Bianca Steele

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

I’d been putting off buying Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, D.T. Max’s biography of the recently late David Foster Wallace.  But also I was nearly obsessively returning to the Amazon page to reconsider it.  Eventually, needing something nonfiction to read, I gave in.  At one point, I’d seek out and read anything Wallace wrote, but eventually gave that up—the nonfiction first, a lot of which I haven’t read (in this, I’m the opposite of many of Wallace’s fans, especially among journalists, who really adore the nonfiction, and especially the pieces I tend to like least), and eventually the fiction, too—Oblivion doesn’t fall into the category of books I’m going to borrow from the library enough times that I really ought to buy them[1], though actually there are only three stories in the collection that I don’t already have in magazine form.  I’d gone through the same nearly obsessive process with The Pale King, which, similarly, I eventually broke down and read.

It’s not too surprising that the biography itself raises the question whether it really needed to be published, and whether anyone really needs to read it.  The book ends with what for many readers, most probably, will be the starting point from which they decided to pick it up: Wallace’s suicide and what led up to it; and what he had in mind for The Pale King, the unpublished and uncompleted manuscript that would be his final novel.  Most of this material appeared already in Max’s 2009 New Yorker piece. 

The penultimate and antepenultimate chapters, similarly, cover material that is already somewhat familiar to many readers: Wallace’s publications after his blockbuster (in literary terms), Infinite Jest, and the editing process and publicity tour for that novel.  Max actually has little to say about the many stories and magazine articles Wallace wrote after Infinite Jest.  The origin of the Harper’s pieces, which it’s known were much longer in manuscript—and as later published in collection—than as printed in the magazine, if they ever appeared at all—is described; but the editing process is not.  The origin of Wallace’s Dostoevsky piece, a review of a biography by Joseph Frank, is dealt with in some detail, but not the fact that it never appeared in print in any magazine (nor the rumors that it was included in a galley version of Wallace’s first nonfiction collection, which appeared in 1997, and circulated in quasi-samizdat form among some insider fans, but was removed before that book went to press—in fact, no rumors at all of this kind make an appearance in this book[2]).  It’s with the publication of Infinite Jest that the “accepted” biography of David Foster Wallace begins.  As far as what comes after that goes, we know all this, or think we do, and there’s not much a biographer can add.  Max recounts a lot of correspondence between author and agent, or agent and editor, all of it pretty much the same as all the rest.

Wallace’s worldview was pretty much set by that point.  What’s more interesting, or was for me, at any rate (and maybe also for the biographer, who counts The Broom of the System, written while Wallace was still in college and published before he got his MFA, as his favorite book), is what comes before.  Max devotes lots of space to the genesis of Wallace’s early stories and nonfiction articles, and to the interactions with university programs and fellow writers they grew out of, as well as to (in passing) debunking certain myths.

Maybe we really didn’t need to know these things, and so didn’t really need a biography of David Foster Wallace.  His life isn’t really history; it took place very recently, so a book about him is inevitably going to fall into the category of journalism, even of publicity hype.  Looking at it feels a little prurient, like wanting to satisfy our curiosity about any individual person, who deserves their privacy.  We don’t have to satisfy our curiosity about where the novelists writing now are coming from, what they studied at school, who mentored them, or what obstacles they encountered, any more than about their political ideas or whether they consumed illegal substances.  But then again, we really don’t need novels, either.

As far as David Foster Wallace’s early life, influences, and development go, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story is a good, basic biography that gives you all the facts (for the most part).  Wallace was born in New York State and moved to rural Illinois as a small child.  He grew up in a university town and attended public high schools where only some of the students were, like him, faculty kids.  He played competitive tennis.  He watched a lot of TV.  He read a lot.  He drank and smoked pot.  His father, a philosophy professor[3], taught him about philosophy.  He had a complicated relationship with his younger sister, his only sibling.  His mother, a teacher of college composition, really was very insistent on good grammar, and really did cough at the dinner table every time one of her children made a grammatical mistake.  He really did go to Amherst College, and considered going to Oberlin (viz. The Broom of the System, in which a girl rejects Amherst’s sister college for Oberlin after visiting her elder sister there).  He really was in recovery.  He was really hospitalized for depression.  He did take a dual summa in English literature and philosophy.  He did know Mary Karr and Elizabeth Wurtzel.  He went to Yaddo twice.  “E Unibus Pluram” was commissioned by Harper’s but not published by them.  He wrote a good number of book reviews early in his career.  Etc. 

There’s some attempt to place David Foster Wallace as a writer, but Max isn’t a literary critic, and there’s blessedly not too much of it.  There’s no attempt to diagnose him or to subject him to commentary.  Only once does the biographer allow himself to wonder whether a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, rather than depression—which would have necessitated, presumably, a drug different from the Nardil he was prescribed—had been called for, and the question whether Wallace was in therapy for most of his adult life, and if not, how he was getting his prescriptions refilled, is not considered.  The book is sympathetic to the twelve-step movement, in a vague kind of way, and respectful of Wallace’s and his friends’ privacy.

The genesis and development of each of the stories that went into Girl With Curious Hair is described to a significant level of detail.  So is the kind of work that was expected at Amherst and at the University of Arizona.  The classes Wallace took at both places are described, and the kind of work Wallace turned in for them.  His struggles with the curriculum, when it pulled against his intuitions, is described, as well.  Every one of his emotional collapses (as an earlier age would have termed them) is narrated, in its genesis, phemonenology, and eventual resolution.  All of this leads up to the completion of the magnum opus, Infinite Jest, and the apotheosis (whatever his feelings about it) of David Foster Wallace as a teaching writer, albeit an occasionally blocked one, with complex feelings about that blockedness.

Where the book is also useful is in debunking (assuming you think that kind of thing is necessary, or desirable) some of the rumors that swirled around Wallace’s persona—what he called “the statue”—while he was alive.

The “standard, accepted” biography of David Foster Wallace during the time of his greatest fame included the following “facts”: that he had never held a teaching job until after around the time Infinite Jest was published, that everything he wrote about AA was based on research and he was not himself in recovery, that he was a cradle Catholic; that the manuscript of The Broom of the System was accepted at Amherst as a thesis in the department of philosophy, as a text about Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Max’s biography shows all these “facts” to be, in fact, false, and it’s helpful for other areas, too, that simply were never very clear.  On the other hand, other questions, such as the pseudonyms mentioned above, aren’t addressed at all.

On the literary side, the following additional facts, I think, were generally largely accepted: that Wallace’s understanding of literary theory (Derrida, De Man, and so on) was one that had been inculcated in him in the standard undergraduate English literature sequence (and not in philosophy classes, which tend to take a different tack); that he had rejected philosophy for literature and that, if he hadn’t done so, he had certainly rejected technical formal logic and Anglo-American analysis in favor of a more literary and subjective philosophical style; that the beliefs held by the faculty of the University of Arizona writing program were his own (in fact he disagreed with them vehemently and was somewhat miserable there); that the best parts of his early published fiction were written by an author who despised Mark Leyner (in fact, he was a fan, and only turned against Leyner’s kind of writing a bit later).  Some might feel that knowing whether these “facts” were true or false is important for understanding what Wallace wrote.  To my mind, Max’s biography casts them in doubt (even for readers who didn’t already doubt them, as a consequence of having read the texts themselves).   To be fair, Wallace did change his mind (or at least nuance it) about, especially, the purpose of fiction and the best way of writing it; but it is not obvious that he made a complete about-face and came to fully embrace the writing preferred by the MFA program that he attended.  And to my mind, it’s an important fact that for Wallace, unlike many of his peers who came out of English-literature programs, De Man belonged to philosophy and not to literature.

It would be too much to say that this book is going to give ambivalent (or even mourning) readers closure about Wallace and the manner of his death.  It did help me come to grips with the earlier stories, again, after I’d become frustrated with his later ones and with the way he’d become given to speaking about them.  It helped me better appreciate The Broom of the System, which never was one of my favorites.  And it helped to explain why there were parts even of his best work—Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, in particular—that eventually came to rub me the wrong way, and why the parts I liked best were so often the parts that Wallace himself seemed to disown.

 

[1] Now that I have an e-book reader, though, the criterion has moved from “don’t really really have to have it, but am about to borrow for the third time,” to “would consider borrowing again just for reference, because it looks pretty interesting.”

[2] This is reasonable, actually.  The book is about the writer, not about his readers.  But all except the bare facts of the publication histories of many of the stories that would be collected in Oblivion is excluded here.  And even that’s an exaggeration, unless the fact that some of them appeared under pseudonyms is excluded from the category of “bare fact.”  For instance, “Mr. Squishy,” one of the best stories in the collection, first appeared as the work of “Elizabeth Klemm,” but the name “Klemm,” like the words “pen name” and “pseudonym,” appear nowhere in the book.

[3] If it were my book, I’d have mentioned the fact that one of James D. Wallace’s books (on open stacks in the Boston Public Library in Copley Square) is about the philosophical implications of fiction.  Maybe also the fact that another of his books is on virtue ethics. But it’s not.

Two Stories About Property Rights

First, David Koch (the Koch brothers’ other brother) has asked the government for a land swap that would grant him some lands that are currently public.  The swap would apparently take a corridor of land that has been used as a path into the mountains for more than a hundred years, making the land the path lies along into private property.  Some locals are trying to have the swap blocked.  I’m not a lawyer, but I would have thought that rights-of-way would have some influence in this case.  Yet these aren’t mentioned in the Times story.  Maybe things haven’t gotten to that stage yet.  The controversy seems to revolve solely over ownership. 

The second case, on the other hand, in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, appears to involve deeded rights of access to the beach.  Some neighbors whose land is attached to such rights have built walls that block access for the others.  (In one case, according to the Globe’s reporting, a new deed appears to have been filed that includes more access to the beach than the seller had the right to transfer.)  People who bought beach houses believed they had acquired, with those houses, rights of access to a particular shared section of the beach.  These rights were enumerated in their deeds.  Now, a few of the people who bought houses in the same area seem to have decided they should be able to build on, and to block off from their neighbors as if it were individually owned private property, the part of the beach that was next to their own land. 

From a Really, Really Big Picture point of view, this case might seem to be very similar to the various historical enclosures of various commons, mostly in England.  These took land which all people had a right to use in common, for instance to graze livestock, fenced it, and made it private property.  This process represented an enormous change in the way the economy of England (and the whole of the West) would end up operating.  I suppose it’s arguable that there was no stopping it.  So, from this Really, Really Big Picture point of view, perhaps the Falmouth case is the same.  A rich person took some land that used to be held in common by a group of people, and now it belongs to the rich person: that’s the end of that. 

On the other hand, it doesn’t seem quite legal.  The neighbors, presumably, wouldn’t themselves own Falmouth beach houses unless they were also fairly well off (and judging from what the Globe has reported happening so far, they seem to have the resources to fight this thing).  They’re not exactly peasants, with no written-down property rights and no formal connection to the government, who by virtue of the solely oral nature of their connection to society can have taken away what little they’re—temporarily, an opponent might argue—currently making use of.  It might be difficult for farmers in Colorado, for example, to see themselves making common cause with a bunch of people who are trying to regain beach rights (and I don’t know whether they are also fighting for public rights, such as between the lines of low and high tide, if those were traditionally granted in the area in question either).  But it seems to me that the issues are the same. 

At Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram has written a couple of times about John Rawls’ idea of a property-owning democracy.  Obviously, a property-owning democracy only works if each property owner can defend his own rights against encroachment by their fellow members of the society.  If the society operates under the rule of law, in other words.  A few years ago, a discussion at the same blog of a book by Steven Teles, called The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, was eye-opening, for me, about the difference between what I supposed was the openness of the law to use by ordinary people, and what is now the case.  This seems to be relevant too.  

Also relevant is the status of the common law.  Somehow—probably largely from watching The Paper Chase—I’d gotten the idea that the common law was very important in the United States.  But checking more recently, for example, in reference books, I read lots of things that suggested I’d been under a misapprehension.  And regardless of the status of the common law in, for example, federal law, I don’t know how Colorado ranchers would view it.  Is the common law, for them, a bulwark against the tyranny of government?  Or, is it “federal” interference with their local rights?

36 Arguments For the Existence of God, a novel by Rebecca Goldstein

This will be another post about Boston-based novels that I read over this past summer (more here and here): about 36 Arguments For the Existence of God, the most recent book by the novel and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein.

36 Arguments For the Existence of God has a single main protagonist, Cass Seltzer.  He’s a professor of psychology at a university west of Boston, obviously modeled on Brandeis (the school’s Jewish foundation and the details of the town it resides in, based on Waltham, give it away).  The plot meanders back and forth through time, exploring Seltzer’s career and the important people in his life.  These are depicted sharply, as are the minor characters.  First is Lucinda Mandelbaum, a fellow psychology professor and a famous game-theoretician.  Lucinda is in the vein of Goldberg’s cold, rationalist female philosophy professors, like Eva Mueller in The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind, but with greater passion and taste for luxury.  While she’s away at a conference, Cass receives an offer from Harvard.  He’s already been scheduled for a debate on the existence of God at Harvard’s Memorial Hall.  And he receives a visit from his first graduate-school girlfriend, Roz Margolis.  In between negotiating with the Frankfurter University president over what to do about the better offer he received, he recollects his past: what brought him to the study of psychology of religion and to the writing of his now notorious book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion.

Cass had been pre-med, at Columbia, until he took a single, fatal lecture course with the charismatic professor of literature, Jonah Elijah Klapper: whereupon he applied to graduate school and followed the great man to Boston.  Also moving to Boston were every one of Klapper’s graduate students: among them, Gideon Raven, who’d already been working on his Ph.D under Klapper for more than a decade, and eventually Cass’s mentor and friend.

Cass’s mother had been born in a Hasidic community in upstate New York, named New Walden, and had returned only occasionally, to allow Cass and his brother to get to know his grandmother.  When Jonas Elijah Klapper discovers Cass’s heritage, he insists on an invitation to visit New Walden in Cass and Roz’s company.  This triggers a crisis in Klapper’s career, and consequently in the careers of the graduate students.  Cass switches his subject to the psychology of religion and eventually writes the book against God that, by the beginning of this one, has made his reputation.

The novel circles around the question whether religion is important to human happiness, or whether it is inherently ridiculous, and possibly pernicious.  Its answer is equivocal.  Roz is a humanist who wants to find the cure for death.  Lucinda is a rationalist who bases her most personal decisions on the cold calculations of logic, game theory, and ego.  The Valdener Hasidim stake everything on the hope that their way of life will never, ever change in any essential feature.  Klapper and Gideon are—if not overtly religious—susceptible to its call, and vehemently opposed—if not to science itself—to “much of what passes for science” (including Darwinism).  Yet Cass, Klapper’s newest disciple, is a science major who’s never before thought about these questions very much.  The plot itself, to the extent it’s centered on the history of his connection to his earliest academic advisor, circles around his bewilderment at what he seems to have gotten himself mixed up in.

It seems necessary to mention that large dollops of the depiction of Jonas Elijah Klapper seem drawn from what’s known publicly of the persona of Yale professor Harold Bloom.  The eventual fascination with Kabbalah would have settled it, if nothing else did.  Nobody who knows even a little about Bloom will be able to read this book and not think of him.  On the other hand, nothing essential about the character depends on his being based on Bloom.  He’s simply an exaggerated version of a professor of a certain kind, whose traits could have been drawn from any number of different people.

The ending of the novel invites comparison with the author’s earlier novel Mazel.  It also invites a reinterpretation of that novel, because each book ends in the protagonist’s apparent reconciliation with traditional Judaism.  Yet sometime between the writing of that novel and the writing of this one, apparently, the novelist left Orthodoxy and identified herself (if I understood correctly) as a nonbeliever.  I don’t think it’s necessary to have a taste for gossip to wonder whether Goldstein’s previous book, a biography of Spinoza, was written before or after the switch; a biography of Spinoza, an apostate and involuntary excommunicate, by an Orthodox Jewish woman, surely is a very different thing than a biography by someone who herself has left the fold.  (Harold Bloom reviewed the biography for the New York Times Book Review, for what that’s worth.)

For me, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God is not among Rebecca Goldstein’s very best books.  Those, I think, are Mazel and Properties of Light (about a physicist with ideas similar to those of David Bohm.  Goldstein has never settled into a single form for her novels; each one is different, depending, presumably, on the needs of the content.  Unfortunately, though, the result is sometimes a book that seems too long or ununified to hold the attention of someone reading mostly for the story.  36 Arguments is brief enough, and close enough in form to a typical mainstream novel, for this not to be an issue, but at times—the inclusion of what feels like the entire debate over the existence of God is one, the unusual chronology is another—the philosophical elements bog things down in a way that didn’t seem satisfying.

Someone who’s very interested in arguments for atheism or for the existence of God will probably find that debate, between Cass and a noted religious apologist, worth the effort.  Readers who aren’t interested as much in ideas may very well skip it, without appearing to miss too much.  Those looking for a campus novel about disillusionment with advisors may find the novel amusing (I don’t know enough to say whether it’s dead-on or unfair).  Goldstein’s characters, especially her women characters, are sharply and wickedly drawn: types, but types I’ve never seen “done” elsewhere.  The unusual structure of the book, on the other hand (together with the longish digressions into academic subjects), will probably make it unsatisfying for many readers who are looking for a straightforward romantic story.  It has such a story embedded in it, but the reader has to think a bit to see how the romance and the ideas link up together.

I said in an earlier post that 36 Arguments is a “woman’s novel,” and that’s true, in part.  The novel is mostly about relationships: Cass’s with the women in his life (Lucinda, his ex-wife Pascale Puissant, and Roz), and with his mother and grandmother.  The bulk of the plot revolves around these women, with how his work affects his relationships with them, and with what they think about it.  On the other hand, most of the interest is focused on the evolution of Cass’s ideas, and significant space is given to his relationships with his graduate school mentors, Jonas Elijah Klapper and Gilbert Gideon Raven.

It’s a bit difficult to get at one of the book’s other major themes without giving away the ending, but it could be labeled “the question of genius.”  If you’re familiar with The Chosen, which I mentioned in the post in which I mentioned this book earlier, you’ll have some idea what I mean.  Moreover, Jonas Elijah Klapper is entirely obsessed by the question of genius (in a much cruder way than the way in which Harold Bloom, with his ideas of the “strong poet,” might be said to concern himself with the topic): how to interpret the genius of others, and ultimately the question of his own.  It’s possible to do this theme very badly, and Goldstein avoids these problems adroitly, but the topic itself seems to me to be of questionable interest.  After finishing the novel, I still didn’t understand how “genius” fit in among the novels other themes, or why it was included.

The book (like Cass Seltzer’s best-seller) ends with a lengthy appendix, detailing thirty-six actual arguments, given by recent or historical figures, purporting to prove that God exists, along with thirty-six refutations.  It’s implied, though not stated outright, that this appendix is taken in some form from the fictional Cass Seltzer’s fictionally notorious book.  These may be interesting in themselves for some readers, especially the probably very many readers who’ve never encountered these arguments before.

Limitless: a film about a pharmaceutical McGuffin

Limitless: This belongs with John Holbo’s “metaphysical McGuffins,” plot points that may be based in science fiction but don't really need to be science fiction to make sense.  What if there was a pill that could make anybody who took it “the best they could be”?  What if you could never be sure who around you was taking such a pill and who was clean?  The pill’s effect has no obvious analogue to any real-life substance: at one moment, it mimics Prozac; at another, Ritalin; at yet another, LSD or cocaine.  Or maybe it’s simply Type A Personality in a bottle.  The question whether the person who takes it is really, after the fact, brilliant, or whether he’s a fraud, is never really explored—and it doesn’t it seem to matter, when the effects are the same, either way.

If you happened across such a drug, and you started using it (for what were more or less good ideas at the time), could you successfully use it to make the world a better place?  Would the temptation eventually get to you, and pull you into the evils you started out trying to transform?  Would “the system” be too strong for even your chemically enhanced self to break out of it?  Would just the fact that you were using a drug turn you into a kind of high-IQ Patrick Bateman?

These questions don’t really matter for the fun, which involves an original bunch of bad guys and a new-style regular-guy superhero who gets into some original situations trying to outwit them.  There seem to be a few plot holes, and the ending may be too ambiguous for all but the most diehard indie-film fans.  Is the message that drugs are OK?  Or, arguably, not much better, is the message that even Prozac and coffee can turn you into a junkie?  Given the choice between Limitless and, say, The Adjustment Bureau—another movie, a more mainstream one, about a regular guy elevated suddenly to the heights of ability and influence—or Pi—a much weirder movie with something of a similar feel—I think Limitless had the more interesting premise and the more engaging story.  Admittedly, The Adjustment Bureau had angels, making sure everything worked out in the end.

The movie was directed by  Neil Burger (who also directed the very well received The Illusionist) based on a book by the Irish novelist Alan Glynn (original title: The Dark Fields).  The screenplay is by Leslie Dixon, who’s previously written several woman-centered way-out but not quite science-fiction movies like the remakes of The Thomas Crown Affair and The Parent Trap: ordinary people on amazing adventures, people out of place.  The lighting seems a little off, with the backgrounds shot beautifully but the people at mid-range a little flat, as if they’d been filmed in a studio (and maybe they were), but the effects of the drug and of its wearing off are signaled visually in a very appealing way.

The trailers on the DVD were all for medievalist action movies from the same studio, like The Season of the Witch, Immortals, and The Warrior’s Way.  This caused no little apprehension about what was to follow, but that turned out to be actually misleading.

UPDATE: I learned from the review in the Philadelphia Inquirer that although the film is set in Manhattan, many of the exteriors were shot in Philadelphia.

Does Economic Value Derive from Demand or Difficulty?

This, from about a week ago, probably will only be meaningful for those who already know about the roots of current “libertarian” thinking in the writings of the mid-twentieth century economists, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek (apparently non-libertarian conservatives are also influenced by them), and in fact I don’t know enough about economics myself to understand all of it, but I thought these paragraphs from economics professor Brad de Long were interesting:

The point of view underlying von Mises's—and von Hayek, and Marx, and Ron Paul—complaint against Fiat money in general and monetary management of the business cycle in particular is this: that value comes from human sweat and toil, not from being clever. Thus it is fine for money to have value if it is 100% backed by gold dug from the earth by sweat and machines and muscles (even if there is no state of the possible future world in which people actually want to exchange their pieces of paper for the gold that supposedly backs it). But it is not fine for money to have value simply because it is useful for buying things. There is, von Mises—and Marx, and von Hayek, and Ron Paul—think, something profoundly wrong on an economic and on a moral level with procedures that create value that is not backed by, in Marx's case, human labor, and in von Mises's and von Hayek's case human entrepreneurial ingenuity. And in its scarier moments this train of thought slides over to: "good German engineers (and workers); bad Jewish financiers".

Note that this does not just apply to fiat money produced by a government.

This applies to all financial market asset valuations in excess of capital cost of production (or perhaps the value of the inventions of the gigantic Krell-like brain of John Galt). They are, to von Mises, all cheats.

This (which, as de Long points out, also applies to Marx’s labor theory of value), does say that because “value comes from human sweat and toil,” the price of edible dandelion roots foraged from a meadow should always be less than the price of a big boulder that was dug out of my yard so a sewer line could be put in place.  It doesn’t, however, imply that it is somehow cheating to ask a neighbor or friend for help, even with trivial things like opening a package or fastening a necklace, which would just be silly.  Though I’m not sure why “value comes . . . not from being clever” isn’t supposed to remove the real value from “the inventions . . . of John Galt.”

But I thought of this again when I read, recently, an essay by Martha Nussbaum, a professor of philosophy, law, and religion, on the objectification and harassment of women on the Internet (in The Offensive Internet, a volume she co-edited).  She discusses

the tendency of some societies to define the ideal adult as self-sufficient, independent, lacking in deep needs with respect to others.  In many societies, such pictures are held out to young people—but far more often to males than to females.  The idea of the "real man" as someone who is never weak, never dependent, always in control, is a very common feature of developmental patterns in countless societies, but certainly in ours, which so strongly valorizes the lone cowboy who can provide for himself without the help of any others. 

Even though, even taken to an extreme, the point of view Brad de Long attributes to people like Marx and Ron Paul and Ludwig von Mises applies only to economic theory, not to the details of ordinary people’s mundane lives, it does sound as though this economic theory supports—since Ayn Rand has already been brought into the discussion—what her novels’ villains condemn as “rugged individualism,” and what Nussbaum suggests is, in some places and at some times, considered appropriate for all men but for no women.

Picture Books: Hippo Goes Bananas

My daughter is two and doesn’t really understand lying yet, but she is enjoying this book by Marjorie Dennis Murray (illustrated by Kevin O’Malley) that illustrates the danger of rumor and jumping to conclusions.  Hippo wakes up with a toothache and crashes around wordlessly, causing minor havoc and waking up Cuckoo Bird.  Cuckoo Bird tells Monkey, in the process vastly overstating the extent of the damage.  Each animal in turn adds something to the story, accumulating “This Is the House that Jack Built”-style.  In the end, they end up curing Hippo’s toothache, but they also nearly risk causing the very environmental damage they’d baselessly imagined Hippo would have caused if they didn’t intervene: Hippo did not throw anything into the river, flooding the savanna, but that’s just what they do to him.

Another cool thing about the story is that surprisingly, it seems to be a variant on the Trolley Problem!  Instead of tipping a Fat Man over a bridge onto a railroad track, so as to save the lives of the people on a different siding, the animals tip Hippo over a cliff into a river, so as to prevent the spread of his supposed case of “skeeter fever.”  (Compare the illustration of their pushing him over to the illustration at the third of three links, above.)  Were their actions, in bumping Hippo down a cliff (illustrated in comic-book format), justifiable?  Was it okay to give Hippo a knock on the head and consequent headache in order to preserve the rest of them from the risk of catching skeeter fever?  If so, what if he had been big enough, or the river had been small enough, for him to have blocked its flow entirely—would it then still have been okay to dam the river and flood the savanna, so as to save themselves?  Or am I just thinking too much?

The Secret Philosophy of the Postmodern Novelist

The New Republic has given Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, one of its first negative reviews (behind firewall, I haven’t read it or the novel, only the New Yorker excerpts).  Not that there’s any reason to give Franzen the utmost in kid-glove treatment—though I’m increasingly fond of The Corrections, it is not perfect by any means, and is often very annoying.  The interesting thing is that, a few days later, Adam Kirsch, TNR’s poetry critic, chimed in to defend neoconservatism from Franzen’s insulting portrayal.  Of course, The New Republic has long leant towards neoconservatism itself on many issues.  Not content to defend the politics of his own magazine, however, Kirsch goes on to defend the late philosopher Leo Strauss from charges, more or less, that he agreed with Plato:

“Not many of the millions of readers of Freedom will also have been readers of The Nation or the London Review of Books during the Bush years. But those who were will immediately recognize this passage as an allusion to Leo Strauss—who was alleged, in these circles, to be the secret mastermind of belligerent neoconservatism.

It was Strauss who allegedly taught that “the philosopher” had the right and duty to lie to the public in the service of a greater good, and who used Platonic myths to undermine democracy. It’s not necessary to reargue here the falsity of this understanding of Strauss—who, in fact, wrote about the way free-thinking and rationalist philosophers throughout history used occult writing to outwit the religious taboos of their time.”

Kirsch is wrong.  Strauss (like his disciple, Allan Bloom) held that philosophers have both an esoteric and an exoteric teaching.  The esoteric teaching is specifically hidden from everyone other than philosophers.  The esoteric teaching is different from the exoteric teaching, and the exoteric teaching is, in turn, deliberately intended by the writer as the message that’s to be conveyed to laypeople who read the book.  The purpose of the dual meaning is to keep most people from knowing what the philosophers are saying, because most people—not to mention the authorities—would not want the philosophers’ real beliefs to be widely shared.  (In fact, in the places and times Strauss was most interested in, the authorities might arrest a philosopher who was too clear about his message.)

Strauss wanted to insist that moral truth is always and everywhere the same, yet philosophers in different times and places have disagreed about the nature of moral truth.  To defuse relativism, Strauss developed a theory that explained away the appearance that philosophers have always been relativists (or “historicists”): “Plato and Aristotle (and their medieval followers as well) often concealed their own thought by accommodating themselves to the opinions of their contemporaries....  Thus was born Strauss’s famous doctrine of ‘esoteric teaching,’ his conviction that philosophical texts can contain hidden meanings reserved for an elite readership that knows truly how to read.” *

In other words: The contents of a philosophy text are not reliable evidence of what the author believed.  What the writer believed is, it follows, the esoteric teaching understood by the true philosopher, who has been educated in a philosophical way.  Only philosophers and scholars of philosophy understand what the texts that constitute the history of philosophy really mean.  People who have read only the primary texts—unless they are themselves philosophers, or at least scholars of philosophy—cannot know.  As Larmore says, Strauss’s aim here is to deny that we should take seriously things like Aristotle’s defense of the morality of slavery, because truth doesn’t change, and we know that slavery is wrong.

The same thing presumably applies to books published today.  That is, if a philosopher named Lenny Ostrich writes a book, he will have the intention that philosophers will use his book as evidence of the truth, and everybody else will use his book as evidence of a lie.  If this isn’t lying, I don’t know what would count.  (Obviously, other thinkers have held a similar idea.  For example, Marxism possesses a variety of theories about social and psychological mechanisms that almost make it impossible not to lie to one group of people or another.)  This is something entirely different from writing a book that is simply “difficult,” an evaluation that includes nonphilosophical works like Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Shakespeare’s King Lear, as well as Werner Heisenberg’s Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory and Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures.

This doesn’t mean that philosophers should write propaganda.**  A philosophy text is not a political act, and its intended audience is philosophers and students of philosophy.  The Straussian idea, on this view, is simply that what philosophers do is nobody’s business but their own (in a way, it’s a kind of hypertrophied zeal for academic freedom).  It isn’t that philosophers ought to have a political project in which they enlist nonphilosophers by misleading them about the nature of philosophy.  But it does include the project of misleading nonphilosophers (not least about the nature of philosophy), and the possibility of someone having a this project like this one should seem at least a little troubling now that education is so widely available (and not least to a journalist like Kirsch).  Five hundred years ago, a writer might want to mislead a few priests and university dons, who wouldn’t want even philosophers to read potentially subversive books: a few people, who had the learning and the time to study deeply, could learn the truth—the others would remain as they were.  These days, the same writer would be misleading large numbers of people (many of whom already nominally agree with him) who had been led to believe what he wrote was important, and who might mistake his untruths for useful information.

And worse: Strauss was a scholar of political philosophy, and his neoconservative disciples have not been scholars but rather practitioners of politics.  They seem to have taken the lesson that philosophy hides, specifically, truths about the world of government and politics.  Moreover, they mostly seem committed to the idea that they themselves belong to the elite that knows all the secrets about this world (if not that they themselves are “philosophers”).  Such a person might well conclude that part of their job is to lie to everybody else about what’s “really going on” behind the scenes.  (Admittedly, their beliefs may have no effect on their actions; most liars don’t need a fancy theory to tell them it’s all right to lie.)

It’s not an uninteresting theory.  And if true, it would make some of TNR’s own writers quite a bit more interesting than they would ordinarily be.  It might even be helpful for interpreting the postmodern novel.

* My quotation is from Charles Larmore’s 1989 essay on Strauss, which was published in The New Republic and reprinted in The Morals of Modernity.

** And it obviously doesn’t turn propagandists into philosophers, either.

Peeving The Dumbest Generation

I’ve been reading Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, a screed against kids today and the culture that formed them, the scapegoat being the Internet.  I’m planning a longer post on the book, and I don’t intend to make style a main object of criticism.  But I wanted to get this off my chest: I just came across the following sentences, on page 107:

“Because that glorious creation of youth intelligence hasn’t materialized.  The Web expands nonstop, absorbing everything it can, and more knowledge and beauty settle there by the hour.  But no such enhancement has touched its most creative and frequent users, the digital natives [i.e., youth who’ve grown up with the Internet].  There is no reciprocal effect.  Digital enthusiasts witness faithfully the miraculous evolution of the digital sphere, but they also assume a parallel ascent by its consumers, an assumption with no evidence behind it.” 

This isn’t even a mixed metaphor, because there is no metaphor here.  There’s just words.  All the words apply to “[t]he Web.”  The Web expands, the Web absorbs things, and it’s possible for good things to settle on the Web.  (We don’t have to suppose the subject should be replaced.  We can just redefine the predicates to make them fit.)  Like God according to some medieval philosophies, the Web can have any and all attributes applied to it.  But the Web isn’t really any more like God (or a god, or a divine-like kind of something or other) than anything else is.  When people write in the style Bauerlein has chosen, it’s just that words can be used any way that seems convenient.  Again, this isn’t zany creativity, which would imply there are limits being pushed up against—rather, everything just kind of seeps around everywhere.

From The Broom of the System, by David Foster Wallace

This is possibly my favorite passage in Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System:

"Now, Weight Watchers perceives the problem as one involving the need to have as much Other around as possible, so that the relation is one of minimum Self to maximum Other.  This is a valid though, as I've seen this afternoon, by no means exclusive way to attack the problem.  Are you getting my drift, Vigorous?"

"Well, a drift is such a--"

"It occurs to me that I couldn't care less.  A full universe, Vigorous, Ms. Beadsman.  We each need a full universe.  Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that the great Other-set will be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and rush in to fill the void created by that diminution of the Self.  Certainly not incorrect, but just as certainly only half of the range of valid solutions to the full-universe problem.  Is my drift getting palpable?  Just as in genetic engineering, Vigorous.  There is always more than one solution."

. . .

"Of course one other advantage of my approach to the Yin/Yang problem is that dieting becomes the worst possible thing to do.  I find dieting makes me extremely angry at everything.  Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me."

"Instead of merely appropriating their space."

"You are not un-sharp, are you?  Rather like your father.  Your father whips a mean carrot.  I could, of course, leave selected small corners of the universe unfilled for those who might arouse in me feelings of affection and attachment."

"I'll get back to you, probably, if things begin to crowd."

This is not, of course, a light-hearded view of the universe.  Corporate CEO Norman Bombardini has rethought the idea of universal complements as an idea of aggression: taking a gentle theory and importing an entirely different idea into it, making it something very dark.  He appears not to have considered the possibility of a middle ground between total equivalence and total domination--or, at best, if he did consider such middle ground, it seems he had not been able to discover any appropriate stopping point between these two extremes.  But it is a fascinating personalization of what I personally feel to be a problem in philosophy or in logic.

Are Humans Creative?

In yesterday’s Boston Globe, language columnist Jan Freeman raises a question that’s of interest to all bloggers: can we have too many peeves? and can community peeving increase each person’s count of annoyances even an order of magnitude higher than it would have been normally?

She starts with the great problem of the word “create.”  Many of us, I suppose, have never heard anyone complain that the word “create” has a modern implication that is foreign to our traditional way of thinking.  I think I first ran into this purported “issue” when reading The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom, or maybe in George Steiner.  At the time, most likely, I assumed the idea—that only since the modern era have artists been considered “creative” in a sense previously reserved to God’s creation of the universe in the Biblical book of Genesis—was a commonplace.  I can easily imagine Percy Bysshe Shelley, perhaps, arrogating the word “creative” to himself and his fellow poets.  Yet that is only speculation, especially if, as Freeman says, there’s no basis in historical fact for thinking that “creative” in this sense is a modern invention.

In Bloom’s case, it is easy for me to dismiss what he says in retrospect.  In the fifteen or twenty years since I read his book, I’ve learned a little about how political disputes can contaminate otherwise scholarly thought, and these days I wouldn’t believe anything Allan Bloom says about anything unless I could find corroboration, properly documented and argued.  The case of George Steiner is more difficult given his liberal politics, but the personality he conveys in his books (and the fact that he says much Bloom would also agree with), makes it increasingly less so.  Yet, if there isn’t a real issue there, why would Daniel Boorstin have begun his popular book The Creators, about the literary canon, with a survey of metaphysics or creation myths in various world civilizations?  Though, on the other hand, the absence of a real issue might be exactly what makes that book a little unconvincing.

Is there really anybody who believes it’s immoral or impious for individuals to “create”?  A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times Book Review ran a review of a book by the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus that inspired me to coin the new logical fallacy, “dixit ergo creavit”: he said it, therefore he created it.  Neuhaus, in essence, blames philosopher of postmodern pragmatism Richard Rorty for certain ills of the modern world.  His evidence: Rorty’s vivid description of the effects of those ills.  That is unfair, surely.  Describing problems does not make them any worse or bring them more concrete being than they had before.  In fact, Neuhaus himself would have been unable to attack those putative developments without Rorty’s description.

Anyway, I considered whether “creavit” or “invenit” (discovered) was the better word.  “Discovered” certainly describes better what I think Rorty, a scholar, not a belle-lettriste, was trying to do in his book.  But the fallacy is not only the unsurprising fact that the first person who says a thing may not have been the first person to think it.  Without the idea that Rorty had introduced something new into the world, Neuhaus’s accusation doesn’t have a lot of force.  Evidently he felt Rorty had created the turn of thought he wrote about: taught his students to believe this, whether or not that was an actual fact.  Evidently he felt human beings would be better off if nobody at all had even suggested its possibility.

No Payoff

I think this is a good definition, from John Emerson's Trollblog:

[T]heories take ten years to learn and a lifetime to unlearn, and all they do is make it possible for you to make counterintuitive mistakes instead of traditionalist, common-sensical mistakes. No payoff.

Frames in the Business Section

A couple of posts ago, I commented slightly negatively on George Lakoff’s frame theory, but I actually think it is very valuable, so here is an example of how one might make use of the theory.

In today’s New York Times business section, Robert J. Shiller has a column addressing the idea that the experts could have or should have known the current crisis could or would happen.  Shiller’s column illustrates a particular set of frames that are sometimes found in business writing.

In 1989, Shiller heard an expert (Lawrence Summers) muse on his speculations that although nobody thinks it could occur, “a severe contraction, even a depression, could indeed come again.”  This is the people think a certain huge problem can never occur again, but in fact there is no reason to think the world has changed frame.  The state of affairs it describes may well be true, for any given situation, at any given time—but often it sounds alarmist, and one is tempted to think it has some of the attributes of a stopped clock.

The fictional scenario began with “lawyers and dentists explain[ing] to one another that investing without margin was a mistake.”  This is the problems are caused by certain kinds of licensed professionals who think they know something about a different field but really are ignorant frame.

The fictional crisis was then triggered when “a major Wall Street firm was forced to merge with another after a poorly supervised trader lost $500 million by failing to properly hedge a complex position.”  This is the problems are caused by subordinates’ failures to follow instructions frame.  There was no real problem, either with the regulations governing Wall Street firms, nor with the way executives were running the company, but only because a small number of employees were insufficiently disciplined.

All of these frames have one thing in common.  They all exonerate the people on top before the fact.  They all find problems only at the very bottom of the hierarchy.  They might permit a problem to be found just one level up from the very bottom—in the supervision or hiring of the lowest rank—but never explicitly put the blame on first-line managers.

None of the frames states ideas that are 100% inaccurate.  Sometimes people don’t follow the instructions given them by their managers.  Sometimes dentists and medical doctors misunderstand the ideas they hear coming out of other disciplines.  However, these frames do make it nearly impossible for any systemic issues to be identified publicly, not only by anyone who feels constrained to stay within the lines they indicate, but also by anyone who is dependent on information provided by those who feel so constrained.  Merely reversing the frame doesn’t work either, in part because the only information that can be provided is what fits into the frame.  It is not an unfair criticism of the New York Times to say that it reuses a limited set of frames over and over again, and that these frames very often indicate a neoliberal point of view.

Marjorie Grene (1910-2009), and the Mirror of Nature

The philosopher Marjorie Grene died earlier this month, at age 98.  She may have been best known for her work on Aristotle, but her primary field of interest was in fact the philosophy of biology, challenging Cartesian ideas of consciousness.  Before getting her Ph.D. she studied with Heidegger and Jaspers in Germany.

She was also married to the classicist David Grene until 1961.  David Grene was one of the translators of the often-assigned University of Chicago Greek tragedies series.  As an amusing and interesting side note, Mr. Grene decided, apparently, in the 1940s, to become a gentleman farmer, a pursuit at which Mrs. Grene lasted not quite twenty years.

I’ve never read any of Marjorie Grene’s work, but here is where Richard Rorty cites her in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:

Kuhnians should, I conclude, resist the temptation to dish the Whigs by talking of “different worlds.”  By giving up such phrases, they would not be conceding anything to the epistemological tradition.  To say that the study of the history of science, like the study of the rest of history, must be hermeneutical, and to deny (as I, but not Kuhn, would) that there is something extra called “rational reconstruction” which can legitimize current scientific practice, is still not to say that the atoms, wave packages, etc., discovered by the physical scientists are creations of the human spirit.  To buy in on the normal science of one’s day in constructing the largest possible story to tell about the history of the race is not, unless one also buys the various Platonic dogmas mentioned in the previous section, to say that physics is “objective” in some way in which politics or poetry may not be.  For the line between making and finding has nothing to do with the line between incommensurability and commensurability.  Or, to put it another way, the sense in which man is a spiritual and not merely a natural being—the sense to which antireductionists like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Marjorie Grene have devoted attention—is not a sense in which he is a being who makes worlds.  To say, with Sartre, that man makes himself, and that he differs thereby from atoms and inkwells, is quite compatible with repudiating any suggestion that part of his self-creation consists in “constituting” atoms and inkwells.  But the confusions among the romantic notion of man as self-creative, the Kantian notion of man as constituting a phenomenal world, and the Cartesian notion of man as containing a special immaterial ingredient need to be examined in some detail.  This set of confusions is embodied in much discussion concerning the “nature of spirit,” “the irreducibility of the person,” the distinction between action and motion, and the distinction between the Geistes- and the Naturwissenschaften.  Since the last distinction is supposedly coextensive with the distinction between hermeneutical and other methods, it is especially important to take it up in order to clarify the notion of hermeneutics which I am offering.

Don't Think of an Elephant: Progressives and Foreign Policy

George Lakoff’s book Don’t Think of an Elephant has been on my radar since it was published in 2004, and I’d of course heard of Lakoff’s seminal theoretical work, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, but until recently I hadn’t read anything of his.  I had heard interviews with Lakoff on NPR and he sounded like someone I didn’t agree with.  The review in the Atlantic that appeared just after the election didn’t make the book sound especially appealing either.  It was reviewed with Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas, which I ended up tackling first, and which I ended up liking quite a bit.  Possibly the media overexposure itself left a bad taste behind, because I’ve just begun Don’t Think of an Elephant and I’m finding it entirely worthwhile: I don’t agree with everything Lakoff says, but his analysis is compelling, and the results of that analysis are persuasive.

 

Last night, however, I ran across a statement I disagreed with to the point of being unable to find anything of value in it.  Most of the first part of Lakoff’s book (I’ll be referring only to Don’t Think of an Elephant in the rest of this blog post) consists of pieces that appeared on the web site AlterNet in 2003 and 2004.  The second chapter, dated October 13, 2003, is about the 2003 recall of California’s Governor Gray Davis and the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger to take his place.  In the course of explaining why the “poor communicator” frame fails to explain those events, first because other, more important things were taking place that the frame elides, and second because Democrats generally are poor communicators when it comes to the greater majority of voters, Lakoff introduces his “family” metaphor for politics.  As I think is well-known, Lakoff says the way we think of politics reflects the way we think families ought to be run: when conservatives think of families, they think of a “strict father” model, while liberals use what Lakoff calls a “nurturant parent” model.

 

Lakoff goes on to enumerate the implications each model has for thinking about various topics in current affairs.  Here is what he says about foreign affairs as seen from the viewpoint of the strict father model: “In foreign affairs the government should maintain its sovereignty and impose its moral authority everywhere it can, while seeking its self-interest (the self-interest of corporations and military strength).”  Here is what he says about foreign affairs as seen from the viewpoint of the nurturant parent model: “In foreign policy the role of the nation should be to promote cooperation and extend these values to the world.”

 

If Lakoff is typical, no wonder Barack Obama’s support among progressives is so tenuous.

 

It explains why the left’s objection to the war was that it was “fought under false pretences”: a slogan you hear much more than that the war was “fought for nonexistent WMD,” yet which is consistently explained as meaning simply the latter.  This would seem to assume that people who supported the war did so because they believed it was a just war, just the way the Bosnia war was just: fought for humanitarian ends, in order to effect a discrete moral purpose.  It might also begin to explain why Democratic insiders who at first had been hawkish on Iraq switched sides exactly when they did: at a time when, to the average person reading the news, nothing obvious had changed.

 

This is essentially a neoconservative argument.  Obviously Lakoff is not a neoconservative.  If I did not know he considered himself to be a progressive, I might conclude that he is a neoliberal.  The argument is strange to hear in a book about how progressives think differently from conservatives, in a talk about how Democrats don’t know how to communicate with the electorate and need to become less like stereotypical liberals.

 

There is more to politics than the family.  There is more to politics than personal morality.  War is not justified by our desire to do good.  Lakoff makes me realize why I am a liberal who sees good things in progressivism, and not a progressive full stop.

Stanley Fish on Interdisciplinary Rivalries

When I was working on a master’s thesis in history about twelve years ago, the subject of my research was best known to literary historians, and I read a large number of recent critical articles. Trying to understand their point of view, I began to read about the literary theory of the time, including a handful of the earliest essay collections published by Stanley Fish.

Some of these essays were on topics I knew something about from my undergraduate courses in computer science and philosophy. Almost invariably, as I recall, they struck me, at the time, as interesting attempts to explore the implications of research in some area or other relating to linguistics, logic, or philosophy. Also almost invariably, they struck me as falling short, almost literally -- before the end of the essay had been reached, some mistake had been made, some misapprehension followed up on when it ought to have been corrected. Over and over again, they failed to grasp the point, failed as Mark Liberman puts it to “understand [the writer‘s] work in the context of her native interpretive community.” It seemed to me that Fish failed to understand the activity that had given rise to the discourse he was, at that moment, trying to learn about, and as a result failed to understand what the words actually meant.  (I realize this sounds arrogant; what credentials do I have to criticize a figure like Stanley Fish?)

Nonetheless, I found the essays interesting for four reasons:

First, in spite of the mistakes I thought I perceived, enough of the ideas themselves showed through his own words that a beginner could learn a lot from them. I think this is because Fish depicted his own struggles with the material in his writing. By following his attempts to understand, I could also understand in part. By noticing his thought processes, I could discover where I agreed or disagreed with them. But once past the beginning stage, this source of interest dissipates somewhat.

Second, Fish seemed to think the way I think. He refused to go forward until he understood the argument being made. He did not accept theoretical statements merely as dogma. He did not seem to accept assumptions that were not obvious.

Third, the form of the essays, always incomplete and often fulfilled in some sense by later writings on somewhat different topics, seemed to confront the incompleteness of our understanding. I was reminded of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, or of Shaw’s contention that each play he wrote should address a problem left unsolved by the previous one.  I guessed the "falling short" was intentional.

Fourth, Fish seemed to be learning as he went along. It seemed that by following the essays in sequence one might confront each successive conceptual difficulty in turn, and that by the end of the process, Fish and we might have approached more nearly to the achievement of a fully worked out science.

However, on the basis of these four reasons, I might reasonably have expected Fish to continue on in the same way as he’d begun, and he did not in fact continue to write explorations of philosophy and theory that pushed his and his readers’ understandings forward. His most recent books, to the contrary, have sharply criticized his own discipline for attempting to do just the kind of thing he himself did in those early collections.

If he is right, his arguments have profound implications going even beyond the possibility of interdisciplinary understanding. They raise questions, for example, concerning source analysis in historical research.

But as far as I know, Fish’s ideas are considered eccentric and are not taken seriously by experts in the relevant fields; he never did make himself enough of an expert in those fields to persuade their practitioners to listen to him. At Language Log today, Mark Liberman calls attention to the problem that Fish strongly defends disciplinary integrity at the same time he crosses disciplinary lines in order to issue a wrongheaded critique of, for example, philosopher Ruth Kempson:

[Fish] depicts Kempson as drawing back in horror from the logical implications of her argument . . . But the context of Kempson's 1973 PhD thesis, republished as her 1975 book, was not an argument about whether rational inquiry is possible . . . Rather, it was an argument among linguists and philosophers of language about whether proof theory or model theory is a better way to think about natural language semantics.

…

The one positive conclusion from Fish's work that I believe I've grasped, so far, is the crucial role of what he calls "interpretive communities" in providing enough of a shared context — even if ephemeral and unfounded — for some minimal communication to take place. So it's ironic that he so completely fails to understand Kempson's work in the context of her native interpretive community.

Fish had little reason to care about the argument between the proponents of proof theory and the proponents of model theory. Additionally, there is really no way he could have learned enough about philosophy of language to understand the problem as a philosopher would have; this would, most likely, have required more time and resources than were available to him.  But he was capable of grasping the arguments for and against theoretical positions similar to those of Kempson, weighing those arguments in relation to one another, and articulating an argument of his own about their relative strengths. I'd guess this is what he did.

I believe the irony Liberman points out can be resolved fairly simply. I assume Fish believes the following: that disciplines have the right to define what their practitioners ought to do -- including when their practitioners talk about other disciplines -- but do not have the right to prevent other disciplines from talking about them. If so, the irony disappears. In favor of this interpretation is the fact that Fish is very clear about there being no “higher court” to which practitioners from rival disciplines might appeal.