24. “Only to someone’s face can one say …”

A person has an intention, a cat has an intention, even an ant one might suppose has an intention.  Watching a fish in a tank, it is in some sense aware … But can one be certain of this?  Perhaps one wants to say that really animals are just organic machines.  (As Descartes seemed to think of them - indeed, somewhat improbably it has to be said.)  What is the evidence?  A dog doesn’t see things as I see them.  And yet aren’t there shared areas of feeling?  There are situations in which I respond to the dog as I might to a person.  With laughter, with anger, with sympathy, and so on.  The dog exhibits pain behaviour.  Emotion … When it comes to an ant the shared experience seems much less.  But even then …

An ant has no face.  But a dog does.  A visible expression.

Were I ever to have a conversation with an ant - I want to say - its expression would be invisible to me.  I wouldn’t know what it was thinking … Even could I see it clearly.

… But after a while, couldn’t I learn to recognise signs? 

“But what on earth would you talk about?”  Well, but what on earth is it that we normally talk about? (Imagine a slightly unusual dream and in the dream speaking to an ant and the ant seeming to make sense - good sense - even if on waking nothing of what was mentioned can be remembered.)

A fragment

In the same way as I can’t I say: “My hand intended to scratch my ear” - just in that way, I can’t know who I am.

Intending to be

The concept of life invokes the idea of intention.  Life intends.  That is, individual creatures intend - purpose - this or that.  The gazelle to drink, the bird to eat, for example.  And so on.  The avoidence of death by living creatures indicates an intention to live.  We say “The drone (bee) intends to live / The drone intends to die”.  In either case we can’t substract the idea of intending without making the concept of life absurd.   “Did you intend to catch the train?”  “Yes.  I did.  What else?”

Here one wants to say that it is in someone’s face that an intention they have occurs: specifically, in their eyes. 

Metaphysical Anthropomorphism

In what sense is it or, can it be said to be, a fact that “genes seek to reproduce themselves”?  If one says, “The earth attracts the moon” it isn’t meant that an emotional attraction occurs.  So shouldn’t it be possible likewise to say that “genes seek“?  But here it’s important to recollect the word’s use.

Evolution and its loopholes

A mouse that can purr like a cat - is that an item ’nature’ produces?  The alteration of a creature’s genetic make up - if that is shaped by human concerns - that would seem to be a product of the human imagination rather than of ‘genes seeking to reproduce themselves’.   A genetically engineered ‘human’ - exhibiting whatever characteristics one likes - a tiger’s strength, a moth’s resilience, cold blood, and so on - the possibilities seem endless - how is that a product of Nature?  The observer of evolution - the human being - seems not to be part of the process whereby the creature evolves in nature.

Everything points to the homelessness of human beings. 

The Importance of Geography

Two things are important to Pere Ubu, intellectually.

 The cliche; and geography.

 These ideas decide everything else.

Relocating the Argument

It is no good where we are.  Not at all.   The argument needs relocating.  Just a few blades of grass survive, if that.  Sticking out of the cracks between the broken paving. 

The Cliche

In ’Little Sister’, on 18 Monkeys on a Dead Man’s Chest Thomas manages to say, or to sing, the word “Yeah” for by my count something approaching 40 times in a row; we hear it - it is repeated, it’s said once and again, where this is done without losing the feel of variation and continuity that music needs - it works as a kind of balancing act - and since it comes off - he nails it perfectly as one of the instruments of the rock canon: the cliche in the affirmative.  Yes, yes, yes; it is realised as a music and it is hilarious.  Of course what he really means is “No”.  But.  But what does “No” mean?

Homelessness (2)

Pere Ubu’s song textures, sounds, mike distortions, studio involutions - aesthetic foibles - guitar bumbles - tape loops - drum beatings advance the idea that we are homeless.  Everything says that we are not at home in the world.  Nothing else is presented.  We are homeless, we have no place to live, there is nowhere to live, nowhere that identifies the human.  Nothing else has meaning.  The opening track of 18 Monkeys on a Dead Man’s Chest for example.  Or ‘Love Song’ from Why I Hate Women.  Or take any song at all.

They find a way of being at home in their homelessness.

Rhetoric: our final homelessness

The Greeks emphased the learning of rhetoric … Its importance for public life is obvious.   That the troops should be pulled out of Iraq is eloquently argued by one party; that they should stay is equally eloquently argued by another.  A bewildering situation.  The question arises if there is, or was, not some other position - prior to its tragedy - some other stance that should have been taken initially in order to forgo the need for this eloquence; so that in the end, what we are listening to, the arguments, these are just laments about spilt milk.  The decisive moment has long since passed.

It reminds me of the argument about God; if he does, if he does not, exist.  Equal quantities of eloquence are expended on both sides in order to ‘try and decide the case’.  One can’t help wondering if the decisive moment doesn’t stand elsewhere, somewhere far different.  Dawkins: “I am arguing from fact …”  But is he?  There is something peculiar about his constant advocacy.  As if his own arguments don’t really satisfy him, as if he doesn’t really feel at home with them, and they just increase his thirst, what they are intended to quench.  We get lost in rhetoric.  Brilliant, dazzling, persuasive - but somehow empty at the same time.  So: the reasonable.