Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Gottfried Leibniz: In accordance with the principle of pre-established harmony, the phenomenon of the chicken appearing to cross the road was caused by the action of monads following instructions given by God. The sufficient reason for the action may be known to God alone.
Today’s chicken joke makes idle fun of the earliest of the Seven Sages of Greece, Thales of Miletus (ca. -624 to ca. -546).
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Thales: Probably to advise another chicken.
The answer to the riddle is based on Diogenes Laërtius’ account of Thales’ answers to two questions:
When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, “To know one’s self.” And what was easy, “To advise another.”
The anachronistic picture of Thales is from the Nuremberg Chronicle, a history of the world published in 1493 under the title Liber Chronicarum. I guess any other image, no matter how authentic it might appear to us, would be almost as anachronistic.
About a year ago I was browsing in a book completely unrelated to my Ph.D. research; it was about criticism of Shakespeare plays on film. I happened on a phrase that summed up an unexpressed insight I’d had about my research subject (a Swiss traveler in the U.S. in the 1820s). It was a well-turned noun phrase: the “penetrating power of the perplexed foreign gaze.”
I grabbed an index card and made a note. The author was one Slavoj Zizek. Cool name, I thought. Must be some kind of critic. I felt grateful to him for supplying a label for my subject’s characteristic of, on the one hand, getting muddled about American commonplaces and, on the other, seizing on details and insights that an American observer would be almost certain to overlook. I thought this phrase might help me answer the prime dissertation question, “So what?”
I have forgotten when I learned that the Slovenian intellectual’s name is actually written “Žižek” and pronounced with “Zsa Zsa” consonants. The caroned Z, especially the capital, presents a challenge to a lot of English-language publishers, so it’s often reduced to an unadorned Z. (Do I sound like a typography geek? Guilty as charged.)
Nothing else came of my minor discovery until right after my oral exam last spring. My examining committee asked a few questions about my dissertation, and I innocently told the anecdote of happening on an apt phrase (which I repeated) from some critic called “Slavoy Zee-zek.” No one said anything, and I thought I detected one of those chills that follow a faux pas. I thought it must have been mild disapproval of my borrowing from cultural criticism before I had even read all my primary documents. It didn’t seem likely that the issue (if I wasn’t just being oversensitive) was with this particular critic.
Afterwards, when I finally sought some background on Žižek, I found that this presumably obscure writer is actually the hottest of academic celebrities right now. No wonder, then. Although I was the one who mentioned his name, I was probably the only person in the room who hadn’t formed an opinion about Žižek. As with preceding superstars like Derrida, Foucault, or Lacan, it seems that nobody who has heard of Žižek is indifferent to him. Not a few think he’s a fraud. Others have become his groupies. He’s the subject of at least one movie. And of course, in compliance with Godwin’s Law of Internet discourse, he’s been called a fascist.
Reading Žižek’s major work is a low priority for me, although I will track down his essay “The Foreign Gaze Which Sees Too Much.” Frankly I’m now concerned that by quoting him at all, I may be pigeonholed as part of some faction or other. It’s a little disheartening. I had hoped to find my way to some stimulating thinking about what may happen when a foreigner plays the role of observer. Turns out that the path leads to a battlefield.
So I wonder whether I can use Žižek’s essay as an authority, in the bibliographic sense, without implying that I’ve submitted to the authority of Žižek. The answer, of course, is that it depends on how each reader responds to my work. I’m probably worrying too much. (All part of the ordeal of dissertation writing, I guess.)
It also depends on whether Žižek sets off the academic equivalent of pack journalism, much as Foucault has done. As with pack journalists worrying the factoid of the moment, I’ve sometimes seen Foucault invoked simply (so it seems) out of a felt need to “work him in.” Mentioning Foucault shows that you’re caught up with the headlines. (I feel that I’m going to have to read Discipline and Punish, at least, because my subject writes about visits to American prisons and asylums. I think Foucault’s analysis, interesting as it is, also has a historical context, and therefore matters no more, probably less, than that of any relevant contemporary intellectual. But when publishing in our historical context, it’s de rigeur to discuss Foucault.)
I don’t mean to complain, as I know it only takes a minority of scholars (or journalists) to create an impression of a pack. It doesn’t mean that the majority is star-struck, or desperate for recognition, or pushing a political agenda. Most of us toil along doing interesting work in obscurity.
Anyway, my take on Žižek so far, based on superficial knowledge, is that he’s a passionate controversialist with a well-trained pen, something like Nietzsche, and like him, easy to misconstrue. He deserves most of the attention he’s getting, leaving aside the irrelevant question of whether someone else deserves it more. I’m very willing, as a reader and thinking person, to wrestle with his ideas and his language, as time permits. What I’m not willing to do is to join an embattled camp, either for or against Žižekism. I don’t see that as consistent with doing history well.
So on Friday my wife and I strolled beside a lake in north Alabama. We admired blue herons and Canada geese, we marveled at a stray sandpiper and a loon from the northern lakes, the way it vanished under water like a thought, and the wild calls it made.
It was a perfect day to be in the Tennessee River valley, car windows down, jackets unzipped, strangers beaming at one another. From a high bluff we gazed down deep into Buck’s Pocket, and even the baying of hounds and the odd gunshot sounded like part of a celebration. Alabama teems with life and beauty, and for all the blundering damage we do, we can’t spoil it all.
Only a German Lit major would think of this, but I just had to track down the devil’s complaint to Faust (in Goethe’s Faust, Part I). It’s about trying to do evil but only contributing to the good:
Was sich dem Nichts entgegenstellt,
Das Etwas, diese plumpe Welt,
So viel als ich schon unternommen,
Ich wußte nicht ihr beizukommen,
Mit Wellen, Stürmen, Schütteln, Brand -
Geruhig bleibt am Ende Meer und Land!
Und dem verdammten Zeug, der Tier- und Menschenbrut,
Dem ist nun gar nichts anzuhaben:
Wie viele hab ich schon begraben!
Und immer zirkuliert ein neues, frisches Blut.
In essence, the devil Mephistopheles is griping that despite all his efforts to trouble the earth and sea, and to wipe out the whole detestable brood of animals and humans, the earth is still serene and there is always “new, fresh blood” out there — always plenty of warm, grubby Something to overwhelm the purity of Nothing. What’s a poor devil to do?
I know cultural pessimism * has a venerable history in Western civilization, but I am inclined not to take part in it. (I guess I can claim Goethe for company in this.) Plodding mankind is not what reality is all about. Even if we succeed in doing ourselves in — and I’m not sure we could if we tried — but even then, life on earth will continue without us, thriving and changing as ever. I haven’t always believed in God, but somehow I’ve always believed in the poem “God’s Grandeur.” Or when I’ve been tempted not to, countless experiences have reminded me that “nature is never spent” and that “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”
I guess my gushing optimism is in danger of making nonsense of my title: What day isn’t perfect? Why make comparisons at all? I guess it’s just that some times and places are easier for our self-engrossed selves to appreciate. For me, Friday in north Alabama was among these.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher and all-around intellectual whose work has perhaps been more often cited than understood.
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Michel Foucault: The discursive practices of the farm, which led to the development of chicken wire, the fenced barnyard, and the institution of the chicken coop, also constructed the authority which both invented the idea of the chicken and exerted power upon that chicken to compel it to cross the road.
