here’s a Fortean Times interview in which Sinclair expounds on his theories of “psychogeography,” plus his entry in the Literary Encyclopedia, and a list of his titles from Granta Books.

I arrived at the Basquiat exhibit in a suspicious and haughty frame of mind, like an obstinate mule towing my stupidity along behind me. The first thing I noticed about his paintings is that they were made with the express purpose of being noticed. Basquiat embedded in his canvases little tricks and riddles and hints in order to keep the viewer’s gaze on them for as long as possible. He designed them with his viewer in mind. This added to my annoyance; though, to his credit, Basquiat was forthright about it. He admitted that he would write words into his canvases and then scratch them out, not to hide them but to draw attention to them. He knew that the eye enjoys lingering over what appears to be hidden or erased rather than what is right there in front of it in plain view. This meant that I was obliged to look at his paintings and think to myself, “Now I am looking at this painting and I am noticing it further because the painter has performed a little magic show here that is not the painting itself or its subject matter but the tricks that draw me into it and keep me lingering over it.”

My companion laughed at me. “What did you expect?” he said. “Basquiat was a graffiti artist. If it doesn’t gain your attention, according to its own criteria, it is a failure.” I am nothing, but the criteria of graffiti art are not my criteria.

I found this “need-to be-noticed” in Basquiat very vexing at first, because I tend to art that doesn’t seek attention for itself. Why sign your work? I like art that erases the ego of the artist; I like the stuff that points me in certain oblique angles or reorients my gaze so that it searches for things beyond the canvas or beneath it. Unless I happen to own the work and can therefore live with it, mining its secrets and limning its meanings, my experience of it can only be temporary anyway—so why build in these little tricks to gain notice and hold my attention when my attention can only ever be a fleeting thing? Yeccch.

I tend to abhor cleverness in art. It’s a dead-end. A Jeff Koons. An ego trip. An act of self-promotion. Even those paintings that claim to be about nothing more than their own materiality (their “flatness,” in a word) succeed because they avoid the pitfalls of cleverness, because they end up pointing to something beyond themselves. I went in expecting to despise what I was about to see, and I was disappointed. Basquiat, I realized, is the last of the New York painters; and his work knocked my little world on its ass.

New York is a beachhead that one must (if one lives here) attempt to gain every-fucking-day. The opportunities for humiliation, abasement and defeat are endless. Just yesterday morning I had to slap a punk on the subway because he was up in my jock and talking smack. He was right: I was hung-over and I looked like piss, but who needs the obvious pointed out to them? The ego exists here in a state of siege. The city is an enormous grinding machine, and it chews up and digests nothing so quickly as ego, which means that memory doesn’t stand a chance. If you linger too long in the past you will disappear, because every day erases the previous one, which has erased all the days before it. New York doesn’t care about you.

This is of course one of the reasons that those of us who love the city love the city: it forgets everything. It isn’t catty. It doesn’t hold grudges. It moves on. But it is precisely this quality of the urban experience that is New York that also lends our existence within it a deep and abiding poignancy. We move through it but we are nothing to it. We recognize things, we welcome certain changes and deplore others, but it is already ahead of and beyond us. It has no memory. It exists only in the present and forces us to straddle the fault line between what was—once upon a time–and is now gone, and what is here today, at the edge of the future. In other words, it is nothing so grand as Death that one is forced to confront here; it is rather the possibility of non-existence, the nothingness that haunts our consciousness. The city does not notice us.

Against my will, I have felt raw and exposed since having seen the Basquiat exhibit. His genius (if I may be so bold as to claim to recognize it) lay in his ability simultaneously to make manifest his present and to bury it like a secret, preserving it within his paintings. That is the direction to which all his hints and riddles and scratched-out words and “Notice me! Stay with me!” signposts point: not to the paintings themselves but to the maelstrom of experience that animated them. They point to New York. If I could lick one of his paintings it would taste like the day upon which he made it. Entering his work involves stepping into a moment that is eternally and irretrievably lost to us. His paintings are time machines. Looking at one of them, noticing it, lending oneself to its artifice, is to gain access to a New York City that will never again exist: the New York of 1980, when being bohemian was (incredibly!) a life choice rather than a style, when Madonna was a performance artist you could pick up in a bar, when you had to take your life in your hands after dark in the East Village, and when the precondition for transcendence was commitment to the holiness of the present.

One hundred years ago this month, twenty-six-year-old Albert Einstein published a paper entitled “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper“ or “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”. As we all know by now, 1905 was Einstein’s annus mirabilis, the miraculous year in which he published four papers in the Annalen der Physik. The first was a paper on the photoelectric effect; the second on Brownian motion; and the third, which we have already mentioned, spelled out the ideas which would come to be known as special relativity. In case you are less than sure why Einstein’s name has become a metonym for extreme intelligence, consider that there is broad consensus among physicists that any one of these three papers by itself would have been more than enough to win Einstein a Nobel Prize. The fourth paper, by the way, used the axioms of the third to derive a nice little result equating energy and mass: E = mc², probably the most famous equation of all time. Not only that, he would certainly have won another Nobel for general relativity, which he published a decade later. In other words, you can safely think of Einstein as someone who, in a fairer world, would have been at least a four-time Nobel winner. As it is, the Nobel committee cited only the photoelectric effect when they awarded him the prize in 1921.

Einstein’s results were disseminated and understood so slowly (especially in the English-speaking world) that when Sir Arthur Eddington lead an expedition to prove general relativity correct by showing that the light from stars near the Sun in the sky would be bent by its gravity (during a solar eclipse in 1919 when you could actually see stars close to the Sun), and a journalist asked him: “Is it true that only three people in the world understand relativity?” Eddington reportedly responded, “Who’s the third?”

This year has been declared the World Year of Physics in commemoration of the centennial of Einstein’s annus mirabilis, and in that same spirit, I would like today to attempt to give you a sense of what the theory of special relativity (SR) is, whose 100th birthday we celebrate this month. Most of you have at least some vague idea of what SR implies: you have heard that time slows down when you start traveling very fast (near the speed of light); that lengths contract; and almost everyone knows the Twin Paradox, where one twin travels out into space at high speed, then returns, say 6 years later to find that her twin on earth has aged 39 years while she was gone. You have probably also heard that Einstein is responsible for inextricably entwining space and time into spacetime. I will explicate all these aspects of SR, and I will not do it by using crude analogies, which tend to confuse more than they illuminate; instead, I will use the actual math so that you fully understand the beauty of this theory. Wait! Don’t stop reading just yet. The math required is no more than simple high school algebra, so if you remember how to do that, stay with me. If the sight of even the simplest equation makes you tremulous, then I can only say: learn some math! Einstein himself famously stated that “The presentation of science to the public must be made as simple as possible, but not more so,” and we cannot but follow his dictum here, where our very aim is to celebrate his science. (The beauty of SR lies in the incredible conceptual leap which Einstein made. The mathematics is relatively (!) straightforward, and this is what makes my elucidation of it possible. The mathematics of general relativity is much more advanced, indeed far beyond the abilities of most people who, like me, are neither mathematicians nor physicists. Even Einstein needed some help from mathematicians to work it all out.)

THE BACKGROUND

A century ago, this was the situation: Galilean and Newtonian physics said that any descriptions of motion by any two inertial observers (for such observers, bodies acted on by no forces move in straight lines) in uniform (not accelerating) relative motion are equally valid, and the laws of physics must be exactly the same for both of them. Bear with me here: what this means is, for example, if you see me coming toward you at a speed of 100 mph, then we could both be moving toward each other at 50 mph, or I could be still and you could be moving toward me at 100 mph, or I could be moving toward you at 30 mph while you are coming at me at 70 mph, and so on. All these descriptions are equivalent, and it is always impossible to tell whether one of us is “really” moving or not; all we can speak about is our motion relative to each other. In other words, all motion is relative to something else (which is then the inertial frame of reference). So for convenience, we can always just insist that any one observer is still (she is then the “frame of reference”) and all others are in motion relative to her. This is known as the Principle of Relativity. Another way to think about this is to imagine that there are only two objects in the universe, and they are moving relative to one another: in this situation it is more clearly impossible to say which object is moving. (Think about this paragraph, reread it, until you are pretty sure you get it. Just stay with me, it gets easier from here.)

At the same time, James Clerk Maxwell‘s equations of electricity and magnetism implied that the speed of light in a vacuum, c, is absolute. The only way that this could be true is if Maxwell’s equations refer to a special frame (see previous paragraph) of reference (that in which the speed of light is c) which can truly be said to be at rest. If this is the case, then an observer moving relative to that special frame would measure a different value for c. But in 1887, Michelson and Morley proved that there is no such special frame. Another way of saying this (and this is the way Einstein put it in 1905) is that the speed of light is fixed, and is independent of the speed of the body emitting it. (The details of the Michelson-Morley experiment are beyond the scope of this essay, so you’ll have to take my word for this.)

Now we have a problem. We have two irreconcilable laws: 1) The Principle of Relativity, and 2) The absoluteness of the speed of light for all observers. They cannot both be true. It would be another eighteen years before a young clerk in the Swiss patent office would pose and then resolve this problem. Here’s how he did it: he asked what would happen if they were both true.

Next, I will show how the various aspects of SR fall straight out of the assumption that both of these laws are true. I will focus in greater detail on the slowing down (dilation) of time, and then speak more briefly about length contraction, and the intertwining of space and time.

TIME DILATION

As I have mentioned, Einstein began by assuming that the following two postulates always hold true:

1) The Principle of Relativity, and

2) The speed of light will always be measured as c by all observers

Now, keeping these in mind, let us consider a simple mechanism that we will call a light clock (shown in Fig. 1). The way it works is this: the top and bottom surfaces are perfect mirrors. The distance between the top and bottom mirror is known exactly. The light clock’s period is the time that it takes light to go from the bottom to the top, and then to come reflected back. Since the mirrors are perfect, light will keep on bouncing back and forth like this forever. All observers can build identical clocks with exactly the same distance between the two mirrors, ensuring the same period. And since the speed of light is always c, and the distance between the two mirrors can be measured precisely, we know exactly how long one “tick” or period of the clock is in seconds.

Let us now say that there are two observers, each of whom has such a clock. If one of them is moving past the other at a velocity v, something close to the speed of light, then the first observer, F, will see the second observer S’s clock as something like what is shown in Fig. 2. Of course, by symmetry, and the principle of relativity, S will see F’s clock the same way. Take a little time to look at Fig. 2 and convince yourself of this. (This is basically like thinking about a man moving a flashlight vertically up and down on board a train; if the train is stationary relative to you, you will see what is shown in Fig. 1; if the train is moving by you, you will see what is shown in Fig. 2. It should be quite obvious once you try to imagine it.)

Since S’s clock seems to be moving to F, it will seem to F that the light travels a longer path than just the vertical distance between the two mirrors, because after the light leaves the bottom mirror, the top mirror keeps moving to the right, and the light beam travels a diagonal path up to where the top mirror has moved to. (Imagine the whole apparatus moving to the right as the light beam goes up from the bottom mirror, or look at Fig. 2.) Since the speed of the light must still be measured as c by both observers, and according to F, the light beam is traveling a greater distance, it must be taking longer to make the trip to the top mirror and back. Therefore, according to F, S’s clock is ticking more slowly, and vice versa!

Someone might object that this is a special kind of clock, and maybe we could construct a different type of clock that would not slow down when seen speeding along relative to some other observer. This cannot be true. The reason is that if we were able to construct such a clock, it would violate our first postulate, the Principle of Relativity. Remember that in saying that only relative motion is physically significant, we are insisting that nothing done by S can tell her whether it is she who is moving past F, or vice versa. Suppose that two different types of clock were synchronized (one of them a light clock of the type we have been describing), then both of them are sent off with S at high speed,  if they do not behave exactly the same way and were to fall out of synchronization, this would tell S that it is she who is really moving, and this contradicts the first postulate. All clocks must therefore slow down in the same way when they are observed in relative motion close to the speed of light. In other words, this time dilation is not a property of any particular type of clock, but of time itself.

So how much exactly is S’s time seen to be slowing down by F? To answer this question, consider the situation in Fig. 3. As shown, the light clock is moving to the right at a velocity v. At rest, the light clock has a period T. In half that time, when stationary, the light beam travels the distance A, but when moving, it has a slower period T’ because it travels the distance C at the same speed. This means that the ratio of the distances A/C is the same as the ratio of the times taken to traverse them, T/T’. (At the same speed, if you travel twice the distance, it will take you twice as long.) So,

(1) A/C = T/T’

Now while the light beam travels the distance C, the mirrors have moved a distance B to the right. The ratio of these two distances B/C, traveled in the same amount of time, is the same as the ratio of the speeds with which the distances are covered. (Moving for a given time at double the speed just doubles the distance covered.) So,

(2) B/C = v/c

Look at Fig. 3 again, and notice that the sides A, B, and C form a right triangle, so by the Pythagorean Theorem:

(3) A² + B² = C²

Dividing both sides by C² we get:

(A/C)² + (B/C)² = 1

Subtracting (B/C)² from both sides we get:

(A/C)² = 1 – (B/C)²

Taking the square root of each side we get:

A/C = sqrt ( 1 – (B/C)² )

Now if we substitute for A/C and B/C from equations (1) and (2) above, we get:

T/T’ = sqrt ( 1 – (v/c)² )

And finally, inverting both sides, we get:

(4) T’/T = 1 / sqrt ( 1 – (v/c)² ) = γ (gamma — the relativistic time dilation factor)

Since the speed of light is so high (186,000 miles per second or 300,000 kilometers per second), gamma is not significant at speeds that are common to our experience. For example, even at the speed which the space shuttles must attain to escape Earth’s gravity (11 km/sec), gamma is 1.000000001. At fifty percent of the speed of light (0.5 c), gamma is 1.155. You can confirm these values by plugging in the speeds into the time dilation equation above. One way in which we know that Einstein was correct about time dilation is that particles with known half-lives decay much more slowly when they are accelerated to near the speed of light in particle accelerators. For example, muons, which have a half-life of 1.5 microseconds, are observed to decay in 44 microseconds on average in a CERN experiment which accelerated them to 0.9994 c, at which speed gamma can be calculated using the equation above to be 28.87. In perfect agreement with the theory, 1.5 microseconds multiplied by 28.87 comes out to 44 microseconds, exactly what is seen in the experiment. There are countless other very exact confirmations of relativistic time dilation effects.

LENGTH CONTRACTION

This time, imagine the light clock lying on its side (in other words, Fig. 1 rotated by 90 degrees counter-clockwise). Now the motion of the light pulse is back and forth in the same direction that the whole clock is moving. What happens this time? Well, as the light pulse leaves one mirror and heads toward the other, that mirror advances forward to meet it. This trip is shorter than when the clock is stationary. On the way back, though, the light pulse is chasing a retreating mirror, and the trip takes longer than it would in a stationary situation. This round trip period, T”, is longer than T’ by the factor 1/γ. (This is similar to the case where an airplane traveling across the Atlantic with a steady headwind against it, and then returning with the same wind at its back, will take a longer time for the round trip than if there were no wind at all. I leave the simple math here as an exercise for the reader.)

Now if this were all there is to the story, the amount of time dilation would depend on the orientation of the clock relative to the direction of motion, but then this would violate the Principle of Relativity. What prevents this violation is a shortening of lengths along the direction of motion. The distance between the two mirrors would thus contract by the factor 1/γ, reducing T” to the correct value T’ as it should be. So, lengths are observed to contract along the direction of motion by a factor of 1/γ. Again, this only becomes noticeable at very high speeds, approaching c.

SPACETIME

Newton’s notion of absolute space and absolute time are no longer valid for us. We have seen that measures of time are relative to the observer, as are measures of space. The good news is that different observers of the same reality can agree on something. And this is what it is: we know that

T/T’ = 1/γ

Substituting for 1/γ from equation (4) and squaring both sides we get:

(T/T’)² = 1 – (v/c)²

Multiplying both sides by (cT’)² we get:

(cT)² = (cT’)² – (vT’)²

Here, vT’ is just the distance L’ that the moving clock travels in time T’. Meanwhile the stationary clock doesn’t go anywhere in time T, so L = 0, and by substituting that L² = 0 and L’² = (vT’)² into the equation above, we get:

(cT)² – L² = (cT’)² – L’²

Here, finally, is a quantity that is the same for both observers. It is not a measure of time or a measure of space; instead, it is a spacetime measure. So we find that in the end, though observers cannot agree about measures of space or time by themselves, it is possible to weave them together into a spacetime measure that everyone does agree on. This is what is meant when it is said that space and time have become interwoven after Einstein.

The account I have followed in explaining special relativity is essentially that used by Richard Feynman (who invented light clocks as a way of explaining SR) and Julian Schwinger. The two of them shared the 1965 Nobel in physics with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga.

Thanks to Margit Oberrauch for all the light clock illustrations.

Have a good week!

My other recent Monday Musings:
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

At 9pm on May 7th, 2005, in an art space in Queens, New York City, three novelists were enclosed within three individual habitats designed and constructed by three teams of architects/artists. For the past twenty-one days, this has been their reality. They are not allowed to leave the building and they are granted ninety minutes of free time each day, for which they must punch a time clock to gain. In seven days time, they are to emerge from their habitats having completed a novel. The name of this conceptual art project, created and hosted by Flux Factory, is Novel: A Living Installation.

This work emanates from the Flux Factory collective. In case you haven’t heard, Flux has taken some heat in the press for their work, most notably from the editorial page of the New York Times. The Times’ criticism amounted to a claim that this project trivializes the act of writing, because it takes writing out of the hands of the writers and spatiates it, mechanizes it, and tethers it to time: “part of the meaning of making a novel is commanding the time to do so and owning the workings of imagination, however they pace themselves.” So says the Times. The criticism is unfair, in my opinion but not because it is inaccurate.

The Flux oeuvre (and—full confession— I say this as a frequent collaborator on their projects) rests to some degree on exploiting the trivial, the absurd, and the happenstance. Flux makes you look at exactly what is in front of your face. (The Dadaists did the same thing.) As a result, their projects often run the risk of becoming gimmicky acts of self-promotion; but when they succeed they succeed either because they manage to transform the trivial and the everyday into something meaningful or because they manage to mine the trivial and the banal for the potential profundities they occlude. Many of their projects function as almost artistic analogues for Socratic irony. They are like gadflies on the ass of the art world.

In this regard, the criticism is unfair because it misses the point. Novel’s aim was never to re-enthrone writing as the queen of the arts and to produce three masterpieces of contemporary American fiction. The point was to remove the crown that writing wears and peer into its brain, to resituate writing as an obsessively mechanical process alongside the other obsessively mechanical processes that comprise the manufacturing of art objects.

Embedded in the criticism, then, is a notion that we may or may not agree with: that writing is most emphatically not an art form. The intention of the curators at Flux was to interrogate that very notion. There are three forces at play in this installation, three intentionalities. This first one is a conceptual force.

The second force at play in this installation, the second intentionality at work, is that of the architects who designed the writers’ habitats. Where space is empty, it is not space—it is nothingness. What I have always found fascinating about architecture is that it seems to have a unique ability to sculpt somethingness out of the nothingness of empty space. In that regard, the work of the architects has been the most under-discussed element of this project. For them, the installation was an exploration of space with the aim of creating new space; and the spaces they have carved (really, out of thin air) are not merely holding pens or empty frames for the work of the writers within them. They were made to give rise to new spaces of the imagination; they are the material politics that make possible the very work that transcends them.

The third force at play is the actual writing that the novelists are doing. They have asserted that their writing is paramount and has superseded the restrictions under which they are laboring. (An interesting discussion remains to be had about the point—or points—at which the formal restraints they have to deal with, restraints of space and time, have actually become opportunities for the liberation of the imagination…) As one of the three groups of artists involved in this project, the novelists (fed and housed for a month, with nothing to do other than write) have had perhaps the easiest task—if one thinks that being oneself is an easy task. But if what one is, is a writer, theirs has also been the most difficult task because, unlike much of what passes for art, you cannot fake writing. As a writer you can’t hide under bells and whistles and wisecracks; you can’t call it in; and you are obliged to work with the knowledge that you have been assigned a Sisyphean fate: Sisyphean not because it is futile, but because it will always remain, to some extent, unfinished and unfinish-able.

So what we are dealing with, in toto, are three forces at play, three intentionalities: the intentionality of the curators (conceptual), the intentionality of the architects (spatial), and the intentionality of the novelists (literary).

What puts the “aaargh” in “art”? My pet theory, which I am testing out when I look at Novel, is that art is the stuff that’s left over. It’s the thing that occurs when intentionalities collide, like flint and steel, when the intent of the artist meets the (often hidden) intent of the material with which she is to work. Art is not the material object that artists produce, it is not the concept or the space or the words we create as artists. It is the stuff that remains; the stuff we are left with after we have said or made or thought or written what we have to say or make or think or write. It is—to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Zizek—the “indivisible remainder” of the interaction between our intentions and our materials. If Novel succeeds as an artwork, then, it does so not because it creates a closed universe of meaning, but because it creates aporias in art, because it throws something up that escapes the intentions of any of the artists working within it.

[Abbas Raza is filling in for J.M. Tyree, who is on vacation this week.]

As in the case of many sciency types, my mostly informal education in the humanities has been somewhat arbitrary and certainly very spotty. I can reliably amuse and horrify more erudite friends by reciting lists of authors and books I’ve never read. Fortunately, Nabokov is not on those lists. I say fortunately, and I mean it literally: in 1986 I was in Buffalo, New York, spending a few nights in the hospital with my mother who was having a back operation, and I needed something to read. Wandering into a nearby bookstore, I was looking for something by Naipaul in the alphabetically arranged fiction section when, purely by luck, I came upon Lolita. The name triggered only a vague memory of something salaciously exciting, and I picked it up. Thus began an obsession with Nabokov that reached its acme when (at the invitation of my dear friend and mentor Laura Claridge) I taught Lolita to the midshipmen (and women) at the United States Naval Academy a couple of years later. (This picture shows the paperback copy of the book I had bought that day, and not wanting to sully my lapel with adhesive, had affixed the hospital visitors’ sticker to its cover instead.)

Nabokov’s (the name is stressed on the second syllable, so that it rhymes with “to talk of”) reputation in the world of letters is so gargantuan that it is easy to forget that he was an accomplished scientist. Nabokov was a serious entomologist; more specifically, a lepidopterist specializing in the identification and classification of a major group of butterflies, the Latin American Polyommatinae, of the family Lycaenidae, more popularly known as the “blues”. For six years in the 1940s, Nabokov held an appointment at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, as a Research Fellow. During this time he was responsible for organizing and supervising additions to their extensive butterfly collection. His enthusiasm for the difficultly precise minutiae of taxonomy can be gauged by the exuberant tone of the following passage in a letter to his sister Elena Sikorski in 1945:

My museum — famous throughout America (and throughout what used to be Europe) — is the Museum of Comparative Zoology, a part of Harvard University, which is my employer. My laboratory occupies half of the fourth floor. Most of it is taken up by rows of cabinets, containing sliding cases of butterflies. I am custodian of these absolutely fabulous collections. We have butterflies from all over the world; many are type specimens (i.e. the very same specimens used for the original descriptions, from the 1840’s until today). Along the windows extend tables holding my microscopes, test tubes, acids, papers, pins, etc. I have an assistant, whose main task is spreading specimens sent by collectors. I work on my personal research, and for more than two years now have been publishing piecemeal a study of the classification of American “blues” based on the structure of their genitalia (minuscule sculpturesque hooks, teeth, spurs, etc., visible only under a microscope), which I sketch in with the aid of various marvelous devices, variants of the magic lantern….

To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena–all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.

(I cannot resist an aside on Nabokov’s false modesty: this I-cannot-describe-it Nabokov–after having just described looking through a microscope like no one else could–is the same one who is able effortlessly to evoke entire worlds of sensation out of the simplest possible raw material. Just look at this:

Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief–the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes…

Nabokov wrote this to describe the birth of his first poem, which he wrote at age 14. I cannot describe it, indeed. And while we are still on the subject of Nabokov’s coy modesty, let me also quickly adduce this, from the afterword to Lolita–which, unlike Nabokov’s early work, was written in English:

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses — the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions — which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

So much for Nabokov’s descriptive incapacity and his second-rate English.)

Back to Nabokov’s lepidoptery: even among many of those who know of Nabokov’s butterfly work, there is a lingering suspicion that he was essentially a dilettante in the field. This relegation of amateur status is not fair. At the time, the distinction between amateur and professional lepidopterist was not made as starkly as it might be today. Much serious work in the classification of animal and plant species was done by gentlemen-scholars, and in any case, as I have mentioned, Nabokov held a coveted academic appointment and was paid as an entomologist for six years by Harvard. As Brian Boyd shows in the second volume of his biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, though Nabokov had no formal education in entomology, his early fascination with and dedication to the study of butterflies eventually made him a world-class lepidopterist. Throughout his life whenever he had a chance, Nabokov visited museums of natural history to examine their butterfly collections. While he collected many and varied species, his scientific work was limited to the Polyommatinae on which he published more than a dozen technical papers, including “The Nearctic Forms of Lycaeides Hübner “; “Notes on the Morphology of the Genus Lycaeides“; “The Nearctic Members of the Genus Lycaeides Hübner,” and “Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae .” Nabokov’s contemporary scientific colleagues consistently acknowledged his expertise, and his classifications and other technical work have stood the test of time.

As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in an essay on Nabokov’s lepidoptery (not available online, but printed in his I Have Landed), another common objection to Nabokov’s lepidopterological work is that although it may have been competent, it does not compare with his prodigious literary achievements. This is true to the extent that Nabokov was not a theorist in science, and he is not responsible for significant scientific innovations. Having said that, one should not belittle the careful, precise, and painstaking work, requiring extensive training and practice, that it takes to accumulate scientific knowledge one small bit at a time. What data would theorists have to work with if not for the Nabokov’s of the world?

Nabokov discovered and named more than twenty genera, species, and subspecies of butterflies. These include Carterocéphalus canopunctátus NABOKOV 1941, and Cyllópsis pertepída avícula NABOKOV 1942 (pictured here on the right). In addition, many butterflies have been name for Nabokov by others, such as Cyllópsis pyrácmon nabokóvi MILLER 1974, and Nabokóvia HEMMING 1960, while yet others have been given Nabokov-related names like Madeleinea lolita BÁLINT 1993: “a polyommatine butterfly known from just one locality in Peru’s Amazonas department (Huambo). Only its males have been examined. They are blackish brown with iridescent metallic blue basal and medial diffusion.”

Nabokov himself, even after attaining monumental literary success with the American publication of Lolita in 1958, regularly expressed his lifelong ardor for lepidoptery. He says in Strong Opinions:

Frankly, I never thought of letters as a career. Writing has always been for me a blend of dejection and high spirits, a torture and a pastime — but I never expected it to be a source of income. On the other hand, I have often dreamt of a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of lepidoptera in a great museum.

He once said, “I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.” His literature and his scientific work share the same qualities of obsessive attention to minute detail, an unabashed respect for facts, and an almost painfully sharp appreciation of the aesthetic pleasures of small things, which would produce in him what he famously once described as “intolerable bliss.” I will give VN the last word:

“A Discovery”

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss
Poems that take a thousand years to die
But ape the immortality of this
Red label on a little butterfly.

Have a good week!

My other recent Monday Musings:
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Perusing the bargain shelf at the Harvard Bookstore this weekend, we picked up a bruised copy of the Kenneth Peacock Tynan’s biography and found ourselves charmed yet again by the man, his persona, and the caliber of his critical output. Hailed as “the greatest theater critic since Shaw,” Tynan is up our alley: an intellectual dandy. He had the following pinned above his desk: “Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.” We appreciate his aphorisms, observations, worldview: “A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car”; “The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art”; “Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence…”

Of Tynan, a commentator once wrote, “He was the sort of character every era needs to polarize opinions and sort out its prejudices.” As we attempt assembling coherence here, we muse: where is today’s Tynan? We are unfamiliar with contemporary theater critics but Tynan’s heirs in literary criticism, Dale Peck and James Wood, either bark or bite, and their legacy is uncertain. Peck, the enfant terrible of contemporary literary criticism, has already been swallowed up by the earth, much like Rumpelstiltskin. And the venerable Wood, who has become of the most important critics today, could prove to be a fad. (After all, presently, postmodern prose is out and Henry James and George Eliot are in.)

Altogether, they really don’t compare.

So who in recent memory polarized opinions and sorted out our prejudices? Edward Said perhaps? Since Said’s demise, the landscape of discourse seems oddly barren, doesn’t it? Of course, Said was marginalized by mainstream media a long time ago. And now the likes of Bernard Lewis – the half-witted dinosaur – lumber through the corridors of power while the feted jackass, Thomas Freidman, passes gas for wisdom. Perhaps our expectations are too high. And perhaps we digress, attempting to straddle ideology and art.

Actually, our beef with contemporary criticism and discourse has to do with something more mundane, our other weekend activity: a coerced viewing of the horrible “Revenge of Sith.” A.O. Scott of the New York Times – arguably one of the most important film critics today – gushes: “This is by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That’s right (and my inner 11-year-old shudders as I type this): it’s better than ‘Star Wars.’” This assertion, ladies and gentlemen, is not only preposterous but irresponsible: whether we like it or not, film critics are today’s public intellectuals. We’ve had beef with Scott before but this time our inner thinking man shudders: Scott doesn’t know the way and can’t drive the car. Our sensibilities cohere with Anthony Lane’s: “The general opinion of ‘Revenge of the Sith’ seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes…True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion. He continues: “it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that await it are unfit for contemplation.” Lane is no Tynan but he sure sticks it to Scott.

Perhaps the age of intellectual dandies and public intellectuals has come to pass: Capote, Vidal, Mailer, in this part of the world; Josh, Manto and Sadequain, in mine; and, of course, Tynan and Said, who straddled divides. It seems that in our coarse times, we have to rely on our own sensibilities.

A week ago, I realized that the 50th anniversary of the Bandung Confererence (the first Afro-Asian Summit in Bandung, Indonesia) had come and gone. There was no real mention of the anniversary in the papers. The blogosphere ignored it, including on its left-wing. Speaking of the left, neither Z Magazine, nor Counterpunch.org, nor The Nation had anything on it, at least that I could find. I found one article in Le Monde Diplomatique, on the lost illusions of Bandung (subscription required).

What surprised me was that it was passed over in relative silence by the media in the Third World itself. The Indian press, which I occasionally look at, said very little. The pieces that were in places like Al-Ahram, which I also occasionally look at, read more like encyclopedia entries telling their readers of the event, or used the anniversary of the Bandung Conference as a frame to discuss American power and its wars.

One exception seemed to be the Chinese press, which did say a lot, which in turn was odd since China had been the odd one at Bandung in 1955—so many of the participants were suspicious of or hostile to Communism. Abdel Nasser, with his hatred of Communists, hadn’t recognized the PRC, and wouldn’t do so until 1956. Still, Hu Jintao, Manmohan Singh, and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono stood and walked in place of Zhou En Lai, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sukarno, with no one to stand in for Abdel Nasser.

This silence was strange, and the classroom tone of what wasn’t passed over in silence was surprising, because it was after all the 50th birthday of the “Third World”, though the term itself was coined and the place (as opposed to places) noticed in 1952 by a French economic demographer and historian, Alfred Sauvy. In 1955 at Bandung, the Third World had taken care to formally notice and assert itself. That desire was neither tragedy nor farce, and reading of it now, it strikes me how much the conference struck the tone of promise, however precarious that promise was in hindsight. (Reading Nehru’s and Sukarno’s speeches, I’m surprised by how precarious it all sounded even at its inception.)

Three years earlier in 1952, Sauvy, writing of this region that was lost in what had become the Cold War, had called on the rest of the world to take note of the newly decolonized and decolonizing states, “…because, this ignored, exploited, scorned Third World like the Third Estate, wants to become something too.” Nowadays it seems that the countries that make it up would like the Third World to be forgotten, after the decades of non-aligment, aligment, coups, wars, posturing, degenerations of societies into personal fiefdoms, and, in its worst moments, a murderous local fascism, at times justified with the rhetoric of Third Worldism.  Or I should say that they would like the Third World to be forgotten, save in the most anodyne form possible.

Perhaps it was inevitable.  Of the conference, Richard Wright had written in The Color Curtain:

“The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and religious consciousness on a global scale. Who had thought of organizing such a meeting? And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel.”

A strange cause of a birth, and a strange thing to be born. But it was a birth nonetheless, by an experience that captures the vast majority of humanity. So, I offer a belated but sincere Happy 50th birthday to the Third World!

Happy Monday.

People look at me truly aghast when I reveal to them that I often book flights with the most amount of connections possible. I love airports. Probably it is a sickness of some kind and a personal problem. I like to be in airports. I like to wander around in them. I like the way they smell and the way the world feels inside of them. I like grandiose and beautifully constructed airports but I like crap airports too. I like the airports of the first, second, and third worlds. I like regional airports and airports where you have to walk out onto the tarmac to board your plane. I like picking people up at airports. I like waiting for them. I like airport bars and the way margaritas taste at airports.

If you had to pick a symbolic structure for the 20th century it might very well be the airport. Through all the disappointments, failures, violence and horror of the 20th century it is also the century that took flight. The airplane, metal birds, improbable sky captains. They are funny things and they are beautiful. I like to watch them, from inside of them and from without. I like the fact that when you enter an airport you leave the particular and enter the universal. I like the comings and goings of the airport because it feels like an intensification of all possibilities.

I was joking with a friend recently, at an airport, about what it would mean to become ‘airport man’. Airport Man is a version of Nietzsche’s overman without all the contempt for everyday experience. The Airport Man is able to adjust his own experiences to the fact that the airport is a site for modern experience. If you aren’t comfortable in an airport, you aren’t adequate to the present age and you aren’t preparing yourself for the future. You must love the airport, you must become one with the airport. You must will that all experience be airport experience.

We imagined a re-writing of literature. “Lady Chatterley’s Airport”. “Airports in the Time of Cholera”. “Catcher in the Airport”. “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Airport”. “Remembrance of Airports Past”. “The Airport of Wrath”. “The Unbearable Airport of Being”.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the airport is its basic assumption: people need and want to go other places to deal with other people. This is one of the most lovely aspects of human need. The world can be a fascinating and joyful place. The airport is the strange, anonymous, beautiful, ridiculous vehicle for that need. The airport is good.

I love airports.

Happy Monday.

Late on a rainy night some years ago, a few blocks away from home on Broadway, I happened to give a homeless man a dollar or two. In gratitude, he handed me a book. It was very dark, so I had to wait until I got home to see that it was a wet, worn and torn, pale blue copy of Studies in Mathematics, Volume XI:  Mathematical Methods in Science by George Polya, edited by Leon Bowden. Leaving it to dry on the radiator overnight, I looked at it the next day. It turned out to be a course of lectures that Polya had given in the summer of 1962 at Stanford to high school teachers of mathematics, under the auspices of the National Science Foundation. (Confession: the book has a Hunter College stamp in it, which may mean that I am in posession of a purloined library book.)

As I skimmed through the book, I found much fascinating material, but most of all, I was struck by a short introduction to the work of Simon Stevinus. I had never heard of Stevinus before this, and I would guess that many of you might not have either. It turns out that Stevinus was a brilliant 16th century Dutch mathematician, engineer, and scientist; a contemporary of Decartes, who even anticipated some of Galileo’s work. Stevinus was the first to use decimal fractions and showed their usefullness. As an engineer, he constructed dykes which are in use to this day.

What I want to talk about today is this: contrary to popular caricature, science does not always advance by observation and measurement. Often, it is a simple thought experiment which results in new insight. Einstein’s musings about what would happen if he sped along with a wave of light at a speed close to its own resulted in a rather famous conclusion, for example. (Of course, even Einstein’s thinking was connected to reality by the experimental and observational work of others.) And this serendipitously-discovered book exposed to me a truly marvelous thought experiment I hadn’t ever known about. I would like to explain this physically-intuitive proof in some detail to you, by which Stevinus derived the Law of Inclined Planes. In going through this step-by-step, I hope to illustrate the power of the thought experiment in general, and the elegance of Stevinus’s imaginative formulation in particular.

Now bear with me here: it is obvious that pushing an object up an inclined plane is easier than lifting it up vertically. (The weight of an object is simply the force required to lift it up vertically.) This is why a brewer will load his wagon by rolling casks of beer up a ramp, and it is pretty obvious that the steeper the ramp, the harder it is to roll the casks. The closer the ramp becomes to vertical, the closer the force required to roll (lift) the cask up becomes to its actual weight. But what exactly is the force required to roll a cask up a given inclined plane? This is the question that Stevinus set out to answer.

His first important move was to ask the question in a clear way. He realized that he must simplify the situation so that only the relevant physical quantities come into play, so he decided to ignore friction (something all of us are now used to doing from high school physics!). Deciding what is relevant and what isn’t is, in fact, half the job. This is how he put it: given the setup of inclined plane and pulley in Fig. 1, what weight would Y have to be, to balance X and keep it from sliding up or down the plane? Keep in mind that movement of X on the plane is frictionless (or you can imagine that the weight X has little wheels that allow it to roll on the plane), as is the pulley.

Stevinus’s next move was to realize that the vertical drop is just a special (extreme) case of another inclined plane, so he was able to generalize his question to this one: given the new setup in Fig. 2, once again, what weight does Y have to be, to balance X and keep it from sliding up or down the plane? (This time, imagine Y as also having little wheels, so it can slide up or down its own inclined plane without friction.)

Stevinus realized that the shape of the weights X and Y is irrelevant, and in an extraordinary leap of imagination, he replaced them with just a uniform rope (or chain). This situation is shown in Fig. 3. Assuming that the rope can still slide without friction on the inclined planes, it is clear that if the downward force is greater on the segment AB, then the rope will slide down that plane. If the downward force is greater on the segment BC, then the rope will slide down that side, and if the forces are in equilibrium, then the rope will stay balanced as it is. So which is it?

Again, in a brilliant move, Stevinus imagines the two ends of the rope connected by an additional loose length of rope. So now we have a closed loop of rope draped over the inclined planes. The situation now looks as shown in Fig. 4. We can see that although the situation is asymmetrical above the line segment AC, it is the same on both sides (the A side and the C side) below it, where the rope simply hangs in a symmetrical U-ish shape (called a catenary, and while we are on the subject see also this). Whatever forces the rope below AC exerts on the part of the rope above AC, must therefore be the same at A and at C. (The part of the rope below pulls equally on both sides.) So now the startling conclusion: if the part of the rope above AC, on the inclined planes, were to tend to slide down to one side, this would result in perpetual motion in that direction! (Because as it slides down a little bit, an equal part of the rope which had been hanging below would go up the inclined plane on the other side, and the situation would be identical to what we started with, therefore more of the rope would slide down, and it would just keep going like that forever.) We will have constructed a pertpetual motion machine. Since this cannot be right, Stevinus concluded that the parts of the rope above AC on the inclined planes must also be in equilibrium. Since X and Y are in equilibrium, and we also know that the weight of the rope is proportional to its length, this means that at equilibrium, the ratio of the weights X/Y justs equals the ratio of the lengths AB/BC. This finally answers our initial question from Fig. 2: What weight does Y have to be, to balance X and keep it from sliding up or down the plane? Simple algebraic manipulation shows that since X/Y = AB/BC,

Y = X * BC / AB  — and this is the Law of Inclined Planes

And there you have it! The weight needed at Y will always be as much less than X, as the length of the side it is resting on is less than the length of the other side. If BC is only half the length that AB is, then only half the weight of X will be needed at Y to balance it. And this conclusion holds no matter what the actual inclinations are, because we have (or Stevinus has) derived this result generally, without specifying any particular angles of inclination. In other words, the law will hold even for the vertical case of Fig. 1. (If you still don’t get it, you could try the explanation here.) I find this a very beautiful result, especially as it relies on extraordinary imagination guided by good intuition at each step. In addition, the proof exploits considerations of symmetry, which were to become of paramount importance in 20th century physics, through the connection of symmetries with conservation laws.

For all his work with inclined planes, even Galileo’s reputation as an experimenter is probably exaggerated. For example, it is unlikely that Galileo bothered to drop objects of different weights from the Tower of Pisa to show that they fall at the same rate. He was too smart to have needed to do this, and had his own thought experiment to show that objects of different weights must fall at the same rate: imagine that you have two objects, say iron balls, one of which weighs 20 pounds and the other 5 pounds. Now, it was thought that the 20 pound ball falls faster (say at some rate F) than the 5 pound one (which falls at a slower rate S). Imagine connecting the two balls with a chain, then dropping them. What will happen? Well, presumably the 20 pound ball should pull the lighter object into a faster rate than S, while the lighter ball should slow down the 20 pound ball from its fast rate of F. In other words, joined together, the balls should drop at some intermediate rate between S and F. But now consider that the two balls joined by a chain can also be construed as one object with a weight of 25 pounds, which should fall even faster than the heavier ball alone, or faster than F! Here we have a contradiction, so they must fall at the same rate. Such is the beauty of the thought experiment!

Stevinus is even supposed to have proven that objects of different weights fall at the same rate before Galileo did. He did work in hydrostatics, noting that the pressure exerted by a liquid depends only on its height and is independent of the shape of the vessel containing it. He also invented a sail-powered carriage which could outrun horse-drawn vehicles of the time, shown here in the picture. He was quite a guy.

Thanks to Margit Oberrauch for doing all the inclined plane illustrations.

Have a good week!

I was thrown into a quandary by a remark in the most recent Editorial of the Wilson Quarterly: “The Web, for all its marvels, hasn’t yet provided a home for the kind of focused and sustained dialogue that smaller magazines create.” This comment struck me as both curious and characteristic of a certain residual attitude of disdain for online writing that it is still possible to find in intellectual circles. Part of it, I think, is a natural tendency toward the Luddite in literary folks, particular in those over a certain age.

Some of America’s greatest magazines still treat the web browser like a second class literary citizen. Harper’s, one of the flagships of American writing, has a miserly approach to the internet. You can find many brilliant Features at Harpers.org, as well as great Readings, and fine Cartoons. They’re laid out in an incredibly weird narrow long format that seems to assume its readers use a screen the size of an ancient iMac. Another problem: I can buy a copy of Harper’s at the newsstand before they update their “Current Issue” page. The Prize Winner in the category “Worst Web Site for Best Magazine,” however, with its frames layout (making linking intolerable) and contempt for graphical prettification, has to be Dissent. Harper’s and Dissent, of course, are fine magazines and will continue to be so. Right now, the web needs them more than they need the web, although this might well change over time. The reason, I would argue, is that so much of the national conversation about ideas, culture, and politics now takes place online, via web logs and email. The Right-wing has been savvier in its approach to its message on the internet, with a far more closely connected network of sites linking to each other.

There’s an understandable negative intellectual response to the web. It’s unholy and overwhelming. I often hear in literary circles a snobbish notion of a world awash in barbarous blogorrhea. Certainly the idea of cutting out the middlemen of traditional media – editors and publishers – also means eliminating those people who can act as a writer’s best friend. (By saying, “Listen, you might want to cut this,” or, “Whoa, dude, that’s just crazy.”) The online world, as a great leveler, the ultimate Whitmanesque democratic experiment in free expression, is the central fact of its fizz. But the web is also a great proliferator of nonsense, propaganda, misleading information, and terrible writing. Here’s a site, Boring Boring, that only lists “dull things.”

So, is there online literature yet? Will there ever be? There’s some truth to the claim that many online-only journals either seem like vanity presses or else attempts by the impoverished to mimic the effects of print. But WQ is wrong if it means to suggest that there aren’t good online journals, of which I like the classy and subdued GutCult, the engaging nthposition, smallspiralnotebook, and The Drunken Boat. The most interesting example, however, is Agni, which runs an lively and excellent online parallel journal separate from but connected to its great print organ. Agni might be a model for other journals to follow, since, for established magazines and nonprofit organizations, creating parallel online journals would be an extremely cheap way to boost prestige. It’s paradoxical, however, that one of the best online journals in America would be edited by Agni’s Sven Birkerts, who has decried the death of print louder than anyone else.

One last comment. Somebody ought to start developing some ideas about what writing works best online and whether online writing will change literary production. LitBlogs are certainly changing the way that books get their word-of-mouth buzz these days. What we don’t know yet is whether new literary forms will emerge from online publishing, especially web logs. Will short fiction, for example, get shorter? Will anybody use a web log to create a great fictional persona or literary character? (This one, purporting to be the diary of Captain Morgan, the swashbuckling Rum salesman, is not exactly what I had in mind. Here is the very silly blog of the Incredible Hulk.) Will there be a great American novel that is written on a web log? Right now, the answer seems to be: “Not if there’s no money in it.”

Our friend Ram recently gave a talk at the Asia Society here in New York on the tsunami and peace in Sri Lanka. It touched on a larger question, or an antecedent question: can you negotiate with people who use suicide bombers?

The LTTE in Sri Lanka has been responsible for the majority of suicide bombings in the recent decades, and it has done so for explicitly secular nationalist reasons with bombers who are largely Hindu and Christian. Ram’s take is that while he doesn’t know whether you can negotiate peace with those who use suicide killers, he thinks that negotiations can delay war. The Sri Lankan state, of course, has little choice, given the balance of forces.

Certainly, states negotiate with people who use terrorism quite often. And the world accepts people who used terrorism to achieve political aims. This is as true of Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir (their Irgun and Lehi past respectively) as it is of Arafat or the ANC. And most terrorist groups, I suspect, would gladly trade resources and methods with their adversaries.

Suicide bombing conjures up different images. Morally, there is little difference from a suicide bomber who kills civilians and a terrorist who fires a rocket propelled grenade into a crowd of civilians, except that the latter may still be left to carry out another attack. But we have this image of suicide bombers as beyond reason, negotiation, and self-interest. That is, it’s hard to imagine what could possibly reach them, what, short of total surrender could appease them if they’re willing to so far as kill themselves in this way.

This image, of course, confuses the bombers themselves, with those who use them. (Or perhaps not entirely.) One can’t really imagine the Old Man of the Mountain, the leader of the Assassins, one of history’s early suicide killers, himself carrying out a suicide attack, or beyond negotiation. Bin Laden’s video message just before the elections seemed in this line and an offer to negotiate. Needless to say, this is not at all the same as saying that one should in this instance, but rather it is to raise the question of can one (in the sense of possible) negotiate with those who use suicide terrorism.

My old classmate Mia Bloom, author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror, met with the LTTE in 2002, as she was conducting surveys of Tamils in LTTE controlled regions. Her impressions and experience are telling.

“I remarked how friendly everyone was and asked the guard, ‘Is he [Secretary-General of the LTTE Peace Secretariat S. Puleedevan] a killer?’

The guard smiled: ‘Oh yeah.’ I never expected terrorists to be so pleasant.

. . .

Puleedevan acknowledged that after Sept. 11, 2001, the tactics that had worked so well for them in the past were no longer appropriate.”

What that all says and means is unclear? If those who use suicide bombers appear more open to reason, to appeals of self-interest, and negotiation, then they seem more morally culpable than before, as the actions seem less born of insanity than of strategic calculation and moral choice. And if that’s the case, then perhaps some states do not have the luxury of not talking to them and trying to appeal to reason.