Description and Anti-prescription
Much of Umberto Eco’s book The Limits of Interpretation is preoccupied with the idea of “correct” and “incorrect” readings of texts. The various essays of his of which the book is a recension focus chiefly on this subject as well. As the title implies, Eco insists that, while there is no such thing as an obvious right reading, or interpretation, of a text, there may be any number of obvious wrong ones. This is an unfashionable idea in many circles and is possibly even more unfashionable when extended to all linguistic acts. I believe that we should, nevertheless, extend it to all linguistic acts, and not only to interpretation, but to use, mention, and citation as well. Here I will be using Eco’s book as a vade-mecum for my assessment of broader issues in the way we now understand language.
The Last True Conservatives
The very-online extreme right, in addition to its many other faults and failings, tends to have a crass, self-conscious masculinity to it. Either in the “pure” form of jacked douchebags who like yelling slurs or in the “inverted” form of resentful Shiraha-from-Konbini-ningen-type evolutionary-psychology-obsessed incels, an enormous proportion of the online rightosphere consists of people with heavily masculinity-inflected beliefs and concerns. I have not experienced this for myself because I only date women, but I’m told that in some quarters the synthesis of “masculinity in crisis” and far-right channer politics is so advanced that women who are interested in men date seemingly normal people whom they realize only later get their views on the great issues of the day from people with handles like “Bronze Age Pervert” posting screeds in the already-unfortunate “Twitter thread” format all day long. It goes without saying, at least among those in the know, that there is usually something homoerotic about this as well; witness the fixation on the deceased Japanese novelist, bodybuilder, and right-wing political commentator Mishima Yukio (whose output of novels and short stories, if nothing else, deserves better than being associated with these people), or the tendency to idolize early periods of Western cultural development in which many or most literate men were either so misogynistic they wrapped round to being gay or so gay they wrapped round to being misogynists. A recent article in The Atlantic about Bronze Age Pervert—a real person or, to make a distinction that Mishima himself would readily understand, at least a real persona, not just a name I made up as a stick to beat an ideal-type with—addresses this directly and at some length. According to Richard Spencer, the infamous former neo-Nazi leader who these days is happy to go on the record for essays in liberal newsmagazines, Bronze Age Pervert is obviously gay; the article’s author describes Spencer himself as a “homoerotic fascist” as well. But what if there were a distaff counterpart of sorts to all of this, a fringey rightist current heavily laden with lesbian cultural signifiers and preoccupied with the idea that femininity, rather than masculinity, is in crisis in weak, enervated, effete, androgynized modernity? I am not happy, but not not happy, to report that such a current does or did exist, and that it has or had surprising links to several other people, places, and things about which I have written before.
The Lesser Beauty
When I was studying Japanese in the languages, literatures, and cultures department at UMass Amherst in the early 2010s, I became enamored of a now-obscure school of medieval Japanese Buddhism called Ji-shū, the Time School. Ji Buddhism was in most respects within the mainstream of Pure Land Buddhist thought, whose characteristic features include the belief that final enlightenment in the present world is no longer possible and the best course of action is to pray to a cosmic buddha called Amida for a rebirth in his Pure Land, a universe in which practicing the dharma is easier. Pure Land is the most widespread and popular type of Buddhism in Japan but has historically not been appealing to Western converts. Where Ji and its founding figure, an itinerant monk called Ippen Shōnin, parted company with mainstream Pure Land was in the belief that by invoking Amida’s name, a practice called the nenbutsu in Japanese, one effected a sort of spiritual time travel back to Amida’s own enlightenment, in which one then partook. The school’s name derives both from this belief and from the related practice of chanting the nenbutsu at particular times of day, somewhat similar to the set times for prayer in Islam.
I attempted to induce something similar to this recently, for secular reasons and involving my own past. On the way back from a road trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania from my apartment in Upstate New York, my housemate and I passed through Bordentown, the New Jersey river town where I spent most of my adolescence after my mother and I relocated from rural Vermont. I have not lived in Bordentown for a decade and had not even been there for almost eight years; I had little idea of what to expect from returning, but I did expect—and want—for it to involve a powerful emotional and even numinous reaction. I went out of my way to elicit this reaction by putting on Riot!, a Paramore album from 2007 (an extremely influential year in my life), while approaching the Delaware River from the west on Interstate 276. It worked. The two hours or so that my housemate and I spent in Bordentown overawed me so much that now, two weeks later, I have found myself waking up and lying in bed for half an hour thinking about it, remembering.
Polemic on the Rectification of Names
It is said that when Confucius was asked what he would do if he were appointed a governor, he said that he would “rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality. This (to English-speaking ears) unusual expression, written 正名 and pronounced zhèngmìng in Chinese and seimei in Japanese, is important in Confucianism and other East Asian philosophy and provides for some interesting harmonies and counterpoints with concepts in Western thought as well, such as direction of fit and disputes concerning linguistic prescriptivism. Unfortunately, the main setting in which one sees the term employed in non-specialist English is the so-called “intellectual dark web” and related far-right online environments—a milieu in which “rectification of names” is used both insufficiently and inaccurately.
Trahison des Mémoires
In my master’s thesis, which was written in late 2016 into early 2017 and was in the field of theology, I coined an expression called trahison des mémoires, “treason of memories.” It was a snowclone of trahison des clercs, the concept of disloyalty to the principles of serious thought by a society’s intellectual or cultured classes. With trahison des mémoires, my idea is that memory, especially publicly-held memory like the institutional memory of a country or a religion, can be twisted and weaponized in ways that do great harm to the people holding onto the memory. I was not so much interested in political or sociological harm—looking at cultural memory through that framework is old hat—as in emotional and interpersonal harm. In the thesis I introduced this concept as part of a discussion of (and I am both dating myself and outing myself as an irremediable dweeb here) the 2001 anime Noir, one of whose main characters is trying to piece together the circumstances of her parents’ murders. When she finally does remember—or, in point of fact, when she finally is provided with other people’s memories concerning—the killings, she wishes she hadn’t.