Paragnosis Unbound (1)

Unicorns are Real and So Are Postmodern Nihilist Academics

It's difficult to convince our colleagues across the hall in the Serious Business department that they should read Dan Brown in order to better understand themselves and their fellows, but that's what we're saying. The popularity of The Da Vinci Code, its imitations, precursors and prefigurations should be enough to convince everyone that these novels answer to some need that is deeper than the sterile explanation that it is fun, entertaining or the like. When these pseudo-explanations are not obfuscations covering the contents and effects of these books they merely push the question about the existence of these books back to the point where we have to ask ourselves why this particular type of novel is so fun, so entertaining. Why? Why mere fun? Once you drink the Kool-Aid of the critique of symbology you discover first that Dan Brown's novels are representatives of an extremely widely disseminated type we call the symbological novel, the variations of which are both systematic and extremely common. (So common in fact that they stretch out of the airport bookshop and into New-York-Times-style literary criticism and writing about neuroscience and evolutionary biology.)

The statement about the type of story of which The Da Vinci Code is an instance is its generative grammar. The grammar describes the basic attitudes in the narrative toward signs, their referents and their significance for the characters and the world of the novel. As originally formulated by the illustríous and learnéd Dr Bremselhäcker, the generative grammar of the symbological novel looks lika dees:

The labels on the left name character types (subject positions) most famously exemplified by the unappetizing Robert Langdon, who begins every novel sure in the belief that while the symbols he studies refer to real things, places, sects and events, these have no real historical significance except as curiosities or "academic" matters. In the terms of the grid, this means that he believes that the ontology of the symbolic is literal (L), but that it's of epistemologically metaphorical (M). E.g., the holy grail is a real thing in the world, but it's of no real cultural, personal or political significance.

The villains of the symbological novel are generally cacognostics: they believe both that signs point to real things and that knowledge of these signs are relevant. The cacognostic is therefore concerned both with locating what the symbol refers to and controlling it. The action of the basic instance of the Brownian symbological novel surrounds the transformation of the mythognostic into the orthognostic. The orthognostic doesn't believe that it matters whether the things, institutions, conspiracies and people referred to by the symbols that decorate these novels exist or not (metaphorical ontology), nor that the symbols have any serious political, religious or personal significance (metaphorical epistemology). Thus however vast the conspiracy or shocking the revelations about the secret history of the world, every novel ends with the casual reaffirmation of the political and cultural status quo. Being an orthognostic means that nothing really needs to change so we can all go back to work.

Much of our literary-critical fate as detailed in this blog has consisted in filling out our symbological bestiary by identifying novels that are variations of this type. E.g., Matthew Reilly's horrible novels of perpetual cacognosis or Coelho's placid tales of eternal orthognosis. What varies from story to story and movie to movie is what aspects of the status quo appear to be undermined by the book before being confidently reaffirmed (so-called ideological recontainment), what types of subject position are transforming into what and how the various subject positions in the novels are related. Along the way deep and disturbing connections emerged between the symbological novel and colonial Orientalism (as understood by Said), bad science, what was once so delightfully called the military-industrial complex (as though perhaps it were a psychiatric condition) and Ameircan religion.

The astute reader will notice however that the grid as it appears above is not quite complete. The fourth possible subject position in the generative grammar, formerly called awkwardly but accurately Judith-Butler-gnosis and now called paragnosis lacked a novel detailing its exploits. Ladies and gentlemen, the wait for this symbological unicorn is fucking over. Meet Guillermo Martínez's wretched novel of mathematical intrigue, The Oxford Murders (2006) and the even worse deadly movie adaptation by the same title (2008) starring John Hurt and Elijah Wood and directed by the villainous Álex de la Iglesia. The Oxford Murders (henceforth ToM) is the story of a young Argentinian mathematician named Martin who gets caught up in a series of murders that he and the police believe are the work of a serial killer. Each murder is announced as it happens by a note with the time of the murder and a symbol and are we are led to believe delivered to the eminent logician Arthur Seldom, but which are in fact manufactured by Seldom in order to cover up the murder by his spiritual daughter Beth of her doddering old grandmother.

Title page of Martínez's literary abortion. Fans of this blog, Umberto Eco novels and the works of Tom Martin will note that Guillermo is obviously the shadow of Tom Martin, the object-cause of this author's desire, whose majestically and perhaps willfully bad novel Pyramid was the occasion for our collective descent into the literary-critical and metaphysical abyss. Pyramid is a crummy imitation of The Da Vinci Code, which I suppose just proves The Oxford Murders' claim that "repetition leads to desire, and desire leads to obsession." (p. 179)

An Introduction to Paragnosis

Paragnosis was originally referred to as Judith-Butler-gnosis as a sort of nasty joke. The subject position within the generative grammar has an epistemological that believes that the code is meaningful but that its referents in the world are unimportant or arbitrary. What kind of a lunatic thinks only what we say and think matters and nothing else? Why, none other than the academic. Thus as Bremselhäcker has revealed to us through gritted teeth, within his Comparative Literature department at Important University at New England the default critical position of his colleagues is that culture has primacy over biological and physical facts. They would probably not admit this at the doctor, but in their professional lives they act as though for example sex were completely determined by gender. Whoever doubts the seriousness and pervasiveness of this and similar propositions has never attended a LGBT meeting at a liberal arts college or major metropolitan center. Within such groups it is often taken for granted that either sex is ultimately irrelevant with respect to gender, which can be either performed for the on the fly adoption of a different or even novel gender. Failing that, a utopian reliance on the transcendence of biomedicine insures that the body may be reinterpreted surgically.

N.B. To any upstanding young queer theorists reading. The point is not to acquiesce to hegemonic sexual identities, but rather not to underestimate the profoundly complex and mutually determining interactions between individuals, their cultural environments and their biology. We take it that a good deal of theory does this, to say nothing of people's struggles in their civilian lives. What struck us  about the paragnostic position within the generative grammar is that very bad books like The Da Vinci Code which purport to describe the exploits of academics imply another kind of academic, or at least a parody of one, the post-structuralist, postmodern, signifier-obsessed, Francophiliac deconstructionist. This paragnostic is the mirror image of the mythgnositic hero of Dan Brown's novels. While Robert Langdon believes that his symbols refer to real things, his study of them is "merely academic" and so cannot possibly have any serious impact on the world. The tour of the mythognostic hero in the classical symbological novel is one that leads him to entertain briefly the notion that cultural codes might be of cultural significance before settling on the pacific and vapid conclusion that there really aren't any secret societies of any concern and that, in fact, his academic knowledge is unimportant enough than he can retire to Harvard. The paragnostic as exemplified by Seldom begins with the converse belief. He is convinced of the significance of signs, but they are merely arbitrarily arranged and do not have any bearing on the real world.

Let us go to the scene of this nihilistic pseudo-logic. In ToM the academic authority that wears the costume of Seldom's views is Ludwig Wittgenstein. The actual relation of the philosophical gibberish in book and movie to Wittgenstein's actual views is at best tenuous and will perhaps be taken up later, however Seldom likes to dramatically invoke the closing words of Wittgenstein's first major work the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the doctrine of which is that we can't talk about anything really, most especially truth.

John Hurts my feelings with third-hand pseudo-Wittgenstein. Note that holding up the TLP in this matter is in fact a perfect performance of his epistemology since it is the book as signifier that matters insofar as it's capable of his coercing his students into adopting his views, while its contents are completely irrelevant.

[Seldom stands before a transfixed mob of young Oxonians.]
Seldom: There is no way of finding a single absolute truth, an irrefutable argument to help answer the questions of mankind. Philosophy therefore is dead. Because whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
[Dramatic silence. Seldom paces the room. Martin raises his hand.]
Seldom [mockingly]: ooooo! it seems that someone does wish to speak! It appears that you're not in agreement with Wittgenstein. That means either you have found a contradiction in the argument of the Tractatus or you have an absolute truth to share with us all.
Martin: I believe in the number π!
[The crowd laughs.]
Seldom: I'm sorry I didn't understand you. What was it you said you believed in?
Martin: In the number π! In the golden section! The Fibonacci series. The essence of nature is mathematical. There is a hidden meaning beneath reality. Things are organized following a model, a scheme, a logical series. Even the tiny snowflake includes a numerical basis in its structure. Therefore, if we manage to discover the secret meaning of numbers we will know the secret meaning of reality.

This awful little speech could belong to nothing other than a cacognostic. Martin believes that mathematics refers to actually existing entities in the world and that mathematical signs grant power over that world. It is for this reason that he is so eager to hunt down the serial killer that Seldom feeds him signs of. It is interesting to note here that insofar as the paragnostic narrative is concerned, mathematical Platonism of Martin's type coincides rather neatly with conspiracy theory numerology. The meaning of numbers is a secret, relevant to human affairs and waiting to be discovered all around us. Seldom, master manipulator of the sign, will disabuse him of this notion in the course of leading him on a wild goose chase for the serial killer that is supposedly feeding them clues to his next murder. For the moment, however, let us return to the scene of this idiotic battle between paragnosis and cacognosis, realism and constructivism.

Seldom: Impressive! ... We find ourselves faced with a fresh, rousing defense of mathematics, as if numbers were preexisting ideas in reality! Anyway, this is nothing new. Since man is incapable of reconciling mind and matter he tends to confer some sort of entity on ideas because he cannot bear the notion that the purely abstract only exists in our brain. The beauty and harmony of a snowflake. How sweet! The butterfly that flutters its wings and causes a hurricane on the other side of the world. We've been hearing about that damn butterfly for decades! But who has been able to predict a single hurricane?! Nobody!

To which the viewer is perhaps tempted to answer, Well, lots of people. We call them "meteorologists." But this would be to send us off course as much a dwelling on the actual philosophy of Wittgenstein. The point as always is not whether or not these books and movies have the facts straight but the way in which their mangling of the facts represents a certain kind of attitude toward the world.

Seldom quite clearly does not think that numbers and in fact signs generally refer to real things. Martin appears to be some kind of straightforward Platonist about mathematics and signs generally, so it should strike us as odd that Seldom characterizes this position with a hackneyed example from chaos theory. While systems sensitive to initial conditions (like weather systems) might be hard to know about they are not in principle unknowable. This example of Seldom's epistemology will come back to haunt Martin. In the novel, Seldom is painfully explicit about the extent to which nothing can be known via signs.

The series 2, 4, 8, can be continued with the number 16, but also with the number 10, or 2007. You can always find a justification, a rule, that lets you use any number as the fourth term in the series. Any number, any continuation. (65)

Not even context, pattern and a rule describing the continuation of a pattern is sufficient to license knowledge of the next term in a series because it's always possible to invent a rule justifying any next term. To quote Simon Schaffer, "You say '2,4,6,8,10.' We say '2,4,6,8, who do we appreciate!'"

Over the course of the novel Martin will be brought out of his cacognosis and into a kind of paragnosis. I will detail this fate in a coming post. I will close this post with an alarming figure from the novel, our lives, our novels and the British National Symbolic.

The Victory of Paragnosis, or, The Badger Vanishes


As the natural sign of the sign as such, the badger is a clear choice when you want to playfully figure the endless disappearance of the Transcendental Signified over the horizon of meaning. Throughout  the novel (this sequence is sadly missing from the movie) Martin encounters a series of dead badgers, symbols left there for the likes of us. Martin describes his first encounter with the beast, run over on the road.

I’d never seen such an animal before. It looked like a type of giant rat but with a short tail, around which lay a pool of blood. Its head had been totally crushed, but the black snout remained. Where its belly had once been, the unmistakable bulge of what must have been its offspring protruded as if from a torn sack. (76)

Later he encounters it again and a native informant explains that the superstitious British road workers refuse to touch dead badgers. Then a third time in an extreme state of decay before, after Seldom's deception is revealed, the badger disappears completely. The series of signs, the code woven by Seldom out of nothing but references to itself, covers in the end nothing. There is no serial killer. The conspiracy is a plot laid by one man to cover the fact that there is no conspiracy. The appearance of a conspiracy is only a product of a series of signs that ultimately point to nothing but the more or less ordinary passions, crimes and selfish deeds of ordinary subjects.

I looked down but could see no sign of the badger. The last shred of flesh had disappeared, as far as the eye could see, the road stretching ahead of me was clean, clear, innocent once more. (197)

The victory of paragnosis, a hyperbolic perversion of poststructuralism, is encoded here in the text of The Oxford Murders. It is difficult not to read this erasure of the badger as a figure of what we've come to call the entropy of mythognosis, a basic premise of symbological historiography. All referents fade into the past and our access to them is speculative at best. This specific figuration of the status of the signifier is, however, deeply disturbing and undoubtedly points to a vast conspiracy theory within the publishing industry aimed directly at the authors of this blog. (Why not a dog? Why not a blood stain? Why a badger?)

Here gentle reader you must take my hand as I reveal to you secret texts, unpublished and unpublishable. In the following fictional recreation, Matthew Reilly, bad novelist extraordinaire fictionalized in our Tom Martin, explains the secret history of the world.

"Well," Reilly replied in a measured tone, "I have been thinking about what Father Unzátegui told us about Antonio Silva's proposition that the teachings of the ancients – and therefore all accurate, motivated correlations of symbols with their real-world referents – are subject to an inevitable process of entropy.  Silva apparently argued that the recognition of the ability of symbols to refer to iconically and indexically to concrete realities would, in all circumstances, gradually be forgotten and replaced with a conviction that signs operate within self-contained systems and obtain their identity differentially, and he used the degeneration and ultimate total disappearance of the tree-badger symbolism as an example of this process. (Tom Martin in press. p. XX)

Just so. For the paragnostic the decay of efficacious signification is immanent to the sign: you can't say anything about a series from any number of its members.

“But that’s not all!” Said Martin, “That has an important implication for the post-structuralists – the ancient cult of ‘ōmochīhuahua inīn tlahcuiloa mecayōtl cahua’ from which their dark lineage derives, chose as its sacrificial victim the badger – they claimed that this was an arbitrary and unmotivated substitution for human sacrifice, but they claimed simultaneously that the badger’s capricious and arbitrary nature... made it a fitting symbol of their counter-symbological heresy.  This is a flagrant contradiction, because the latter rationalization is clearly motivated by necessary relations of signification...  The victory of symbology is encoded in their most basic narratives!”

To paraphrase Tom Martin, "The victory of paragnosis is encoded in their most basic narratives!" It is difficult not to read this as a shot across our bow: the true author of Pyramid and Kingdom has laid plans for us using nothing but signs. He is our own private Seldom, if he exists at all. No doubt Martínez is simply his latest pseudonym, another mask designed to lead us astray and announce his literary-theoretical victory and the impossibility of ever chasing him down.