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Anthropologists are always reminding us about the basic equivalence between the cultures they study and our own.  Sociologists tell us to mind the gap: our post-agrarian, hierarchically organized societies are, for those very reasons, comparable with each other but not with hunteer-gatherer or nomadic societies that lack these traits.  The sociologists are wrong, the anthropologists are right, and we’re going to pay a steeper price the longer we fail to confront the consequences of this fact.

I’m writing (as pretty often) with particular reference to the problem of so-called “post-truth:” we’re apparently living through a moment in history when people who know the facts no longer have the authority to command the agreement of other, less well-informed sectors of society.  The problem with this account is that, for the very reason it appeals to the sort of people who would describe themselves as “knowing the facts,” it fails to capture a deeper substrate of the problem.  When the question of who really “knows the facts” is under debate, as I think it is now, then it’s meaningless for individuals or groups to cite their “knowledge of the facts” as a justification for their authority claims.  The status of that knowledge is, after all, exactly what’s being disputed.

Bruno Latour has it largely right in his recent work on climate change: scientists can’t (any longer) complacently dismiss anyone who contradicts their account of the facts as out of touch with reality, they need to offer an aggressive defence* of the claims to authority that would justify their “knowledge of the facts” as such.  Where Latour gets it partly wrong is in his assumption that conflicts like the one now ongoing about climate change can be “won” anymore in a meaningful sense.  If by such “winning” Latour envisions, as he often seems to, a political victory that results in certain actions being taken by whatever collective agency still inheres in the government, then the concept still has a sense.  If, instead, as he also sometimes appears to do, Latour means “winning” in the debating sense of convincing the other side or assembling a consensus, then the concept seems to me to be a thing of the past.

Since Socrates, this style of debate has assumed a set of shared definitions that ensure we’re talking about the same thing in similar ways.  That we do share such definitions is so far essential to the institutions of liberal democracy that we’ve even become habituated to debating those fundamentally private topics, pleasure and pain, in a utilitarian framework that pretends to treat them ostensively and objectively.**  As Socrates also knew, however, consensus definitions can only exist at the cost of close policing of public discourse – a task that was possible even a decade ago, when that discourse really was public and under the control of a relatively small number of people, but which facebook and twitter have (wisely or not) abandoned.

The truth is, the existence of consensus definitions has always been an effect of hierarchical society that was essential for the reproduction of that society.  What else is a monarchy, for instance, but a society where everyone roughly agrees about who (but more importantly what) the king is?  In retrospect, the first sign of our present predicament may have been the appearance under Bush II of bumper stickers claiming that Bush is “not my president,” a trope that’s repeated itself in ever-wider generic contexts for every president since.  The speaker of a phrase like that is either delusional (sometimes), a declared political rebel (unlikely), or someone who means something different by “president” than what the word meant for the first 230 years of American history.

That division is symptomatic of a series of growing splits in American society, not just over what should be done with X, but about what X actually is.  To take probably the least politically noxious example, there was widespread consensus as recently as five years ago about the shape of the Earth; now you can find communities to support your claim that it’s round, flat, toroidal, and many alternatives other than these.  Just search on youtube and go down the rabbit hole.

People understand that the modern internet tends to build communities around shared beliefs, then insulate these communities from evidence that would seriously challenge such beliefs.  What’s been less appreciated is the potential depth of the divisions that result.  There’s no reason to think that this echo-chamber effect will stop (or has stopped) short of what anthrolopogists call cultural fission, the splitting of one group into two that share no particular loyalties or concepts.  The facebook algorithm’s practice of showing us content that “generates engagement” by giving us an outrageous representation of the other may even accelerate this process by providing material for a chiasmatic schizmogenesis through which we construct our own identities in direct opposition to a cultural other.

The groups that result don’t just disagree about certain issues, which would hardly anyhow justify my calling them different cultures.  They don’t even agree about the objects of agreement.  Never mind whether we should cut CO2 emissions to limit climate change: is it carbon dioxide we’re talking about, or dephlogistonated air?  When we talk about saving our national parks, are we talking about preserving remarkable geological phenomena or the stumps of titanic ancient trees, cut down and harvested by Luciferians?  Your evaluation of Trump’s policy choices might actually change depending on whether you think he’s governing a nation or, as QAnon maintains, trying to hunt out a global cabal of child sex traffickers.

That these discussions are even being had is evidence that, intellectually at least, we now live in a fissional culture for which government, in the classical agrarian-state sense, has no meaning.  There’s no one who can tell us we need to grow grain for Marduk; there’s not even anyone who can tell us the earth is round.

In a practical sense, obviously, “government” still does have meaning for these United States.  Even if we can’t agree what a president is, we’ll (probably) all participate in the ritual of electing one in 2020.  But what does democratic politics actually mean over a territory in which there are dozens or hundreds of different cultures, none of whom can agree on what the objects of political struggle really are?

One thing it means is that, for any particular culture, the outcomes of political struggle take on a cosmological significance, not as policies rationally articulated according to some set of values but as an incomprehensible evil forced on us by a hostile other.  This is why politics is now immensely depressing for practically everyone, and, if the current situation ends violently, then politics itself is going to be to blame.  For a hierarchical society, politics is the field of peaceful struggle; for a fissional society, politics is what generates hostility betweeen cultures that would otherwise have remained closed off unto themselves.

* The phrase “aggressive defense” is only apparently an oxymoron, but the incongruousness of the phrase does point toward a tactical difficulty that status-quo institutions and opinions are confronting everywhere right now: to mount an attack on rival positions is to admit that those positions are rivals and, accordingly, to sacrifice the fetishized “unquestionability” of whatever’s being thus defended.  Nevertheless, this is a sacrifice that will have to be made.

** On the subject of utilitarianism…

Charles MacKay isn’t much of a sociologist or even a particularly good historian, but he has a fantastic eye for anecdotes.  A story that’s always particularly stuck in my mind from his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the  Madness of Crowds is this one, from his chapter on alchemy, totally orthogonal to that topic but irresistable.   A young Raimond Llull, Catalan philosopher and original Wheel of Fortune fan, keeps hassling this lady who’s absolutely not interested.  She tells him as much, over and over again, but it doesn’t matter.  So her radical solution is that she just tears open her blouse in front of him, showing him her breasts but also that she’s got a nasty-looking cancer on one of them.  “This is what you love,” she says, and suddenly it turns out that Llull doesn’t actually love that – he’s totally cured.

I thought at the time that this was a tactically pretty remarkable gambit.  To destroy an unwanted affection, you sacrifice your own image in the eyes of another, not by being self-deprecating – which the other can always regard as a lie or, probably rightly, as an invitation for affirmation that makes the other’s affection valuable to you no matter how unwanted – but by giving the other exactly what s/he wants.  You expose the bare reality of yourself, exactly what the other wants to see, but in so doing you expose that reality as not desirable – as marked by a physical flaw or, as moralized in the account from which MacKay takes the story, by the curse of mortality.  The other’s desire recoils in horror (and ideally, in this particular account, gets caught by Jesus on the rebound*).

I was rereading Stendhal’s On Love the other day and it changed my thinking on this.  I hadn’t really grokked before that the process of “crystallization” he describes – the process by which our imaginations turn a regular person into the only object worthy of love – can operate on literally any trait, beautiful or ugly, transforming it into a virtue uniquely possessed by the beloved.  Suppose, as Stendhal does, that the transvaluations produced by this process have a lasting effect on our sensorium, and you have an early theory (more complete than Rousseu’s practice) of perversion.

From this point of view, the gambit employed by Llull’s stalking victim looks especially risky.  What prevents Llull from turning her cancer into a beauty mark, which is what the troubadour next door would have done?  What prevents him from reconfiguring disease and mortality as desirable in themselves, rather than as disgusting?  Again, Stendhal provides the answer: Llull isn’t in love, he’s just DTF.  Amour-physique, not amour-passion or any of the other, more complex amour-flavors.  In this case, crystallization may fail to take place simply because the lover doesn’t actually love this person in particular; s/he loves bodies in general.  If a given love object turns out not to have the kind of body in which Llull’s interested, his desire recoils.**   So, a good gambit for filtering out people who only love you because you have a body; but, if they’re actually in love with you, if they’re already (as inevitably in such cases) imagining what you are, then you’re only going to get yourself in deeper.  Si tu es pris(e) dans le reve d’un(e) autre, tu es foutu(e).

* Note, this means that Jesus is Llull’s second choice: he would rather have had the girl, but she (and all flesh) turns out to be mortal and thus liable to  abandon you (by dying).  Jesus isn’t as pretty, but at least he’ll stick around.  That’s an attitude shared by a lot of Medieval Christians, who have already lost faith in their god as the highest good.

** Llull’s physically normalizing rejection of the cancerous body is about what we would expect.  Again to take the moral that MacKay’s source draws, though, what kind of culture trains someone to desire only bodies that are going to be around forever?  Medieval Latin Christendom, I guess, but also one that presents (via film, TV, etc) the images of beautiful young people long after those people have ceased to be young, or alive.

In the book from which this post takes its title, Timothy Morton remarks that miasma is the first hyperobject of which mankind becomes aware.  That’s a good idea, but there’s something dense and a little too rationalizing about what Morton does with it.  For him, in this book, miasma is just another word for epidemic, a pre-school version of modern germ theories of disease.  Elsewhere, he takes it as tantamount to pollution – in the modern chemical/material sense, not in the one that Romans meant when they rendered the word as pollutio.  Both approaches are weird and wrong and not at all appropriate to the way that miasma actually operated on the minds of ancient Greeks (or better Athenians).  I can’t help but think that the reason Morton flubs the discussion is that he approaches the natural world in a fundamentally modern/empirical way, as though modern science were all we had to go on – despite Morton’s neo-Kantian protestation that our “facts” have no bearing on what actually exists.  From this standpoint, Morton’s “hyperobjects” – global warming prominent among them – look like rather domesticated things, for all Morton’s own self-staging as a prophet of doom.  That’s by way of a preface, and the last time I’m going to mention Morton’s name.  In the rest of this essay, I want to use the concept of miasma to show what a really dark ecology would look like.

Most people who know about miasma probably know it as the theory of contagion by vapor that germ theory overthrew.  You need to put that idea out of your head, because it has little or no purchase in Ancient Greece.  There, miasma is a kind of stain or filth.  In Homer, the word means literally: you can get to be miaros (the adjective form of miasma) by wallowing in mud just as well as blood, and all you need to do to stop being miaros is to take a bath.  What’s surprising is that the word takes on much more serious ritual connotations over time.   In fifth-century Athens, miasma is almost a curse that you bring on yourself by breaking certain rules, most prominently (in surviving literature) by shedding blood, and you can’t get rid of it without some serious rites of purification – if you can get rid of it at all.  Now, moreover, it starts to spread contagiously.  You can pick up miasma by sharing a table, a bed, or even a roof with someone who has it already.  On an individual level, symptoms of miasma now include illnesses we would call psychological (as in Aeschylus’ Eumenides) but also more complex disorders that embrace both body and mind (as in the popular theories attacked by the author of On the Sacred Disease).  Collectively, a citywide miasma can lead to crop failures (aphoria) and other disasters.

I want to stress again that there’s no way to explain any of this as what an earlier generation of anthropologists would have called a “primitive survival.”  Miasma as a matter of serious ritual pollution is unheard of before the fifth century; in fact it is an innovation, one of the strangest inventions of the Athenian enlightenment.  Why?  Modern scholars have approached this problem from a range of perspectives without really arriving at a satisfactory solution.  Generally they have treated it as a question of personal moral psychology (E.R. Dodds) or of legal functionalism (lots of people, but originally Arnaoutoglou).  Looking at miasma as a form of ecological thought may shed new light on an old question.

What is an ecology?  By contrast with an economy, and using techniques of retrojective definition that might at best be called imaginative, we could say that an ecology is a set of techniques for living in a house.  If economy is household management (oikonomia) and thus belongs as a science to the master of the household, then ecology must be an approach to the household that studies what it does not control, a methodology for sons rather than fathers.  Everyday use of these two terms would suggest that they cover different domains – economy for the man-made world, for society; ecology for a nature that precedes and escapes us – but a little reflection would show that the domain of the economic no more escapes ecological constraints than “nature” can evade economic exploitation.  The only thing dividing economy from ecology is a question of perspective; economy is for people who cherish the illusion that they are in charge.

As distinct from ecology, the sum of all methods for studying a household we do not rule, an ecology would be some way for such a household to be organized, an ordering that would show our position in it.  If the world, the oikoumene, our space for living, can be characterized as such a household – a point on which ancient thinkers as otherwise divergent as Plato, Lucretius, and Gregory Nazianzen are all in agreement – then the systematics of miasma are very clearly a way of organizing this household that excludes our being in charge of it.

From this point of view (and if we are going to be serious about adopting an anthropological perspective on Ancient Greece, then this is the point of view we have to take), miasma is a set of beliefs that entails an ecology, one in which the major pollutant is what runs through our veins, and also one in which spilling that pollutant entails potentially catastrophic consequences.  The function of such an ecology may in practice be to discourage bloodshed, but if so its function no more brings miasma into being than a desire to stop global warming called forth modern environmentalism.  A better way to think the analogy: as environmentalism has constituted the problem of climate change, so the ecological thinking behind miasma brought into being the problem of bloodshed.

Was bloodshed not a problem before?  Perhaps not, and certainly not any threat to the functional performance of those societies that, as best we can tell, preceded the city-state.  A segmentary society like that of Homeric Greece and most archaic poleis addresses the threat posed by murderers in its own way, by retributive violence between sections.  Viveiros de Castro has shown how bloodshed can even serve as a means for a socius to think the other and thus, on a larger scale, guarantee cohesion.  This is to say nothing of to all appearances politically-organized societies like the Classical Maya and the Mexica  where public bloodshed, voluntary or involuntary, forms an essential part of social life.

On these grounds, a hypothesis: miasma theory emerges from a state of generalized social crisis and binds this crisis to bloodshed, an ecological problem.  It thus falls between the fusion or pacification of the polis (in particular, Athens) and the articulation of polis laws.  Laws allowing the state to punish murderers are miasma’s version of the Paris Accords.

This is not the way that miasma narrates its own history.  Actually it has no history; ecologies with histories, conceived of as movements that respond to evental catastrophes, are an artifact of unhealthy parasitism on the modern scientific disciplines and of the modern need to adopt a rhetoric of advertising.  A thinker superficially modern in both these ways, the author of the Pseudo-Hippocratic On the Sacred Disease, wants to bring belief in miasma to an end.

As an ecology, miasma is rather co-original with the world.  Philology teaches us that there was a time before miasma; for fifth-century Athenians, miasma was always.  I said I was done with Morton, but I can’t end without saying one more thing.  What makes Morton’s ecology dark is that, for it, the disaster has already happened.  A fifth-century Athenian had it still worse, since he conceived of miasma not as stemming from some disaster but just as part of the way of the world in which he lived: there could never not have been a disaster.  This is why I identify miasma as the original dark ecology, an appelation it shares with a welter of ancient and premodern beliefs that bear explaining in similar terms.  By comparison with these, Timothy Morton’s ecology is not dark but only elegiac.  It seems dark to us – and in this it makes an important contribution – only because it exposes the extent of our unlicensed optimism.

 

Near the end of On the Natural Faculties, at a point when Galen feels he has already proven his case, he stops to sum up.  The various parts of the body receive and process food not mechanically, like cogs in a machine, but because they have “natural powers” (phusikoi dunameis) through which they attract, hold, and digest the nutriments proper to them.  The same natural powers drive each organ to expel what it cannot digest (its perittoma) and to supply the results of its digestion to the rest of the body.

Nature thus governs each organ in much the same way as it governs the whole organism.  This claim, however, introduces complications of its own, because it blurs a distinction between organ and organism that Galen, for reasons of his own, wants to maintain.  If both organs and organisms are what they are – i.e., alive – because of a set of natural powers, what justifies our subordinating the one to the other in the course of our analysis?  What prevents us from treating organs as organisms, and vice-versa?

Galen tries to remedy this breach by asserting a distinction that will strike modern readers as a little strange.  It’s true, he admits, that the organs have appetites (orexeis) for their nutriments just as the body itself has an appetite for food.  What organs lack, however, is a sense of their own teleological reason.  The stomach, to use Galen’s example, desires food for its own sake and not in order to provide fitting nutriment (epitedeia) for the other parts of the body.  If it did act with such an intention, he goes on, it would no longer be a phusikon organon (a natural organ?  an organ by nature?) but some kind of animal (zoion ti) which use mind (noun) and reasoning (logismon) to decide (hairesthai) on the best course of action.  In effect, what sets organs apart from organisms is that the former lack what a philosopher would call (and Galen comes close to calling) prohairesis, the ability to choose its activity on the basis of a rational plan.  Organs act by instinct alone.

In light of the resonances of his argument, it is odd that Galen claims prohairesis would convert an organ into “some kind of animal.”  As Galen must have known, most philosophers held that non-human animals precisely lacked prohairesis: this was what distinguished brute beasts (ta aloga) from humans.  By this logic, the organs that Galen describes – equipped with their own natural powers and appetites, with what amounts to an instinctual program – are already animals.  The best we could say, to save Galen’s account, is that they are animals of a particularly tame sort whose instincts never drive them to rebel against the body of which they are said, without apparently much justice, to be mere parts.

In a digression driven by his experimentalist’s interest in nature, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo reports an encounter with the flying fish of Bermuda:

“The dorados swam along, occasionally breaking the surface, and they stirred up these flying fish, which they would chase in order to eat them, and the latter took to their wings to flee, and the dorados followed running behind them to catch them as they fell; on the other side, the seagulls took a lot of the flying fish in the air, so that they were not safe either above or below.” (trans. Gerbi)

Oviedo intends this as a parable about the life of mortal man, who is safe neither in obscurity nor at the high point of fortune.  I set side by side with Oviedo’s anecdote the following text, number 169 in Alciati’s Emblemata:

“The golden bream snatches up sardines from the midst of the sea, unless they flee in terror and seek the surface.  But there, they are prey for diver-birds and coots.  Alas, weakness remains unsafe everywhere!”

Oviedo’s Summario, whence the anecdote just quoted, was published in 1526; the first edition of the Emblemata appeared in 1531.  From this we could conclude that Oviedo, who always enjoyed an Italian audience despite writing in Castilian, has inadvertently provided material for Alciati’s emblem book, or else, more probably, that both Alciati and Oviedo are rewriting a fragment of the highly moralized zoological knowledge of the Middle Ages.  In the latter case, we would have further evidence of the extent to which this inherited knowledge could channel the observations even of a historian known for his rugged empiricism.  We would also, I think, have in Oviedo’s more expansive and fully-annotated parable a near-contemporary guide to reading one of Alciati’s emblems, always so opaque and, by virtue of their involuted character, anticipatory of the Baroque.

Galen, On the Natural Faculties 2.3 is a refutation of pores.  If we had pores, Galen argues, then they would have to grow in proportion as the rest of us grew.  Again he invokes the children’s game of blowing up pig bladders, and again the question circulates around how to distinguish between real and (hypothetical) artificial life.

His interlocutor in this chapter is Erasistratus, one of the two medical bogeymen he confronts throughout OTNF.  Erasistratus tries to construe biological processes in a mechanical way as much as possible, while Galen favors an account that imbues the body with various extramechanical powers (dunameis) of attraction, separation, transformation, etc.  An example of the distinction: Erasistratus thinks that the kidneys operate like a sieve, pulling thicker matter out of the blood, while Galen thinks that they draw serous humor and various other excrements toward themselves like magnets attracting iron.  Given the way that circulation was understood to work in the first century CE, Galen can make a strong case, but that’s neither here nor there.

Erasistratus’ mechanical explanations usually involve his postulating the existence of invisible (we would say microscopic) pores in the body that allow some substances to enter some spaces while excluding others.  If this were so, says Galen, then the same pores would have to exist in children, or even in embryos, as exist in adults.  To keep up with the functional demands of a growing organism, the pores would also have to grow, so that we as adults would be walking around full of gaping holes.  Galen insists on the topological conformity of the body: just as a certain region on a pig’s bladder grows when children inflate it, so must all regions on the body grow in proportion as the whole body does.

One might ask: instead of growing the holes that are already there, why not just add more holes?  Well, says Galen, it’s important that we distinguish living bodies from the products of human craft – say, a basket.  Baskets get larger through the addition of more fibers, but bodies get larger by growing, uniformly (the pig bladders, again).  Galen asks us to envision a basket with a digestive tract.  We can easily imagine such a bucket getting longer at one end or the other, but how would the whole thing get larger in a proportional way as human bodies do?  The basketweaver would have to undo the whole thing and remake it at a larger scale.  It follows, says Galen, that the human body doesn’t grow by the addition of new parts, basket-style, but according to a natural power of growth that exceeds, dimensionally, the artistic power of a Phidias or a Praxiteles.

Galen has given us another recipe for artificial life, this one strangely close to how we now understand growth to work: when the cells in our body divide, they add extra parts just as a basketweaver would do.  In this instance, by comparison with Galen’s concept of the person, we’re robots.

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.