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(Linguistic) facts are linguistic (facts)

Sorry, it’s late for a friday, unless it isn’t.

From Chomsky’s Revolution in Lingusitics by John Searle in the NYRB, 1972.

Throughout the history of the study of man there has been a fundamental opposition between those who believe that progress is to be made by a rigorous observation of man’s actual behavior and those who believe that such observations are interesting only in so far as they reveal to us hidden and possibly fairly mysterious underlying laws that only partially and in distorted form reveal themselves to us in behavior. Freud, for example, is in the latter class, most of American social science in the former.

Noam Chomsky is unashamedly with the searchers after hidden laws. Actual speech behavior, speech performance, for him is only the top of a large iceberg of linguistic competence distorted in its shape by many factors irrelevant to linguistics. Indeed he once remarked that the very expression “behavioral sciences” suggests a fundamental confusion between evidence and subject matter. Psychology, for example, he claims is the science of mind; to call psychology a behavioral science is like calling physics a science of meter readings. One uses human behavior as evidence for the laws of the operation of the mind, but to suppose that the laws must be laws of behavior is to suppose that the evidence must be the subject matter.

In this opposition between the methodology of confining research to observable facts and that of using the observable facts as clues to hidden and underlying laws, Chomsky’s revolution is doubly interesting: first, within the field of linguistics, it has precipitated a conflict which is an example of the wider conflict; and secondly, Chomsky has used his results about language to try to develop general anti-behaviorist and anti-empiricist conclusions about the nature of the human mind that go beyond the scope of linguistics.

His revolution followed fairly closely the general pattern described in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: the accepted model or “paradigm” of linguistics was confronted, largely by Chomsky’s work, with increasing numbers of nagging counterexamples and recalcitrant data which the paradigm could not deal with. Eventually the counter-examples led Chomsky to break the old model altogether and to create a completely new one. Prior to the publication of his Syntactic Structures in 1957, many, probably most, American linguists regarded the aim of their discipline as being the classification of the elements of human languages. Linguistics was to be a sort of verbal botany. As Hockett wrote in 1942, “Linguistics is a classificatory science.”

Suppose, for example, that such a linguist is giving a description of a language, whether an exotic language like Cherokee or a familiar one like English. He proceeds by first collecting his “data,” he gathers a large number of utterances of the language, which he records on his tape recorder or in a phonetic script. This “corpus” of the language constitutes his subject matter. He then classifies the elements of the corpus at their different linguistic levels: first he classifies the smallest significant functioning units of sound, the phonemes, then at the next level the phonemes unite into the minimally significant bearers of meaning, themorphemes (in English, for example, the word “cat” is a single morpheme made up of three phonemes; the word “uninteresting” is made up of three morphemes: “un,” “interest,” and “ing”), at the next higher level the morphemes join together to form words and word classes such as noun phrases and verb phrases, and at the highest level of all come sequences of word classes, the possible sentences andsentence types.

The aim of linguistic theory was to provide the linguist with a set of rigorous methods, a set of discovery procedures which he would use to extract from the “corpus” the phonemes, the morphemes, and so on. The study of the meanings of sentences or of the uses to which speakers of the language put the sentences had little place in this enterprise. Meanings, scientifically construed, were thought to be patterns of behavior determined by stimulus and response; they were properly speaking the subject matter of psychologists. Alternatively they might be some mysterious mental entities altogether outside the scope of a sober science or, worse yet, they might involve the speaker’s whole knowledge of the world around him and thus fall beyond the scope of a study restricted only to linguistic facts.

Mysterious mental entities… For a fun game at home, pick out your own favorite, random three words.

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Pompidou and Circumstance

So, I can see the Centre Pompidou from our bedroom window. It’s a huge glass rectangle surrounded by tubes and steel cables, designed by Renzo Piano back in the 70’s. From the plaza side [I’ll explain in a minute] it looks like a giant hamster cage/ant farm; the escalator is on the outside in a glass tube, going diagonally from the 1st floor to the sixth.

At its scale for the neighborhood, it’s a bit of a landmark anyway, and we’ve spent a lot of time just sitting in the plaza on the non-street side of the building, where you can do everything from have an old vietnamese guy serenade you with Smells like Teen Spirit on the guitar to have another of many, very zealous portraitists try to draw your picture [“You have a good nose,” they say and while I can’t prove it I think they say this to everybody] to nothing at all. People just sit out in front of this monstrosity (in a good way), have lunch, make out, smoke, talk, whatever. It’s pretty awesome, as tens of thousands of people live right around here, rents seem to still afford a huge variety of shops and restaurants despite or maybe because of the old underground mall next door (Les Halles), and the Pompidou serves as a kind of pass through destination for all and sundry. We actually came to it often during the last stay here, just to take a pause and sit outside.

Yesterday, we went inside the museum for the first time and, without being too dramatic, it changed a lot of what I thought about the building. First it’s a great building from the inside; the tube escalator is better than it is even curious from the outside. But most of all, it’s a great modern art museum, my new favorite [drawing from a, needless to say, shallow well].

We saw two exhibitions, neither of which I particularly liked, and one I especially did not. Lucien Freud L’Atelier; I already knew I didn’t like his painting, now confirmed. But there were some things about it that were good, just not the people in his pictures, who he seems to loathe. Other buildings, rooms, plants, even a dog appeared several times… all remarkably well done. Then the other exhibit, Dreamlands. The program says the goal of this exhibition “of more then 300 works is to show how the World’s Fairs, international exhibitions and amusement parks have inspired significant developments in urban design and urban life.” An ambitious mouthful and you can partially imagine the building of the Eiffel tower, Dali on Coney Island, lots about Vegas, some about EPCOT. But there was the Rem Koolhas book, Delirious New York, that I’d never heard of and they had some images from that. Then two Philip Guston paintings, one I had seen before. But thing was, interspersed with all of this on the sixth floor galleries were… staggering views of the city. All the while, you never feel lost in the labyrinth that some museums exhibition spaces can be.

So, this is already really long but, the only reason I was writing any of it was because of the permanent collection on the 4th and 5th floor. Debouffet, Leger, Bonnard, but also a lot of Picasso and Braque, one room of their back and forth images in particular that was great, each painting practically the same thing. Sculptures by Brancusi throughout, it was great to see this stuff after a day of work. And when I say stuff, I mean like this.

IMG_3932

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Ballad of the Sleepwalker

So I’m in this semi-disclosed location working on a novel about a play and… reading about Garcia Lorca I came across his gypsy ballads. This one is the Ballad of the Sleepwalker:

THE BALLAD OF THE SLEEP-WALKER

Green, lo i love you green;
green wind, green branches;
the ship on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.

With a shadow around her waist
she dreams on her balcony,
green flesh, hair of green,
and eyes of cold silver.

Green, lo i love you green.
Under the gypsy moon
all things are watching her
but she cannot see them.

Green, lo i love you green.
Big frosty stars
come with the fish of darkness
that opens the road of dawn.
The fig tree rubs its belly
with a rasp of branches,
and the mountain, a filching cat,
bristles its angry spikes.
But who will come, and from where?
She lingers on her balcony,
Green flesh, hair of green,
dreaming in the bitter sea.

“Friend, i want to change
my horse for your house,
my saddle for your mirror,
my knife for your blanket.
Friend, i come bleeding
from the passes of Cabra.”
“If only I could my son
a deal would easily be done.
But no more i am myself
nor is my house now my house.”
“Friend, i want to die
decently in my bed;
of iron if possible,
with sheets of fine linen.
Cant you see the wound i have
from my breast to my throat?”
“Three hundred dark roses
cover your white shirt-front.
Your blood oozes and curdles
under your belt.
But no more i am myself
nor is my house now my house.”
“Let me climb at least
up to the high balustrades.
Let me come, let me come,
up to the green balconies;
balconies of the moon
where the water murmurs.”

The two friends go up
to the high balconies
leaving a trail of blood,
and a trail of tears.
Tiny tinfoil lanterns
trembled on the rooftops.
A thousand crystal tambourines
tore wounds across the dawn.

Green, lo i love you green.
Green wind, green branches.
The two friends ascended.
The long wind left
in the mouth a rare taste
of gall, mint and sweet basil.
Friend, where is she, tell me,
where is your sorrowing girl?
How often she has waited for you.
How often she might have waited,
cool face, black hair,
on this green balcony.

The gypsy girl rocked
on the face of the cistern.
Green flesh, hair of green,
with eyes of cold silver.
An icicle of moonlight
suspends her above the water.
The night grew intimate
as a little square.
Drunken civil guards
were beating on the door.

Green, lo i love you green;
green wind, green branches;
the ship on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.

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Que sais-je?

Purely coincidental, like a huge oil volcano coming so near to peak oil.

This is from The Essays by Michel de Montaigne, published in 1580, That We Taste Nothing Pure:

THE imbecility of our condition is such that things cannot, in their natural simplicity and purity, fall into our use; the elements that we enjoy are changed, and so ’tis with metals; and gold must be debased with some other matter to fit it for our service. Neither has virtue, so simple as that which Aristo, Pyrrho, and also the Stoics, made the end of life; nor the Cyrenaic and Aristippic pleasure, been without mixture useful to it. Of the pleasure and goods that we enjoy, there is not one exempt from some mixture of ill and inconvenience:

“Medio de fonte leporum, Surgit amari aliquid, quod in ipsis floribus angat.”

Our extremest pleasure has some air of groaning and complaining in it; would you not say that it is dying of pain? Nay when we frame the image of it in its full excellence, we stuff it with sickly and painful epithets and qualities, languor, softness, feebleness, faintness, morbidezza: a great testimony of their consanguinity and consubstantiality. The most profound joy has more of severity than gayety in it. The highest and fullest contentment offers more of the grave than of the merry; “Ipsa felicitas, se nisi temperat, premit.” Pleasure chews and grinds us; according to the old Greek verse, which says that the gods sell us all the goods they give us; that is to say, that they give us nothing pure and perfect, and that we do not purchase but at the price of some evil.

Labor and pleasure, very unlike in nature, associate, nevertheless, by I know not what natural conjunction. Socrates says, that some god tried to mix in one mass and to confound pain and pleasure, but not being able to do it, he bethought him at least, to couple them by the tail. Metrodorus said that in sorrow there is some mixture of pleasure. I know not whether or no he intended anything else by that saying; but for my part, I am of opinion that there is design, consent, and complacency in giving a man’s self up to melancholy. I say, that beside ambition, which may also have a stroke in the business, there is some shadow of delight and delicacy which smiles upon and flatters us even in the very lap of melancholy. Are there not some constitutions that feed upon it?

“Est quaedam flere voluptas.”

and one Attalus in Seneca says, that the memory of our lost friends is as grateful to us, as bitterness in wine, when too old, is to the palate-

“Minister vetuli, puer, Falerni Inger’ mi calices amaroires”

and as apples that have a sweet tartness.

Nature discovers this confusion to us; painters hold that the same motions and screwings of the face that serve for weeping, serve for laughter too; and indeed, before the one or the other be finished, do but observe the painter’s manner of handling, and you will be in doubt to which of the two the design tends; and the extreme of laughter does, at last bring tears. “Nullum sine auctoramento malum est.”

When I imagine man abounding with all the conveniences that are to be desired (let us put the case that all his members were always seized with a pleasure like that of generation, in its most excessive height) I feel him melting under the weight of his delight, and see him utterly unable to support so pure, so continual, and so universal a pleasure. Indeed, he is running away while he is there, and naturally makes haste to escape as from a place where he cannot stand firm, and where he is afraid of sinking.

When I religiously confess myself to myself, I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice; and I am afraid that Plato, in his purest virtue (I, who am as sincere and loyal a lover of virtue of that stamp, as any other whatever) if he had listened and laid his ear close to himself, and he did so no doubt, would have heard some jarring sound of human mixture, but faint and only perceptible to himself. Man is wholly and throughout but patch and motley. Even the laws of justice themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice; insomuch that Plato says they undertake to cut off the hydra’s head, who pretend to clear the law of all inconveniences. “Omne magnum exemplum habet aliquid ex iniquo, quod contra singulos utilitate publica rependitur,” says Tacitus.

It is likewise true, that for the use of life and the service of public commerce, there may be some excesses in the purity and perspicacity of our minds; that penetrating light has in it too much of subtlety and curiosity: we must a little stupefy and blunt them to render them more obedient to example and practice, and a little veil and obscure them, the better to proportion them to this dark and earthy life. And therefore common and less speculative souls are found to be more proper for and more successful in the management of affairs; and the elevated and exquisite opinions of philosophy unfit for business. This sharp vivacity of soul, and the supple and restless volubility attending it, disturb our negotiations. We are to manage human enterprises more superficially and roughly, and leave a great part to fortune; it is not necessary to examine affairs with so much subtlety and so deep: a man loses himself in the consideration of so many contrary lusters, and so many various forms; “Volutantibus res inter se pugnantes, obtorpuerant… animi.”

‘Tis what the ancients say of Simonides, that by reason his imagination suggested to him, upon the question King Hiero had put to him (to answer which he had had many days to meditate in), several sharp and subtle considerations, while he doubted which was the most likely, he totally despaired of the truth.

He who dives into and in his inquisition comprehends all circumstances and consequences, hinders his elections: a little engine well handled is sufficient for executions, whether of less or greater weight. The best managers are those who can worst give account how they are so; while the greatest talkers, for the most part, do nothing to purpose: I know one of this sort of men, and a most excellent discourser upon all sorts of good husbandry, who has miserably let a hundred thousand livres yearly revenue slip through his hands; I know another who talks, who better advises than any man of his counsel, and there is not in the world a fairer show of soul and understanding than he has; nevertheless, when he comes to the test, his servants find him quite another thing; not to make any mention of his misfortunes.


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Agitated Behavior of Significance

Speaking of the nature of Greek Tragedy, it’s odd to consider that People used to think of and use entertainment for something more than just turning off their brains for a while.

This is from The Theatre and Cruelty, by Antonin Artaud, translated by James O. Morgan from Le Theatre et Son Double, Paris 1938. With permission of Librairie Gallimard.

A concept of the theatre has been lost. And indirect proportion to the matter in which the theatre limits itself only to allowing us to penetrate into the intimacy of some puppet or to transforming the spectator into a Peeping Tom, it is to be expected that the elite will turn away from it and the crowds will go to the movies, the music halls, or the circuses, in search of violent satisfactions which at least have no false pretenses.

After the wear and tear to which our sensibilities have been subjected, it is certain that, before all, we have need of a theatre that will awaken us: heart and nerves.

The misdeeds of the psychological theatre since Racine have made us unaccustomed to that violent and immediate action which the theatre must possess. Then come the movies to assassinate us with shadows, which, when filtered through a machine, no longer are able to reach our senses. For ten years they have kept us in a state of ineffectual torpor, in which all our faculties seem to have been dulled.

The agonizing and catastrophic period in which we live makes us sense the urgent need for a theatre which will not be left behind by the events of the day, and which will have within us deep resonance and which will dominate the unstability of the times we live in.

Our long familiarity with theatre as a form of distraction has led us to forget the idea of a serious theatre, a theatre which will shove aside our representations, and breathe into us the burning magnetism of images and finally will act upon us in such a way that there will take place within us a therapy of the soul whose effects will not be forgotten.

All action is cruelty. It is with this idea of action pushed to its extreme limit that the theatre will renew itself.

Penetrated by the idea that the crowd thinks first with its senses, and that it is absurd to attempt as the ordinary psychological play does, to address itself to the understanding, the Theatre of Cruelty proposes to recourse to mass effects: to seek in the agitated behavior of significant mass grouping thrown against the other in convulsive action a little of that poetry which is found in popular festivals and in crowds on those days, now too rare, when the people take to the streets.

All that is to be found in love, in crime, in war, in madness the theatre must return to us if it is to become significant again.

Day-to-day love, personal ambition, banal squabbling have no value except in an interaction with that form of terrifying Lyricism that is to be found in Myths to which large collectivities have given their belief.

That is why we shall try to concentrate around famous persons, atrocious cries, or superhuman devotions, a spectacle which, without having recourse to the expired images of the old Myths, will be capable of extracting the forces which are at work in these Myths.

In a word, we believe that there is in what is called poetry, living forces, and that the presentation of a crime in the requisite theatrical manner is more powerful for the mind than that crime in realized life.

…

To further clarify my point, the images in certain painting of Grunewald and Hieronymous Bosch tell us what a theatrical spectacle might be – whereby in the mind of a saint, the objects of external nature come to appear as temptations.

It is here, in this spectacle of temptation, where life has all to lose and the spirit all to gain, that the theatre will again find its true significance.

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Novels vs. los Interweb

Hey, all the kids are doing it. If you’ve ever read Sven Birkerts’ essays on  20th century literature, An Artificial Wilderness, then you know you’re in capable hands with this piece Reading in a Digital Age.

Information comes to seem like an environment. If anything “important” happens anywhere, we will be informed. The effect of this is to pull the world in close. Nothing penetrates, or punctures. The real, which used to be defined by sensory immediacy, is redefined.

FROM THE VANTAGE POINT OF HINDSIGHT, that which came before so often looks quaint, at least with respect to technology. Indeed, we have a hard time imagining that the users weren’t at some level aware of the absurdity of what they were doing. Movies bring this recognition to us fondly; they give us the evidence. The switchboard operators crisscrossing the wires into the right slots; Dad settling into his luxury automobile, all fins and chrome; Junior ringing the bell on his bike as he heads off on his paper route. The marvel is that all of them—all of us—concealed their embarrassment so well. The attitude of the present to the past . . . well, it depends on who is looking. The older you are, the more likely it is that your regard will be benign—indulgent, even nostalgic. Youth, by contrast, quickly gets derisive, preening itself on knowing better, oblivious to the fact that its toys will be found no less preposterous by the next wave of the young.

These notions came at me the other night while I was watching the opening scenes of Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Wings of Desire, which has as its premise the active presence of angels in our midst. The scene that triggered me was set in a vast and spacious modern library. The camera swooped with angelic freedom, up the wide staircases, panning vertically to a kind of balcony outcrop where Bruno Ganz, one of Wenders’s angels, stood looking down. Below him people moved like insects, studying shelves, removing books, negotiating this great archive of items.

Maybe it was the idea of angels that did it—the insertion of the timeless perspective into this moment of modern-day Berlin. I don’t know, but in a flash I felt myself looking back in time from a distant and disengaged vantage. I was seeing it all as through the eyes of the future, and what I felt, before I could check myself, was a bemused pity: the gaze of a now on a then that does not yet know it is a then, which is unselfconsciously fulfilling itself.

SUDDENLY IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO IMAGINE a world in which many interactions formerly dependent on print on paper happen screen to screen. It’s no stretch, no exercise in futurism. You can pretty much extrapolate from the habits and behaviors of kids in their teens and 20s, who navigate their lives with little or no recourse to paper. In class they sit with their laptops open on the table in front of them. I pretend they are taking course-related notes, but would not be surprised to find out they are writing to friends, working on papers for other courses, or just trolling their favorite sites while they listen. Whenever there is a question about anything—a date, a publication, the meaning of a word—they give me the answer before I’ve finished my sentence. From where they stand, Wenders’s library users already have a sepia coloration. I know that I present book information to them with a slight defensiveness; I wrap my pronouncements in a preemptive irony. I could not bear to be earnest about the things that matter to me and find them received with that tolerant bemusement I spoke of, that leeway we extend to the beliefs and passions of our elders.

AOL SLOGAN: “We search the way you think.”

I JUST FINISHED READING an article in Harper’s by Gary Greenberg (“A Mind of Its Own”) on the latest books on neuropsychology, the gist of which recognizes an emerging consensus in the field, and maybe, more frighteningly, in the culture at large: that there may not be such a thing as mind apart from brain function. As Eric Kandel, one of the writers discussed, puts it: “Mind is a set of operations carried out by the brain, much as walking is a set of operations carried out by the legs, except dramatically more complex.” It’s easy to let the terms and comparisons slide abstractly past, to miss the full weight of implication. But Greenberg is enough of an old humanist to recognize when the great supporting trunk of his worldview is being crosscut just below where he is standing and to realize that everything he deems sacred is under threat. His recognition may not be so different from the one that underlay the emergence of Nietzsche’s thought. But if Nietzsche found a place of rescue in man himself, his Superman transcending himself to occupy the void left by the loss—the murder—of God, there is no comparable default now.

Brain functioning cannot stand in for mind, once mind has been unmasked as that, unless we somehow grant that the nature of brain partakes of what we had allowed might be the nature of mind. Which seems logically impossible, as the nature of mind allowed possibilities of connection and fulfillment beyond the strictly material, and the nature of brain is strictly material. It means that what we had imagined to be the something more of experience is created in-house by that three-pound bundle of neurons, and that it is not pointing to a larger definition of reality so much as to a capacity for narrative projection engendered by infinitely complex chemical reactions. No chance of a wizard behind the curtain. The wizard is us, our chemicals mingling.

The rest is at the link. It might go without saying but, while you rest, others are linking. and some are writing and making, as you rest and others link; so when you wake, don’t just go read something, go and read many things. You’ll feel more rested when you wake again, a greater link to what is and more tired when it’s time for rest.

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Dead Malls

Friday Reading Slideshow. Found by Mrs. Green.

The photo shows a former Pep Boys store in Columbus, Ohio, photographed in August 2009. Ulrich had spent a long day shooting at a mall down the street; it was 3 a.m. when he stopped here. Inside the lobby, he could see a dead bird. He went in for a close-up, not realizing a motion sensor was still active. “I started to step in, and this alarm went screaming,” Ulrich recalls. “It probably went off for half an hour.” This being a ghost store, though, no one came.

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Not Knowing Anything

Born yesterday… Just fell off the cabbage truck… wet behind the ears.

We cannot must not forget this very compelling meaning of green. Henry Giroux reminds us what public schools are for.


There has been a long, though declining, tradition in the United States in which public school teaching was embraced as an important public service. It was assumed that teachers provided a crucial foundation for educating young people in the values, skills and knowledge that enabled them to be critical citizens capable of shaping and expanding democratic institutions. Since the 1980s, teachers have been under an unprecedented attack by those forces that view schools less as a public good than as a private right. Seldom accorded the status of intellectuals that they deserved, they remain the most important component in the learning process for students, while serving as a moral compass to gauge how seriously a society invests in its youth and in the future. Yet, teachers are being deskilled, unceremoniously removed from the process of school governance, largely reduced to technicians or subordinated to the authority of security guards. Underlying these transformations are a number of forces eager to privatize schools, substitute vocational training for education and reduce teaching and learning to reductive modes of testing and evaluation.

Indications of the poisonous transformation of both the role of the public school and the nature of teacher work abound. The passage of laws promoting high-stakes testing for students and the use of test scores to measure teacher quality have both limited the autonomy of teacher authority and devalued the possibility of critical teaching and visionary goals for student learning. Teachers are no longer asked to think critically and be creative in the classroom. On the contrary, they are now forced to simply implement predetermined instructional procedures and standardized content, at best; and, at worst, put their imaginative powers on hold while using precious classroom time to teach students how to master the skill of test taking. Subject to what might be labeled as a form of bare or stripped-down pedagogy, teachers are removed from the processes of deliberation and reflection, reduced to implementing lock-step, time-on-task pedagogies that do great violence to students, while promoting a division of labor between conception and execution hatched by bureaucrats and “experts” from mainly conservative foundations. Questions regarding how teachers motivate students, make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative, work with parents and the larger community or exercise the authority needed to become a constructive pedagogical force in the classroom and community are now sacrificed to the dictates of an instrumental rationality largely defined through the optic of measurable utility.

Read the whole thing.  Pay forward the Baldwin quote.

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Leading from the Rear

Is that even possible? Can we make drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions without destroying our economy?

Luckily we have a Nobel-Laureate economist on duty.

If there’s a single central insight in economics, it’s this: There are mutual gains from transactions between consenting adults. If the going price of widgets is $10 and I buy a widget, it must be because that widget is worth more than $10 to me. If you sell a widget at that price, it must be because it costs you less than $10 to make it. So buying and selling in the widget market works to the benefit of both buyers and sellers. More than that, some careful analysis shows that if there is effective competition in the widget market, so that the price ends up matching the number of widgets people want to buy to the number of widgets other people want to sell, the outcome is to maximize the total gains to producers and consumers. Free markets are “efficient” — which, in economics-speak as opposed to plain English, means that nobody can be made better off without making someone else worse off.

Now, efficiency isn’t everything. In particular, there is no reason to assume that free markets will deliver an outcome that we consider fair or just. So the case for market efficiency says nothing about whether we should have, say, some form of guaranteed health insurance, aid to the poor and so forth. But the logic of basic economics says that we should try to achieve social goals through “aftermarket” interventions. That is, we should let markets do their job, making efficient use of the nation’s resources, then utilize taxes and transfers to help those whom the market passes by.

But what if a deal between consenting adults imposes costs on people who are not part of the exchange? What if you manufacture a widget and I buy it, to our mutual benefit, but the process of producing that widget involves dumping toxic sludge into other people’s drinking water? When there are “negative externalities” — costs that economic actors impose on others without paying a price for their actions — any presumption that the market economy, left to its own devices, will do the right thing goes out the window. So what should we do? Environmental economics is all about answering that question.

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Molloy

It being Green and all, I meant to put up something for St. Patrick’s Day (I know, so sentimental). But I didn’t and now the last Friday of the month already and so, okay, we’ll settle for an Irish writer. But of course, not just any.

From Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, the sucking stone sequence…

I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of
sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on
this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them
equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn
about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following
way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these
being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my
greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and
putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my
greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I
replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I
replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I
replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had
finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my
four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to
suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my
greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time.
And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I
have just described. And so on. But this solution did not satisfy me
fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the
four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which
case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was
really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about. But
I shuffled them well in my pockets, before I began to suck, and
again, while I sucked, before transferring them, in the hope of
obtaining a more general circulation of the stones from pocket to
pocket. But this was only a makeshift that could not long content a
man like me. So I began to look for something else …


I might do better to transfer the stones four by four, instead of one
by one, that is to say, during the sucking, to take the three stones remaining
in the right pocket of my greatcoat and replace them by the four in the
right pocket of my trousers , and these by the four in the left pocket
of my trousers, and these by the four in the left pocket of my greatcoat,
and finally these by the three from the right pocket of my greatcoat,
plus the one, as soon as I had finished sucking it, which was in my mouth.
Yes, it seemed to me at first that by so doing I would arrive at a better
result. But onfurther reflection I had to change my mind and confess that
the circulation of the stones four by four came to exactly the same thing
as their circulation one by one. For if I was certain of finding each
time, in the right pocket of my greatcoat, four stones totally different
from their immediate predecessors, the possibility nevertheless remained
of my always chancing on the same stone, within each group of four, and
consequently of my sucking, not the sixteen turn and turn about as I wished,
but in fact four only, always the same, turn and turn about. So I had
to seek elswhere than in the mode of circulation. For no matter how I
caused the stones to circulate, I always ran the same risk. It was obvious
that by increasing the number of my pockets I was bound to increase my
chances of enjoying my stones in the way I planned, that is to say one
after the other until their number was exhausted. Had I had eight pockets,
for example, instead of the four I did have, then even the most diabolical
hazard could not have prevented me from sucking at least eight of my sixteen
stones, turn and turn about. The truth is I should have needed sixteen
pockets in order to be quite easy in my mind. And for a long time I could
see no other conclusion than this, that short of having sixteen pockets,
each with its stone, I could never reach the goal I had set myself, short
of an extraordinary hazard. And if at a pinch I could double the number
of my pockets, were it only by dividing each pocket in two, with the help
of a few safety-pins let us say, to quadruple them seemed to be more than
I could manage. And I did not feel inclined to take all that trouble for
a half-measure. For I was beginning to lose all sense of measure, after
all this wrestling and wrangling, and to say, All or nothing. And if I
was tempted for an instant to establish a more equitable proportion between
my stones and my pockets , by reducing the former to the number of the
latter, it was only for an instant. For it would have been an admission
of defeat. And sitting on the shore, before the sea, the sixteen stones
spread out before my eyes, I gazed at them in anger and perplexity …

There was something more than a principle I abandoned, when I
abandoned the equal distribution, it was a bodily need. But to suck
the stones in the way I have described, not haphazard, but with
method, was also I think a bodily need. Here then were two
incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads. Such things happen. But
deep down I didn’t give a tinker’s curse about being off my
balance, dragged to the right hand and the left, backwards and
forewards. And deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked
a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the end
of time. For they all tasted exactly the same. And if I had
collected sixteen, it was not in order to ballast myself in such and
such a way, or to suck them turn about, but simply to have a little
store, so as never to be without. But deep down I didn’t give a
fiddler’s curse about being without, when they were all gone they
would be all gone, I wouldn’t be any the worse off, or hardly any.
And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all
the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another,
and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or
swallowed …


One day suddenly it dawned on me, dimly, that I might perhaps achieve
my purpose without increasing the number of my pockets, or reducing the
number of my stones, but simply by sacrificing the principle of trim.
The meaning of this illumination, which suddenly began to sing within
me, like a verse of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, I did not penetrate at once,
and notably the word trim, which I had never met with, in this sense,
long remained obscure. Finally I seemed to grasp that this word trim could
not here mean anything else, anything better, than the distribution of
the sixteen stones in four groups of four, one group in each pocket, and
that it was my refusal to consider any distribution other than this that
had vitiated my calculations until then and rendered the problem literally
insoluble. And it was on the basis of this interpretation, whether right
or wrong, that I finally reached a solution, inelegant assuredly, but
sound, sound. Now I am willing to believe, indeed I firmly believe, that
other solutions to this problem might have been found and indeed may still
be found, no less sound, but much more elegant than the one I shall now
describe, if I can …


Good. Now I can begin to suck. Watch me closely. I take a stone from
the right pocket of my greatcoat , suck it, stop sucking it, put it
in the left pocket of my greatcoat, the one empty (of stones). I take a second stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And so on until the right pocket of my greatcoat is empty (apart from its usual and casual contents) and the six stones I have just sucked, one after the other, are all in the left pocket of my greatcoat. Pausing then, and concentrating, so as not to make a balls of it, I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, in which there are no stones left, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. At this stage then the left pocket of my greatcoat is again empty of stones, while the right pocket of my greatcoat is again supplied, and in the right way, that is to say with other stones than those I have just sucked. These other stones I then begin to suck, one after the other, and to transfer as I go along to the left pocket of my greatcoat, being absolutely certain, as far as one can be in an affair of this kind, that I am not sucking the same stones as a moment before, but others. And when the right pocket of my greatcoat is again empty (of stones), and the five I have just sucked are all without exception in the left pocket of my greatcoat, then I proceed to the same redistribution as a moment before, or a similar redistribution, that is to say I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, now again available, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And there I am ready to begin again. Do I have to go on?