(This is a portion of a continuing work in progress. It is a follow-up from a previous installment here. Parts of this will not be intelligible without reading that earlier post.)
*
Ursula: Didn’t Emilia say she would be here?
Orsino: She said I should wait for you and she’d be along. She was just putting up some posters, and she has to deliver some signed petitions to the office because they all have to be turned in early next week to count.
Adam: You were at the demonstration?
Orsino: For the beginning. I heard the speakers before the march started. It looked like it might get – acrimonious? There were a lot of counter-protesters.
Ursula: A lot of police, too, I assume.
Orsino: Emilia promised she wasn’t going to get arrested. I saw Yorick too.
Ursula: Oh she promised, did she? We’ll hope the police understand. If she takes too long, her fries will get cold.
Adam: Well, her vanilla shake won’t melt anyway. Where is that draft coming from? It’s chilly in here. I shouldn’t worry about Emilia if I were you; she knows how to keep her head. What’s the petition? And is the wine on the lower shelf?
Ursula: I’ll put on the kettle. What was Yorick doing? Not marching, I trust? He’s too old for that.
Orsino: I’ll find the wine. Not marching – at least, I don’t think so. I think he was listening to the speeches like me – or, well, not like me. We stood together for a bit – at one point he leaned over to me and said something about Diogenes. I’m afraid I didn’t catch it, because just then someone started yelling with a bullhorn. I wandered off, then I saw him again just before I left. He assured me he’s coming tonight. The petition is – well I’m not sure exactly. It’s getting a measure on the ballot. Something about redistricting, or making sure homeless voters can vote no matter where, something like that. I haven’t looked at the wording; but I’ve heard Emilia talk about it.
Ursula: The “Floating voting” district. It’s about making sure voters who have no fixed address can still participate in elections. Enfranchising the growing population of citizens who are sleeping on the streets.
Orsino: Right. Iachimo’s dead against it. Here’s the wine. Just red.
Adam: Red is what we want; it’s too cold tonight for anything chilled.
Ursula: It’s cold in here, Adam’s right. Why’s that?
Adam: Why am I right? I’m always right.
Ursula: Is that that docta ignorantia you are always talking about?
Adam: Yes actually. Socratic ignorance. It’s what I’m right about.
Orsino: It’s chilly because there’s a draft – the window by the porch doesn’t close flush.
Adam: But surely being able to vote doesn’t require a permanent address? A mailing address, yes.
Orsino: I think the measure has more than that in it? Something about mobile voting places –
Ursula: The pollmobile. They’re calling it, for short. Also, there would be a seat on the City Council.
Adam: So you're telling me that Iachimo has a political position?!
Ursula: You’re one to talk. You’re the most apolitical person I know.
Orsino: Actually that makes him sound more vehement than he is. I think he’s more upset about the homeless encampments around the school and the lab. Someone forced a window the other night. Or tried to.
Adam: Just because I am not seduced by the promises of whatever slate of “options”, as they are called, is on the ballot, does not mean I am indifferent to the state of the polis. As for enfranchising the homeless, I suspect the measure is rather an effort to harness them.
Orsino: Or cordon them off.
Adam: Which does not mean, of course, that they ought not to be able to vote. I’m merely cynical about the motives of those who would ride on it into office. But I’m genuinely surprised about Iachimo; I thought he really resented every moment he had to attend to anything beyond his research. Staving off the singularity, or building neural nets, or new cryptocurrency, or whatever it is –
Ursula: I should have thought you would agree with Iachimo on that. Politics as a distraction.
Adam: I suppose I do agree with him, roughly. But I resent it less – a little less – and anyway “roughly” leaves a good deal of room for nuance. There’s a different sense, of course, in which the political problem is determinative –
Orsino: I’m doing crypto. Well, really it’s analysis of crypto models – economics of decentralized exchange and security. I'm not, say, developing some new viable currency. That's a whole different kind of thing. Iachimo is doing AI and physics. And he does resent it – politics, I mean –
Adam: And what about you? Do you “have a position,” Orsino?
Orsino: It’s complicated.
Ursula: Ah, something we can agree on!
Orsino: Yeah, well wait until Iachimo gets here.
Adam: Yes, he does like to simplify things down to their elements.
Ursula: Parsimony.
Adam: You said a window was forced the other night? Is that why it’s stuck open?
Orsino: No, the window here just doesn't close right. Or open, for that matter. The window that got forced – almost – was at Iachimo’s lab, on campus. That’s part of why he’s not feeling the “it’s complicated” so much.
Adam: When? Was anything stolen?
Ursula: Ah – I think Emilia’s getting here. With someone else – who’s that?
Orsino: Oh I saw them talking at the march.
Adam: Have you met her?
Orsino: No – I don’t think so? – but I guess we all will in a second. Iachimo can tell you the window story when he gets here, I don’t know much. But I think the alarms scared off whoever it was.
(Emilia and Juliet, entering.)
Emilia: Hey everyone. Sorry I’m late. Did you find the drinks? This is Juliet, she volunteers on the ballot initiative. She’s coming in to warm up; plus, I thought she would be interested. Not because of the initiative exactly –
Juliet: Not directly, anyway. Emilia says there’s an ongoing philosophical dispute. On what?
Adam: Hard to say – it’s ongoing.
Orsino: And philosophical.
Adam: But the short version is –
Emilia: Oh my god, fries, yes. Thank you. I am so hungry.
Ursula: And a vanilla shake, if you still want it on a night like this. Long march through the institutions?
Emilia: Yes, the shake. In a minute. It might be cold, but it’s sweet. We should make tea.
Ursula: The kettle is on.
Emilia: Thank you. And yes – very long. The march I mean.
Orsino: Not so institutional, though, I bet.
Adam: Oh I should think it was. Even anti-institutionalism is institutional these days.
Ursula: All the more so.
Juliet: It wasn’t planned to be so long.
Emilia: There was a question about whether to change plans at the last minute; there was a counter-protest. As Orsino saw. And I guess there was some disagreement among the organizers about whether to re-route, or move ahead and confront.
Adam: And who were the bad guys?
Emilia: This is Adam. I was telling you about him.
Adam: Ah.... should I be worried?
Juliet: Definitely.
Emilia: I mean, I was telling her about everyone. But I was just getting to you when we got here.
Juliet: By “bad guys” – you mean the counter-protest? It was the usual mix: some pro-police people; some NIMBYers; some assholes who just want to make trouble.
Adam: One wonders what it must be like for police to be protecting protesters who insist they want the police abolished.
Juliet: Um, yeah. I don’t, really, wonder about that. They’ve got a job to do. It would be great if they would do just that, and stick with it.
Emilia: There were a lot of people showing up in support of them. Presumably they don’t want to make the police’s job harder.
Adam: While they still have a job.
Orsino: Yeah, well, they were – the counter-protesters I mean – were getting … agitated? I saw them starting to gather on the outskirts of the square. They were clumped up further towards the library.
Ursula: I assume Emilia will have told you Adam wants to make trouble.
Juliet: Something like that.
Emilia: What I said was, Adam’s the one who keeps things serious. And Yorick.
Adam: Serious! That’s worse! Serious means heavy – look at the etymology. I aspire to lift things up, my friends.
Orsino: When Iachimo arrives, you will get to see Adam’s troublemaking for yourself. I’m Orsino.
Juliet: I think I saw you at the march? You look familiar.
Orsino: You too? I left before it got intense.
Ursula: I’ve often thought, in the midst of a long slog of a departmental lunch – you know what would really liven up, lift up, this conversation? Some etymology.
Adam: Try it some time. An amuse-bouche to cleanse the palate between the salad and the Critical Race Theory course.
Ursula: I’m Ursula.
Emilia: Media Studies and Sociology.
Ursula: Oh that was mostly long ago. I’m in private practice now. I just teach one seminar a year.
Adam: Plus departmental meetings.
Ursula: Lunches. That’s very important.
Adam: Fortify you for that long march through the institutions.
Ursula: You’re the one who’s always talking about playing the long game.
Emilia: You see what I meant?
Juliet: I do. I assume it’s amusing for everyone. Private practice?
Orsino: Ursula’s a psychotherapist.
Ursula: Psychoanalyst. There really is a difference.
Adam: One’s a meeting, the other is a lunch.
Juliet: Actually, I took your Intro class. It wasn’t that long ago – maybe five years, six? There was a lot of, I think, Judith Butler. And Jameson. And Lacan.
Ursula: Oh! That was probably my last one.
Adam: You can tell from the syllabus? I’d have assumed Lacan was a staple.
Ursula: Freud is a staple. Lacan, despite what you might think, comes and goes – well, I always use a little of him, but how much, and what, does vary. No, I can tell because of Butler. I got rather interested in Butler when I was planning the switch to the seminars. Still am, of course. But that last time, I tried her out on the undergrads – sorry to use you as a guinea pig, my dear.
Juliet: It was – it was a weird class.
Ursula: It was. It was experimental, an introduction for both Psychology and Sociology majors, and of course I used almost no Sociology. Well, Weber. And Durkheim.
Juliet: No, there were others. There was a chapter from Bourdieu, and a lot from Foucault, and – who was it? – the journalist on poverty –
Ursula: Ehrenreich, yes. Not strictly a sociologist, but, but then neither is Crenshaw and we used her too. Same with Putnam, now that I think of it.
Adam: You used Hilary Putnam in a sociology introduction? Why wasn’t I invited? Not that I love Putnam, but I would have loved to see how you pull it off.
Ursula: Robert Putnam. Don’t panic. If I ever do that, you’ll be the first to know.
Juliet: Yes, Putnam I remember too, because I had mixed feelings.
Adam: I was having mixed Putnams, apparently.
Juliet: I liked that he was trying to talk about community. But all the community things he seemed to be nostalgic for were – like, white things. Fifties things. Front porch conversations and garden clubs and bowling leagues. And church.
Ursula: Believe me, you’d have liked Hilary Putnam less.
Juliet: This was just before I changed majors to Social Work, at the last possible moment. You wouldn’t remember me; there were about a hundred of us, and I sat in the back and never raised my hand.
Ursula: Yet another one. Did I drive you out? Ah, there’s the kettle. Tea?
Emilia: Yes, please, cinnamon chai for me.
Juliet: Likewise.
Emilia: And then something stronger. It was cold out there.
Orsino: We were just saying it’s cold in here. We’ve got to fix that window.
Adam: I was just going to open the wine – did you say, something stronger?
Emilia: Whiskey – top shelf, behind the paintbrushes.
Adam: Ye gods, it’s rye! “Song of Sixpence.” We’ll save the wine for Yorick.
Ursula: “Give it time to breathe,” as you like to say. You know that rye was once extremely lower-class, yes? And then, with just a little fudging with the signifiers –
Adam: Rumors of my aristocratic roots are vastly exaggerated.
Ursula: Not least by yourself.
Adam: In any case I’m not drinking it because of any signifiers at all. They water it down.
Emilia: The wine’s already open. I got it refilled yesterday. Yorick’s not here?
Orsino: He’s coming. I saw him just as I was leaving the protest.
Emilia: I really want to tell him – tell you all – about a new canvas I’m planning. Well, tell just a little. It’s too early to say very much. The art gets shy. But I think Yorick might be able to understand something.
Ursula: “The art gets shy.” You have to know what you’re not knowing.
Adam: Now there’s the docta ignorantia I was talking about.
Juliet: Thank you for this tea, it’s perfect. And no, you certainly didn’t drive me out – I just wanted to do something practical and on the ground, to make a difference. Or – sorry – a different kind of difference. It wasn’t your class, at all. In fact, I still think about the thing you said about intersectionality as a rhizome. I use it in DEI trainings.
Adam: I would have thought Deleuze was a little heady for that sort of thing.
Ursula: You would. Adam’s a lightweight. A cheap date, as we no longer say.
Adam: Just because I let the wine breathe does not mean I water it down.
Emilia: What’s a rye zone?
Orsino: Your top shelf, behind the paintbrushes, apparently.
Adam: And soon, my bloodstream. This flavor is nice – there’s more than one layer. Lightweight indeed. Look at the etymology. What on earth do you mean, you got the wine refilled?
Emilia: At the farmers’ market there’s a really nice couple from a winery where you can fill your bottles from the cask. They call it New Wine in Old Bottles. It’s a recycling thing.
Adam: Ah, the Gospel has made it to the farmers’ market.
Emilia: Yeah I saw missionaries there –
Orsino: No, Adam’s citing the Bible.
Ursula: It’s from one of the parables of Jesus. Adam is always tickled to find scripture cited in the public square.
Juliet: I don’t know about the Farmer’s Market –
Emilia: Juliet’s opposed.
Juliet: – but missionaries are always targeting the encampments too. Can’t really slam the door of your tent. If you have one.
Orsino: I guess you could yank the zipper closed.
Juliet: If you have one.
Adam: Matthew chapter 9; Luke chapter 7. Though the surface of the text advises against recycling the bottle, just to be clear.
Juliet: Not the first time the Bible got something wrong. No offense.
Adam: Not to worry. It must needs be that offenses come.
Orsino: What’s your objection to Farmers’ Markets?
Juliet: Uh – look they’re fine. Just not for me.
Emilia: OK, but seriously, what’s the rise home thing?
Orsino: Don’t look at me.
Ursula: Should you explain, Juliet, or should I? You probably use the notion more than I do.
Juliet: “Rhizomatic,” as Adam apparently recognizes, is a term from Deleuze and Guattari’s work. It means horizontally structured, tangled, and immanently-oriented; as opposed to a hierarchical order, like a tree, which is vertical, ordered, linear, and oriented to the transcendent. A rhizome is a root-system that doesn’t have a main source or single origin; unlike a tree, with a central trunk or root and branches and smaller sub-branches.
Emilia: And the analogy with intersectionality is – ?
Juliet: Sometimes we see systems of oppression reproducing themselves in the very tools we want to use to dismantle them. So you’ll see people comparing and (the story goes) implicitly competing for gravity of oppression – or more realistically, for resources that are allotted on the basis of need to correct for marginalization.
Adam: Ah I see. The old canard: who is more in need – a black man with a felony conviction experiencing homelessness, a trans Asian woman who communicates only with sign language, or a Latinx undocumented worker in the US with a third grade education and no English?
Emilia: That sounds like a caricature.
Adam: Indeed it is.
Ursula: Adam when you try to speak in shibboleth your accent betrays you.
Adam: Well it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
Juliet: In fact these kinds of marginalization are almost never in direct competition with each other, and when they are it’s not for status as marginalization. But you do hear that caricature out in the world, particularly from trolls. This is a way – I mean, talking about oppression as rhizomatic – to cut off that notion before it gets reproduced inside communities that are actually doing the work of resistance. Because in subtle ways, these questions – who is more marginalized, who is more at risk, where should we allocate resources, whose harm do we need to address or address first, and so on – all of these can implicitly and sometimes explicitly derail conversations within marginalized communities. And they are also exploited on the outside, to minimize or to mock activist efforts and social justice generally. That’s the caricature you’re referring to.
Orsino: But does this have any significant political impact? Even when it’s – well, I wouldn’t say “done right,” but let’s say it can be exploited effectively. Playing off of people’s fears and lack of education. Let’s say that. I can see it getting traction among people who are already opposed and will never be on your side. But in the kinds of circles you are talking about –
Juliet: The question comes up in two ways. Well, three, if you count what you just mentioned – people who use it as a talking point for themselves. In DEI I do have to encounter those people.
Emilia: Sometimes people like that can be educated.
Juliet: Sometimes they can. But among people who are committed to this work, it comes up in two other ways. The easy one to deal with is from the outside – trolls or infiltrators who are “just asking questions” and doing so in bad faith. That’s commenters, online, or sometimes actually infiltrators.
Adam: This happens?
Juliet: A lot more often than you might think.
Ursula: But do you bite? It’s only the question that finds some place to lodge and grow, that gets bitten on, that matters. And this means it’s fallen into some little crack.
Adam: I would want to ask: Does the fact that a question can be raised in bad faith makes it a bad question per se?
Juliet: Well Ursula’s point does point at what I was getting to. I wouldn’t put it exactly like that – it isn’t that there’s some, what, some weakness in the ideas of justice, or equity, or belonging. Or in people’s commitment to them. Those are foundational, you know? But first, confusion can get sown, and more importantly, there are real conflicts that can arise. Maybe there are people from different backgrounds – someone from a culture where it is really disrespectful to look someone in the eye, or where you are not supposed to bring up complaints directly. And maybe there’s someone else whose culture values directness. Or maybe there is someone who needs the volume up high to help them hear, and someone else with noise sensitivity, possibly headache triggers.
Emilia: So these would be conflicting access needs.
Juliet: Right. That’s the term used in disability groups. Well, first used, it’s been borrowed.
Emilia: So your concern is how to talk about these without them becoming fissures in the community?
Juliet: The point is that race, gender, orientation, class, ability, neurology, and so on – they don’t need to be ranked in hierarchies of greater and lesser. They are mutually ramifying; because oppression is a system – a social system, you see – and it is perpetuated by being dispersed.
Orsino: Perpetuated how? Like, intentionally?
Ursula: It’s systemic. It runs on its own.
Adam:“They do not know it, but they are doing it.”
Ursula: Now there’s the docta ignorantia.
Adam: Not so much the docta.
Juliet: I see what Emilia meant when she was telling me about the little codewords you all use.
Ursula: So sorry – I suppose it does look a bit exclusive from the outside.
Orsino: The private language of friends.
Adam: Well, it’s not really private, it’s Latin. Once the language of the whole Western world. Docta ignorantia – it’s from Nicholas of Cusa –
Ursula: The Latin, at least, does not always roll off the tongue either.
Juliet: No, really, it’s OK, I wasn’t complaining.
Emilia: Anyway, sometimes oppression is actually intentional.
Juliet: Sure it is. But there’s no central board of oppression making these decisions; it just gets perpetuated because of course if you have an advantageous position you want to preserve that. It’s partly this that makes it so hard to combat – no one wants to see themselves as oppressive, certainly no one wants to be called oppressive; and this makes the idea of a hierarchy of oppressions a nonstarter, even if it weren’t incoherent on theoretical grounds anyway. So, the question is, how to talk about it instead, if not in terms of greater and less? So this is the rhizome: rather than envisioning a hierarchy of oppressions, in which the marginalized are implicitly competing with each other for status –
Orsino: In which whoever checks more of the boxes, or the more prestigious boxes, gets bragging rights (as the sneerers would say) – ?
Juliet: – we have instead a horizontal network, in which identities, and their position as marginalized or privileged, is in flux. This model is flexible and can show how these categories overlap and cause systemic inequities to persist, but also to shift; to wax and wane.
Adam: So, then – according to this approach – there are not greater and lesser degrees of marginalization?
Juliet: You could still say that there are; it depends on your purposes. A rhizome model doesn’t imply otherwise, except that it would say there’s no absolutes. But it does change how we gauge this; it shifts the emphasis from an implicit calculus of more and less, a quantitative emphasis, to one on lived experience. It also means that these degrees and positions might alter from context to context, including with one’s ability to pass. So for example: a young black man in an American convenience store – marginalized. A young black man in a black church – less marginalized, in that specific context. As soon as he steps outside, it’s a different story.
Orsino: Pass?
Emilia: You know – look like the non-marginalized. There’s a novel by Nella Larsen, called Passing, about two light-skinned Black women, one who passes as white – and chooses to – and her friend, who doesn’t.
Orsino: Oh! So, you mean, me. I get it all the time. Double-takes, slow dawning of realization. It’s kind of funny. Forget about whether I’m marginalized or not – I’m actually way more recognized as Black if I go to church than anywhere else. Or the mosque.
Juliet: You might be in either?
Orsino: My mother is Christian. She’s black. Well, mixed. My father is Muslim. Arab and Bosnian.
Ursula: Orsino comes by his ability to pass honestly.
Juliet: Sounds like an interesting story.
Orsino: For another time. I don’t want to derail what you were saying.
Juliet: Well, so the piece about context is really important, because it isn’t just oppression which is a self-enforcing system. Empowerment is too. So in the church – or the mosque – Orsino is surrounded by people with a shared experience. But this can still be the case even if we’re talking about different communities – for instance, alliances between the disabled and black communities were crucial during protests that eventually led to the Americans with Disabilities Act. So allyship is also a rhizome.
Ursula: Of course, as Orsino’s case shows, there are people who belong to both communities.
Orsino: Or who pass, anyway.
Emilia: Either way.
Juliet: We all belong to multiple communities. We’re all multicultural. Which is just what is meant by intersectionality.
Adam: Of course, Orsino, that slow realization you see on people’s faces might not be because you don’t “look black.” It might be because you don’t mouth certain platitudes.
Ursula: Well – as the internet meme I saw the other day said – “why not both?”
Orsino: You just saw that? It’s years old.
Ursula: I was reared on a different medium, young man.
Adam: In any case, as I recall, the term “passing” was used in the 90’s for straight people who passed as queer –
Juliet: Today it’s often about trans folk who pass as cis–
Ursula: Yes. The polarity’s reversed.
Juliet: – but we can expand that usage: say, neurodivergent people who can cover more easily – though always at some cost; people who code-switch to signal different class membership – like if you are educated enough to sound like you belong with the college grads, but can still talk street talk in the prison yard. And so on. In the rhizomatic model, this is important because passing in one sense is a mitigation of oppression, but in another sense, the necessity of passing should be regarded as a form of oppression, imposed by the same structures that decide and bestow the benefits of it. This is another reason why we can say that there is no definite and unchanging hierarchy of marginalized positions. Relative to the standard, supposedly universal position of “human”, which is really always code for cis-hetero-white, and usually property-owning, male, all other identities are marginalized; relative to each other, they shift and transmute. Hierarchy just is oppression.
Ursula: Well, you’ve certainly taken my toss-off comment about the rhizome and run with it.
Adam: Straightforward and subtle, at the same time.
Ursula: You do love to damn with faint praise, don’t you? Or is it the other way around.
Adam: I mean it. Straightforward: it manages to have its cake of castigating the patriarchy and white supremacy; and yet, subtle: it gets to eat the cake of letting a thousand identities bloom.
Ursula: And you manage to mix your metaphors with equal parts spite and sarcasm.
Adam: I would prefer to say, impishness and irony, but I suppose beggars and choosers and all that. So Juliet, do you really cite Deleuze and Guattari in your Diversity-Inclusion-Equity trainings?
Juliet: Well, I mention them. I mean I don’t read people the whole chapter. From A Thousand Plateaus, I think? Anyway this is in the more advanced trainings, after we’ve covered the basics.
Adam: Um. So, supposing I was to acknowledge that intersectionality, at least, is a useful way of approaching the question of what we will call systemic oppression –
Ursula: “Suppose he acknowledges.” Don’t let him fool you.
Orsino: Adam’s the hyper-elitist among us.
Adam: “Hyper,” indeed. I am the one who drinks rye regardless of its lowbrow or highbrow status. And I am the one who acknowledges my elitism; everyone else – everyone but Yorick – gets theirs on the sly. Ursula knows very well that I am perfectly capable of stipulating anything, temporarily. As Yorick was saying last time, stipulation is a legitimate move so long as it is not irreversible.
Emilia: Do you really think Yorick is elitist?
Iachimo (entering): I’m elitist!
Ursula: Ah look, here’s Iachimo. It’s true, he is.
Emilia: Iachimo, Juliet; Juliet, Iachimo.
Iachimo: And let’s not pretend that citing A Thousand Plateaus isn’t elitist.
Orsino: What were you doing, eavesdropping on the doorstep?
Iachimo: Tuning in through the surveillance cams. No. I was rummaging in my backpack, making sure I had something I want to show Yorick. But voices were being raised. I can’t help it if I can hear through the door.
Ursula: Voices raised? I didn’t think we were shouting.
Emilia: We weren’t, it’s just the window by the porch doesn’t close all the way. There’s a gap.
Orsino: Which is why there’s still a draft. As we were saying.
Adam: You don’t usually carry everything about with you, Iachimo.
Orsino: More than you know. It’s the miracle of Moore’s law.
Emilia: Information is easy to carry.
Iachimo: Software lets me carry information. Current events compel me to carry hardware. Hardware, in case you didn’t know, is orders-of-magnitude heavier.
Ursula: Try some etymology, that might help.
Iachimo: As usual, the in-jokes have begun without me.
Adam: Orsino was saying you’d had a break-in at the lab?
Iachimo: An attempted one. No one got in. But I’m not taking any chances, at least with certain things. I talked to the police, and they say they come by a few times a night now, but by their own admission, this just makes it easier. All the thieves have to do is wait for the routine patrol to leave; they know that the next one won’t be for hours. I have better cameras up now; harder to see, and much harder to displace, they can do infrared, and they get a better angle and sharper focus. Maybe anyone who does break in will be easier to identify. It won’t be much satisfaction though, if my equipment is smashed or scattered to the black market.
Emilia: I keep telling Iachimo that no one is trying to steal his work.
Iachimo: Of course not; they’re interested in anything expensive that they can turn over. “It’s not personal, it’s business.” A great comfort.
Adam: It gets harder and harder to tell the difference between these. Personal. Business.
Juliet: It’s pretty unlikely that people on the streets are going to be able to sell – or are interested in selling – high-end computer hardware. They’re probably after a warm room, shelter from the rain, and a clean bathroom.
Orsino: Or any bathroom.
Iachimo: Well there are two of them who stayed out of the rain in the lab’s doorway last night. I stepped over them. And locked the door behind me. They seem to use the bushes as a toilet, from what I can smell, though in fact there are portables set up just on the other side of the quad. And I doubt very much that this is all they’re interested in. I’ve got plenty of equipment, portable enough, that would be very easy to sell in the right neighborhood, and nothing at all to pawn at any of half a dozen places within twenty blocks. Besides, the alarms would give them about five minutes of warm, dry time in the bathroom before security arrived. Time enough to get in and get out. Possibly time to flush, if they bothered. Not much quality REM sleep.
Adam: The library has a night watchman. You could have one too.
Iachimo: With what budget?
Adam: How did you pay for the new cameras, then?
Iachimo: Those are my own work.
Orsino: New code in old hardware.
Iachimo: Oh it’s new hardware. Frankenstein’d a bit.
Orsino: Anyway, the night watchman won’t be much use – at the library, I mean – if there’s another demonstration like this afternoon’s. One guy against a crowd like that? Unarmed?
Juliet: That’s all we need. Armed night watchmen.
Iachimo: Well the encampments have some armed guards of their own, that’s for sure.
Ursula: Did it get rough, Emilia? We worry about you, you know.
Emilia: Oh I was fine. Aside from being so cold. Which the people camping have to deal with all the time –
Juliet: It was “fine” because we re-routed the march and avoided the counter-protest, so the police didn’t have much to do until the blocking of traffic started.
Ursula: Doubtless disappointing.
Adam: Ah, but for whom?
Juliet: Anyway, I doubt if the University will grant another protest permit. They’re afraid something will get smashed. Next time it will have to be real civil disobedience.
Orsino: Meaning?
Juliet: If you have a permit, you aren’t really disobeying.
Adam: And if you smash things, you aren’t really civil.
Ursula: Civil disobedience, my dears, is a theater of tacit assumptions, as serious as comedy. You are pushing on the growing edge of –
Juliet: Of the acceptable.
Ursula: – I’d say, rather, of awareness of the acceptable. You know it when you get there. The moment the police crack down will be the moment you have reached, not the limit of what is accepted, but the limit of what we can acknowledge we accept.
Emilia: I’m not sure I get what you mean, Ursula.
Adam: She means, both sides (not just the anti-protest side) are acting within the acceptable. We accept a protest, we accept a counter-protest, we accept a police response to the whole thing.
Ursula: If you get within spitting distance of something we actually have no tolerance for, you’ll have more than police to worry about.
Orsino: An experiment, you might say.
Adam: The new science of politics.
Iachimo: An experiment isn’t scientific if it’s not controlled.
Juliet: Well the state is clearly comfortable with uncontrolled experiments with people’s lives. The demonstrators are just responding in kind.
Emilia: Right now the only people who are doing actual civil disobedience are the people camping out every night. And they would love to not be.
Adam: I must say, I’m surprised at the University. It seems like exactly the sort of bleeding-heart cause the administration would be crawling all over. To say nothing of the faculty. And the students.
Orsino: Students are definitely divided. I saw a lot of them in the counter-protest crowd.
Ursula: As for the administration, they can’t afford to annoy the Board.
Juliet: As far as I can tell, most of the faculty are supportive “in principle.” But since they don’t want to do anything about it, their support is meaningless.
Emilia: That’s not true. There were professors doing outdoor class discussions on the edge of campus all last week, from six or seven departments. Sociology, Poli-Sci, Economics, Black Studies, Women’s –
Orsino: Yeah I know those Black Studies profs. I used to argue with a couple of them all the time, during my undergrad.
Ursula: You presumably know the Economics professor too.
Juliet: You majored in Black Studies?
Orsino: Minored. Was going to major, but I got more interested in the nerd aspects and less in the, what to call it –
Adam: The ideology.
Orsino: We can go with that for now. I majored in Economics and Computer Science.
Ursula: Orsino neglects to mention that he also double minored, not just in Black Studies but also Psychology. It’s how we met.
Juliet: Wait – that’s where I know you from! That Intro class!
Orsino: Oh maybe so.
Emilia: Wait, so you knew what “rhizome” was too. You could have explained it.
Orsino: It’s been years. I wasn’t faking it, I truly don’t remember anything about the class. No offense, Ursula.
Ursula: It must needs be.
Orsino: Besides, Juliet does actually use the idea in her work. I just read about it once.
Adam: And besides besides, it’s not true. You remember all kinds of things.
Iachimo: Orsino has the best poker face of any of us.
Orsino: I learned it from Yorick. It’s how I pass.
Ursula: Dissimulation.
Orsino: And, I do remember from that class that I liked Putnam. Robert. I remember because later I read Hilary Putnam and it took me a bit to realize this was a different person.
Iachimo: You couldn’t tell right off the bat?
Orsino: There’s a reason. Putnam – Hilary – is famous for changing and critiquing his ideas all the time. And I was reading an anthology, and so I encountered all these shifts in position. So I assumed at first that, in that earlier book I’d read about the unraveling of American community and civic norms and trust, that his political concerns had just come to the fore. I did feel a little silly when I belatedly understood – totally different Putnams.
Adam: H2O and XYZ.
Juliet: I assume that’s some little bit of private lore.
Adam: Putnam – Hilary – I suppose we’ll have to keep saying it this way now – imagines a parallel world, exactly the same as ours, except that water is different – “XYZ”, he says, because the specific details he thinks aren’t important, aren’t what he’s getting at. His point is that the word “Water” means something different in each world.
Ursula: To be fair, Orsino is quite right, Putnam – Hilary –did indeed keep overturning his previous views, and changing his focus. He was a strident Marxist for a while, a Maoist. The department at his university, Harvard I think, didn’t know what to do with him. And then he changed his mind.
Juliet: That’s too bad.
Iachimo: Speaking of which, they’re not all supportive. The faculty, I mean. I can tell you that there are several who are afraid to say anything critical. Like our friend Orsino here, they just keep their mouths shut.
Adam: About the encampments? The demonstration? The ballot initiative? Or what?
Iachimo: One or more of the above. Everyone is quote-sympathetic-unquote, of course; no one wants to be seen as heartless. But scratch the surface and you find a lot of dissent on the demonstrations. Plenty on the initiative too, though maybe less so. But no one without tenure – and almost no one with it – will show up on the counter-protest side.
Orsino: I saw Yorick there. Not on the counter-protest side – he was talking to someone. This was towards the end. I reminded him about tonight.
Adam: Well, Yorick is certainly not tenured.
Ursula: Talking with whom?
Orsino: Police. It was just after the first arrests. I was worried – I thought for a minute there that Yorick was maybe going to get himself arrested, which he had certainly not mentioned to me earlier – but he assured me we’d see him tonight.
Ursula: My God, can you imagine Yorick in zipcuffs?
Emilia: I can imagine Yorick getting arrested for sure. And I don’t want it.
Juliet: It’s hard on even someone who’s young. The cops are not gentle with you if they think they can get away with not being. And you told me Yorick is – how old?
Emilia: Actually I don’t know. I’m not sure any of us know.
Ursula: I certainly don’t. But I think he was born before the Second World War. Or during. Do you know, Adam?
Adam: He’s told me he has an early recollection of hearing a battle from his bedroom window during the night – he thinks he must have been four or five. And he says there were Jews or gypsies or deserters or something, hidden in the family barn for a while. I’m not sure whether he remembers that, or if it was something he was told later.
Orsino: So, born before or quite early during the war.
Ursula: Anyway, Emilia, you I worry about; Yorick I must leave to himself. But if he told Orsino he wouldn’t get arrested, he won’t–
Juliet: Let’s hope the cops understand that.
Adam: Well I agree with Emilia – I can see it. You sort of never know with him. He’s a law unto himself.
Orsino: I’m pretty sure he was in prison once, in – where was it, Romania? Greece? Hungary?
Adam: Ruritania.
Ursula: Also briefly – I mean, a day or so – in the U.S. Protesting a nuclear weapons test. He would have been maybe in his 40’s?
Iachimo: Anyway, Yorick isn’t faculty exactly. He’s emeritus or something. He’d better show tonight, I have a whole argument to unpack.
Ursula: So does Adam, something about – what was it?
Adam: The Tree of Porphyry, Aristotle’s Categories, Kabbalah –
Emilia: I was trying to explain to Juliet a little about last week. The simulation.
Adam: You’re interested, Juliet, in the – how to put it? – the epistemic status of the physical universe? Isn’t that a bit far from your political interests?
Ursula: Of course Juliet could have – gasp – more than one interest.
Adam: That’s what I’m hoping for. “Why not both?” As your internet meme put it.
Juliet: I’m not interested in the simulation, exactly. Emilia said it was something about Orwell? I care a lot about surveillance.
Iachimo: Oh that.
Ursula: Well, you’ll have to put up with a bit of simulation-talk anyway. We all do. Because we love Iachimo, and are here to support him while he breaks his addiction.
Iachimo: Very funny. The camps are what’re going to cure me. Force me to go cold turkey. It’s impossible to do work.
Adam: Iachimo, are you more irritated by the campers, or more alarmed by the singularity?
Iachimo: AI threat is by far the more grave. It’s not even a contest. Though, well, the swastika spray-painted on the lab didn’t exactly allay my worries.
Emilia: My God!
Orsino: You didn’t tell me about that.
Iachimo: Would you believe, I didn’t actually notice when I was first looking over things? I was preoccupied by the splintered window frame. And of course it’s not clear just what is meant. Yes, I’m Jewish, if you ask the rabbis. Or my mother. But it’s not like I’m involved in any of the Jewish groups on campus. Or off campus for that matter. It could just have been a bit of ignorant graffiti. It was backwards, incidentally.
Ursula: Well I’m not involved in any of the Jewish campus groups either, but I do get hate mail from time to time – you know, “you tenured radicals”, that kind of idiocy – and every once in a while there are some, let’s say curiously specific messages. I haven’t been in a synagogue since I was a little girl, except for funerals, but someone out there thinks of me as Jewish.
Adam: You are Jewish. You're a psychoanalyst.
Orsino: As opposed to therapist. Lunch versus meeting.
Adam: Personal versus business.
Ursula: True. It’s so much nicer when you say it. Anyway, I always forward them on to campus security. Well, except when I don’t. Nothing’s come of them.
Emilia: So far.
Adam: I would think that a swastika on the lab door might be significantly more frightening than the singularity.
Iachimo: It was the wall, not the door, which is part of why I didn’t notice it at first – it’s on the side that doesn’t have any windows. Anyway, it doesn’t even have to be the singularity. That’s just a word Kurzweil came up with for the moment when AI – generalized AI – radically surpasses human intelligence, in what he imagines will be a compoundly accelerating cascade, as AI gets not only smarter, but smarter faster and faster. I don’t assume this is what has to happen. But yes, AI safety is a real concern. There is just no reason to assume that the ends AI will have for itself will resemble the ends of human beings.
Emilia: But which is more concerning?
Iachimo: It's not really a comparison. I work on – among other things – AI safety. That concern is existential. If you don’t understand that, I envy you, but also please stay out of my way. The encampments just make it hard – sometimes really hard – to do my work. It will be a stupid, stupid irony if – and I’m not trying to overblow the importance of my research, I’m just one guy and this is just an illustration – if World War Three were started because we missed a deadline in the lab thanks to noise outside the windows. And not just noise. The scene around campus is just not safe.
Adam: Not for anyone, I imagine.
Orsino: No. I doubt it can go on much longer.
Juliet: I think the next step is to have sleep-ins in solidarity.
Iachimo: I suppose I might be stepping over you. Watch your step if you go near the shrubs.
Orsino: I heard someone at the demonstration saying people should open various buildings.
Iachimo: Oh sure. Open the lab. Just lock up the really important stuff – yeah right. Emilia could open the studio, too.
Emilia: I know. I could.
Juliet: The answer to houselessness isn’t, can some individual people make some spaces available. We need a massive allotment of public funding to make affordable housing; we need re-zoning; we need a huge overhaul of traffic and parking laws –
Emilia: Well I was really just talking about supporting the protests, not trying to solve the whole issue. Iachimo’s right – the studio and the lab are spaces that could be used and would be pretty symbolic if they were made available.
Iachimo: Yeah…. Um, no, I won’t be doing that.
Ursula: The department would never give permission.
Iachimo: Not the point, for me. But no, they wouldn’t.
Juliet: Also, I’m sorry your lab got vandalized. That’s truly terrible. The swastika.
Iachimo: Thanks. Honestly I assume it has nothing to do with me personally.
Emilia: I couldn’t do what I do for the protests or the petitions if I didn’t have a place like the studio to re-charge.
Juliet: If people had a place to be warm and safe there wouldn’t need to be protests.
Emilia: Look, I know I’m talking about my – my privilege, I guess; but I can’t see what good it would do to rip off my own oxygen mask.
Orsino: None. I think you want to be really careful – I mean, even if you weren’t a woman – in doing something that can’t be easily walked back. There’s a whole lot of unintended consequences just waiting to happen.
Ursula: Something paradoxical about that formulation. Unintended, yet waiting to happen….
Emilia: And something odd – aside from questions of safety, which believe me I’ve thought about a lot –
Adam: Why “odd”?
Emilia: I mean, as an artist I do court unintended consequences, right?
Adam: We all do, within our spheres. A conversation is a way of finding out what we think, and this is only possible within very specific – one might even say laboratory – conditions.
Iachimo: Ahem. As I was just saying, an experiment – a scientific experiment – is not just “trying something out.” There are parameters, that’s what makes it a test of a hypothesis. I don’t want to say Emilia can’t call her art an experiment if she wants to, but can we please distinguish this from science.
Emilia: An artistic experiment is not “without constraint.” You don’t just throw a bunch of stuff into the air, Iachimo.
Iachimo: OK, OK.
Ursula: And even if you did, that is still not “unconstrained.” As we said last week, as I recall.
Adam: Nor is a scientific experiment simply an exercise in constraint and nothing else. No one repeats an experiment merely to duplicate established results. You are finding out if they replicate. You nudge a boundary and note the difference in outcome. I have no doubt that it is the same in your studio, Emilia. You have to listen to the medium and the subject, and I am sure that what unfolds is different from whatever you imagined you had “planned.” If it were a matter of science we might say “anticipated” instead, but the surprise is the essential thing.
Emilia: But then – this is my privilege too – only within certain, what you’re calling, parameters. I want to see what happens on the canvas or the wheel. Less so with my life.
Juliet: What you are calling parameters, others would call a safety net.
Iachimo: Or just safety. Like, the rule of law.
Orsino: I don’t know, Emilia – you might be selling yourself short here. Didn’t Yorick once say that every day, even every moment, is a “seeing what happens?”
Ursula: I remember. It bothered me at the time – it sounded a bit too inspirational. Like a fortune cookie.
Adam: I give Yorick the benefit of the doubt. Philosophy pretty often risks sounding like such adages. Unless of course it risks sounding like nonsense, or –
Iachimo: Or being it.
Adam: – I was going to say, or sophistry.
Iachimo: Or – at least – being mistaken. So look – I want to talk about this with Yorick, but I can at least make a start before he gets here: I was mistaken about something last time. When I said there could only be a finite amount of energy available – for rendering a simulation – I was not thinking futuristically enough.
Emilia: I still don’t really understand what it would mean to say that we could be living inside a computer simulation. Wouldn’t that just mean that we were simulated?
Adam: And what would that mean?
Ursula: Ah, the anxiety that we might ourselves not be real. We are getting to the real heart of the matter. Right on the surface, as usual.
Iachimo: “Computer” is an approximation – almost just a place-holder. But yes, some kind of artificial, intentionally-created virtual reality – again, assuming this is plausible at all, the odds are extraordinarily likely.
Emilia: That’s one of the things that’s confusing. You’re saying, well, we don’t know if it’s possible, but if it’s possible, it’s not just possible but overwhelmingly probable. This just sounds very strange, like wanting it both ways.
Orsino: As the internet meme put it –
Adam: Not what I expect from Iachimo, either.
Orsino & Ursula: – “Why not both”?
Juliet: Liberalism.
Adam: Hmmm?
Juliet: Liberalism. Wanting it both ways. Anything to avoid having to choose. To commit. Keeping options open.
Ursula: That’s interesting, Juliet.
Adam: Maybe in more ways than you intend.
Iachimo: It’s not that I want it both ways, at all. It’s just that – look, given the state of our knowledge, we can’t actually say whether simulation of the sort we’re imagining is plausible. But if it were –
Emilia: That’s what I’m saying. “If.” It’s all stipulation, to use a word you seem to like.
Orsino: I think I can explain what Iachimo means – he’ll correct me if I’m wrong. Let me try an analogy. Suppose we discovered a planet, and with spectography we could discern that there must be a good deal of water there.
Emilia: Um, OK.
Ursula: H2O, or XYZ ?
Iachimo: It won’t matter.
Orsino: But – again suppose (it wouldn’t actually be this way) – we are unable to tell from our data how near its sun the planet is, and so we can’t estimate its surface temperature. So we have no reliable way of knowing whether the water is frozen or liquid, or even steam – we can only guess. In such a case, we would say something like: There may or may not be oceans, but if there are, they likely cover most of the planet.
Emilia: I can understand the example, but not why it’s an analogy for this. Because possible and probable are too close. It’s not like saying, if there are oceans, there are a lot of them. We know what the possibility of oceans means. But here, you’re talking about – the possibility of possibility, or something.
Adam: You are onto something, Emilia.
Juliet: OK, but what does this have to do with surveillance?
Orsino: It doesn’t, I don’t think. Except, as I remember, that in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party kind of enforces a huge fake reality. Which is like a simulation.
Ursula: And which is very much what we swim in already. You don’t need either a science-fiction scenario or a political satire to give you that.
Juliet: It’s what I said earlier about privilege and oppression. Privilege doesn’t want to see what it does – doesn’t want to see that it’s doing it; it has to think that it’s just the way things are, that it’s natural.
Adam: But you also said – didn’t you? – that this isn’t an intentional gaslighting of some by others. It’s, what did you say, self-perpetuating.
Juliet: Oppression is self-perpetuating, but it’s self-perpetuating because there are winners and losers; it perpetuates itself by the winners, the socio-normative, hiding from themselves that they keep the system going. The winners want to believe this is just the natural order of things, that “there is no alternative,” et cetera et cetera. So they have to also try to deny it to the marginalized. Either the marginalized aren’t really marginalized at all, goes the ideology, or else if they are it’s either it’s somehow their fault, or else there’s simply nothing to be done about it.
Ursula: Kettle logic.
Emilia: Sorry? More tea?
Ursula: No – I mean, yes, that’s a lovely notion, and no that’s not what I meant. But why not both? Kettle logic, it’s a phrase Freud uses, for moves that each individually accomplish something performatively, but taken together cancel each other out. “I’m returning your kettle in perfect shape,” “It had a hole in it when you lent it to me,” “I never borrowed your kettle anyway.”
Orsino: Rock, paper, scissors.
Juliet: Yes, same kind of principle. Ideology always moves the goal posts.
Iachimo: Fine, I’ll wait until Yorick gets here.
*
(To be continued.)
