Listening to Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, Part Three: Catastrophe

To get to parts one and two, as well as the introduction, use the handy-dandy side bar.  These posts are listed just under the "search" and "subscribe" widgets.

"Catastrophe" is a Greek word, a combination of "strophe" - meaning turn - and "kata" - meaning down.  "Strophe" was used primarily to describe the actions of the chorus in Greek plays, with each choral poem either a Strophe or an anti-strophe, a figurative motion in one direction, or in another.  Catastrophe, then, is a total interruption of that process, a proverbial wrench in the works, a form-defying event in the course of the narrative.

In the development section of the first movement of Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, the listener confronts what can only be described as a catastrophe.  The common name of this section is "the train wreck," and it shows Beethoven at his most intense, most devious, and most, well, catastrophic.  Here's the development section of the opening movement, up to and including the "train wreck," but leaving out the resolution that follows (because that's the next post):



As you can hear, the beginning of the development is a tumultuous back and forth between the second theme (see part two) and the opening theme (see part one).  I think it's fair to say the development starts out relatively cohesive, but each repeat of either theme adds further and further chaos.  The opening theme starts to sway against itself, raising in pitch and intensity, the secondary theme finds itself beset by all kinds of strange counterpoint.  New melodies are introduced, adding tension due to their dominant feel and the urgency of the violins playing them.  Before long, the back-and-forth of strophe (the militant first theme) and anti-strophe (the pastoral second theme) collapses on itself in what can only be described as catastrophe.  As the piece bucks and writhes, it reaches its climax in the "train wreck," separated from the development below:



All semblance of meaningful melody or rhythmic progress disappears from the piece here.  While harmonically the progression still makes sense, that's hardly the point.  This section is barely, by the classical definition, even music.  So many of the chords are dissonant, the entire orchestra is blaring, and there is nothing to do but to push on from one horrible, full-voiced, dissonant chord to the next.

It's too easy to focus just on the train wreck itself, however, and that's why I've included the build-up to it, also.  If the first and second themes truly are incompatible - as I suggested earlier in this series of posts - it's no wonder that, once they were really forced to reckon with each other in the development section, they created a kind of musical conflagration.  A potentially helpful image, if an imperfect one, would be the Viennese elite at their dancing and partying (the second theme) suddenly beset by an invading revolutionary army.  The result is chaos, the destruction of the court itself, and along with it the decomposition (so to speak) of the courtly music to which the nobles were dancing.

A particularly interesting part of this collapse, to my mind, comes not in the loud and flashy places that jump out even during a cursory listening to the development.  No, there's a subtle trick Beethoven plays in the buildup to the train wreck, an inversion of the melodic and rhythmic quality of the second theme that says more about what's going on here than just about anything else.  Listen again to the last statement of the second theme before the train wreck, and then the passage that follows it and leads into our catastrophe:



Can you hear the rhythmic inversion?  Here again is a piece of the theme:



And here's the inversion:



The waltz is still there in the inverted version, but it's hidden behind a strange and different rhythmic emphasis.  All that's really different, actually, is that strong beat of the melody used to fall on the first beat of the measure, in the original theme, but instead falls on the second beat of the measure in the "inverted" version.  The result of this minor change, however, is a fundamental shift in the feel of the melody, a transformation from Viennese waltz to urgent escape from impending disaster.

That this variation of the second theme leads into the train wreck is telling.  Rather than returning to the opening theme, which has found some measure of stability in its back-and-forth washing earlier in the development (perhaps it's not a satisfying kind of stability, but like a pendulum, at least it's not going anywhere), it's the second theme that leads us into catastrophe.  And it does so by allowing itself to be broken, by succumbing to the chaos that surrounds it in the development section.

As for the train wreck itself, there's little to say except that it is completely different from anything in any symphony that comes before it.  As I said earlier, it would hardly be considered music by Beethoven's contemporaries, chiefly because of its dissonance and lack of melody, but also because it plays more of a narrative role than a musical one.  By pointing out the strange motions of the second theme, I hope I've helped you to see how the train wreck is not just a sudden and loud interruption, but rather an inevitable collapse after increasingly strained efforts to put the square peg of the second theme into the round hole of the symphony.

As a wrap-up to this post, I want to ask a couple of questions about meaning.  Well, a question anyway.  What, really, does all of this mean?  In the first couple of posts of this series, I've talked some about potential narrative interpretations we might impose on the symphony, but at the same time I've been hesitant to pick one and stick with it.  Even in this post, I've used the "Viennese nobles confront revolutionary army" idea, but I tell you know that it's only a crutch, a way to help getting at the music.

I suppose, as I listen more and more to the Eroica, as I dive deeper (and I'm diving deeper now than I did even when writing my thesis), I truly am starting to feel like the music has its own narrative, its own meaning, and its own mode of communication.  I don't think that's purely emotional, because I can trace it with some semblance of literary objectivity.  Nor do I think it's purely spiritual, because, while it's mysterious, I'm not sure how meta-physical it is (would, for example, I be able to follow the narrative in the same way were I deaf?).

No, I think the narrative of Beethoven's music is musical, and its meaning equally so.  It's unfortunate that we're stuck using words like "meaning" to describe a meaning that is non-linguistic, but then again isn't that exactly the point of this effort, to find a way to bridge that gap?  Ah, but the point is also to help bring myself (and my readers) closer to an understanding of that musical meaning, even if that understanding is fundamentally non-linguistic.  What I mean is, I will not be able to write a sentence that says: this is what the Eroica means, but I hope that, by sharing the process of trying to understand and - inasmuch as it possible - translate it, we might all get a little better at our music comprehension.

It is no accident, either, that the train wreck raises this conundrum.  I know of no moment in any other piece that is so direct an attack on the notion that music has no meaning, no narrative value on its own.  Then again, it remains one of the most difficult-to-penetrate moments in Beethoven's oeuvre, precisely because its lack of melodic structure makes it less "musical."  Perhaps, then, our next assay into the symphony will help, when we look at the third theme, the resolution of the catastrophe.

Interrogating the Internet, Part Three: Information

In spite of all the mean things I said about e-commerce in my last post, there is a notable exception to the Internet-as-giant-money-machine routine.  Wikipedia is a free website, a vast and successful experiment in crowd-sourcing, and a remarkable human accomplishment.  While the site still requires money to run, it is the rare enormous non-profit enterprise run truly for the good of mankind, and not for the good of some one man.

Wikipedia is the height of information on the Internet, but it is not the hub, nor is it perfect.  Like any source of information, it is constantly in flux, a battleground for ideology and interpretation.  That scholars often scoff Wikipedia does not make it less valuable, but it does indicate that, especially when highly specialized knowledge is involved, the site might be just as guilty of perpetuating myths or, at least, subtly flawed characterizations of information as it is deserving of praise for striving to make anything and everything available to the curious.  Of course, while the debate continues over Wikipedia's overall fidelity compared to traditional encyclopedias, there is no question that it is more comprehensive and more-userfriendly.  The "wiki" has spread far beyond wikipedia.org, and for good reason: behind the specific information presented on the site, there's a process for how to present information that has proven extremely effective.

As I said above, however, Wikipedia is not the hub of information on the Internet, because Google is.  Whereas Wikipedia is a non-profit organization dedicated primarily to providing articles on any and every piece of information available, Google is a for-profit, publicly traded search engine that, some time ago, began to reach far beyond search.  Google's success in part owes to the fact that, when the search engine battleground was still densely populated, Google chose to separate out "sponsored results" from organic ones, giving users the opportunity to make their own decision, rather than being forced towards some marketing campaign by a page worth of disguised but paid-for search results.  Google, internally, put this kind of decision under a broader heading: "don't be evil."

I won't venture into the question of whether Google has become evil, whether it has maintained it's plucky start-up idealism as it has become a publicly traded corporation, slowly but surely taking its place as one of the most successful companies - and certainly the most successful brand - in the world.  Rather, I want wrap up this post by talking about where information fits in the picture of the Internet, in light of the two organizations discussed here.

Can information ever be unbiased?  Probably not.  Any historical event, for example, will have dozens of different interpretations, even at the time that it occurred.  How much more so twenty years later, or a hundred, or a thousand?  What, then, can a provider of information do?  Wikipedia strives for an unbiased account, where possible, but its crowd-sourced mechanism for doing so is susceptible to the tyranny of the masses.  On the other hand, the expert - who pens the Brittanica entry, for example - is liable to skew information in favor of his own perspective, ignoring competing theories or interpretations, even if he does so subconsciously.  Especially troubling is not just interpretation, but hierarchy: not just what happened, but how important any given event - or other piece of information - is might also be debatable, and the cause or result of bias.

The Internet does nothing to change the conundrums of information, it merely makes them more pronounced.  Wikipedia, to my mind, has as good an approach as can be expected: tap into the knowledge of the masses, edit carefully and vigilantly, strive for a lack of bias even when impossible.  As a source for answers to factual questions, there is no better resource in the history of mankind.

Google's approach, meanwhile, is more complex.  As a search engine, it is not actually designed to provide the user information.  Rather, Google connects users with websites, websites which may contain information, but may (and usually do) also contain advertisements, interpretations, arguments, and other kinds of networks.  Google takes minimal responsibility for what you find on the other end of your search, and rightfully so, but it bears remembering that the output part of the search enginge experience is not merely fallible, but often malicious as well.

We might say the same about Wikipedia, of course, if in a different way, because we might say the same about information as a whole.  What the Internet does, I would argue, is that it elevates information by making it so sublimely accessible.  That we can answer almost any question about history, etymology, science, mathematics, sports, weather, or just about anything else almost instantly has made us almost too comfortable with information.  So much of our web-based learning, thanks to Wikipedia and Google, is the transmission and acquisition of information that we might not be doing so well on the critical thinking, interpretation, and creativity side of the equation.

Not that those things don't exist.  Indeed, I have no evidence to suggest that we, as a society or as a world, are any less creative or critical now than we ever have been.  Rather, my point is that, from my own experience, easy availability of information can inspire a kind of intellectual laziness that is far from fatal, but is troubling nonetheless.  Where we should see an opportunity to do more and better critical thinking thanks to the Internet, all-too-often we're satisfied merely to link from one piece of information to the next, as if connections alone comprised analysis.  Society wide, it seems to me that we're more interested in saying what a text (for example) reminds us of or what it resembles than we are in what it means, as if meaning were just another piece of networked information.

What does the Internet do, then?  It makes information readily available to anyone and everyone.  What doesn't it do?  It doesn't assess the validity and uncover the biases of that information, it doesn't interpret it, and it doesn't create meaning.  None of that is troubling, in itself, because those tasks are - to some extend - the exclusive right of the mind.  Rather, what is troubling is that it is so easy to believe that the Internet does assess validity and bias, does interpret, and does create meaning, and, indeed, that it does so better than we can.  Combined, especially, with the obvious but secret fact that the Internet is moved by money, first and foremost, and there is a strong incentive for information to be a commodity, for interpretation and meaning to be bought and sold.

The Language of Degree and Kind in Baseball and Life

This post is also available - with pictures and dancing bears - at Pitchers and Poets.  I lied about the bears.

When we construct our little narratives to explain the strange things we see every day, we tend to lump our world into broad categories.  Actions are "good" or "bad," "smart" or "dumb."  People are "tall" or "short," "happy" or "sad."  Sporting events are "entertaining" or "boring."  Politicians are "liberal" or "conservative."  And so on, a veritable smörgåsbord* of quotated and contrary descriptors.  Here at Nicht Diese Tone, of course, we think this stuff is all hogwash.  Most of the time, when you're confronted with a duality, it's very probable that you're oversimplifying things.  While that oversimplification may be a real time saver - indeed, our ability to do so with such verve and expertise might very well be a key part of our relative evolutionary success - it can also be extremely dangerous.

* Much to my surprise and pleasure, my spell check added the umlaut and the circle thingy over the a.

Much as I'd love to illustrate the point with something profound and socially meaningful, my April-addled mind can't help but turn to baseball as a perfect locus for the issue.  The advantage of baseball over things like, say, politics or morality are numerous.  The chief reasons, however, are only two: 1) baseball is far less contentious than politics or morality* and 2) baseball is much, much, much easier to quantify, which will help to illustrate the point.

* This is not, strictly speaking, true, as the recent Dodgers-fan led assault against a Giants fan - leaving the man in a coma - attests.  Nevertheless, it's much easier for most of us to put aside our sporting-related differences than our political ones.

In particular I want to look at the beloved home of my beloved (and, as of this writing, 12-3) Colorado Rockies, the notorious Coors Field.  Coors Field is, in our dualistic narratives, a "hitter's haven."  It's a miraculous spa where batting averages go to recover and ERAs go to die, a slugger's wet dream and a scrappy, replacement-level slap hitter's salvation.  Otherwise insignificant careers have been forged (Neifi Perez, Juan Pierre), mediocre major leaguers have been saved (Preston Wilson, Kurt Manwaring), over-the-hill sluggers reborn (Jason Giambi), stars made into superstars (Todd Helton, Larry Walker), and aspiring pitchers wrecked (Mike Hampton, Denny Neagle, Pedro Astacio, Daryl Kile, Bret Saberhagen, Greg Harris, and on and on) by its thin air and its cavernous outfield.  In the popular narrative of Coors Field, it is an almost mystical place, one man's Heaven and another's Hell, a Miltonian paradox.

Until the advent - and advent is exactly the right word - of the capital-H Humidor, playing at Coors Field was like stepping into a video game.  Every decent hitter would hit .350 and slug 40 or 50 homers, as if controlled by some over-obsessive teenager on his X-Box.  It was so easy, scores were routinely closer to football (or even basketball) proportions than proper baseball ones.

The Humidor, of course, changed all of that, transforming Coors Field from Bichette's Paradiso to the upper echelons of Purgatorio instead.* No longer a panacea for ailing bats, it became, instead, a kind of minor boost along the lines of many other so-called hitter's parks.  Suddenly pitchers with mediocre stuff like Jason Jennings and Jeff Francis could throw complete game shutouts, and Rockies 8-hole hitters stopped hitting above .300.  The narrative transformed, enough that Coors Field and Humidor became opposing watchwords, simultaneously an excuse to disparage Rockies hitters for their advantages and mock pitchers for their crude, cigar-inspired handicap.

* I will not apologize for the Dante reference, even though it is also a terrible pun. 

Undoubtedly you can tell what I'm going to say, but I'll say it anyway.  It's all a bunch of sensationalist nonsense.  Because we like to explain the world through clean, discrete, and ultimately meaningless categories Coors Field is painted as a "hitter's park."  And it is.  The problem is, it's only a marginally better place to hit than anywhere else in baseball.  It is, by degree, a better environment for hitters than, say, the Ballpark at Arlington or Fenway Park, but we have created a narrative where it is fundamentally different in kind.  Coors Field is a magical place in that narrative, even if its (post-humidor) Park Factor of roughly 115 means that only 15% more runs are scored there than the average stadium (let alone other good hitter's parks).*

* The pre-humidor PF for Coors was, again roughly, 125.  Big?  Yes.  Infinite?  Not quite.

This "difference in kind" thinking is responsible for the hullabaloo about the Rockies cheating by storing some balls in the humidor, while keeping others in the dry mountain air in case of late-inning emergency.  The difference between the pre-humidor 25% increase in runs and the post-humidor 15% increase in runs is, of course, only 10%.  Since, even at Coors, most teams average less than one run an inning, the difference between using the non-humidor balls and the humidor balls in the final inning of a game comes out to somewhere around one extra Rockies run every month (which, we can assume, would lead to maybe one extra win over the course of the entire season).  That's a real difference in degree, of course, but that's not the narrative we hold dear.

Instead, as last season drew to a close, the Rockies were accused of cheating, their successes at home pinned on a vast late-inning conspiracy.  With humidorized baseballs, the story went, the Rockies were a normal baseball team, capable of scoring runs, yes, but also capable of striking out, hitting into double plays, and regularly stranding runners who reached third with no one out.  Bring out non-humidor balls, however, and the Rockies became unstoppable, a force not merely capable of destroying even the best of pitchers, but indeed destined to overcome any deficit, no matter how large.  To this way of thinking, the difference between the humidor and non-humidor baseballs was not 10% more runs, but rather "win" instead of "loss."  The whole picture became about differences in kind (wins and losses) instead of differences in degree (15% more runs than average and 25% more).

The same, of course, is true about pre-humidor Coors.  That Park Factor of 125 is big.  Really big.  Big enough that the Rockies routinely had one of the worst offenses in Major League Baseball during the early 2000s, and yet were mistakenly believed to have one of the best.  But, even with a Park Factor that large, the difference remains one of degree and not kind.  While the cumulative effect of a PF of 125 leads to the kind of mis-evaluation that makes Neifi Perez look like an actual Major League baseball player, that is only because the baseball season is 162 games long, and because the actual difference between Albert Pujols and, say, Aaron Miles is much, much, much, much smaller than we usually believe.*  Another way of reading, then, that Park Factor of 125 is this: teams that would score 4 runs a game elsewhere scored 5 at Coors.  Suddenly that doesn't seem nearly so insane as the narrative of "hitter's paradise" made it sound.

* While Pujols certainly hits more homers than scrappy middle infielders, and by a long shot, his unreal career high in Wins Above Replacement is 10.9.  That's epically, historically great.  It's also 11 wins out of 162 games, or about 6.8% of the season.  I'll let you decide: difference in kind, or difference in degree?

Once our narratives have been constructed, we reinforce them with the stainless steel of confirmation bias.  When the Mets come from behind by four in the bottom of the ninth at Shea Stadium (or their new digs, Citi Field), we think of it as a great comeback.  When the Rockies come from behind by four in the bottom of the ninth at Coors, we think of it as Coors Field up to its old tricks.  A 12-11 slugfest at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City is the result of bad outings from both teams' pitching staffs.  A 12-11 slugfest at Coors Field is the result of the absurd ballpark.  The special category of "Coors Field" explains and is the cause of all offense in the Mile High City, while elsewhere it's just normal baseball.

Now don't get me wrong, and allow me to reiterate my point one more time.  Coors Field does matter.  It used to inflate scoring by 25%, and now inflates scoring by 15%.  The Rockies, on the whole, will come from behind to win in the bottom of the ninth more often than other teams.  But only very, very slightly more often.  The difference is one of degree: the Rockies will score 23 late inning runs for every 20 that a comparable offensive team scores, thanks to playing at Coors.  The problem is, our narratives, our categories, our confirmation biases all conspire to make every single run we see at Coors a product of the park, and not of the million other things that go on in a baseball game.

But wait, I'm not done yet.  We can apply the same logic to steroids (gasp).  While there may be a categorical difference between Barry Bonds, All Time Home Run Champion and Barry Bonds, Great Hitter, we tend to forget that we don't even know exactly how many extra home runs Bonds hit because he used steroids.  And we can't know.  What's more, we don't know who else benefited, and to what degree.  What we do know, however, is that the easiest thing to do is to look at the picture and to discount any player who had a peak season during the "steroid era" as a "cheater," whose whole body of offensive work is attributable exclusively to his steroid use.  Rather than imagining that steroids help a player become X% better, we see steroids as being the difference between "good" and "bad," or "great" and "good."  We can't even begin to suppose, in our absolutist narrative, that Bonds may well have hit 700+ home runs even without steroids.  No, every single home run he mashed is tainted, cheap, unfair.  They categorically, absolutely, definitively do not count.

Is that right, though?  My answer is no.  Of course the steroids issue is a big deal precisely because we do not and cannot know exactly what the effect is, but to imagine that the effect is categorical instead of incremental is absurd.  Even if players hit twice as many home runs because of steroids, they didn't hit infinitely times as many.  And I think that would be easier to accept if our categories hadn't also been violated.  Barry Bonds is not merely a guy who hit X% more homers, but rather is the Home Run King, both in terms of career and single season jacks.  Those categories carry far more weight for us than numbers do.

To return to where we started, there's a good reason we think in categories instead of increments, kind instead of degree.  It helps us survive.  It's better to assume that the unusual ripple in the tall grass we see is dangerous (it might be a tiger) than to assume that said ripple is only marginally more pronounced than usual.  In nature, nuance leads to destruction.  That's no excuse to turn away from more nuanced thinking, however.  If anything, it's an exhortation towards the opposite.  That we like to see things as either categorically good or categorically bad makes us easy to persuade and, as a result, hoodwink.  If, for example, a politician speaks eloquently to our absolutist moral sensibilities, we're quick to cast our vote in his favor.  In the process, we forget that the difference between him and his opposition might not be categorical, but rather incremental, that there are perhaps a range of (non-linear) possible solutions to any given problem instead of two diametrically opposite ones.

The narrative of absolute, dichotomous categories is an extremely dangerous one exactly because it is beautiful.  Coors Field as "hitter's haven," human beings as fundamentally good (or bad, as the debate goes), politicians as liberal or conservative, such characterizations make it easier to think, easier to live, easier to write.  Poetry may owe itself to complexity, but on some level it also owes itself to simplicity: without a sense of Good and Evil, Joy and Misery, how do we understand No Second Troy?  Without the narrative of great plays or bad ones, how do we appreciate an unrepeatable Tulowitzki play in the hole?*  The possibility that the narrative value of categories is ultimately empty - of a kind of brute, practical use, but devoid of substantial, metaphysical meaning - is what drives the anti-statistics crowd of baseball fans mad.  The reliance upon and manipulation of categories is what makes so many religions so powerful, and - along with hefty doses of confirmation bias - it is what makes Fox News and MSNBC so persuasive to so many Americans.

* Another little pun for which I will not apologize.

Ah, there I go breaking my own rules.  You see, I too am talking in categories, in differences in kind instead of degree.  The notion of diametric opposites, the need for clear categories like Good and Bad cannot be, if we are to challenge it, innately and fundamentally Bad.  To say so would undermine the argument.  The problem is, every single word we read is a category, every single idea a kind of absolute.  We can deconstruct and deconstruct, and then reconstruct and reconstruct, and what we'll end up with is words that stand for something, some category.  Words that can never be truly specific, for true specificity would require a new word every second, every thought, every sentence.  Communication, as much as miscommunication, is built on categories.

So what is there to do?  Uncomfortable though it may be, I believe it remains useful to deconstruct, to analyze, to see where differences of kind actually are differences in degree, even though every difference is, in the end, actually both.  To my mind, we do not need to destroy the narratives of politics, religion, morality, or, most importantly (of course), baseball.  We need, instead, to dive into them, to see where they come from and why, and then to reconstruct them in some new form so that we can once again communicate.  Analysis and synthesis stand together, it turns out.  Like any set of supposed opposites, they actually are more alike than disparate.  Is there an endpoint to all of this analyzing and synthesizing, a point at which narrative and myth turn into Truth?  Maybe, but probably not.  Instead, it seems to me that the very act of trying to understand, of insisting upon being a learner, an asker of questions, a thinker, a skeptic (though we might also insist on being ignorant, a provider of answers, allowed to zone out, and a believer) is at the heart of what it is to be human.

A Lion's Mane

There is always so much to say, and none of it is quite right.  A poet knows this, but his words are not closer to the heart of the matter for that knowledge.  No, they are rather further, because they clothe a fundamental mystery inside an intractable but mundane one.  What good is that?

Perhaps it is best, instead, to shut up and listen?  Ah, but where is the joy in that?  Why read Kerouac, for example, if you'll only ever read him?  Isn't the point to talk, to live?  (Isn't talking living?)

While we're at it, what is a mystic anyway?  Am I one?  I am an astrologer, after all, and while I don't pretend to know why or how it works, sometimes a chart opens up like a flower, or the universe, and I feel aware.

There's no room for such talk these days, though.  Our life unfolds 140 characters at a time, our thoughts no longer ours, but distributed, collective.  Where is poetry in that?  Or is that all poetry is?  Where is Keroac, then?  Where is mysticism and where is the soul?

No matter how hard I try, I can only write about myself.  Whether I write in a private journal, or in an anonymous Internet forum, or on this blog, or even in an academic paper, the words I produce are a reflection of my soul.  A very selfish, myopic, and even arrogant reflection.

What's wrong with self-confidence?  Ah, it always comes with self-doubt, for one thing.  Confidence - the need to express one's own perceived greatness - is flanked by fear that one's greatness is an illusion.  The simple-minded will say "that's not confidence at all, then.  Confidence is silent."  Ah, but a lion still roars, does it not?  And its mane is ever visible.

Who gives a shit about confidence, though?  It doesn't matter at all.  What does?  Heh, that's what we in the question-asking business like to call "a good question."  Problem is, it isn't actually a good question at all.  It's a terrible question, in fact, because it's obvious and totally unanswerable.  Because of these two facts, men throughout history have killed and died because they believed someone knew the answer, and there was never a way to weigh the value of those answers other than through rhetoric, violence, or both.*

* And, really, is there any difference between rhetoric and violence?  One is to the mind what the other is to the body.  I'll let the reader choose which is which.

Of course I, too, am guilty.  Of rhetoric, of violence, presuming to know what is important and what is not.  And yet, as I get older (slowly at first, but faster and faster) I find myself more and more confused - yes, as the cliche goes - but also more and more bored with my confusion.

Oh, I will be forever curious, forever a leaner, forever joyful (forever does not mean what you think it means).  But the "complex" and "outside-the-box" (the most ironic cliche there is) thoughts, when they become commonplace, do not readily give way to something more complex and more interesting or innovative.  Having grasped paradox itself, the thrill of intellectual discovery is, if not crushed, at least transformed.

I suppose the real question is, then, what is my purpose?  Now that I have a direction, a job to do, a path to travel, I must strive to understand why I am traveling that, and what I might achieve (is the wrong word) while on it?

I might as well ask: "What is being?"

Art and Abstraction in Waterston's "Clearing"

As someone who has spent a lot of time thinking, reading, and writing about (and listening to) music, I've always struggled to understand the visual arts.  Actually, my problem does not stem from music, but from language.  I'm a linguistic thinker, a slave to narrative and context, a conversationalist and - to the occasional chagrin of companions - a deliverer of monologues that resemble my blog posts.  In short, I am in love with language, with words, with how sentences are constructed and how stories are told and how arguments are made.  Little wonder, then, that I struggle to uncover the meaning of pictures.  "What," I ask, "Does meaning even have to do with it?  Meaning is a linguistic concept, and much art - especially abstract art - is not linguistic.  Whither meaning?"

A part of me wants to believe that modern art isn't supposed to have meaning, but that's clearly not true.  While I certainly cannot penetrate into the hidden meanings of giant blue spots next to giant orange spots, or little red rectangles, or massive canvases painted in a single glossy shade of pink, obviously some people can to the extent that there is a massive modern art community, complete with critics, connoisseurs, and museums sufficient to fuel the careers of a good many artists.  What do those people see, then, in the abstractions of abstract art?  What dialogues do they have?  What narrative is present?  And if not narrative, what emotional content?

You see, much as I am a linguistic thinker, my problem ultimately is musical.  In music - and especially in, for example, Beethoven - there is an undeniable narrative arc, simply because music takes place in time.  Every listener, no matter how tone deaf and/or untrained hears the same fundamental thing in the same order.  The same is true in a novel or a play.*  The story, whether literary or musical, unfolds in a certain way, as determined by the artist.

* Granted, in both music and literature it is possible to get things out of order, but that is not the intent of the composer/writer, usually.  Exceptions like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake - which is just as confusing no matter where one begins or ends - only further support the rule: there is a strong temporal, narrative sense in literature.

In a painting, on the other hand, the experience of the viewer is much more haphazard.  While we have certain tendencies (left to right, top to bottom), any given painting might strike us differently.  Where you might be attracted to the white splotches, I'm drawn to the blue "stars," for example.  While the black spindly branches might strike you as the key to the painting, I might not even regard them as important on first glance.

Being out of time, paintings allow the viewer to revise their initial impressions, of course, but that doesn't change that we remain subtly and heavily influenced by that first brush with the work.  Add in the propensity for art museums to contextualize art with neighboring pieces, with biographical information, or with descriptions of the work in question, and the process of constructing a personal narrative gets very muddled.

Which is not to say that doesn't happen in other media.  Indeed, it happens very much, and such shaping of the narrative is exactly the point of, for example, the Beethoven project that I've undertaken in this space.  What differs, then, is where that narrative comes from, and thus what "understanding" a piece of visual art even means.  Whereas the Eroica Symphony, in my opinion anyway, speaks for itself once you know enough about music theory and a little about history, I'm not necessarily convinced that the same is true in visual arts.

That's not totally fair.  I think that, if I knew more about composition and technique and so on, that works like the one that we are, slowly, coming to would speak to me much more directly.  I suspect, however, that a lot of what they would say would be "this is the style used here, this is the technique, this is the skill," and not "this is the meaning."  Again, this is my bias as a musician, but I feel as though music theory is a way to unlock, yes, compositional techniques, but more importantly, emotional, spiritual, and even political meaning in music.  Is the same true in visual arts, especially the more abstract works of modernity?*  I don't know, but I struggle with the possibility that either answer to that question might be true.

* To be fair, again, we might ask the same question of music, where modern composition has been divided into music for the movies (and TV and commercials and so on) and music that is extremely strange and abstracted.  Maybe the question I'm asking here isn't about art at all, but about modernity (or, I suppose, "post-modernity").  Hmm...

Without further ado - since we've adone enough already - here's the particular painting I want to share and discuss, briefly.  Briefly because I'll struggle to know what to say, for all of the reasons highlighted above.  Nevertheless, I want to share the work because, of all of the many hundreds of pieces of art I say during my recent visit to the bay area, this was the one particular piece that most caught my eye.  Why?  Well, that's the question I want to try to answer.  Here it is:

"Clearing" by Darren Waterston.  Displayed at Cantor Art Museum, Stanford, CA.

The title of the work goes a long way towards shaping the narrative that the viewer - in this case me - constructs.  "Clearing" may be a word with multiple meanings, but it has one particular meaning that strikes me as being the primary - though probably not the only - one intended here.  The black tendrils in this piece are reminiscent enough of branches, and the background enough of a kind of abstracted night sky that, at first blush, "clearing" seems to indicate where you are metaphorically standing as you look at this piece.  The space in the middle of the canvas - with the nebular/amoeba-ish mass and the little blue star-like dots are the night sky from a spot in the forest where the branches part.

I particularly like the sky analogy here because of the figure that looks like a nebula.  While we, perhaps, don't see those massive gas clouds when we look at the night sky, they are there, and this painting in that sense reminds me that, while behind the trees there are stars, behind the stars there are still more things that I do not perceive.  The clearing is, in that sense, only a partial one.

Of course, we still see the branches on either side of the clearing, which further remind us that our view of the space between is constrained.  Consider the second nebula behind the largest of the branches, and you'll see that, though it is just as large, just as complex, and perhaps even more aesthetically pleasing than the more fully visible one, it is also muddled and unimportant thanks to its backgrounding.  Only looking closer do you see that, actually, it is prominent in the narrative of the painting principally because it is partially obscured.

What strikes me most, however, about the painting is the ambiguity of meaning in the symbols.  This work is somewhere in between abstract and representational.  The branches are only just barely reminiscent, the stars not quite the right color, the nebulae a bit too much like water stains.  The random white, blue, and black spots that occupy other spaces in the work may suggest - in the case of the largest one in particular - a not-quite-right moon or other satellites, but they could also be the splotches that occur in a camera when looking near, but not at the sun.

Then again, the painting is too dark to be daytime, but too light to be nighttime.  Dawn or twilight perhaps makes sense, especially with the reddish "cloud" that hands across the top of the painting, but placing the piece temporally almost seems unfair.

It also is unfair to leave the ambiguous symbols with only one interpretation.  The branches could also be briars, I suppose, but are also not unlike the tendrils of a neuron.  Nebula, amoeba, water stain... Why not a ginger root?  And so on.  At a certain point, the representational value starts to break down, and while there are hints and suggestions here, there is clearly no single interpretation that does the painting justice.

Perhaps this is too obvious a point to make, but I'm going to make it anyway: if Waterston wanted to paint a clearing in a forest, with the night sky shining above, I'm sure he could have.  Perhaps, in our sophisticated artistic age, we take for granted that we're not supposed to paint that way (we're not supposed to write music in the romantic style or Petrarchan Sonnets), but that doesn't answer the question at the heart of this post.  What is it that work like this is trying to capture?  Is ambiguity, as such, really the point?  How many works can be about mystery and absence or nebulous meaning before it gets old?  Doesn't art about art have a limit?

In short, the question is "so what?"

And yet maybe that question misses the point, and therefore answers itself.  For some reason this painting spoke to me, not in words, music, emotions, or any other structure that I can access linguistically.  Maybe I'm missing the words, but maybe there simply aren't any, and the "meaning" of art is a nonsensical thing to look for, an artifice we construct because we so much predicate the linguistic.  Understanding isn't what one does with a painting because "understanding" is a word, and words need not apply.  Of course, paintings are (usually) still titled and described, but is that maybe because we're afraid to acknowledge that they might have something profoundly powerful about them that we can't access?

As I've said, I don't know the answers to these questions.  In many ways, writing about art is almost as pointless as writing about language.  If you try hard enough, you're either reduced to talking about structure and technique or you start traveling in logical circles.  In some ways, I think, art drives you there even quicker, because it is so much more urgent than language, so much more removed from our mundane day-to-day experiences.  Looking at a piece like "Clearing," then may not tell me anything, but it certainly disrupts something, and I don't know what.  Maybe that's all that "meaning" means?

Listening to Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, Part One: A Revolutionary Opening

Does music have meaning outside of its context?  That is, when a piece is so revolutionary, so very different from everything that came before it, can we hear that difference, or do we have to be trained to hear it?  Even with training, even with a knowledge of what came before, doesn't the "new" piece still sound to us like it is decidedly old, that is doesn't even begin to capture the things that came later in the composer's career, much less the things that came after the composer's death?

Those are some of the questions I struggle with when trying to explain Beethoven's Eroica Symphony.  It's unlike anything written before it.  The first movement alone takes about 15 minutes, making it as long as some Haydn and Mozart symphonies in their entirety.  The second movement is another 15 minutes.  The thing as a whole takes over a quarter hour, so long that Beethoven advised it not be performed late in a concert program lest the audience become restless.

Length, however, is not always indicative of a revolution.  War and Peace is a long book, but it doesn't feel like a particularly revolutionary book as you read it.  Don't get me wrong, it deserves its reputation as a great work, and it is extremely ambitious in its storytelling, but it did not fundamentally alter the way that books were written, as far as I know.  The Eroica, on the other hand, well, it did fundamentally alter the writing of music.  Or, if it did not alone, it was the capstone of a set of works that did.

Can you hear what makes it so outrageous, so different, so offensive, so intense, so awesome?  Here's a rendition from the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, conducted, at the time, by the incomparable Gustavo Dudamel.



There's a lot in this piece, too much to talk about all at once, so let's start with the beginning.  The big, fat, E-flat Major chords that open the piece are perhaps a tad jarring, but it's not unusual for a composer to signal what key he's in to start off a piece.  No, what's really odd is what comes after those two chords.  Take a listen to the first few seconds of the piece again.



The melody that Beethoven introduces here doesn't sound particularly odd to our modern ears, but it would have been jarring in its time.  What's more, it was uncharacteristic even for Beethoven.  Why?  Because it has a flatted seventh (Db or C#) in it.

After the two chords, what you hear is an outline of the Eb Major triad: Eb - G - Eb - Bb - Eb - G - Bb.  That is followed by a chromatic descent to the 7: Eb - D - C#.  This is jarring because that C# is not a part of the Eb Major scale.  It destabilizes the key, making Eb feel like a dominant, and not a tonic.*  As a result, we're pulled away from the tonic, and you can hear it quite clearly in the clip; it sounds incomplete, it sounds like it's going somewhere, and it's not entirely clear where.

* Quick theory 101 lesson: tonic is, generally, the key the piece is in.  It feels restful and complete.  Think of a simple piece like Mary Had a Little Lamb, or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.  The tonic happens at the very beginning and ending of those pieces.  The dominant, meanwhile, is usually the chord on the 5th of the tonic.  It feels unstable and pulls you back towards the tonic.  Try singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and stopping on the "how I wonder what you" without singing the "are."  That "what you" is the dominant.

Analyzing the experience of hearing this opening harmonically is only a beginning, however.  More important is the meaning: what is Beethoven trying to accomplish with this C#?  This symphony is called - by Beethoven himself - Eroica, "Heroic."  Famously, it was originally written for Napoleon Bonaparte, but rededicated after the French Consul declared himself Emperor to Beethoven's chagrin.  Is this a Napoleonic symphony, then, a story of the French Revolution?  Or is it, perhaps, meant to stand for an ideal instead?  Was it ever, really, about Napoleon at all?

Those are questions we can't answer yet, and some of those questions may not be easy to answer from the music alone.  Instead, we need to dive into the narrower questions posed by the infamous C#.  What kind of heroism is this piece going to be about?  Martial heroism?  Political heroism?  Populist heroism?  Artistic heroism?  And what does it mean to have the tonic - the core of the piece - destabilized so early?  Perhaps the heroic is a result of instability.  We, as listeners, are invited to understand musically the context in which heroism takes place.

On the other hand, some listeners want to make the opening theme stand for the hero, and not heroism or the hero's situation.  In that account, the C# is perhaps some kind of Greek tragic flaw, hubris, or a failure of self-awareness.  If the piece is about Napoleon, there could be a kind of accidental truth to this interpretation: while it was written before Napoleon's ambition became clear, the piece might nevertheless anticipate his arrogance.

For my part, I do not think there is meant to be a single correct interpretation.  Music is not, after all, denotative.  There is, however, intent.  Beethoven intends, regardless of specific imagery we apply to his C#, to make us uncomfortable, to make us wonder what is going on.  This effect is compounded by the meter of the piece.  The opening movement, here, is in 3/4, despite its "military march" feel.  Indeed, the opening two chords are wholly ambiguous - they could just as easily be in 4/4 - and it is only with the introduction of the very theme that destabilizes harmonically that we realize our rhythmic expectations have been violated as well.

Regardless of specific interpretation, it is worth recognizing that the movement as a whole is very warlike.  Particular motifs and themes suggesting a battlefield are frequent.  For example, there's this "galloping horses" motif:



And a passage many liken to cannon fire:



This latter passage is particularly notable thanks to the extended "4/4" at the end of it.  After a series of "1-2-rest, 1-2-rest" chords we hear a bunch of big fat "bam rest bam rest bam rest" chords that betray the time signature.*  This is a particularly warlike device, because it shakes the rhythmic foundations of the piece.

*This moment of undermining the time signature is worth keeping in mind as we progress, because it is a tool Beethoven will use in every movement of the symphony.

These motifs we'll come across as we progress through the first movement, but for now they can lend a hand to our understanding of the opening.  In short, there is a revolution afoot.  What kind of revolution?  It's hard to say.  Certainly a musical one - for nothing quite like this symphony has ever been written before - but perhaps a political one and a spiritual one as well.  What that looks like, how music can convey that or - perhaps more to the point - help to create that is the question that we'll be confronting throughout this series of posts.  For now, it's sufficient to recognize that the opening of the Eroica sets us up to go on a long journey.  The destabilization of the tonic here is not something easily resolved, and it may take quite some time to put everything back together again.  Indeed, as we wrap up the first movement (in the distant future) we'll have cause to ask whether or not the questions raised by our C# have really been resolved: can you return to the tonic - to the way things were - after such a piece of music?  Is the hero of this piece redeemable?  Is heroism itself?  Is there such a thing as a great man in an egalitarian society?

Beethoven, in his idealism, believed that Napoleon would bring about a Europe filled with equality and freedom and opportunity.  But there's more than just boundless optimism in the Eroica, because Beethoven recognized the innate contradiction in Napoleon's project: forcing equality on the world.  He believed the General could do it, but his symphony - from its very outset - is very much aware of the challenge.  That Napoleon himself did not live up to Beethoven's expectations - or, more properly, his dream - does not change the very nature of the project.  If anything, it only reinforces how extremely difficult it is to accomplish what the Eroica suggests: transforming a society for the better.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.  For now, we've set off on the heroic journey of the 3rd Symphony.  It's not always pretty, and it's not always easy, but it is exciting and stirring and intense.  The fear and indignation with which many of Beethoven's listeners - those disciples of Haydn and Mozart who believed music should be just so - was countered by the excitement and expectation of those listeners who could tell that this was a new, and altogether more powerful kind of music.

If powerful, then also dangerous, perhaps?  That's another question we'll have to pursue as we go along.  Before we get there, however, let's first learn how to hear the optimism, the idealism, the joy, along with the frustration and the violence in the Eroica.  Without hearing those things, first, the question of danger and power is meaningless.

Follow-Up on Meaning and Truth

I was going to respond to Luc Duval's comment on my last post with a comment, but then I realized I'll probably be long-winded enough to turn the response into a post of its own.  Plus, this way there's a better chance you'll see the excellent points he makes.

Luc writes, in his comment to my last post:

You really dislike Twitter, eh?

That post was intriguing but overwhelming. I have some friendly criticisms and some questions.

1. Were you trying to expound on something you read by Hegel? Or...wait...Wittgenstein? Or Husserl? Though I'm familiar with most of these names, it would be helpful if you provided a more focused explanation of which of their ideas/statements you refer to, or, even better, some quotes.
2. I enjoyed reading what seemed to be buildup to conclusive statements of yours but sometimes felt left hanging. For example, your discussion of the tautology of meaning/truth or truth/meaning was valuable - I was really hoping for you to try to separate the two with something definitive, but I don't think you did.
3. You made a lot of comparisons to the past with great certainty but provide no examples, statistics, or metrics. (Maybe I'm looking for the wrong kind of truth.)

1. How did you get to "Well, certainly we have destroyed 'Capital T' truth," without first defining what you mean by such Truth?
2. Your discussion of media seems limited to online networks. Does your idea that, to paraphrase, "the search for meaning/truth has become homogenized via excessive individual 'shouting in a crowded room'" change at all when you give consideration to literature/drama/music/visual art? Furthermore, does that change your comparison to the past at all?
3. I got a little bit lost reading about "artificial and limiting" systems of expression. Spoken language seems limiting to me, but natural, whereas painting seems un-limiting, but artificial. Were you trying to say that "Truth" is less accessible because our systems of expression are limited? Is, then, "Truth" dependent upon expression?

To do justice to Luc's many excellent points, let's take them one-by-one.  First, the criticisms, all of which are valid.  I'll rephrase how I understand each one (and I'll probably be less tactful than Luc is), and then offer some brief thoughts.

1) Pretentious invoking of famous names does not help your point.  If you're not going to cite exactly what you mean when you mention Hegel, you could at least explain it a little bit.

This is very true, and it's a huge weakness of my first-draft style of blog writing.  Where, in an academic paper, I would never be so careless, I tend to write my blog posts with less care.  Which is ironic because the likelihood of my audience being able to follow the argument without further explanation is far greater if I were writing for a professor.

Anyway, the people in particular I mention in my previous post are people who I talk about regularly, especially with my friends who are fellow Johnnies.  The result is a shared understanding of what those names mean, but that's a shared understanding that does not go beyond the rather limited audience of, well, fellow Johnnies.  Even philosophy majors often don't actually read famous philosophers (though, of course, they are told what those philosophers say, in the opinion of their professors anyway).  It strikes me that I should probably do a post or two about the particular philosophers I cite or allude to most, not as be-all-end-all interpretations, but as helpful way-points for when I'm working on heavier posts, and I don't want to worry about spending extra paragraphs explaining the reference.

To answer Luc's question, then, in general if I'm responding to something I read elsewhere, I say so.  Rather, in this case I'm using "Hegel" as a stand in for a complicated, lengthy argument that I don't want to get into because I already "know" - or at least have a strong opinion about - the beginning and end points, as well as the process.  It's not, ultimately, vitally important to be familiar with the three philosophers in question to understand my last post, but I can see how their presence is confusing.  Luc is right to call me out on my name-dropping for exactly that reason.

2) The train of thought moves pretty well when it leaves the station, but where do these tracks go?

Now this, I would say, is a big part of the Nicht Diese Tone modus operandi.  Because I emphasize process so much over outcome, it is frequently the case that I avoid conclusive statements.  That's not fair, because I often make conclusive statements, but as a writer I generally treat them as a kind of dramatic flourish, and not at all necessary to my own satisfaction.  This, I think, is both a weakness and a strength.  It's also a symptom of my approach to writing: I'm rarely trying - especially in posts like the last one - to get somewhere.  Rather, I'm trying to explore things, and so often I end up with tangents that are more interesting than the main point.

Anyway, the weakness, here, is obvious.  My writing isn't always reader friendly, especially because it's not usually clear what the takeaway is.  And, frankly, if it is I feel like I haven't done my job.  I strive to be a complicator in a world of simplifiers, a person who makes understanding things hard (or, rather, who shows that understanding things is hard innately) in a time when we tend to believe that understanding things is easy.

I would concede, however, that my blog posts tend to get too far afield, which is principally, again, the result of them almost always being first drafts.  My usual writing style - when writing academically or professionally - is to draft, throw away, draft, throw away, and so on many times exactly because of how easily I'll get sidetracked.  Indeed, usually when I begin an academic paper, I'll write three paragraphs before I realize what I'm actually supposed to be writing about, and then I restart.

So, in short, I don't know where the tracks are going, either.  Sometimes I feel like that gets me to an interesting place.  Other times, I'm left as unsatisfied as Luc, with a profound sense of "and that happened."  But hey, at least the train is usually moving pretty well before it crashes.

3) Where's the beef/data?

This is actually a more interesting question than I can address in any reasonable amount of time here.  While I am certainly a proponent of good data and not making stuff up, I'm also extremely wary of the citation-over-idea culture that academia tends to cultivate.  I read too many articles and papers at Stanford that were, essentially, devoid of original thought (or even half-decent writing) that my own tendency is to over-emphasize ideas, to the point of not always doing the extensive background research I should be doing (and would be) were I publishing in a more formal setting.

Suffice to say, Luc is absolutely right to call me out for not supporting most of the assertions I make about the past versus the present, about modes of expression, and even about my interpretations of various philosophers.  Ironically, in the very post in question I talk about the modern explosion of "you have your facts, I have mine," and proceed to practice that very maxim.  Of course, the question becomes what the goal and audience of my writing is.  In general, my failure to provide data is a result of my taking for granted that my audience understands the situation to be very much as I suggest.  That is, I'm relying on "common knowledge," even of opinion.

Now that's hardly rigorous, but I dare say it's extremely common.  Sportswriters, generally, (at least in my experience) tend to take for granted a great many things that are alternately supported or denied by advanced statistical analysis.  Likewise, I suspect my previous post has a handful of assertions that intensive data collection would confirm, and a handful of assertions that intensive data collection would challenge.  I just don't know which is which, and - and here's the damnedest thing - in some cases I suspect the data does not exist, and would be nearly impossible to collect.

Let's not, for the moment, get into what is the most intellectually rigorous approach in such a circumstance.  Rather, sometimes, for the sake of argument, I'm liable to take a position that I don't actually believe - or, rather, that I don't actually have evidence for - because I would rather practice drawing actionable (or at least write-about-able) conclusions from limited data than trying to always be 100% certain about everything.  Indeed, that was largely the purpose of invoking Wittgenstein in my previous post.  His On Certainty is a work which tries and tries and tries to define certainty, and ends up talking itself in circles because, in the end, context matters so much to meaning that knowledge, in any fundamental sense, comes across as impossible to him.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.  Onward to Luc's questions.

1) What is this "Truth" of which you speak?  And who destroyed it?

This is a very good question, and as I re-read my post with Luc's comments in mind, I realized that I did a very poor job laying out my premises.  The distinction I wanted to make was this:

Truth, with a capital T, is to my mind an indication of some Platonic, universal, almost inhuman reality.  It is, in short, the idea that there is a single, unyielding, unchanging essential set of metaphysical (or, possibly, physical) things and ideas which are applicable to all beings.  In some sense, arguing for the Truth, with a capital T, is akin to arguing for a kind of abstraction of God.  That is, whether or not there is Truth or not is not the same as whether or not there is a God.  Rather, it's whether or not there is a single way in which God (or anything else, really) exists.  That's maybe an opaque distinction, so let me try to clarify.

It seems to me that God, as a word, undoubtedly means a thousand different things to a thousand different people.  We might say, then, that one of those thousand people is right, and the rest are wrong.  God means one thing and one thing only, and that is the Truth.  We might, on the other hand, say that there are a thousand different valid ways of understanding God.  While that doesn't mean that there isn't maybe a deeper Truth (still capital) that synthesizes all or some of the thousand of those disparate and maybe even mutually exclusive (to we humans, anyway) perspectives, what it does mean is that, as far as human experience goes, there is not really any Platonic, eternal, universal Truth worth striving for.  Rather, there's only truth in as much as it applies to a given context, in a given time, to a given society.

So Truth, as such, hasn't been destroyed, per se.  But I would argue that post-modernism, as a philosophical and social movement, has roundly rejected the idea of a single correct interpretation of the world, metaphysical or otherwise.  As a result - because post-modernism has become so ingrained in our society - we are a world easily able to say "let's agree to disagree," because "you have your truth and I have mine."  That doesn't mean it's right and, as I argue (kind of) in my post, that doesn't mean there isn't a Truth (only that we haven't sought for it hard enough).  What it does mean, however, is that society at large, and academia in particular, are a lot more interesting in discovering contexts and situations than Truths, because we don't really take Truths seriously anymore.  Or, perhaps more poignantly, we see Truth, as an idea, as tied into colonialism and racial and sexual oppression, thanks to the preponderance of rich white males among the historically prominent seekers of Truth.

2 and 3*) "Procedural homogeneity," who do you think you are?  People still write books, paint pictures, and play music.  Also, why the Twitter hate?  And what does any of this have to do with truth?

* Because my writing about the once bled into the other.  Also, I'm lumping in Luc's opening comment here, because it's related to his actual question.

I don't hate Twitter, actually.  I find it fascinating, and while I'm not in a rush to start an account, I do sometimes read a select handful of people's Tweets.  Like in many situations, there's a paradox at work here: constricted form limits expression, but it also liberates expression.  The sonnet is an extremely limiting formal construct, but it is precisely because of its limits that writers of sonnets are so creative.  Similarly Twitter, where the character limit may homogenize the creative process (just like the sonnet form does), but within those limits the possibilities for expression are actually quite large.

It is also the case, in our digital age, that people do engage in all of the same creative forms they always have.  And, on top of that, we've begun to synthesize forms in ways that previous generations could never have imagined.  A simple example, to demonstrate the point, would be modern video games, which increasingly blend principles of cinematography with dramatic writing, both two and three dimensional artistic rendering, and, of course, good audio design.  The creative process is certainly alive and well in our modern age, and - by virtue of our increasingly huge population alone, let alone greater access to technology - innovation is probably faster and more widespread now than ever.

The problem, then, is a subtle one, and I'm not sure my post did a good job explaining it.  Indeed, I know it didn't, partially because I'm not sure if I really can explain it.  What I'm getting at, more or less, is that there's a kind of complicity the writer of sonnets has with the sonnet form that I'm not sure the Twitter use has with Twitter.  That is, the writer of sonnets winks and nudges at his form, knowing that its limits are precisely what allow him to achieve such high artistic expression.

Now, compare that to a Tweet, which is generally not taken as a piece of art to begin with.  What does the user of Twitter consider to be his relationship with the medium of self-expression he is using?  Is he aware at all that he is limited?  Those are real questions that I don't have the answer to.  What I suspect, however, is that Twitter users take for granted their character limits, just like we take for granted the limitations of our native tongues (Luc's language example is a good one).

In that sense, there may be little difference between modern man and man of any time.  We have - as I say in the post - always been limited in our means of expression.  All art is limiting in form because it is principally through limitations of form that we are able to create anything at all.  What is more pernicious, then, is not limitation, but the widespread homogeneity in the type of limitation in which we, as a society, participate.  It's not just Facebook, Twitter, and text messages that I'm talking about, it's decreasing biodiversity, it's dying languages, it's fewer and fewer cultures.  Now - and this is a leap - those latter things might be related, at a procedural level, to the former ones.  It might just be... Or let me make it a question: is it the case that there is a technological imperialism going on?  Are the wonderful tools for self-expression and communication we have developed in our modern age choking out diversity of all kinds, not because of what they are, but because of how they work?

Again, I really don't know the answer to that question, but it's a question that I don't think is being asked nearly enough.

Wither truth (or Truth), in all of that?  Well, I'm of the opinion that not only more ideas, but more different ways of generating ideas will get us closer to whatever the Truth might be.  And, even if no such thing exists, at the very least it's a lot more interesting - and probably a lot healthier intellectually, spiritually, and physically - to deal with variety rather than homogeneity.  In the end, I'm not so concerned with truth, I guess, because I'm more concerned with the process of getting there.  Or, rather, it might very well be that the closest we can get to truth as a species is good process.  Not good thoughts, but good thinking.

With that in mind, thanks to Luc for forcing me to do better thinking.

The Status of Meaning and Truth in the 21st Century

Philosophers, poets, and lawyers throughout history have argued over what constitutes the truth.  Or the Truth.  Or the "Truth."  You see, it's one of those words that changes its meaning based upon whether or not the first letter is capitalized or not, and some people are liable to accompany the sound with air quotations whenever possible.  The reason?  Truth is a complicated concept, an ideal that, nevertheless, seems to have some bearing on the real world.  Truth is a thing most people think it is worth striving towards, and yet, it's also a thing that's incredibly difficult to actually find.

You could say the same things, pretty much, about "meaning," except that it rarely gets capitalized.  The search for truth and the search for meaning are in many ways related, though in our modern parlance the latter seems to have replaced the former, as we've come into contact with more and more disparate ideas about what truth might be.  As Truth (with a capital T) has lost its luster - as fewer and fewer people believe there is such a thing - more and more people are content to find meaning, knowing that truth - if it even exists - is probably not worth the effort.

In our modern age, what with Wikipedia, Twitter, email, and smart phones, it seems to me that the status of meaning and truth are changing in our society.  That is not to say that truth itself is changing - if, again, there is such a thing - or that meaning is becoming harder (or easier) to find.  No, what it means is that the status of those concepts and the way we use those words is changing in a way that is uncommon.  Hegel has it that human history is effectively a long series of reversals in the status of meaning and truth resulting in socio-political and spiritual transformations leading humanity towards a brighter and eventually perfect future.  I'm not sure I buy all of that, but part of it is fair: we, as a society (or a society of societies) are constantly redefining our purposes and goals.

That is not to say there's not a great deal of constancy in human pursuits.  It would be foolish to ignore, in spite of all the radical differences between modern computer-happy man and a hunter-gatherer, the many similarities.  Sure, our conflicts and desires are more sophisticated and/or fetishized than they once were, but they are still more or less the same.  We still want to eat food and drink water, we still want to sleep safely, and - perhaps most important - we still are subject to strong reproductive urges that a cynic might say dictate somewhere between 90 and 100 percent of our actions.  In some ways, things never change.

Ah, but what does change is understanding.  Understanding is not truth, of course, nor is it necessarily meaning.  Rather, understanding is a very human attempt to put construct something sensible around the chaotic mess that is the world we experience every day.  Hegel would argue that, just as an individual has understanding, so too does a society as a whole.  And even if Hegel wouldn't argue that, I will.  From an anthropological perspective, we might just call that social understanding a "culture."  That is, we establish expectations and shared experiences that are so ingrained into our world-view that generally we don't even believe that things could be any different.

Consider, as a simple (and classic) example, standard American elevator behavior.  We stand, facing the door, head and hands down, quietly.  Most of us engage in this socially expected behavior without even thinking about it.  There are, however, examples of more consequence as well.  Things like facial expressions, gestures, and intonation when we ask a question versus when we make a statement are vital to our conceptions of meaning, but yet go largely unexamined except by a select group of social scientists (who, it should be added, are mostly ridiculed).  Even more important are our shared assumptions about morality and practicality, assumptions which spill over into political and religious beliefs.  Indeed, perhaps the biggest reason why our political and religious disagreements tend to be so violent and irrational is because our beliefs in those areas are cultural and not rational; that is, they come from an understanding of the world that is vestigial, subtly inherited from the world we live in.

Despite those ingrained assumptions about everything from how to shake hands to how to argue about elections, it remains the case that things do change.  I am not persuaded that human beings are purely rational creatures, but it does seem to me that reason and assumption dance with each other in a complex tango, leading to refined and re-defined understandings, which in turn change the possibilities for how we understand things like meaning and truth.  An optimist, like Hegel, might call this process evolutionary, pushing humanity towards further refinement and perfection, while a pessimist might call it corruption.  But regardless, there is change.

So where do we stand, in the year 2011, with regards to meaning and truth?  Well, certainly we have destroyed "Capital T" truth.  Our social reality is such that it's impossible for any reasonable person to argue that anyone in particular has access to the Truth, and while that doesn't mean there isn't one, it does mean that determining what it is is impossible.  Faith still exists, of course, and a reasonable person might very well acknowledge that it is not intellectually inconsistent to have faith in a given system of truth - whether that be scientific, religious, political, or otherwise - but then again, while faith itself is not intellectually dishonest, faith without acknowledging the possibility that it is misguided probably is.  Indeed, I, for one, take a very cynical view of religious strife: it seems to me like the insecurity of a bully, who will say he believes in his strength, but who secretly understands that he is not, necessarily, the strongest guy there is.  So too the religious fanatic: the more fanatical, the less certain, fundamentally, he is about his faith.

"Truth," then, has become a kind of rallying call for the refusal to consider another person's perspective.  "You have your facts, and I have mine," is a refrain you have likely heard.  Ironically, while this means that the status of truth is undoubtedly in question, it does nothing to undermine the philosopher's ideal that Truth is worth trying to uncover.  That people refuse to converse with each other and consider alternative opinions is perhaps the best indication not that there is no truth, but rather that no one is particularly working hard enough to get to it.  A tutor of mine at St. John's was fond of saying that perhaps the Truth is very, very, very, very, very hard to get to, while even the most devoted lover of wisdom is only willing to work very, very hard to get there.  It seems to me that Truth, if there is such a thing, is something right now we're not even willing to work hard for.  If it's not on Wikipedia, it's not worth knowing.  Of course, that assumes that Truth is knowledge, when it might be that Truth is, in fact, a way of thinking or a way of being.

Now that we're getting Taoist about things, I think it's time to dive into the deeper linguistic issues that are at play here.  The biggest problem with Truth is not its distance or the difficulty of the search to find it, but rather its ambiguous metaphysical status.  What do we mean by truth?  This is why meaning is so important, and why Wittgenstein was such a crazy person.

Meaning, generally, refers to the desire we have for our lives not to be a miserable waste of time.  But beyond the personal meaning we also use meaning to denote, well, what things mean.  You see, the problem with talking about meaning is that it tends to be a circular conversation.  Meaning is the truth of a thing, truth is the meaning of a thing, and so on.  In the end, a lot of words spew out, but we don't get anywhere.  Again, read Wittgenstein and you'll see what I'm talking about.

So, rather than trying to define meaning, let's talk about the status of meaning in 2011.  Meaning is, in short, becoming more and more individualized, whilst simultaneously becoming more and more standardized.  That is, modern technology is making a kind of paradox that even Husserl in his worst nightmares could never have imagined.  Increasingly, we are encouraged to define and express our own meaning; we live in a knowledge producing, and not knowledge consuming culture (I am as guilty as this as anyone, seeing as I write a blog with very few readers, but read very few blogs myself).  We are all shouting in a crowded room with our Twitter accounts and Facebook status updates.  We, in short, are given a lot of leeway to define and understand what meaning means to us.

That's hardly a bad thing; indeed, more opinions and ideas is probably more likely to lead us to, if not truth, at least somewhere interesting than fewer opinions and ideas.  No, the troubling part is that the variety of opinions and ideas - the individuality - we honor so much is essentially an illusion.  We like, in our culture, to believe that the message and the medium are different, that the content and the form of a thing are only incidentally related.  I think that's foolish.  While we all have the freedom to individually express ourselves, that our media are so constricted means that the possibilities for our opinions are similarly constricted.  Twitter may allow for a huge range of expressions of meaning, for example, but how huge, really?  Is there not a limit to what you can say in fewer than 200 characters?

Similarly the blog, which allows for imbedding videos or songs or pictures, and thus can do things that writing alone could never do.  Nevertheless, it's still limited, it's still restricting in ways that I can't express or imagine.  Of course, you might argue that this has always been true, and you'd be right to do so.  Humanity has never - or rarely, anyway - been able to imagine expressing meaning in ways that reach beyond the restrictions of whatever the contemporary media may be.  But the danger we get into, now, that we haven't in the past, is the assumption that things are supposed to be the way they are, that modern structures are inherently good because they are modern.

Take one of my favorite examples: politics.  While major parties have always been more powerful than minor ones (hence, major parties), it used to be that people found it possible to believe that neither of the two major parties were adequate expressions of their understanding of the meaning of a democratic nation.  In such cases, significant - sometimes in the 20 percent range - swatches of the population voted for third parties.  Now, however, we have narrowed the spectrum so far that we refuse to believe that something outside of that spectrum could possibly make sense.  Voting for a third party is practically a mark of insanity, which only goes to show how dangerous constricting the form (the parties) and not the content (actual issues) can really be.

We might do this with political systems, as well.  Regardless of political affiliation, it's generally considered nonsensical to believe in any kind of government but a Democratic Republic, if you live in the USA.  Indeed, you have to support not just a Democratic Republic, but specifically the archaic American Constitution.  It's not that we can't argue for other systems; it's that we can't even conceive of those systems.

If such is the case in something as simple as politics, imagine how much more pernicious the result of this artificial constriction of meaning is in spirituality, or music, or philosophy, or emotion.  Now I'm not arguing that there should be no systems at all, or that it would be better if we had completely unchecked emotional expression (because, hey, hello murders everywhere).  No, the point is that we have artificially limiting systems that people don't realize are artificial and limiting.  That, again, has always been true, but never at the scale - and thus with the homogeneity - that we have now.  The process of defining meaning (though not meaning itself), principally because anyone can share theirs with anyone else, is in danger of becoming homogenized.  And anytime processes become homogeneous, it seems to me, you see stagnation.

Ironically - paradoxically even - we live in a time where meaning is exploding, but where the processes behind meaning are atrophied.  This is a crisis much more poignant than Husserl's fear that science would destroy meaning altogether.  Rather than the broad, soul-crushing forces of an Orwellian totalitarian world, we're trending towards a Brave New World in which we share a wonderful illusion of freedom, meaning, truth, and beauty.  What Huxley missed, however, was that you need not restrict access to ideas or thoughts or even processes: you need only provide systems that are sufficiently limiting in form, but boundless in content.  Given the proper impetus, people will restrict themselves willingly.

The status of meaning and truth in the 21st Century?  Perilous, but expansive.  Paradoxically healthier and sicker than ever.  But that should come as no surprise.  The truth of the matter is, complexity and paradox have always been present in human experience, its just that we avoid acknowledging it.  Now we live in a time where refusal to acknowledge paradox is much more dangerous than it ever has been, whilst the opportunity to benefit from acknowledging paradox is larger than ever.  Color me pessimistic, of course, but hopeful.