practice exercises

The death of Jean Baudrillard was marked by an obituary in the NYT that reminded its viewers how important the man was – why, he was quoted in a popular movie, the Matrix. That settles that. Surprisingly, though, the Guardian had two posts about him in their Commentisfree section, stirring my competitive and patriotic juices. What the fuck is happening? England, the land where the phlegmatic philistine was born and suckled, is now more intellectual than our Purple Mountain’s Majesty in these here states, where the masses go to classes? How low have we fallen in this age of Cheney?

The comment threads in the Guardian piece here and here are pretty good, although they eventually peter out in that futile and bizarre controversy that pits the unscientific and wild French against the scientific and rational Anglo-Americans. The many levels of ignorance involved in this controversy continue to astonish me. While the Anglo-Americans do read as though they were scientific and rational, i.e. the level of dullness of articles in analytic philosophy seems to be a quirk that the creators of that dullness are actually proud of, anybody who reads them soon gets that all over weird feeling, since it is like the Mad Hatter doing accounting. The A-A’s are always going on about things like possible worlds, coming up with completely stupid thought experiments, and spending decades formalizing supervenience relations – supervenience coming neither from science nor common sense, but being the overheated product of the cramped scientistic imagination. Actually, the best part of A-A philosophy is its wildness, which has its charms if one can only dust off the language in which it is chained. Meanwhile, for all Baudrillard’s rhetoric of hyperreality, his stuff is firmly anchored in tv, war, money, sex, fashion – watercooler and newspaper realities. Not for him the question: is H2O on our planet the equivalent of XYZ on Counter-Earth 1? On which tottering foundations careers have been built.

Well, as my favorite epileptic St. Paul said, we see now as in a glass, darkly.

But this is all an excuse for me to scribble a few notes in this post re a section of the preface I am writing for Silja’s book. Maybe this will straighten out my God damn argument, and I can just transfer it, minus the fucks, shits, damns, cunts and dicks with which I like to sprinkle my musings. Oops, did I forget pussy and cock? I do want to make the current rightwing blog craze for collecting naughty words easier.

A section of this preface is devoted to defending the conceptual reconstruction of the longue durée of economics that would permit citing economists across a pretty wide chronological spread. The argument that Silja makes is an immanent one: mainstream economics is astonishingly consistent with itself from its roots in the 18th century right up to, say, the attempt by Lucas in the 1980s to define the business cycle in terms of a sequence of equilibrium states – an attempt that even preserves Says law. Thus, the ruptures within economics – most notably, the recasting of the classical notion of value by the marginal utilitarians – do not have the profundity characteristic of ruptures found in other sciences, where real questions of reduction can be raised – interfield reduction is the useful phrase of Darden and Maull. Okay?

So: what does this mean? Well, here’s one way of looking at the story that Silja is telling. Take two moments in economics. One is a famous survey conducted by Leontief in 1982. Let’s quote Mark Blaug: “In a letter to Science, Wassily Leontief (1982) surveyed articles published in the American Economic Review in the last decade and found that more than 50 percent consisted of mathematical models without any empirical data, while some 15 percent consisted of nonmathematical theoretical analysis, likewise without empirical data, leaving 35 percent of the articles using empirical analysis.

Morgan (1988) has updated Leontief’s findings, showing oce again that half the articles published in the American Economic Review and the Economic Journal do not use data of any kind…”

One of the proudest claims of economics is that it is the physics of the social sciences – in fact, the only truly scientific social science. Economics imperialism sometimes goes so far as to claim that economics is the foundation of physics itself – a claim Schumpeter pushed in a rather bizarre passage in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Morgan both compared the economists to articles published in physics and chemistry journals, finding 12 percent of the articles in physics contained no empirical data and 0 percent in chemistry. Economists know this, of course. Alan Blinder has made a typical economist’s joke about it: an economist is "someone who sees that something works in practice and wonders if it also works in theory." The punchline wasn’t supplied by Blinder, but it is: if it doesn’t work in theory, then it simply can’t work in practice, and must be ignored until economists have successfully pressed for policies to destroy it. That is the story of the minimum wage law, for instance.

I select this survey in order to look back two hundred years to Dugald Stewart’s memoir of Adam Smith. In this memoir, Stewart introduced a brilliant phrase to describe the methodological justification that underlies Smith’s theories of language, ethics and political economic – in fact, all Smith’s theories about human institutions. Stewart called this “conjectural history”. “To this species of philosophical investigation, which has no appropriated name in our language, I shall take the liberty of giving the title of Theoretical or Conjectural History, an expression which coincides pretty nearly in its meaning with that of Natural History, as employed by Mr. Hume, and with what some French writers have called Histoire Raisonnee.” This history follows the contours of the “known principles of human nature” to understand “how all its various parts might have gradually arisen.” From theorizing about the origin of language, this method could be ‘applied to the modes of government, and to the municipal institutins which have obtained among different nations.” And in particular: “In his Wealth of Nations, various disquisitions are introduced which have a like object in view, particularly the theoretical delineation he has given of the natural progress of opulence in a country, and his investigation of the causes which have inverted this order in the different countries of modern Europe.” (Stewart, 34-36)

These two moments may seem as divided and different as the Wealth of Nations is, itself, from the mathematically sophisticated modeling of the standard essay in the contemporary mainstream economics journals. Yet a little analysis will reveal that conjectural history is at the very root of the modeling culture of modern economics.

more leftovers!

More leftovers, I'm afraid. And where are those editing jobs that my readers were supposed to find me, eh? Poor LI, mired in poverty and an article about the philosophy of economics!

So, if you want more interesting fare, go to UFOB, where Mr. Scruggs is lamenting the decline of the yellow ribbon industry, or go to IT, for the post on Jean Baudrillard's death. Or go to the KinoFist essay on Brecht, which I would probably be writing about except that I'm not. It is long and well argued, yet it contains a couple of assumptions that I'd like to thrash out - but I can't! Gotta run.

And now, without further ado: a post from October of 2001!

Sometimes you come upon a fact that you know has an essayistic depth to it, if you only had the time, or the mental capacity, to write the essay. For instance: last night I read this anecdote about Hans Christian Andersen. Since he lived in fear of awakening in a coffin, "he always carried a card with him saying, "I am not really dead," which he put on the dressing table whenever he stayed at a hotel abroad, to prevent some careless doctor from wrongly declaring him dead." -- Buried Alive, by Jan Bondeson.
Now the Walter Benjamin in me takes that as an image applicable to every modernist artist -- didn't they all carry with them, at least metaphorically, some card saying 'I'm not really dead?' And what kind of sentence is that, anyway? Who, after all, is the speaker? What kind of truth claims can the dead make? There's a good reason that wills begin with a declaration of health -- we only trust the living.

Cheney: even sociopath's sometimes feel sad

I am trying to procrastinate, looking around the web, and I come across the NYT story about whether Cheney, in the tumor he calls a heart, felt pinpricks of sympathy for Scooter Libby - or whether it was a fuck him and fold him like a Dixie cup situation - the usual m.o. of our sociopathic VP. The article ended with this startling graf:

"With a career in politics that goes back to the Nixon White House, Mr. Cheney is no stranger to Washington scandal and how to weather it. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said he went hunting with the vice president late last year and did not sense that the trial was bothering him."

No doubt. The reporter failed to ask Graham how much time he spent pondering the VP's mood, and how much time he spent thinking, if the son of a bitch plugs me, I'm going to shoot him back!

my humble prayer

Well, I am still stuck in this unremunerative task, writing this preface to Silja's book. God is punishing me for all those times I said the Lord's Prayer sideways. Come on, God, don't be like that, dude. Send me that angel of inspiration. I promise I'll, uh, be better. How about: no cocaine for a whole year? How about: I'll get back in contact with the old man?... No, don't think I'll do the latter. Probably I should - oh well.

In the meantime, I'm going to cheat and recycle a post from 2005 on La Salamandre.

Here it is...

My friend D. sent me a little CD the other day. It had the Rage against the Machine song on it, Killing in the Name of. D. is an old Metallica fan, from before they had an on-call psychoanalyst. Myself, I love noise, but I am not a metal person. I particularly hate the voices that a lot of metal music features, in which some singer has to assume the precise sound that would be made by the Cowardly Lion on meth – a fake monster voice, full of empty volume and scatchiness.

All of which gets me, by a detour, to today’s topic: La Salamandre and Nietzsche.

A couple of days ago I saw Alain Tanner’s La Salamandre. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It was made in 1971, and Tanner had obviously seen his Godard, his Antonioni. It has the political language of Godard, and it has the dissipative structure (minus beautiful dresses and garden parties among statuary) of Antonioni. But the political language – exchanged by two down and out writers, one of whom makes his real money as a part time house painter – is all quoting the quotation. In fact, in the 80s, when I was a grad student, this had come to be the default style. Language inspired, distantly, by Marx, or Adorno, bantered about and at the same time made into an elaborate in joke. Being taught how to analyze, with the old male elegance, the oppressive structures that one hadn’t a chance of overturning or gaining the slightest bit of power over. And the dissipative structure wasn’t about the vanishing of purpose so much as the omnipresence of impromptu – each character making things up, including jobs and ends, as he or she went along. There was, of course, a firm sense in La Salamandre that after the trente annees glorieuses a form of capitalist paradise had been established. But all the characters were well aware that this was a predator’s paradise, and they were prey.

The plot of the film is simple. A young woman, maybe twenty, is accused of shooting her uncle in the shoulder with his army rifle. The scene is set in Switzerland. Two writers are paid to write a screenplay for tv about this fait divers. Both writers sleep with Rosamunde, the woman, played by Bulle Ogier. Rosamunde is the name of a sylph, and Ogier’s face alternates between lighting up, beautifully, to show the sylph, and plunging into sallow and slack darkness, the sylph turned tree, or at least like the trees in Dante’s infernos, the bark over the suicide. Rosamunde had a wild hair in high school, then got jobs like the first one we see her doing: working on the assembly line in a sausage factory, holding the skins that are filled with sausage meat shot from a tube.

Rosamunde is prey. While the two writers have a certain intellectual distance from predator’s paradise, or at least pride themselves on it, Rosamunde is pure prey. And… and this is what I like … and she responds to being prey by quitting frequently and listening to the 1971 equivalent of metal. Just noise, although recorded without the modern technology. She bobs her head, turns up the record player of the juke box, becomes vacant.

That’s the prey deal. We can do little to deny the predators. They have the power to occupy our desires, our hours, our minds. Their photos, films, demands, schedules, signatures on our paychecks, politics and wars go on whether we want them to or not. But Rosamunde can choose to be invaded by noise.

Which is where I thought about Nietzsche. Particularly that Nietzschoid saying that lept from the page right onto the walls of innumerable public toilet walls: that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. There is a certain fate to grafitti, because that saying is all about shitting in a public toilet. That which doesn’t kill me isn’t what is outside me. It is what invades me. The site for the mythical invasion is just that encounter of the asshole and the public toilet plastic seat. The myth about getting disease here is really about something aberrant in this glitch in the system, since Americans are generally so careful about their hygiene. But let down your pants once and the Alien crawls right into your gut. That is what the predators do. The mimicry of that act, and the momentary release from it, is to fill oneself, to let oneself be invaded by noise. Rosamunde, nodding her head with a totally vacant look to the wordless electric guitar sounds, wrung my heart. This is, in a sense, what we do at LI. Every post is, essentially, noise. Meaningless noise, boom boom boom. But it brings a small relief, it produces a gap between invasions of the predators, who rule and who will always rule, with maximum greed, lust, and callousness the little paradise they’ve trapped us in. Their pictures, their politics, their celebrities, their gossip, their cars, their restaurants, their money, their businesses, their porno, their church, their gods,. their bozo leaders and bozo adulations. It is a joke to think that the prey will have any effect on this, but somehow every invasion – if I can choose it, if I can turn the volume up -- makes me feel stronger.

Menger mania

I am going to be trying to write this preface to my translation of Silja Graupe’s Basho of Economics. So I might not be too on the mark this week. However, it is a good time to beg – I’m really looking for some editing jobs this month, which is lookin’ kind of Mother Hubbard bare. The dog wants a bone. LI wants a bone. The Landlady wants a bone. The phone company wants a bone. All God’s children want bones, want bones. So – if you want editing, research, proofreading, the whole deal, know somebody who wants same, know somebody who knows somebody, etc. – send them to me, please.

In the meantime, I’m going off to think about Carl Menger’s curious notions concerning the foundations of economics.

Goodbye 20th century, it was good to know you

Prospect Magazine did a survey for this month’s mag. This was the question they asked, and their sense of the response they got:

“We asked 100 writers and thinkers to answer the following question: Left and right defined the 20th century. What's next? The pessimism of their responses is striking: almost nobody expects the world to get better in the coming decades, and many think it will get worse.”

Admittedly, the thinkers they asked seemed somewhat random. David Brooks gets his say, and Joe Boyd, a music producer, gets his, and apparently what qualifies one to have a view of the next one hundred years best is to work for a bank or business or write an opinion column. There were no H.G. Wells, that’s for sure, and few seemed to disagree with the premise of the question. LI, however, thinks the premise is wrong. Left and right did not define the twentieth century. The century was defined, in our view, by two things: first, the treadmill of production – that system which is falsely defined as capitalist because one of its surface characteristics is the market system – which emerged in Europe in the 17th and 18th century, followed out its logic in all systems (communist, fascist, liberal capitalist) on a world wide basis, having laid the foundations in the 19th century (the development, for instance, of the terror famine in Ireland and India by the British was surely the model for Stalin's agricultural policy) and collapsed the agriculture-based culture that humans had lived under for the past 12,000 years. That was surely the most significant thing that happened in the 20th century, and no ideology led it, no ideology opposed it, and no ideology even envisioned it. The anxiety naturally attendant on the end of civilization created a macro feature, which I’d call the dialectic of vulnerability – basically, that process by which populations, feeling ever more vulnerable even as they became ever more affluent developed systems meant to render them invulnerable – that is, an ever more threatening war culture, with an ever greater destructive reach – which, of course, rendered them ever more vulnerable, an irony that was not rhetorical, but systematic. 9/11 was, in part, a moment in which the nakedness of the system was revealed – a system that could, theoretically, respond to ICBMs traveling over the poles, couldn’t respond to 19 half educated men with box cutters and homemade bombs. And… of course it couldn’t. Defense is a collective fiction, which is its function – being a fiction, there is never a limit on the amount of money one can spend on it. It is, theoretically, inifinitely expensive, while its payoff, as a defense system against all threats, is nearly zero – it will never defend against all threats. That’s ever, with a big fucking E.

The intersection between the treadmill of production and the war culture shaped the 20th century. The division between the right and the left were epiphenomena of that dynamic. It is, of course, impossible to predict the next five years … but in a sense it is probably easier to predict the next 100, since prediction here isn’t about particulars but long, long trends. H.G. Wells was so great because he had a novelist’s instinct for the life of those trends. LI doesn’t – in 1985, when we entered Grad school, we would never have predicted the cultural triumph of Reaganism, for instance. It would have seemed utterly implausible that the combination of endebtedness, meanness, and libertarian logic that flew in the face of reality would ever survive the end of the Gipper. From our inability to see what was in front of our nose, we took a lesson: never underestimate the Death Wish of a culture. It strikes us as, frankly, insane to frame the next hundred years in terms of terrorism or the “battle of civilizations” between Islam and the west. For one thing, among threatening issues, terrorism ranks way below, I don’t know, highway safety as a real issue. But given the need to feed the war culture, terrorism is an invention that has no enemies – it is a win win for all participants, giving an excuse to the war culture’s governors to continue doing what they want to continue doing anyway, and thus guaranteeing that a little place will always be set aside for terrorists – sort of like in Network, where the tv network discovers the audience pull of terrorism, and puts the unorganized groups of guerillas on a business basis. As for Islam, again, the use value of Islam is not in Islam per se, but the way it operates as a wonderful two-fer – dark skins that aren’t Christian! Is there a more perfect enemy? Really, Milosovic should be hailed as a prophet – his ideology has now become standard on the Right, and will no doubt be more and more embedded in the policy of the American state as we drift from disaster to disaster. There is nothing like having a vicious, dark skinned enemy to slaughter – Keynes’ “animal spirits” get all stirred up and shit. But LI will never get our brain around the fact that this might be the future. This is because we don’t want to commit suicide right away – we do want a reason to hang around a bit longer. So we will not believe what seems to be happening right before our eyes as a matter of spiritual health. Otherwise – somebody get me a rusty razor!

I love to jerk off, but I don't love all jerk offs

“But if the personalities weren’t ridiculous by themselves, one wouldn’t be able to make up good stories.” – Rameau

Frankly, LI doesn’t like Atrios’ wanker of the day award, because it associates one of God’s greatest gifts – wanking – exclusively with the warmonger and the feeb. I guess it is the last gasp of the great onanism fear that swept over Europe and the States in the 18th century. But it has had one good effect at least – it is obviously driving Time Magazine’s Joe Klein crazy. Today, he published a You can trust a Communist to be Communist post on his blog, and it is a useful map of the parameters of U.S. reporting. Anything that seems to indicate that a reporter will be called a “left wing extremist” is excluded. Since Klein is an insider to these circles, I think we can trust his accuracy. Here are the rules, the things that are tabu for your average thumb up his ass D.C. scribe:

A left-wing extremist exhibits many, but not necessarily all, of the following attributes:

--believes the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world.
--believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism.
--believes that the decision to go to war in Iraq was not an individual case of monumental stupidity, but a consequence of America’s fundamental imperialistic nature.
--tends to blame America for the failures of others—i.e. the failure of our NATO allies to fulfill their responsibilities in Afghanistan.
--doesn’t believe that capitalism, carefully regulated and progressively taxed, is the best liberal idea in human history.
--believes American society is fundamentally unfair (as opposed to having unfair aspects that need improvement).
--believes that eternal problems like crime and poverty are the primarily the fault of society.
--believes that America isn’t really a democracy.
--believes that corporations are fundamentally evil.
--believes in a corporate conspiracy that controls the world.
--is intolerant of good ideas when they come from conservative sources.
--dismissively mocks people of faith, especially those who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage.
--regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives.”

While Joe Klein richly deserves Atrios’ scorn – if he is a wanker, he is the kind of masturbator who gives that glorious supplement a bad name – he’s done a service by spelling out the rules that run through the head of the press corps. One by one, the fear that one will show, for instance, that a corporation is acting evilly, or the fear of showing that fundamental democratic rights are violated by the governing class in the U.S., stifles the baby news story in its cradle. The item that particularly amused me was “believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism.” Let’s see. The U.S. financed the Islamic radical fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s; the U.S. encouraged Saudi Arabia, from 1956 onward, to use its position as a fundamentalist Islamic state to fight Nasser and communism; the U.S. gave a green light, after the Iranian revolution, to the Saudi program of pouring millions into Wahabi controlled mosques, placed from Morocco to Indonesia, from Germany to Turkey; the U.S. went so far, in the 1980s, as to give the man who directed the first bombing of the WTC in 1993, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, a CIA signed visa into the U.S. His air fare and travel arrangements were practically comp’ed by the CIA in the 80s, which he spent flying around on behalf of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. This is Robert Friedman’s article for that communist magazine, the New Yorker – which Klein, innocent of those vile red schemes, actually worked for himself! – published in 1995:

Here’s a snippet:

The Alkifah Refugee Centre, in addition to providing a hangout for the disaffected, distributed pamphlets and videotapes on the rebel war in Afghanistan. On any given day, a visitor to the centre might take martial-arts classes, or sign up for an automatic-weapons training course taught by instructors from the National Rifle Association. The club even had its own T-shirts: A MUSLIM TO A MUSLIM IS A BRICK WALL. But the highlight for the centre’s regulars were the inspirational jihad lecture series, featuring CIA-sponsored speakers.

”One week on Atlantic Avenue, it might be a CIA-trained Afghan rebel travelling on a CIA-issued visa; the next, it might be a clean-cut Arabic-speaking Green Beret, who would lecture about the importance of being part of the mujaheddin, or ‘warriors of the Lord.’ The more popular lectures were held upstairs in the roomier Al-Farooq Mosque; such was the case in 1990 when Sheikh Abdel Rahman, travelling on a CIA-supported visa, came to town. The blind Egyptian cleric, with his ferocious rhetoric and impassioned preaching, filled angry, discontented Arab immigrants with a fervour for jihad – holy war. This was exactly what the CIA wanted: to stir up support for the Muslim rebels and topple the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan.

The sheikh, however, had a somewhat broader agenda.

A former investigative counsel for the Senate Foreign Relatiosn Committee, now a private attorney in Washington, Jack Blum speaks bitterly but fatalistically. ‘After every covert war there is an unintended disposal problem,’ he says, as if he were talking about unexpected land mines and not potential Islamic terrorists living in Brooklyn. ‘We steered and encouraged these people. Then we dropped them. Now we’ve got a disposal problem. When you motivate people to fight for a cause – jihad – the problem is, how do you shut them off?’”

This, of course, is noway near as satisfying as Paul Berman's little book, that blames it all on the Nazis. Those nazis. Intellectual history as wanking - oh, wanking, so many crimes have been committed in your name!

And, according to Sy Hersch, the latest Bush folly is to … start the Saudis up again.
How does this work out as a parameter? when looking at the news, one has to have a sense of what isn’t being reported as opposed to what is. For instance, the reports about Iran’s supposed supplying of weapons to the Shi’a militias have taken up, I’d estimate, oh one hundred times more story space than the story of the Saudi and Gulf Sunni financing of the Sunni insurgents. Now – it isn’t that I don’t expect that the Saudis would operate like that, in their own self defense. That financing just happens to have contributed to a hundred times more deaths of American soldiers than the Iranians have. But… just as a hijacking that was manned mostly by Saudis and financed by a Saudi millionaire in close contact with Pakistan’s secret service operates as an excuse to invade Iraq, so, too, the dance around the obvious is a way of trying to lead us into a war with Iran. The truth, of course, is that the U.S. just isn’t powerful enough to take on the Saudis. Who wants them to? I don’t. I simply want the U.S. to recognize its real strength in the Middle East is weak at best, and operate accordingly. But to get back to the theme – sometimes, newspapers do stumble over reality. They do their best, at these moments, to move on. One of the funnier examples of this, recently, was a NYT story about the evil Iranians, supplying those evil Shi’ite militia those American killin’ weapons. Here’s an excerpt from this James Glanz piece, Feb. 27th:

In a dusty field near the Baghdad airport on Monday, the American military laid out a display of hundreds of components for assembling deadly roadside bombs, its latest effort to embarrass the country it contends is supplying the material to armed Shiite groups here: Iran.
Officers of the First Cavalry Division whose unit seized the components said they had been found in a palm grove just north of the Iraqi capital two days earlier, after a tip from a local resident. An explosives expert said the components were made to be assembled into the deadly canisters called explosively formed penetrators, or E.F.P.'s, which explode and hurl out a high-speed blob of copper designed to cut through tough American armor.
''I've lost good friends to these E.F.P.'s,'' said Capt. Clayton Combs, whose unit turned up the cache of weapons. ''And the fact that we found these before they got to the side of the road is just a huge win for us.''
The cache included what Maj. Marty Weber, a master explosives ordnance technician, said was C-4 explosive, a white substance, in clear plastic bags with red labels that he said contained serial numbers and other information that clearly marked it as Iranian.
But while the find gave experts much more information on the makings of the E.F.P.'s, which the American military has repeatedly argued must originate in Iran, the cache also included items that appeared to cloud the issue.

Among the confusing elements were cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran. One box said in English that the tubes inside had been made in the United Arab Emirates and another said, in Arabic, ''plastic made in Haditha,'' a restive Sunni town on the Euphrates River in Iraq.
The box marked U.A.E. provided a phone number for the manufacturer there. A call to that number late Monday encountered only an answering machine that said, ''Leave your number and we will call you back.''

Right ho. Why is it that the NYT isn’t going to call back? Joe Klein gave us the answer. I think I could pretty much predict the ratio of stories about reality - who supplies the money to buy the goods for the insurgents - as opposed to the Administration's soft soap story about Iran. I would guess one to fifty. I'll check this with Factiva some time. It is nice to have a propaganda criterion.

And people say wanking has never lead to anything good.

happy texas independence day, pardners!

Happy Texas Independence day!

"Today is the 171st anniversary of the signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence at Washington-on-the-Brazos on March 2, 1836." - Houston Chronicle.

This is a good time to remember one of my favorite American politicians, Sam Houston - friend of the Indian (they didn't call him the fuckin Raven for nothing), agin that bestial slavery system, pro-Union, and especially pro the bottle. Sammy, what happened? LI is going to commune with his ghost today.

Here's a bit of history. On April 19, 1861, Sam went to Galveston, which was like the Charleston of this state, pro-secesh, and from the balcony of the Tremont House Hotel he threw down, which was a dangerous thing to do in Texas. After all, at around the same time, round the Dallas area, Confederate hoodlums were lynching pro-Unionists (always remember, the Confederacy was founded on the blind criminal violence, and was a completely dishonorable enterprise from start to finish - a nation of lynchers, crosseyed nosepickers, and rapists, ruled by bearded retards). When Houston made the speech, someone in the crowd shouted: here's a rope, let's hang the old traitor. Ah, the peabrained descendents of the man who shouted that now run the country!

Being a man of some sense, Houston ended his speech with a prediction: "You may, after the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure, and hundreds of thousands of precious lives, as a bare possibility, win Southern independence, if God be not against you: but I doubt it. I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of State rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery impulsive people as you are for they live in cooler climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, where great interests are involved, such as the present issues before the country, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche, and what I fear is they will overwhelm the South with ignoble defeat."

So you see, not all Texans are as retarded as the freak show specimen currently parading his baboon like hindquarters around the White House.

So GO OUT AND GET DRUNK TONIGHT! And sing the yellow rose of Texas, or - oh my favorite, I'm gonna cry - Marty Robbins El Paso: "Down in the west texas town of El Paso/ I fell in love with a Mexican guuuuurlll".

If you don't like that song - well, fuck you.

the art of the lickspittle

“A party of us were together one day – we’d been drinking, it’s true – and suddenly some one made the suggestion that each one of us, without leaving the table, should tell something he had done, something that he himself honestly considered the worst of all the evil actions of his life. But it was to be done honestly, that was the point, that it was to be honest, no lying.” – The Idiot

Dostoevsky is perhaps the greatest artist of the ugly story, the shameless and shameful anecdote. There are so many of them in his novels, and of course, Notes from under the floorboards is one big ugly story. It is obvious that Dostoevsky himself considers that he picked up the genre from the French. One usually thinks of Rousseau’s Confessions. Perhaps that is literally the source of the ‘game”, but, in broader historic terms, Rousseau’s Confessions emerge from a whole sub-genre of ugly stories. I could, perhaps, trace the psychology of these stories to the moralistes. But then I’d be here all fucking day, right? Rameau is, if nothing else, a fount of ugly stories. Of which, let me transcribe two.

The first story is funny, in a way. And the bones of it are definitely La Rochefoucauld. It is not about Rameau himself, but – like many stories – the telling of it sticks in a peculiar way to both the teller and the hearer - it creates a secret bond, the kind of bond that is pointed to, negatively, by the phrase, "I don't want to hear this." To hear is to have, to be entrusted with, to share and have a share in. In the Idiot, when Ferdyshtchenko suggests the game at Nastasya Fillipovna’s birthday party, the intent is a general degradation of all present, and for reasons intrinsic to that moment, it is what Nastasya needs to break out of the situation she finds herself in. But here is the thing - it is a degradation within the bounds of a game. It is the guise of the game that makes it acceptable, or makes it acceptable, at least, to suggest it. As a game, of course, it isn’t serious. But like the best games – like Russian Roulette – its non-seriousness penetrates what is serious, making the serious look shabby and shallow and suspect. As we’ve pointed out before, there is a game like, a ritual aspect to the dialogue between Diderot and Rameau. Here, then, is Rameau’s story.

It is about one Bouret. Fermier général Etienne-Michel Bouret – a tax gatherer. A man whose wealth allowed him to hope for social advancement in the complicated court circles of Louis XV. But there is a price to pay for not being born in the right class, there is always the price of birth. There is now, don’t kid yourself. Bouret, then, determines to win the affection of the keeper of Seals. This is a story that, with variations, could be applied to the Georgetown circles in D.C. at the moment, or – actually, to corporate achievers, going through the ranks, in any Fortune 400 corporate office. Variations of this happened at Enron. But let's get on with it, right?

I’m going to quote from the Penguin translation, as I don’t feel up to translating the whole bit at the moment. But I will make a few modifications:

Lui: “But if this role is amusing at first, and you find a certain amount of pleasure in laughing up your sleeve at the stupidity of the people you are hoodwinking, it ends up by losing its point, and besides, after a certain number of inventions you are forced to repeat yourself. Ingenuity and art have their limits. Only God and one or two rare geniuses can have a career that broadens out as they go along. Bouret is one such, perhaps. Some of his tricks really strike me, yes, even me, as sublime. The little dog, the Book of Happiness, the torches along the Versailles road, these are things which leave me dumbfounded and humiliated. Enough to put you off the profession.21
I: What do you mean about the little dog?
He: [What planet are you from]? What, you don’t really know how that rare man set about [scaring a little dog away from himself and attaching it to the Keeper of the Seals, who had taken a fancy to it?]
I: No, I confess I don’t.
He: All the better. It is one of the finest things ever conceived; the whole of Europe was thrilled by it, and there isn’t a single courtier it hasn’t made envious. You are not without sagacity: let’s see how you would have set about it. Remember that Bouret was loved by his dog. Bear in mind that the strange attire of the Minister terrified the little creature. Think that he only had one week to overcome the difficulties. You must understand all the conditions of the problem so as to appreciate the merits of the solution. Well!
I: Well, I have to admit that in that line the simplest things would catch me out.
He: Listen (he said, giving me a little tap on the shoulder – [he is chummy]), listen and admire! He had a mask made like the face of the Keeper of the Seals, he borrowed the tatter’s ample robe from a footman. He put the mask over his own face. He slipped on the robe. He called the dog, caressed it and gave it a biscuit. Then, suddenly changing his attire, he was no longer the Keeper of the Seals but Bouret, and he called his dog and whipped it. In less than two or three days of this routine, carried on from morning till night, the dog learned to run away from Bouret the Farmer-General and run up to Bouret the Keeper of the Seals. But I am too good natured. You are a layman and don’t deserve to be told about the miracles going on under your very nose.”

There are so many beautiful bits here (LI said, tapping you familiarly on the shoulder). For instance, the way the problem of brownnosing is laid out like a chess problem, just like the chess games going on around Diderot and Rameau. And the admiration demanded for something abject, something inhuman, something truly, in every way, shitty. To be willing to go to such lengths of humiliation in order to curry favor – the history of those humiliations will, of course, rise up again, ghosts that will torment the perpetrator. One can only assuage one’s own wounded pride by such success that one can enjoy the abasement of others – that endless chain. While much is said about masculine aggression contributing to that curious eagerness for war, there is also the revenge for the thousand humiliations that have to be crossed in order to get to be fermier general, or undersecretary of Intelligence in the Department of Defense – and that mass accumulation of humiliations among a group that considers itself the most powerful, the most just, the most benign grouping in history – ah, those are the boys to order the next bombing. The violence in this group is never pure, it is always muddied by obscure memories of toadying, the ingrown rancor. In another century, Bouret is Foley, Bouret is the gay evangelical preacher who gets the 100 percent heterosexual grade at evangelical redemption camp. Giving up the little doggie just for just a little taste of the highest level of cocaine - fame, power, acceptance by the guys who count. Being made. Ah, the bliss of it, the entire bliss.

The next story I reserve for the next post.

Rieff

LI recommends Gerald Howard’s book review of Philip Rieff’s posthumous My Life Among the Deathworks and CHARISMA: THE GIFT OF GRACE, AND HOW IT HAS BEEN TAKEN AWAY FROM US. Rieff’s sociology was entirely in the domain of what Mills called the sociological imagination - rooted in the novelist's sense of the moment, on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other, the latter coming to Rieff via a lifelong engagement with Freud. The review profiles the entire career, and the entire career sounds very much like Herzog’s in Bellow’s novel, down to the young wife – in Herzog’s case, Madeleine - who simultaneously divorces Herzog and starts on the threatening upward academic journey. In Rieff’s case, the young wife was Susan Sontag:

It was in a Chicago classroom in 1950 that he met and was instantly smitten with his beautiful student the seventeen-year-old Susan Sontag. Autres temps, autres mœurs, they were married ten days later. In the annals of miserable American literary marriages, only the misalliance of Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy can match this one for marriage-of-true-minds interest and, perhaps, reciprocal influence. She followed him as half graduate student, half faculty wife, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they had one child, the writer David Rieff. But they separated and were divorced in 1959, and the tenor of the marriage may be judged by Sontag's comment, years later, that after reading Middlemarch at age eighteen she "realized not only that I was Dorothea but that, a few months earlier, I had married Mr. Casaubon"…

Sontag’s putdown is so very awesome that it almost removes its sting – if one of my lovers could abase me with one punch like that, I’d be awful damn proud.

I want to discuss Rieff’s conservative social vision in another post. From LI’s perspective, the review brought home the troubled trajectory of the American sage – again, reminding me of Herzog. The American sage is well aware of being the peculiar object of an exterior negation at large in the culture. That negation is a characteristic compound of two of the enduring features of American life: anti-intellectualism and worship of success.

That awareness drives the angry movement from sage to buffoon, gets into the sex, the clothes, the dialogue with so called old neighborhood friends, the longing for power, the vendettas which figure in Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift, Mosby’s Memoirs – so many of Bellow’s novels.

However … before I get to Rieff and Bellow, perhaps I should finish up the Rameau thread. I will do one more post on that, translating two anecdotes that Rameau tells which contain a certain dreadful touch of the historically premonitory.

Don't let it get you down, it's only castles burning...

Like all good Americans – and Russians, come to that – LI harbors apocalyptic fantasies and eagerly looks for the promised horror in the flotsam and jetsam of bad news in the newspapers. In The Idiot, you’ll remember, Lebedev is a buffoon/parasite of the Rameau type who insinuates himself into Salon society with his interpretations of the Book of Revelations. At one point, somebody accuses him of interpreting the star Wormwood as the railroads spreading through Europe. Actually, an excellent interpretation – it was, after all, the contention of the more sober historian, AJP Taylor, that the schedule of those same railroads was the driver for the mobilizations that led to WWI.

So – in spite of my worry about my brother’s investments – I got that certain vertigo from the 400 point stock market drop yesterday – although I in no way believe that indicates a permanent trend. And it made me think of posting a little story about the end of Carthage written as one of the Imaginary Dialogues by the always bizarre late romantic, Walter Savage Landor. Landor, of course, is now off the map as far as the canon is concerned, but remember – he was held in the highest esteem by Emerson, Swinburne, and other assorted literati in the 19th century.

The dialogue is imagined to take place between Scipio Africanus, Polybius, and Panaetius – ah, the air of mustiness is already collecting around your muzzle, lecteur! – but don’t worry, this isn’t some Victorian re-enactment of Roman virtues. Like Flaubert, Landor has a view of Carthage that is full of sexual imagery and violence. Scipio describes the razing of the city – shades of Fallujah – with a cynical view of the meaning of it all. Far from honor and dignity, it is a matter of business – Carthage offers a competitive advantage to Rome that can’t be tolerated. Then Polybius tells a story. He and a patrol enter the half destroyed city. They hear cries issuing unexpectedly from a part of it, and make their way through ash clogged streets until “two old men throw themselves on the ground” at his feet. The men are Carthage’s judges. One of the judges says, ‘the laws are yours, o Romans, and nobody judges treason and parricide more harshly.’ With that sentence, the old men led the patrol around the next corner. Here, I’ll let Landor take over:

‘We entered a small square: it had been a market-place: the roofs of the stalls were demolished, and the stones of several columns, (thrown down to extract the cramsp of iron and the lead that fastened them) served for the spectators, male and female, to mount on. Five men were nailed on crosses; two others were nailed against a wall, from scarcity (as we were told) of wood.

“Can seven men have murdered their parents in the same year?” I cried.
“No, nor has any of the seven,” replied the first who had spoken. “But when heavy impositions were laid upon those who where backward in voluntary contributions, these men, among the richest in our city, protested by the gods that they had no gold or silver left. They protested truly.”

“And they die for this! Inhuman, insatiable, inexorable wretch!”

“Their books,” added he, unmoved at my reproaches, ‘were seized by public authority and examined. It was discovered that, instead of employing their riches in external or internal commerce, or in manufactories, or in agriculture, instead of reserving it for the embellishment of the city, or the utility of the citizens, instead of lending it on interest to the industrious and needy, they had lent it to foreign kings and tyrants, some of whom were waging unjust wars by these very means, and others were enslaving their own country. For so heinous a crime the laws had appointed no specific punishment. On such occasions the people and elders vote in what manner the delinquent shall be prosecuted, lest any offender should escape with impunity, from their humanity or improvidence. Some voted that these wretches should be cast amid the panthers; the majority decreed them (I think wisely) a more lingering and more ignominious death.”

The men upon the crosses held down their heads, whether from shame or pain or feebleness. The sunbeams were striking them fiercely; sweat ran from them, liquefying the blood that had blackened and hardened on their hands and feet. A soldier stood by the side of each, lowering the point of his spear to the ground; but no one of them gave it up to us. A centurian asked the nearest of them how he dared to stand armed before him.

‘Because the city is in ruins, and the laws still live,” said he. “At the first order of the conqueror of the elders, I will surrender my spear.”

“What is your pleasure, O commander?” asked the elder.

“That an act of justice be the last public act performed by the citizens of Carthage and that the sufferings of these wretches not be abridged.”

Such was my reply. The soldiers piled their spears, for the points of which the hearts of the crucified men thirsted; and the people hailed us as they would have hailed deliverers.”

sources of disinformation: iran

The anonymous claptrap which, herded through the NYT, WAPO, LAT and the tv news helped Bush and his merry men lead this country into a most satisfying circle jerk of war in 2003, is happening all over again with Iran. But to get the full affect of the war aphrodisiac, you need a chosen set of experts to interpret the wisdom of anonymity.

None is better than a man in uniform – and we know how much the media loves a man in uniform – and so who better to push to the front for yesterday’s bogus story about a weapons cache “found in a palm grove just north of the Iraqi capital” than Maj. Marty Weber, who plumbed his infinite wisdom about Iran’s weaponry to explain that this cache, consisting of weapons easy to make in Iraq (and easy to buy, given the money flooding in from the Saudis for Sunni militias) had the high sulfur and brimstone smell of Iranian goods.

Yet then there was this: “But while the find gave experts much more information on the makings of the E.F.P.’s, which the American military has repeatedly argued must originate in Iran, the cache also included items that appeared to cloud the issue.

Among the confusing elements were cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran. One box said in English that the tubes inside had been made in the United Arab Emirates and another said, in Arabic, “plastic made in Haditha,” a restive Sunni town on the Euphrates River in Iraq.”

Marty Webb first appeared as our Iranian weapons expert yesterday, in a story about another weapons cache found in Hilla. In that story:

“Major Weber said he doubted that Hezbollah — the group that the Mahdi militia leader Moktada al-Sadr has used as a model for his political movement — would have provided the material and technology to the Mahdi militia or to other Shiite fighters in Iraq. “It is possible, but based upon my experience we have not seen Hezbollah share information or technology on anything until they have been told to,” he said.”

That Major Weber – apparently he is on Hezbollah’s “Look what those crazy mullahs want us to do now” email list.
…
But the other Iranian experts and analysts are the dealmakers, not one overworked, weapons cache rushing Major. This is why LI was so pleased to discover the Right Web site – which we have included on our blogroll – it is the link entitled, DIRECTORY OF THE PSYCHOPATHS WHO RULE US - SMELL THE INSANITY. It is proving very useful. For instance – take an article like this thumbsucker from the Christian Science Monitor, “Iran's pursuit of nuclear power raises alarms ; Does access to fuel ease nations toward nuclear weapons? Rising demand has nonproliferation experts unsettled.” Four Iranian ‘experts” are quoted – although why we call them experts is left in the shadows. They sort out in classic thumbsucker fashion. Two are foreign policy moderates, lukewarm imperialists: a Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, and a Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Center for America Progress. Cirincione even goes so far as to gingerly reference reality:

“A problem for the international community is that many developing countries, no matter what they may think of the Iranian regime, perceive that Iran has a point when it speaks of developed-world favoritism, says the Arms Control Association's Mr. Kimball. Other analysts agree.

"Whether we like it or not, Iran is tapping into this issue of fairness and equality," says Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Center for America Progress and author of a new book, "Bomb Scare," on the future of nuclear weapons.”

That the U.S., which has used nuclear weapons in the past, is pushing an ABM defense aggressively at the present, and is stocked full of lunatics like our Vice President, intent on restarting bomb testing, does have that quality of begging the question of fairness and equality. Oh, and then there are the hundred or so bombs stockpiled by Israel, and the U.S.’s gladhanding of the Indian nuclear program. So I suppose the questioning of the fairness and equality, here, is rather like the questioning of the fairness and equality of Jim Crow laws in the South. A shocking eruption of common sense.

Balanced against the lukewarm imperialists are the running dogs: Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington and a former Pentagon nonproliferation official, and Ilan Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council and an Iran expert. This is where the righweb directory comes in handy. You can look up Sokolski and find out, among other entertaining things, that he signed a letter from Project for the New American Century on September 21, 2001, which said: “Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [9/11] attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.” This non-sequitor has, of course, become the principle to which the U.S. has sacrificed 200-400 thousand Iraqi lives. And Sokolski is all over the place, at the moment, pushing the proposal that Iran has no right to enrich nuclear fuel at all – for it turns out that the U.S. is the only country that has the right to unilaterally withdraw from its treaty obligations, viz the limitations placed on the country by past ABM treaties. It is an asymmetric world for these people. As for Ilan Berman, you can learn that he is a freedom fighter. Yes indeed. This is what he has said about Iran: “A frequent invitee to congressional sessions covering Middle East and terrorism issues, Berman consistently advocates expansive U.S. intervention in the Middle East. At an October 2005 briefing for the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, Berman argued:

The fundamental problem facing the United States is that Iran's ‘nuclear clock' is ticking much faster than its ‘regime change clock.' Altering that equation—both through initiatives that delay and derail Iran's nuclear ambitions and through those that empower opposition forces inside and outside of the Islamic Republic—should be the starting point for any serious American strategy.

So, for those reading the papers, keep that invaluable link to the rightweb in mind. We will. As well as Berman’s comment, which pretty much sums up the wishful thinking of the Bush Administration. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. The starting point for any serious American strategy should be – throw away Berman’s advice, recognize Iran, let NGOs engage with Iranian dissidents, do business, grow up, realize that American power has shrunk in the Middle East, and realize that we aren’t in World War IV, there is no long long long war, we are on the edge of economic and environmental problems that will require resources that we are massively wasting, etc., etc. You know the words and the tune.

Locke vs. the Witch

This is a typical story from Edward Wingfield's Discourse of Virginia. Wingfield, one of John Smith's men, is talking about another expedition of starving, quarreling gentlemen up another hopeless river in a country seemingly infinite in expanse and strangeness. He and Smith meet a kyng of an Indian nation, named Pawatah. The Englishmen presented him with a hatchet.

“Monday he came to the water side, and we went a shore to him agayne. He tolde us that our hott Drynckes he thought caused his greefe, but that he was well agayne, and we were very welcome. He sent for another Deere which was roasted and after sodd for us (as before). Our Captayne caused his Dynner to be Dressed a shore also. Thus we satt banqueting all the forenoone, some of his people led us to their houses, shewed us the growing of their Corne and the maner of setting it, gave us Tobacco, wallnutes, mulberyes, strawberryes, and Respises. One sheewed us the herbe called in their tongue wisacan, which they say heales poisoned wounds, it is like lyverwort or bloudwort. One gaue me a Roote wherewith they poison their Arrows. they would shew us any thing we Demaunded, and laboured very much by signes to make us understand their Languadge.”

LI thinks there are fascinating things in the early stories of the colonists – (and reminds you to be on the watch for Matthew Sharpe’s Jamestown). We are bringing up this account of gifts to contrast it with a recent post on Crooked Timber by John Quiggen, which is about a recent survey of happiness and how one should interpret the results of it . This is a truly ponderable matter, although economists are only moved to spasmodically engage with empirical evidence about happiness once in a blue moon, as a sort of homage to Bentham.

Well, the post, and the assumptions, have made me ponder about the emphasis on the happiness parameter, and the neglect of others – among which, most strikingly, is generosity. And on this neglect hangs a tale of Weltanshauungs.

It really does make perfect sense for economists to be worried about happiness, just as it made sense, so long ago, for the Jamestown colonists to look at all those gifts and plan on seizing them – or just as it makes sense that one of the enduring American myths is of the “purchase” of Manhattan for a deal of beads. For here, the avant garde of the Early Modern Era, Lockians avant le lettre, encountered an ethos they had already overthrown in Southern England. They met it, too, in the Scots highland, and the wild country in Ireland. They met it and invariably they killed it. For this was the deal – the Lockian view was that liberty, that amazing invention of the Dutch and the English, consisted of the disposing of property. Freedom and owning property were synonymous. Whereas the Kynge Pawatah, the highland clans, the cattle raiding Irish, all saw liberty – not that they conceptualized it as such – as generosity. To be powerful was to give. Account after account of the first settlements tell us that the colonists, always seeming to be a miserable lot, survived, crucially, on the generosity of the salvages. The learning of planting techniques, the seeds, the food for the winter, the banqueting – it was all accepted without question by the settlers, who responded with maps, surveys, claims, and treaties. Of course, we are not talking of an unmixed capitalist ethos – these seventeenth century bravos were still too close to the older ways to be completely comfortable with the triumph of property. But so it went – the fall of one definition of freedom – transmuted into today’s terms, it is the freedom from the iron laws of economics, the remorseless gameplaying for profit – versus another: freedom of contract. While, from the Lockean viewpoint, generosity is nothing more than irresponsibility, a parasitic relationship to the production machine.

Poor Marx. He was born too late. If only he’d been there, at John Smith’s side.

Now, the thing about conservatives is that, no matter how they might go on about Aristotle and natural law, in the end, they are always going to come back to Locke. The Aristotelian virtue of generosity is absolutely foreign to the ethos of property based liberty. Try to imagine Americans, now, looking out at strangelooking, foreign tongued peoples straggling down their streets, and going out and – showing them all their wealth. Treating them to the best food. Giving them medicine. This is not going to happen.

The thing about liberals is this: we are nostalgic for the ethos of generosity, but aware of the amazing wealth created by the freedom of contract. Our idea is that eventually, the wealth will be so much that society will evolve, peacefully, into a thing more generous – generous beyond the belief of those Indians.

This is to tacitly ignore what “evolution” is all about. Marxists, of course, think that they can skip and seize, banking on a revolution that comes from outside history. And LI, ex-lefty, misfit liberal, only figured out, last year, that Red Riding Hood going up the path of pins is not the same as Red Riding Hood going back down the path of pins. That there are irreversible paths, and that the negation of the negation is best embodied in that moment in which the witch says the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Little Red Riding Hood can get eaten by the wolf, or have the wolf killed, or – back back back down that path – worship the wolf.

I imagine that, on the parameter of generosity, this country would show up as characteristically schizophrenic. If I close one crow’s eye and gaze at these here states, I see an astonishingly selfish place. Foreign aid has radically declined since the sixties, even as the country has become much, much richer. This is a country that calmly looked on in the nineties, watched Africa fight an AIDS epidemic that was, in its scope, like the Black Death, and moved only to make sure that the intellectual property rights of the drug companies were properly respected. This is a country that abolishes welfare, and substitutes the system of jails – jails being a two-fer – you can both enforce apartheid and sink the poor into such straits that they become absolutely demoralized. In these days of the long long war, World War IV, don’t you know, what country is taking in the million plus refugees from the Iraq war? Syria and Jordan – where the average income is, maybe, a tenth what it is in the U.S. The U.S. – the major cause of the death of the two to four hundred thousand Iraqis, and the flight of the million plus – will take in – 7.000 this year. Ideally. This is typical, however. Unless you are white, coming to the U.S. is always a fraught enterprise – from the coast card turning back starving Haitians all the way back to the policy of slamming the door in the face of the Jews in the 30s.

However, closing that eye and opening my other crows eye, I see evidences of generosity in another form. A restlessness and energy in the culture that is all about giving everything up. About second chances. The bold forging of new sexual relationships. A lot of things that I find incredibly moving, but would have trouble materializing it into questions on a generosity questionnaire.

I am finishing up a project that has powderized the marrow from my bones and snuffed it up its big fat nose. So, no big post today, no flapping of my dusty moth wings against the infamies of empire. No rousing and pointless charges at my usual tilts. Instead, go to this link, which is about something capitalism is getting right for a change: the google book project! I have a tragic and total love for the google book project. Gots to testify, here, friend, neighbors, mooks and gibberers! As a editor and researcher for hire, this project has certainly revolutionized my life and given me a stiff neck from hours of searching for hire. I haven’t used this blog to advertise myself, lately, or shill for buckos, but let’s just say LI is an early adapter, and well worth the pittance if you are in need of a research scout for that paper.

good news (again) in Iraq

As LI has said before, there is something curiously hollow about the Bush administration’s policy stated aim of victory in Iraq. On the one hand, we already won – you will remember the Saddam Hussein hanging. On the other hand, we are still there, fighting for something. Often, that something is simply conflated with “defeating Al Qaeda.” It is an interesting policy – one perhaps stemming from Jesus’ Good Samaritan parable - that seeks to protect the Iraqis from Al Qaeda while allowing Al Qaeda to regroup and party in Pakistan. Is this due to the saintliness of our president? Bravely trying to wrestle the control of the White House plane away from the pilot on 9/11/2001 so he could go mano a mano with the terrorist fiends, did Bush’s thoughts drift to the potential danger to the Iraqis – in Kirkuk, Mosul, Basra, Baghdad and all of those cities he had difficulty finding on a map – from an Al Qaeda that didn’t exactly exist in Iraq, but could, if America didn’t challenge them by inviting them in and then fighting them interminably.

Well, that’s our president. Even when he was knee high to a grasshopper, he was always in a sweat about Iraqis. Were they happy? Was their burning yearning for liberty being satisfied? Were there enough of them happily vacationing (in that funny way Iraqis vacation – they bring all their money, as many possessions as they can, and their families) in Jordan and Syria? Even then, he knew that when he grew up, he would protect them against the terrorists that he invited into their country and win a big victory and go down in history as one of our great presidents, like George Washington – except with better teeth.

Now that the British have started to withdraw from Basra, our Vice President has remarked that this is good news. This is all about success in Iraq. So now, at least, we can catch a glimpse of what victory means – what the Iraq of our dreams is going to look like. That’s why readers should go to Patrick Cockburn’s report in the Independent. It is a heady thing, victory, and this is what we are fighting for:

The British forces had a lesson in the dangers of provoking the heavily armed local population when six British military police were killed in Majar al-Kabir on 24 June 2003. During the uprising of Mehdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr in 2004, British units were victorious in several bloody clashes in Amara, the capital of Maysan province.

But in the elections in January 2005, lauded by Mr Blair this week, Sciri became the largest party in Basra followed by Fadhila, followers of the Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, the father of Muqtada al-Sadr. The lat-ter’s supporters became the largest party in Maysan.
Mr Cordesman says the British suffered political defeat in the provincial elections of 2005, and lost at the military level in autumn of the same year when increased attacks meant they they could operate only through armoured patrols. Much-lauded military operations, such as “Corrode” in May 2006, did not alter the balance of forces.

Mr Cordesman’s gloomy conclusions about British defeat are confirmed by a study called “The Calm before the Storm: The British Experience in Southern Iraq” by Michael Knights and Ed Williams, published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Comparing the original British ambitions with present reality the paper concludes that “instead of a stable, united, law-abiding region with a representative government and police primacy, the deep south is unstable, factionalised, lawless, ruled as a kleptocracy and subject to militia primacy”.

Local militias are often not only out of control of the Iraqi government, but of their supposed leaders in Baghdad. The big money earner for local factions is the diversion of oil and oil products, with the profits a continual source of rivalry and a cause of armed clashes. Mr Knights and Mr Williams say that control in the south is with a “well-armed political-criminal Mafiosi [who] have locked both the central government and the people out of power”.

The war’s supporters, of course, have reason to feel smug. Our long nightmare is over. As a people, Americans – rich and poor, black and white – have, for over a decade, been clamoring for an Iraq ruled by Sciri and Sadr. It is all that we talk about. Sometimes we entertain ourselves with a few celebrity deaths or haircuts, but here in the States – I’m writing this down so that readers overseas get a feel for the American reality – conversations about money, sex, jobs invariably drift to that dreamy moment when your average American says, I don’t care how much money it takes or how much blood, I want to see an Shi’a fundamentalism take control in Mesopotamia – it is a long held childhood dream, actually! Then Americans get all misty eyed, thinking about how they can die happy if only things go the right way in Kirkuk.

One thing you have to say about this country – we are willing to sacrifice any amount of Iraqi blood to make our dreams come true. It is the way we are. Morally superior to the rest of the world. Which is why GOD has promised us victory, damn it, and we are going to reach for it!

fightin' al qaeda at abu ghraib

“I beg you, let us establish from the start as the solid bases of any such system,” said Verneuil, that in the intentions of nature there is necessarily one class of individuals essentially subordinate to the other by weakness and by birth: given this, if the subject sacrificed by the individual who gives himself up to his passions belongs to this weak and deficient class, then the sacrificer has no more done anything evil than the owner of a farm who kills his pig.” – D.A.F. de Sade, quoted in Luc Boltanski’s Distant Suffering.

Boltanski’s book has a section devoted to the pure spectator. He uses painting and its placement to illustrate the evolution of the spectator, and his erasure from the painting. In Florence, the paintings that depicted the tortures of the damned were placed in chambers of justice where the tortures of the living – the criminals – were enacted. “The works analysed by Edgerton which represent the Last Judgment (or, in the upper part a Last Judgement and, in the lower part, a trial and execution) are not directed at a spectator who contemplates them for pleasure. These pictures, which are sometimes displayed in the rooms where the tribunals are held or in the chapels of places of detention (like the Bargello in Florence), place the prisoner before the sufferings awaiting him in the hereafter and also – the demonic cruelties reproducing farily exactly the procedures of interrogation and execution in force in Renaissance Italian towns – before those due to him and soon to be inflicted on him in the world below. They have meaning only in an active relationship with the culprit who, exposed to what they illustrate, must find the way to contrition.”

This, of course, reminds LI of the dialogue between Mr. Shiftlet and the old lady in The Life you Save May be Your Own:

“"I told you you could hang around and work for food," she said, "if you don't mind sleeping in that car yonder."
"Why listen, Lady," he said with a grin of delight, "the monks of old slept in their coffins!"
"They wasn't as advanced as we are," the old woman said.”

How advanced we are comes home to this reader from Alessandra Stanley’s review, more in sadness than in anger, of “The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.” The sadness, of course, is for the lack of good old American know-how:

“The problem with the Fox thriller “24” is not that it justifies torture but that it fosters the illusion that the American government is good at it.

The practices of Abu Ghraib suggest the opposite. The mystery of that shameful episode was not the cruelty of American troops assigned there. After the initial disbelief over the obscene snapshots, their smile-for-the-camera barbarity turned out to be another painful reminder that the banality of evil has no borders.
The real puzzle is why the administration, which argued that the war against terror required extreme interrogation techniques — the kind critics call torture — would then entrust such measures to untrained amateurs.”

Now, of course, it is rather banal to condemn torture. But Stanley’s idea of spiffying up the tired subject by taking a “we can surely torture better than this” approach to Abu Ghraib does have a way of revealin’ just how fuckin’ advanced this great, this moral, this benign superpower has become. From Stanley’s tone, one can tell that if she was at Abu Ghraib, why she would have been producing memos about better torture techniques left and right. Why, just the introduction of some of those lovely power tools you can purchase at home depot for those basement repairs would come in handy! But no, it strikes her that her country is letting her down in the torture department.

But the raw material never ceases to shock. How is it that a government that took such bold steps to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions and update the rules of combat did not pay closer attention to how its policy changes were carried out on the ground?

The Pentagon didn’t even manage to shield the worst excesses from public view.

The power of photography was yet another forgotten lesson of Vietnam, one relatively easy for the military to have remembered. If school principals can ban cellphones from the classroom, it seems strange — or reckless — that generals did not apply the same common sense and forbid cameras inside top-security cellblocks.”

The future Stanley guide to the subject (7 highly efficient tortures for highly efficient soldiers!) will certainly advise against those cameras!

“If there were no photographs, there would be no Abu Ghraib, no investigation,” says Javal Davis, an M.P. interviewed on camera who was court-martialed and sentenced to six months in prison on charges of prisoner abuse. “It would have been, ‘O.K., whatever, everybody go home.’ ”

However, though Stanley’s concern that the torturing business in the U.S. needs a definite overhaul – dental drills, front and center! – we beg to differ on the picture issue. For what signals total domination more than being able to take a picture, any time any where, of a subject? Here the world surely closes in. The Florentines, it turns out, just wasn’t advanced like we are, digital cameras in hand. If Boltanski is right to connect the evaporation of the spectator from within the picture to the pure spectatorship of the bourgeois era, starting in the 18th century – a cooler relationship that prefigures tv – the Abu Ghraib pics might just figure the foreclosing of the possibility that Iraqis could be spectators – our form of subjectivity in these here states, gimme the channel changer would ya, honey – and that, in turn, would be perfectly consonant with their erasure from the Iraq story as it is reported, day after day, in the newspapers. I notice that the NYT published, today, on the same day as Ms. Stanley gets depressed about America’s torture deficit, an op ed about the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq that goes on and on as if the occupiers were just the most popular things with the Iraqis since clay bricks. That even the Pentagon’s polls have shown, for years, that a majority of Iraqis approve of attacks on the coalition troops, that they overwhelmingly support withdrawal, is one of those cutting room sequences. There is a buncha those piled up on the floor, from what the Iraqi government thinks of Iran’s interference in Iraq (they are trying to get more of it, as every Iraqi politician who has traveled to Teheran has been saying for three years) to the popularity of free enterprise reform in Iraq (overwhelmingly rejected by the population).

So, as we blissfully ignore what the Iraqis say, we torture them to give us Intelligence. Not that we could fuckin' understand it if they gave it. The motherfuckers insist on speaking Arabic.

But let’s let Ms. Stanley, valiantly getting bi-partisan about the torture issue (some are for it, some agin – but us advanced folk are willing to look on both sides) have the last word:

““Ghosts of Abu Ghraib” will appall and sadden viewers worried about human rights and international law. But it will be just as discouraging for those who believe that the danger posed by Al Qaeda trumps even those humanitarian concerns.

Abu Ghraib wasn’t just a moral failure, it was a strategic setback in the war against terror.”

“That danger from Al Qaeda” – yes, that is just just jjjjust why we are in Iraq! It is simply bliss to be alive at a time of such record levels of cretinism. I’m going to die of being so tickled every day.

check out lumpenprofessoriat on the love boat to mesopotamia

A friend of mine has started a blog, and has a nice, rabble rousing post up for today. Check out lumpenprofessoriat! LP argues that we can see the outpouring of love, love, love in the wreck and murder of Iraq: “Love of country, love of freedom, love of the troops, and love for the victims of 9/11 becomes transformed into the injustice and evil of shock and awe, of Abu Ghraib, and of the hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq. This seems to fit well with both the experience and rhetoric of the war to date where noble sentiments and endless shit have marched hand in hand.”

a post that bristles with references like a porcupine bristles with spikes

“Let’s be clear. There is simple ass kissing, and there is metaphorical ass kissing.” –Rameau.

The dialogue between Diderot and Rameau’s nephew seems, like a normal conversation, to touch on one thing and then another. The theme of it, though, keeps returning to Rameau – how he lives, and how he lives with himself. Rameau is a flatterer, a backbiter, a crook (escroc), a go-between, a lover of good food and riches. But he is also endowed with good taste, or at least steady, classical taste – he doesn’t delude himself about the quality of Voltaire’s work, but he does comfort himself with the badness of the worst of Voltaire's moral character. To illustrate his world, he tells several anecdotes. Now,the curious thing about these anecdotes is that they operate as a test. It gradually becomes clear that there is a competition, a game, going on between Diderot, the moi in the dialogue, and Rameau, the lui.

What is this game?

It is a test we all go through as kids: the test of disgust. The test, as it happens on the playground, consists of being told something disgusting, or being the witness of something disgusting, and not giving vent to any sentiment, any shrinking, any shame. LI is not, by the way, trying to disparage this particular sequence of our common education. There is something that pisses me off about people who are too particular, too grossed out about blood and shit and the whole general stink of life – the full diaper, the squashed cockroach.

So let's not load the dice. I have zigzagged against the buffoon, but this swerve should be seen within a dialectical history of the disappearance of the sage. Look at this as a plea for the counterbalance, as well as an indictment for social murder.

Perhaps there is something in this playground test that is particularly male – although I’m cautious about this kind of gender generalization. In William Miller’s anatomy of disgust, he quotes the case of the wild boy of Aveyron, reported by Doctor Itard: ‘The well documented early nineteenth century wild boy of Aveyron had no sense of pure and impure, was extraordinarily filthy, was not “toilet trained”, and clearly disgusted Jean Itard, the doctor who supervised him and to whom we owe our knowledge of the case. Itard’s evidence, however, is not without some problems. Although the boy would sniff like an animal at everything no matter how malodorous, he would not eat everything. “A dead canary was given him, and in an instant he stripped off its feathers, great and small, tore it open with his nails, smelt it, and threw it away” The boy was not exactly omnivorous. He was initially willing to eat a canary, but this particular canary had an unappetizing odor. Certain odors might indeed have disgusted him, although his aversion might have been more simply constituted, that is, it might have given rise to no thoughts of contamination and pollution. We would surely like to know how he felt about his hands after discarding the bird.” Contamination [Ansteckung] is, in fact, the word Hegel uses to speak of one moment in the struggle of Enlightenment – borne by an intelligence that is founded on universal principles, and yet confronts, as an individual, the belief of the masses – as it carries out its social strategy of stripping belief from its supports: “The communication of the pure intelligence [Einsicht – understanding] is thus comparable to that of a scent in an unresisting atmosphere. It is a penetrating contamination, which does nothing at first to call attention to itself against the indifferent element, in which it insinuates itself, and thus cannot be guarded against. Only when the contamination has spread is it something for the consciousness, that had carelessly permitted it.”

Thus, in one sense the Nephew of Rameau recapitulates a primal, playground scene, the moment in which shame and shamelessness engage in a ritual contest. However, there are limits to a test that is so structured that victory must go to the shameless. These limits are embodied in the moment that the surrounding silence, the spectatorial silence, the silence of accommodation, is broken. The ‘consciousness’ – which in this passage in Hegel is embodied in the institutions of the state, the church, and the third power of the bourgeoisie – finally reacts. In so reacting, they claim dominion over shame itself. But the Café de la Regence lies, for a moment, outside of those institutions. While the pure intelligence of chess (a use of virtuosity about which Diderot was doubtful) is being played around our pair, the game of shamelessness procedes without witnesses, so to speak, allowing Rameau to bare not only himself, but the shamemaking institutions themselves, and the political strategy they have taken against the ‘contamination’ of the enlightenment philosophes. This is the beginning of a wobble – that wobble which, in the history of the pairing of the buffoon and the sage, will eventually turn the buffoon against the sage and, at the same time, seem to ordain the sage’s place for the buffoon. Diderot represents both himself as the philosophe, being half jokingly led through this trial (and getting in his own strokes as well) and the common sense, the massed, silent witness, which is the aftermath that supposedly belongs to the writer – although the trajectory of the manuscript of the Nephew of Rameau provides an ironic commentary on that writerly certainty. As Jacques D. once wrote, in an essay on Poe’s Purloined Letter, another story about the competition between shame and shamelessness – about provocation as an instrument of power - "a letter can always not arrive at its destination".

the true victims of the Iraq war - some of them not wearing underwear

Here’s an article that probes that American concern, anguish really, about war, peace, and freedom, and the death of half a million Iraqis, and the flight of at least two million so far. And - impressively - it turns out that the big victims here, the real victims, are Americans. The stories of going to Europe and being victimized are just heartbreaking. People, good people, are being treated meanly! In Europe!

An excerpt:

“Jacqie Venable, a 40-year-old music producer, was wearing a beret and jeans. She said she wasn’t wearing underwear.

She said the war in Iraq was meant to happen “karmically.”

“In my spiritual picture, it has to do with karma,” she said. “Everything that happens in life, to each of us, is what we call into our space. Everything comes full circle. So right now, it’s going to work out to whatever it works out to be. It might be happy for me and not happy for you.

“The people who are there fighting—it’s their journey. This is our journey,” she continued. “People are dying all around the world. Forget Iraq—they’re dying in this country. And their parents are suffering with them, and our parents suffer for us because we’re at Bungalow. There is no separation in the trauma.”

The guy who wrote it, incidentally, George Gurley, also did the drooling piece over Ann Coulter in the Obs.

Zigzag

This is from Ashton’s The History of Gambling in England. It is what Ivan Karamazov would call an allegory. Yes, for LI, there is something about this story of drunken hanging that reminds me of the paired destiny of the buffoon and the sage, this thread that I have been following – into my own asshole, certain cruel readers might say. No – into even drier gulches of history than that.

"The Annual Register about this time supplies us with several gambling anecdotes, the following being almost incredible: 15th April, 1812 – “On Wednesday evening an extraordinary investigation took place at Bow Street. Croker, the officer, was passing along the Haampstead road, when he observed, at a short distance before him, two men on a wall, and , directly after, saw the tallest of them, a stout man, about six feet high, hanging by his neck, from a lamp post attached to the wall, being that instant tied up and turned off by the short man. This unexpected and extraordinary sight astonished the officer; he made up to the spot with all speed; and, just after he arrived there the tall man, who had been hanged, fell to the ground, the handkechief, with which he had been suspended, having given way. Croker produced his staff, said he was an officer, and demanded to know of the other man the cause of such conduct. In the meantime, the man who had been hanged recovered, got up, and, on Croker’s interfering, gave him a violent blow on the nose, which nearly knocked him backwards. The short man was endeavouring to make offl however, the officer procured assistance, and both were brout to the office, when the account they gave was that they worked on the canals. They had been together on Wednesday afternoon, tossed up for money, and afterwards for clothes; the tall man who was hanged,won the other’s jacket, trousers and shoes; they then tossed up which should hang the other, and the short one won the toss. They got upon the wall, the one to submit, and the other to hang him on the lamp iron. They both agreed to this statement. The tall one, who would have been hanged, said, if he had won the toss, he would have hanged the other. He said he then felt the effects of his hanging in the neck, and his eyes were so much swelled he saw double. The magistrates expressed their horror and disgust, and ordered the man who had been hanged to find bail for the violent and unjustifiable assault on the officer, and the short one for hanging the other. Not having bail, they were committed to Bridewell for trial.”

If the short man and the tall man weren’t named Estragon and Vladimir, fate missed a trick.

Surely it is odd that LI is railing, in these posts, against the buffoon, when this is the same LI that claims to be lead, as if by supernatural light of the muse of ludicrousness, through the shadow of the valley of the moronic inferno I call my own country, my life and times. However, what I want to know is why, of the sage and the buffoon, the moi and the lui of Rameau’s nephew, only the buffoon made it into the present – and how it came about that the sage has been so utterly throttled by circumstances. What was the toss about? What were the stakes? How did they meet (illmet) and how did they part (one alone)? So, these are the questions, which I’m laying out like a deck of cards in this game of solitaire.

The key to the conversation of Rameau’s nephew is shamelessness – that most dialectical of attitudes. Shamelessness not only assumes shame, but it also assumes innocence – but only as a supreme lie. The lie of innocence is embodied in the peculiar way in which Rameau’s nephew not only speaks, but pantomimes – as if word and act were indivisible, which is indeed how a child has to learn to speak. It is later that we ignore the act of the tongue. Yet the charm of the pantomime is fully intended – Rameau’s nephew is nothing if not intentional in all things, even as he is described as being self-contradictory and a ball of contradictions. Shamelessness has become his strategy – just as it is the strategy of Sade’s fuckers. Shamelessness, vanity and flattery are the circuit of acts and attitudes in which Rameau has his existence, and they collectively have a political value. One that is fairly new. The ideology of the old right, the legitimist or the Tory, is about tradition and order – but the new right, that represented by Rameau, is about provocation. What takes shape here is a foretaste of the system that dominates us now, the mixture of shamelessness and outrage by which we drift over the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and howl at, say, the nasty language of bloggers. To use the U.S. for one example – but the same thing happens in Italy, in France, in the U.K.

A couple more posts on this and then I have done.

two trillion dollars - where is that pesky wabbit?

As LI has written again and again and again, there is no war on terrorism, and President Backbone is its prophet. Nothing changed, for the White House, on 9/11. Not a damned thing. Garbage in has meant garbage, oh so much of it, out. So much movement around so much stasis. This lovely article from the NYT gives us an exciting glimpse into the future that was decided when the U.S. “allowed” Osama Who to escape in 2001. Now, let’s see. In the past six years, conservatively, the U.S. has spent two trillion dollars are “defense”, and Mr. Who has spent maybe a cool million or two becoming a video star. And the end result of that is, as anybody would have expected from the unparalleled criminality of our Little Caesars in D.C. – that Osama is becoming the Toyota of terrorists. Moving up fast!

As recently as 2005, American intelligence assessments described senior leaders of Al Qaeda as cut off from their foot soldiers and able only to provide inspiration for future attacks. But more recent intelligence describes the organization’s hierarchy as intact and strengthening.
“The chain of command has been re-established,” said one American government official, who said that the Qaeda “leadership command and control is robust.”
American officials and analysts said a variety of factors in Pakistan had come together to allow “core Al Qaeda” — a reference to Mr. bin Laden and his immediate circle — to regain some of its strength. The emergence of a relative haven in North Waziristan and the surrounding area has helped senior operatives communicate more effectively with the outside world via courier and the Internet.
The investigation into last summer’s failed plot to bomb airliners in London has led counterterrorism officials to what they say are “clear linkages” between the plotters and core Qaeda operatives in Pakistan. American analysts point out that the trials of terrorism suspects in Britain revealed that some of the defendants had been trained in Pakistan.

eine kleine Hegelmusik

In the Phenomenology, Hegel introduces some of the dialogue from Rameau’s nephew in the section on the “self alienated spirit”. Here, the social conditions that frame the dialectical image embodied, eventually, in the “myself” and “him” of the dialogue are State Power and Wealth. They inevitably impinge upon “Bildung” – education, the development of the intelligence (Einsicht) – and there is no resigning from them, or turning away from them. Since State Power and Wealth are, indeed, the spirits that preside over our current miseries, the current sad state of American culture, American aggression, American cluelessness – the whole D.C. daisy chain – the dialogue between the sage and the buffoon takes on a whole new relevance. One has only to read, say, in the Friday Washington Post a profile of Michelle Malkin by Howard Kurz entitled Hard Right Punch to see how the transaction between decency (o decency), the false transparency of the media, and buffoonery plays out in these dire days of the mock apocalypse, how we are invited to suffer, and do suffer, as comments galore demonstrate, for the victimization of the wealthy. In the course of the article, a homespun little piece in the genre of here's looking at you kid, it is reported that “after a few liberal sites posted her home address and phone numbers last year, Malkin received a wave of harassing calls. She responded with a defiant post, headlined "I AM NOT AFRAID OF YOU." Malkin and her family have moved elsewhere in Maryland” jostles, without comment, next to this description of Malkin’s rise to notoriety: (“Malkin's detractors -- whom she derides as "moonbats" -- were further riled by her book "In Defense of Internment," in which she said the confining of Japanese Americans during World War II was justified, and backed racial profiling as a vital tool against terrorism”) The opinion is driven by, with the aplomb of a person who knows that he will never have to give up his house because of his race - ah, that wonderful superiority of it all. Of course, moving Japanese families out of their homes and behind barbed wire is a question that is up in the air – was it a good thing? a bad thing? and what is the ideological slant of those who are “riled” by the defense of it?. This is neutrality pleased at its own shamelessness, the view from nowhere that just happens to look exactly like the view from the cancer zone of the status quo, with its mortgages up the asshole and its soldier f/x on tv - this is the voice of the sage, except that the dividing line, the wall, has been lost that separates it from the voice of the buffoon. Or rather, the sage has become completely vacuous, found no relation to wealth and state power that would preserve its own in-itselfness, the potential to become a beggar in a brothel - no, rather the buffoon multiplies and becomes both the sage and the interviewee, the reporter and the provacateur, the producer and the propagandist, the politician and his campaign consultant. The orgy of the minimal self, armed with the orgy of the maximal weapon - such is the environment in which the sage has vanished.

Hegel sets the stage for the entrance of the buffoon – as I am calling this figure – by giving us a history of the relationship between the state and the noble spirit, which is the spirit of “heroic” service: (this is the J.N. Findley translation).

“State-power has, therefore, still at this stage no will to oppose the advice, and does not decide between the different opinions as to what is universally the best. It is not yet governmental control, and on that account is in truth not yet real state-power. Individual self-existence, the possession of an individual will that is not yet qua will surrendered, is the inner secretly reserved spiritual principle of the various classes and stations, a spirit which keeps for its own behoof what suits itself best, in spite of its words about the universal best, and tends to make this clap-trap about what is universally the best a substitute for action bringing it about. The sacrifice of existence, which takes place in the case of service, is indeed complete when it goes so far as death. But the endurance of the danger of death which the individual survives, leaves him still a specific kind of existence, and hence a particular self-reference; and this makes the counsel imparted in the interests of the universally best ambiguous and open to suspicion; it really means, in point of fact, retaining the claim to a private opinion of his own, and a separate individual will as against the power of the state. Its relation to the latter is, therefore, still one of discordance; and it possesses the characteristic found in the case of the base type of consciousness — it is ever at the point of breaking out into rebellion.”

In our case, us in these here states, the individual, at least the individual as interviewee, both promotes the risk society and survives it pretty well - as indeed do the soldiers who are privileged to fight for the interviewee. In fact, the win win only breaks down on the margines, with the fought-for - the terrorized/terrorist masses. They are, however, not interviewees, and so have an ambiguous status. Heroic service has become properly commoditized, and thus a new form of reconciliation between state power and the noble spirit becomes possible: state power pretends to be two things, a self-abnegating force that only wants to diminish itself into small government with all its heart and soul, and a universal abstraction representing liberty that requires being able to build enough missiles and host enough armed servicemen to destroy vast tracts of the world – while nobility becomes a mere position filled in by a meritocracy that embodies clap-trap (Geschwätze), which has found a way to make every sacrifice turns into profit in its hands – a miracle much more impressive than the loaves and the fishes.

Hegel supposes that the noble self, defining itself by a mortal sacrifice and thereby preserving itself, is genealogically precedent to the alienation of the self that is the condition of the rise of state power:

“It comes thereby to be actually what it is implicitly — the identical unity of self with its opposed self. In this way, by the inner withdrawn and secret spiritual principle, the self as such, coming forward and abrogating itself, the state-power becomes ipso facto raised into a proper self of its own; without this estrangement of self the deeds of honour, the actions of the noble type of consciousness, and the counsels which its insight reveals, would continue to maintain the ambiguous character which, as we saw, kept that secret reserve of private intention and self-will, in spite of its overt pretensions.” In this way we come to language in the age of the self-divided self – and to Rameau’s nephew. Which we will return to at some future post.

the setting

“No matter if the weather is fair or foul, it is my habit to talk a walk, at five in the evening, to the Palais-Royal.” This is how Diderot begins Rameau’s Nephew. With a walk.

For the sage, the regular walk is important. Kant, that indefatigable commenter on all things under the sun, noted the importance of the walk to the scholar in The Conflict of the Faculties under the heading: “On Pathological Feelings that Come from Thinking at Unsuitable Times”. “Thinking – whether in the form of study (reading books) or reflection (meditation and discovery) is a scholar’s food: and when he is wide awake and alone, he cannot live without it. But if he taxes his energy by occupying himself with a specific thought when he is eating or walking, he inflicts two tasks on himself at the same time – on the head and the stomach or on the head and the feet; and in the first place this brings on hypochondria, in the second, vertigo.” In a note, Kant distinguishes (Kant indefatiguably distinguishes – this guy is the very Prince of distinguishers) thinking from what should be occurring in the head of our non-multi-tasker during the walk: ‘When a man of studious habits goes for a walk alone, it is hard for him to refrain from entertaining himself with his own reflections. But if he engages in strenuous thinking during his walk, he will soon be exhausted, whereas if he gives himself over to the free play of imagination, the motion will refresh him – the reports of others whom I asked about this confirm my own experience. If in addition to thinking he also engages in conversation while he is walking, he will be even more fatigues, so that he will soon have to sit down to continue with his play of thought. The purpose of walking in the open air is precisely to keep one’s attention moving from one object to another and so to keep it from becoming fixed on any one object.” The Man in the Crowd might disagree with the prospect of health Kant holds out here, for it is precisely the habit of not becoming fixed on any one object, but on one after another, on the crowd itself, on a multiplication of objects, that has brought the man in Poe’s story down in the world – made him into a human fiend.

Diderot, on the other hand, is going off to the Palais-Royal, a section of Paris built up by the Regent, the Duc D’Orleans, containing shops, restaurants, and a garden. The theater of the Comedie Francaise was there – recently, Palissot’s play, Les Philosophes, which mocked, among others, Diderot, had been put on there – and Café de la Régence was located in the garden. There was a cannon in the garden, too, that was fired by means of the light focused by a large magnifying glass, to announce the hours – the kind of clever toy that delighted the enlightened soul. Mercier, in the Tableau of Paris, devotes a chapter to the Palais-Royal, which he claims is “precisely the spot which Plato would have assigned the captive, in order to retain him without a jailer, and without violence, by the voluntary chains of pleasure…” – which I believe is a distant reference to the myth of the cave. Mercier bemoans the fact that people walk in the Palais Royal when they could have much more philosophical walks in gardens of the Palace of Luxemberg – “Whilst the Palais Royal is crowded with courtesans and libertines, the Luxemburg presents a quiet philosophic walk, and is only frequented by honest citizens with their decent families.” No doubt, the Luxemburg would have been preferred by Kant – but this is the difference between Kant and the French philosophes.

The Café de la Régence, which is where Diderot ends up, meeting by chance the nephew of the famous musician, Rameau, was a famous spot for chess players. The greatest chess player of the time, Philador, played there. Paul Metzner, in his book, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill and Self Promotion in Paris during the age of revolution devotes a chapter to the chess players of the Café de la Regence. The place was owned by a chess amateur, M. de Kermur, sire de Légal: “For countless years he sat in the same chair and wore the same green coat, taking large quantities of snuff and attracting a crowd with his equally brilliant conversation and combinations. He had already established his reputation as the best in France when Philidor first walked into the Regence in 1740, and he continued playing into the 1780s, his own eighties, without ever having to acknowledge a superior, although he lost at least one match.” Philidor learned how to play blindfold matches from Legal, although the latter did not often do this himself.

Well, now we have a setting for the dialogue.