Olivier's Othello (1965)

Despite the blackface, he's incredible here. And a very young Maggie Smith as Desdemona. Compare to Welles scene of weird ritualistic creepiness. I like both versions, but Olivier's is more empathetic somehow, less a mad man than one tragically manipulated.

Welly, Welly, Welles. Welles as Othello (1952).

The murder scene. Creepy erotic with that smothering kiss of death:

And in entirely with commentary from Bogdonovich:

Scribblings on Othello: Honesty, Skepticism, Irony, Tragedy

This scribbling is for my purpose. I'll be teaching Othello soon, and want to get some ideas down. I've never taught Shakespeare, but I think this play while complicated will be very teachable i.e. easy to get students interested, even immersed in the aesthetic swirling of this play--so much is going on! I've quite a bit of time to simply scribble before formally planning anything. I'm reading Hazlitt, Goddard, G. Wilson Knight, Bloom, Bernard McElroy, Jan Kott's fabulous Shakespeare Our Contemporary, and Millicent Bell's Shakespeare's Tragic Skepticism. The students are undergraduates, so I want to approach with close reading rather than beat them about with wonky theory. Theory can open up new worlds of a text, but you really need to read it with a clear head first. Scribbling begins:

Valences of "honesty": trust, and virtue/chastity. William Empson counts 52 occurrences of the word (or its variations). The increasing irony of such a word as the play moves along. To be true, or to be false. To be black or white. Is this a black and white world? Or can something be both? Is this a grey world? Can you trust what you see, what you hear? Are things what they seem? Appearance/Reality becomes the major philosophical concern of this play:

"I am not what I am."

 "Speak of me as I am."

"Men should be what they seem." 

Moral vs. intellectual truth. Does one prevail? Do both fail? Shakespeare vs. Iago. Which author/manipulator wins? What is the significance of Iago's silence at the end of the play? Are Othello's last words to be trusted i.e. are they honest words?

The tragic exploitation of the gap between appearance and reality. Deception vs. honesty.

Motivations of Iago--that old question. Is he a devil, or man who hates himself and the world? A man who would have agreed with Hamlet that the world seemed "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable," seeing abject fecunity everywhere: "tis an unweeded garden / That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in / nature / Possess it merely."

Is this a cosmic play? Is it trapped, as G. Wilson Knight claims, within the boundaries of its own literality? I'm tending toward the former.

Cosmic rhetoric (language of heaven and hell) and also the animal/bestial rhetoric.

Moving more toward a reading of Othello's tragical skepticism. Certainly Othello is tragic in the Classical sense. Edith Hamilton tells us that "[t]ragedy's preoccupation is with suffering," and certainly in Othello we have suffering. But the stakes are always immense, if not cosmic, in the very best tragedies. We need "[t]he suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly" (The Greek Way). Othello suffers greatly. But what do I mean by tragical skepticism? If we do read Othello as cosmic rather than literal--dealing with the universal as well as the particular--then the tragic letdown has to be ultimate.

Things are not, cannot be, what they seem in this world. Stanley Cavell wrote that skepticism was "that anxiety about our human capacity as knowers that can be taken to open modern philosophy in Descartes". Cavell links this anxious awareness of the limitations of human perception to tragedy: skepticism becomes "the playing out of tragedy" and tragedy "the working out of skepticism" (see In Quest of the Ordinary). We're talking about disappointment, about getting exactly nowhere. I think of Thoreau's quiet desperation.

Anxieties of appearance and perception--how fascinating and troubling in a play steeped in race. Things aren't black and white. We want to keep the world black and white! No philosophical or biological miscegenation allowed!

Tim Morton's definition of irony as an aesthetic exploitation of a gap between levels of signification really cleared up many vague ideas about irony I had previously been pretending to understand. From Timothy Morton's Realist Magic, near the end of Chapter 2: "Magic Birth":

"Beginnings thus involve a peculiar brand of irony that I call apoleptic. We’re all fairly familiar with proleptic irony: the irony of anticipation in which we know something that a character in a narrative doesn’t know yet. Now meet its weird sister, apoleptic irony. Apoleptic irony is the retroactive irony we feel when a narrative’s ending causes us to look back differently at the narrative. The gap between what we thought we were reading and what we are now reading is exploited. (While teaching I describe irony as gapsploitation: the aesthetic exploitation of a gap between 1+n levels of signification. Which is more of a mouthful than “gapsploitation.”) What is ironic about Alanis Morisette’s song “Ironic”? [66] What’s ironic is the fact that none of the examples she gives are examples of irony. There is a gap between what the song says it is and what it actually is...

 

Practically Pro Choice

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” So said Joan Didion. I recently had a conversation about abortion, and while I said I was prochoice, I became conscious of a kind of paleness of conviction. Why was I prochoice? Why did I feel a tinge of guilt about admitting to be so? I realized that although I had stated an opinion, I couldn’t articulate satisfactory reasons for that opinion. Reasons, that is, beyond the usual rhetorical go-to. Feminism tells me that as a woman I have a right to the processes of my body, but the argument somehow feels a bit thin. This logic actually heaves more responsibility onto the mother of a child. Fatherhood begins to pale in comparison to the importance of childbearing motherhood. Men are pushed to one side, having little of importance to say unless they too act to shore up the battle line of Woman’s Right to Choose: get in line! You’re with us or against us! And yet, prolife feels immediately wrong to me. But I need reasons. I need a why. I need to be certain.

Prochoice most often rests its laurels on exactly what the moniker suggests—the right to choose. I am for choosing! This amusingly right-wing maneuver, this upholding of FREEDOM TO X, grounds itself with the breezily simple premise of “my body my choice.” Positive freedoms (freedom to rather than freedom from) are usually invoked by libertarians and conservatives as constitutional rights of the individual. Prochoicers, avid feminists or not, have good reason to ground the argument in My Body Land: after all, the mother bears the child, not the father. Men may express opinions, so this story goes, but the buck stops with the woman: her body her choice. No Republican WASPs beyond this point! Get out of the bedroom etc.

I always loved this argument because through it I was automatically a PIP (a Politically Important Person i.e. a woman). I was automatically entitled, then, to an opinion as a person politically-important-in-itself. As a woman, I’ve actually very little to do reading- and thinking-wise since being a woman makes my body “always already political” as any good academic person will offer. I quickly realized that anyone disagreeing with me on the subject of abortion either: does not actually have a right to disagree with me unless they have the physiological capacity to birth a child; secretly hates women pathologically; is just not culturally up to snuff; hasn’t read as many Slate articles as I have; is either religious or ignorant (the two are certainly not mutually exclusive); is a tragically misinformed (probably traumatized) exile of the sisterhood in dire need of a crash course on her cultural subordination and marginalization of which she was somehow blissfully ignorant; or is just an old person, and thus excused for their inevitable bigotry and general irrelevance.

Now I would maintain that many of these hyperbolic cartoons do proliferate (pun intended) in the prolife camp. In fact, given the choice (cf. previous parenthetical) between spending time on either side of the abortion fence just for drinks and mingling, I’m not sure I’d ever rub elbows with prolifers—moralizing from the religious right would seem to be inevitable (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia dramatized the difference beautifully as between a raging feminist and a religious whacko (as if one was stuck between a rock and a bat shit sandwich)).

All too often prolifers are as content with the gut reaction answer as prochoicers. Reasoning for the former rests on an unambiguous observation that we’re dealing with a life, and also that that life is sacred, vulnerable, threatened, and thus deserves to be protected. Now prochoicers can cartoonize prolifers until kingdom (doesn’t) come, but the my-body-prochoicers will always have to grapple with the eventuality that the argument falls rather impotently back in on itself. Tasty candy without calories, to scream Woman’s Right gets one exactly nowhere because the whole impetus behind the abortion procedure is that it isn’t your body. It’s another body, and one that for any number of reasons just needs to not be in your body anymore. If it was just one body, there would be no problem, thus why the my-body-my-choice argument is so tempting for the political Left: it erases the painful difficulty of a very uneasy responsibility for all thinking adults (not just women). As of 2015, 38 states have fetal homicide laws, 23 of which apply to the earliest stages of pregnancy. Is this unreasonable? I’m not sure.

Thus many painful rhetorical and moral difficulties ensue. The difficulty for any reasonably independent thinker is one of ideology: both camps are soaked through. Enlightened persons valuing women as independent, intelligent equals go prochoice. Persons with a steady moral compass valuing human life from conception to fruition steer prolife. Moral condescension infects both camps.

But it is a moral question, isn’t it. We need to decide if morality should be foundational or fruitional. Should morality come from high ideals for which we strive, or should we determine ethics as we go as a kind of tool for adjusting to the everyday travails of living. Both of our camps depend on vocabularies that are simply too difficult to remain coherent: where really does one body end and another begin? Where does an individual life begin? Words, vocabularies, rhetoric will never exhaust the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” that constitute the processes of life in all its difficulty, wonder, and weirdness. But we need an answer for abortion, don’t we? Moral idealism fails us because it can never address the gorgeously inconvenient flux that is our ethical battleground of the everyday. Our problems of today are just that: of today. They are not all of yesterday, nor with they all be with us tomorrow.

Abortion now divides the American political landscape. It seems to be an issue irreconcilable, making de facto enemies and allies; an issue of freedom and of life, perhaps worthy of war (cultural or otherwise). But imagine that the other side actually has a legitimate point. We have, then, competing definitions of good. There’s a kind of tragedy here. Ethics is supposed to resolve clashes among moral claims, not create them. William James wrote that “there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance.” People scream loudest when they are least certain of being right (if certain, you only have to whisper). No one is certain down to the very marrow with abortion. What if the mother is dying? What if the father wants to keep the child, and the mother does not? What if the child will be deformed, and can expect little beyond a life of alienation and pain? What if the mother is herself a child, and will later regret an abortion that seems convenient only for the present? Sidney Hook wrote about the tragedy of uncertainty:

I mean by the tragic sense a very simple thing which is rooted in the very nature of the moral experience and the phenomenon of moral choice. Every genuine experience of moral doubt and perplexity in which we ask: “What should I do?” takes place in a situation where good conflicts with good....No matter how we resolve the opposition some good will be sacrificed, some interest, whose immediate craving for satisfaction may be every whit as intense and authentic as its fellows, will be modified, frustrated or even suppressed.

The choice may be easy, or it may be difficult—but it cannot be certain. Hook was writing about the philosophy of pragmatism, a philosophy which dismisses platonic idealisms (the Good, Truth, Justice, Nature, etc.). Philosophy as the search for truth becomes the search for adjustment, an adjustment for living in a world of many values and many definitions of what the business of living should be. “Truth is made,” William James wrote, “just as health, wealth, and strength are made, in the course of experience.”

Practically speaking, I see two possible worlds here: a nation where abortion is condoned, and one where it is sanctioned. Putting aside politics and high morality, we look at actual life of the everyday. To condemn abortion may well reinforce our reverence for human life. We would be surer of where we stand, and the responsibility for fetal life would be handled with a degree of honesty and righteousness not found in legal or political systems today. However, one reality will not change: women and girls will still seek abortion. It will be unregulated and it will be dangerous, but abortion will never be an option unsought. And where abortion may have saved a mother from a difficult pregnancy, there will be no legal recourse for a responsible doctor. Rape victims will either have unwanted children, or pursue more dangerous recourse. Women neither psychologically, emotionally, financially, nor perhaps even physically equipped for motherhood will be unduly tested--perhaps beyond reasonable capacity. Foster care will be further burdened, and young people beginning to climb out of poverty will simply sink back down. Parental planning will become a moral pamphlet with little to offer someone who did not plan to get raped, to have their life endangered by unforeseen complications, or who otherwise simply cannot be a responsible parent.

Permitting abortion is not without risk. The creeping in of a kind of casual regard to a very uncasual procedure is certainly possible. But I do not think it probable. Anyone even vaguely familiar with abortion seldom takes the procedure lightly. To create conditions where women who are either unwilling or unable to become a parent, or else are endangered by a pregnancy—to create conditions where these women are obligated to “go through with it” and take those consequences—that is a far riskier, uglier reality. If women are given the choice to abort difficult or unwanted pregnancies, perhaps every child born would be wanted. But perhaps not.

This is a better not best philosophy. Anyone thinking the issue simple has simplified it in order to feel certain about it. We lost certainty long ago. I come reluctantly back to prochoice, with less certainty but somehow also with more resolve. I know more now why I know not. Is this tragic as Sidney Hook writes? Surely we’ll continue to adjust, hopefully not without more thinking and even a little bit of play:

I have perhaps overstressed the sense of the tragic in human life in an effort to compensate for the distortions to which pragmatism has been subject. There is more in life than the sense of the tragic. There is laughter and joy and the sustaining discipline of work. There are other dimensions of experience besides the moral. There is art and science and religion. There are other uses for intelligence besides the resolution of human difficulties. There is intellectual play and adventure. But until men become Gods—which they never will be—they will live with the sense of the tragic in their hearts as they go in quest for wisdom. Pragmatism, as I interpret it, is the theory and practice of enlarging human freedom in a precarious and tragic world by the arts of intelligent social control. It may be a lost cause. I do not know of a better one. And it may not be lost if we can summon the courage and intelligence to support our faith in freedom—and enjoy the blessings of a little luck.

Louis Menand on Pragmatism's Three Moments

This lecture is great. Menand, editor of Pragmatism: A Reader and author of The Metaphysical Club (an incredible book, and excellent as an introduction to American philosophy) is as intelligent and concise as his philosophical subjects. He also importantly points out in this lecture the blind-spots of pragmatism, such that while pragmatism (an idea about ideas) is a great philosophy to take down traditions and dogmatism, it's not great at pushing social movements. Which makes sense, really, when you think about pragmatism's Emersonian inheritance--the emphasis on the individual so strongly endorsed by pragmatism--William James in particular. Civil rights movements, for example, strongly rely upon the notion of universal human rights ("We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" etc.). 

Idealism relies upon certainty. William James said that "certainty is the root of despair," and his friend the Honorable Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. similarly said that certainty led to death. Conflicting certainty about ideals led to, oh I don't know, the Civil War for instance. In this context, Emerson's observations in "Fate" about slaves "crowing about liberty" seem slightly more understandable:

So far as a man thinks, he is free. And though nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a "Declaration of Independence," or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act...

Freedom is earned for Emerson by how you think, how you approach the world. It's not so much an ideal state one can attain via some document or legal status, but a process, a way of thinking. Of course, this is rather easy to say when you're not a second-class citizen.

One might go about this in a pragmatist way, but you sometimes need Idealists and dreamers (Martin Luther King Jr. would be one example of a dream, a visionary, a prophet of sorts). I'm still thinking about the problems of pragmatism as a political tool.

The American Voice in Philosophy Project

Wish I could go...this seems to happen every summer though. I guess the Irish do like us--we could talk about James and Rorty over Guinness! Check out the site, very cool work going on.

http://www.american-voice.org/index.php/summer-institute-in-american-philosophy

The project's mission/inspiration:

"About the Project Richard Rorty (1931-2007) and Stanley Cavell (b.1926) are philosophical contemporaries most recently moved to question the writing of philosophy in America. Intriguingly, the figures diverge significantly in their chosen philosophical inheritance. Cavell seeks to inherit the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (figures he regards as America’s most likely exemplars for intellectual life and national regeneration) while Rorty presents his work as a radical re-description of the classical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. Undoubtedly, it is significant that two of the most influential voices in contemporary philosophy – both inspired by the promise of a distinctively American tradition – so resist and embrace the standard narratives of U.S. intellectual history. 

What is offered in Cavell’s work is a perfectionist promise of our own lives’ validation, a validation before ourselves and before others. This promise might be glossed, alternatively, as the potential to authorize our own voice – in the history of philosophy as well as the history of culture. It is of the first importance for Cavell, and this carries particular resonance in his engagements with Hollywood film, that cultural participants never cede their aesthetic experience but work to possess it. For Rorty, controversially, self-creation is fully removed from public life. Finding voice and finding conviction, though of great personal interest, is not communally or inter-subjectively important. Achieving America, by the same token, is a matter for politics before philosophy. 

This project is inspired by such compelling conceptions of the American. Directed by the recent work of Rorty and Cavell, it expands to consider the history of philosophy in America as well as the distinctively American grain of such philosophical writing. Captured in William Carlos Williams’ resonant phrase are intimations of character as well as constitution, mood as well as ethos, spirit as well as style. This project aims to touch on all these aspects of American philosophical writing. It moves beyond the pragmatist and transcendentalist inheritance to encourage a fuller and finer attunement to philosophical America. To invoke William James, what we are finally concerned with are the varieties of American philosophical experience, the varieties of American voice."

Tim Morton on Subject Position

For me to remember. Probably the best advice for "how to read a poem" I've come across. I used to get depressed in undergrad theory classes where you walk away for the first time stuffed with poststructuralism thinking: "oh I thought "great poetry" meant something, but turns out I'm wrong, and sadly naive. Graffiti might be as meaningful as Emily Dickenson." That cost me a year or two of existential crisis, mourning the loss of what I had thought made great works great. Huzzah! There is middle ground! Poems talk to you, in a way. But you talk back too. This is somewhere between formalism and reader-response, which is nice. The poem and I are translating eachother, so something like a conversation is actually going on. Madness in the best sense. Read Tim's post here or on his own site: http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/08/hegel-ecology-aesthetics.html Again, this work belong to Timothy Morton--I'm just spreading the word:

...a sneak preview of the first few pages of the talk I'm giving at Queen Mary University of London next month: 

The Time of Hyperobjects: Hegel, Ecology, Aesthetics 

Hegel's philosophical approach is intuitively very satisfying if like me you trained to study literature. From an early age as a literature student, you're taught that texts have narrators, and that these narrators are different from the author. For instance, a text might not have a single author, or even a human one. You could discover the text written in gigantic letters on the surface of Mars or floating at in the tealeaves at the bottom of the pot. No matter: all texts, these ones included, have a narrator. Now the thing about narrators is that they do two things, roughly: they establish a point of view (or points of view), and they establish a subject position (or positions). The point of view is fairly straightforward: it's the answer to the question, what or who is the narrator? Is the narrator omniscient, omnipresent? Does it have a gender, a race, a class? Is the narrator a character in the story? Characters? And so on. Slightly more difficult to grasp is the notion of subject position, but this is where it really gets interesting being a literature (or any kind of art) student, “where the rubber meets the road” as They say tediously over and over again in awful bureaucratic meetings where nothing is decided. I think that if you had to boil down what we do as humanities scholars into a single task, it would be identifying subject positions and working on them—which by the way makes me a good Hegelian. Because that's what Hegelian philosophy is all about. So what is a subject position? The subject position of a text or artwork answers the question, “Who are you, the reader?” In other words, what attitude towards itself does the text expect you to take? Think of a perspective painting. The vanishing points in the painting dictate where to place your gaze in order to make a 2D surface appear 3D. Your gaze is encoded into the picture surface. In the same way perhaps a flower's subject position is that of a bee, if it's painted with ultraviolet landing stripes. It tells you where to put your proboscis. This is the bad, or good news of literary theory, in a Lacanian, Althusserian nutshell. People come in to the theory class with the expectation that you can make anything mean anything. You will always get a certain essay on deconstrution that totally misinterprets it along these lines. No: that's what I call the pre-theory attitude. What you should leave the theory class with is the knowledge that not only is the interpretation of texts subject to all kinds of nonsubjective constraints, but also a place for you has been pre-established by the text itself. It's like those maps with the little red arrow that says, “You are here.” Now Hegel's great insight is that ideas come bundled with attitudes, in other words, ideas code for subject positions. When you think an idea, the idea's thinkability as such depends upon assuming a certain attitude on the part of the thinker. So when a Hegelian wants to debate you, she doesn't argue the toss about the truth content of your claims. She makes a beeline for the subject position that your ideas code for, and talks to that. It's a very disarming approach, as a matter of fact. I try my best to use it all the time. Again it's what I think the humanities were put on the Earth to do. Now honing in on the subject position is literally disarming, because it tends to be the unconscious of the idea, the idea's personality, as it were, and we sort of know from psychoanalysis that one's personality, how one appears to the other, is unconscious. So what happens when you hone in on the subject position is that you deprive it of its effectiveness. You collapse the idea and the attitude it codes for into a bundle. Now this bundle is yet another idea. And guess what? Since ideas code for attitudes, this one is no exception. So off you go, Mr. Hegelian: you now have to figure out that one. And so on. It's called dialectics. It means that philosophy is the history of philosophy, not the superficial occurrence of ideas “in” time, but a temporality and a temporalizing that is internal, intrinsic, to thinking as such. For instance, it has no reverse gear. Thinking is futural, since ideas don't know yet what they code for. That's what an idea is. (Cue the spooky Heidegger music.)