Tamen's essay is one of a group of responses to Émilie Hache and Bruno Latour's article “Morality or Moralism?” which advocates our “sensitization” to nonhuman things. Tamen examines the picture of universal reciprocation that Hache and Latour propose, according to which, when I “bow at” (acknowledge) things, some things bow back at me, and I must treat whatever bows back as if it were like me. Unlike James Lovelock, a passage from whose work they discuss, Hache and Latour understand this (...) picture in a sense that is essentially “honorary.” The picture or premise they propose sets up, they admit, “a promising misunderstanding.” Tamen offers two arguments in response: one against as-if locutions and another against the very notion of setting up a misunderstanding. But it is good news, Tamen concludes, that sensitization cannot be set up. To what extent we would want a “revival of scruple” to succeed is a serious question, the answer dependent on how much scruple about which things and for what reasons. However pleasing the Hache/Latour or Lovelock picture, it is easy to imagine an intemperate degree of scruple, requiring agonies of continual debate and calculation of the minutest consequences of our acts and the most unlivable alternatives. (shrink)

A strikingly original work, Friends of Interpretable Objects re-anchors aesthetics in the object of attention even as it redefines the practice, processes, ...

People who talk about interpretation often suggest that what is interpreted must offer some kind of resistance, in quasiphysical terms. The physics entailed by such suggestions is never fully specified, and for a good reason: it is purely nonexistent. This essay presents arguments against physical fantasies in interpretation, very current in the humanities and the social sciences, and offers a different picture of interpretation. The picture has two parts: interpretation is described as a way of dealing with intentions, motives, purposes, (...) linguistic noises, actions, meanings, and so forth, relative to all sorts of stuff; and interpretation is a default condition, rather than an optional acquired talent. (shrink)

In this guest column, the author argues, first, that being at the place of an event does not guarantee that one understands what is going on and, second, that something's happening with or to me does not guarantee that I understand what has occurred. He shows that it is generally assumed that the best descriptions of oneself are those given by oneself and, further, generally felt that allowing for the possibility that better descriptions than one's own have been produced by (...) others is comparable to surrendering a civil right. He concludes instead that allowing for that possibility is commendable and shows its application to an aspect of the life of Louis XVI that historians and ideologists of revolution have widely ridiculed. (shrink)

The essay discusses the presumption of one's singularity, the uniqueness of one's time, the picturesqueness of one actions, and the capacity of human beings, whether corporately or individually, to begin everything or indeed anything again from scratch. Such presumptions are indeed present in some varieties of contemporary fanaticism, but, more to the point, it is suggested that the feeling of doing something for the first time is the oldest feeling in the world.

It is often argued that a shared culture, or at least shared cultural references or practices, can help to foster peace and prevent war. This essay examines in detail and criticizes one such argument, made by Patrick Leigh Fermor, in the context of his discussing an incident during World War II, when he and a captured German general found a form of agreement, a ground for peace between them, in their both knowing Horace's ode I.9 by heart in Latin. By (...) way of introducing the sixth and final installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” this essay proposes that Leigh Fermor's narrative be understood in terms of commerce, rather than consensus. It concludes by examining Ezra Pound's use of the word commerce in his poem “A Pact” to define his relationship with his “detested” and “pig-headed” poetic “father,” Walt Whitman. (shrink)

On the face of it, Phillips's claim is that we are getting better all the time, or at least that we may do so. For him, “to talk about getting better... is to talk about pursuing the life we want.” His book, always suggestive and often brilliant, entails an argument in moral philosophy, roughly in favor of Millean experiments in living. A number of difficulties, however, arise. The first and perhaps the foremost is that the moral philosophy is covered by (...) several layers of sheep's clothing. The first three chapters of the book (“Cure,” “Unsatisfying Pleasures,” “Truth”) put forth a version of psychotherapy that substitutes a cheerful William James for Freud and, ultimately, for every conceivable psychoanalyst. James is also the explicit topic of the fifth and final chapter (“Loose Change”). Phillips argues that James's description of conversion turns out to be a theory of change and that “the new way we should describe change is experimenting with beliefs.” To believe is, for Phillips's James, “to act as if something is true.” The lupine part of Phillips's argument, and the most complex and best section of the book, comes up in the fourth chapter (“On Not Having Experiences”). The picture painted is not rosy. Children, babies, and conceivably the rest of us are depicted there as Humean skeptics, for whom, since there cannot be any future experiences, there really cannot be any criteria for engaging in any particular experiment in living. Alas, our present condition does not allow for any experience of the future—which is to say that pragmatism about the future is just wishful thinking; we cannot experiment with experience. Phillips perceives the deep affinity between Humean and Freudian metaphysics but is unwilling to subscribe to either version. He somehow knows that there is no getting better there. (shrink)

This comic, serious inquiry into the nature of art takes its technical vocabulary from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It is ridiculous to think of poems, paintings, or films as distinct from other things in the world, including people. Talking about art should be contiguous with talking about other relevant matters.