Mailer - and I'm not feeling too well myself

God damn it. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Mailer's dead.

I saw him read last year, and typically he chose a nicely salacious passage from his last novel with which to entertain the largely white haired audience. There were even males in the audience - Mailer's career spanned the time when there was actually an intelligent, novel reading segment of American malehood, hard as that is to believe now. Of course, those guys are disappearing, and their places being filled by the usual male shitheads, heads filled with babyish action movies, so imaginatively illiterate that they are unable to make it all the way to the end of a Penthouse letter.

I wrote a piece for the Austin Statesman last year about the Mailer exhibit at U.T.'s Harry Ransom center. I had to radically rewrite the piece to get it published. Here's the unadulterated piece. It is newspaperish. Sorry about that.

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Although writers may be, as Shelley once said, the “unacknowledged legislators of mankind”, museum exhibits about writers tend to put them in a more modest light. A writer usually exists in a hidey hole and produces manuscripts, which are then made into books, if he or she is lucky. The writer mopes, drinks, procrastinates, writes letters, and is, more often than not, married and divorced many times. We can see the manuscripts under glass, we can see the book covers, we can gaze at some photographs of the writer, friends, and family, but we usually make this pilgrimage to pay tribute to the books themselves.

The upcoming HRC exhibit on Norman Mailer is a louder thing entirely. Rather than the archaeology of a living arrangements of a celebrated pen man, this is, rightly, an x ray of contemporary American culture, touching on all the cold war currents – celebrity culture, the Vietnam War, black power, crime and media – that are still with us as we try to create our own, shaky post Cold War models. It is hard to think of another American writer as plugged into our discontents, a more persistent critic of the (in his words) ‘barbed wire cocoon of … middle class life’, and a more conflicted egomaniac than Norman Mailer. His career provides not only the basis of this exhibit, derived from the purchase of Mailer’s archive last year, but also for a three day symposium of scholars, activists, enemies and friends, capped by a panel on which it is hoped that Mailer will participate himself, and a showing of the four films he directed at the Alamo Draft House. The latter are an especially nice touch. D.A. Pennebaker, the filmmaker with whom Mailer worked, loaned his own prints for these rarely seen movies. According to Jameson West of the Austin Film Society, who suggested the film festival to the HRC, the early films – Wild 90, Beyond the Law, and the legendary financial disaster, Maidstone, are a ‘holy grail’ to cinephiles.

From best selling author to hip

In a self-revealing passage in Armies of the Night, his book about the march on the Pentagon in 1967, Mailer writes about seeing himself in a documentary that

“for a warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter – he had on screen… a faint taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable – the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.”

Mailer was raised, however, to be a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, in a household in which he was the much loved and loving son, who made his family proud by going to Harvard and studying to be an engineer. Then came World War II. Mailer, who really wanted to be a novelist and saw himself as the heir of the great generation of novelists before him – Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos and Steinbeck – joined not only out of patriotic feeling, but out of his sense of the literary main chance: the biggest novelists, the Tolstoys and the Hemingways, wrote about war.

According to his official biographer, Robert Lucid, [shall I say, who was interviewed for this story?], he was, in effect, a nice young man at Harvard. “His mother said, in an interview with Manso [another biographer], that when Norman got out of the army, there was something missing. There was a gentleness that was taken away.” Mailer himself has said he discovered the best part of America in the obscenity of American military humor and conversation. He had, also, picked up experience in the Pacific theater of combat that went into the The Naked and the Dead. When he finished that novel, he went to France with his wife, Bea. He returned to find that it was an overnight sensation. He was one of the first literary ‘stars’ of the WWII generation. While the book endures, and provided Mailer with an steady income in the fifties, Mailer has never ranked this novel among his favorites. He has often said that he did not feel that the style of the book was something unique to himself. To find out what was unique to himself, Mailer commenced a long hegira to his own style, during which he produced two novels: Barbary Shore, which was greeted by an almost universal Bronx cheer by the critics, who not only hated it but hated it gleefully; and, Deer Park. This, too, at least in Mailer’s opinion, was not given the critical reception it deserved – although over the years it has come to be viewed as one of the few great Hollywood novels. For Mailer, however, whose ambition was not simply to write novels, but to write novels that were as newsworthy and change making as presidential elections or World Series, there was a sense that he had come to some unlucky impasse in the American culture itself in which even the greatest novel wouldn’t have the effect it should have. Something had either gone dead in the American nerve, or in the form of the novel itself.

According to Lucid, at the same time Mailer was wrestling with these writer’s issues, he continued in full flight from being the ‘nice guy.’ This was accelerated by his marriage to Adele Morales in 1951, after divorcing Bea. Adele was a painter who ran with the abstract expressionist set and mixed with New York’s beats. Norman and Adele became habitués of the bohemian circles in New York as well as in the circles of the literary establishment. In the demi-monde of the beats, heavy drinking, experiments in sex, curiosity about drugs and the outer limits of experience were norms long before the birth of the sixties counter-culture. Adele, self confessedly, loved drama. And Mailer, self-confessedly, was getting interested in ‘the dangerous imperatives of his psychopathy.’ The result was a marriage with the quality of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf:’ a traveling show of ugly party scenes, continuous tension, and games of infidelity – all of which fed into the more and more frenzied tone of Mailer’s writing, which found its rhythms in a series of essays for a weekly newspaper Mailer helped found, The Village Voice. Many of these were collected in an unusual book entitled Advertisements for Myself. Michael Lennon, a Mailer scholar who, for years, kept Mailer’s archives, said about his own interest in Mailer, “the trigger for me was Advertisements for Myself.” This was true for many in the coming sixties generation. The book gave birth to a new tone and attitude that turned into the cultural politics of the sixties.

At the center of this attitude is an essay beginning: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years.” No other essay Mailer ever wrote had the impact of The White Negro: superficial reflections on the hipster. Here thoughts Mailer had been revolving about politics, race, sex, and metaphysics finally achieved critical mass in a style that Mailer would only deepen for the next fifteen years.

In the essay, Mailer outlined his Manichean view of the possibilities in the present day world situation. Given the looming possibility of mass death, one had two choices. One could exist in the face of that risk as an existential bravo, embracing the input of the senses and impulses and even one’s most hideous fantasies as they lead you to actions which may annihilate any control you could exert over your life. This was the path of the ‘existentialist.’ Or one could strangle the muddled vital impulse by opting for ever greater levels of security, and a society that exiled the primitive, the raw, and the ambiguous. The outlaw or the conformist – these were the options.

The complexity in this essay can easily be hidden by the wild and romantic investment Mailer makes in the ‘primitive’ black male – who he sees as the ultimate sexual player, marked for violence in an America in which the sounds of lynching parties still rumble in the basement of the collective psyche. This ‘negro’ of Mailer’s is an odd creature, touched by the prevailing racist codes of the fifties, yet still as recognizable as the semi-serious heroes in today’s gangsta rap. In the sixties, Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver would defend Mailer against charges of racism by James Baldwin, seeing Mailer’s mythic street fighter as the prefiguration of black power. Equality of opportunity, for Cleaver, as for Mailer, meant equality of threat. Still the importance of this essay in Mailer’s work is not so much for its racial mythology as for the fact that here he finally he forged the connection between our historically unique vulnerability, materialized in the bomb, and the root of that condition in our search for invulnerability. Out of our fear arose the promise that technology would give us a final solution – power, goodness and absolute invulnerability. The latter project led not only to the atom bomb, but to the technological colonization of every outcropping of nature in our lives: of sex, with birth control; of food, with the sacrifice of taste to the mass production of fruits, vegetables and meats; of our living spaces, with the clutter of homogenous franchises, the rise of faceless business architecture, and the increasing loss of regional particularity; and of course, in art itself, with the merger of aesthetic standards and mass marketing. In later essays in the sixties, Mailer overlays this technophobia with a final, cosmological touch – the nature that technology tries to crush is related to the beleagured status of Mailer’s existential God, conceivably outgunned by his loveliest creation, Lucifer. While many took this to be Mailer playing with language, all indications are that Mailer wasn’t fooling. In the best intentions, Mailer saw the signature marks of the devil; in the worst criminals, he saw the workings of divinity. There is nothing Mailer hates more than the liberal idea, expressed by Hannah Arendt, of the banality of evil. Mailer has never backed away from his belief in both God and the Devil – and finds the embarrassed liberal attempt to eliminate the latter as delusive as the conservative’s notion that he represents the intentions of the former.

These insights led Mailer throw himself into the countercultural politics of the sixties. In 1960, as Mailer was writing an influential, pro-Kennedy essay in Esquire, he also planned to run for Mayor of New York. His idea was that he would appeal to those never appealed to by politicians: the homeless, the outlaws, the gang members. All of which came to a halt on November 19, 1960, when, at the party thrown to announce his mayoral intentions, a clearly disassociated Mailer stabbed his wife Adele.

Adele survived, and decided to divorce him instead of imprison him. Mailer got off with a few weeks observation in Bellevue. But he was now marked as a violent man, a reputation he both used – his next novel, The American Dream, begins with the hero killing his wife – and objected to. In the sixties, Mailer seemed to be wired to everything that was happening in America. His early, prescient opposition to the Vietnam war, and his idea that the anti-war movement should move out of the traditional ways of doing politics, deeply influenced the movement. His book, Armies of the Night, won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer. He was a familiar presence on tv talk shows, and rarely a boring one. And he finally did run for the mayor of New York City, using his unorthodox strategy, in 1969. Fortunately for Mailer, he lost.

However, he ended the decade broke (from financing his film Maidstone, a monumental flop) and a little worn out by the assassinations, the election of Nixon, and the launching of the Apollo 13. The last seemed to signal the triumph of the technological power he associated with Satan. On all fronts, Mailer seemed to enter the seventies as a loser. Yet, as Lucid argues, the seventies is perhaps his most artistically successful decade. It includes the biography of Marilyn Monroe, The Fight (Mailer’s classic account of the Ali-Foreman fight) through Executioner’s Song to Ancient Evenings in 1983.

From Male Chauvinist to Ancient Egypt

Mailer began the seventies by launching a strong attack on women’s liberation. In retrospect, this was an almost suicidally foolish thing to do for a writer. The audience for novels was shifting, as men began to desert fiction and women became the core audience for the novel. Mailer became, in the media, a caricature of the male Neanderthal, and sometimes seemed to gleefully help on the process. A TV appearance on the Dick Cavett show, in which he was supposed to debate Gore Vidal (who had infuriated Mailer by writing in a review that ‘There has been from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression’) added to his notoriety as a wild man. On the aesthetic level, however, the feminist movement seemed to have more of an impact than he admitted. His best writing of the seventies either centered on women – the biographical ‘novel’ of Marilyn Monroe – or were anchored in female characters of a much more considered complexity, such as in Mailer’s portrait of Nicole Baker, Gary Gilmore’s lover, in Executioner’s Song.

At the same time he was picking fights with Germain Greer, Mailer also maintained his fascination with criminals. This lead to what some consider his best book. Larry Schiller, “a hard-scrabble guy,” as Michael Lennon calls him, had bought the rights to Gary Gilmore’s story. Gilmore had killed two men in Provo, Utah. Condemned to death, he asked the state to execute him, in spite of the pleas of his lawyer. A circus atmosphere surrounded the execution. Gilmore requested death by firing squad. Schiller had already teamed up teamed up with Mailer to do the Marilyn Monroe book. He persuaded Mailer to do Gilmore’s story. The result was absolutely uncharacteristic of the Mailer people had grown accustomed to. Mailer, or his ego counterpart, seemed to drop completely from the text. The story gathers its own momentum in unadorned, unsparing paragraphs, seemingly beyond the author’s biases or control. Joan Didion’s review of the book is famous in its own right, and its description of what Mailer is up to still seems perfect: ‘The very subject of “The Executioner’s Song” is that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fade out, trail off, like skywriting.”

But Mailer’s next, real life encounter with a convict didn’t come off so triumphantly. A convict named Jack Abbott began to write Mailer letters. Mailer found them astonishingly good. He arranged to get Abbott paroled, and his letters published at the same time. But in July 1981, in the same month that Abbott’s letters were coming out and merely three weeks after he’d been released from prison, he knifed a waiter to death. Mailer came in for some very hard press from the New York tabloids.

In 1983, Mailer’s highly touted ‘big novel’ was finally published. A long novel about ancient Egypt was not what one expected, exactly, from the heir to Hemingway’s throne. Ancient Evenings received decent reviews, but it never made the impact Mailer’s previous novels made. In the current literary atmosphere, which is more accepting of fantasy and alternative realities, it would perhaps have fared better. The Egypt of three thousand years ago, in which death and reincarnation are facts of life about which the reader just has to get around as he or she can, reflects to a large extent Mailer’s own conclusions about the nature of the world. Michael Lennon points out that Mailer was always interested in point of view, but always had trouble escaping from the prison of the first person, even though he had a firm belief in his own extra sensory ability to escape from his own person – to influence events by directing his mind’s eye at them. His solution in Armies of the Night and the works of the late sixties is to externalize himself as “Mailer’ or ‘Aquarius.’ In Ancient Evenings, with a narrator who can read minds, he can combine the objective and the subjective in a wholly different way, breaking down the reader’s sense of fundamental categories.

No justice, no peace

In his debate with Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett show, Mailer had said, “By God, I may be writing on the floor, but if you taught me something about writing, I’d look up and I’d love you for teaching me something about writing.” As Lucid puts it, “it is almost impossible to separate any horrible or mundane thing he did from the underlying strategy to be a writer.” By 1983, Norman Mailer was the writer he’d set out to be. It was the era of the Pied Piper, as Mailer called Reagan. Mailer was settling into a more established role himself. His marriage to his sixth wife, Norris, did not progress from epic battle to epic battle – it was actually rather stable. Mailer worked on his CIA novel, Harlot’s Ghost, engaged in a few literary cat fights – notably, with Tom Wolfe – and seemed to be generally in that retreat we accord to venerated writers whose most upsetting writings are now coolly embalmed by graduate student’s in the clammy terms of whatever literary theory is in fashion. The ambitious, even megalomaniac notion of the writer as a fighter pitted against the malign intentions of the culture was out of synch with 80s culture. In 1991, Mailer did manage to make waves with his semi-defense of American Psycho, Brad Easton Ellis’ much abhorred novel. For Mailer it horrifyingly inversed the premise of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities: in this novel, it was not that the rich, in contact with the underclass, committed crimes, but that the rich were the criminals from the get-go, and the underclass was its privileged victim. At the same time he was carrying the torch for this anti-corporate stance, Mailer alienated some of his older audience by seeming to make piece with the world of intelligence he probed in Harlot’s Ghost. He made a speech at CIA headquarters, a building he would formerly have picketed. One wondered if all the fires were banked.

Recently, it looks like they are still active. Mailer’s denunciations of the war in Iraq have been issued with as much fire and brimstone as the early speeches against the war in Vietnam. They are logically continuous with the view of the world he worked out long ago, as a young man, after The Naked and the Dead. His appearance in Austin in 2005, coinciding with the announcement of the purchase of his papers, was turned into an opportunity for provocation as Mailer once again spit fire against the war, and against Bush’s administration.

Appreciation

There is a Jewish myth recounted by the philosopher Shestov that goes like this: when the angel of death comes down to close the eyes of man, the angel’s body is all covered with eyes. Sometimes the angel discovers that he has made a mistake. The term of the man’s life that he has come for still has more time to go. So the angel pulls one of the eyes off his body and gives it to the man. “ … then the man sees strange and new things, more than other men see and more than he himself sees with his natural eyes; and he also sees, not as men see but as the inhabitants of other worlds see: that things do not exist "necessarily", but "freely", that they are and at the same time are not, that they appear when they disappear and disappear when they appear. The testimony of the old, natural eyes, "everybody's" eyes, directly contradicts the testimony of the eyes left by the angel. But since all our other organs of sense, and even our reason, agree with our ordinary sight, and since the whole of human "experience", individual and collective, supports it, the new vision seems to be outside the law, ridiculous, fantastic, the product of a disordered imagination.” Such men are then considered mad. Shestov simply says, “And then begins a struggle between two kinds of vision, a struggle of which the issue is as mysterious and uncertain as its origin.”

Surely of the writers of his generation, Mailer has been the one most gifted or cursed with this kind of outlaw vision. It has lead him through stunts, exhibitionism, some incredibly stupid posturing, and some extremely valuable prose in which something outside of the normal run of human experience, some possibility in an age that erected absolutes into weapons at the same time as it destroyed absolutes in all domains of intellectual life, still lives. Who, in the present state of American culture, in which all our present claimants to outlaw visions are cleverly obeying the dictates of marketing campaigns, is Mailer’s heir? Nobody. The line is extinct.

the civilizing mission: Tahiti/Samoa

A thesis is the poetry of logic, and it usually ends up, x eyed and down, strangled by detail. Or at least this is my conclusion after hearing many many details in many many papers at the History of Science Society conference. It jolted me, since my own essay in the making, attacking the triumph of happiness, sometimes seems so mired in the Enlightenment underground, so intent on picking up odd writers, that it seems bent on disappointing my original inspiration, which was to strike a blow against a cultural dominant that is leading us to ruin. So, I need a bit of air and a leap ahead, which is why LI’s post today is about Andy Martin’s Willing Women: Samoa, Tahiti, and the Western Imagination, published in the Raritan in 1997.

It is a superclever essay, since Martin takes Bougainville’s Voyage – an important Enlightenment text – as the background to dissect the famous controversy about Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa – another famous text, this one coming out of the ‘mongrel modernism’ of the twenties. Mead was accused of gross fraud by an Australian anthropologist in the 1980s, Derek Freeman – but it wasn’t just Mead who was accused, here. Rather, Freeman rightly saw Mead as representative of the cultural relativism and liberalism of her time – from a vulgar Hegelian viewpoint, you could say that American liberalism springs from the synthesis of twenties liberations (cultural and sexual) and the thirties economic rationality (FDR’s patchwork Keynesianism). Freeman is a bit of a hero on the right, and Mead more than a bit of a devil.

“Mead's scenario of love in the South Seas, "under the palm trees" in her own phrase, started to unravel in the 1980s, when an Australian, Derek Freeman, denounced her narrative as a myth {Margaret Mead and Samoa, 1983). In his account, Samoan culture was in fact rigid, male-dominated, hierarchical, fundamentalist, fixated on premarital virginity. He even brought forward, as evidence, one of Mead's own sources who confessed—sixty-odd years after the event—that she and her friends had freely misled Mead by telling her what she wanted to hear, stories of innumerable moonlit rendezvous and sultry perfumed liaisons. In truth they remained strict conformists to the Samoan moral code. Mead herself later admitted she had been hoaxed.”

Martin begins his essay with a variation of the classic Freudian question, what do women want – in this case, what did Mead want? Want, of course, is fated to produce doppelgangers and decoys, generating a black market in which authenticity is traded for mockery and vice versa. It is zoned for irony. In this case, the irony is that what the women of Samoa wanted in telling Mead what she wanted to hear, supposedly. Martin is a little too comfortable changing the locus of the controversy to Tahiti – the shift is justified by the reference to the “South Seas”, and the easiness comes to haunt this essay, as I will point out later – but I don’t think he is totally wrong to make the shift. Martin starts with an account of Bougainville’s ten day stay in Tahiti. Bougainville came there in a ship named, appropriately, Boudeuse - ‘literally, "Sulky Woman" or "Kissing Couch"’ – and his description of this landfall as a sexual paradise became, of course, a topos for the crossed destinies of Rousseau and Sade, for the nobility of the natural and the unnaturalness of nobility.

Martin’s essay is a nice attempt to survey the metaphorical implication of ‘Tahiti’ – viewing it as not simply a metaphor attached and functioning in a Western orientalist metaphoric, but as a catalyst that joins together one view of women’s desire (a view that Martin, rather hastily, identifies with Freud’s discovery, via Dora, that the unconscious never says ‘no’), with orientalism itself. Tahiti touches Napoleon and Flaubert’s Egypt and transforms them into Cythera – Bougainville’s own metaphor for Tahiti. Flaubert’s Egypt leads us from Madame Bovary to Gauguin - back to the real Tahiti. Gauguin leads us back to rape. And rape leads us to Sade, whose texts contain woman as the object who cannot be raped – since women are fated always to say yes, even when they say no. The problem with this account of rape is, obviously, that it takes raped to be defined by a judicial notion which is surely, if anything, a product of the liberal patriarchy which is, at the same time, being accused by Martin of generating the unrapeable, infinitely submissive, infinitely wanting woman. One theme is entangled with another, but Martin, working through the margins, comes to affirm the patriarchal gestures of a rightwinger like Freeman and – in a bizarre coda concerning Martin’s own sexual object, Brigitte Bardot – Bardot, whose autobiography is disconcertingly thrown into this mix.

Thus, though LI can say that both Martin and myself are operating under the baleful moon of deconstruction - we are brothers under the skin - I cannot fully endorse Martin’s elaboration of his theme.

Only men and boys can truly seem to be raped [in Sade], since they frequently put up more than token resistance, whereas, in the case of girls and women, sex, however coercive and even fatal, is always ultimately consensual. The Sadeian would-be rapist is invariably irritated, provoked, outraged by this apparently irrepressible fountain of feminine pleasure and desire. The sexual criminal can therefore always reasonably assert, in Sade, that no crime has been committed since he was only responding to an implicit invitation: all along he has done nothing but provide the supply to her demand.

Suppressed by Napoleon, marginalized as erotica, Sade's texts can now be seen to constitute the archetype of the nineteenth-century novel in Erance. Erom Madame de Stael through to Colette, the novels written by women constitute a series of variations, suh-Juliette, on the uninhibited woman. Novels written by men tend to subscribe more to the model of Justine, taking an initially more passive woman and forcing her to show her true and more predatory colors. One reason, I would contend, why Elaubert's Madame Bovary is often represented as the greatest of nineteenth-century novels is that it is the most flagrantly Sadeian of afl texts in the period.”

It is a bold thing to elaborate a contrarian thesis that you then take to be operating, unconsciously, among the community at large all the time – Martin is contending not only that his reading of Sade is right, but that the Sadeian impulse is so dominant that it determines unconsciously the judgments of the critical community. Sade so dominates that you will notice it is Sade in particular who Napoleon bans - rather than, as was the case, a whole group of erotic writers from the eighteenth century. By this means, Sade becomes so central that the critic, apparently, like the women of Tahiti, can’t say no to Sade, even if they appear not to be thinking of him at all. Derridian histories become problematic in the instance in which they forget their own overdeterminations. There is no, so to speak, control on the catalyzing power of Tahiti in Martin’s metaphoric chain. Still, Martin is right, I think, to see Bougainville’s Tahiti as the background to Mead’s Samoa.

“Bougainvillea, the brilliantly colored vine (named by Commerson. Botanist Royal aboard the Boudeuse) that Bougainville brought back from the tropical South, takes root and flowers in Europe. At the same time there springs up a whole Bougainvillean crop of ideas, which we can loosely bundle under the heading of "Southism," that bursts out in the nineteenth-century novel and the paintings of Gauguin. The Bougainvifle-Gauguin axis becomes the center of gravity of a pertod, from Rousseau to Mead, which proudly thrusts up fantasies of willing women like the figurehead of a ship. That hazy catchall concept of phallogocentrism can be understood, I would
argue, as the revelation of a secret orgiastic theory about the desires of women, especially young girls, for men.”

LI has found it hard to say what women want, in my thesis about the change in emotional customs brought about by the great transformation. I’ve made several false starts. My sense that volupte acts as the ‘center of gravity’ of the seventeenth century prehension of the Enlightenment bonheur thesis has been influenced by the fact that so many women took their intellectual places as advocates and opponents of volupté – and that the women who advocated it were writing in the wake of Gassendi’s re-introduction of Epicurus to the high cultural scene. But so many women makes for… how many women? My sample size will always be unrepresentative, insofar as it is hard to know just what samples to take, what the variables are that influence them, etc.

That Martin seems to naively accept Freeman’s account of Mead, and Bardot’s account of her younger self, tells us that he definitely needed to counterweight his own quest for the catalyzing effects of Tahiti. Such is the power of poetry that some of Martin’s instances are irresistible:

“At the end of the eighteenth century, the poet and revolutionary Camille Desmoulins spoke of his desire to "compose a Tahiti of the heart" as he was carted off to the guillotine.”

But Martin's thesis, which aligns Desmoulins, Napoleon, Freud and Mead in a massive denial of rape, seems to me not to be the center of gravity of Orientalism. One way to bring this out is to read Martin's article against this piece in the Summer, 2006 issue of Ethnohistory by Paul Shankman, which goes over the Freeman-Mead controversy one more time. His article makes for an interesting twist on Martin’s thesis, for it is possible, on re-reading it, to see that Martin is making an argument that is imbricated with a standard apologetic for imperialism – that the Europeans abolished barbaric customs that oppressed women. The suttee is one. The abolition of the public defloration of virgins in Samoa, or taupou, is another. This is a quote from Mead:

Mead noted that by the 1920s the taupou and many other aspects of Samoan tradition had changed appreciably.

‘ Deviations from chastity were formerly punished in the case of girls by a very severe beating and a stigmatising shaving of the head. Missionaries have discouraged the beating and head shaving, but failed to substitute as forceful an inducement to circumspect conduct. The girl whose sex activities are frowned upon by her family is in a far better position than that of her great-grandmother. The navy has prohibited, the church has interdicted the defloration ceremony, formerly an inseparable part of the marriages of girls of rank; and thus the most potent inducement to virginity has been abolished. If for these cruel and primitive methods of enforcing a stricter regime there had been substituted a religious system which seriously branded the sex offender, or a legal system which prosecuted and punished her, then the new hybrid civilisation might have been as heavily fraught with possibilities of conflict as the old civilisation undoubtedly was. (Mead 1928: 273–74)’”

Reading Shankman as a sort of counter-reading of Martin is interesting, especially in the light of Martin’s 90s-ish take on feminism, rape and Freud (Martin goes so far as to agree with Masson), which, as we can see from the past seven years, is consistent with using feminism as the avant garde justification for America’s imperial policy – precisely toward that Orient which, in Martin’s view, is Napoleon’s unrapeable female. There's a well known history of viewing the imperial power as the guardian of the native female, but it is not to be found in Martin – rather, it is disguised by a trendy extension of the Sadean template to all of Europe. The rape ideology then infects Mead and the cultural relativists. And, to give us a sort of ultimate 90s-ish trompe l’oeil effect, Martin prominently features the memories of older women, looking back at their younger selves and telling the truth about those selves – the Samoan women Freeman quotes, and the older B.B.

Shankman, however, reverses the nineties trope by quoting the younger Freeman, whose dissertation, arising from his fieldwork in Samoa in 1948, actually tallies with Mead’s picture of Samoa, and disagrees with Freeman’s later assertion that the intervention of the missionaries was not inconsistent with the native Samoan ethos, which never countenanced the free sexual behavior Mead claimed that she had discovered from her informants. Younger selves and older selves, here: a variable that is too often underconceptualized, or simply omitted, in our narratives.

Shankman has engaged in a lot of controversy with Freeman, as is evident from his paper. However, in his defense of Mead’s credibility, he quotes from Freeman’s 1948 thesis on our topic: rape and unrapeability.

F

reeman continues his discussion of marriage by reporting that ‘‘most avaga’’[elopement marriages] begin with a moetotolo, or ‘‘sleep crawling.’’ ‘‘Sleep crawling’’ refers to a practice in which a young man silently slips into the young woman’s house at night and, without awakening the household sleeping all around them, engages in sex with her. It is one form that clandestine relationships take and may be part of courtship. It is also dangerous for the young man, who, if caught, could be severely beaten and his family fined. Nevertheless, Freeman (1948: 208) comments that ‘‘in many instances a moetotolo is achieved with the connivance of the girl concerned.’’ That is, despite the risk involved to the boy and possibly to herself, the girl may have encouraged the relationship. Here Freeman is suggesting that in many cases the relationshipwas consensual and that the girl might be willing, a point made in somewhat more detail by ethnographer Tim O’Meara (1996: 108).

In Freeman’s published description of avaga in Margaret Mead and Samoa (1983: 240), he reiterates that girls may ‘‘actively encourage’’ their own seduction. However, Freeman now defines moetotolo exclusively as forcible ‘‘surreptitious rape’’ (244), in which the young man clandestinely crawls into a girl’s house and manually deflowers her in symbolic imitation of the pre-European defloration ceremony. In fact, Freeman argues that moetotolo is characterized by aggression and that Mead misinterpreted this custom (245), stating that:

“The intention of the sleep crawler is, in fact, to creep into the house in which a female virgin is sleeping, and before she has awoken to rape her manually by inserting one or two fingers in her vagina, an action
patterned on the ceremonial defloration of a taupou.”

This is all rather fascinating. To disentagle the the politics of rape and consent, of subjects and objects, of the construction of a legal system that punishes rape in the context of a culture that tends towards liberal ‘relativism’ gives us the contradictions and stresses of our current imperialist fiasco. That fiasco depends, muchly, on its refusal ever to take ‘women’ or ‘men’ as anything but unified and compartmentalized categories. That compartmentlization allows for disengaging them from the other variables of their social life - notably, their social and economic position in society - and allows us to gain a compartmentalized truth. What has puzzled me about the discourse of the last seven years is that the Enlightenment, the springtime of cultural relativism, has become a codeword for universalism. And that the feminist strike against patriarchy has been seized as a buttress of imperialism. From universal values to a nice little bombing raid on Iran is another hop skip and a jump through catalytic metaphors that I will save for some later post.

46 more shopping days till Hulaichi's deathday

Another black hole in the killing zone
A little more mad in the methadrome…

“Washington: Sir, the CIA rendition program was started under Bill Clinton. This is something that just gets lost in all this discussion. I hope your film reflects that.

Stephen Grey [producer, FRONTLINE: Rendition]: Yes, we made that clear.
It's an important legal point because it means that when the U.S. came to Sept. 11, they already had extensive experience in how these prisoners would be treated when rendered to places like Egypt. The biggest rendition was in the summer of 1998 (four from Albania, and one from Bulgaria). Of those rendered, two were hanged without trial. All alleged very serious torture; it was documented in court.”
- Discussion, Washington post


While I was away in D.C., I was unsurprised to see that there was no announcement that Andrew Moonen had been arrested for murder, nor any announcement that the justice department took any interest in Margaret Scobey’s status as an accessory. So I was thinking: what can we do to celebrate this great, this minor, this emblematic, this damning, this sickening, this let’s all eat shit and die social fact? Well, by a happy circumstance, the murder of Raheem Khalif Hulaichi took place on our greatest holiday, when God said that he so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosever believeth in him could buy a Desert War III: Hard Combat for the boy and the TinyTots Iphone for the little girl this Hulaichi deathday. Yes, I was thinking of counting down the shopping days to Raheem Khalif Hulaichi’ s deathday. Maybe Umm Sajjad can even get her compensation from the Maliki or Mehdi official who apparently stole it before it reached her – for such is the virtuous circle of Moloch in Baghdad, as pointed out by Praxis in my comment section below.

In the meantime, let’s all sing our Hulaichi deathday songs as we gather 'round the yule log:

Its a small world and it smells funny
I’d buy another if it wasn’t for the money
Take back what I paid
For another motherfucker in a motorcade

ezekiel returns from babylon, bearing gift certificates

I’ve known M since we lived together on ‘Manslaughter’ street in New Haven back in the 90s, and have loved her with as pure a love as this corrupt hulk can manufacture. She is now a professor, married to a writer and historian (who, she told me, just won one of Mexico’s most prestigious prizes for a book he published last year) in Mexico City, and has two incredibly beautiful kids. She was giving a talk on a panel at the Society for the History of Science conference in D.C., and floated me a ticket to come up and see her.

So I flew into the Ronald Reagan airport with the kind of funny feeling Ezekiel would have had if he had were going on an all expense paid weekend to Babylon. D.C., after all, is at the very center of the American Jitters that have knocked me severely askew for years now – it is the symbolic embodiment of all that is lunatic, corrupt, short term and blind in this land where God shed his grace and the corn grows as high as the genetically altered elephant’s eye.

When I was a kid, I went to D.C. a lot. My Mom’s people lived in Montgomery county. They were all, or mostly, Republican, and – such are the tricks in this life – all worked for the guv’mint. Except my Democrat Uncle Harry, God bless him. First big Democrat, first big cigar smoker, first Catholic in my life. Otherwise, it was a nest of Southern Baptists. In truth, at the time I was less interested in Democrats and Republicans than cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, or the huge slide in the park in back of my grandmother’s house, which had one of those nice shiny and sharp metal edges at the end of it now banned in most places and replaced by softer outdoor environments made of plastic and painted with candy colors and holding no threat. I suppose that is a good thing.

However, since I came into a man’s estate, I have not often walked the streets of D.C. And not at all since it was infested with Bush.

As it turned out, though, the stooge tourist in my soul soon fell in love with the monuments and book stores and coffee shops, worshiped the God Lincoln in his temple, went the dutiful round of National Museums, and even had a few kindly thoughts for the Crystal Gate Marriott, where the History of Science wingding was going on. There were a lot of microhistories that receded into the micro a bit too much, and there were the cocktail hours that had the odd flow you get when you put cheap wine and expensive bottles of beer in the hands of the chattering academic type and confine them to the unimpressive architecture of international blandness characteristic of mid priced hotels – imagine the buzz that would arise from a special flypaper that caught a couple hundred intellectuals, and you get the soundscape. My people, obviously. The HSS Hazen lecture, ‘How Science became Technical’ by Theodore Porter was my own personal highlight of the conference. Porter works in areas dear to my heart, and upon which I am probably going to poach for this review I am way behind on, namely: quantification, precision and the construction of the system of objectivity.

M. is a walker. She once walked me down the entire length of Miami Beach to the very end, across a bridge, and deep into Miami’s Colombian neighborhood. A journey that looms larger in my mind than it does in hers. We did considerable urban hiking, however. And once we resettled in cheaper digs at Day’s Inn, after the Marriott business ended, we rather radiated out from Connecticut avenue – to the left, into the heart of Georgetown, and to the east, to the Capital and such. We did most of the things we set out to do, except finding some boots for C., M.’s daughter, and finding a particular pale blue shade of tights – in quest of the latter we must have sorted through every Benetton’s and Sisley’s in the precincts of the Capital district. We even included in our sweep the clothing stores in Union Station.

Pale blue tights are hard to find this year.

There are three things about me that irritate M. I always leave food on my plate. I have a terrible sense of direction. And … well, I can’t remember what the third one is. In the main, however, we get along pretty well as traveling companions. She wanted to see the the Natural History Museum and the Botanical Garden, and I wanted to see the WACK! exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. We were pretty well satisfied with our choices. I will write about the WACK! exhibit in my next.

Like one of North’s M & M astronauts, LI is blasting off to D.C. for the next four days. I’m going to be attending the Society of the History of Science conference there – or, really, sneaking into it. My friend M. is giving a paper there, a brief prospectus of her upcoming book on Colonial science. Then we are heading out to see the D.C. sites – ah, you FBI/Homeland security people who’ve been reading my pot-bouille of disgruntlement, take note! Yes, I plan on scourging with my fearsome criticisms every branch of government whilst up there. I’m taking my soapbox. (Although, in actuality, I’ll probably go to the zoo. Fuck worrying about the guv’mint. Picture me givin a damn I said never).

finally, monsieur, a wafer thin mint

Finally,monsieur, a wafer thin mint.

It is a minor thing, really. The Fed’s rate cut yesterday. It goes against every principle that the Federal Reserve used to adhere to. It was accompanied by a Commerce Department report that told a tale of epic fiction about inflation – down this quarter to its lowest point in years, apparently. Such is the magic of the hedging formulas now used to produce almost any result that you want. The rate cut sank the dollar further, and raised the price of oil. In effect, the Fed declared that its raison d’etre, at the moment, is simply and solely to help out the richest investors in this country, and the rest of the country be damned.

Sure, that has been the Bush mantra since 2001. Although it is a mistake to think that the change in degree brought about by the Bush seizure of power is a change of kind – we have had the same economic and social trends since 1981. The quiet violence of a policy intended to reduce the majority of the country to a comfortable peon status, where their major power would consist of selecting their favorite singers on American Idol and, if they were lucky, shifting their credit card debt to a lower interest rate on a special one time only offer, while in the background economic and political power was concentrated in the hands of a debauched few, has become the open violence of that meshing of interests between the financial, the petro-chemical, and the war industries, displaying its naked form in the great war crime of Iraq. We have been coming to this point ever since I was legally entitled to fuck. So I should be as used to the mix of affluence and powerlessness as anyone else. But unluckily for me, I was perverted to the very marrow by Sunday School, Bob Dylan, and the game of Monopoly, all of which taught me that untrammeled and irresponsible power forms itself, irresistibly, into murder. It also taught me about Get out of Jail Free cards. They are now issued like party favors in D.C.

So what happened yesterday and what happened this summer is that the Fed dispensed with disguises and openly became a boiler room adjunct of Wall Street. Having crafted one bubble after another to keep the economy humming along, we have reached the end of the string. Bubbles are the crack capitalist way to affect redistribution of the wealth. The crack for the common man comes in the form of an expanded power of purchase on all levels – although one not accompanied by a corresponding expansion of earnings. This, in turn, leads to an ever widening dominance of the investor class, the group that is, collectively, ‘owed’. That group, however, monetizes what it is collectively owed – its virtual capture of surplus value - to expand its own purchasing power – it builds a second tier of debt on the debt it is owed. And like the tower of Babel, from the ground level this looks like it can go on forever. There is an upper limit, however, at least theoretically, a point where the expanded power of purchase of the common man can go no further without something drastic happening – for instance, an expansion of real earnings. The primary directive of the Fed is to keep that from happening – it is the institutional embodiment of strike breaking in the U.S. But if that doesn’t happen, the wealthiest themselves will become overextended – they won’t be able to monetized what they are owed in the vulgar sense, that is, with actual money, without risking massive default, which comes down to one of those old economic laws: you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.

So, to treat the pain, the Fed has turned into Doctor Feelgood. But in two or three months, the pain is going to show up at the gas station. And nobody is going to like that pain. Similarly, the metric that the Fed really despises – how much common things cost for common people – is going to intrude like a big party crasher. On the upside, given the intangible of warmer weather, there will probably be less heating oil used in the cold states this year – that which doesn’t kill us, as Fred N. liked to say, allows us to contrive ever more elaborate systems for killing ourselves.

So the question then will be: how much more shit will the common man swallow? Since shit eating and toad eating have been the most popular American pastimes lately, it ought to be quite something to watch: this moment when we all can’t eat that last piece of crap, handed to us from on high.

no little murders

“What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world who from opposite sides of great gulfs have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!”

It is a funny thing, murder. I am definitely romantic enough to be sympathetic to the right murderer. But in truth, I am not in the economic class where something like me being wiped off the face of the earth is going to make much of a stink. I am among the easily murdered rather than the other way around, and I suppose that makes me sensitive. So I have cause for some solidarity with the spilt blood of Raheem Khalif, a man whose image I can’t find on Google. No fame or fortune for him, indeed. And such a small, such a tiny, such a remote soul does not haunt the corridors of the State Department. Or so the State Department thinks.

I think differently. I think that when David conspired to have Uriah the Hittite ambushed so that he could take Uriah’s wife, Bathsheeba, I think God cursed Israel. I think when Lady Deadlock committed no crime but that of deserting her daughter and, on the way to the long discovery of this fact, Tulkinghorn was murdered, that Lady Deadlock would die herself, chased by the Furies of the liberal novelist’s conscience. I think when Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, is murdered by the woman he could actually be in love with, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, that he turns her into the cops:

"Well, if you get a good break, you'll be out of Tehachapi in twenty years and you can come back to me then. I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck. Yes, angel, I'm gonna send you over. The chances are you'll get off with life. That means if you're a good girl you'll be out in twenty years. I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I'll always remember you."

It is the improbable, liberal hope of the novelist that the circle will be unbroken, by and by lord by and by.

On the other hand, most murders do go unsolved. Who murdered the forty to sixty million in World War II? Who murdered the million and a half in Southeast Asia, circa 1954-1974? Name the murderers, make a list. But the river is deep and the river is wide, and you’ll never cross to the other side. Name the murderers of the 675,000 in Iraq. Or more. One can be resigned that this is the way it is. One can be angry as fuck. But there it is.

But one can’t be resigned to the little murders. No, the liberal novelists idea, his one shining idea, is that there aren’t any little murders. The liberal novelist represents the hope of every potential dumpee. For the defining trait of the republic that the novelist operates in, can operate in, is that it aspires to a minimum level of justice in which there will be no impunity for the Deadlocks – there will be none for the cops – there will be none for the rich heirs – there will be none for the politicians – there will be none for the policymaker, the stock broker, the VIP, the strikebreaker, the mercenary, the bodyguard. Watching night and fog, aka the Justice department, engulf and hide the murder of Khalif, and hide the murderer, and hide his accomplices, is an insult, an assault, on all of us who are eminently murderable. They begin the million murder strings with just such acts of gross impunity.

“But the evil of it is that it is a world wrapped up in too much
jeweller's cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the
larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun.
It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for
want of air.”

Update on the prosecution of Andrew Moonen for murder

For those interested in justice for the murdered Iraqi bodyguard, Raneem Khalif, the Washington Post's Karen DeYoung runs a shocker today. Apparently the State Department people in Iraq promised Blackwater guards involved in mowing down Iraqis in Nisoor square in September 'immunity.' As I said in a previous post, the comparison of Bush's administration to some European fascist regime is truly off base - it is much more like a Cold War classic kleptocracy, Argentina in the 80s, the Philippines under Marcos - a place in which the air of impunity that hangs over the elite allows them maximum leaway to flout the law until the stones cry out in the street and some crystallization of all discontents emerges. Of course, given the cholesterol around the American householders sense of justice, that crystallizing moment will have to be something that especially strikes them - perhaps a speech by the President that pre-empts a really exiting episode of American Idol. At that moment, I wouldn't be surprised to see marching in the street!

In any case, the unhappy few that are interested in the mundane workings of justice should look at DeYoung's article. Here's what it reports about the homicide committed by Andrew Moonen:

The FBI investigators sent to Baghdad are due to return to Washington early this week and will then turn the information they gathered over to the Justice Department, which will decide whether prosecution is warranted. An earlier case, involving the shooting of a bodyguard of an Iraqi vice president by a Blackwater contractor last Christmas Eve, was referred to Justice months ago, but there has been no prosecution.

Law enforcement officials have said it is unclear whether the contractors are liable under any U.S. law. The administration has said it opposes a bill passed by the House last month that would place State Department contractors under laws that currently apply only to Pentagon contractors.

Administration officials have said that the Christmas Eve case has languished because of the legal uncertainties. But in congressional testimony last week, Rice said that the holdup was "not the absence of law . . . it's a question of evidence."

Karen DeYoung is one of the good Washington Post reporters. She is having a discussion today about the crimes of Blackwater, among other things. Go to the Q and A here
and drop her a question about Andrew Moonen. Ask why he is not being prosecuted. Ask why Margaret Scobey is not being prosecuted as an accomplice. Ask politely but firmly. Although we can say, of the American relation to Iraqis, what Gloucester says in Lear about the relation of gods to humans - Iraqis are to Americans as flies are to wanton boys, they kill them for their sport - let's try to kick the habit. Let's do it by honoring at least one Iraqi murdered, indeed, for sport.

P.S.

Well, for what it is worth, this is the question I sent in, and this is De Young’s answer:

Austin, Texas: In your article today, there is a puzzling paragraph about Andrew Moonen, the Blackwater guard who killed Raheem Khalif, President Maliki's bodyguard, last Christmas. Condi Rice seems to claim that the case has languished not because of an absence of law but because of "a question of evidence." But do we have any evidence that the Justice Department even has questioned Moonen after he was sent back to the U.S.? And if Moonen is prosecuted for the murder of Raneem Khalif -- which seems like an open-and-shut case to me -- will they prosecute Margaret Scobey, the acting ambassador in Iraq at the time, as an accessory? After all, she knew that Moonen killed Khalif while drunk and apparently approved -- or even decided -- the day after to help him escape back to the States.
I would think that this case is tailor-made for a special prosecutor, given that there were many people at the State department involved in covering up Moonen's crime. What frustrates people like me, outside the Beltway, is the perception since the Scooter Libby pardon of an air of impunity that seems to cover all wrongdoing by the government elite, even up to accessory to murder.
Karen DeYoung: Although we now know a lot about what happened in this case and actions of Blackwater and the U.S. Embassy in the immediate aftermath, we know practically nothing about the status of the Justice investigation into it or the likelihood of any prosecution. Although I've been told by many here that the problem is one of "what law can be used for prosecution," Rice did, indeed, say the other day that that was not the problem--that it was a lack of evidence. Apparently it is both--there were only two people present when the event occured, and only one of them is still alive.

For a more D.C.-centric view of the case, here’s another question/comment:

Washington: Everyone needs to be realistic about this ... of course these people were offered immunity -- they wouldn't be in Iraq if they weren't. They are there to protect our diplomats in a war zone where people hide behind women and children and use sucicde bombs and other things that we as Americans can't imagine using. Of course mistakes are going to be made ... and innocents are going to be killed. It is a neccesary evil, plain and simple. If we put these guys in jail, good luck getting private contractors into Iraq and other war zones across the world.
Karen DeYoung: More food for thought and comment.

I believe the good folks at UFOB invented a machine that processes lesser evil into rectitudinous squirrels. It has been a smash seller, as you can imagine. Mr. Scruggs was wined and dined extensively at the last Kos convention, where he modestly opined that he was “the Thomas Edison of political apparatuses”. I believe those are his words. Or was it "The demon Belzebuub, come to judge among the quick and the dead"? The vocal distortion on the video I saw made it hard to tell, although the room did, at that moment, grow bloody red, and griffons appeared to hunt among the shrieking members of the audience.

Anyway, UFOB needs to come up with an evil machine 2.0 tout de suite, that can work on ‘necessary evil’. Remember, without necessary evil, ‘good luck getting private contractors into Iraq.” Yikes. A world without mercenaries is like a day without sunshine – or rather, like hell without sulfur.

I'll give you four mars for one venus

Worldwide, irrigation guzzles about 70 percent of the freshwater people use. To grow food for expanding human populations, people divert rivers, drain inland seas, and extract fossil groundwater collected over thousands of years, often at unsustainable rates. Worse, current agricultural practices often waste as much water as they use: about half the water that flows through conventional irrigation systems never actually reaches a crop plant. A lesser--though still formidable--amount of water is siphoned off to slake the thirst of cities and industry, and when you add it all together, it's clear that people are using more than their fair share. The Mekong still manages to reach the sea. But at least ten other major rivers, including the Colorado, Ganges, Jordan, Nile, Rio Grande, and Yellow, now regularly run dry before they reach their outlets. – Sold down the river, Eleanor Sterling and Merry Camhi, Natural History, Nov. 2007

Via Crooked Timber, LI read this article in Nature’s commentary section by Gwyn Prins & Steve Rayner. It is well worth reading, even if the neo-liberal tone is somewhat grating.

Here’s the first paragraph of the Prins and Rayner article:

“The Kyoto Protocol is a symbolically important expression of governments' concern about climate change. But as an instrument for achieving emissions reductions, it has failed. It has produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions or even in anticipated emissions growth. And it pays no more than token attention to the needs of societies to adapt to existing climate change. The impending United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Bali in December — to decide international policy after 2012 — needs to radically rethink climate policy.”

‘Adaptation’ is the key word. Prins and Rayner are much too optimistic about adaptation as something the 'market' does supremely well. However, LI agrees with Prins and Rayner’s analysis of Kyoto, and in general the systematic problem that is posed by global warming – systematic in the sense that every economic module developed since 1800 is dependent on a manufacturing and resource extracting system that feeds inexorably into the interconnected problems of the massive increase of CO2 in the atmosphere and the complex of changes that unfold on the earth’s surface as the effects of the increase ramify.

Climate change is not amenable to an elegant solution because it is not a discrete problem. It is better understood as a symptom of a particular development path and its globally interlaced supply-system of fossil energy. Together they form a complex nexus of mutually reinforcing, intertwined patterns of human behaviour, physical materials and the resulting technology. It is impossible to change such complex systems in desired ways by focusing on just one thing.

Social scientists understand how path-dependent systems arise4; but no one has yet determined how to deliberately unlock them. When change does occur it is usually initiated by quite unexpected factors. When single-shot solutions such as Kyoto are attempted, they often produce quite unintended, often negative consequences. The many loopholes that have enabled profiteers to make money from the Clean Development Mechanism, without materially affecting emissions, are examples5. Therefore, there can be no silver bullet — in this case the top-down creation of a global carbon market — to bring about the desired end.”

I’d even embrace their self-interested suggestion about government financing of green R and D. I’d embrace it for the reasons they suggest, - because I think this is the only thing that will work short of catastrophe – and because of its one pleasant positive externality. Shifting the large scale bribery now given to that mesh of engineers, consultants and investors in the petro-chemical and military industries to bribing approximately the same sector, except to produce another kind of output, would positively inflect our politics. The neandrathal basement warrior group would simply have to change the objects of their psycho aggression without having to lose the vocabulary, to which they are addicted. Mass bribery of the well to do is, realistically, the only way to bring about change in the short term. In the long term, there’s always biblical denunciation and revolution and sniffing glue. (I must admit, I find it funny when the authors of articles in august journals of science solemnly advocate, after rationally viewing all the options, that more money be given to the authors of the article).

Here is where the article runs into trouble:

“For the best part of a decade, discussion of adaptation was regarded by most participants in climate policy-making as tantamount to betrayal. Even though it was widely recognized by the end of the 1980s that the existing stock of atmospheric greenhouse gases was likely to lead to some inevitable warming, the policy community suppressed discussion of adaptation out of fear that it would blunt the arguments for greenhouse-gas mitigation.”

The two problems with this is: one, it isn’t true; and two, it doesn’t reckon with the scope of the problem. Here’s one entrance into the scope of the problem: via John Gertner’s The West is Drying Up article, the projection is for the population of the Western states – the Rockie Mountain States, the Southwest, and the Pacific States – to grow by one hundred million more people. At the same time, the projection is for less rainfall, and a melt of the ice pack that could go from a quarter to three quarters. So tell me how these people are going to adapt to having no water? Prins and Rayner are great believers in the market, and believe that it we must contour the market to ‘adapt’ to this situation. But it is easy to predict that the market will make the situation worse – that it will spread drought by mining for water in distant places that it can carry to the West, thus creating unparalleled environmental havoc and, most likely, simply expanding the problem. Adaptation here could mean keeping current laws in place and making people pay the full price for their water in the West, which would mean that in fifty years, a cup of coffee would cost about fifty dollars. That, it is true, might encourage migration from the West. But I am not sure this is the kind of adaptation Prins and Rayner want to sell.
In Sterling and Camhi’s article, they concentrate on the species depletion that is coming with the maximum use of our water resources for drinking, growing crops, polluting, making electricity, etc., etc. Only 1 percent of the world’s water is really available for human use. That use, over the next fifty years, is surely going to lead to the human world – a world in which other, non-human chosen species have simply died off.

“As a result, even as the human population of the globe has doubled, many species that depend on freshwater ecosystems have suffered steep declines. The list would bring tears to a conservationist's eyes: in the past three decades, a fifth of the world's water birds, a third of freshwater mammals, a third of amphibians, and more than half of freshwater turtles and crocodiles have become either threatened, endangered, or extinct. Freshwater fishes represent a quarter of the world's living vertebrate species, and yet more than a third are threatened or endangered. The ecology of freshwater systems may be irreversibly damaged if we humans don't improve the way we treat them.”

The irony of the fully human world is that it will become rapidly unliveable for humans. The collision between less fresh water, expanding population, and the development along industrial lines of less developed economies is probably today’s most overlooked problem – forget flooding Florida – and it is hard to see at the moment any place from which it can be averted.

The problem with thinking that the market can solve these problems is – well, Sterling and Camhi put it pretty well here:

“Their rich biodiversity aside, freshwater systems bestow untold--and underappreciated--benefits on people. Indeed, they are the very foundation of our lives and economies. The value of all the services freshwater ecosystems provide worldwide, such as drinking water, irrigation for agriculture, and climate regulation, has been estimated at $70 billion per year--a figure that assumes, rather delusionally, that one could purchase the services elsewhere if they became unavailable in nature.”

There’s no market in planets.

Banners: charging andrew moonen with murder

You will notice that I've been trying to make some banners. One says: CHARGE ANDREW MOONEN WITH MURDER. The other is going to be: JUSTICE FOR RANEEM KHALIF. The murder banner is the more attention getting, I think. So far, the banners suck. But once I get them right, it will be relatively easy to copy the code and put them on a site.

the sweetness of life, Donna Summer and Madame du Chastelet

In a famous phrase, Tallyrand once said that those who did not live before 1789 did not know what the true sweetness of life was like. We’ve been zapping that douceur de la vie with x rays, lately, on LI. And I hope all true followers of this death march through hedonism did note, in the Vibrational Man post, that we discovered something – yes, an actual discovery! Which is that the epicurean notion of pleasure, which preceded 18th century hedonism, was still anchored in the notion that, given pleasure and pain as quantitative descriptions attaching to the continuum of sensation, the idea that too much sensation – a quantitatively greater intensity of sensation – gives us pain, led logically to the fact that the maximum of pleasure should then be found in the maximum of non-sensation. In the early modern period that witnessed Gassendi’s rediscovery of Epicure, this notion of pleasure and pain changed to another. The change in conceiving of the structure of pleasure and pain is caught in the changing discourse concerning volupté, which is why the libertines and Hobbes were so shocking to European intellectuals, imbued as these intellectuals were with the Stoic ethos that essentially agreed with Epicurus here.

So, in the eighteenth century, while the continuum of sensation model is mostly retained, another structure is impressed upon it, in which pain is a catastrophic moment away from pleasure. Although I am using a non-eighteenth century vocabulary to describe this, basically, here’s what is happening: in the Lockean dispensation, the quantitative view of pleasure and pain results in what I’ve called, using Per Bak’s term, sensation as a form of self organized criticality. I should also note that the continuum of sensation takes a much cruder and more linear form in the works of the utilitarians and classical economists. Because much depends, there, upon greed, the hedonic calculus separates from any physiological or philosophical discourse about sensation. Because in that calculus – as Silja Graupe points out in The Basho of Economics – there is no limited to the amount of money that is desirable for the economic agent. There is no sense that pleasure can become pain along the continuum. There is simply greater and greater increments of pleasure. In a sense, even with Smith, in the heart of capitalism, disco was already pre-formed, for that is, as we all know, the disco ethos. It is about the orgasmic moan in “Love to love you baby” continued forever. Adam Smith was to Donna Summer as John the Baptist was to Jesus Christ. And don’t you forget it!

The editor of Madame du Chastelet’s philosophical oposcules introduces her essay on happiness with an anecdote that, by coincidence, has to do with the continuum of pleasure. Once, at the court of Frederick the Great, Chastelet asked the philosophical doctor, Maupertius, if he sometimes felt bored. ‘Always, madame,” the doctor replied, as a good old fashioned libertine. Chastelet, the editor points out, avoided boredom in her life. But she recognized its lurking power to bore into the very sweetness of life and rot it to the core. Her essay on happiness embeds it in the positional economy of her time – for among other things, the eighteenth century was the century of ambition. So, I’m going to translate a couple of pages, here, 25-27, since they point to the struggle between a new economic order (one that France got a heady taste of in the days of John Law) and an older, crumbling morality of restraint. The essay sorts through the conditions of happiness, and churns out the usual order – health, love, etc., etc. And then we come to that most delightful 18th century thing- gambling.

“… nature, I say, only gives us desires in accordance with our state. We only desire naturally by increments: a captain of infantry desires to be a colonel, and he isn’t unhappy not to be the supreme commander of the army, no matter what talent he senses within. It is up to our common sense and our reflections to fortify this wise sobriety of nature. It is thus best to desire only those things that one can obtain without too much work, and this is a point we can do much to manage for our happiness. To love what one possesses, to know how to enjoy it, to taste the advantages of its state, to not gaze too much upon those who appear happier to us, to try to perfect what one has and to derive from it all of its advantages, this is what one must call happiness. I think my definition is well formed when I say that the happiest men are those who desire the least change in their estates.[states of being] To delight in happiness, it is necessary to cure or pre-empt a sickness of our species, which is entirely opposed to us here, and which is only too common – that is, inquietude. This disposition of the spirit is contrary to all enjoyment, and by consequence to every kind of happiness. Good philosophy, that is, the firm persuasion that we don’t have anything else to do in this world than be happy, is a remedy against this sickness, of which the bons esprits, those who are capable of principles and consequences, are always exempt. It there is a passion that is unreasonable to the eyes of philosophers and to reason itself, it is the passion for gambling [jeu]. It would be a happy thing to have if one could moderate it and reserve it for that time of our life where it will be necessary, which is old age. It is certain that the love of gambling has its source in the love of money; and there is nobody who is not fascinated by big bets [gros jeu], by which I mean those that can make a difference in our fortune. Our soul likes to be moved by hope or fear – it is only made happy by those things that make it feel its existence; thus, gambling puts us perpetually face to face with these two passions, and holds, by consequence, our soul in an emotion which of one of the great principles of the happiness that is within us. The pleasure given to me by gambling has often consoled me for not being rich. I believe I have a good enough spirit that a fortune which would be mediocre to another would suffice to render me happy, and given that case, gambling would become insipid to me; … and this idea persuaded me that the pleasure I took in gambling was due to the smallness of my fortune and served to console me for it.”

bodies of iron

One of the strong influences on Heinrich Kleist was a scientist well known in the Germany of the early 19th century, G.H. Schubert. The man published a book entitled Views of the Night side of Nature. Fragments from this book were first published in a review of art and science, Phoebus, that Kleist edited. Here is one of Schubert’s fragments:

Among the most curious cases of so called human petrification belongs this one, to which Hülpher, Cronstädt and the scholarly Swedish almanacs have dedicated some notice. Here a corpse, which to all appearances had turned into a solid rock, fell into some sort of ash after a few years even though the attempt was made to put it under a glass bell in order to protect it from the incursions of the air. This antique miner was found preserved in the Swedish mine in Falun, as a break had been effected between the sinking of two shafts. The corpse, entirely saturated with ferric vitriol, was, in the beginning, pliable, but as soon as it was exposed to the air, became as hard as stone. For fifty years, at a depth of more than two hundred feet, in this ferric acid, the man had lain in the mine. Nobody had recognized the as yet unaltered features of the face of the poor lad; if it had not been for one old true love, nobody would have kept a souvenir of him through the time since he was laid down in the shaft. For as about the recently extracted corpse the people were milling, observing his unrecognized youthful features, there came an old mother, with gray hair and crutches, who with tears for the beloved dead man, who had been her bridegroom, sank down, blessing the hour that had given her, so far advanced on the path to the grave, this vision one last time ; and the people saw with wonder the reunion of this curious couple, of which the one, in death and in a deep pit, had preserved the youthful aspect, while the other, with the withering and aging of her body, had preserved that youthful love, true and unaltered. And as though at their fiftieth golden anniversary they were found, the still youthful groom, stiff and cold, and the old and gray bride, full of warm love.”

A deep message there for LI – for indeed, we have been trying to draw up from the past a vast body, preserved in its youthfulness but, indeed, dead: and that vast body is the way the people in the “West” once thought about their emotions; how they connected those emotions to their lives, their bodies, the way they worked and played and prayed. And what became of them as they became, over time, us. And if that body of thought and feeling is analogous to the dead miner, myself, I play two parts; one, the milling crowd; and two, the gray bride. The gray bride is, of course, my imagination, or my muse, tied to my aging body as a tin can is tied to a dog’s tail – to quote Yeats. Except that the marriage between this history in the fresh state and the imagination in a state of despair was made not on earth, but in some telluric vault.

On the other hand - isn't the whole and splendid vision of any work, which comes to the writer in a flash, like that body in the mine? As soon as you see it, it falls away, down black shafts, and you have to dig to get it out again, and when you finally do, it has altered into a mockery of what it was - and you are still not out of danger, for at the moment of at least extracting the thing, it is always possible that it will all turn to ash.

So - this is how I excuse myself for reanimating a seemingly endless series of half forgotten figures. One of whom is Madame Chatelet, Voltaire’s mistress, the translator of Newton, and a philosopher in her own right – actually, in possession of a much more acute metaphysical mind than Voltaire’s. Judith Zinnser recently wrote a biography of her, which was reviewed in the NYT. This relieves me of having to cobble together some biography.

Here are three grafs:

“Nonetheless, Voltaire could not resist the occasional joke at Du Châtelet’s expense. Belittling her devotion to physics (her ambitious translation of Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” remains, to this day, the only complete French edition), he nicknamed her “Mme Neuton Pompom.” He responded to her taking a new lover with “subtle mockery,” advising Jean-François de Saint-Lambert, the young poet with whom Du Châtelet became involved after Voltaire began an affair with his own niece, to take Du Châtelet “quickly to her toilette,” rid her of her “old black apron” and cleanse “her hand dirty with ink.” Only in abandoning her studies, the philosophe suggested, could the marquise hope to “reclaim all her charms” and obtain the love for which she was intended.

According to Zinsser, such “fanciful and subtly demeaning images” have distorted history’s verdict on Du Châtelet’s intellectual achievements, which were formidable by any standard. As a woman, Du Châtelet was deprived “by custom” of the formal collège (secondary school) education granted her male peers. (This privation later prompted her to declare: “If I were king, I would establish collèges for women.”) Undeterred, the marquise sought independent instruction from some of Paris’s most prominent scholars. In 1733, at 26, “she began lessons in advanced geometry and algebra.”

Over the next 16 years, working obsessively right up to her death from a pulmonary embolism in 1749, she became a respected authority in both these fields, and in physics and integral calculus as well. She translated Mandeville and Newton, was the first woman published by the Académie Royale des Sciences and was elected to a similar academy in Bologna. She also wrote a complex synthesis of Descartes, Newton and Leibniz that “formulated a ‘unified theory’... for the workings of nature.” All the while, she somehow managed to look after her children, please her husband and keep her lovers happy. This balancing act forced her to do much of her own work from midnight till 5 in the morning. Though she confessed to Saint-Lambert that her regimen “required a mind and body of iron,” it enabled her to fulfill the ambition that she experienced as “a frightening need.” And she never questioned her right to satisfy this need, even if she had occasionally to beg her loved ones “not to ‘reproach me for my Newton.’ ”

WHY HASN'T ANDREW MOONEN BEEN CHARGED WITH MURDER?

Margaret Scobey

If a big bug gets into your house from the outside, don't you sometimes try to help it back outside, instead of crushing it into its insect jellies?

In the case of butterflies and crickets, we often show some respect for life. So it is with mounting anguish that I have waited, since the news was first reported at the beginning of October, for charges to be raised against Andrew Moonen – you remember Andrew Moonen. Andrew Moonen reduced an Iraqi bodyguard of President Maliki to his jellies last December. It was a Christmas present to himself. Wanting to murder an Iraqi, and having the means and the proximity, being a hired employee of Blackwater in the Green Zone, he got drunk and hunted for one. And in cold blood he slew one.

This is first degree murder.

He wasn’t arrested. Rather, the State Department in the Green Zone in Iraq, having been informed that he was drunk, that he slew an Iraqi man, and that he was in the custody of Triple Canopy, another private military contractor, did deliberately and with malice aforethought contrive to have Moonen escape Iraq. The acting ambassador at the United States Embassy in Baghdad was fully informed of, and approved this operation. Her name is Margaret Scobey.

Andrew Moonen should be charged with murder in the first degree. Margaret Scobey should be charged with being an accessory to murder.

I’ve been waiting for a month for some action to develop. I’ve been waiting for some outrage to be expressed. Of course, I am not naïve. In the politics of contrived outrage, killing an Iraqi man ranks much lower than, say, calling the man a faggot among those of liberal sensibilities. If Moonen had been accused of hate speech, an outrage story would race from one fine liberal blog to another. Or if Andrew Moonen had said something mean about America’s fine soldiers. What if he called them phoney soldiers? That would be truly outrageous. But he only took the life of a so far unnamed Iraqi guard. It was only murder. And Andrew Moonen isn’t even a celebrity. He isn’t a Britney. He isn’t a Paris. He is only a ‘security’ employee. He only was having good American fun. He only wanted a fun Christmas, one in which he could dabble in Iraqi blood. He got his wish. And for his murder, they docked his pay.

Although it is a bothersome even to mention it, it is murder. And though it is even more exasperating in some circles to mention any crimes related to the elite, like Margaret Scobey – who isn’t, like, some hip hop trash that we can casually toss into prison as we would toss an empty beer can in the trash – she was an accessory to murder. Murder is a crime that, presumably, you can still get in trouble for even in D.C. It isn't like perjury, which you can only be charged with if you aren't Republican or connected to a D.C. powerbroker.

Charge them now. Please, if you read this and you have a blog, consider writing a post demanding that Andrew Moonen be charged with murder, and Margaret Scobey be charged with accessory to murder.

vibrational man

My Name Burned In Your Skin
I Am Your Nasty Sin

LI has been mulling over the chapter on the sponge in Bachelard’s “The Formation of the scientific spirit”, because I think Bachelard is on to something that I want to steal.

A little backstory: Bachelard,in his book, distinguishes the scientific from the pre-scientific spirit. The latter is a grab bag of epistemological ploys, although the dominant ploy is the ‘they said” – the notion that knowledge grows out of authority, intuition, common sense. Images of that authority can be varied – it can be the Bible, or it can be Aristotle, or it can be your grandmother, the witch – but the causal structure is subordinate to an essential social fact: respect for authority. Scientific experiments do not occur in the pre-scientific framework – that is, there is no latent sense of tying trials to variations of the elements of the trial, and the comparisons engendered thereby – but are replaced by ‘common sense’ observation. This doesn’t mean that the pre-scientific spirit is a concatenation of untruths – far from it. It does mean that these are the truths of what Bachelard calls ‘general knowledge”:

“Nothing has slowed the progress of scientific knowledge more than the false doctrine of the general which reigned from Aristotle to Bacon and which remains, for many intellectuals, a fundamental doctrine of knowledge. Listen again to the way philosophers speak, among themselves, of science. You will soon acquire the impression that Mach was simply being malicious when he said, in response to William James’ statement, “Every expert has his philosophy”, with the reciprocal observation, Every philosophy has its very own science.” We would say more freely still that philosophy has a science which is only a philosopher’s science , the science of generality. We are going to strive to show that this science of the general is always a frozen bit of experience, a check on inventive empiricism.”

Taking a look at how the pre-scientific spirit views the world involves looking at those generals, as well as the system of images and associations within which those generals work. Which is why Bachelard took the examples of philosophical and scientific writing seriously (for it is important to note that the ‘scientific spirit’ as Bachelard construes it is not just science – rather, actual science often involves hybid products of the pre-scientific and the scientific). Thus, Bachelard takes us through how the ‘sponge’, interposed as an illustrative metaphor, can throw scientific discourse off the track – or at least point to the track in which that discourse flows. “Whether we like it or not, metaphors seduce reason. These are particular and distant images which by insensible degrees become schemas.” So the sponge – to take Bachelard’s particular tracking of an pre-scientific object – becomes, in the eighteenth century, an illustration of how the atmosphere holds moisture. But – to use a word Bachelard doesn’t use – every illustration has ‘affordances’ that are not under the control of the author. Bachelard cites Reaumer, who uses the atmosphere as a sponge image to explain the relationship between air and water, and, without noticing it, goes from on affordance of the sponge – that it can absorb water – to another – that it cannot absorb metals, or salts. And thus, Reaumer corrupts the level of abstraction that he is working on with the attraction of a concrete image - a seduction by sponge.

A derridean such as LI can’t resist pointing out that the chapter on the sponge generates, even in Bachelard’s criticism of using that image, a number of spongy terms, revolving around absorbtion. But I will not go into that, for the fun, here, is about the “generalized image”- the “leitmotiv of a valueless intuition.”

All of which has a bearing on the way LI has been trying to sort out Hartley’s vibrationism and the Lockean dispensation. As I’ve pointed out, Hartley took his suggestion from Newton. Newton explicitly wanted to replace the animal spirits of the Cartesians with vibrating chords. Now, this tells us, already, that we are talking about substitutions within a functional space. In a sense, you could say that the animal spirits had staked out an epistemological territory – a space which had to be filled in order to have a theory of the consciousness – and that the vibration theory took over that space.

Before I go into the implications of vibration as a generalized image – and why it is important to understanding this seemingly eccentric bypath to grasp the development of the culture of happiness – I need to reconstruct, briefly, Hartley’s theory of affections. Following Locke, Hartley does not find the principle of the affections to be radically different from thoughts, i.e., both are ideas. Affections are ‘aggregates of simple ideas united by association. For they are excited by objects, and by the incidents of life.”

That excitation is the clue to the core of the passions, which is pleasure and pain. There is a long philosophical tradition that makes this conjunction between pleasure, pain and emotion, as though a distinct emotion were a sort of cloud around a general nucleus of sensation. Hartley takes the pleasure/pain distinction to be a warrant for using love and hate as the primary emotional categories. Love and hate can be translated, in acts, to attraction and aversion. Yet there is a small gap in this series of associations, for love is taken to be the affection aroused by what pleases, and hate the affection resulting from pain, and yet pain and pleasure seem to be, simply, states of hate and love on a primitive level. Hartley doesn’t want us to make this identification. Pleasure and pain are primitives insofar as they are the primitives of association – they are the associative form in which the sensations are organized. That difference between love and pleasure and hate and pain gives us a psychology of the will – with love pursuing pleasure, and hate counseling us to fly from pain. And so the gratification of the will, associated with pleasure, should be the very mechanics of love. Yet it isn’t. For there is, it appears, a limit that emerges in sensation itself, or rather two limits: one is an upward bound, in which gratification makes us so hypersensitive that it makes disappointment intolerable. And there should be a lower bound, too, a descent to a null state, but Hartley doesn’t talk about that. Rather, he uses this schema to explain that “because mankind are for the most part pursuing or avoiding something or other, the desire of happiness, and the aversion to misery, are supposed to be inseparable from, and essential to, all intelligent natures. But this does not seem to be an exact or correct way of speaking. The most general of our desires and aversions are factitious, i.e. generated by association; and therefore admit of intervals, augmentations and diminutions.” By the logic of association, that second nature that usurps sensation itself, we can sometimes find ourselves pursuing what is painful. And, as Hartley puts it, “in the course of a long pursuit, so many fears and disappointments, apparent or real, in respect of subordinate means, and so many strong agitations of the mind passing the limits of pleasure intervene, as greatly to chequer a state of desire with misery.”

Now, myself, reaching for the “they’ in this story, I am very tempted to see the replacement of one body – the body in which animal spirits, hybrids of liquid and non-substantiality, quest about – with another body – the vibrational one, which folds, by the end of the 18th century, into the electrified one – as having some underground connection to the great transformation of the European economy. It is, in a sense, the body’s own industrial revolution. And yet there is a recognizable mythical narrative here, too. The animal spirits dry out, recede, before the mechanical spark. We are emerging from the flood, here.

But does symbol call to symbol, they to they, generalized image to generalized image, quite the way I am putting it here?

Hartley, in constructing the affections, found reason to think that man doesn’t have a natural tendency to happiness. If so, this would profoundly question the inference from the hedonic fallacy – that one should construct ‘happy’ social conditions – since those aren’t even in synch with what humans naturally pursue. Unhappiness can as naturally emerge from the associative mix that gives us love and hate in our happy circumstances.

…
Well, I want to return to that in a post on Madame Chatelan’s essay on happiness. But let’s return to the pleasure/pain schema in Hartley. Richard Allan, in his book on Hartley nicely summarizes how Hartley conceives of pleasure and pain:

“Hartley begins his discussion of sensate pleasure and pain (OM 1.1. 1.6) by observing that “the doctrine of vibrations seems to require, that each pain should differ from the corresponding and opposite pleasure, not in kind, but in degree only; i.e. that pain should be nothing more than pleasure itself, carried beyond a due limit.’ Vibrations, according to his theory, differ from each other in four ways: degree (i.e. amplitude), kind (i.e. resonant frequency), place of origin and “line of direction” (i.e. through which part of the nervous system they are received and travel to the brain). (121-2)

This view of pleasure and pain is, by the way, somewhat different than the way it was constructed by the Epicureans. That difference explains the place of non-activity in the Epicurean system – for if the quantitative view of pleasure and pain being on a continuum is true, and if it is also true that pain is on the side of heightened sensation, than one logic would imply that the highest degree of pleasure should be the lowest degree of sensation. This isn’t the modern view, though. One way of thinking of this is to think of the continuum, the sensation substrate, in terms of self organizing criticality. As pleasure increases, it approaches a critical cusp – a non-linear moment when it becomes pain. Actually, Hartley’s work sometimes still contains legacy traces of the Epicurean view, but on the main he conceives of pain and pleasure in the modern way.

I’ll use Henrik Jensen’s book to explain what I mean by self organizing criticality. According to Jensen – who is repeating the work of Per Bak, the grandfather of SOC – those systems that tend toward the extreme limit of their equilibrium are SOC. These systems tend to pass through metastable states – and Jensen has a nice illustration of that (ah, the images of general knowledge! kill me with this if you can, dear reader) in the moving of a piano over a floor. At first, if you are pushing on a piano, it resists – the friction forces between the piano and the floor are stronger than the force you apply to move it. But as the force continues to be applied, that stability of friction forces is broken. At a certain point, the piano moves forward. But it is not possible to calculate with certainty either the exact moment it will move forward nor the distance forward it will dart. It will, however, dart forward to another stable state, and so on. Hartley’s description of pleasure and pain gives us a similar picture. Thus, the Epicureans, who want a straight up and down continuum, misunderstood the operation of pleasure.

Admittedly, I am being a bit anachronistic to speak of metastable systems, a language that Hartley was unfamiliar with. But this language does stem from Newton, and it is basically what he is getting at.

southern cal

I’d like to dream
My troubles all away
On a bed
of California Stars


Disaster always has a backstory. It's karma-like, or at least movie-like, in that way. Of course, what inevitably happens when you combine wind, drought, and forest, shake and bake – when the fire starts – is that it will appear to us as something unexpected, something that jumped out at us, the wolf’s hairy paw coming out of grandma’s sleeve and grabbing us by the throat. But this cycle is going a little faster, and now we are getting used to it. The 2003 fires burned up 740,000 acres and 2,000 buildings. Stephen Pyne, the fire historian, has pointed to the quiltwork of fire: in 1987, and in Northern California in 1996, and in 1999, and the worst ever recorded in Arizona in 2002, and the same year, the Biscuit fire in Oregon, another worst. Pyne calls the recent fires those of the Long Drought.

The water in the Los Angeles region that will be used to douse the flames will come, some of it, from Owens Lake, and some of it from the Los Angeles River, which the city laid claim to in the 1890s due to a quirk in its founding – L.A. claimed that the Spanish law under which the city was originally chartered superceded the California law of capture, which was being used by San Fernando business men in an attempt to claim the water of the Los Angeles river. L.A. won that court suit. William Mulholland, an Irish born engineer, came to L.A. in 1878 and saw the river and “it at once became something about which my whole scheme of life was woven, I loved it so much.” Indeed.

Chinatown, which is about the way L.A.’s oligarchs set about capturing Owens Lake, was originally entitled Water and Power. But L.A.’s Water and Power company scotched that – as it has successfully scotched most things that get in its way. For instance, much of the land that Hollywood studios like to do shoots on around L.A. are owned by the L.A. Water and Power department, which rather discourages any dramas that question the Water and Power’s own version of history. They also happen to have their own little army that guards the LA aqueduct, a structure that has attracted attempts to blow it up since it was built.

All of these facts are culled from a fascinating book by Karen Piper, who was raised near the toxic dust pit that is now Owens Lake. The book, Left in the Dust, is an attempt to show how the politics of race and class penetrate the politics of water in Southern California all the way down to the molecular level – literally. High quality Owens River’s water is the least polluted in the L.A. region, and is distributed to householders in Western L.A. and San Fernando Valley. The Central and Eastern districts, including Koreatown and Watts, get the back of the bus water – that is, a mix of polluted groundwater plus the aqueduct water. It is all in being close to the source.

As Piper shows, the aftereffects of the drying up of Owens Lake have fallen disproportionately on Indians and Hispanics. Because the lake was dried out suddenly and recently, the lake bottom has not become hardened yet (as it will in a couple of hundred years), and so is liable to lift up in the breezes, the many many breezes, and waft around, carrying with it things like toxic heavy metals: arsenic, nickel cadmiun, selenium. And it leaves a little bathtub ring of cardiac and pulmonary diseases, of deposits in the kidney and autoimmune disorders, in the populations closest to it. Thoughtfully, when the U.S. was interning the Japanese, they interned some of them in Mazanar, a camp near Owens Lake.

In a way, the template of U.S. history has always been settlers and Indians. As any child knows, anybody can play an Indian – or have that position thrust upon one. Once the Indian nations were displaced, the Indianization of other populations commenced. Piper quotes a masterful memo from the California Waste Management Board from 1984 – oh, year of the Magic of the Marketplace! Year of Ronnie, and of the glorious L.A. Olympics! The memo recommends criteria for communities to be on the receiving end of waste disposal, which include – that they have fewer than 25,000 inhabitants; that they have low incomes; that they have demonstrated ‘lack of concern with issues'; and that there is an elevated portion of the population that has lived there for twenty five years or more. Sometimes the truth just busts out of bureaucracies, and we can see their vision plain. In that vision, the world is divided between those who deserve everything – the successful, the experts the oligarchs – and human products. Or, as the AEC said long ago about the downwinders it was sprinkling with radiation, nurturing a world of cancers and misbirths – the low use population.

So much for the rough and tumble of Southern California history. And yet, all of its apocalypses seem somehow tranquilized. I admire that, the bland dismissal of the very idea that there won't be a future here. One can bash the region for one shortsided policy after another, but out of those policies has arisen something … new and strange. I was reading Edmund Wilson’s famous essay about California writers, the Boys in the Backroom, yesterday, and it ended on the cliché note that California seems unreal, and the literature is ultimately thin. But Wilson couldn’t even see how glorious the movies were back then. He’d been blinded by a certain kind of modernism. And so he missed the tough lilt that was being introduced to literature by Chandler and Hammett and Cain. He missed the traces of scarface in the vernacular, tracking into everybody's house.

Myself, I rather wish I was in L.A. right now.

in the land of drifty drift

In other news from the land of drifty drift – Bush just asked for 46 billion more dollars to throw into the sinkhole of his vanity war. To put that in perspective, that is 10 billion more than the s-chip bill. It is, of course, a characteristic of the authoritarian right to pursue a policy of impudence – to continually shock the temporizors, that vast media machinery which spends its whole existence trying to take plutocratic inputs of the most rancid injustice, the most feeble minded racism, and the most ostentatious theft, and process them out as bipartisan suggestions that are fun for the whole family. The settings in the machinery are moved by impudence, as the Bushies know well by now. So there is a beautiful convergence here between blocking child health care, spending more in various black boxes for puffing up GOP connected mercenaries, and ranting about World War III versus Iran – thus driving up petro profits. Harry Reid, of course, replied with a stentorian voice that they would, they would, well, they would want to know, if the White House would just be so kind as to tell them, really, what the money, uh, that they are voting for, uh, is going to be like used for if you have the time that is and it isn’t too much trouble.

And, on the impudent warmonger publicist front, Chris Hitchens told an audience of atheists in Chicago (sucker enough to give him some award, invite him to speak to them, and forced then to suffer through the exterminationist rant that has become his Coulter routine – he’s all for bombing Iran, now) that he is for Giuliani. This makes so much sense. Giuliani now has a sweep of the lunatic field, from Daniel Pipes to Hitchens. Horowitz is on the horizon.

I think the dems still don’t understand how much Giuliani appeals to the Southern peckerwood faction, and for one reason: they sense he hates blacks as much as they do. The liberals can’t understand, for instance, how somebody who supports gun control could get any support in Dixie. They should look to history. Dixie, during its glorious Jim Crow years, had gun control laws all over the place, specifically aimed at keeping African Americans from owning firearms. And the southern perception, which I think is correct, is that Giuliani was not supporting gun control laws so that cops could look for illegal guns on Staten Island, or the white West Side – no, it was simply a tool to arrest masses of black men in the Bronx, in Harlem, etc. The all American machine at work.