Showing papers in "Common Knowledge in 2013"

Is Yoga Hindu?: On the Fuzziness of Religious Boundaries

Abstract: This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” explores the boundaries between religions by exploring the ambiguous place of yoga in various religious traditions, both modern and premodern. Recently, certain Hindus and Christians have tried to argue that yoga is an essentially Hindu practice, making their case by appealing to the Yoga Sutras, a text by the Sanskrit author Patanjali. However, on closer examination, the Yoga Sutras seem to exist in a fuzzy, indeterminate space that is not quite “Hindu” in the way the word is understood today. For instance, other Sanskrit authors of the first millennium CE criticized Patanjali’s yoga teachings for not being properly theistic and for having strong affinities to Buddhism and Jainism. Yoga was also integrated into at least one of the “religions of the book” in the medieval period: in India in the second millennium, yoga was practiced widely among Sufis, who adapted it in surprising and idiosyncratic ways to make it compatible with their own Islamic philosophies. Nicholson concludes with an appeal for a more nuanced understanding of religious contact that goes beyond the pejorative term syncretism to acknowledge that religious mixing has been a central force in the development not only of Hinduism and Islam, but also of Christianity.

Fuzziness and Perceptions of Language in the Middle Ages: Part 3: Translating Fuzziness: Countertexts

Abstract: This is the final part of a three-part essay on fuzziness in medieval literary language. Each part corresponds broadly to Clifford Geertz’s trifold instances of blur as involving “face-to-face interaction” (“life as game”), “collective intensities” (“life as stage”), and “imaginative forms” (“life as text”). Part 3 considers what Geertz might mean by describing text as a “dangerously unfocused term,” through discussing how bilingualism is negotiated in poetry. Three areas of vagueness are explored: the linguistic boundaries in a bilingual poem, the definition of a poem in the trilingual culture of insular medieval writing, and the relationship between literary and ordinary language. Examples are taken from a fifteenth-century bilingual carol, an early fourteenth-century trilingual poem, a bilingual sermon, a passage of love-writing discovered in the midst of a fifteenth-century legal roll, and finally a pair of French poems about the death of the English commander, Thomas Montagu, fourth earl of Salisbury, at the English siege of Orleans in 1428, contrasted with some English translations of poems by Charles d’Orleans. The essay argues that blurriness in medieval bilingualism gives us a fresh way of approaching primary questions about poetry and the literary.

Ambiguity, Ambience, Ambivalence, and the Environment

Abstract: In this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur,” the words ambiguity , ambivalence , and ambience are shown to share the common prefix, from Latin, ambi- , defined in most modern dictionaries as “around, on both sides.” Ambi captures some, but not all, so Leo Spitzer has argued, of the multiple senses (physical surrounding, spiritual embrace, air) that Greeks infused into the prefix peri. Ambiguity and ambience (“going around,” “that which surrounds”), as well as the more modern ambivalence (coined in the context of psychonanalysis), suggest different angles of perception, but all represent fuzzy modes, modes that would seem to have no place in science, especially in climate science, which is pressed to be ever more precise. Yet an analysis of the genealogy of these terms and, in particular, of the differential relation between “around” and “on both sides” may reveal that the very fuzziness of ambi is precisely what is required to grasp the chaotic complexity of the environment.

Fuzziness and Perceptions of Language in the Middle Ages: Part 2: Collective Fuzziness: Three Treaties and a Funeral

Abstract: This article on fuzziness in medieval language use is the second part of a three-part contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur.” Each part corresponds broadly to Clifford Geertz’s trifold instances of blur as involving “face-to-face interaction” (“life as game”), “collective intensities” (“life as stage”), and “imaginative forms” (“life as text”). Part 2 discusses “collective intensities” by means of some of the key examples of diplomatic negotiations in the Hundred Years War. The main focus of interest is the Treaty of Bretigny, the funeral of Jean II, and the Treaty of Leulinghen. The article asks how English and French negotiators worked collectively through language to create, identify, and maintain borderlines in their public, political relationships.

Reticence and the Fuzziness of Thresholds: A Bakhtinian Apology for Quietism

Abstract: This article discusses implicit conceptions of reticence in the early philosophical writings of Mikhail Bakhtin. Contrary to the image of Bakhtin as a thinker of dialogue, polyphony, and voice, it finds a strand in Bakhtin’s thought that suggests that there might be good reasons for remaining silent and not stepping into the world in speech: in reticence, the human being avoids both judgment and being judged, eludes the risk of the addressee’s absence or unreliability, and resists the finality of utterance that shares in the finality of death. This essay makes a case for a Bakhtinian apology for quietism and seeks to contribute to recent work in Common Knowledge on that subject. Bakhtin’s conception of reticence is usefully understood with reference to threshold situations: in withholding a future word, a human being hovers on the borders of nonbeing and being, on the borders of the present, future, and past. In this sense, reticence is allied to conceptions of fuzziness and blur that have also been concerns of this journal in recent years. In making these claims, the essay relates Bakhtin’s thought to a Russian literary tradition of thinking about silence (Tiutchev’s and Mandelstam’s Silentium poems), as well as to a more broadly European intellectual context (Arendt and Heidegger, for example), where thinkers understand being in terms of becoming and understand disclosure through speech.

Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism by Slavoj Žižek (review)

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Introduction: Bland Blur

Abstract: This essay, by the editor of Common Knowledge , introduces the sixth and final installment of “Fuzzy Studies,” the journal’s “Symposium on the Consequence of Blur.” Suggesting that “Fuzzy Studies” should be understood in the context of a desultory campaign against zeal conducted in the journal for almost twenty years, he explains that the editors’ assumption has been that any authentic case for the less adamant modes of thinking, or the less focused ways of seeing, needs to be unenthusiastic and carefully ramified. To establish the distinction between overenthused and unemphatic approaches to blur, he contrasts the ecstatically amorphous “Blur building” (on Switzerland’s Lake Neuchâtel) with examples of classical Chinese landscape painting. Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio, in their book blur: the making of nothing , chronicle the development of their plans for the Blur building and, in the process, inadvertently show that, to overbear various negative associations of blur and fog, the authors/architects grew self-contradictorily emphatic about the need to produce de-emphasis in architecture and in modern life. Perl shows how this self-contradiction appears also in phenomenology-inflected writings on blur by T. J. Clark, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Kraus, J.-P. Sartre, and Georges Bataille, but not in the work of the phenomenologist (and sinologist) Francois Jullien, whose book The Great Image Has No Form analyzes the role of blur in classical Chinese art theory and practice. Where traditional Western painting, Jullien argues, calls for voyeuristically intense focus, traditional Chinese painting stimulates “ de-tente , relaxation or ‘untensing’.” Intense focus on a blur is still, Perl observes, an intense focus. In describing a painting by the Yuan Dynasty master Ni Zan, Perl concludes that the only way to be un-self-contradictorily positive about fuzziness, whether in logic or aesthetics, is to de-reify and de-differentiate with the aim of achieving blandness.

Modernist Poetry's Encounter with Epistemic Models of Value

Abstract: This article elaborates on the dilemma faced by modernist poets in seeking to define values in an intellectual context that was post-Romantic and post-epistemic. Pound and Stevens, for example, reacted strongly against the ways that Romantic writers had tried to tie the rhetorical elaboration of values to precise descriptions, as if description could still support values. Victorian writing tended to experience the effort to ground value in fact as a source of constant irony, given that the desired values refused to become manifest. Positivist philosophy and its literary allies asserted that values simply occupy a different and much more unstable realm than do facts. Having established these historical premises, the essay then concentrates on how Stevens and Pound, in challenging positivist assumptions, sought two different sources of value, each of which, however, placed value within the domain of experience. Pound’s approach was Nietzschean, in that it was Nietzsche who had demonstrated how valuing precedes determinations about fact. Pound’s capacity to make his early lyric poems seem to come out of nowhere and depend on linguistic invention alone for their power is shown to be a realization of Nietzschean strategies. Meanwhile, Stevens in his early work tried out a range of attitudes that seemed to him capable of defying fact, especially by approximating aphoristic self-assertion. Finally, Pound in his Cantos and Stevens from the late thirties onward developed self-reflexive versions of an analogical model of valuing that, as Dora Zhang has shown, shaped the response of novelists (James, Proust, and Woolf) to the same dilemma that modernist poets were facing. The essay closes with a reading of section XII of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” as a demonstration of Stevens’s analogical mode.

On Sort of Knowing: The Daoist Unhewn

Abstract: The article, a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur,” analyzes the metaphysical assumptions behind the valorization of “clear and distinct ideas,” apodictic knowledge, and definitiveness, and it suggests alternatives derived from Daoist sources, where a different model of knowing prevails. That model undermines the idea of purposive willing in the service of goals known in advance, and undermines as well the bases for any human or divine activity designed to achieve definite ends. If purpose is not privileged either metaphysically or ethically, the concomitant notion of unambiguous fact is also shaken. In the absence, even in principle, of any form of knowing, human or divine, that is unambiguous and apodictic, there is no reason to grant ontological privilege to the paradigm of “unambiguous potential objects of knowledge.” This article concludes by asking and in part answering what the world looks like, what sort of human cognition and activity is most appropriate, in the absence of clear purposes, definite knowledge, and unambiguous facts.

History from Way Above: Recognizing Patterns through the Fuzz and Fog of the Past

Abstract: This contribution to part 4 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur” shows how the reputedly radical position that history is not about eternal truths but about the creative construction of a convincing narrative of past events is not an argument of recent vintage. In the days when postmodernism was a technical term used mainly by scholars of art and architecture—and indeed, decades before then—professional historians were grappling with the incapacity of facts to write themselves into a universally satisfying, single version of history. Successive presidents of the American Historical Association such as Andrew Dickson White, Carl Becker, Charles Beard, and William McNeill admitted that writing history is a desperate attempt at pattern recognition in a fuzzy discipline. Pattern recognition is a tool, valuable as a stage in historical thinking, but destined ultimately to come undone. What remains, then, is fuzzy thinking. It can be a good thing, the article concludes, to let our thinking about history remain a blur or, at least, to bear in mind that any patterns we recognize in the past are liable to dissolve under a different light.

China's Sakharov and Havel: Fang Lizhi, 1936–2012

Abstract: This essay, written in memory of the Chinese astrophysicist and dissident Fang Lizhi, reexamines the period in Fang’s life when he was vice president of the University of Science and Technology of China and, because of his activities as an educational and political reformer, came to be dubbed “China’s Andrei Sakharov.” It also retells, from the perspective of an insider, the dramatic narrative of Fang’s year with his wife, Li Shuxian, living in the US embassy in Beijing following the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and subsequent massacre. But the special focus of this overview of Fang’s career is on his development as a thinker on questions of politics and human rights. Though Fang never returned to China and, while living in the United States, kept his distance from dissident movements, he continued to develop intellectually in ways that made him, in later life, China’s Vaclav Havel.

Fuzzy Categories and Religious Polemics: The Daily Life of Christians and Muslims in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean World

Abstract: This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium "Fuzzy Studies" argues, on the basis of recent research, that religious polemic is a phenomenon closely associated only with monotheist traditions. Focusing on religious polemics in medieval and early modern Islamic and Christian Spain, it analyzes polemical texts of diverse natures and from different centuries to see how their authors, by attacking both dogmatic and legal opinion, aimed to harden the amorphous boundaries between groups. On the Christian side, polemicists argued for the restriction of the rights of Muslims and Jews in Christian territories, or for the outright expulsion or conversion of these groups. On the Islamic side, a number of Muslim authors voiced the claim that Muslims should emigrate from Christian territories. The article seeks to show how these polemical voices argued against known opponents but also against anonymous Christians, Muslims, and Jews who, untouched by such polemics, had lived close to one another and, without conflict, had accepted the undefined character of their daily life together. In support of this argument, the author makes use of hitherto unknown archival documents regarding how adherents of the three religions interacted in medieval Christian Spain.

FRIZZLY STUDIES Negotiating the Invisible Lines of Race

Abstract: Beginning with the assumption that race is a conceptual blur, this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” argues that race conflates what is plain to see with something that is invisible. Race roots today’s policy decisions in a remote and often imagined past. It blurs agency and overwhelming structural inequality. It is a set of categories that people define for themselves and that, at the same time, others—strangers, neighbors, government officials—relentlessly impose upon them. For four hundred years, the meaning of racial categories in North America has remained unstable. A central question underlying the history of race in the United States is how people could acknowledge the incoherence of racial categories while still structuring their lives, communities, politics, and culture around the idea of race. At a fundamental level, race has functioned as a set of rules and rights—and legal entitlements and disabilities are a primary source of meaning for racial categories. The law provides a starting point for understanding how there could be so much consensus regarding such a blur. Legal decision making is itself a process that blurs what is objective and subjective, scientific and social, precise and penumbral. Taken together, the pervasive fuzziness of race and law ensured the resilience of clear and definable regimes of discrimination and hierarchy.