PIG IN A PIT

After a teaching hiatus I'm back and working and looking forward to posting that's a bit more regular than biennial. The exciting news: me and some friends are getting together to roast a whole pig on the beach. Photos and grisly details to follow.

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The Whaling Code

Here's something interesting from Melville, the statutes of whalers:

I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.
II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.

There is some discussion of how these vague rules are to be interpreted as they pertain to whales in particular, but Melville characteristically broadens the scope of the concept to a profounder level:

"...these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, I say, will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human jurisprudence; for notwithstanding its complicated tracery of sculpture, the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the Philistines, has but two props to stand on.
"Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow's last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain's marble mansion with a door-plate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of Savesoul's income of £100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-back laborers (all sure of heaven without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular 100,000 but a Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooner, John Bull, is poor Ireland but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law?
"But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and universally applicable.
"What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.
"What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?"

Melville, of course, leaves the payoff for the last paragraph, which I find the most penetrating and curiously applicable to today's situation. In fact, I felt haunted by this voice from the past as I read it for the first time, haunted because amidst Moby-Dick's overwrought archaisms this note rang strangely familiar. Wasn't Iraq a Loose-Fish? Are we going to behead it, like a whale, drain it of its oil, and then burn or dump the remainder overboard?

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Jargon 2.0

And on a more humorous tip, here are a couple of funny jargon generators. First, dack.com's "bullshit" generator, which is oriented toward web design and business types. I submitted "Let's sell some donuts." The response: "Integrate virtual communities." I'm not sure, but this may be tied to those "empty calories" served up in a gooey Krispy Kreme.

Or here's an oldie but goodie -- a postmodern (pomo) paper generator. Hit refresh and it'll keep spitting out new papers. One of my favorites is that it prefixes "de" and "post" to any available -ism. Interestingly, the first line of many sections begins with a mash-up of a Marx quote and a later theorist -- Foucault, Sartre, Wittgenstein, etc. I particularly liked this iteration, a collaborative piece by a professor from MIT's English department (which does exist) and "Miskatonic University" in Arkham, Mass. Fans of H. P. Lovecraft will recognize the school.

This kind of composition reached its peak in the Sokal hoax a decade ago -- when NYU physicist Alan Sokal succesfully submitted a gobbledy-gook paper of postmodern quotes to the journal Social Text. In fairness to the editors of Social Text (which is published at my school, Rutgers) I doubt Sokal's paper would have gotten in if he hadn't been an accomplished physicist, at a neighboring institution, writing on physics (whatever the jargon).

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This day in jargon

One of the best pieces of advice I received from a professor was to single out popular keywords or phrases which had become ubiquitous and avoid them like the plague. Her example was 'paradox,' which achieved such wide academic currency in the late 1970's that it threatened to devalue the specie of literary criticism. As she put it: "everything was 'paradox.' But if everything was paradox, so what?"

From time to time, I've decided to share a few of my pet pariahs of phraseology. A wealth of such phrases abounds in business; recently a friend of mine from an energy company told me that everyone was talking about 'drilling the onion' -- whatever the hell that means. But I'm an academic, not a businessman, so I'm going to focus on the terms of my trade.

Today's word is 'overdetermined.' It's a term originally drawn from mathematics -- and it is invoked when you have more information than is sufficient to solve an equation. The extra information allows you to solve the equation in more than one way, each reaching the exact same answer. Hence, "overdetermined."

As far as I can tell, this word moved definitively into deeper academic waters through Freud, who used to argue that the dreams of the unconscious were like a code, and like any code, could be "solved." Freud speculated, moreover, that you could often take several different paths to decoding a dream, but that they would all reach the same core meaning -- hence, dreams were "overdetermined" much like some equations. Whether or not you believe that dreams are in code, I think you'll agree that at the least, dreams and dream interpretation are quite a bit fuzzier than algebra. Which is why this algebra metaphor seems stretched -- real interpretive problems don't have multiple crisp avenues to a fixed and certain solution.

But from the writings of Freud, this use of "overdetermined" metastasized, spreading to deconstructive critics like Lacan, and thence, into academic jargon generally. The term has come so far that it can now be found in some (high-fallutin') journalism. As an example, Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo used the term yesterday with regard to the question of why we're in Iraq. He begins by quoting reader "BH":

At present, your logic seems to be: There are only two possible purposes of maintain a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq: nefarious (i.e., securing the world's oil supply), and virtuous (i.e., ensuring democracy for Iraq). Bush is nefarious. Therefore, the purpose of Bush's desire to maintain a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq is to secure the world's oil supply.

[Marshall responds] I don't find any of this persuasive. In fact, I find the whole bit of reasoning needlessly over-determined. I myself wrote a long article just before the war started, explaining how the grand neo-con plan was to institute an outward unfolding cycle of democratizing and chaos in the region that would ultimately topple almost all the governments in the region.

Here, Marshall seems to be using "over-determined" to mean tied down too concretely into specific arguments. He is taking exception to how his reader has distilled these arguments into two exclusive propositions (the purpose of maintaining troop presence is either virtuous or nefarious, bush is nefarious, therefore purpose is nefarious). Of course, this exclusive propositional logic in fact takes Marshal's arguments and makes them more mathematical in their precision. In other words, BH's interpretation is what makes it possible to talk describe Marshall's arguments as 'determined' at all. Outside of such concrete and exclusive formulation, the language of determination just doesn't apply. Marshall's use of 'overdetermined' as something like 'too logically specific' therefore runs counter to the term's meaning; which means to have multiple, logical paths to solution. It seems that the "over" is being taken as a pejorative modifier of the quality of determination, rather than, as in its original use, a multiplier of the quantity of determinations.

To my griping, one might respond that this is just how language changes. But I think the problem here is that, as with most jargon, what Marshall really means to say is something simpler -- perhaps "too logicky" or "too concrete" or "too absolute" -- and instead he's using "over-determined" because it has a nice hefty mathematical sound to it. The problem is that outside of formal languages (like logic and mathematics), 'overdetermined' simply does not apply, and it asserts a plainly false sense of the specificity of meaning. For me, this situation boils down to my (sometimes-followed) mantra for dissertation writing: if it can be said more simply and more precisely, for Jeebus sake, do it.

Note: "Overdetermined" is now most popular in psychology, and can mean a whole host of things, from having more than one psychological cause, to giving expression to more than one need or desire (OED). This is clearly still not what Marshall meant, but does go to show how terms, when abstracted from their intended use, tend to get sticky and unclear.

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France Swoons

It appears the French are going all rubbery over their new conservative president, Nicolas Sarkozy, what with his bluejeans-blazer-and-RayBan sporting ways and his Prada-clad wife. The current fad in French coverage (duly mimicked by the NYT) is to compare the Sarkozys to Kennedy and company ca. Camelot. Elle ran a page comparing Cecilia Sarkozy's style with Jackie's (at right). But my favorite bit come at the end of the article, in an interview with Jean-Marie le Pen, the jingoist uber-conservative who's voting block was co-opted by Sarkozy in the elections:

Mr. Le Pen accused Mr. Sarkozy of stealing his right-wing message and using "American advisers who know how to work the great popular masses." (emph. added)

Wow. I wondered where they'd gone.

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Why do giraffes have horns?

My family recently returned from a trip to Africa with a bunch of photos of wildlife. We were halfway into a marathon of lions, wildebeests, and secretary birds when we came upon a close-up shot of a giraffe (not pictured above). And suddenly, it occurred to me that I didn't know why giraffes have horns. I raised the question, promised to research, and report back.

And the result of my exhaustive search of the internets: we don't really know. Based on what I've found, it's likely that the horns of the giraffe are an example of what Steven J. Gould called "spandrels" -- structures or adaptations that served as a support for some other function. In the case of giraffes, biologists know that the ancestors of giraffes had antlers, much like deer. Antlers are made of protrusions of bone which are shed and regrown each year. The giraffe's "horns" however, are not antlers -- they are permanent outcroppings of bone from the skull, called "ossicones." Giraffes are born with them, and they are covered with hair (except for adult males, who wear away the fur at the end). A best guess is that the giraffe's "horns" were originally support structures for their antlers -- sockets that supported the large racks which deer find so handy during mating season in their tests of strength and dominance. To speculate a bit, as giraffes grew taller, and their necks thinner, the violent frontal assaults of the mating ritual would have become dangerous. Instead, giraffes joust by wrapping their necks around each other (pictured at right) and banging the back of their skull, and sometimes their forehead, into the skull of their opponent. For this purpose, giraffes additionally have bony protuberances above their eyes and at the back of their heads -- just visible in the illustration above. But this method of fighting renders antlers at the top of the head useless -- as you can see, the horns remain pointing more or less into the air. There's a strong chance that it was partly because of this that giraffes lost their horns.

But it is possible that the bone structures which supported those horns were not lost so easily -- resulting in ossicones.

Thus, the "horns" of the giraffe may present a strong example of a structure which no longer serves a purpose, because the antlers these horns were meant to anchor no longer exist. Gould loved to talk about such "spandrels" because they provided evidence of evolutionary by-products, evidence that creatures are not designed from the ground up, but adjusted and shifted over time. Sometimes, spandrels find a new, secondary function. And it may be that the horns of the giraffe do have some new purpose which biologists have been unable to suss out as yet. But it may be that they are evolutionary flotsam -- illustrations of the odd side-effects produced as evolution fiddles with a few thousand genes in order to produce the wild variety of physical forms we call life.

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From News of the Weird:

Last year, a BBC News correspondent in Sudan reported that village elders in the Upper Nile state had punished Charles Tombe, who had been caught being amorous with a goat, by requiring him to pay a dowry to the goat's owner, to endure a "wedding" to the goat, and to treat the goat as his "wife" to embarrass him. The dispatch ran worldwide and was the most popular story on the BBC News' Web site for 2006. BBC News reported in May 2007 that the goat, "Rose," which had given birth to one kid in the interim (clearly, not fathered by Tombe), had recently passed away after choking on a plastic bag.

Just think of the opportunities. (Bush/Blair marriage, anyone? I'm sure the U.K. would appreciate a hefty dowry.) And here's to BBC news. Not only to they report on a -- quirky -- story like this, they follow up on it.

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New and improved: Logic (Now, with Benchmarks!)

I'm studying some logic right now and it occurred to me last night (around 3) that much of the public debate over Iraq can be distilled into a single fallacy called "affirming the consequent."

To explain. If I were to tell you, "If it rains tomorrow, I'm going to get wet" and the next day I walked into a coffee shop sopping, would that mean it rained? The answer is no; it's conceivable that I got splashed by a car, or ran through a sprinkler, etc. In any of these cases, my prediction is not false, because it only applies if the antecedent (if it rains tomorrow) is true. This is called "affirming the consequent" because the fallacy pretends that by verifying the second, "then" part of the statement, the "if" part is proven true. Any of us could come up with a hundred examples which make this point clear. (I.e. if I'm abducted by aliens, I'll be surprised. You find me surprised -- does that mean I was abducted by aliens?)

But the main arguments for the war in Iraq present the clearest examples of this fallacy, arguments which have been used (ridiculously) to prove a variety of "ifs" about Iraq.

For instance, it was argued that if Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, we must invade. And for quite a while, people believed that there must be such weapons, because we had, in fact, invaded.

It was also argued that if Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda, we should attack them. And because we attacked, many believed for years that Iraq did have ties to Al Qaeda. Of course, this brew is muddied by the further argument that if we fought Al Qaeda "over there" we wouldn't have to fight them elsewhere. Now that we're fighting Al Qaeda forces in Iraq, it's been argued that the war is protecting us from Al Qaeda's expansion. But of course, recent articles -- based on the analysis of our intelligence services -- have shown that the opposite is the case. Iraq is serving a as a recruitment center and huge revenue drive for Al Qaeda-in-Iraq, which is now exporting expertise and money around the globe.

But this basic fallacy can also illustrate the central misbelief of our Iraq policy: If we are to stabilize Iraq and prevent a military failure, we must not withdraw our troops. Conservative and administration officials, despite all the contrary evidence, continue to affirm the consequent -- arguing that continued presence in Iraq will stabilize the country and prevent failure. The fallacy lies in the failure of the consequent -- maintaining troop levels -- to secure the antecedent -- peace and political success in Iraq.

To put this differently, affirming the consequent illustrates that there is a huge difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. It may be necessary that I pick up a bat in order to hit a home run in the World Series. But it is completely insufficient -- no matter how many times you put a Louisville slugger in my hands and send me in against Andy Pettit, I still suck at baseball. And no matter how long our military stays in Iraq, there's nothing they can do to solve a civil war driven by forces that predate our presence by a hundred years.

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