Special Functions

I attended a fantastic wedding reception about ten years ago. Nothing since has come close for eye-popping fun. It was in Toronto. It was loud, drunken, universally enjoyed, massive fun, without overt rancour, and Irish.

Jim M. was wed to the love of his life, a charming and vivacious woman whose very Richmond Hill Jewish family was quite scandalized by the behaviour of the hooliganish other half of the room - but without overt rancour, as I said.

The music - my God the music. Now, I'm a kind of Irish. I grew up in Canada raised by parents who grew up in Canada. So, really, I'm not Irish. And here's a fun observation. Someone asks me,"So, what are you?" I respond, "I'm Canadian." The natural next questions is, "Sure - but what are you really?" I respond, "Scots-Irish". Here I intend no disrespect to my Mennonite U.E.L. forebears, but this is the closest part to me, heredity-wise, in terms of ethnicity. Still, I build my own furniture...yeah, there's a bit of ruthlessly self-sufficient German floating around in there. And I have tremendous respect, although it's conflicted, for the reigning monarch. Yeah.

The music. Fast, frantic, and screaming Gael - the load of it. I watched the collected Irish clansmen hit the floor with their partners and perform the most complicated and chaotic yet holistically rhythmic and overall-coherent jigs. In the midst of this, the father and uncles of the groom introduced a new element into the dance. When the drum beats of the music, dum-dum-ta-tum, dum-dum-ta-tum were heard at the end of every couplet, they managed to work into the swirling dance a co-ordinate aggressive stomping of feet towards the partners nearest to them. It was a kind of a threat, really, but a threat with smiles and hurriedly lifted feet from the defendants. It was fantastic. Lots of laughter.

I managed to edge closer, through the crossfire, to the father of the groom. I had my line:

3L: (screaming over the noise) Hey, Joe, do you know why the Pope tried to ban shagging standing up?
JM: (the bluest of eyes alight) No...why?
3L: (triumphally drunk) They were afraid it would lead to dancin'!

Gales of laughter, a clip round the ears for me from the paterfamilias avec, "Ye Bugger!", looks of astonishment from the Hilliers of Richmond, and my Italian Catholic date's horrified scoff and blush of shame - damned inappropriate sauce from her considering the low cut and lacey top by which she was being, at best, barely contained. I use here the word 'bare-ly' advisedly, bless her trashy little sanctimoneous heart...that's about all that the crowd couldn't see of her.

Note the fact that in the face of the perceptible violence of the dancing, everyone involved knew it was a joke, and thus I shall turn sometime in the future to the topic of the 'pragmatics' of the communication. By the way, I ripped the joke off from the film Rob Roy. It's a good bit.

That wedding reception was a special function, special for me for different reasons than for the family of the wedding couple, and was also replete with special functions having nothing to do with me. Now, towards the point.

There's been some wild talk about a seminar in the coming term, Winter 2007, on the topic of Special Functions. It is the brainchild of one of the new hires in my department, Philosophy, and the reigning Chair of Mathematics. I don't know much more than the title, but I have some initial reactions that I want to suss out a bit.

Function: what something is for. There's a long and robust history of accounting for the existence of a thing by making an appeal to its use - I refer any interested parties to the vast and rarefied body of work in the philosophy of biology which parades under the title 'teleological functionalism', a topic on which I worked in a grad course under that name and about which I still understand next to nothing.

Function. This, in Aristotle, is the ergon of a thing. In the shortest possible terms, a thing's function is the use to which it is put by nature. There are surely more wrinkles and refinements that ought to be added to this, but they currently escape me. Chock that up to a long motorcycle ride back to London in cold weather and four (sorry, now six, erm...seven) bottles of Canadian (I'm editing this entry in increasing drunkenness).

The hand, so it goes in Aristotle, is a tool for using tools. This, observes my Master with a grin, is 'rather tidy'. And so it goes. A hand has the function of being an object subject to our command that has the function of using tools. The same cannot be said for other parts of the body. So, using tools is the particular function of the hand.

This makes tool use the special function of the hand. It is a function that can only be performed properly by use of hands. And here I joyfully add a new spin to the already dizzy corpse in Aristotle's grave by observing the great spirit who penned 'My Left Foot'.

On the great dear man himself, so sayeth the Pogues:

Christy Brown, a clown around town.
Now a man of renown, from Dingle to Down.
I can type with me toes, I sip stout through me nose,
And where it's gonna end, God only knows.

Take that Aristotle!...a man whose name renders as 'Noblest Goal' (or, 'most special purpose' with a certain looseness of translation). So now I think I'll have to download some Pogues to see me through this one.

If it is the special function of, say, a hand to perform a function of, say, using tools, then we can see one sense of special function in play.

There are certainly other senses of special function. One might be, to pick and example, a wedding. That is a function (read: event) that is special for lots of reasons. It's special mostly because it's the event of a rather important performative utterance, to whit: I do. It's also special because a lot of people agree that it's special. Now, why is it special?

It's probably special outside of the momentousness of the performative utterance because it's rare. It doesn't happen for either of the primary participants every day - or indeed more than once, twice, or at the outside three times in a life, barring serial divorcees who are, nevertheless, wedding enthusiasts. They've just got a way-too-hungry monkey on their backs. For me, beyond the second time, it ceases to be at all special - I mean really.

Here's a sidebar on the topic of "starter marriages" which is a concept introduced to me by my very yuppy cousin and her someday-to-be-betrothed.

Two people start dating. They start the part of the dating that requires some 'special time' alone. (Ahh, special again, and here for a damned special function that only loses its specialness under circumstances of mindless repetition - people need to think about this, be mindful!). They invariably each live with room-mates to make life affordable in Yuppidom. They negotiate with their room-mates to secure nights alone periodically. After a while, the ongoing static difficulty in securing nights free of room-mates, the increasing friction that develops between co-habitors, and the as yet unsatiated desire to have more time for 'special' nights, prompts our two yuppies to move in together in a rented apartment. Time passes. Their been-together-longer-as-a-couple-friends, in an attempt to normalize their own still fresh commitment to cohabitation in the context of home ownership, peck at our couple to stop throwing their money away (read: renting). Our heroes buy a little condo or townhouse. Two years on from the first 'special' night, they realize that they should probably be married since, for all practical purposes they are already. They wed. Two years (let's say) later, they realize that, as they come to know each other better, they're not really all that fond of each other. Promotions have been won, trips have been taken apart, and mortgage payments and the much argued-over Visa and phone bills are all they have left in common. They split up, divide the house, and are both now on the housing market with both their starter home and, (are you ready for it???), their starter marriage done.

They each marry again, but somehow - certainly for the families - the subsidiary wedding/s are not quite as 'special' as the first one. Yes, I have seen all this happen. No, I am not writing in any sense about myself. I rent. Please, no punchlines.

There are other special functions that are less personally committing than marriage - consider a convocation ceremony. It's certainly got the kind of special that is felt by the convocants, it also has the special that is felt by their beaming and financially drained relations. It also has the kind of special that the university likes, which is lots of Pomp and Circumstance and God Save the Queen. When I earn my doctoral degree, I assure you, that in spite of the fact that it is the third convocation ceremony in which I will take part, it will be by far the most 'special'. So special can increase with frequency in at least this regard. If I were at some point to decide to pursue a second MA, or a second PhD, it would probably be less special. Some do this, one occasionally meets them - collectors they are, I guess. One might well wonder what was wrong with the first PhD such that they needed another one. MUCH less special.

The thing is, that from the point of view of the university, there are a couple of dozen convocation ceremonies each year. Each one is special for the people involved, but each one is a matter of course for the system in which they are a culmination.

Here's the tie in to systemic thinking. My suspicion is that once a function is subsumed into a system of behaviour or practice, it starts to lose its 'specialness' internally since it is a part of the overall program of behaviour. This, obviously, not considering the particularity of functions performed by special persons, who we normally call 'experts'.

Ask anyone who is regularly called upon to help run a convocation. Reports generally agree that they're gruelling because there are so many, and because they're always the same. They should let the Irish run them, at least then there would be dancing.

So, a special function is either special because people agree that it is special, or because it is a funtion that is especially performed by one thing/person or another, or simply because it is rare.

And in the latter case, special functions become less internally special the more times they are replicated if particularity is not a consideration. Or, whatever. I still like getting 'treats' no matter how many Hallowe'ens pass by, and presents no matter how many Christmasses I celebrate. That stuff is just special.

Here's a parting thought: both the audience and the players find Opening Night and Closing Night to be special performances, but for completely different reasons.

3L.