How do I work? (Do I work?!)

Weird^2

Writers block is an absolute bugger. Whatever you are trying to write, you get to a certain point and either realise you’ve repeated yourself or that the English language isn’t entirely flexible enough to say exactly what you want to say (And yes, me blaming the language almost certainly is one of those ‘bad workmen always blame their tools’ moments). I’ve tried all sorts – distractions, breaks, planograms, spider diagrams, brainstorms, walks in the park, music, no music, radio, no radio, silence, cooking, fire alarms (unintentionally), reorganising, rereading, rewriting out, writing other things… You get the idea.

I’ve run out of distractions so it looks like I just have to write. The thing that annoys me is that in this thing I’m writing (I get a little bit paranoid about giving too much away) I know that three years ago (yes, I write slowly — no, it’s not a haiku, its a bit longer), this particular point got me stuck for August through November. The main problem – as you can probably guess by the fact I’m revisiting the same issue – is that I was never really happy with the fudge of the situation which I’d acheived on the previous attempt.

So I’m back in a weirdly similar position after three years. Working on the same (ACCURSED) chapter, playing with the same characters, just before enrollment day, on the evening of the Freshers party in an empty house. OK, the past and future don’t naturally parallel each other much on a deeper level – on the previous occasion, I decided that it was a good idea to get entirely bladdered and then lost in the Freshers party, then drink gin neat out of a mug because I didn’t own any tonic. But a parallel is a parallel, and enough of a parallel to get that doo-doo-doo-doo-dooo moment going in my brain. 

All cures for writer’s block welcomed.

Cookery

As a nice contrast from writing out revision notes and calling it a blog, I’m going to talk about food for a bit. This will not only demonstrate that I am a balanced individual with a variety of interests but also hopefully stop phrases like Beauvoirian feminism, the Great Incarceration and Three Phases of Infantile Libidinal Development from cluttering up my consciousness. Since my brain is experiencing the philosophical equivalent of a force 10 gale at the moment (cue: falling trees, thunder, lightning and dooooom), it should help everything feel better, hopefully.

OK, food, now where was I…? Colours, that was it! Have you noticed that the more colours there are in a meal, the better it tastes? The logic seems to work like this. A uni-colour meal has very little flavour, or excitement. Bi-colourity on the other hand can either indicate a fusion of eclectic textures, tastes and olfactory notions (aka smells), or something a little dull.

This leads me to postulate the significance of different colours. A meal which is mostly one shade of green (which we’ll call, for sake of argument, ‘lettuce green’) will generally not be that pleasant and/or exciting. Similarly, with the exception of quiche (see below), beige coloured foods on their own or with only the simplest of additions are, to be frank, quite rank. Anyone who lived with me in year one or two will doubtless have observed the rankness which I addressed by the laughingly polite title of ‘pasta with sauce’ (spaghetti, tomato puree, cheese).

This leaves us with muticolourity (which I think looks better as multicolarity, so that’s what I’ll call it). Multicolarity is a plate and/or dish which contains three colours or more. For example, meat (I don’t know much about this), green beans and yorkshire puddings (or quorn, if you’re one of those, we all know who you are). Similarly, although the outer appearance of quiche is one of uniform brown-and-beige dullness (or black, if you forget its in the oven), inside it is a delicious yummy eggy yellow suffused with whatever your particular penache for pastry-covered dishes happens to be. Cheese on toast, with onions, is a further case in point. And any good salad must have at least three colours. I would indeed be tempted to complain about vegetation selections which did not reach this stringent criteria, since it is wholly likely that they will (a) ming, as the youth of today say, and (b) that they will come in a Fort Knox style polythene container which renders the veggie goodness within unattainable.

At this point I tend to resort to sharp objects and return to the question. It should be stressed that multicolarity can be taken too far. For instance, the addition of certain brightly coloured ingredients to any dish is likely to render them inedible. As a guide, the addition of green mouthwash to plain beige pasta will not liven up the taste-experience, even if you sautee it. Although adding a toothpaste topping to a particularly uninteresting quiche may be a worthwhile experiment.

Potato wedges or roast potatoes should not be livened up with shaving foam. Equally, adding laptop, television, CD-Roms or newspapers to any dishes is to be discouraged, particularly at the preparation stage. The two exceptions to these are fish and chips, which have to be constituted to an approximate ratio of 1 part fish to 3 parts chips to 2 parts soggy papier mache from the newspaper which ‘wraps’ them up.

The second example is TV dinners, in which case any level of multicolarity (even to the mouthwash and shaving foam level) will not improve their flavour in any way whatsoever.

Now back to Beauvoir…

Could Freud have been right?

This is another in the occasional series of ‘proof that I have been revising’ blog entries where I pontificate without hesitation, repetition or deviation for several hundred words in order to demonstrate that it is just possible that some information has slipped in through the haze of laziness and alcohol which makes up the outer layers of my cranium (and hell, I need a haircut).
DEVIATION

Sorry about that, as I was saying. Could Freud have been right? Well, unless anyone out there in Internetland has secret infantile sexual fantasies about their mother, or has a castration complex, or alternatively remembers experiencing Penis Envy (why that has to be capitalised, I’ve no idea) as a young girl, the answer is theoretically a resounding “no”. Freud extrapolated his personal experiences as a bisexual fin-de-siecle white, middle class and proffessional Jew in Vienna to encompass the entirety of humanity.

Now if that isn’t egoism, I don’t know what is. Let us not forget Sigmund’s closeness to his mother. “Meiner goldene Sigge” she used to call him. From much of his own life, we can find traces, clues, hints and outright massive example shaped demonstrations of the theories he was later to come up with (after a few false starts, involving, in no particular order, hypnotism, cocaine and cutting open women’s noses). 

Fun though it may be to rubbish his ideas (having cut open this woman’s nose, he recorded in her notes that she suffered “hysterical bleeding” – whether this was hysterical in the “feminine” or the “uncontrollable laughter” sense, well, is something which only the sick-minded amongst us will wish to consider).

We are always left with the faint feeling that – though he got a lot of things wrong – there was a kernel of truth in his psychoanalysis. For a start, the same modern science which discredited pretty much all of his ideas has produced a neuropsychopharmacology which rests on a similar determinism (of chemicals in the brain) of human action. Likewise, neurology and genetics have cast huge doubt on the extent to which being human is really the existential crisis which Sartre would have us believe. Most illuminatingly, the work of Gilligan on gender-difference and moral reasoning, and also the work of Simon Baron-Cohen on brain-types.

We are determined beings. Our human nature is not infinitely malleable. While Freud may have got the content of his view wrong, he is at least in the same camp as modern science. Liberating though the existentialist idea may appear, it is fundamentally a flawed ontology. Similarly, it lacks the ethical prescriptions of Freud’s pseudo-science. Psychoanalysis is not a science, yet it is based on a similarly rigidly determinist view of humanity.

Unless you want to question the entire epistemology of Western knowledge of course.

Mission Control – Sartre Calling

OK, another title which purely results from the lyrics currently emerging to musical accompaniment from my iPod (“80s Life” by The Good the Bad and the Queen). Really, this post is going to be short. I should be reading “Being and Nothingness” by Jean-Paul Sartre but for some reason not reading it is just soo much more tempting.

I guess that ironically demonstrates Sartre’s point about existentialism – that we are free to re-invent ourselves and our projected with every moment. Indeed, the fact that I have trudged through 30 pages of about 430 and then abandoned the enterprise seems to be an apt demonstration of the nature of man’s (as Sartre defines him) existence to precede his essence. I.E, the choices we make realise the multiple potentialities and alternative contingencies which are open to us and equally infinitely variable for us. 

Its ironic then that his philosophy has been employed to negate me reading his philosophy. Which is practically a paradox, in the linguistic if not the temporal sense. Talking of which, its also worth noting the inflexible relationship between signifiers and referrents in Sartre’s work…

Nose preparing to dock with grindstone, pickaxe approaching coal-face, all pigs fed and ready to fly…

Relativism

It sounds ideal in a way to say Foucault got it right and managed to sweep away the two thousand year history of glorious and not-so-glorious attempts at envisaging some form of universal morality. One can now stand up and proudly be culturally and temporally contingent and conscious of it. In history (my particular personal pastime), Foucaultian analysis emphasises the centrality of language/discourse in the construction of contingent meanings, thus banishing the nasty metanarratives of unicausality and universalism forever. Huzzah (et al)! For moral philosophy, we can proudly stand tall and, with swellings of pride, declare

EVERYTHING IS RELATIVE!

Hold on a minute. Since reading a bit of Habermas, it surprises and shames me somewhat to observe the fundamental philosophical problem with that declaration. Secondly, with said small amount of knowledge of Habermas, like a leopard that changes its stripes, I don’t think I’m a relativist anymore.

Although that is possibly just because PERFORMATIVE CONTRADICTION is quite a cool phrase, philosophically speaking anyway. The obvious problem (as any fule know) with everything being relative is obviously that the statement everything is relative must be a part of everything and therefore must be relative. If everything is relative, declaring that everything is relative contradicts the content of the statement that everything is relative (since ‘everything is relative’ is a universal statement, not a relative one).

This puts post-modernism through the blender a bit since it constantly asserts (with overtones of the old Nietzschian Dionyssian stuff) the impossibility and undesirability of universalism. This is most apparent in Foucault’s history of the prison system where some have argued that his analysis rests on a cleverly cloaked essentialism of an age – the pre-modern as barbaric, and the modern as rational, controlling and unfree. The implied moral prescriptions here are problematic in the light of Habermas’ critical theory – Foucault’s moral philosophy (if such a thing is relativistically possible) rests on ethical and ontological relativism.

If one wants a moral philosophy of any sort and to engage in a debate, as Habermas points out, surely one must presume that both interlocuters believe absolutely in their own positions. This is where relativism falls down – if morality is relative, contingent and dependent on a thinly disguised its-just-what-we-do-around-here-at-this-point-in-time (or, to put it another way, shorter and with less hyphens, ‘contingency’) how can one engage in moral discourse?

Such a relativist position contradicts itself since, within the framework of critical theory (discourse) at least, it seems to me to be impossible to be a relativist. To do so robs one of the power to engage in the arguments one supports, and to reject those of your opposing interlocuters. Furthermore, the basic ontological contradiction of everything being relative leaves you in what is best termed a grey area of a moral vaccuum.

Of course, Habermas is not perfect. He himself robs the moral power of discourse through the lack of moral prescriptions in his advocacy of discourse (as opposed to ending the discussion or declaring a Hobbesian war). Yet I still feel profoundly shook up by discovering that I’m probably not a relativist (I’m not a critical theorist either, or a nihilist, or a particularly good philosophy student but those aren’t strictly relevant here). 

Relativism has a certain self-centred security about it, particularly if we apply it to big moral questions like international relations. It allows me to support democracy, wholeheartedly believe in it, and yet contradict myself in (originally) opposing the (effectively democratising) invasion of Iraq. It neatly sidesteps issues of power relations and soft versus hard power with what is probably the discourse equivalent of a lilly livered liberal shrug of the shoulders which screams (or rather wetly suggests) that ‘everything is relative man.’

So if I am a moral universalist, what does that mean? Even as a relativist, I contradicted myself and had beliefs, ideals and politics, yet I could safely hide behind that screen of reflexivity or ironism. If I support democracy, then without relativism, I can’t talk vaguely about cultural rights. In that case, do I no longer think cultural difference is important? Implicitly, yes. And yet I think a strong form of relativism (nice oxymoron really) which acknowledged cultural difference yet empowered one to engage in moral/political critiques of inhuman, degrading, anti-democratic practices is perhaps impossible.

But that means a moral universalism is effectively what I’m left with. A view which (while clearly evolving, adapting and responding to change) has its positions and sticks to them, which believes in moral absolutes. Is that a loss of intellectual flexibility of an increase of intellectual maturity? 

My head hurts.