Help me make a list

of phenomena that, though not directly observable, make themselves known by the distortions they cause in some mediating element.

Comments

[jane]

Gravity. Ideology. History. "The unconscious." "The Real." Sound.

[The Constructivist]

Black holes. Dark matter. Wind. Thoughts.

Elaine Showalter in the ladies' room...........

[Phritz]

Nietzsche's comments on IK, the chinaman of Konigsberg, and his hyena laugh (echoing Hume) at the "synthetic a priori". Ezra Pound's groovy talk radio. John Wilkes Booth day. Numb Chomksy's one decent rant against Americun pro-coonball. HL Mencken, usually. Erwin Rommel.

[Kenneth Rufo]

My personal favorite: virtual particles in atomic nuclei. Though I'm biased, since my cousin studies them.

The academic research of bloggers

[va]

Pornography. You know it when you see it, plus intent to arouse. Who says the phallus isn't a signifier?

[Phil]

(hypothetical) gravitons, WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles)

[Adam Kotsko]

Love

[Craig]

Surprised no one mentioned it - perhaps because I am, possibly, the crudest person commenting/posting with their own name: but farts in public, especially in enclosed spaces (i.e., classrooms, elevators, etc).

[Infinite Thought]

Thought, lust, envy...all the sins, plus thought, which is probably a kind of sin too, at least according to the Bible.

[Nominalist]

Goodman/Quine Bug Spray: removes postmodernists, metaphysicians (even pesky platonic "analytical" sorts), various species of aesthetes, marxist-freudians, existentialists, theologians, and other noxious insects.

[Adam Kotsko]

According to most Christian cosmologies, evil fits this description.

[Nominalist]

Given: Reason is a virtue (as Screepture itself suggests).

Nominalism is more reasonable (plausible, justifiable) than non-nominalism (ie metaphysical Realism).

Thus nominalism, being more plausible than metaphysical Realism, remains closer to the traditional theological position (Aquinas, right) insistence that "faith" be supported by rational thinking and argument (and there have been xtian nominalists, have there not, including Ockham hisself)

Thus the rejection of abstract entities (essences, universals)--- and a view of knowledge as empirical (including apparent a priori knowledge), derived solely from experience, via sensations (as Locke himself argued (and even Karl Marxo agrees to Lockean sensationism) is what Jeeee-susss wants!

[Ben]

Gravitational fields detectable only by their effects on light. Einstein predicted (and was confirmed in thinking) that stars appearing to be in the neighborhood of the sun would be visually displaced outward from the sun during a solar eclipse--confirmed 29 May, 1919.

[Nominalist]

General relativity is still a function related to mass (and matter), is it not--in this case the gravitational force of the Sun (tho' the curvature [which accounts for the "bending" of light] is not the same as the Newtonian attraction). There is no gravity qua gravity; and the supposed indeterminate mysteries of the quantum theory {the Uncertainty principle] are negligible at very small quantities still. Comrade Bricmont (google him on chaos, or rather anti-chaos) addresses many of these supposed refutations of determinism and order.

[Swifty]

Carl,

On the History Channel, which I don't even watch, I've seen where experts using high-powered microscopes, or something, have been able to establish the letter so-and-so ancient author must have been writing by the indentation on the damaged manuscript page that the letters originally made.

And I really don't watch the History Channel. They have a TV at the dentist's office in the waiting room and it is always tuned to the History channel and so I saw this one show, not even a whole show, just a segment, and it could hardly even be called voluntary. It wasn't like I could leave the waiting room.

[Carl]

Jeez, like the Prozac and birth control pills you get from drinking city water. A geologist at the party I was just at said that it was just World Water Day--I missed it. Drank probably 32 oz. today--lame. But don't worry, Swifty, even if you did watch some History Channel, you wouldn't be bad--no need to protest so strenuously. The music I used to involuntarily absorb at the dentist's is now my favorite. Not just Steely Dan, who have managed to acheive some hipster respectability, but the Eagles, too, & Elton John--Someone Saved My Life Tonight--wow. I'd be curious if anyone had a view on why the Dude in the Big Lebowski has such an acute hatred for the Eagles. The Coen brothers' movies usually decode pretty nicely. Something about 60s radicalism getting comfortable in the 70s, just wanting that peaceful, easy feeling--but why does the Dude find that so threatening? Probably too close to what he's become. Oh--for the list? How about the conditions of the possibility of experience.

[Nominalist]

Oh--for the list? How about the conditions of the possibility of experience.

Hmm. Food perhaps? Warm place to pump it out after digestion, nice mama tit to suck. Bada bing: ontology (and Hobbes, Marx, and even Chas. Darwin are in agreement there)

[Swifty]

Carl writes:

I'd be curious if anyone had a view on why the Dude in the Big Lebowski has such an acute hatred for the Eagles. The Coen brothers' movies usually decode pretty nicely. Something about 60s radicalism getting comfortable in the 70s, just wanting that peaceful, easy feeling--but why does the Dude find that so threatening? [end Carl]

The song being played in the taxi cab that the Dude objects to is, if I remember correctly, Hotel California. Boy do I hate that song. But I think the song you mention, the one about peaceful easy feeling, is closer to the problem with the Eagles. The sound of their music is very valium-like. And California is already so much like what the world would be if someone perceiving it were on valium, that to be listening to valiumesque music in such a valiumistic world is just too much fucking valium. And valium is meant in particular: a horrible, deadening drug. Don't take my word for it. Go to California -- say Palo Alto or Santa Cruz -- and take some valium. And then put on some Eagles. It makes me scared just to think about it.

[Nominalist]

Oooooooo time for some grand generalizations---how about those progressive havens around Boston and New York, and the cutting-edge sappho-monarchy of the Ivy league--now there's Kultur. The Eagles suck; so do the bogus liberals and corporate parasites such as the Coen Brothers. Movies aren't arguments or ideological statements, tho' they are taken as such. There are even some dupes who think a pimp such as Warren Beatty is a progressive.

[Nominalist]

Fargo was corporate-funded fascism of the first degree, even if the right namesteins were attached to it. In effect, Fargo was a sentimental lie (one might even say petit-booj-wah), with little or no inherent "meaning", but a great deal of manipulation and image-pandering. I was rooting for the Swede to like grab that Francis ho, and like bend her over, sodomize the byatch for a few hours, than dispatch her in ye olde wood chipper. Now that woulda been a flik.

[patrick j. mullins]

'And California is already so much like what the world would be if someone perceiving it were on valium, that to be listening to valiumesque music in such a valiumistic world is just too much fucking valium. And valium is meant in particular: a horrible, deadening drug. Don't take my word for it. Go to California -- say Palo Alto or Santa Cruz -- and take some valium. And then put on some Eagles. It makes me scared just to think about it.'

Swifty, you write some of the best things on here, including the original comment on this thread--the interesting part was not anything about the History Channel but that you found about the indentations.

But I agree with nominalist about these 'sweeping generalizations' about California. They are so outmoded I am really surprised you could write them. Of course, if you tried to 'image' a Valium-like sensation by going to Palo Alto or Los Angeles (why didn't you say L.A., because that's where all the writing about how 'valium-like' California has been traditionally concentrated? Easterners (which I have been for several decades) talking about Los Angeles is itself a deadening, horrible thing. Los Angeles is a thoroughly unique culture that does not lend itself to anything but serious probing. Tourists don't know what they are doing there most of the time (they don't know where to find those 'stars', although it isn't difficult), and the naive are especially prone to major sorts of victimization. I've spent a good bit of time there, and there is no other metropolitan configuration like that one. This bewilderment about the 'non-focus' of the tourists is wonderful, because of all major cities, you hardly see any at all, whereas every time I walk out the door in New York I see the tourist buses full of B'way scream-show fans trying to act like they're on a Reality TV show.

So I think your characterization of California is mostly fictional, especially because I do know Los Angeles well and it's usually the target. The other areas I don't know well, but San Francisco itself is the only other one that would have a special character that is not reducible to the Silicon Valley thing you're talking about with Palo Alto and Santa Cruz--and isn't that more of a Business Park matter than an especially California one? There must be all sorts of goings-on much like the Eden-Olympia of Ballard's 'Supercannes'. THAT'S the nightmare: places where rich business people get artsy-craftsy, start taking all sorts of 'courses', start doing work to keep from going crazy and then start going crazy if they don't find some kinky sex and exhibitionistic type criminals to provide them with a vulgar sense of community bound together only by cheap sensation..

Of some interest given one of the songs you mention and hate is that on one of the 9 stays in Los Angeles I've made in the last 6 years, is that I once tried to find all the locales in 'Chinatown.' I did go to Lake Hollywood, the artificial lake that was part of the water scandal and where you see the body dumped--that's beautiful despite all: This is an extraordinary place that is possibly made even more sinister by the fact that it looks like a paradise and yet originates from all sorts of municipal and private corruption. The Los Angeles Chinatown I've spend a lot of time in, but not managed to get very deep into it. But I was trying to get to Point Fermin, the beach of which is seen in the film, and had been deposited, after a glorious trip through Palos Verdes, in the low-lying and very moribund San Pedro, to wait for the bus which did not come. All the while I sat there with this somnolent sensation going on, there was an actual Hotel California a few blocks down I couldn't quit musing on. I recall in one of Paul Theroux's travel books his description of a certain kind of motel room in which people go about their little activities dutifully, brushing their teeth and unpacking...and then kill themselves. Actully, this Hotel California is more something you could imagine from Ellroy's best books or from Richard Fante's one good book 'Ask the Dust,' but I think what you have is vast variety if you have done at least a bit of groundwork.

What you are talking about is a realm of 'destroyed dreams' sensations that can be found very much in Los Angeles, and surely in some ways in other parts of California, but somehow this was an appealing mythology at some point, and people figured out ways to capitalize on it at some point. It was indeed already somewhat lurid, because of endless speculation and get-rich-quick schemes of all kinds as well as Hollywood tragedies and squalours, but this was exponentially increased by making Los Angeles the star of many lurid movies beginning about the mid-70s. Before that, it was a place where movies were made, but rarely a subject itself. In the 70's, it was a matter of mostly New Yorkers (this was especially coarsely done by Woody Allen--not a trace of any kind of understanding of the place at all) who had become upset at the way Los Angeles was actually growing up and becoming a cultural threat to NYC's primacy. Some think it has already surpassed NYC, although this is a new mythology: It is still behind in some ways, but definitely has caught up in a number of other--and New York definitely has nothing in Broadway that is a comparable phenomenon to Hollywood. The fact is that Southern California and many other tropical places have a lulling sensation. High-strung types may not be able to see the charm of this, and I'm one who doesn't know how to stay in it permanently. But it's mainly sublime, I love the place, obviously; there are nightmares there, but like any other place, you don't necessarily have to get them if you don't want them.

[patrick j. mullins]

'Fargo was a sentimental lie'

It was also an incredibly overrated bore, almost like it wanted to be a 'poetic' movie, like say Terence Davies beautiful Liverpool films about his childhood, but there wasn't anything poetic about it, so it was just this sort of stasis. McDormand is better in almost anything else; even pulp like 'Laurel Canyon' was better.

[Nate]

Schelling.

Re: Fargo, my parents considered moving to that part of the US at one point for some reason, then they saw the movie and my dad decided the accent was annoying so they scrapped the plan.