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Comparative Philosophy of Religion 1
Timothy D. Knepper
Leah E. Kalmanson Editors
Ineffability:
An Exercise in
Comparative
Philosophy of
Religion
Comparative Philosophy of Religion
Volume 1
Series Editors
Timothy D. Knepper, Drake University, Des Moines, IA, USA
Leah E. Kalmanson, Drake University, Des Moines, IA, USA
Editorial Board
Purushottoma Billimoria, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Jay Garfield, Smith College, MA, USA
Steven Katz, Boston University, MA, USA
Louis Komjathy, University of San Diego, CA, USA
Gereon Kopf, Luther College, IA, USA
R. Simangaliso Kumalo, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Robert Cummings Neville, Boston University, MA, USA
Mohammed Rustom, Carleton University, Canada
Jin Y. Park, American University, DC, USA
Kevin Schilbrack, Appalachian State University, NC, USA
Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, Colby College, ME, USA
Wesley J. Wildman, Boston University, MA, USA
Bin You, Minzu University of China, China
This book series publishes works of comparative philosophy of religion—works
that are religiously inclusive or diverse, explicitly comparative, and critically
evaluative. It serves as the primary publishing output of The Comparison Project, a
speaker series in comparative philosophy of religion at Drake University (Des
Moines, Iowa). It also publishes the essay collections generated by the American
Academy of Religion's seminar on “Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion.” The
Comparison Project organizes a biennial series of scholar lectures, practitioner
dialogues, and philosophical comparisons about core, cross-cultural topics in the
philosophy of religion. A variety of scholars of religion are invited to describe and
analyse the theologies and rituals of a variety of religious traditions pertinent to the
selected topic; philosophers of religion are then asked to raise questions of meaning,
truth, and value about this topic in comparative perspective. These specialist
descriptions and generalist comparisons are published as focused and cohesive
efforts in comparative philosophy of religion. Global-Critical Philosophy of
Religion is an American Academy of Religion seminar devoted to researching and
writing an undergraduate textbook in philosophy of religion that is religiously
inclusive and critically informed. Each year the seminar explores the cross-cultural
categories for global-critical philosophy of religion. A religiously diverse array of
essays for each seminar are published along with a set of comparative conclusions.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13888

Timothy D. Knepper • Leah E. Kalmanson
Editors
Ineffability: An Exercise in
Comparative Philosophy of
Religion
Editors
Timothy D. Knepper Leah E. Kalmanson
Department of Philosophy and Religion Department of Philosophy and Religion
Drake University Drake University
Des Moines, IA, USA Des Moines, IA, USA
ISSN 2522-0020 ISSN 2522-0039 (electronic)

Comparative Philosophy of Religion
ISBN 978-3-319-64163-8 ISBN 978-3-319-64165-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64165-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953450
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information
storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
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Preface
The Comparison Project is an experimental effort in comparative philosophy of

religion. Although its ultimate aim is to raise traditional philosophical questions
about the truth and value of religion, its primary sources are not very traditional at
all—human acts of reason-giving as they shape and sustain a diversity of religious
traditions. It is in this sense, first and foremost, that The Comparison Project is an
experimental effort in philosophy of religion, one that compares over and philoso-
phizes about a diversity of concrete religious reasons rather than the ahistorical
abstraction of theism.
The Comparison Project is also experimental with regard to its core program-
ming—a biennial series of lectures by scholars of religion, dialogues between prac-
titioners of religion, and comparisons by philosophers of religion, which together
concern a common philosophical-religious topic. Most of these events are designed
to “stand alone,” serving to educate the general public about the religions of the
world and to engage local practitioners of religion in interfaith dialogue. But the
culminating event of each series is a set of comparisons that attempt to “put it all
together,” drawing philosophical conclusions about the topic in comparative
perspective.
A few brief comments about this method are in order. Although it is true that
human acts of religious reason-giving are our primary locus of inquiry, it is also true
that the topic of each series guides the kinds of reason-giving that we explore. It
matters not that some act or form of reason-giving is commonly classified as reli-
gious or philosophical or otherwise; it matters that it constitutes a culturally-
epistemically distinct and compelling instance of reason-giving relevant to the topic
at hand. We try not to get tangled up in the semantic thickets of religion; we don’t
think it matters much for a comparative inquiry into reason-giving about topics of
religious concern.1 We do, though, think it is important to attend critically to the
categories that we use to make our comparisons, particularly insofar as they bias the
results of our comparisons. And we do not shy away from the philosophical tasks of
1
See Chap. 4 of Knepper 2013 as well as Knepper’s forthcoming essay “Why Philosophers of
Religion Don’t Need ‘Religion’.”
v
vi Preface
explanation and evaluation, though we do try to remain humble and honest in under-
taking them. We disagree with those philosophers who maintain that there is no role
for explanation in philosophy of religion—insofar as philosophy of religion is reli-
giously diverse in scope, it is comparative, and insofar as it is comparative, it needs
to explain the results of its comparisons, be it through traditional philosophical
means or the natural and social sciences. We also disagree with those scholars of
religion who maintain that there is no role for evaluation in the study of religion—in
fact, we think that one of the most important tasks in the study of religion involves
raising questions about the value and truth of religious beliefs and practices, pro-
vided that this is done from a diversity of perspectives (not just our own) and in a
diversity of contexts (not just our own). Moreover, we have found our local audi-
ences eager to raise such questions, if in a way that is respectful of religious differ-
ence. It is for this reason, among others, that we believe that our program in
comparative philosophy of religion is relevant to a twenty-first-century world—a
world that is teeming with religious diversity but does not know how to broach
issues of truth and value about this diversity in an open and informed manner.
We also believe that our program in comparative philosophy of religion is rele-
vant to the academic field of philosophy of religion, a field that has been mired in
the critical examination of theism since its Enlightenment origins. We aim to influ-
ence this field, not only through our programming but also through our publications.
Each biennial series of programming is organized around and published under a
topic that can serve as a fundamental category of comparative inquiry in philosophy
of religion. Each series also contains a diverse set of perspectives about this topic.
Thus we hope our publications can contribute to both the categories and the content
for a comparative philosophy of religion.
The Comparison Project is directed by two professors of philosophy and religion
at Drake University (Des Moines, Iowa, USA): Tim Knepper and Leah Kalmanson.
While Tim’s training is in a philosophy of religion that is informed by religious
studies and analytic philosophy of religion, Leah’s is in non-Western and continen-
tal philosophy. This collaboration has been mutually enriching for a number of rea-
sons, chief of which is the different emphases of their approaches to comparative
philosophy of religion. Put succinctly, Leah’s evaluative endeavors often turn on the
(un)suitability of comparative categories, whereas Tim seeks to make comparative
categories (more) suitable for evaluative endeavors.
The Comparison Project is also steered by a committee composed of other Drake
religion faculty, Drake philosophy and religion students, and members of the local
Des Moines community who are involved in interfaith activities. In the case of the
programming contained in this collection (2013–2015), this steering committee
included professors Brad Crowell and Jennifer Harvey; students Todd Brown, Erin
Mercurio, and Nora Sullivan; and community representatives Richard Deming
(founder and chairman of Above + Beyond Cancer), Mary Gottshalk (local author
and interfaith activist), Ted Lyddon-Hatten (director of Drake’s Wesley House),
Sarai Rice (executive director of the Des Moines Area Religious Council), and
Bulent Sengun (director of the Niagara Foundation of Iowa). This collaboration of
academy and community has also proved enriching, especially as The Comparison
Preface vii
Project has labored to select topics that resonate with the interests and concerns of
the community while also serving as key categories in comparative philosophy of
religion.
None of this would have been possible without funding. We therefore end by
thanking those who have made possible the 2013–2015 programming efforts of The
Comparison Project: Drake University’s Center for the Humanities, Drake
University’s Principal Financial Group Center for Global Citizenship, the Medbury
Fund, Humanities Iowa, the Des Moines Area Religious Council, and Cultivating
Compassion: The Dr. Richard Deming Foundation.
Des Moines, IA, USA Timothy D. Knepper

Leah E. Kalmanson
References
Knepper, Timothy D. forthcoming. Why philosophers of religion don’t need “religion”—at least
not for now.
Knepper, Timothy D. 2013. The ends of philosophy of religion: Terminus and telos. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Contents
1 Introduction: Ineffability in Comparative Philosophical

Perspective�� 1
Timothy D. Knepper
2 From Communicable Matter to Incommunicable “Stuff”:
Extreme Combinatorics and the Return of Ineffability �� 9
Barbara Maria Stafford
3 Pseudo-Dionysius and Paul’s Sermon to the Unknown God �� 29
Timothy D. Knepper
4 After Silence, That Which Comes Nearest�� 41
Jonathan D. Bellman
5 “Names Are the Guest of Reality”: Apophasis, Mysticism,
and Soteriology in Daoist Perspective�� 59
Louis Komjathy 康思奇
6 Translating the Ineffable: How Hunters Consult the Dead
in Northwestern Côte d’Ivoire�� 95
Joseph Hellweg
7 Sikh Mysticism and Sensuous Reproductions�� 113
Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh
8 When Expression Is Expressed, Non-expression Is
Not-Expressed: A Zen Buddhist Approach to Talking About
the Ineffable�� 135
Gereon Kopf
9 “That From Which All Words Return”: The Distinctive Methods
of Language Utilization in Advaita Vedānta�� 157
Anantanand Rambachan
ix
x Contents
10 Using a Net to Catch the Air: Poetry, Ineffability, and Small

Stones in the Shoe: A Lecturish�� 169
Christopher Janke
11 The Sayings and Missayings of Samuel Beckett: Literature,
Writing, and Method �� 187
Craig N. Owens
12 Jewish Mysticism Wrestles with Language �� 207
Steven T. Katz
13 Meanings, Words, and Names: Rābi‘a’s Mystical Dance of
the Letters �� 219
Tamara Albertini
14 Dharma and Dao: Key Terms in the Comparative Philosophy
of Religion �� 245
Leah E. Kalmanson
15 Ineffability in Comparative Philosophical Perspective�� 257
Timothy D. Knepper
Chapter 1
Introduction: Ineffability in Comparative
Philosophical Perspective
Timothy D. Knepper
Abstract This introductory chapter previews the content and conclusions of The
Comparison Project’s 2013–2015 programming cycle on ineffability. Each of the 13
content lectures on ineffability is summarized, especially as it informs its corre-
sponding essay in this volume. The comparative conclusions of the programming
cycle and volume are also discussed, at least with regard to their methods and aims.
1.1 Content
Ineffability is a common motif in the religions of the world—though not a universal

one. Many religious traditions have claimed that their ultimate realities, truths, or
experiences are ineffable—but certainly not all, and maybe not even most.1 Why
ineffability has been prominent in some religious traditions and communities is one
of the questions that will be taken up in the comparative conclusion of this book.
But since this book, and the project from which it derives, is ultimately an exercise
in the philosophy of religion, its comparative conclusions will push past such
explanatory questions to evaluative questions of meaning, truth, and value.
This is of course no easy task; it is, though, one that begins simply—with the
religious traditions and communities of the world. In the 2013–2014 and 2014–
2015 academic years The Comparison Project explored motifs of ineffability in nine
religious traditions as well as the fields of literature, poetry, music, and art. It did
this through 13 topical lectures and two comparative conclusions, all but the first of
which appear here as essays, in the order in which the lectures were originally
1
The many meanings of ultimate need to be allowed to ring out, not just the Tillichian ones: ulti-
mate as “the best or most extreme of its kind”; ultimate as “a final or fundamental fact or princi-
ple”; ultimate as “last in a progression or series”; ultimate as “basic, fundamental”; ultimate as
“original”; ultimate as “incapable of further analysis, division, or separation.”
T.D. Knepper (*)
Department of Philosophy and Religion, Drake University, Des Moines, IA, USA
e-mail: tim.knepper@drake.edu
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 1

T.D. Knepper, L.E. Kalmanson (eds.), Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative
Philosophy of Religion, Comparative Philosophy of Religion 1,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64165-2_1
2 T.D. Knepper
d elivered.2 Collectively, these essays constitute an exercise in comparative philoso-

phy of religion: the topical essays provide descriptive content about the deployment
of ineffability discourse in different cultural contexts and literary modes, while the
comparative conclusions draw philosophical conclusions about this diverse content
in comparative perspective.
Our lecture series commenced with a talk on ineffability in Indian Buddhist phi-
losophy by Amy Donahue entitled “Ineffabilities and Conventional Truth in
Jñānaśrimitra’s Buddhist Philosophy of Language.” Unfortunately, Donahue was
the only speaker unable to submit an essay to the collection. But the content of her
talk nevertheless informs our comparisons, so we include a brief summary of it here.
Although Donahue spoke in general about late first- and early second-millennium
Buddhist philosophy of language, she focused in particular on the tenth–eleventh
century Indian Buddhist philosopher Jñānaśrimitra, for whom all things (dharmas)
are ineffable, both immediate sensory phenomena (svalakṣaṇa-s) and the cognitive
objects that are inferred from them (samānyalakṣaṇa-s). In the former case, directly
sensed particulars do not endure and therefore cannot be signified; in the latter case,
inferred cognitive objects are never directly present to thought and therefore derive
their meaning not inherently but by excluding every other. Still, in the case of
Jñānaśrimitra, the conventional truths that are indirectly inferred provide a ground
for practical action based on the degree to which they extinguish the thirst or crav-
ing caused by “benighted understandings.” Interestingly, ineffability here would
seem to serve the end of social critique. Knepper’s conclusion in particular is
informed by this insight.
In the second lecture of the Fall 2013 semester, Barbara Stafford delivered a
multi-media presentation that provided a unique look at the ineffability of “stuff”
from a critical cultural and aesthetic perspective (Chap. 2, “From Communicable
Matter to Incommunicable ‘Stuff’: Extreme Combinatorics and the Return of
Ineffability”). By “stuff,” Stafford’s essay refers not only to the countless new tech-
nological advances that we moderns encounter almost daily but also to some recent
trends in visual art that repurpose everyday objects or utilize mechanistic techniques
and products. In each case, Stafford maintains that these “extreme ambiguities,
equivocalities, and uncertainties” are “perceptually destabilizing and cognitively
bewildering” (Sect. 2.1) and that they are therefore unlike the venerable ineffabilities
2
Although we order the essays according to the lecture series, one need not read the essays in this
order. What we do not—indeed, cannot—include in this volume are the four “special events” of the
2013–2015 series. The entire programming cycle began in F13 with a visit by Tibetan Buddhist
monks from the Gaden Shartse monastery, who created a sand mandala, delivered lectures, partici-
pated in an intra-Buddhist dialogue featuring local Buddhist leaders, and enacted sacred music and
dance. In conjunction with Joseph Hellweg’s S14 lecture on the ineffability in the rituals of the
dozo hunters of Côte d’Ivoire, Drake hosted a West African dance workshop conducted by Diadié
Bathily (the artistic director of Afriky Lolo, a dance company based in St. Louis). The second
programming year commenced with a “meditation workshop and dialogue” that featured local
meditation instructors from the Buddhist, Christian, and Hindu traditions. And later in the F14
semester, Drake hosted an “ineffability exhibition” that included poetic and musical performances
of ineffability, a gallery talk on contemporary abstract painting as a form of wordless communica-
tion, and a concert by the jazz sax quartet New Third Stream Quartet.
1 Introduction: Ineffability in Comparative Philosophical Perspective 3
of philosophy and theology. Stafford concludes her essay by asking how we “stave
off the relentless slide of unspeakable things into unspeakable stuff,” hinting that
this requires the practice “paying close attention” to the processes by which we
bring forth definite, substantive, and communicable compositions from the indeter-
minate boundless (Sect. 2.5).
The final lecture of Fall 2013, Timothy Knepper’s address on “Pseudo-Dionysius
and Paul’s Sermon to the Unknown God,” detailed the grammars of ineffability in
the corpus of the sixth-century Christian Neoplatonist, who wrote under the name
Dionysius the Areopagite, the first-century convert of the apostle Paul mentioned in
Acts 17 (Chap. 3). These grammatical techniques include the use of “beyond”
(hyper) terms to refer to God (e.g., beyond-being, beyond-goodness, beyond-
divinity), the negation of properties of God, the use of directive illocutionary acts to
lead the reader beyond ordinary knowing and speaking, and the metaphorization of
divine things as luminous darkness or clouded summits. Ultimately, though,
Knepper’s essay maintains that, just as Paul’s sermon at the Athenian Areopagus is
concerned to set straight misconceptions about who God is, so Pseudo-Dionysius’s
corpus sets forth a God who is not entirely unknowable and ineffable but rather
knowable and effable as the Trinitarian cause of all.
Our Spring 2014 semester featured four lectures, the first of which examined the
ineffability of music (Chap. 4, “After Silence, That Which Comes Nearest”).
Jonathan Bellman argued against both the classic musical composer Mendelssohn
and the contemporary musical theorist Jankelevitch, claiming that music does func-
tion as a language that can express particular meanings, notably the particular
meaning of ineffability. Music is not, therefore, ineffable due to either its inability
to express meanings at all or its expression of meanings that differ wildly from
listener to listener. Rather, music can be interpreted to signify ineffability, provided
that the listener does just this; indeed, Bellman provides several examples of conven-
tionally established associations between musical motifs and the notion of ineffabil-
ity in the case of funeral marches from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European
composers.
In the second lecture of Spring 2014, Louis Komjathy offered what he called a
“radical reading” of the classical Daoist text commonly referred to as the Zhuangzi
in which he emphasized contemplative practice and mystical experience over philo-
sophical argumentation (Chap. 5, “‘Names Are the Guest of Reality’: Apophasis,
Mysticism, and Soteriology in Daoist Perspective”). Komjathy maintains that in the
Zhuangzi Daoist apophasis serves both the subversion of conventional philosophi-
cal knowing and the transformation of consciousness in contemplative practice and
mystical experience. Importantly, a significant section of Komjathy’s essay details
some of the apophatic grammatical techniques that convey and cultivate a state of
union with the Dao that is without conceptual content and therefore without linguis-
tic expression.
The third lecture of Spring 2014, Joseph Hellweg’s talk on ineffability in the ritu-
als of the dozo hunters of Côte d’Ivoire, took a very different look at the nature and
function of ineffability, one that enriches our comparative study in just the ways he
says—by making the familiar strange and the strange familiar (Chap. 6, “Translating
4 T.D. Knepper
the Ineffable: How Hunters Consult the Dead in Northwestern Côte d’Ivoire”). For
Hellweg, that which is ineffable for the dozos is not some undifferentiated reality or
non-dual experience; such matters are rather frivolous to the everyday concerns of
the hunters who provide for and protect their communities. Rather, it is the wordless
forms of communication that occur between dead and living dozos that are
ineffable—those that the dead send to the living through dreams, and those that the
living return to the dead through sacrifice, song, and dance.
In our final lecture of Spring 2014, Nikky Singh analyzed the grammar of inef-
fability at the very end of the Japji, the opening hymn of Sikh scripture, Guru Granth
Sahib (Chap. 7, “Sikh Mysticism and Sensuous Reproductions”). Near the end of
the Japji, the final stage of Sikh practice and experience—sach khand, the realm of
truth—is depicted metaphorically as a place of “continents, constellations, and uni-
verses” whose “limits cannot be told.” The author of the Japji, Guru Nanak, exclaims
that describing this stage of practice is “as hard as iron,” after which he turns to a
different metaphor, the metaphor of a smithy, to image Sikh practice. Singh takes
this metaphor as one that both conveys and cultivates Sikh mystical experience.
Our Fall 2014 lectures turned to the religious traditions of Zen Buddhism and
Advaita Vedānta (Hinduism), as well as to poetic discourses of ineffability. In the
first talk of Fall 2014, Gereon Kopf questioned the commonplace view that Zen
Buddhist religious philosophy generally embraces ineffability by casting off
linguistic description of the ultimate (Chap. 8, “When Expression Is Expressed,
Non-Expression Is Not-Expressed: A Zen Buddhist Approach to Talking about the
Ineffable”). Drawing on the work of the thirteenth-century Japanese monk Dōgen,
whom many consider a paradigmatic Zen figure, Kopf shows how Dōgen’s philoso-
phy of “expression” regards both silence and language as adequate means of
“expressing” the transcendent. But since all expressions express only part of the
totality, no expression can be “complete,” even if “full.”
In our second lecture of Fall 2014, Anantanand Rambachan spoke about the “dis-
tinctive methods of language utilization” in the philosophical tradition of Advaita
Vedānta in general and the writings of the eight-century Advaitan philosopher
Śaṅkara in particular (Chap. 9, “‘That From Which All Words Return’: The
Distinctive Methods of Language Utilization in Advaita Vedānta”). Rambachan
considers the challenge of speaking about brahman,3 the source and ground of real-
ity for most contemporary Hindus, given that brahman is neither a sensory object
that can be known through perception nor a logical object that can be known through
inference. The words of the Upaniṣads are, however, a valid means for knowing
brahman, thereby opening up the possibility of using “skillful modes of instruction”
about brahman, three of which Rambachan details: superimposition/de-
superimposition, negation, and implication.
The final lecture of Fall 2015, Christopher Janke’s “How To Use a Net to Catch
the Air,” functioned as much as a poetic performance of ineffability as a discursive
3
Following the convention employed in Rambachan’s essay, we do not capitalize brahman, even
though it/he is considered to be ultimate reality in the Advaita Vedānta tradition in particular and
for many contemporary Hindus in general.
lecture on ineffability (Chap. 10). Equating ineffability with indescribability, Janke

queries the criteria and uses of description in a manner that unsettles not only the
commonplace view that descriptions describe the world in a way that is more or less
accurate and useful but also Knepper’s view that nothing is ineffable insofar as
everything can be minimally described. Calling the former view naïve, the latter,
unsatisfactory, Janke illumines how poets try at once to speak the unspeakable and
unspeak the speakable, simultaneously putting into words that which cannot be put
into words while disclosing the incompleteness and falsity of every attempt to put
into words.
Our final semester of the series, Spring 2015, began with a lecture by Craig
Owens on the “sayings and missayings” in Samuel Beckett’s final published work,
the short novel Worstward Ho (Chap. 11, “The Sayings and Missayings of Samuel
Beckett: Literature, Writing, and Method”). Owens’s linguistic analysis not only
demonstrates the many creative ambiguities and self-referentialities in Beckett’s
text but also suggests how Worstward Ho ultimately enacts ineffability by “testing
the limits of language’s ability not to mean” (Chap. 11). In doing so, Owens believes
that Worstward Ho gives the lie to any “literary narrative that seeks to suggest an
origin for its utterance” (Chap. 11). Moreover, as the Derridean notions of iterabil-
ity and differance constitute all discourse, Owens suggests that there is ineffability
in every utterance—“every saying is a missaying” (Chap. 11).
In the second lecture of Spring 2015, Steven Katz argued against the traditional
view that mystical experiences and transcendental realities actually are ineffable, at
least as that view is applied to the Jewish mystical tradition (Chap. 12, “Jewish
Mysticism Wrestles with Language”). Drawing on numerous examples from Jewish
mysticism in general and Kabbalah in particular, Katz details how language serves
a positive, kataphatic role for Jewish mystics. The Torah constitutes a “mystical
lexicon” regarding transcendent realities and mystical experiences, the Hebrew
alphabet is the “vehicle par excellence” for facilitating mystical experiences and
communicating mystical insights, and the Hebrew language possesses not only a
theurgical power to assist in mystical ascents but also a descriptive function for
speaking about supposedly unspeakable mystical realities and experiences (Chap.
12).
Tamara Albertini delivered the final content lecture of Spring 2015, a presenta-
tion on love and naming in the eighth-century Sufi mystic Rābi‘a. Albertini explored
how, for Rābi‘a, love of the divine beloved culminates in the renunciation of naming
the beloved (Chap. 13, “Meanings, Words, and Names: Rābi‘a’s Mystical Dance of
the Letters”). Such love is ‘ishq, an ardent, passionate, excessive love that longs for
intimacy with Allah. Although names themselves are born out of such a longing,
Rābi‘a is reported to have said that through prayer, the soul is brought to place
where no names exist. Albertini’s essay picks up several of these themes, ultimately
drilling down into Rābi‘a’s use of ‘ishq. Albertini argues that Rābi‘a in fact employed
a “semantically-based etymology” by which she detached the letters of ‘ishq from
one another, identifying each with its associated name: eye (‘ayn), desire (shawq),
and heart (qalb). For Rābi‘a, ‘ishq thereby becomes a passionate desire for Allah
that unites the knowledge of the heart and the seeing of the eye (Sect. 13.8). Thus
6 T.D. Knepper
Rābi‘a effectively creates a discourse for partially expressing, if not cultivating,

‘ishq, even while maintaining that ‘ishq is ultimately ineffable, a state that can only
be experienced or “tasted” first hand.
1.2 Comparison
As is perhaps now obvious, there is a good bit of variety in these essays. This is in
part explicable by the fact that ineffability was intentionally left undefined for the
lecturers. We wanted instead to know how ineffability could be differently
conceived in fields like musicology, anthropology, and Islamic studies. Moreover,
we wanted the scholars of these fields to describe, with attention to context, how
ineffability was differently deployed by the individuals, communities, and texts that
they studied. Still, for the sake of uniformity of comparative content, we did ask
each scholar to address four basic questions: (1) What is allegedly ineffable? (2)
How is this claim conveyed linguistically (or otherwise)? (3) What reasons (if any)
are given in support of this claim? (4) To what ends is this claim made and defended?
At the end of this lecture series, it was up to The Comparison Project’s director
and co-director to make some philosophical sense of this variety of ineffabilities by
means of these questions of comparison. Leah Kalmanson’s conclusion first imag-
ines alternative frameworks to the philosophy of religion in general, if not also inef-
fability in particular (Chap. 14, “Dharma and Dao: Key Terms in the Comparative
Philosophy of Religion”). Drawing on an eighteenth-century Japanese encounter
with European religious categories, Kalmanson’s essay helps us see that no com-
parative category is generic and neutral; rather, all comparative categories come
from somewhere and empower those perspectives. Kalmanson’s overall objective is
therefore to “decolonize” the philosophy of religion, not just by “switching out one
dominant discourse for another,” but also by “being savvy regarding the realities of
ongoing power differences in academia, so as to be strategic with our word choices
in ways that make sustained interventions in hegemonic practices” (Sect. 14.4).
Recognizing that even the category of ineffability comes from somewhere,
Timothy Knepper’s concluding essay seeks to “specify” it with the diverse religious-
philosophical-aesthetic content from the lectures; the result is a robust comparison,
the results of which can then be explained and evaluated (Chap. 15, “Conclusion:
Ineffability in Comparative Philosophical Perspective”). In this sense, Knepper
attempts to implement his own method for religiously diverse and historically
grounded philosophy of religion: thick description, formal comparison, multidisci-
plinary explanation, and critical evaluation.4 In comparing, he identifies important
4
See Knepper’s Ends of Philosophy of Religion (2013), but note that the language of “specifica-
tion” comes from Robert Neville’s Comparative Religious Ideas Project. See Neville and
Wildman’s introductory essay to volume 1: “On Comparing Religious Ideas” in The Human
Condition (2001). See also Knepper’s assessment of Neville’s method in chapter five of The Ends
of Philosophy of Religion.
and interesting similarities and differences in the content essays with respect to the
comparative categories. In explaining, he offers models that provide reasons for the
similarities and differences identified in his comparisons. And in evaluating, he
raises traditional philosophical questions of truth, meaning, and value about ineffa-
bility in comparative perspective.
In the interest of letting the collection unfold as the series did, we will not fore-
cast Knepper’s conclusions here. But we do want to point out that he makes no
assumptions that there actually are ineffable things. Nor does he assume that what-
ever ineffable things there are, are ineffable in the same ways. Quite the opposite: if
Knepper went into this project with any preconceptions about this matter, it was that
there are a variety of things that are claimed to be ineffable by the religious philoso-
phies of the world, in a variety of ways, for a variety of reasons, and to a variety of
ends—but that no thing that is claimed to be ineffable can actually be ineffable.
One can get a glimpse of the varieties of ineffability simply by considering the
logical terms involved in any expression of ineffability: (1) that which is claimed to
be ineffable, (2) by whom, and (3) with respect to what language. Where things are
said to be ineffable for all speakers of all languages, those things either lack deter-
minate content altogether or possess content that cannot be expressed by means of
any semantic category. Where things are ineffable only for some speakers of some
languages, matters are more complicated; there are cases where some people can
speak such things better than others either due to experiential familiarity or special
knowledge, cases where some languages can convey such things better than others
due to their capacity for creative or paradoxical expression, cases where such things
cannot be fully expressed due to their greatness or sacredness, and cases where such
things should not be expressed due to taboo or respect. In this latter set of cases,
ineffability can be said to be relative—ineffable to some degree, to some speakers,
in some languages. The former case, by contrast, is one of absolute ineffability—
that which is in no way identifiable or predicable due to its very nature.
Why study ineffability in comparative perspective? Three reasons guided us.
First, given that it is no easy task to express putatively inexpressible things, at least
in ways that avoid apparent contradiction or defeat, the study of ineffability dis-
course discloses the innovative creativity of human expression. Second, insofar as
these creative expressions possess cross-cultural similarities and differences, the
study of ineffability discourse shows the common and unique ways in which indi-
viduals and communities speak about—and thwart speaking about—allegedly inef-
fable things. Third, in cases where these allegedly ineffable things are ultimate
realities and experiences, the study of ineffability discourse reveals important simi-
larities and differences with respect to the ways in which religious traditions, texts,
and thinkers conceptualize and express ultimate realities, truths, and values. We
hope that our study of ineffability discourse furthers the growth of knowledge in
general and comparative philosophy of religion in at least these three ways.
8 T.D. Knepper
References
Knepper, Timothy D. 2013. The ends of philosophy of religion: Terminus and telos. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Neville, Robert Cummins, and Wesley J. Wildman. 2001. On comparing religious ideas. In The
human condition, ed. Robert Cummins Neville, 1–20. Albany: State University of New York
Press.
Timothy D. Knepper is Professor of Philosophy at Drake University, where he chairs the

Department of Philosophy and Religion and directs The Comparison Project, a public program in
comparative philosophy of religion. He teaches and publishes in the philosophy of religion, com-
parative religion, late ancient Neoplatonism, and mystical discourse. He is the author of books on
the future of the philosophy of religion (The Ends of Philosophy of Religion, Palgrave, 2013) and
the sixth-century Christian mystic known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Negating Negation,
Wipf & Stock, 2014). He is currently working on a monograph on the “Genealogy of Ineffability,”
a textbook on “Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion,” and a photo-illustrated book on the
“Religions of Des Moines.”
Chapter 2
From Communicable Matter
to Incommunicable “Stuff”: Extreme
Combinatorics and the Return of Ineffability
Barbara Maria Stafford
Abstract Since Kant, there has been an intense debate around the question of the
location of the sublime: Is it in the object or in the subject? In this essay, I tackle
what I see as a fast-growing, indeed ubiquitous, socio-cultural phenomenon, namely,
the imagistic, linguistic, and ontological inability to configure the rising tide of
confounding “objects,” leading to the vacuous usage of the non-descriptor “stuff.”
Today, I argue, the viewer is deliberately presented with experiences, “entities,” that
are not only without a concept but without the possibility of a concept, thus produc-
ing a failure of intuition—that is, not a soaring ascent into comprehension, but a
bewildering descent, into ineffability. I will examine this cognitive and emotional
impasse from the perspective of ineffability’s dark side. By this I mean its fall from
Neoplatonic awe at radiant unity into the current shambling inexpressibility.
Focusing on a handful of telling cases—both particular and exemplary—ranging
from the invasion of the unexamined digital absolute, to terrifying transplant surger-
ies, to extreme scientific experimentation and its uptake by BioArt, I ask, What does
it mean when we completely sever action from reflection and judgment? If the
object world is now permeated by the IT and media world, does the “scientization
of art” inherit not only science’s undoubted wonders but also its ethical ambiguities,
the violence of its experimentation, the opacity of its aims, its indifference to social
or cultural impact when personal promotionalism is at stake, and its inscrutable
darkness or incommunicability?
Ineffable: Latin, in, not + effabilis, utterable. 1. Too overwhelming to be expressed in words
2. Too sacred to be spoken. (Webster’s New World Dictionary)
Also: inexpressible, indescribable, indefinable, unutterable, unspeakable, unwhisperable,
unmentionable, uncommunicable. (Roget’s International Thesaurus)
B.M. Stafford (*)

The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
e-mail: bms6@uchicago.edu
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 9

T.D. Knepper, L.E. Kalmanson (eds.), Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative
Philosophy of Religion, Comparative Philosophy of Religion 1,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64165-2_2
10 B.M. Stafford
2.1 Combinations Beyond Name
Stuff happens.1
About me, I make stuff, predominantly for museums and galleries but also for commercial
clients and occasionally private individuals. This stuff, is often digital or new media, as with
my research into AR, but is often very physical, making furniture or landscaping a play-
ground for example. . . . Making stuff [is somehow allied with] the pressure for early stage
identification of end product [and] is also at odds with the much more organic developmen-
tal processes that form part of the core methodologies of fine art and design higher educa-
tion. . . . [So] many graduates are poorly equipped to engage with creative/tech industries
that are pursuing a marketable, commercially realized concept. (Jefferies 2015)
If our age is anarchic in mood and rife with nebulous situations—even horrify-
ingly indescribable scenarios—no wonder material culture studies are booming,
embracing a wide range of traditional practices in art and design both inside and
outside the art school,2 as if such object-oriented media and hallowed genres could
move us towards making things matter again.
At the same time, as the Internet post above indicates, these empirical substances
are in crisis, sharing the stage as they do with the strange entities and perplexing
amalgamations emerging genie-like from opaque corporations.3 This essay attempts
to formulate a key question: How do we make sense of this novel, experience-
oriented, indefinite stuff that is seemingly everywhere, resulting from the vagaries
of everything from the “technologies of the extended mind” to “Bio-Fictions” to
“multispecies intra-actions” to, more generally, the “naturally hypernatural”?4 How
do we touch it, speak it, image it? And, in light of the new rule of information tech-
nology, is it still worth fitting together—constructing a definite viable “some thing,”
given the fluid essences of subjects and objects in the twenty-first century? (Fig. 2.1)
Think of the arcane processes required to manufacture “living technology” (i.e.,
microbial organisms from scratch), or the computational “superpositioning” of
quantum entities to be in two states at the same time, or the lightning-quick “entan-
glement” of electrons, or the conjuring of hypothetical “zombies” that may or may
not inhabit the machinic brain bereft of self (McFadden and Al-Khalili 2015). As we
sink deeper into a haunted period where “real” assets or concrete objects with dis-
cernible physical properties that have lasting power depreciate or vanish, the veil of
representational opacity descends.
1
Jeb Bush’s widely publicized response to the Umpqual Community College shootings on October
1, 2015 in Roseberg, Oregon.
2
Note the nostalgic interest in “vintage” materials fostered by historic suppliers such as Winsor &
Newton, Liquitex, Conté à Paris, and Lefranc & Bourgeois, all of whom still purvey sketching
tools, paints, chalks, pastels, gels, fluids, all manner of deeply textured colored powders, creams,
and fixatives.
3
See the “Conference on Material Culture in Action: Practices of Making, Collecting and
Re-Enacting Art and Design” at the Glasgow School of Art on September 7–8, 2015.
4
See the special issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture entitled “Naturally
Hypernatural” (Anker and Flach, eds., 2015).
2 From Communicable Matter to Incommunicable “Stuff”: Extreme Combinatorics… 11
Fig. 2.1 SVA bio art lab, BFA fine arts department, New York (Reprinted with permission from
photographer Raul Valverde)
Beyond any ethical constraints imposed by the academy—whether in the science

fiction outback of game design, or in the apocalyptic artificial intelligence indus-
tries, or in the wilderness of open-ended synthetic biology laboratories, or in the
esoteric surgeries performed on transformative operating tables—a disturbing ques-
tion lingers. Are we (or, rather, the adept “they”) just making a lot of equivocal stuff
that cannot be identified and is of no discernible use—or is even useless—by
design? Figuring out what these undecideables “are” and why and to whom they
appeal might be dramatic enough. But I propose an even more fundamental issue.
How should we tackle the massive breakdown in communication between those
who are initiates into the production of weird phenomena and those who are merely
confounded users or awestruck beholders of spooky effects and elusive methods?
Consider just one recent medical “new frontier”: head transplants coming hard
after the previously “unthinkable” face transplant. Clearly the uncanny sight of a
“small black mouse with a new brown head” announces a troubling expansion into
super-strange domains (Wang 2015a, pp. A1, A8). Dr. Ren, the Chinese micro-
surgeon who performed the stunning transplant, asserted afterwards that “he always
dreamed of fixing the seemingly unfixable.” And when contemplating the current
marathon of motley organ transplants, he simply asked, “what’s the next frontier?”
given the possibility of innumerable potential couplings or ingenious unions.5
5
See the original Wall Street Journal article for photos of Dr. Ren’s mouse-head transplants: http://
www.wsj.com/articles/surgerys-far-frontier-head-transplants-1433525830
12 B.M. Stafford
In the global fiscal- and conceptual-merger or piecemeal “gig”-economy there

seems to be no limit either to our imaginative tendency to exceed the real or to mate-
rialize the most jabberwocky of thoughts as bizarre reality. Not unlike Through the
Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)—in which the heroine walks
into a shady wood where things have no name (“to step into what?”)—we cannot
summon the words for the host of alien objects (“stuff”?) surrounding us. And, like
the mystified Alice under the secretive trees, even our own identity escapes us.
(“Then it really has happened after all! And now, who am I?” [Carroll 1946,
pp. 192–193].)6
Although, and perhaps because, repellently gruesome, the transfigured mouse—
for want of a better word—embodies a quasi-metaphysical vision of duality willed
into oneness. It also visualizes the presence of the non-present—the absence of the
real residue of that other, now unreal, contributing mouse. In essence, the engineer-
ing neuroscientist performs like the shape-shifter alchemist, metamorphosing
fleshed and unfleshed things (animal + animal + wiring, etc.) into dysfunctional
“stuff.” Recall that the dichotomous “mouse” represents only a prophetic stage in a
cyclical process where revelation follows upon revelation. This fleetingly alive gro-
tesque, we are informed, will soon be replaced by a convergent monkey, and so
onward and upward to the ultra-reconstruction: the perfect homo-sapiens synthesis
forged through an infinite series of unfathomable transmutations.
Such hard-to-define collages—much like Lewis Carroll’s “uffish” Jabberwock or
“whiffling” Jubjub bird or “frumious Bandersnatch”—arise both from the hyper-
virtuoso skill of the magus-operator as well as from his soaring speculation, the
future-oriented recombinant simulations he runs in his head (Carroll 1946, pp. 164–
165). Accordingly, we frequently hear the righteous admonition advantageously
multiplied to become incantatory: because one can think of it, one can do it.
Mattering is not in question.
The tinkered mouse—as a what’s-its-name kind of conjuncted thing—stands, I
believe, for a vast emergent class of utopian puzzle-creatures similarly manifesting
an extreme physical and cognitive undecidability. One might even call it an esoteric
incommunicability in terms of ordinary language or descriptive imagery adequate
to the heterodox perceptual experience (Stafford 2007).7 Is this perplexing phenom-
enon a corporeal product of a second creation or a Coleridgean “secondary” imagi-
nation (that “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates” the images held in the mind “in order to
recreate” them [Coleridge 1983, p. 304])? What in fact is this fearful vision:
organism or chimera, reality or ideal construct, natural or supernatural ensemble,
correlative with no objective?
Self-stimulating speculation and its resulting imaginary products, then, perturb
or disrupt established codes of creation whose historical touchstones were mimetic
form, stability, harmony, order. Paradoxically, these intricately layered blends also
6
Also see the commentary by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (2015).
7
Making the befuddling competing story lines of television shows like the Game of Thrones or
Orange is the New Black cohere is a screen analogy to the surgical physico-cognitive problem of
making the compelling compounded mouse apprehendable (Jurgensen 2015, pp. D1–D2).
become more iterable over time. That is, they come to inhabit a closed or autonomy-
producing, perfection-seeking system, one following a continuous circular or recur-
ring method of iteration whereby every conceivable solution to a question or
problem becomes the starting point for another, heightened iteration, over and over
again until and unless the whole formal structure collapses or gets violently
over-turned.
Intriguingly, then, we find here both the systematic structural features character-
istic of a palimpsestic occult Neoplatonism—externalizing as ritual the brain’s
sophisticated self-generating craft—as well as of a many-layered psychophysical
autopoiesis. The ideal unitary nature of the system paradoxically owes to the recur-
ring self-construction of its multiple components. Resembling a self-enclosed sanc-
tuary, the uncorrected looping brain-mind spins a plausible illusion of coherent
wholeness for the initiate. Within its cultic confines the most radical mental leap is
indistinguishable from a demonstrable proof.8
This formulaic logic of repetition is particularly evident in the hybrid computa-
tional practices used to expand and control the digital cosmos—built by manipulat-
ing lines of self-delimiting code that establish mathematical laws of nature rather
than hand-crafting its details. This helps to explain why almost all aspects of science
today are wrought from a cryptic IT—permeated by secret societies and Snark-like
delirious dreams. Left behind are the empirical truth-testing senses (Bull and
Mitchell 2015; Laplantine and Howes 2015). Seeing, touching, hearing, smelling
are decommissioned in favor of the invisible, the startling, the mysterious free-
wheeling operations of the brain.9
The extreme ambiguities, equivocalities, and uncertainties surrounding the new
vaporous materiality—captured in the popular adoption of the cloudy non-concept
or un-term “stuff”—are perceptually destabilizing and cognitively bewildering
(Berthet 2015). This spread of foggy undecidability—perhaps announcing some
sort of general change of being—is furthered by the rapid growth of uncoordinated
scientific discoveries (for example, the still mystifying connections between micro-
and macro-phenomena, single neurons and behavior). Then there is the obfuscation
caused by increasingly complex technological devices as well as by the advent of
bigger and bigger invisible “Big Data.” All this “frabjous” information is not only
always already consolidated in transcendent data assemblages but often gathered
without assessing the ethical, social, and political consequences.
So what is this pervasive ineffable stuff that leaves the viewer endlessly over-
whelmed? Is it merely an ephemeral residue of something more solid, more uni-
form? Or is it the latent remains of an ancient Neoplatonist “invisible reality” since
it magically films different surfaces, miraculously possesses different properties at
different locations, and dissolves in different ways (O’Donnell 2015; Stafford 2001)?
8
Although a disappointing anti-religious crusade, biologist Jerry A. Coyne’s stark dichotomies
between religion and science usefully raise the specter of science vs. scientism—i.e., excessive
trust or faith in all things scientific (Coyne 2015).
9
For example, the game industry has attempted to create a full-scale digital cosmos (Khatchadourian
2015, pp. 48–57.
14 B.M. Stafford
The word “residue” already exists as a realtime application on the Internet, as an

application on the computer, and on numerous computer screens, large or small. But
in our digitized universe the term aphoristically stands for more ineluctable qualities
as well, such as seemingly infinite malleability, swift emergings or vanishings, and
continual self-reflective iterations, with the result that stuff seems to subsist in a
cosmos now so diffuse that diffuseness has become a sort of absolute.
2.2 Magical Thinking
Gerard had always recognized his friend as being, in some radical, even metaphysical
sense, more solid than himself, more dense, more real, more contingently existent, more
full of being. This ‘being’ was what Levquist had referred to when he said of Jenkin,
‘Where he is, he is.’ . . . Whereas Gerard, who was so much more intellectually collected
and coherent, felt sparse, extended, abstract by contrast. (Murdoch 1988, pp. 122–123)
Like the marvel-mouse, insofar as it signifies some thing or any thing, misty stuff
represents a negative: disconcertingly embracing both an ideal vagueness as well as
an impossible unity. Unlike the venerative theological and philosophical ineffables
of the past (God, the One, the Absolute, the Unconditional, the Hidden, the Invisible,
the Good, the Beautiful, Light or Darkness), the blurry secular ineffables of the
present are about the unspeakability, the unsignifiability, of a stream of indefinable
and conflicting substances.
If grommeting matter—with its connotations of something that is real, intercon-
nected, potentially assemblable or disassemblable—suggests the cognitively
demanding and thus communicable, what does unimageable limitless “stuff” evoke?
Undeniably, usage of the word has become ubiquitous, all-encompassing. But the
question remains: synonymous with what?
In the epigraph heading this section, the distinguished British novelist and
scholar of Platonism, Iris Murdoch, gives an optimistic, animistic definition of mat-
ter in her succinct characterization of the earthy Jenkin, whose groundedness
reminds us: “you can’t bypass where you are by an imaginary leap into the Ideal”
(Murdoch 1988, p. 133). Even his perpetually questing Neoplatonic opposite,
Gerard, is repulsed by philosophy’s alien, “quasi-mystical, pseudo-mystical,
Platonic perfectionism” (Murdoch 1988, p. 132). Yet, ironically, neither was he “at
home, made continuously restless by a glimpsed ideal far far above him; yet at the
same time, the glimpse, as the clouds swirled about the summit, consoled him, even
deceived him, as with a swoop of intellectual love he seemed to be beside it, up
there in those pure and radiant regions, high above the thing he really was” (Murdoch
1988, p. 132). All mud and matter and dirt, by contrast, Jenkin declares, “I am a slug
… I move altogether, if I move at all. I only stretch myself out a little, a very little”
(Murdoch 1988, p. 136).
According to the school master Jenkin—accustomed to molding grimy, restless
boys—Gerard is someone forever on the edge of things, always looking at some-
thing intangible “much farther off.” Thus he lacks the immediacy, the nowness, of a
shaped object or graspable thing, finding himself totally ill at ease with being incar-
nate. By contrast, feeling embedded and living fully within society, Jenkin is not
translatable into flimsy stuff, i.e., into a disposable “product” or a labile “brand.”
Nor does he waste his energy in Idealist acrobatics, trying to vault into the unknown.
Murdoch’s acutely observed evocation of these dual moral agents skillfully
weaves together persons, things, objects, facts (as in “This is what happened”) to
capture her characters’ contrasting facticity—composed of a number of internal and
external situations, causally connected events with consequences as far as imputa-
tion and accountability are concerned. In the process her novel does not describe,
but rather embodies, the obverse and reverse sides of a distinction: between the
constructive method of a truthful fiction from its Late Neoplatonic magical reverse.
The latter is synonymous with sophistic fabrication, tricking illusion or the act of
pretending, and even willful mystification in order to produce a false belief, a mys-
terious pseudo-stuff.
This metaphysical fascination with a difficult-to-speak invisibility—a longstand-
ing preoccupation of mine beginning with the publication of Body Criticism:
Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Stafford 1991)—embraces
incorporeality, unperceivability, the yearning for luminous transparency, as well as
for all those optical technologies past and present opening up unseen extra dimen-
sions to which we aspire (Stafford 2016). The central condition of these desires and
devices is beyondness—their capacity to exceed the natural world and its expres-
sions so as to attain unnatural vision into the otherwise hidden elements of our bod-
ies, minds, matter, the universe. Today, we are engulfed by new invisibles often
made distortedly visible by hyper-instruments: neurons, molecules, genes, viruses,
pixels, and voxels. Yet unlike the prisoners shackled inside Plato’s Cave—mistaking
the dirty shadow play on the wall for Ideal Forms—we can see or say almost noth-
ing about the matter that matters.
2.3 The Digital Absolute
digitize
from the Latin “to finger
or handle” as if
to sink your fingers
deeply
into this
flood of light (Youn 2015, pp. 46–47)
Today the digital is absolute. Without regretting the rise of e-readers and laptops,
one can still question this mighty revolution: what other foggy action-at-a-distance
has been so unconditionally accepted with apparently limitless, although ill-defined,
benefits and inadequately analyzed drawbacks? A tautological argument in favor of
this radical technological upheaval is that a data-hungry public requires constant
feeding. One form this over-brimming need takes is the demand for dramatically
16 B.M. Stafford
Fig. 2.2 Suzanne Anker, Remote Sensing (21), 2013, plaster, pigment, and resin, 4 × 4 × 2″
(Reprinted with permission by photographer Raul Valverde)
increased wireless spectrum—that eerie ether or incandescent net of invisible radio

frequencies that transmit high-speed information to and from proliferating mobile
devices. Eager auction bidders for licensing and “zoning space” argue that as hordes
of consumers upgrade to smartphones, tablets, wearables, and multitudinous other
connected apps, much more—how much?—than the current deployment of 4G
wireless technologies and existing bandwidth will be required (Genachowski and
McDowell 2015, p. A13).
It’s not without significance that entrepreneurs and private investors urge this
expansion—whereby the digital becomes a habit, a reflex, an impulse—as crucial to
fostering the budding “Internet of Things” (Fig. 2.2). This questionable invention—
whereby even the human brain is distributed and manipulated like any other algo-
rithm—alludes to the accelerating pro-growth economy of as yet unrealizable
“stuff” produced through the click or touch of a screen. The trouble with too-much
pointless automation ranges from the laughable to the grave. Witness Apple, Google,
and Samsung rolling out pre-programmed “smart-home” technologies that fre-
quently add thoughtless complexity and frustration to otherwise simple tasks like
turning on and off the light. Or, more sinister, consider the turning of the brain into
a product through technologies that invade the privacy of our thought.
Gaming is yet another phenomenon illustrating that digital data has become our
daily diet. Video games—ranging from those that involve non-stop visual-pattern
processing monopolizing our cerebral resources to totally immersive 3-D life
games—numb us to our own surroundings. This, despite the fact that playing video
games is now being touted as aiding our biological condition, giving purpose to
leisure, improving our work ethic—by increasing dopamine levels and generating
more gray matter in reward processing centers—thus fostering productivity. Yet the
lucrative gameification of everything hardly frees the mind. Rather it “habituates us
to the tidy mechanisms of effort and reward, to established paths, and to prefab nar-
ratives” (Heller 2015, p. 90). It means tuning out direct engagement with what
stands or exists beside you, outside you.
Coming to grips with the ominous dynamics of tailoring more and more auto-
matic control applications to a subject’s behavior patterns is one of the many chal-
lenges faced by the multidisciplinary fields of media, communication and culture.
By definition, these future-oriented investigations must constantly position them-
selves to respond to the metamorphic and unseizable landscape that they study. In
recent years, these fields have shifted considerably due to the rise in digital and open
media, the turn to affect, and the ways in which we are now trying to articulate the
relationship between bodies, images and environments as fuzzily permeable and
algorithmically interconnected.
Given the drift to undecidability, how have manual objects been exploded by an
economy of unseen wireless networks and hidden infrastructures? Nothing under-
scores the disaggregating power of such simulated mixtures than the attempt to
make virtual reality an actual reality. As one proponent put it: “to try to do things
how we would do them if we didn’t have any physical laws governing how we do
them”; and again, “it allows you to experience anything, anywhere in the world with
the fidelity of real life” (qtd. in Wolfe 2015, p. C11). The growing market of virtual
reality consumer products tellingly shows how a boundless IT and enthralling digi-
tal stuff have created a new orthodox universe, while the established world exists
merely as a heterodox space enclosed within it. The systematic, and often unexam-
ined, invasion of IT into every phase of contemporary life involves a reciprocal
causality in which local causes produce global effects that cause those local opera-
tions to produce precisely those effects. Consequently, this supposedly common-
sense “transparent” technology has become the largely invisible reflexive engine not
only of all interpersonal relations, but of any action whatsoever.
Suzanne Anker, in a conference on Media Materiality: Towards Critical
Economies of New Media, as well as in a subsequent book with Sabine Flach (2015),
stated that the claim to newness draws meaning from what is supposed to be the
peculiar nature of digital technologies. This progressivist narrative is mirrored in the
analysis of a historical shift from an industrial age, based in the logic of mass fac-
tory production (i.e., of material objects, vintage things like those paints, pigments,
creams, and gels with which this essay opened) and mass consumption, to an infor-
mation age centered on the production and communication of immaterial informa-
tion. In an industrial logic, “material” referred primarily to a critique of a utilitarian
political economy of real objects, whereas “immaterial” referred to a politics of
18 B.M. Stafford
identity and culture. She challenges this definition by arguing what is evident is that
so-called “new” media (a phrase inexpressive to the point of vacancy) does not sim-
ply and definably extend the notion of “old” media.
In fact, I would say it does not begin to address the undecidable nature of the
research being produced in this entangled art/science/technology domain. Consider
the vast domain of computer art that makes itself via intricate cellular automata.
Such autopoietic systems were foreseen by Friederich Nake, one of the earliest
computer art pioneers. Mesmeric stuff that automatically generates itself poses spe-
cial challenges of creating, conserving, collecting, and containing within the con-
text of a relentlessly ongoing digital revolution.
Multiplicative and additive technologies and their arresting, if unnameable, stuff
continue to yield uncanny mergers and unforeseeable outcomes. Graphic designers
as well as new media industries, for example, are beginning to investigate the real
possibility of tailored or privately produced objects (“the Internet of things”). Some
do this by carefully testing the constraints and potentials of 3D printing with metal
powders to produce everything from near-exact replicas of items ranging from auto
parts to coffee cups. But do-it-yourself consumer products—especially alluring to
hobbyists who like to print their own collectibles instead of purchasing them—also
raise the specter of spreading digital piracy and counterfeiting just as it did with the
digital distribution of music.
These fears about lack of control over licensed or copyrighted products are
accompanied by the expanding problem of indefinition, because 3-D printed stuff—
what else to call it since it is not yet some thing or, rather, because the data hovers
between becoming and being?—exists in the digital ether before becoming a tan-
gible item, thus presenting a judicial conundrum. Legal experts on infringement say
it is difficult to know who exactly conceptualized the design: the person who wrote
its code or the person who operated the printer (Schwarzel 2015, p. B1).
This case—at the moment primarily relevant to the entertainment industry—
nonetheless highlights the more general fragility of the online marketplace. Think
of its astounding ability to produce endless quasi-exact or mutated reproductions at
top speed. It also helps to make intelligible the lack of clarity occurring when the
immaterial world of digital technology collides with the conventions governing the
physical materiality of sculptural form.
2.4 Creating Undecidables
… one may understand that no matter how wide the perspectives which the human mind
may reach, how broad the loyalties which the human imagination may conceive, how uni-
versal the community which human statecraft may organize or how pure the aspirations of
the saintliest idealists may be, there is no level of human moral or social achievement in
which there is not some corruption of inordinate self-love. (Niebuhr 1944, p. 16–17)
So wrote one of the great Protestant theologians of the twentieth century.

Reinhold Niebuhr, whose interests lay in Christianity’s social and political ideas
rather than in its theological doctrines, rejected liberal Protestantism’s rosy view of
man and willfully blind optimism about human progress. His observations thus
seem especially apt for today as we ponder a range of art/science-situations vested
in desires for human perfectionism and social utopianism (Fig. 2.2).
Certainly if alive now, one of Niebuhr’s “unhappy realit[ies]” would be the rest-
less fabrication of impossible objects through swarming, merging, morphing, canti-
levering, imploding, exploding all manner of substances into matters-of-fact. Think
of the idealizing conflation of the machinic with the human, or animate/inanimate
“stuff” compounded through spellbinding pattern generation, or random aggregates
caused or brought into ephemeral existence by themselves.10 Interestingly, the med-
ically hard-to-define misfold, clump, or bunch characterizing the misshapen tau and
amyloid proteins typical of Alzheimer’s disease no longer do what they are sup-
posed to do and confusingly stick together. The resulting pathological mazy plaques
and tangles—also found in the misshapen alpha-synuclein aggregates of Parkinson’s
or the clumping prions of mad-cow disease—all defy description in contrast to the
geometry of undamaged proteins (Wang 2015b, p. D2).
Unlike researchers investigating these progressive neurological disorders, BioArt
does not focus on identifying or speaking the name of the toxic aggregation, collec-
tive behavior, or manner of grouping together of cells and what might go awry lead-
ing to faulty clustering. Hovering between utopian promise and dystopian fear, bio/
technological-conceptual stuff spurs sublime visions of supernatural powers,
seduces techno-dreamers, and fosters the growth of “razzrezz” laboratories as
experimental places with limitless synthesizing capabilities (Bright 2015). Although
there are many questions to be posed about such explorations, for me the central
question is not so much what all these new bifurcated bodies can do. The question
is: what are they, as a matter of fact?
As we have seen, in today’s museums, artworks, as well as in digital- and bio-
technologies, we seem to be witnessing again the rise of cabinets of curiosities.
Unlike the boxed Wunderkammer of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, how-
ever, these heteroclite collections of singular objects no longer display cosmic rela-
tionships and far-flung powers of attraction or repulsion, sympathy or antipathy.
Chaotic juxtapositions of hoarded stuff without rhyme or reason replace the acute
idiosyncrasies of early modern natural history classificatory systems—where even
the oddest specimen had the hope of eventually belonging to some as yet undiscov-
ered taxonomy or undefined family of objects.11
Consider the crafting, arranging, and displaying of dislocated biological materi-
als and strange morphologies made for difficult-to-articulate reasons. We have
BioArt, Neolife, Alien Art, Enstranged Objects, and so on—intellectually as well as
physically disturbingly fuzzy compositions inhabiting labile gray zones. The
Dadaesque groping for new, usually hyphenated, names for collaged forms indicates
10
On self-causation, see the recent exhibition “Causa Sui,” featuring artworks by Ann Stewart,
Whitespace gallery, Atlanta, Georgia, June 2015.
11
See for example the following exhibitions by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr: NoArk, The Tissue
Culture & Art Project (2007); NoArk II, The Tissue Culture & Art Project (2008–2010); Odd
Neolifism (2010); and NoArk Revisited; Odd Neolifism (2011).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
{27}
In his opinion the Ashantis had been preparing ever since the
British occupation in 1896 to reassert their independence."
The Governor was, himself, in Kumassi when the Ashantis first
attacked it, on the 25th of March, and he has given an account
of the desperate position in which the few British officials,
with their small native garrison and the refugees whom they
tried to protect, were placed. "Our force," said Sir Frederic
Hodgson, "consisted of only some 200 Hausas, while there is
reason to believe that we had not less than 15,000 Ashantis
surrounding us. In addition to our own force we had to protect
some 3,500 refugees, chiefly Mahomedan traders, Fantis, and loyal
Kumassis, none of whom we were able to take into the fort,
where every available bit of space was required for military
purposes. It was heartrending to see the efforts of these poor
people to scale the walls or break through the gate of the
fort, and we had to withdraw the Hausas from the cantonments
and draw a cordon round the refugees. It is impossible to
describe the horror of the situation with these 3,500 wretched
people huddled together without shelter under the walls of the
fort. That same night a tornado broke over Kumassi, and the scene
next morning with over 200 children was too terrible for
words. Afterwards they were able to arrange shelters for
themselves." Near the end of April, two small reinforcements
from other posts reached Kumassi; but while this strengthened
the numbers for defence, it weakened the food supply. Taking
stock of their food, the besieged decided that they could hold
out until June 23, and that if the main body then marched out,
to cut, if possible, their way through the enemy, leaving a
hundred men behind, the latter might keep the fort until July
15. This, accordingly, was done. On the 23d of June Governor
Hodgson, with all but 100 men, stole away from Kumassi, by a
road which the Ashantis had not guarded, and succeeded in
reaching the coast, undergoing great hardships and dangers in
the march. Meantime, an expedition from Cape Coast Castle was
being energetically prepared by Colonel Sir J. Willcocks, who
overcame immense difficulties and fought his way into Kumassi
on Ju]y 15, the very day on which the food-supply of the
little garrison was expected to give out. The following
account of his entry into Kumassi is from Colonel Willcocks'
official report: "Forming up in the main road, we marched
towards Kumassi, a mile distant, the troops cheering wildly
for the Queen and then followed silence. No sound came from
the direction of the fort, which you cannot see till quite
close. For a moment the hideous desolation and silence, the
headless bodies lying everywhere, the sickening smell, &c.,
almost made one shudder to think what no one dared to
utter—'Has Kumassi fallen? Are we too late?' Then a bugle
sound caught the ear—'the general salute'—the tops of the
towers appeared, and again every man in the column, white and
black, broke into cheers long sustained. The brave defenders
had at last seen us; they knew for hours' past from the firing
growing ever nearer that we were coming, yet they dared not
open their only gate; they perforce must wait, for even as we
appeared the enemy were making their last efforts to destroy
the outlying buildings, and were actually setting them on fire
until after dark, when a party of 100 men went out and treated
them to volleys and cleared them out. If I have gone too fully
into details of the final scene, the occasion was one that
every white man felt for him comes perhaps but once, and no
one would have missed it for a kingdom."
ASPHYXIATING SHELLS: Declaration against.
See (in this volume)

PEACE CONFERENCE.
ASSASSINATIONS:
Of President Barrios.

CENTRAL AMERICA (GUATEMALA): A. D. 1897-1898.
Of President Borda.

URUGUAY: A. D. 1896-1899.
Of Canovas del Castillo.

SPAIN: A. D. 1897 (AUGUST-OCTOBER).
Of Empress Elizabeth of Austria.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1898 (SEPTEMBER).
Of Governor Goebel.

KENTUCKY: A. D. 1895-1900.
Of President Heureaux.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: A. D. 1899.
Of King Humbert.

ITALY: A. D. 1899-1900;
and 1900 (JULY-SEPTEMBER).
Of Professor Mihaileano.

BALKAN AND DANUBIAN STATES.
Of Nâsr-ed-din, Shah of Persia.

PERSIA: A. D. 1896.
Of M. Stambouloff.

BALKAN AND DANUBIAN STATES (BULGARIA).
ASSIOUT, Nile barrage at.

EGYPT: A. D. 1898-1901.
ASSOCIATIONS BILL, The French.

FRANCE: A. D. 1901.
ASSOUAN. Nile barrage at.

EGYPT: A. D. 1898-1901.
ASSUMPTIONIST FATHERS, Dissolution of the Society of the.

FRANCE: A. D. 1899-1900 (AUGUST-JANUARY).
ATACAMA, The question concerning.

CHILE: A. D. 1894-1900.
ATBARA, Battle of the.

EGYPT: A. D. 1897-1898.
ATHENS: A. D. 1896.
The revival of Olympic games.
As the result of a movement instituted in France by the Baron

de Coubertin, an interesting attempt to give athletic sports
the spirit and semblance of the ancient Olympic games was made
at Athens in the spring of 1896. A number of wealthy Greeks in
different parts of the world joined generously in the
undertaking, one gentleman especially, M. Averoff, of
Alexandria, bearing the cost of a restoration in marble of the
stadium at Athens, for the occasion. The games were held in
April, from the 6th to the 15th, and were witnessed by a great
number of people. Besides Greek competitors, there were 42 from
Germany, 23 from England, 21 from America, 15 from France. The
great event of the occasion was the long foot-race from
Marathon to Athens, which was won by a young Greek.
The U. S. Consul at Athens, writing of the reconstruction of

the ancient stadium for the games, described the work as
follows:
{28}
"The stadium may be described as an immense open air

amphitheater constructed in a natural ravine, artificially
filled in at the end. It is in the shape of an elongated
horseshoe. The spectators, seated upon the sloping sides of
the ravine, look down into the arena below, which is a little
over 600 feet in length and about 100 feet wide at the widest
part. … The stadium, as rebuilt for the games, will consist of
(1) the arena, bounded by a marble curbing, surmounted by an
iron railing adorned with Athenian owls;
(2) a walk between this curbing and the first row of seats;
(3) a low retaining wall of marble on which rests the first
row of seats, the entire row being of marble;
(4) the seats;
(5) the underground tunnel.
In addition to these features there will be an imposing

entrance, a surrounding wall at the top of the hill, and two
supporting walls at the entrance. As far as possible, in the
reconstruction of the stadium, the old portions will be used,
where these are in a sufficient state of preservation, and an
effort will be made to reproduce, as nearly as practicable,
the ancient structure. The seats at present will not all be
made of pentelic marble, as there is neither time nor money
for such an undertaking. At the closed end of the arena,
seventeen rows will be made of pentelic marble, as well as the
first row all the way around. The remaining rows up to the
first aisle are being constructed of Pincus stone. These will
accommodate 25,000 seated spectators. From this aisle to the
top will be placed wooden benches for 30,000 seated
spectators. Add to these standing room for 5,000, and we have
the holding capacity of the stadium 60,000 without crowding."
United States Consular Reports,

March, 1896, pages 353-354.
ATLANTA: A. D. 1895.
The Cotton States and International Exposition.
An important exposition, named as above, was held with great

success at Atlanta, Georgia, from the 18th of September until
the end of the year 1895. The exhibits from Mexico and many of
the Central and South American States were extensive and
interesting; but the main interest and value of the exposition
were in its showing of the industrial resources of the
Southern States of the American Union, and of the recent
progress made in developing them.
AUSGLEICH, The.

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: FINANCIAL RELATIONS;
and A. D. 1897 (OCTOBER-DECEMBER).
AUSTRAL ISLANDS:
Annexation to France.
The Austral or Tubuai Islands were formally annexed to France

by the Governor of Tahiti, on the 21st of August, 1900.
----------AUSTRALIA. Start--------
AUSTRALIA:
Recent extensions of Democracy in the Australian Colonies
and New Zealand.
Social experiments.
"The five colonies of the Australian continent, Tasmania, and

New Zealand constitute seven practically independent
commonwealths under the British crown. Australians and New
Zealanders have therefore been able to develop their countries
along their own lines, and have surpassed all other
Anglo-Saxon nations in the number and variety of functions
which the state is called upon to perform. … The railways
almost without exception, and all the telegraph and telephone
lines, are in the hands of the community. In the few cases in
which there is private ownership of railways, a particular
line was demanded at a certain time, and the government were
not then in a position to borrow the funds required for its
construction. Western Australia has recently purchased the
entire property of one of the two private undertakings in the
colony. A mass of sanitary and industrial legislation also has
been placed upon the statute book.
"Again, South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia, and New

Zealand lend money to settlers at low rates of interest; South
Australia sells its wines in London; Queensland facilitates
the erection of sugar mills; Victoria and South Australia have
given a bonus upon the exportation of dairy produce; South
Australia, New Zealand, and Victoria receive the produce,
grade and freeze it free of charge, or at a rate which barely
covers the expenses; Victoria contributes toward the erection
of butter factories; Victoria and New Zealand have subsidized
the mining industry; and Western Australia has adopted a
comprehensive scheme for the supply of water to the Coolgardie
gold fields. In all the colonies the national system of
primary education is compulsory and undenominational. In South
Australia, Victoria, Queensland, and New Zealand it is also free.
In the other colonies fees are charged, which may be remitted
wholly or partly if parents are unable to pay them. Assistance
is given in most cases for the promotion of secondary,
technical, and university education. New Zealand and South
Australia have appointed public trustees. New Zealand has long
possessed a department of life insurance.
"Finally, … New Zealand has adopted a system of old-age

pensions. A pension of seven shillings a week is to be given
to every person above the age of sixty-five years, provided he
or she has lived in the colony for twenty-five years, and is
able to pass a certain test in regard to sobriety and general
good conduct. … In South Australia direct taxation takes two
forms. There is an income tax at the rate of four and a half
pence in the pound up to £800, and of six-pence in the pound
above £800 of taxable amount resulting from personal
exertions, and at the rate of ninepence and one shilling in
the pound respectively on incomes from property. Incomes
between £125 and £425 enjoy exemption on £125 of the amount.
Again, there is a tax on the unimproved value of land of one
half-penny in the pound up to, and one penny above, the
capital value of £5000. …
"Similar taxation is to be found in New Zealand, and includes

both a progressive income tax and a tax on land values which
is more highly graduated than that of South Australia. … All
improvements are excluded from the assessment of the taxable
amount. … If the owner of the property is dissatisfied with
the assessment of the government, he can call upon them to buy
it of him at their own valuation. In only one case has such an
extreme step been taken; and it is pleasant to find that it
has resulted in an annual profit of nearly five per cent upon
the outlay, and that the land which formerly gave employment
to a few shepherds is now occupied by a large number of
thriving settlers.
{29}
I may add that when the government deem that an estate is not
being developed as it should be by its owners, they are
authorized by statute to purchase it—by negotiation if
possible, otherwise at a price paid by an impartial
tribunal—with a view to its subdivision into small holdings
suitable to the requirements of the community. This system of
taxation, it will be said with some truth, is based upon the
teachings of Henry George. He travelled in Australia and New
Zealand, and was listened to with attention; but, while he
looked to the ultimate absorption of the whole unearned
increment, his hearers in the antipodes dissociated themselves
from his conclusions, though they appreciated the value of his
premises. Consequently, while accepting his principles, they
did not hesitate to exempt small properties from the tax, and
to increase its rate progressively in relation to the amount
of the unimproved value. …
"One of the most hopeful signs of the day is that, with the
help of the representatives of labor in Parliament, Australian
governments have done much within recent years to mitigate the
excess of population in the large towns, and to replace the
unemployed upon the land. Of course mistakes have been made.
In some cases settlers have failed through lack of
agricultural knowledge; in others, on account of the
barrenness of the soil. In South Australia, the village
settlements, which were avowedly started as an alternative to
relief works, have been only a modified success. In New
Zealand, village settlements have produced very satisfactory
results. … In Victoria, a labor colony has been established,
with the entire support of the trades-unionists, to which the
unemployed may be sent, and at which they receive, at a very
low rate of wages, a course of instruction in agricultural
pursuits which enables them subsequently to obtain private
employment with farmers or others. In New Zealand, I found a
very strong feeling among trades-unionists that it would be to
the interest of the workingmen themselves if a penal colony
were established, on the lines of those which exist in
Germany, to which loafers might be sent, and at which they
would be compelled to work, with the alternative of
starvation."
H. De R. Walker,
Australasian Extensions of Democracy
(Atlantic Monthly, May, 1899).
See also (in this volume),

NEW ZEALAND: A. D. 1891-1900.
AUSTRALIA: Western Australia:

The Outlander problem in Australia.
"Here we have a problem in many respects similar to that which

has distracted South Africa. In several particulars the
resemblance is startlingly close. … Many of the elements of
disorder in the two continents are the same. In Western
Australia, as in the Transvaal, there is a large population of
mining residents, who complain that they are treated like
'helots'—to use Sir Alfred Milner's term—by the privileged
agricultural burghers. They urge that they are denied fair
representation, so that the burghers monopolise political
power; that the administration is in the hands of a knot of
politicians and place-hunters at Perth—I had almost written
Pretoria; that they have made the colony wealthy by their
enterprise and capital, only to see a large part of the fruits
of their industry drawn from them by excessive taxation, which
is expended mainly outside their own district; that they are
burdened by oppressive railway rates and denied access to the
port which is the natural outlet to the Goldfields, and so on.
The Kalgoorlie 'Uitlanders,' like the Johannesburgers, have
sent a petition to the Queen, signed by a larger number of
persons than those who forwarded the famous memorial which set
the ball rolling in South Africa and led to the Bloemfontein
Conference. The case is fully and temperately set forth in
this petition, and in the Manifesto of the Eastern Goldfields
Reform League of Western Australia, both of which documents
are in the last Bluebook relating to Australian Federation.
The same official compilation contains a statement to Mr.
Chamberlain from Dr. Paget Thurston, in which the parallel
between West Australia and the Transvaal is asserted with the
most uncompromising directness. 'We have here,' says the
writer, 'a Boer and Outlander question almost parallel to that
in the Transvaal. As an Outlander I appeal to you.' Dr.
Thurston adds: 'The old West Australians openly speak as if
the colony was theirs, and we were interlopers who have no
course open to us but to leave the colony if we are
dissatisfied.' This has a very familiar sound, and so has the
following: 'The great bulk of the taxation is levied through
duties on food and drink. As the Boer party includes all the
agricultural producers, and the Outlanders include the great
bulk of the consumers, this acts injuriously on us in two
ways. It puts a frightful load on the Outlander taxpayer, and
enables the Boer producer to command a very high price for his
food-stuffs. Owing to the limitation of the market by
excessive protection, many articles of common use reach famine
prices at times. In the three years I have been here, for
instance, potatoes have been £22 10s. a ton; apples, 2s. 6d. a
pound; oranges, 5s. a dozen; new-laid eggs, 4s. a dozen (at
the time of writing, 3s. 6d.). Fresh butter is practically
unobtainable for ten months in the year, and common country
wine (such as I used to buy for 3d. and 4d. a bottle in the
Canary Islands) is here 2s. a bottle. I ask you, Sir, whether
any other place in Her Majesty's Empire (not physically
inaccessible) can show prices one half as high during the past
three years?'
"Nor does the ominous kind of hint that preceded the Jameson
Raid fail to be uttered. Only three terminations, according to
Dr. Thurston, are possible if Sir John Forrest does not modify
his Krugerite policy towards the mining settlers:
'(1) Separation of the goldfields.—This would be only fair to
the goldfields; but thousands of Outlanders have settled in
the other parts of the colony, and this step would not redress
their wrongs. The practical result of this step would be
prosperity for the goldfields, but almost ruin for the rest of
the colony.
(2) Revolution.—I fear this is much more probable than is
generally thought. Unless a material change takes place
quickly there will be bloodshed in this colony.
(3) General depression, practically equivalent to bankruptcy.'
Separation, however, and the creation of a new colony, which
would include the Goldfields district and come down to the
sea, and would immediately join the Australian Federation, is
the remedy officially proposed by the representatives of the
Outlanders. …
{30}
"The Colonial Secretary has deferred his final answer to the

Goldfields Petition until the comments of the Perth Ministry
upon that document have been received and considered. But he
has sent a provisional reply to the representatives of the
petitioners in London. He sees the solution of the matter in
getting Western Australia somehow into the new Commonwealth.
In a communication to Mr. Walter Griffiths, one of the
Goldfields delegates, the Colonial Secretary says: 'The
decision of the Government of Western Australia to summon
Parliament immediately with the view to the passing of a
measure for the submission of the Commonwealth Bill to the
electors of the colony has removed the chief of the grievances
put forward in the petition and has opened up an early
prospect of obtaining the object which the petitioners had in
view. An answer will be returned to the petition after a
careful consideration of its terms and of the comments of the
Government of the colony thereon, but Mr. Chamberlain trusts
that before an answer can be returned the people of the colony
will have decided to join the Commonwealth, for the government of
which, in that event, it will be to deal with the grievances
alleged in the petition in so far as they are not exclusively
within the province of the Parliament and Government of
Western Australia.' In other words, let the Federation dispose
of the matter. But the delegates point out that this might not
remove their grievances. The Federal Parliament would have no
power to compel the dominant party in the Perth Assembly
either to redistribute seats fairly, or divide the colony, so
as to create 'Home Rule for the Rand.' True, we should have
washed our hands of the affair, and could tell the malcontent
Uitlanders that it was none of our business. But if Perth
still remained obstinate, and Coolgardie in consequence began
to carry out some of those ugly projects hinted at by Dr.
Thurston, it might become our business in an embarrassing
fashion. At any rate, it does not seem quite fair to the new
Commonwealth to start it in life with this grave question,
still unsettled, upon its hands."
S. Low,
Enigmas of Empire
(Nineteenth Century, June, 1900).
AUSTRALIA: New South Wales: A. D. 1894-1895.

Defeat of the Protectionist policy.
Adoption of a liberal tariff.
At the general elections of July, 1894, in New South Wales,

the tariff issue was sharply defined. "'Protection' was
inscribed on the banners of the ministerial party, led by the
then Premier, Sir George Dibbs, while the aggressive
opposition, led by Mr. Reid, … fought under the banner of
'free trade.' The Free Traders won the battle in that
election, as there were 63 Free Traders, 40 Protectionists,
and 22 labor members, mostly with free-trade leanings,
returned. On the reassembling of Parliament, Sir George Dibbs
was confronted with a large majority, and Mr. George H. Reid
was called to form a government on the lines suggested by the
issues of the campaign. The Council or 'upper house,'
consisting of Crown nominees for life, rejected the measures
suggested by Mr. Reid and passed by the Assembly by an
overwhelming majority, and Mr. Reid dissolved Parliament on
July 6, 1895, and appealed to the country. The election was
held on July 24, and again the issues, as set forth in the
measures, were fought out vigorously. The great leader of
protection, Sir George Dibbs, with several of his ablest
followers, was defeated, and the so-called Free Trade party
came back, much stronger than before. Thus, it was claimed
that the mandate of the people, declaring for free trade and
direct taxation, had been reaffirmed, and on the reassembling
of Parliament, on August 13, the same measure, as passed by
the Assembly and rejected by the Council, was again presented
and passed by the Assembly by a majority of 50 to 26, and
again went to the upper house. Again it was met with great
hostility, but the Government party in that chamber, having
been augmented by ten new appointments, the temper of the
house was softened and the bill was passed with some two
hundred and fifty amendments. As, the Assembly could only
accept some eighty of these without, yielding material points
… a conference was suggested, which, after several days of
discussion, agreed to a modified measure, embracing the
principle of free trade, as interpreted in this colony, and
direct taxation, and the new law goes into effect as above
stated, on January 1, 1896.
"It may be well here to remark that there are a few articles,
notably raw sugar, glucose, molasses, and treacle, upon which
the duty will be removed gradually, so as not to wantonly
disturb vested interests, but, with these exceptions, the
change is a very sweeping one."

June, 1896, page 299.
AUSTRALIA: New South Wales: A. D. 1896.

Change in the government of Norfolk Island.
Its re-annexation to New South Wales.
A change in the government of Norfolk Island was proclaimed in

November, 1896, by the Governor of New South Wales, who came
to the island, acting under directions from the British
Colonial Office, and announced that "Her Majesty's Government
has decided to appoint a resident magistrate. The object
sought is to secure the impartial administration of justice,
while leaving the local and municipal affairs of the island to
be conducted by a council representing the inhabitants. In
consideration of the fact that the Norfolk Island settlement
originally formed part of the administrative colony of New
South Wales, and that the legal business of the island and the
registration of all land titles and transfers have uniformly
been conducted by the Government departments at Sydney, Her
Majesty's Government has decided to transfer the
administration of the island to the Government of New South
Wales. The Government of New South Wales has accepted the
charge and as soon as the necessary arrangements have been
completed Norfolk Island will be administered by the governor
of New South Wales in council." "It will thus be seen that the
Pitcairn community, which, for more than one hundred years,
has governed itself by its own laws, is now abolished and that
a new era has begun. The governor's legal right to annul the
constitution given by the Queen when the community emigrated
from Pitcairn was questioned. A deputation was appointed to
wait on the governor, but he refused
to discuss the subject further."

May, 1897, page 37.
AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1897.
Conference of colonial premiers with
the British Colonial Secretary.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1897 (JUNE-JULY).
Map of Australia and Islands of the Pacific.

{31}
Federation of the Australian Colonies.
The steps by which the Union was accomplished.
Passage of the "Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act" by
the Imperial Parliament.
"The first indication of a plan for united action among the

colonies is to be found in a proposal of Earl Grey in 1850.
The main object of the proposal was to bring about uniformity
in colonial tariffs; but, though partially adopted, it came to
nothing. From 1850 to 1860 the project of federation was
discussed from time to time in several of the colonial
legislatures, and committees on the subject were appointed.
But there seems to have been little general interest in the
question, and up to 1860 all efforts in the direction of
federation met with complete failure. Shortly after, however,
a new form of united action, less ambitious but more likely of
success, was suggested and adopted. From 1863 to 1883
conferences of colonial ministers were held at various times
to discuss certain specified topics, with a view to
introducing identical proposals in the separate colonial
legislatures. Six of these conferences were held at Melbourne
and three at Sydney; and one also was held at Hobart in 1895,
though the period of the real activity of the conference
scheme practically closed in 1883. The scheme proved a
failure, because it was found impossible to carry out the
measures concerted in the conferences. But material events
were doing more than could any public agitation to draw
attention to the advantages of closer union. The colonies were
growing in population and wealth, railroads were building and
commerce was extending. The inconveniences of border customs
duties suggested attempts at something like commercial
reciprocity between two or more colonies. New political
problems also helped to arouse public interest. Heretofore
there had been little fear of foreign aggression and, hence,
no feeling of the need of united action for common defense;
nor had there been any thought of the extension of Australian
power and interests beyond the immediate boundaries of the
different colonies. But the period from 1880 to 1890 witnessed
a change in this respect. It was during this period that much
feeling was aroused against the influx of French criminals,
escaped from the penal settlements in New Caledonia. The
difficulties in regard to New Guinea belong also to this
decade. Suspicion of the designs of Germany upon that part of
the island of New Guinea nearest the Dutch boundary led to the
annexation of its eastern portion by the Queensland
government. This action was disavowed by the British
government under Gladstone, and the fears of the colonists
were ridiculed; but almost immediately after the northern half
of New Guinea was forcibly taken possession of by Germany. The
indignation of Australians was extreme, and the opinion was
freely expressed that the colonies would have to unite to
protect their own interests. Finally, this was the time of the
French designs on the New Hebrides Islands and of German
movements with reference to Samoa. These conditions, economic
and political, affected all the colonies more or less
intimately and resulted in the first real, though loose, form
of federal union. At the instigation of the Honorable James
Service, premier of Victoria, a convention met at Sydney,
November, 1883, composed of delegates from all the colonial
governments. This convention adopted a bill providing for the
establishment of a Federal Council, with power to deal with
certain specified subjects and with such other matters as
might be referred to it by two or more colonies. … New South
Wales and New Zealand refused to agree to the bill, but it was
adopted by the other colonies; and the Imperial Parliament, in
1885, passed an act permitting such a Council to be called
into existence at the request of any three colonies, to be
joined by other colonies as they saw fit. Meetings of the
Council took place in 1886, 1888, 1889 and 1891, but very
little was accomplished. That the Federal Council was a very
weak affair is obvious. … Meanwhile, interest in a more
adequate form of federation was growing. In 1890 Sir Henry
Parkes proposed a plan for federal union of a real and
vigorous sort. At his suggestion, a conference met at
Melbourne, February 6, 1890, to decide on the best method of
getting the question into definite shape for consideration. …
Provision was made … for the calling of a convention to draw
up a constitution. … In accordance with the decision of the
conference, delegates from the several colonies convened at
Sydney, March 2, 1891; and with the work of this convention
began the third and final stage in the federation movement.
The Sydney convention formulated a bill, embodying a draft of
a federal constitution, and then resolved that provision
should be made by the several parliaments to submit it to the
people in such manner as each colony should see fit. … But
there was no sufficient external pressure to bring about an
immediate discussion and an early settlement. … The result was
that nothing was done. … Meanwhile, federation leagues had
been organized in different colonies, and in 1893 delegates
from a number of these leagues met at Bendigo, Victoria. …
After adopting the bill of 1891 as a basis of discussion, the
Bendigo conference resolved to urge the colonial governments
to pass uniform enabling acts for a new convention—its members
to be elected by popular vote—to frame a constitution which
should be submitted to the people for approval. This proposal
met with general favor and resulted in the calling of a
meeting of the premiers of all the colonies at Hobart in
January, 1895. There an enabling bill was drafted which five
premiers agreed to lay before their respective parliaments. …
It took two years to get this machinery into working order. At
length, however, the requisite authority was granted by five
colonies: New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Western
Australia and Tasmania, Queensland and New Zealand declining
to participate. On March 22, 1897, the second constitutional
convention assembled at Adelaide. This convention drew up a
new federal constitution, based upon the draft of 1891.
Between May 5 and September 2 the constitution was discussed
in each of the parliaments. When the convention reassembled at
Sydney on March 2, as many as 75 amendments were reported as
suggested by the different colonies. Many were of an
insignificant character and many were practically identical.
The constitution and proposed amendments were discussed in two
sessions of the convention, which finally adjourned March 16,
1898, its work then being ready to submit to the people.
{32}
In June a popular vote resulted in the acceptance of the
constitution by Victoria, Tasmania, and South Australia; but
the failure of the parent colony, New South Wales, to adopt it
blocked all hope of federal union for the moment. Recently,
however, at a conference of colonial premiers certain
amendments demanded by New South Wales were agreed to in part,
and upon a second vote the constitution, as amended, was
accepted by that colony."
W. G. Beach,
The Australian Federal Constitution
(Political Science Quarterly, December, 1899).
In August, 1899, the draft of a Constitution thus agreed upon

was transmitted to England, with addresses from the provincial
legislatures, praying that it be passed into law by the
Imperial Parliament. Early in the following year delegates
from the several colonies were sent to England to discuss with
the Colonial Office certain questions that had arisen, and to
assist in procuring the passage by Parliament of the necessary
Act. Looked at from the Imperial standpoint, a number of
objections to the draft Constitution were found, but all of
them were finally waived excepting one. That one related to a
provision touching appeals from the High Court of the
Australian Commonwealth to the Queen in Council. As framed and
adopted in Australia, the provision in question was as
follows:
"74. No appeal shall be permitted to the Queen in Council in
any matter involving the interpretation of this Constitution
or of the Constitution of a State, unless the public interests
of some part of Her Majesty's Dominions, other than the
Commonwealth or a State, are involved. Except as provided in
this section, this Constitution shall not impair any right
which the Queen may be pleased to exercise, by virtue of Her
Royal Prerogative, to grant special leave of appeal from the
High Court to Her Majesty in Council. But The Parliament may
make laws limiting the matters in which such leave may be
asked."
This was objected to on several grounds, but mainly for the

reasons thus stated by Mr. Chamberlain: "Proposals are under
consideration for securing a permanent and effective
representation of the great Colonies on the Judicial
Committee, and for amalgamating the Judicial Committee with
the House of Lords, so as to constitute a Court of Appeal from
the whole British Empire. It would be very unfortunate if
Australia should choose this moment to take from the Imperial
Tribunal the cognizance of the class of cases of greatest
importance, and often of greatest difficulty. Article 74
proposes to withdraw from the Queen in Council matters
involving the interpretation of the Constitution. It is
precisely on questions of this kind that the Queen in Council
has been able to render most valuable service to the
administration of law in the Colonies, and questions of this
kind, which may sometimes involve a good deal of local
feeling, are the last that should be withdrawn from a Tribunal
of appeal with regard to which there could not be even a
suspicion of prepossession. Questions as to the constitution
of the Commonwealth or of a State may be such as to raise a
great deal of public excitement as to the definition of the
boundaries between the powers of the Commonwealth Parliament
and the powers of the State Parliaments. It can hardly be
satisfactory to the people of Australia that in such cases,
however important and far-reaching in their consequences, the
decision of the High Court should be absolutely final. Before
long the necessity for altering the Constitution in this
respect would be felt, and it is better that the Constitution
should be enacted in such a form as to render unnecessary the
somewhat elaborate proceedings which would be required to
amend it."
Great Britain, Parliamentary Publications

(Papers by Command, April and May, 1900,
Australia—Cd. 124 and 158).
In reply, the Australian delegates maintained that they had no

authority to amend, in any particular, the instrument which
the people of the several colonies had ratified by their
votes; but the Imperial authorities were inflexible, and the
article 74 was modified in the Act which passed Parliament, on
the 7th of July, 1900, "to constitute the Commonwealth of
Australia," as may be seen by reference to the text, published
elsewhere.

CONSTITUTION OF AUSTRALIA.
The question of the Federal Capital.
By the Constitution of the Commonwealth, it is required that

the seat of government "shall be determined by the Parliament,
and shall be within territory which shall have been granted to
or acquired by the Commonwealth, and shall be vested in and
belong to the Commonwealth, and shall be in the State of New
South Wales, and be distant not less than one hundred miles
from Sydney;" and "such territory shall contain an area of not
less than one hundred square miles." "New South Wales," says a
correspondent, writing from Sydney, "is naturally anxious to
get the question decided as quickly as possible; but Victoria
will equally be inclined to procrastinate, and the new
Parliament—which cannot be more comfortable than it will be
at Melbourne—will not be in a hurry to shift. The necessity
for a new and artificial capital arises entirely out of our
provincial jealousies, and it would have been a great saving
of initial expense and a great diminution of inconvenience if
we could have used one of the old capitals for a quarter of a
century." To remove preliminary difficulties and avoid delay,
the government of New South Wales appointed a commissioner to
visit and report on the most likely places. The report of this
commissioner, made early in October, "reduces the possible
positions to three—one near Bombala in the south-east corner
of the colony at the foot of the Australian Alps, one near
Yass on the line of the railway between Sydney and Melbourne,
and one near Orange on our western line. On the whole he gives
the preference to the first named."
AUSTRALIA: New South Wales: A. D. 1900.

Old-Age Pension Act.
A letter from Sydney, November 29, 1900, announced: "The

question of the establishment of an old age pension system,
similar to that now in successful operation in New Zealand
[see (in this volume) NEW ZEALAND: A. D. 1899], has been
agitating New South Wales for several months, and to-day the
bill for that purpose became a law. There has been a desire on
the part of some members of the Legislature to hold over the
bill until the convening of the Federal Parliament, in the
hope that the measure would become universal throughout the
continent, but the majority, including the Premier, wished the
bill to be pushed through without loss of time. There is no
opposition worth mentioning. … At a mass meeting in favor of
the bill representatives of every political party, of every
Church and of every profession and trade in the community were
present.
{33}
The sentiment of the colony has never been more unanimous. …
The estimated cost of the scheme is something like £250,000 or
£300,000 a year, but this does not take into consideration the
amount which will be saved by doing away with the charitable
institutions now draining the pockets alike of the state and
of the individual. Private contributions alone amount to
£600,000 a year; all this will be saved, together with a part
of the Government's annual expenditure—about £400,000—for
public institutions. Not all pauper institutions can be
abolished, for many of the aged and friendless poor are ailing
or slightly feeble minded, and will continue to need medical
attention."
AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1900 (March).

New Zealand looking toward federation with the Australian
Commonwealth.

NEW ZEALAND: A. D. 1900 (MARCH).
AUSTRALIA: West Australia: A. D. 1900 (August).

Vote to join the Commonwealth.
The question of union with the other colonies in the

Commonwealth, from which the West Australians had previously
held aloof, was submitted to them in August (women voting for
the first time), and decided affirmatively by 44,704 against
19,691. Adding the West Australian totals to the aggregate
vote at the decisive referendum in each of the other
federating colonies, the following is the reported result:
For federation. 422,647

Against federation. 161,024
Majority. 261,623
AUSTRALIA: A. D. 1900 (September-December).

The Queen's Proclamation of the Australian Commonwealth.
Contemplated visit of the Duke and Duchess of York
to open the first session of the Federal Parliament.
Appointment of Lord Hopetoun to be Governor-General.
The first Federal Cabinet.
On the 17th of September the following proclamation of the

Australian Commonwealth was issued by the Queen:
"Whereas by an Act of Parliament passed in the sixty-third and

sixty-fourth years of Our reign, intituled 'An Act to
constitute the Commonwealth of Australia,' it is enacted that
it shall be lawful for the Queen, with the advice of the Privy
Council, to declare by Proclamation that, on and after a day
therein appointed, not being later than one year after the
passing of this Act, the people of New South Wales, Victoria,
South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, and also, if Her
Majesty is satisfied that the people of Western Australia have
agreed thereto, of Western Australia, shall be united in a
Federal Commonwealth, under the name of the Commonwealth of
Australia. And whereas We are satisfied that the people of
Western Australia have agreed thereto accordingly. We
therefore, by and with the advice of Our Privy Council, have
thought fit to issue this Our Royal Proclamation, and We do
hereby declare that on and after the first day of January, one
thousand nine hundred and one, the people of New South Wales,
Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, Tasmania, and Western
Australia shall be united in a Federal Commonwealth under the
name of the Commonwealth of Australia. Given at Our Court at
Balmoral, this seventeenth day of September, in the year of
our Lord one thousand nine hundred, and in the sixty-fourth
year of Our reign. God save the Queen."
At the same time, the following announcement, which caused

extreme delight in Australia, was published officially from
the Colonial Office:
"Her Majesty the Queen has been graciously pleased to assent,

on the recommendation of the Marquis of Salisbury, to the

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Printed on acid-free paper

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The Comparison Project is an experimental effort in comparative philosophy of

Des Moines, IA, USA Timothy D. Knepper

1 Introduction: Ineffability in Comparative Philosophical

10 Using a Net to Catch the Air: Poetry, Ineffability, and Small

Ineffability is a common motif in the religions of the world—though not a universal

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 1

d­ elivered.2 Collectively, these essays constitute an exercise in comparative philoso-

lecture on ineffability (Chap. 10). Equating ineffability with indescribability, Janke

Rābi‘a effectively creates a discourse for partially expressing, if not cultivating,

Timothy D. Knepper is Professor of Philosophy at Drake University, where he chairs the

Barbara Maria Stafford

B.M. Stafford (*)

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 9

2.1 Combinations Beyond Name

Beyond any ethical constraints imposed by the academy—whether in the science

In the global fiscal- and conceptual-merger or piecemeal “gig”-economy there

The word “residue” already exists as a realtime application on the Internet, as an

2.2 Magical Thinking

2.3 The Digital Absolute

increased wireless spectrum—that eerie ether or incandescent net of invisible radio

2.4 Creating Undecidables

So wrote one of the great Protestant theologians of the twentieth century.

ASPHYXIATING SHELLS: Declaration against.

See (in this volume)

See (in this volume)

See (in this volume)

Of Canovas del Castillo.

See (in this volume)

Of Empress Elizabeth of Austria.

See (in this volume)

See (in this volume)

See (in this volume)

See (in this volume)

See (in this volume)

Of Nâsr-ed-din, Shah of Persia.

See (in this volume)

See (in this volume)

ASSIOUT, Nile barrage at.

See (in this volume)

ASSOCIATIONS BILL, The French.

See (in this volume)

ASSOUAN. Nile barrage at.

See (in this volume)

ASSUMPTIONIST FATHERS, Dissolution of the Society of the.

See (in this volume)

ATACAMA, The question concerning.

See (in this volume)

Des Moines, IA, USA Timothy D. Knepper

1 Introduction: Ineffability in Comparative Philosophical

10 Using a Net to Catch the Air: Poetry, Ineffability, and Small

d elivered.2 Collectively, these essays constitute an exercise in comparative philoso-

2.1 Combinations Beyond Name

2.2 Magical Thinking

2.3 The Digital Absolute

2.4 Creating Undecidables