Month: August 2017

Ancient writers are not usually very forthcoming on the question of what artificial life would be like.  This is because most of them think about being alive according to a subtractive logic, such that you just add faculties – or souls, or whatever – to matter and then, as you add more faculties, you turn that matter into a crystal or a plant or an armadillo or a human being.  The faculties themselves remain something of a mystery of nature.  If this is what life is like, then any attempt to imitate life – by, say, building a working model of an armadillo – is an irrelevancy.  However like an armadillo your model might be, it doesn’t have the faculties that would make it alive, so it’s not in any kind of position to be called artificial life.

There are places nonetheless where the kinds of uncanny imitation of life that we worry about nowadays also come to the fore in Greco-Roman literature.  One is in Galen, On the Natural Faculties 1.7:

“Taking hold of pigs’ bladders, children fill them with breath and rub them against the ash near the fire – so as to soften but not mar them…While they’re rubbing, they chant certain phrases with meter and song, and all this speech is an invitation for the bladders to grow.  After it seems to them to have stretched enough, they blow into it again and stretch it again and again they rub it, and they do all this a number of times, until the bladder seems to them to have reached an adequate stage of growth.  But in these children’s works it is clear that, if they increase the magnitude and the internal space of the bladder, it is necessary that they render the body slender by the same amount.  If the children were able to nourish away this slenderness, they would change these bladders from small to large in the same way that nature does.  But their work is lacking, and it is impossible to bring about growth in imitation of nature not only for children but for anyone else.  This is proper to nature alone.”

If Galen explicitly denies that imitation (mimesis) of natural growth is possible, he implicitly concedes that it is: the childish game of blowing up pig bladders would not have struck him as an apt parallel for natural growth unless it were, in some way, actually like that growth.  The failure of this imitation is partial, but so is its success.  It is like natural growth in one dimension (megethos) but unlike it on another (leptotes).

Galen concludes by positing an absolute difference between the two kinds of growth – one stems from child’s play while the other has its origins in an obscure natural faculty – in a way that does not carry great conviction.  If the children – perhaps now wearing masks and lab coats – were also able to add a layer of pluripotent stem cells to the outside of the bladder after each round of inflation, wouldn’t their game now count by Galen’s own standards as a complete imitation of natural growth?  The bladder would then be artificially alive, not because it mimicked some living thing or another – after all, there are no pig balloons in nature – but because it possessed a successful imitation of a natural faculty of living things.

 

 

One of the really interesting things about medieval Islamic literature is the way it represents an economic milieu far in advance of what we might have imagined for, say, the eighth or ninth centuries CE.  An example: al-Khalil ibn Ahmad, who died around 790, is supposed to have discovered metrics while listening to the sound of smiths hammering copper in the copper-market.  It’s the anvil chorus – or, if you like, the racket of industrial Birmingham – 750 years early.

Another example: Abu Kislan, a character from the Arabian Nights who is too lazy even to stand upright without his mother’s support.  He invests a few dinars in the trading expedition of a local sheikh, who uses that money to buy a monkey.  The monkey, in turn, is a money-making machine: he dives for pearls, saves the crew from infidels in return for a ransom, and eventually just makes crates full of money appear out of thin air.  To whom does all the cash belong?  To Abu Kislan, as long as his monkey is just a dumb beast.  When it starts talking to him, though, Kislan’s wealth turns into a debt marker.  The monkey cashes it in by having Kislan undo a talisman, at which point the monkey turns into the jinn that it was all along and runs off with Kislan’s wife.

This story turns around a problem that closely resembles one I discussed a while ago in the context of Boethius’ Consolation: what to do when wealth comes alive.  As I suggested then, this is (or is going to be, pretty soon) a problem for capitalism too.

Capitalist development of an industrial economy involves the use of machines as intermediaries between capitalists and workers.  The workers get what’s necessary to reproduce themselves, and the rest of the profits go to capital.  In practice, “capital” always means “the capitalist,” because this kind of economy is founded on the assumption that machines can’t own things.

This is an assumption that (replacing, for the pre-industrial context, “machines” with “animals”) runs back to Greco-Roman culture and probably should count as a basic anthropological fact of Western Civilization.  At the same time, and given the reflective-neurotic character of that civilization, people are always trying to justify this assumption with reference to ethological or cognitive factors: the ability to speak, to choose, to deliberate, to do syllogisms, etc.  At best, machines and animals only appear to do these things.  That’s why they can’t own property, and that’s what makes them workable conduits for accumulation of property among the rich.

Animals are more or less what they are – which is just to say that the old explanations as to why they can’t own property will continue to hold good for the foreseeable future.  Under capitalism, though, something different happens with machines.  There’s a systemic imperative to minimize dependence on labor, which means making machines able to do as much of what humans can do as possible.  Eventually – in how long, who knows – this is going to result in a general machine intelligence.  The monkey will turn into a jinn, and forces that used to be purely productive (for others) will turn out to be acquisitive as well.  Are we prepared to reckon up the debts we’re going to have to pay?

I taught for a while at Yale, and I hated it.  Here’s a story that might help you hate Yale, too.

Since I’m prone to forgetting or losing keys, I got in the habit of leaving my office door unlocked.  It didn’t seem to me like there was much in there to steal.  But I’d underestimated the depravity of the Ivy-educated mind: some fraternity brothers who drank in the classics building went a little hard on the PBR one night and, finding my office door conveniently open, set to mayhem.  The next day, I discovered my desk festooned with sketches of dicks.  They’d left two written messages as well: one superficially astute, the other inscrutable.

The university’s official response to all this is a story for another time, and maybe a useful contribution to the dossier of whoever next sues Yale for a Title 9 violation.  What I want to talk about now, though, is the vandal as critic.

One of the messages they’d left, on a copy of Carson’s Sappho that I’d taken out from the library, was a single word, in all caps: FAG.  I guess it’s not hard to see why some day-trader’s idiot son, blitzed out of his mind on light beer and casual homophobia, might read Sappho this way, eliding – as modern scholars don’t – all questions of ancient sexual identity or the authorial persona.  There’s nothing here of any great critical depth.

The other message, though, was one that it took me a long time to understand.  Someone had scrawled “it’s gay” on the cover of my copy of Sophocles’ Theban plays.  At the time, I thought that you couldn’t really get Sophocles more wrong than this.  Sure, at a stretch, you could argue that he puts Greek gender norms to the test and thereby reveals their spectral, constructed nature, but that’s some distance from being gay.  In the rich and frequently homoerotic world of classical Greek lit, Sophoclean tragedy seems about as straight as you can get.

Not long ago, graduate student with whom I work in my current department got me thinking about the problem again.  We were reading Oedipus Rex, and I remarked on what I still think is the play’s basic moral: don’t have children.  To this, my student said that he loved a good anti-procreative tragedy.  I thought right away of Lee Edelman’s argument in No Future – that the homosexual in art is basically what rejects the specious justification of pleasure-seeking in terms of some fantasy of futurity, usually centered on sexual reproduction – and all the rest fell into place.  The Theban cycle isn’t gay in any obvious thematic sense.  Instead, it’s super-gay: it shows us what happens when we try to weave our weird and sexy pleasures into a fabric of family life.  What happens, of course, is that the woman you’re fucking turns into your mother, you turn into your own father, and your children end up as monsters who curse you for bringing them into being and then hound you to death.  Sophocles understood the revolutionary potential of gayness before being gay – as we understand it – was even a thing.  Thanks, Yale frat boy: you taught me a lesson that you yourself, as you settle down in Manhattan or Westchester or Greenwich with a woman whose charms will become, over time, distinctly Oedipal, will surely have forgotten.

 

When people talk about the cultural construction of color, the example that always comes up is orange.  “Orange” designates a color and a fruit; the historical evidence will tell you that the fruit came first, so the color must have been named after the fruit.  This is true not only in English but in every language spoken west of China.  Edible oranges came from India more or less directly to Europe (“orange” itself being an anglicization of the Hindi word via Spanish and French).  They were carried back east by Portuguese merchants, with the result that they came to be called “bortugali” in Arabic.  There too, the name of the fruit became the name of a color, so that to call something “orange” in Arabic is actually to call it Portuguese.

This seems like a pretty clear-cut case of culturally-conditioned color-awareness.  When people had the fruit, they started paying attention to the color; before they had the fruit, orange things were described as “red” or “gold” or “yellow” or via some mixture of those terms.

Fair enough, but the unanswered question is why oranges, in particular, should have caused people to start seeing the world differently.  After all, there’s no prima facie reason why oranges themselves couldn’t have been described as red or gold.  Compare Andrew Marvell’s “Bermuda” (c 1653):

He hangs in shades the orange bright

like golden lamps in a green night.

We only assume that oranges are orange out of centuries of habit.

What got me thinking about this problem was a parallel case in a narrower set of languages, also involving an introduced agricultural product – in this case coffee.  Arabic (bunni), Persian, and Turkish (both kahverengi) get their word for brown either from coffee itself or – more probably, since the Islamicate World took its coffee black – from the coffee bean.

I thought this was pretty weird.  There aren’t all that many orange things in nature, so you can get by easily without a specialized word for that color.  Brown things, by contrast, are everywhere.  Dirt, trees, leather, pottery: you’d think there would have been a word since time immemorial to indicate the color that all these things had in common.  Why did it take coffee to make people notice the color brown?

It always bears repeating that words are tools.  If we’re trying to explain the invention of a new word (and, if you like, the corresponding concept), we should start by asking what the word was good for.  Color words are good for description.  As Marvell shows, though, you can describe the color of an orange without calling it “orange.”

But color words also give us norms that can be useful for setting rules or giving instructions (e.g. “cook the onions until they turn brown.”)  I suspect that something like this is at work behind the adoption of “orange” and “coffee-colored” as color words in the early modern period. You need a certain kind of color-consciousness to cultivate both these crops.  Oranges tell you when they’re ready to eat by turning a certain shade that isn’t exactly yellow, gold,  or red.  Coffee beans need to be roasted to a certain level of darkness, but you certainly don’t want to turn them black.  In both cases, new color-words helped to spread an awareness of the color norms governing the harvest and preparation of a new crop.  That, I suspect, is what these color-words were good for; they were descriptive second, normative first.