(This is the third instalment in a A Foundering Conversation (here are links to Part I and Part II), which itself followed upon the (single) instalment of A Simulating Conversation.)
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Iachimo: Hold on, if Adam’s going to really go there, then – well, hand me that. OK, now yes go ahead.
Adam: All right, though I was counting on Yorick to – well to do the translation. That’s what I’m terrible at.
Ursula: It’s not so much Yorick you want to tell it to, as with.
Adam: Well yes that’s partly it. Though he also has specialized knowledge which will let him see what I’m –
Emilia: It’s OK. We’ll either ask questions when we don’t understand, or we won’t even notice that we don’t understand.
Orsino: Or both. Why not?
Juliet: This is going to either get old or get – I’m not sure.
Orsino: Again, why not –
Juliet: Don’t say it. Yes, probably old.
Adam: So Aristotle gives two different accounts of the categories. Or, one account with two stages. The categories are – well, something like the terms in which we think. The first is a four-way schema: he says of every being that it is either said of another, or not said of another; and too that any given being is either in or not in another. And these can be used – combined – to make a fourfold grid: so any being is either said of and also present in another; or else it is said of but not present in another; and so on.
Iachimo: Four possible permutations. So the other two are, not said of and also present in; and not said of and not present in. OK. Just wanted to be sure I was tracking.
Adam: It isn’t entirely clear what Aristotle means by these four fields –
Orsino: That’s a relief.
Ursula: They sound epistemological and ontological – said-of and present-in –
Adam: Well, but it’s frequently thought – and for these purposes I’ll assume – that he’s talking about universals and particulars, accidents and essences. But then Aristotle goes on to give a different account of the categories, with a relation to the first one that isn’t immediately obvious.
Ursula: Not immediately! From what I remember of the Organon, I’d say, not.
Emilia: The Organon?
Adam: That’s the collective name for Aristotle’s logical works, of which the Categories is one. His next move is a ten-item list. Substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, having, action, passion. “Passion” doesn’t mean emotion or such, it’s the opposite of action – being acted on. So then – we have these two different accounts, fourfold and tenfold. And the tenfold one in particular is extremely influential, all down through the medievals. There are whole disputations about how to derive the list.
Iachimo: Imagine.
Emilia: Go on, Adam.
Adam: So some read Aristotle as very opposed to his teacher here. It’s not the things said of other things that are most real for Aristotle, it’s the things of which they are said. Again, according to some.
Iachimo: Ah, the weasels have been at it again.
Adam: No need to blame the weasels this time, it’s actually true. Well, whether he opposed Plato I don’t know; whether his account needs interpretation to be reconciled with Plato’s – that seems true to me. There were strong efforts made to attempt this, and one of these was made by Porphyry. This is some five hundred or more years later. At the very beginning of Porphyry’s Isagoge – it’s an introduction to the Organon – Porphyry spins a new variation, what he calls predicables or attributables (he’s writing in Greek; usually translations say predicable.) This is by way of a detour through Aristotle’s Topics even though the Isagoge mainly treats the Categories – ah, I see I may be losing you.
Ursula: Believe me – I know I mock you sometimes, but I do understand that one can have a hard time knowing what is essential and what is a distraction. Yorick would probably ask me at this point to give a prima facie account of that very distinction, and I’d be a bit at a loss.
Adam: Thank you. All right. So, the predicables are five terms that Aristotle uses in the Topics – that’s another work in the Organon, incidentally – five terms, though Porphyry actually changes one of them, for various levels of generality. They are ways – Aristotle suggests they are an exhaustive list of the ways – in which a characteristic can belong to a thing. The terms are genus, species, difference, property, and accident. I – I do realize this is specialized terminology, and I’ll try to give you some examples.
Orsino: So, “species.” We assume that Aristotle is not doing biology. I mean, not here.
Iachimo: If you start talking about natural kinds, I may regret asking you to go into all this.
Adam: Species is a good place to start. No, it isn’t – well it isn’t just – a biological term here. Yes, a horse is a species of animal – Aristotle actually uses horses quite a lot as examples – but so too squares and pentagons are species of shape; black, white, and red are species of color; and salt, bitter, sweet, are species of flavor, and so on. This is why we say it’s a category mistake to ask how salty or dark a triangle is – a shape isn’t the sort of thing that has those characteristics –
Emilia: But I paint dark and light triangles all the time. Or whatever.
Orsino: And we see dark and light things – I mean, if you see it at all, it has a hue. And a shape, too, for that matter. Street signs, houses, flowers –
Iachimo: Computer screens. Graffiti.
Juliet: People.
Ursula: The difference is: a given triangle may be dark or light, but it isn’t dark or light qua shape.
Adam: Correct. Its hue is – this is another one of Porphyry’s predicables – accidentally associated with the shape.
Emilia: As I was saying earlier, I don’t just throw paint at the canvas –
Adam: “Accident” just means that the triangle could have been a different color. And indeed, shape too is only accidentally associated with many things – a given form (say a traffic sign) certainly could have been a different shape.
Emilia: Not in one of my paintings it couldn’t. There’s always a reason. If a shape is there, it’s there because the composition needs it. And the color is the same.
Adam: Well you may disagree with Porphyry, or maybe Porphyry isn’t addressing your specific concerns as artist – notice, “specific” derives from the same root as “species” –
Ursula: Ah, there’s the etymology.
Adam: But Porphyry would say, within your painting perhaps it’s true that any given shade is there because it has to be there for the painting to be as it is – but you could have painted a different painting.
Emilia: Again – well I still want to say, No. Because the painting tells me it needs to be painted. I know how that sounds, I don’t care. Roll your eyes if you want to, Iachimo.
Orsino: Actually – I mean sure Iachimmo may think of that kind of talk as just vague and allusive –
Iachimo: I’m not in charge of what anyone says. I’m just not going to accept it if I’m asked to think that way myself.
Orsino: – but even in his field – or mine –aren’t there are philosophers who are starting to talk this way?
Ursula: Indeed! Nick Land – Reza Negarestani –
Iachimo: Accelerationism.
Ursula: Of which there is more than one version.
Adam: Interesting figures – nihilists to the core of course, and Land is quite mad – but let me keep going. Or accelerate, if I need to. Of course, what concerns Emilia qua artist may well be different from the concerns of Porphyry qua metaphysician –
Iachimo: Metaphysics is what is wrong with this entire thing.
Adam: I am not surprised you think so, but someone asked me to sketch my research, and these are necessary preliminaries.
Iachimo: “Sketch!” Not paint your masterpiece in real time. Let alone the whole exhibition. With all its shapes and colors.
Ursula: If I may intercede, all Adam is doing here is laying out some of the ways in which thinking transpires, and he’s not wrong. It’s a bit, well, Euclidean, but these really are as it were the broad outlines of the assumptions of common sense. We all have recourse to these kinds of habits of thought. When we need to.
Adam: She knows that when she gets helpful like this, I get nervous.
Ursula: Which is precisely why I help. It surfaces your symptom. This is all part of the analysis.
Iachimo: Terminable or interminable.
Juliet: “Why not both.”
Ursula: Why, Juliet!
Juliet: Coming to understand your secret code.
Orsino: Four-twenty.
Emilia: You’re not bored?
Juliet: I wouldn’t say bored. Not yet, anyway. I might have – criticisms.
Adam: I will be interested to hear.
Ursula: You say that now.
Adam: From Juliet, in any case.
Juliet: Um –
Orsino: Go on, anyway.
Adam: So – an “accident” is the way something like green pertains to a shape, whereas “species” is the way green pertains to color. Color here would be the “genus,” which is to say how broader categories appropriately pertain to – are predicated of – more specific terms. All of Porphyry’s five predicables are ways of explaining pertinence. So for example, differentia: this is how species of the same genus are distinguished from each other. Say, the number of sides as regards shapes – or whether some angles are concave or not – and so on. A triangle doesn’t get differentiated from a pentagon by virtue of being green, but by virtue of having three sides rather than five. Or to take Aristotle’s horses and men, they get differentiated by virtue of horses being irrational, and men being rational. Again – don’t look at me that way, Ursula – this is Aristotle’s account. As for property – this is a different way of distinguishing between species. Porphyry’s example is: that only horses neigh, and only humans can laugh.
Orsino: I’m not sure that’s true –
Adam: It’s merely an illustration.
Ursula: That’s what you think.
Adam: You see? I was right to be wary. Ursula is getting something ready.
Orsino: But OK, I think I follow: it’s “proper” to horses that they can neigh – it’s not an accident, like green to the green triangle, since obviously not all triangles are green, and if something is green that doesn’t make it a triangle; whereas neighing and horses correspond to each other – if it can neigh, it’s a horse, and if it’s a horse, it can neigh.
Adam: Yes, you have it there. They’re mutually convertible.
Emilia: Oh! And when I said that Hathaway doesn’t see the painting as a painting – it’s an object for her but not a work of art – this is – she’s seeing some things about it – size and solidity and shape and color –
Orsino: Aren’t cats color-blind?
Emilia – but she’s just, just missing a, what did you call them Adam?
Adam: A predicable.
Emilia: So it’s not the thing she’s not seeing – it really is what Adam said – its mode.
Iachimo: And if cats are color-blind – as by the way, I am, red-green that is –
Adam: Then Hathaway and you each sadly miss out on certain other relevant aspects. Though I am not sure the word for these would be modes. This is indeed diverting, and we could think about just how Porphyry would make sense of these respective lacunae – art qua art, and color –
Ursula: But I’m guessing this is not your project, still.
Adam: No indeed. Painful as I find it, I am inevitably leaving out so much that is so interesting. Though of course making this sketch is a good exercise. So, then: Porphyry’s account is vastly influential – and controversial, naturally; it’s disputed over and over again – and Boethius in particular renders it into Latin, and then in the thirteenth century, Peter of Spain – a very fascinating figure, we don’t know much about him –
Emilia: Wait – how can he be so interesting if we know so little?
Ursula: I imagine it’s the frisson between what little we know and how much we don’t.
Adam: Well among other things, he might or might not have been Pope John the Twenty-First. Who seems to have died suspiciously, in an accident in his own laboratory.
Iachimo: The Pope had a laboratory?
Adam: This Pope did. Briefly. There were three Popes that year.
Orsino: And we don’t even know for sure if one of them was Peter of Spain?
Adam: The identity is disputed, though John XXI was a learned and curious man, as the laboratory indicates. What is not disputed is the text Peter of Spain – whoever he was – wrote. So Peter uses the account of the predicables, from Porphyry via Boethius, in a book called the Tractatus – it’s also called the Summaries, and it went on to be very influential as a textbook, for generations, and – this is the crucial thing – in it, he put Porphyry’s schema of the predicables into a diagram. It gets called a Porphyrian “tree,” because it takes the form of a column with “genus” at the top and concrete individual things like Socrates or Bucephalus at the bottom.
Emilia: Bucephalus – that’s a horse again, right?
Ursula: Alexander the Great’s.
Adam: Correct. Though here Peter is, like Aristotle, just using the horse – or the human being – as an illustration; his diagram is a purely formal depiction of these relationships. Peter is actually walking us through a particular exposition early in Porphyry, where Substance is the genus; it can be either bodily or non-bodily (those are species); a body can be animate or inanimate – “body” just means a material entity, a stone can be a body in this sense, but an animate body is of course different; an animate body might be sentient or insentient; a sentient body – that is, an animal – either rational or not; rational animals are divided into mortal and immortal; and finally, mortal rational animals – humankind – instantiates as individuals: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and each of us.
Iachimo: Down to earth at last.
Adam: Yes, well, in a manner of speaking.
Iachimo: This is part of what I could potentially find interesting, Adam, if you would humor me.
Adam: I mean – I am just getting to – but yes, your observation?
Iachimo: Well look. There’s a lot we don’t agree on. Or at least, I can admit, we frequently talk past each other. But this is an interesting scheme – primitive, but interesting – which could be used to inventory and classify – well, potentially anything. It’s generalizable. Hierarchical models are promising, intriguing, and if they can be formalized – rigorously, I mean – they can lead to interesting results. It’s interesting because it’s already so formal – it isn’t so much a metaphysical scheme as purely logical. You could take this – well, it has been taken – into programming. There are what are called type systems, that give every term – “term” is a, um, term of art. Strings of symbols, different words, phrases even, are called “terms.” And every term is said to have – and the programming language assigns it – a “type.”
Orsino: Oh I think I see where you are going. Yes. The language knows – I mean, the system running on it knows – that types have to match; so for example you can return and answer like “I’m great, how are you?” to the input “Hey, how’s it going,” and an accurate output if you ask how long in kilometers the Amazon river is, and there is an answer to the request to compute the square root of seven. But there’s no response to “what’s the square root of Hey!”, or how many kilometers the square root of seven is, because the terms “square root of” and “Hey!” and “kilometer” are all different types.
Iachimo: Well I don’t want to say that the program or the computer “knows” it either, but you’re right that’s the upshot, there is no well-formed possible response given the constraints of the typology.
Ursula: And you’re saying that this is more or less logically isomorphic with Adam’s schematic.
Adam: It’s not mine! It’s from Aristotle, via Peter of Spain, Boethius, and Porphyry.
Iachimo: You asked me earlier, am I more frustrated with the squatters on campus, than I am worried about A.I. alignment. And I could answer, these are actually different types. You can’t be more blue than you are loud –
Orsino: Why not? What if for instance, both soft-versus-loud and, let’s say, black-&-white versus colored, are on scales of zero to a thousand –
Iachimo: You can do that, but you have to define this as what you are doing. It all depends on getting the formalism consistent. And actually, doing that is not so challenging, in itself, as you know.
Orsino: Right, that’s why I ask.
Emilia: Wait, why isn’t it challenging? I’d think this kind of – numbering of color or sound or whatever would be bound to get all kinds of things wrong.
Orsino: You can just decide, arbitrarily, what your lower and upper bound is, and you can spread the numbers out –
Emilia: Ugh. I know there’s a place for, for quantitative measures. If I mix five drops of cadmium red and three of ochre yellow I get something different than if I use different proportions. But even this I usually do by feel. This pushing some arbitrary spread of “zero to a thousand” on art just makes me – kind of furious.
Iachimo: Well, aside from your biases against measure, you’re not wrong –
Adam: Ye gods. Iachimo, are you feeling all right?
Iachimo: Everyone thinks I’m some kind of reactionary reductionist. I’m not. The problem is – the problem Emilia is pointing out – is, you might lose verisimilitude. If you describe two different sets of phenomena using a single scale, no matter how fine the gradient, you are assuming that there’s just one relevant axis. And that’s an empirical question. Figuring this out happens by trial and error.
Orsino: OK, sure. It’s like engineering, in a way.
Iachimo: And in fact the question about frustration versus worry is a good example, because on the surface these look much closer than blue and loud, but in fact they are pretty different, and given their various objects – the protests, A.I. alignment, the continual ceding of human systems to A.I. operation, and on and on – actually not so similar at all.
Ursula: To say nothing of the ways these interact and complicate each other.
Iachimo: Right.
Ursula: Which of course also complicates their apparent difference from each other.
Iachimo: Recursive feedback isn’t the same as identity. Or even as sameness of type. That can be coded too.
Adam: You said that formalizing was not such a great challenge.
Iachimo: In fact there are already programs that could do most of it, and others to check their work.
Emilia: Programs to do programing?
Orsino: Oh sure. Programs to program programs to program, you could in theory do it ad infinitum.
Ursula: No, you couldn’t.
Adam: No, you couldn’t.
Emilia: Now it’s Ursula’s turn to be nervous. Why is Adam suddenly on her side?
Juliet: You’ve clearly watched each other for a long time, to not just know how to read it but find it endearing.
Ursula: Oh I know very well why Adam says No, he thinks there’s got to be a telos and a cause.
Adam: It’s the very same thing we were saying about imagining a motive for the simulators. There’s a reason. Even in Iachimo’s terms, I mean not the “terms” of a programming language just the terms of his argument, it doesn’t work; there’s an output to the program after all. Term, by the way, if you think about it for a moment, means limit. The medieval logicians talk about the terminus of acts and intentionality all the time.
Juliet: You really do like etymology.
Adam: I like thinking. Words are one of the tools for thinking. I try to respect my tools.
Emilia: OK but Ursula why do you say “No,” then?
Ursula: “Ad infinitum” isn’t some unsurpassable limit. It’s the name for a short-circuit of thought. In fact it isn’t the limit at all, it’s the starting-place. That ellipsis that seems to stretch out forever over the horizon? It’s akin to what Lacan calls the quilting-point. You might call it, stipulation, but inexplicit – inarticulate, and in fact incoherent, necessarily incoherent – stipulation. This idea that you could just keep going on and on doing exactly the same thing – it inverts, into the claim that what has been going on is exactly what has always been going on and on. It’s a denial of origins. But none of us has always been doing just this same thing forever. The Unconscious is immortal, Freud says, and that goes in both directions; but it’s an illusion. A parallax, Zizek would call it.
Adam: Ursula, this is actually quite interesting – I’m sure we don’t agree, but I don’t know how much we might disagree, though I feel closer to what you just said than to Iachimo’s drive to formalism – rigor is one thing, abstraction is another – but –
Emilia: But you actually hadn’t got all the way done with your account.
Adam: Well the interesting part is – and Iachimo you might see this if you focus on the formal resemblances I’m going to sketch (and yes I’ll try to just sketch) – all right, so about the time of the publication of Peter’s Summaries – this is in the late 13th century – there was a younger contemporary of Peter (whoever he was), a Jewish Rabbi named Joseph Gikatilla. He’s one of the foremost exemplars of the great generation of Kabbalists, the Jewish mysticism which was having a renaissance about this time. Abraham Abulafia, and Moses de Leon –
Iachimo: Will these names be on the test?
Emilia: Iachimo, stop.
Adam: It’s really all right, Ursula is quite right that I don’t quite know how to distinguish what’s essential and what’s extra.
Emilia: Well I think it’s because you are just in love with the subject, and all the aspects seem beautiful to you.
Ursula: Which is – if we’re being fair – why Iachimo can’t distinguish the niceties of coding from the terror of A.I. threat.
Orsino: Except that Iachimo isn’t in love, he’s afraid.
Ursula: You know what I’m going to say.
Emilia: “Why not both?” or “What’s the difference”?
Orsino: What’s the difference between those? Oooh, it could be recursive!
Iachimo: Stop, please, or you will just crash the system right here and now. Adam, you can see how desperate are our straits that I turn to you for rescue.
Adam: I will be your knight in shining armor.
Ursula: I’m quite serious, you know. About the love and fear.
Orsino: And the jokes.
Juliet: These interludes are interesting. The way you all punctuate your substantive talk with these social back-and-forths –
Orsino: Which is the essential, and which is the extra?
Emilia: Wave or particle?
Ursula: Why not both?
Iachimo: ADAM!
Adam: Where is my Sixpence? Ah thank you. So: there’s a famous edition of Gikatilla’s masterwork, the Gates of Light, the first Latin translation – first as far as we know, 1516; it has a frontispiece designed by Johannes Reuchlin, showing what is now a familiar diagram: the Kabbalistic Tree, the Etz Chaim or “Tree of Life.”
Orsino: OK, this too I know.
Emilia: Me too. I once did a set of Tarot cards, on commission, and the woman who asked for it wanted a lot of kabbalistic imagery.
Adam: So, as you know then, this diagram is an arrangement of ten headings in a semi-hierarchical structure. These ten headings are traditionally the names of sephiroth, which is plural for sephira, a word that has been variously derived from or related to Hebrew roots – and I make no apologies – meaning sapphire (which preserves its resonance in English); also meaning text, scribe, boundary – there’s limit again, by the way – and number – which is why I said numerology was involved, it’s actually gematria, which means the reading of numerical values of words. Hebrew letters each have a numerical value, you see. As do the Greek, incidentally. The word sephiroth for example comes to 756.
Ursula: I happen to agree with Adam in considering Nick Land interestingly mad, but I will just interject that he too – and quite seriously, though that’s not always apparent – introduces this sort of alphanumeric correspondence.
Adam: “Sephiroth” as a word has also quite plausibly been related to the Greek sphairos, i.e., sphere. The sephiroth are thought of as ten emanations of God, and the tradition is very explicit that there are ten. Not nine, not eleven. This insistence goes very far back, in material that dates perhaps as far back as the second century AD. Though of course there are more conservative estimates.
Iachimo: So – about the dates – you said that the Latin edition of this book has the sephiroth diagram. That was – when? Fifteen-something?
Adam: 1516, I believe. You can see how that one is easy to remember.
Ursula: Iachimo is going to ask, is this diagram not in the Hebrew?
Adam: It was certainly not devised by Reuchlin. Who was absolutely the preeminent Gentile scholar of Hebrew of his day. He wrote in defense of Jewish books to stop their destruction,
Iachimo: Yes, well I suppose I’m bound to thank him for that. But I’m wondering if we know how he devised it, if it isn’t depicted in the work he was translating.
Adam: Reuchlin in fact did not make the translation, which was done by a Jewish convert, Paolo Ricci. But the relationships between the sephiroth are clear. They almost always are enumerated in a specific order, unless occasionally – as indeed in Gikatilla – in reverse. The diagram certainly predates Reuchlin – he had too much respect for his material to simply impose his own ingenuity on it, and besides that, he would undoubtedly have been accused of forgery – but I don’t know how precisely how old it is. The lists of the sephiroth certainly go back to roughly the 13th century, possibly the twelfth, but their depiction varies – sometimes concentric circles or a single chain. Just when the canonical three-columned chart emerged , I’m not sure. There is here an interesting corollary with what I was mentioning earlier in the case of Porthyry. But what is striking for my purposes – as I suppose for yours, Iachimo – is the structure.
Ursula: You’re going to point out, aren’t you, that the Etz Chaim looks like the Porphyrian Tree.
Adam: I am; but before I get to that, there’s simply the question of origin, since in both cases we have a first instance we can identify, but we must assume that the graphic has a prehistory that is lost. For instance Boethius, who as I mentioned translated Porphyry into Latin and wrote more than one commentary on him, mentions “a figure giving a visual example,” and speaks of the lower genera “branching” from the higher ones. So although the first picture we have comes (I think) from Peter Hispanus, it seems very likely that Peter’s diagram is reproducing something that was already in the tradition. In any case, after Peter, it spread throughout Europe, in a way that indicates that perhaps the ground was ready.
Orsino: And you’re pointing out that this is probably the case with Gikatilla too.
Adam: Not only does Reuchlin’s diagram certainly trace to Gikatilla and doubtless before, but it seems likely that it and Peter’s diagram – which again is roughly contemporary with Gikatilla, even though Peter is writing logic and Gikatilla is writing mysticism – have a common source. As Ursula notes, representations of the Tree of Porphyry have a clear resemblance to the Kabbalistc diagram of the sephiroth on the Tree of Life. This might indeed seem so obvious that it might seem to be solely a function of the graphic itself.
Iachimo: The way chess and checkers “resemble” each other superficially.
Adam: But this conclusion is a mistake. I am of course far from the first to notice this resemblance, as the fact that Ursula almost immediately raised the observation should indicate. But what is really of interest is, why?
Ursula: Well, what I would really observe is that neither of them really look very much like trees at all.
Adam: Leave it to a psychoanalyst – I mean this as a compliment – to state the obvious. Hiding in plain sight, is the fact that both of these diagrams, which are expressly named “trees,” are in fact not pictures of trees, not even remotely. Well, in a few cases they are decorated with leaves. But what they are, is diagrammatical representations of conceptual structures – structures which can be arrayed in other ways, and even without being altered, are sometimes metaphorically presented as analogous to other realities than the arboreal. Neither Ammonius nor Marius Victorinus – sorry, no I haven't mentioned them before – they each commented upon Porphyry in the centuries immediately following, and neither called his arrangement a “tree;” they associate it with the Aristotelian square of opposition. This should be enough to underscore that the structure it depicts is logical or metaphysical. It is not, by this token, unreal.
Iachimo: “Other than the arboreal,” nice. For example?
Adam: For example. As I mentioned, they were visualized as circles, one inside the next, like the orbits of the heavenly bodies. They have been superimposed upon the human form: the trunk, the left and right sides. Or upon architectural features: usually two pillars forming a gateway, or three pillars (sometimes the middle one being a further column or stele seen through the gate).
Ursula: Interesting. Why three?
Orsino: “Three” is interesting?
Ursula: For all kinds of reasons. Hegel, Lacan – it would take us somewhat afield to explain in any detail. What I want to know is whether this triadic form shows up here coincidentally or not.
Emilia: Well, in the tarot cards I painted – the woman who wanted them gave so much input, it was one of the hardest commissions I ever did – the different spheres, sephiroth you called them, are kind of arranged, like beads on a string maybe?, in three strands. There’s a middle one, and two flanking ones. The middle is longer, taller.
Adam: Taller, and in fact not arranged exactly like the left or right columns. Four sephiroth in the center, three on either side; and in the central column, or pillar, there is a gap where one of the sephiroth could be, and instead there are two at the bottom. It’s also interesting to note the terminology. The left pillar is called Din – it’s Hebrew for something like severity, I believe – while the right is called Chesed, mercy. Now – I can’t, you will be relieved to hear, expound on all of this, but I am getting towards the end. All three of the pillars ascend towards the higher – these are all understood as manifestations or aspects of God, of divine power, but manifestations in creation – and there is a path that weaves from below to above and moves between all three of the columns. But the left-hand, Din, is always understood to be, well, limiting – “severe” – in the way that the created order transpires; whereas the right-hand, Chesed, is giving, generous, proliferating. And it’s this, among other things, that first made me think there was something more to the resonance than just coincidence.
Emilia: Why?
Adam: Because notice how the Porphyrian tree, too, has a side that is just negation – non-bodily, inanimate, insentient, non-rational, and so forth. But there is considerably more. It is true that the formal structure of both arrangements – I mean of the predicables, and of the sephiroth – the structure occasions certain resemblances, but other resonances cannot be accounted for thus. The causality is the other way around: it’s the relations represented by each “tree” that are similar enough to each other, which then make it possible to schematically show them by diagrams that are so alike. And this, in turn, leads us to wonder why – why are these relationships so isomorphic? But to answer this, we must look again at the formal similarities. Even for instance, the way the initial fourfold of the categorial scheme unfolds into a ten-fold scheme.
Ursula: Nick Land, who I was mentioning before – well it wasn’t just him – introduced a very Deleuzo-Guattarian version of this diagram, and it too has ten elements.
Adam: Yes – well I suspect there’s a common form behind all of these developments, from the ancient to the postmodern. Because in the kabbalah too, the tree is separated into four levels, and –
Iachimo: OK, let me stop you. Aside from the fact that this is all extremely fast and loose – free-association, almost –
Ursula: Adam does free-associate well. He’s actually an almost ideal patient.
Iachimo: – there’s a really obvious problem, which is that, for all that you have ten sephiroth in Gikatilla, and ten categories in Aristotle, and two tree diagrams, the diagrams you are talking about don’t chart the sephiroth and the categories at all – they are the sephiroth and the predicables. I do pay attention. And believe me, this is a significant coding error.
Adam: I am gratified that you are tracking, and you are right – this remains to be explicated – I’m still thinking of various ways to account for it. One way might be to note that it’s quite clear that any of the categories can function as genus in a chain of predicables.
Ursula: And why does this help?
Adam: Because, at least in later kabbalistic tradition – what comes out of Isaac Luria and Chaim Vital, they’re actually just slightly later than Reuchlin, and no don’t look at me that way, I’m not dropping names it’s just how I remember – every one of the sephiroth can be, as it were, the crown – Keter, the first sephiroth, means crown – of a kind of sub-tree. So one can speak, for instance, of the Malkuth of Binah, or the Tiphereth of Din, (all of these being sephiroth, you understand) –
Iachimo: So, permutations. Well, good luck with that. I mean, yes, I was interested – still am – in the Aristotle-Porphyry bit. As I say, this is broadly applicable – and of course has been applied – to all kinds of coding and modeling problems. The categories are – I suppose you could call them, different kinds of kinds, if you see what I mean – the list of categories is a way of distinguishing between ways we make distinctions. And this meta-level or recursivity is interesting, since any system that can represent itself must have functions that enact this. I suppose in a way what you are describing in the application of the sephiroth to themselves is another example? But I’m skeptical – to put it mildly – that you’ll get much traction there.
Ursula: Well I admit – and it’s not a surprise, everyone knows I love Adam and that we’re friends precisely in order to disagree – I admit I find it diverting, and it’s precisely the hand-wavy parts that intrigue me. This three-ness for instance. And the way there seems to be a kind of dialectic of limit and unlimited.
Emilia: You said it was something like Lacan?
Iachimo: Oh Lord, No. Adam.
Adam: I’m afraid I can’t interfere. Fair play and all that. Let the marketplace of ideas sort it out.
Juliet: Like I said: Liberalism. The marketplace of ideas. Please.
Orsino: Yes, that’s the second time you’ve raised this objection, but I’m not sure what it means.
Juliet: It means, this fantasy of “debating the case on its merits” or whatever is just that. A fantasy. If Adam wants to dispute Ursula, he should go ahead, and if not, fine, but let’s not pretend that either of these is some kind of neutral wait-and-see pose. Let alone that everyone’s opinion is valid.
Adam: Ah, I think you misunderstand me. I simply think that one simply makes one’s best case, and does what one can. Of course there’s no arguing with incorrigibility. But Ursula – and indeed Iachimo – though they put up a good show, they are fair, and if I haven’t persuaded them in the end, I usually conclude the fault is with me. Of course, their starting-places are completely wrong, but in a sense that’s not their fault.
Ursula: As I often say: praising with faint damnation.
Iachimo: But look, Juliet – this is the first time you’ve heard any of this, yes?
Juliet: Um, yeah –
Iachimo: So: coming in from the outside, with no previous exposure or loyalties: what is your impression of the merits of either case?
Juliet: You really want to know?
Iachimo: Of course. I’m asking.
Juliet: It’s tedious and pointless –
Adam: Ah, well. I did say I should have waited for Yorick.
Juliet: And, honestly, I think it’s problematic. Both of you. Can I just say – your rapport I like, it’s fun; as a DEI trainer I look at lots of organizations’ cultures, and I notice how norms go and so on, and y’all’s is interesting, until it gets a bit much. But what you're going on about? This is pretty hard to take. I’m not saying it’s boring, I’m saying it’s harmful. Or – OK, that’s a bit strong. It’s potentially harmful. Rationality. All these neat little items. All these scales and hierarchies. What goes where. The difference between horses and men. Of course it’s men. Look, color may be accidental to a pentagon, but I have to tell you, in the system of white supremacy, it has some very real and not very “metaphysical” effects.
Adam: Of course, I’d forgotten – you prefer rhizomes to trees.
Iachimo: But wait. Hold on. Even I know that’s not what Adam is talking about when he says color.
Juliet: Yeah well maybe that’s the problem.
Adam: In fact the ancients do have some things to say about color in just this sense.
Juliet: Oh I know. Your friend Aristotle said some people are naturally slaves.
Orsino: Um – so as I mentioned, I minored in Black Studies. I did a lot of reading in the history of race, history of slavery. I hate that I seem to be the person to say it, the person who’ll be listened to, but I guess I am, so I’ll say it: these are just different things. Like radically different.
Juliet: I know, obviously – there’s indentured servitude, there’s rampant wage slavery, there are company towns – still! – there are –
Orsino: Hold on. All I really meant to say here was, I don’t know Aristotle even a tenth as well as Adam does, but I do know that when he talks – when Aristotle talks – about the “natural slave,” he’s not thinking about race. At all.
Juliet: The Greeks thought of others as barbarians –
Ursula: Which meant more or less people who didn’t speak Greek. I can do etymology too, Adam.
Juliet: Right, people who barked. Like animals.
Iachimo: Not only are slavery and race obviously different, it’s well known that during the western slave trade, different African groups in fact captured and sold slaves.
Emilia: Isn’t that exaggerated?
Juliet: It’s not only exaggerated, it’s a standard talking point of people on the far right.
Orsino: It’s not exaggerated. At all. Juliet is right that it’s brought up a lot in bad faith – of course it is. But it actually needs to be mentioned, because otherwise we get this completely misguided and historically uninformed way of thinking about race. The Dahomey, the Yoruba, the Ashanti, all kinds of African powers making war on each other, drove a huge proportion of the supply side of the slave trade. Of course Europe and America drove the demand, and economics did the rest.
Juliet: Look, I don’t actually know the history maybe as well as you do Orsino, and as a white woman and an ally of POC I know I have my blind spots. I’d never dispute your report of – of what it’s like for you as a Black man living in America, that’s your experience – but what’s just not arguable is that American slavery was anything but a particularly awful and dehumanizing institution –
Orsino: I’ll go you one better: the slave trade was worse than what had happened before, in Africa, in at least one really decisive way. Of course there had always been slaves taken away from their homelands, but not like that. And here, color does matter – a slave taken as payment of their family’s debt is still surrounded by others who look like them and share many common cultural assumptions. Even if you are taken, say in battle, and live the rest of your life in another part of the continent, you are still not that far away relatively speaking – if there was a war there was a shared border, probably – and you are surrounded by people who look like you to some degree, and speak a language that you might also speak. What any given slave maked of this is different, but that much, we can say. This is aside from the simple physical barbarity of the Middle Passage, but even that – I mean we’re talking about war and slavery, it’s bound to be terrible; but I would say it was the uprooting of Africans from their continent that was unprecedented. At least in scale.
Juliet: And this, this brutality, was built into the founding of the country and has massive ongoing effects to this day.
Orsino: That’s, um, too broad a statement for me to comment on without knowing exactly what you mean –
Juliet: Well what I do know is the statistics. We see it in, like, the life expectancy of Black people, we see it in the median incomes of Black families, we see it in the school-to-prison pipeline, we see it in segregated neighborhoods – we see it in police shootings. Every day.
Iachimo: Yes but you were talking about Aristotle. And all Orsino was pointing out is, that’s not what Aristotle says. “Natural slaves” may be objectionable –
Ursula: Assuming we know what he meant by this –
Adam: It’s actually complex –
Juliet: Oh I bet it is. Of course. Complex.
Iachimo: – the point is, Aristotle wasn’t – as Orsino was saying – talking about race at all.
Adam: Well, if I may – I actually wasn’t speaking of Aristotle when I mentioned what the ancients say on this matter –
Emilia: You’re right, we got side-tracked.
Adam: Should I go on?
Juliet: By all means.
Adam: When Porphyry is explaining what an accident is, he says there are some that are “separable” –that’s the usual translation – and some that are “inseparable.” “Asleep,” he says, is a separable accident – a given person may be asleep or not; one can conceive of them in either state (that’s what makes it an accident), and they could actually be in either state (which is what makes it separable). Whereas “black,” he calls – here, let me find it –
Iachimo: Should we brace for yet another moment of ancient racism?
Orsino: I’ll be the judge of that.
Ursula: I think that would be what Adam would call anachronistic.
Adam: Ah, here: “Hence, sleep is a separable accident; blackness however, an accident that applies inseparably, both to ravens and to Ethiopians.”
Juliet: Wow. Just, wow. Like how can you even –
Orsino: Yeah I have to say, I don’t find that objectionable.
Juliet: OK, well, I’m glad you can deal. I would just – I would never.
Orsino: Nevermore.
Iachimo: Quoth the raven.
Orsino: Hey, we can call us that. You can’t call us that.
Emilia: Ursula I think you’re going to need to give us some therapy here.
Ursula: As I was telling Adam: I’m not a therapist, alas.
Adam: And even she doesn’t call herself that.
Juliet: Look, I’m – I’m glad this is all fun and funny to you, but –
Ursula: Oh as I was saying, the jokes are serious. It’s how we do serious.
Juliet: Emilia did try to explain. But –
Ursula: As you know, Freud pays a great deal of attention to jokes–
Juliet: Yes I know, but –
Ursula: It’s a way of saying without saying – or saying and not saying at the same time. I was remarking towards the beginning of the evening, about your protests – I said you were testing the limits not of the acceptable but of what we can say is acceptable. Because there’s always a boundary a hazy zone, that shades off from what we all know and admit is acceptable, towards what is actually not.
Adam: Yes, well, hard cases make bad law.
Ursula: No, law makes the case. And the exception. There is always a way – an expected, an accepted way, but an implicit way – of pushing back against the law; breaking it, resisting it, ignoring it if you like, but pointedly ignoring it. There is no commandment – and it can be a Thou Shalt or a Thou Shalt Not – without an unspoken codicil – an unofficial but in fact countenanced way – that winks towards the usual ways it can be trespassed.
Adam: You’re talking about perversion.
Ursula: You can live your whole life counter to the law, as it were, but still in its thrall. The camps and the protests – so far – all fall into this place. The city is in fact perfectly happy to have this demonstration of its tolerance for spicy unrest.
Adam: And the protesters of course get their daily dose of frisson as well.
Emilia: But come on. The protesters aren’t doing this just to get some kind of rush –
Juliet: And the campers – I guess I just gotta keep saying it – just want to be safe and housed. I have to say there’s something a little appalling about calling them perverts.
Ursula: Not the campers. They’ve fallen outside the law entirely. They’re close to what Agamben calls homo sacer.
Iachimo: So I’m not so sure about this. There are plenty of these people who make the choice, over and over, to not go to the shelter, to opt out of the housing program, to –
Juliet: Who you call “these people,” can I just tell you, I know a lot of them by name, and I also know the conditions in the shelters. Aside from them being just unsafe places, there can be a wait of going on two years for a regular bed. Two years. For a bed that you still have to show up on time for or it’s given away. In a place that you might get robbed in, or – Look, these are just shitty options.
Iachimo: Robbed, huh? Nice people.
Emilia: You might not be so nice if you lived like –
Iachimo: I’m not nice now, by some metrics.
Orsino: So look Juliet I don’t at all dispute that. Yes, those are bad options. But I’m still struck by what Ursula says, and I think you might be wrong, Emilia. I don’t mean anything as reductionist as saying that protesters are all just looking for trouble or whatever –
Juliet: I’d say that about the counter-protesters, for sure. Some of them.
Orsino: But that’s interesting, right? You’re pretty sure about the folks on your own side – they’re just showing up for fellow human beings, doing the right thing. Whereas those others – you recognize in them what Ursula’s describing.
Juliet: If I were trying out my psychoanalytic riffs, I’d say that yes, the pro-police faction is getting off on the way there’s a kind of legal excuse to act lawlessly.
Iachimo: But that’s just what the protesters are getting, too. The law protects their right to protest –
Adam: As I recall, Juliet, you said actually that waiting for the law – I think what you said was “asking for permission” – actually called into question the notion of civil disobedience. Qua disobedience, I mean.
Juliet: The issue is one of human solidarity. Of people who are just trying to survive, asking to please not be just shoved, just shoved away – to no one cares where, even, and there is no place, they’re not even being told where to go, the city has just criminalized not having a house, criminalized not being rich enough. If you don’t see this, if you just see the protests as some folks getting excited that they get to go wave signs or something – I mean, I guess there probably are some people like that, but I don’t care, that’s not what this is about, and if that’s all you see, if that’s what you see – I have to wonder. And also, everyone needs some way to get on board. Maybe it starts with getting excited about waving a sign. Cool. You start there, you hang out, you get educated, you get radicalized. That might be how the revolution happens.
Adam: Sorry – you think that the revolution might happen via this, what, this slow spread of onboarding more and more trend-followers? Really? Because this strikes me as precisely what Ursula is saying: the permitted way of rule-breaking.
Juliet: It’s just one step. If you show up to wave a sign at a march, and find out that the next night there’s a non-permitted sleep-in in the University President’s office, maybe that’s all it takes.
Ursula: Far be it from me to dismiss what you are doing. But even this notion of “really” disobeying – say, protesting without a permit – is still well within the boundary I’m speaking of.
Juliet: Maybe you break the rule often enough, publicly enough, eventually the rule gets changed.
Ursula: That happens often enough; but you are not thereby pushing against the law itself. You’ll need to verge – and I’m not commending this, by the way – far closer to terrorism if you want to edge out of that space. If you do something like that, you’ll find the state of exception invoked very quickly. Now that’s no joke.
Adam: But Ursula, you would also say there’s a non-terrorist way of living free of the law, surely?
Ursula: In one’s own eyes, maybe. It is harder and easier than it sounds. But in the eyes of the law – ?
Emilia: So I don’t quite know what you mean by this boundary, still. Or what it has to do with jokes, which is where you started.
Ursula: In the Introductory Lectures – the first series, the ones that were actually given as lectures – Freud starts out by talking about little things: slips of the tongue, lapses of memory in an otherwise capable person, moments when you drop something two or three times. He calls these little details, which we are inclined usually to dismiss as utterly unimportant, the “dregs” of phenomena.
Adam: Hair, and dirt.
Emilia: Hmmm?
Adam: In the Parmenides, Socrates – he’s very young in this dialogue – asks the old Parmenides if there are even Forms of such lowly things as hair and dirt. He’s not sure there can be. Parmenides tells him, this is because you haven’t done enough philosophy yet.
Juliet: Do we have to do the imaginary world of perfect Tables and Horses and Beautiful Things, really?
Adam: And Chuang Tzu says that the Tao is in the bugs, the weeds, the dirt; in piss and shit. The Buddha, we are told, is “shit on a stick” – this being effectively a reference to a hygiene implement. Even Augustine says we come into the world inter urinas et faeces.
Emilia: But Ursula’s talking about Freud. Is this, like, the anal stage?
Adam: I thought of Parmenides’ “dirt and hair” when she mentioned Freud’s attention to the “dregs.”
Iachimo: I’m willing to bet Augustine doesn’t mean what Chaung Tzu meant.
Juliet: We know what he meant. You think I didn’t meet that quote in my women’s studies classes?
Adam: It’s good that they’re teaching the classics. And Iachimo is right, I was – well, joking? That’s your cue, Ursula.
Ursula: If I may, kids. In Freud’s case, to answer Emilia’s question, these cast-off things, these negligibles, aren’t – well they aren’t just – the feces of the anal stage in psychic development. That’s a feature of his account of childhood libido, yes, but this is a much bigger issue. His point is that these moments that seem completely superfluous are in fact potentially the key to what makes us what we are. Because they are indications of what we do despite our stated intentions. On Freud’s account, our every interaction is a transmission of either flowing or blocked libido – no not just sex, but desire – desire and its satiation, its frustration, or indeed its overflow; this is simply the defining characteristic of what it is to be a psyche like we are.
Iachimo: I’m gonna say it – Ursula you know this – this makes me crazy. This analysis of slips of the tongue and so on. Because once you open this door to claiming that people can be held as saying things they don’t mean to say, things they expressly deny saying, on the basis that something they do can be, what, “read as meaning” that, you effectively license anything. It’s nothing but convenience –
Adam: Hmmm, Iachimo, interesting you should say that. “Makes you crazy,” you say …
Iachimo: Ha, ha.
Ursula: My dear, first of all, Freud doesn’t hold that anything and everything can be deduced from this. It isn’t quite like, Adam what’s the principle – ?
Adam: Ex falso quodlibet. Roughly, “from a contradiction, anything follows.” It’s a maxim of medieval syllogistic logic. Which by the way, I too deny. Or rather –
Orsino: I think you once said “Yes but they say this like it’s a bad thing.”
Adam: Yes that sounds like me.
Ursula: As with Emilia’s art, which as she’s been at pains to insist is not at all an anything-goes affair, there are principles of what counts as a legitimate interpretation. They are however, not so easy to press into formulae –
Iachimo: Also very convenient.
Adam: Also, not true! Lacan has formulae galore – mathematical (well, pseudo-mathematical) formule –
Ursula: Adam, someday when you want to read Lacan, let me know. Truly. You bring the pleasure principle and I’ll bring the death drive. Until then, I have to do the work of two, so please.
Juliet: Now I can’t even tell what’s a joke.
Orsino: Now you’re catching on.
Ursula: Lacan – and Zizek even more, by the way – observes how, as I was saying, the Law produces an inevitable pushback – not an “equal and opposite reaction,” or some such; the Law – not any particular legal measure or system, but “The Law” write large – permits as it were its own transgression, but note, not in a way of a regrettable flaw, or “allowing for imprecision,” or even necessary venting of social frustration; rather, this is a feature of the Law as such.
Adam: But this really is – it’s just Aristotle. The Nichomachean Ethics – justice finally transpires to be, well, epieikeia; I mean, it’s complex – sorry, but it is – and I should say, Ursula, of course I recognize the same would be said of Lacan, and yes, I’ll read – well go ahead and choose something. From Ecrits, or –
Ursula: No, it’s obviously got to be Seminar Seven.
Orsino: OK, I have to ask – why obviously?
Ursula: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.
Adam: – but let me just say, epieikeia, it’s – well it’s a kind of moderation in applying the law. And it’s not formulatable as a known-in-advance principle. It’s contextual.
Iachimo: Mm-hmm. And in any given case, can you say why you are doing what you’re doing? Can you say how the context impacts the application? Because if yes, you can back up a level to a principle. And if not, you don’t really know, and it’s just a word for blundering ahead.
Adam: Iachimo, someday when you want to read Aristotle –
Iachimo: Although, wait – maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s engineering. Like you said earlier, Orsino.
Emilia: Or art.
Iachimo: Sorry – go on, Ursula. I need to think.
Ursula: To answer Juliet’s question –
Emilia: Juliet can you say your question again?
Juliet: I think Ursula was trying to explain to me why this banter is y’all’s love language.
Ursula: And why it is that permits the seriousness of the conversation to transpire. Between us, there are – let’s say, disputes. I think Adam is nostalgically fixated on the past in shall we say interesting ways; Adam thinks I am painted into a self-refuting corner with too much hermeneutic of suspicion. Poor Iachimo thinks we are all whistling past the graveyard in which Roco’s Basilisk has already laid our graves –
Iachimo: You think it’s funny. Also, no, I don’t.
Ursula: I think it’s fascinating, and I do believe it too is symptomatic – I don’t mean you, Iachimo, I mean what you’re working on, the whole field. Emilia can’t quite take all of us seriously, except of course that she puts her energy into her art and into her political work and she wants people to talk with about both of these, and also she is full of love. Probably she and Orsino have the least difficulty with any of the rest of us. Orsino fled one doctrinaire environment –
Orsino: More than one.
Ursula: – and enjoys all the triangulating, all the while posing as straight man to Iachimo’s comic. Orsino will turn out to be a spy.
Iachimo: Code name, Raven.
Orsino: Four-and-twenty blackbirds.
Ursula: But the disagreements are real. We argue because –
Adam: Because you’re almost right but not.
Ursula: – well, I happen to think it hasn’t got much to do with being right or wrong; it’s because this is where the jouissance is.
Adam: Which is why you are wrong! But also, almost not.
Iachimo: I think – I think I keep talking to you all because you listen. I still hold out hope of convincing you. But –
Emilia: But you have colleagues in the department, at the lab, who listen too.
Iachimo: No, you’re right. It’s also because the kinds of objections I get here are different.
Ursula: But I think that none of this would work, without – or no that’s not quite right, it’s not that it almost works and if you add humor then it works – rather, in and by working, there is a tension that build up and needs releasing – or rather, again –
Juliet: I don’t know. Sometimes it looks like – I mean, I just got here. But sometimes it looks like you don’t really go to the heart of the disagreements. It might be more that you disagree in order to joke, than that you joke in order to disagree.
Ursula: I like this, at first pass.
Juliet: And can I just say, I mean yes there are all kinds of ways in which disagreement is hard, and yeah it can turn into fights and sometimes those fights are not worth it – but. But there are times you have to fight. I mean, I’m not going to have just a respectful disagreement with some transphobe, right, who’s clearly baiting me. I might have to step away, be kind to myself, but there’s not some principled agree-to-disagree neutral ground here. It’s like, what this quote says by Robert Jones Jr, it’s something like, “We can disagree and still get along, but not if your disagreement involves my oppression or denies my humanity or my right to exist.”
Emilia: Who’s Robert Jones Jr?
Orsino: He’s an author. That quote sometimes gets attributed to James Baldwin because for a long time his handle was “Son of Baldwin.” And can I just say? It’s nowhere near as good as anything Baldwin would have said.
Adam: I’m glad you said it.
Orsino: I mean, just in terms of language. And he might be right, but this “denial of my right to exist,” or whatever – this is a really problematic formulation.
Juliet: Why? I don’t understand. If someone pretends they’re “just asking questions,” or whatever, when their bottom line is that Black people, or queer people, or people who are unhoused, should just suck it up, or ideally go away –
Orsino: It’s a problem because this “denial” of someone’s “right to exist,” unless it’s explicit, is really in the eye of the beholder. I can get huffy and indignant because you said, what, maybe that Black conservatives – which I don’t really think I am, and I’m not claiming this is your position, to be clear – are Uncle Toms, but even something as egregious as this doesn’t mean you want them all forcibly re-educated, right? And rhetoric that argues that this is what it means, that we’re all headed to Woke Sensitivity Training Camps forever or something, just pours gasoline on a fire. It’s needlessly provocative. If you tell me I’ve “denied your right to exist,” or contradicted your basic humanity – I have to say, that’s a very high bar.
Juliet: No, it’s not. It’s not just a matter of opinion. If someone who experiences oppression tells me about their experience, I believe them. And there are things you can say that just do entail that people ought to get out of the way, and the practical upshot of this is that people get harmed, and people die.
Adam: So you’re saying that the height of the bar is an optical illusion.
Juliet: That people know on some level is false and keep buying into anyway.
Ursula: Well, this practicality, this de facto upshot, is important – I mean not just the upshot but the de facto. You might say, Juliet, that with jokes – as in other kinds of parataxis, or other forms of slippage of meaning too – euphemism, irony, all the ways we avoid by not quite avoiding – there’s a kind of, what you were saying was the case with liberalism. Wanting it both ways.
Emilia: But don’t people say things they don’t really mean all the time? Or else – things they mean but not so much? Exaggeration. It’s a way of, what, blowing off steam.
Juliet: I don’t think of sexist jokes as blowing off steam. I don’t think of dogwhistles as blowing off steam. They perpetuate – and they’re meant to perpetuate –
Emilia: No, wait. I know, people say they perpetuate toxic masculinity, whatever. I don’t think that’s false exactly. I think it’s true. Or – it can be true. But I also think that you are doing a lot of blaming the smoke for the fire, if you see what I mean.
Juliet: If I’m doing a training at a workplace, and some male there makes a sexist joke – or I hear about one – I treat that as the symptom of something underlying. And you know what? Everyone says, “Oh I was joking.” They get this taken-aback look, “What?? Don’t be so sensitive.” And it isn’t harmless. Jokes aren’t even remotely harmless. But I don’t go pour water on the joke. And I don’t think I’m pouring gasoline either.
Ursula: No – I wouldn’t say harmless either, in fact.
Adam: Perhaps you could pour some XYZ.
Juliet: Look, that’s what I mean. Why is something funny? If the answer is – and it is, a lot of the time it is – basically, “because the joke is on them,” “about them,” “those people,” then I want to know – why does that make it funny? I want to know, does “them” mean people with more power, or less?
Iachimo: Punching up, or down.
Adam: Is it always about power, then?
Juliet: “Try some XYZ”. Look, that’s clearly meant to both talk over people’s heads with a kind of nudge-wink, in-crowd, we-get-it-don’t-we energy, and it’s also meant as a demeaning slight towards the whole idea of DEI, the work that I do. Don’t think I don’t pick up on it, I’ve met too many employees who are resentful of having to do another one of these stupid trainings, isn’t it enough that we all try to get along? And what’s more, you have this plausible deniability, which is the whole point of the joke in the first place.
Orsino: What’s wrong, exactly, with trying to get along?
Juliet: What’s wrong is that it’s not cost-free, and the costs aren't borne equally. It costs people. It costs people putting up with shit, with sexism, with passive-aggressiveness, with microaggressions, over and over and over – and they always have to, certain people always have to play nice or else they’re the ones who are ruining the party or whatever. Kind of like I’m doing right now. Sorry Emilia.
Adam: Ah – I presumed that you were by now in on the H2O / XYZ joke – insofar as it is a joke, I don’t suppose it is all that funny – and I don’t think I’ve dissimulated regarding my estimation of DEI work, either – in any case, I apologize. In fact I truly had no intention of –
Juliet: Didn’t you though? Because “apologize” is another one of those words people say a lot. Is it a step in actually making repair? Or does it just mean, Stop making me feel bad, when they have no idea what they did, and no interest at all in understanding what the impact of their action was? No interest at all in doing the work to get better at it. “Apology” is not some get out of jail free card –
Iachimo: That’s an interesting figure of speech. Sort of carceral, wouldn’t you say?
Ursula: You’ll make a psychoanalyst of you yet, Iachimo.
Juliet: What I’m saying is, people say “I apologize” and it just means “Shut up.” And I’m saying we should say what we mean, because this whole game of hint-hint doublespeak and doublethink – here’s some Orwell for you – serves power. It matters what we say, what words we use for things. We say “collateral damage” in a war and we’re talking about kids being crushed in blown-up hospitals, we say “boys will be boys” to describe rape culture.
Adam: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
Juliet: Whatever.
Adam: Precisely.
Juliet: And then you throw religion in – “God’s work”, and it turns out, we say “love,” and it means conversion therapy. Did you know – one cop who shot a black kid, in “self defense” of course – an unarmed kid, does it even need to be added – said this boy was a demon? We need to call things what they are. Because when we don’t –
Orsino: I know the case you mean. It was Michael Brown, shot in Ferguson Missouri. And for the record, the officer, who by the way was investigated twice, said that Brown “looked like a demon.” I read the whole transcript.
Ursula: And you are outing yourself as actually having a rather keen memory.
Orsino: I take notes.
Emilia: We’ve observed.
Juliet: Oh, “looked like,” well that's OK then. My God –
Adam: I do remember the case Orsino means, and it might seem a slender point, but I think it is true that “looks like” is not the same as “is.” More broadly, it seems to me curious how some of your points are euphemisms – collateral damage, etc. – and some are exaggerations.
Juliet: You’re – what does that even matter – ? –
Adam: I’m asking – as were you, I took it – for a little care in how we speak. If we attribute to our opponents worse arguments and worse stances than are really theirs, we will be unprepared to meet them in their strength. Moreover, it is not merely needlessly provocative, as Orsino observes, it actually gives them a weapon, when we misconstrue them –
Juliet: I don’t think I’m misconstruing them at all. I think it’s absolutely clear that the police regard black and brown bodies as a threat, that landlords and businesses see homeless encampments as a threat, that cis and hetero people see queer and trans people as a threat. Talk to Evangelicals out there, they will say it is literally demonic. What kind of “strength” do you have in mind, if you mean something that’s more than police power and bullying –?
Orsino: Can I just say – and I’m going to put this as straightforwardly as I can and still be diplomatic: as one of those black and brown bodies out there, I object. I object to being made into a talking point. In someone’s agenda. Especially parties who are keen to position themselves as having the cause of black people at heart. It’s a little – if I may say so – I hate putting it this way because I don’t believe in leveraging my apparent quote identity unquote to get any kind of deference whatsoever – But I am frustrated, and I find this a little – condescending.
Juliet: I – I’m sorry. That’s not my intent. Obviously you’re entitled to your opinion. I hear how this impacts you, and – I’m sorry. I’m just trying to talk out of my experience here, and I know a lot of people who just do not feel that way –
Orsino: So do I. Some of them are my family. We argue about stuff. And we keep talking to each other.
Adam: As, I hope, we shall –
Emilia: Adam is scrupulous. He’s going to ask what people say, not what we guess about what they mean –
Ursula: This time I mean it. Why not both?
Juliet: – Oh sure. This reasonable tone, this respectful disagreement. It’s a way of dismissing people who get angry, who have had it, who are asking just not to be killed.
Adam: When was the last time you spoke to an Evangelical Christian, just out of curiosity? I suppose in your work you must –
Juliet: “Just out of curiosity,” of course, I guess I won’t speculate about what you mean there. I saw a long facebook post just this week. This Karen was going off about drag queens grooming in the schools and how sad it was that the fucking Confederate flag couldn’t be shown outside her kids’ first grade classroom –
Iachimo: You know this person?
Juliet: No, it was linked to in a post on someone’s Twitter I follow. Point is, she was plenty sure there were diabolical forces at work.
Adam: First of all, Emilia is very kind, but in fact I do have guesses about why people say what they do, and I act upon these surmises sometimes. I hope that I know they are guesses. But such speculation is perfectly in order. Secondly, I too can get angry. The faculty of the soul I’ve mentioned several times this evening, thumos, it’s Greek for the self-assertive function, the seat of that in us which can be affronted, and which mounts a defense. This is the irascible faculty, and I certainly hold that it has its place, and that denying it is folly. Thirdly –
Juliet: “Has its place,” that’s nice of you. The faculty of the soul.
Adam: Thirdly: when we argue for a position on inaccurate or invalid grounds –
Juliet: What’s inaccurate? What?
Adam: – we leave ourselves open to further mistakes which are even more egregious. As you said: it is important to call things what they are.
Juliet: Right, by reading everyone the fucking dictionary and translating into ancient Greek. Give me a break. Yes. Call patriarchy patriarchy. Call racism racism. Call transphobia transphobia. And call evasion evasion, not some fucking high-minded stand on rational principles. My God, I’m so tired of hearing straight, cis white men –
Adam: – Sorry - do you know I’m straight?
Iachimo: That’s right, you’ve only just met Adam.
Juliet: – recasting everything in the terms that suit them. Let’s be reasonable. Are you sure he meant it that way? Maybe he was just grabbing your ass to make sure you didn’t lose your balance. “She looked like she was asking for it.” Maybe he didn’t mean he was a demon, after all he just said he looked like one –
Adam: May I mention that those terms you just used – patriarchy, transphobia – those are Greek. Well, Greek and Latin –
Juliet: God, that’s exactly what I mean –
Iachimo: Is that Yorick out there?
Emilia: Oh thank God.
Juliet: I’m sorry. I should go.
Emilia: Please stay. I really want you to meet –
Ursula: It is Yorick! With – does anyone recognize who he’s with?
Adam: No. I don’t believe so –
Juliet: Wait – I do. It’s Hero. Hero knows your friend Yorick?
Orsino: Hero’s the one in the wheelchair?
Iachimo: Well she isn’t Yorick.
Emilia: I think I know her, but from where?
Juliet: Hero volunteers with the meals for the encampments.
Emilia: No, I don’t think that’s where.
Juliet: She mostly does coordination, because the chair makes it hard to do distribution, but –
Orsino: I think there’s ice on the ramp, we should check.
Emilia: Yorick!
Yorick: I come late, but I come with a friend!
Hero: Hi.
Emilia: Come inside out of the cold.
Ursula: There’s tea waiting.
Hero: That sounds wonderful.
Orsino: We’ve got to see if we can fix the gap in this window frame.
Iachimo: What the Hell – the lights just went out!
Yorick: There are rolling blackouts. I assume it is the cold. The power system – there’s a great deal of strain.
Adam: You have no idea.
