killing and its names

 

It is easy to write “bang bang he’s dead.” The written – on a scroll, a page, a screen – may be bloody, but it doesn’t bleed. The long train of individual deaths,  from Socrates to Ivan Illych, must number in the hundreds of thousands. The deaths of both Hector, who could be a fiction, and Sinead O’Connor, who was not a fiction, are written down in the same way

In history, the same rule of course applies, even to mass deaths. I can write about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising: “A total of 13,000 Jews were killed, about half of them burnt alive or suffocated.” That is 13,000 individual bodies. But there’s no special grammar or diacritics that distinguishes this from writing a note about the plums in the refrigerator.

We write to commemorate, but of course although we can remember blood, memory doesn’t bleed, either.

Of course, writing is confounded and interlocked with acts, events, institutions, lifestyles, etc. In jurisprudence, the judge “sentences”. The judge says, and the judge writes. The orders given to the Naza soldiers in Warsaw and the report by the commander, Stroop, were written. Writing is an instrument of coercion and liberation, but it is firstly and always a bloodless thing. This, for a writer, is a hard law. You cannot be a writer, a real writer, and think that your writing is not, somehow, alive, does not have a separate existence.

Which gets us to the subject that I have, given our circumstances, been thinking about a lot: the word “genocide”.

I don’t like the word.

Now, Tennyson didn’t like the word scissors, supposedly, but scissors is, I would say, a harmless word to name the things I cut paper and cloth with. Perhaps the word brought out some hidden lisp in Tennyson. I can sympathize – when I was a child, I had a lisp that was taken care of by a speech therapist who took me out of my classes and had me do phonic exercises.

The word genocide, though, unlike scissors, is a very document bound word. It is in the family of -ide – homicide, suicide, etc. Like those words, it is vaguely juridical. It is not slaughter. It is not even murder or killing. It freezes the tears of things. It doesn’t speak of being suffocated to death in a traincar, dying in your shit. It doesn’t suggest the look of a child whose face has been ripped off.

Genocide, though, has had a large life after the Nazis massmurdered the Jews and Gypsies. It is chanted, for instant, in protests. Charging someone with genocide/who can’t hide – I have definitely chanted that before and, alas, probably will again. But I feel that, though it is invested with the gravest and vilest acts that an armed force can commit against another, it loses the ultimate horror of the individual killing – the horror felt by the killed, even. The horror, even, of being killed by people who are not worthy of killing you.

If that makes sense.

The mass murder in Gaza, which has now taken twice the number of victims killed in the Warsaw Ghetto result, might be genocide according to the courts. But to my mind it is first and foremost a mass murder.

The German mass murderers suffered various fates. Some were hung by the courts, like Rudolf Hoess. Some became rocket scientists in the U.S. and have streets named after them, like Werner von Braun. Some became the head of intelligence agencies, like Gehen in West Germany. And surely the Israeli mass murderers will have various fates. But to absorb this crime, spiritually, the crime that is still unfolding will take decades.

 

a lucky man : our bigoted president

 

I read the news today oh yeah/

About a lucky man who made  the grade.

 

Ah, Biden. Who knew that inside that old body beat the heart of a huge, dangerous beast? But then again, all the American Emperors are dangerous. It is a bad business entirely.

Two news items. One is Chotiner’s interview with Aaron David Miller, a man who has an actual career as a Middle Eastern negotiator – starting in the eighties and reaching through Bush to Biden. It is the end of the interview that breaks your heart.

“ … when Biden gave the speech on October 10th, you watched the tears well up in his eyes. He talked about the black hole of loss. He’s conflated the tragedies in his ownpersonal life with what Israelis felt on that day.

Yes, that’s very moving, but there is another kind of loss going on now which he apparently can’t conflate with his own experience.

Oh, if you’re asking me: Do I think that Joe Biden has the same depth of feeling and empathy for the Palestinians of Gaza as he does for the Israelis? No, he doesn’t, nor does he convey it. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.”

His empathy, such as it is, stops with the killing of White aid givers. The rest is dross.  https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/bidens-increasingly-contradictory-israel-policy

Two. The other less reported story is about a White House “dinner” and outreach to Americans of Middle Eastern origin.

“Dr. Thaer Ahmad, an emergency physician from Chicago who traveled to Gaza earlier this year, told CNN he abruptly left the meeting that included Vice President Kamala Harris, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, other administration officials and a small group of Muslim community leaders.”

It was a meeting mainly concentrating on optics. But the optics department in Biden’s campaign and White House is obviously concentrated on important things, not Muslims, for god’s sakes:

“CNN previously reported that what was supposed to be an iftar dinner to break the Ramadan fast was changed to a meeting because participants didn’t feel comfortable having a celebratory meal while hundreds of thousands in Gaza are on the brink of famine. It’s another example of the administration’s fraying relationship with the Muslim American community — other attempts at holding meetings in key states have been hampered by declined invitations, and relationships with important community groups have frayed since the war began.”

Well, what a group for Biden to address in his most heartfelt tones to talk about the Hamas attack on October 7. He feels it still. That 32,000 Gazans have died since then is of course all so sad, but is it really sad?

“Following the listening session, Ahmed said that Biden initially responded with a focus on the terrors of October 7.

“He kind of went back to that and said, ‘You know, I hear what everybody’s saying, but like, think about the young people that were killed on October 7.’ And it kind of dismissed the over 30,000 people dead in Palestine,” she said.

Biden went on to discuss the complexity of eradicating Hamas and ongoing talks with leaders in the region working toward a ceasefire, Ahmed said.”

And though the news was rather sad,

 Well, I just had to laugh.

I saw the photograph.

 

 

 

Marx, Cologne and the West Bank

Marx made the great leap towards what became Marxism in Cologne in 1842, when he became the editor of a newspaper there and did a few articles on a local controversy: the new legislative rules that eliminated the time honored custom of gathering sticks in forests owned by the great landholders. Marx at this time was a graduate of law school. He gets it that the legislature is creating something new here – a property – out of the denial of something old – a customary right. But it occurred to him that it was not enough to remain on the level of the law – for what was driving the legislative proces was not so much any legal confusion, or any unfolding of some previous logic in the legal code, a la Hegel, but instead, was a basic, extra-legal social force.

The custom of gathering fallen wood, as Marx came to see it, had its roots in another kind of social order. Marx latter on considered this social order as pre-capitalist, evidently defining it from the ‘stage’ that succeeds it. However, I think it is entirely within the Marxist spirit to define it differently, as the regime of the “image of the limited good”, a phrase coined by the anthropologist George Foster to describe the image of the world inherent to those who inhabit a social economy in which economic growth is not the norm. The norm, instead, for the peasants and their governors, is of rise and fall, in which prosperity can be expected to lead to superbia, or vanity, which in turn creates the condition for the fall. The image of the limited good is congruent with the iconography of nemesis, or justice, a blindfolded figure holding a scale in which our sins and accumulations are weighed.

In this world, it makes sense to talk about the poor. There is no sense that in this world, the laborer produces such wealth as will cause economic growth to be the primary fact of the social world. Marx, in Cologne, began to sense the meaning of this.

To put this another way: Marx made the very important discovery that “the poor”, as a socio-economic category, was vacuous. The poor were easily recognized in pre-capitalist economies: the beggars, the serfs, the slaves, they all exist under the sign of minus. They had less, and that quantitative fact defined their social existence. What Marx saw was that capitalist society was not just a matter of old wine in new bottles – the archaic poor were now free labor. Perhaps nothing so separates Marxism from religion as this insight: in all the great monotheistic religions, poverty is viewed in feudal terms: the poor you will have always with you. But in capitalism, or modernity tout court, the poor continue to exist as a mystificatory category, usually in a binary with the rich. In fact, the real binary in society is capital and labor. The bourgeois economists, and even the non-scientific socialists, operate as though the archaic poor still exist. To help them, we need to develop a method of redistribution that is, in essence, charity – run by non-profits or run by the government, but still charity. But Marx saw this in very different terms. Labor produces the economic foundation of capitalism – value. In these terms, it is not a question of the poor being a qualitative or moral category – it is a question of the alienation of value, of surplus value, that circulates through the entire capitalist system and allows it to grow on its own, while at the same time making it vulnerable to crisis.

Daniel Bensaid, the French Marxist, wrote a fascinating book on Marx’s essays on the Wood Laws. Bensaid sees the new category of the “poor” under the sign of dispossession. What Marx saw in the move to take away a traditional right and transform it into a kind of property for capital was, in Bensaid’s account, tied to a whole system of dispossession.

Bensaid springs these essays, so to speak, from their purely philological interest as early writings of Karl Marx, to show that the wood laws, with their alternative dispossessing of a traditional right or usage and their thrusting the dispossessed into the market society is happening here and now. Bensaid shows how it has been happening, since the end of the Cold War, in Africa, with the scramble for resources churning great masses into urban barrios as the environment is clubbed and axed and extracted to death. But even in developed economies, dispossession remains one of the great drivers of profit.

You have to read the forms that are being created in the area around Cologne – or in the seizures of the British commons, or in the creation of roads, etc. – in order to see the dispossession that works in such developed economies as that of the U.S.

Here’s the wood laws: “Pierre Lascoumes and Hartwig Zander cite the following list of “forest infractions and their economic causes” established by forest rangers: theft of blueberries and other berries; theft of forest products necessary for the production of brushes and brooms, or as food for livestock; theft of twigs for the production of fishing rods; theft of timber for the repair of domestic and agricultural implements; theft of wood for roof shingles; theft of timber for hop-poles; theft of wood for stairs, trestles, and scaffolding; theft of ground roots for basket weaving; theft of fagots for firewood . . . an edifying inventory! It is composed of all those marketable goods without which life itself could not be secured, especially as their domestic use was itself increasingly subject to market circulation.”

Those who have eyes to see recognize the way in which Internet companies, or the whole of computer capital, have managed to make secondary markets illegal – for instance, in selling or sharing you Microsoft Office Suite – in a way that is unquestioned, for the most part, by the user. Publishing companies would love to annul the secondary market in books – imagine that the book you bought could not be re-sold or given as a gift, except under very limited circumstances. Life itself is increasingly unsecurable without the ramifying Internet, yet it is also increasingly out of the hands, entirely, of the end user. We may play at pirates on the net, but the true Pirate captains sit secure on their billions and on our faces and pay for pirate catchers to make their raids on lesser fry.

“The invocation of a “natural status” to these objects seems to refer to the tradition of natural law in which the invocation of “occupancy rights,” or jus nullius, accords a right of first occupancy onto a “personal good.” It is this juridical rationale that was used to legalize the colonial appropriation of lands decreed “virgin.” Marx exploits the paradoxical logic of the argument: if property is not legitimated by an activity that transforms the object (through mixing with labor, as it is with Locke), then the right of occupation derives from an initial stroke of force (a “seizure of the land” in the case of colonial conquests).”

Eyal Weizman, who founded the Forensic Architecture group in Tel Aviv and London, has studied the seizure of Palestinian land on the West Bank by Israeli “settlers”. Even the terms are taken from the golden age of colonization, and one sees the same set of laws and changing of laws to justify seizure and control:

“As for security, up until 1979 the legal tools that the government used in order to seize land and build settlements were based on the 4th Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory. The convention states that you are not allowed to build permanent settlements on occupied land, but you are allowed to build temporary interventions for security reasons. What the government was claiming was that the settlements were temporary paramilitary posts.”

After 1979, however, as the Israeli government became settler oriented, they needed a new set of rules to displace the Palestinian population. So they came up with them:

“The government had to opt for another legal tool because they could not build settlements and argue that they were temporary strategic military outposts. They said, OK, we can rely on Jordanian law and start a project of land registry. The West Bank had not had a land registry since Ottoman times, and if you look at Ottoman land laws, you did not have real land ownership. You would just pay tax for what you cultivated. Nobody wanted to own anything beyond what he was growing on, because that is what you paid tax on. If someone fenced off a hilltop, he didn’t register it because that would just mean more taxes. So basically Israel was collecting Ottoman tax documents to establish ownership and map out the extent of cultivated lands. Whatever land could be proven to be under continuous cultivation remained in private Palestinian ownership, and the rest was declared state land according to Jordanian law, which was based on Ottoman law.”

Jordanian law, based on Ottoman law, was applied by Israel for Israelis on territory seized from Jordan. As always in colonizing situations, the law exists to displace the indigenous people. There are times that the lawgivers forget and extol the “universality” of the law, but they are soon pulled back to their true task. The war in Gaza, whenever it ends, will surely be followed by the seizure of Gaza land in the North by the Israelis. Nobody will raise a hand or make a fuss about that. Gaza is, after all, not Eastern Ukraine, where the West has discovered the morality of resisting conquest and illegitimate seizure.

Interestingly, the “vacant” land on the West Bank, and the overthrowing of hundreds of years of Palestinian boundary making and common land usage, is basically, with little transformation, the same think Karl Marx encountered in Cologne. This is a larger and more complex thing, historically, than it appears to be in Capital, which is devoted to another historical moment in the system of alienated labour. And it is wrong to attempt to mark it as a primitive starting point for capital accumulation – it is a cyclical phenomenon that emerges again and again in all capitalist systems.

Biden goes the GW Bush route

 The Bidenists are sounding more and more like the Bushies of yore. Not just the immorality of the policy in the Middle East, but the absolute blindness to the possibility of blowback. Blowback knocked down the two largest towers in NYC and slammed into the Pentagon. Blowback blew up the Atocha station in Spain, and gave us the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Bataclan massacre and the Nice massacre in France. But now we are to believe that crushing a million Gazans like so many earthworms will have no larger effect in the world.

The Bidenists are as braindead as the Bushies if they accept this story. And, like the Bushies, they will be confounded if something happens. And will rush to embrace the most fascist but country club sounding Republican. It is as predictable as the most tired TV series.

Meanwhile, in France they are actually going to be sponsoring an Olympics in the city I live in, Paris. As if we can tra la la our way between shipping weapons to Israel from Marseilles and giving little Commander Macron an opportunity to bla bla bla. The political elite is brain dead.

Asking day 2

 

Another day, another thousands of starving Gaza children, another vigorous social media argument between the well nourished: would Trump be worse for the Palestinians than Biden? Perhaps we should ask this child, Leila Jeneid. Her starvation is graphically photographed in the Daily Mail.

Leila Jeneid is lightly skipped over by the NYT today. I don't mean that they lowered themselves by mentioning her. If she has not been discovered by a rightwing Israeli quasi-journalist and propagandist Anat Schwartz, she doesn't exist. Instead, the NYT has moved on to the post-war. Goodbye, starving kids.

In an article about drafting orthodox young men into the Israeli army – much more interesting than mere famine – the NYT provides a fascinating view of its own politics:

"A new Israeli government led by centrists is unlikely to take a markedly different approach to the war in Gaza, but it may be more open to allowing the Palestinian leadership in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to play a bigger role in Gaza after the war. That arrangement could create a more conducive environment for Israel to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia, which had edged closer to sealing diplomatic ties with Israel before the war broke out."

Ah Bidenism! This is north star guiding the Biden administration, providing the bandage of a quisling Palestinian administration absolutely in the power of Israel while bringing together our best friends – the tyrants of Saudi Arabia and the fascists of Israel! Why, the lion will lie down with the lion after eating the lamb’s guts, eyes, face, legs and tail.

It is a happy world, and one in which there will be no consequences for mass murder in Gaza.

Well, beyond the criminality of this point of view, we are back once again to pure Bushism. The entire Iraq occupation – which the NYT was all for - was about wishing away the present, subtracting it from the if-then calculations about the future, and substituting a free trade utopia, where the oil companies flowed like wine. Democracy was in the air, as long as the democracy didn’t represent the real wishes of the Iraqis, which would be just awful. Plan after plan was earnestly discussed by the Bush Vulcans, and reverently reported on by the best and the brightest NYT reporters.

There's a teensy weensy problem, though, with subtracting the present from one's calculations about the future. It leads to completely futile and insane conclusions.

But heck, that is negative thinking! And thus, the perfect fit for the DC-Centrist press mindset is going great guns in America, save on the nasty social media. And the solution to that is simply to ban Tik Tok. I mean, the low information voter might get the idea that their leaders are war criminals with the ability to calculate of broken ChatGPTs. And that would lead to conspiracy thinking and such!

So here we go again. While all the kids starve to death.

Asking

Yesterday, I watched a very sparkly Biden official, who looked like he had just come from the Ken-at-High-School-UN box, answer questions from a very well fed looking journalist. The questions were about what the UN ceasefire resolution meant, whether it was binding, what the U.S. was doing, etc.

All very edifying – like a debate in an insane asylum.

Rather than questions about the “ongoing” talks at Doha and the politics of the UN, the questions should have gone a totally different direction.

Ask the Biden suit how long he, personally, has ever gone without eating.

Ask the Biden suit what he would feel if he saw his five, ten year old child lose twenty pounds in a week. Ask him how much nutrition for a two year old can be derived from soupy rice in a small bowl delivered once a day. Ask if he has ever fed a child. Ask if he would be willing to propose, to the delegates at Doha, that they all eat the same diet as the average person in Rafah. Ask if he would be willing to rush forward for his one meal a day while being shot at. Propose that the only meals the Doha conference attendees can receive be parachuted into Doha. Ask whether he would feel safe getting those parachuted in meals if he was aware that the same area might be bombed five to ten minutes later, after the drop. Ask the Biden suit how he would feel about his child having his or her leg amputated in a hospital where soldiers were shooting people in the hall. Ask the suit how he would feel if the doctor amputating the legs of his five year old daughter were halted in midcourse, taken out into the hall, and executed. Ask him if he would feel very peaceful and warm about the people who did that. Ask the suit whether he has ever studied the psychology of starvation. Ask the suit whether he would feel it was totally just to consider his 18 year old son a fair target for marksmen, because he is potentially a military recruit. Ask how often he has drunk muddy water from a rusty can. Ask what he would think about the delegates at Doha being limited to drinking muddy water from rusty cans.

Ask if he is human. Ask if anybody sitting at the conference asking questions about the “process” is human.

Ask if he would mind if all the questioners threw up in disgust at the little play they are putting on. Ask about the stink of that vomit, and how he think it compares to the stink of the hospitals that are under attack, or the stink of the buildings in which bodies are crushed in Northern Gaza. Ask if the question of those smells ever come up at the ceasefire conference at Doha.
Ask.

Lovecraft

“If Lovecraft was an odd child,” his biographer L. Sprague de Camp writes, “his mother showed signs of becoming even odder. In fact, she gave evidence that Lovecraft’s peculiarities were largely her doing. She got the idea that, for all his genius, her boy was ugly. She even told neighbors that he was “so hideous that he hid from everyone and did not like to walk upon the street so that people would gaze upon him… because he could not bear to have people gaze upon his ugly face.”

If Lovecraft’s mother had made a vow to raise another horror writer, she could not have done a better job of it. Of course, she did have the excuse that she was going insane, and finally ended up in an asylum. Lovecraft’s Dad also died in an asylum.

Lovecraft, who was a thorough racist and threw around the word “race stock” – with all the implication of inheritable traits – was, in a sense, incorporating into his conceptual schema both the anxiety-producing facts of his parentage and a plea for an exception to the race rules he laid down for himself.

I have made attempts to read Lovecraft. I like weird tales well enough, and certain of Lovecraft’s favorite weird writers – Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen – are all right with me. However, Lovecraft, perhaps because of the attempt to instil hideousness from the continual use of that word – a word his mother used about him – is never fun enough for me to read for any length of time. I know that Lovecraft has left an influential trace in the Anglophone imaginary of terror, and that he’s a cultic reference in the Fangoria community, having well overtaken Edgar Allan Poe.

Which makes me want to find a way of approaching him.

Lovecraft almost surely never read the autobiography of Daniel Paul Schreber, the paranoid patient who wrote it in order to make a plea for getting out of a mental asylum. The book became famous, of course, and was the basis for Freud’s essay on paranoia. It continues to have readers and interpreters. The surround sound in Lovecraft’s stories has some thing to do, I think, with the kind of paranoia that Schreber describes. In the Octopus edition of the e-flux journal (2016), there is an essay by Antonia Majaca - Little Daniel Before the Law: Algorithmic Extimacy and the Rise of the Paranoid Apparatus – that contains this passage – an uber relevant passage to reading Lovecraft:

“In his contemporary appraisal of the relevance of Schreber’s case, Eric Santner situates the judge in the wider social aftermath of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf and the accompanying paranoias about cultural degeneration in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Santner reads Schreber’s testimony as an “investiture crisis”—a point of rupture when institutional protocols and symbolic orders “collapse into the most intimate core of one’s being.”7 Through both a psychoanalytic and historical materialist lens, such a collapse entails a complete “loss of distance to some obscene and malevolent presence that appears to have a direct hold of one’s inner parts,” generating anxieties not of absence but of extreme proximity.8 I would argue, in affinity with Santner, that it is necessary to understand this particular historical neurosis in order to identify a lineage of libidinal economy running from the totalitarian fascist regime that emerged in the decades after Schreber’s death, through the modern and postmodern forms of totalitarian rule and the collective paranoia of the Cold war, to the neoliberal world order that followed and the forms of technocratic postfascism we have witnessed in recent years across the Global North.”

The investiture crisis is all over the current vogue for horror and the weird as the most pertinent genre to our current state. The sense both of an absolute proximity and an absolute helplessness before a mass phenomenon – isn’t this the social psychology of our current aesthetic moment?

Lovecraft was no prophet, but it is pretty obvious that something in his almost ridiculously genteel way of displaying blood and guts and tentacles has a pull on a large, mostly younger audience, torn by the incongruity of being raised protectively by a generation that seems convinced that there is no future, and acts, or doesn’t act, accordingly.

From the Holodomor to Gaza: NYT softfocuses on famine - the spirit of Walter Duranty lives!

 

When Gareth Jones, a former secretary of David Lloyd George, made a walking tour in Ukrainian agricultural districts in 1933, he wrote a series of articles about the famine and the pitiable state of the villages.

The articles caused a stir. So the New York Times reporter, Walter Duranty, decided to put an end to this. Having talked to Jones and found that he did not report seeing dead people, Duranty turned to the sources the New York Times has always held in highest regard: the government. And looking at the Soviet Government’s account of its agricultural policy, Duranty, who in the article acknowledges “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”, wrote that there was a serious food shortage, but no famine. No indeed.

In an article about Jones, Duranty and the Holodomor in Journalism History, Winter 2014, Ray Ganache writes: “Evidence clearly shows that the newspaper was complicit in duping the public. In a memorandum dated June 4, 1931, A. W. Kliefoth, a member of the U.S. Berlin Embassy, summarized a meeting he had with Duranty. The final sentence of the memorandum read: "In conclusion, Duranty pointed out that 'in agreement with NEW YORK TIMES and the Soviet authorities,' his dispatches always reflect the official position of the Soviet regime and not his own."

Well, the NYT seems determined to return to its Duranty-esque reporting  on the terror famine in Gaza. I was unsurprised, though morally shocked, when NYT’s “analysis” of the split between Biden – who continues to supply arms to Israel – and Netanyahu over the United Nations censoring of Israel with comments from sources within the Biden administration expressing surprise – the censoring of Israel was not “serious” after all – and this bit

 "Mr. Biden is facing outrage from his own supporters and global allies about the toll of civilian deaths in the war against Hamas and Israel’s seeming reluctance to allow into Gaza adequate amounts of food and medicine."

The “seeming reluctance” is definitely an improvement, in the propaganda field, over Duranty’s remark about omelettes. That was, in retrospect, so gross! No, the way you handle your favoured governments atrocities is that you soften them down. You make them sound like, oh, innocent mistakes. Mistakes they might not even know they are making! Surely the Israeli government would just be rushing that food to Gaza’s starving population if there wasn’t something blocking them. It must be just like the reporting on the flour massacre on March 1, where the story’s headline explainer was:  "The deaths of scores of Palestinians in a desperate rush for food aid in northern Gaza..." It leaves one pondering. Did God himself strike down those Palestinians. Or was it the seemingly reluctant machineguns in the hands of seemingly reluctant Israeli soldiers that spewed seemingly reluctant bullets into the heads and hearts and stomachs and legs of scores of Palestinians?

 Your incense is detestable to me.
New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations—
    I cannot bear your worthless assemblies.
¹⁴ Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals
    I hate with all my being.
They have become a burden to me;
    I am weary of bearing them.
¹⁵ When you spread out your hands in prayer,
    I hide my eyes from you;
even when you offer many prayers,
    I am not listening.

Your hands are full of blood!

 

- Isaiah 1, 13-15

 

From Will to Control

 

 

 

In the early nineteenth century, there was a great romantic fashion for the  “will” in the moral, or ideological sphere. The will seemed like a way out of the dry materialism and sensualism of the 18th century philosophes.Conveniently, it also had a hero – Napoleon.

However, a curious thing happened as the century went by.  In the sphere of psychology, the will gradually lost any status it had as a psychological object. In the old rational psychology, it was one of the faculties of the intellect. But as psychologists began to measure things, experiment, and consider psychology as an adjunct of the entire biological system, it became clear that the will was a superfluous entity. I raise my arm, and by no train of introspection, and by no degree on  any measuring device, is there an intermediate moment where I will to raise my arm.

At the end of the century, two philosophers – Nietzsche and William James – both took these findings at face value. Nietzsche took the absence of any psychological entity called the will to mock the notion of both those who argued for the free will and those who argued for determinism, in as much as the latter still used this archaic psychological devise. James, with his own sly Yankee wit, also went through the introspective stages that make us see that the will is a conjuring trick.

Yet these two philosophers are associated with the will – the will to power and the will to belief. How did they reconcile these moral insights with their psychological ones? Well, in Nietzsche’s case, the will moved outside the psyche. The psyche, in fact, becomes a manifestation of a will that is unanchored to a self at all. James, on the other hand, creeps close to the admission that the will, being a good thing to believe in, is acceptable at least in moral terms.  In other words, both take the will as a supreme fiction.

In the twentieth century, in the psychological sphere, the will was replaced by a cybernetic model of the psyche, one that emphasized control and coordination. The old questions surrounding the will were simply no longer relevant. This image not only provides psychology with its paradigm – it penetrated, to an extent, into the public consciousness. Into, that is, our moral speech. It is impossible to imagine Jane Austin characters speaking about being out of control or in control. They wouldn’t say it, and they wouldn’t understand it if it was said to them. But this has become a reliable part of ordinary speech for those in the twentieth and twenty first century.

However, it is a part of speech that is not entirely coherent with the will ideology, which still exists, and which still influences the way we speak of ourselves and of the polis. It is easy to see why. We all have the experience of doing things we don’t want to do. I have work to do and it is late, but instead of going to bed, I do the work. And the moment of doing something that is not immediately desirable – over something that is immediately desireable – gives me the impression that I will myself to do this over my circumstances. It is easy to think of a computer – say Hal in 2001 – doing what it “wants” to do. But it is much more difficult thinking of it in a will situation – doing what it doesn’t want to do.

This concept in the moral sphere is, I think, slowly changing. It isn’t rare for a driver, or a computer user, to speak of a machine ‘not wanting’ to do something. Being ‘coaxed” into doing something. Of course, at the bottom of this are the lines of routine that one imagines define the machine – are the machine in the machine, so to speak. There’s no ghost in there.  All I’m saying is that the dialectic between the moral image and the cognitive image might well produce an inflection decisively away from the will.

Control without will, control without purpose – artificial unintelligence in a nutshell.

the metaphysics of the address

 

In the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the thieves from the cave that Ali Baba steals from send a spy into the city to discover who the robber was and where he lives. By a clever device, the spy finds Ali Baba’s house and leaves a mark on it. Ali Baba, however, employs a clever maid, Marjaneh, who discovers the mark and, suspecting some skullduggery, takes a piece of chalk and marks other houses, thus bedeviling the band of thieves when they come to town.  This happens a couple of times until the robber captain comes to town and, instead of marking the house, “examined and observed it so carefully” that it was impossible for him to mistake it.
As we know, the clever Marjaneh will thwart the thief captain at every turn. The story has another meaning, however, in Anton Tantner’s Die Hausnummer: Eine Geschichte von Ordnung und Unordnung – The house number: a history of order and disorder: here it throws a light into the premodern era of the city, where direction did not depend on addresses or housenumbers, but on acquaintance, appearance and landmarks, much the same way fishing craft navigated a shore.
Tantner’s book, along with Deidre Mask’s The Address Book, which features a chapter on him, are on the bookshelves of all right thinking address-freaks.   Tantner is faithful to the Foucaultian creed of genealogy – there is no one source for these affordances of contemporary life. The housenumber appears sometimes in early modernity as a sort of score for the height of a house, sometimes an inventory number for the house as property, and only in the 18^th century as a direction mark, a reference.  In  Vienna, where Tratner lives, the address was discussed by the town council in 1754, where it was touted as a guide that would help police find the “disreputable and the dangerous” – but it was voted down. The council feared popular unrest. The populace that was considered disreputable and dangerous by those in power knew exactly what the address was all about.
Ali Baba’s story itself was likely written in the 18^th century by Antoine Galland, the translator of the One Thousand and one nights, who might have heard a core story somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean. After Galland created the Ali Baba story and his translation became famous, the story was fed back, one might say, to its source, and Ali Baba reappears in collections of these tales in India and Egypt.
Galland died at an auberge, the Cerceau D’or, on the corner of Rue des Sept Voies and Rue des Chiens, on February 17, 1715. The auberge had no address, literally: the Rue des Sept Voies was renamed Rue Valette in the 19^th century, which is when a wing of the Bibliotheque Saint Genevieve was built there, obliterating Rue des Chiens. One biographer, describing the auberge, writes that it was on the left or the even-numbered side of the street – a necessary anachronism for us, who come after the Chief Thief in Ali Baba’s tale.
The address system in the 18^th century was the object of many a speculator’s reflections. Among others, Choderlos De Laclos (the author of Dangerous Liaisons) published a scheme for numbering the houses in Paris. But the turning point was, naturally, the municipal code published under Napoleon. Before, house numbers had been considered as a substitute for house signs. But the 1805 code treated addresses with regard to both to the system of streets and the places on the street – places that could contain a house, or a shop, or various hotels, courtyards, apartments, etc. In this way, it made navigation easier and the place less personal – or less, shall we say, feudal.
By such strokes the old family patterns were broken. By such strokes it was possible to find, tax and raid the inhabitant.  
However, the drama of the address does not end there. Even now, the idea of distributing an address on the internet can cause an upset. Doxxing has become part of our vocabulary. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the great doxx-ers were the newspapers.  The bread and butter policing story – the theft, the murder, the assault, etc. –  included addresses. When a rich man or woman died, where they died and even how much the property was worth was part of the story. The address, to me, has a siren power – I think of them as calling out, in their own sonic language, to their own communities. It strikes me that it is no coincidence that the abolished auberge where Galland died was possibly the same auberge, under a different name, that three hundred years before welcomed Erasmus when he came to Paris. And I think of what Borges might have made of the historical fact that a famous library, much visited by foreign students, is figuratively built on top of the death bed of the translator of the One Thousand and One nights – one of whose nights, at least, was written by him from errant memories of a story muttered by an old Turkish dervish.
 
 
 
 
 

chatter in the moral vacuum - Gaza and us

 The whole discussion of whether Trump or Biden will be "worse for Palestinians", mounted by privileged Americans who have not lost their legs to a U.S. supplied bomb, or all of their children, or all of their children and their sister's children and their brother's children

It shows zero empathy, zero heart, zero hesitation, in the face of moral atrocity, to chatter. Twittering the concentration camp - this is a sort of moral insantity.

As well, it shows an absense of any sense that Middle Eastern things spill into the "West". It will be a miracle if there isn't a "terrorist" attack before Nov. 6. And I am sure the death and destruction will be met with the chatter-point: it would be worse under Trump.

It is worse and worse now. The least we owe to the child with the amputated leg, the homeless family, the starving street, camp, city, is to feel something for them. Once that human bond is erased, chatter fills the void. It is a symptom of the only disconnect of the connected society.

Gaza will matter more and more: remembering against the current of idiocy

 Another day, another headline on Al Jazeera - "Israel’s war on Gaza live: Overnight air attacks kill 11 in the enclave" and another NYT turning a blind eye, no headline whatsoever. Imagine the headlines if Russia attacked a hospital in Kyev.

The media in the US is not only not doing its job by, well, reporting. It is also failing its job of alerting. It is as if everything we have learned about the Middle East over the twenty years has been poured into the memory hole. To think that, by the election in November, with 60 000 Gaza dead to gaze at, there will be no response by paramilitaries and "terrorists" from the Middle East is crazy. We've all seen this before - for instance, Francois Hollande sending French planes to bomb DAECH sites as if we lived in 1900, and DAECH inspired men can't find guns and entry into the Eurosphere.

How did that turn out?

Are we doomed to another round of this idiocy? The end game of neo-colonialism is being staged as a series of bloody massacres modeled on Whak-a-Mole, and the intelligentsia is more involved with figuring out who Prince William is cheating with than a mass murder that has everything to do with the end of the world order as we know it. But those outside of Gaza think that if they are silent enough, everything will turn out to be fine. Ifnoring the consequences of, say, cutting off a food supply to a small area with two million people for two weeks, three weeks, for weeks won't lead to anything... unsightly.

The future is unfolding before us.

The clock is ticking: murder and re-murder in Gaza

 I am generally hoping for a Democratic party victory in the House and Senate, but I am passing on voting for Biden. There are 31,000 corpses and counting that count against him. Whatever happens in November, we are set for that body count to soar to 60, 80 or more, and if, as now seems likely, the U.S. does nothing to stop the attack on Rafah, we might get a Palestine-rein Gaza by Christmas. Meanwhile, on of the Ministers of Fuck-all in Netanyahu's Cabient is distributing 100,000 guns to settlers in the West Bank.

Joseph Roth, in Paris and dying in 1939, corresponded with his friend Stefan Zweig about the leader of the Zionist movement, Chaim Weizmann. Roth saw in Zionism the same blind natinalism and racism as he saw in Germany. Roth, who wrote a great book about Eastern European Jews - and was one himself - defended the view that that the bestiality of Hitlerism was in its attack on humanity itself, under which the attack on Jews should be judged: "If I am, as well, concerned to protect the Jews, it is only in so far as they constitute the the most directly threatened avant-garde of humanity."

Roth was a man who went from the Left to the Right, from sympathy for the Russian revolution to nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian empire. He is no sure guide to politics. But I think he expresses something very true here: we honor in every murdered person the image of humanity murdered. Six million or more Jews worked to death, gassed, tortured and otherwise extinguished by the Nazis were each of them a victim of a crime, and that individuality gets rather blurred by the easy use of the term genocide. Justice, at the extremes, is either a form of mourning or it is nothing. And if we murder in turn to "revenge" that person, we take a heavy risk - the risk of defiling that person's memory with the blood we pile upon it.

Hamas, on October 9, murdered 1200 some people. Netanyahu's government, since October 9, have re-murdered these people by murdering 30000 others, making a blood sacrifice that will forever stain those who did it and those who abetted it. We are at the beginning of the starvation and the murders of thousands in Rafah. Those who pretend the U.S. is helpless here are fooling themselves. Worse - I don't think they have any concern with yesterday's victims if they are brown, or Islamic. Meanwhile, the people under the various U.S. allied Middle Eastern dictatorships stew. The clock is ticking.