_why is a role, not a person
words.steveklabnik.com
words.steveklabnik.com
The guy simply likes to be anonymous. So do I. There's not that much to it.
Woopdeedoo.
Lets not continue this line of conversation.
That said, you are entitled to your opinion that "there's not that much to it," but I have too much evidence to believe that's the case. I just hinted at it here; when you need to summarize an entire school of thought _and_ share how to apply it, it can get a bit lengthy, and I wasn't in the mood for that, but did have many people asking me "what do you think about the possible return of _why."
Artaud, however, is very straightforward, a kid would understand: it is mostly naked scatologic poetry.
That sounds pretty damn unfortunate.
> Artaud, however
I haven't read Artaud directly, but I just wanted to mention that while D&G take the imagery of the BwO from Artaud, it's pretty much just those words: they fully develop in into its own concept (as well as the very-nearly-identical 'plane of immanence') over a few books, so it's much more Lacan (though Anti-Oedipus is a polemic against psychoanalysis, sooo) than scatologic poetry. Though they did digress into some of that silliness sometimes.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics http://books.google.com/books?id=B0eB8mvov6wC&printsec=f...
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology http://www.mohamedrabeea.com/books/book1_3997.pdf
and, for fun...
Jacques Derrida, Differànce http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/diff.html
(At least, that is my current understanding of the history)
I like that the author doesn't embarrass himself by attempting to define a Zebra by what it does.
On a more serious note: philosophers who use a process-based ontology/metaphysics would be a little more careful with words: you're defined by your position in given historical processes. Some of these, of course, are initiated by you, hence 'what you do.'
So in the case of a zebra, it's a zebra because it's genesis lies in a historical process: zebras giving birth. If you have two parents who are zebras, then you're a zebra. The first zebras became zebras once they are unable to sexually reproduce with another species, I forget the exact biology term here. For another example, I'm a citizen of the United States because I'm part of a historical process by which people are born in a particular space, both geographical and political, over a certain time period. I don't possess some sort of intrinsic US-ian property.
If you're interested in this kind of thing, Whitehead, Deleuze, and more recently, de Landa (who I adapted the zebra example from) are all materialists who replace identity with process.
I think "speciation" is the word you're looking for. No idea why I remember that!
I feel like there was another related terms, specifically about the point where reproduction can't happen. "genesis" was in there somewhere, I thought. Regardless, thanks.
Deleuze and de Landa were my primary inspirations during graduate architecture school. I wrote about how such thinking might be incorporated into a web design.[1]
[1]: http://kimble.co/2012/bottom-up-web-design-and-the-materiali...
You know, something about de Landa bothers me a bit, maybe you can chew on this and sometime, we'll discuss it: he wants to "de-postmodernize Deleueze" (even though he's careful that Deleuze isn't pomo, just that he uses dense words), but I'm not entirely sure that you can really separate, say, A Thousand Plateaus from the performative properties of the text. It seems strange to me that a materialist would want to remove the ideas from the primary material that they came from.
That said, he does a damn good job of making it a bit more accessible, especially to technologists.
I don't have anything specific yet, though: what would you suggest?
_why was/is a name (or alias), not a role - it refers to a particular (awesome) dude, not a class of awesome dudes.
We don't all start calling each other "Steve Jobs" when we put on black polo-necks and start being mean to each other.
You can redefine it as a role if you want, but that's a semantic change to English that I can disagree with (and will.)
Just because it is an alias does not mean that it cannot also be a role: roles have names, you know. ;)
> We don't all start calling each other "Steve Jobs" when we put on black polo-necks and start being mean to each other.
This is not even close to what I mean. You would say that someone that does that is 'acting like Steve Jobs' though, no?
Right, metonymy is a rhetorical device that can be used for figures such as _why, but that doesn't mean that the figure is [just] a metonymic structure and not a person.
Its nice to think that it could be a symbol, and maybe it is... but it would only be due to the actions and desires of the ruby community.
> Blix was right. I’m in so [sic, should be 'no'] shape to write this book.
> Goodbye until I can shake this.
>
> Aw, come on!!! You're leaving us here??
>
> Ha! I was right! He flipped his lid! He's all burned out
> and he's going to shoot himself in the head!
>
> But what about us? This doesn't bode well for us.
>
> Oh, *we'll* be fine. We're famous. Other people _will_ sketch
> our likeness.
>
> We'll be twice as famous when he's gone. People can be
> so idolatrous with their mourning!
That said: I think the trick here is to be careful that we not confuse process philosophy (Whitehead, Bergson, Hartshorne) for pure nominalism, or the pure separation of identity/name/essence from its object. Process philosophers, as I read them, as a general category try to bridge the tension between idealism (the reification of essence or form into an eternal fact) and nominalism (the view that all names/essences are purely ad hoc and never actually representative of the substances they attempt to indicate).
It's not that process philosophers reject essences out of hand, but that they attempt to find more descriptive language that accounts for the constant motion and change of substances. So Bergson had the notion of "Duration" and Whitehead had "occasions" and "ingressions." Names, essences in the process view expanded further along the ontological spectrum than the ad hoc naming of Occam/nominalism, but never so far as Platonic 'ideals' which are eternal and unchanging. It's really, at the bottom of it, not that far from Aristotle himself, but with language that pulls notions of essence further toward immediacy and the Heraclitean flux (i.e., You can't step in the same river twice -- or maybe even once).
All this to say, I wonder if the notion of a 'role' is truly descriptive here -- the role itself changes, as does Subject. The idea of "_why" as a free-floating identity actually, to my mind, moves it further towards an Idealism rather than the process/duration ideas you seem to be advocating. "_why" in this scheme becomes almost a pure abstraction devoid of the context of having been invented and inhabited by Subject.
Questions of essence always become arcane and you can chase this rabbit down countless holes. For the issue at hand, to me it becomes a question of execution rather than definitions. "_why" as a role is only as abstract as Subject makes it. Compare with, say Bob Dylan, who to my mind has spent most of his career negotiating the same dilemma. There's no question that "Dylan" is a character that Robert Zimmerman has been playing and inhabiting for decades, with varying degrees of theater and overlap between real autobiography and pure myth-making. _why/Subject is playing a similar game here probably for similar reasons, and the connection between the two and how much real biography and myth-making is really up to Subject.
In other words, I don't think the idea of "_why" as a free-floating 'role' is completely adequate here -- the narrative is too entangled in the community's mind with Subject for it to become purely abstract/theatrical/literary and divorced from its creator. We're not going to see _why fan-fiction any time soon, and I suspect if anyone else starting writing in the voice of _why, it would quickly be spotted and met with opprobrium. Whatever distance between Subject and the _why role there is remains in the hands of Subject and in the nuance of how he executes the theater of it.
For me personally I've been fascinated with his creative persona since I read the Poignant Guide many years ago and love his creative integrity and sense of whimsy and fun. Totally unique in the software world, and one of the big reasons I was attracted to Ruby in the first place. It'll be fun to see how/if Subject plays this out.
Thanks! I'm not sure I invoked it well enough for people that don't read these things, though: that's what I get for dashing off a blog post. I'm still learning how to properly communicate the things I've been doing for the past few years with people, and I've had mixed success.
> the trick here is to be careful that we not confuse process philosophy (Whitehead, Bergson, Hartshorne)
So: I think that part of our difference is that I'm coming from process philosophy from the 'other direction' if you will: Deleuze and de Landa, who come later than Whitehead/Bergson. I still have yet to actually read those two, so there might be a bit of that going on.
> the trick here is to be careful that we not confuse process philosophy (Whitehead, Bergson, Hartshorne) for pure nominalism, or the pure separation of identity/name/essence from its object.
Right. I certainly don't want to confuse the two, and maybe I have a bit here.
> It's not that process philosophers reject essences out of hand, but that they attempt to find more descriptive language that accounts for the constant motion and change of substances.
See above about Deleuze vs. Whitehead. Regardless, point well taken.
> All this to say, I wonder if the notion of a 'role' is truly descriptive here
I am not perfectly happy with 'role' to be honest, but was trying to find a good analogy for those who haven't read my influences. Also, probably because (process vs essences) as (DCI vs OOP) is weighing heavy on my brain at the moment. Not that I like DCI...
> "_why" in this scheme becomes almost a pure abstraction devoid of the context of having been invented and inhabited by Subject.
I think this is a good critique, and I think that's where I was getting at with my bit at the end about "I don't think anyone should literally take up the mask." I may be making this too ideal; obviously, I prefer to stay material. Idealism is just too easy though!
> It'll be fun to see how/if Subject plays this out.
Agreed.
Anyway, thanks for this: I'm gonna give this some thought for when I write out a longer, more rigorous iteration. Feel free to email me if you ever want to talk about this intersection; it's pretty much what I do these days.
Absolutely, I'll ping you over email shortly. Although I find in person over libations to be much more dialectical (in the Socratic rather than Hegelian sense.) Maybe we'll cross paths at a conference some day...
> it's pretty much what I do these days.
A minor obsession we share, apparently, although it's been a while since I've been in full philosophical immersion mode.
I must admit I am woefully late to the Deluezian party. I've been reading around him for years (Heidegger, Husserl, a bit of Lacan, Marion, Levinas) but this discussion has pushed me over the edge, it's time I got up to speed -- where would you suggest I start?
As for Bergson, I see him as a kind of rival to the entire Husserlian tradition, Heidegger in particular; addressing the same questions regarding science and the difficulties of post-Kantian, post-Hegelian epistemology in the modern world, but much clearer and therefore less subject to the cult of interpretation that seems to be the domain of French phenomenology. It's all but forgotten that in say, 1920, had you had asked who was the most important philosopher in the world likely the answer would have been 'Bergson.' I think he still has a lot to say to us in 2013.
I'd start with his Introduction to Metaphysics and then to Matter and Memory.
Thanks for the exchange Steve, very fun stuff.
It depends: I personally struggled through Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus, then read Delueze's solo stuff after. It was pretty rough, though: worthwhile, but dense. If you're doing Lacan/Heidegger, I'd imagine you'd be fine. But I'm really super partial to Nietzsche and Philosophy: in the intro, Mike Hardt says it's "the best introduction to both Nietzsche's thought and Deleuze's." My understanding is that it relies a bit too much on The Will To Power for more recent Nietzsche scholarship, but that doesn't necessarily matter... anyway. You should check it out for sure, as it has really interesting relations to _why as well...
TL;DR: A Thousand Plateaus, Nietzsche and Philosophy, in either order.
I've always appreciated the simplicity of Heidegger's way of talking about this in terms of 'as' vs. 'is.' There's a degree of abstraction there that, I suppose, may not work for everyone, but I find it encapsulates the issue quite well. Deleuze is also excellent here -- I saw you mentioned BwO (and have Nomadology referenced in your profile), but I think you would particularly like The Fold and parts of Difference and Repetition, both of which approach the 'is' as endlessly, imperfectly repeated 'as', much the way one thinks of DNA mutatedly reproducing itself. Making a mental note to raid my library tonight and pull out some choice bits to send your way.
Whoah, if you got "Don't be excited" out of this, then I've failed: I am trying to not get too excited, just in case, but it's certainly exciting.
At the end of the Poignant Guide, _why talks about his own return: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/book/chapter-7.htm...
> Don't "hi" us!! Where have you _been_?
>
> Just Around.
>
> ...
>
> What about us? Do we have to take a nap?
>
> No no! We got chapter eight...
Seeing a great actor pick up his most famous role and re-take the stage is certainly a reason for excitement.
I'm on the fence, mostly as I came to ruby and RoR long after the _why era, but I get why someone might value their privacy and remain hidden whilst working in public.
I also do not want someone to literally pick up the name and 'adopt the mask.' I mean that if we want to truly understand his work, we should keep that joy alive, and occasionally have a moment of becoming-_why. But just a moment.
I do not think that it's often appropriate; I maintain quite a bit of _why's code these days, and we've had to throw much of it out straight-away. Creative, artsy C code doesn't do much for maintainability, even though it was the genesis of many great ideas.
Except when they try they're not very interesting; unlike `Subject`.
I don't know why people feel the need to do this. Someone has different political beliefs. Deal with it.
"Inhabitants of The United States of America. Typically uneducated and/or ignorant, they tend to have conservative political stances, speak only American English (no foreign languages), tend to only live and travel exclusively inside the United States, have strict religious ethical codes and practices, and rarely understand or mingle with people of other cultures, races, or ethnicities. Merikans are often disliked by citizens of other Nations and tend to be parodied in foreign television, movies, or other media. They tend to also be disliked by many other Americans."
None of these things are judgements: they're statements of facts. They'd think that all of these qualifiers were positive.
You can imagine what happens when I bring up anything French.
When I lived in Korea one of my co-workers didn't have a problem with the slur gook. She equated it to mean people of rice. That doesn't mean that gook is no longer a derogatory term.
When people use the term Murrican they really mean, "Those people down south who are dumb as shit."
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_E...