Fischer, Molly. “Who Did J.K. Rowling Become?” The Cut, 22 Dec. 2020, www.thecut.com/article/who-did-j-k-rowling-become.html.

“that world was…entirely mine”

“Is there a sense,” Gompertz asked Rowling, “in your own mind — philosophically, more than sort of literally — that you don’t own Potter anymore, that it’s owned by the fan base?”

“I wouldn’t go that far, Will,” she said, not quite smiling. (Someone with Rowling’s taste for adverbs might note that she said this rather sharply.) The collaborators sitting alongside her laughed. “I’m deadly serious,” she continued. “Because that would be to disavow what that world was to me. Seventeen years, that world was mine. And for seven of those years, it was entirely mine; not a living soul knew anything about it. And I can’t just uproot that from all the personal experiences that informed those stories and say, ‘I’m throwing that away now.’ And that’s how that would feel.”

“imaginative empathy”

Twelve years before, at a Harvard commencement, Rowling had delivered a speech in which she extolled the importance of imaginative empathy. “Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s place,” she said. But “many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.”

“the author is always right”

“This Is Not a Drill” is the title of a Medium post on the case by the British philosopher Kathleen Stock, who had taken up Forstater’s cause. Apart from advancing philosophical objections to trans identity, Stock’s work focuses on aesthetics, and in that field, she is a proponent of “extreme intentionalism.” Set in opposition to Continental theory, this view holds that fiction is “a set of instructions to imagine certain things” — a book means whatever its writer says it does. The author is always right.

I’m interested in the overlap/mapping of theoretical authorial intentionalism, individual authorial control-freakery, and epistemic authoritarianism/culture-war epistemics here. And when it plays out on the stage of The Discourse and the bestselling mass-market franchise of the twenty-first century, which retains claims to moral education that are often renounced, it seems very clearly a where-the-theoretical-rubber-meets-the-real-world-road kind of thing.

Scott, Eugene. “Analysis | Republicans' Disdain for Intellectualism Was on Display in Wednesday's Hearing.” The Washington Post, 6 Dec. 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/06/republicans-disdain-intellectualism-was-display-wednesdays-hearing/.

Just a quick hit documenting the place of academic institutions and expertise in the politicized culture war. Scott recaps Republican congressmen’s specifically anti-academic comments during the testimony of several legal scholars in an impeachment hearing, and connects them to the phenomenon that “attitudes toward higher education — and perhaps specifically intellectualism because of a growing disregard for expertise — have been trending negative among conservatives for a while.” Scott collects a little more data: Pew reports that 58% of Republican and Republican-leaning independents surveyed considered higher education bad for America, and that number represents a swift rise from 45% at the time of the last survey two years ago. Scott does a little analytical work with George Will’s thoughts on populism, then Trump, who both dismisses higher education and fetishizes his own Wharton degree, and brings it home with Kellyanne Conway telling Trump voters that “that woman” (an academic witness) “looks down her nose on[sic] you.”

Carroll, Sean. “Even Physicists Don't Understand Quantum Mechanics.” The New York Times, 7 Sept. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/opinion/sunday/quantum-physics.html.

The fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, Carroll argues, are the place where physics comes closest to aspiring to “understand the universe,” but pursuit of them is disparaged within the field: “vaguely philosophical and disreputable,” or, quoting Werner Heisenberger, “a superfluous ideological superstructure.” It seems there is something too humanist about the inquiry, both its motivations and its methods, for the field as it has organized itself since Niels Bohr won “the public relations battle” against Einstein for the legacy of quantum mechanics. But Carroll argues that pursuing the theory in its most abstract state is possible to do within the parameters of the scientific method and necessary in order to square inconsistencies that demonstrate practical limitations to our understanding of quantum mechanics.

Personal notes:

• A parallel shape, rendered here on the other side of the humanities/science divide: a similar problem, a similar institutional orientation towards that problem.

• Quantum mechanics and the observer effect are a product of “the first decades of the 20th century,” contemporaneous with parallel thinking in the humanities.

• The difference between abstract and concrete modes of seeing.

• The problem of framework and terms.

• The unflattening of observation, the relation between representation and reality.