Supple Towel Cuddle

Archaementation 101

Hey you.

To form, deeply and slowly, a one-on-one message that you know will see only the eyes of the person for whom it is written, such is to beg your audience's attention. To do the same, but less discriminatingly, as with the construction of a hard-hitting essay that both you and your professor understand may see more than just the professor's eyes, is to beg somewhat less of your audience's attention. The impact only lessens the further one expands his horizons. For instance, a blog posted for all to see is actually a message to be internalized by none; no matter how vividly one's point is made, no matter how personable the rhetoric employed, no matter how philosophical or heartrending the author may be, there will always be that diffusion of responsibility on the part of the reader, the result of his omnipresent awareness that he is, in fact, one audience member amid an audience of audience members. The up-close poetics are in how no one wants to share the inspiration he feels that he has earned from a piece, because true inspiration grants him insight on the piece, which in turn allows him to contribute to the piece's further public reception, presumably causing those to whom he preaches to identify him with the great work (i.e., like wanting to be the actor with the most and/or best lines in a great screenplay); this is a truth with consequences oh-so-commonly manifested in the bandwagon-backlash that occurs with the popularization of great indie music or film (i.e., the fundamental reason why no one can outright "like" Pitchfork Media and/or Napoleon Dynamite anymore, at least not until the disliking of these things becomes its own big, bad bandwagon). Someone writing a message with the intention of reaching everyone (for example: a blog) must understand, whether or not he understands, that his words will reach no one, (not in earnest, anyway). The realest benefit of blogging is in assuming the altered perspective one is granted of one's own words upon dispatching them to the web; pretending to be some uninitiated reader is made all the less challenging by the expedient makeover one's writing undergoes when it's "published" to the website (e.g., changes in font, color, text-wrapping, etc.). Masturbatory is the word for this epidemic, if you can will yourself, as a reader, to infer the implications.

All that having been stated: everyone, this is a cry for help.

Though my Argumentation class is full of kids who will not (and/or possibly cannot) struggle with the course's writing-intensive curriculum, theirs is not the kind of confidence I envy. They almost unanimously appreciate my professor's cryptic condemnations of Those Who Do Not Assert Their Opinions, even when she then goes on to explain how--and I cannot but find this confounding--no opinion is righter than another. If you find her partnering of platforms accommodating to your understanding of logic, then bear with me out of sympathy, please, help me through the labyrinth.

My troubles began early with this professor. After class, on day two, she asked me about my style of argument, "So would you call yours a 'philosophical' approach?" Admittedly, I had been contributing quite a bit to in-class discussions, interesting comments, mostly out of frantic defense for all that I have taken to calling Objective Truth (e.g., that questioning any assertion is a healthy practice). However, I didn't know how to answer her inquiry, because I had never heard of "philosophy" being addressed as an "approach" to understanding, or, what I guess I mean is, that there are other approaches. Though I didn't know how to answer, I answered, sort of: "Sure, I guess you could call it that," because I wasn't about to dissatisfy the woman who had, just with that question, evinced how impossible she was going to be to satisfy for the rest of the semester. Let me elucidate this befuddlement by sharing with you the OED entry on "philosophy," which I was (slightly) relieved to find out shares my opinion on the meaning of the word: "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, and the basis and limits of human understanding; this considered as an academic discipline. (Now the usual sense.)" Other approaches to understanding include: ...

This not a rant, mind you. This is an explanation of why and how I need guidance. I must take this class, inevitably. And don't get me wrong: I am actually rather eager to take part, if not because we are assigned to ramble passionately about issues of our choosing, then because it gives me an excuse to preach David Foster Wallace to like twenty of my DFW-ignorant peers. (To be fair, actually, one of them knows he wrote Infinite Jest, another owns and has not yet begun to read Brief Interviews With Hideous Men but intends to, and though my professor hasn't read any of his work, she asked me if "[I'd heard] he's dead now." So I'm only almost entirely alone, in that respect.)

The reason I cannot just see myself as immediately correct about my "philosophical approach" is because such an approach does not meet what most could probably agree are the two most basic requirements of any compelling argument, that is, that a compelling argument must be both compelling and argumentative. This is an argumentation class, it's called "Argumentation," and my professor's been teaching it for about forty semesters now, so I have very good reason to comply to the demands of Writing A Compelling Argument. Befuck my philosophical obligation to fundamentals. Unless I can find an exemplar for my cause, an argumentative author with both renown and a tendency to take no side but that of the inquisitor, then I'll finally have to cave.

It's at this point when my mind flees in horror to David Foster Wallace and clings to his thick leg, puling into the fabric of his trousers and only sometimes peeking back at Washington University in St. Louis. You tell em' DFW. You make em' see. Please. I need this.

DFW proffers his portfolio of non-fiction works. Though nearly all of them address an argument at some point or another, the question then arises as to whether he makes an argument at any point. Take "Consider the Lobster," for instance, the title essay of one of his last collections, which saw publication in the August 2004 issue of Gourmet Magazine. It's DFW covering the Maine Lobster Festival on Gourmet's behalf, journalizing, if you will, at least until he begins to feel disturbed by the world-record-sized lobster boiler, that is, by the near un-face-able question of "Is it okay to boil alive a sentient being for our gustatory pleasure?" A responsible journalist surely cannot write about such a touchy conundrum without also asserting some side, either "Yes, it is okay," or "No, it is not." So what does Wallace do with the problem once he reveals that it exists, that it vexes him? I am in no position of authority to judge his actions in this domain, for myriad reasons, not the least of which is because I can't trust my own worshipful opinions of the man to give me an objective answer about his strategy. And I need objectivity, right now.

So I did the excruciating. I dug up a mediocre review of David Foster Wallace's book, Consider The Lobster, an article by Brendan Wolfe of the San Francisco Chronicle entitled "OK, So The Guy Can Write..." and read the whole damn thing. You can't write about this book without writing about its title essay, and Wolfe reserves a couple of paragraphs that I think are worth sharing:

In the title essay, [DFW] travels to coastal Maine for the annual Lobster Festival. What begins as a witty, sometimes snooty point-and-laugh swerves into something altogether more uncomfortable when the author poses the question "Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?" "Consider the Lobster" originally appeared in Gourmet magazine, and it was controversial for all the obvious reasons. Few carnivores were amused by what they perceived as an attack on their morality. At least one prominent lobsterman, meanwhile, took issue with Wal-lace's facts. He encountered a similar backlash after "Authority and American Usage" was first published in Harper's. Apparently U.S. lexicography does have a seamy underbelly.

In the end, though, and to his credit, Wallace doesn't demand we put faith in his facts; he doesn't even demand we stop eating lobster. He asks of us something more difficult -- that we think about our actions. And like the best of his essays, "Consider the Lobster" invites us to participate in a new and fascinating conversation.

The rest of the review aside, this opinion agrees with just about all the other, more-positive reviews. It also agrees with mine, though I think Wolfe's choosing the words "at least one prominent lobsterman (...) took issue with Wal-lace's facts" make evident his antagonism, and I personally feel a little poisoned by that ill-intentioned hyphenation. What Wolfe and I concur on is Wallace's true intent with his "argument," which is in fact not to argue at all, but to engage readers-of-any-opinion in aporia. The essay does not end up making an opinion too far to either side of the should-we-or-shouldn't-we debate, (he makes compelling cases for both sides, in that lobster are delicious delicious beasts, but their blatant suffering is due some complex thought) and instead serves to enter into a more fundamental debate: can two sides of an argument both be correct?

The boldest thing I do, not just as a result of Wallace's work, is to say no. No argument has two correct sides, but just two (or more) parties that are in an often-very-slow race to find the evidence that will debunk all opposition (which usually entails an unforeseen degree of compromise, the unpleasantness of which will keep the actual compromise's occurrence dragging out for decades afterward in the form of smaller, fractalized arguments). The truest, philosophic-most approach to one's surroundings is to question everything and take note only of the observable patterns, infinitely avoiding interpolation and extrapolation, (i.e., the whole idea is to emulate omni-disciplinary Savantism). The physical universe is far from completely understood. The cognitive universe, also a black-box. Medicine, chock-full of questions. Political science, a science by only the kindest of standards. So to deviate even slightly from this path and assert some opinion in any field is to fail completely, to become a contemptible Sophist, or, in other words, to live a totally normal life. Every single person is programmed to not want to do this, and, really, it's to our evolutionary advantage not to focus on just how many flaming chainsaws we're juggling, so to speak. But the geniuses try. I'm not saying I'm a genius, but I sure would like to be, and I believe, more than I believe in just about anything else, that opinions are a mark of ignorance, or, more accurately, an impasse on the way to understanding.

I don't support collective efforts, because opinions are an inescapably divisive aspect of collectives. But I also believe that opinions are an inescapable aspect of being an individual, that the body is the one fence that can't be torn down, which is why I support collective efforts, (but which, in turn, is why I support individual efforts, because, as anyone who has ever thought more than thought can agree, the mind is a collective effort, but which I then can't support... and so on, ad infinitum). That my professor so cheerily asserts that One Must Earn His Opinion makes me ache and ache and ache. Let me please detail:

When I critiqued a nationalistic article written by Lippmann in 1939 called "The Indispensability of Freedom of Speech," I claimed that his argument for calling freedom of speech "indispensable" is based on the only half-true conclusion that free speech is necessary, that is, that it exists because we needed it to exist and chose to make it exist; I found this argument to be human-centric, almost religiously so, and I say that while his point is valid, he needs to acquiesce to how freedom of opinion is not just "indispensable" but literally quite "not dispensable"; regardless of how strictly freedom of speech has been policed throughout time, individuality (i.e., opinion-having) has always been its own self-governing system. My paper goes into a lot of cool, thoughtful details, too. When she handed it back, however, my professor said that Lippmann was not targeting the audience I wanted him to target (and she's right: I wanted him to target the thinking person, not just the 1930s American in need of a pseudo-philosophical pat on the back). In other words, she did not find my argument compelling. I came near implosion. I wanted only to acknowledge, rather than argue, how (literally) Lippmann's thesis statement was only a half-truth, how he made his point seem inarguable, (in every way the opposite of David Foster Wallace) so that only a madman would disagree; I wanted to address what he neglected to address, to encourage dialog, rather than pacification. I wanted to do what DFW would have done in my shoes. I even used footnotes. But that which I feared came to pass: my philosophical approach was not compelling.

The questions then arise: Can one make a compelling argument against argumentation? What is compelling? How does one compel? Is it possible to compel via philosophical inquiry, when philosophy mandates inconclusiveness (i.e., Socratic aporia)? If it is not possible, then is "compelling" a productive practice? Is answering any of these questions possible without deploying opinions?

I have no answer to these questions, none for any of them, and thusly do I suffer.

Making matters worse is the fact that the likeliest person reading this right now, after you, is me.

Posted by suppletowelcuddle at January 25, 2009 1:18 PM