The Colt 45 Chronicle #77

I read philosophy while I was at the university, a practice that lasted for five years after my school days had ended. Then, while living in Texas, I shifted to reading American history. But periodically, every three or four years, I would dip back in and try to figure out what I was working on and what issues I was trying to resolve in my lost and unfinished honors thesis on the analytic a posteriori. The last time was during the Trayvon Martin shooting protests. I stopped off and did some research in the Koolhass-designed downtown public library on my way to a rally.

Taking a quick look this morning at some of the big philosophy/theory journals -- Mind, Synthese, October, Representations -- from when I was a toiler in the groves of Academe, nothing much seems to have changed in the last 30 years. The offerings in October -- articles on Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt --  and Representations -- an issue devoted to how online search tools and big data are affecting research in the humanities and social sciences -- at least seem interesting.

Philosophy takes more time and energy to read than history, politics, or fiction. So it falls to the wayside if you are a worker running the rat race to earn a living.

The letter below is addressed to my friend Shale who is now a professor at a state university in the Midwest. I spent part of the 1988 Xmas holiday with him and his roommate Steve, who were both political science graduate students at UCLA. Other friends would stop over in what turned out to be a four-day bacchanal punctuated by brutal two-on-two basketball games at a backyard garage hoop; also, drunken, competitive ping pong matches.

The letter ends on a note of regret that we didn't keep the party going as I continued my Christmas travels north up I-5 to San Francisco, and from there on up into Southern Oregon. That winter was a particularly cold one for the West Coast. As it turned out it was the dividing line between my years at -- and my friends from -- the university. Life would not be the same; there would be no bacchanals together in the future. I realized that the next time I was out on the West Coast, the spring of 1990, which marks the end of this collection of letters.

Speaking of which, I did the audit of the number of these missives that remain. There are little more than 20 left. If this project is to be completed by the end of the regular NFL season, I'm going to have to start posting two a week. If I stretch the deadline to the Super Bowl in February, I can stick to a single post on Sunday, shifting to a Saturday-and-Sunday schedule in December.

Winter 1989

You know what philosophers are? They're comic book heroes. Plato might as well be Superman; Aristotle, Batman. Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume are the Fantastic Four. Spider-Man is Kant. Being a little bit away from the academy and that bitch Philosophia, as I have been now for close to 9 months, helped me come to this while I was pissing just a second ago. 

I heard the other day when I called up Mark and Niall (Mark had left a message on the here machine in NYC saying that his car had been stolen), that the sadomasochistic love trinity didn't quite make it, that the Belgian waffle didn't get cooked up. Niall did relate to me though the story of Steve  puking on -- as I envision it -- the trunk of your body. Whew! You guys are shattering all records and putting together quite a storehouse of memorabilia. I'm glad I was around for a spell to feel a little of that LA effervescence.

But back to the philosophy thing. I read an essay by Derrida yesterday, and it was damn good. He was writing about the whole humanist existential turn-on in France after WWII; you know, about how the Sartre behemoth was spawned; that a lot of the shit boiled down to a systematic misreading of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger; that Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY was read only in light of Kojeve, who taught it as a kind of textbook for a philosophical anthropology and who thereby overlooked Hegel's own architectonic as set forth in the ENCYCLOPEDIA: Phenomenology of Spirit follows Anthropology; that Hegel's Anthropology concludes with the general form of consciousness, "sensuous certitude," which begins the PHENOMENOLOGY.

Oh, what the fuck am I doing? I don't have the stamina to finish this explanation. Anyway, I read Rorty's intro to the THE LINGUISTIC TURN today -- all about Ideal versus Ordinary Language philosophy. It stank like shit compared to Derrida, and I've done my reading on Ideal Language philosophy (Urmson is the guy to read here; he's sweet and clear). I guess what I wanted to say about Jacques Derrida is that I think he is one damn-ass fine historian of philosophy. Now, if you read him as some serious methodologist, a la your hero Weber, you're just gonna be disappointed. But as someone who gives you a good sense of all the important issues at stake in reading Heidegger, or Husserl, or even Nietzsche (who he creatively rehabilitates from all the low-minded snipes of "last metaphysician" cunts), I don't think there is anyone better today. 

Just to finish up the poor-man's recapitulation of the essay I read -- Derrida was simply saying that the supposedly metaphysically-free existentialism of the '50s did not escape traditional metaphysics. "Man" was baldly yet deceptively substituted for "consciousness," ontology for phenomenology. Please remember, this is a gross oversimplification, and I really do miss the point, I think. I fail altogether to capture the persuasiveness and subtlety of argument. He whips in a little Nietzsche at the end; you know, the bit in ZARATHUSTRA about high noon and the difference between the superior man and the superman (ouch! that high noon shit is good -- the superman who turns his back on the camera, his tracks disappearing as he walks away). And mind you, Derrida is not one of these poststructuralist sloppy types, the kind who don't footnote, who engage in constant speculation. Derrida always exhaustively footnotes, always entertains all the published secondary, in many languages. 

Anyway, enough of the tirade.

I had a lot of fun cruising the Grapevine. I had never done it before. I did 35 mph a lot of the way up the thing, but it was perfectly fucking incredible coming down out of it and seeing those Bakersfield stretches straight as a ruler. Pushed the old bus hard at 65-plus the whole day, no stops. But I couldn't help feeling a twinge of regret leaving the dudes behind like that. Shit, I felt like all of us should have just piled into the old beast, bought a couple cases of the Banquet Beer, had the boom box spitting, and then cruised north. There would have been pillows and sleeping bags back there for you guys, Steve, Colum, you, Jeff to lounge on. I would have been at the wheel, beer nestled in crotch area; empties could have been thrown anywhere; and there was a hole in the floor, about a foot behind the driver's seat where the sink (for camping) used to be, where you guys could have pissed out without even requiring us to stop.

But you and Steve were doing something, Colum was doing something, Jeff was doing the same, and so was I. So we'll chalk it up to "could've been" and look forward to the future.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #46

I fiddled about on my undergraduate honors thesis for a couple of years before finally leaving the university the summer of 1988 without completing it. I shouldn't say "fiddled" because I worked quite long and hard on that thesis -- a discourse on Kant, Frege and Derrida that argued for the possibility of the analytic a posteriori (a type of statement Kant ruled out) -- though I would frequently say I was working on it when I was actually off drinking and copulating with one girlfriend or another who was not my wife-to-be.

Right before my betrothed and I left Berkeley in a VW bus bound for a quick Reno stopover in order to tie the knot on our way to the married-student housing offered by New York City's Columbia University Medical School, I inexplicably plucked from the fully-loaded bus a box containing the fruits of two years of research and writing -- countless days spent in branch libraries taking notes from academic journals and then spilling my musings into composition books while I drank coffee in Telegraph Avenue cafes -- and handed it to my father with instructions for him to mail it to me when we arrived in New York.

My father did what I asked of him, but the tomato box containing my honors thesis, my "magnum oh" that ingeniously (or so I imagined) bridged the gap between continental and analytic philosophy in au courant fashion, never made it to New York.

A cutout of the front portion of the box containing my father's return address was mailed back to him. My honors thesis had gone missing. The speculation was that the crack-and-peel label containing the address of our married-student apartment fell off the box. But if that were the case why not ship the whole box back to the return address which was still visible? The lid of the box must have become separated from the box itself.

My father was disconsolate; he felt responsible for the loss of the thesis. To this day he suspects some sort of foul play by the postal service. Just the other day he related to me that when he dropped off the box at the post office and was admonished by the woman working the counter for coming in so close to closing time with a such a heavy box that she was expected to lift.

Whatever it was, whether a label that had lost its adhesive or sabotage by a disgruntled clerk, my fate was sealed. I told myself I could recapitulate the pith of what was contained in all those boxed notes, and I made a half-hearted attempt evenings after work during the summer of 1989. But the jig was up. I used to be able to recite from memory the chapters of my thesis, how the argument moved from the analytic-synthetic distinction Kant makes at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781); to Frege's logicist program in his Begriffsschrift (1879) and The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) and the ontological implications of defining arithmetic as analytic; to Derrida's Of Grammatology (1967) and the possibilities for a new, more ethical pedagogy. Now, I can barely remember the barest of outlines. Hopefully, I still have notes somewhere from that weak summer of '89 attempt to capture what was lost in that missing tomato box.

Autumn 1988 

Gentlemen,

The parcel which I'm looking for is a box, approximately 8"x12"x10", with a lid (it's much like an IBM photocopy-paper box). It has air holes on either side (I believe it was originally a box for shipping tomatoes). It weighs about twenty-five pounds.

CONTENTS

The box contains l) books, 2) photocopies of books, and 3) loose-leaf handwritten pages (see next page for sample of hand writing). A list of the authors and titles of the books is as follows:

Saul Kripke, NAMING AND NECESSITY
Jacques Derrida, WRITING AND DIFFERENCE
Immanuel Kant, GROUNDWORK . . .
Gottlob Frege,FOUNDATIONS OF ARITHMETIC
John Sallis, SPACINGS

The package was sent from Fairfield, CA to New York City (10032). My biggest concern is not with recouping any dollar value for the missing material, but with finding it. You see, the box, which I had my dad send to me, had a year and a half's work in it. Without it I can't write this paper; and without this paper, I can't get my bachelor's degree. (A real, honest-to-goodness, tearjerker.) So I would sincerely appreciate any kind of reply, no matter how brief. 

Thank you,

Metatron

What does it mean that the only time the light on my answering machine is blinking is when a credit card company has left an automated message asking if I want a lower rate? It means, I think, that I'm either doing something very right or pitifully wrong. At times I secretly hope it's an old flame calling to rekindle a romance.  But by now I know better. The only recording angel for me is a bank robodial.

Below are scans of the front and back of the Foreign Agents Series edition of Sol Yurick's Behold Metatron, the Recording Angel along with an interior page listing the Columbia University campus address of Semiotext(e). At the time I read Metatron I was working on my honors thesis, my magnum-oh on the analytic a posteriori, a Kant-Frege-Derrida synthesis.  My ex-wife, who at the time was a live-in girlfriend who had just moved out, was living in a one-room outhouse working as an au pair for a financially well-off family in southeast Berkeley.  The head of the family was the wife who was a physician and her husband was a contractor; they had a little boy and a newborn (whether boy or girl I can't recall).  The outhouse was actually a completely renovated small one-room living space with a portable toilet.  It was located in the backyard beneath healthy old trees. This is where I read Metatron. I believe if I was thought about at all by the husband and wife I was considered a persona non grata, a self-indulgent bohemian in the Groves of Academe.