Not One More Victim.

I. What is consciousness?

A. Brains, Bodies, and "Things."

"Consciousness ... is experience or awareness. Human mental life has a phenomenal side, a subjective side that the most sophisticated information-processing system might lack. To paraphrase Thomas Nagel, there is something it is like to be in a conscious mental state, something it is like for the organism itself." (T. Hondereich, Oxford Companion to Philosophy, at p. 152.)

Comparisons may be found between proponents of A.I., like Daniel Dennett or (perhaps) the Churchlands, and skeptics concerning A.I., such as Colin McGinn, John Searle, or Thomas Nagel.

What does this highly technical debate in philosophy have to do with raging political controversies? Why should feminists care about the mind/body problem?

Well, the mind/body problem is concerned with figuring out how it is that subjective, "technicolor" phenomenal experience (qualia), "coincides" with duplicable information processing by organisms or machines (that is, if machines ever become conscious) "accessing" facts in data banks. No effort to deny subjectivity or reduce "qualia" to behavior is very persuasive, especially when the denier is informed of his or her own pending death. James Garvey, "Hacker's Challenge," in The Philosopher's Magazine, 4th Quarter, UK, 2010, at pp. 23-32.

At the heart of much of this discussion are rival paradigms, different a priori assumptions concerning what is at issue when we speak of consciousness and the only conscious entities that we know of -- i.e., persons. To suggest that computers can be conscious is to imply that computers can be persons without being human beings.

Proponents of so-called "strong A.I." theories -- I call these theories "ideologies" -- fail to realize that this contention about conscious machines as persons involves the further suggestion, or "analogous entailed proposition" as analytical philosophers say, that some human beings may be "object-like," or single-function machines.

Our dominant culture still sees women as, essentially, sexual objects or providers of satisfaction to others. In other words, women are single-function entitites.

The logic of this externalist mechanical discourse regarding consciousness implies that some humans are less than fully conscious entities, that is, less than persons: the mentally ill, possibly members of some disfavored minority groups or races, or all women. ("Is Western Philosophy Racist?" and "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")

Traditionally, in terms of the mind/body duality inherited from Christianity, by way of Descartes, women were associated with the body; men were identified with mind or thinking. This denigration of feminine intelligence required centuries of conceptual struggle to overcome, to the extent that it has been overcome.

As beings lacking in cognition, premodern understandings of women, dictated that women were more "object-like" than men. The consequences in terms of the sales of women as brides, concubines, possessors of dowries, prostitutes is well documented by feminist scholars. ("John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness" and "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/body Problem.")

The desire to transform others into "objects" worthy of control, manipulation, or use by self-proclaimed "superiors" -- who insert "errors" in texts, perhaps -- leads to political philosophies and behaviorist psychologies that make persons into "things."

In America, some persons today -- like beautiful women or movie stars -- are more likely than others to become "things." ("Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility" and "Behaviorism is Evil.")

Under Capitalism almost all persons become commercial objects or products, that is, "things" that are for sale. The difficulty that then arises, however, is that users of "things" or "commercial products" need to fill the void of a world increasingly deprived of rival subjectivities. Thus, the yearning to create things that serve our needs or fulfill our purposes without expressing needs or claiming rights as well as purposes of their own.

This need may explain sex robots or persons asked to perform the functions of sex robots -- like the various kinds of prostitutes thriving in our society, some of whom enjoy great social esteem -- as with many politicians or advertising executives. What follows should make it clear that the mind/body problem is a metaphysical discussion, but it is more important as a political debate in sexist society. Terry Eagleton, "Was Marx Right? -- It's Not Too Late to Ask," in Commonweal, April 8, 2011, at p. 9. ("Senator Bob, the Babe, and the Big Bucks" and "'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.")

This bizarre situation also explains our popular forms of slavery, disposable fashion models, insatiable thirst for novelties in the celebrity realm, teen vampires, sex goddesses, some porn -- male and female "idols" -- also many images in advertising and art. What is missing from our interactions (or Dr. Phil-like "relationships") is the messy reality of free subjects to rival our interpretations of the world. The dominant ethos underlying this controversy and set of issues reflects values that are overwhelmingly sexist. The Cartesian "I" is (and always has been) male. Today, sadly, the Cartesian "I" is reduced to what can be expressed in a "twitter." Peggy Orenstein, "I Tweet, Therefore I Am," in The New York Times Magazine, August 1, 2010, at p. 11. (Look past the social science babble to the unrecognized ideas and philosophical assumptions in this article.)

Science is and will remain irrelevant to what is fundamentally a political and ethical decision not about how consciousness emerges from, or is produced by, cerebral processes -- something we may figure out some day -- but what is consciousness and in what terms do we define the ontological level to which consciousness instantly elevates those who possess it, those who "are" conscious, regardless of whether this category will someday include machines?

"It is precisely thus that the for-itself apprehends itself in anguish; that is, as a being which is neither the foundation of its own being nor of the Other's being nor of the in-itselfs which form the world, but a being which is compelled to decide the meaning of being -- within it and everywhere outside of it. The one who realizes in anguish his [See what I mean?] condition as being thrown into a responsibility which extends to his very abandonment has no longer either remorse or regret or excuse; he is no longer anything but a freedom which perfectly reveals itself and whose being resides in this very revelation. But as we pointed out at the beginning of this work, most of the time we flee anguish in bad faith."

Sartre, "Freedom and Responsibility," in Existentialism and Human Emotions, at p. 39.

Must my freedom come at the expense of the liberty of others?

Sartre feared this was necessarily so. I suggest that this is a highly masculine-aggressive view of freedom and rational agency.

Simone de Beauvoir's use of these ideas, for example, allows for the inclusion of the feminist revolution within the metaphysics of mind/body duality and dual-aspect thinking. ("Master and Commander.")

Other people cannot be objects for you to "fix" in accordance with what you think is for their own good. You cannot do things "to" people without their consent because you believe that it would help them. You cannot disregard their needs, wishes, hopes and emotions (or rights) to "affect" them.

To do such things to others is to violate their autonomy as subjects. Ironically, many women suffer from this bizarre delusion that they are entitled to "alter" others to satisfy their own notions of what is right and/or good, perhaps as a response to being altered by the suffocating expectations of social sexism. There is no "remote control" for other people. Not yet. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")

Consciousness frightens people. We feel a need to deny consciousness or subjectivity to others. This is especially true of women who have been denied autonomy themselves by powerful men -- fathers or abusive husbands. More astonishingly, many people feel a need to deny consciousness to themselves.

As Erik Fromm suggests, persons try desperately to escape freedom. This accounts for Darwinian explanations and dismissals of mere "behavior" or "events" as opposed to "actions," as evolutionary drives, or Freudian subconscious drives, Marxist economic determinations, and many other efforts to avoid the reality of subjective choice and construction -- not always conscious to be sure, but quite real -- of those annoying "lesser" others whom we need to "fix," like women, racist stereotypes, "inferiors," "crazy people," Communists, terrorists, muslim fanatics, "detainees," Democrats or Republicans. For some reason, these others do not want us to "fix" them. ("'The Matrix': A Movie Review" and "'The Island': A Movie Review.")

"Rejecting his own existence, the nihilist must also reject the existences which confirm it. If he wills himself to be nothing, [an object?] all mankind must also be annihilated; otherwise, by means of the presence of this world that the Other reveals he meets himself as a presence in the world. But this thirst for destruction immediately takes the form of a desire for power. The taste of nothingness joins the original taste of being whereby every man is first defined; he realizes himself as a being by making himself that by which nothingness comes into the world. Thus, Nazism was both a will for power and a will for suicide at the same time. From a historical point of view, Nazism has many other features besides; in particular, beside the dark romanticism [Ayn Rand] which led Rauschning to entitle his work The Revolution of Nihilism, we also find a gloomy seriousness. But it is interesting to note that its ideology did not make this alliance impossible, for the serious often rallies to a partial nihilism, denying everything which is not its object in order to hide from itself the antinomies of action."

Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, at pp. 55-56. ("'The Rite': A Movie Review.")

Tragically, this nihilistic impulse and will to power, usually, will result not only in suicide, but also in the destruction of persons surrounding desolate and despairing individuals trapped in moral nothingness or squalor. ("More Censorship and Cybercrime" and "Censorship!")

II. Can you buy persons in America?

A. Electronic Slaves at the Megaplex.

Two features of our culture are relevant to my discussion of women (mostly) in these very weird situations of so-called "celebrity."

"Celebrity" is somewhat different from the older word and concept of "fame." Fame seemed to point to something more lasting and related to positive achievement of some kind. Celebrity is a kind of fancy notoriety or object-status. Jean-Paul Sartre was famous; Mamie Van Doren was a celebrity. If you ask "who?," then you have proven my point. ("Celebrity" and "Pulp Fiction.")

Entanglement of America's twin deities -- sex and money -- which are usually "in bed together," as it were, round out the picture of our contemporary "reality." Commercialization, commodification, packaging accompanies the notion of a "movie star." It is not simply that movie stars are, and have always been, commercial entities (or products). Smart "stars" and all women in Hollywood have always known this is one price of success in the movie business -- being transformed into a joke. I think this recognition that she had been made into a dirty joke had much to do with the tragic death of Marilyn Monroe. ("Of Women and Their Elegance.")

What is new in American culture is the displacement of the iconic status of celebrity not only into products, but as a single, all-consuming (right word!) action and event that matters: BUYING THINGS. Stardom is about "buying things" with your newfound wealth, even as other people buy you, through purchasing your image on "things." Persons used to have souls, now they have "images" and "image-consultants" instead of priests, which may be an improvement:

"Aside from the changes in society as a whole, developments like hedonistic consumerism and the constant need of stimulation of the body, which make any qualitative human relationships hard to maintain, it is a question of breakdown in cultural resources, what Raymond Williams calls structures of meaning. Except for the church, there are few potent traditions on which one can fall back in dealing with hopelessness and meaninglessness. There used to be a set of stories that could convince people that their absurd situation was one worth coping with, but the passivity is now overwhelming. Drug addiction is only one manifestation of this -- you live a life of living death, of slower death, rather than killing yourself immediately. [The goal of torturers and powerful officials in many places -- including quite a few in America, like New Jersey -- is to instill nihilism by denying the value of anything or anyone that you care about.] I recently spoke at a high school in Brooklyn, and the figures are staggering: almost 30 percent had attempted suicide, 70 percent were deeply linked to drugs. This is what I mean by 'walking nihilism.' It is the imposing of closure on the human organism, intentionally, by that organism itself. Such nihilism is not cute. We are not dancing on Nietzsche's texts here and talking about nihilism; we are in a nihilism that is lived. We are talking about real obstacles to the sustaining of a people."

West, The Cornel West Reader, p. 293.

You purchase the identity, role, or status of the action hero of your choice with the acquisition of the official t-shirt, or other item. You buy the t-shirt and you become the "One." Batman underwear is available at Target for $4.95. For an extra dollar on the item price, you can probably get your Batman underwear bearing the signature of Christian Bale. Soon "Inception" t-shirts inviting you to "Take the Leap of Faith!" will also be available at K-Mart and fine stores everywhere. The Batman underwear features the bat logo on the fly, as it were, and "Inception" may feature a spinning top in the place of honor. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")

The predictability of response from others is what commodification promises. You pay your money and you get the quality of the product (or woman) associated with your "fantasy image" along with your expectations. People want reliability, predictability, every time, in terms of the reactions of others, as with electronic appliances. This expectation is very distant from the often painful and messy reality of sharing a love with and for another subjectivity, where the mystery and inner pain of the beloved is shared, where one must love without full understanding, sometimes, and respecting the boundaries, privacy, silences and needs of another person. ("Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey" and "Sexism, Race, and Incarceration," then "Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meaning(s) of Prison.")

Genuine love grows and deepens with pain and the passage of time; the commercial form of what is called "love" is about purchasing or getting a newer model. Love may increase and live with a person in the absence of the beloved and despite the loss of someone with whom a life has been shared. Love is a lifetime deal. ("'The English Patient': A Movie Review.")

Transferral of these needs and cultural expectations -- which are still overwhelmingly and uniquely American -- to the sexual realm and encounter means that sex is abstracted into a symbolic exchange, a mediated encounter coded in movie "icons." Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, DiCaprio and Winslet on the Titanic are found at the local wax museum. This museum is an externalization of our collective subconscious in America. People magazine. Our only "real" shared territory these days -- given the differences between many factions of the society -- is entertainment culture. We are beginning to treat one another as we treat our lap tops, I-pods, DVD players, cars. ("'Diamonds Are Forever': A Movie Review" and "A Doll's Aria.")

We have deviated "recognition" of the other, as a person, into abstract fictional identities associated with Hollywood characters as "avatars." (See Bruce Willis in "Surrogates.") Look at human behavior in New York bookstores, sidewalks, shopping areas. I am sure that you will find yourself in the company of any number of Scarlet Johanssons, Kate Winslets, Zoe Zaldanas or Leonardo DiCaprios, Denzel Washingtons, Harrison Fords. The reason we are projecting our inner needs and desires on to Hollywood fictions and commercial products, also actors (Carmen Luvana, Jenna Jameson), is because they are more convenient and better at meeting our "needs" than "real people." ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")

This is a hell of a burden to impose on artists. This is to make movie actors "unreal." Yes, movie actors are real people, but not in their capacities as "stars." As movie stars, persons become commodities. Smart actors in the movie business never forget that truth. We have made it impermissible not only for movie stars to age, become sick, commit a crime, but we have deemed it an affront when a movie star dies. Harrison Ford said to an interviewer: "I figured out that Hollywood is about money early on." ("A.I.")

"I do think that the influence of Skinnerian behaviorism in the United States can actually be discerned in certain fragments of American life. Most people in the United States believe that they have to be trained to do things (even to make love), and then being trained they must wait for the approriate conditions to be realised. [sic.] Then, like automata, they will routinely produce the necessary actions. Renting a car in the United States is a fascinating example of this. The beautifully trained Avis girl [sic.] says the same thing from coast to coast, talking exactly like some automaton from Dr. Who, and one can see somehow that that person deeply believes that this is the way the human psyche should function. [The word "function" is used without irony.] The idea of doing the thing a little bit differently each time, perhaps instead of saying 'take care how you go now, do you hear,' saying something else instead, even outside the exigencies of a job, would threaten the kind of routinisation in American social interchanges that goes well beyond the ritual of custom. [Courtrooms may be worse examples of this phenomenon despite the hard truth that justice is always individual.] I think one of the elements in this assumption of scientism that has somehow filtered down through the teachers' colleges, through the business schools [law schools] -- a legacy of the idea [of] humans as fit subjects for experimentation, that simple or complicated they are ultimately automata. That I think is not a scientific principle, but a moral view which I would wish to repudiate."

Rom Harre, "An Analysis of Social Activity," in Jonathan Miller, States of Mind, at p. 172.

The "girl" in the Avis office has a counterpart in every office that you will visit in America, whether in banks, hospitals, shops. This depersonalized attitude to "dealing with" others is becoming common throughout the culture, together with the false and evil assumptions concerning humanity from which they derive.

These philosophical assumptions -- for this is what they are, bad philosophical ideas -- have produced horrors like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, but they will do much greater harm unless they are challenged now. Persons are not and should not be "cyborgs." ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem" and "Good Will Humping.")

Being treated like a thing will generate a "thing-like" response. The phenomenon of "black rage" -- which is a real and highly understandable condition -- is a response to dehumanization. One would have to be deaf to the meaning of words and blind to the realities of our lives in America to believe otherwise. It is either because one believes in an inherent "superiority" of one race over others, or because of social conditions, that African-Americans are incarcerated well in excess of their share in criminality as compared with whites in the United States, that they suffer from emotional illnesses, higher suicide rates, worse poverty rates, denials of education, publication, or other creative opportunities in comparison with whites. Few people will admit to being racists these days. When alternative sociological explanations for disparities affecting African-Americans are discarded, only one intellectually respectable response to what we see and live with in America remains -- it is called "racism."

Compare Ray Rivera, "In Calm 911 Call, a Killer of 8 Spoke of Wanting to Kill More," in The New York Times, August 6, 2010, at p. A1 with Margalit Fox, "Marilyn Buck, 62; Imprisoned for Brink's Holdup," in The New York Times, August 6, 2010, at p. A21; "New York's Prisons Fall Short Again," (Editorial) in The New York Times, March 22, 2011, at p. A26 and David Kaiser & Lovisa Stannow, "Prison Rape," in The New York Review of Books, March 24, 2011, at p. 26.

Concerning New Jersey's continuing plunge into the sewer of pervasive child molestation, see John Petrick, "Paterson Man Gets 12 Years for Sexual Assault of Girls, 9," in The Record, March 30, 2011, at p. L-6 and Erik Shilling, "Garfield Man Charged in Sex Assault," in The Record, March 30, 2011, at p. L-3. ("Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "New Jersey Prosecutors and the Mafia.")

The logical inferrence that can be drawn from an examination of a great deal of American social science, penology, social psychology and forensic science included, is that there are persons (experts) whose goal is to generate criminality from oppressed people through the use of frustrations and denials of self-esteem. I cannot imagine what other reaction persons expect from individuals in prisons or inner-city settings targeted for experimentation in such horrible ways and bombarded with contradictory messages concerning consumption and violence. I am sure that one goal of the obstructions to my communication efforts are to generate a violent or pathological response from me. I doubt that such efforts will succeed with me. However, I am sure that -- if such tactics are used against vulnerable people -- many victims will be made to destroy themselves by torturers. http://www.justdetention.org/ (Torture as sex in America's prisons, especially as regards women.)

Tragically, hatred of women is matched by the hatred of many social scientists (often females!) for men and/or women on display in efforts to condition "acceptable behavior" from inmates in U.S. prisons. Torture as therapy is always a sexual act. ("'Shoot 'Em Up': A Movie Review.")

The utterly harassed individual -- even non-human animals -- who react to cruelty by lashing out at torturers or "trainers" is providing the expected response to "conditioning" that will be used to rationalize the racist and other evil assumptions motivating the so-called "research" to begin with.

Violence is what America wants from young African-American or other minority males. Sex is what America wants from young and desirable women. As crazy as this sounds, there is no other way that our social reality makes sense. It is possible that these "wants" are not fully conscious for many of our leaders and social scientists. We teach these same sexually-heightened young people that they should abstain and be "good." Result: schizophrenia or suicide. R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1960), pp. 58-61 and D.D. Jackson, "A Note on the Importance of Trauma in the Genesis of Schizophrenia," in Psychiatric Quaterly, Vol. 20, p. 181.

Is the goal of the constant "error" insertions in my writings to produce a violent reaction, breakdown, depression, or is it all of the above? I will continue to write.

III. "An Essay on Liberation": Prostitutes, Performers, and "Products.

A. Andrea Adams, Brittany Murphy, Lindsay Lohan, Kristin Riordan.

Relations among persons as well as between individuals and government agencies are depersonalized as never before. This impersonality or depersonalization is typical of the interactions that are inescapable for everyone in postmodernist cultures. I think this feature of our society and aspect of our lives has now become worse than depersonalization, more like inhumanity.

The inhumanity becomes structural and systematic, a feature of the social hirerarchies that we create and that then create us, "speaking our subjectivity," as a language of cultural/commercial exchange. ("Antonio Gramsci and Hegemony" and "Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Redemption.")

Others are seen as obstacles to one's goals or means to achieving them, instruments and not ends in themselves. Get that promotion by doing whatever is necessary, make sure that things run efficiently, meet one's sales quota at any price, be seen as having satisfied officially-set objectives whatever the reality may be and regardless of the human cost. After all, we are told, there is no "objective" reality under the dominant contemporary ideology beyond self-defined strategies and goals, specifications that simply are reality, persons merely become statistics. ("'Michael Clayton': A Movie Review" and Michael Caine in "A Terrible Shock to the System.")

This fiction in which we live (persons as instruments) enters into punishment in the legal system:

"Moreover, the prison sentence, which is always computed in terms of time, is related to abstract quantification, evoking the rise of science and what is often referred to as the Age of Reason. We should keep in mind that this was precisely the historical period when the value of labor began to be calculated in terms of time and therefore compensated in another quantifiable way, by money. The computability of state punishment in terms of time -- days, months, years -- resonates with the role of labor-time as the basis for computing the value of capitalist commodities. [Brittany Murphy] Marxist theorists of punishment have noted that precisely the historical period during which the commodity form arose is the era during which penitentiary sentences emerged as the primary form of punishment."

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, at p. 44. (Foucault, De Sade.)

Not only are you an object, but you are an object reducible to a certain amount of money. This status as a "commodity" is true of every movie star, including those who are also genuine artists.

Celebrities are not "real" persons for audience members. People on red carpets are rarely viewed as themselves audience members or occasional shoppers in grocery stores. Celebrities become, for lack of a better word, "tokens," icons for display, whose status and value are precarious and always fluctuating. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review.")

Like baseball cards, today's trendy beautiful actress appearing on a magazine cover will be gone tomorrow, or on a reality show, "traded-in" for a younger, more beautiful, trendier version of herself appearing in Hollywood, seemingly, every day. To gain one pound (size 4) or age from the median ideal in today's media circles (age 19) is a terrible offense which makes one's professional life even more precarious.

Like a fancy car, whose value declines the moment one drives it out of the show room, beautiful women are old at 30 in Hollywood, especially if they play ingenues. Worse, it may be that women in all of American public life are "old" at 30 years-of-age. (Again: "'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")

To buy into this system of meanings and shallow scheme of values is to guarantee misery for yourself and tragedy for all. It is essential for women placed in such absurd and evil situations to realize that these corporate commercial values are just that: all about money, not about people.

Who you are is reflective of those you love and the people who love you. What matters is what you find meaningful, satisfying, creative, or important, and not what others tell you is worthwhile (money, for example, or political power).

You and only you can define your purposes, meanings, loves. No one, certainly no so-called "therapist," torturer, cop, lawyer, judge, or other "expert" can presume to define your subjectivity, nor can anyone (legitimately) deny that inner realm to you by making you a slave, or an object of conditioning. In terms of depersonalization, Marilyn Straus, there is no difference between your situation and the plight of someone like Lyndsay Lohan. ("An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli" and "Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")

There will always be plenty of people trying to do exactly that to you -- to enslave you. In the curious phase of culture we now occupy, there is an effort underway to possess "electronic slaves" through the consumption of DVD's and magazines.

We are projecting absurd emotional needs on to celebrities whom we, too often, worship as substitutes for the gods of the ancient pantheon. Meeting celebrities in the flesh will almost always be less interesting than studying their works. The AMC t.v. shows "Mad Men" and "Rubicon" are examining some of these issues from very different perspectives. ("'The Prisoner': A Review of the AMC Television Series.")

No one can tell you what you must find beautiful or good. The conclusion that a film or book is "good" or "great" is less important than discovering the conclusion for yourself, experiencing art, wrestling with its meaning and importance is what matters. The destination is the journey with all cultural experience as opposed to consumption. The point of seeing a movie is to see/experience that movie for yourself and decide what it means, or whether you like it, certainly not merely to tell your friends that you saw the movie or to adopt the views of a famous critic in a newspaper. ("David Denby is Not Amused.")

No one can tell you what to feel. The purpose of any human life is to live it, fully and on your own terms, as a person. In my judgment, this requires a moral outlook on life and most importantly, the capacity to love deeply and truly. These emotions and capacities are also threatened today by the shallowness of our public culture and decline in education, alienation, consumerism, rampant nihilism, official inhumanity, and the loss of spirituality regardless of what you think of religion. We no longer really see one another or feel one another's pains and losses.

Why should it surprise us that our reactions to works of art are so inadequate?

Social life is meant to be inadequate, sometimes non-existent. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld" and "Why I am not an ethical relativist.")

Absence of feeling and imagination explains the death of 18 year-old Andrea Adams who "jumped from the tenth floor of the Tower Block in which she had spent the last few months of her life."

The indifference of overworked and burned-out civil cervants, the almost deliberate destruction of all ego supports and coping mechanisms (did they obstruct her writings?), separation from the one person who genuinely cared for this young woman -- all of this amounts to a kind of murder by ironically-named "social welfare workers."

The cruelty barely concealed behind psychobabble platitudes and New Age drivel, or policy-wonk talk and legalisms, is shown to be what it is -- lethal platitudes offered as a smoke screen for murder or indifference amounting to murder and greed for public money:

"At the inquest, coroner John Pollard identified 23 separate failings of individuals, organisations and authorities that had contact with Andrea during the critical stages prior to her death, yet ruled that none of the apparent failures had a direct causal link with Andrea's death. 'Rather, she was completely overwhelmed by the apparent hopelessness and worthlessness of her situation.' ... "

Worse, is malice, sadism, delight in cruelty that become common experiences for powerless young women in Europe and/or America, especially in places like Hollywood.

There are so-called "experts" in America who produce feelings of helplessness in persons targeted for destruction for a "small fee." ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")

"In their own internal inquiry into Andrea's death, the Greater Manchester police condemned the officers' lack of action and failure to contact Andrea's mental health worker." (The Guardian, July 7, 2010, at p. 7.)

It is difficult not to see the death of Brittany Murphy -- whose failed effort to remain 19 years-old forever and a size 4 is both heartbreaking and absurd -- as closely related to the death of Ms. Adams. Seeing Ms. Mulligan's face on a magazine cover or Ms. Wasikowska's success as "Alice," I feel great concern for their future welfare. (Both of these new young stars look to be about 19 years-old and wear a size 4, I believe.)

Moreover, dozens of other young women, like these two victims, Ms. Murphy and Ms. Adams, die in America and the UK on a daily basis. I have known some of these victims. ("Would you have helped Katherine 'Kitty' Genovese?")

The result of incarcerating Lindsey Lohan, for example, may be disastrous in the long term:

"There is a horrible inevitability to the news that Lindsay Lohan is going to prison. After all, this won't be the 24-year-old actor's first period of incarceration. In 2007, she was convicted of driving under the influence and cocaine use after a meeting between her Mercedes-Benz and a Beverly Hills tree. She spent 84 minutes behind bars, her one-day sentence having been reduced as a response to prison overcrowding. This time she'll need to pack a toothbrush." (The Guardian, July 8, 2010, at p. 14.)

A jail sentence is the best way of destroying what remains of this young woman's self-esteem, reinforcing negative assaults upon her worth, after surviving a broken home and difficult upbringing in the Disney-like asylum of Hollywood. It is a miracle that Ms. Lohan is not more disturbed than she is. ("The Art of Melanie Griffith.")

If Ms. Lohan is allowed to use her talent -- which is clearly her way to cope with adversity -- to help others (by teaching drama to persons traumatized by rape or other violations, for example) as part of a creative and mixed non-custodial sentencing package, I believe that Ms. Lohan is much more likely to do well leaving self-destructiveness behind. Someone who has so much to give the world should not be consigned to this oblivion of a jail sentence in response to what, obviously, is a cry for help. ("The Art of Robert Downey, Jr.")

Optimum results are more likely with the right relationships in Ms. Lohan's life. The yearning of power-wielders to impose their will on persons they may secretly envy and/or despise for their talents and intellect is a very ugly and visible aspect of many judicial or expert decisions in celebrity cases.

Being a famous movie star can help you in a courtroom but it can also hurt you. Many judges are addicted to the tributes and humiliations of persons who come before them, so-called therapists may be worse. Ironically, this is usually more true when judges encounter celebrity defendants or exceptionally gifted persons who are required to genuflect to them. I suspect that this was part of the problem in Robert Downey. Jr.'s experience with the legal system: judicial ego run amok. (Again: "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?")

Kristin Riordan -- the "prostitute" to New Jersey media -- is a human being, a person and not a "thing" or sex robot, who deserves a second chance to make something of her still young and redeemable life.

The tragic loss of one young woman's life should not produce yet another victim of forces of control and pacification of women that have grown monstrous, much to the delight of judges in what is widely acknowledged to be America's most corrupt and mafia-controlled jurisdiction, New Jersey.

Saying these things has much to do with the criminal censorship to which my writings are subjected. Assaults on an envied intellect will not make you any smarter, New Jersey Cubanoids. New Jersey officials may suppress, censor, alter my writings or destroy my cable signal to prevent me from writing further.

I do not believe that these actions are taken because my writings are ineffective. I cannot believe that daily violations of copyright laws and plagiarism, censorship and suppressions of speech as well as computer crime can take place without the cooperation of government in America. ("What is it like to be censored in America?")

"The construction of a free society would create new incentives for work. In the exploitative societies, the so-called work instinct is mainly the (more or less effectively) introjected necessity to perform productively in order to earn a living. But the life instincts themselves strive for the unification and enhancement of life; in nonrepressive sublimation they would provide the libidinal energy for work on the development of a reality which no longer demands the exploitative repression of the Pleasure Principle. The 'incentives' would then be built into the instinctual structure of men [and women]. Their sensibility would register, as biological relations, the difference between the ugly and the beautiful, between calm and noise, tenderness and brutality, intelligence and stupidity, joy and fun, and it would correlate this distinction with that between freedom and servitude. Freud's last theoretical conception recognizes the erotic instincts as work instincts -- work for the creation of a sensuous environment. The social expression of the liberated work instinct is cooperation, [mutuality of concern,] which, grounded in solidarity, directs the organization of the realm of necessity and the development of the realm of freedom. [Karl Marx's "Essay on the Jewish Question."] And there is an answer to the question which troubles the minds of so many men of good will: what are the people in a free society going to do? The answer which, I believe, strikes at the heart of the matter was given by a young black girl. She said: for the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going to do."

Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, at p. 91.

To remain passive in the face of a near plague of dying young women, or African-American men and all kinds of women being lost to pathologies resulting from out-of-control nihilism and commodification, racism and sexism, is to share in the guilt for these crimes by the culture. To witness torture and do nothing is to become a torturer. ("How Censorship Works in America.")

We are reducing young women -- more than ever in human history, I believe -- to sexual objects and destroying the self-esteem of those young women early in their lives. Women who do not meet the transitory and sometimes absurd standards of beauty of any given society are in deep trouble today. ("America's Holocaust.")

We are injuring young women, hurting them every day, making them feel more guilt for the slightest imperfection, aging -- soon breathing -- will be something women should feel guilty about. We are turning girls and women into "things" of little value.

Not every young woman will look like the latest fashion model. No one should feel that they have to look a "certain way." Beauty can mean many things.

We must be aware of the suffering and uncertainties that young women experience in a media age when self worth may involve identification with celebrity alter egos or ideals that become impossible to emulate. Loss of self-esteem has taken too many lives for us to remain indifferent to further losses. Let us hope that Brittany Murphy and Andrea Adams are the last victims of this scourge.

Are these the thoughts that you wish to censor and suppress or plagiarize in America?

Sources:

Periodicals:

Peggy Orenstein, "I Tweet, Therefore I am," in The New York Times Magazine, August 1, 2010, at p. 11. (Forget the psychobabble and look to the underlying ideas.)

Julie Bindel, "Driven to Despair: The Lonely Death of Andrea Adams," in The Guardian, July 8, 2010, at p. 4. (Harrowing account of psychologists lethal indifference to cruelty.)

Donald G. McNeil, Jr., "U.S. Infected Guatemalans With Syphilis in '40s," in The New York Times, October 2, 2010, at p. A1. (Who cares about the little brown people?)

Ryan Gilby, It's Not Too Late, Lindsay," in The Guardian, July 8, 2010, at p. 14

"I, Sexbot," in Harper's Monthly, March, 2010, at p. 25. http://www.truecompanion.com/

The foregoing article describes a company that offers "ROXXXY" the world's first autonomous sex robot. Designed by artificial intelligence engineer, Douglas Hines, ROXXXY is available in six different personalities, including "Frigid Farah" and "Mature Martha," and is priced starting at $7,000.00.

Only six personalities? The same society that allows for the sale of this sex robot criminalizes slavery and prostitution for persons engaging in sex acts for money. See the film "Cherry 2000" which dates from the late eighties. ROXXXY is the identity prepared for many women in America. Is this "robot" what many men want when they "marry" or "date" a woman? I hope not. ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review" and "The Art of Melanie Griffith.")

Benedict Carey & John Markoff, "Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot," in The New York Times, July 11, 2010, at p. A11.

U.S.C. researchers developed a robot called "BANDIT" to interact with children suffering from autism whose parents or significant others are "too busy" for such encounters. Soon these robots may be built to resemble celebrities, like Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, Lindsay Lohan or Brittany Murphy, Melanie Griffith and Robert Downey, Jr. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")

Jaron Lanier, "The First Church of Robotics," (Op-Ed) in The New York Times, August 9, 2010, at p. A19. (Confused Op-Ed essay, spoiled by over-editing, echoes my comments in this essay and elsewhere that "machines become more human as we become more machine-like." A citation to my work would have been appreciated, Mr. Lanier. Please see "What is it like to be plagiarized?")

Caitlin Flanagan & Natasha Vargas-Cooper, "Sex and Porn in the Age of the Internet," in The Atlantic Monthly, January/February, 2011, at pp. 87-104. (Further borrowing of ideas or reactions first published in these blogs without acknowledgment.)

Kira Cochraine & Hadley Freeman, "Feminist Icon? The Lady Gaga Debate," in The Guardian, September 17, 2010, at pp. 4-6. ("I am not a piece of meat!")

James Garvey, "Hacker's Challenge," in The Philosopher's Magazine, 4th Quarter, 2010, at pp. 23-32. (November-December, 2010.)

Juan Galis-Menendez, "Magic, Technology, and the Self," http://www.geocities.com/newyearswithjuangm/philosophy.html

Juan Galis-Menendez, Audietur et Altera Pars, http://laingsociety.org/colloquia/polofdiagnosis/etaltera.htm

Juan Galis-Menendez, "R.D. Laing and Evil," at: http://www.laingsociety.org/colloquia/peaceconflict/natureofevil.jgm.htm

I am very grateful for this publication and for the creation of a link to this blog at that site. One of these essays has also been selected for inclusion in a Critical Psychiatry web site in the UK which has also linked to these blogs. http://www.uea.ac.uk/~wp276/article.htm (I am told that several of my writings are available in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America.)

A link to this article and to my blogs is found at http://www.rosemadder.com/

Dennis Overbye, "Is Gravity Real? A Scientist Takes On Newton," in The New York Times, Science Times, July 13, 2010, at p. D1. (The "ideal" nature of gravity and its "illusory" properties are set forth, allegedly, by daring physicist and Kantian, Erik Verlinde. I believe this article is a hoax or fraud.)

Ray Rivera, "In Calm 911 Call, a Killer of 8 Spoke of Wanting to Kill More," in The New York Times, August 6, 2010, at p. A1. ("Black Rage" and see Charlize Theron in "Monster.")

Margalit Fox, "Marilyn Buck, 62; Imprisoned for Brinks Holdup," in The New York Times, August 6, 2010, at p. A21. (Every crime committed by a woman in America, often unknowingly, is a political act.)

Previous Writings Dealing With Similar Issues: "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem," "A Doll's Aria," "John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness," and "Would You Have Helped Katherine 'Kitty' Genovese?" then "Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey" and "Foucault, Rose, Davis, and the Meaning(s) of Prison" also "Mind and Machine" and "Good Will Humping."

Scholarly Works:

Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1993).

Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London & New York: Verso, 2004).

Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992).

David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Andrew Collier, R.D. Laing: The Philosophy and Politics of Psychotherapy (New York: Pantheon, 1977).

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories, 2003).

Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Philosophical Society, 1948).

Terry Eagleton, On Evil (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2010.)

Stephen F. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion Books, 2007).

Susan Estrich, Real Rape: How the Legal System Victimizes Women Who Say No (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973).

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1965).

Marilyn French, The Women's Room (New York: Summit Books, 1977).

Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Marjorie Grene, Introduction to Existentialism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1948).

John Gribbin, In Search of the Double Helix (New York: Bantam, 1985).

Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).

Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," in Thomas Doherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 62.

Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (New York: Cornell University Press, 1981).

R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1960).

R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1967).

Norman Mailer, Of Women and Their Elegance (New York: Tom Doherty, 1980).

Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (New York: Dover, 1999), (1st ed., 1869).

Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Katha Pollitt, Learning to Drive and Other Stories (New York: Random House, 2007).

Rick Roderick, Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986).

Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1994).

Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Kensignton Books, 1957).

Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic (New York: Free Press, 1986).

John H. Smith, Dialectics of the Will (Mich.: Wayne State U. Press, 2000).

Claudia Springer, Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age (Austin: University of Texas, 1996).

Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

Roberto Mangaberia Unger, Passion: An Essay on Personality (New York: Free Press, 1984).

Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession With Purity is Hurting Young Women (New York: Seal Press, 2010). http://www.feministing.org/

Cornel West, The Cornel West Reader (New York: Perseus Books, 1999).

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (New York: Random House, 1988).

The Proust Questionaire.

"Despite her journal sketches, she no longer really believed in characters. They were quaint devices that belonged to the nineteenth century. The very concept of character was founded on errors that modern psychology had exposed. Plots too were like rusted machinery whose wheels would no longer turn. A modern novelist could no more write characters and plots than a modern composer could a Mozart symphony. It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning, the sensations of a child standing at a window, the curve and dip of a swallow's flight over a pool of water. The novel of the future would be unlike anything in the past."

Ian McEwan, Atonement (New York: Anchor, 2001), p. 265.

"I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess. Clad only in a garter belt and one dress shield, I held off the entire elite of the Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for 'why' or 'because.' Wielding a stone ax, I broke the arms, the limbs, the balls of their finest warriors, my beauty blinding them, as it does all men, unmanning them in the way that King Kong was reduced to a mere simian whimper by beauteous Fay Wray whom I resemble left three-quarter profile if the key light is no more than five feet high during the close shot."

Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge (New York: Bantam, 1968), p. 1.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Not what, but who.

What is your current state of mind?

Determined.

What or who is the greatest love of your life?

Every love is the greatest love of my life.

Which living person do you most admire?

With the death of Nelson Mandela, Noam Chomsky is my preferred person.

What is the quality you most like in a man?

Loyalty.

What is the quality you most like in a woman

Grace.

What is your greatest extravagance?

Books. Movies. Music.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Cruelty.

What is your greatest fear?

A growing withdrawal of love and compassion from human societies.

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Social adjustment.

Which living person do you most despise?

Feel anger, struggle for justice, demand a confrontation with evil, but do not "despise" anyone. Pity them. It is not easy, I know, because hatred combined with disgust are overwhelming emotions sometimes. Still, pity them. Evil persons are dead and do not know it.

When and where were you happiest

In Paris, with two women. (Interpretation required.) And in Rome with friends and someone I love very deeply.

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

"Happily," I refrain from overusing words -- like "mad cool"! -- and others "too." (I am also reluctant to use quotation "marks" or exclamations!!!)

Which talent would you most like to have?

I am torn between singing Otello and writing like Vidal, then I recognize that they are the same talent -- communication.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be

I would be six feet tall.

If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?

You mean, again?

What is your most treasured possession

Photographs of people I love, and an imagined picture of someone that I keep in my mind. I only keep the picture in my mind. The person is and always will be, FREE. I hope that you will be ...

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery

One of America's worst prisons, including an emotional cell that I sometimes inhabit.

What do you value most in your friends?

Loyalty.

Who are your favorite writers?

Shakespeare, Byron, Marti, Hugo, Dickens, Austen, Hemingway, Mailer, Vidal, Styron, Jacobson, McCarthy, Parker, Chandler, Fowles, Amis, Hitchens, Maugham, McEwan, Burgess, Fuentes, Borges, Barnes, Lively, Byatt, Murdoch, Jong, Baldwin, Davis, Hughes, Roth, Rushdie, Roy, West and many more, to say nothing of other philosophers, historians, scientists, painters and film makers, whose works must be "read." And someone named "Gore Vidal." Did I mention him?

Who is your favorite hero of fiction?

Myra Breckinridge and/or "as" Gore Vidal.

Who are your heros in real life?

In alphabetical order: Hilda, Isabel, Marilyn, Silvia, ... Alas, I don't know many people in real life.

What historical figure do you most identify with?

Baruch Spinoza. On July 27, 1656, this was the anathema pronounced on the "unethical and evil" Baruch Spinoza

" ... having long known of the evil opinions and deeds of Baruch de Spinoza, [we] have endeavored by various ways to turn him from his evil ways. But having been unable to reform him, but rather, on the contrary, daily receiving more information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about the monstrous deeds he did, and having for this numerous trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and born witness to this effect in the presence of said Espinoza" -- that's better than the OAE! -- "[we] ... have decided ... that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel. ... Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him, but the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven."

Mathew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 33-34.

"What matters is not what others think of us but what we think of them." (Gore Vidal)

How would you like to die

On a high note after my 101st birthday.

What is your greatest regret?

Missing, aching for someone dearly loved.

What is your motto?

Struggle.

Walker Percy on Symbols and Semiotics.

May 30, 2011 at 4:29 P.M. "Errors" were reinserted in this essay as part of the continuing computer crimes against me. In the absence of my personal computer I must repair the harm done to my works by N.J. officials (or their hackers) at public computers throughout New York city. I cannot say how many texts have been damaged in this latest wave of attacks. ("How censorship works in America.")

December 2, 2010 at 3:18 P.M. From a public computer: "Errors" reinserted in this essay have been corrected.

July 28, 2010 at 3:01 P.M. "Errors" were inserted and corrected in this essay which had been left alone for a while. Copyright protection and the U.S. Constitution have no meaning for New Jersey legal officials. This means that we can expect future vandalism of this essay and others aimed at causing psychological harm to me through what they call: "induced frustrations." Lots of luck, New Jersey.

July 7, 2010 at 2:23 P.M. I notice that one of my essays examining the work of Norman Mailer was deleted from this blog against my will by New Jersey's hackers. I will write another essay about Mailer to replace the deleted work which will probably appear under someone else's name in print. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and ''Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")

Walker Percy, "Symbol, Consciousness, and Intersubjectivity," and "Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism," in The Message in a Bottle (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1983), pp. 265-287.

Walker Percy, "A Semiotic Primer on the Self," in Lost in the Cosmos, The Last Self-Help Book (New York: Washington Square, 1983), pp. 86-140.

Henry Kisor, "Dr. Percy on Signs and Symbols," in Lewis A. Lawson & Victor A. Kramer, eds., Conversations With Walker Percy (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1985), p. 193.

Charles Sanders Peirce, Chance, Love and Logic: Philosophical Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1998), pp. 238-301.

John P. Hogan, Collingwood and Theological Hermeneutics (Latham: University Press Inc., 1998), pp. 167-196.

More good stuff about my book: http://www.forbesbookclub.com/authorbrowse.asp?letter=g

Walker Percy's essays and novels are philosophical in the sense that works by Camus and Sartre, Mann and Tolstoy are also philosophical meditations on ultimate life-issues by way of narrative structures.

Percy's writings illustrate forms of awareness and a concern with wisdom, which is enriched by Percy's Christian faith and familiarity with the tradition of Biblical scholarship and reflection. Percy was a physician and biologist, and he was up to date on scientific issues. Also, Percy was a Southerner.

Two of Percy's essays in a collection entitled The Message in the Bottle are especially relevant to my interests. You can read chapters 12 and 13 of that book together, for example, as explorations of the role of symbolic thinking in our self-understandings, particularly in coming to terms with the puzzle of consciousness, also in physics and mathematics. Both of these superb essays nonetheless suffer, I believe, from a failure to make use of key insights in the writings of Paul Ricoeur.

Percy begins by stating the issue dividing the two basic approaches to the mystery of consciousness: 1) the "explanatory-psychological" (behaviorist or scientific) view of consciousness; and 2) the "phenomenological-hermeneutic" (humanistic or interpretive) view. The first of these approaches seeks knowledge of causes and the workings of consciousness from an external or objective perspective; the second seeks understanding of consciousness from an interpretive or hermeneutic perspective.

Neither of these approaches is likely to be sufficient on its own or to eliminate its rival from the intellectual scene. Pluralists concerning descriptive vocabularies, like me, are convinced that we need both of these perspectives to know and/or understand the "unitary phenomenon of man."

Much depends on what aspects of human beings interest us. When it comes to the human realm of meanings, phenomenology wins; when it comes to understanding empirical reality, science wins. Men and women must be understood in both ways, externally and internally, because we live in dual realities. Percy says:

"One can either look upon consciousness as a public thing or event and as such open to explanatory inquiry; or one can regard it as an absolutely privileged realm, that by which I know anything at all -- including explanatory psychology. As exemplars of these two approaches I shall refer to ... the work of George H. Mead [behaviorist-externalist] and Edmund Husserl [phenomenologist-idealist-internalist].

I adopted a similar strategy by comparing the philosophies of Owen Flanagan and Paul Ricoeur.

Percy and I wish to use other thinkers as "place-holders" to mark the spot (roughly) that each occupies on the philosophical map then to move from one to the other (Ricoeur, for me; Mead for Percy), choosing one, finally, as home base -- in order to analyze consciousness and language philosophically -- so as to establish a reconciliation with the rival position.

Percy is best thought of as a scientific-phenomenological-existentialist.

No doubt Percy's existentialism was at least in part the result of his experience of Tuberculosis and stay at a sanitarium during the forties. Mr. Percy died some years ago. This experience of illness and training as a physician may also explain the Catholic novelist's fascination with Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

The "quest" is for a synthesis of these rival views, aufheben, or a form of "transcendence" (reconciliation is the "Holy Grail"). The problem for all philosophies results from the need to account for what Percy calls "intersubjectivity." I will speak of the "encounter with the Other" or of making the "Ogival crossing.

It may be best to pause in order to define some key terms that people often find puzzling. I happen to be reading Dan Brown's pulp novel The Da Vinci Code. The book is fun, if you recognize how silly it is and do not take it seriously. All of Percy's novels are better that The Da Vinci Code. Regrettably, many people do take that pulp novel seriously. Some of the subtexts in Brown's book are not very pleasant. I cannot help laughing at some of the blunders in Brown's novel. No, this is not getting off-course.

For one thing, Brown's hero (Robert Landon) is a "symbologist" who teaches at Harvard. There is no such academic subject. There are no university departments of "symbology." There are people who are experts in "semiotics," which is the "general study of symbolic systems, including language." A key text in semiotics is C.W. Morris, The Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938), all the way up to Umberto Eco's A Theory of Semiotics (1976).

Julia Kristeva makes use of the term "semiotics" in her own system, mostly to confuse everyone, which sounds like fun. A neo-Marxist tradition that interprets the language of commodities (as a system of signs) is associated with postmodernist sociological theory as in the writings of Jean Baudrillard.

"Hermeneutics" is "the theory and practice of interpretation." It is a modern method or discipline developed early in the nineteenth century in Biblical criticism which was extended by Schleimacher and Dilthey to cover the whole of human existence, distinguishing human from natural world concerns in social theory or "the human sciences" -- especially as developed by phenomenologists -- in a tradition including thinkers from Hegel (The Phenomenology of Mind) to Heidegger, especially Gadamer and Ricoeur in our times. American legal theory has made creative use of the field.

Back to Percy. Neither of the two basic approaches to the study of consciousness does very well in accounting for social reality (or intersubjectivity) because behaviorists are stuck on the "outside" of people, with what is observable, which is public and social; whereas phenomenologists are stuck on the "inside" of people, with their inner lives and development of intentionality, but unable to get to the public world of others.

John MacMurray and Gabriel Marcel, among others, help with this problem by making love the path to the other, an other who is always already with us:

Percy says -- I agree -- that many of these difficulties result from a failure to appreciate the crucial importance of symbols, especially words as symbols. Sources for this insight include Ernst Cassirer and Susan K. Langer. An appreciation of the peculiar role of symbols in formulating or constituting subjects ("and don't forget power!" Foucault says) will leads us to ...

" ... (1) confirm in an unexpected way Mead's thesis of the social origin of consciousness, (2) reveal intersubjectivity as one of the prime relations of the symbol meaning-structure, (3) provide access to a phenomenology of consciousness, not as a transcendental idealism, but as a mode of being emerging from the interrelations of real organisms in the world."

The failure to refer to Ricoeur is a major problem for Percy because Ricoeur's project begins from the insight that the "other is always with us already" to the extent that we are formulated or shaped in and by languages that define us and that we also help to redefine, all the time, in a kind of energy-exchange, bringing us close to idealism again.

"The symbol gives rise to thought," says Ricoeur. Symbols make thought and identity possible in community. A symbol is necessarily a social space.

We look for the self not "inside" the mind in a Cartesian meditation or by way of Husserl's epoche, but "outside" of the psyche, in collective mind or shared cultural meanings, through a "truncated ontology of the sign."

This is Ricoeur's Kantian move, which leads him in a Hegelian direction. You can do better than Mead, folks, and avoid all of the absurdities and ethical problems of behaviorism, while still achieving the objective and external perspective so beloved of those who are "into" scientific psychology and pragmatism.

"I am objective," says the science major. Ricoeur answers: "So am I." Lawyers ask: "What would you like me to be?" ("Behaviorism is Evil.')

French philosophers and literary theorists are way ahead of us in this area. True, from a Continental perspective, Percy is reinventing the wheel. However, he is doing so very well and translating these weird European ideas into an American idiom

"Semioticists take due notice of the relation of denotation in semantics, which is that dimension of semiotic which has to do with the RULES by which a symbol is said to denote its denotatum. ... ... Signification is essentially and irreducibly a triadic meaning-relation, whereas symbolization is essentially and irreducibly a tetradic relation. The three terms of the sign-response are related psycho-causally. The schema, sign -- organism -- significandum, has so persistently recommended itself as the ground of meaning, human and sub-human, because it deals with physical structures and with causal relations and energy exchanges between these structures."

In other words, for Percy, an organism is always merely "responding" (yes, but how freely?) to an environment in formulating an identity, even when the environment is a "sign-structure."

Now we need Derrida and Chomsky -- but also John Austin -- to remind Percy that language has a constitutive power. Every human environment is a language. Languages, however, are more than environments. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom" and "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")

Sign-mediation is more than an environment for a subject. Sign mediation creates what it describes. Think of mathematics and the years of effort to cope with such items as the Reiman hypothesis or Fermat's last theorem. (Austin's "How to do things with words.")

This linguistic essence is even more true of symbols. Just head down to Thompson Street and play chess with the hustlers. You will find yourself in a universe of knights and castles, "king's indians" and "queen's gambits." ("Sinbad's Excellent New York Adventure.")

I heard Derrida address these themes concerning the constitutive power of language, referring to Austin specifically (which was surprising), in a French language public lecture I attended at New York University's French Studies Center.

Legal training comes in handy at this point. American Constitutional theorists have found poststructuralist and hermeneutic theory useful for their interpretive concerns. In U.S. jurisprudence there are often legally-mandated terms ("magic words" ) that must be spoken in order to alter legal reality

"I now pronounce you man and wife."

When a statutorily mandated set of requirements are satisfied, a judge may speak these foregoing words creating a new entity, in fact, merely through the use of words. The life-world of those about and to whom such words are spoken is recreated, instantly, by their use.

Indeed, the entire society's legal reality is altered by such a pronouncement because the network of legal obligations changes for those with a new status and all other legal subjects. They (and we) stand on new common ground in a shared world of language-relations or meanings after such words are spoken. Denotation, the act of naming, requires the TWO, namer and hearer. My calling this thing a chair is another way of saying that it "is" a chair for you and me. Get this move:

"Every symbolic formulation, whether it be language, art, or even thought, requires a real or posited SOMEONE ELSE for whom the symbol is intended as meaningful. Denotation is an exercise in intersubjectivity. The two are suddenly no longer related as organisms in a nexus of interaction but as a namer and hearer of a name, an I and a Thou, co-conceivers and co-celebrants of the object beheld under the auspices of a common symbol." ("Is it rational to believe in God?")

I now reach for my copy of Judith Butler's and Gillian Rose's books and for John MacMurray's writings.

What does it mean to tell me that "Latinos are not smart enough to be philosophers?" What reality are we creating by doing this, speaking these words, to a young person? How about this: A judge holds his or her nose and says, "You are the personal injury lawyer from the storefront office, right?" Am I your "inferior," Mr. Rabner?

What place is created for you if you accept that label of "inferior'? What if you are "the Defendant"? Or "offender"? What if a woman is called a "filthy whore" or a "fat pig"? What if you are told in an American courtroom to "sit on the last bench in the room"? Do you embrace the label that seeks to dehumanize you and transform it? Or do you reject the entire discourse and create another? What is the best form of resistance to such stupidity and injustice? "Ethics"? You must be joking, New Jersey. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics" then "What is it like to be tortured?")

The trial or legal proceeding is already over when you can refer to a defendant on the front page of the newspaper in town as "the prostitute." ("Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey.")

When a judge can say before the trial of Mumia Abu Jamal "I am going to help them to fry that nigger!" the outcome is predetermined. Welcome to America's legal system! ("Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal" and "America's Holocaust" then "Race, Sex, and Incarceration" and, again, "Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey" and, finally, "Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meanings of Prison.")

I choose struggle. How about you?

You have forty-five minutes and may use any sources that you like to answer these questions. Finally, citing Gabriel Marcel's "intersubjective nexus," Percy concludes:

"If we wish to study the knowers themselves, the I-Thou relation, we must use some other instrument, speak some other language, perhaps an ontological one rather than physico-causal."

Then, the Turandot phenomenon:

"Awareness is not only intentional in character; it is also symbolic. ... I am not only conscious OF something; I am conscious of it as being what it is for you and me. ... The 'I think' is only made possible by a prior mutuality: 'we name.' ..."

We name. Mutual naming is only possible, in turn, because persons always share a common language of images or archetypes. In fact, that capacity for language is part of what it means to be a person, together with an aptitude for other forms of discourse or non-verbal languages -- art, for example -- and a set of collective memories, or a deep, shared or universal subconscious, which is expressed in archetypal symbols. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")

It is these symbols which (at the most profound level) locate or place each of us, like it or not, in the lives of all others. ("Daniel Dennett and the Theology of Science.")

Such a bizarre experience of "heightening" awaits many cinema stars who, usually through no choice of their own, tap into mythic or archetypal images and become undying (and often unwilling) symbols. Kate Winslet was faced with a Jaguar automobile named after her. This is a heavy burden, which must take a psychological toll on anyone. 12 cylinders, Kate? ("'The Reader': A Movie Review.")

Even in death these persons or their images (Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley) are used or exploited for purposes and reasons which are not their own. One is reminded of the mythology of shadows -- and of the theft of shadows -- as in the story of Peter Pan. ("'Finding Neverland': A Movie Review.")

Something deeper than words is involved in symbolizing by way of primal and archetypal images, for we reach that universal or fundamental humanity where we must stand together. And this "something" is captured in a few of our greatest symbols: Star of David (which is an abstract expression of all that is in Da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man" and more), Enlightened Buddha under the tree, and crucifix, all are representations of the point at which human and universe (God, if you like) meet, where all opposites are transcended and resolved -- including masculine and feminine -- in or by love. The crucifix is a symbol of ultimate community and our only possible total reconciliation of fate with hope.

Tragically, given the bloody history of humanity, a crucifix (like every other important symbol) must be ambiguous as a symbol.

If I were to meet the proverbial anthropologist from Mars (suppose he looks like Woody Allen or Marilyn Monroe, see what I mean?) and he or she asks me: "What is your species?"

My answer would be to point at such master symbols -- for me, this means a crucifix most of all -- and then to give him or her (it?) a "name."

Through naming we escape necessity.

Michel Foucault and the Authorship Question.

July 11, 2010 at 5:45 P.M. The following essay was subjected to numerous attacks when I first posted it at MSN and blogger:

New "errors" inserted into a number of essays, together with obstructions and problems accessing this site, have made it difficult to write today. I will continue to struggle to do so.

July 20, 2007 at 10:05 A.M. I am blocking:

http://m1.2mdn.net/viewad/1442731/1-transparent (NJ)

http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/N763.networksite.ww (NJ)

I have not replaced the image accompanying this essay, which has been blocked by hackers. Sometimes, blocked images are restored -- after a security search or restarting my computer, only to be deleted again. I believe that these hackers are affiliated with the disgraced legal system of New Jersey.

It is a federal crime to violate (or conspire to violate) civil rights, including free speech rights. The persons engaging in such violations -- in response to legitimate and legal criticisms -- are entrusted with enforcing the law, including civil rights laws. The persons engaging in this unethical and criminal conduct, publicly, will then judge the ethics of others. Please see "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court."

This continuing and very public horror is made possible by political bosses providing protection for such criminality.

Is a nation engaging in secret psychological tortures of its own citizens losing the authority to comment on the human rights records of other countries? Ethics? ("Is Senator Bob 'For' Human Rights?" and "Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?")

"What is an author?"

Michel Foucault once asked the question: "What is an author?" In seeking to answer this question, Foucault said: "I want to deal solely with the relationship between text and author and with the manner in which the text points to this figure that, at least in appearance, is outside it and antecedes it." (p. 101.)

All of my citations are to Foucault's essay "What is an Author?," in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Michel Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 101.

Prior to modernity there were simply stories. Story-tellers were the inheritors of an oral tradition of narration. The adventures and religious dreams of a people were sung or repeated from memory and taught to the young for centuries without much concern for attribution. Even after the arrival of writing there was little worry about attribution or identification of the teller of the tale.

The emergence of the author as an even more central figure than the hero of the story had to do with such material and concrete considerations as the development of copyright laws and the explosion in the earning power of authors resulting from the spread of literacy to the middle class after the industrial revolution.

Accounts of the arrival of Charles Dickens in New York to offer "dramatic" readings from his works in a sold-out Broadway theater suggest a level of celebrity for authors by the middle of the nineteenth century well in excess of anything cinema or rock stars can experience today.

The still young Foucault -- under the fading spell of structuralism and using terms like "signifier" and "signified" at the drop of Magritte's hat -- is fascinated by Beckett's riddle for the contemporary reader: "What does it matter who is speaking?"

It does not matter "who" speaks, Foucault suggests, because "writing unfolds like a game [or "playing"] (jeu) that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears." (p. 102.)

Perhaps the "real" Dickens -- for us -- is not the nineteenth century man arriving in New York with a lingering backache, but a voice or presence found in (or created by) sentences strung together in a text, black marks on white paper, words appearing before the eyes of the reader.

Today, in fact, words may just as well appear on a computer screen. The essential literary gesture is an invitation to the reader to share in the author's consciousness. It is a request to be seen and heard. ("Beauty and the Beast" then "John Banville's 'The Newton Letter.'")

Shakespeare promised to make his lover immortal with a Sonnet. He may well have succeeded in doing so despite the mysteries that gather around his own name. Yet the living person inspiring those passions is now long gone.

With the creation of a text -- say, a novel -- separated lovers can be reunited in a narrative and the "wounds of the spirit may heal," while also allowing for a final defeat not only of life's most cruel injustices and painful separations, but also of that "villain" time.

One excellent reason to write is to get even.

Is an author merely a name? The arrival of the author and the new prominence of texts in modernity is not unrelated to the crafty strategies by which writers seek to outwit death. Foucault says:

"Our culture has metamorphosed this idea of narrative, or writing, as something designed to ward off death. Writing has become linked to sacrifice, even to the sacrifice of life: It is now a voluntary effacement which does not need to be represented in books, since it is brought about in the writer's very existence. The work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now possesses the right to kill, to be its author's murderer, as in the cases of Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka." (p. 102.)

Is this true of Shakespeare?

Foucault is saving Shakespeare for later in his essay; it seems only fair that I do the same.

Comparisons abound at this point, everything from Julian Barnes' novel Flaubert's Parrot to George Perec's writings come to mind to illustrate Foucault's point. In the Michael Frayn novel The Trick of It, a puzzled academic follows "his" author to discern the magic that the unlikely figure conjures in order to perform this elusive trick of becoming an "author" by producing a narrative, only to find himself more bewildered in the end; worse, this puzzled academic finds himself pinned -- like a rare butterfly -- to the page of the very book the reader holds in his or her hands that is ostensibly written by someone named "Michael Frayn."

Nabokov's fascination with butterflies is understandable because these beautiful creatures are symbols both of the human soul and linguistic meaning, freedom and self-becoming. ("Lolita, Light of my life.")

I will set aside Nicholson Baker's exercise in Updike fascination entitled U and I since I have written a long essay on Updike myself. I am planning an even longer one about Gore Vidal to be called V and Me. Vidal anticipated all of this fancy Left Bank theory in his essay "French Letters: Theories of the New Novel" and in Myra Breckinridge, but even more by Vidal's reinvention of the Gospel narrative in Messiah, then again in Live From Golgotha. Here is a hint: Read the final paragraph of Messiah before you read the first. Colin McGinn, "Nabokov's Formula," in Ethics, Evil and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 108-113.

This disappearance of the author has led to a concern on the part of critics with several other notions meant to supplant the author in our investigations. One such notion is the idea of the "work."

What is the extent of the writerly "corpus" (interesting word!) of the author? How much is to be included in the writer's literary or written "works"? A grocery list? Jacques Derrida famously wonders about the inclusion in the Nietzsche Nachlass of a note: "I have forgotten my umbrella."

Where do we draw the boundary around a group of texts so as to call that group a single text? Are the Tales of the Thousand and One Nights only one "work"? What about The Decameron? Or The Cantebury Tales? What about the U.S. Constitution and the centuries of case law interpreting its abstract provisions? Does the original document and the set of interpretations generated by it constitute a single "work"?

The only possible response to these questions is the philosophers' favorite phrase -- "That depends on what you mean."

For Jean Paul Sartre there could be no author and no work until there was a reader. In his essay "What is Literature?" Sartre insisted: Literature demands "the conjoint effort of author and reader . ... There is no art except for others." (p. 37.)

In deciding between the idea of the author as exclusively the empirical reality of Charles Dickens with his backache and upset stomach arriving in New York, and the author as the persona standing behind the narratives appearing under the name "Charles Dickens," Foucault suggests that we play off "one against the other, two ways of characterizing writing, namely, the critical and the religious approaches. Giving writing a primal status seems to be a way of retranslating, in transcendental terms, both the theological affirmation of its sacred character and the critical affirmation of its creative character." (p. 104.)

This last statement by Foucault was merely the left jab followed by this beauty of a right cross:

"To admit that writing is, because of the very history that it made possible, subject to the test of oblivion and repression, seems to represent, in transcendental terms, the religious principle of the hidden meaning (which requires interpretation) and the critical principle of implicit significations, silent determinations, and obscured contents (which gives rise to commentary)." (p. 105.)

We live in a suspicious and literal time, a time that is wary of the imagination and its products; dismissive of the non-factual and brutally reductive in its understanding of truth. We prefer "masculine toughness" in thought to feminine "sensitivity."

The absurdity of these categories should be apparent, as I never tire of insisting.

The religious notion of the author as akin to a Kantian noumenal or "transcendental ego" floating above the page or within the tradition, like a guardian angel, is deeply unsettling to literal- but not literary-minded academics in America who, nevertheless, like to think of themselves as "rigorous" and "powerful" thinkers. Hence, some may wonder whether the questionable mathematical capacities of women indicate an inherent "inferiority," not realizing that it is only their own imaginative and intellectual inadequacies that such a question reveals. ("David Stove and the Intellectual Capacities of Women.")

Is it really not possible to imagine any other explanation for a difference in performance on math tests by young girls, Professor Summers, as compared with boys than so-called "intellectual deficiency" in young girls? Does a culture that makes the notion of a "math geek" even less acceptable for girls as compared with boys not have something to do with this situation?

Scholars in the humanities tend to suffer from "science envy." When Foucault throws in talk of the transcendental "excess of the text's meaning in relation to the author," professors panic, wondering whether law school is still an option. In fact, Foucault is only warming up. He will turn to the nature of the author's name and then to the author's function, before offering some conclusions. (Again: "David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women.")

"The other one, the one called 'Borges' ..." -- Jorge Luis Borges.

The disappearance of the author has been duly noted by Foucault, but then who or what is it that is disappearing? What is an author's "name" and is that all that we mean by authorship? Is an author only a "linkage" from the text to a name? What function does the author's name perform in a text, besides that of identification? Foucault says:

"The author's name is a proper name, and therefore it raises the problems common to all proper names. [Foucault cites John Searle's work concerning "speech acts."] ... Obviously, one cannot turn a proper name into a pure and simple reference. It has other than indicative functions: more than an indication, a gesture, a finger pointed at someone, it is the equivalent of a description." (p. 105.)

The distinction between denotation and connotation will not be all that helpful, much to the chagrin of analytical philosophers and literal-minded lawyers, because names of authors not only serve as labels attached to specific human beings, but also as general descriptions. To describe a situation as frightening may amount to saying that it was a "Steven King moment" while a nightmarish experience with bureaucracy becomes "Kafkaesque."

An author's name is both an identification of a historical individual and a description of a set of qualities that exist in the mind which are understood, through language, independently of the actual presence of a physical or empirical individual fulfilling (or displaying) those qualities. An appeal to Derrida's work is useful. (See the story entitled: "Sherlock Holmes and The Case of the Missing Author" and "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")

The same point applies to great literary characters, like Sherlock Holmes. To speak of sharp powers of deduction and flamboyant investigative techniques, for example, of the peculiar, embodied characteristics unique to Holmes, is instantly understandable to readers all over the world, regardless of the non-existence in the "real" world of a person possessing those specific mannerisms and history. Theological issues are highly analogous in this ostensibly "post-deistic culture."

Is our Western culture "post-deistic," I wonder? Foucault states:

"The proper name and the author's name are situated between the two poles of description and designation: they must have a certain link with what they name, but one that is neither entirely in the mode of designation nor in that of description; it must be a specific link. However -- and it is here that the particular difficulties of the author's name arise -- for the links between the proper name and the individual named and the author's name and what it names are not isomorphic and do not function in the same way." (p. 106.)

Samuel Clemens is a name attached to a specific individual, who is now gone; Mark Twain is an author associated with certain texts in a mysterious relationship, who is very much alive within those texts, amusing many and troubling others with unanticipated questions. Twain's disturbing essays on religion did not appear until after his death. There are distinct and philosophically puzzling relationships between those two names and what or "who" they "identify."

If it turns out that we were mistaken about the house in which Shakespeare was born, to take another example, so that tourists have been led around for decades in what turns out to be the home of, say, Shakespeare's taylor and not his own dwelling, this would have little bearing on the use of the name "Shakespeare" in connection with his plays, or upon what that name means for us.

On the other hand, if the author of Shakespeare's plays turned out to be the Earl of Oxford, Queen Elizabeth, or a visitor from another planet (I lean towards the third possibility), then the use of the name which has been attached to a set of specific texts becomes much more problematic. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")

We become less certain that we know who Shakespeare was or is, or with whom (with what historical personage) the qualities of the dazzling authorial intelligence that we associate with his great works is to be linked. What matters most to me, as a reader, is the possibility of encountering that intelligence -- not the name attached to it by scholars -- when I open my volume of The Collected Works of William Shakespeare.

To say that Homer, for example, did not exist may only amount to suggesting that several writers were brought together under that name and it would have no bearing on the quality of the texts which we associate with the name "Homer." Similarly, the intelligence and subtle humor emerging from the plays and poetry associated with the name "Shakespeare" continue to exist even if we decide to call that organizing intelligence by another name. This is because the value in the experience of the great works that we think of as "Shakespeare's plays" is not altered at all, and neither is the meeting with the genius to be found "within" them by such a change in attribution. "A rose by any other name ..."

Who is the author of Kierkegaard's texts? Victor Eremita, Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Frater Taciturnus, Constantine Constantius, are each narrators of different levels of intelligence and values, and different degrees of reliability. Kierkegaard is not usually regarded as a literary author, but as a writer of non-fiction, a philosopher, so that his texts are found in the philosophy section of the bookstore. Assuming for the moment that philosophy is best thought of as non-fiction, which is not at all clear, then it seems that the philosopher's name exists only to the extent that it performs a certain function. The author's role simply is that function -- to bring together and organize a number of texts. Also, the author establishes relationships between texts. For example: "this was written before his messy divorce, but after his conversion to Communism" may be a typical critical observation. Kierkegaard's device of deliberately fragmenting the literary self in order to avoid schizoid division in life -- or in the quest for Regina Olsen -- has not been surpassed. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow" and "What you will ..." then "Magician's Choice" and "Metaphor is Mystery.")

Scientists have found the notion of a "Deus Principle" similarly helpful in theoretical understandings of the workings of nature. This is a point reinforced and not challenged by the principle of parsimony.

I am certainly not suggesting that God is scientifically provable. I am suggesting that the idea of God may help "readers" to understand the meaning of what is "known" (scientifically) and is fully compatible with that knowledge as well as humanistic understandings in art. Others may prefer an "Anthropic" principle which may amount to the same thing. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")

Foucault summarizes his thinking:

"It would seem that the author's name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it; instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The author's name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and culture." (p. 107.)

Foucault concludes:

"The author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society." (p. 108.)

Authors only exist in societies where modes of discourse make the concept necessary. Within our Western civilization Foucault identifies four functions of the author's name: 1) the authorial function allows us to make texts or discourses "objects of appropriation," property, in other words; 2) it allows for the categorical differentiation of texts for scientific as opposed to literary purposes; 3) the author function does not merely develop spontaneously, so that it serves to "construct [socially] a certain rational being that we call an author" (p. 110.); 4) finally, the author provides the principle of a certain unity of writing.

Foucault might have added another function: The author becomes an identity, the performance of a role for that taciturn and shy person sitting at his computer keyboard constructing a narrative by which to transcend his or her physical and other limitations. ("Spephen Hawking's Free Will is Determined" and "Stephen Hawking is Right On Time.")

It is this penultimate function that provides the link to the tradition governing the attribution of Scripture and brings Foucault to the currently fashionable method of "hermeneutic reconstruction" -- which is a fancy way of saying "figuring out how or why some writing 'exists' as a text." Here is Foucault being brilliant again:

"The author is also the principle of a certain unity of writing -- all differences having to be resolved, at least in part, by the principles of evolution, maturation, or influence. The author also serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge in a series of texts: there must be -- at a certain level of his thought or desire, of his consciousness or unconscious -- a point where contradictions are resolved, where incompatible elements are at last tied together[,] or organized around a fundamental or originating contradiction." (p. 111.)

Think of the author as a magician who pulls not a rabbit, but him- or herself out of a hat, as part of the set of "tricks" presented to an audience. (The audience is really one "person" or "reader.") The literary magician's theatrical gestures, robes and wands, smoke and mirrors, must be seen as part of the literary "performance."

I often use the example of the narrator's opening monologue in "The Glass Menagerie" to illustrate this point -- "... [The author] is the opposite of the stage magician. [The magician] gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth; [the author] gives you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion." ("God is Texting Me!" then "Master and Commander.")

Notice where all of this is leading Foucault and all of us, as readers, for he extends his reasoning to the interpretation of traditions within languages that "speak" authors. This is to touch again on the sacred or religious origins of authorial power. ("Sinbad's Excellent New York Adventure" and "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")

Is the author dead?

"It is easy to see that in the sphere of discourse," Foucault writes, "one can be the author of much more than a book -- one can be the author of a theory, tradition, or discipline in which other books and authors will in their turn find a place. These authors are in a position which we call 'transdiscursive.' This is a recurring phenomenon[.]" (p. 113.)

Marx, Freud, or the authors of the American Constitution are, accordingly, "authors" of an entire mode of discourse, in which there is a recurring pattern of return to an original sacred or revered text (or texts) for re-authorization of the interpretive and constructive license to add or contribute to that tradition.

The literary-mythical tradition operates as a constraint on authorship setting the preconditions -- as do general social conditions and needs -- for what will be written and why. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")

The social setting along with the language used "creates" the author. The point to bear in mind is that the author is distinct from the person who writes the texts that we admire. Neither of these entities -- author nor individual human being -- can be "found" by searching for the other. Do not look for Samuel Clemens in the writings of Mark Twain for you may be disappointed. Foucault concludes:

"How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules? In short, it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse." (p. 118.)

The language and historical moment "speaks" the author according to Foucault. The author is only a functional principle of inclusion and exclusion, one that becomes less important with new modes of discourse.

Foucault wrote before the advent of the Internet, which seems to confirm some of his more dire predictions. As discourse spreads and morphs -- becomes a shape-shifter in cyberspace -- it acquires additions and variations while continuing to undergo transformations since an alter-ego borrows a text from another then taking that text (in its altered form) to a third location in a constant process of ever-wider dissemination. By such means traditional authorship becomes increasingly irrelevant and the scripted self is "disseminated" more widely.

The point may be clearer with cinema where a vocabulary of images is quickly shared among directors, writers, actors in the ultimate collaborative medium. Much the same may be said of celebrity and identity in the age of images as famous "personas" are fashioned in the way that actors create "characters" on screen. Leonardo DiCaprio must invent a movie star persona and an everyday self. Most of us can barely manage to create one identity. It is easy to see why famous people suffer from psychological "vertigo." ("Serendipity, III" and "'Inception': A Movie Review" then "A Doll's Aria.")

I reject Foucault's most extreme claims.

Without authors, without authorial vision, coherence and finally relevance both disappear from texts. Authors can never disappear entirely, they do not even fade away. "Authors" only become more complex entities in our brave new communicative environment. ("Conversation On a Train" and "Beauty and the Beast.")

"Look for me, find me," the author says, "in the magic castle of the text."

The reader must understand -- I know that this is paradoxical -- that by finding the author in any complex work, he or she will also be finding the unique personal truth of that work. If you find the author in the text then you will have found yourself in it. At the center of the linguistic labyrinth there is always a mirror which is held by the author. Analogies to the scientists' task of reading "the book of nature" should be obvious, along with the theological implications of this observation. ("Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Is this atheism's moment?" then "Pieta.")

This is the advice to keep in mind, when coping with the mystery of Shakespeare. Do not get bogged down in the historical clues about the Stratford genius concerning where he slept or what he ate. Search for Shakespeare in that glorious poetry of the plays and you will find him ... always smarter, wiser, more forgiving than yourself, telling you who you are.

The analogies to religious thinking, again, are obvious: At the center of any great "work" is the possibility of an embrace (abrazo) with an authorial intelligence that, through that experience of absorption alone, results in the giving and receiving of something precious. The books are for you. ("An Evening With Gore Vidal" and "Shakespeare's Black Prince.")

If it is true that every text is better for a good than for a bad reader, then it must be equally true that every good reader is made better by a rich and complex text which is the priceless gift of a good author. Moreover, the text is also made better by good readers. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review" and "'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")

Writing and reading well is a kind of "energy exchange," as Erica Jong has said. This may be even more true of cinema. Good and active viewers will always get more out of movies than passive viewers of films. (See my reviews of "The American" and "Inception.")

"I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still within a system of constraint -- one which will no longer be the author, but which will have to be determined, or perhaps experienced." (p. 119.)

Does it make a difference who is speaking?

Despite Foucault, I think that it always matters who writes a text and who wishes to read it. You are a text. ("Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author.")

The deepest connection in communication by means of language is always with an absent subject of discourse -- it is a human connection. I choose to read (and re-read) what a favorite author writes, not the writing that I then check against its source to determine who wrote it. If the text speaks to me I know who wrote it -- regardless of the name attached to the work. I defy anyone not to recognize the haunting voice of Myra Breckinridge on the page as contrasted with the Chandler-like style of, say, crime novelist Edgar Best. ("Metaphor is Mystery.")

Much the same may be said of film directors: I know when Steven Spielberg is directing after about two minutes of viewing a film.

Readers are changed by those authors whom we cherish, finding ourselves saying things in a new style as we absorb the admired qualities of the favored literary persona.

Among the most spiritual forms of love (and no, "love" is not too strong a word for serious readers when it comes to some authors) is that curious relationship that may arise between some writers and readers, between readers as the co-authors of the texts that they admire most and writers hoping to be understood (above and beyond their texts), or even loved, by their best readers. (See Virginia Wolf's "A Room of Her Own" and "The Ideal Reader.")

It has been suggested that "we read in order to know that we are not alone."

Maybe it is better to say that we create texts (and read them?) in order to find (or create?) our "other selves," perfect readers who will know that we were here and feel our absence when we are gone, sharing in our perceptions and pains, in our laughter and rage at the powerful, which is another way of saying, who will love us. ("Abrazo.")

We who search for missing lovers and truths, especially, will seek for -- and maybe find them -- only on the page. Recall E.M. Foster's advice: "Only connect."