Noah Roderick The Being of Analogy Noah Roderick Noah Roderick The Being of Analogy The Being of Modern physics replaced the dualism of matter and form with a new distinction between matter and force. In this way form was marginalized, and with it the related notion of the object. Noah Roderick’s book is a refreshing effort to reverse the consequences of this now banal mainstream materialism. Ranging from physics through literature to linguistics, spanning philosophy from East to West, and weaving it all together in remarkably lucid prose, Roderick intro- duces a new concept of analogy that sheds unfamiliar light on such thinkers as Marx, Deleuze, Goodman, Sellars, and Foucault. More than a literary device, analogy teaches us something about being itself. OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Cover design by Katherine Gillieson · Illustration by Tammy Lu The Being of Analogy New Metaphysics Series Editors: Graham Harman and Bruno Latour The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphys- ics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analytic- continental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intel- lectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical ‘sound’ from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main inter- est is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy. Noah Roderick The Being of Analogy OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS London 2016 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2016 Freely available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/the-being-of-analogy Copyright © 2016 Noah Roderick This is an open access book, licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy this book so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 Design by Katherine Gillieson Cover Illustration by Tammy Lu The cover illustration is copyright Tammy Lu 2016, used under a Creative Commons By Attribution license (CC-BY). PRINT ISBN 978-1-78542-022-1 PDF ISBN 978-1-78542-023-8 OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. Contents Acknowledgements 9 List of Figures 11 Introduction 13 1. Sunt Lacrimae Rerum 29 2. Tricksy Things 72 3. Similarity and Reality 110 4. Empiricism and the Problem of Similarity 121 5. Grammar and Emergence 164 6. The Dynamic Lives of Languages and Genres 196 7. Form and Knowledge 214 8. Marxian Amaterialism 227 9. Know. Fish. Happy. 245 Endnotes 255 For Dad. Akana shai ankeres ande k’o vast kado lil. Acknowledgements The more you understand your debts to others, the harder it is to articulate them. With that terrible paradox in mind, I want to thank Charish. Above all. All of my love. Thanks to Mom and Susannah for persevering and inspiring. Thanks to my great friends for their support, feedback, and encouragement: Chris Al- Aswad (R.I.P.), Lilly Anderson, Ricia Chansky, Eric Lamore, Chris Lackey, Gino Liu, Paul Morris, Travis Olson, and Ericka Wills. I’m forever grateful to Ron Strickland and Chris Breu for teaching me how to read, and to Kate Beutel and Holly Baumgartner for supporting me with time and infinite patience. Many thanks also go to Sigi Jöttkandt and the reviewers at Open Humanities Press for the transformative feedback and for bringing this book to press. And finally, this book would not have been possible had Graham Harman not taken a chance on me. I thank him for the revolutionary ideas he brought to the world, for the comma he brought to page 137 of my manuscript, and for everything in between. List of Figures Figure 1: The Koch snowflake Figure 2: The Kouroi statues, Kleobis and Biton Figure 3: The Riace bronzes Introduction The Midday Stars Einstein’s great mystique lies in his intellectually humble beginnings and in his unorthodox thinking. Every eighth grade science student has heard about his inability to speak until the age of four (though this is almost certainly untrue). They know about how his most important ideas were developed while he was a frustrated patent office worker, and about how he dreamt up his theory of relativity while watching trains pass each other. Einstein’s exuberance, his funky hair, and his ability to translate startling visuals into beautiful mathematics made him a counter-culture hero. All of it seemed to come naturally to Einstein, a quirk of personality. Not so for Hideki Yukawa. He titled his memoir Tabibito, “The Traveler.” Yet, it is full of mentions of his distaste for leaving the sanctuary of his home and routine. The book’s subtitle might well have been An Unexpected Journey. Yukawa had to work hard to become an unorthodox thinker. Since it was not part of his personality, it had to become his philosophy. In the years following the Russo-Japanese War, in the spirit of Meiji curiosity about the nation’s rivals, Russian literature was all the rage in Japan. Because of his crippling shyness and his lack of interest in all of the things boys at the time were supposed to be interested in, Yukawa’s classmates took to calling him “Iwan-chan,” after Tolstoy’s Ivan the Fool.1 In Tolstoy’s fairytale, the Devil sends three imps to destroy Ivan, a simple farmer, and his two brothers, one a soldier and the other a merchant. The imps sent to Ivan’s two brothers successfully ruin them by using the soldier’s 14 Introduction ambition and the merchant’s greed. Ivan, being a fool with no other desire than to work the land, frustrates all three imps. Each imp in turn becomes exhausted, and Ivan catches them. The first imp offers Ivan anything he wants, and so Ivan asks the imp for something to cure his stomachache. The imp duly provides three roots, one of which Ivan takes and the others he saves. When the second imp, the soldier’s imp, is caught, he offers Ivan the ability to turn straw into soldiers. Ivan agrees to this because he’d like the soldiers to sing for him. When the merchant brother’s imp is caught, he offers Ivan the ability to turn leaves into gold pieces. Ivan agrees to this because he believes the gold pieces would be pretty things for the peasant children to play with. Through a series of events, Ivan becomes king of his realm, but having no ambition to increase the wealth or the power of his kingdom, all of the wise people flee, leaving a kingdom of fools who have no use for currency or soldiers. Eventually, the Devil himself attempts to ruin Ivan, but he too fails because Ivan and his kingdom of fools refuse to recognize instruments of power as anything but objects for enjoyment. Yukawa didn’t himself relate any of the details of Tolstoy’s story, and seems to have taken the “Iwan-chan” nickname at face-value, but his philosophy of scientific invention very much involves Ivan’s foolish intuition of objects preceding the assigned meaning of those objects. When he was six years old, his grandfather, a teacher of Chinese classics, began teaching him the sodoku method of reading kanji. In the sodoku method, the student learns the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters before ever learning anything about the meanings of those characters. By contrast, in alphabetical learning, a student already has access to the connection between the sound of a word and its meaning. The job is to analyze the word’s phonemes so that they fit into the general scheme of a language’s orthography. Exceptions to the 1:1 phoneme-grapheme ratio are either unobserved or analyzed later on. In analytic languages, such as Chinese, where the phoneme-morpheme ratio is already close to 1:1, students analyze the morpheme-grapheme (plus radical) relationship. Thus, there is comparatively little analysis in sodoku learning. One can only guess at patterns from an infinitude of singularities, and this alarmed the young Yukawa: [A]ll of these books were like walls without doors. Each kanji held a secret world of its own; many kanji made a line and The Midday Stars 15 several lines made a page. Then that page became a frightening wall to me as a boy.2 But in 1922, when Yukawa was eighteen, Albert Einstein made a well- publicized visit to Japan, and for a brief time “quantum theory” became a buzzword. Yukawa was drawn to the subject because the words “quantum” and “theory” seemed to bear such an arbitrary relationship to each other. Like the kanji, the two signs came together out of a pure infinity of other signs, and so could only be experienced aesthetically, with all of the terrifying pleasure of the Burkean sublime. It was around this time that particle physics was beginning to face down its own infinity problem that would drive the science from that point forward.