[Image: Sally Soames/Time Warner Books]

Down the years, James Patrick Michael Donleavy has been portrayed in the Anglo-Irish press as a gentleman recluse with a roistering life of hard drinking, fisticuffs and harlotry behind him. It makes nice copy: the former ‘hell-raiser’ sequestered in his Georgian mansion in Westmeath, Ireland. James Joyce wrote about this country pile, Levington Park, in Stephen Hero having, apparently, stayed there as a boy while his father was working in nearby Mullingar. Yet while the ‘literary recluse’ shtick seems overstated, it may contain a germ of truth. After all, Donleavy has admitted himself that he rarely leaves his home, and once said that, of all his protagonists, the one he most resembles is the sadly humane George Smith from his paranoiac second novel, A Singular Man. Smith - a man of independent means - finds our indifference to our fellow beings nullifyingly sad. Protecting himself behind a two inch steel, mahogany-look front door, he makes regular sorties into the world in search of “good fellowship”. What he finds is casual froideur and brutal stupidity.

In Anthony Cronin’s superb memoir of the ‘Rare Oul Times’ among Dublin’s literati, Dead As Doornails, it is recalled that Donleavy showed hermit-like tendencies even in the forties. Certainly, there is a sense in the writer’s picaresque debut novel, The Ginger Man, of its hero, Sebastian Balfe Dangerfield, being besieged by an uncivilised world. (Young Dangerfield runs amok through late forties’ Dublin substituting sex and liquor for the love and meaning he fails to find). But then, it is never wise to over-identify a novelist with his characters. Especially as it is well known that the Sebastian Dangerfield character was partly inspired by the author’s heroically caring and courteous friend, Gainor Stephen Crist, a “pagan sensualist” whose “do-no-evil” stance still renders him a saint in Donleavy’s eyes. Crist is said to have died in 1964, although Donleavy is not convinced of this. At any rate, it is clear in Donleavy’s fictional and autobiographical work that good manners are paramount. Sadly, my progress to Levington Park involves three duff steers from Westmeath locals. These send me miles out of my way, and see me stomping up Donleavy’s muddy drive ten minutes late for our appointment. I rap on the front door wondering how my tardiness will be rewarded. After all, Donleavy is a man who has written the impishly amusing guide to social etiquette, The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival & Manners. Happily, his secretary, Virginia, welcomes me warmly and assures me that I am not remotely late. I am piloted into a commodious hallway, and we then turn right into a large, yet cosy kitchen.

I notice a range stove in the room’s far right side, and across the way from that there is a large round table positioned in front of a crackling turf fire. The turf tints the air with a homely scent of whiskey. J.P. Donleavy - Mike to his friends - sits before this fire with a hearty smile on his face. Instead of the tweeds and plus-fours many people associate with the author, he is dressed casually in a long leather jacket and dark, well-worn trousers. He looks very much the elegantly informal artist. After proffering biscuits to complement my coffee, Donleavy is soon enthusing about his work in progress, The Dog on the Seventeenth Floor - a book that delighted his fan and friend, the actor Johnny Depp, when he read it in the mid-nineties. Donleavy even reads me an excerpt from the manuscript of this still gestating work, the third in a trilogy of New York City novels. It sounds promisingly visceral, and in a similar vein to his last offering, the heart-rendingly droll, Wrong Information is Being Given Out in Princeton.

“When I met him in New York, Mr Depp asked me what I was working on, so I told him about my story that describes a dog jumping out of a seventeenth floor window. At the time, we were standing by a seventeenth floor window,” laughs Donleavy. His mellifluous Anglo-American tones and quiet charisma suggest a time-ripened thespian. This impression is reinforced later on by his beautiful living room, which calls to mind the stage set of a Terence Rattigan play. Of which, more later. Having finished his brief reading, Donleavy scans me with a benignly searching gaze: “Do you know New York yourself, at all?”, he asks, sounding like he is interested in my answer. When I say no, he responds in fine literary style. “Oh really? Goodness. You ought to just get someone to send you over there so that you can present a new picture of something that you perhaps find out about yourself by exposing yourself to the city. And then you have got the setting and subject for a story, you see. I wonder has murder, for instance, slowed down in New York or not? Or where are the Mafia, and what are they doing these days?”

Wherever Donleavy chooses to set his stories, his protagonists always seem to be existentially adrift. They have a talent for feeling like tourists in their home towns. There is a genuine sense of these stories being penned by an alienated observer. This is strikingly the case in the author’s magisterial and mordantly funny novel, A Fairy Tale of New York, whose main character, Cornelius Christian, would get along famously with J.D. Salinger’s prep school Hamlet, Holden Caulfield. Having studied in Ireland, Cornelius sails home to New York accompanied by his wife’s coffined corpse. He is then given impromptu employment in the very funeral parlour which buries her so that he may be able to foot the bill. And so begins a state-of-the-human-psyche novel of delightful humour and oceanic depth. I wonder where Donleavy’s strong sense of remove stems from.

“I think, as a writer, you approach the world from an observational perspective, and this is your position from beginning to end. Then you take what you see and shape it into literature. You are almost like a scientist in that regard: taking words and using them for their sound, and using all kinds of technical variations. Of course, every writer has his or her own style. Now, in my own case, I always find that the use of short sentences and a direct approach is a beneficial way to work. Sometimes, when I think occasion demands, the prose would get more flowery.”

Donleavy believes that most people think in the short, telegraphic sentences he uses in his work. The interchangeable nature of the first and third person, along with his habit of allowing his characters to drift into reverie during tumultuous scenes, are two more Donleavy tropes. The writing style is a surging current-of-consciousness, with strategically-placed white water interludes. I ask him what would be uppermost in his mind as he writes fiction.

“On one side, you are thinking of the immediacy of the words in a technical sense, and on the other you are making the story take flight with the descriptive imagery. And I remember looking seriously at the most efficient way one could use the language when those books were written. There was a very purposeful attempt to keep the prose sharp. I remember Brendan Behan [who famously let himself into Donleavy’s house at Kilcoole and “corrected” the original manuscript of The Ginger Man] being very helpful in this respect. He was the first person to read my manuscript, and he came up with a couple of technical insights like that. He noticed that my style was different to anything he had ever confronted. Brendan had been in prison and read prodigiously during that time. So he discussed these stylistic things in detail.”

I’m curious about Donleavy’s earlier scientific simile. Aptly enough, he studied bacteriology and zoology at Dublin’s Trinity College (1946-49). However, this writer’s waxing empirical may surprise readers who regard Donleavy’s work as an ungovernable force of nature. So perhaps there was a sense, during his carousing years in Dublin, of undertaking scientific field work; of observing his milieu through a microscope as if they were cultures on a collection of petri dishes?

“Yes. But I also realised that material was not a thing you searched for: you had to literally let events occur and drift into focus. Naturally. So you would never go around looking for literary opportunities. Things would just come to you slowly and you would allow your imagination to do the rest. Take words, take images and embellish them so they would float away and find their natural storyline. So, yes, a lot of what you find in, say, The Onion Eaters [Donleavy’s oneiric, gothic extravaganza] came from my life; the people I encountered in Dublin.”

 
Eli Friedlander has written a book about the philosophical Walter Benjamin, who would be 120 this year. Previously he has written about Rousseau and Wittgenstein. Friedlander is always wondering about our modes of existence. He’s a very soulful kind of philosopher.  
 
3:AM: Your philosophical interests seem to track a prevailing sense of existential crisis. Is this to do with your personality? When did you start recognising that you were interested in philosophical questions, and that these were the questions you wanted to pursue?
 
Eli Friedlander: Even though I wrote on the relation of philosophy and autobiography, or maybe because I wrote on that issue, I wouldn’t wish to move too directly from philosophical preoccupations to the space of life and personality. Without denying the personal dimension of my attachment to philosophical themes and even a degree of identification with the philosophers that concern me in my writing, I think that making that relation as oblique or roundabout as can be, is actually a virtue. The longer it takes to make the way from philosophy to life, the more significant their correlation becomes.
 
What most characterized my philosophical education is that I could not decide which were the questions that I wanted to pursue. I studied for my PhD at Harvard and at some point realized that I would not write the required one-topic dissertation. I availed myself of the option of writing three papers instead: on the relation of feeling and communication in Kant’s aesthetics, on personal exemplification in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequalities and on the limits of language in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
 
I have things to say, to myself and to others, about the connection between the three papers; for instance that they were various ways of developing a problematic of showing versus saying. But the truth is that I was completely taken by three philosophers, who first were my teachers, then became my dissertation advisors, and which, for all my good will and inventiveness, I could not bring together around a single topic. These were Stanley Cavell, Burton Dreben and John Rawls. The result was my disjointed dissertation. One of my advisors referred to this dissertation as a three-headed monster. I think he meant this as a compliment. At least this is the way I took it. I still feel that I am committed to following up the implications of the contingencies of my education. And I still like to write and plan my teaching in such a way that I am drawn, at the same time, to different extremes in this constellation of interests.
 
3:AM: Your 2004 book JJ Rousseau: An Afterlife of Words began with the beginning of the Reveries: “Here I am then, alone on earth.” You say that Rousseau does not merely feel lonely but “writes of being alone.” You cite him a few pages later: “I live here as in some strange planet on to which I have fallen from the one I knew.” You consider the strangeness of the affirmation of solitude, for who is he supposedly affirming it to? You wind back from the ‘then’ in that opening line to the cogito of Descartes. Your philosophical enquiry follows from this affirmation of extreme solitude. Can you say more about the book and why and how you connect Rousseau’s extreme existential situation to the skeptical programme of Descartes?
 
EF: I was concerned in this book to articulate the philosophical dimension of Rousseau’s autobiographical writing in the Reveries. This meant for instance taking the Reveries to be part of the same project as the writing of the two Discourses, or the Social Contract. So I sought ways to relate the autobiographical writing to the problem of the access to the state of nature in the midst of society, or to the formation of society out of nature. But I also wanted to think of Rousseau’s autobiographical turn in relation to other autobiographical moments in the philosophical tradition.
 
Rousseau’s Confessions would probably be best read relating them back to Augustine’s, but there was no doubt in my mind that the opening of Descartes Meditations and the cogito were invoked in the affirmation of Rousseau’s solitude in the Reveries. This initial insight had numerous consequences and informed many of the themes of the book. Most of all this juxtaposition of Rousseau and Descartes brought out how underplayed the skepticism concerning other minds and the threat of madness is in Descartes’ methodical doubt. Taking Rousseau not only to be suffering from the onslaught of such skepticism but also as seeking ways to address the skeptical ordeal led me to concentrate on the fundamental paradox of reading of the Reveries: What is writing in, and of, absolute solitude? Rousseau writes for himself alone. He writes his memories in the hope that, in the future, he will find a friend in his past self. A rather radical solution to his condition of terminal solitude. But the possibility of establishing a relation to another emerges as we ask what is it, for us, to read this work without denying Rousseau’s solitude? Is there, in the correlation, if not in the communication formed between author and reader, something that can be seen as the last stage of Rousseau’s thinking about the constitution of society out of nature?

 
3:AM: If we look at your earlier book Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus what is striking immediately is that here is another writer who is writing out of a critical existential awareness of solitude, in Wittgenstein’s case, the solitude that comes with the total incomprehension of his peers. The letter he wrote to Russell in 1915 is very poignant where he writes: “I’m extremely sorry that you weren’t able to understand Moore’s notes. I felt that they’re very hard to understand without further explanation, but I regard them as essentially definitive. And now I’m afraid that what I’ve written recently will be still more incomprehensible, and if I don’t live to see the end of this war I must be prepared for all my work to go for nothing. – In that case you must get my manuscript printed whether anyone understands it or not.” Again, it seems you are drawn to a philosopher affirming a deep solitude. Is this right? And is it this incomprehensiblity that it’s what you take the text to be about? What drew you to Wittgenstein and his Tractatus?

EF: You shouldn’t forget that the notes dictated to Moore are notes on logic, and Russell is not one whose ability to comprehend logic you would want to doubt. I say this to point to the peculiar nature of the difficulty involved. It has to do with the way the content of Wittgenstein’s logical insights is always intertwined with what he wants out of them. But you can’t put the goal first and think of the involvement with logic, so to speak instrumentally. Much in Wittgenstein must be read as soberly as possible, with no trace of existential pathos. As opposed to Rousseau who opens straight off with what you called the existential crisis, for Wittgenstein the critical moment comes at the end, with the famous throwing away of the ladder. Yet this gesture comes about after, and most importantly continuously with, the most difficult and rigorous progress through logic and language. Just as you shouldn’t peak ahead to the resolution of a mystery novel, you shouldn’t read the Tractatus for its ending. It must be read in such a way as to go through all its complexity and conceive of it as leading to the necessity of that final reversal. For the point of throwing away the ladder to have the force it does, you must see yourself as arduously climbing up its rungs. There is really an immense challenge of reading this book in a way that keeps together content and form, or logic and its ethical point.
 
This being said, the ending of the Tractatus does constitute, just like Rousseau’s Reveries, a paradox of reading or of communication with the reader: with Wittgenstein true understanding is threatened by all content turning out to be nonsense; with Rousseau no place is left for a reader to relate to the self enclosed solitude of the author. I would even venture to say that, for Wittgenstein, isolation is inherent to the excesses of philosophy and combating it would be one of the highest aspirations of the Tractatus. But, arguing for that would require going back to Wittgenstein’s discussion of solipsism and to what he takes to be the truth in solipsism in the Tractatus. A stage of the advance, of climbing up the ladder, would be the realization that properly placing a subject in language demands the overcoming of an illusion, a fantasy, of solipsistic meaning.

3:AM: As you said above, Stanley Cavell and Burt Dreben were influential on your philosophical development. You approach philosophy as an enquiry into good reading as well as good thinking. How were these philosophers influential on how you approach your work and what do you find important in approaching philosophy from this perspective?
 
EF: This is a difficult question and I will indicate only one way, out of many, in which I think of the influence of these two teachers. Dreben put into practice his understanding of Wittgenstein by reading the history of analytic philosophy. In his hand scholarship became a method for showing how, to quote one of his favorite expressions, “there is no meeting of minds.” In the secret history of the subject he delineated, there was nothing one could call progress. This methodic disintegration of the history of philosophy is to my mind unparalleled. And it required his particular philosophical character, so as not to “chicken out,” meaning not to turn these insights into the writing of a less explosive, positive, history of the subject matter.
 
From Cavell, I learned to find philosophy lurking in unexpected places: in Shakespeare, in movies or in autobiography. But Cavell is always careful not to collapse philosophy and literature into one overarching category, say that of the text or the cultural discourse. And his writing is constantly exemplifying what it means to insist on the utter difficulty of philosophy, especially in relation to such playful contexts as Hollywood remarriage comedies. Maybe putting the two together I would say that I am interested in cases where philosophy tends to thin itself out as a proper domain having its own meaningful vocabulary. That is, where philosophical work is to eventuate on the possibility of taking a stance in the broader scene of our lives. This is how I understand the stakes in Wittgenstein’s throwing away the ladder, the demands made upon us by Rousseau’s written solitude, and Benjamin’s ascetic mode of writing that foregoes all theory for a careful construction out of the most concrete historical materials.
 
3:AM: At the heart of your book you argue that the logical and the ethical are entwined. Can you say something about this?
 
EF: It is quite obvious to any reader of the Tractatus that Wittgenstein is not offering us a positive ethics, or a theory of morality. But nor should we be tempted to read him as delimiting the ethical negatively. The ethical is not the unsayable or ineffable other of a language ruled by logic. I argue that in the progress of the Tractatus there occurs a gradual transformation of our understanding of language as well as of what it is to have language or be in language. To put it much too briefly it is a transformation from meaning to meaningfulness, from the signifying to significance. Having language itself being valuable, or seeing the fundamental dimension of value in terms of the acceptance or loss of the ordinary conditions of meaning, is what I mean by the entwining of the logical and the ethical.

3:AM: Benjamin seems, like your Rousseau and your Wittgenstein, another bereft philosopher threatened by the loneliness of incomprehensibility. Is that right? Is that where you find his appeal?
 
EF: Much could be written about the intellectual isolation Benjamin suffered from during his life, from the rejection of his Habilitationsschrift by the university of Frankfurt resulting in his withdrawal from academia, to his failed attempts to be involved with various intellectual centers such as the Warburg Institute or the Institute for Social Research. His intellectual and personal friendships with Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno or Bertolt Brecht were also not unproblematic. But, this is not my focus: I am interested in a certain mode of posthumous isolation that is not incompatible with the growing fame of Benjamin in the intellectual world.
 
It is possible indeed to isolate Benjamin by marveling at his unclassifiable genius and his incomparable precious insights. I don’t think of isolation then as a personal issue but rather as concerning, what Benjamin himself calls the afterlife of works. To combat isolation in this sense meant for me to insist on the rigor of Benjamin’s writing as well as on placing him in a tradition of thinking. That is, it was important for me to estimate his uniqueness by the way in which he engages the past of philosophy. The problem is of course that much of what he writes does not look like philosophy. That is why I think of my book as a philosophical portrait of Benjamin, as gathering his corpus of writings so that it can be recognized as a configuration of philosophy.

 
3:AM: Your new book is a reading of the philosophical preoccupations of Walter Benjamin and his Arcades Project. You say that Adorno called “… that juncture at which Benjamin’s work stands the crossroad of positivism and magic.” And you find Adorno retreating from what you take Benjamin’s philosophical practice and demanding philosophical theory. Can you say something about this crucial issue and why you say Adorno’s is a kind of retreat to safer ground from the revolutionary aspirations of Benjamin?
 
EF: Adorno’s criticism must be understood against the background of what Benjamin was trying to achieve: the construction of philosophical history primarily out of the most concrete material. This is evident in the formidable number of quotations he amassed arranged in convolutes bearing such titles as Iron construction, Modes of Lighting, Flanery, Dolls etc… By locating Benjamin’s work at the crossroad of positivism and magic Adorno meant to warn him of two dangers that his method opened him to: his work could collapse into a mere collection of facts, thus be understood as a positivistic history. Or it could lead him to be spellbound by the allure of such things as flanery and the outmoded (as to some extent is characteristic of surrealism’s attraction to remnants of the past). In either case, Adorno could not understand how construction out of such materials could in itself form the basis of a critical standpoint. This is why he insisted that Benjamin formulate a theory be it Marxist or other. You can imagine, given my preoccupation, say with Wittgenstein’s rejection of theory in philosophy, that I take Adorno’s demand to be a retreat from Benjamin’s aspirations in philosophy.
 
3:AM: How does Benjamin link then with a Marxist philosophical tradition. Brian Leiter regrets the moral Marx of Cohen, prefering Marx as a Realist, Naturalist philosopher. How does Benjamin fit with Marxism? Is he really a Marxist in any useful sense of the term?
 
EF: Benjamin’s Arcades Project is the work of a historical materialist. Whatever it is that he is attempting to express, it is clear that it is presented solely by the construction out of material contents. These material contents, quotation material, have to do with the manifestation of life concentrated in or by the Paris arcades. It is a work that is realistic or naturalistic in a very special sense. Benjamin describes what he does for history as paralleling Goethe’s investigation of the primal phenomenon in nature.  
 
In relation to that material, there is no strong, or substantive use of Marxist terms such as alienation, false consciousness, or ideology. Benjamin foregoes the systematic use of these terms in the framework of a well-defined evaluative language or theory. This is why Adorno feared his work would lose any critical edge and either collapse into materialistic positivism or risk enchantment with the material. But Benjamin recovers what motivates Marx in translating the substantive use of these critical terms into the very articulation of the meaning of the material he works with. Let me very schematically indicate several moments of this translation: Benjamin distinguishes Marx’s attempt to trace the causal origins of culture in the economy, and his own undertaking in the Arcades Project which he characterizes the expression of the economy in the culture.
 
The configuring or arrangement of the material contents, gives, in the first place, expression to what one could call the dreams or wish -images of humanity. These are not understood as fantasies in a psychological sense, but rather are manifest in the meaning emerging out of the material itself. Think of it as a material unconscious. But secondly, and this is the other side of these dreams, what is expressed is the utter poverty that has befallen human experience. It is a poverty in our very mode of experiencing the world significantly, and in our capacity to transmit experience as tradition. One might think of it as the violence we suffer as long as the arrangement and articulation of life avoids the transformation of the economic basis, a violence that Benjamin associates with a renewed rule of myth over life.
 
The last stage in the articulation of the material is what Benjamin calls the interpretation of the dream configuration that is our past. This extreme articulation leads to the dissolution of the wish images and precipitates awakening in the present. Awakening is Benjamin’s revolutionary moment. It is at one and the same time a destructive critique of the past and a mode of realizing or salvaging the truth that was nested in those dreams by revolutionizing the present.
 
3:AM: Finally, you seem to be a literary person where art and books are important rather than merely entertaining. Is that right? Have you always read? What novels and books have been influential to you, as both a person and a philosopher?
 
EF: I will try to avoid this question in an informative way: my kids sometime make fun of me by saying that I forever read the same book. I tend to immerse myself in a book, often in a way that makes me forget the importance and pleasure of reading. So, I am not quite the voracious reader, even if I spend many hours of the day staring at the pages of books. It does help to work on someone who has read a lot, such as Benjamin. Then I can, so to speak, read by proxy, or put together my reading list by following his trail. Still that leaves you a bit out of touch with the present literary world. I try to make up for that by going to the movies and watching TV series.
 
The truth is that I still tend to think of myself as more of a visual than a literary person. I was well under way in my studies in an art academy when I decided to break off for a PhD in philosophy. Not one of my most reflective decisions, I must confess. I am not complaining or regretting it, but, since then, I have been thinking of roundabout ways to make something of these early dreams or failed promise. In recent years I am taking time out from teaching and writing to work as a stage designer in productions of opera that my spouse Michal Grover-Friedlander, is directing. We recently put together a performance of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Yes Sayer (Der Jasager).
 
3:AM: And finally, for the smart thinkers here at 3:AM, could you recommend your top five books that we should get our teeth into, apart from yours of course.
 
EF: I will not be very original here, and will only name one book that has been very important for me in recent years: Kant’s Critique of Judgment. It is also, I find, a book to read for the ways it allows us to articulate the present moment of philosophy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.
 

 
Jason Stanley is a multi-groove philosopher at Rutgers. He translated some Frege with Richard Heck. He wrote a cool book Knowledge and Practical Interests and last year a brain-boning book Know How that lames the virtue epistemology and ethics tradition started way back with the Ancient Greeks. He thinks philosophy is perpetual crisis. For many he is to philosophy what Ocarina of Time is to video games.
 
3:AM: You have strong views about philosophy in general, in particular the public perception of its place in the academic curriculum. You wrote a piece ‘The Crisis of Philosophy’ where you said that in America at least the place of philosophy in the humantities was unclear. You’ve been engaged in a number of high profile defences of the subject, from the New York Times to the rousing debate with Carlin Romano. Can you say why you think there’s a suspicion of philosophy, and a kind of crisis and why you defend the important place of philosophy in our culture?
 
Jason Stanley: There has always been a suspicion of philosophy, dating back to Socrates. The talk of “crisis” falsely suggests that there is something new about the issue of the relevance of philosophical work. Hannah Arendt is right when she describes as unavoidable the question, “How can anything relevant for the world we live in arise out of so resultless an enterprise?” There is also no new crisis in the discipline. Philosophy itself is and ought to be in continual crisis.
 
There are areas of philosophy that have obvious relevance for the world we live in. For example, it’s obvious that Doug Husak’s work has extrinsic value – he uses philosophical reasoning to criticize the prison industrial complex, the great moral failing of our country. But ethics and philosophy of law are not my areas. I have spent my life thinking about knowledge, representation, and intelligent action, and I hold out the perhaps naïve hope that a greater understanding of the capacities that make humans distinctive in the world will end up having relevance beyond simply an expanded self-understanding.
 
I’m also engaging in philosophy when I write about the value of philosophy. There is a grand tradition of skepticism about my field – Hume and even more clearly Nietzschze come to mind. It’s sad that there are no current sophisticated defenders of that tradition with whom to engage, because it’s healthy for philosophers to be forced to defend the worldly relevance of what they are doing. The fact that I work on questions that do not have obvious extrinsic value makes the intellectual challenge more formidable. But I think that my philosophical work is better because I take this intellectual challenge seriously.
 
That said, I do think the estrangement between philosophy and our fellow humanities takes a particular form right now. There has been genuine progress in neighboring areas in the humanities. The progress has come through the realization of how much of the traditional humanities was done from a specific empowered, privileged perspective, either a white European male perspective, or from the perspective of the state and not its inhabitants, and the realization of how taking such a perspective skewed the work. Think, for example, of the time in the 1960s when it became clear to historians, via belated recognition of the work of Du Bois, that historical research on the Reconstruction era in the south was largely inaccurate, and the inaccuracies were due to underlying racial biases of the historians. In almost every humanities discipline, there are examples like this – cases in which it was realized that biased perspectives resulted in shoddy and inaccurate work or scholarship. The recognition of the pervasive nature of implicit (or explicit) bias in perspective, and the recognition that such bias impedes truth-seeking enterprises was an important moment in intellectual culture. But it left the discipline of philosophy relatively untouched. That has created an even wider than usual gulf between the rest of the humanities and philosophy.
 
Finally, as I emphasized in my Inside Higher Education piece, there is an additional difference between philosophy and the humanities, one that is less profound but nevertheless equally divisive. Our fellow humanists write about novelists and artists and musicians. In contrast, the intellectual life of most philosophers is closer to that of novelists and artists and musicians than people who study novelists and artists. There is great naïveté in the ambition to write the great American novel, naïveté that is mirrored in the ambition to solve some of the long-standing philosophical questions once and for all. It’s utterly natural to view someone who is trying to write the great American novel, or is trying to explain once and for all how autonomous action is possible, as not only naïve but also ignorant (of the greatest of Melville, or the greatness of Kant). So there really is a cultural divide between the vast majority of humanists and the majority of philosophers.

3:AM: One of the things that will support your defence of philosophy is getting more people to see what you and your peers are doing. It’s sometimes difficult for those outside the discipline to get a grip on the geography of what’s going on that’s important at the moment. Eric Schwitzgebel’s just posted on his blog about how there can be philosophy of more or less anything, even dating, which kind of makes the point about how difficult it is to know where to look. Philosophy of language is perhaps where you are best situated so perhaps you could give a broad outline of what the main issues are in that domain at the moment. I love your comment about your piece on philosophy of language in the 20th Century for Routledge where you say, ”I attempt to summarize philosophy of language in the Twentieth Century. It’s a completely absurd task, and I fail miserably.” We’ll take another failure if its as good as that one!
 
JS: Let me begin by responding to your points about the relative accessibility of philosophical work. Even topics the significance of which is obvious to the lay public involve arguments that will stretch the patience of the lay public. For example, the significance of the topic of consciousness is very easy for the lay public to understand. But the best work on even this topic involves stretches of reasoning that are dauntingly complex. The conclusions David Chalmers‘ draws from his views are accessible and sexy to the public. But the views of content he has that support these conclusions are deep, complex, and subtle. They are certainly not accessible to the lay public. It’s the arguments he gives that make him a great philosopher, rather than the accessibility of his conclusions.
 
As Peter Ludlow emphasized in his comments at the Philosophical Progress conference at Harvard, philosophers need to introduce terminology that may not have pre-established usage. A successful definition carves up conceptual space the right way. This makes philosophical work, like mathematical work, terminologically heavy. Mathematical progress depends in part on arriving at the right sort of definitions – what Frege in The Foundations of Arithmetic called “fruitful definitions” (the example Frege gives is that of the continuity of a function). Philosophical progress is no different. Both mathematics and philosophy are difficult to access, because they are terminology heavy in similar ways.
 
Philosophy of language is particularly close to mathematics in this regard, because of how close it is to mathematical logic. As I emphasized in my piece on philosophy of language in the 20th century, philosophy of language has made so many advances because of the advances in logic in the late 19th and early 20th century. Developments in logic, and in particular model-theoretic semantics, gave impetus to the discipline, and its sibling empirical discipline in linguistics, formal semantics. Right now, there is a large body of researchers sprawled across philosophy, linguistics, and computer science (and perhaps psychology as well) working on similar topics. For example, if you take Rutgers as an example, the leading program in philosophy of language in the world, you see that our semantics research group has active faculty members in linguistics, computer science, and philosophy. I would describe the principal goal of all of our work, as with my own research in the philosophy of language, to be devoted to figuring out how much of linguistic interpretation is due to convention, and how much is due to general knowledge about the world.
 
There was a trend in the philosophy of language starting in the 1970s to argue that what appeared to be due to linguistic conventions was in fact due to knowledge about the world and general reasoning. Probably, this divorced philosophical work on linguistic representation from thought about representation elsewhere in the humanities, where theorists were looking for symbol-like representational systems everywhere. Philosophy of language instead was devoted to emphasizing how little conventionality played a role in linguistic communication. As I have also pointed out in the essay you mention, this was the result of quite accidental sociological features of the discipline – because of the titanic influence of Saul Kripke’s work, in the 1970s and the 1980s the focus of the discipline was on defending the view that proper names that had the same reference, such as “Mark Twain” and “Samuel Clemens”, had the same conventional meaning. A lot of energy in the discipline was devoted to defending this thesis. There was interesting work done here, but also some stagnation. There was a sort of template for writing a philosophy of language paper for several decades – start with an interesting phenomenon that seems to reveal complex conventionality (like the difference in meaning between “Mark Twain” and “Samuel Clemens”, or the fact that “Every beer is in the fridge” can convey different things in different contexts), and argue that really the symbol system itself gives us very little guidance in interpretation. This really isolated the philosophy of language from many disciplines – both the humanities at large, and linguistic semantics, and even formal pragmatics in linguistics, where people were interested precisely in investigating the special features of the symbolic system.
 
In the mid-to-late 1990s, a group of philosophers of language with training in linguistics started to reverse the trend, and focus on the special, quirky properties of symbolic systems. As a result, philosophy of language has emerged from its relative isolation. Because the focus in philosophy of language was for so long on arguing what the symbolic system didn’t do, there was a lot of catching up to do. A lot of the interesting topics and developments, such as research into the meaning of questions, had moved into linguistic semantics, where it was a bit divorced from philosophical concerns. Now, there is a great deal of excitement in the field, as people have realized that there is so much more complexity to linguistic meaning that we had realized. Philosophers such as Elizabeth Camp have started to see that there is a case to be made that phenomena that seemed obviously not conventional in nature, such as sarcasm, might be conventional after all. The discovery by Andy Egan, John Hawthorne, and Brian Weatherson that epistemic modals – terms like “might” as they occur in a sentence like “It might be raining outside now” (said by someone ignorant of the weather) – behave in ways very different than standard models of meaning would predict have led to the thought that a new model of meaning might be required. Motivated by the complex properties of very simple words, philosophers and linguistic semanticists have started to formulate new theories of content, giving new life to old programs such as expressivism. So it’s a very exciting time in the philosophy of language, and has been for about a dozen years.
 
For a long time, philosophers of language had thought that there was nothing foundational to be learned anymore from detailed work on particular constructions in language. We have now learned that this is false. Thinking intensely about the meaning of words like “might” or “if”, or the relation between the meaning of questions and declarative sentences, has led to really interesting discoveries. We are at the beginning, rather than at the end, of inquiry into the complex properties of the distinctive representational system that is natural language.

3:AM: Now one of the subjects that you keep returning to is Ryle’s distinction between knowing that and knowing how. Before you tell us about your argument which I believe is to say that knowing how is a species of knowing that, can you say what’s at stake here. I think sometimes one of the problems for outsiders is that they don’t pick up on the large and important issues that the detailed arguments are then engaged in sorting out.
 
JS: There are two ways to look at my new book. The first is that I am using a defense of thesis that knowing how to do something is knowledge of a truth to shed light on the notion of knowledge. The second is that I am using a defense of the thesis that knowing how to do something is knowledge of a truth to shed light on the nature of knowledge how and related notions such as skill.
 
Philosophy, and indeed broader intellectual culture, is in the grip of a false conception of factual knowledge, one that is antithetical to much recent work in epistemology. Once one has the correct externalist conception of knowledge, a dichotomy between practical and theoretical knowledge starts to look dubious. To use an example Robert Stalnaker suggested to me, think of my knowledge that the code to an alarm is 17-32-14. I may not be able to tell you what the combination is – I just can type into the alarm pad. The knowledge resides, so to speak, in my fingers. But it’s still propositional knowledge – I know that the code to the alarm is 17-32-14, I just can’t tell you. One reason the conclusions of Know How matter is that they free us from a constraining and misleading picture of propositional knowledge.
 
A second reason the conclusions of Know How matter is that they shed light on how much of skilled action is due to learning information about the world. Knowledge how to do something is a large part (or maybe all of) skill. I can only be skilled at basketball if I know how to play basketball. If I am right that knowledge of how to do something amounts to learning a truth, then we learn that skilled action requires learning something about the world. Even if I’m right, the question is open as to how much of the acquisition of a skill is acquiring information about the world. Does knowledge exhaust skill, or is skill knowledge together with something else? What about improvements in skill? Does that amount to additional knowledge about the world? There are a whole set of questions and positions about the notion of skill that are opened up here.
 
It is of the utmost importance for philosophy to gain greater clarity on what is involved in acquiring a skill, since skill and competence plays such a central role in so many philosophical projects. For example, virtue epistemologists hold that propositional knowledge relies on skills – think of the appeal to competence in the work of, for example, Ernest Sosa. The appeal to skill in Sosa’s work has a reductive character – knowledge requires competence, and competence itself does not presuppose knowledge. It is important that competence does not presuppose knowledge, since competence, for the virtue epistemologist, halts the regress of justification. If knowledge how is propositional knowledge, many if not all versions of virtue epistemology are imperiled.
 
There are many other uses of the notion of skill in philosophy that will need to be rethought if the conclusions of my book are correct. Philosophers have typically assumed that knowing how and skill are not propositional knowledge states, and used these notions in their theories. Generally, the pattern of argument is to establish some connection between the target notion to be analyzed – be it linguistic understanding, virtue, knowledge, or perception – and knowing how. The assumption that knowing how is a non-propositional state is then brought in to solve some kind of problem, e.g. to halt a regress, or to provide a reductive, non-factual basis for something. There are projects in epistemology, in ethics, in philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language that have this character. In general, if I’m right, all of these philosophical projects have to be rethought.
 
The topic of the relation between knowing how to do something and factual knowledge is not local to philosophy. It has been picked up by many disciplines. For example, it is a label for a distinction in artificial intelligence, and is thought to mirror a fundamental distinction in cognitive neuroscience, between procedural and declarative knowledge. My book takes up all of these issues. For example, in chapter 7, I argue that the cognitive neuroscientific discussion of declarative knowledge is muddled. And obviously, many disciplines care about the notion of skill. The thesis of my book bears on all of this work.

 
3:AM: Another area of interest is that of the role of context in making meaning. Your book of essays, Langauge in Context contains a treasure trove of your thoughts on this area. Again, though, I wonder if you could just lay out why this is an  important issue outside of philosophy before we look at some of your arguments?
 
JS: My work in the philosophy of language is devoted to preserving a certain view of linguistic representation. Think of a basic non-linguistic act of communication, such as a tap on the shoulder or a kick under the table. We do not interpret what is communicated by such acts by applying highly specific rules to structured representations. Interpreting such acts does not involve much convention. Instead, we rely on our general knowledge about the world, together with facts about the context in which the act is performed. Prima facie, linguistic communication is different. With linguistic communication, we rely on conventions governing the representations we employ. But there is a lot of reliance on general world knowledge and facts about the context of use even in linguistic communication. So the context-dependence of what is communicated by an utterance of a sentence provides an argument that linguistic communication and non-linguistic communication are not so different after all. The purpose of my work on context is to save the prima facie distinction between linguistic communication and non-linguistic communication, in the face of this kind of challenge. In contrast to non-linguistic communication, I argue that the role knowledge of context plays in linguistic understanding, and production, is limited to a few conventional sources. In short, the goal of this work is to preserve a theoretically significant distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic communication.
 
All of my philosophical interests coalesce around explaining the properties that make humans distinctive. My work in philosophy of language is part of this project. Sophisticated language use is one of the properties that is distinctive of our species. This strongly suggests that it involves a distinctive kind of representational mechanism. This gives me confidence to pursue the difficult details of accounting for the fact that, like non-linguistic communication, it relies on knowledge of facts about the context of use.
 
I tend to assume in this work that linguistic communication is distinctive in being the application of highly specific (and conventional) rules to structured representations. I tend to assume, for example, that pictorial representation works differently. But the work of Gabriel Greenberg, now a professor of philosophy at UCLA, has shed some doubt in my mind about the distinctiveness claim. He mounts a good case that at least some kinds of pictorial representation involves many of the same features as linguistic representation.

3:AM: You won a top prize for your book Knowledge and Practical Interests. There you claim that my knowing something is dependent on my practical interests. So knowledge turns out to be dependent on how much it matters! This is counter-intuitive – and so exactly what I want from my philosophers! So could you explain this position and why you argue what you do?
 
JS: My two books about knowledge are connected. Both take on the distinction between the practical and the theoretical. In my first book, I argue that there isn’t the kind of sharp divide between practical and theoretical reasoning that we learned there was in our introductory philosophy classes (when we, for example, discussed Pascal’s Wager). In my second book, I take on the distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge. Both books are in the service of explaining the value of knowledge by connecting knowledge to action.
 
My specific argument for the stakes-sensitivity of knowledge, the thesis that whether or not you know something at a time is dependent upon how much the knowledge matters to you at that time, has to do with the connections between knowledge and action. For example, if I am right, then if you know something, you can act on it. But whether you can permissibly act on something depends on what is at stake – whether I can act on my belief that there are nuts in my salad depends upon whether I have a fatal allergy to nuts. It is via the connection to action that knowledge gains its dependence on what is at stake.
 
I deny that the thesis is counter-intuitive. It’s commonsensical to think that if what’s at issue really matters, you need to do more work in order to know something. Knowing that a country poses a threat to the United States requires a huge amount of investigation, if what is at stake is the decision to go to war.

3:AM: Another area that you have intervened in is that of intention in action. There’s been a lot of recent interest in this subject through the book of Essays on Anscombe’s Intention last year. It seems as if you take issue with those philosophers who argue for a notion of direct knowledge/action that is incompatible with causation (i.e. those who move away from Davidson’s interpretation. I guess McDowell is the parade case?). It’s something you write about in a dispute with Jennifer Hornsby, a contributor to Anscombe book, in terms of the phenomenology of meaning. Is that right? This is another of these big issues where the stakes are not always made clear to outsiders. But this dispute seems to be about the scope of a scientific causal explanation in human intention. Those arguing for the idea of a ‘direct’ thing outside the scope of a causal relation almost sound like they’re saying we don’t need science or can’t have a scientific explanation of intention. I always feel a bit lost with this because I’m sure that there’s something I’m really missing here. Can you say what you take the big issue is with this and what your take on it is?
 
JS: My 2005 debate with Jennifer Hornsby is but one chapter in my overall project of emphasizing the centrality of factual knowledge, properly understood. Hornsby argues that knowledge of meaning is not factual knowledge, but something else, practical knowledge. I argue, against her, that knowledge of meaning is indeed factual knowledge. Again, the significance of this debate is that it bears on the nature of factual knowledge, and the nature of skill. Knowledge of meaning is just one of the battlegrounds in the larger war about whether factual knowledge is what gives us the capacities that make us distinctively human.
 
3:AM: I think we can see that you are wrestling with core issues that are not orthogonal to the deep, eternal and traditional philosophical questions. We are living in hugely complex times and troubling ones too. The financial crisis, mass inequality, war, eco doom – there’s a hell of a lot out there that seems we need philosophical thinking. What do you think will be the dominant themes, contributions and discoveries of philosophy in the next decade? Where are your interests going next?
 
JS: I can’t predict where philosophy is going next. Probably that question has as much to do with accidental sociological features of the discipline than anything else. I have been consistently working on a general picture of knowledge and agency for many years now, and increasingly find myself isolated from the hive mind in philosophy.
 
I have been working for about twelve years on my book on knowing how – which I started as a joint project with Timothy Williamson. I took time out from this project to write my first book (which, as I’ve said, is related). My own work over the next several years will be devoted to exploring some of the consequences of my work, both within philosophy, for the projects of virtue epistemology and virtue ethics, and also the cognitive sciences. For example, I want to continue the research I started in cognitive neuroscience, and in general track the notion of skill across the various disciplines that study it.
 
However, I am easily distractible. This is why I have published on so many different topics (of course my extensive project in philosophy of language is not connected to my main work in epistemology and action theory). I expect I will continue to do research on a wide variety of topics not directly related to my central philosophical life project. I’m also interested in certain topics in philosophy of language that relate to politics, such as the nature of propaganda (as in my recent New York Times piece). I have been thinking a lot lately of how politicians and their handlers use the special features of our symbolic system to manipulate us. It’s an interesting enough topic that I can imagine eventually writing something substantial on it.
 
3:AM: And finally, are there things outside of philosophy itself – such as the arts, novels and so on, that you find a source of inspiration and help. So has there been something you read that has helped shape your perspective on the issues you brood on?
 
JS: The issues I brood about and the literature I read when I’m not absorbed in philosophy have exclusively to do with man’s inhumanity to man. I’m not yet sure whether philosophy is my refuge, or where I think I will ultimately find the explanation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.
 

 
Roger Teichmann is a philosopher who has written four books so far, Abstract Entities, The Concept of Time, The Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe and last year’s Nature, Reason, and the Good Life. He edited a collection of essays Logic, Cause and Action: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Anscombe. He hasn’t burned his armchair as Josh Knobe would like him to but composes modern tonal classical music, which is a groovy thing for a philosopher with an armchair to do.
 
3:AM: You are a philosopher and a composer, an unusual combo. When and how did these interests come about? Were you a brooding tuneful chap as a lad?
 
Roger Teichmann: My mother was a professional philosopher, so as a boy I heard philosophical talk going on, and got hooked listening. With music you could say it was similar, in that there was often a record playing, or the radio. When I was about eleven I took up the piano, and subsequently the violin and viola; the impulse to compose was pretty immediate. But brooding? I hope not…
 
3:AM: You are an expert in the philosophy of G.E.M. Anscombe. Although now recognised as a giant of philosophy by philosophers I think she’s less well known outside of those circles, yet she was iconoclastic, a friend and translator of Wittgenstein, a woman and a Catholic who famously thought President Truman was a kind of war criminal. Could you tell our readers a few biographical details so we get orientated.
 
RT: Anscombe was born in 1919, and in the late ’30s went to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she studied Classics (or ‘Greats’). In her teens she had alarmed her parents by converting to Roman Caholicism, an early manifestation of her independent-mindedness.  When at Oxford she met another Catholic convert, Peter Geach, and they married soon after graduating, and went on to have seven children. Geach also became a professional philosopher of note. In 1970, Anscombe was offered a professorship at Cambridge, and she and her family lived there from that time. She died in 2001. Anscombe and Geach were so suited to each other that their friend Philippa Foot once remarked that it might almost be taken as a sign of divine providence that they had met! (Foot herself was an atheist.)
 
3:AM: You write in your book The Philosophy Of Elizabeth Anscombe that “part of the difficulty in reading Anscombe is in finding your bearings, and this has to do with her eschewal of System.” Before discussing your take on what she argues, can you say something about why you think she didn’t systematise her thinking as you’d expect a philosopher to do. Is this something she picked up from Wittgenstein? Is it something you sympathise with or do you think it makes things unnecessarily hard?
 
RT: Yes, I’m sure it was through her contact with Wittgenstein that Anscombe came to see the pitfalls of over-systematic thinking, and on the other hand the real potential in philosophical methods which aim to elucidate rather than to reduce. Like Wittgenstein, she had both intellectual honesty and philosophical stamina, and these are necessary when it comes to resisting the charms of system-building, since those charms have a lot to do with having an easier time of it. Getting an accurate overview of a complex and tangled set of problems is always more difficult than constructing a system and airbrushing out the inconsistencies and counterexamples.
 
3:AM: I’m interested in what you say about her criticism of C.S. Lewis‘ argument for miracles that claimed that naturalism was self-refuting. She argued against Lewis’ position whilst at the same time thinking that there was something important Lewis was getting at. Was she religious herself at this time? How do naturalism, religious faith and her philosophical position fit together?
 
RT: Yes, she was indeed religious at this time (see above), and I think respected Lewis quite highly. The occasion on which she set forth her criticisms of his arguments about naturalism, at a meeting of the Socratic Society in 1948 in the presence of Lewis, has become something of a legend, with some of Lewis’ followers taking the line that he was devastated by this ‘defeat’ at Anscombe’s hands - not how Anscombe herself remembered it. Anscombe wasn’t defending the position Lewis dubbed naturalism, she was merely arguing that he hadn’t succeeded in nailing it; and insofar as ‘naturalism’ signifies a (probably simple-minded) reductive enterprise she’d have no sympathy with it, on philosophical grounds. But I don’t think Anscombe felt there to be any conflict between natural science as such and religious truth. Indeed, she thought a proper scientific approach to certain matters was essential for us to be able to arrive at a sensible position, for example when thinking about the ethics of abortion.
 

3:AM Her important book is Intention. It has been described as the most important book on the philosophy of action since Aristotle! It’s a book that is growing in stature and philosophers are currently beginning to understand it better. It used to be thought that the position she argued for was the same as Donald Davidson’s anomalous monism but this is now in dispute, most recently in the collection Essays on Anscombe’s Intention. Can you say something first about how you read Intention?
 
RT: There’s an enormous amount in those ninety-four pages. But if one were to pick out just one thing, it would be natural to mention Anscombe’s account of intentional actions as ones to which a certain form of the question ‘Why?’ (e.g. ‘Why did you do that?’) has application. The account is characteristically non-reductive: it doesn’t try to give necessary and sufficient conditions for ‘X is an intentional action’. It also connects action with linguistic practice; for Anscombe, as for Wittgenstein, language and life are interwoven. It also shows Anscombe’s Aristotelian bent, since the sense of ‘Why?’ in which she’s interested is such that answers to ‘Why?’ questions give what Aristotle would call final causes, rather than efficient causes. (Aristotle also appears elsewhere in Intention, in particular when Anscombe discusses practical reasoning.) Finally, in foregrounding the reasons a person has for his or her actions, which can be good or bad reasons, and which can often lead to the further question, ‘But why do you want that?’, the account points to the connection between the topic of intention and that of (moral) responsibility - something of considerable importance for Anscombe. But there’s a lot more to the book than these brief remarks suggest!
 
3:AM: So how does this differ from Donald Davidson’s position? Jennifer Hornsby argues that Anscombe argues that action can be described in different ways and that raises the question: what is the entity being described? The action, obviously! But the action understood as an event caused by an event and causing other events, says Davidson. Causation is nomological for Davidson and that is the only thing he needs to add to his idea of an action as an event to develop his theory. But Anscombe doesn’t agree? Is this right? Can you say something about this business of the divergence between Anscombe and Davidson?
 
RT: Davidson picked up one particular idea from Anscombe, the idea that an action can be intentional under one description, but not under some other description, and he put this idea to work in his own account of intentional action. But the account is really utterly different from Anscombe’s, and I can only think it was this single point of similarity, plus Davidson’s approving reference to Anscombe, plus people’s not really understanding (or even knowing) what Anscombe had said, that led to the notion that the two philosophers were peddling the same basic line. The collection you just mentioned, Essays on Anscombe’s Intention, is very useful in dispelling the myth of Anscombe-Davidson. Perhaps the most obvious difference between the two accounts is, as you say, that Davidson’s is a causal account (roughly, an action is intentional if it was caused, ‘in the right way’, by a belief plus a desire, these being states of the agent) - whereas Anscombe’s is very far from being that. But there are other differences, some of them quite fundamental.
 
3:AM: Davidson’s interpretation of action gained immediate traction in a way that Anscombe’s didn’t. Why do you think this was? Is it because she was a woman? Is it because it is less amenable to a scientific orientated sensibility? Is it a question of style?
 
RT: All three, up to a point. There was also the association between Anscombe and Wittgenstein: in the ’60s, a backlash against Wittgenstein’s influence started up, gathering momentum over the next couple of decades, and I think that although she was obviously very much her own philosopher, Anscombe was assumed by many to be ‘merely’ a linguistic philosopher - even a so-called ordinary language philosopher. That in particular is ironic given her own pretty negative attitude to the echt ordinary language philosophers of the ’60s.
 
3:AM: Anscombe was a philosopher where ethics was a central concern to her and you point out that she wrote numerous papers on such matters. Is there a link between her analyses of intention and the centrality of ‘why’ questions – reason demanding – and her approach to ethics? Is her moral philosophy something that you find attractive? Can you say something about this?
 
RT: In the late 1950s, Anscombe’s colleague Philippa Foot went on leave for a term, and asked if Anscombe would take over some of her ethics teaching for that term. Anscombe prepared for this by reading various texts of modern (as opposed to ancient or mediaeval) moral philosophy, and she found much of it very unsympathetic, both in philosophical argumentation and in ethical recommendation. The result was her paper, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, which both throws down several gauntlets and points us in the direction of enquiries that were at the time fairly novel. One of these was indeed the enquiry into reasons for action which she herself was involved in, Intention being written at around this time. Another was the enquiry into such notions as virtue and vice, human flourishing, etc. etc., notions which had been central to Aristotle’s moral philosophy. Anscombe’s paper was rightly credited with having helped start up the renewed interest in Aristotelian ethics, an interest which produced what is now often called ‘virtue ethics’. Her moral philosophy is enormously important, and this by the way is something which can be admitted as readily by an atheist philosopher as by a Roman Catholic one.
 
3:AM: One thing that strikes a reader of Anscombe, and you note it in your book, is not only is the work formidably smart, but her examples can be odd, even macabre. I’m thinking of the poisoning of a house’s water supply, the stabbing murder examples and so on. Was this just that she was odd, or was she deliberately trying to shake up the stuffiness of philosophical discussion?
 
RT: The examples can be macabre or odd, but they can also be very everyday (someone going shopping or doing yoga, a bird alighting on a branch, and so on). They can also be a bit surreal - for example, the person who collects all the green books in the house in order to spread them on the roof, or the person who goes up to another and says ‘I promise to stand on my head’. The surreal ones remind me to some extent of Wittgenstein, and in both cases the surrealism typically results from putting some twist on an everyday phenomenon in a way that shows up a rather deep conceptual truth. Wittgenstein once remarked that you could write a philosophy book that consisted entirely of jokes. That said, I also think Anscombe liked to produce mild (or not so mild) shocks, something that funny or macabre examples can do.

 
3:AM: One thing that I think is important is her religious faith, which seems to frame her ethical system. Does this make much of her thinking irrelevant to modern sensibilities without such faith or is that sort of idea “the complacency that any established ideology produces in some of its adherents”, as you say? It seems though that the three areas of interest to Anscombe, the fact/value distinction, consequentialism and a legalistic conception of morality make more sense if you don’t have a realist understanding of morality. Anscombe had God backing up her moral system so the need for more contractual anti-realist models based on a naturalism is less pressing. What do you think about these issues both in Anscombe but in your own thinking?
 
RT: I don’t think I’d call either contractualism or ethical naturalism ‘anti-realist’. At any rate, these theories take moral judgements (or many of them) to be objectively true or false, don’t they? And the differences between contractualism and naturalism look to me about as large as those between either of them and Anscombe’s position, a position which in many ways is a naturalist one (like Aristotle’s). Of course, her substantive moral beliefs show her Catholicism, especially on such topics as abortion, euthanasia, sex, etc. - but these topics, and hence any serious views concerning them, are far from being irrelevant to us moderns! The question is whether Anscombe’s views here are worth taking seriously, and I think only a very prejudiced person could say that they weren’t. This isn’t to say that I toe the Anscombean line on all these substantive issues - I would disagree with her on various things, such as homosexuality or contraception. But it’s not as if the ethical issues surrounding contraception, say, are just simple; and there’s a danger in our society, as in any society, of thinking that if something is generally accepted then it can’t be in any way problematic. That’s one reason why Anscombe is so useful: she is a particularly articulate critic of many modern nostrums, and so acts in the manner of a gadfly, as Socrates recommended.
 
3:AM: Your latest book, Nature, Reason and the Good Life: Ethics for Human Beings, picks up on this discussion to some extent. You make some important arguments in this book. One is that philosophy is not a part of science. You say it’s obvious, “so obvious that you might wonder how scientism in philosophy could ever have become a prevalent view, and the answer will surely have to be largely sociological.” This is fighting talk! Can you say more about this?
 
RT: I think one very important difference between philosophy and natural science, one that I discuss in my book, is the following: that the practical requirements of handing on and sharing information and theory lead in the sciences to a practice of learning from authorities (people or texts). This means, among other things, taking those authorities’ words for what you learn, until or unless you bump into something that seems to undermine their truth. There is nothing like this in philosophy - you’re not meant to take your teacher’s word for whether the mind is distinct from the body, or whether the future is unreal. And that’s because the aims of philosophy are quite different from those of natural science. Science aims, roughly, at amassing a shared pool of knowledge, while the purpose of philosophy is a person’s individual understanding. (Needless to say, neither aim is in itself ‘better’ than the other.) This is not the only difference between science and philosophy, but I think it’s an important one, and one that hasn’t received much attention. The differences have been obscured by myths coming from both sides: philosophers of the last few decades want to think of what they’re doing as ‘continuous with science’ mainly on account of the kudos enjoyed by science (one of the ’sociological’ reasons I mention in my book) - while what I just alleged about scientific modes of learning conflicts with a prevalent self-image among scientists, according to which (a) the strength of scientific knowledge resides in its being testable, and hence (b) the justification for a scientist’s believing what she does believe isn’t to do with trusting authority, but to do with empirical testing - as if the scientist had in fact established for herself the truth of all her scientific beliefs. (a) may be true; (b) certainly isn’t.  
 
3:AM: Now some philosophers of a scientistic bent will be surprised to be told that their position is merely due to sociological pressures. Alex Rosenberg, for example, argues that his philosophical naturalism follows from what science tells us about the world. What do you say to these guys? You are pretty pugnacious in the book. This is an important issue, isn’t it?
 
RT: It is an important issue. For one thing, if philosophers have misconceptions as to what philosophy is, they’re likely to produce poor philosophy. Now I wouldn’t want to say that scientific facts can never be relevant to a philosophical problem, or anything like that; the dispute here rather concerns the distinctive aims and methods of philosophy on the one hand and of science on the other. But there is also the fact that scientism or science-worship is a cultural phenomenon, an element of the Zeitgeist, and in certain ways a dangerous one; so it is depressing to see philosophers succumbing to it.
 
3:AM: How much do your interests in music and composing help contribute to your philosophical thinking? Do you think there’s a connection at some level between your creativity and your arguments against making philosophy a science? We’re always interested in music at 3:AM, so could you say what you like to listen to, and what your own music’s like!
 
RT: My philosophical and musical personas are in fact pretty distinct, though I do have a philosophical interest in various questions about music. As to my tastes in music, they’re predominantly of a ‘classical’ bent, though ‘classical music’ isn’t really a genre at all, comprising as it does about five centuries of music from a host of different countries. I guess you’d call my own music ‘modern tonal classical’, or something like that.
 
3AM: The world’s in a mess at the moment. A lot of people are having a hard time. There’s a general feeling in the air that things are unfair to an unacceptable degree. Do you think that philosophy has got a role in helping us consider this?
 
RT: I hope so, yes. Of course, there hasn’t been an era of human history when you couldn’t say that the world was a bit of a mess and lots of people had a hard time. And philosophy has always offered a kind of solace and a route to something ‘higher’, for anyone to try. I’m with Plato on that. Whether professional philosophers can do much as a group to alleviate the problems of the world, I don’t know. I doubt if putting philosophers on advisory panels has a huge effect in that direction, if only because there are bad philosophers as well as good ones, and philosophers who shine as Committee Men or Apparatchiks may not be good ones…
 
3:AM: And finally, if you were to recommend your top five books for the smart readers at 3:AM, what would they be?
 
RT: Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, Conrad’s Nostromo, Shirer’s Berlin Diary, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

3:AM: I’d like to start by asking you about some contemporary ideas in philosophy that are really relevant to your work. You talk about the idea of a “technological singularity.” Before we proceed, perhaps you could give us the various definitions associated with this idea.

Vernor Vinge: For the sake of discussion, I see the Technological Singularity (that is, the rise of superhuman intelligence via technology) as separable into five trajectories:
The Artificial Intelligence trajectory: We create superhuman intelligence in computers.
The Intelligence Amplification trajectory: We enhance human intelligence through human/computer interfaces - that is, we achieve Intelligence Amplification (IA).
The Biomedical trajectory: We increase human intelligence by improving our own neurological capabilities.
The Internet trajectory: Humanity plus the nonhuman resources of the Internet together become a superhuman being.
The Digital Gaia trajectory: Reality “wakes up” as the network of embedded microprocessors become a superhuman being.

3:AM: So one thing being discussed at the moment is about consciousness and cognition. Eric Schwitzgebel and others have thought about hooking up computer technologies to biological systems like our own minds in order to boost intelligence. You’ve written about this in your work. Can you tell us how realistic this is as a possibility in the near future and what we should value in this?

VV: Much of human-computer interface work is in support of this trajectory - though there could be dispute as to how intimate a connection must be before it qualifies as creating a new category of being. Intelligence Amplification is one of the three trajectories (see above) that involves the ongoing participation of humans. For many, IA is especially attractive because we ourselves can remain active players.

3:AM: I guess I’m thinking about whether enhanced intelligence and other capabilities that this kind of hook up might bring both positive and negative results. Could you signal which are the books, authors and films alongside your own which give answers to this question and what your own thoughts are at the moment about this?

VV: My own stories ‘Bookworm, Run!’ and ‘Marooned in Realtime’ are about this possibility. The earliest story I know about the idea is Poul Anderson’s ‘Kings Who Die’. Charles Stross‘ superb novel Accelerando takes on IA and a number of other Singularity themes. I’ve heard that the web series H+ is to look at a very dark scenarioinvolving IA. Occasionally I run into folks who are negative about Intelligence Amplification because they believe that our evolutionary heritage (”bloody in tooth and claw”) would make us less trustable than pure machines. Personally, I think humans have a lot of potential for moral improvement; both the IA and the Internet trajectories look very attractive to me.

3:AM: One thing connected with the idea of the technological singularity is the idea that some time in the future we’re going to be outmatched by technology. Computers are going to be smarter than us and the consequences of this are kind of hard to predict.

VV: But note that pure machine scenarios are just one or two of the possibilities (see list above) for the Singularity.

3:AM: Yes, there are a range of ideas connected to this. There’s the hard takeoff idea where you think it might happen in the space of 100 hours. And there’s the soft takeoff where it happens over a period of years, maybe even decades. And all this is linked the the mathematics of exponential growth. Have I got this right and can you tell us about this view and how plausible it is and which of the two views strikes you as the one most likely to happen?

VV: I think all the Singularity trajectories will mix together. (Separating them is helpful for sensible discussion though, especially if some have strong results before the others.) The human-oriented trajectories give me reason to think that we can guide or at least influence the outcomes. For example, the Internet trajectory seems like a plausible soft takeoff. The others might be hard or soft - perhaps depending on whether the context is a military arms race.

3:AM: And again, this is something you have written about in your books. Can you say how you treated the ideas and whether in the course of writing over the last three decades you’ve changed your mind at all?

VV: My overall opinion on these issues hasn’t changed very much over the years, but there are some changes in emphasis I would make: In the 1993 paper, I did not have Digital Gaia on my enumerated list of trajectories (though the possibility was mentioned in passing). Also, in the 1993 paper, I should have made the point that unrelated disasters could derail this tech progress. For instance, a large nuclear war with MAD strategy could be a show stopper, and not just for this discussion. (I have a talk on this, ‘What if the Singularity Does NOT Happen.’)

3:AM: Connected to the last question is the idea of the manifest image of humans, the way we see ourselves and conceive of ourselves. Now in a way, and this is something you write about in Rainbow’s End for example, this is a profoundly disturbing possibility. The emergence of superintelligence that leaves the human race behind makes any idea of human progress pretty redundant. And the idea that we are the dominant species who can grasp more than anything else in the universe is blown away. It raises serious questions about the value of our values. So much seems invested in the self image we have of ourselves. As Nietzsche and the naturalist philosophers point out, the image was always an illusion. We have no freewill, they say, and our values and thoughts are really just post hoc rationalisations. So what’s the problem? Do you think the singularity you discuss is a profounder challenge to the illusions of the human manifest image than any before?

VV: Yes, I think it is a more profound challenge than any before in human history. But it isn’t deeper than events on the scale of the history of life on Earth.

3:AM: I guess the idea of AI is also linked with the singularity. We’ve seen this idea treated brilliantly all over the place in films and books. Can you say which of the treatments you really find satisfying and stimulating and also how you treat the idea and its implications in your own work? How far are your books and stories entangled and responding to others, and vice versa?

VV: There is great entanglement! For us writers, this has been a conversation extending across the decades, where novels and short stories have played the role of sentences in normal conversation. For ideas about mind, my great inspirations were Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov, but there were also individual stories by many many authors that together were a great influence. Walter M. Miller, Jr, had a short story about a warbot (’I Made You’ (1954)), almost an operations log, that illustrated programmed behavior finally exceeding its design spec (plausible machine creativity). There was Murray Leinster’s ‘A Logic Named Joe’ (1946) that described some of the most important features of the internet and search engines. (Actually, ‘A Logic Named Joe’ illustrates the problem of being too far ahead of the game. It should have influenced me, but instead it went right over my head.) And I’ll bet that almost everyone has encountered the vision of Olaf Stapledon.

3:AM: Some people argue that the singularity you discuss might be something that makes no difference to us. We just won’t notice it. So these people point to all the billions of ants in the world and note that they haven’t noticed us at all. So, is all this stuff about the end of the human and the downgrading of our image etc. besides the point? For all we know, the singularity happened last Tuesday and nothing happened from our point of view. Does this idea grab you? After all, if the singularity is like a black hole in physics, where over the rim there lies we know not what and cannot ever know, then how could we know?

VV: The notion that the Singularity would be invisible or secret is intriguing. (As a science-fiction trope, the “Invisible Singularity” is especially nice, another tool we writers use to make human-scale hard SF stories. (Other tools are: Big disasters slow down progress and allows normal SF; magical assumptions that the Singularity can’t happen in certain physical zones of the universe.)) In the event, I think the Singularity will be strikingly evident (even if, say, the ants analogy turns out to be a good fit). One way of considering this question is to look at it in terms of each of the five trajectories I list above. For instance, if the Singularity grew out of IA, then you might wake up one morning with a proof of the Riemann Conjecture that is as obvious to you as balancing your cheque book had seemed a few weeks earlier.

A pure AI Singularity might be harder to perceive - especially if the AIs wanted to keep us in the dark! But I can see plausible motives for such Minds to have a very visible human affairs department (see below). In any case, I don’t see any strong reason for the Minds to be secretive. Very likely there would abound spectacular physical effects and tech breakthroughs that no ordinary human understood. In fact, a long-term increase in claims of an “Invisible Singularity” would probably be a defensive measure on the part Singularity enthusiasts - in the face of no Singularity!

3:AM: There’s an idea that the super smart intelligences are pretty dumb even though they have much vaster processing powers than we do. So the argument is that even though we can built chess playing computers that can beat a human at chess, playing chess is a task that doesn’t require the kind of thinking humans use. They have brute memory power far in excess of the human, but they can’t draw on a Capablanca heuristic (because they’ll never need to evolve tactics to overcome computerising limits). So even though the machines will be able to do loads of things faster and better than we can, there will be blanks. There might be no consciousness, for example, and without it they might end up not being so far ahead as we might have imagined, say. Is this idea a possibility and what would you say to those who think there are reasons for thinking that AI is in principle not going to be possible?

VV: Time will tell. For human equivalent intelligence, I think the Turing test is still the best (at least if we take it in the general form that Penrose describes in his book The Emperor’s New Mind, at the end of his (generally skeptical) discussion of the Turing Test). It’s interesting to track progress in pure AI. As goals are met, arguments such as that about chess-playing are raised. For instance, Watson’s success on Jeopardy! is also clearly short of humans’ general abilities. What is the ultimate residuum, if any, of this distillation process? That is an extraordinarily interesting question, whether one is a skeptic or not, and there seems to be a good chance that we are within years of having some kind of answer.

3:AM: Another thing you’re interested in is the idea of conscious organisations and the way that, say, a corporation or a whole system of government might become conscious. What are the implications of this? In some studies of what ordinary folk think there are suggestions that people think that an organisation like Google, for example, can plan but not feel emotions.

VV: My intuition is that many emotions arise naturally when a real-time program must entertain multiple, prioritized goals (often with very different deadlines). In fact, pathologies of human psychology (OCD, bipolar, phobic lockups, obsessions) may reveal things about methods for handling multiple prioritized goals.

3:AM: What about the idea that if we develop biologically using our knowledge of the genome and so on we can keep ahead of the machines? Indeed one idea is that we can keep in step with the soft take off and even the hard takeoff of the singularity if we become superintelligent. And if that is possible, why would the superintelligent future human not want to stop the machines from rising? If they could know what was happening, why not just close it down everytime it starts to look likely. Why wouldn’t vigilance and power stop the singularity?

VV: This might be possible, though I think it would be very difficult, ultimately for some of the same reasons that ordinary humans couldn’t stop this progress. The long-term issue is that intelligence can probably run on a variety of substrates (bio, silicon, …) and there are probably non-biological substrates for mind that allow much faster and larger minds. Thus the great virtue of the IA, Internet, and Biomedical trajectories is that they provide us humans a means of guiding the transition and insuring the survival of both physical humans and minds of a human kind.

3:AM: These scenarios and the ones in your books are pretty depressing aren’t they?

VV: No. Disasters related to this progress are possible, but they are not the most likely bad things that could happen to the Human race. If the Singularity were something we thought was going to happen 100,000 years from now, in a remote future when human striving finally led to our becoming or creating something that transcended us - then I think it would be a vision that most people would have warm and happy feelings about. It is the possibility that it may happen before you reach retirement age, that is what’s unsettling.

3:AM: Is it because trying to stop this future would require repression on a scale worse than the predicted future that you don’t think we should try and stop it happening. Or do the good things coming from it outweigh the bad? Or is it because you just think it’s going to happen no matter what we do?

VV: Assuming the technology of the Singularity is possible, I don’t think that any tyranny can stop it. Basically, continued incremental improvement in automatic computation is such an immense win for almost all human endeavors (artistic, intellectual, economic, military, scientific, …), that only nuclear war or equivalent end-of-civilization events could stop or slow this progress. I think the Singularity would probably be a very good thing for humanity, so the main goal is to avoid existential threats (like nuclear war) and make progress as safe as possible.

3:AM: Your new book, what’s it about and how does it take forward your extraordinary visions of our futures. You invented the term ‘cyberspace’; are there new concepts coming out of this new work?

VV: Alas, I didn’t invent the term “cyberspace”. Back in 1981 I had a story, ‘True Names’, that took place in cyberspace - but which I called “the Other Plane” (thus illustrating Mark Twain’s distinction between lightning and a lightning bug).

I think that my second-from-most-recent novel, Rainbows End does a good job portraying a plausible 2020s. My most recent novel, The Children of the Sky, is an adventure set thousands of years from now, and thousands of light years from here. It has some things to say about issues of mind, but it’s looking at our present situation from a great and fantastical remove.

3:AM: In your books politics and social issues and moralities are inevitably part of the futures you imagine, even if they are broadly drawn. How important is a morality in these future worlds and do you think the technological worlds you consider require new thinking bout what it is to do right and wrong. If the new technologies are just far far superior to us, won’t it seem to us that our moral systems and value systems generally seem otiose and pathetic in relation to these supercreatures. And won’t that threaten how we behave and shatter our sustaining belief systems? Will we survive?

VV: I’m very attached to some fairly conventional notions of right and wrong. I hope that they apply, perhaps in some generalized form, on larger fields of play. I imagine two areas affected by oncoming events:
The last few hundred million years, we (metazoan life on Earth) have depended on relatively high boundaries between individuals. When humans showed up to think about this situation, “self” issues were a large part of the resulting ethics. For much of the last 150 years, notions of bloody confrontation have been the general perception of evolution. I think we’re entering an era where self, identity, and mortality will be reexamined. (The simple-minded, reductionist view of mind as a computational process leads to all sorts of questions and alternative views on these issues.) Recasting ethics in a world of labile, variable, minds is a project that extends beyond our normal human horizon, but we stand at the beginning of the process.

As a species, we humans are a very homogeneous lot. There is the suspicion that modern humans are the surviving first movers, having eliminated - except for limited interbreeding - the alternative models. On the other hand, in the last couple of thousand years technology and markets have immensely enriched humankind. These developments rely on very high levels of cooperation that exploit what different abilities and advantages there are. I listed five trajectories to the Singularity above. I think they can all be successful, but they may result in very different styles of thought. This time, I don’t think the first mover will wipe out the rest. The costs of living are low and the profit from cooperation is very high. (Karl Schroeder’s novels do a great job with this notion of species of mind.)

3:AM: It’s refreshing to have a top maths guy and a top computer guy also being a top literary guy. I’m interested in how the imagination works in all these fields. There are some people who want to say that there’s a hierarchy of the imagination, with maths at top and if you’ve got time, arts way down near the bottom. What’s your take on this as someone pretty much at the top of both these domains?

VV: The hierarchy argument could as easily be made in the other direction. For different classes of problems there are different ways of thinking. I guess it’s a version of the answer to the preceding question. A wonderful thing about large human populations with good standard of living, is that even weird combinations (fatal in earlier times) of thought styles can still be of use. Now with the Internet and computers, there are much more spectacular improvements possible.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Eric Schwitzgebel is a mad dog crazyist philosopher at the University of California, Riverside and argues really cool and smart ideas. He also hosts one of the top philosophy blogs, The Splintered Mind and writes books about his thoughts. He likes to have experiments to back up his philosophy, so he’s a kind of experimental philosophy guy like Josh Knobe. This means that there’s always a burning armchair somewhere in the background of his thoughts.

3:AM: I think that it’s going to be helpful to put your thoughts in the context of something that you and Russell Hurlburt wrote about in your first book, Describing Inner Experience?, where you say that despite all the advances in our knowledge about the universe we know very little about our own conscious experience. And yet we have writers of fiction, for example, telling stories where they claim to be telling us what is happening in the minds of their characters. And we make judgments of quality based on these reports, we seem to be able to say that some descriptions are richer than others and we like these. So Proust and Joyce, for example, are considered top writers because of their ability to probe the phenomenology of minds. So you think that it’s kind of bunk. We’re being fooled. We are just in the grip of illusions about our own experiences. Now this is pretty radical stuff. It suggests that I’m systematically always ignorant about my own mental life. Is this right?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Proust and Joyce – and Woolf, who is my favorite in that line – are brilliant artists. But the stream of real human thought is probably much less interesting to most people than what is portrayed in their fiction. Our real stream of thought is probably no more really like the streams of thought we see in their writings than Elizabethan-era conversations were really like what we see in Shakespeare plays. It’s stylized art, in a medium of words.

There are some things we know about our stream of experience. For example, if you’re looking in good light at a canonically red object and you think you are having a visual experience of redness, you’re probably right. But as I have argued in both of my books, I think we quickly fall into error when we try to go beyond a few obvious things. People seem to err massively when they start to think about such issues as what their imagery is like (sketchy or detailed?, flat like a picture or with depth?), or their dream experiences (colored or black and white?, first-person or third-person point of view?), their emotional phenomenology, or their stream of thought. You might think that you think about sex all the time and actually you think about it hardly at all. You might think you’re a poor visualizer with almost no imagery experience and yet actually have lots of imagery going on. Russ Hurlburt has some terrific examples of this latter sort of thing in his work, which involves beeping people at random moments and interviewing them very carefully about what they were experiencing at those moments. My book with him is just one of his many projects. And yet ultimately I am much more skeptical than Russ is.

Early modern philosophers such as Descartes and Locke thought that we know first and best our own stream of experience and then, based on that secure knowledge, we reach more tenuous conclusions about the outside world of physical objects. I think that’s almost exactly backwards. What we know first and best are outside objects. Our knowledge of our stream of experience is much shakier, later developing, and often directly dependent on our knowledge of things outside. I know that I’m having a visual experience of red because I know I’m looking in good light at a red thing, not the other way around. And that case only works well because it’s so clean. Introduce a bit of noise or weirdness and we start to fail.

20th century psychologists like Freud and Nisbett argued that we don’t know our own motives very well, but neither of them really challenges knowledge of our stream of inner experience. For both of them, there’s a big unconscious that we don’t know about, but we still know about our ongoing consciousness. So my skepticism goes farther than theirs.

3:AM: So you’ve some pretty cool experiments to back up your claims about this. Can you take us through some of them to get readers to understand why you’re making such counter-intuitive claims?

ES: I appeal to three different types of evidence. First, I appeal to the reader’s own sense of her experience. For example, right now, form a visual image of something, maybe your house as viewed from the street. Now let me ask some questions. How clear is that image? Is it clear in the center and sketchy at the periphery, or is it all clear simultaneously? Do you have to build up clarity in it over time? Is the image thoroughly colored from the outset or do you have to add colors to it? Is the image in some sense flat like a picture or is it more richly three-dimensional than that? Is the image stable over time or does it shift around a lot with changes in your attention? Most readers I have chatted with, when presented with these questions and others like them, discover some questions about which they are uncertain and about which they could easily imagine people erring. Comparably sized questions about nearby external objects – whether they are thoroughly colored, stable over time, etc. – seem much easier to answer. Even if such doubt-inducing exercises aren’t entirely convincing on their own, I think they help prepare the reader to find my general skeptical conclusions more plausible and palatable. Philosophers who think we have infallible knowledge of our stream of experience tend to focus on a few particular examples, like seeing red and feeling pain in vivid, canonical conditions. But those cases are highly unrepresentative, I think. When we consider real, naturally occurring experiences and carefully consider medium-sized questions about them, it becomes much less tempting to think we have excellent self-knowledge of the stream of experience.

Second, I describe the strange and suspicious diversity of opinion about the stream of experience across the history of philosophy and psychology – diversity that I think suggests error in reporting, not real differences in underlying experience. For example, in the U.S. in the 1950s, people used to say they dreamed almost exclusively in black and white. Now people say they dream in color. Before the 20th century, philosophers and psychologists used to say or assume that we dream in color. What’s the deal Well, I think it has to do with the fact that the 1950s were the heyday of black and white film media in the U.S. This relationship between film media and reports of dream coloration holds cross-culturally too, as I found in a Chinese study I did with Changbing Huang and Yifeng Zhou. In the early 2000s, rural Chinese people with lots of black and white media exposure tended to report black and white dreaming while high-wealth urban Chinese with very little black and white media exposure reported mostly colored dreaming. Have the media hijacked our dreams, so that when the media are black and white so are our dreams? I don’t think so. For example, if you look at dream diaries in the 1950s vs. the 1990s in the U.S., color terms like “red” and “green” appear at virtually the same rate. My hypothesis is rather that some people are wrong about the coloration or not of their dreams, overanalogizing their dream experiences to movies. Either people reporting mostly black and white dreaming are wrong, or those reporting mostly colored dreaming are wrong, or both groups are wrong. (The last possibility is my favorite, but you’ll have to read Chapter 1 of my 2011 book, Perplexities of Consciousness, to see why.)

Third, I examine the instability and variability of people’s reports of their own experiences in the contemporary West. For example, I interview people about their visual experiences of the periphery of vision. Over the course of the interview, people regularly change their opinions about what it’s like to see. At the beginning, most people say that they visually experience a broad field of stable clarity, with indistinctness only in the margins, say 20 or 30 or 50 degrees from the center; by the end of the interview, most people say they were wrong in their original opinion and really they only experience a small point of clarity, maybe 2-5 degrees of arc, that bounces very rapidly around a hazy background. What matters here isn’t who’s right, but how easily people’s opinion changes about apparently as central and obvious a thing as the general character and clarity of visual experience. Another point of variability is in people’s reports of the vividness of their imagery. Across hundreds of studies, psychologists have generally failed to find any robust relationship between people’s subjective reports about their imagery experiences and their performance on cognitive tests that are widely thought to involve imagery, like mental rotation tasks and mental folding tasks. In Chapter 3 of Perplexities, I defend the view that this lack of correlation reflects people’s introspective incompetence in such matters.

3:AM: Now out of this you have the idea that we are often in a state of in-between beliefs. Can you say what kind of a state this is and why you call it in-between? I think you talked about this in relationship to how the ignorance of the phenomenology can interfere with beliefs about really important stuff, like our feelings towards others and this results in a kind of dissonance between what we think we think and this hidden phenomenology?

ES: The best way to conceptualize “belief”, I think, is that to believe something is to steer one’s way through the world as though it were true. And although reaching explicit judgments about things is an important part of steering one’s way through the world, much else is even more important. Suppose, for example, that you are disposed to say, in all sincerity, that all the races are intellectually equal. You will argue for this claim against all comers and really feel that you believe it in your heart of hearts. It doesn’t follow that you really do steer your way through the world as your egalitarian utterances would suggest. You might really be incredibly biased. You might really always treat people of a certain race as though they were stupid. In that case, I don’t think we should say that you really, fully believe in the intellectual equality of the races. Instead, I think, you’re in a mixed-up condition in which it’s neither quite right to say that you believe the races are intellectually equal nor quite right to say that you fail to believe that. I call this an “in-between” state of believing. It’s in-between but it’s not at all like being uncertain. You might still feel unshakeably certain.

I think such in-between states are very common for the attitudes we regard as most central to our lives. Do you really believe that God exists? Do you really believe that family is more important than work? Let’s not look just at what you sincerely say to yourself and others but at how you act and how you react. Let’s look at your spontaneous valuations of things. Often, the match between sincere words and in-the-world reactivity is poor. And I doubt we have very good self-knowledge about any of this.

It might help repair our ignorance about such matters if we had good knowledge of our stream of experience. If I knew, for example, that I was frequently having angry thoughts about my children, or if I knew that I felt a kind of emotional soaring at the prospect of a new project at work and an emotional crash at the prospect of having to come home early to have lunch with the family – that might provide an important set of clues. But we don’t know such things about ourselves, and in fact we regularly fool ourselves in such matters to protect our self-conception.

3:AM: You have come to suggest a new philosophical position, ‘Crazyism’, which is partly motivated by this work but broadens out into the thought that all metaphysical positions have to accept some counter-intuitivism somewhere along the line. Is this right? Can you explain your thinking here and why we should all be crazyists?

ES: Bizarre views are a hazard of metaphysics. If you look across the history of philosophy, all metaphysicians say crazy-seeming things when they talk in depth about such issues as the mind-body relation, personal identity, causation, and the basic ontological structure of the universe. Even philosophers who explicitly prize common sense can’t seem to keep true to common sense about such matters. The great “common sense” Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, for example, attributed immaterial souls to vegetables and said that physical objects can’t even cohere into stable shapes without the regular intervention of immaterial souls. So here’s the question: Why? Why are there no truly commonsensical metaphysicians? Nietzsche, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Descartes, David Lewis – all of them say some incredibly bizarre-seeming stuff. Why is metaphysics so uniformly crazy?

My suggestion is this: Common sense is incoherent in matters of metaphysics. There’s no way to develop an ambitious, broad-ranging, self-consistent metaphysical system without doing serious violence to common sense somewhere. It’s just impossible. Since common sense is an inconsistent system, you can’t respect it all. Every metaphysician will have to violate it somewhere.

Common sense is an acceptable guide to everyday practical interactions with the world. But there’s no reason to think it would be a good guide to the fundamental structure of the universe. Think about all the weirdness of quantum mechanics, all the weirdness of relativity theory. The more we learn about such things, the more it seems we’re forced to leave common sense behind. The same is probably true about metaphysics.

But here’s the catch: Without common sense as a guide, metaphysics is hobbled as an enterprise. You can’t do an empirical study, for example, to determine whether there really is a material world out there or whether everything is instead just ideas in our minds coordinated by god. You can’t do an empirical study to determine whether there really exist an infinite number of universes with different laws of physics, entirely out of causal contact with our own. We’re stuck with common sense, plausibility arguments, and theoretical elegance – and none of these should rightly be regarded as decisive on such matters, whenever there are several very different and yet attractive contender positions, as there always are.

I conclude that regarding the fundamental structure of the universe in general and the mind-body relation in particular something that seems crazy must be true, but we have no way to know what the truth is among a variety of crazy possibilities. I call this position “crazyism”.

3:AM: Is this what motivates you to look at the history of philosophy? You have an interesting approach to this scholarship where I think you use the historical figures as giving you new data for your theories. Can you say something about this and perhaps give examples of how this works?

ES: Most philosophers, when they read the history of philosophy, are primarily concerned about one of two things: working out the nuances of the interpretation of various philosophical heroes, or evaluating historical philosophers’ claims for truth or falsity. That’s not how I approach the history of philosophy. I’m primarily interested in what the history of philosophy tells us about the psychology of philosophy. Nietzsche, I think, had a similar attitude. What does it say about how philosophers think, that historical figures in philosophy would say this rather than that? What does it say about the psychological origins of our own current philosophical attitudes?

Consider my answers to some of your previous questions. I’ve looked across the history of metaphysics to see if any philosopher can sustain a thoroughly commonsensical broad-reaching metaphysical picture. From the fact that no one seems able to pull it off, plus some other considerations, I draw a conclusion about the necessary conflict of metaphysics with common sense. I’ve looked at the history of philosophical and psychological opinion about colored dreaming and noted that that opinion seems to vary contingently with available cultural metaphors for dreaming. The same media-dependent contingency, I think, influences philosophers’ claims about ordinary waking visual experience, which it now seems natural to us to compare to photographs. (See Chapter 2, ‘Do Things Look Flat?’ in Perplexities.) I’ve also looked at German philosophers’ rates of involvement in Nazism in the 1930s. Heidegger was no exception; many of the leading German philosophers appear to have been swept up in Nazism. From this fact about philosophers, I conclude that expertise in philosophical ethics offers little or no protection against being lured into noxious ideologies. This seems to me to be evidence that professional philosophy doesn’t tend to generate lots of real practical wisdom.

Some people seem it obvious that professional philosophical ethics doesn’t generate moral wisdom and good behavior, but few have argued for it systematically and empirically. In fact, I have a whole series of empirical research projects on the moral behavior of ethics professors.

3:AM: The moral behavior of ethics professors? Surely their behavior is a model of virtue and rationality? Not!!!

ES: I don’t feel the cynical pull on this issue that most people seem to feel. It has always seemed to me that philosophical moral reflection – pondering both grand moral issues and more applied issues about what to do here and now – ought to have an overall positive influence on one’s moral behavior. And it seems empirically likely that professional ethicists engage in such reflection more often than do other people and at least as well. But it has also always struck me, in personal interactions, that ethicists don’t in fact behave much differently than other people.

So I went ahead and ran a bunch of empirical studies. Here are some: I looked at the rate at which ethics books are missing from academic libraries compared to non-ethics philosophy books similar in age and popularity. Ethics books are more likely to be missing. With Joshua Rust, I looked at whether professional ethicists in the U.S. vote more often than other professors (on the assumption that voting is a civic duty) and whether they are any more likely to respond to emails designed to look as though written by students. Ethicists behaved the same on both measures. With Josh and several others, I looked at courteous and discourteous behavior at philosophy conferences. Ethicists seem to slam doors, talk rudely during presentations, and leave behind trash at their seats at the same rate as do other philosophy professors. In a survey that Josh and I sent to ethicists, non-ethicist philosophers, and a sample of professors in other fields – again in the U.S. – we found that although ethicists were much more likely to say it was bad to eat meat they were just as likely as other professors to have reported eating meat at the previous evening meal. And although ethicists tended to say they see more moral value in donating blood, donating organs, and donating money than did other professors, the apparent rate at which they actually do those things appears to be no different overall. And of course there’s Nazism, which I have already mentioned.

So I’m inclined to think that we now have systematic empirical evidence, which we didn’t have before, that ethicists in fact behave no better, on average, than do other professors, at least in the U.S. and Nazi Germany. I’m still working on how to reconcile this finding with the practical value of philosophical moral reflection. It would be too easy to snap these results into my general skepticism about philosophical reasoning and about human rationality and self-knowledge, resulting in a diatribe against the value of philosophical ethics. But I think that’s too facile. I favor a more complicated story.

3:AM: Now one of the things you are is also a scholar with interests in Chinese philosophy and philosophers. Now there’s been a lot recently about the division between Analytic and Continental philosophical traditions and I find appealing Brian Leiter’s approach to this which basically denies that there are two traditions, even though sociologically there are probably interesting things to notice. So he famously has reread Nietzsche as a naturalist philosopher of morality. So I guess I’m interested to know what your interest in Chinese philosophy means? Do you find a separate tradition in the actual kind of philosophy done by the philosophers you have studied, separate from the Western tradition in terms of approach, intuitions, conclusions, purposes and so on, or is your interest in the continuities, the broadening out of a unified philosophical perspective? I think many readers will be like me and confess to knowing little about these philosophers, so could you tell us about what you’ve been studying in this area?

ES: One of the most valuable things, I think, about reading the history of philosophy is seeing that the broad questions explored by different thinkers are often similar – what is the nature of a person? How should we balance the apparent competing demands of morality? How much do we really know about the world? – but the answers to those questions, and the approaches taken to trying to answer those questions, are often very different. And the farther one gets away from the standard canon of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, etc., into weird minor philosophers and different cultural traditions, the more diversity one starts to see, I think.

But there is one big problem in making these cultural shifts in one’s philosophical reading, which is that many philosophical traditions build upon a network of culturally specific presuppositions, especially religious ones, that are hard to get one’s head around and take seriously from a contemporary secular or mainstream American-Christian perspective. This is why ancient China is particularly inviting. Although of course there is a foreignness to the ancient Chinese and things one needs to know about the period to get the most out of the texts, nonetheless the main ancient Chinese philosophers are quite comprehensible at a first pass even without any specialized knowledge of the tradition. This is especially true if one looks beyond Confucius and Laozi to figures like Mozi, Mencius, and Xunzi. Later Chinese philosophers, Indian philosophers, and Islamic philosophers are often not as approachable.

The ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi is among the most interesting radical skeptics in philosophical history. The great Western skeptics – Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne, Bayle, Hume – are all interesting in their own ways, and Zhuangzi is every bit their equal, and yet different. If you’re interested in skepticism and you don’t read Zhuangzi, you’re missing out on a valuable perspective.

The ancient Chinese Confucians Mencius and Xunzi had a very interesting debate about whether human nature is good – about the relation between morality and our natural impulses, about the universality of morality, about the developmental sources of morality and the proper course of moral education. I think we still have a lot to learn from their framing of these issues. In fact, the Mencius-Xunzi debate about human nature is how I got started thinking about the moral behavior of ethics professors.

3:AM: And I think Indian philosophy has been of interest to you as well. I suppose what will interest people is whether ideas from the East have permeated the West more than perhaps might be recognised, and vice versa? At a time when the world can seem splintered, and especially when we hear so much about the irreconcilable Western and Eastern world views, do you think a greater awareness of the shared understandings and streams of philosophical thought that you seem to be finding should be a priority in philosophy, so we should ensure that Descartes and Zhuangzi, for example, being taught together?

ES: I’m still struggling to get my head into Indian philosophy. I’’s a very difficult tradition, and I think I will never feel comfortable in it the way I feel comfortable with the ancient Chinese. When I write an article or pull together a course syllabus, I’m interested in looking at things from a broad perspective, historically, if I can do so while keeping things coherent for the student or reader. When I have the knowledge and competence to do so, and I think a philosopher outside the main stream of the Western tradition has an interesting perspective that I can bring to bear, I will bring that philosopher into the conversation. I am not satisfied with my knowledge of the Indian and Islamic traditions yet, however. I wish I could fission myself and lead three philosophical lives in constant contact with each other!

3:AM: You have some really wild thought experiments and as a science fiction fan I want to ask you to talk about a couple! So can you talk about ‘Strange Baby’ and why its important? When you put together these ideas do you draw on your reading of sci fi and watching tv and films to put the experiments together? Can you say what are you fave books/films in this area are, who are the writers you find helpful, if any? Do you think we’re going to become super-intelligent bio-machines?

ES: Well, ‘Strange Baby’ still needs some work, I think. What intrigues me in science fiction, and what I was trying to take a step toward in that blog post, is similar to what intrigues me in non-Western philosophers. A good science fiction writer can open your mind up to possibilities that you might not have considered before, can break you out of your culturally-given shell of presuppositions about how the world must be. I especially like science fiction that explores possibilities around amplification of our cognitive powers and what this means for our sense of personhood and our values. Greg Egan is terrific in this way, I think, especially in Diaspora and Permutation City. Olaf Stapledon too, especially Sirius and Last and First Men. Recently I’ve been enjoying Vernor Vinge’s portrayal of group minds in A Fire Upon the Deep and Children of the Sky, though sometimes I find his plot-to-mind-bending-idea ratio a bit too high.

If we continue on our current technological trajectory for another 50 or 200 years – which I don’t regard as a given – I think the human mind and human body might become very different from the human mind and human body as we know them today. Maybe, indeed, as Egan envisions (and also futurist Ray Kurzweil), we will mostly be uploaded onto computers and able to duplicate and alter ourselves at will. Then we might look back upon natural unmodified human beings as only a baby step up from monkeys, terribly cognitively deficient.

Let me bring this back to meta-philosophy. We can barely get right the most simple of logical puzzles (see, for example, the Wason selection task or the Tversky-Kahneman conjunction fallacy). Given that kind of cognitive deficiency, how could we reasonably hope to sustain complicated, abstract philosophy page after page without serious error? How could the giant architectonics of Kant or Hegel, for example, possibly be right? If we go the way Egan and Kurzweil envision, our descendants will laugh at us – hopefully good-naturedly, with some respect for how much we were in fact able to achieve with our little monkey brains.

3:AM: The other idea was the question: ‘Is the United States Conscious’ Great question, and yet there are serious issues at stake here. Can you let people know what the issues are and what the answer is? So will we wake up one morning and find out that Google rules the world?

ES: My interest in the consciousness of the United States is connected to my “crazyism”, my skepticism, and my interest in breaking away from our culturally given presuppositions about the structure of the world. It also connects with my recent interest in Vinge. In Anglophone philosophy since the 1960s, the dominant approach to the mind has been materialism: the view that human beings are naturally evolved beings, wholly made out of material stuff like elementary particles, with no immaterial soul of any sort. On materialistic views of consciousness, the reason that we have a stream of conscious experience is that we have brains that represent the world, can guide us in goal-directed action, and that are massively informationally connected in complex self-regulating loops. It is that fact about the complexity of our organizational structure that is responsible for our having a stream of conscious experience so that there’s “something it’s like”, phenomenologically, to be us, or to be a mouse, while there’s nothing it’s like (we ordinarily think) to be a toy robot.

But the United States appears to have all those same features! The citizens of the United States are massively informationally connected, in complex self-regulating loops – not in the same way neurons are connected, but just as richly. The United States engages in environmentally responsive coordinated action, for example in invading Iraq or in taxing imports. The United States represents and self-represents, for example via the census and in declaring positions in foreign policy. As far as I can tell, all the kinds of things that materialists tend to regard as special about brains in virtue of which brains give rise to consciousness are also possessed by the United States.

The United States is a large, spatially distributed entity. But why should that matter? Isn’t it just morphological prejudice to insist that consciousness be confined to spatially compact entities? The United States is composed of people who are themselves individually conscious. But why should that matter? We can imagine, it seems, conscious aliens whose cognition is implemented not by neurons but by intricate networks of interacting internal insects confined within their bodies, where each insect has a minor animal-like consciousness while the organism as a whole has human-like consciousness and intelligence. (Maybe such aliens are much-evolved descendants of bee colonies.) In the vast universe, it seems likely that intelligent environmental responsiveness, and consciousness, could emerge in myriad weird ways. It seems chauvinistic provincialism to insist that our way of being conscious is the only possible way. So why not regard group organisms as possibly conscious? And if so, why not the very group organisms in which we already participate, given that they seem to meet standard materialist criteria for consciousness?

It would be crazy to think that the United States is literally conscious in the same sense that you and I are conscious. But, as I mentioned before, I think we have good reason to think that something radically contrary to common sense must be true about the mind-body relationship. Maybe this is one of those weird, true things. Or maybe not. Maybe materialism is wrong. Or maybe, though it seems strange and unjustified to think so, spatial compactness really is necessary for some hunk of material to be conscious. Or…. I’m not sure this is something we can figure out with the tools at our disposal.

If it is true that the U.S. is conscious, I have no idea what to do about it. If the United States is conscious, would Exxon-Mobil also be conscious? Would disbanding a corporation or a nation be a kind of murder? I have no idea. And I guess that maybe I’m different from a lot of other philosophers in that I think it’s exhilarating to find myself tossed into such confusion, with my apparent certainties evaporating beneath me.

3:AM: So you’ve been working on these issues and it seems that you’re opening up a very crazy world. One thing that seems worrying is that the picture you give of us humans is that we’re really in the dark about even those things we thought we could trust and be certain about. You seem to suggest our lives are much more twilightish than ever. So here’s something that could follow from what you’ve suggested: if people don’t really know what they’re feeling then we shouldn’t worry when someone claims to be really unhappy because hey, what do they know? They’re just reading off this report from irrelevant factors. Couldn’t we just stop caring because we can’t trust these reports anymore? Wouldn’t this be both justified and kind of horrible?

ES: Yes, I do think skepticism can be dangerous. Who knows where the politics might lead? For example, people with severe disabilities often report surprisingly good quality of life. I’m told that insurance companies like to discredit those self-reports because then they can justify denying people treatment, saying “well, despite their reports, five more years of life like that isn’t really worth paying for”. Now, I too think we ought to be really careful with quality-of-life self-reports, but it makes me nervous that my opinion is so convenient for insurance companies. Overall, though, I doubt that skepticism is more dangerous than certainty.

3:AM: Finally, if you were to give the smart but non-philosophically trained reader a list of five books that’ll blow their heads off with wonder, other than your own of course, what would they be? And your all time favourite film?

ES: Tough call! I think everyone finds different things wonderful. Here are some of my favorites, for what it’s worth, in no particular order:

Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Olaf Stapledon, Sirius
Greg Egan, Diaspora and/or Permutation City
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

My all-time favorite film is My Dinner with Andre. I watched it over and over again in college, gradually shifting sympathies from Andre to Wally. I really have no idea whether that film is any good. My perspective on it now is too personally laden with memories.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

3:AM: I guess I think it would be useful to start with you telling us a little bit about yourself and how you came to become a professional philosopher. Were you a philosophical child, or did your interest develop at a later stage?

Jeffrey Bell: How one came to philosophy has long been a question I’ve been interested in and so this is indeed a good place to start. John Protevi has a series of interviews up at the NewAPPS blog and this is one of the first questions he always asks. In my particular case, I grew up in Southern California and spent much of my childhood outside – at the beach, riding my bike, running, and generally just enjoying the weather, an enjoyment I didn’t fully appreciate, especially in the summer months, until I moved to New Orleans (where summers are, well….hot and humid!). My first visceral connection with philosophy, and one that sparked my life-long interest in philosophy, my philo sophia so to speak, was when I read Plato’s Dialogues in the car during a long drive to our annual family ski trip. I had always been a reader. When not involved in my outdoor activities I could usually be found in my room, from grade school up through college, reading and listening to music. At the time I discovered Plato I was in junior high (around 12 years old) and I felt almost like I was reading the science fiction I was heavily immersed in at the time. Despite my interest in philosophy being piqued, I never really thought I’d become a philosopher. I always thought of myself as a scientist or doctor, being an academic philosopher never crossed my mind. That changed in college when a series of great classes and professors convinced me to go all in with philosophy. I have been fortunate since that I’m still able to make a living doing what I love to do, and what I would do even if it were not my profession.

3:AM: Do you consider the appellation ‘Continental philosopher’ accurate or helpful in describing yourself and your activities and thoughts. I’m thinking that there has been much discussion about the so-called analytic/continental divide and it seems people are beginning to come round to the position that the idea of there being these two traditions just isn’t a helpful categorisation. And of yourself, and Deleuze, isn’t there a small bit of your approach that might be labeled scientism? In this I make you utterly distinct from a Heideggerian approach. Is this plausible or am I just pushing my luck on this one?

JB: As a philosophical label I do think ‘continental philosophy/philosopher’ is not very helpful and perhaps even harmful to the discipline in that it tends to lead to the further ghettoization of a whole host of philosophical problems, tactics, and texts. When the Jobs for Philosophers comes out, ‘continental philosophy’ will be listed as one of the AOS along with metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and ancient philosophy, etc., but that tends simply to reinforce the perception that the philosophical problems being addressed, and the methodological manner in which they are addressed within continental philosophy, are marginal to what is taken to be the cutting edge of philosophical research. Would a department that is doing a search for someone who has a specialization in metaphysics seriously consider a Deleuze scholar? That said, I do believe there is a sociological truth that underlies the analytic/continental divide. There are two distinct canons within the traditions and although they often overlap the tendency for much of the latter three decades of the twentieth century was to highlight the differences rather than their common, shared history. Grossly simplified, the division as one often heard it described was that analytic philosophy focused on collaborative efforts and the division of labor, while continental philosophy was more literary, with the solitary geniuses writing alone in their study. This is largely a myth built around a few grains of truth (for example, the most important texts within ‘analytic’ philosophy are essays, which usually credit a number of people who contributed in some way to the thoughts developed within the essay; and in ‘continental’ philosophy books are more important than essays and there is less acknowledgement given). I think a careful history of twentieth century philosophy, and this is one of the projects I’m engaged in at the moment, will undo much of the mythology that has grown around and reinforces the sociological divide among philosophers.

As for whether my philosophical approach is to be placed within the tradition of scientism or not, I can see why you might say that it does. I have tended in my work to emphasize empirical enquiry, and I do tend toward skepticism (as is evidenced in my book on Hume), and moreover my Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos book draws heavily from the concepts and experimental results associated with dynamic systems theory, and so it might seem natural to infer that I privilege scientific forms of enquiry over all others (which is how I understand scientism). There is a difference for me, however, between the use of philosophical concepts that draw from empirical, scientific investigations and the claim that philosophical concepts simply are, and ought to be, nothing more or less than scientific tools of investigation.

3:AM: Recently you contrasted Dewey and Deleuze’s approach to the relevance of philosophical thinking in pugnacious terms. Dewey saw philosophy as a way of thinking through problems that matter in a shared, consensus-seeking, dialogic setting. You seemed to be arguing that by the time a problem has become the subject of a debate it is no longer philosophy. You cite Deleuze and Guattari where they dismiss “the Western democratic, popular conception of philosophy as providing pleasant or aggressive dinner conversations at Mr Rorty’s,” and link their proclamation to Nietzsche’s idea of the fatal process of abbreviation in order to avoid misunderstanding and then provide an alternative picture of philosophy which is “no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussible problem posed. Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous.” Can you say something about this and what implications you draw not just for philosophy, but more broadly, perhaps, the role of the novel and the arts, and politics, as understood through this lens.

JB: That’s an important and immense question. I suppose the simplest way I have of expressing the importance of philosophy and its relationship to the arts, politics, and even science, is to see its task as that of problematizing established routines and habits, ready-made beliefs and thoughts. In short, I think an important task of philosophy since Socrates (though I read this in Islamic, Indian [such as Nagarjuna] and Chinese philosophy as well) is to problematize common sense. In a post up at NewAPPS a few months ago titled ‘In Praise of the Incredulous Stare‘, I argue that Jason Stanley’s approach to philosophy as being ultimately a defense of, and return to, common sense is only half the story. The other half is the problematizing of common sense, the efforts that leads to the incredulous stares from those who hear your daft ideas for the first time. These efforts can then result in a return to common sense, but this is not the same common sense; it’s a transformed common sense. To the extent that thinking is going on within the arts, literature, and politics there will be a similar double movement away from common sense and back toward a transformed common sense. After the post you cite a few people took me to task for being too harsh against Rorty – too pugnacious perhaps – and they may be right. Rorty seems to have had a similar double movement in mind as well when he stressed the importance of the ongoing conversation in contrast to the Truth or Mirror of Nature that ideally ends the conversation as that which cannot be undone – the ultimate common sense or doxa. That said, as Rorty lays things out I don’t see how one can create concepts under the conditions he envisions; Rorty’s conversation is too loose and not rigorous enough in my mind. Take a concept such as Hume’s on “belief,” or Descartes’ “cogito”. Each of these concepts is a response to a particular problem – how, for Hume, to account, based upon the givens of impressions and ideas, for a new, original idea such as the idea of necessary connection when it is nowhere to be found within that which is given; or, in the case of Descartes, how can we account for objective knowledge without presupposing the truth and nature of objectivity itself? Each of these concepts involves a number of components which are fairly rigorously and systematically involved with one another within the concept – there are the components of force and vivacity, impressions/ideas, doubting, externality of relations, and habit and custom for Hume, and doubting, thinking, and being for Descartes.

3:AM: Now, one of the key things you think about in relation to this notion of ‘creating concepts’ is what you have called ‘historical ontology’, a phrase you say you took from Ian Hacking who took it from Foucault. This is the idea that external objects of belief, including historical, scientific, psychological, architectural, basically everything, is inseparable from active processes of human minds. It’s an idea that links with Latour’s work on science, for example, where he sees scientific objects as products of history rather than the discovery of external objects. I guess the idea is that the process is one of invention rather than discovery. And of course you trace this thought to the work Deleuze stated on David Hume. Is this right and can you explain how this works, perhaps giving some examples to illustrate your ideas here?

JB: You’re basically right, though I wouldn’t argue that external objects of belief are inseparable from “active processes of human minds.” One of the lessons I draw from Latour is that we need to overcome our continuing fascination and belief in belief, whereby this either presupposes a subjective belief that projects its own subjective processes upon the world around it as is done with fetishes, or whether it merely represents what is objectively, factually there independently of belief. For Latour, the subjective and objective poles of belief are abstractions from what he calls factish, by which he means a messy network of associations and connections. In Laboratory Life and a host of other works, Latour shows how the difference between an artifact and an actual fact in science is inseparable from a myriad of processes that establish connections with other processes, and the more these networks are built up (in the same sense in which the repetition of impressions leads through habit to belief in causation and necessary connection for Hume) then the more “objective and autonomous” the object is. This is the sense in which for Latour the more constituted something is, the more enmeshed in networks that presuppose this thing, the more objective and autonomous it is. This is neither an objective nor subjective process; it is just process (and hence Latour’s admiration for Whitehead and, similarly, Deleuze). This is where I jump in with my use of the concept “historical ontology” to account for how determinate reality is itself inseparable from but irreducible to a network of relations that give to the existent a relative existence. As an example one could use one of Latour’s favorites – Pasteur’s discovery of microorganisms. During the first half of the 19th century the very notion that fermentation might occur by virtue of microorganisms ran counter to the “common sense” opinion among most other chemists and biologists of the time who believed that fermentation was simply a chemical reaction. By the end of the 19th century the number of alliances and networks with which microorganisms became associated increased, and continued to increase through the twentieth century with antibiotics, antibacterial cleaners, etc., and with this increase so too increased the relative existence and autonomous reality of microorganisms.

3:AM: I guess the role of technology in your thinking is also important in this respect and in your book on Hume you illustrate how we tend to exclude science from historicised thinking but not technology. So you give an example of finding a mummy of some Egyptian and finding he died of TB and that is totally acceptable. But had we found that he had died by machine gun fire, then we would count that as impossible. You link some of your thoughts here with work of Woolgar and Latour. So what I want to ask is whether this contrast in attitudes signals a difference in how we think about these two things – science and technology – a difference that kind of mirrors the natural kinds, non-natural kinds distinction. And doesn’t this problematise your position of historical ontology in that it ignores a commonly felt distinction?

JB: The TB example is indeed a good one. The point of this example, as I understand it at least, is to highlight an important point about realism. According to traditional scientific realism, the technologies used by science (telescopes, microscopes, Large Hadron Colliders, etc.) do not create the realities these technologies make it possible for us to verify and assert as an objective fact. It was because the bacteria that causes TB was already there that we say we discovered it with the microscope and then say that it caused the death of Rameses II. By contrast, deaths by machine gun were not possible until there were machine guns, and thus these facts depend upon the technologies that create the possibilities of such facts. We could call this the anti-realist position. Latour’s point as I see it, and this is where I bring in Hume and Humean skepticism, is that the assumptions regarding realism depend upon the network of associations that can lead to and detract from a strong relative existence. For example, if there were to be a revolutionary rethinking of microbiology a few centuries from now we may say then that there has always been something that we don’t say exists now, or that the microorganisms such as bacteria don’t really exist now as we think they do. Latour discusses the case of Watson and Crick’s claims regarding the form and structure of DNA hinged in part on overturning the then textbook assumptions of what form it had to be in. Admittedly the associative relationship between humans and machine guns is impoverished compared to that between bacteria and the other existents. Machine guns are counterfactually dependent upon a human historical act whereas bacteria, despite the technological means necessary to verify their existence, come to be seen to acquire associations independent of human technological innovations. So there is indeed a difference between the two cases which justifies our claim and sense that we cannot infer death by machine gun to Rameses II although we can claim he died of TB. The difference here is a difference of degree rather than a difference of kind, however, and it follows (or at least I claim that it follows) from the arguments I make regarding “historical ontology” and relative existence. So I don’t think this example problematizes my position, though there are no doubt other places where what I am arguing may become problematized. At least I hope so.

3:AM: One of the fascinating things that happens in your discussions of David Hume and Deleuze is that you show how a conventional reading of Hume is not the most probable if we take Hume at face value. Ernest Gellner said something about this in his Legitimation of Belief where he points out that if all there is is this buzzing confusion of impressions then cultivating our passions and feelings so we become connoisseurs of them would be the rational thing to do. Creating something anew out of them seems to be what Deleuze also considered an obvious move. This seems to be a separate issue to the question of how to bundle the impressions up so that the idea of a self makes sense. Is this something you’d sympathise with, the idea that Hume and other philosophers Deleuze and yourself examine have been packaged to suit interests external to their own positions and that what you’re doing is getting back to the revolutionary potential in them?

JB: That’s a fair assessment of what I attempted to do in my Hume book. I was certainly challenging many of the contemporary readings of Hume and offering an alternative reading that sits well with Hume both philosophically and historically. And I would agree that I’m also trying to think through thought itself, and in particular philosophical thought, as a challenging of common sense such that it becomes revolutionary and transformative. At the same time, however, I am approaching the positions of Hume and Deleuze as being both inspired by the problem of how to transform a multiplicity into a determinate, identifiable system or belief. For Hume this is the problem of belief in necessary connection as well as the problem of the self; and for Deleuze this is the problem of individuation. The result of approaching Hume and Deleuze in this way is that in the end we probably end up with a Deleuze-Hume hybrid rather than “faithful” (whatever that means) readings of Deleuze and Hume. This hybrid reading, I’d like to think, can clarify a number of issues and perhaps raise new problems that have not been seen before.

3:AM: Now another idea that is current in your thinking engages with the topic of determinism and freewill. Recently some naturalistic philosophers such as Alex Rosenberg have bitten the bullet and said that because we have a naturalistic universe there can be no freewill. Compatibilists like Dan Dennett have argued that even in a fully deterministic universe there’s room for freewill. Other philosophers kind of ignore the determinism because they don’t think it ever matters what the state of nature is to understand the relevant discourses of intentionality in which they say freewill sits. So perhaps G.E.M Anscombe and Wittgenstein and maybe McDowell and Brandom might make this move. Now you relate this issue to Spinoza in the Ethics where he writes “the idea of a singular thing which actually exists has God for a cause not insofar as he is infinite, but insofar as he is considered to be affected by another idea of a singular thing which actually exists; and of this [idea] God is also the cause, insofar as he is affected by another idea, and so on, to infinity.” So I guess you’re taking the line that determinism does matter and that any worked out view about our freewill will need to address this. Is this right? Can you say what your arguments are in this area and whether you think autonomous agency is possible somehow and why this puts you in conflict with Badiou?

JB: You put the question to me in an interesting way, for while I do not directly address the free will/determinism question in my work I do discuss what I see as the crucial difference, or point of contention, between Deleuze and Badiou, and your question has highlighted the connection that this discussion bears on the free will/determinism problem. To be brief, I’m largely in agreement with Dennett, though I don’t understand determinism in its classical sense whereby every thing has a mechanical, determinate reason for being precisely the determinate thing that it is – namely, the principle of sufficient reason – but rather I opt for an alternative version of the principle of sufficient reason, which I draw from Spinoza, where this reason is not a determinate reason but is instead what I call a substantive multiplicity (I argue for this in my Between Realism and Anti-Realism essay). And this gets to the second question about whether or not my embrace of a form of compatibilism. Badiou believes that Deleuze’s metaphysical commitments – to Spinoza in particular – do leave him unable to account for novelty. Every thing is just a fold and extension of everything that precedes it and hence nothing emerges that is not in some sense prefigured within that which came before, and therefore it is not truly new. By contrast, Badiou argues for events that rupture with what is, they are the void and null set that cannot be placed within any situation. The problem then is to account for how such events become effective, how they come to transform the way things are. This is where Badiou calls upon the fidelity of the subject who answers the call of the event and thereby effectuates its potentialities within the world. My argument for the notion of a substantive multiplicity avoids the necessity of calling upon a loyal subject to effectuate novelty while at the same time not sacrificing the radical nature of the new as that which cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, that which preceded it. The argument to make this case consumed many pages of my book, but in short the substantive multiplicity does not determine the new for it is only as actualized, determinate modes (following Spinoza) that this substance is determinate and determinable in the first place. This reading, I argue, fits well with what Spinoza actually says and avoids some of the problems that plague Badiou’s reading of Spinoza.

3:AM: You are developing a fascinating theory of philosophy, of both western and non-western, developing it in terms of an actor-networking theory. You describe your trajectory as being one which started with a Foucaultian historical analysis that then was influenced by Latour’s work until, through your book on Deleuze and Hume you developed further so that now you have an ethical and political system “related to Latour, actor-network theory, speculative realism, and Donald Davidson among others.” You label it a Spinozan ethics and politics. This is hugely ambitious. Could you say something about this and how it contrasts with the kind of ethical and political thinking currently found in philosophy. Interestingly, in Leiter’s blog there have been many philosophers commenting on how poor (and boring) moral philosophy in particular has been for a while and that there is a real need for an approach that blasts open new thinking. Is this your hope?

JB: Yes! There is a good reason why Spinoza’s masterpiece is titled Ethics, and in the end what I am doing is indeed intended to resurrect for contemporary concerns the ethical dimensions of philosophy while demonstrating the relevance of this dimension to metaphysical and epistemological problems. Perhaps this goes back to my initial entrée into philosophy by way of Plato’s Dialogues, but I continue to think that the ethical dimension is essential to the nature of philosophy itself. This is the main reason why I think it is a mistake to charge philosophy with the task of aspiring to the status of being a science, or that it ought to hitch its wagon to scientism.

3:AM: Now it strikes me that you have affinities in much of your approach to Buddhist thought in some ways. You have written about Nagarjuna and the tain of mirrors and emptiness. These seem to be all part of your way of reimagining politics and ethics, and who we are and what we should do. Interestingly, several philosophers have found Buddhist teachings useful in finding a way of protecting Sellars‘ manifest image of humanity. Owen Flanagan for example, has just published his book The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalised. Can you say something about this aspect of your thinking and whether you (and Deleuze even) might be considered naturalized Buddhists? Or would the historicism prevent a truly naturalised characterisation of your thinking?

JB: Again, I think the distinction you bring up at the end of your question between historicism and naturalism returns us to the natural/non-natural kinds distinction you brought up earlier. This distinction brings me to the heart of what is for me the primary inspiration of Buddhism as it relates to my own thinking, especially the work of Nagarjuna, and that is the sophisticated and rigorous manner in which they think through the implications of non-dual thought as a condition for contradiction, or as a condition for determinate, identifiable differences and oppositions (and Graham Priest as well has an excellent chapter on Nagarjuna in his Beyond the Limits of Thought). The parallels with Deleuze should be pretty clear as well. Nagarjuna, I would argue, was the first true philosopher of difference.

3:AM: You write about Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. And music is important generally to your philosophical outlook. Could you say what the place of music is, and give examples of music that is inspirational for you. And could you broaden this out to discuss also the art and novels and poetry that you have found important and sustaining throughout your philosophical career. How influenced are you by theories of art and creativity, as in, for example, Rancière?

JB: In at least a number of cases, the philosophers I most admire were also very artistically inclined. Nietzsche wrote piano music and poetry; Spinoza was reportedly a talented sketch artist; and Sartre was an excellent novelist. I would argue that philosophy itself is a form of creative process - it creates concepts. Personally for me I always wanted to be either a novelist or a musician, but my actual abilities didn’t cooperate and I found instead a talent for creative philosophical work – creating concepts as Deleuze would put it. Despite my shift to philosophy, I have nonetheless continued to draw tremendous influence from the arts, especially music and literature. In music I have always been most strongly drawn to the “alternative” scene, even though I’m open to listening to almost any kind of music. Brian Eno, Lou Reed, David Byrne, Kate Bush, and Laurie Anderson are some of the foundational musicians for me, but more recently I have gotten much from Andrew Bird, St. Vincent, and Bon Iver. As for literature the four names that come to the top of my mind are Kafka, Cormac McCarthy, China Miéville, and Haruki Murakami. I read quite promiscuously so I’m not limited to the worldview of these writers but they do represent the strange attractor I continually return to. As for how the theories of Rancière and others connect with my interest in the aesthetic of such authors and musicians, I’ve been underwhelmed with most efforts to date though I do believe that it is a crucial task for contemporary intellectuals to make an engaging connection between cultural products and the possibility/necessity of revolutionary transformation. I do admire this in Rancière’s work, and his principled defense of equality, though I think the trajectory of this thought needs to be extended in light of more recent cultural events.

3:AM: I think Sartre was one of your early influences, the very epitome of the engaged intellectual. So finally, we’re looking at a very disturbing social and political scenario at the moment, with perhaps the Occupation movements signaling a deep fissure in the capitalist structures, with inequality and sexism and racism still rife. Can you say something about your own take on this current crisis and how you think we should proceed? In a recent discussion with Jean-Michel Rabaté about Beckett and the role of the intellectual and artist, he considered it a duty of these figures to be iconoclasts, dangerous and making trouble. Here at 3:AM we’ve been tracking Stewart Home who takes this trajectory. What do you think about this?

JB: Sartre was indeed the philosopher that got me into philosophy, and to this day I admire his engaged, political activism. Sartre was living proof that one does not necessarily become more conservative as one ages! And just today (December 14, 2011) Time Magazine named the protestor as the person of the year, and Sartre himself would certainly have identified with the “occupy” movements. I do think the protestor movements that began in the Middle East and then spread to Wall Street are a consequence of 30 years or more of the hegemony of neoliberalism. It is not that neoliberalism itself has come to be the explicit target of these protests, but the consequences of neoliberal policies which have only exacerbated economic inequalities are certainly what has fueled the ease with which the “we are the 99%” campaign has spread and transformed the public debate from one of government profligacy to that of economic inequality. I think Joseph Stiglitz in his Globalization and its Discontents anticipated much of what we see today and this is likely to continue for some time. As for the interest in Stewart Home I think that is on target. He has an ability to coalesce political and aesthetic concerns in a way that challenges contemporary common sense perspectives. Although I am not as familiar with Home’ work as I probably should be, I do know enough to encourage 3:AM to continue tracking Home’s work.

3:AM: And really finally, who would you consider to be the philosophers, poets, novelists, playwrites and artists working at the moment that smart, but non-philosophically trained, readers would benefit from reading. A list will do!

JB: Let’s end with a list:
Bryan Magee
Logicomix
Richard Tarnas
Thomas Pynchon
Haruki Murakami
Cormac McCarthy
China Miéville

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

The sky was violet and fumed with smoke. On the other side of the street an old van was parked. Inside was a boy reading a magazine. A girl ambled up to the open window, passed him a pack of cigarettes and climbed in. Both were nut-brown and loose-limbed in beaten-up old jeans: partners in crime. The boy jumped out, walked away, did a double take and tossed a cigarette back to her before sauntering off with a smile. The girl kicked back with her bare feet on the dash and lit up.

Corinna watched them enviously from her balcony, dressed in her wrapper, drinking the last of Jimmy’s beer alone. That double take, the remembered cigarette; that was love.

This, from ‘Double Take’, is the kind of poised prose-writing that makes you want to high-five the author. It’s one of many just like it in Rowena Macdonald’s debut short story collection Smoked Meat, out on northern-based indie Flambard Press now.

Based on the author’s twelve-month sabbatical in Montreal – half-Francophone, half-Anglophone; covered in snow for half the year, too – the stories eye up the city’s demi-monde, the innocence of life-models, contemporary artists and cash-in-hand cafeteria staff corrupted as they’re each transformed, like Montreal’s signature dish, from green to smoked meat. The stories and lives overlap: Corinna, dumped by her boyfriend Henry for another man, covets Jason and Amy’s relationship from her window; meanwhile, Josh, a drug-dealer working at a backwater restaurant for cover, obsesses over Corinna from afar, her ex a former client. In perhaps the most memorable story, however, the delicately balanced ecosystem of Brian and McMurphy’s loft studio is disrupted by the arrival of Sally, rambunctious and randy – and raring to go.

These are stories of interlopers and of (North) Americana, as evocative of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X as they are James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. Which is handy, given Macdonald’s admiration for what is probably Dubliners‘ stand-out short – its protagonist’s very nature, much like the characters of Smoked Meat, in irrevocable flux. Or, as Joyce puts it: “His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.”

3:AM: Which writers did you have in mind when you approached this collection and, if you could’ve written any short story – ever – which would it be?

Rowena MacDonald: A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s memoir of his time in Paris, was dimly in my mind – as I read it while I was in Montreal. Katherine Mansfield’s short stories more prominently, and Jean Rhys‘ novels of women in Paris. Katherine Mansfield is probably my favourite writer. I also love Patrick Hamilton. In terms of contemporary writers I admire Alan Hollingshurst and Philip Hensher. When I was starting out Shena Mackay was influential; I love pretty much all her novels and she mentored me for six months. I also adore John McGahern and made a pilgrimage to his birthplace in Ireland a few years ago. If I could have written any short story ever, it would be ‘The Dead’ by James Joyce – which is what many writers would say. The final story in Smoked Meat, ‘The Life and Soul’, is my homage to it.

3:AM: Tell me about your background as a writer. Why Montreal?

RM: I ended up in Montreal aged twenty-five a couple of years after graduating from university. I had an apprenticeship on a local paper in Sussex, but my friend Lucy persuaded me to abandon it all to go and live in Montreal with a guy she had met while on holiday in Scotland. His name was Mark and he put us up for the first couple of months until we found jobs. Mark became a great friend and Smoked Meat is dedicated to him and his friend Chloe, who also became a good friend of mine. Mark and Chloe were my muses. In retrospect it was a silly idea giving up a good career to go and live without visas in another country, but I had decided about a year before that I wanted to be a writer and I didn’t have the time or energy to do my own writing while working on the paper. I wanted an adventure. I didn’t intend to stay in Montreal for a year. My plan was to go to America but when I got to Montreal I liked it, so ended up staying there. I didn’t know much about it before I went but it surprised me by being really atmospheric and inspiring.

3:AM: The cover blurb mentions the city’s demi-monde. Did your experiences growing up in the West Midlands fuel that at all, or was there something about your time in Montreal that focused your attention on the margins?

RM: I’m not sure there is a demi-monde to the West Midlands and if there is I certainly didn’t grow up in it, though my parents were slightly unusual in that they both went to art college as mature students when my brothers and I were kids, then my mother became a painter and my dad set up an art transport company. They weren’t bohemians – indeed, my mother disdains that sort of self-conscious artiness – but some of their friends were and I used to be attracted to those kinds of people, though I’m too straight to really live ‘on the edge’. When you’re young you’re more keen to hang out with oddballs – or at least, I was. I went to a very strict, very academic all-girls grammar school in Wolverhampton, so perhaps it was partly a reaction against that. I don’t feel the characters in Smoked Meat are particularly marginal. I didn’t seek them out; that’s just what the people I met were like. It’s probably because I was doing casual cash-in-hand jobs in bars and restaurants – you get a lot of raffish, fly-by-night people in those jobs. Many of the characters are drawn from my friends, though, and they seemed like the norm rather than on the margins. We all lived on the Plateau, which, at the risk of sounding like I’m really up myself, was the cool area. Mainly I just like the word demi-monde; I’m not actually that sure what it implies.

3:AM: How close to the characters of Smoked Meat are you (or, indeed, was ‘the Montreal you’)?

RM: Some of the traits of the female characters are similar to mine – and some of the male characters, too. None of them is actually me, though I did work at a clothes store like Freya’s and at a restaurant like Corinna’s. Corinna isn’t really like me at all as a personality; she’s far more passive, mermaidy and feminine. All the characters are amalgams of people I knew. I didn’t want anyone English in the book because I wanted it to be about Montreal people. I started writing something more autobiographical but got bored. It’s more fun to make stuff up.

3:AM: Short story collections are slowly coming back into fashion – especially as debuts – but it’s seemingly the norm for editors to ask new writers if they have a novel they’re working on when they submit stories. Do you think there’s value in turning that on its head; pushing new writers to start with stories, then move on to a novel? Or is this sort of ‘conduit’ link from one to the other misleading?

RM: I didn’t set off on publishing this as my first book – it’s just the way it worked out. It took me six years to find a publisher for Smoked Meat. While I was in Montreal I wrote a novel set on the Isle of Wight (where I was born), which I finished when I got back to England but couldn’t find an agent for – although I gave up trying pretty quickly. Then I started writing Smoked Meat. It took me three years on and off. In between I wrote another novel. Then I wrote another two novels, the fourth of which is almost finished. I started out writing short stories but I knew publishers were mainly interested in novels, which is why I started writing them. It’s less daunting to begin with a smaller form as novels take so much stamina. You can concentrate on crafting your prose in a short story, whereas with a novel you have to marshal a load of other disparate elements. Most writers start out with short stories; I wish publishers would recognise that more, but I can see why they think the public prefer novels as it’s a longer, more immersive experience. Readers think they’re getting more for their money even if often a lot of it is padding.

3:AM: Reading the stories I thought of writers like Chuck Palahniuk – the Off-Beat chroniclers of contemporary Americana. How much of that’s a fair assessment, and at what point do you think the collection separates and becomes distinctly North American – even, Canadian?

RM: I’ve only ever read one Palahniuk story: ‘Guts’, about a kid whose insides are sucked out by a swimming pool filter. Pretty horrible but I am flattered you associate me with him… I am fascinated by America and love Americana. I naturally write in a pared down, casual way, which might be thought of as typically American. I like the direct, gutsy way Americans and Canadians express themselves. They’re more easily verbal than the English. As far as my book being distinctly Canadian, I don’t know. Perhaps only the setting. To me the language Canadians use seems similar to Americans, though any Canadians reading this will probably curse me for saying that. There is a particular wholesomeness to Canada, but I don’t know whether I’ve captured it in Smoked Meat.

3:AM: Are you ambitious, and do you have dreams as a writer – a place you want to end up? A garret, perhaps? Maybe a trilogy movie deal? How far off are you, do you think? Or are you where you want to be?

RM: I am ambitious. I wish I wasn’t as it’s tiring being ambitious and when you’ve reached one goal there’s always another one just out of reach. You never fully rest on your laurels. I’m thrilled Smoked Meat has been published as it was a labour of love and it’s about a time in my life that was important to me – but I hope to publish some novels in the future, particularly the one I’ve nearly finished writing. I’m not motivated by money, though it would be nice to do less of my day jobs and make more money from writing. I’m motivated most by creative satisfaction. I feel most myself when I’m writing. When I was a kid I used to spend hours drawing cartoon strips of princesses and ballerinas, telling stories about them to myself under my breath, and when I’m in the flow with my writing it feels like that: completely absorbing and entertaining.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gavin James Bower is the author of Dazed & Aroused and Made in Britain.

3:AM: I love the cover of Stories V! It is a woman in a pose. She is wearing a purple bra and purple panties. Who is she?

Scott McClanahan: Actually it’s a man. Or, maybe it’s a woman. I’ve told so many lies about that cover over the past couple of months that I’m having a hard time keeping it straight myself. I was told by some “new puritans” and some graduate students that it’s a “misogynistic” image though. Maybe it is. Of course, when it comes to people I always follow the Marky Mark philosophy on growing mushrooms, “Feed em shit and keep em in the dark.” So actually it’s just a really hot man. I mean I don’t think there’s anything wrong with lust and desire. Lust and desire are the reasons why the world exists. I’m really glad the world exists.

3:AM: The covers of your books are all distinct and eye-catching. How did you choose the covers for your books?

SM: Yeah, the covers feel real personal to me. For instance, the first cover is a mugshot of my grandfather Elgie from the 30s. He had just been arrested for beating up a cop over some illegal alcoholic beverages he was selling out of the back of his truck. He spent three months in jail for the beating, but he was actually only sentenced to two months (I guess beating up a cop wasn’t such a big deal in the 30s). He stayed the extra month because they were feeding him so well.

3:AM: Damn. Has your family lived in West Virginia for several generations?

SM: I have that black Irish blood running through my veins - so, yeah, like most of us, we’ve been here for about 150 years. The first McClanahan of my bloodline that I can find in West Virginia is from 1872. The census has categories for age, height, weight, and then employment. Under employment it says, None. Things never change! I have some Swiss blood in me too, and that’s good because I’m not into this whole idea of dying young thing. I’m not dying at 25 (with all apologies to that fake Mr. Bowie). I plan on living until I’m 756, and I mean that. I see myself surrounded by 5,000 children, 10,000 grand-children - a goddamn paterfamilias if you will. I’m ready to be an amazing old man.

3:AM: Speaking of alcohol: there’s drinking and bars in your book, but have you ever lived in a dry area? I’ve been to dry areas in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky. Why do you think there are so many dry areas in Appalachia?

SM: No, I never have. I’m not sure why counties ban it, except most of the time you feel so helpless in this life. I think telling somebody ‘no’ makes you feel a little less dead. Our culture has a weird fascination with this type of junk - exercise, diet, healthy living, 12 step programs, keys to financial health, etc. It makes me think of a Peter O’Toole story. They asked him he ever thought about exercising. He said, “No. The only exercise I get is at funerals following the coffins of my dead friends who loved to exercise.”

3:AM: On Facebook you said your new novel is called Crapalachia, but the excerpt that was published at BombBlog says its called Hill William. Can you elaborate, both on the former title and why there’s two different titles?

SM: No, they’re two different novels. I don’t even know what a novel is really, but I’m calling them novels. I really think they’re more like “books.” Hill William is for the ladies, and (like Wu Tang) Crapalachia is for the children.

3:AM: Stories V almost felt like a novel. Each story seemed to come from the same first-person narrator and the setting was the same town. And yet, like your two other books, it’s called Stories. Did you intentionally hope to distort classfications for fiction based on length, plot, etc.? Do you like writers like De Quincey, Kundera, and Noah Cicero who write relatively short form semi-autobiographical fiction that blurs lines of novel/novella/stories and fiction/non-fiction?

SM: Um, I’m not sure about intention or wanting to distort something. I just want to get to a place where my inner becomes my outer. I think I’m almost there. It’s much more interesting trying to be Emma Bovary than yourself. Most people are just trying to be “writers.” I don’t know of a more boring pursuit in this world. I know a shit ton of them, and the majority of them are just loathsome. To know them is to loathe them. I love the writers you mentioned though. Cicero is a peach. Thomas de Quincey is one of the greatest writers ever, and Kundera is one of the few contemporary writers who can write in third person and not make you want to catch the “ebola” virus. Kundera’s collection Laughable Loves is one of the great books of stories of the last century. The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting are fucking alive man. Also, I find myself wanting to sleep with Milan Kundera. Do you hear me Milan? I want to sleep with you. There is no such thing as good writers or bad writers - only writers you want to sleep with.

3:AM: You’ve done some film work with Holler Presents. Have you ever considered trying to make a film for one of your stories? Your story ‘Chapter from a Book I Will Start Writing in 2012′ was one of several that I felt could be visually stunning on screen, with the nurse who can’t find the fat kid’s penis. I guess it might be hard to find an actor for the latter part, at least, though.

SM: Yeah, we’ve talked about it. I really like what Riley Michael Parker and Marika Haskins did with their Chelsea Martin film. Actually, finding a fat actor without a penis may be the easiest part of that film. It would take some balls for someone to do it, but having balls is overrated. I want people in my life who have big ovaries.

3:AM: I don’t know if I agree with what you said earlier about the idea of being a “writer”. I have always wanted to be a writer because the entire concept of “occupation” seems pointless, and being a writer seemed to almost be a “middle-finger” to the entire idea that a person should be identified by their job. You know what I mean? Also, if you don’t consider yourself a writer what do you consider yourself?

SM: No, I don’t really know what you mean. I guess I would consider myself Scott McClanahan. I’m much more interested in people who are trying to be human beings. It’s the wildest and most outrageous and radical thing left in this world - being human. Sadly, our numbers are decreasing rapidly. John Updike was a writer. Samuel Pepys was just Samuel Pepys. That’s why Samuel Pepys is the shit and John Updike is just the remnant of fart. Rod Stewart is a singer. John Lennon is just John Lennon, and that’s why he is John Lennon. That’s why he is an amazing singer. I’m not a writer, I’m just Scott McClanahan. I’m just trying to be Scott McClanahan.

3:AM: What is your writing process like? I write from exhaustion or boredom a lot, but I always hear stories saying the great authors wrote when they first woke up in the morning. Do you write early and late in the day, or neither really?

SM: I don’t think I have a process. I guess most writers are lying when they babble on about their process. It would be like talking about how you pray or make love. You don’t really think about it, you just do it. You do it because you’re infected with it. I just write when I want, and I write what I want. I think I was a really bad writer when I worried about process. Of course, maybe I’m still a really bad writer. I think people should quit trying so hard. I haven’t tried hard in years. It’s like people who say that relationships are hard work. No, they’re not. Maybe if you’re in a bad one.

3:AM: Do you have hope as a writer? Or as a person in general? I feel you do, at least as a person.

SM: No, I’m pretty full of hopelessness too. I think that’s probably what makes this life so much fun. People with hope eventually think they’re going to win a Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes or something. I know better though. I have nothing to lose. I’m just made of flesh, and flesh rots. I don’t have shit. I’ve been through some real hells, and I still wake up every morning thankful for lungs and my heart and that I can go and eat a whole bucket of chicken at KFC. Of course, I may be thinking about suicide in the middle of that bucket of chicken, but this life is pretty damn amazing. That doesn’t mean I’m going to rattle on about hopelessness and boredom all of the time. What the hell is there to be bored about? There are babies to be held, old women to help across the street, drugs to be had, alcohol to be consumed, women and men to have sex with, curses to place upon people who have wronged you. I don’t know if it’s hope. I think it’s just called breathing.

3:AM: Any last proclamations for the people reading this?

SM: Don’t follow leaders and watch the parking meters.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Worthington is a writer. He lives in New York. He exists on the Internet at http://fuckingbigthoughts.blogspot.com/.

3:AM: I want to ask you about the Wall Street Occupation and Plutocracy but I want to start by giving our readers a sense of where your arguments are coming from. You’re an expert in the philosophy of law, a leading authority on the philosophy of Nietzsche and have taken on the role of a public intellectual of the left. So were you always an iconoclastic type and was it political ideals that brought you to philosophy originally?

Brian Leiter: Yes and no! Yes, I guess my mix of intellectual interests and normative positions are iconoclastic, but, no, it wasn’t politics that brought me to philosophy. What brought me to philosophy most immediately was the study of Sartre, especially Huis Clos, in high school, which crystallized my propensity towards existential angst, which follows naturally for any sentient being upon atheism and a vivid sense of mortality. There followed upon this interest in Sartre a kind of fateful mistake: Sartre was a philosopher, so I was told, and he dealt with matters of existential moment, and, on top of all that, my father had studied philosophy in college and thought it a worthy topic, so I thought I should study philosophy! So I went to the college that, at the time, was reputed to have the best philosophy program in America, not knowing that most of its faculty did not think Sartre was really a philosopher! Things worked out happily, though, as I took to the other parts of philosophy, learned about Nietzsche and Marx and Freud with Richard Rorty and Raymond Geuss, but also discovered the useful “intellectual cleanliness” (as Nietzsche would say) that is characteristic of so-called “analytic” philosophy, which was then dominant.

The parochialism of analytic philosophers didn’t much matter for me, as I had my own sense of what really mattered, what really had value, and that probably explains my iconoclastic mix of interests: as a sympathetic student of Marx who loves Nietzsche; as a Nietzschean who values the dialectical rigor of so much boring “analytic” moral philosophy; as a defender of H.L.A. Hart’s legal positivism, who thinks the American Legal Realists that Hart did so much to discredit had far more insight than he gave them credit for. I’ve been helped by being largely immune to, indeed often offended by, amour-propre (to use Rousseau’s term): I don’t really care what “respectable” academics think, though sometimes they get it right. My political sympathies did play a role, however, in my decision to also study law, as I’ve discussed elsewhere. This was before the “revolution from the Right” that Reagan orchestrated, and so it was possible, back in the 1970s, to think of lawyering as a force for social and economic progress.

3:AM: You use a striking phrase in one of your essays, “the hermeneutics of suspicion”, to discuss three of your intellectual heroes, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Could you say a little about what you were getting at in that phrase and how it is really relevant for the intellectual left today?

BL: The phrase itself derives from the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, though I take strong issue with how he understands what such a “hermeneutics” - or method of interpretation - involves. But what Ricoeur correctly notices is that Marx, Nietzsche and Freud represent ways of thinking about and analyzing human societies and human behavior that share certain structural similarities. First, they typically suspect that people’s own self-understanding and self-presentation are misleading as to what really explains why they say what they say and do what they do. Second, these thinkers try to show that the real explanation is one that would undermine the credibility of the beliefs and values people affirm.

Take a wonderful Freudian example, that has since been confirmed by experimental work in psychology. A “reaction formation” is a psychological process in which one forms moral views in reaction to desires that one really has - so, e.g., one becomes a vociferous critic of the immorality of homosexuality and gay marriage precisely because one has strong homosexual urges and desires that one finds threatening. A reaction formation is a “defense mechanism,” a way of trying to protect oneself from desires one doesn’t want to act upon. The typical religious or moralistic homophobe will conceive of himself as “defending family values” and “traditional marriage,” when, in reality, he only mouths these moralistic platitudes because deep down he’d like nothing better than to have anal or oral sex with another man. If, in fact, it’s the reaction formation that really explains his moral beliefs, then those beliefs can’t possibly be justified, since they arise from a mechanism, reaction formation, that’s inherently unreliable (that is, it’s not a reliable way to figure out what’s morally right or wrong). This bears emphasizing: if what really explains your moral attitudes is that they are a desperate psychological attempt to restrain your own desire for what those attitudes condemn, then why should anyone else take them seriously?

This kind of critical suspicion is very offensive to the dominant political culture, especially in the United States: it is considered rude and disrespectful. And so it is, but, again, that has no bearing on its epistemic relevance, that is, its relevance to figuring out what’s really going on. Take Barack Obama, in whom many on the anemic American left invested their hopes. As President of the United States, his domestic policies, like those of Bill Clinton, have been largely to the right of Richard Nixon, and his primary economic advisors were the various economic soothsayers who orchestrated the deregulation of the financial sector in the 1990s that brought about the collapse of the global capitalist system under George W. Bush. His most ambitious “progressive” legislation was a healthcare plan originally developed by the Republican Governor of Massachussetts. At every moment where Obama, if he had any moral or intellectual core, might have led, he pivoted to the right. How could the great “liberal” hope have turned out to be such a shallow apologist for and tinkerer with the status quo?

If we put aside the romance surrounding the advertising product “Barack Obama,” and even put aside the more genuine emotional resonance of electing a Black President given the history of vicious racism in America, the answer seems quite obvious. In the United States, no one can compete meaningfully for the Presidency without tens of millions of dollars, and no one can raise such money without backing from the richest sliver of American society, i.e., the plutocrats. Since enough of the public can be manipulated at any time to believe just about anything - the entire history of the world is massive confirmation of that fact - it follows that only a candidate who meets the needs of the plutocracy has any chance, since only that candidate can get plutocrat money. The plutocracy has largely become more liberal on so-called “social” issues (e.g., anti-gay bigotry), and so any Democrat who basically respects the prerogatives of the rich is a viable candidate for them. Obama is not a fool, and nor are the plutocrats: they understand each other, and the result is that Obama has had and will have more money than any of his Republican opponents, and Obama will pivot to the right on any economic issue that affects the interests of the plutocratic class. That’s the hermeneutics of suspicion, and we need more of it every day.

3:AM: Linked with that last question is what makes your views distinctive about Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. You’ve expressed disagreement with readings of these three thinkers that undermine the naturalism you take to be embedded in them. So post-modernist readings get short shrift from you, for example. Could you explain this? The editor of The Wire once wrote that it was post-modernism that saved Marxism’s sorry ass; in other words, it’s the view in certain quarters that the left’s best hopes are found in theories of post modernism, the Heideggerian, Foucaultian, Derridean, Badiouian, Zizekean approach. Now I put it like that because I know that its part of your distinctive approach that you don’t bracket these thinkers together at all. You in fact are vehement about this and this feeds into the discussion about the alleged two traditions of philosophy – the Analytic and the Continental - a distinction you think is bogus. Can you tell us about how you navigate these waters?

BL: There are real dividing lines in the history of philosophy, but the one between the “analytic” and the “Continental” isn’t one of them, though it’s interesting today from a sociological point of view, since it allows graduate programs in philosophy to define spheres of permissible ignorance for their students. A real dividing line, by contrast, one that matters for substantive philosophical questions, is between “naturalists” and “anti-naturalists.” The naturalists, very roughly, are those who think human beings are just certain kinds of animals, that one understands these animals through the same empirical methods one uses to understand other animals, and that philosophy has no proprietary methods for figuring out what there is, what we know, and, in particular, what humans are like. The anti-naturalists, by contrast, are (again, roughly) those who think human beings are different not just in degree but in kind from the other animals, and that this difference demands certain proprietary philosophical methods - perhaps a priori knowledge or philosophical ways of exploring the distinctively “normative” realm in which humans live.

So on the naturalist side you get, more or less, David Hume, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Ludwig Büchner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rudolf Carnap, W.V.O. Quine, Jerry Fodor, Stephen Stich, and Alex Rosenberg and on the anti-naturalist side you get, more or less, Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Gottlob Frege, Jean-Paul Sartre, G.E.M. Anscombe, Wilfrid Sellars (at least for part of his career), the older Hilary Putnam, Alvin Plantinga, and John McDowell, among many others. This disagreement - a disagreement, very roughly, about the relationship of philosophy to the sciences - isn’t one that tracks the alleged analytic/Continental distinction. Indeed, the founders of the 20th-century traditions of “analytic” and “Continental” philosophy (Frege and Husserl, respectively) are both on the anti-naturalist side, and both are reacting against hardcore naturalist positions in philosophy that had become dominant on the European Continent in the late 19th-century. And the first explosion of what anti-naturalists would derisively call “scientism” came in Germany in the 1840s and 1850s, as a reaction to Hegel’s obscurantist idealism. Naturalism and anti-naturalism mark a profound dividing line in modern philosophy, but it has nothing to do with “analytic” vs. “Continental’ philosophy.

The other distinction that I think is increasingly important is that between what I call “realists” and “moralists,” between those who think the aim of philosophy should be to get as clear as possible about the way things really are, that is, about the actual causal structure of the natural and human world, how societies and economies work, what motivates politicians and ordinary people to do what they do, and, on the other hand, those who think the aim of philosophy is to set up moral ideals, to give moralistic lectures about what society ought to do and how people ought to act. On the realist side, you find Thucydides, Marx, and Nietzsche, but also Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Richard Posner, and Raymond Geuss. On the moralist side, you find Plato and Kant, but also John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin and Martha Nussbaum, among many others. Many, but not all, naturalists are realists, since it’s reasonable to think that if you want to understand the way things really are, you ought to rely on the methods of the sciences, which have been the most successful ones over the past several centuries.

On this way of thinking about the serious disagreements in the history of philosophy, post-modernism is just an embarrassing blip, largely anti-naturalist in its sympathies, but infatuated with sophomoric versions of skepticism about truth and knowledge, that both the naturalist and anti-naturalist, and realist and moralist, traditions largely repudiate. Foucault is the hard case in this story, though it always pains me to see a thinker and scholar of his seriousness lumped with poseurs like Derrida and some of the others you mention. It’s important, though, to avoid the kind of cult of personality that Heidegger and a lot of post-Heideggerian philosophy depends upon. Foucault was human and fallible, so perhaps we need to recognize that he sometimes had bad intellectual judgment and picked up certain bad intellectual habits in Paris as well. But when he was at his best, Foucault diagnosed how individuals in the modern era becomes agents of their own oppression in virtue of certain moral and epistemic norms they endorse and thus impose upon themselves. That is Foucault’s uniquely disturbing contribution to the literature whose diagnostic aim is, with Max Weber, to understand the oppressive character of modernity, and whose moral aim is, with the Frankfurt School, human liberation and human flourishing.

Now Marx certainly didn’t need to be saved by sophomoric post-modernists; indeed, Marx didn’t need to be saved at all. On two central issues, Marx was far more right than any of his critics: first, that the long-term tendency of capitalist societies is towards immiseration of the majority (the post-WWII illusion of upward mobility for the “middle classes” will soon be revealed for the anomaly it was); and second, that capitalist societies produce moral and political ideologies that serve to justify the dominance of the capitalist class. Marx had three faults, to be sure: one was that he took Hegel seriously; another was that he wasn’t a very good fortune teller, so wildly over-estimated the pace of capitalist development; and a third is that he had no account of individual psychology, of the kind Nietzsche and Freud provide. Within academic philosophy, however, far more harm, in my view, has been done to Marx by moralists like G.A. Cohen than by any of the post-modernists. Cohen - a truly smart man and delightful human being to boot - did two unfortunate things to academic Anglophone Marxism: first, by offering a philosophical reconstruction of historical materialism in its least interesting form (namely, as functional explanation, rather than in terms of class conflict); and second, in his later work, by calling for a moralistic change in the consciousness of individuals, regardless of historical circumstances. This latter, Christian turn in Cohen’s thought represents as profound a betrayal of Marxism as Habermas‘ attempt to supply it a Kantian foundation - in this respect, both Anglophone and “Continental” Marxism betray Marx’s original realism.

To be sure, Cohen on historical materialism is preferable to Althusser, but that hardly matters, except for academic debates. What does matter is that class conflict is both the actual causal mechanism of historical change and intelligible to the people who are the agents of that change. Functional explanations are, by contrast, an interesting but irrelevant theoretical overlay. And the idea that Marxism should be reduced to moralistic sermons is, well, depressing, an admission of intellectual defeat.

3:AM: I guess the last question was raised because certainly here in the UK there’s a sense that the political left have rather struggled to find a distinctive voice to discuss issues of inequality and injustice. In fact I think its fair to characterise the last Labour government as being as unconcerned about plutocratic pressures as the right, and this was disappointing and shocking to many supporters of Labour. And now we have a lib-Dem party in bed with Tories – it’s kind of ridiculous. You do have a distinctive line on all this though and would it be fair to say that the philosophical naturalism you argue for is the starting point for your ethical and political stance? Could you tell us about Naturalism and how Naturalism and politics and ethics go together in your thinking?

BL: The line of political development in the UK over the past generation that you describe has certainly been similar to that in the US, though perhaps not as extreme. Just as Clinton in the U.S. delivered the Democratic Party wholesale to the plutocracy (so that the only issues on which it could take a real stand concerned the mistreatment of social minorities like gay men and women), so too Blair delivered the Labour Party to the slightly less rapacious ruling class in the UK. I consider this kind of analysis to follow from my realism, which I view as a subset of naturalism. As naturalists, we want to understand human beings as they actually are, and that ends up requiring realism about those human beings who are political actors. Marx is the key realist in this regard, since he understands politicians as representatives of a dominant economic class. But naturalism and realism go no further, and this is where Nietzsche is important. For I accept Nietzsche’s view (from The Gay Science) that, “Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature - nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present - and it was we who gave and bestowed it.” I think, with Nietzsche, that the idea that “nature is always value-less” is one upshot of a serious naturalism about the world. And as Nietzsche notes at the end of the first essay of his on the Genealogy of Morality, “the well-being of the majority and the well-being of the few are opposite evaluative points of view.” This is why, to my mind, the dispute between Marx and Nietzsche is as stark as any dispute can be: they are both naturalists and realists, but Marx adopts the point of view of the majority, while Nietzsche adopts the point of view of the genius elite - not the capitalist elite I hasten to add, since he regarded them as contemptible herd-animals, like the mass of humanity. The choice between those two evaluative viewpoints isn’t one that can be made on rational grounds. What worries me, as someone who mostly sides with Marx, is Nietzsche’s challenge that a culture defined by egalitarian values is one in which genius will no longer be possible. I still don’t know what to think about that challenge, but it’s the most serious one to Marxism and to liberalism on offer.

3:AM: So when you look at the Wall Street Occupation, and others elsewhere both in the USA and in London, for example, you bring a distinctive approach to thinking about what’s going on. You’ve also brought to our attention serious police brutality being endorsed by university leaders even, which again is shocking. But you’ve also described the USA as the most powerful and dangerous state on earth and it has been a depressing reality that there seems to be a perpetual Orwellian war going on as a backdrop to our lives. Can you give us your take on the current economic and political situation and what you find most valuable and interesting about the Occupation phenomena. I’m particularly interested in your views about the use of state violence and the endorsement of plutocratic policing to clear the protests.

BL: I think Robert Paul Wolff, the distinguished philosopher who has written on Kant and Marx, is quite right to note that the Occupy movement succeeded, in the space of a couple of months, in changing the national dialogue in the U.S. from the need for austerity and cuts to programs that benefit the elderly and the poor, to the actual reality of massive economic inequality. If 75% of the wealth of the richest one-tenth of 1% of American society were immediately expropriated, there would be no need to discuss cuts to spending that affects the well-being of the vast majority. This is a democracy, why isn’t this a major topic of public debate? Why aren’t the national media full of debates between defenders of the right of the Koch brothers to keep their billions and advocates for seizing the majority of their fortune to meet human needs? One only needs to read Marx to know the answer.

An important strategic question for the Occupy movement concerns the police. The police are, themselves, members of the 99%, indeed the 99.9%. Police labor unions remain strong, despite a three-decade long campaign against labor unions in the United States. As unionized workers, the interests of police lie with the Occupy Movement, not the plutocrats. On the day the police refuse to clear “Occupy” protesters from their sites, that will be the day the game is up for the plutocracy in America. It would behoove the Occupy activists, indeed any opponents of the plutocracy, to remember this.

3:AM: Which brings us to your work in legal studies and the philosophy of law. You’re known for again developing a distinctive legal theory that you oppose the likes of Ronald Dworkin and you think that law is much closer to what Richard Posner describes in his How Judges Think book. This itself is refreshingly pugnacious. Can you say what your views are and what it opposes? And why you think it is justified?

BL: This harkens back to the dispute between moralists and realists noted earlier, and in legal philosophy, I am an unapologetic realist (like Judge Posner, who has a first-person vantage point on what it is judges really do!). The core question is how do we understand what courts are doing: do we take at face value the opinions they write, and see if we can reconstruct, as Dworkinians try to do, the principled grounds of their decisions, to understand them as trying to discover the answer the law always required? Or do we, instead, understand judges as political actors, who exploit the many points of indeterminacy and uncertainty in the law, to reach the outcomes they deem morally and politically desirable? In the United States, it seems to me utterly incredible that anyone could look at most of the work of the appellate courts, and adopt the Dworkinian view. Cases that reach the courts, especially those that reach the appellate courts, are precisely the ones in which the law’s indeterminacies are most apparent, and judges are called upon to make moral and political judgments, not legal ones. Given that reality, decisions to confirm, say, judges on the U.S. Supreme Court should be decisions based on their moral and political views, and little else. The U.S. Supreme Court is a super-legislature, though one with a decidedly limited jurisdiction (that is, only the litigated cases that come before it). A bit of realism about courts would lead the public to realize what is at stake in every single confirmation hearing for a position on the Supreme Court - to be sure, all politicians since Reagan onwards realize it, but the public is sadly in the dark.

A harder question is how far this realism about courts generalizes, though in talking to my legal realist friends in countries like Italy and Spain, my suspicion is that the narrow, but nonetheless legislative, role of courts is true most places. The English are in denial on this score, and perhaps their civil service judiciary is sufficiently disciplined that the legislative analogy is inapt. But I’m skeptical, but agnostic!

3:AM: Now one of the interesting things happening at the moment in philosophy is x phil. You wrote a paper with Josh Knobe on Nietzsche and morality and in that essay, and in your seminal book on Nietzsche’s moral philosophy, you make the case for arguing that Nietzsche had three basic beliefs about humans that make this position distinctive and important (and a better description of moral agency than those of its chief rivals, Aristotle and Kant). The challenge of this is that it seems to offer a very different view of what it is to be human than is usually presented. Do you believe that a change of the human self-image is indeed what follows from this approach, and can you say what the opportunities and risks attached to this are?

BL: You are quite right that the Nietzschean conception of the person involves a very different view of what it is to be human. In the Nietzschean view, our conscious life is largely superficial, largely epiphenomenal - we are, as on the Freudian picture, largely creatures of our drives, many of which are unknown to us, except obliquely. But Nietzsche, unlike Freud, is not especially optimistic about the capacity for “ego” to exercise much rational influence on these drives - though it can exercise some, but only when it acquires the motivational energy of opposing drives behind it. To make matters worse, Nietzsche thinks our particular constellation of drives is a kind of biological legacy, so we are, in a kind of naturalized Calvinist fashion, set on a particular course in life long before we become aware of it - that’s why Nietzsche says, famously, that “one becomes what one is without knowing what one is.” So one’s life, on this picture, is largely a matter of figuring out what one already is - basically the opposite of the existential picture we associate with Sartre, who was, alas, a superficial reader of Nietzsche.

I think one reason Nietzsche thinks that “illusion” and “falsehood” are essential to human life is that he recognizes no one can actually live - in the sense of get up in the morning and try to make decisions about what to do - with this picture in mind. So Nietzsche should change what philosophers call our third-person perspective on human beings, and how to understand them, but Nietzsche realized that from the “first-person” perspective (the perspective of you or me thinking about what to do), the illusion of freedom and choice is essential. But it is, to repeat, an illusion, which means we ought to rethink every normative realm dependent on those concepts.

3:AM: Now, from within the naturalism approach, I wonder if there isn’t a tension between your Nietzschean idea that there are human types and empirical evidence that there isn’t enough stability in any human behaviour to justify saying that we can conform to type. I’m thinking of experiments that seem to show that ethically irrelevant factors can alter moral choices people make. So, for example, you have a person finding a dime, they are kinder straight away after than if they didn’t find the dime. Or the idea that if tired we’ll make different decisions from when we’re not. Or that if the moral questions are asked in different orders different answers are given. Or Josh Greene’s work on the famous trolley puzzles, where it seems that our moral decisions are strongly altered by how they are presented to us etc, etc. Don’t these undermine any idea that there is a type? And doesn’t this erode even projects like those of Freud and Nietzsche who wanted to offer a way of stitching us into something more unified than this crazy creature the experiments seems to be finding? And, at risk of sounding Kantian, how do we navigate if we lose reason?

BL: You’re quite correct that there is a tension between Nietzschean moral psychology, which depends on a notion of a psychological “type” or “character,” and the situationist themes in a lot of social psychology which call attention to the influence of particular situational cues on behavior. I think there’s two key points to make about this apparent conflict. First, the actual empirical results make perfect sense from a Nietzschean point of view: for in all the famous case studies - including the Millgram experiments about obedience to authority - there is always some minority of subjects who are not influenced at all by the situational cues. So, in the case of the Millgram studies, there are some who simply refuse to turn up the voltage, despite being ordered to do so by the experimenter “in charge.” It’s quite natural to think that these were precisely the folks with character, while those who complied with even outrageous directives betrayed precisely their lack of character. Nietzsche certainly wouldn’t be surprised that most “herd animals” will do what they’re told! Millgram himself didn’t think his experiments showed that character was explanatorily otiose in understanding behavior. Second, and this is a point I owe to Joshua Knobe and that we make in our jointly authored paper to which you allude, it may well turn out that situational cues are important to understanding behavior on particular occasions, and still be true that character type gives you the best explanation of behavior over the long haul, as it were. In the end, I suspect the situationist challenge to character-based explanations has been much over-played, both with respect to what the actual results show and with respect to their import for a plausible moral psychology.

What happens to “reason” depends on what is meant by reason. Kant will not be happy on either the situationist or Nietzschean view. But that’s because Kantians think reason can dictate our ultimate ends, not simply the means to deploy in service of ends that have no rational standing. That marks another important dividing line in the history of philosophy - about the deliverances of practical reason - and, unsurprisingly, I’m on the anti-Kantian, thoroughly naturalist and realist side of that debate.

3:AM: You have taken a distinctive approach to the place of religious beliefs in society. We’re very familiar to the approach to the debate presented in terms of the science – so figures like Dawkins and Dennett and Hitchens tend to fix on the truth of religious claims to oppose religions. Your approach is different in that it’s about claims constitutional, legal and just and these don’t justify treating religious beliefs separately from any other. Is that right? Can you say something about your ideas about religious tolerance?

BL: This is the subject of the book I’ve just finished, Why Tolerate Religion? which Princeton University Press will publish next year. I share one thing with so-called “New Atheists” like Dawkins et al., namely, the assumption that religions involve significant amounts of false belief. It’s a bit too late in the day for that to be a serious topic of debate, since the evidence is all on only one side of that question. But I’m Nietzschean enough to realize that the fact that religion involves a lot of false belief goes no distance to deciding its value, its contributions to human well-being, its centrality to human life. If we only were allowed to believe what was true, after all, we’d give up on life pretty quickly since, as Nietzsche likes to say, “the truth is terrible”! So I come at this from a very different angle. My initial question was whether, if you think “liberty” or “freedom” of conscience is valuable, something that ought to be protected, whether there was some reason to think that only religious claims of conscience should enjoy its benefits. And the strange reality, even in Europe - which is largely an atheistic Continent now (the spectacle of the Pope notwithstanding) - is that the only times the courts will exempt someone from a generally applicable law is when they assert that their religion requires them, as a matter of conscience, not to comply. We understand well enough how, as an historical matter, this came to pass: the bloody wars of religion that tortured Europe in the early modern period led to the idea that religious toleration would be a better alternative. But that’s history, and the question is whether, today, there is some reason to think religious conscience is more important than any other claim of conscience. I argue that there isn’t.

3:AM: Now 3:AM is about books, music, film and the kind of thing typically exciting to English graduates among others. But you don’t seem to like English departments, in the US at least. Is this right? Is it because they seem to be in thrall to obscurantist philosophers, as you characterise them, such as Derrida? Or are you like Alex Rosenberg in his new book where he largely dismisses the study of literature per se?

BL: I love literature, and love the study of literature - indeed, I was almost an “English” major in college. One problem with a lot of American English Departments in the 1980s was that they stopped teaching literature, and became the repositories for bad philosophy, bad history, bad social science! Rosenberg’s position is a bracing one, and a useful challenge to lazy anti-naturalist tendencies in a lot of Anglophone philosophy, but it does seem to me to be based ultimately on armchair philosophy of the kind naturalists are supposed to decry. Physicalism is not a scientific result - Carnap thought it would be, but we know it isn’t the case that everything that is causally explicable is explicable in terms of causal relata that are physical. So my view on this issue is certainly not Rosenberg’s, as much as I admire his work. In any case, it seems to me that American literature departments have recovered quite a bit from the intellectual disaster of the 1980s, a happy development. And if I may paraphrase Nietzsche, life without literature would be a mistake!

3:AM: And finally, you have written harsh things about the state of the press in the USA but of course its not just the USA that has the deficit. Given the state of the world at the moment, the erosion of a strong 4th estate seems to be worrying. Are you optimistic about the future not just in terms of press freedoms and ownership but generally?

BL: This is one of the few areas where the Internet has made a positive difference to human freedom and well-being. The U.S. is obviously at one extreme in terms of the supine posture of its media, as well as its low intellectual level - and I’m not even talking here about the more-or-less openly fascist media like Fox News! But the Internet now makes available the media in multiple jurisdictions, at least to anyone who looks. I often read Al Jazeera’s English site, not because they are paragons of journalistic objectivity and intellectual depth, but because their biases and blinders are not those of the New York Times. So I think one reason to be optimistic is that as the United States fades as a hegemonic power, other countries, with very different agendas, will support media that make very different judgments about what is newsworthy, what sources are credible, whose suffering counts, and so on. Fascists like Rupert Murdoch may destroy the major media in some countries, but it’s a big world out there, and the Internet makes it available. That’s a reason for hope.

3:AM: And really finally, can you recommend your top 5 books for general readers that we all should be reading over the xmas break?

BL: Only five books, that’s hard! But here’s five, of relatively recent vintage, that are provocative and interesting, that relate to some of themes we’ve discussed, and that I think would be accessible to any educated reader: Richard Posner’s How Judges Think, Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, David Livingstone Smith’s Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, Jonathan Wolff’s Why Read Marx Today? and, a bit older but still psychologically fascinating, Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao. All books for any good naturalist or realist to read!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Josh Knobe has already got a philosophical idea named after him, ‘The Knobe Effect’. This is the idea that corrodes the idea that we add moral judgments to preconceived non-moral facts about the world. The Knobe Effect suggests that that picture gets the flow of judgments the wrong way round. So Josh Knobe is now a very famous philosopher. Josh Knobe thinks about stuff like, do babies have morals? Are we born believing in God? Do we have free will? Do we think what we think we think? What do drunk people calculate? Where does greed come from? Why do we think God is to blame for bad weather? Why do conspiracy theories have sinister plots? Do we justify our own oppression? Why don’t political activists fit their stereotypes? Why can Google plan but not feel? Why the chair of the board will be held responsible for the bad he does but not the good? Can a lobster feel sad? How being yourself makes a punk band singer and a corporate businessman disagree? Why college students turn into Raskolnikov without regressing? Why Nietzsche is better than Aristotle and Kant at describing moral agency? Is being happy the opposite of being unhappy ? What is the role of disgust? Are infants little scientists?

He wrote the Experimental Philosophy Manifesto with Shaun Nichols. What he thinks is that we should get out of the armchair and look to see if we’re real life robots being controlled by troops of miniature girl scouts. Or not. Getting out of the armchair leads to revolutionary philosophical thoughts.

Alina Simone was interviewed by 3:AM. On YouTube she sings: Let’s take it to the streets / To the parks, to every strip mall parking lot / Let’s take it back to the primary source / And find out who we really are / X-phi! And on the video an armchair is burning. So the message is: watch out you philosophers who like to think in armchairs all day long. You’re going to get burned!

He wears t-shirts and listens to bands. He married a funky singer in an indie band. He is described as a ‘new breed.’ There is a fan page on Facebook run by an Australian. He eats vegetarian and vegan pizzas with his students. He has a couch for two in his office because x phi is dialogic. He likes the Pixies and Shrek. He lived in a tent when he studied at Stanford. He got there by bike from Massachusetts where he came from. He’s now at Yale. He’s a very very very smart guy. He’s very modest and down-beat. He’s an indie philosopher who breaks with academic style. He’s the opposite of the snarky, preening know-alls who talk down at you. And a clarity that blows away obscurantists and obfusticators. There’s a feel of ‘hey, we can think about this cool smart stuff together…’ He likes to farm out the credits and make sure anyone interested can join in. For example, there’s this hilarious footnote to a paper done by Knobe and Jesse Prinz, another really smart, young and funky x phi dude, that goes: ‘The second author wishes to make it known that the first author actually did the majority of the work on this paper. (However, the first author wishes to make it known that the second author is just being silly and really ought to stop denigrating his important contributions. [However, the second author wishes to make it known that the first author suffers from occasional delusions about authorship.])’ This all adds up to a new content (or back to the classics) and a new style. The thinking is still tough and nuanced but juicier, unzipped, so it feels spritely and young. Philosophy got its fizz back.

3:AM: So how did you start? You have brought a freshness to academia, how come?

Josh Knobe: From very early on I was interested in philosophical questions but I always had a fear of academia. I thought that if I ever became an academic I’d became this dried up person and spend my life writing about something that no one would ever read or care about. And I’d write about it for a few years for a few other professors who’d obsess over it but it would make no difference. So then after I was an undergraduate I was still very interested in philosophy but instead of going to philosophy school I instead did a whole bunch of weird jobs. I was working with homeless people and teaching English in Mexico and doing translations in France. So then over time I began to feel that I wasn’t getting anywhere and I’d always had this interest in philosophical problems and they wouldn’t go away. So in the end I decided to return to academia and I eventually did return to grad school.

3:AM: And what kind of philosophy interested you at the time, given that experimental philosophy didn’t exist then, obviously!

JK: At the time before I went to grad school the kind of philosophy I was interested in was very much the traditional philosophy. I was obsessed with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and so I wanted to investigate and do the kinds of things that they were doing. So that was what my sense of what philosophy was all about. But at the same time I was doing all this research in psychology. I had published a bunch of papers with someone who had been a grad student at the time when I was an undergraduate student. And we were working away at these psychological projects. But at that time I saw this work as being sort of a thing on the side and separate from my real interests, which I took to be my philosophical interests. And then when I got to grad school something kind of weird happened. Someone started to write a commentary on the stuff that we had been doing in the psychology journals. But this person was in philosophy and wanted to treat these psychological papers as being of philosophical importance. So he’d be saying, you know, I think you’re right about this, wrong about that, maybe this needs better evidence. But he was treating it all as if it had philosophical significance.

So as I looked through his criticisms and one thing I was really struck by was how some of the things he said we were right about struck me as being wrong. I started thinking that we were not actually right about those things. And then I wanted to go and show that we were wrong! But this time I had the idea that this time, when I try and do it, I’d publish it as philosophy. I’d call it a philosophy paper. So then I did more studies to try and show that we had been wrong about what we’d said earlier in the psychology journals. And this time I sent them to philosophy journals and that’s when I got the idea of doing experiments but qua philosophy.

3:AM: So you’ve really got your feet in two camps.

JK: I am a philosopher of two different things. So I have a weird job. I’m a philosopher both of cognitive science and philosophy. So I have two offices and different students in both departments.

3:AM: Are you treated differently depending on which office you are in? Do people make different sense of what you have to say depending on whether they take you to be working as a philosopher or a cognitive scientist?

JK: Absolutely. You know it’s really interesting. It’s not that I do separate papers, so I have cognitive science papers and then philosophy papers. It’s that the very same work, the same papers, will be treated as incredibly controversial and polarizing in philosophy whereas in cognitive science they’re just some interesting contributions to cognitive science. There’s something rather strange about the way this can happen.

3:AM: So can you say a little about the kind of experiments you’ve been doing. For instance, there’s the experiments investigating intuitions about freewill that you’ve written about which might strike readers as being a strange thing to try and run experiments about.

JK: Yes, well, since the very beginning of philosophy and the Ancient Greek period philosophers have been debating about whether freewill is compatible with determinism. So the question is, if everything we do is completely determined, if each thing we do is completely determined by what happened beforehand, then can we still be morally responsible for the things we are doing? And some people say, ‘Obviously not! If everything is determined then we couldn’t be morally responsible for them.’ But some people say, ‘No, that’s no problem at all. Whether you are morally responsible has got nothing to do with whether you are determined. These are just two completely separate issues.’ So what we were interested in was what were the psychological roots of this conflict.

So we were interested in finding out what it is within people that is drawing them to the one side or to the other side of the issue. So we thought; maybe it’s people’s abstract theory that is drawing them to the idea that someone who is determined cannot be morally responsible. And that it’s people’s more immediate emotional responses that are drawing them to the view that people who are totally determined can be morally responsible. So we tried to devise these questions that would make people think about the issue either from a more abstract, theoretical perspective or from a more concrete, emotional, immediate perspective. So I guess the study you already know is the one where everyone was told about this universe, Universe A, where everything was determined. And then some people were just asked in the abstract, in Universe A, could anyone be held to be morally responsible for anything they do? And people said overwhelmingly no, absolutely not. We got the same response in America, in Japan, in India, in Columbia. Everyone was saying the same thing, giving the same answer: definitely not! You cannot hold anyone morally responsible. No one can be morally responsible in this universe. But then in the other condition, we asked a more concrete question. So we said, ‘Consider this one guy, his name is Bill, and he lives in this determinist Universe A. So this guy, Bill, he falls in love with his secretary. So he decides to leave his wife and family. Then he sets up an incendiary device to burn them all to death.’ And then we asked whether they thought this one guy, Bill, was morally responsible for what he did. And in this case people say ‘Totally!’ That guy Bill is morally responsible even though he lives in Universe A. Everyone said this. But in the other condition everyone said that no one in Universe A could be morally responsible. So it seems as if people who have been made to think about it in this more emotional way are giving one answer and people being asked to think about it in a more rational, more abstract way, are giving the exact opposite answer. And so this is a significant difference and helps us to think about why we believe what we believe.

3:AM: But then you found that engineers didn’t conform to this, was that right?

JK: Now this was strange. The philosopher Arudra Burra tried this out on a bunch of engineers and they were the only ones who had the point of view that it was compatibilist in the abstract case. So people of all different cultures and all different groups they had the opposite intuition except for the engineers who have this view that determinism is no problem at all for moral responsibility and we would be fine if it turned out that determinism was true.

3:AM: Why did Kierkegaard and Nietzsche attract you initially and how would you link those two to what you’re doing with experimental philosophy?

JK: Well I’m really interested in moral intuitions and how people come to form the ideas that we do, and these are questions that interested Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. They were doing exactly the sorts of thing that we are trying to do with our approach – except that we are using empirical data from experiments to help us work out our answers. So I don’t see experimental philosophy as a break from the philosophical tradition; it’s rather that recent philosophy has been untypical of what philosophy has been like for most of its history.

3:AM: So this would link in particular to your reading of Kierkegaard from back when you were starting out, with his interest in Naturalistic religious beliefs and so on?

JK: I hadn’t really considered that but now that you raised it have I can see that that might be a very interesting connection.

3:AM: This seems to offer a challenge to philosophers who want to say that our beliefs and concepts are not relative but can be fixed and discussed without knowing any of this experimental data. So is philosophy being made redundant because of your work?

JK: Not at all. I wouldn’t agree with that. Maybe what should end is the idea that there is a rigid distinction between philosophy and everything else. That distinction isn’t an historical distinction; it’s a fairly recent invention. If you go back to Karl Marx or John Stuart Mill or other thinkers from the nineteenth century, they were very interested in questions of economics and psychology and philosophy, and they just didn’t worry about the idea that we have to draw some big careful line between these different fields. If we’ve got to end anything, it’s certainly not philosophy, which has an incredibly rich and valuable history. It’s just this relatively recent idea that philosophy has to be cut off from all these other disciplines.

3:AM: So is it that there’s a continuum from physics to the arts, to literature say, where the difference is more a difference in degree than kind?

JK: That’s a nice way of thinking about it. So if you say there’s clearly some kind of distinction between philosophy and literature we can say there’s a continuum where at one end of it you’re clearly doing philosophy and at the other end you’re clearly doing literature and that will be helpful. But if you say that we have to establish this rigid line between philosophy and literature, so that everything is either one or the other and nothing can be a mix of the two, then you’re doing something that is not helpful at all.

3:AM: So what else other than philosophy and cognitive science is feeding into your work?

JK: Well you know, my wife and I have been together now for twenty years, and for the whole time she’s been involved in indie rock. I feel that she has given me the sense of all these other possible virtues – virtues that aren’t always recognised in academia but they are really essential to rock and roll. The sense of rawness and excitement. And this sense, especially in indie rock, of having a community that is collaborative and supportive of each other. The idea that if you’re on a bill with another bunch of bands, you should try and support the other bands on the bill. I feel that the people I am working with in my little area of philosophy, experimental philosophy, have taken on this indie ethos.

3:AM: Talking of which, you’ve got interests and links to that indie culture. Have you a particular band at the moment that you’d recommend – other than your wife of course.

JK: If I’m not allowed to recommend my wife, I’d recommend a band called She Keeps Bees.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Diane Coyle updates our steam-punk visions as she talks about her new book, The Economics Of Enough, and what we’re going to have to do to resist Darth Vader.

3:AM: It’s been a while since we last spoke. Since then you’ve published several books and before we talk about the new one can you bring us up to date with what’s been happening to your thinking over this past intervening decade?

Diane Coyle: We last talked about The Weightless World which was the first one I wrote about the effects of these new technologies on the way the economy works and the way society works. Looking back on it, that was 1996, I think it was pretty prescient although it got lots of details wrong as well. But I still maintain that the communication revolution of cheap computers and mobile phones and so on have had a radical effect, transforming the structure of the economy. Funnily enough, economics has been really bad at thinking about that in recent decades and if you look back one of the best thinking about these issues about the way technology just completely changes social structures is Karl Marx. And he gets lots of things wrong too. But at least he spotted that technological underpinnings are important. Since then I’ve continued thinking about it.

I did a book in 2001, Paradoxes of Prosperity, that was addressing the kinds of uncertainty people feel when things change so much. The reason they hate what’s happening at a time when the economy looks like it’s doing fantastically well. And we had the productivity figures and a boom in the economy at the time and people were becoming quite emotionally upset because of the changes that were coming about because of this. Globalisation, which was a feature of the fact that you could produce things half way across the world and work out the supply chains and all that communications revolution, so people were upset about that and what that meant and what it was doing for job patterns, how it was deskilling a lot of the labour force in economies.

People were upset about lots of the social effects of the technologies, so we had stories about whether games were destroying our brains and so on, is our concentration going because of the internet, the way that politics is being transformed by social networking and communication etc, etc. All these problems of prosperity upsetting people. Hence the paradoxes. Unfortunately two things happened when that book came out. The dot com bubble was bursting. And the 9/11 attacks happened in the month the book was published. So not a great time to bring it out! But nevertheless I think those issues have stood the test of time and that longer cycle of how the technologies are fundamentally changing society, politics, the way we interact sis right. We’re seeing them coming to a head again now. We’ve had a boom and now we’ve had a bust.

3:AM: So why can’t we just figure this stuff out?

DC: There’s this perception problem where we end up being short-sighted and long-sighted at the same time. So people overestimate the short-term impact of a thing so you get these bubbles like the dot com bubble. People overhype technology but at the same time they greatly underestimate the effect of the technologies on the ordering of society. A good example is the railways. There was a railway mania in the middle of the nineteenth century. Shares did their thing and then collapsed. And people said, ‘Well, that’s railways done with,’ and forgot to take account of the fact that railways made different ways of organisation available. Now there were ways of bringing food in from the countryside into the towns and cities. So now we could support much bigger cities than before. The urban century that we have now, where we have just recently passed the mark where over 50% of the world’s population are living in cities, was made possible by rail. So the effects of that were fifty years and then a hundred years, so we have very long term effects.

3:AM: So the world changed and we suddenly had new policies and a whole new way of looking at the world and what was possible.

DC: Well, I think the book was an over-optimistic book actually because I was focusing on the productivity gains, the variety, the extra options and that was definitely the up-side in the growth of capitalism and at the time. With the end of the Cold War the fiscal benefit of not spending all that money on pointing nuclear weapons at the Soviet Union and the effect that has through the financial markets, all that made it much easier to be optimistic then.

I think events subsequently have made it much harder to be optimistic. If you look around now it’s very hard not to feel very gloomy about the disruptions that are ahead and the likely political reactions to them. I then had what felt like a time where I looked inwards to economics itself. I wanted to write about economics and how various economic problems are thought about by economists and the way they think about problems differently from the way other people think about them.

I did a book called Sex, Drugs and Economics that has done pretty well amongst students and it’s about how would you think about the problem of organised crime or drug trafficking using economic principles. How would you think about the effect of technology on the music industry and the impact of Napster and file sharing. Then I did a book called The Soulful Science that was really a response to criticisms of economics and people saying, ‘This subject makes such artificial assumptions that we don’t like about human behaviour. It’s obviously all rubbish.’

3:AM: So in The Soulful Science you were really standing back and asking yourself just what you were doing as an economist and as a social science. What did you conclude there, because you still hear the criticism – well, you didn’t predict this, and you didn’t predict that, so what’s the point if you keep missing all the important things in economics? So people ask what is the point of economics? It’s a point Ernest Gellner made when he said that the strange thing wasn’t that Aristotle didn’t write about economics, given that he wrote about everything else, but what was strange was that Adam Smith did!

DC: Well I think any honest economist would have to admit that there is an awful lot to criticise in the subject. They might have kept quiet about it in the past but when you look at the failures of forecasting just recently you have to acknowledge that we did a pretty bad job. How much is that to do with the content of the subject and how much is it to do with politics and sociology of the subject and how much is it to do with the way that politicians use economics is pretty complicated. First of all there are two kinds of economics, there’s micro and macro. The micro stuff is looking at individual people, companies and how they make decisions. That too is being challenged by behavioural psychologists.

Daniel Kahneman’s brilliant new book Thinking, Fast and Slow has the thesis that there are lots of contexts where we take decisions that is absolutely clearly not the way economics assumes. So the economist assumes that you look at the information that is available to you, it doesn’t have to be perfect, you can accept information that is not totally accurate, but you can then make a rational decision about it through cognitive processes. And it’s clear that a lot of the time people don’t think like that. Sometimes though, those economic models work really well at predicting. So there are whole branches of economics designing auctions and market design where that model works really well. And there’s lots of data and empirical techniques supporting this where economics is doing a fantastic job.

I think because of the data we have now, there’s a bit of a renaissance in that bit of the subject. But we don’t know where they apply or how to apply the models. It looks like it’s a good approach when you’re making decisions when you’re very uncertain about variables and perhaps you don’t even know what you don’t know. It’s in the world of Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns’. That seems the right context for applying the behavioural psychology to economics. There are a whole bunch of economists working on developing models to do with understanding the cognitive science much more carefully. A lot of people who are not economists have used behavioural results to say that economics is completely rubbish and I think that’s a very unfair attack on the subject because economists do use a scientific method and most of them you show them evidence that contradicts the way they think the world works they will change their models. So it’s a really big and important branch of economics as well and also very successful.

Macroeconomics has been pretty flawed. I think you can see this best by not looking at the crisis and its failure to predict but looking at what people say now about what to do. There’s a bunch of economists who say the government needs to tighten its belt, cut deficits, the austerity will signal to financial markets that things are ok and it will be all right. And then there’s another group who say what the government needs to do now is forget the deficit; spend more to get us out of the depression because there’s not enough demand around. When two sets of intelligent people are saying opposite things you’re not in the realm of science. This is politics. And we don’t even know how to assess which of those is right or not because the world is so involved in so many causes of things we can’t determine the relevant factors, you can’t identify the data, identify the relevant causes. And so we need to have a really big rethink about macroeconomics.

People are going back to Keynes because he wrote about radical uncertainty, which is what we have now. His big book was in 1936 so he was responding to the Depression and he changed his mind a lot in the course of his writing, which is one of his strengths actually, and people pick out the bit of Keynes that seems right for their times. So in the 1960s they picked out the bit that said you could fine-tune the economy, which proved wrong. And now people are going back to the bits that say you’ve got to think about uncertainty. And we have to say, there is huge uncertainty. We don’t know, say, about the Euro, we don’t know how the Central Bank will respond, we don’t know what Angela Merkel will decide or the reality of real politik, because this is political as well as economic. We just don’t know what kind of economics we can do when you’ve got all these millions of decisions. So who knows what’s going to happen?

3:AM: So things seem pretty scary. Is it as worrying as it seems at the moment to an expert like yourself?

DC: Yes, it is very, very worrying at the moment.

3:AM: It seems as if the Occupy movements in New York and St Paul’s and elsewhere seem to be a response to a general feeling that there’s something lurking, something horrible and unknown, something we don’t know quite what it is, and we certainly don’t know what to do about it, but it’s a real sense of unease. People keep wanting the protesters to say what it is they want but I think that’s the point: no one knows quite what to do. But the fear is real. People, maybe subliminally, are feeling that this is a critical time.

DC: There’s a story I tell in The Economics of Enough about October 2008 after Lehman Brothers had gone bankrupt when the rate of interest at which banks lent money to each other overnight went through the roof. And I looked at it and thought, ‘They don’t trust each other with their money overnight, so I don’t trust them either.’ I went to the cash machine and got out a lot of cash so I had enough cash to go to the supermarket and buy enough food for the family for the next few weeks if those payment mechanisms between the banks stopped working.

So we are definitely back there. I’m stocking up on the cash again. Because if the European Central Bank doesn’t convince the financial markets that it will do whatever it takes and it can do whatever it takes to guarantee the money that people have in banks then all those markets could dry up. And when the banks start drying up the banks stop having a cash flow problem and it becomes a problem of whether they are solvent or not. And so you could get into a situation where more banks go bankrupt, where people worry that their savings in banks are evaporating, because the basic problem is that all banks lend out more money than they have. One extreme is that we could end up with most of Europe’s banks nationalised because governments have had to step in and say, ‘The banking system has messed up, we’re having to do it instead and run them as if we’re in a planned economy.’ Another extreme is that the fear stalking European politicians at the moment makes them agree that the European Central Bank can do what it needs and it will ebb away again. That’s the radical uncertainty.

3:AM: The theme of your new book is ‘how to run the economy as if the future matters’, and it runs through the whole book this idea that if you’re going to do economics now, certainly at this macro level, you have to discuss a whole bunch of stuff – politics, social policy, education – and that not having an eye to longer term results in the future will be fatal.

DC: The thought linking a whole range of problems, and it’s not just economic but environmental ones, and the social ones of inequality and the civility of life in our cities and so on, is a sense of stewardship. A sense that across the whole range of public policy it’s become extraordinarily short term and there hasn’t been any thought about stewardship for future generations. And at some point what is unsustainable can’t be sustained any longer. And this short termism has been going on for so long that we are getting to that point. So there’s a choice about what kind of breakdown occurs, whether it’s the financial structure, the welfare structure, is it nasty chaotic consequences for people or do you try and make policies that can switch you to a more sustainable frame of mind?

3:AM: One of the things about the future, and something you wrote about in The Weightless World was that technology makes the future very unpredictable. So the problem is how we are to be good stewards, in the way you write about, whilst at the same time staring into an abyss of ignorance?

DC: I’ve been thinking a lot about the Victorian era when there was massive technological change, not just steam but a lot of the secondary technologies around, when there were great social problems and there were the extremes of inequality that we have returned to now, when people had great fears of technology – just think of Frankenstein – so there was that fear as well, so there was Ruskin’s response to change in his Unto This Last. So there were many, many parallels in a way. And at the same time it was a time of incredible innovation. Not just technological innovation but societal innovation as well. People tried all sorts of things. So people built the museums in South Kensington, they built libraries, they invested in a sewage system, there were campaigns for social reform, schools, you saw Rowntree starting his work. Across the board massive energy went into social experimentation. So that’s the way my thoughts have turned now really. We don’t know, so we need to try lots of things. This will depend on the energies of lots of people trying lots of things.

3:AM: That’s attractive to me. But someone might say that there was a darker side to the Victorian Empire. That in order to sustain the innovation we had to plunder Africa and the colonies and that in order to build the stuff we wanted we were doing pretty nasty stuff elsewhere. Now that’s not an option any more for civilised people, we just don’t think that it’s right to behave like that and have policies like that now. But without the plundered minerals and crushed populations, the wars and so on, the Victorian miracle wouldn’t have been possible. So how can we now innovate in the same way without causing the sorts of inequalities and problems of the Victorian era somewhere else?

DC: You certainly need economic growth and I’m certainly not in the camp that says we can’t have growth anymore for environmental reasons. I think that’s a non-starter. Without growth nothing good is going to happen. And if you don’t want exploitative growth then you’ve got to find ways to have inventive growth instead. All around new technologies there are examples of people inventing things that will make people’s lives better and increase their capacities to do things. Some of them are to do with new energy technologies, some of them are on-line stuff, some of them are about medical treatments and pharmaceuticals. So there’s a whole array of secondary technologies that use the basic ones, or can deliver growth. It’s not easy. None of the developed economies are growing very fast or have been. So if we can get back to the two and a half per cent needed to bring unemployment down that’ll be pretty good going.

3:AM: Now I always read your books with the cyberpunk, steam punk metaphors and stuff, Gibson et al, running through. So I project some of that onto what you’re writing about. I think of you as a kind of Jules Verne economist where you replace the iron and steel of his techno futures with the silicon and graphene of ours. You’re an optimist despite the fear. Is that fair?

DC: Yes, I’m optimistic about human creativity. So I think we should be very cheered by graphene, which is such a light airy material, that if you built an airplane out of it and filled the tank with fuel you’d quadruple the weight with the fuel. It’s an incredible material and there’s going to be massive innovation around that. So in that sense there’s much to be optimistic. But the social and economic stuff is much harder. Getting any kind of change when the proportion of people who trust politicians and the political system is minimal is very hard. And its hard because its really long term stuff. The inequality that we are seeing is partly because the skills that are needed to work with these new technologies are either really quite advanced cognitive skills or cognitive skills that we don’t value in the education system such as creativity – being a good dancer or artist, being a good carer of people, these things we just don’t measure them well, we don’t value them, we tend to chop those people away. So we need to change the education system to get everyone into one of those tracks, give them a good education in it, and if we got that right tomorrow it would take twenty years to get the workforce through, and we’re unlikely to get it right tomorrow because as you know the social fractures that the education system is having to deal with is enormous. We have very damaged children coming into the school system. So it’s probably going to take fifty years.

3:AM: And what about the emergence of China, India and Brazil? So if we take China as an example. There seems to be a democratic deficit there. A pessimist might say, well, they’e just going to take and control the technologies, there’s going to be a small elite who will control everything and they’re going to live forever and the rest of us, we’re going to be the drones, and it’s going to be horrible. It seems that that’s going to need political will rather than anything else. So I guess the question is, how much do you think that technology and innovation will automatically sweep away those problems, or will there be power strictures that will take the innovations and use it for their own evil ends? You think of science fiction scenarios where there are worlds with Darth Vader and his Death Star and so on. China, it seems, could go either way. America might go that way if Leiter and Bloomberg are right about the plutocracy and how power has been bought by a small uber rich minority. The rest of humanity is going to be left in the gutter. That seems to be part of the uneasy fear that people have.

DC: I’ve got a high degree of optimism that the American plutocracy is in its final days. Partly because the national crisis is getting more severe. So, we don’t want the banks to collapse but if they do then this series of successive banking crises is bound to change the political system in the end. I don’t see how politicians could ignore the need for banking reform second time around.

3:AM: Even if the Republicans got in? It seems they can ignore anything!

DC: They could only get in because of populism. There’s definitely populist politics in play in the United States. In a funny way, the Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are quite similar.

3:AM: Because they have the same fears?

DC: Yes. The same fears. And the same kind of people. People who feel that they have no control over their destiny. The idea that there are all these rich bastards running things, which is true. So that kind of political reaction is already in play and with freedom of information and so on in the States it’s not likely that they decide to become a police state and monitor everyone. China it would happen differently. But they have their own social tensions. The concern of the Communist Party to maintain stability reflects the fact of their fear that they can’t maintain stability. Their concern reflects their realisation that stability is slipping out of their control. But then again, they are the only people doing advanced nuclear research. We have a fear of nuclear technologies so all the radical innovation around nuclear technologies is going on in China. So they might develop much safer, much cheaper reactors and generate all their power via nuclear, and not let us have the technologies. I think the only way of dealing with that technological race is to carry on doing it here as well. So we may not do nuclear but we might do something else. And that’s a kind of logical response. Or we might decide to go to war with China and have a global war!

3:AM: That’s not a good scenario.

DC: No, but history suggests we shouldn’t just rule it out!

3:AM: So taking your ideas as a whole, what is the best way to proceed? Do we do it all at once or do we try and fix one domain first and then another?

DC: I think you have to take them all together but there is a theme, a common theme, which is about the institutions of society and the way we react to any problem, whether its environmental or financial or whatever. The most alarming of all the problems is that no one trusts the politicians. Wherever you look around the world, the trust people have in politicians and in democratic systems is rock bottom. So I looked at the Mori Poll that they do frequently in the UK and 14% of people said they trust politicians. The bottom of the heap. And I think politicians are generally people who want to help the public and have a sense of public service and are quite passionate about the right way to do it. So there’s some real disjunction between what they are trying to contribute and the way they are being received.

3:AM: So how do you account for that? Are there economic principles behind this trust deficit?

DC: I think it’s a function of institutions, and it applies to big business as well, not having responded quickly enough to these structural changes that we started talking about. So new companies that set up operate in completely new way but long established large slow moving organisations find it hard to change.

3:AM: Like FIFA.

DC: Yes, where you’ve got this radical openness that we have now.

3:AM: When you have David Beckham sounding like the sharpest thing on the planet you know the organisation is in deep trouble.

DC: And Ferdinand tweeting about it, yeah.

3:AM: But I guess this is part of your optimism. The old bloated institutions will have to either adapt or they will die. They can’t survive because the folk are now just too agile and smart to allow these old practices to continue. And it’s what you’re saying about China – for all the bad things they are going to have to be, and are being, innovative and that will corrode the existing institutions.

DC: Yes. I think you have to be strategically optimistic. You have to be optimistic to get people to do things. One thing we know is that things are going to change because everything is very dynamic. The way things change will depend on how people behave and how they behave depends on what they believe so you’ve got to be optimistic and work for the right kind of changes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Peter Carruthers is a philosopher with intriguing theories about our minds. His new book is the latest of a series of books about human nature, the philosophy of psychology and consciousness. He lives and works in Washington DC and in this interview he tells us that many of our views about our own minds are just wrong.  

3:AM: You’re a philosopher whose work interfaces with cognitive science. Can you introduce yourself and how you’ve ended up thinking that philosophy and psychology complement each other. Were you a philosophical child etc or was it something you grew into or did something happened to turn you into one?

Peter Carruthers: I got into philosophy as a teenager hoping that it would make me think and reason more clearly, and because I wanted to know the meaning of life. I guess it did help with the former. But I simply stopped thinking about the latter once I met my wife in my second year in college. I was also always interested in figuring out how the mind works, and applied to university initially to pursue a dual degree in philosophy and psychology. But this was back in the 70s, and the psychology classes were all about rats and behavioral conditioning, which I found deathly dull. So I switched to pure philosophy. It was only a dozen or more years later that I started reading work in cognitive science again, initially through the writings of philosophers like Dan Dennett and Thomas Nagel, which draw on psychological results. Their stuff was so much more exciting and interesting than the Wittgenstein texts that had formed the basis of my philosophical training that I gradually found myself switching direction. I have since come to think of myself as a sort of theoretical psychologist (by analogy with theoretical physics, which takes other people’s data and tries to make sense of them). I also believe very strongly that good philosophy needs to be empirically informed, at least.

3:AM: Could you give an overview of where you think the connections are between the disciplines? Many folk will think that psychology and philosophy are not asking the same kind of questions, but you seem to believe that they do overlap. How do you see this situation?

PC: I think the difference is largely one of scope. Thus many of the questions that occupy cognitive scientists are quite fine-grained, about this or that mental phenomenon. (But not always: many cognitive scientists, too, are troubled by the issue of how consciousness can exist in a physical world.) In contrast, many of the questions that occupy philosophers are quite general: do mental states form part of the furniture of the universe, or are they a sort of useful fiction? Are mental states causes of physical phenomena? And so on. From this perspective, philosophy and cognitive science can flow into one another: with philosophy taking data and fine-grained theories from cognitive science and attempting to integrate them into a wider theoretical framework, and with cognitive science sometimes looking to philosophy for help in providing such frameworks, or perhaps for some useful distinctions.

3:AM: Linked to this, are you then part of the experimental philosophy movement that gets linked with Josh Knobe and others?

PC: No. It requires a long apprenticeship to design and implement experiments effectively. While there has been some good work done by people in the experimental philosophy movement, whenever I talk to psychologists about this stuff I find myself embarrassed for my discipline by their reactions. I’m not averse to philosophers being involved in experiments, of course, but it is probably wise always to do it in collaboration with someone who has had the necessary training.

3:AM: One of the interesting things you argue is about introspection. You take a rather counter intuitive view that what we introspect is not infallible. Can you say what this position is and why it’s controversial? There have been some cool experiments about this that you write about, readers would be interested in some of these I think.

PC: What I actually claim is something much stronger than this. For many philosophers today allow that introspection is fallible, and is subject to errors resulting either from pathology or inattention. What I claim is that we make systematic errors about our own thoughts, and that the pattern of errors reveals something about the mechanisms that normally give us access to those thoughts. (Compare the way in which visual illusions are used by cognitive scientists to give us insight into the mechanisms involved in visual perception.) In particular, I claim that people make errors whenever they are provided with cues that would lead them to make a similar error about the thoughts of a third party. This suggests, I think, that they are using the same mental faculty for both (often now called the ‘mindreading’ faculty), relying upon the same sorts of cues.

For example, people who are induced to nod their heads while listening to a message (ostensibly to test the headphones they are wearing for comfort and staying-power) express greater confidence in the message thereafter than those who have been induced to shake their heads while listening. This is just what we would think when observing other people: if they nod while they listen we assume they agree, and if they shake their heads while they listen we assume they disagree. Likewise, right-handed people who are induced to write statements with their left hands express lower confidence afterwards in the statements that they have written than people who write with their right hands. This is because the shaky writing makes the thoughts look hesitant. (And people who look at the written statements of others will make just the same judgments about the writers’ states of confidence.)

People are completely unaware that they are always interpreting themselves in just the same way that they interpret others, however. Indeed, they think that they are directly introspecting their own thoughts. (I argue in my book, The Opacity of Mind, that there are reasons why the mindreading faculty should have been designed in such a way as to produce this illusion.) As a result, people will smoothly and unhesitatingly confabulate about their thoughts, telling of thoughts that we know they didn’t really have.

For instance, in one study people were presented with pairs of pictures of female faces, and asked to pick the most attractive one. When they did so, the pictures were laid face down on the table for a moment, before the chosen picture was handed to subjects and they were asked to say why they had chosen it. However, in some trials, through the experimenter’s sleight of hand, the picture that they were then looking at was the one they had rejected, not the one they had chosen. The results were quite remarkable. First of all, hardly anyone noticed! Moreover, they went on to tell why they had chosen that picture, often citing factors that we can be quite sure were no part of the reason for their choice. (For example, saying, ‘I like her ear rings’, when the woman in the chosen picture hadn’t been wearing ear rings.) When people’s answers in the actual-choice and sleight-of-hand conditions were analyzed, the experimenters could discover no differences between the two. People’s reports had the same degree of emotional engagement, specificity, and so on, and were expressed with the same degree of confidence. I take this study, and many others like it, so show that people have no direct access to the factors that determine their liking for things.

3:AM: In your new book you put forward a theory  - is it the idea that there’s not introspection and perception of the world but a single thing that does both?

PC: Not quite. I do argue that there is no introspection of our own thoughts (our judgments, beliefs, intentions, decisions, and so on). But what I argue is that there is a single ‘mindreading’ faculty that enables us the perceive our own thoughts as well as the thoughts of other people. This faculty evolved initially for social purposes, enabling us to anticipate (and sometimes to manipulate) the behavior of other people, as well as to better coordinate cooperative activities. But it can likewise be turned on the self, relying on the same channels of information that are used when interpreting the behavior of others. Sometimes we attribute thoughts to ourselves by literally perceiving our overt behavior. But often we rely on sensory cues that utilize the same perceptual channels, such as our own visual imagery, or our own inner speech.

3:AM: Another big subject you’ve looked at is creativity. You have a theory that creativity isn’t a uniquely human thing but is due to a relatively simple mechanism that even moths have. Can you say what your theory is and what evidence you’ve found supporting it?

PC: I should say that my work on this is much more tentative and exploratory than my work on self-knowledge. And it is a theory of just one component of creativity, namely, the ‘generative’ component. Thus it is common for theorists to distinguish between two phases in creative activity. One is generative, when new ideas are thrown up for consideration. The second is evaluative, then these ideas are considered, explored, developed, and (if they are judged worthy) expressed or implemented.

There is quite a bit of work suggesting that the generative process is stochastic, or semi-random, in character. For example, the most creative individuals also tend to be the most productive individuals, and such people have more ‘duds’ or failures than others, just as they have more successes. What I have done is to suggest that this process may co-opt and re-use much more ancient mechanisms for the stochastic generation of actions. For it is known that many species of animal can engage in so-called ‘protean’ behavior (especially when fleeing from a predator). A fleeing gazelle, for example, will execute an apparently random sequence of twists and turns and leaps in the course of its flight. There is a good reason for this: the best way to make your actions unpredictable to a predator are to make them as close to genuinely random as possible. (It is for this reason that the submarine commanders in the Second World War would throw dice to determine the pattern of their zig-zag patrols, to make themselves unpredictable to the submarine-hunting vessels up above.)

So the paradigm example of creativity, from this perspective, is fast online improvisation in jazz. Those who study such performances report that the players seem to be stochastically selecting among well-rehearsed notes and phrases, while operating within a set of local constraints (such as permissible keys). And notice that jazz improvisers will often report that they are surprised by their products, suggesting that they were unplanned, but rather proceeded directly from stochastic selections among actions.

3:AM: What are the consequences of your theory for, say, our views about the creative artist or scientist? Do you think it diminishes the significance of creativity by making it kind of mechanical and simple. Should we appreciate music less or differently than before if your theory is understood and accepted?

PC: No, I don’t think the theory should have any of these consequences. Creativity doesn’t have to be deeply mysterious in order to be valuable. And much of the real work of the creative artist occurs downstream of the initial generative phase, when the ideas are evaluated and implemented, or upstream when knowledge is being acquired or skills are being developed and rehearsed.

3:AM: Your new book looks at a whole range of issues about the opacity of mind. One of these issues is cognitive dissonance and its interpretation. Can you explain why this is an important subject and why you come to a fairly surprising theory about this.

PC: These data count powerfully against the existence of direct introspective access to our judgments and beliefs, in my view. But this will take a little while to explain. Bear with me. The basic finding is a long-standing one: people who have been induced to write what are called ‘counter-attitudinal’ essays (arguing against something they are known to believe) will thereafter shift their reported attitude in the direction that they have argued if (but only if) their freedom of choice in writing the essays is made salient to them. In the ‘low choice’ condition, for example, subjects might be told something like this: ‘Thank you for agreeing to participate in this exercise. A university committee is considering a rise in fees next term, and needs examples of arguments on both sides of the issue. We would like you to write an essay laying out the arguments in support of a fee rise. Thank you for your cooperation.’ In the ‘high choice’ condition, in contrast, the experimenter might say, ‘Of course it is entirely up to you whether to write this essay’ (most still comply; if they don’t do so immediately, the experimenter might say, ‘We would be very pleased if you would; it is important to have examples of arguments on both sides of the issue, and we don’t have enough on the side of raising fees; but of course it is entirely up to you’). Alternatively, subjects might be asked to sign a consent form on top of the essay sheet that reads, ‘I hereby participate in this activity of my own free will’, or something of the kind.

The effects in experiments of this kind tend to be highly significant and quite robust, even about matters (such as fee levels for university students!) that subjects regard as of high importance. In a typical experiment ‘high choice’ subjects might shift their reported attitudes from ’strongly opposed’ to the fee increase to only ’slightly opposed’ or even ’slightly in favor” (whereas ‘low choice’ subjects shift their reported attitudes not at all). We know that this has nothing to do with the quality of the arguments produced by the two groups, because there are no such differences. We also know that the ‘high choice’, but not the ‘low choice’, subjects are put in a bad mood by the end of the essay writing, and that once they have reported their change in attitude they are no longer in a bad mood.

The traditional explanation of the finding is in terms of ‘cognitive dissonance’. The idea is that people sense the inconsistency between their freely undertaken advocacy of a fee increase and their underlying attitude, and this makes them feel uncomfortable. Since they cannot change what they have done, they thereafter change their attitude, thus removing the feeling of discomfort.

But we now know that this explanation isn’t correct. For ‘high choice’ subjects will shift their reported attitude just as much even if they write a pro-attitude essay (arguing against a fee increase, for example), provided that they believe that their action will have bad effects. This was beautifully demonstrated in a study in which subjects were told of the recent [fictional] discovery of a so-called ‘boomerang effect’. They were told that the committee making the decision would be reading a significant number of essays before deciding. Essays read late in the sequence would persuade in the normal way. But essays read early in the sequence would boomerang: an essay arguing for a rise in fees would be apt to convince the readers not to raise fees, whereas an essay arguing against a rise in fees would be apt to persuade the readers to raise them. The subjects were only told about the order in which their essay would be read after writing their essays. Seemingly drawing a number out of a hat, subjects were told that their essay would either be read second, or second-to-last.

In this experiment, ‘high choice’ subjects who wrote counter-attitudinal essays showed no change in attitude in the boomerang condition (whereas they showed the usual degree of change in the no-boomerang condition). In contrast, ‘high choice’ subjects who wrote pro-attitude essays in the boomerang condition shifted significantly. Although they had written essays arguing that fees should not be raised (which is what they believed), they thereafter reported thinking that it wouldn’t be bad if they were. The real cause of the phenomenon, then, is the sense that one has freely done something bad (since what one has done seems likely to cause fees to rise), not that one has freely done something inconsistent.
Moreover, we also now know that subjects don’t change their underlying attitude in advance of being given the questionnaire on which to express it. For subjects will also use denials of responsibility to reduce dissonance, or they will deny that the issue is an important one. And if they are given a number of such options, they will use whichever one is offered to them first, without using any of the others.

So the true explanation of the phenomenon, in my view, is this. Subjects are feeling bad because they see themselves as having freely done something bad (not necessarily on a conscious level, of course). When presented with the attitude questionnaire, they imagine responding in various ways: ‘Should I circle the 2 [on a 9-point scale, meaning 'strongly oppose'], or the 3, or the 4, or the 5?’ Imagining themselves circling the 5 (the neutral point) presents their essay-writing action to them as being not bad (because the fee rise that they might have helped to cause would not then be thought to be bad). So they experience a little flash of pleasure at the thought of taking that action rather than the others, and so they go ahead and do it. Seeing themselves say that they aren”t opposed to a fee increase they believe that is what they think, and hence their negative mood disappears. This is because they are no longer appraising what they have done as bad.

Note that this explanation only works if subjects don’t have introspective access to their real antecedent belief about the matter. For if they did, then at the same time that they circle the 5 they would be aware that they are lying, and this would make them feel worse, not better. Note, too, that a question about one’s attitude is precisely the sort of thing that ought to bring it to consciousness, if such a thing can ever happen. But plainly it doesn’t, since otherwise the effect wouldn’t occur. Hence these findings provide powerful evidence, in my view, that beliefs can never be directly introspected.

3:AM: What other issues do you think are central to your approach to understanding the mind and ourselves?

PC: Perhaps the main issue concerns the architecture of the mind as a whole, especially its ‘central’ portion that deals with abstract thoughts (non-perceptual judgments, decisions, and the rest). Philosophers are virtually united in believing that there is a sort of central arena in which these thoughts can become activated and interact directly with one another, and I think most people tacitly accept something similar. But there is a lot of work in cognitive science to suggest that this picture is radically mistaken. Granted, there is a central arena of sorts, but it is a sensory-based one, realized in the so-called ‘global broadcast’ of attended sensory information to many different areas of the brain. This attention-based global broadcasting mechanism has been co-opted in humans and some other animals to form the basis of a working memory system. Hence we can call up, sustain, and manipulate visual images in this workspace. And likewise we can generate items of inner speech that become globally accessible in the same sort of way. These sensory-based representations can carry conceptual content. So one can hear oneself as saying [to oneself] that one should make a trip to the supermarket, or whatever, just as we hear meaning in the words of other people. But an item in inner speech is not itself a judgment, or decision, or any other form of thought. Rather, at best, it expresses and is caused by such a thought (although in fact we know that the relationship between speech and the underlying attitudes is complex and pretty unreliable).

Of course we hear ourselves as entertaining specific sorts of attitude, too, through the interpretive work of the mindreading faculty, just as we perceive other people as judging that it is about to rain (as they fumble with an umbrella while looking at the clouds), or as deciding that it is time to leave, or whatever. But on reflection, we should no more think that we have direct non-interpretive access to our own attitudes than we have such access to the attitudes of other people. What we really have access to is sensory-involving events of various sorts. And the only ‘arena’ in which all our attitudes can interact in a global way is indirect, through their contributions to the contents of sensory-based working memory.

I think we intuitively identify ourselves with the conscious events that we experience as occurring in working memory, and we tend to believe that these events include such things as judgments and decisions. But in my view, they don’t, and these sensory-involving events are merely the effects of the activity of the self, rather than constituting the self. This occasions a radical change in perspective on ourselves. For the self and its attitudes is something completely submerged from view, directing and orchestrating the show of sensory events that parade before us in working memory.

3:AM: So in terms of our image about ourselves, how do your theories change what might be the folk-belief about ourselves and how far does it preserve this image? I guess one big area is that of human values which some see as being threatened by this approach to human ethics. So would it be fair to place you squarely in the Hume, Nietzsche, naturalism camp?

PC: I haven’t really begun to explore the implications of my recent work on self-knowledge for human ethics. But the theory does suggest that our folk conception of ourselves is radically in error. This is because, outside of the broadly sensory domain (perception, imagery, inner speech, emotional and bodily feelings, and so on) none of our mental states is ever conscious. In particular, there are no such things as conscious non-perceptual judgments, no such things as conscious intentions, and no such things as conscious decisions. (And this holds, I argue, irrespective of what sort of theory of consciousness one endorses.) So our conception of ourselves as conscious agents is radically wrong. Rather, although there are many conscious events that contribute to agency, there is no such thing as conscious choice or conscious decision.

3:AM: How much non-professional reading helps you with your thinking, eg science fiction, novels, art, music – are there cultural things that you find helpful in formulating your thoughts and ideas?

PC: I have barely read a novel since my wife and I had kids! (Although I used to read a lot.) All my reading time now is devoted to philosophy and cognitive science. I visit the Smithsonian museums fairly often (we live just outside Washington DC), but I don’t think my interests in art and music have the slightest connection with my work. Nor, come to that, do my interests in sport. (I am an American Football fan, and regularly attend my college’s games.)

3:AM: Finally, it seems that we’re living in complex and tough times. Philosophers like yourself seem to be working in areas of real importance, working out why we think what we do and how we do it etc. So how might the stuff you are doing help us understand better the challenges of the complex world we’re in?

PC: There is a great deal of good and potentially useful work that has been done by studying areas of human weakness, as well as policies or techniques that might enable better decisions to be made. One has to do with institutional defaults. In some areas of Europe, for example, there is no shortage of organs for those needing transplants, whereas here in the United States the shortage is chronic. The difference? It turns on whether the law requires people to opt out of being an organ donor (as in some countries in Europe) or to opt in (as in the US). Yet the two rules are equally consistent with the principle of respect for people’s freedoms and religious beliefs. There are similar findings regarding the effects of standard plate sizes on the amounts that people eat, and so on. In fact I am teaching a new course at the moment entitled, ‘Know Thyself: wisdom through cognitive science’, which looks at a range of findings from the cognitive sciences and attempts to extract practical morals (or rather, it gets the students to try to extract those morals).
 
But in the most general terms I think it is crucial that people should realize that they don’t know themselves nearly as well as they believe they do. This is what The Opacity of Mind is about. We should be much more humble in our attitudes to our own powers of reasoning and decision making, and much more open to learning about the factors that really have an impact on the outcomes, for the most part outside of our awareness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Martin Amis provokes strong reactions from admirers and detractors alike. Some consider him the greatest English prose stylist of the last half-century while others accuse him of inflammatory views and claim that he hasn’t produced a decent novel since the 1980s. Last year, around publication of The Pregnant Window, it was difficult to open a newspaper without finding gossipy condemnation of Amis. So is now the ideal time for the first biography of the ex-enfant terrible of English letters? Richard Bradford, who has written books about Amis’ father Kingsley, Philip Larkin and Alan Sillitoe, believes so. I sent him my questions in the hope that we might gain some insights into the biographer’s process, debunk the myth of Martin and clear the way for the rigorous discourse that his work warrants. Here’s how it went…

3:AM: When I interviewed Martin Amis he said he wrote Experience following a “concatenation of events.” What prompted you to write the biography?

Richard Bradford: Martin was very helpful when I was researching my biography of Kingsley (2001), doing a couple of interviews and allowing me access to the letters before they were published. He came to Northern Ireland to share a public lecture with me. I was driving him to the airport and he asked, ‘Who’s next?’. I answered, a bit flippantly, ‘What about you?’ Surprisingly, he said yes - and caused me to almost crash the car - but we agreed that it would not be practical to begin until he returned from Uruguay 4 to 5 years later. In the interim I did biographies of Philip Larkin and Alan Sillitoe. Alan and I became good friends. The biography of Martin took about two years, to first draft stage. If there was a particular reason for doing it I suppose the fact that he polarised opinion - as an individual and a writer - was decisive.

3:AM: Is it an authorised biography?

RB: Not ‘authorised’. He was cooperative but there were conventions - mutually agreed to - from the beginning. Primarily, I would not contact members of his close family, though he would be willing to talk with me about them. I fully appreciate his insistence on that. I could approach anyone else for an interview, with his approval. Whether they spoke to me was up to them. Some who said no did so simply to protect their privacy; some others, I suspect, were saving their recollections for their own memoirs. Pure coincidence I suppose, but three of his ex-girlfriends who wouldn’t speak to me sold their stories to the Mail on Sunday during the six months after I contacted them.

3:AM: I was intrigued to read that Martin was surprised when Pat Kavanagh and Tom Maschler asked when his novel would be complete. You say he hadn’t told them he was writing, so did Kingsley Amis?

RB: Yes, Kingsley would have told them. But only in passing. He was not trying to pull strings. Both of them - Maschler and Kavanagh - were hard-nosed professionals and would not have published a bad novel, irrespective of its author’s connections.

3:AM: You write, “Like most major writers he rarely admits to anything as compromising as influence… ” I’ve always thought Amis was open about his influences - Nabakov, Bellow, Joyce, Austen - so what do you mean?

RB: It depends what you mean by ‘influence’. He admires greatly, and enjoys, the authors you mention. They and others played a part in the formation of his literary ideals - his personal cannon if you like - but I think his writing is his own.

3:AM: Do his experiences with Eric Jacobs, over the first biography of his father, make him suspicious of biographers? He praised your book about Kingsley, but did you have to earn his trust and co-operation?

RB: We fell out a few times. Not so much on the nature of the book as on things such as nuclear disarmament and climate change. Let’s put it this way, on these and many other matters I probably have more in common with Kingsley than Martin. Back to your original question, I think his dealings with Eric Jacobs caused him to become wary of biographers.

3:AM: I get the impression that you also share Kingsley’s resistance to modernism. You write that Joyce “failed momentously.”

RB: Yes, I’d say my views on modernism are similar to Kingsley’s. Martin and I disagreed on that too. He thinks that Ulysses is one of the greatest novels ever written. In my view, were it not for the elitism of academia - that is, a wish to protect the self-indulgent and inaccessible from the vulgarity of the marketplace - it would have gone out of print many years ago. I argue that Martin is responsible, in part, for making the avant-garde more saleable and reader friendly, without dumbing it down.

3:AM: He must have been pleased with that old photograph on the cover. Is he still smoking?

RB: I haven’t seen him since just before he was arranging the move to the US. He was still smoking then, roll-ups as ever.

3:AM: Why do you think he gets such a hard time from the press? Does he get a fairer hearing in the US?

RB: Regarding your first question, the press - and plenty of others who tell stories and write letters to the press - often begin to foam at the mouth as soon as he says and writes anything. Why? Envy plays a part. But also, he is inclined to say things that many of us think but keep quiet about to avoid offending the delicate sensibilities of the p.c. establishment. Perhaps he receives a little less harassment in the US. Probably because over here we tend to reserve a special brand of contempt for those who are successful at what they do. Envy again, I suppose.

3:AM: You say that characters from the short story ‘State of England’ reveal as much about the early 1990s as P.G Wodehouse’s characters do of the 1920s and 1930s. Later, you call Money, “as important a literary landmark as Ulysses,” despite your reservations about Joyce. Do you really hold Amis in such high regard?

RB: Yes. I confess that there are some of his novels that I don’t like but I could say the same about the plays of Shakespeare. But I admire them. Martin, more than any other novelist, has changed the landscape of contemporary British fiction.

3:AM: “What I value is innocence.” When I read that quote from Amis in your book, I was reminded of an interview where he said that writers are innocents. What do you think?

RB: His first comment is sincere. As an individual he does value innocence. Some might treat it as a weakness, a form of vulnerability, but I think Martin sees it as a quality possessed by children that can be preserved, even improved on, as we mature. Maybe his comment on writers as innocents is a little bit solipsistic. I mean: Mailer, Hemingway, Orwell, Kingsley himself, Larkin…? Innocents? And Ben Johnson stabbed a man to death.

3:AM: You discuss reversals in Yellow Dog, backwards chronology in Times Arrow, characters from The Information who represent opposing sides of Amis’ personality. Do you think the consistent use of reversals and binaries might be linked to his parents’ divorce? After all, a broken home can lead children to see the world in terms of division and opposition.

RB: To be honest, I’d never thought of that. You might have a point. He treats their divorce in a way that seems remarkably indulgent, never laying blame or even allowing that he was unsettled by what happened. But who knows how he really felt, more than 45 years ago? Or whether later he channelled very private feelings into his work?

3:AM: You describe The Information as a “novel of extraordinary complexity and outstanding quality.” I remember Martin saying that he thought that book would be better understood “when I’m gone” and I’ve always suspected that he considers it his best. Any truth in that?

RB: I think perhaps he does think it his best, though not for obvious reasons. It was distilled from experiences and emotions that were, for him, painful. But it was not simply his way of disposing of them. It is a great book in its own right.

3:AM: Which of his works do you rate most highly?

RB: Money. I wouldn’t argue that it is his best - we probably all have different opinions on that - but I enjoy it most. It’s hilarious and sad. I like Dead Babies a great deal too. Comedy does not get much blacker than that.

3:AM: There have been some negative reviews of this book so do you agree with Kingsley that a bad review should ruin breakfast but not lunch?

RB: There were some bad opening ones - at present though they’re running about 60:40 in my favour - and of course you remember the bad ones, so I’d disagree with Kingsley. Though it all depends on how much liquid you take with lunch. A couple of reviewers seemed unable to control their loathing. Personally, I never give a bad review. Dishonest I know, but all books have a few redeeming features and life’s to short to make other people miserable.

3:AM Would you consider writing a book about writing this biography?

RB: Oh yes indeed. It would - will - be very revealing and entertaining.

3:AM: Why was this book delayed? Did Martin’s lawyers and his agent, as some have speculated, “crawl all over the manuscript”?

RB: The phrase you quote is typical hack-speak. We’d agreed from the beginning that he would read the manuscript and make sure everything was factually correct. More than 500 pages of typing takes a while to get through. He is, as you know, a very busy man and it was generous of him to check it. I was not going to pester him with deadlines. But the main cause of the delay was that I had to change publishers. Again this was twisted and exaggerated by the press.

3:AM: Did he only check to make sure everything was factually correct? Or did he object to any of your readings of his work and events?

RB: I was allowed my own opinions on his work and lifestyle. He did comment on a few things he thought I’d misinterpreted - not related to his work; that was up to me - but whether or not I rewrote was my choice. I know the notion of ‘facts’ can be a grey area, particularly when you try to connect events with motive or state of mind, and he did question some of my interpretations of things. When these involved people he knew intimately I generally assumed - though not always - that his judgment was more trustworthy than mine. A point not directly related to your question but which occurred to me after this book: Martin rarely writes letters and his emails are concise to say the least and I’d say that in less than a generation, when electronic communication has virtually extinguished hard copy private correspondence, the literary biography will die, at least if the subjects are near-contemporary authors. Letters are the lifeblood of biography and even if people, alert to their legacies, start keeping decades of emails how will we know if they are authentic? It’s easier to alter or forge an email than to change what appears above a signature.

3:AM: Christopher Hitchens comes across extremely well in your book. I sensed a terrific working rapport between the pair of you so would you consider writing a biography of him?

RB: Christopher was really helpful. But he is for everyone. He’s a fine man. I think he gave special time to this because he holds Martin in such esteem, as a writer and a friend. A biography of Christopher Hitchens? It would be impertinent to ask. And I don’t think he’d be keen. Irrespective of what he thinks of me, he’s recently published his memoirs. But well, it would be great.

3:AM: Kingsley published the Old Devils - perhaps his best book - at 64 and Julian Barnes has just won the Booker Prize in his mid-sixties, so what chance Martin’s best work might be yet to come?

RB: I’m reluctant to speculate but there’s something about The Pregnant Widow that suggests a certain mellowing of tone - without any diminution in quality - and if rumours of his next are correct - British society mercilessly satirised - then he seems to be taking new directions. He is not becoming conservative exactly; let’s say unpredictable but without a capricious desire to shock. So yes, I’d say there is some very good stuff to come.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Max Liu is a writer and journalist. He lives in North London where he is at work on a novel and a collection of autobiographical essays.

Craig Taylor interviewed 200 people about their London experiences, and the only certainty he came away with was: “The bedbugs in Tottenham look just the same as the bedbugs in South Ken” – a wisdom imparted by a pest control officer. Other facts he has learnt may be less chiselled but equally fascinating: apparently squatting in the arches of London Bridge station is prosecuted under anti-terrorism laws; the Lost Property Office near Baker Street gets tons of books given away by Evening Standard and an occasional Samurai sword; “London is the kinkiest city in the world” if you ask a professional dominatrix. These and many other snippets of information obtained from Londoners can be found in the eponymous book, which follows in the footsteps of One Million Tiny Plays about Britain. But if Taylor’s 2009 collection is made up of fictionalised conversations, the monologues here are all real, each recited in a different voice. The author’s own is almost never heard, so it’s good to meet him in person and confirm that after over ten years in London he still sounds Canadian – more of which later.

3:AM: That London is perpetually changing is a thread that runs through the accounts of many characters in your book, from a city planner to a grief councillor. At the same time, there is a school of thought that insists on the place’s eternal nature. According to this theory, it has its own energy which dictates people’s actions, century after century. How does it fit in with your observations?

Craig Taylor: I was a bit concerned about the book coming out too specific to the present moment, too of its time. For instance, people would start talking about the Olympics – a big deal now, but would it still be relevant a couple of years down the line? I was worried the whole thing would turn out too particular. But there are, of course, some eternal themes, which gradually started to rise out of the text; the more I worked on it, the more visible they became. When the crematorium technician talks about his fear of epidemics you remember the plague raging in the city ages ago. The street cleaner puts you in mind of all the mess that’s always been there: it’s different now, there are probably more McDonald’s wrappings than ever, but the process of it appearing and being removed by someone is continuous. So yes, the book is full of particulars – although it was never going to be complete, however much you write about London you are bound to miss something – yet, hopefully, it also touches upon some things that never change.

3:AM: The presence of violence being one of them. You have a lot of it in the book, from street quarrels to police operations to the recent riots. Some people say that it’s violence that gives them the strongest creative impulse. Do you ever feel in a similar way when faced with certain sides of London life?

CT: Violence is important not so much for my work – I’m just curious about all sorts of things, they don’t have to be particularly outrageous to get my attention – but it’s there on the streets of London, you can’t talk about the city without mentioning it. That policeman who told me about almost beating someone to death with his baton, he patrols Islington, an area most people think of as placid and quiet. You have a street with lovely houses, all those beautifully painted doors, but turn a corner and the atmosphere becomes vicious. The policeman knows it all, that’s why I wanted him to speak. Another idea was to talk about the way our lives intersect with violence, because it does happen, in this city probably more often than in others. Take the guy who witnessed a suicide on the Tube – it actually happened here, at Camden.

3:AM : Yes, when he says the girl “basically disintegrated on impact”, it sticks in the memory. As for less random, more channelled forms of violence, you mention last year’s student protests, all that window smashing. Why do you think they were so subdued this time around? Does it mean the revolution is off, or will it happen quietly?

CT: I suppose the police tightened things up to make sure there is no disruption. But the lack of clashes doesn’t make protests less effective – quite the contrary. What matters is whether or not you stick around. One of my interviewees in the book talks about the 2003 demonstration against the war in Iraq: people gathered together one Saturday afternoon, made some noise and dispersed. What difference could it possibly make? Remember Brian Haw, the anti-war activist who died recently? He did make a huge impact – just by taking up residence outside the Houses of Parliament and saying: I’m not leaving. He was there every day, calling them killers, and that’s what really angered them, much more than any one-off action would. What he did was extremely powerful, they changed the legislation as a result. Look at the Occupy London movement today – don’t you think they are being successful? Everyone knows they are there, they’ve been making headlines, it’s been a very efficient campaign. Their aim wasn’t exactly to topple the government, but you have to dig in, that’s when people get agitated.

3:AM: Another popular image of the city is London as a stage. You’ve adapted your books for the theatre and have a good ear for dialogue. One of the sections of Londoners is called ‘Putting on a Show’, and although it’s quite short, there are performances galore in the book. Was that one of your focal points as a playwright?

CT: Of course London has often been compared to a multitude of performances happening around us all the time. I had this in mind too, but didn’t want to have lots of professional actors in the book – they can be quite tiresome, you know. In fact, the best actor I’ve come across is Peter Thomas, the fruit market trader – he really is great, he goes and performs with his supporting cast every night, rhyming slang and all. I think it’s more interesting to see people who act naturally, whatever their job.

3:AM: For a theatrical place like London, there is relatively little dressing up in the book. One of you interlocutors, who wears shoes signed by Bjorn Borg, talks about fashion at length, but that’s about it. Presumably the tensions of modern life are to blame?

CT: There’s that, but still you get people dressing up all the time, here in Camden, in Dalston and elsewhere. The thing is, it is not necessarily the dressers themselves who give the most interesting perspective on fashion. My nightclub door attendant has a sharp eye for it; she needs to measure people up instantly, and she does that just by looking at their clothes and manners – she is an ethnographer of sorts. When she herself dresses down and a bunch of Australian girls appears, all dolled up, she knows straight away they are going to be trouble. The longer you live in this city, the more you learn about these things yourself: if you see a guy wearing a particular kind of skinny jeans you place him accordingly, as you do someone wearing a puffa jacket.

3:AM: Your nurse working at an STD clinic says at the end of his monologue: “If there was no alcohol in the city I probably wouldn’t have a job.” The same probably applies to the very existence of London. So you see booze as a cohesive element in its life?

CT: Yes, it’s a great unifying force, and not something I was used to growing up on the West Coast of Canada. Where I am from, people drive to a pub and have a half pint with their meal; over here it couldn’t be more different. Pubs are also invaluable for a project like this as you get to explore various slices of London through its drinking places. And you have to see a swanky bar in the City where someone is having a birthday bash before you go to some place in Kilburn to encounter a bunch of old drinkers.

3:AM: One of the most crucial things in your study of London is language. An Iranian refugee, a black actress turned plumber, a hedge fund manager born in Derbyshire – they all have their speech peculiarities, as do Cockneys, Geordies, and the rest. Instead of making full introductions, you let your subjects speak for themselves, so by the end of each monologue the reader has a fair idea of their background. And then there’s your own, outlined at the beginning. Does it help being a foreigner in London?

CT: Yes, I managed to keep my accent unlike some of my Canadian friends who’ve acquired English ways. It wasn’t deliberate – it just happened. But I can’t claim any great talent for recognising different registers. Well, perhaps as an outsider your ear is more attuned, you listen more carefully to what’s going on around you. I thought letting a voice tell the story was much more interesting than just saying at the beginning: he is white, middle-class, etc. Several of my interviewees talk about the role your accent plays, how you are judged by it. For instance, Emma Clarke, the voice of the London Underground, is a Northerner, but had to go for RP, just so the announcements would be easier to understand. It’s also interesting to think about her intonations – they have long been part of the fabric of people’s lives, so imagine what effect it would have made if she tweaked her way of speaking. There’s also the mother who is bringing up her son in Hackney; she knows that to get to the top he’d have to drop his wivs and whatevas, which he uses all the time to be accepted by his friends. These things still matter, of course, the outcome of your job interview still depends on the way you speak. As a foreigner, I’m judged not by class, but by other criteria. When I was interviewing people for this project they usually thought I was a weird American. Still, I like the fact that I speak with a strong accent – having your own, distinctive voice helps you find your place here.

3:AM : And where is that place? You talk to people from all walks of life, but there are no writers among them, while you yourself tend to step back, never interfering with your subject. Not so much an artist in the landscape, but rather one dissolved in it?

CT: No, I didn’t feel like posing against that backdrop, I’m kind of allergic to these things. The idea was to disappear into the project after a brief introduction, just to indicate that I am somewhere among those voices. I didn’t want to make any judgements, you know, along the lines of “After he told me this I knew…” So the whole process wasn’t like painting a landscape on an empty canvas, more like chipping away at a piece of sculpture that’s already there. Initially I had a million words to be pared down, so writing the book was all about finding that perfect line, somewhere in the middle. And I did work very hard on it, cutting and stitching and splicing; my editor was also a great help. Not sure how close I managed to get to that imaginary line, but whenever someone says to me: yeah, it must’ve been easy, you’ve just gone and typed up all those interviews – when I hear that I say: that’s perfect, if you think so, my job is done.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anna Aslanyan is a translator and journalist living in London. She regularly contributes to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and writes for the TLS and a number of online publications. Anna’s translations into Russian include works of fiction by Tom McCarthy, Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd, Mavis Gallant and Zadie Smith.

[Image: Matthew Spencer]

Alina Simone is a singer and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She was born in Kharkov, Ukraine and came to the U.S. at a young age as the daughter of political refugees after her father refused recruitment by the KGB and was blacklisted for ‘refusal to cooperate.’ Raised in the suburbs of Massachusetts, Simone moved to Austin, Texas after graduating from art school in Boston. It was there that she first started singing in public, in the doorway of an abandoned bar on Sixth Street. After the release of her first EP, Prettier in the Dark (2005), and her debut album, Placelessness (2007, 54º 40′ or Fight!), Simone became known for her sparse instrumentation and raw and powerful delivery, earning national airplay and critical acclaim.

In 2008, Simone released Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware, an homage to the music of Russian cult icon, Yanka Dyagileva, a Siberian punk-folk singer who drowned under mysterious circumstances in 1991. Sung entirely in Russian, Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware both echoes the lo-fi samizdat quality of Yanka’s recordings and subverts it with lush arrangements and intricately textured layers of trumpet, cello and guitars. The album received widespread critical acclaim from major national and international outlets including the New Yorker, BBC’s The World, Billboard Magazine, Spin Magazine, New York Magazine, NPR, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and Pitchfork among many others. Alina Simone was named one of the ‘Top People of 2008′ by USA Today’s Pop Candy and among the ‘Top 12 Bands to See’ at SXSW 2008 by Billboard Magazine.

A second original full-length album is also on the way. Make Your Own Danger was produced by Steve Revitte (Yeasayer, Liars, Black Dice) and promises to be Simone’s most lush and fully realized work to date, with a larger cast of musicians and exotic touches including flute, autoharp, horns, Brazilian drumming and vocal loops.

Over the past five years, Simone has performed under a windmill in Aarhus, Denmark, at a club located within the Arctic Circle in far northern Russia, as well as hundreds of lonely bars throughout the United States. She has shared the stage with artists including Final Fantasy, Loney Dear, Alele Diane, The Dodos, Fiery Furnaces, Castanets, Dead Meadow, The Duchess and the Duke, Franz Ferdinand and many others.

Most recently, Alina Simone received an odd message from an editor at the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and a guy who happened to like her music, asking whether she’d be interested in writing a book. Though she feared he was, at best, playing a weird joke on her, at worst, a creepy stalker, this unlikely request turned out to be a serious offer. You Must Go and Win, is Simone’s collection of essays about Russia, family and the tragic-comic struggle to make it in indie rock. Since unwittingly becoming a writer, Simone has shared the stage (either reading or singing or both) with a number of notable authors including Sam Lipsyte (FSG Reading Series at the Russian Samovar), Aleksandar Hemon (Upstairs at the Square), Stephen Elliott, Rivka Galchen and Tao Lin (The Rumpus One Year Anniversary) and Nick Flynn (NYC book release for The Ticking Is the Bomb). She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, philosopher Josh Knobe, and their daughter Zoe.

3:AM: For our readers could you give a little bit of background about yourself.

Alina Simone: Well, I’m an indie rock singer and author, based in Brooklyn, NY. I was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, (in what was then the Soviet Union) and came to the US with my family, as political refugees. I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts.

3:AM: Your dad is a pretty amazing physicist I believe?

AS: Yes, my father has become a very well known physicist. I’m very proud of him. My parents came to this country with only $100 and no family or friends. My father’s certainly come a long way since working as a nightwatchman at the Kharkov city zoo.

3:AM: So your music is really beautiful …

AS: Thank you. I’m actually completely self- taught. Growing up, I idolized Sinead O’Connor and Siouxsie Sioux. The riot grrls of the 90s were also a great inspiration. I’ve been singing for as long as I can remember. I don’t think I ever made a conscious choice to be a singer. It just always…was.

3:AM: So how would you describe your music?

AS: It has been categorized as rock and folk and world music. I would simply say that it is raw and emotional. I’m not much a part of any “scene,” though I do have musician friends, of course. I love music that actually makes you feel something, as opposed to being kind of blendy, pleasant background noise, so that’s all I’m trying to do. Create music that moves people. And moves me. Hopefully.

3:AM: Is there a scene you’re involved in?

AS: Nope, I’m not involved in any scene whatsoever. I do have some great friends who have become very successful artists, but many of them I’ve known for a very long time, before I was a singer. For example, singer Amanda Palmer and comedian Eugene Mirman went to high school with my husband and I — they were the maid of honor and best man at our wedding.) As for the type of music that interests me, the common thread is less a genre distinction than having a unique, irreplicable sensibility. I tend to love music that is raw, difficult, passionate…I really don’t care if it’s zydeco or Russian chanson or indie rock. I definitely think, though, that the internet has made it a lot easier to be genre-crossing in your tastes. I remember in the late 80s and early 90s, things seemed a lot more stratified. Indie rockers were separate from punk rockers were separate from the ska people etc.

[Image: Andrei Konst]

3:AM: The world’s in a mess at the moment – the Wall Street thing is something I’m thinking is important. How much are these broader political issues important to you and what you’re doing with your music?

AS: Ha! I feel pretty ill-equipped to answer these broad-ranging questions. Inequality is terrible, for sure, but the difficulty lies in pointing towards feasible solutions, not just problems. I was actually just contacted by some of the organizers behind the Occupy movement in Seattle about making some music for Occupy. I think I’m going to chat with them about it this week and see what they have in mind.

3:AM: There’s a lot of stuff about the role of big business on the music industry on your site.

AS: Well, unfortunately, I fear that the era of the reclusive artist is over. Being an artist now means having to be your own brand. In my book, You Must Go and Win, I discuss the moment when I learned what a publicist is and how many seemingly DIY bands were actually paying quite a lot of money in order to portray themselves as an overnight phenomenon. When you are competing for press or gigs or sales with bands that actually have a machine behind them, you are going to feel frustrated and/or shattered. So the best thing you can do, if you’re serious about making a living in art (as opposed to just making good art), is educate yourself regarding how things really work behind the scenes.

3:AM: Can you say something about the bands you really like at the moment?

AS: I tend to listen to a lot of old music and definitely don’t have my finger on the pulse of new music, but one newish Brooklyn band I really love is She Keeps Bees. In general, Brooklyn has really become a nexus of indie rock and a lot of great venues have sprung up in my neighborhood, Park Slope. If you are visiting from London, and want to hear some great music, you won’t be disappointed if you head to Park Slope and hit up The Bell House, Rock Shop or Union Hall.

3:AM: What cultural things outside of music have been influential for you?

AS: Oh god, too many to mention. My undergraduate degree was in photography and I’m a huge fan of artists who flirt with the distinction between documentary and fiction, like Justine Kirland and Jenny Gage. Stark, realistic writers had a large influence on my lyric-writing, particularly Raymond Carver. I always hope that my best songs read like short stories.

3:AM: Of course it can’t be overlooked that you are a woman and some of the people you have on your site are also women – does this matter in terms of a politics of gender for you and what you’re doing? Rock music’s dominated by men in the past but I’m thinking of people like Patti Smith and Chrissie Hind and Blondie as examples of women who’ve been able to do stuff on their own terms as women.

AS: My basic philosophy about this stuff is just try your hardest to make good art. Worrying about your advantages and disadvantages just becomes a distraction. True, women are still a minority in the rock world, but there are plenty of examples of female musicians who have succeeded on their own terms. P.J. Harvey, Cat Power and Carrie Brownstein (all of whom I love!) to name just a few.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

3:AM: I want to start with Spurious, and in particular with the passage from Dionys Mascolo that W. sends to Lars from his notebook. The quotation appears from nowhere, without commentary, but somehow the simple fact that it’s suddenly there captures the joy and the sadness of what the book wants to say. For me at least, this was one of those rare moments in reading when a book seems to show you its ‘soul’. I’ll repeat most of it here:

‘One writes for the disadjusted… that is to say, for one’s friends, and less for the friends one has than for the innumerable unknown people who have the same life as us, who roughly and crudely understand the same things, are able to accept or must refuse the same, and who are in the same state of powerlessness and official silence.’

Lars and W. don’t attempt any exegesis of this, but I’m wondering whether you would. The quote elicits a sense of recognition that seems central to the experience of reading Spurious. For readers of Blanchot and Bataille it might resonate with certain other remarks about community. Of course, it could also say something about the sort of literary community one finds on the internet. So, first of all, what are your thoughts on literature and community?

LI: Dionys Mascolo was one of the group of political activist friends that met in Marguerite Duras’s flat in the rue Saint-Benoît from the 1940s onwards. The group, which included Blanchot and which was notorious for having opposed the French colonial war in Algeria, sought to galvanize the non-Party Left. Mascolo, like the other members of the group, never gave up on the idea of communism, which he understood as a radical egalitarianism characterized by less alienating forms of communication. The friendships practiced between the members of the group were to exemplify these less-alienating forms. But Mascolo also attributed particular importance to literature, as exhibiting an inspiring kind of communication. In his 1953 book, Communism, he argues that practices of friendship, and also the work of literature, point the way towards the kind of social relations for which the communist revolution must strive.

The quotation that you have pulled from Spurious comes from Mascolo’s Communism. Mascolo is addressing his friends, and also the disorganized non-Party Left that, he hoped, shared his and his friends’ frustrations with official politics and need for ‘truer’ forms of communication. The passage is very moving. When it appears in my novel, it might be interpreted as a manifesto for W., who is always talking of friendship, and what a band of loyal friends might be able to achieve. Or it might, of course, be one of the many ways in which the narrator ironically marks the distance between W.’s dreams of friendship and the friendship that he actually has with Lars. Then again, the passage might also be read as something of a mission statement for Spurious itself, which was written by one who is ‘disadjusted’ and for those who are ‘disadjusted,’ written perhaps as a kind of reassurance that there are others ‘who think the same things at the same time,’ to quote Thom Yorke’s song. But I cannot help but read the quotation more generally, in the context of the disappearance of forms of solidarity, forms of politics, that were still possible when Mascolo was writing his book.

Today, of course, there is no real Party of the Left, and there is only a very weak assortment of non-Party leftist groups. For the most part, we are now outside of the possibility of real political intervention. To be sure, we all have friends who share our political convictions. But these convictions remain largely privately held rather than publicly attested to.

You mention Bataille and Blanchot. It is true their notions of community are very close to Mascolo’s. Blanchot particularly took part in many politically-motivated projects with Mascolo, most notably La Revue Internationale. Their concerns were, in many ways, the same. What is the relationship between ‘literary responsibility’ and ‘political responsibility’, Blanchot wonders in the ‘Proposal’ he sent to his fellow participants in La Revue Internationale. Both, he says, ‘engage us [...] absolutely, as in a sense does the disparity between them.’

Literature and community: as I read this phrase in your question, and reflect on Blanchot and Bataille, I think of literary communities such as that which gathered around the Athaeneum back in Jena, such as the Surrealists, such as Bataille’s Socratic College, and, following on from that, the communitarian demand to which Bataille sought to respond in his great wartime writings. I think, of course, of the Saint-Benoît Group, of their activities in the Resistance, of their struggle against French colonialism and against de Gaulle’s unconstitutional return to power in 1958, and of their participation in the Events of May 1968. And I think of Blanchot’s homage to Mascolo – For Friendship – in which Blanchot reflects on the failure of La Revue Internationale (‘if the idea proves to be utopian, then we should be willing to fail as utopians’).

This is a formidable legacy. But it is one that seems to me to me to have little to do with our current situation, and perhaps little to do with Spurious! The question of the relationship between literature and community is of interest now only to scholars. And it does interest me. But I wonder, in poring over the relevant texts, whether I am not in the position of the figure in Dürer’s Melancholia, who sits puzzled and bemused, among discarded things, things that he can no longer understand. The cultural world that made sense of the rue Saint-Benoît group, and the whole dimension of political and aesthetic optimism that belonged to it, seems to have disappeared.

When I think of what Mascolo and Blanchot were looking for, in their reflections on the relationship between ‘literary responsibility’ and ‘political responsibility’, I feel overwhelmed, not only by what Walter Benjamin called ‘left wing melancholy’, but also by a kind of literary melancholy. It is not simply that the relationship between literature and community has collapsed, nor even that literature is no longer in contact with politics. For me, the meaning of literature itself – the very possibility of literature – has collapsed. Literature, like left-wing politics, seems impossible.

You mention the internet. When I first began to blog, I dreamed of realising a contemporary version of Blanchot’s and Mascolo’s never-achieved ambition for the multi-authored La Revue Internationale. I wanted to consider the way in which culture registers massive changes in our world – the impending environmental disaster, the becoming-routine of financial catastrophe, accelerated globalization, the rise of China and India as superpowers, the triumph of neoliberalism. That was my ‘hope in the dark,’ to quote the title of one of Rebecca Solnit’s books. But it was a hope that I never had the ability to fulfil.

3:AM: Spurious seems deeply concerned with rhythms of exhaustion and renewal. Or perhaps ‘renewal’ would be the wrong word! But Lars and W. look like quite untimely figures, less in tune with their own age than with one that’s already ended. ‘Old Europe’ crops up a lot, like a sort of lost world whose inhabitants, says W., ‘live in history, as we do not.’ What exactly has happened to history, in the world of the book? Are W. and Lars, like T.S. Eliot, in search of a past they can shore up against their ruins? If so, does their attitude towards that past differ at all from more conservative versions of cultural pessimism?

LI: W.’s and Lars’s Old Europe is an amalgam of cultures and traditions characteristic of continental Europe in the last century. It encompasses philosophy and literature, as well as various religious traditions and left-wing political practices.

W. and Lars are particularly impressed by what they think of as Old European commitment. They hanker after the seriousness of Old European thinkers and artists, who were prepared to risk their happiness and reputation for what they believed in. Here, Dionys Mascolo is exemplary. He was said to be full of generosity to his friends, full of outrage at political foes. W. and Lars also admire the Italian thinker-activists of the ‘70s, and the contemporary Hungarian film director Béla Tarr, who all have something of the same ethical concern and personal integrity about them.

But, for W. and Lars, there are no figures who embody Old Europe more strongly than Kafka and Rosenzweig. No generation was more serious and committed than theirs. Their intellectual world was marked by a particular interest in Jewish religious tradition. Along with Scholem, Benjamin, Buber, Bloch and others, they were inspired to rethink the hidden, utopian dimension of Jewish messianism. Despairing of their times, they looked instead to the creative interruption of history that messianism promises, to the break in the chain of causality that messianism effects.

Some of these thinkers attributed a political role to the idea of messianism. Commenting on his own Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin wrote: ‘Karl Marx and all that nineteenth century socialism is but a different form of messianic faith’. For Benjamin, the socialist hope of a classless, egalitarian society secularizes the older, religious idea. In his Theses, Benjamin argues that a renewed religious reflection on messianism and its peculiar temporality might reinvigorate political thought. Which makes clear the link between the Jewish figures mentioned in Spurious, and many of the other thinkers quoted by W. and Lars. They are all thinkers of the ‘past’ in a certain sense, thinkers of Old Europe. They belong to particular traditions, be they religious or political. But they are also thinkers of the future, in that they anticipate a disruptive, creative moment that breaks into our present and sets us on another course. They thus have a shared conviction that the times in which they live are apocalyptic, in the original double sense of that word: marked by crisis and by promise, by despair and by hope.

A sense of despair, and an accompanying sense of hope, is what is missing in the Britain of W. and Lars. As Scholem makes clear in his writings, recourse to messianic thought of the kind Kafka and Rosenzweig and their generation articulate, usually marks a period of historical crisis. Messianic hope is a desperate hope, a hope in the dark. For the characters of Spurious, this darkness takes the form of the looming financial crisis (the book is set before the collapse of the banks) and the coming climatic disaster. Their messianism lies in something apparently feeble: in the human ability to speak, to converse, their appreciation for which is drawn from the generation of Old European Jews whose thought they admire.

3:AM: If their world is little more than a wound left by the loss of ‘what is missing’, W. and Lars are at least aware of that loss, or that absence (as, in a Socratic sense, they seem keenly aware of their ‘idiocy’). Does Spurious suggest there’s a hidden grace in this kind of awareness, or a negative knowledge that can be extracted from it? I’m thinking here of when W. memorably urges Lars to ‘experience your failure’.

Maybe failure, as these characters suffer it, has a crucial connection to spuriousness. To be ‘spurious’ also seems similar to being ‘disadjusted’, in the sense that both words signal a situation of not being equal to something, or not measuring up to it. Many of the characters’ conversations concern their efforts to measure themselves against some missing symbol, some lost object. Re-reading the book before our interview, I was struck, again, by these recurrent acts of measurement. There’s the bit where they compare their friendship to that of Blanchot and Levinas; it falls short, of course. Elsewhere, Rosenzweig is said to be ‘the measure of all things’, to them. In each case, Lars and W. try, and fail, to coincide with some third term that’s irretrievably absent. Yet their failure somehow ‘preserves’ that absence, or makes it obliquely present to them. For example, doesn’t their mutual recognition that they are, together, ‘Brod and Brod’, not Kafka, nonetheless conjure up Kafka as a kind of pure possibility?

In short, Spurious seems to have quite a complex interest in the value of failure, and the potential of the negative. Do you have any further thoughts on this?

LI: Failure is an inevitable aspect of the life of the would-be thinker, especially if, like W. and Lars, you hold that philosophical thinking bears upon what matters most.

You suggest that W.’s and Lars’s awareness of their failure might conceal a ‘hidden grace’, a kind of ‘knowledge’. In some ways, this is true, but only really when it comes to the realm of the ethical. W.’s and Lars’s awareness of their failure does not make them anything more than the failed thinkers that they are, but it does give them a (rather vague and pathos-ridden) desire to do good.

But then again, this ethical achievement presupposes another kind of failure, the ethical failure that comes from our inevitably falling short of the responsibility we have in respect of other people. W. and Lars are great enthusiasts for Levinas, whose fundamental idea is of the interpersonal relationship as asymmetrical: the Other is always ‘higher’ than I am, and always demands more from me than I can possibly give.

For Levinas, as also for Blanchot, we have each of us already been chosen by the Other. We have each of us been elected, and found wanting in this election. We have each of us been tested and we have failed in the test. Failure is, therefore, universal. Levinas borrows Zossima’s formulation from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: ‘Each one of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all.’ For Levinas, each one of us is a messiah to the extent that each one of us has been chosen to serve and to save other people. But most of us have failed to respond to this call. We are therefore both chosen and fallen. We are therefore guilty before the Other, guilty before all the human beings in the world.

What, then, of W. and Lars? Is there anything of what you call ‘hidden grace’ in their awareness of their failure? Might their general sense of failure, as thinkers and as friends, be understood as the beginning of wisdom, if only because it preserves a trace of the messianism that Levinas believes to be our universal condition?

Perhaps yes. Perhaps W.’s and Lars’s awareness of their failure does give them a kind of ethical wisdom. On the other hand, W.’s and Lars’s awareness of failure consists in very little more than an endless acknowledgement of their failure. They do not act, like, say, Mascolo or the Italian philosophers they admire. They might know that they have fallen short of their constitutive messianism, but they have done very little about it. If they are, considered from the perspective of the tradition of the thinkers they admire, at the beginning of wisdom, ethical and philosophical, then they do their best to ruin this beginning. W. and Lars have failed – they know that. But they will only ever fail, over and over again. Every beginning is a false beginning. This is why Spurious never settles into what we would normally understand to be a plot, instead revolving over and again around the same concerns. The novel can only take the form of an endless circling around failure. It can only take the form of spuriousness…

But that might be its success. If the characters fail, Spurious, I hope, succeeds in remaining with that failure, preserving a distance between W. and Lars, and the traditions of thought they admire. ‘Since the destruction of the Temple, the divine inspiration has been withdrawn from the prophets, and given to madmen and children’, it says in the Talmud. W. and Lars are these madmen, which is to say, fallen prophets (though not false ones, perhaps). And Spurious is a fallen book of prophecy – the only kind of such book there can now be.

3:AM: I want to turn now to the nonfiction piece you’ve recently written; your ‘Literary Manifesto after the end of Literature and Manifestos’. There, the present predicament of art, or at least writing, is figured in terms that might tie in with some of what you’ve said about the failure of thinking. There’s a sense, again, of a certain ‘tradition’ that’s now grown irreparably distant. Summing this up, you say,

‘What was literature? It was the literature of Diderot, Rimbaud, Walser, Gogol, Hamsun, Bataille and most of all Kafka: revolutionary and tragic, prophetic and solitary, posthumous, incompatible, radical and paradoxical, a dwelling for oracles and outsiders, it was defiant and pathetic, it sought to break and alter, to describe, yes, but in describing, shatter; it was outside the culture looking in, and inside the culture looking out.’

So, what is lost is not just a roster of canonical names but also a set of styles, or strategies, or ways of seeing. You quote Pessoa on the paradoxical task of extracting beauty from an ‘incapacity to extract beauty from life’. Yet these days maybe we fail to lay claim even to that kind of failure. Despite this, you manage to move from mapping an absolute impasse (one where ‘even originality itself no longer has the ability to surprise us’) to providing prescriptions or, as you more modestly put it, ‘pointers’, for a literature after the end of literature. Unlike some other manifestos, the piece doesn’t describe death and rebirth (I think we’d be wrong to call it that) so much as death, decomposition, then, in your words, the search for ‘that last inviolate bit of bone’. I’d like to hear more about the motives behind this article. How do you think it fits with, for instance, the manifestos of an earlier literary Modernism?

LI: You refer to the literary manifesto I wrote, published in Post Road and made available in the online version of The White Review. Writing a literary manifesto today is a laughably belated act. What is there to take a stand against? What does the future of the novel matter? Who reads, anyway? And who reads, who even wants to read, anything new? Ridiculous as it is, however, I hope that my manifesto plausibly diagnoses and responds to a real change that has occurred with respect to our relationship to literature.

In Vila-Matas’s Montano’s Malady, originally published in 2002, the eponymous protagonist feels trapped by literature. All of his experience is mediated through the great books that he has read. The world itself seems a mesh of literary tropes and associations. How will he cure himself? The search for his cure provides the comedy of the novel, because the cure itself is cut through by his malady. Overwhelmed by literary sickness in one city, Montano catches a train to somewhere else. But, as he admits, ‘this is a very literary thing to do’. And he is right. The move seems borrowed from the repertoire of great writers.

For me, the truth about Montano’s sickness is that literature, what is called ‘literature’, has very little to do with our world. Something has happened. Something has come between us and the world of literature we admire. And that ‘something’ has to be acknowledged if literature is to avoid becoming a kind of repertoire routine, like The Nutcracker at Christmas.

Reading Vila-Matas, I thought at once of Sebald’s novels. The first three of these I greatly admire. But not Austerlitz, which is so full of almost kitschily ‘literary’ details that it is really laughable. The characters wander about, solemnly ‘catching trains’ in the manner of Montano. It seems a simulacrum of seriousness. The pull-quotes on the paperback of Austerlitz tell us that it is concerned with great themes. But I find much of it fake and hollow, especially when compared with Sebald’s earlier writings.

Much supposedly ambitious literary fiction seems to have similar characteristics. In attempting to distance itself from our marketized, neoliberalized, liberal-democratized world, it has become as stylized as bad high-fantasy. I want to read books that are commensurable with this world, in content and form, books that have abandoned a whole repertoire of literary gestures but which still, in some way, respond to what literature once was. I want to read books that make a problem of their inheritance, a problem of coming somehow after literature. I want to read books that register a sense of their own belatedness.

No more Solemnity. No more Great Themes written in a Grand Style. But no pastiche, either. No parasitism on older forms. I’m not making some claim here for ‘the postmodern novel’, even if Montano’s Malady might appear to be one of these – what with its narratives nested within narratives, its unreliable narrator, its exuberant playfulness. Perhaps Montano’s Malady is a postmodern novel. But it is the particular way that it reckons with the legacy of Modernism which interests me.

Reviewers have expressed frustration with the sudden transitions in Montano’s Malady, with the uncertainty of its ‘base’ reality and the tricks that it seems to play on the reader. But this frustrating pell-mell is, I think, a sign of the broader changes that mark our time: for whatever reason, and we can speculate about this, it is not only a certain literary style, but literature itself, that is no longer believable.

Montano’s Malady is not a lament. It is not heavy-handed, like Austerlitz. It isn’t Solemn or Serious in a kitschy way. It is swift and light. It is funny. It belongs on our side of the great divide that separates us from figures like Kafka. But, for all that, Montano’s Malady does acknowledge this divide. It does negotiate its relationship with Modernism, with the past. It does situate itself with respect to Old Europe and the ‘narrative voice’ of Old Europe’s great writers. And it does all of this in the present, in our present.

3:AM: W. and Lars are, like their ‘real life’ counterparts, employed (in their case, maybe not for much longer) as academics. Several of your recent blog posts, which I assume relate to either Dogma or Exodus, are explicitly concerned with what we could call ‘the space of the university’ – a space now in the final phase of being shut down or ‘restructured’ by capital. Against the brave new non-universities of neoliberalism, we’ve seen W. sketch out an alternative ideal, whose points of reference are both historical (ranging from the University in Exile of the ‘30s to a fabled generation of ‘Essex postgraduates’) and also speculative, or utopian.

You’ve suggested above that the current conjuncture denies literature its former relation to ‘literature’. Literature is then forced to operate without easy access to most of its former resources. (Although, under such conditions, maybe literature is merely made modern again. That claim would rest on a transhistorical definition of ‘Modernism’ as something like a ‘truth’ of literature, or an abstract possibility; a truth or a possibility that it can fall, or be forced, into greater or lesser alignment with at any given historical point).

Whether or not you agree with that, has something analogous to literature’s death happened to thought more broadly? The destruction of the university denies thought the apparent security of a stable context. In a sense, thought is then forced into homelessness. Yet is there any measure of freedom in that? I mean, the outlook is certainly bleak, but is it in any way apocalyptic, with the double force of that word as you’ve described it? How could it ever hold out any promise?

LI: Exodus, the second sequel to Spurious (the first, Dogma, is coming out in February 2012, and hopefully Exodus will follow it a year later), is concerned particularly with the university, celebrating the legendary generation of Essex Postgraduates of which W. is supposed to have been part, and anticipating new forms of university (the University in Flight, the University of Speech) of which W. dreams. The ‘exodus’ of the title refers to a departure from the British university, with W. leading postgraduates as Moses did the children of Israel.

As always in these novels, I’m both satirising W. and his wild hyperbole, and celebrating his idealism. Of course, I admire the attempt to set up spaces of learning outside the university. But state-run institutions, for which the university remains the template, are for me quite necessary because of the discipline they impose on study. ‘Homeless’ thought is not much of a prospect, despite the various non- and para-academic spaces (blogs, open access publishing companies, etc.) that have opened up on the internet.

You mention that Modernism might have revealed the ‘truth’ of literature. I am cautious about such a view. For me, the name ‘Modernism’ is too strongly tied to a time, perhaps also to a place, to become trans-historical in the manner you suggest. I can never quite see how Modernism could lift itself from its conditions to become something like a messianic ‘promise’ of literature. I don’t see how this promise would work now, when, it seems to me, we have been removed from the conditions under which what we call ‘Modernism’ was possible.

What does this remove amount to? Few people now read as they once did. This is part of it. A whole idea of culture has moved out of reach. This is another part of it, although it is probably the effect of something else. I think the answer might lie in Fredric Jameson’s diagnosis of ‘late capitalism’, or in the Italian Marxists’ claim that there has been a ‘step change’ in the degree to which life is subsumed by capital. And I am drawn to my favourite blogs – Steve Mitchelmore’s This Space among them – because they reflect on such changes. Kafka said, ‘There is infinite hope, but not for us’. I would say, ‘There is Modernism, but not as the condition of our literature’. And perhaps there is no literature either…

3:AM: Your blog has drawn attention to a recent academic article on ‘The Rebirth of the Nouveau Roman’. The author of this piece identifies – in you, Tom McCarthy, Lee Rourke and others – the revival of ‘a literary tradition whose formal aesthetics represent an internalization of crisis’. The paper also gives a good quasi-sociological summary of the ‘institutional apparatus of publishers and critical venues’ that has underscored much of this, mentioning the likes of Melville House, Dalkey Archive and The Quarterly Conversation.

The article raises some interesting questions. There certainly seem to be clear connections between Rourke, McCarthy and the nouveau roman. At times though, the term’s application looks a bit too elastic. I’m not confident I could agree with the paper’s description of Josipovici as a ‘practicing nouveau romancier’, for instance. In your case, I think I hear echoes of the nouveau roman when your (anti-)manifesto calls for ‘an unliterary plainness’. At the same time, the aims of that piece didn’t immediately put me in mind of, say, Robbe-Grillet’s For a New Novel. What’s more, Spurious itself often reminded me of David Markson, surely not someone so easily categorised.

When it comes to books, I find it easy enough to articulate what I’m against. Mark Thwaite’s phrase ‘Establishment Literary Fiction’ does a good job of pithily capturing that. But I’m not so sure I can express what unites the contemporary writers I admire. Perhaps more interestingly, I’m not entirely sure such a thing should be expressed. I’d be keen to hear how you feel, not just about the pros and cons of the perceived parallel with the nouveau roman, but about the value of any such categories, when they’re applied to contemporary writing.

LI: Daniel Davis Wood’s argument is very interesting. He claims that, among American readers in the wake of 9/11, there has been growing dissatisfaction with realism as a credible mode of fiction. This, says Wood, has led to increased interest in novels situated within a European literary tradition which is at best ambivalent to realism. He quotes Michael Rothberg: ‘While American novelists have [...] announced the dawn of a new era following the attacks on New York and Washington D.C., the form of their works does not bear witness to fundamental change’. Flatteringly, Wood selects Spurious, alongside Lee Rourke’s The Canal and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, as exemplifying a form that does respond to fundamental change. Wood argues that the three of us, British men all, are nouveau romanciers for our time, and that our work has found a warm transatlantic welcome for that reason.

I am certainly inspired by Robbe-Grillet’s and Sarraute’s famous essays calling for a new novel: for a novel to reject anthropomorphism in its presentation of the world; for a novel to deny the primacy of character; for a novel to present things that Robbe-Grillet describes as ‘hard’, as ‘unalterably, eternally present’, as ‘mocking the “meaning” assigned to them’; for a novel to ‘break away from all that is prescribed, conventional and dead’, as Sarraute would have it; a novel to register what she calls the ‘vast, empty stupefaction’ at the world that is appropriate in the wake of the concentration camps. How do W. and Lars spend most of their time but in a state of ‘vast, empty stupefaction’? What else are the damp in Spurious and the rats in Dogma but unalterable and eternally present, mocking any meaning that might be assigned to them? The narrative technique of Spurious and Dogma is intended as a rejection of older forms of character-novel. I want nothing else than Sarraute did: to ‘break away from all that is prescribed, conventional and dead’ in the novel and to ‘turn towards what is free, sincere and alive’.

In this sense, one might certainly recognize features of the nouveau roman in Spurious, as well as in the work of Rourke and McCarthy. And, if Wood is right, our novels resonate with American readers because of these features. But, for me, Robbe-Grillet’s and Sarraute’s polemics are remarkable not only for their particular prescriptions for the novel, which remain exhilarating, but also for the very fact that they felt able to prescribe a future for the novel at all. For me, their prescriptions for a new novel can only, in the end, be so many more exhibits in the museum of literature. Their essays belong to an almost-unimaginable past in which such ideas mattered, a past which had a real stake in the future of the novel.

Sometimes, I wonder whether my making claims of this kind is a result of my literary melancholy! Shouldn’t it be possible, if one only tried hard enough, to dream of a fabulously new novel to come, of a nouveau roman newer than the nouveau romans of Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute, of an eternally nouveau nouveau roman which would always belong to the future? Mightn’t there be some fiery rebirth of the Modern in some faraway place, among writers who write new manifestos in the dream of restoring a revolutionary purity to their endeavours? But I can only say that it seems to me that literature has, in some fundamental way, run its course.

In 1967, Gore Vidal wrote:

‘The portentous theorisings of the New Novelists are of no more use to us than the self-conscious avant-gardism of those who are trying to figure out what the next ‘really serious’ thing will be when it is plain that there is not going to be a next serious thing in the novel. Our lovely vulgar and most human art is at an end, if not the end. Yet that is no reason not to want to practice it, or even to read it. In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words.’

‘Our lovely vulgar and most human art is at an end, if not the end’: the funny thing is, I think that Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute knew this, or half-knew it, in the way they sought self-consciously to link their endeavours to Joyce, Proust, and Kafka. Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute, would-be New Novelists, wanted to legitimise their struggle in terms of what had gone before! This would have been anathema to those whose legitimation they sought, to Joyce and to Proust and to Kafka, to those we call ‘Modernist’. But Perry Anderson has argued that ‘Modernism’ is a post-facto category, unifying a variety of movements and forms ‘whose own names for themselves knew nothing of it’. The very name of ‘Modernism’ comes too late for what it would name. For Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute to seek a nouveau roman that would somehow stand in the tradition of Modernism was, then, impossible by necessity; the writers of the nouveau roman were too late for the tradition to which they would belong because it had been constituted as a tradition to which they would belong!

What were the reasons for this lateness? Once again, we would need a thinker like Fredric Jameson, or the Italian Marxists, to give us a real answer to this question. Or we would need to look at the researches of a new La Revue Internationale. Might they have to do with the rise of capitalist democracy, and the consumer boom that followed the war? Might they have to do with the erosion of the cultural power of the bourgeoisie, the traditional foil for the vanguard? Whatever the reasons, the very idea of the nouveau roman is already a sign of irreparable break with Modernism, which occurred almost as soon as Modernism emerged as a category.

As you note, Wood is quite elastic with respect to his notion of the nouveau roman, which seems, for him, to name a free-floating suspicion of realism and a messianic promise for literature. But for me, for whom literary melancholy is not a merely personal issue but a condition of writing in our time (and this is why I admire what I have read of David Markson, who thoroughly understands this point), no novel, least of all Spurious, could be a nouveau roman, and much less a nouveau nouveau roman! My novel, like all novels published today, is a roman after the roman, a novel that comes after the novel and after literature.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

David Winters writes fiction and literary criticism. He has written for The Millions, Bookslut, Open Letters Monthly, ReadySteadyBook, The Marx and Philosophy Review of Books and others. He is a contributing editor at 3:AM. His blog is called Why Not Burn Books?

3:AM: When did you start writing?

Ben Brooks: I think I was 16 when I wrote the first book [Fences] and most of Grow Up. And then there was a big period of time between, and then I finished it off. Like a year or two afterwards.

3:AM: Would you describe the other books as ‘experimental’?

BB: Probably but it’s a horrible word. And sounds really embarrassing [laughs].

3:AM: You wouldn’t describe them that way?

BB: I would, I’d just be embarrassed about it [laughs]. You can’t call it just ‘writing’ because it’s obviously a bit weirder.

3:AM: Do you think you’ll return to writing experimental stuff?

BB: Well yeah. I think it’s more relaxing because there’s no constraints at all. You don’t have to think about plot or any of that stuff. So it’s a lot of fun. I think a lot of people won’t notice [laughs]. Because a lot of people have read Grow Up and a lot of people haven’t read the experimental novels so they’re kind of two separate spheres, because Grow Up is in all the bookshops and then the other ones you can just buy online from the publishers.

3:AM: How did you get into writing?

BB: I just found a book called The Human War by Noah Cicero.

3:AM: Is there a functioning group of you guys now? Cicero, Tao Lin, Megan Boyle, Brandon Scott Gorrell…

BB: Yeah, I’m not really part of it very much. I talk to Noah sometimes. I talked to him last night when I was really drunk. Hopefully we’re going to drive across America next year. I think they had quite a close-knit group early on when Muumuu House started, with Tao Lin. But as a group they seem to have drifted apart a little.

3:AM: Why do you think they came together? Was it about a similar ethos, or about promoting each other or something else?

BB: I think it was because a lot of people liked Tao Lin, and were inspired by him, so he wanted to support them.

3:AM: Are you a fan of Tao Lin?

BB: I am a big fan.

3:AM: When you first started, you were sending things to James Chapman (owner of Fugue State Press) and he was rejecting them but being encouraging at the same time?

3:AM: Yeah, they were really awful things. It was me trying to write like Noah. Really awful rip-offs of Noah, trying to write exactly like he did. And I had to get out of that, and Fences was it, I guess.

3:AM: There was only Noah, no one else you felt you were inspired by?

BB: I guess Tao Lin as well, but it took me a while to get into the bloggers.

3:AM: What is it about their writing that you appreciate?

BB: I think it seems a lot more honest than most novels because they’re always so blunt. And it always feels a lot more personal. You can tell that they’re not writing for readers, they’re writing for themselves.

3:AM: Is that the same for you? Do you think about an ‘audience’?

BB: I do now, I think, because it’s… for a living. I still like writing experimental things but…

3:AM: Do you see it as a career?

BB: I would like to just keep going. I don’t think I could do a ‘normal’ job now. I’m too lazy.

3:AM: Have you ever had a ‘normal’ job?

BB: Only little ones, when I was at school. So I finished school, I had no money and I didn’t go to university, and I was living with my Nan. Then I got the advance for Grow Up and I moved here [London].

3:AM: Do you have an agent?

BB: Yeah. He called me when I sent him the thing, the book, and we had a meeting and he said that his boss had told him not to take it on. That it wouldn’t make any money. But he was secretly going to send it to Canongate [publisher of Grow Up] anyway, which he did, and then they accepted it so his boss let him take me on.

3:AM: Why would he not think he could make any money?

BB: No idea. I guess it’s quite weird.

3:AM: But it does fit in somewhere.

BB: It’s quite an old-fashioned literary thing, so maybe it was just the agency.

3:AM: Canongate also published Julian Assange’s autobiography.

BB: That was really weird. I felt weird that everyone was being so aggressive towards Canongate about it when, in reality, he took loads of their money, and they’re an independent house and then he couldn’t give it back, and told them not to publish it.

3:AM: What sort of thing were you writing when you first started, emulating Noah?

BB: It was just about people being bored.

3:AM: That’s a through-line to a lot of the Muumuu House stuff.

BB: I think Fences was less about boredom, and more about being really sad, rather than being bored and apathetic.

3:AM: I read a line of praise for Fences and it was something like, ‘Don’t kill yourself yet, Ben.’

BB: [Laughs] It was a really adolescent work, and a bit over-the-top.

3:AM: Is the age thing an issue, do people judge your writing on that, do you think?

BB: I think some of the reviews of Grow Up have been quite snide about the age thing.

3:AM: Do you read the reviews?

BB: I read every single review [laughs]. Especially when they’re immediately there on a website. I got really upset, I think, by the first two, because the first two were just the Guardian and the Observer and those were really gammy. But I got over it. The Times was really positive.

3:AM: I spoke to the books editor at The Evening Standard about Grow Up and he called it ‘irresistible’.

BB: [Laughs] That’s very kind.

3:AM: That must be strange for you to hear that.

BB: It is. It is. I had the weirdest thing ever happen to me the other day. Like everything’s weird and getting the book’s weird but the other day I was just at Deptford market and this girl came up to me and said, ‘Sorry, can I have your autograph?’ And I was like, ‘Are you joking?’ And she said, ‘No,’ and I asked her, ‘Who told you to do this? This is ridiculous.’ And it was real, apparently.

3:AM: Does that happen a lot now?

BB: That’s never happened before.

3:AM: Before you got onto Fugue State Press [publisher of two of Brooks' novels], were you writing things just to get accepted?

BB: I guess. I mean I was trying to write something that was ‘me’ and not a copy of Noah and then that happened, and he accepted it. I really didn’t think it would be accepted. It was totally stupid thing to do to make all the words different sizes and put them everywhere. So if I wanted them to get accepted, it wasn’t a good way to try and do it. But it seemed to work.

3:AM: You’ve got blurb quotes from Noel Fielding and Tim Key. What sort of comedy do you like?

BB: I just like Peep Show, Flight of the Conchords, that sort of straight-faced, domestic kind of comedy. Have you seen any of Miranda?

3:AM: No, I haven’t. Is it animated?

BB: No, it’s Miranda Hart. She’s quite tall and… a little chubby. It’s a BBC comedy series that’s very clean and very traditional comedy. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, I think. I can’t think of anyone else off the top of my head.

3:AM: But it’s that kind of style, like with Flight of the Conchords, because that’s how Grow Up reads.

BB: Yeah, I wouldn’t know how to describe it. Kind of… laconic humour. It’s quite… lazy.

3:AM: And Noel Fielding’s praise, on the cover?

BB: We went to a Canongate party and me and him got really… ’something’. And then I stayed at his house. That was a bit weird. And after, I think he felt somehow obligated. I don’t think he even read it.

3:AM: How about Tim Key? I found it strange he said it was your ‘debut’.

BB: Yeah a lot of people were confused by that, a lot of people called it a debut novel. In a way, it maybe is a debut novel because the other ones, you could quite easily not call them novels.

3:AM: Novellas?

BB: These are all horrible words.

3:AM: How about ‘flash fiction’?

BB: [Laughs]

3:AM: There’s a literary journal and their submission guidelines state how they refuse to recognise the term ‘flash fiction’… > kill author, I think it is.

BB: Oh, > kill author is funny. You know the premise of kill author?

3:AM: For the editors to stay anonymous?

BB: But I know who the editor is.

3:AM: [Laughs] I won’t ask you to tell me the name.

BB: It’s not someone that you would recognise.

3:AM: Was Grow Up heavily influenced by all of this other comedy?

BB: I think it probably was, but it wasn’t consciously written to be ‘comedy’ I think. I didn’t really realise it was funny until someone said it was. It would be weird to write something and say: ‘This is definitely hilarious’.

3:AM: [Laughs] But that’s how it came across. It was funny from unexpected places, and not really forced.

BB: It was more that the guy [Jasper] was just weird. Jasper’s just a weird protagonist, so sometimes he has these… thoughts.

3:AM: People must ask if it’s ‘true’?

BB: Yeah, people ask that all the time and it’s pretty much all true [laughs].

3:AM: Even the internal thoughts of Jasper.

BB: Yeah… [laughs] a lot of the internal thoughts of Jasper.

3:AM: Are you embarrassed by that?

BB: A little, maybe. He has some pretty creepy thoughts [laughs].

3:AM: Let’s go back to James Chapman again.

BB: The bedrock of the interview.

3:AM: [Laughs] You said you got confidence out of his acceptance.

BB: Yeah, I got rejected by a lot of places, like everyone else, I guess. I looked through my old e-mail inbox a couple of days ago and there were so many rejections from people.

3:AM: Where were you submitting to?

BB: Just any small publisher I could find, regardless of whether they published fiction or regardless of whether they published fiction that short. Almost all of the rejections I got were, ‘We won’t publish anything this short’.

3:AM: Were you submitting Fences?

BB: No, it was things before Fences, things that James Chapman was rejecting.

3:AM: So after he accepted it, you’d kind of found a place where you could get published.

BB: Yeah, after that people started reviewing Fences and saying nice things about it. And so the second book was on a different publisher, just because the other publisher offered to publish it.

3:AM: Mud Luscious Press?

BB: Yeah.

3:AM: J. A. Tyler?

BB: Yeah, he writes a lot of books. He’s very prolific. I don’t know how he does it. He’s a teacher and he has children and stuff.

3:AM: Are you into the writing of the people who’ve been publishing you?

BB: I respect them a lot. I really like James Chapman’s writing.

3:AM: How about Upward Coast and Sadie [Brooks' next book, scheduled to be released by Mud Luscious Press]?

BB: We had, not a falling out, but that was scheduled to be published by them this year and then I went back to look at it, and I really didn’t like it at all. I completely changed it, and then he [J.A. Tyler] said that he didn’t want to publish it like that. He wanted it in the original form. Then I said, ‘No’.

3:AM: What was it about it you didn’t like?

BB: It just seemed really boring and didn’t really make much sense to me when I read it back. It was about… kind of a similar thing to Fences, just a boy and a girl who are far away.

3:AM: Is that still coming out?

BB: No, it’s not any more. I think I don’t want to publish it. It’s something I’d rather forget about. I think it’s a book not worth publishing. I could send it to a couple of other places and probably get it published but…

3:AM: So are you more conscious now of forming a career, trying to release only things you’re proud of?

BB: Yeah, whereas before it was more like I would publish whatever I could.

3:AM: Do you think about that when you’re writing?

BB: Not when I’m writing but just kind of consciously try to make it better than the other things.

3:AM: Does it ever feel futile to be writing?

BB: Yeah, I think it can get really frustrating writing books. And a lot of the time things are going awfully and nothing’s really working and things are feeling futile. But as soon as the book is finished it no longer feels futile, it’s only while you’re writing it.

3:AM: What are you writing at the moment?

BB: I keep starting… I’ve started so many books since Grow Up came out and scrapped them all.

3:AM: What were they about?

BB: They’re generally about someone that’s younger than Jasper. Pretty much always a similar character but doing wildly different things. I do’’t really feel qualified from an adult’s perspective [laughs].

3:AM: So you intend to keep going, then.

BB: I think I’d just like to keep writing at the moment. I can’t really imagine what else I’d like to do. Writing seems like the only thing that I really like doing.

3:AM: Do you feel like you have something you’re trying to get across, a message or something?

BB: I don’t think I actively have. Not really a message, no. That seems weird for me to write with a message in mind. I did that once and it was horrible, which was Island of Fifty. I hate it. It’s absolutely… I hate it. Never, ever read it. It’s awful.

3:AM: What was the message there?

BB: It was like a thing about how industrial civilisation is destroying the world [laughs]. It was told allegorically through people living on an island. It was absolutely awful.

3:AM: When you read something that does have a message, do you think that detracts from the writing?

BB: No, not at all. I think some people want to, some people know where they stand. Like Noah. He knows what he thinks about so many things and then he wants to write about and explain them. And I don’t have those sorts of strong political opinions… I don’t really have any messages to give.

3:AM: You’re not trying to ‘change the world’.

BB: I know I like just reading books, and I would like to write books that people like reading.

3:AM: There’s that line about Murakami in Grow Up, saying that reading him makes you feel safe.

BB: Yeah. I don’t think I’m quite there yet. But I’m trying.

3:AM: Apart from Murakami, who else do you like to read?

BB: There’s a book at the moment that I’m very excited about, called The Instructions by a guy called Adam Levin. It’s like a thousand-and-something pages. It’s a huge thing. I’ve got it in my bag. It’s about a ten-year-old Jewish boy written from his point-of-view, and he’s the potential messiah. It’s just four days of him at school. And it’s absolutely one of the weirdest things, it’s kind of invented its own language. It’s just really exciting. I can’t think of people that I read consistently, apart from online writers and Murakami. Maybe Vonnegut.

3:AM: Who are the online writers you read?

BB: Cicero and Tao Lin obviously. Zachary German. He had a novel published on Melville House as well, but it was a more extreme version of Tao Lin, and that’s called Eat When You Feel Sad. But I think they had a falling out and now they don’t talk. But he was part of the Muumuu House thing, and he was profiled in Nylon with them.

3:AM: What’s all this falling out?

BB: [Laughs] It’s something stupid. Like: they were at a party together and it was one of theirs party, and one of them said ‘This is shit’ and took some of his friends away to a different party. Something really stupid. But there was a weird thing because in Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel and Zachary German’s book Eat When You Feel Sad, there was five or six paragraphs that were exactly the same in each book, that matched up almost exactly. Which was really weird. Maybe it was a joke.

3:AM: How about music? At the beginning of Grow Up is a Los Campesinos song.

BB: Yeah, one of my favourites. Their lyrics are very good, I think. They come across as a bit whiney sometimes but… they’re really good. I like kind of ‘folksy’ people. I like a lot of American folk-punk bands that do sort of have ‘a message’, smashing capitalism and eating vegetables [laughs].

3:AM: I take it you’re not a vegan.

BB: No. Not at all. Jonathan Safran Foer is another writer that I really like, and when I read Eating Animals by him I didn’t eat meat for, like, a day or something. I went to McDonald’s and ordered a pancake for breakfast.

3:AM: Maybe the whole ‘message’ thing is futile?

BB: Yes. Though I do like ‘messages’ sometimes, I just think they don’t have much impact on me. And I’m not sure how much impact they have on everyone else.

3:AM: You said somewhere that you’re an anarcho-primitivist. Was that serious?

BB: [Laughs] I think I was being serious when I wrote that. It was when I was writing that book I mentioned, I was reading a lot of a guy called Derek Jensen who writes these big books about how industrial civilisation is destroying life and raping the planet and that the only way to end it is through violence. And that you have to violently take down industrial civilisation. I agreed with it at the time, and then I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ [laughs]. This is completely stupid.

3:AM: Have there been books that changed the way you see things?

BB: I think there probably has, but it’s not something I’m aware of. I think if you’re reading a lot of one kind of book and one style of writing, essentially one similar view on life, then it’s inevitably going to change something, just that you might not be aware of it.

3:AM: Most of the names you mention are American writers.

BB: I think that’s just a fluke. Because there’s not much of an indie writing scene here. Well there is. There’s some. But it’s just that it’s really bad. Like do you know Lee Rourke?

3:AM: No.

BB: He wrote a book called The Canal. And it’s published by Tao Lin’s publisher actually, and it’s about sitting by Regent’s Canal and it’s been really lauded, it won the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize. But that’s really awful and everyone says it’s really good. It’s a book about boredom.

3:AM: Everyone seems to be writing about how bored everyone is. And has been doing so for a long time now.

BB: When Tao Lin says it, I quite like it. But this one was just a bit pretentious.

3:AM: What comes after it?

BB: I don’t know. I like the new thing at the moment, the Steve Roggenbuck thing, ‘post-ironic positivity’, and it’s all about ‘boosting’ people. It’s a very funny, non-serious kind of thing but at the same time it’s good, the opposite of the Tao Lin thing, and the way things are written are really excited and short. The ‘boosting’ thing is a kind of a semi-serious ‘being positive on the Internet’ type thing. Which is good I think because, like you say, it’s getting over that boredom and embracing the stupid things.

3:AM: A lot of what’s coming out seems to be a ‘temporary’ bit of play, nothing sustainable.

BB: That’s the difference with Mud Luscious Press. The books that they publish, and J.A. Tyler, it’s the opposite of what we’re saying about the ironic stuff. They’re all very sincere and it’s all very poetic writing. And they describe it as ‘brutal’ and writing that ‘tears down things and builds them up again’ [laughs]. They’re quite serious guys.

3:AM: What sort of questions do you like to answer in an interview?

BB: I don’t really mind. As long as they’re not about politics. And stuff like that. Or questions about Skins. Because I’m not trying to ’say’ things as much as write books that people like.

3:AM: What’s going wrong with the writing the next book?

BB: I think it’s that I don’t have any confidence in it. And there’s expectation now that Grow Up is out on a big publisher and it’s done quite well. Whereas with the experimental books it was more like no one bought them, no one read them, not really reviewed. So there was no pressure on what to write next.

3:AM: So you’re trying to build up to something that can follow Grow Up.

BB: Yeah. Not that it’s hard to follow, it’s not a great novel that can’t be surpassed.

3:AM: So you’re kind of feeling pressure now?

BB: Yes. Definitely. There’s a lot of people that have read Grow Up now and now there’s money as well. Now that I’ writing for money as well.

3:AM: Do you feel like you have to prove something, to show that you’re ‘worthy’?

BB: Yes, because Grow Up was a coming-of-age novel that was quite straightforward to write and drawn straight out of what I was doing at the time. And now it’ that you kind of have to prove that you can write an actual novel that’s not just…

3:AM: Will the next thing be more traditional then?

BB: I think it will be. Even though the person will be quite young, it’ll be completely different, I hope. But I don’t think it will [laughs]. I think the style will be quite similar and the tone, and the character’s age [laughs] will probably be quite similar.

3:AM: You didn’t really set it anywhere.

BB: As in actual place names? Because to me it seemed like it was ‘every-town’, every suburban area, every boring town. And also I felt embarrassed saying ‘Gloucester’. Just because it seems stupid. If it’s Japanese places, like in Murakami books, it sounds amazing. But ‘Gloucester.’

3:AM: How about other influences?

BB: There’s a writer called Chris Killen, who wrote a book called The Bird Room, and that was… the tone of that was something I would have liked to come close to, but I don’t think I really did.

3:AM: It’s all mostly recent writers.

BB: Yeah. Though I have read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and stuff. Kerouac, Beats…

3:AM: That video interview of you.

BB: Oh, it was horrible. I hate that so much. Everyone that I meet from the publisher and stuff, say ‘That video was great, that video was great.’ But everyone I know were like, ‘How did they make you look so awkward and horrible in that video?’ It was in Edinburgh. The publisher paid for me to go up there, I think it was in the afternoon, and I was quite drunk. And the woman interviewing me kept telling me what to say, and I was like ‘I’m not saying that’. Just weird things, like ‘Could you please say: Grow Up is about life as I know it’ [laughs].

3:AM: But in that you say you spent a lot of your time at the library, while skipping school, and that’s why this book was here.

BB: Yeah. Not Fences, that was written when my mum kicked me out and I was living in a horrible little flat somewhere. But the others were in the library when I should have been at school.

3:AM: Would you say the book is plotless?

BB: It really surprised me when everyone said it was plotless. A lot of people didn’t even say it as a criticism, like it didn’t have a plot but that’s fine. I tried really hard to make it have a plot [laughs]. Really hard. So I guess I can’t do plots.

3:AM: The plot was kind of an in-joke, it seemed.

BB: I didn’t want to give it a really lame ending, where they ‘just fall in love’. So it had to be a little ambiguous. In the initial draft they didn’t get together at the end. And I was talking to people who had read that draft and they were like, ‘I don’t understand why they don’t get together at the end. They care about each other blah blah blah’. So that sort of happened. The other ending was just that he came out of the police station and there was nothing else there. Either way it was a cliché. Because one way they kiss and then they’re like ‘Uhhh that doesn’t work, let’s just be friends’ which is a cliché as well. But it felt right that they would get together.

3:AM: I liked the dream sequence.

BB: A lot of people say like, ‘This is such an unbelievable dream sequence.’ But the point of the dream sequence, which probably isn’t that clear in retrospect, is that Jasper went back and supposedly made it up and wrote it in to show how he was feeling at the time, rather than an actual dream. That was a lot more fun to write. A lot easier to write than the rest of the book. And more similar to the way I write in the experimental books.

3:AM: Do people think of you as a ‘young writer’?

BB: It depends if the person’s a dick or not, really [laughs]. A lot of the time the age is mentioned just because it makes the story more credible, like it makes the story more legitimate. And the fact that I was writing it when I was that age.

3:AM: It seems to be a selling point at the same time as some people seeing it as a detraction. It’s kind of a weird place.

BB: Yeah, I think that with the experimental novels it wasn’t but with this it could easily be a selling point.

3:AM: Have you thought about doing something ‘creative’ apart from writing?

BB: Grow Up has been optioned, and I think they’re trying to get me to write a treatment and a script for it. I haven’t tried it yet.

3:AM: Is that a British production?

BB: Yes. We haven’t signed it yet. They made an offer and they’re still kind of arguing over it. But hopefully that will happen. It’s an independent production company but they made Spooks and Hustle and Life on Mars.

3:AM: So will it be a TV thing?

BB: Yes. But there are so many hoops I have to jump through first. A script needs to get commissioned and then once a script is commissioned, the actual making of it needs to get commissioned.

3:AM: Have you started writing the treatment?

BB: No, not at all. When they sign the contract. And when they bloody pay me for it [laughs].

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Declan Tan is a borderline freelance journalist. He has also published minor amounts of fiction and poetry.