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.
Richard Marshall interviews experimental philosopher Josh Knobe.
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.
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.
What Far South shows, I think, is that a lot of what happens in the world goes on hidden from sight. For example, Wikileaks revealed a lot of what goes on in the dark between governments. That said, some things need to go on in the dark from time to time. One government may cut a deal with another government that actually benefits ordinary people on the ground, but officially neither government will say this publicly in order not to lose face. So it doesn’t make sense that everything is out in the public domain. Sometimes it’s actually dangerous. The problem is that the worse excesses and atrocities are often concealed from the public and the world.
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.
Booze is 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.
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. 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.
Much supposedly ambitious literary fiction, in attempting to distance itself from our marketized, neoliberalized, liberal-democratized world… 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.
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. Really hard. So I guess I can’t do plots. 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.
Fiction is everywhere, from four minute pop songs to films; I like the idea that my words can show the conversation they are having not just with the literary tradition they’re coming from, but also the many other forms too : visual art, film, music and indeed, other less glamorous things, environmental science, history, engineering. Maybe my next book will be illustrated with the designs of oil rigs. Or the social history of the German train network… I’m just talking about realism here: The Readymades is a realist novel, realist fiction changes with the age, many novelists today fail to realise this and write books like Dickens or Balzac, or even worse, Evelyn Waugh.
