by Mike O’Brien

This is going to be a broad-strokes, fast-and-loose affair. Or at least loose. In April I wrote a piece about recent work in the field of animal normativity, a quickly developing area of research that is of interest to me for two key reasons: first, it promises to deepen our knowledge of animal cognition and behaviour, allowing us to better attend to their welfare; second, it promises to fill in the genealogical history of our own normative senses, allowing us to better understand the human experience of morality.

Mostly following the cohort of researchers around Kristin Andrews, who are working on de-anthropocentrized taxonomies and conceptual frameworks for studying animal normativity, I noted that one question of particular interest remains outstanding, viz. “do animals have norms about norms?”. Put another way, do animals think about the (innate, and learned) norms governing life in their communities, and do they (consciously or unconsciously) follow higher-order “meta-normative” rules to resolve conflicts between two or more conflicting norms? The answer still seems to be that they do not, at least not among the higher primates who are the principal focus of study for these questions.

One possible explanation for this apparent absence of recursive or reflexive normativity among non-human animals is a lack of language. It is supposed by some that in order to make norms the object of thought, capable of being analyzed, evaluated, compared and synthesized, some system of external representation is needed, and such a system would fit most definitions of a language. If other species possessed such a powerful cognitive tool, we might suppose that they would use it for all kinds of things, not just resolving normative quandaries. And yet we don’t see much evidence for that kind of abstract, propositional communication among other species. Some tantalizing exceptions come to mind, like enculturated apes using sign language and cetacean communication exhibiting structure and complexity that we have yet to fully understand. But as yet there are no examples of bonobo judges or dolphin sages sorting out the immanent logic of their societies’ rules. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

In 2015, political scientist Larry Diamond warned against defeatism in the face of what he called the democratic recession. “It is vital that democrats in the established democracies not lose faith. […] If the current modest recession of democracy spirals into a depression, it will be because those of us in the established democracies were our own worst enemies.” A few years later, as the world’s most powerful democracy had decided to play out that darker option, Diamond wrote with more urgency about how to protect liberal democracy worldwide. In Ill winds, he emphasized the need to provide not only a rejection of alternatives, but a positive vision. “Democracy must demonstrate that it is a just and fair political system that advances humane values and the common good.”

Daniel Chandler places his book Free and Equal (2023) in this same context: for fifteen years in a row, more countries have experienced democratic backsliding than improvement, and the threatened state of democracy worldwide makes it “tempting to go on the defensive”. However, just playing defense is not enough; an ambitious vision for improvement is necessary. “In a moment that calls for creativity and boldness, all too often we find timidity or, worse, scepticism and cynicism”. Chandler believes he has found a recipe for combining the values of liberalism with the spirit of progress and reform.

This combination is crucial. One of the most dangerous narratives taking root in the collective subconscious is that liberalism has had its day; that history is moving on, that liberal democracy belonged to a geopolitical era that is coming to an end, something we tried and that we know the limits of; a system that has already given all it will ever be able to give. Well, not if Chandler has anything to say about it. “There are plenty of exciting and workable ideas about how we could do things differently”, he announces. As our guide to these ideas he has selected John Rawls, and this is quite plainly an excellent decision: Rawls is at the center of 20^th-century liberal political thought, but also utopian and principled to an extent that he can hardly be accused of rationalizing an already-existing situation. It makes complete sense to use him as a rallying point for a forward-looking form of liberalism. Read more »

Bread Upon the Water

Every book just speaks,
and every light just shines,
and every touch just feels,
and every look just finds,
and everywhere just is,
and every road’s a line —

So, throw your bread on the water
and beat your feet to the chimes
and if you have a daughter
and count your change to the dime
and if you open up the borders, you’ll
let it all fall in behind—

When every deed is done
and you might be feeling so low,
as if a dream is over,
as if it didn’t grow,
you know the soil is still good
and with what we know—

Just throw your bread on the water,
and beat your feet to the chimes,
and if you have a daughter,
and count your change to the dime,
and if you open up the borders
it’ll all fall in behind
……………………………………. it’ll
………………… fall in behind—

Jim Culleny, 1970
excerpt from a song

by Bill Benzon

From beginning to end, Unfrosted is constructed with the intricacy of Seinfeld’s stand-up bits. Taken as a sequence of five-minute segments it’s wonderful, and there are resonances among and mid- and long-range connections among those segments. But you can’t carry an hour and 20-minute film on watch-making intricacy alone. There’s got to be a compelling story, a plot. Oh, we’ve got lots of plotting: Kellogg’s vs. Post, Big Milk vs. Big Cereal, Cuban sugar vs. Puerto-Rican sugar, Russia vs. America, mascots vs. Kellogg’s, and all the while NASA’s shooting for the moon. What holds that together? Pop-Tarts

And that’s not enough. As I noted in my original review, “You can’t take a Godzilla toy, hook it up to an air-pump, and expect to inflate it into a world-destroying comedic monster.” Unfrosted in meticulously crafted, but unfocused and rambling.

It’s not enough. Pop-Tarts themselves exist at the right scale for a meticulously-crafted stand-up bit, which is where the movie started, as a stand-up bit. But in a feature-length film Pop-Tarts are reduced to being a MacGuffin. “MacGuffin” is a term of art that means – I’m quoting the dictionary on my computer – “an object or device in a movie or a book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot.” The statue in The Maltese Falcon is a classic example. It turns out to be junk, but it motivates the action.

Let’s take a closer look at Unfrosted. I’m going to start by looking at Seinfeld’s bit about Pop-Tarts, then look at the movie itself, and conclude with some speculative observations about Seinfeld’s aesthetic confusion. Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Author’s Note: A version of this essay was presented at the London Arts-Based Research Conference (Dec ‘23) on the topic: “The Emergence of Soul: Jung and the Islamic World through Lecture and Art”.

The Sufis aspire to the highest conception of love and understand it to be the vital force within, a metonym for Divine essence itself, obscured by the ego and waiting to be recovered and reclaimed. Sufi poetry, in narrative, or lyric form, involves an earthly lover whose reach for the earthly beloved is not merely a romance, rather, it transcends earthly desire and reveals, as it develops, signs of Divine love, a journey that begins in the heart and involves the physical body, but culminates in the spirit.

My reading of Sufi love poetry, translated from different languages, shows that even though this tradition spans more than a millennium and includes disparate cultures, it follows the same mystic logic at its core. Whether folkloric or classical, penned or belonging strictly to the oral tradition, this genre has a discernible sensibility that likely stems from interpretations of the Quran itself.

As I explore the relationship between the earthly and Divine beloved in poetry by Persian, Arabic, Urdu or Punjabi poets, I am led to the love epics sourced from the Quran. These have been abundantly repeated, adapted, and studied, and of course yield a variety of interpretations. I approach them here in relation to the three features that I understand to be the dynamics of Sufi Poetics that integrate the earthly and Divine: An all-encompassing, merciful love as the force of deep awareness (Presence) that facilitates an appreciation of differences and contradictions (Paradox) and pours into harmonious coexistence (Pluralism)— forming a circuit that flows in and out of Divine love. Read more »

Christine Ay Tjoe. First Type of Stairs, 2010.

Oil on canvas.

More here and here.

by Marie Snyder

Over thirty years ago I was in an on-again-off-again relationship that I just couldn’t shake. After months of different types of therapies, I lucked into a therapist who walked me through a version of the Gestalt exercise of talking to a chair,  which ended my longing for this guy on a dime. 

The exercise had me reimagine many ways he had enraged me, bringing all that to the surface. Then it raised any guilt I had around my own actions towards him, sadness around missing him, and finally ended with celebrating what I learned from him. It took just an hour, and I left feeling completely finished, excised of any clinging or craving, and able to effortlessly say “No thanks!” to his next late-night phone calls. Pairing words and actions with emotions in a contained and structured time and space, that gives some order to the chaos, might do next to nothing — but it might help to move through a difficult transition. I was so impressed with this power hour that I went to grad school to study ritual work. Gestalt psychotherapy is a far cry from cultural anthropology, but I perceived a connection to rites of passage that help neophytes transition from one state to another. 

I recognize the cringe-factor in all of this, but it’s worked for thousands of years to take children into adulthood, and we’ve kept at it when marrying and burying, so there’s likely something useful in the process. And it feels like we need something transformative more than ever. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Angela Starita

A few months ago, I visited Freehold, NJ, an hour’s drive south of Manhattan. The town has serious Revolutionary War credentials as the site of the Battle of Monmouth, a tactical mixed bag from the American perspective but a definite win for local identity. I grew up in the town just south of Freehold, and the battle, from the annual re-enactment to the many historic plaques and business names in honor of Molly Pitcher, water girl to the Revolution, looms large. As county seat, Freehold is home to the Monmouth County Historical Society and a cache of papers related to a commune once sited in what is today a town called Colts Neck. Named the North American Phalanx (NAP)—mentioned a few months ago in this column—it’s generally viewed by historians as the most successful of a few dozen communes organized around the ideas of one Charles Fourier (1772–1837), a French socialist thinker trying to solve an essential puzzle: how do we pursue our own happiness while working towards communal goals of eradicating poverty, war, and famine? As far as Fourier was concerned, finding a way to get pleasure from work, from camaraderie, from sex, from love is key to ecological and even cosmic progress. Our commitments to capitalism not to mention monogamous family units had obstructed our development as human beings, which, in turn, stymied our physical environments. Most famously, Fourier believed that our oceans would taste of lemonade (what he called a boreal citric acid) once we had freed ourselves of jealousy and greed, and pursued higher forms of knowledge and sensation. But as things stood at the turn of the 19th century, Fourier saw us as mired in pointless, confused pursuits unworthy of our innate talents. As Dominic Pettman put it in a 2019 article for Public Domain Review, Fourier “also took it for granted that aliens on other planets were far more evolved than we are, and that we are the slow kids on the cosmic block, having been mired in incoherency for so long.”

To get us closer to enlightenment as he envisioned it, Fourier proposed a model community to be set up in multiple points around the world. These working, communally-run farms (he called them domestic agricultural associations) would demonstrate the folly of isolated pursuits of consumption, and eventually convert the masses to pursuing their passions in concert with a community. The result would be world-wide harmony, a key term in the Fourier lexicon. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

I was asked recently to speak at the University of Toronto about poetry in translation, a topic close to my heart for a number of reasons. I happened at the time to be working on a text concerned, not with translating poetry, but with lyric expression in its most practical form: that is, as a commodity with a material history, as an object that can be traded, one with an exchange value as well as a use value (however the latter might be defined, or experienced).

The reason for this pragmatic frame of poetic mind was as follows: I had for pecuniary purposes been learning about fintech (financial technology), about tokenized assets and distributed ledgers, and was thus briefly engaged by an ecosystem distant enough from my typical life experience that it had begun to present itself to me under the lurid aspect of science fiction, as a Peter Max and William S. Burroughs-inspired lucid dream of aliens and teleporting and iridescent currencies riding an ominous conveyor belt of ballot boxes. In other words, my day job was encroaching on my vocation!

The pushback I devised, a method for domesticating this unfamiliar terrain and rendering it at least temporarily welcome, after-hours in my psychological household, was to imagine a range of revered poets—Sappho, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, and Philip Larkin—anachronistically encountering the strange new gods of Bitcoin, Blockchain, and CBDC, and to ghostwrite the appropriate text for each of them. I was so pleased with these efforts that I went on to imagine a newfangled poetry journal featuring videos of poets reading their own work, minted as NFTs or non-fungible tokens—you may know these digital artifacts as the images of a Bored Ape or a Penurious Ex-President—and hosted on a blockchain. I wrote up the concept, and my “white paper” will appear later this year as a contribution to a new Swiss cultural studies journal devoted to the appealingly opaque concept of transindustriality.

And so it was that, when I agreed to give a lecture on translating poetry, I was of a mind to consider that typically immaterial artform as a physical object in circulation, in the process of being fundamentally transformed by the technology of its new medium; and thus it wasn’t a great leap for me to consider the ancient craft of literary translation—think Saint Jerome and his lion—in a thoroughly contemporary form, rather than sub specie aeternitatis. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

One of the great pleasures in life is learning about something today that you couldn’t have imagined yesterday. The infinite richness of mathematics means I get to have this experience regularly. However much I think I know, it is a drop in the ocean of things yet to be learned.

And even if lots of people already know something, it doesn’t matter when it’s new to you. As is often the case, xkcd made this point already.  Even the most ordinary facts are amazing and new for the 10,000 or so people learning it today:

A few weeks ago I once again had the joy of learning about a previously hidden corner of the mathematical world: Gaussian Periods. Samantha Platt, a graduate student working with Ellen Eischen at the University of Oregon, gave a fantastic talk about Gaussian Periods in one of our seminars. Since a close second to learning something new is the fun of explaining it to someone else, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share Gaussian Periods with you. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Here’s the gist of it. I think a recent declaration on animal consciousness, being signed by a growing number of philosophers and scientists, is largely correct about nonhuman animals possessing consciousness, but misleading. It insinuates that animal consciousness is a recent discovery – made in the last five to ten years – based on new experimental work. As exciting and revelatory as recent work on the minds of nonhuman animals is, animal consciousness is hardly a new discovery. In fact, I am not sure the declaration is really a scientific manifesto so much as a moral one. We ought to be treating nonhuman animals better because many seem to have some level of consciousness, but implying we should do so because of new “scientific evidence” may be a mistake.

NBC recently reported that “discoveries…in the last five years” show that a “surprising range of creatures” exhibit “evidence of conscious thought or experience, including insects, fish and some crustaceans.” 

“That has prompted a group of top researchers on animal cognition to publish a new pronouncement that they hope will transform how scientists and society view — and care — for animals.” 

“Nearly 40 researchers signed The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, which was first presented at a conference at New York University.” Many more have signed the Declaration since then, and many more are likely to sign it in the near future.

Here is The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness in its entirety.

“Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged.

First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.

Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).

Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.”

When I read this my first reaction was “I can’t believe it, they’ve solved the ‘other minds’ problem!” A leading problem in philosophy, after all, has been ‘How do we even know other humans have consciousness?’ – much less nonhuman animals. In fact, one of the signatories to the declaration, leading philosopher of mind David Chalmers, is well-known for arguing that there might be beings (“philosophical zombies”) that look and behave just as we do, but have no consciousness. In other words, recognizing there is a philosophical problem about how we can be justified in attributing consciousness to others. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Light Play in The Living Room, November 2023.

Digital photograph.

by Brooks Riley

by Nils Peterson

Charles Simic says, “[I] suspect that a richer and less predictable account of our lives would eschew chronology and any attempt to fit a lifetime into a coherent narrative and instead be made up of a series of fragments, spur-of-the-moment reminiscences occasioned by whatever gets our imagination working.”

I was reading an article yesterday on translation of Proust and the author mentions Proust’s decision to build “a whole long novel on an involuntary memory.” You’ll remember the moment. He has a madeleine cookie with his tea and all of a sudden “An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin…. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray.” He is transported back to his childhood.

I got caught up in the idea of an involuntary memory. Michael Wood, the author of the Proust article, goes on to explain ‘Involuntary here means not only unintended but barred from the realm of intention. Whatever it is, it won’t happen if you try to make it happen.” A philosopher of language would have a ball playing with what is going on in those last two sentences, but I’m not interested this morning in going down that road because I had on Tuesday an involuntary memory. I saw the floor of the bedroom my brother and I shared in the chauffeur’s apartment above the garage in the late 30’s. I think I was eight the last time I saw that floor. It was covered in linoleum and the linoleum was divided into squares and each square had a nursery rhyme with an illustration. Mind settles for a moment on Miss Muffet and her tuffet. Part of my learning to read may have come from hearing my mother recite the rhyme and my finding it on the floor and understanding and parsing out the words. This last is a forced memory and it may not even be a true one. How different a making from the involuntary appearance in my memory of the linoleum.

There was a path to there. I was walking back from poetry salon I lead here at my old people’s home. People bring poems they want to read. Tuesday we got everything from Casey at the Bat to some lovely Robert Frost. When a person comes who didn’t know he or she was supposed to bring a poem to share, I ask for a song lyric or nursery rhyme and usually they can come up with something. The younger they are, the less likely they are to come up with a nursery rhyme. I think they’re on the endangered species list.

The subject of Memory interests me and I have written a couple of attempts to understand it. Here’s one. Read more »