Alias Arts

Bounded by water, circumscribed, and discrete, islands arguably constitute a natural geographical model for the classic territorial conception of a state (where sovereignty is thought to extend homogenously across a defined terrestrial region and …

In his On the Natural Faculties (179 AD), physician and philosopher Claudius Galen explains the growth of animal organisms by using the image of a balloon—or rather the balloon of antiquity, an inflated animal bladder. “Children [in the district …

“Most men agree that a true friend is a precious treasure,” Socrates’ student and amanuensis Xenophon records the philosopher observing, “and nevertheless there is nothing about which we give ourselves so little trouble as to make men our friends.” Such tensions—between the utter centrality of friendship to the development of both the individual and society at large and the casual, almost thoughtless way in which so many friendships are made and lost—have animated philosophical discourse since the very beginnings of the western intellectual tradition. The elusive, nuanced nature of philia and its relationship to community (both earthly and otherwise) remained an essential theme for theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas and secular thinkers like Montaigne and Mill, and such questions continue to tantalize contemporary thinkers and politicians today. Angie Hobbs—Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, England—has written widely on the philosophical history of friendship. She spoke with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi by phone in December 2009.


A little while back, when I was working on one of
my many doomed projects, I went into a cave. Not just a little cave,
either, but an enormous emptiness in the ground, the trace of a
watercourse that gnawed its way across half the state of Kentucky a few
thousand years ago. We—this was my friend Wayne and I—went a long way
in, then we sat down and turned off our lights. The darkness was like
nothing I’d ever seen. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face; after
a while I could barely believe that my hand was there, in front of my
face, 
waving. 


That darkness is what I think about when I think
of black. I was going to write, the color black, but as every
child knows black isn’t a color. Black is a lack, a void of light. When
you think about it, it’s surprising that we can see black at all: our
eyes are engineered to receive light; in its absence, you’d think we
simply wouldn’t see, any more than we taste when our mouths are empty.
Black velvet, charcoal black, Ad Reinhart’s black paintings, black-clad
Goth kids with black fingernails: how do we see them?


­­­­­­­­By the last decades of the nineteenth century, an
obscuring perplex of ideas regarding dust hung above the inhabitants of the European
city like overlapping clouds, variously threatening or inspiring with the weight of
knowledge, quantity of filth, or degree of infection they contained. London,
especially—having only lately escaped a mid-century cholera season that had
devastated parts of the inner city—seemed to exist in a miasmic haze of dirt,
disease, and curiously aestheticized industrial pollution. As early as 1661, in th­e
pages of his Fumifugium: Or, The Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London
Dissipated, the diarist and polymath John Evelyn had complained that citizens
breathed “nothing but an impure and thick Mist, accompanied by a fuliginous and
filthy vapour,” which concoction scoured their lungs and disordered the entire body,
so that coughs, catarrhs, and consumption raged more in London alone than in the
whole of the rest of the world. The poison fug was partly attributable to domestic
fires, but Evelyn blames brewers, dyers, lime-burners, and salt- and soap-boilers
for the most noxious emanations:

­THE PROBLEM

In his brief essay “Gli
scacchisti irritabili” (“The 
Irritable Chess Players”) of 1985, Primo
Levi elaborates a set of symmetries between the act of literary creation
and the playing of a game of chess. Both a work of literature and the
royal game, he suggests, unfold in time within strictures that
inexorably invoke “life and the struggle for life.” There is, as he puts
it, a “symbolic shadow” that lengthens over a chess board, since 
the
way to the end is the way to a death, “a death for which you yourself
are guilty.” The novel, of course, 
is the literary form that has
evolved precisely to afford 
language the means of erecting and
choreographing such a metaphorical life space. And thus it is no
surprise that the novel, too, is haunted by a long shadow: all plots, as
Don DeLillo memorably put it, end in death. Moreover, en route to their
respective endgames, both chess and the novel offer powerful arenas in
which to investigate the question of questions: the ever-vexatious issue
of the relationship between fate and agency, between necessity and
freedom. Every move is our own, except when it’s not. Either way, the
board thins, the sheaf of paper in the right hand dwindles, sifting

left as if blown by an inexorable wind—though of course, we turn every
page. Chess, in this sense, is the opposite of dice, just as the novel
is the opposite of Scripture (the exact difference between chance and
providence has never been clear, but they share an antithesis in
deliberative subjectivity, and this may be 
a clue).

In the earliest laboratory notebooks, the wall-mounted m­echanism shown in this image was simply called “the pinball machine.” In the published output of the research program of which it was a part, it wen­t by the more dignified­ appellation Random Mechanical Cascade, yielding a catchy acronym: RMC. Around the lab, however, the ­device was known affectionately as ­Murphy, since if anything could go wrong, it would.­

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­In a way, of course, this was exactly the point: the whole system—the nine thousand polystyrene balls droppin­­g through a pegboard of 330 precisely cantilevered nylon pins, the real-time photoelectric counters tallying (by LED readout) the segmented heaps forming belo­w, the perennially balky bucket-conveyor for resetting an experimental run—had all been painstakingly constructed and ca­librated in order first to exemplify, and then to defy, what the Victorian statistician ­Francis Galton dubbed the “Law of Frequency of Error."­

Sixty-four pages into his 1930 manifesto of rhythmic experimentation, New Musical Resources, the composer and music theorist Henry Cowell made a passing suggestion about how his more extravagant ideas might be realized: “Some of the rhythms developed through the present acoustical investigation could not be played by any living performer; but these highly engrossing rhythmical complexes could easily be cut on a player piano roll.”¹ As far as­ we know, onl­y one man took him up on the proposal, an expat American card-carrying communist jazz trumpeter and polyrhythmic prodigy named Conlon Nancarrow. But this man made it his life’s work.­