Bull Sessions Research Articles

The African Company Presents Richard III

Reviewed by: The African Company Presents Richard III Marissa Galvin The African Company Presents Richard III Presented by Red Bull Theater via Livestream Presentation through Zoom, in partnership with The Axe-Houghton Foundation. 11 January 2021. Adapted and directed by Carl Cofield. Producing direction by Nathan Winkelstein. Zoom coordination by Rebecca C. Monroe. Open Broadcast Studio (OBS) coordination and sound design by Jessica Fornear. Graphic and video design by Jim Bredeson. Drama league directing fellow, Emma Rosa Went. Music by Andres Alfonso. With Edward Gero (Stephen Price), Jessika D. Williams (Sarah), Antoinette Robinson (Ann Johnson), Dion Johnstone (James Hewlett), Craig Wallace (Papa Shakespeare), Clifton Duncan (William Henry Brown), and Paul Niebanck (The Constable). A haunting recitation of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” preceded the first scenes of the Red Bull Theater’s livestream reading of Carlyle Brown’s The African Company Presents Richard III. Andres Alfonso’s rhythmic djembe drumbeat supported the solemn cadence of the recitation, setting the mood and providing context for what the play would explore. Dunbar’s lines “With torn and bleeding hearts we smile / And mouth with myriad subtleties” foreshadowed the work that this reading did to demonstrate the interesting complexities of blackness and performativity. As W. E. B. Du Bois elegantly theorized in his foundational work The Souls of Black Folk, Black people contend with a lived experience of double consciousness that has required them to wear masks for survival. The Red Bull reading of The African Company Presents Richard III demonstrated that this double consciousness is also what has uniquely prepared them to wear the masks required to perform Shakespearean roles. Brown’s play is a work of historical fiction, based on the real-life experiences of The African Company, which was the first known Black theater troupe in North America. According to Anthony Duane Hill, the troupe showcased their talents in nineteenth-century New York City at the home of William Henry Brown, in a second-floor space converted to a theater dubbed The African Grove (Hill). The play dramatizes the very real-life tension created when Stephen Price, owner of the Park Theater, puts on a production of Richard III at the same time as the African Company is mounting their own production of the play. Although The African Company Presents Richard III focuses on the events and drama surrounding the performance of Richard III and not necessarily Richard III itself, the experience is still Shakespearean in a sense that it is reminiscent of the multi-layered meta-theater that exists within Shakespeare’s plays. [End Page 302] Brown’s nod to the intersecting historical and theatrical contexts worked to create a space where he could elevate the African oral tradition and demonstrate the ways in which Black people create “culture” as they showcase what Brown calls a mastery of subtext (“Bull Session”). Indeed, such mastery was on display throughout this particular reading of his play: the actors nodded, side-eyed, and signified in the production’s unique digital environment, adapting as much as they could to the limitations that the platform provided. Even without the costuming and shared proximity of a stage, it was still hard to tell sometimes where the performance began and the actors ended. The characters felt familiar to me, speaking a language that I have recognized since childhood. And who better to make Shakespeare cool than Black people, the arbiters of style and creators of culture. I don’t know what my initial expectations were before viewing the performance. Zoom performances have limitations that stem primarily from the fact that the actors aren’t in the same space, feeding off of one another’s energy or playing off the reactions of the live audience. Such limitations didn’t seem to hamper this particular performance, however, as it played out like a conversation among friends and enemies. I was watching an amplified table read masquerading as conversation, masquerading as performance. I say this not as a critique, but as an acknowledgement of the creativity with which the cast translated the reading to the digital format. This was never intended to be a fully acted performance, so there were few opportunities for technical glitches. However...

Bull sessies ter bescherming van intieme grenzen

Bull sessions to protect intimate boundaries Sven da Silva During research for my MA thesis in Brazil I theorized slum politics by following a community leader. He was often bullying me. After an uncomfortable start of my fieldwork, I became interested in bull sessions, a term that describes well the development of my relationship with the community leader. Bull sessions encourage participants to speak about topics they would normally not talk about, yet participants are primarily concerned with impressing others rather that with the truth. These bull sessions guarded intimate borders. They masked a shared condition, namely that of the painful memories of being from the favela. I use this experience to make the methodological argument that – to create openness and stimulate and adventurous dialogue with informants – ethnographers should engage in bull sessions, but at the same time use their toolbox to separate performance from content. They should transparently place quotes in context for readers to make their own judgment.

Bruce Grindal's Hidden Theology, Kabbalah, and the Need for a Humanistic Theodicy

SummaryWhile Bruce Grindal never explicitly disclosed his own religious outlook in print, in the epilogue of the draft prospectus for his unpublished book on religious life in North Florida, he professed a “spiritual” impulsion to “admit to being one of the many” and implied that he fit a category he dubbed “quasi‐religious.” I would not be the first to observe that even the most secular, allegedly impartial anthropology has a spiritual dimension. I believe that Dr. Grindal's anthropology—perhaps owing to decades of quiet reflection upon his experience of mysterious happenings during his sojourn among the Sisala—was particularly spiritual in this manner, even if not expressly so. Grindal himself likened humanistic inquiry to “a spiritual quest” and the classroom give and take to “listening to a myth and participating in a ritual.” While his published works are elusive on the matter, in graduate seminars and undergraduate lectures, office hours conversations and impromptu bull sessions, there were occasional flashes of disclosure and candid exposition of his personal convictions about the sacral mysteries of the universe. In this essay, I endeavor to demonstrate how a bricolage of such noncanonical remarks permits us to descry the underlying influence of a somewhat patchwork secret theology in Bruce Grindal's writings on synergetic consciousness and his lectures on normative anthropology and ethics. Further, I enter into dialogue with Bruce's reconstituted theology and humbly attempt to offer emendations to one area he left underdeveloped by bringing it into conversation with the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah: the problem of suffering and evil.

On Bullshit

A number of leading academicians and practicing professionals in the fields of instructional and human performance technology (HPT) have observed over recent years a disturbing pattern of ideas and propositions being advocated by academics and practitioners alike that do not always ring true. At best some of these propositions are misleading, and at worst they are disingenuous. In some cases these propositions are deemed nonsense. In trying to understand this perpetuation of nonsense in instructional and performance technologies, we have found and use for reference a small book by Harry G. Frankfurt titled On Bullshit. This 2005 publication traces the meanings of BS and argues that it is a form of falsehood that is different than lying. Frankfurt disdains nonsense talk and relates it to the now popular concept of a bull session. We hope that you, like us, find Frankfurt's treatise on BS useful in understanding and differentiating between sense and nonsense in the fields of instructional and performance technologies. On Bullshit (2005; 67 pages; ISBN 10:0691122946; hardback $9.95) is published by Princeton University Press.

A study on relationship between the return of value/growth portfolio and market return: Evidence from Tehran Stock Exchange

Article history: Received January 4, 2014 Accepted 1 June 2014 Available online June 5 2014 This study examines the relationship between the returns of two value and growth portfolios and the return of market on 15 selected firms on Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 20082011. The study divides the firms into two groups in terms of the ratios of price on earning as well as price on book value into two groups of value and growth portfolios. Using some regression analysis, the study has determined a positive and meaningful relationship between value portfolio and market return when the market is on the upside but this relationship is not meaningful during the bear session. The results indicate that during the bull sessions, value portfolios provide better investment opportunities than growth ones do. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Bull markets and bull sessions

Frankfurt's (2005. On bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press) having given the term ‘bullshit’ philosophical respectability is quite timely for an understanding of the financial services industry. There is no doubt a preponderance of financial bullshitting nowadays, much more in fact than in the not so distant past. Some of this might indeed be as harmful as Frankfurt claims bullshit can be. On the other hand, in financial services as in many other human activities, bullshit is not only inevitable, but it also performs a variety of useful functions for individuals and for society. As a species, we may not have evolved to the point of making optimal probabilistic decisions in the stock market, as behavioral finance consistently illustrates, but we have certainly evolved enough to bullshit about it. We have also evolved the ability to detect financial bullshit, which may serve to mitigate its deleterious consequences.

Conference report: The 13th National Conference on Planning History, (SACRPH), Oakland, 2009

Europeans, especially, may be forgiven for assuming that planning history in the United States must be a limited subject and a frail intellectual endeavour. After all, urban regions there are noted neither for their age nor for the rigour and consistency with which they have been planned. However, since 1986, the continuing vitality of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH)1 has challenged sceptics and perhaps even surprised its own membership. Attendance at SACRPH's latest biennial conference, in Oakland, California from 15 to 18 October 2009 reached an all-time high of about 300.2 Those present supported, and required, eight concurrent paper sessions spread over two days. These were bookended by field trips, paralleled by an academic book display (with free coffee), and interspersed with lunchtime plenaries or panels, breakfast and evening meetings, corridor kibbitzing, and evening bull sessions in excellent local bars.3 On this evidence, planning history in the United States is very much alive and well. Its conferences have been the lifeblood of SACRPH, sustaining the organisation and indeed the field of study itself. Continuing a tradition established by a founder, Laurence Gerckens, they have always been stimulating, well-organised, eclectic and welcoming. The Oakland gathering was typical. Optional field trips included a food tour of the Oakland waterfront and tours of housing and housing projects in West Oakland (once home to the Black Panthers), of ethnic districts near the downtown, of Berkeley's architecture, San Francisco's urban renewal and of recent agricultural development (including vineyards) in Marin and Sonoma counties. (One vineyard - Ravenswood, if you must know - was a conference sponsor.) In between were squeezed plenary sessions on regional equity and San Francisco Bay Area planning initiatives; an end-of-term address by SACRPH president, Robin Bachin; 54 conference sessions that included roundtables on publishing and cultural sustainability; a dissertation workshop, and a poster session for undergraduate or Masters students; and a concluding awards ceremony and reception. Everything that I observed ran smoothly, while conversation hummed, notably at the three evening receptions, courtesy of excellent food and, on two occasions, complimentary drinks. The eclecticism of the conference, noted by President-elect Alison Isenberg in her introduction to Bachin's Presidential Address, was apparent in the fact that it attracts planners and preservationists, as well as urban historians, in significant numbers. To be sure, many of the planners were from the Bay Area, and spoke about local issues, while the historians came from across the United States and Canada.4 None the less, many sessions and one plenary brought the two groups together, and this did promote dialogue. In part, such exchange is possible because, despite the everyday pressures to focus upon the present and immediate future, some planners have a concern for the long-term implications of public intervention. In part it also reflects the fact that a high proportion of urban and planning historians - who in Oakland included a sprinkling of historical geographers like myself, as well as those employed to teach urban, architectural and planning history - have interests that are focused on the recent past, or upon the connections between past and present. Thus, for example, Lawrence Vale enumerated the parallels between the slum clearance programs of the 1930s-1950s era and the HOPE VI initiatives, which are meant to revitalise public housing, sometimes through demolition. In addition, a whole session, for example, was devoted to an historical assessment of recent policies of Smart Growth. The linkages between planners and historians were nicely exemplified at the concluding awards ceremony. The organisation's most prestigious award is the Gerckens prize. In Oakland the names of the two latest recipients were announced. …

Psychiatrist Gains Otherworldly View of Mental Health

Psychiatrist Gains Otherworldly View of Mental Health

Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans. By Charles Hersch. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xiv, 289 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-226-32867-6.)

Charles Hersch fills a historiographical gap by providing the first interpretive cultural study of early New Orleans jazz. This is surprising; the tropes, signifiers, discourses, and other indices of cultural conflict and change arising from the city's dangerous streets, shabby dance halls, multiracial brothels, lakeside bandstands, and parades and celebrations, circa 1880–1920, have long been ripe for theorizing. Earlier histories avoid such postmodern approaches, but they provide many suggestive illustrations of oppositional behavior, subversive textuality, and cultural hybridity among the Creoles of color, Sicilian and Irish immigrants, voodoo queens, pimps, roustabouts, and slumming white dance hall patrons who peopled the New Orleans scene. Hersch both repeats the narratives of other historians and realizes their inchoate interpretations. Like earlier histories, Subversive Sounds describes at length the Caribbean character of New Orleans society and the liminal social status of the city's Creoles of color, and finds both to be central to the formation of jazz. The degraded status of all African American residents in the era of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) reflected the dominant white view that blacks threatened Caucasian racial purity; jazz, Hersch argues, boldly injected “impurity” into American music and culture. This is perhaps his most original argument, countering popular notions of New Orleans jazz as a cozy gumbo or melting pot of amicable white, Creole, and black influences. Hersch's introduction of the concepts of the carnivalesque (Mikhail Bakhtin) and heterotopia (Michel Foucault), though, add little to his analysis of the vigorous expressiveness of New Orleans street life, which covers familiar musical sites such as Congo Square, second line parades, and funeral marches. As an interpretation, Hersch's book resembles a lively bull session that clothes well-known historical data in mostly predictable interpretations. As a result, it only slightly modifies the prevailing narrative about the music. Hersch is a political scientist whose attention to chronology and use of analogies is more casual than that of most historians. This adds to the book's playful and suggestive nature but detracts from the persuasiveness of its interpretation. In contrast, Thomas Brothers's Louis Armstrong's New Orleans (2006), while less provocative, is more empirically thorough and original in its description of how musical materials cohered in specific times and places to create early New Orleans jazz.

The Yazoo Blues

Page 4 American Book Review The Yazoo Blues C. D. Albin The notion of the “good ol’ boy” as Southern icon is a tired, often tiring, idea. Like any stereotype, it evokes easy visual clichés—soiled feed caps, rusty pickups, crumpled beer cans—that prove remarkably opaque, obscuring real revelation of actual human beings. John Pritchard’s debut work of fiction, the novella Junior Ray (2005), achieved a certain cultish appeal precisely because its narrator and title character, Junior Ray Loveblood, would not abide being considered anything but actual. “Some people might say there ain’t much to me,” he growls in the opening lines of Junior Ray, “but that’s a gotdamn lie. There’s just as much to me as it is to any other sumbich I know.” Loveblood’s words, both in the novella’s opening and throughout, invite multiple readings of his character. Is he laughable, a buffoon who unintentionally prompts the stereotype he abhors? Is he bitter, a rural Southerner who hates feeling invisible to the larger, increasingly urban culture? Is he sympathetic, a put upon Everyman occasionally capable of crude eloquence?Appreciative readers of Junior Ray likely identified these traits and more in Loveblood’s character, and Barnes and Noble listed the book among its Top Ten Debut Novels for 2005. Pritchard’s follow-up, The Yazoo Blues, is heftier than Junior Ray by a hundred pages, and Loveblood’s comic, digressive, unrelentingly profane narration is again showcased, but something of the previous book’s verve is missing, as if Loveblood has now begun to savor the sound of his own voice, substituting a popular storyteller’s sense of achievement for the edgier, more midnight notes that distinguished Junior Ray. To be sure, the rough-hewn rhetoric is still present, and Loveblood’s treatment of race, sex, and religion is often so coarse that the novel’s fictional “facilitator,” McKinney Lake (who transcribes Loveblood ’s monologue and sometimes offers editorial comment), feels compelled to note in her preface, “The point is, you ought not to throw somebody away just because once in a while they may seem like a monster. What kind of world would that be? We’d be without friends and have to avoid mirrors.” Still, the Loveblood of this book is mildly mellowed, his former obsession with shooting someone—namely, Leland Shaw, the addled war hero of Junior Ray— now largely replaced by a fascination with an episode from the Civil War known as theYazoo Pass Expedition , a failed 1863 Union attempt to navigate large gunships through the narrow Yazoo Pass toward Vicksburg. The notion of the “good ol’ boy” as Southern icon is a tired, often tiring, idea. One of the more richly comic elements of The Yazoo Blues is Loveblood’s conviction that he is, by nature, if not by education and training, a historian. Since he discovered his personal gift for history well after retiring from the Mhoon County Sheriff’s Department, his research, which consists almost entirely of bull sessions with friends and examination of the “z-rockses” supplied by them, leaves him ample time to work as a part-time security guard at a local casino and to frequent his favorite Memphis strip bar. When not engaged in either activity, he thinks about history, which for him means, almost exclusively, the Yazoo Pass Expedition. As a child, Loveblood was transplanted to the Mississippi Delta from the state’s hill region, and his years as a Mhoon County deputy acquainted him with the region’s physical and social geography. Similarly, his discovery of the Union debacle at Yazoo Pass has sparked in him an intense, if highly imaginative, interest in the local past. Unconsciously paraphrasing William Faulkner, he declares of history that “It ain’t what WAS, it’s what AM,” and he frankly admits, “I wanted to know what was going on then where I am now.” That curiosity launches Loveblood into a creative recounting of the travails of naval Lieutenant Commander Watson Smith, travails that are complicated—in Loveblood’s telling—by the commander’s infatuation with a lovely Confederate spy, Anguilla Benoit, who daily doses his tea with peyote and carries on a...

A Second Adolescence: Two Big Questions and Where They Belong

Evidence points to the importance undergraduate students attach to two "big questions"–"What should I do with my life?" and "What does 'higher' education have to do with my life?" Recent changes in American higher education, while individually desirable, have had the unintended cumulative effect of making it more difficult to deal with such questions. These and similar questions are not subjective issues appropriate only for "bull sessions" but require very high order cognitive capacities–post-formal reasoning or reflective judgment. The article ends with five specific suggestions about how such questions can best be addressed in colleges and universities. This paper is based on a presentation given at the 2008 Institute on College Student Values in Tallahassee, Florida.

Victor Ambros

Victor Ambros

So Now They Tell Us

When I was an undergraduate, those who aspired to be “cool” made sure to do certain things. A cool person should always give the impression of doing very little work—for example, I can remember one occasion when I spent most of the evening in a bull session and then left saying that I had a date. In fact, my “date” was an all‐nighter with the famous text by Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky and Melba N. Phillips on electromagnetic fields. Working through the night required stimulants such as multiple cups of truly rotten coffee and 10 or 15 cigarettes. By the end of a semester, a person would look kind of pale, but that could be corrected by another really cool activity—getting a deep, dark suntan.

The Cold War as History

In the fall of 1991, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, Michael J. Hogan asked a group of diplomatic historians to write brief essays commenting on the end of the Cold War. Twenty contributors gave their views in articles that originally appeared in 1992 in Diplomatic History, the journal that Hogan edits for the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. The authors meet all the tests of political correctness. There are revisionists and postrevisionists, American and foreign historians, generalists and regional specialists, and even a token woman. Predictably, the result is disappointing. If you ask historians to give their views about current events, you are likely to get, as you do here, a set of rambling comments that have all the consistency of an academic bull session. Deprived of the very essence of their craft, documentary evidence and the perspective that only the passage of time can afford, these writers struggle valiantly with their charge, but end up, with only a few exceptions, by restating well-known views and stressing the obvious. The end of the Cold War, it turns out, leads to the same division among scholars as the once-explosive issue of its origins. The postrevisionists, inheritors of the now defunct orthodox view of this subject, see the outcome as confirming their belief in the rightness of the American cause, while the revisionists, faithful to their assumptions to the end, view it as substantiating all their suspicions about the real motives behind containment. The downfall of communism becomes for the first group the ultimate justification for waging the Cold War-the triumph of liberty over tyranny. For the dissenters, however, the outcome simply confirms their claim that American leaders, acting from ulterior motives, had all along exaggerated Soviet strength to carry out a design for world hegemony. John Lewis Gaddis, restating "the long peace" theme he put forward in the 1980s, stresses ideology as the determining factor in the rivalry between the

On the Cutting Edge—the Gadfly and the Strong Voice—Raising Hell

On the Cutting Edge—the Gadfly and the Strong Voice—Raising Hell Edward T. Breathitt Thefollowing remarks about Harry Caudill were made byformer Governor Breathitt in response to questionsposed byAppalachian Heritage. We began by asking him about the beginning of their friendship. How did I meet Harry Caudill? When I returned from World War II, I got a room in Bradley Hall, a men's residence hall at the University of Kentucky. Harry Caudill had a room there too, and so did T. George Harris, who is a writer from down at Trenton, Kentucky. We wound up getting to know each other and we would have long bull sessions in the dormitory at night. All three of us were undergraduates. I had only gone two quarters before I enlisted in the air force. Dr. Bennett Wall, a professor ofhistory at UK who was in charge of the residence halls, would sometimes join us, and we'd talk late into the evenings about all kinds of subjects—war experiences, girls, Kentucky, Kentucky history. Harry, of course, was very entertaining and so was George. There were two or three other people we knew there at the university that were good friends and we would quite often have Sunday breakfast together. Then Harry and I went to law school. George Harris left us; he went to Yale and then to Cambridge. We sort of lost track of him, but Harry and I were good friends all through law school and we'd meet and talk Edward T. Breathitt was governor of Kentucky from 1963 to 1967. After some years as senior vice-president of the Norfolk Southern Corporation in Washington, he now practices law at Wyatt, Tarrant, and Combs in Lexington, Kentucky. 21 between classes, and when we were studying we'd take a break and we'd talk. We'd talk about Kentucky politics, Kentucky history, and Kentucky's needs. We both were big on education in those days and the need to pass a sales tax to fund it. But then we went back home to practice law—Harry went up to Whitesburg and I went to Hopkinsville. I would see him mostly at bar-association meetings. Then, in the 1950s, we both ran for the legislature and won. Together with John Breckinridge and several others we formed a little group called the Rebels. They called us that because we rebelled against the iron leadership of Happy Chandler. I remember that we came out for a number of things like the merit system for state employees and the last we'd ever see of it would be the day we introduced it. It'd get sent to a committee and buried. But Harry would have a lot of funny things to say about that bill, wondering where it was. Everybody would get to roaring and laughing but the bill would never get out of committee. There was another bill that was to provide for a special parimutuel handle for a nonprofit track to benefit Keeneland race track. Happy Chandler was strong for it and it was backed by the horse people of Central Kentucky. But there was some populist opposition to it—Harry would make fun of it, saying that he had never seen a horse that cost over forty dollars. We had a lot of fun with it. We wound up with a platform of legislation, election reform , campaign-contribution reform, a merit system for state employees. We couldn't get anything accomplished on some of the things at that time, but at least we had a lot of dialogue and created a lot of interest in those issues. Harry and I were together all the time. We would plot, scheme, laugh, and talk, and we got to be very close then. After those days Harry and I spent a lot of time working in politics for Bert Combs in that losing 1955 campaign. Then we sort of drifted apart until I saw him some during the Combs administration after 1959. I was personnel commissioner; we got the merit system through, and Harry would on occasion come down to Frankfort to talk with us. Then he wrote Night Comes to...

The american college of theriogenologists

Beginning about 20 years ago, at most AVMA meetings, there were usually informal bull sessions involving veterinarians interested in reproduction. In the late 50's-the Rocky Mountain Bull Testing Society got under way, evolving subsequently into the American Veterinary Society for the Study of Breeding Soundness. This Society has been sponsoring annual or semi-annual educational programs separately and in conjunction with the AVMA.

Great Expectations and Secular Depreciation: The First Ten Years of the Social Science History Association

The idea of forming a new scholarly association has been generated in the lonely study of scholars hungry for supportive contact, in the interaction of kindred seekers in convention bars or bull sessions, and no doubt, in many other kinds of circumstances. The Social Science History Association began as an exercise in transmogrification, and although, in retrospect, its origin may appear to have been an act of secession, it was not intended as such. Institutional manifestation of what came to be called the “New Political History” was apparent as early as 1957 when a small group of historians interested in the political history of the American early national period met at Rutgers under the sponsorship of the Social Science Research Council to discuss the methodology of political history. The draft report of that conference, prepared by Richard P. McCormick (1957), rather accurately forecast significant developments during the next decade.

Introductory Sociology as a Study of Modernization

a vague sense of the sociological imagination. Sociology may be seen as an interesting (or uninteresting) pastime, something similar to a bull session, in which opinions are offered, strawpersons annihilated, and value judgments asserted. What is lacking is a sense of the urgency of the sociological task; that sociological understanding is a crucial variable in grasping the conditions of existence (Watkins 1982). This outcome is partially a consequence of the substance of the usual introductory course. It is a survey course, touching many bases and landing securely on the few selected by the instructor for emphasis. The course lacks an integrating perspective. It could be claimed that such a perspective does exist, the implicit agreement among text writers. A typical Introductory Sociology text is eclectic. It seeks to introduce the discipline in some 18-20 chapters, each of them about 35 pages in length. The structure of this eclectic text could be summarized as follows:

Text and Process in Poetry and Philosophy

Francis Sparshott TEXT AND PROCESS IN POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY Ir. H. Bradley in an optimistic moment described philosophy as an • unusually intense and sustained attempt to think clearly.1 If that is what it is, it is clearly a process; and, if it is a process, one does not see what a philosophical text could be. A text is surely not a process, though it may be the product of one. A text that purported to be philosophy would deceive, as many of us complain that textbooks deceive, by substituting for the living endeavors of thought a series of slogans and purported conclusions the parroting of which demonstrates that thought has been evaded, not clarified. But there are such things as philosophical texts, and we could not easily do without them. They are, indeed, central to our experience ofwhat philosophy is. They must be doing some work, and it is up to us to establish what that work could be. 2. If philosophy is indeed a process of clarifying thought, it must in each of us be a self-critical monologue, and it must in the world be a manyvoiced conversation among Thaïes and his contemporaries and successors through history. (Similar traditions in other parts of the world constitute different conversations, in other corners of the room, and sometimes we eavesdrop on each other's conversations; but we will not be concerning ourselves witii them here.) A philosophical text should be a record of parts ofthat conversation, a minute ofthe long meeting ofminds. Without such a record the conversation could be no better than a bull session; we would be forever returning to the beginning, not to recover our origins but because memory had stretched to snapping. After all, what use would the clarification of thought be unless die progress won could be preserved? Philosophy begets philosophy as humanity begets humanity; there must be an Aristotelian efficient cause, a form-bearer. 2 Philosophy and Literature 3.As minute of the clarifying conversation, the text might serve the purpose of an interim conclusion, a tentative result. But not necessarily, and not if the clarity sought is indeed clarity in thinking. Minutes of decision-making bodies may record only the motions passed; but deliberating bodies often prefer to include in the minutes the arguments on either side, so that when they come to reconsider a matter on which a motion has been passed they may do so with renewed insight. A progress report may report only where one has progressed to, but it may also retrace the progression whereby die progress was made. So perhaps die best sort of text in philosophy is die sort I shall call a philosophoumenon, a text that recreates in and for the reader the experience ofclarification itself. But if this is to be done the reader must be sucked in: before clarification can be done, unclarity must be re-enacted. Confusion must be induced and its recognition must be enforced: the reader must be enticed not only to recognize but to undergo in person the Socratic elenchus, which for two millennia has ensured that the best philosophers shall be the best hated philosophers. To do its elenctic work, a philosophoumenal text must be deeply ambiguous, internally divided, blatantly self-contradictory. The Platonic dialogues are exemplary in this as in most ways: dramatic denunciations of drama, written disparagements of writing, conclusive proofs of the impotence of reason. But the other masters did the same: Descartes guides the reader of his Meditations step by step through the argument that is to lead the reader to doubt Descartes's existence; Aristotle invents and deploys a highly technical vocabulary which he never uses in the same way twice, and establishes a classification of intellectual methods into which none ofhis own work can be fitted; Wittgenstein obsessively philosophizes to show the folly of philosophizing, and carefully ensures diat his students circulate die content of the texts that he ostentatiously refuses to publish; Kierkegaard stridently claims authorship of his pseudonymous works so that he can repudiate them audioritatively; G. E. Moore accurately defines goodness so as to make it clear exactly what he is saying when he says that goodness is...

Archaeology and Prohibition

The importance of alcohol to the archaeologist is investigated through a study of archaeological productivity before, during and after Prohibition. This contribution to the ethno-science of archaeo...