On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt

        This book is bullshit. Philosophical bullshit, but bullshit.

Harry G. Frankfurt’s book, On Bullshit, is an account of truth, lies, language, and, of course, bullshit. In this slim volume, Frankfurt compiles definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary and scraps from other philosophers, like St. Augustine and Ludgwig Wittgenstein, to determine just what, exactly, bullshit is.

It might be a stroke of genius that the book itself feels like a joke, an exercise in bullshit. I think everyone has some intuitive understanding of the core concept, so to spend 80 pages defining it in grandiose terms and elevating it to the status of a high concept, with lengthy discussions, definitions, and meanderings, feels like an exercise in enacting the concept itself. It reminds me of J.L. Austin’s book How to Do Things with Words, which demonstrates locutionary and illocutionary acts and performs the concepts in question (he does do things with words, after all!).

After providing a methodology for his exploration, Frankfurt then goes on to discuss the definitions for a range of words that mean, essentially, the same thing as bullshit. He begins with “humbug,” noting that the words are not interchangeable but that the difference is essentially one of gentility (i.e. it is more polite and less intense than to say humbug, balderdash, claptrap, hokum, bunkum, imposture, quackery, etc.). When considering the definition offered in another essay, written by Max Black, called “On the Prevalence of Humbug”: humbug is “deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody’s own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes.”

At its core, the book is an exploration of what kind of speech act bullshit is, as opposed to a regular lie. Frankfurt notes that bullshit is “deceptive misrepresentation” since it is designed or intended to deceive. It’s not a mistake; it is deliberate. The intention to deceive is critical, which then means that the standard for assessment is a comparison to the speaker’s state of mind: their motives and the properties of the statement work in conjunction. So, both humbug (b.s.) and lying are at least in this the same: the speaker’s mind intends to deceive.

Frankfurt then tries to add nuance to the discussion of a lie. For instance, if someone knows they have five dollars in their pocket and they claim to have ten, they have lied about the reality of things. He gives a survey of some other accounts of lying which suggest that someone could lie even if the statement is true. Once again, he relates this to the speaker’s state of mind: they think they are not reporting the truth but actually they are. For instance, they imagine they have five dollars in their pocket, claim to have ten, but then actually do have ten. As long as the speaker believes the statement is false, it is a lie—even if the statement is factually true.

If the utterer’s heart is in the right place, there are other characteristics that must be considered. Humbug is “short of lying” in that it has some characteristics of lies, but not all of them. Returning to Max Black’s definition that humbug appears “pretentious by word or deed,” it alerts Frankfurt’s ear to the fact that “pretentious bullshit” is a common phrase. He justifies this connection with the idea that pretentiousness is the motive of the utterer, not the nature of the utterance. So, bullshit need not necessarily always be pretentious, and again it depends on intention.

Frankfurt really targets the notion that the perpetrator of humbug is misrepresenting himself and most of the book’s details can be traced back to that idea. A bullshitter misrepresents their state of mind (e.g. pretending to have a desire or feeling that isn’t there), but they might also misrepresent something else in addition. He misrepresents what he is talking about, but also his own state of mind towards it. Frankfurt claims that that is unavoidable, which seems a fundamental distinction between lies and bullshit. The other consideration is the purpose of lying or the purpose of “talking shit.” A liar might misrepresent what is in his mind in order to persuade someone to do something. A bullshitter might have other motives, like experimentation (more on that later). 

One of the things that defines bullshit, irrespective of its truth value, is its shape. A lie, for example, might be well-crafted in order to be disseminated. Bullshit is supposedly not well-crafted. It does not have thoughtful attention to detail. It is subject to impulse and whim. If anything, Frankfurt notes, bullshit is an indifference to how things really are. Indifference is not the same, quite, as the well-structured lie. Yet, Frankfurt notes that in practice there are all kinds of bullshit that exist in marketing and politics that are extremely calculated. Both liars and bullshit craftsman are a little lax, but are both trying to get away with something. 

Thus, we continue.

Frankfurt gives an anecdote, possibly apocryphal, of Wittgenstein speaking to his friend Pascal, who had had a tonsillectomy. Pascal says she felt like a dog that had been run over, and reportedly Wittgenstein says she doesn’t know what a dog that’s been run over feels like. There’s a certain consistency in truth-value that Wittgenstein demands. The whole exercise makes me think back to J.L. Austin’s notion of statements that, when spoken, might be true but lack context and thus misfire. Frankfurt suggests that this may be an instance of bullshit—of speculation, perhaps. (Or, as Maebe Fünke says refers to it in Arrested Development: “I was just specu-lying.”) Elsewhere, Frankfurt suggests that bullshit is more like a bluff than a lie. A liar deliberately suggests a falsehood, but bluffing is not false so much as fake. Bullshit isn’t false, it is phoney—and that which is not genuine doesn’t mean it’s less true. Essentially, again, it all comes down to the idea of intention.

Much is made of this Wittgenstein story, but what I find more important is the notion of sincerity. Part of what Frankfurt suggests is that bull has a different relationship to sincerity than a lie. A bullshit artist might not be sincere, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are wrong. If bullshit is sincere, Frankfurt says, it means that it cannot be produced inadvertently. One cannot be inadvertently insincere. Thus, they might simply put forward something that is phoney in intention, but qualitatively the same as the real deal (i.e. fake it ‘till you make it!). A bullshitter can be fake while not getting things wrong.

Perhaps one of the more useful explorations of language is when Frankfurt discusses the idea of “bull sessions”---that is, informal discussions, often among men (though Frankfurt notes that this gendered aspect seems unnecessary). What is of value is the discussion that bull sessions are characterized as being “not for real.” The circumstances are such that people do not speak openly if they think they’ll be taken too seriously, so bull sessions allow them to see how it feels to say things and discover how others respond without having to commit to their purported position. It’s an experimental approach. Thus, if we think about the purpose of a lie, it seems to be to convince. If we think about the purpose of bullshit, it is to explore, to test, to experiment.

To me, there’s the important component that a bullshitter is an artist of sorts. They do not care about the relationship between truth. The truth value of statements are not of interest to him. He is not trying to report or conceal the truth. As a result, a bullshit artist can be more free to play. 

All of this is a little abstract. Especially since our world seems to be full of bullshit, there’s the question of why all of this matters. Frankfurt notes that there is a higher propensity for bullshit today because people are required to speak on any number of topics while lacking the expertise. We are all compelled towards discourse we cannot actually be a part of in a meaningful way. In that respect, much of this review is probably bullshit—I’m just trying to give an account, fake my expertise, and explain ideas I’m trying to grapple with.

I think the conversation could be continued, actually, with the full implications of intentionality. Modern discourse, especially in social justice spaces, has taken an anti-intentionalist approach to language. Misfires of language (e.g. making a racist remark) is judged by its impact rather than the intention guiding it. At one point, Frankfurt comments on how we are much harsher in doling out consequences to liars than to bullshitters. I wonder how this rubric might be applied to mismatches of language and intention.

When closing the book, Frankfurt returns once again to the idea of sincerity and posits the issue that we cannot possibly be sincere because sincerity requires a degree of self-knowledge that we rarely, if ever, have. We cannot be sincere because we can’t isolate understanding of ourselves from our context. It’s a controversial claim to end the book on—if we can’t ground what we’re saying in our self-understanding, the idea of intentions, and the idea of motivations, the book seems to end on the note that everything is bullshit.

So, there we go. Everything is bullshit.

Happy reading, I guess?

Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval

  Taken once more from my file of “books Harneet arbitrarily told me to read but was somehow right about,” this review will focus on Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval. It’s a slim volume that focuses on a Norwegian woman, Johanna, moving to the fictional town Aybourne, Australia, to study biology. When she arrives, she finds herself in awkward social situations, edged out of housing by her Canadian counterparts, before eventually finding a room in a slightly renovated warehouse (or is it an old brewery where a girl drowned?). She moves in with Carral, who has a free and easy demeanour that Jo finds unusual and somewhat enticing (for example, that she freely talks while peeing). Their space has two mezzanines and paper-thin walls. This is important for reasons I’ll get into later. The novel recounts Johanna’s experiences with Carral and the strange, erotic charge between them.

A few months ago I read Nudités féminines. Images, pensées et sens du désir by Laurence Pelletier and I can’t help but feel that Paradise Rot would be of profound interest to philosophers of the body and its image. From the initial pages of the book, there’s a sordidness that permeates everyday moments—Jo rides on the subway, where a man’s pants have fallen down and his penis dangles out and is supported by others, who then throw him out at the next stop. There’s also a moment where Jo contemplates her urine in the bowl and mourns flushing that vibrant yellow colour. Throughout the book, Hval crafts that mix of the vile and the poetic; that which we consider disgusting is described with poetic detail while still maintaining an unpalatable aura.

Part of this is tied to Johanna’s seeming hypervigilance and hyper awareness of all that is sensual. Remember that Johanna and Carral live in a place where barriers and boundaries are largely non-existent. The ad that Johanna responds to lists the room as “.quiet.” with periods on both sides, which incentivizes her. After she moves in, that quietness forms the context for a sensitivity to sound verging on the superhuman. She senses Carral’s movements by sound alone: even Carral scratching her pubic hair gives Johanna a complete image. The synesthesia throughout the book (seeing through sound, the permeability of touch, etc.) is evident throughout. As one example, Johanna’s neighbour Pym has forced himself upon her and she recalls the words from a book that Carral continually reads and then notes the following:

Next to me Carral was trying to separate the pages of Moon Lips. She must have got to the part with the stain. Once she’d slid a knife between the pages and they came apart, she turned the page and sighed softly. The article in front of me displayed colourful images of thick mushroom stems and caps, but I couldn’t read at all anymore, just sat and listened to her breath, guessing how far she’d got. I didn’t notice her moving until her face almost touched mine. (90)

There is a pattern of Johanna listening to the sounds and simply sensing what Carral is doing. The fact that she can sense where she is in a book simply by the page turns demonstrates this deep connection (or at least projection) between Jo and Carral. Later on, Johanna “sees” Carral having sex with Pym, despite the fact that there is a wall between them. Based on sound, Johanna imagines their position and she can sense that Pym is taking Carral from behind, and knows that her and Carral are making eye contact as he takes her. It’s implausible, of course, but in the context of the book it feels like it’s absolutely real, absolutely plausible.

As I mentioned earlier, the book is loaded with an erotic charge. One of the things that makes the book so charged is its ambiguity; it certainly seems that both Jo and Carral are lesbians, but Carral continually talks about having sex with men and Jo has never had sex at all. When people meet Jo and Carral, they assume they are together, but they have to continually assert that they are just roommates—this despite the fact that Johanna notes several times that she senses Carral’s nipples under cotton even when they are not visible. Meanwhile, Carral keeps showing up in Jo’s bed, sometimes naked. You’re never quite sure, and throughout the book both of the women have sex with the same man at different times, and yet it feels like they’ve been together by transitive property.

There’s an odd permeability to them. To return to the novel mentioned above, Moon Lips, it is a trashy romance Carral continually reads. She says how she studied serious literature but now all she reads is trash where women have sex with tough men and possibly monsters. Johanna reads some of the book and finds a sticky page. Presumably, Carral was masturbating and some stickiness from her hand transferred to the page. When Johanna touches it, it seems to linger on her—as if sex is contagious.

Before discussing contagion, I want to take a digression into the idea of eroticism by making reference to two other authors. First, in Camera Lucida (I think) by Roland Barthes, he talks about the most erotic photograph he knows of. It’s a picture of a naked boy with his arm stretched out towards the other end of the frame; all of our typically “sexy” parts are out of frame, and the picture has its erotic charge based on what it does not show. Similarly, in Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, there’s a discussion of looking through a hole in a sheet and seeing only bits of the woman on the other side a little at a time. There’s also discussion about how film could not show sex, so there’s a woman who takes a drink from a tea (I think?) and then the man drinks from the same glass, placing his lips on the same place she kissed (I might have this backwards). There’s no direct contact between them, but that’s what makes it so charged. Jenny Hval seems to take the same approach; the less direct the sex, the more powerfully it tunnels in.

Going back to the idea of contagion, it does seem to be critical to the text. The permeability of Jo’s consciousness and the synesthesia of the text reflects that. Johanna’s studies in biology take a particular interest in mycology, which then manifests in her apartment when a mushroom grows from a gap where the bathtub meets the wall (and also takes on phallic imagery, of course). Early in the book, Jo and Carral acquire an excess of apples and have an erotic exchange of eating them and biting through the skin and so forth. Then, throughout the rest of the book the apples are rotting in a compost bin, melting and decaying. Towards the end of the book, the two central characters start to rot together; Carral breathes onto Jo’s back and she feels spores growing in her. After Carral has sex with Pym, she seems to absorb his freckles into her skin. When Carral and Jo kiss, Jo gives an account of how they are sucking Pym out of each other and exchanging him between them. The house where they live seems to flood and mould and reach its tendrils to grasp onto Johanna. It’s like she becomes fused to the house and it gets increasingly surreal, so much so that the ending is deeply symbolic but also deeply ambiguous.

Carral and Jo fuse together in a really interesting way. Partway through the book, Johanna tells Carral a story where a “tough girl” at school tells her that people get pregnant by laying down together (as they are laying down together). Jo knows that she can’t actually get pregnant laying next to another girl, but because the girl is so tough she starts to believe it and gets dressed. She tells this story to Carral, but then much later there’s an incredible scene where Carral starts telling the story as if it is an anecdote from her own life. She starts telling the story and Jo says, “Yes, but that happened to me.” Then, Carral tells the story in more detail, adding points that Jo never said—but the details are right. It’s surreal and stunning and eerie. Jo later dreams “of two bodies, girls’ bodies, our bodies: our upper bodies had melted together and our necks twisted around each other, thin, and long like swans’ necks” (135). 

The book makes some pretty clear connections to the Garden of Eden, but in a bizarre and surrealist way. If I try to map the apple, Adam, Eve, and the snake, I’m not sure it’s an easy overlay. In some ways it also feels inverted: is Jo entering the garden? Or expelled from it? Is Pym the snake or the apple? Or is his manuscript the apple (it is found in the compost along with the apples, after all)? The conflict of the book is fundamentally ambiguous, too. Pym writes a manuscript for a novel in verse that describes a biologist (Johanna) creating a world and then having vigorous sex with Pym and Carral. Then, Carral writes an addendum where the two girls consume him. In reality, as I mentioned, when they kiss, it is like they are sucking Pym through them back and forth. Jo is frustrated with Carral for not telling her that she slept with Pym and Carral says she only did it because she was afraid Johanna would leave. It’s a painful psychological triangle where the intentions of its vertices are ambiguous.

The ending of the book, which I won’t spoil, is ambiguous, too. I hereby request someone read it and explain to me why things play out the way they do. It’s as if it’s transitions into a haunted house narrative or a ghost story, but it’s unclear to me why Johanna has to act the way she does. I’ll leave it at that for now.

All things considered, I really liked this book. It was oddly visceral, erotically charged, poetic and grotesque, beautiful and painful. It’s the kind of book people will write essays about; it connects to so many discourses and offers an endless well of discussion. If it isn’t a hit in the academy yet, it will be. I guarantee it.

Happy reading!

Complicity by Iain Banks

       

        Iain Banks’ Complicity places you in the terrible position of—and I’m sorry to tell you this—being a murderer. There are lengthy passages in which you are invading homes, tying people up, abusing them and murdering them in all sorts of grisly ways. Banks narrates these sections with the second person “you”, placing your agency as a reader in a tough spot: do you keep reading, and thereby enacting the horrific murders you are perpetuating? Or do you put the book down, disgusted by your own capacity to be drawn into the killing spree?

I want you to remember that question for later.

For now, let’s take a step back. Running opposite to the narration of ‘you’ is a first-person narration from Cameron Colley, a journalist with a penchant for the “big story.” In this case, he continues to receive phone calls from a mysterious Mr. Archer, who sends him names to investigate. Meanwhile, Cameron is trying to engage in counter-culture journalism, suggesting a corporate conspiracy in a would-be local interest story about the brewery. He’s also a drug addict, having an affair with his friend (who happens to be another friend’s wife), and he is a chronic masturbator who loves playing a computer game called Despot, which sounds like a more heavily sentient Age of Empires.

In the first half of the book, it’s perverse, but the most engaging parts are the murders and conspiracy that Cameron is trying to uncover. The hypermasculinity and hedonism is absurd, ridiculous, and gets boring pretty quickly. The transgressive nature of the text recalls works like American Psycho or perhaps Fight Club, but has that distinctly mid-80s to mid-90s  ethos of hyperreality popularized by works like William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It’s a work of profound excess.

I would say until the last fifty pages or so, I was a sceptic. But Banks’ conclusion delivers and justifies so much of what came before.

Around the halfway point of the book, something happens. I will try not to spoil too much here, but it’s worth noting that Cameron is pulled in for police questioning. He’s being interrogated for the murders. As it turns out, the victims are all important figures that have been specifically denounced in some of Cameron’s articles. He is forced to watch the videos of a gorilla-masked figure as he sexually abuses his male victims, severs peoples’ limbs, injects them with the HIV virus, and other more spectacular murders. After being sick, it is then that Cameron begins delving into memories. He is told to think of who else could have—might have—committed the horrific crimes.

The text devolves into a stream-of-consciousness panic before revealing backstory through flashbacks to Cameron’s youth. I think the best way to experience the book is going in ignorant, so if you’d like to preserve the sanctity of the secret, now is the chance to navigate away.

Through a series of flashbacks, we are invited to witness Cameron’s various failures. He lets his friends down in a number of ways, and it’s alluded to that there are two times Cameron abandoned a particular friend. Once, when he nearly drowned under a frozen lake, and the second—well, it’s a little ambiguous. The plot slows, somewhat, abandoning the high-octane whodunnit approach for a more ruminative exploration of old friendships. The section does a lot to humanize Cameron, which the novel desperately needs following his drug-fueled binges of self-indulgence. For example, in one scene, Cameron is enticed into performing a sex act on his slightly older male friend. An adult man then confronts them, having witnessed the act, and Cameron fails to defend his friend as the man rapes him. They then are able to attack and kill the man and hide his body. That bit of backstory gives a bit more depth to Cameron and his friend.

Banks offers effective twists and tensions throughout the book, both in the ‘present’ of the story and in the past. New details come to light and the filmic delivery of the book allows for some jump-cutting into different moments for greater impact. The tension heightens with interrogation scenes and Banks offers a great deal of impact through dialogue and sparse narration. The uncertainty of motivations, including for Cameron himself, is an excellent device for creating the atmosphere of the book. Even in the sections where ‘you’ are the narrator, your own motivations are not directly stated, which makes the project seem, at first, senseless.

When the murderer is revealed, Banks repeatedly layers the killer’s intentions. There are personal motivations, political ones, moral ones, and a healthy dose of nihilism. In the first half of the book, Banks develops a finely wrought political paranoia. It reads like a conspiracy and entices us in—just as it entices Cameron. The genius of this is that Cameron is so susceptible to paranoid fantasies that he is rendered oblivious to more obvious motivations in front of him. Through a finely crafted red herring, we, too, are pulled into the falsehoods, allowing ourselves to be deceived. It’s an odd situation where the conspiracy is a lie, but still serves its intended function and has the internal coherence of a bona fide conspiracy.

The whole situation sets up a paranoid mood, which only intensifies as the cat-and-mouse game progresses. We are led through the chase, the traps, the hunt. Even when you recognize the killer has been three steps ahead at every turn, there’s still the genuine horror of discovering the depth of the plan and the accounts of murdered and dismembered bodies are genuinely disgusting. Take that for what it’s worth from a literary perspective. As the book progresses, the ever-present killer stalks his prey and you start looking for him everywhere. In fact, the book easily could have resolved with him apologizing, disappearing, and with Cameron suspecting that he sees the murderer everywhere. That would be almost as chilling.

Some of the more superfluous aspects of the book take on a deeper significance in light of the killer’s omnipresence. For example, when Cameron describes his favourite video game, Despot, he talks about how he builds civilizations from scratch. He hops from individual serfs into other bodies and eventually takes on the power of a governing deity. Ironically, the game gets to know so much about your play style that if the game is on, it will play for you, though in a slightly degenerating way where your civilization slowly reverts. The game serves as an effective microcosm of all kinds of elements of the book. For instance, the fact that Cameron hops between bodies is like us at the start of the book, hopping into the body of the serial killer before shifting into an “I” and eventually taking on the position of the police department on the hunt for a killer. The omnipresence of the killer reads like the player of the game, able to manipulate the situation as he sees fit. The book also addresses themes about civilization, degeneracy, and the maintenance that is constantly needed in order for society to sustain itself. There’s something about a fictive video game that can give voice to so much.

Returning to the idea of paranoia, towards the end of the book, the serial killer is on the loose with the promise of behaving. But we all know it’s a lie, don’t we? There’s an excellent scene where Cameron’s car breaks down and someone pulls over to help him. The description does not at all match that of the killer—at first. From a narrative standpoint, though, we know that such a tense moment is likely to result in disaster, so our tension is heightened. Cameron, too, starts to recognize clues that are similar to the murderer—plus, we know that he puts on accents, has disguises, and so on. So we have this moment of a confrontation and it’s not initially clear whether it’s really the murderer. There’s a tension where you think that Cameron is in a rough enough place that he might attack or even kill this man, perhaps mistakenly. There’s a part of me that wanted to see it go that way—to see Cameron murder a man out of the lingering paranoia of a threat that no longer looms over him. That tension was just excellent.

The final confrontation with the killer is a bit super-villain-ish. It’s like the scene in every James Bond movie where, feeling he has the upper hand, the villain explains the plot in full. The killer reveals the full intentions and the message of his “work.” The philosophy teeters on the notion of a kind of Nietzschian claim to the Overman or an opportunistic Social Darwinism. The murderer, though, frames it as the natural extension of Cameron’s leftist beliefs. The rich people who exploit and kill others through their own negligence (either directly or indirectly) deserve to be killed themselves. The killer suggests it is no different that an oil baron, for example, kills any number of people through ecology than him taking one life to shock the system back into order.

The dialogue itself is a little on-the-nose, but the delivery is redeemed by giving Cameron an impossible choice in which both options are philosophical losses. Cameron could call the police to apprehend the murderer, which is the morally right thing to do, perhaps, but also would be to admit that his leftist politics (or at least the popular understanding of them) are a lie. Alternatively, he can let the murderer go free and admit that we are all complicit in a system which produces death. This is the kind of paradox I could see emerging in the work of Mark Fisher or Slavoj Žižek, if he hasn’t analyzed this book already. The seeming hypocrisy at the core of the philosophy is a profoundly challenging notion to grapple with.

I also loved the way Cameron approaches the phone call. Banks dramatizes Cameron’s inner conflict effectively and the choices of phone call on the killer’s cell phone are fantastic. First, Cameron calls his parents and receives an answering machine. Second, he calls his doctor to check if he has lung cancer. It’s a great moment that reinforces Cameron’s self-interest. He wants to know, in my reading, “am I going to die?” The answer to that question seems to impact his choice to call or not call the police—-which way the answer influences his decision is left to your own interpretation.

The ending of the book, despite the villain’s monologuing, is excellent. The final chapter shifts back to using the second person, but it’s a different second person than before—or is it? “You” used to be the murderer. Now, “you” are (seemingly) Cameron. The implications of that shifting “you” are intriguing from a political, moral, and literary standpoint. Essentially, “you” are complicit at every stage of the project. It’s an experiment in narrative culpability.

I’m not quite sure where to place Iain Banks in the literary canon. At times, Complicity feels like a conceptual literary work, at others a pulp whodunnit or political thriller. Plot-wise, I would say I was pretty consistently engaged, especially past the halfway point of the book. From the point of view of characterization, I can’t say I actually loved the characters, but Cameron’s consistency was finely achieved through his response to extreme situations. You may recall that a few months ago I reviewed John Updike’s Terrorist. This book is what that book should have been: stunningly paced, finely-wrought tension, more dialled-back misogyny, and more consistent characterization with a plot that had actual events. It has its flaws as a text (psst, your 1990s are showing), but it still feels at least somewhat relevant thirty years on.

 

Keep fighting the good fight and happy reading!