Reflections on Translation – I: Accepting and Assessing Translations

Like any reader with a sufficiently long career, I have read many works in translation. In doing so, I have been aware of the distance between the author and myself, of being subject to the same constraints as any other reader of translated works is. Still, I have never ceased to be surprised when I hear someone tell me that they have read a work–known only to me in English–in translation, in a language I would not associate with the author. The most dramatic instance of this astonishment came while talking to an Austrian graduate student who told me he had read Orwell in German; I found it utterly bizarre that anyone could read Orwell in German. I had the tables turned on me when I told a Russian friend I was  reading Dostoevsky, and was greeted with the perplexed inquiry, “You’re reading him in English? How can you do that?” Indeed. How could I do that? But my incompetence in Russian meant it was the only option available to me, and so, I’ve had only one window into that entire body of literature, one that has enriched me in more ways than one, an interaction with which has been subject to limitations I’ve acutely been aware of. I have come to reconcile myself to this shortchanging with my awareness that my engagement with those works is still unique because of my particularities as a reader. It’s a minor blessing, but it will do for now. (I find my relationship to Russian literature especially poignant in its limitations because I’m aware that as a young man my father read many Russian novels  in English translations and then later, went on to learn Russian well enough to speak it–or so I am told–reasonably fluently; I often wonder whether he went back  to reread those same works in Russian.)

I grew up bilingual, so I’ve had a chance to bridge this sort of gap. In high school in India, we read the short stories of the Indian novelist Premchand in Hindi. Later, after moving to the US, and during a trip back to India, I picked up a collection of Premchand’s short stories–translated into English. The temporal distance between my first exposure to Premchand’s shorts and this one was too great; when I read them in English, I was aware of a difference, but it was not one I could adequately describe or articulate. I was merely cognizant of the fact that I was reading distinct works and was unable to make any sort of critical assessment of the quality of the translation.

I have a chance to conduct this experiment again; I own three of Premchand’s novels in the original Hindi, and plan to pick up translations in English on my next trip to India. I have often found myself groaning at the quality of the subtitled translations of Indian cinema; if  more than one established translation of Premchand into English can be found, I intend to make those rough expressions of discontent more formal, to finally be the kind of snob that is able to say “I prefer X’s translation to Y’s.” I say this with all due humility: my fluency in Hindi is debatable; I am aware of the indeterminacy of translation; but still, it’ll be nice to be able to turn the tables, to go from being the one on the outside, being told of my separation from the translated work, to being the one on the inside, informing others of theirs.

Bernard Rose’s Kreuzer Sonata: Sex and Jealousy Forever

Bernard Rose‘s The Kreuzer Sonata might be the best cinematic treatment of insidious, corrosive, and ultimately self-destructive sexual jealousy that I have seen recently. Based on Leo Tolstoy‘s 1889 novella, and part of a trilogy of Tolstoy-adaptations by Rose–I have not seen his Anna Karenina and Ivan’s XTC yet, but I intend to–the film belongs to the transposition genre; it sets Tolstoy’s story of 19th century Russia in 21st century Los Angeles. The locale changes; the plot details are modified in response accordingly, but the essential component of the lurid sexual imagination–made more feverish by imagined infidelity–is faithfully preserved. Rose’s rendering has the visual look and feel of a low-budget quasi-cinema-verite production in both its dark color palettes and camera work; the dialogue is often clipped and overlapping, and thus unfailingly rings true. These elements of Rose’s style combine to give the Rise and Fall of Marriage Founded on Carnal Love the feeling of a terrifying headlong rush toward the final, inevitable, tragic denouement.

In Tolstoy’s story, the narrator repels and fascinates us as we realize his jealousy is grounded in his own uncomfortable positioning of sex within his self: he is unable to shake loose its demands on him, and yet repelled by his response to it. His wife is sullied by her acceptance of his sexual desires but her rejection would have enraged him; so from the very beginning he despises his wife even as he makes love to her. Caught in this bind, he is an easy mark for the green-eyed monster. Without exaggeration, Tolstoy’s story was about sex–talked about, referred to, and obsessed over–but in the context of that tale never made explicit in its pages (Tolstoy’s treatment was still explicit enough to get the novella banned in Russia and–briefly–in the US). In the cinematic version, the sex is explicit, frank, and center-stage; it makes clear precisely what the husband is fantasizing about. This is what his wife did before him with other men; this is what she did with him; this is what she now does with her ‘new lover’. The husband’s obsessions are made worse, of course, because the sexual component of their monogamous, child-producing, buzz-killing relationship is in terminal decline; this precipitous fall is neatly paired off with a correspondingly dizzying rise in his obsessive desires to control her sexual being, to know her more than he had ever wanted, or is ever possible in this world of ours.

Rose has pulled off the rather neat trick of making Tolstoy’s story more relevant for our times by his adaptation: Tolstoy’s original narrator made himself distant by his idiosyncratic, religiously-inspired, crankish attitude toward sex; but Rose’s central character is worldly, sophisticated, even sexually powerful in his attractions and charms. He is not asexual, reluctantly drawn into its sordid embrace; he is an active player in the sexual arena, one who conquers frequently and successfully. And yet, he is ultimately defeated by its unique challenges. Tolstoy’s central character always appeared ill-equipped for the challenges of the sexual relationship; what leaves us shaken about Rose’s pseudo-hero is that even one so apparently strong is humbled by the seemingly-perennially paired companions of sex and jealousy.

Random Searches on the New York Subways: Getting Used to the Stop-n-Frisk

New York City residents are, by now, used to the subway version of the stop-and-frisk, to the sight of policemen manning the turnstiles to the city subway, subjecting passengers to ‘random’ searches of their bags and belongings. The rules are quite simple: if you don’t subject yourselves to the search you don’t get to enter and ride. Many of the city’s residents, however, do not realize the option to refuse the search exists. (I have never looked closely enough to verify whether this option is made clear to the potential passenger; rather, the subway rider becomes aware of the impending search when a policeman menacingly waves you toward his partners with the irritatingly faux-polite “Sir, would you step this way?”)

Over the past few years, in the course of teaching the privacy portions of my Computer Ethics class at Brooklyn College, I became aware of a rather depressing fact when discussing the Fourth Amendment: not a single student in my classes was aware of the fact that they could decline a search and simply leave the subway station instead. When I informed them that on two separate occasions–once at 42nd Street station and once at Atlantic Avenue–I had said, “No thanks” and walked out–on the latter occasion, I walked up the stairs, crossed Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues and then entered the same station at the unmanned Hanson Place entrance–I was greeted with cries of disbelief: “Really?” “No way! You can do that?”

This little discussion is quite useful in enabling a segue into a discussion of the ludicrous rallying cry–If You’ve Got Nothing to Hide, You Shouldn’t Mind a Little Stop-n-Frisk Action–of the pro-search brigade. I ask my students whether concealment of a crime is the only reason that someone might give for refusing a search, and ask them to suggest situations where someone might quite reasonably decline a search in order to keep something entirely legal private. (Unsurprisingly, some of the examples involved pornography: one student suggested a closeted gay man going home with recently purchased gay porn; another student said he wouldn’t want his hetero-porn purchases to be visible to other passengers; others disliked the idea of police looking through their clothes; and some students, because of their own personal history of encounters with the police, simply disliked the idea of police, once again, subjecting them to an atmosphere of intimidation.) Many of my students quite like the sound of a great line I got from Marc Rotenberg: If I’ve Got Nothing to Hide, Then Why Do You Need to Search Me?

During this discussion, I also ask my students what they think is being achieved by these random searches in the subway system. As my example of entry and re-entry to the Atlantic Avenue station suggested, the system is easily co-opted (when I declined my search at the 42nd Street station, I walked eight blocks and entered the subway at 34th Street); moreover, someone actually planning to do harm to the city subways would not plan an operation that could preempted by a mere search at the turnstiles. The answer to this question emerges quite quickly: this system of searches does nothing to increase our security; it does however, ensure that the citizens of this city (and certainly those who visit it), increasingly get used to a world in which armed representatives of the state are present in public spaces, ready to inspect, regulate, and commandeer. Gradual conditioning like this can do wonders to ensure the steady, relentless erosion–one enabled by the acquiescence of the citizenry–of legally sanctioned and protected civil liberties. These searches are not tactics of protection; they are strategies of subversion.

Starting to Understand the Reactionary Mind

My Brooklyn College colleague Corey Robin‘s new book, The Reactionary Mind, has, thanks to its provocative thesis (and its brilliant prose, a rare quality in an academic book), sparked a great deal of discussion in academic and non-academic circles alike. Given the relevance of the book to modern American political life, and its provision of an intellectual history of conservatism, the Wolfe Institute at Brooklyn College–where I serve as faculty associate–has decided to make the book the subject of this semester’s faculty study group. We will meet once a month to discuss the book’s arguments and analysis; I will lead the discussion. (The Wolfe Institute conducts such faculty study groups every semester; last semester I discussed Alexander Nehamas‘ Nietzsche: Life as Literature; Nietzsche, incidentally, is classified as a conservative by Robin.)

Unfortunately, this rather humdrum business of a bunch of academics getting together to read a book and discuss it, seems to have been rather bizarrely misunderstood–by some–as an ideological exercise of sorts. Professor Mitchell Langbert of the National Association of Scholars described, in a blog post, the study group’s planned activity as a “discussion…at taxpayer expense,” possibly an exercise in “taxpayer-funded ideology,” and wonders whether I will “permit disagreement” and whether “the democratic ideologies of Stalin and Mao will be used to illustrate Robin’s and Chopra’ commitment to freedom and democracy.” Professor Langbert also emailed Professor Robert Viscusi of the Wolfe Institute and myself (making sure to copy Brooklyn College administrators, though he got the email addresses wrong), and said, among other things:

I am offended at and concerned about the announcement that you released yesterday concerning a talk about conservatives at the Wolfe Institute. The talk is ideological, and your announcement is offensive to the few, suppressed Brooklyn College conservatives not already eliminated from their jobs via ideologically motivated personnel decisions. Calling American conservatism a reaction against democratic challenges and claiming that conservatives defend power and privilege against freedom movements are red herrings. The fishy scent is evident in your lumping together Ayn Rand, John C. Calhoun, and Edmund Burke. Have you sponsored speakers who can explain why doing so is ill informed?

Professors Chopra and Robin are entitled to their political views, but do you intend to offer balance? If the Wolfe Center sponsors ideological attacks on conservatism, do you also offer balance with a speaker or two who know something about conservatism?

I remain puzzled as to how a “faculty study group” could be confused with a “talk” and how the activities of a study group devoted to a discussion of a book’s arguments could be construed as the promulgation of an ideology. The invitation to the study group was sent to all Brooklyn College faculty members, presumably a diverse group that includes political orientations of all stripes. As Professor Robert Viscusi put it, “As many points of view will be represented as the participants choose to espouse.” My task is to lead the discussion, not to censor disagreement.

The problem might be, of course, that merely reading and discussing the book is offensive to some. To that sensibility I have nothing to say.

Update (February 10th): In my original post, I forgot to mention that Professor Langbert appeared to have copied Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, the CUNY Board of Trustees member who, last year, had played a significant role in the university’s disastrous decision to deny Tony Kushner a honorary degree. (The decision was subsequently reversed.) Mr. Wiesenfeld joined the fray by writing:

This is the curse of academia: no honest debate. Just shut your opponents down. Ahhh…but if political islamists come along, the liberalls[sic] cower. Nothing like implied or real threats of violence to take campus control. Checkpoints and BDS conferences anyone?

My reactions to this message are the same as above. I have added a link to “BDS conferences” so that readers can understand the reference.

Update (February 18th): Professor Langbert has responded to the post above in another blog post (at the National Association Scholars blog).

Cary Sherman is Upset SOPA and PIPA Were Not Enacted

I am thankful to the RIAA‘s Cary Sherman for having provided a wonderful sample of writing, which may profitably be used by those teaching classes on rhetoric and critical thinking. I’m referring to Sherman’s screed in today’s New York Times, which alternates between self-pity and bluster in complaining about the failure of the passage of SOPA and PIPA, and which concludes with the line “We need reason, not rhetoric, in discussing how to achieve a [‘safe and legal Internet’].” Do as I say, not as I do.

(Pardon me for merely taking potshots at Mr. Sherman below; on matters like these, I tend to write with a red cloud misting my eyes, and can barely type coherent sentences; pardon me too, for not addressing every single ‘point’ that Mr. Sherman attempts to make.)

We begin then, with:

The digital tsunami that swept over the Capitol last month, forcing Congress to set aside legislation to combat the online piracy of American music, movies, books and other creative works, raised questions about how the democratic process functions in the digital age.

“Tsunami”: Remember those aqueous beasts that killed hundreds of thousands and caused billions of dollars in damage? That’s what a concerted, organized political action against the RIAA’s attempt to clamp down on the ‘Net was like. It certainly raised questions for me about “how the democratic process functions in the digital age.” For instance, why doesn’t it happen more often in this nation? Note: I said “clamp down.” I am playing along.

Then,

Policy makers had recognized a constitutional (and economic) imperative to protect American property from theft…They knew that music sales in the United States are less than half of what they were in 1999, when the file-sharing site Napster emerged, and that direct employment in the industry had fallen by more than half since then, to less than 10,000.

“Constitutional” – the use of this term is an old-fashioned, well-worn American tactic to induce feelings of betrayal in a good citizen (ideally, one that hasn’t read the Constitution). I assume Mr. Sherman is equally concerned about another “constitutional imperative,” that of limited terms for copyright protection.

“Theft” – followed by two claims whose causes have yet to be traced to online music sharing. Note: I used “sharing.” I brought my bat and ball too.

At the 11th hour, a flood of e-mails and phone calls to Congress stopped the legislation in its tracks. Was this the result of democracy, or demagoguery?

“Demagoguery” – unfortunately, the line between this terrible thing and “democracy” is a hard one to draw and historically, has been so. Certainly, from the ramparts of the castle, the approaching “tsunami” of pitchforks may look like it was cobbled together by demagogues.

Misinformation may be a dirty trick, but it works. Consider, for example, the claim that SOPA and PIPA were “censorship,” a loaded and inflammatory term

“Loaded and inflammatory,” like “piracy,” “tsunami,” “theft,” and “misinformation” (which conjures up images of a Ministry of Information dishing out newspeak). The use of the latter terms is permitted only when the RIAAA and its minions are obeying “constitutional,” “economic,” and perhaps even moral imperatives. To resist them is “demagoguery.”

I might be mistaken in presenting Sherman’s Op-Ed as a piece of political rhetoric; its agonizingly self-pitying tone suggests a deeper, psychologically rooted dysfunction. I know pop-psychologizing is poor form, but really, what can you do with lines like the following?

The hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the world’s most popular Web sites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power….[These sites]  are duping their users into accepting as truth what are merely self-serving political declarations.

So let me wrap up this shooting-fish-in-a-barrel episode and get back to work: Sherman’s “hyperbolic mistruth,” presented on the editorial page of one of the world’s most moneyed media outlets is a “self-serving political declaration.” Read it, ‘clip it’, keep it aside. You’ll see in in textbooks soon, mark my words.

And go read the Wikipedia articles linked to above.

Roger Cohen, the “Two Footballs”, and False Dichotomies

Over at the New York Times, Roger Cohen has an Op-Ed contrasting football and football. I mean, Association football and American football. Or, rather, soccer and football. Roughly Cohen’s thesis is: soccer is all skill and art, football is all violent force and anti-finesse; America reveals its plebeian failure to appreciate soccer artistry by its obsession for football; no matter how much soccer is promoted or played, it is doomed in America. Roughly.

I’m inclined to think Cohen’s article is a classic piece of trollery, looking for hits in a slow news week (But is it really? The Palestinians and Israelis are talking about a new peace deal; fighting rages in Syria; Greek workers are striking; the ISI faces possible legal trouble in Pakistan; plenty of material for Cohen to turn his cool analytical lens on, so this bit of dabbling in sport is rather mysterious.) Cohen will, rather predictably, get taken to task in the Letters section. But I might as well start the party here.

Cohen commits a classic fallacy, common among a particular breed of sports fan, who might justifiably be accused of having missed the point: a superficial similarity between two sports does not entail a coherent comparison between the two. Should I, for instance, compare tennis to golf, because in both games there is a ball and an implement with which to strike the ball? So too, with football and soccer: yes, a ball is moved across the length of a field by a bunch of players, but that’s where the comparison should end. To continue further risks too much strawman construction and demolition.

The facile comparison of two radically dissimilar sports, which is bound to generate ludicrous generalizations, reveals nothing as much as ignorance of one of the sports being compared. I am used, for instance, to the pointless and endless comparisons between cricket and baseball, both of which I enjoy and take pleasure in. Those cricket and baseball fans that like both sports–and there are many, I assure you–watch on in bemusement as cudgels are taken up on behalf of sports which need neither defense or aggrandizement at the cost of the other.

Cohen, similarly, fires off well-worn cliches about football, imagining that in doing so, he is glorifying soccer by contrast; he does no such thing (ironically, the kind of jabs he directs at football have their counterpart in the ignorant rants made about soccer by the ignorant American fans Cohen derides.) More problematically, Cohen imagines that he is a harbinger of a greater cosmopolitanism to the hopelessly low-brow American sports landscape, bringing us news of sports played in distant lands that we would do well to focus our attention on, if only we could be bothered raising our knuckles off the ground.

But Cohen should know better: he started his article by telling us that Fox (FOX!) broadcast the Chelsea-Manchester United game live on Sunday.  The mavens at Fox, who have their fingers on America’s pulse, know something that Cohen doesn’t seem to: soccer is a big deal in the US. Not as big a deal as football, and it probably won’t ever be, but big enough to make silly any use of it as a rhetorical device in complaining about American insularity.

To do that, there is plenty of ammunition to be found elsewhere. A good journalist should be able to track it down.

Cyberflânerie Contd.

My post yesterday on cyberflanerie sparked a couple of thoughtful and interesting comments in response.

John says:

[T]he social web also permits us to make ‘friends’ on the basis of common interests. On blogs or on Twitter, we regularly see conversations between former strangers on subjects of common interest.

And David Barry said:

[T]o a small extent with Facebook, and to an enormous extent with Twitter, I get to see many, many more interesting things than if I were randomly following links….if I put even a small value on the interesting thing itself, then the total number of interesting things will overwhelm the pleasure at discovering a cool website on my own. To take your library metaphor, with social media I see many more bookshelves than I would have seen on my own. And even then, it is not as though I’m constrained by what my friends are reading

These are fair points, and they underlie:  a) the intuition that most people have that social networking provides real value; and b) the promotion of social networking by its creators and proponents. I don’t think these blessings are insignificant and I don’t mean to discount them. So, to take John’s comment, I concede that new ‘friends’ can be made this way, new contacts formed. And I will happily concede David’s point too, that I am often pointed to links of interest by my online contacts.

That said, in my post yesterday I was attempting to point out a consequence of a particular kind of social networking architecture, a consequence that appears likely given its actual implementation and patterns of usage (as opposed to just its promised form and application). The architecture of Facebook and Twitter–to stick to two prominent examples–is a ticker-tape of feeds from our ‘friends’ or our ‘leaders’ (the ones we follow). I could simply do the following: fire up Facebook and Twitter, open a tab for each, and watch the feed scroll, picking and choosing from the buffet offering. These then, are my windows to the web. I leave this window to go browse, and there is the chance that while I am so diverted, I will go off on journeys of exploration of my own, where I might find links that I post back on my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Or perhaps I open the link in a new tab, and then return to Facebook and Twitter to do more browsing.

So in one way, serendipity lives on: someone is providing links for me to chase, but the possibility of my diversion has not been taken away. Of course, when I do go to a site link provided by my Facebook or Twitter feed, I am likely to see other signs telling me my friends have liked or shared or read an article and I might be tempted to go chase those down instead. The entire net is marked with like buttons, and signs telling me what has been read and shared and by whom. The informational content of the web now is not just content, but content tagged with readership information. We impose hierarchies in this tagging of course. For instance, I might treat certain friends’ shares as more valuable indicators of good content than others and so on.

But as the ticker-tape/smorgasbord model and as the the presence of all pages–all tagged–all the time indicates, I am threading my way through a heavily marked-up, recommended and annotated world. All by my ‘friends’. It is the possibility of this world–and the sense that something has been lost in it–that I was trying to get at in my post yesterday. (One might ask of course, who is doing the initial discovery and link-provision; the answer might be ‘the leaders’, which would be a depressing sort of thing to find out about a space that was to introduce a kind of democratization of knowledge but which seems to just have imposed its own hierarchies.)

The central question then remains: is the possible loss of the un-guided exploration a reasonable bargain? David’s comment seem to indicate the answer is ‘yes’; perhaps all I had done yesterday was indicate the possibility of this loss and make a prima facie claim that its loss would be an undesirable consequence. I think the answer to this question can be quite fascinating especially because it could expose the degree to which even flânerie is perhaps a fiction: that even the notion of an unguided self exploring in autonomous fashion is a fallacy, that we are always being guided and prodded in our discoveries.

I did not mean to ever indicate that valuable information sharing and access provision was not taking place on the current ‘Net. My intention was rather to point out that the information-sharing model which is fundamentally about annotation, guidance, tagging, link-provision, and ‘sharing’ is likely to displace a particular kind of inquiry. It might be as David points out, that flanerie-style inquiry and exploration just isn’t that valuable, and we should be happy to see it displaced by the sharing and recommendation model. The assessment of the relative value of those models of inquiry needs an additional argument. My initial statement was to point to its impending loss (or its survival in tiny, epistemically aristocratic enclaves).

Incidentally, I do think that the customized search that Google seems to want to provide us is a disaster; I most certainly don’t want my past search history to constrain–in the ways that Google wants–my present and future searches. I find myself signing out of my Google account when I search, largely because I’m finding the personalized pages that come up to be perniciously foreclosing possibilities for discovery.

Evgeny Morozov on the Death of the Cyberflâneur

Evgeny Morozov pens a thoughtful piece on the death of the cyberflâneur – a natural consequence of the customized, walled-off, app-and-Like-and-Tweet-button-infested ‘Net that is staring us in the face–no pun intended–as Mark Zuckerberg and his merry band of Facebook buccaneers ride through town, rolling blunts in thousand-dollar bills. (Morozov runs the inevitable risk of turning off those who don’t like invocations of French notions in contemporary commentary but it is one worth taking.)

The cyberflâneur is animated and sustained by serendipity as he travels through and around the ‘Net. He hopes he will stumble upon the new, the unexpected, the not-immediately-contingent-on-the-past through his travels. He puts his trust in the ‘Net’s ‘community’ to generate content that he might like (not Like); he might generate some of his own to throw into the bubbling mix. He is not guided at every single step by their preferences, their recommendations, their idiosyncrasies. Facebook’s most tone-deaf assumption–as revealed in Zuckerberg’s par-for-the-course infantile insistence that we want to go to the movies with our friends–is that what we consume, appreciate and possibly integrate into our preferences is wholly driven by what our contemporaries do. We are creatures of our time indeed, but we are also capable of, and responsible for, our own distinctive paths and patterns of interaction with the culture that surrounds us. The kind of lock-step marching that appears as a not-too-distant consequence of the kind of ‘sharing’ culture Facebook is preparing for us is truly depressing in its grey conformity and its frightening lack of solitude.

If the Zuckerberg-Facebook assumption–that we always want to be guided by our ‘friends’, that we always want to share, and have tastes shared with us–were true, then we would always visit the most crowded attractions in the world and go precisely where the herds go. But we don’t. Even in a museum packed to the rafters on a weekend, we sometimes take a turn into the obscure side-gallery because something has caught our eye, tickled an obscure part of our imagination, tapped into a part of us that we did not know existed till then. We do not know ourselves fully; to explore by ourselves, guided by our own mysterious inclinations can be an entrancing journey of self-discovery. To be constantly guided, prodded, pushed, recommended, into well-worn and commented on paths is dismissive of our potential for reconfiguration.

The ‘Net was supposed to be Borges’ library. It might be that; but it is a library with all its books marked with little stickers telling us who liked what, with its pathways marked with commentary, urging me to add my own so that I may ‘guide’ the others who follow me. This library’s custodians don’t want us browsing the shelves; they want to guide us into small reading rooms where we will meet those with whom we are already familiar.

In this ‘Net, our past determines our future; our essences become fixed quickly as we lock into trajectories determined by our ourselves and our Friends. Talk about existential crises.

I left Facebook more than a year ago, and have not returned. My decision, in many ways, was irrational: as a writer, I cut myself off from a form of advertising that is increasingly crucial in today’s social media world. I still owe myself a post here that explains my rationale for doing so. All in good time.

Girl, Napalm, and ?

So what did you fill in the blanks? Vietnam, I’m guessing ((Chrome’s autofill suggests “photo” and “attack” when I begin typing in “girl napalm”). And the reason for that in all likelihood is Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the subject of Nick Ut’s iconic, Pulitzer-prize-winning image of the Vietnam war.

That straightforward association of “girl” and “napalm” with “Vietnam” came to me as I read The Gangster We Are All Looking For, the 2003 novelistic debut of Vietnamese-American author lê thi diem thúy. In particular, it happened as I turned to page 86 and read the narrator of the novel, a young girl, displaced after the war to the US, tell us about one of her mother’s memories:

She had heard a story about a girl in a neighboring town who was killed during a napalm bombing. The bombing happened on an especially hot night, when this girl had walked to the beach to cool her feet in the water. They found her floating on the sea. The phosphorus from the napalm made her body glow like a lantern.

As I read the lines I thought about Ut’s photograph; precisely the association lê thi diem thúy wanted me to make. To work in a direct reference to Phan Kim Thi Phuc would be clumsy given the novel’s structure, so the most perspicuous way to bring the reader to her–in a quasi-autobiographical book written by an author whose identity as a refugee from the Vietnam war is known to the reader, whose narrator is a refugee and so on–is to simply use “girl”, “napalm”, “bombing” and “village” together. It worked. (I cast my mind back to the time I first saw the photo in an anthology of Life‘s photographs in my school library; I was a sixth or seventh-grader then, and my notion of a wartime photo was restricted to explosions, fireballs, mushroom clouds, gleaming weaponry, and strong, grimy men in martial poses. A young, naked, helpless girl in pain didn’t fit in well. More to the point, in my dim understanding of the war, it was the US v. Someone Or The Other and the thought that the US–strictly speaking, a South Vietnamese plane and pilot–was responsible for her defenceless, agonizingly painful state of being was jarring.)

That straightforward reaction was followed rather quickly by a sense of disbelief that more than a decade after the launch of the Afghan war (on 7th October 2001), I cannot think of a single, classic, enduring photograph associated with that continuing conflict. (In the case of the Iraq war, the Abu Ghraib photographs now aspire to the status of “iconic”). Somehow, despite the multiple documentaries made on the war (including the excellent Restrepo), and despite the enduring presence of “Pakistan” and “Taliban” in American geopolitical discourse, Afghanistan has once again managed to stage a forgotten war.

But it has been aided and abetted in that trick by the pernicious combination of a forgetful polity and successive administrations determined to reinforce that not-so-benign neglect with the always-powerful machinery of bluster and obfuscation about war aims, strategies and objectives. Forgetfulness, in this case, seems to be almost effortlessly associated with pointlessness.

Artificial Agents and Knowledge as Tractably Accessible, Usable Information

In commenting on my post on teaching philosophy by reading out loud in class, David Auerbach quotes Georges Dreyfus‘ The Sound of Two Hands Clapping on the process of the education of a Tibetan monk, which includes the memorization of scriptures, supplemented by active, repeated vocalization. Dreyfus’ quote–please read Auerbach’s comment for the full quote–concludes with:

This educational process reflects the belief that knowledge needs to be immediately accessible rather than merely available. That is, scholars must have an active command of the texts that structure the curriculum, not simply the ability to retrieve information from them. Knowing where bits of information are stored is not enough: the texts must inform one’s thinking and become integrated into one’s way of looking at the world.

I find interesting resonances between this analysis of knowledge and one offered in my recent A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents. There, in attempting to make coherent the notion of attributing knowledge to an artificial agent, we began with an intuition captured in the following example (originally due to Andy Clark in his Natural Born Cyborgs):

As I walk down the street, I am asked by a passer-by, “Excuse me, do you know the time?” I answer, “Yes,” as I reach for my cell-phone to check what time it is. The plausibility of this exchange suggests we readily attribute knowledge to ourselves and others when the relevant information is easily accessible and usable….This example is extensible to those cases when we are asked if we know a friend’s telephone number stored in our cellphone’s memory card. Or imagine someone who knows I am carrying a cellphone pointing to me and suggesting I should be asked the time: “He knows what time it is.”

The crucial bit, with respect to the Dreyfus quote above is usable. Later, building on this example, and others, to bolster our claim that “Knowledge claims speak to a bundle of capacities, functional abilities, and dispositions; their usage is intimately connected to a pragmatic semantics” we offer an analysis for artificial agents as follows:

An artificial agent X is attributed knowledge of a proposition p if and only if:
1. p is true;
2. X has ready access to the informational content of p;
3. X can make use of the informational content of p to fulfill its functional role; and,
4. X acquired access to this informational content using a reliable cognitive process.

An extended explication of this analysis is in the book; for present purposes, I’ll throw in an edited version here.

The first condition retains the intuition propositions must be true to be known. The second condition suggests an artificial agent required to conduct intractable searches of its disk or other storage, or engage in other computationally expensive procedures before being able to locate or derive a particular item, would be pushing the limit of the plausibility of such ascriptions. Moreover, there are at least two dimensions along which the ready access or what we might call the “readiness to hand” of a particular item of information can vary: the physical and the logical or computational. What is considered knowledge can therefore vary according to the strictness of the criteria to be applied along each of these dimensions.

The third condition requires the agent to be able to use the information content of p to display functional competence; an artificial agent reveals its knowledge of p through the ready availability of the proposition in facilitating the agent’s functionality; it demonstrates its knowledge by its functions.

The fourth condition requires knowledge attributed to an agent to have been acquired non-accidentally, not just dropped into its memory store by mistake or by fluke. This condition is identical to traditional reliabilist conditions.

We are thus able to conclude:

When we say, “Amazon.com knows my shipping address is X,” our analysis implies several facts about Amazon’s website agent. Firstly, the shipping address is correct. Secondly, it is readily accessible to the agent through its databases: Amazon would not be said to know my address if it was only accessible after the execution of a computationally intractable procedure. Thirdly, the shopping agent is able to make use of the informational content of the address to fulfill its functions: it is able successfully to send books to me. Fourthly, the shopping agent acquired this relevant information in the “right way,” i.e., by means of reliable cognitive processes: its form-processing code was reasonably bug-free, carried out appropriate integrity checks on data without corrupting it, and transferred it to the back-end database scripts that populate its databases. This last condition ensures the shipping address was not stored in the agent’s data stores accidentally.

Update: On February 14-16, the Concurring Opinions blog will be conducting an online symposium on my book. I expect this analysis to be discussed there.