Monday, December 7, 2015

Destination Infinity

I once knew a man
who could put words
into images,
and images into words.
He had a glass box
full of ants that he studied.
Music was playing,
and he was dancing,
but his dancing was more like twitching.
His twitching was in time to the music.
He was losing the images in his head.
And he struggled over whether or not
the ants
should be experimented upon.
Then the box was smashed,
and the ants were everywhere.
He felt they were inside him,
and he stuck his tongue out rhythmically,
so they could come out.

He told me
about Alpha Centauri and the Aquarian.
He told me 
how far the earth is from the sun.
He said,
“You have to move your body to the funk.“
He could talk without moving his mouth.
There is a world of sound.
There is a world of vision.
Sometimes the worlds come together.

His glasses had two-way mirrors
so that when he looked out,
he looked into himself.
He represented a collision
between matter and anti-matter.
There was too much energy
to be measured in candle-power.
He made me ask myself,
“When a rocket
accelerates through the atmosphere,
what determines the boost factor?”

When he talked,
he  created an electrical storm.
When he cried,
his words were raining.
The storm windows
were smashed, and
the power lines were down.
The cables were swinging
into epileptic outcry.
He gazed upward,
and looked
at the burning holes in the sky.
A bat was hanging on a wire.
The unconscious became conscious
with the smell of noseblood.

He taught me
how to see people coming out of the shadows.
They were doing a new dance routine.
They tried new top hats on.
Their melancholy
could not be measured with a light meter.
Their faces were expressionless,
and they couldn’t feel anything.
They were practiced
in the art of the poseur.
They said that everything
was a copy of something else.
They were on a platform,
and the floor was tilted.
The shoes of those that passed by
were all I could see.
I could see no higher.

He asked me,
“What world do you want to live in?
The world of lasers and starships?
The world of clouds,
where you float in the sky?
The world of water,
where your boat is tossed
gently by the wind?”

I said to him,
“Are you talking about
the present or the past?”
But he answered,
“When you finally get ready to act,
it will already be too late.
Your life will be over.
Your time will have passed.
The nuclear rockets
and the guided missiles
will already have been here.
The thunderclouds
will have broken.
The next man to be killed
by another man
will already have died.
Today’s newspaper
will already be old news.
Tea will have been served.
What you thought about yesterday
will not be done tomorrow."

So he climbed a rope
to contemplate his theosophy.
I couldn’t follow him,
because I wasn’t skilled enough.
“What is the reverse of God?” 
he asked.
“Maybe the reverse of God is God,”
I said.
But then I thought,
“Isn’t there a presence in absence,
and an absence in presence?
Isn’t there a disorder in order,
and an order in disorder?
Doesn’t the absence of meaning
mean something?”
The meaninglessness of something
may be defined 
by what gives meaning 
to everything."

I went places with him,
wanting to find out who I was.
But my rainbow break was shorted out.
I couldn’t hang it on a gliding board.
I knew where I was going,
but not where I’d come from.
Australopithecus was picking his teeth
on the bones of my ancestors. 
I went to a graveyard
and slept with the dead.
The tenth book of tombs
had been written
before I entered in.
I looked around
at the gravestones.
The aurora was following 
the midnight sun.
The land had footprints on it.
It had been lived on.

I laid down on the earth,
and had visions.
A man with a trumpet was playing jazz.
A nightmare was sitting next to him.
The nightmare was a man
whose face couldn’t’ be seen
because of his hat.
He was wearing a trench coat,
and had pockets of blue.
He spoke through an alto saxophone
that didn't need to be translated.

I found myself in a bedroom,
looking at a chest with brass handles
that had a mirror over it.
A magus was hiding in the back drawer.
His kidneys weren’t functioning properly.
He had endured many tests
on his kidney function,
and he didn’t want to be tested anymore.
I lifted him out of the drawer,
and we went downstairs to the backyard.
He’d invited people over for a cricket match
that he didn’t want to attend.
People were standing about silently,
waiting for him to show up.
There were gate crashers
whose attire clashed with the others.
Garden parties were out of season.
The art of mime was in rehearsal.
The rain from yesterday
left tears on a jonquil.

I had to learn more
from the man who’d told me
about the present and the past.
He told me about life and death.
He said, “I’ve already had my death.
This is the afterlife.
So anything in death,
I’ll have lived as life.
I’m one of the living dead.
What’s been given birth
will have death and rebirth.
And what is, will always have being.
As long as I have life, I’ll know death.
And what I know of those who have life,
I can know of those who are dead.
I can learn to know those who are dead,
just as I can learn to know
those who have life.
To be one with life is to know death.
But to commit oneself to death
is no longer to know life.
What I can say to the living,
I can't say to the dead.
And what I’m concerned with
is not death, but life.”

He took me walking on a rock.
He told me the planet was dividing.
The rock was split
by a force moving.
All movement was faceted,
and anything that could fly
had struts in its wings.
The trees were bare, 
and blood was spattered 
across a black sky.
I saw his fingers stretching out
in a network over the scorched earth.
Thousands of locusts
were coming in and out of the invisible.
We went into a house
where we met an old man.
He opened a closet door,
and there were incredibly dirty rags inside.
Spiders were regimented
into an attack force.
We went into the closet
and my friend asked the old man
to let him sit in the electric chair.
The clamps were placed on his skull,
and the message was transmitted.
An array of cubes over his head
was organized spatially
to generate controlled acoustics.
The walls of the closet fell away.
We were standing on a glass floor
as vast as a convention center.
There were prisms sliding back and forth
across the axis in which he stood.
He was in an arcade of spheres
that was orbiting over his head.
Whorls of dim stars
signaled him
like sidelights on a marquee.
Pulsars and quasars
were contracted into him.
Searchlights were swinging
in arcs of increasing complexity.
We walked to the edge of the platform.
We stepped down and walked to a door.
The door opened to a small dumbwaiter
and he climbed in.

There was a smell of garbage inside.
His vision was iridescent,
and he saw infrareds he’d never seen before.
The birth image he had
was of being born in a walnut.
It was burning,
and some of the ashes
were clinging together and crawling away.
He moved over,
and I got into the dumbwaiter.
We crawled down a tunnel
and came onto a stone floor.
There were vertical steps
projected out of a wall onto a parapet.
It was sunset,
and the clouds were ascending.
Someone was coming toward us,
and we couldn’t tell
if it was a man or a woman.

We climbed upward
and found ourselves 
in a city at midnight.
Thousands of kilowatts 
had been snuffed out.
Mortuaries were brighter places.
The street we were on
was a corridor
that led toward an edifice.
The lines that were drawn
were demanding a definite conclusion.
In front of us, 
a man stood next to the monolith
that stood at the end of the street.
The inscriptions on the obelisk
told of something that was unknowable.
The man had a visor over his head,
and inside his helmet nothing could be seen,
no features were visible.
He had a creed that was one for all places.
It was really calendar-gone.

I asked the man
who told me 
about the present and the past
if there is light 
that doesn’t produce light.
Is there light 
that doesn’t travel through space,
and that travels only into itself?
Can there be light
that doesn’t have 
the physical properties of light?
Somewhere there is someone
who has such a beam of light.
    
He tried to tell me what the bottomless was.
The place where there is no light.
The bottom of the soul.
The bottom of the world.
The abyss without a bottom.
The bottomless underbelly of endlessness.
The beginning of the bottomless emptiness.
I couldn't come up from the bottom.
     
We walked around the city.
It was dawn.
A new day was coming.
A wino was standing on a street corner.
He could see train wrecks,
and was on a bender
that was rocking his mind.
He just let the scotch
run ‘round his mouth,
and said he could do
the mashed potato.
He had a friend named Shortwave
who was into mainlining.
She said she wanted
to cut us some smack,
give us a taste
of what would rock our minds.
Let us see a backdoor man
playin’ a funky blues piano.
Even if he could see,
and we were all blind.
     
We came to an iron works.
A furnace was burning.
Clouds of ash
brought the hydrocarbons
that were making the rain fall.
Axes to grind
came from the blacksmith.
He swung his blade against a wall,
and plaster chips fell away.
The fathom riot
of his drunken speeches
founded a liberal paganism.
     
Miscreants were throwing
rolls of toilet paper
into the street.
We talked with a poet
who wrote
about what they were doing.

She took us to a printing house.
The assistant editor 
was reading a manuscript,
and was asking, 
"What are the ambiguities?"
The apogee of the grammarian
was his triumph
over sentence structure.
The psoriatic stenographer
put camphor on his wounds. 

There were amazing 
structural possibilities.
Shamans were talking to ex-bankers.
The cause that men died for
was given the once-over
by a brilliant ideologue.
Band-aids were made ready
by professional pundits.
The bunions of the Manicheans
foretold concepts of destiny.
     
I told the man who’d told me
about life and death
about a dream I had.
It was a dream
about faces of people
I’d never seen.
People with no faces
were talking to me.
I looked into a mirror,
and saw that I had a face.
In fact, it was inescapable.
But each day
I looked into the mirror,
I saw I was losing
more and more of my face.
I became one of the faceless.
I no longer had a face,
and there were no more faces.
I couldn’t remember my name.
I couldn’t remember who I was.
I walked along the street,
and saw other faceless people.
We were all faceless people.
I knew the only way
I could regain my identity
was by remembering
that I’d once had a face.
I did things
that weren’t approved of
by the faceless people
but they couldn’t show me
their disapproval
in a way that would change me,
because I couldn’t see their faces.
I saw that the only way
to regain my identity
was to express myself,
to care for others,
to love and share
with even those
who’d been faceless to me.
And the more I was able to do this,
the more I saw
that I was regaining my face.
And then I was able
to give faces to other people,
who, in turn, were able
to give faces to others.
And then
there were no more faceless people.
     
We met a little boy
who wore spectacles
and had dirty smudges on his nose.
He was in a sheet,
playing a ghost story.
He held a clock book in his hand,
and asked me what was in it.
There were suns inside the sun.
He opened his mouth,
and it was the sun talking.
He asked me
how long I could look at the sun.
     
I walked to school,
and went to class,
trying to find out
which class I belonged in.
I didn’t belong in History.
I didn’t belong in Math.
I didn’t belong in English Lit.
I ended up waiting in the hall
until all the classes were over,
and then I went into each one,
and apologized for not being there.
     
The wind was blowing
a stack of papers away.
I was trying to run
and catch hold 
of each sheet of paper,
but I couldn’t catch them,
and they were all blowing away.
I knew that each sheet of paper
that I couldn’t find
would be a part of my mind
that was lost.
     
I walked into a seminar 
on existential psychology.
The instructor lectured
on the history of ideas.
Besides politics, her interests
included psychiatry
and the philosophy of rationalism.
She said the course of history
was changed by logic.
There were no inner truths
to be marsupialized.
I asked myself whether it’s logical
to say there are no inner truths.
Isn’t it better
to labor under the illusion
that there are basic truths?
To say there are no basic truths
is to try to state a basic truth.
     
She let me visit her apartment.
In her living room,
she'd painted clouds on the walls.
She'd been doing cartwheels
in a photographer’s dream.
She opened her pocketbook
and showed me a picture
of a blind man with dark glasses.
“He used to be my lover,” she said.
She took a mirror out of her pocketbook.
“We're all mirrors for each other,” she said.
“I’d rather be my own mirror,” I thought.
     
We went riding in a sedan.
We arrived at an estate.
I talked to the motorman.
He sat with his legs crossed.
He’d been to the petrified forest.
His white jersey was freshly laundered.
He described accidents
for which he’d written a tone poem.
Collisions of belief.
Thrusts on the brake pedal of his hostility.
The kindly
wicker basket carrying lady
of the black shroud
at the estate had requested
letters of introduction
to his great-aunt.
She served spaghetti
in an uncontrollably
steamy deep dish
that hardly demanded
any inquiry
as to what
it was laden with.
Her masseuse had showered her
with a sense of longing for former protégés.
Her rusted carriage
was a silhouette of afterthought.
Her smile was simple and uncalculated.
She was in love with the motorman.
     
We came to the sea,
and walked on the beach.
Our feet were wet.
Lights were glowing in our eyes.
My eyes were like headlights.
The philosopher who was with us
had taken so many tranquilizers
that his face was numb.
The griots were far away.
They had asked for a day’s journey
to the place from which reasons
for unreason come.
The rational man
had observed that patterns
always intersected each other,
so that the conclusions
that could be drawn from one plane
could be drawn from another.
But the philosopher said
that to find the answer
for anything,
you had to enter
the realm of the imagination.
He said the only drugs
he took were freebies.
His only drug was experience.
He said,
“Where the known becomes unknown,
that is where I begin.”
     
We were in a place
where all the colors
were reds and yellows.
The sky was yellow.
The water and earth
were red.
I was dark red,
and my eyes were yellow.
There were only two colors.
We didn’t have bodies.
We only had forms.
All concepts were two-dimensional.
There were only two planes in space.
If you walked through a door,
you walked
into the plane the door was in.
You always walked in the same plane.
     
We walked into the other plane again,
where we had bodies
and not just forms,
but were human beings.
We were with many others.
Everyone was naked.
We were all naked.
There was no thought
of hiding or concealing
anything from one another.
We didn’t have to touch one another.
We all accepted our nakedness.
There was something impenetrable
that proposed our honesty
to one another.
The fact of our nakedness.
We talked and accepted our bodies.
No one belonged to anyone else.
Every individual
was accepted as a human being.
     
I asked, “What is the meaning of our nakedness?
When you're naked,
is anything changed in your identity?
Do you become a different person?
Maybe the more naked you are,
the more that others know about you.
But if your nakedness is known,
what control do you have
over what others know about you?
Do you lose something
of yourself perhaps,
when others 
know your nakedness?
When is it good
to want to make yourself
naked in front of others?
There’s no way of taking back
your nakedness,
once it’s known.
But if you're naked,
maybe the more naked you are,
the more you know yourself."
     
We walked
into another part of the city
that was in ruins.
Architects were trying to reconstruct it.
Wrecking crews were deciding
in what way it would be a finished product.
The remnants of a lost deity
were collected for description.
The people who were there
piled stones to their creator.
The Myrmidons
who bent their backs to an overlord
were summoned by an agèd paraclete.
Everyone had found out
how to put the fragments together.
The thorn brake of ontology
was broken by one mind redivivus.
     
I gave cards to all the people in the street.
I wanted them to know
where I was to be buried.
The tombstone sank into the earth
deeper in February.
Alabaster columns
were in front of all our tombs.
I wanted to talk to the funeral director.
He felt that a casket should rise
and expand after it is closed,
like a French crescent roll.
I went to a funeral.
There was a graveyard for crucifixes,
but not for the dead.
There was a hearse that had
beaming headlights
and was a radiant black
and had curtains in the windows
that looked like white icing.
But I started to smell an old smell,
and I told myself,
“I have to get out of here 
as soon as I can.”
     
We came to a sacred place.
It had been erected from rocks
that had fallen out of the sky
from another planet.
The coloratura of divinity
outdistanced all thoughts of being.
The parson’s testimony
was mostly not taken.
His findings were inconclusive.
The answer that he found
measured zero on the Richter scale.
He didn’t know whether God was dead.
He lectured on the meaning of faith.
The evangelist had a marble in his mouth.
The heaven that was browsed upon by agnostics
was condensed into a tin can.
But the parson didn’t know
that they couldn’t be taught
how to run quickly.
Meridians of varying densities
were what they exalted.
His only remonstrance
was the subject of a baccalaureate.
He told us that answers were being given
by people with no questions.
The nature of divination
was characteristically arcane.
By way of metaphor,
he turned from cerebration
to seminars on how to cope.
Basic mechanics
were as necessary as grocery shopping.
     
We sang the Agnus Dei
and the Sursum Corda.
The life ever after,
and the resurrection.
The dogs were dead.
The curses of caves
were echoed with songs of faith.
The strumpet put on the mitre
of the archbishop.
Her labors brought her
to an altered epiphany.
The beauty of her ugliness.
The ugliness of her beauty.
     
I asked the parson about his sermon.
“If everything living were dead,
would there still be God?
If God is what has created life,
and there were no more life,
would there still be God?
Is God being?
Is God meaning? 
Is God a condition?
Is God a state of mind?
Is God the creator?
Is God in the past or present?
What does being closer to God mean?
Why do some people think
they're closer to God than others?
Who can tell someone else
what God is? 
If I ask whether this is God,
is that the same
as asking whether there is life?
If there is life,
does that mean there is God?”
     
I asked whether there is a point
at which life starts
in the physical structure of things.
Is there something mystical called life,
other than what is defined
by the physical structure of things?
Is there a point
at which an object in itself
becomes a living thing?
And who can define that point?
And why that point
and not another?

The man who had told me
about life and death
asked me if I had found out
where to start to look for life.
I said,
 “When I’ve found what I’m looking for,
I’m not sure I’ll know I’ve found it.
Because I’m involved in
a struggle with death.
Yes, I’ve seen death.
But I can’t hold death in my hands.
I can’t really know
what I’m struggling with.
When I’ve found
that I’ve lost the struggle for life,
death will already have taken that life.
I’ll have nothing to struggle for.
I want to find out
if whatever has lived will always have life.”

Time was traveling incredibly fast.
The frequency of radio waves
was all I could hear.
My brain waves
had become only alpha activity.
I was lost in heat, light, density,
time, space, numbers of events.
There was a new day,
and the time was coming.

I lived in a prehistoric forest
with an old man,
and we made a soup
with crushed plants.
The water we used
was heavy water.
The old man tested it
with a strip of litmus paper.
The litmus turned a color
that wasn’t defined by acid-base.
The old man drank,
and he was at the dawn of life.
He sharpened a stone
that he used to make a fire.
His invention was tested
on a frictionless wheel.
It was a time
when humankind
had not yet started
its history on the earth.
There were mud skulls on the ground
that had real teeth.
The eyes in the skulls were watching us.
The old man had a book
that was filled with recipes for truth.
The halo that surrounded his head
gave me a migraine.
He rededicated his parsimony
with an aspirin.

The outside of my brain was burning.
It was burning
between the pia mater and dura mater.
There was no ectoplasm or endoplasm.
There was no white matter or gray matter.

I felt as if I could do anything.
I could make myself invisible,
disintegrate matter
and reconstitute myself.
The flash uncoiled a spring
of orgasmic feeling.
I felt that if I were the dealer,
I could throw down.
I went to the school of mother wit.
I did improvisational dance steps
to boring speeches.
I grew images in a bouquet of flowers.
I copied mathematical equations
and subscribed to a philosophy of poverty.
I lived in a tree for twenty-three years,
and grew very dry.
I was an aesthete,
fascinated by denying myself macaroons.
I knelt on the floor of a cave,
and played marbles
with the stones on the floor.
I let vultures pick at my liver.
I denied there was any such thing
as the thing in itself.
Destination zero.
The beginning and the end.
And death infinity couldn't do me in.

I asked myself,
“What impulses do I want to control,
and what do I not want to control?
What impulses do I have?
If I controlled every impulse,
what would I have left?
Where would my impulses take me,
into a method or a lack of it?”

I was in a world
where smells, tastes, sounds,
images, and sensations
were all interchanged.
I could feel colors
and see sounds.
I could see
whatever colors I wanted.
I couldn’t shut
any doors of perception
without opening others.

We played with gyroscopes and radiometers.
The concepts of quantum physics
were totally within our understanding.
All computers were constructed 
in the image of Man.

Dirigibles collided in the air.
It was the earth that was moving,
and the sky that stood still.
The farmer opened his almanac.
He said, “If you’re not watching television
at the right moment,
you’ll probably not know
when the missiles are in the air,
and you won’t know
when there are a few minutes left
before the world is blown to smithereens.
The eclipse will be rhythmic,
and right-sided,
and soft caramel.

But the land masses were moving.
The waters were opening,
and the surface of the earth
was totally changed.
There were numberless continents.
The clouds that covered the earth
were only in one hemisphere.
The earth was spinning and rolling.
It had no orbit in relation to other planets.
There was no day or night.
Hardly any people were left.
The earth had no force of gravity.
Everything was vertical.
The surface of the earth
became impenetrable,
and as hard as plate glass.
Those that were left behind
clung to the earth with picks and axes.
The others had fallen off.

I lived in a realm of space
where there were no directions.
To travel in any direction
was to travel in all directions.
There was no here and there.
To be there,
and to be infinitely far away
were one and the same.
If you reach the center of things,
is there any other place to go?
If the universe is infinite,
doesn’t that make any point
the center of the universe?

I reached critical mass.
My circuits were connecting.
I reached someone else in the universe.
I was going to go off
with the force of a hydrogen bomb.

I told the man who’d told me
about life and death
that I thought I ‘d found life.
He said, “To be given birth
is to realize there is no death.
It was birth to come to life.
But before birth, you already had life.
Your being given birth
means that
there had to have been something
to be given birth.
Your life is a rebirth.
Birth, life, death.
Is death the end of life?
There is something in life
that doesn’t end in death.
When you’ve seen what death is,
then you’ll know
whether you are one with others.
When you become one with others,
then you’ll have found life.”



Sunday, November 22, 2015

On Certainty

Certainty is the state of being or feeling certain, and is freedom from doubt. If something is certain, then it is free from, or beyond, doubt.

To claim absolute certainty about the truth of a proposition may be to claim the right to ignore or be blind to further evidence affirming or denying the truth of that proposition.

Logically, if you say that you're certain about something, then you should be prepared to wager everything on it. If you're not prepared to wager everything on it, then you must not really be certain about it (unless there are psychological, social, or other factors that prevent you from making such a wager, despite your alleged certainty).

Of course, if you say that it's not in your nature to wager everything on something, then your reluctance to wager everything (or to wager anything at all) may be due to your recognizing that you can never be absolutely sure of, or certain about, anything.


Benjamin Franklin's well-known saying (now so often quoted that it has become a cliché) regarding certainty appeared in a letter to the French scientist Jean-Baptiste Leroy, written on November 13, 1789: "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."1

Other certainties may include mathematical certainties (such as "2+2=4"), physical certainties (such as "marble is harder than limestone"), cosmological certainties (such as "Ganymede is the largest moon of Jupiter"), and historical certainties (such as "The Battle of Bosworth Field was fought in 1485").

F.W.J. Schelling (1800) says that "for certainty in theory we lose it in practice, and for certainty in practice we lose it in theory" ("über der theoretischen Gewissheit geht uns die praktische, über der praktischen die theoretische verloren").2

I can't be more certain of anything than I am of the fact that some (though perhaps not all) lost opportunities are lost permanently. Perhaps this is merely certainty of my own (and more generally of human) finitude. I may only be certain of my own fallibility and uncertainty.


Believable fiction may depend on fictionalization of the real and realization of the fictional.

If to be thoughtful is to be careful, and to be thoughtless is to be careless, then you might suppose that to think is to care. But unfortunately that's not the case.

Isn't the term "certain knowledge" redundant? Either we know something or we don't. If we're certain that we know something, then we may more precisely be said to have attained "certainty of knowledge" or "epistemic certainty."

It may always be possible to say "I don't know" with greater certainty than "I know."


If I'm feeling pain, and it's a pleasurable pain, then I may be uncertain whether I'm actually feeling pain.


Epistemic duty (or the ethics of knowledge) may require that we have adequate grounds for saying we're certain about something. It may also require that we have adequate grounds for saying we're doubtful about something.


Wittgenstein asks, "Doesn't one need grounds for doubt?"3 But it may be argued that we aren't required to believe a proposition to be true just because we can't prove it to be false.


If we qualify our statements about certainty by saying, "We think (but aren't sure) we're certain about that," then we may be saying we're relatively certain, but not absolutely certain. Relative certainty may be susceptible to doubt, while absolute certainty may be immune to doubt. The former may be much easier to attain than the latter.


If we tell others that we know something, then we may have a duty to let them know when we're not absolutely certain that we know. Our claim to know something requires some degree of certainty on our part. We don't always have to be absolutely certain about something in order to properly claim to know it. Relative certainty may be sufficient in some cases. But we must at least have met some threshold level of certainty about something in order to properly claim to know it.


The term "objective certainty" may be ambiguous, insofar as it may refer to either the objectivity of the fact that certainty has been attained or the objectivity of the reasons for which certainty has been attained. In the first case, certainty can objectively be said to have been attained, while in the second, certainty can be said to have been attained objectively. It may be important to distinguish between the two cases. For example, Bill can objectively be said to be certain about something without his having objective reasons for being certain about that thing.


Subjective certainty may include psychological and intuitive certainty. Objective certainty may include epistemic, propositional, and evidential certainty. 

One way of expressing subjective certainty may be to say, "I'm certain, but I could be wrong." This way of hedging one's bets about certainty may be a way of immunizing oneself from error—
or it may just be a way of equivocating.

Subjective certainty doesn't entail objective certainty. We may be subjectively certain about something, but objectively wrong about it.

There may be various kinds of certainty (psychological, moral, epistemic, deductive, and statistical). There may also be various degrees of certainty (which may be expressed by such adjectives as "absolute," "high," "low," or "relative.")


However, Peter Unger (1975) argues that there are no degrees of certainty, and that "certainty" is an absolute term, like "flat." Just as nothing (or hardly anything) in the world is (absolutely) flat, nothing (or hardly anything) in the world is (absolutely) certain. Unger thus argues for scepticism regarding the possibility of knowledge, by saying that since knowledge entails (absolute) certainty, nothing (or hardly anything) is known.4,5


Peter Klein (1981) also argues that knowledge entails absolute (psychological and evidential) certainty, and that if S knows that p on the basis of some evidence e, then e renders p absolutely certain for S. Klein argues that S knows that p only if p is absolutely certain for S, but he makes clear that he's not saying that the ordinary understanding of the meaning of the term "knowledge" restricts the term to only those cases in which a proposition p is absolutely certain.6 There may be relative as well as absolute uses of the term "certainty."


Harry Frankfurt (1962) says that there may indeed be degrees of certainty, and that some things may be regarded as more certain than others. We may be willing to wager more on the truth of one proposition than we're willing to wager on the truth of another proposition, if we regard the one's truth as more certain than the other's.7


Jason Stanley (2008) says that knowledge doesn't entail certainty, and as an example he provides the statement, "I know that Bill came to the party. In fact, I'm certain that he did," which seems to show that we can know something without being certain of it. As another example, he provides the statement, "John knows that Bush is a Republican, though, being a cautious fellow, he's only somewhat certain of it," which seems to show that we can know something without being completely certain of it. Stanley explains that there's nothing strange or odd about ascribing knowledge of something to someone who's not completely confident that she does indeed know that thing. We don't automatically object when someone is described as knowing something of which she isn't certain.8

Stanley also explains that fallibilism in epistemology (the theory that knowledge is compatible with a lack of certainty) is compatible with both "the knowledge norm for assertion" (that we should assert p only if we know that p) and "the certainty norm for assertion" (that we should assert p only if we're certain that p). Thus, while fallibilism holds that we can know p without being certain that p, it doesn't hold that we can say we know that p if we don't know or aren't certain that p.9

Gaining greater knowledge of something may sometimes lead us to feel less certain about that thing. By learning more about that thing, we may sometimes develop a greater appreciation of the limits of our knowledge. 

Second-order certainty may be exemplified by such statements as, "I feel certain that I'm certain."


The certainty of faith may be an example of psychological, moral, theological, or doctrinal certainty. It may be based on belief in truths that cannot be proved by reason or that surpass our understanding. It may be based not on empirical proof or scientific testing, but on the power of authority, scripture, testimony, or revelation.



FOOTNOTES 


1Benjamin Franklin, The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. XII, Letters and Miscellaneous Writings, 1788-1790.
2F.W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, translated by Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,1978), p. 11.
3Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1969), p. 18c.
4Peter Klein, Certainty: A Refutation of Scepticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), p. 131.
5Peter Unger, Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 49.
6Klein, Certainty: A Refutation of Scepticism, p. 117.
7Harry G. Frankfurt, "Philosophical Certainty," in The Philosophical Review, Vol. 71, No. 3 (July 1962), pp. 303-327.
8Jason Stanley, "Knowledge and Certainty," in Philosophical Issues, Vol. 18, Issue I (September 2008), pp. 41-42.
9Ibid., p. 56.




Sunday, November 1, 2015

The Dispositional-Occurrent Distinction

What exactly is a disposition? Tim Crane (1996) offers the following preliminary definition: 

“a disposition is a property (such as solubility, fragility, elasticity) whose instantiation entails that the thing which has the property would change or bring about some change, under certain condtions.”1 

      Stephen Mumford (2011) offers another preliminary definition by saying that the term “disposition” may refer to a type of property, state, or condition that, under certain circumstances, provides for the possibility of some further specific state or behavior.2 
      Thus, for example, if we say that “ice cubes have a disposition to melt at room temperature” (or simply that “ice cubes melt at room temperature”), we are saying that under those conditions (room temperature), the disposition of ice cubes to melt will be manifested.
      Jennifer McKitrick (2003) explains that some marks of dispositionality include the following: (1) a disposition has a characteristic manifestation, (2) a disposition is triggered in certain types of circumstances (it has certain circumstances of manifestation), (3) if something has a disposition, then certain subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals are typically true of it (e.g. if a fragile glass has a disposition to break when dropped, then the conditional “If it were dropped, then it would break” is true of it), and (4) once the manifestation and the circumstances of the manifestation have been identified, the disposition can be referred to by an overtly dispositional locution, such as “the disposition to so and so” (e.g. “the disposition to break when struck” refers to fragility, and “the disposition to dissolve in water” refers to water-solubility).3
      Dispositions may be ascribed to kinds (e.g. “paper is flammable”), objects (“that sheet of cardboard is flexible”), persons (“I tend to agree with you”), and conditions (“the weather’s likely to turn chilly today”).
      Crane (1996) explains that there has been much debate about the question of whether the ascription of a dispositional property to a thing entails that certain counterfactual conditionals are true of it. If this is indeed a criterion of dispositional properties, then, for example, saying that a glass is fragile entails the conditional: “if the glass were struck with sufficient force, then it would break.”4
      Another example of a conditional analysis of dispositions would be to say that the elasticity of a rubber band entails the conditional, “if the rubber band were pulled, then it would stretch, and if the pulling force were removed, then it would return to its original length.”
     However, C.B. Martin (1994)5 introduces the notion of a “finkish” disposition in order to show that the ascription of a dispositional property to a thing does not necessarily entail that an associated conditional is true of it. Thus, the testing of a “finkish” disposition may not result in the manifestation of the disposition, because the testing itself may cause the disposition to be lost. Alternatively, in a reverse finkish case, a disposition may be absent, but may be gained when it is tested for.6
      Sungho Choi (2011) explains that dispositional maskers have also been introduced as counterexamples to the notion that dispositional properties can be analyzed in terms of simple counterfactual conditionals. If a disposition is masked, or if there is an antidote to it, then it may not be manifested, even under the appropriate stimulus conditions. Choi argues, however, that the absence of dispositional maskers may be implicitly or explicitly implied by dispositional ascriptions, and that the failure of masked dispositions to be manifested does not necessarily threaten the simple conditional analysis of dispositions.
      Choi (2009) also explains that the two most widely debated versions of the conditional analysis of dispositions are the simple conditional analysis of dispositions (SCA) and the reformed conditional analysis of dispositions (RCA). The SCA may be expressed as follows:

      “Something x is disposed at time t to exhibit manifestation m in response to being situated in stimulating circumstance c iff, if x were to be situated in c at t, it would exhibit m.”7

The RCA, formulated by David Lewis (1997)8, may be expressed as follows:

      “Something x is disposed at time t to exhibit manifestation m in response to stimulus s iff, for some intrinsic property B that x has at t, for some time t’ after t, if x were to undergo stimulus s at time t and retain property B until t’, s and x’s having of B would jointly be an x-complete cause of x’s exhibiting manifestation m, where an x-complete cause is a cause complete in so far as havings of properties intrinsic to x are concerned, though perhaps omitting some events extrinsic to x.”9

Lewis’s RCA is designed to resist refutation by finkish dispositions or other counterexamples to the SCA. Choi argues that the intrinsic nature of dispositions doesn’t threaten either the SCA or the RCA.10
      Dispositions have been understood as persisting properties or states that make possible other properties or states, and they have been contrasted with occurrences, which have been understood as more episodic or transient events. Mumford (2011) says that the distinction between dispositions and occurrences derives mainly from the work of Gilbert Ryle (1949), and that as the appeal of Ryle’s form of behaviorism has faded, interest has shifted from the distinction between dispositions and occurrences to the distinction between dispositional and categorical properties.11
      Ryle (1949) distinguishes between dispositional terms (which may describe tendencies, propensities, potentialities, abilities, etc.) and occurrent terms (which may describe episodic or actually occurring events). He argues that it is mistaken to assume that any term that has a dispositional use must also have a corresponding episodic use.12 For example, the dispositional terms “know” and “believe” may not have episodic counterparts, and the dispositional statements “I know” and “I believe” may not correspond to episodic acts of knowing or believing. (I can’t properly say, conceptually or grammatically, “I am, at this moment, knowing or believing such and such.”) Ryle thus argues that mental states are dispositions to behavior, rather than unseen and unobservable occurrences.
      Ryle also distinguishes between generic and specific dispositions. He offers the sentence, “He is a cigarette smoker” as an example of a disposition ascription, and the sentence, “He is smoking a cigarette now,” as an example of an occurrence ascription. To say that someone is a cigarette smoker is not say that he is currently smoking, but to say that he has a disposition or tendency to smoke. Cigarette smoking is a specific disposition, in contrast to more generic dispositions such as the disposition to seek a method of reducing stress, relieving pressure, managing anxiety, or producing euphoria. Dispositional properties, according to Ryle, are nothing more than habits, tendencies, or other behavior regularities.
      McKitrick (2003) explains that Ryle’s distinction between specific and generic dispositions also corresponds to the distinction between single-track dispositions (those that are triggered by only one kind of circumstance, and that have only one kind of manifestation) and multi-track dispositions (those that are triggered by more than one kind of circumstance, and that have more than one kind of manifestation).13
      Against Ryle’s view, it may be argued that there may indeed be occurrent, as well as dispositional, mental states. I may know or believe something at this very moment, and this knowing or believing may be an occurrent state.
      It may also be argued that dispositions themselves are occurrences. There may be occurrent dispositions and dispositional occurrences. Dispositions may not always be separable from occurrences.
      E.J. Lowe’s account (2006, 2009, 2013) of the dispositional-occurrent distinction may best be understood in the context of his four-category ontology. In this formal ontology, there are four fundamental ontological categories (or kinds of being): substantial universals (kinds), substantial particulars (objects), non-substantial universals (attributes), and non-substantial particulars (modes). Kinds (such as tomatoes) are characterized by attributes (such as redness), and are instantiated by objects (such as particular tomatoes). Attributes (such as redness) characterize kinds (such as tomatoes), and are instantiated by modes (such as the redness of a particular tomato). Objects instantiate kinds, and are characterized by modes. Modes characterize objects, and instantiate attributes.
      Lowe regards instantiation and characterization as the two fundamental or primitive metaphysical relations. Another metaphysical relation, that of exemplification, he does not regard as fundamental or primitive, since it may result from instantiation or characterization, and may come in two different varieties: dispositional or occurrent. An object (such as a particular tomato) dispositionally exemplifies an attribute (such as redness) when it instantiates some kind (such as tomatoes) that is characterized by that attribute, and it occurrently exemplifies that attribute (redness) when it (the particular tomato) is characterized by some mode (such as its own redness) that instantiates that attribute.14
      In addition to making a distinction between dispositional and occurrent exemplification, Lowe makes a distinction between dispositional and occurrent predication. The sentence, “This piece of salt is water-soluble,” is an example of the former, and the sentence, “This piece of salt is dissolving in water,” is an example of the latter.15 Universal terms (such as “salt”), as well as individual terms (such as “this piece of salt"), may serve as subjects of dispositional and occurrent predication.16
      Martijn Blaauw (2013) distinguishes between dispositional and occurrent belief. An example of the former would be John’s belief that physical exercise is good for his health, and an example of the latter would be John’s belief, as he looks at his watch and sees that it is 3 o’clock, that it is indeed 3 o’clock. Blaauw also distinguishes the disposition to believe from dispositional and occurrent belief. For example, John may have a disposition to believe something, without ever having dispositionally or occurrently believed that thing.
      David Rose and Jonathan Schaffer (2013) argue that knowledge entails dispositional belief, since “if s knows that p, then s dispositionally believes that p.” Knowledge is not merely occurrent belief (conscious endorsement of a thought), but dispositional belief (information available to mind for endorsement).17
      The distinction between dispositions and occurrences may be complicated by the fact that there may be many different kinds of dispositions (moral, aesthetic, behavioral, cognitive, emotional, behavioral, social, and cultural), and many different kinds of occurrences (historical, geographical, environmental, evolutionary, physical, biological, physiological, genetic, epidemiological, and statistical).
      Another question to be considered is whether dispositions can conflict with one another. Thus, Choi (2012) asks whether opposing dispositions can be co-instantiated. He defines conflicting dispositions as dispositions that have mutually consistent characteristic stimuli but inconsistent manifestations, and he concludes that opposing dispositions cannot be co-instantiated by one and the same object at the same time. He admits, however, that there are opposing viewpoints regarding this question of whether a single stimulus can trigger the manifestation of opposing dispositions.18
      There may also be disagreement about whether some dispositions are innate or acquired, intrinsic or extrinsic, “natural” or “unnatural.”
      There may also be positive and negative dispositions (“dispositions to” and “dispositions not to”).
      Dispositions may vary in their duration, strength, stability, and susceptibility to change.  They may also vary in the consistency with which they are manifested.
      Occurrences may be variously described as frequent, occasional, rare, unusual, expected, unexpected, regular, irregular, variable, invariable, timely, untimely, concomitant, or coincidental.
      Jennifer McKitrick (2009) describes “dispositional pluralism” as the view that there are many different kinds of dispositions,19 and “dispositional essentialism” as the view that all dispositions are essential properties of the objects that instantiate them.20 Dispositional pluralism is compatible with property dualism (the view that there are two fundamental kinds of properties: dispositional and non-dispositional) and with pandispositionalism (the view that all properties are dispositional), but not with anti-dispositionalism (the view that no properties are dispositional).21
      McKitrick (2003) says that there are extrinsic, as well as intrinsic, dispositions. Intrinsic dispositions are intrinsic properties of the things that have them, and do not depend on what is going on outside of those things. Extrinsic dispositions, on the other hand, are extrinsic properties of the things that have them, and depend on what is going on outside of those things.22
      The dispositional-categorical distinction may be even more difficult to define than the dispositional-occurrent distinction. Dispositional properties may be categorical, in the sense that they may categorically (rather than hypothetically) belong to things. Categorical properties may be dispositional, in the sense that they may take the form of dispositions. Properties may have both dispositional and categorical aspects.
      On the other hand, dispositional properties may be conditional in a way that categorical properties are not.
      According to the identity theory of dispositional and categorical properties, dispositional properties are the same as categorical properties. All dispositional properties are categorical, and all categorical properties are dispositional.
      Stephen Mumford (1998) describes property dualism as the theory that there are two fundamentally different kinds of properties: dispositional and categorical. Categorical monism is the theory that all properties are categorical, and dispositional monism (pandispositionalism) is the theory that all properties are dispositional.23
      Mumford also describes four types of property monism. Categorical reductionism is the theory that all dispositional properties can be reduced to categorical properties. Dispositional reductionism is the theory that all categorical properties can be reduced to dispositional properties. Categorical eliminativism is the theory that all properties are categorical, and that all reference to supposed dispositional properties should be eliminated. Dispositional eliminativism is the theory that all properties are dispositional (even those traditionally regarded as paradigmatically categorical), and that all reference to supposed categorical properties should be eliminated.24


FOOTNOTES

1Tim Crane, “Introduction,” in Dispositions: A Debate, by D.M. Armstrong, C.B. Martin, and U.T. Place, edited by Tim Crane (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 1.
2Stephen Mumford, “Dispositions,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011, http://www.umb.no/statisk/causci/Dispositions%20REP.pdf.
3Jennifer McKitrick, “A Case for Extrinsic Dispositions,” in Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81:2 (June 2002), p. 157.
4Tim Crane, “Introduction,” in Dispositions: A Debate, p. 5.
5C.B. Martin, “Dispositions and Conditionals,” in Philosophical Quarterly, 44, (1994), 1-8.
6Mumford, “Dispositions,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011.
7Sungho Choi, “Dispositional Properties and Counterfactual Conditionals,” in Mind 117 (2008), 795-841.
8David Lewis, “Finkish Dispositions” (1997) in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 133-151.
9Sungho Choi, “The Conditional Analysis of Dispositions and the Intrinsic Dispositions Thesis,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LXXVIII, No. 3, May 2009, p 571.
10Ibid., p. 568.
11Mumford, “Dispositions,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011.
12Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 119.
13Jennifer McKitrick, Dispositional Pluralism,” in Debating Dispositions: Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Mind, edited by Gregor Damschen, Robert Schnepf, and Karsten R. Stüber (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), p. 188.
14E.J. Lowe, More Kinds of Being: A Further Study of Individuation, Identity, and the Logic of Sortal Terms (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), pp. 10-11.
15Ibid., pp. 142-143.
16Ibid., p. 144.
17David Rose and Jonathan Schaffer, “Knowledge Entails Dispositional Belief,” in Philosophical Studies (2013), Vol. 166, Issue 1, Supplement, p. 22.
18Sungho Choi, “Can Opposing Dispositions be Co-instantiated?”, in Erkenntnis, Vol. 8, Issue 1, Feb 2013, pp. 161-1182.
19McKitrick, Dispositional Pluralism,” in Debating Dispositions: Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Mind, p. 186.
19Ibid, p. 193.
20Ibid., p. 201.
21McKitrick, “A Case for Extrinsic Dispositions,” in Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81:2 (June 2002), p. 158.
22Stephen Mumford, Dispositions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 18-19.
23Ibid., pp. 172-175.


FURTHER REFERENCES

Martijn Blaauw, “Contrastive Belief,” in Contrastivism in Philosophy, edited by Martijn Blaauw (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 90-91.

Sungho Choi, “What is a Dispositional Masker?” Mind (2011), Vol.120, Issue 480, pp. 1159-1171.

Sungho Choi and Michael Fara, “Dispositions,” 2012, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dispositions/.

E.J. Lowe, The Four-Category Ontology: A Metaphysical Foundation for Natural Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

E.J. Lowe, Forms of Thought: A Study in Philosophical Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).


Friday, October 2, 2015

Non-signs and Non-signification

If a sign can be defined as anything that signifies or stands for something other than itself,1 then a non-sign can be defined as anything that doesn’t signify or stand for something other than itself. A non-sign doesn’t signify, and also doesn’t indicate or represent anything.
      While a sign may consist of a signifier and a signified idea or concept,2 a non-sign may consist of a non-signifier and a non-signified or absent idea or concept. While the term “signification” may be used to describe the relationship between a signifier and a signified idea or concept,3 the term “non-signification” may be used to describe the relationship between a non-signifier and a non-signified or absent idea or concept.
      Non-signs do not designate, denote, imply, or refer to anything. They may be described as blank spaces, unfilled slots, or empty placeholders in systems of signification. They may also be described as non-signifying interruptions, pauses, silences, or discontinuities. They may also be breaks, gaps, or holes in language and communication. They may belong to the realm of non-language and non-communication.
      While the linguistic world may be a world of signs and symbols, the non-linguistic world may be a world of non-signs and non-symbols. The linguistic world (the world of “meaning”) may be subjectively or objectively derived from the non-linguistic world (the world of “non-meaning”).
      The intelligible world may be a world of signs and non-signs. Semiotics may therefore need to consist of not only a theory of signs, but also a theory of non-signs.
      Signs may have signifying and non-signifying elements or parts. A thing that is a sign of something may also be a non-sign of something else. Non-signs may also in some cases be non-signifying coincidental events or “meaningless” epiphenomena associated with signifying events or “meaningful” phenomena.
      According to Charles W. Morris (1971), all signs are signals or symbols. Signals are signs that are not interpreted to signify other signs, but symbols are signs that are interpreted to signify other signs.4 Non-signs are therefore neither signals nor symbols.
      Morris describes five modes of signifying: identificative, designative, appraisive, prescriptive, and formative. Signs signifying in these modes may be described as “identifiors,” “designators,” “appraisors,” “prescriptors,” and “formators.”5 Non-signs demonstrate none of these modes of signifying.
      The modes of “non-meaning” or non-signifying belonging to a non-sign may also be denotative or connotative, literal or metaphorical.
      A sign may be empty if it can’t signify something or if there is nothing for it to signify. However, an empty sign (if there is such a thing) may signify nothing and still be a sign (e.g. a sign of unsignifiability, meaninglessness, emptiness, or nothingness).
      While a floating signifier has a variable or unstable form of signification,6 a non-sign has no signification at all. While signs may always have some “meaning,” even if that “meaning” is empty or undefined, non-signs have no “meaning” at all.
      While a sign may not signify an actually existing object or event,7 a non-sign does not signify anything at all.
      Objects qua objects do not signify or “mean” anything. They only signify or “mean” something as ideas or concepts signified or symbolized by signs or symbols. On the other hand, signifying objects (objects qua signs) may signify ideas or concepts, while non-signifying objects may not.
      Signs that have outlived or lost their usefulness may be destined to become non-signs (or things that no longer signify anything). Signs may also become non-signs if their conventionally accepted signification is shown to be unwarranted or unjustified. Things that have not yet become signs (pre-signs, pre-symptoms, and other pre-semiotic phenomena) may also be seen or interpreted as non-signs.
      A sign must be adequate for the purposes for which it is used, if it is to function as a sign. Some signs may become so inadequate for the purposes for which they are used that they no longer function as signs, and thus become non-signs. Some signs may also become so obscure or ambiguous that they become non-signs. Some signs may also become so unstable and unreliable in their signification that they become non-signs.
      Non-signs do not signify statements or propositions. Nor do they signify beliefs, attitudes, moods, emotions, feelings, or other states of mind.
      The designification relation may be one in which the signification of a sign is destabilized, disrupted, revoked, or nullified. To designify a sign may be to render it a non-sign.
      Non-signs may in some cases be able to be ignored, because of their lack of “meaning” or signification. False signs, on the other hand, may require some degree of attention and response. For example, a false alarm may be a false sign of an emergency, but also a true sign of a defect in an alarm system requiring repair or correction.
      Non-signs have no “meaning” to be interpreted, but they may still need to be read or examined in some way in order to be understood as non-signs. They may also present a challenge to the hegemony and all-importance of signs and signification.8
      Signs may sometimes be misinterpreted as non-signs if their signification is overlooked or unrecognized. Thus, there may be some signs that are mistaken as non-signs, and whose supposed non-signification may be merely a matter of the interpreter’s ignorance or lack of understanding.9
      The mode of non-signification belonging to a non-sign may also depend on the non-sign’s relation to signs and other non-signs. Changes in the non-sign’s relation to signs and other non-signs may result in changes in its mode of non-signification.
      There may be no adequate signs for that which transcends signification. “Signs” for that which transcends signification may not be signs at all, and may actually be non-signs.
      Unlike signs that signify through other signs, non-signs do not signify at all. Nor do they express anything.
      Although there may be sign systems of “meaning” and signification, there can be no non-sign systems of “non-meaning” and non-signification, since non-signs do not signify or refer to anything, and therefore cannot have cohesive or coherent relations with one another.



FOOTNOTES

1Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volume 2, Paragraph 228, 1897 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).

2Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics [1916], edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger, translated by Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 67.

3Ibid., p. 67.

4Charles W. Morris, Writings on the General Theory of Signs (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 366-367.

5Ibid., p. 364.

6Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), p. 74.

7Morris, Writings on the General Theory of Signs, p. 416.

8Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987), p. 15.

9Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, Volume 2, translated by John Moore (London: Verso, 2002), p. 276.