Bollettino
When LI was in a graduate school in philosophy, one of the philosophers we didn’t read was Leo Strauss. We did read, and we continue to read, a lot of the great conservative writers. There’s no better tonic for a lefty. But Strauss never struck us as an essential figure.
Well, he struck others as one – notably conservatives. So we should have paid more attention. And we have, in a scattered fashion, tried to get some idea of Strauss.
This is why we were interested by a link on Eric Alterman’s blog to this exposition of Strauss by Nicholas Xenos, on . It is an unrelievedly hostile assessment of Strauss from an unapologetically liberal viewpoint. We have nothing against this. Xenos knows his sources, obviously, and is familiar with the “Straussians.” Yet Xenos seems not to understand, or to willfully misunderstand, the ways and customs of conservative thought in the post World War I period in which Strauss came to maturity as a thinker. His root fault is to confuse fascism with any form of opposition to democracy. True, right wing thought since, probably, the period of the Dreyfus trial overlaps the crystallization of fascist thought, and shares certain characteristics. But it would be a mistake to think that fascism succeeded in monopolizing the conservative ‘conceptual space’ of the period.
In Strauss’ case, Xenos’ most damning evidence is a letter that Strauss sent Karl Lowith , after Hitler’s takeover of Germany. Here is Xenos’ translation of a passage in that letter:
“Just because Germany has turned to the right and has expelled us,” meaning Jews, “it simply does not follow that the principles of the right are therefore to be rejected. To the contrary, only on the basis of principles of the right—fascist, authoritarian, imperial [emphasis in original]—is it possible in a dignified manner, without the ridiculous and pitiful appeal to ‘the inalienable rights of man’ to protest against the mean nonentity,” the mean nonentity being the Nazi party. In other words, he [Strauss] is attacking the Nazis from the right in this letter. He wrote that he had been reading Caesar’s Commentaries, and valued Virgil’s judgment that, “under imperial rule the subjected are spared and the proud are subdued.” And he concluded, “there is no reason to crawl to the cross, even to the cross of liberalism, as long as anywhere in the world the spark glimmers of Roman thinking. And moreover, better than any cross is the ghetto.”
However, Strauss, by this time, was developing a conservatism that was the antithesis of fascism. Xenos doesn’t see this, partly because of the way he interprets Strauss’ Hobbes book:
“Also in 1932, he wrote an extended review of a book by the German legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt entitled The Concept of the Political, in which Schmitt articulated his notion that the core of the political problem is the distinction between friends and enemies. Schmitt later became a member of the Nazi party and a leading figure in the main legal organization of the Third Reich. In Strauss’s review, he criticized Schmitt from the political right. He argued that “the critique introduced by Schmitt against liberalism can . . . be completed only if one succeeds in gaining a horizon beyond liberalism. In such a horizon Hobbes completed the foundation of liberalism. A radical critique of liberalism is thus possible only on the basis of an adequate understanding of Hobbes.” His point was that Schmitt was, in his criticisms of liberalism, working within the bounds of liberal society because liberalism had become so dominant that it was difficult see beyond it anymore, and it was thus necessary to go back to Hobbes to see what was there before. What was there before was a very strong sense of the absolute dichotomies of good and evil. For Strauss, Hobbes represents the foundation of liberalism and modernism in the claim that these notions of good and evil are nominalist; they simply do not exist in anything other than our judgment about them. So Strauss was suggesting that you had to go back before liberalism to reconnect with the sort of absolutist distinctions upon which Schmitt was attempting to ground the political.”
Xenos, we think, misses the point. Hobbes was a revelation to Strauss not because of some notion of the relativity of good and evil that he saw in Hobbes. Rather, it was because Strauss believed that Hobbes was the first political thinker to shape his philosophy consistently on the notion of Will. It was Will – whether the Will of the People, in Rousseau, or the Will of the Leader, in Fascism, that Strauss felt had to be resisted; and the state and law gains legitimacy only insofar as it resists the temptation to represent it, or, rather, to give him his due, transforms it through those processes that make for natural order. Far from being a fascist, Strauss’ conservatism objected to the first and pretty much only principle of fascism: the Fuhrerprinzip. Hence, the references to the imperial in that letter have to be read in the context of the Nazi contempt for imperial Germany – the Wilhelmine society and its aristocracy that Hitler abhorred. One can think – I think – that Strauss’ nostalgia here is crazy, but it is certainly not nostalgia for a charismatic leader, but for the world before the Bolshies and the Nazis..
Xenos submerges Strauss’s texts with his own language, which is so full of the language of absolutes and cultural relativisms – so full, that is, of the language in which contemporary Straussians like to fire their popguns and charge – that it is easy to confuse with Strauss’ own. But I would suggest another language to understand what is going on with Strauss in the thirties. It is from Max Weber. Weber’s distinction between three ideal types of domination seems particularly apposite both to Strauss’ objection to Hitler and to liberalism. In fact, as odd as it might seem to Xenos, in the 30s there were many conservatives who thought that Hitler was the deviant endpoint of liberalism, with his all embracing state planning, and his way of intruding the state into the private economic affairs of the individual. If I were to make a grand typological generalization about conservatism, or at least the European variety, I would explain in terms of two moments: one is the synthesis, from the conservative’s viewpoint, of the charismatic mode of domination – in the modern era, the will – with what Weber called the rational, or legal mode of domination. The other is the anxiety this arouses. For other conservatives, there is, ultimately, only the pitting of varieties of two modes of domination. One consists of varieties of order, or tradition, the other consists of varieties of charisma, or the will. The conservative – and in this, Strauss is typical – fears the world becoming all too human. He seeks a hedge – nature or God – a limit to the human. He seeks the in-human. One can see this a bit even in a fundamentally liberal thinker like Hayek, with his emphasis on self-organization – that organization that is emergent, rather than planned.
I am no expert on Strauss, and don’t know how he carried through on his program in America. From the little I’ve read, Strauss seemed to suffer from the same adolescent nostalgia as Heidegger. Adolescent nostalgia is for what I have missed; middle aged nostalgia is for what I have done. You can’t have missed something as absolutely as the Golden age of Greek philosophy – hence the dislike for the modern, hardening sclerotically into a dogma.
Thinking about Xenos’ piece, I thought about other conservative writers of the twenties and thirties. In particular, about Bernanos. So I went back and read a 49 memorial elegy on the great Georges, by a man named Ernst Erich Noth. At the same time Strauss was seeking a way to meet Maurras, Bernanos was breaking with him – a break completed by the howl of anguish about Franco’s atrocities in Spain, Les grandes cimetieres sous la lune. Noth doesn’t bother to disguise Bernanos’ place in a line of French thinkers who were “prophetic”, but also anti-semitic, beginning with the odious Drumont. But Bernanos was closer to Bloy – the weirdest of all anti-semites, who seemed to actually believe that persecuting the Jews made the Jews holier – and hence, it was the gentile duty to persecute them. Or something like that. What Bernanos had that Strauss never had was a belief in prophecy. A belief, ultimately, that the in-human really is God. Here’s a quote from Bernanos, via Noth:
Oh, we are not exactly a race of prophets, like the Jews, we do not utter prophecies, but we fulfill them very well. We are not a race of prophets, to such a degree that our prophets themselves are scarcely distinguishable from other citizens, and we perform miracles only at the last minute, when there is no way of doing anything else…
Friday, June 18, 2004
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Bollettino
What is an elite, and how does it differ from, say, any group?
This is the question that any artist has to ask himself about his audience. There is a disconcerting habit, in this country, to confuse the scale of one’s audience with the issue of elitism, as though only those works of art that extend to the largest scale – the movie Titanic, for instance – are truly “popular.” In one sense, this idea is sheer nonsense – we know that the manipulation of the audience actually produces less popular art, insofar as that art then gets run through a bureaucracy of ‘experts’ in public taste. The result is that a smaller set of themes and variations, and a smaller set of makers, gets chosen to produce the supposedly more ‘popular’ works or art. This leads, too, to thinner and thinner responses – art that doesn’t please immediately is selected out, in favor of art that does. The immediacy of effect and the popularity of the artwork are malignly coupled – deadending in the MTV video, the 30 second advertisement, the celebrity. In fact, as that immediacy becomes more compulsive, it becomes more “mine-able” by the artist – which is why, for instance, Andy Warhol’s Jackie Kennedys and Elvis Presleys still have an undeniable power.
In another sense, however, this idea, grotesque from the viewpoint in the above paragraph, is, from another viewpoint, absolutely correct. The audience for an artwork is not contingent to the artwork, but necessary to its internal structure. The audience is inseparable, in other words, from the making. The process of selection is already encoded in the artwork, exists there rather like Mephistopheles in Faust – as the necessary demon of art. And insofar as elitism is about some process of selection, there is no getting away from the question on the aesthetic plane. While morality is burdened down with the Universal – there is no process of selection going on, ideally, in, say, speaking the truth or not killing – the aesthetic only exists by way of various processes of selection. Which is why the ethical so often stands in a relation of envy to the aesthetic.
Chaouli’s essay about Schlegel displays the confusions surrounding the notion of elitism. Before, much to my friend T.’s chagrin, we quoted Chaouli’s thesis that the romantic art might be taken to found, not a political art, but art as an autonomous structure. Art for art’s sake, T. says. Here’s Chaouli talking about Schlegel’s lectures about Greek tragedy, given in Paris around 1805. First, we have to understand that Schlegel is moving from an earlier, much more revolutionary stance, which Chaouli claims for a perhaps unacknowledged predecessor of certain leading themes in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory:
“Such a judgment would find corroboration in the young Schlegel's sympathetic view of the French Revolution, his engagement for the emancipation of women, and his violation of erotic taboos (for example in Lucinde), which have led some readers to celebrate his kind of romanticism as "a continuation of the bourgeois revolution in the field of ideology." (16) That Schlegel at this point supports the French Revolution is well-documented (17): when reflecting on letters from Caroline Bohmer, a fierce supporter of both the Revolution and the short-lived Mainz Republic (who would marry, first, Schlegel's older brother, August Wilhelm, and later Schelling), the twenty-one-year-old Friedrich Schlegel confesses to be "drunk" with "this enthusiasm for a great public matter." (18) A few years later, in 1796, he writes the deeply anti-republican August Wilhelm: "I don't want to deny that republicanism is still a bit closer to my heart than divine criticism and the most divine poetry."
In that state of drunkenness, appropriately enough, Schegel formulated a ‘republican’ theory of Greek tragedy against which Nietzsche reacted later:
“One important element of what he calls the "republicanism of tragedy" (28) is the fact that the chorus constitutes the "representation of the people." (29) But crossing the barrier of the proscenium and placing the people on both its sides--as members of the audience, as members of the chorus--can become problematic in unfavorable political conditions:
“ The boundaries of the dramatic sphere are determined by the
strongest will of the mass of the audience which necessarily dominates and
guides dramatic representation. When for example higher estates or
the will of the Few rules, then they will establish as law their
conventional and accidental concepts; their pettiness becomes the boundary
of art. Limits of this kind would then be decency etc. These limits
disturb the freedom of art. But if the will were really public and if there
were only the law that the representations should be civil,
republican, public: that really imposes no limits on the poet. (30)”
So much for Chaouli, who has selected some very key citations. Schlegel’s last sentence has been repeated, with little variation, since Schlegel’s time by every artistic movement that has tried to move away from some, as it perceived it, hegemonic and sterile predecessor. Interestingly, this gesture parallels one spotted by Strauss in Hobbes as the characteristic move of the modern era – the move towards a Politics of Will. Just as the politician represents, somehow, the will of the people, so, too, the new artwork, the new way of making art, represents the will of the people in its own way – infinitely explained in the various manifestos that have marked art movements since 1900.
We will end this post with a long quote from Chaouli, and return to the theme of elitism and irony later.
“Schlegel provides us--or, more precisely, the four lone members of his audience at his lectures on The History of European Literature--with his own derivation of the trope of parabasis, which is worth attending to:
The only difference [between Greek comedy and tragedy]
consists in parabasis, a speech that in the midst of the play was held by
the chorus in the name of the poet to the people. Yes, it was a complete
interruption and dissolution of the play, during which (just as in the
play itself) the greatest licentiousness reigned and the chorus, which had
stepped out to the outer limits of the proscenium, said the grossest
vulgarities to the people. The name is derived from this stepping out
(ekbasis) (39)
Schlegel does not consider this "complete interruption and dissolution" of the performance to have harmed the unity of the comedy. It lies in the very form of comedy, as "pure comedy," to "dissolve in itself all ends and all intention"; in comedy "nonform itself is ... the highest art."
… Chaouli goes on to quote the rest of Schlegel’s passage:
“…then wit must be boundlessly free. This freedom is to be permitted
when it is meant for a small audience which has the right to take
part in such freedom. Under no circumstances is this for the mixed
crowd which is entirely unworthy of this freedom, where the most
unpleasant, the most pernicious consequences could be feared. (42)”
About which, Chaouli gives us a dense and stimulating reading. LI fears we are quoting too much of his essay, but this passage is absolutely crucial, so please excuse us.
“Athens, where the highest form of comedy was available, is an example of such abuse. "The magistrate was really forced," Schlegel notes, "to ban both the personal satire and the chorus with parabasis. But this coincides with the decline of republicanism and democracy." (43) The point is not whether at the time and place that he utters these sentences--Paris, 1803-04--Schlegel supports or condemns republicanism. What is crucial is that this line of reasoning reproduces the logic of the arguments from 1795 about the dependence of poetry for its freedom on democracy that I quoted earlier. While its evaluation may have changed, the basic point remains that a tight, indeed causal, link is assumed between political freedom (promoted by republicanism and democracy) and the boundless freedom required for the operations of parabasis and Witz, required, in short, for unrestrained irony.
To understand its exact political consequences, we need to look more closely at the trope of parabasis. Elsewhere I have proposed reading Schlegel's experimental poetics together with the language of late eighteenth-century chemistry, which furnishes Schlegel with countless metaphors and images. (44) I have argued that the very precariousness of chemistry--a field perched between the phlogiston and oxygen theories, between magical and rational explanations, between the machine-like logic of combinatorics and the anthropomorphic theory of affinity--makes it into a particularly fitting allegory of the poetical model Schlegel develops. The chemical model has the further virtue of allowing him--and us--to think about poetic entities without immediately pinning them to particular psychic or historical referents. We can thus avoid the temptation to think of the textual irony in mental terms, which would provide us with a second, "higher" consciousness "staging" the irony (even if permanent irony) for our benefit. Permanent parabasis is, so to speak, the inverse of the process of combinatorial coupling that yields poetic forms, for a recombination is only thinkable if we assume a momentary state of pure potential in which all valences are open and anything can happen. This chaotic state, in which substances are thrown into disarray (recall, in the Elective Affinities, the Captain's talk of A "flinging" itself at D) needs to occur before a new combination can form. Interruption is not an intrusion from outside (not a second voice), but rather a defining feature of the progression of the process itself. As Blanchot puts it, "[i]nterupted, it goes on." (45)
In such a state, distinguishing process from interruption is no trivial task. We could turn the usual understanding on its head and say that the chemical process consists of a long series of fluctuating states interrupted by the occasional stable compound. As in Wittgenstein's and Escher's famous drawings of Gestalt switches, we can flip the interruptions from the foreground into the background. In this precise sense, they are permanent, a series of uninterrupted interruptions.
When Schlegel writes that the poetry of Witz is "meant for a small audience" worthy of such boundless freedom, we are likely to frown upon such elitism. This gesture would certainly have the advantage of permitting us to congratulate ourselves on our great courage in standing on the side of republicanism and democracy and against the limitations of freedom. It may, however, have the disadvantage of obscuring our view to the pitfalls of transferring the poetic project to the political realm, and hence of missing the most advanced features of the poetic theory.”
Which brings us around again to the vexing question of what art is for. To which we will return in another post.
What is an elite, and how does it differ from, say, any group?
This is the question that any artist has to ask himself about his audience. There is a disconcerting habit, in this country, to confuse the scale of one’s audience with the issue of elitism, as though only those works of art that extend to the largest scale – the movie Titanic, for instance – are truly “popular.” In one sense, this idea is sheer nonsense – we know that the manipulation of the audience actually produces less popular art, insofar as that art then gets run through a bureaucracy of ‘experts’ in public taste. The result is that a smaller set of themes and variations, and a smaller set of makers, gets chosen to produce the supposedly more ‘popular’ works or art. This leads, too, to thinner and thinner responses – art that doesn’t please immediately is selected out, in favor of art that does. The immediacy of effect and the popularity of the artwork are malignly coupled – deadending in the MTV video, the 30 second advertisement, the celebrity. In fact, as that immediacy becomes more compulsive, it becomes more “mine-able” by the artist – which is why, for instance, Andy Warhol’s Jackie Kennedys and Elvis Presleys still have an undeniable power.
In another sense, however, this idea, grotesque from the viewpoint in the above paragraph, is, from another viewpoint, absolutely correct. The audience for an artwork is not contingent to the artwork, but necessary to its internal structure. The audience is inseparable, in other words, from the making. The process of selection is already encoded in the artwork, exists there rather like Mephistopheles in Faust – as the necessary demon of art. And insofar as elitism is about some process of selection, there is no getting away from the question on the aesthetic plane. While morality is burdened down with the Universal – there is no process of selection going on, ideally, in, say, speaking the truth or not killing – the aesthetic only exists by way of various processes of selection. Which is why the ethical so often stands in a relation of envy to the aesthetic.
Chaouli’s essay about Schlegel displays the confusions surrounding the notion of elitism. Before, much to my friend T.’s chagrin, we quoted Chaouli’s thesis that the romantic art might be taken to found, not a political art, but art as an autonomous structure. Art for art’s sake, T. says. Here’s Chaouli talking about Schlegel’s lectures about Greek tragedy, given in Paris around 1805. First, we have to understand that Schlegel is moving from an earlier, much more revolutionary stance, which Chaouli claims for a perhaps unacknowledged predecessor of certain leading themes in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory:
“Such a judgment would find corroboration in the young Schlegel's sympathetic view of the French Revolution, his engagement for the emancipation of women, and his violation of erotic taboos (for example in Lucinde), which have led some readers to celebrate his kind of romanticism as "a continuation of the bourgeois revolution in the field of ideology." (16) That Schlegel at this point supports the French Revolution is well-documented (17): when reflecting on letters from Caroline Bohmer, a fierce supporter of both the Revolution and the short-lived Mainz Republic (who would marry, first, Schlegel's older brother, August Wilhelm, and later Schelling), the twenty-one-year-old Friedrich Schlegel confesses to be "drunk" with "this enthusiasm for a great public matter." (18) A few years later, in 1796, he writes the deeply anti-republican August Wilhelm: "I don't want to deny that republicanism is still a bit closer to my heart than divine criticism and the most divine poetry."
In that state of drunkenness, appropriately enough, Schegel formulated a ‘republican’ theory of Greek tragedy against which Nietzsche reacted later:
“One important element of what he calls the "republicanism of tragedy" (28) is the fact that the chorus constitutes the "representation of the people." (29) But crossing the barrier of the proscenium and placing the people on both its sides--as members of the audience, as members of the chorus--can become problematic in unfavorable political conditions:
“ The boundaries of the dramatic sphere are determined by the
strongest will of the mass of the audience which necessarily dominates and
guides dramatic representation. When for example higher estates or
the will of the Few rules, then they will establish as law their
conventional and accidental concepts; their pettiness becomes the boundary
of art. Limits of this kind would then be decency etc. These limits
disturb the freedom of art. But if the will were really public and if there
were only the law that the representations should be civil,
republican, public: that really imposes no limits on the poet. (30)”
So much for Chaouli, who has selected some very key citations. Schlegel’s last sentence has been repeated, with little variation, since Schlegel’s time by every artistic movement that has tried to move away from some, as it perceived it, hegemonic and sterile predecessor. Interestingly, this gesture parallels one spotted by Strauss in Hobbes as the characteristic move of the modern era – the move towards a Politics of Will. Just as the politician represents, somehow, the will of the people, so, too, the new artwork, the new way of making art, represents the will of the people in its own way – infinitely explained in the various manifestos that have marked art movements since 1900.
We will end this post with a long quote from Chaouli, and return to the theme of elitism and irony later.
“Schlegel provides us--or, more precisely, the four lone members of his audience at his lectures on The History of European Literature--with his own derivation of the trope of parabasis, which is worth attending to:
The only difference [between Greek comedy and tragedy]
consists in parabasis, a speech that in the midst of the play was held by
the chorus in the name of the poet to the people. Yes, it was a complete
interruption and dissolution of the play, during which (just as in the
play itself) the greatest licentiousness reigned and the chorus, which had
stepped out to the outer limits of the proscenium, said the grossest
vulgarities to the people. The name is derived from this stepping out
(ekbasis) (39)
Schlegel does not consider this "complete interruption and dissolution" of the performance to have harmed the unity of the comedy. It lies in the very form of comedy, as "pure comedy," to "dissolve in itself all ends and all intention"; in comedy "nonform itself is ... the highest art."
… Chaouli goes on to quote the rest of Schlegel’s passage:
“…then wit must be boundlessly free. This freedom is to be permitted
when it is meant for a small audience which has the right to take
part in such freedom. Under no circumstances is this for the mixed
crowd which is entirely unworthy of this freedom, where the most
unpleasant, the most pernicious consequences could be feared. (42)”
About which, Chaouli gives us a dense and stimulating reading. LI fears we are quoting too much of his essay, but this passage is absolutely crucial, so please excuse us.
“Athens, where the highest form of comedy was available, is an example of such abuse. "The magistrate was really forced," Schlegel notes, "to ban both the personal satire and the chorus with parabasis. But this coincides with the decline of republicanism and democracy." (43) The point is not whether at the time and place that he utters these sentences--Paris, 1803-04--Schlegel supports or condemns republicanism. What is crucial is that this line of reasoning reproduces the logic of the arguments from 1795 about the dependence of poetry for its freedom on democracy that I quoted earlier. While its evaluation may have changed, the basic point remains that a tight, indeed causal, link is assumed between political freedom (promoted by republicanism and democracy) and the boundless freedom required for the operations of parabasis and Witz, required, in short, for unrestrained irony.
To understand its exact political consequences, we need to look more closely at the trope of parabasis. Elsewhere I have proposed reading Schlegel's experimental poetics together with the language of late eighteenth-century chemistry, which furnishes Schlegel with countless metaphors and images. (44) I have argued that the very precariousness of chemistry--a field perched between the phlogiston and oxygen theories, between magical and rational explanations, between the machine-like logic of combinatorics and the anthropomorphic theory of affinity--makes it into a particularly fitting allegory of the poetical model Schlegel develops. The chemical model has the further virtue of allowing him--and us--to think about poetic entities without immediately pinning them to particular psychic or historical referents. We can thus avoid the temptation to think of the textual irony in mental terms, which would provide us with a second, "higher" consciousness "staging" the irony (even if permanent irony) for our benefit. Permanent parabasis is, so to speak, the inverse of the process of combinatorial coupling that yields poetic forms, for a recombination is only thinkable if we assume a momentary state of pure potential in which all valences are open and anything can happen. This chaotic state, in which substances are thrown into disarray (recall, in the Elective Affinities, the Captain's talk of A "flinging" itself at D) needs to occur before a new combination can form. Interruption is not an intrusion from outside (not a second voice), but rather a defining feature of the progression of the process itself. As Blanchot puts it, "[i]nterupted, it goes on." (45)
In such a state, distinguishing process from interruption is no trivial task. We could turn the usual understanding on its head and say that the chemical process consists of a long series of fluctuating states interrupted by the occasional stable compound. As in Wittgenstein's and Escher's famous drawings of Gestalt switches, we can flip the interruptions from the foreground into the background. In this precise sense, they are permanent, a series of uninterrupted interruptions.
When Schlegel writes that the poetry of Witz is "meant for a small audience" worthy of such boundless freedom, we are likely to frown upon such elitism. This gesture would certainly have the advantage of permitting us to congratulate ourselves on our great courage in standing on the side of republicanism and democracy and against the limitations of freedom. It may, however, have the disadvantage of obscuring our view to the pitfalls of transferring the poetic project to the political realm, and hence of missing the most advanced features of the poetic theory.”
Which brings us around again to the vexing question of what art is for. To which we will return in another post.
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Notes
My friend, the Brooding Person, publishes a rather hasty epistle from LI.
Bollettino
“It is manifest that the sociology of knowledge is concerned with problems which have had a long prehistory. So far is this true, that the discipline has already found its first historian, Ernst Gruenwald. As he properly indicates, some of its dominant conceptions are simply more systematic and more clearly formulated restatements of views which found expression in the writings of Francis Bacon (see his discussion of the Idola), to trace them no further back. In this same tradition, marking the intellectual optimism of the Enlightenment in asmuch as it assumed that man is capable of acquiring valid knowledge concerning all problems but does not do so merely because of disturbing factors, is Voltaire’s doctrine of the priestly lie. From this view that man, who can know the truth, Is lead to conscious dissimulation by his interests (economic, the will to power, etc.), it is not a far cry to the doctrine that ideas are the outcome of profound interests which unwittingly tincture and distort every phase of man’s thought. Nietzsche starts out from this basis but adds a new facet: the fact that a judgment is false does not necessarily preclude its utility. This distinction between truth and utility finds further expression in the works of Vahihnger, Sorel, Pareto and G. Adler.” – Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Knowledge, 1937
Back to the ever diminishing returns of Friedrich Schlegel.
I will not tolerate groaning from the back row! You there, after class, I will want the floor mopped and the erasers cleaned!…
Merton’s famous essay introduced American audiences to continental controversies that have since made themselves home on the American campus. Rather like learning not to spit tobacco juice on the carpet, generations of American freshmen and sophomores have learned, at least temporarily, that there is more to the theory of truth than George Washington knew when he cut down that cherry tree. And they have put this knowledge merrily to use, producing a world of shabby advertisements, sham celebrities, and bogus political contests.
So it goes.
The early twentieth century American sociologists were bothered by the idea of the penetrative power of democracy. That is, they were worried that the governing class in all of its fields would have to contend with a public grown so recalcitrant as to refuse to obey.
The changes wrought on this theme by the New Deal were interesting. The image of the public was re-sentimentalized, and the image of the governing class was recast as the class of experts. This is still true today, with the word elite conjuring up a haughty, sniffing set of port drinkers ordering about the servants, while “experts” are standard copy in newspapers and magazines, to be quoted slavishly and questioned only by … other experts.
However, whether it was the worry that the elites were losing their coercive power or the worry that experts were being interfered with, the confidence that the truth could be discovered and communicated was still in the zone of G. Washington’s.
Merton’s essay was part of the gradual cultural undermining of this confidence. Merton used part of the essay to examine Mannheim’s very influential Ideology and Utopia. The idea that “ideology,” or a framework of assumptions and habits, could so distort the knowledge of ‘experts’ that it would close off the vivifying shock of reality was explored by Mannheim to the extent that it begins to play the role of Descartes’ malin genie – for couldn’t ideology distort every attempt at describing reality, or acting with reasonable expectations within it? Mannheim’s answer, according to Merton, can be recognized as an ancestor of the contemporary attempt, by some post-modernists, to find a place of ‘nomadic’ thought:
“Inasmuch as Mannheim has severely delimited, if not eliminated, the realm of valid thinking, he is compelled, as were his predecessors, to justify his own observations as true and not merely ideological. This he strives to accomplish by indicating that there is an “unanchored, relatively classless stratum, the socially unattached intelligentsia”, (sozialfreischewbende Intelligenz), who can, by virtue of their detachment, transcend class perspectives and attain valid thought, which integrates the various partial points of view.”
Well, we still haven’t gotten to Schlegel. No cheering in the back, by God I will have order in this classroom! We will, I promise, soon.
My friend, the Brooding Person, publishes a rather hasty epistle from LI.
Bollettino
“It is manifest that the sociology of knowledge is concerned with problems which have had a long prehistory. So far is this true, that the discipline has already found its first historian, Ernst Gruenwald. As he properly indicates, some of its dominant conceptions are simply more systematic and more clearly formulated restatements of views which found expression in the writings of Francis Bacon (see his discussion of the Idola), to trace them no further back. In this same tradition, marking the intellectual optimism of the Enlightenment in asmuch as it assumed that man is capable of acquiring valid knowledge concerning all problems but does not do so merely because of disturbing factors, is Voltaire’s doctrine of the priestly lie. From this view that man, who can know the truth, Is lead to conscious dissimulation by his interests (economic, the will to power, etc.), it is not a far cry to the doctrine that ideas are the outcome of profound interests which unwittingly tincture and distort every phase of man’s thought. Nietzsche starts out from this basis but adds a new facet: the fact that a judgment is false does not necessarily preclude its utility. This distinction between truth and utility finds further expression in the works of Vahihnger, Sorel, Pareto and G. Adler.” – Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Knowledge, 1937
Back to the ever diminishing returns of Friedrich Schlegel.
I will not tolerate groaning from the back row! You there, after class, I will want the floor mopped and the erasers cleaned!…
Merton’s famous essay introduced American audiences to continental controversies that have since made themselves home on the American campus. Rather like learning not to spit tobacco juice on the carpet, generations of American freshmen and sophomores have learned, at least temporarily, that there is more to the theory of truth than George Washington knew when he cut down that cherry tree. And they have put this knowledge merrily to use, producing a world of shabby advertisements, sham celebrities, and bogus political contests.
So it goes.
The early twentieth century American sociologists were bothered by the idea of the penetrative power of democracy. That is, they were worried that the governing class in all of its fields would have to contend with a public grown so recalcitrant as to refuse to obey.
The changes wrought on this theme by the New Deal were interesting. The image of the public was re-sentimentalized, and the image of the governing class was recast as the class of experts. This is still true today, with the word elite conjuring up a haughty, sniffing set of port drinkers ordering about the servants, while “experts” are standard copy in newspapers and magazines, to be quoted slavishly and questioned only by … other experts.
However, whether it was the worry that the elites were losing their coercive power or the worry that experts were being interfered with, the confidence that the truth could be discovered and communicated was still in the zone of G. Washington’s.
Merton’s essay was part of the gradual cultural undermining of this confidence. Merton used part of the essay to examine Mannheim’s very influential Ideology and Utopia. The idea that “ideology,” or a framework of assumptions and habits, could so distort the knowledge of ‘experts’ that it would close off the vivifying shock of reality was explored by Mannheim to the extent that it begins to play the role of Descartes’ malin genie – for couldn’t ideology distort every attempt at describing reality, or acting with reasonable expectations within it? Mannheim’s answer, according to Merton, can be recognized as an ancestor of the contemporary attempt, by some post-modernists, to find a place of ‘nomadic’ thought:
“Inasmuch as Mannheim has severely delimited, if not eliminated, the realm of valid thinking, he is compelled, as were his predecessors, to justify his own observations as true and not merely ideological. This he strives to accomplish by indicating that there is an “unanchored, relatively classless stratum, the socially unattached intelligentsia”, (sozialfreischewbende Intelligenz), who can, by virtue of their detachment, transcend class perspectives and attain valid thought, which integrates the various partial points of view.”
Well, we still haven’t gotten to Schlegel. No cheering in the back, by God I will have order in this classroom! We will, I promise, soon.
Saturday, June 12, 2004
News
Somebody came to the site this week and -- deciding that I knew a language or two besides English -- contracted with me to do translation work.
This is good. This is not enough. My fault, really. LI's little advert for the RWG Editing service is real, and we should point to it periodically. Check it out. I'm even going to be overcoming my habitual sloth and using the code my friend D. sent me to make the page Mozilla friendly, so that those who are using a better browser can actually use my little drop down table to see some of my work. In the meantime, I discovered, amusingly enough, that some institute in Florida that calls itself the Vargas Llosa Org has stolen one of the reviews I wrote for Newsday. Here is the link.
Somebody came to the site this week and -- deciding that I knew a language or two besides English -- contracted with me to do translation work.
This is good. This is not enough. My fault, really. LI's little advert for the RWG Editing service is real, and we should point to it periodically. Check it out. I'm even going to be overcoming my habitual sloth and using the code my friend D. sent me to make the page Mozilla friendly, so that those who are using a better browser can actually use my little drop down table to see some of my work. In the meantime, I discovered, amusingly enough, that some institute in Florida that calls itself the Vargas Llosa Org has stolen one of the reviews I wrote for Newsday. Here is the link.
Thursday, June 10, 2004
Bollettino
Napoleon once remarked that that, if he had been king, he would have thrown Beaumarchais in prison for writing the Noces de Figaro. “The Marriage of Figaro is already the revolution in action.”
Astute of Napoleon to notice – and symptomatic of the tyrant’s syndrome of mistaking the symbol for the fact. The conditions that would precede the revolution in action were happening in the countryside; repressing the symbol becomes, itself, a symbol of the essential narcissism of the court. Figaros in the fields were already claiming equality with his absentee owners by the admittedly less artistic means of putting their houses to the torch. By the time that kind of censorship is needed, it is already too late for that kind of censorship.
If the Bourbons had been treated to a collective lobotomy, you might get something like the Sauds. This family arose from wretched origins, captured power through deceit and mass murder, and has kept it the way a pirate captain keeps order on a ship: by the timely distribution of spoil. This isn't to say that the American embrace of the family wasn't a very clever move. In the post war period, it seemed like an obvious move. Having frozen our relationship to Saudi Arabia to what it was in 1957, however, we have become, so to speak, inadaptive to the Middle Eastern landscape. It is rather like betting on the dinosaurs. We now have two unpalatable alternatives in Saudi Arabia -- supporting the Sauds, which is unviable in the long run, or supporting their overthrow, which is unviable in the short run.
In the aftermath of 9/11, there were several articles exchanged between right wing think tanks about the dispensability of the Sauds. While think tankers were confidently asserting that we didn’t need the dirty oil of the Sauds, Bush was doing what he could to help the ruling family get through the storm of blame that would ensue when it finally sank in that the 9/11 atrocity was committed mainly by Saudis, financed by Saudis, and had its root causes in the politics of Saudi Arabia. The think tankers put out white papers with such silly ‘facts” as the one they loved, about how the U.S. received only 17 percent of its oil, or some such figure, from Saudi Arabia. Thus, if the country went off line, we would only have to make up for a 17 percent loss, right? As though the 83 percent of the rest wouldn’t create a massive competition in other oil fields for the more than 70 percent of overseas oil we need annually. The think tankers, for all their commitment to capitalism, have an oddly naïve view of it. If the price of gas shoots up to 10 dollars a gallon, do they really think the president, of whatever party, is going to endure the fallout? In fact, the Sauds did the usual favor to the American regime du jour, and in the aftermath of 9/11, kept the price of oil down. The quid pro quo was sustained.
There were two articles this weekend in the British press about the coming revolution in Saudi Arabia. It has been predicted over and over that the Saud family is falling, but so far they have enjoyed a very vivacious decrepitude. They always have the outlet of massacring Shiites to relieve tension in the kingdom. But the Kingdom's problems just keep ticking away. In the nineties, the Saud family quietly replaced the officers in the air force after the discovery of numerous conspiracies to overthrow the royals. Saudi Arabia usually stifles news of internal dissent, and international papers, who are happy to spotlight problems elsewhere – say, the dictatorial aspects of Chavez’s presidency in Venezuala – have obliged the Saudis by pretty much ignoring conditions within the Kingdom. But it is going to be hard to ignore those conditions when they start involving dead Americans, as in the murder two days ago of an American security contractor; or when they involve attacks on the infrastructure. It is the latter which just might provide the biggest surprise in the election season here, bigger even then the capture, if capture is possible, of Osama bin Laden. The Sunday Times published a piece by Tony Allen-Mills that begins with a scenario taken from Baer’s book on Saudi Arabia – an attack on Ras Tanura, the largest oil terminal in the world.
Here is the news hook: “The murders of 22 foreigners -one of them a Briton whose body was tied to a car and dragged through the streets by his attackers -provoked an instant spike in oil prices and forced western governments to re-examine their contingency plans.
The prospect of a catastrophic interruption of oil supplies from the world's largest producer is once again haunting the West.”
The NYT reported last week that there was a Saudi radio discussion about when and where one could mutilate the body of one’s enemy in Saudi Arabia a couple of weeks ago. As the Times noted, even the most anti-American imams in Iraq condemned the mutilation of the American contractors in Fallujah. But this isn’t the way Saudi’s ‘theologians’ think of the problem.
Perhaps the Figaro moment was that odd hostage crisis last week. As Allen-Mills describes it:
“Others argue that such speculation is unduly alarmist; that Al-Qaeda is a spent force, the oilfields are well-defended, and that Crown Prince Abdullah and senior members of his family remain unshakably in charge.
That was certainly Abdullah's message after Saudi commandos stormed the Oasis compound last Sunday and freed 50 hostages held by a small group of gunmen.
"Security forces will, God willing, deal with them and others like them by force," the country's de-facto ruler announced. Yesterday a religious edict was issued calling on all Saudis to "inform on anyone planning an act of sabotage".
"But that was not the message conveyed by the bizarre ending to the siege at al-Khobar, where hundreds of Saudi police and commandos surrounded the compound yet somehow allowed all but one of the terrorists to escape. Suspicion of collusion between terrorists and security forces continues to undermine western confidence in the regime.”
The other article, by the Independent’s Mark Hollingsworth, focused less on worst case scenarios than on Saudi Arabia’s financial power. For those who think the U.S. can simply shrug off that power, there were some interesting facts and figures.
“The Saudis also keep an estimated $1trillion (pounds 550bn) on deposit in US banks and another $1trillion or so in the stock market. If they were to suddenly withdraw their investments, it would have a catastrophic impact on the US economy.”
LI thinks we will look back at the Bush response to 9/11 with puzzlement. How could we be so clueless as to have gone to war with Iraq, rather than engaging Al Qaeda? While Osama is both alive and well in a Pakistan that has proven, this spring, that it doesn’t have the strength to dislodge the terrorists, the real threat to the U.S. is growing in a Saudi Arabia where Osama has become a folk hero. While Al Qaeda’s point man for Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz al-Moqrin, crows about the latest attacks on foreigners in the country, the Saud’s keep up their policy of bribery to the tune of subsidizing the thousands of Saud “princes” to the tune of 19,000 dollars per month. Meanwhile, the Saud underclass gets nothing.
The revolution is in action already in the oil fields. We are heading for the falls, captain.
Napoleon once remarked that that, if he had been king, he would have thrown Beaumarchais in prison for writing the Noces de Figaro. “The Marriage of Figaro is already the revolution in action.”
Astute of Napoleon to notice – and symptomatic of the tyrant’s syndrome of mistaking the symbol for the fact. The conditions that would precede the revolution in action were happening in the countryside; repressing the symbol becomes, itself, a symbol of the essential narcissism of the court. Figaros in the fields were already claiming equality with his absentee owners by the admittedly less artistic means of putting their houses to the torch. By the time that kind of censorship is needed, it is already too late for that kind of censorship.
If the Bourbons had been treated to a collective lobotomy, you might get something like the Sauds. This family arose from wretched origins, captured power through deceit and mass murder, and has kept it the way a pirate captain keeps order on a ship: by the timely distribution of spoil. This isn't to say that the American embrace of the family wasn't a very clever move. In the post war period, it seemed like an obvious move. Having frozen our relationship to Saudi Arabia to what it was in 1957, however, we have become, so to speak, inadaptive to the Middle Eastern landscape. It is rather like betting on the dinosaurs. We now have two unpalatable alternatives in Saudi Arabia -- supporting the Sauds, which is unviable in the long run, or supporting their overthrow, which is unviable in the short run.
In the aftermath of 9/11, there were several articles exchanged between right wing think tanks about the dispensability of the Sauds. While think tankers were confidently asserting that we didn’t need the dirty oil of the Sauds, Bush was doing what he could to help the ruling family get through the storm of blame that would ensue when it finally sank in that the 9/11 atrocity was committed mainly by Saudis, financed by Saudis, and had its root causes in the politics of Saudi Arabia. The think tankers put out white papers with such silly ‘facts” as the one they loved, about how the U.S. received only 17 percent of its oil, or some such figure, from Saudi Arabia. Thus, if the country went off line, we would only have to make up for a 17 percent loss, right? As though the 83 percent of the rest wouldn’t create a massive competition in other oil fields for the more than 70 percent of overseas oil we need annually. The think tankers, for all their commitment to capitalism, have an oddly naïve view of it. If the price of gas shoots up to 10 dollars a gallon, do they really think the president, of whatever party, is going to endure the fallout? In fact, the Sauds did the usual favor to the American regime du jour, and in the aftermath of 9/11, kept the price of oil down. The quid pro quo was sustained.
There were two articles this weekend in the British press about the coming revolution in Saudi Arabia. It has been predicted over and over that the Saud family is falling, but so far they have enjoyed a very vivacious decrepitude. They always have the outlet of massacring Shiites to relieve tension in the kingdom. But the Kingdom's problems just keep ticking away. In the nineties, the Saud family quietly replaced the officers in the air force after the discovery of numerous conspiracies to overthrow the royals. Saudi Arabia usually stifles news of internal dissent, and international papers, who are happy to spotlight problems elsewhere – say, the dictatorial aspects of Chavez’s presidency in Venezuala – have obliged the Saudis by pretty much ignoring conditions within the Kingdom. But it is going to be hard to ignore those conditions when they start involving dead Americans, as in the murder two days ago of an American security contractor; or when they involve attacks on the infrastructure. It is the latter which just might provide the biggest surprise in the election season here, bigger even then the capture, if capture is possible, of Osama bin Laden. The Sunday Times published a piece by Tony Allen-Mills that begins with a scenario taken from Baer’s book on Saudi Arabia – an attack on Ras Tanura, the largest oil terminal in the world.
Here is the news hook: “The murders of 22 foreigners -one of them a Briton whose body was tied to a car and dragged through the streets by his attackers -provoked an instant spike in oil prices and forced western governments to re-examine their contingency plans.
The prospect of a catastrophic interruption of oil supplies from the world's largest producer is once again haunting the West.”
The NYT reported last week that there was a Saudi radio discussion about when and where one could mutilate the body of one’s enemy in Saudi Arabia a couple of weeks ago. As the Times noted, even the most anti-American imams in Iraq condemned the mutilation of the American contractors in Fallujah. But this isn’t the way Saudi’s ‘theologians’ think of the problem.
Perhaps the Figaro moment was that odd hostage crisis last week. As Allen-Mills describes it:
“Others argue that such speculation is unduly alarmist; that Al-Qaeda is a spent force, the oilfields are well-defended, and that Crown Prince Abdullah and senior members of his family remain unshakably in charge.
That was certainly Abdullah's message after Saudi commandos stormed the Oasis compound last Sunday and freed 50 hostages held by a small group of gunmen.
"Security forces will, God willing, deal with them and others like them by force," the country's de-facto ruler announced. Yesterday a religious edict was issued calling on all Saudis to "inform on anyone planning an act of sabotage".
"But that was not the message conveyed by the bizarre ending to the siege at al-Khobar, where hundreds of Saudi police and commandos surrounded the compound yet somehow allowed all but one of the terrorists to escape. Suspicion of collusion between terrorists and security forces continues to undermine western confidence in the regime.”
The other article, by the Independent’s Mark Hollingsworth, focused less on worst case scenarios than on Saudi Arabia’s financial power. For those who think the U.S. can simply shrug off that power, there were some interesting facts and figures.
“The Saudis also keep an estimated $1trillion (pounds 550bn) on deposit in US banks and another $1trillion or so in the stock market. If they were to suddenly withdraw their investments, it would have a catastrophic impact on the US economy.”
LI thinks we will look back at the Bush response to 9/11 with puzzlement. How could we be so clueless as to have gone to war with Iraq, rather than engaging Al Qaeda? While Osama is both alive and well in a Pakistan that has proven, this spring, that it doesn’t have the strength to dislodge the terrorists, the real threat to the U.S. is growing in a Saudi Arabia where Osama has become a folk hero. While Al Qaeda’s point man for Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz al-Moqrin, crows about the latest attacks on foreigners in the country, the Saud’s keep up their policy of bribery to the tune of subsidizing the thousands of Saud “princes” to the tune of 19,000 dollars per month. Meanwhile, the Saud underclass gets nothing.
The revolution is in action already in the oil fields. We are heading for the falls, captain.
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Bollettino
Well, my post about elites seems doomed to perpetual postponement. First Reagan dies, which I had to lament; then there was Schlegel to explain; and lately I’ve been getting epistles from my friend T. honing in with an evil eye on two sentences from the essay of Chaouli’s I quoted. The offending passage reads: “The line of reasoning I propose assumes that romanticism, far from furthering a mutual implication of art and politics (or art and religion, or art and philosophy), promotes their differentiation. With romanticism, art (and not politics, religion, or philosophy) increasingly decides what art should be.”
To which my friend, knowing that I was slyly inching towards some beret headed affirmation of the autonomy of art myself, the dangerous doctrine of art for the sake of art, made the following crabby but just remarks:
the “for the sake of" is in my craw (wherever that is)....either (i) the artist knows for what it is that the item is executed and such knowledge is not articulated in any way save for the item executed - this in the sense of 'I have been to the promised land and return with this mere indication of what is the bounty to be had there'; and perhaps (ii) I am merely a vessel for that which generally flows - in the sense of 'I have no choice but to make that which is made merely through my hands'. Each in its own way a narcissism which is ever reproached for it lack of accountability (read: dichotomously claiming authorship and messengership). "For the sake of" as a justification beyond formal terms of evaluation (yes, I'm thinking of Clem Greenberg) and/or execution.”
Well, T. had caught me. I was hoping to sneak through this without running into that cursed slogan. I agree with my friend that it is a wretched idea, and replied:
“… But here is what I was thinking. Politicians and artists appear, historically, about the same time in the early modern period. Their appearance is all about social folds unknown in the medieval period, such that a man could seek power independently of his rank -- like Walpole or Ben Franklin -- just as a man could write or paint or compose independently of his institutional patronage.
Okay, now what you say about for the sake of sticking in your craw -- well, it sticks in the craw of every artist, partly because it is a misplaced generalization. Art is not for the sake of art, but for the sake of this or that artwork. It eradicates, in other words, the punctum -- the now of the artwork, within the confines of which one works -- in favor of the universal -- where there is no confining, and no work, and no fun.
But that is also not entirely true. Art absorbs art. Now when you make the choices i and ii, I think: hmm, does the artist know? I like the ineffability of the known object -- it is the earth, it is promised, and don't bother me with the contracts and the lawyers -- but I keep thinking, knowing about art is not the business of the artist, but the critic or the philosopher.”
That’s a shifty reply, I admit it. My move – to highlight the cognitive side of the word “know” – is not completely above board.
T., as a matter of fact, had a premonition of my move, and wrote me back:
“…not what the artist knows, but what the artist does (thinking, at this very moment, of Twombly's pencil marks on pigment adjacent to raw canvas). “
This discussion made me wonder about the phrase art for art’s sake, which I vaguely attributed to Gautier. I looked it up and found, on this site, some interesting background:
“The expression,” the site claims, “of art for the sake of art appears for the first time in Frence in 1818, in series of lectures by Victor Cousin, entitled ‘on the foundation of the absolute ideas of the true, the beautiful and the good.”
A few paragraphs down, we come to Gautier:
But it is the preface to the novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834) that appears to be the first manifesto of the art for the sake of art school. Of course, a flagrant desire to shock the bourgeois is no stranger to Gautier’s attitude, with the “multiple love affairs of the diva, Madeleine de Maupin (Garnier: 1930,. p. 42). But at the same time he wants to vindicate his opposition to certain moralizing clichés of romanticism. Gautier reproaches the “moral journalists” with their hypocrisy, for, on the one hand, contemporary literature has nothing approaching the licentiousness of certain comedies of Moliere and Marivaux, and, on the other hand, “Books follow the morals of the time and the morals don’t follow the books.” But he really gets indignant at the utilitarian critics who ask, “what purpose does this book serve?” : There is nothing really beautiful that can serve anything else, for everything that is useful is ugly, being the expression of some need, and the needs of men are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and infirm nature. The most useful place in the house is the bathroom. ( « Il n’y a de » vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir ; tout ce qui est utile est laid, car c’est l’expression de quelque besoin, et ceux de l’homme sont ignobles et dégoûtants, comme sa pauvre et infirme nature. – L’endroit le plus utile de la maison, ce sont les latrines » (p. 28).”
Perhaps it is an appropriate fate that the apostle of such a high brow doctrine should be generally known, in this country, as one of the fathers of the Mummy story – Gautier’s Novel (or Romance) of the Mummy was one of the first uses of the mummy returns motif in the 19th century. This site, with its story of the typically arrogant English amateurs entertaining Victorian audiences by ‘unrolling” mummies in front of them, ought to contextualize Gautier’s orientalism. I never found the Mummy a frightful creature when I was a boy. But I’ve always found the decay of the human body frightful. The Mummy, all trussed up with bandages like the cartoon of some Dagwood in the hospital, seemed terminally silly. It would be hard to mistake this genre for anything remotely highbrow – although I admit that I haven’t read the novel. I’m going to, though – it occurred to me that I should read at least one of Gautier’s novels. I’ve downloaded it – as you can too, gentle reader, here .
Well, my post about elites seems doomed to perpetual postponement. First Reagan dies, which I had to lament; then there was Schlegel to explain; and lately I’ve been getting epistles from my friend T. honing in with an evil eye on two sentences from the essay of Chaouli’s I quoted. The offending passage reads: “The line of reasoning I propose assumes that romanticism, far from furthering a mutual implication of art and politics (or art and religion, or art and philosophy), promotes their differentiation. With romanticism, art (and not politics, religion, or philosophy) increasingly decides what art should be.”
To which my friend, knowing that I was slyly inching towards some beret headed affirmation of the autonomy of art myself, the dangerous doctrine of art for the sake of art, made the following crabby but just remarks:
the “for the sake of" is in my craw (wherever that is)....either (i) the artist knows for what it is that the item is executed and such knowledge is not articulated in any way save for the item executed - this in the sense of 'I have been to the promised land and return with this mere indication of what is the bounty to be had there'; and perhaps (ii) I am merely a vessel for that which generally flows - in the sense of 'I have no choice but to make that which is made merely through my hands'. Each in its own way a narcissism which is ever reproached for it lack of accountability (read: dichotomously claiming authorship and messengership). "For the sake of" as a justification beyond formal terms of evaluation (yes, I'm thinking of Clem Greenberg) and/or execution.”
Well, T. had caught me. I was hoping to sneak through this without running into that cursed slogan. I agree with my friend that it is a wretched idea, and replied:
“… But here is what I was thinking. Politicians and artists appear, historically, about the same time in the early modern period. Their appearance is all about social folds unknown in the medieval period, such that a man could seek power independently of his rank -- like Walpole or Ben Franklin -- just as a man could write or paint or compose independently of his institutional patronage.
Okay, now what you say about for the sake of sticking in your craw -- well, it sticks in the craw of every artist, partly because it is a misplaced generalization. Art is not for the sake of art, but for the sake of this or that artwork. It eradicates, in other words, the punctum -- the now of the artwork, within the confines of which one works -- in favor of the universal -- where there is no confining, and no work, and no fun.
But that is also not entirely true. Art absorbs art. Now when you make the choices i and ii, I think: hmm, does the artist know? I like the ineffability of the known object -- it is the earth, it is promised, and don't bother me with the contracts and the lawyers -- but I keep thinking, knowing about art is not the business of the artist, but the critic or the philosopher.”
That’s a shifty reply, I admit it. My move – to highlight the cognitive side of the word “know” – is not completely above board.
T., as a matter of fact, had a premonition of my move, and wrote me back:
“…not what the artist knows, but what the artist does (thinking, at this very moment, of Twombly's pencil marks on pigment adjacent to raw canvas). “
This discussion made me wonder about the phrase art for art’s sake, which I vaguely attributed to Gautier. I looked it up and found, on this site, some interesting background:
“The expression,” the site claims, “of art for the sake of art appears for the first time in Frence in 1818, in series of lectures by Victor Cousin, entitled ‘on the foundation of the absolute ideas of the true, the beautiful and the good.”
A few paragraphs down, we come to Gautier:
But it is the preface to the novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834) that appears to be the first manifesto of the art for the sake of art school. Of course, a flagrant desire to shock the bourgeois is no stranger to Gautier’s attitude, with the “multiple love affairs of the diva, Madeleine de Maupin (Garnier: 1930,. p. 42). But at the same time he wants to vindicate his opposition to certain moralizing clichés of romanticism. Gautier reproaches the “moral journalists” with their hypocrisy, for, on the one hand, contemporary literature has nothing approaching the licentiousness of certain comedies of Moliere and Marivaux, and, on the other hand, “Books follow the morals of the time and the morals don’t follow the books.” But he really gets indignant at the utilitarian critics who ask, “what purpose does this book serve?” : There is nothing really beautiful that can serve anything else, for everything that is useful is ugly, being the expression of some need, and the needs of men are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and infirm nature. The most useful place in the house is the bathroom. ( « Il n’y a de » vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir ; tout ce qui est utile est laid, car c’est l’expression de quelque besoin, et ceux de l’homme sont ignobles et dégoûtants, comme sa pauvre et infirme nature. – L’endroit le plus utile de la maison, ce sont les latrines » (p. 28).”
Perhaps it is an appropriate fate that the apostle of such a high brow doctrine should be generally known, in this country, as one of the fathers of the Mummy story – Gautier’s Novel (or Romance) of the Mummy was one of the first uses of the mummy returns motif in the 19th century. This site, with its story of the typically arrogant English amateurs entertaining Victorian audiences by ‘unrolling” mummies in front of them, ought to contextualize Gautier’s orientalism. I never found the Mummy a frightful creature when I was a boy. But I’ve always found the decay of the human body frightful. The Mummy, all trussed up with bandages like the cartoon of some Dagwood in the hospital, seemed terminally silly. It would be hard to mistake this genre for anything remotely highbrow – although I admit that I haven’t read the novel. I’m going to, though – it occurred to me that I should read at least one of Gautier’s novels. I’ve downloaded it – as you can too, gentle reader, here .
Sunday, June 06, 2004
Bollettino
A few notes on Schlegel
Chaoli’s article, as we said, takes off from a reply made by Friedrich Schlegel to an essay, On Perpeutal Peace, written by Kant. The translation of the essay is here:
It is interesting that the phrase of Kant’s that attracted Schlegel’s attention, Die bürgerliche Verfassung in jedem Staate soll republikanisch seyn, is translated as The Civil Constitution of Every State Should Be Republican." This disguises the force of bürgerliche, even though civil is a pretty good equivalent, since it derives from civus, OF the city. . However, there is a definite overtone of the concept of class – the class of the city’s worthies, to use the older English term - in the word that is rather lacking in its English equivalent. The citizen is not simply an inhabitant – which the American reader, product of the struggle for universal suffrage, might unthinkingly assume.
Schlegel is not well known to American readers. He isn’t, frankly, that well known to LI. But we’ve been reading up on him. He and his brother, August, formed part of the nucleus of German romantics. He was twice married, the second time, after a long cohabitation, to Moses Mendelssohn’s daughter. Schlegel was responsible for the turn towards India in German intellectual culture. He was an Orientalist. He was also the critic whose conception of Greek drama was attacked later, by Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy.
Such is his outline. We looked up a famous putdown of Schlegel by Heine, in his book, The Romantic School. Here is what Heine has to say: “ .. I have to mention here [in the second volume of his book] that many French people have complained about how I have treated the Schlegels, (mainly August Wilhelm), with rather acrid words. But I think such complaints betray a lack of exacter acquaintance with German literary history. The French mainly know A.W. Schlegel from his place in the works of Madame de Staël, his noble defender. Most recognize only his name. The name sounds in the memory as something honorably famous, rather like the name Osiris, about whom we only know, that he was a wonderfully queer kind of God, honored in Egypt. What other curious similarities there might be between A.W. Schlegel and Osiris are little known to my French readers.
Since I once belonged to the academic scholars of the old school, one might consider that I should show some forbearance to them. However, did A.W. Schlegel show any mercy to old Bürger, his literary father? No. He dealt with him according to his own uses and traditions. Because in literature, just as in the woods inhabited by the North American savages, the fathers are murdered by the sons, as soon as they get old and weak.
I’ve already observed in a previous chapter that Friedrich Schlegel was more significant than August. In fact, the latter only fed on the ideas of his brother, and only understood the art of working through them. Fr. Schlegel was a deep thinking man. He knew all the glories of the past, and he felt all the pains of the present. But he had no conception of the holiness of these pains and their necessity for the future healing of the world. He saw the sun set and blinked tearfully at the place where it set and complained bitterly over the spreading darkness of night, but failed to spot the new dawn reddening on the opposite horizon. Fr. Schlegel once called the historian an “inverted prophet”. This phrase is the best description for he himself. He hated the present, was shocked by the future, and only exercized his revelatory vision on the past, which he loved. Poor Fr. Schlegel never saw that the pains of our time are the pains of rebirth; he mistook them for the agonies of death. Out of this fear of death he flew into the tottering ruins of the Catholic Church, which was, when all is said and done, the best place of refuge for a man of his sentiments. All things considered, he was full of the kind of animal spirits that should have made him bolder in life, but he finally decided these were sinful, and as sins, could only be repented. So this is the impulse that drove the writer of “Lucinde” inexorably towards Catholicism. Lucinde is a novel, and outside of his poems and one drama on the Spanish model, Alarkos, it is the single original work of art he left behind him. Recently, the honorable Schleiermacher has published a few enthusiastic letters about Lucinde. There are even critics who praise this novel as a masterpiece, and who prophecize, that someday it will be valued as one of the great books in the German canon. By order of the government one should take these people and treat them as they treat prophets in Russia, who prophecize some public catastrophe: they put them in prison until the time that their predictions come true. No, the gods will protect our literature from this particular piece of bad news. Just as Schlegel’s novel is currently neglected, it is fated to be condemned in the future, for the same reason: because of its trivial lasciviousness.
A few notes on Schlegel
Chaoli’s article, as we said, takes off from a reply made by Friedrich Schlegel to an essay, On Perpeutal Peace, written by Kant. The translation of the essay is here:
It is interesting that the phrase of Kant’s that attracted Schlegel’s attention, Die bürgerliche Verfassung in jedem Staate soll republikanisch seyn, is translated as The Civil Constitution of Every State Should Be Republican." This disguises the force of bürgerliche, even though civil is a pretty good equivalent, since it derives from civus, OF the city. . However, there is a definite overtone of the concept of class – the class of the city’s worthies, to use the older English term - in the word that is rather lacking in its English equivalent. The citizen is not simply an inhabitant – which the American reader, product of the struggle for universal suffrage, might unthinkingly assume.
Schlegel is not well known to American readers. He isn’t, frankly, that well known to LI. But we’ve been reading up on him. He and his brother, August, formed part of the nucleus of German romantics. He was twice married, the second time, after a long cohabitation, to Moses Mendelssohn’s daughter. Schlegel was responsible for the turn towards India in German intellectual culture. He was an Orientalist. He was also the critic whose conception of Greek drama was attacked later, by Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy.
Such is his outline. We looked up a famous putdown of Schlegel by Heine, in his book, The Romantic School. Here is what Heine has to say: “ .. I have to mention here [in the second volume of his book] that many French people have complained about how I have treated the Schlegels, (mainly August Wilhelm), with rather acrid words. But I think such complaints betray a lack of exacter acquaintance with German literary history. The French mainly know A.W. Schlegel from his place in the works of Madame de Staël, his noble defender. Most recognize only his name. The name sounds in the memory as something honorably famous, rather like the name Osiris, about whom we only know, that he was a wonderfully queer kind of God, honored in Egypt. What other curious similarities there might be between A.W. Schlegel and Osiris are little known to my French readers.
Since I once belonged to the academic scholars of the old school, one might consider that I should show some forbearance to them. However, did A.W. Schlegel show any mercy to old Bürger, his literary father? No. He dealt with him according to his own uses and traditions. Because in literature, just as in the woods inhabited by the North American savages, the fathers are murdered by the sons, as soon as they get old and weak.
I’ve already observed in a previous chapter that Friedrich Schlegel was more significant than August. In fact, the latter only fed on the ideas of his brother, and only understood the art of working through them. Fr. Schlegel was a deep thinking man. He knew all the glories of the past, and he felt all the pains of the present. But he had no conception of the holiness of these pains and their necessity for the future healing of the world. He saw the sun set and blinked tearfully at the place where it set and complained bitterly over the spreading darkness of night, but failed to spot the new dawn reddening on the opposite horizon. Fr. Schlegel once called the historian an “inverted prophet”. This phrase is the best description for he himself. He hated the present, was shocked by the future, and only exercized his revelatory vision on the past, which he loved. Poor Fr. Schlegel never saw that the pains of our time are the pains of rebirth; he mistook them for the agonies of death. Out of this fear of death he flew into the tottering ruins of the Catholic Church, which was, when all is said and done, the best place of refuge for a man of his sentiments. All things considered, he was full of the kind of animal spirits that should have made him bolder in life, but he finally decided these were sinful, and as sins, could only be repented. So this is the impulse that drove the writer of “Lucinde” inexorably towards Catholicism. Lucinde is a novel, and outside of his poems and one drama on the Spanish model, Alarkos, it is the single original work of art he left behind him. Recently, the honorable Schleiermacher has published a few enthusiastic letters about Lucinde. There are even critics who praise this novel as a masterpiece, and who prophecize, that someday it will be valued as one of the great books in the German canon. By order of the government one should take these people and treat them as they treat prophets in Russia, who prophecize some public catastrophe: they put them in prison until the time that their predictions come true. No, the gods will protect our literature from this particular piece of bad news. Just as Schlegel’s novel is currently neglected, it is fated to be condemned in the future, for the same reason: because of its trivial lasciviousness.
Bollettino
Wow. There go my twenties…
An egocentric response to the death of Ronald Reagan, the man whose presidency defined almost all of my politics between the ages of 21 and 29. I don’t think Reagan ever proposed a policy or a program, espoused a bill or advocated an idea that I didn’t think was shabby, bogus, illegal, immoral, or simply dumb. From supporting the death squads in El Salvador to the money he wasted on the anti-missile defense – a trillion dollar monument to our now dead pharaoh, which will outlive us all, and never, ever work – Reagan’s presidency galvanized me, at least.
Not that I don’t have a sneaking affection for the guy. There was something so Hollywood corrupt from the thirties about him, like a Raymond Chandler character who, inexplicably, was NOT involved in a murder. A Terry Lennox with permanently ink black hair and – unlike Lennox – a good woman (and a good woman’s astrologer) to guide him through the rough times. I could never get mad at Reagan the person. This, perhaps, was the famous Teflon. Listening to Bush do his usual lipsynch speech – has there ever been a president less able to make a simple speech? – I thought about how smoothly Reagan would have responded, in his salad days, to the news of his own death. The man knew how to talk. Bush, I despise. Reagan has earned some retrospective respect.
Memories, memories. I landed in New Orleans in 1983, just back from a year in France, and plunged, as much as I could plunge, into politics. I joined CISPES, for one – a now defunct organization, then devoted to stopping the support of the contras, and the support of El Salvador’s death squads. Little did I, or anybody, know that the real trouble would be coming from the CIA station in Islamabad, with its gleeful and insane support of a jihad that we are all now paying for. That was way too far away for me. In 83, many of my friends, or friends of friends, in N.O. were – for complicated reasons I won’t get into here – doctors, and they all loved Ronnie. This made sense to me. They were all ferocious about the tax cuts, ferociously investing in various of the schemes that had been let loose in the national bloodstream by the loosening of all regulatory rules. In my part of the country, that meant setting up S&Ls and diverting billions into the pockets of crooks. It was a party.
But the real love for Reagan came from a different strata of people, who could only have been invented by Don Delillo. I mean the truly sinister clique, the retired CIA people, the states rights racists, the ones with the murky pasts. I’d lived in Louisiana off and on for years. Louisiana is different. It is the kind of state that would produce both Lee Harvey Oswald and David Duke. Oswald bothered me, like a shadow out of the corner of my eye, whenever I went out with my comrades to protest against another Yanqui atrocity in Central America downtown. Oswald was not the doppelganger of my preference – I prefer to think of myself as a poete assassine, rather than a poete assassin. Those demos -- such scenes – plainclothesmen hovering around, openly displaying video cameras and recorders, rumors of rightwing Cubans with batons massing on other streets, and the chants which we would bellow out: the people/united/will never be defeated.
A prediction that has been falsified countless times, bellowed with the enthusiastic convinction of mice bitching about mousetraps. Nice to march to in the street, but, as a practical slogan, worthless.
New Orleans press was fiercely for the contras. I remember the Picayune doing a big series about Guatamala in which it was pretty overtly suggested that mass murder might be in order. Can’t have communism on our doorstep. It was that kind of time. Perhaps we should remember 50,000 some Guatamalan peasants were slaughtered, while Reagan’s administration provided their slaughterers with military aide.
Well, there is one thing that keeps small powerless leftist splinter groups going: the bottomless faith of the FBI in their dangerousness. The “mutual delusions of each vice/such are the gates of paradise”, to parody Blake. So it was with CISPES. The New Orleans group started to crumble in 1984. The FBI had penetrated it – as if there were anything to penetrate – and had cornered one young guy from El Salvador. This guy was illegal. Now, at the time, sending someone like that back to El Salvador was equivalent to murdering him. So the FBI said that was what they were going to do, if he didn’t ‘name names.” Next thing I knew, one of the people I worked with at Tulane ( a man I shall call Peter) was receiving calls from the FBI – at work. Peter was an ardent leftist, but in terms of his subversive potential, the FBI had the wrong man – his sneakiness was devoted less to overthrowing our liberties than to cheating on his girlfriend. However, his girlfriend, who was the Nicaraguan consul to New Orleans, was eventually picked up too, and expelled from the country for spying. Supposedly, she had made a map of the New Orleans harbor. Even now, that makes me laugh – the only spying she was doing was following around Peter, to find out if he was cheating on her. If she could draw a map to her house from two blocks away, I would be astonished. We are not talking about a cartographically endowed woman.
Of course, LI loved the idea that the FBI was closing in – it validated both our sense of self importance and our idea of what the FBI does. Alas, even after he made elaborate precautions – telling the neighbors, for instance, that if the FBI came for him, he was going to ‘call them over as witnesses” – there was no party.
Later, reading the Times, we put it together. The FBI just wanted to pre-empt CISPES threatened demonstrations against Reagan at the Republican convention in Dallas.
And now he is dead in L.A. God rest his bones.
Wow. There go my twenties…
An egocentric response to the death of Ronald Reagan, the man whose presidency defined almost all of my politics between the ages of 21 and 29. I don’t think Reagan ever proposed a policy or a program, espoused a bill or advocated an idea that I didn’t think was shabby, bogus, illegal, immoral, or simply dumb. From supporting the death squads in El Salvador to the money he wasted on the anti-missile defense – a trillion dollar monument to our now dead pharaoh, which will outlive us all, and never, ever work – Reagan’s presidency galvanized me, at least.
Not that I don’t have a sneaking affection for the guy. There was something so Hollywood corrupt from the thirties about him, like a Raymond Chandler character who, inexplicably, was NOT involved in a murder. A Terry Lennox with permanently ink black hair and – unlike Lennox – a good woman (and a good woman’s astrologer) to guide him through the rough times. I could never get mad at Reagan the person. This, perhaps, was the famous Teflon. Listening to Bush do his usual lipsynch speech – has there ever been a president less able to make a simple speech? – I thought about how smoothly Reagan would have responded, in his salad days, to the news of his own death. The man knew how to talk. Bush, I despise. Reagan has earned some retrospective respect.
Memories, memories. I landed in New Orleans in 1983, just back from a year in France, and plunged, as much as I could plunge, into politics. I joined CISPES, for one – a now defunct organization, then devoted to stopping the support of the contras, and the support of El Salvador’s death squads. Little did I, or anybody, know that the real trouble would be coming from the CIA station in Islamabad, with its gleeful and insane support of a jihad that we are all now paying for. That was way too far away for me. In 83, many of my friends, or friends of friends, in N.O. were – for complicated reasons I won’t get into here – doctors, and they all loved Ronnie. This made sense to me. They were all ferocious about the tax cuts, ferociously investing in various of the schemes that had been let loose in the national bloodstream by the loosening of all regulatory rules. In my part of the country, that meant setting up S&Ls and diverting billions into the pockets of crooks. It was a party.
But the real love for Reagan came from a different strata of people, who could only have been invented by Don Delillo. I mean the truly sinister clique, the retired CIA people, the states rights racists, the ones with the murky pasts. I’d lived in Louisiana off and on for years. Louisiana is different. It is the kind of state that would produce both Lee Harvey Oswald and David Duke. Oswald bothered me, like a shadow out of the corner of my eye, whenever I went out with my comrades to protest against another Yanqui atrocity in Central America downtown. Oswald was not the doppelganger of my preference – I prefer to think of myself as a poete assassine, rather than a poete assassin. Those demos -- such scenes – plainclothesmen hovering around, openly displaying video cameras and recorders, rumors of rightwing Cubans with batons massing on other streets, and the chants which we would bellow out: the people/united/will never be defeated.
A prediction that has been falsified countless times, bellowed with the enthusiastic convinction of mice bitching about mousetraps. Nice to march to in the street, but, as a practical slogan, worthless.
New Orleans press was fiercely for the contras. I remember the Picayune doing a big series about Guatamala in which it was pretty overtly suggested that mass murder might be in order. Can’t have communism on our doorstep. It was that kind of time. Perhaps we should remember 50,000 some Guatamalan peasants were slaughtered, while Reagan’s administration provided their slaughterers with military aide.
Well, there is one thing that keeps small powerless leftist splinter groups going: the bottomless faith of the FBI in their dangerousness. The “mutual delusions of each vice/such are the gates of paradise”, to parody Blake. So it was with CISPES. The New Orleans group started to crumble in 1984. The FBI had penetrated it – as if there were anything to penetrate – and had cornered one young guy from El Salvador. This guy was illegal. Now, at the time, sending someone like that back to El Salvador was equivalent to murdering him. So the FBI said that was what they were going to do, if he didn’t ‘name names.” Next thing I knew, one of the people I worked with at Tulane ( a man I shall call Peter) was receiving calls from the FBI – at work. Peter was an ardent leftist, but in terms of his subversive potential, the FBI had the wrong man – his sneakiness was devoted less to overthrowing our liberties than to cheating on his girlfriend. However, his girlfriend, who was the Nicaraguan consul to New Orleans, was eventually picked up too, and expelled from the country for spying. Supposedly, she had made a map of the New Orleans harbor. Even now, that makes me laugh – the only spying she was doing was following around Peter, to find out if he was cheating on her. If she could draw a map to her house from two blocks away, I would be astonished. We are not talking about a cartographically endowed woman.
Of course, LI loved the idea that the FBI was closing in – it validated both our sense of self importance and our idea of what the FBI does. Alas, even after he made elaborate precautions – telling the neighbors, for instance, that if the FBI came for him, he was going to ‘call them over as witnesses” – there was no party.
Later, reading the Times, we put it together. The FBI just wanted to pre-empt CISPES threatened demonstrations against Reagan at the Republican convention in Dallas.
And now he is dead in L.A. God rest his bones.
Friday, June 04, 2004
Bollettino
In our last post, we said that we wanted to ponder, at length, elites and elitism.
Let’s start with our all too brief remarks about the doctrine of double truth. If the philosopher writes texts with double messages – a public one for the vulgar, and a hidden one for the elite – one wonders: why does the elite need to hide?
In the Republic, Plato dreamed of a philosopher king – but in the Apology, Plato shows the philosopher’s real fate, the most inglorious of murders at the hands of the state. From Plato to Nietzsche, the philosopher posed a problem by his very existence in a society structured by the three functions: workers, priests, nobles. The philosopher was the free agent – or the cursed portion, the shit, kindling, the nomadic. The inability to socially stabilize the philosopher’s power became the philosopher’s theme – picked up again in the early modern era, and finding its most extreme expression in Nietzsche, where it became the single greatest symbol of the culture of nihilism that has grown secretly inside Western culture.
So okay, this is where we are. In this post, we want to approach those topics with our usual exemplary obliqueness, like a sidewinding snake, through an article in the Fall, 2003, Studies in Romanticism: “The politics of permanent parabasis,” by Michel Chaouli. A lovely article about that unlikely paragon of the problem we are addressing, Friedrich Schlegel.
Chaouli’s problem is this: how did we come to think that the “link between artistic practice and political ideology” determines the “correct” interpretation of artistic texts?
Chaouli refers to two ways of thinking about romanticism – either as a set of sinister political ideas encoded in a set of aesthetic ideas, or as a set of sinister political ideas that are transformed into utopian ideas in aesthetic practice. Either the Frankfurt School or Ernst Bloch.
About this, he writes: “both strategies therefore find themselves unable either to consider or to test the hypothesis that one of the crucial accomplishments of romanticism may lie precisely in the weakening or breaking of this link. This is not to suggest that the romantics did not hold political views, nor that their poetic works do not engage important political questions. It does suggest that their most radical innovations in poetic practice and aesthetic theory can only be recognized and absorbed by later writers if those innovations are not constrained by the demands placed upon a political theory or social model. The line of reasoning I propose assumes that romanticism, far from furthering a mutual implication of art and politics (or art and religion, or art and philosophy), promotes their differentiation. With romanticism, art (and not politics, religion, or philosophy) increasingly decides what art should be.”
In our next post: Schlegel and Kant
In our last post, we said that we wanted to ponder, at length, elites and elitism.
Let’s start with our all too brief remarks about the doctrine of double truth. If the philosopher writes texts with double messages – a public one for the vulgar, and a hidden one for the elite – one wonders: why does the elite need to hide?
In the Republic, Plato dreamed of a philosopher king – but in the Apology, Plato shows the philosopher’s real fate, the most inglorious of murders at the hands of the state. From Plato to Nietzsche, the philosopher posed a problem by his very existence in a society structured by the three functions: workers, priests, nobles. The philosopher was the free agent – or the cursed portion, the shit, kindling, the nomadic. The inability to socially stabilize the philosopher’s power became the philosopher’s theme – picked up again in the early modern era, and finding its most extreme expression in Nietzsche, where it became the single greatest symbol of the culture of nihilism that has grown secretly inside Western culture.
So okay, this is where we are. In this post, we want to approach those topics with our usual exemplary obliqueness, like a sidewinding snake, through an article in the Fall, 2003, Studies in Romanticism: “The politics of permanent parabasis,” by Michel Chaouli. A lovely article about that unlikely paragon of the problem we are addressing, Friedrich Schlegel.
Chaouli’s problem is this: how did we come to think that the “link between artistic practice and political ideology” determines the “correct” interpretation of artistic texts?
Chaouli refers to two ways of thinking about romanticism – either as a set of sinister political ideas encoded in a set of aesthetic ideas, or as a set of sinister political ideas that are transformed into utopian ideas in aesthetic practice. Either the Frankfurt School or Ernst Bloch.
About this, he writes: “both strategies therefore find themselves unable either to consider or to test the hypothesis that one of the crucial accomplishments of romanticism may lie precisely in the weakening or breaking of this link. This is not to suggest that the romantics did not hold political views, nor that their poetic works do not engage important political questions. It does suggest that their most radical innovations in poetic practice and aesthetic theory can only be recognized and absorbed by later writers if those innovations are not constrained by the demands placed upon a political theory or social model. The line of reasoning I propose assumes that romanticism, far from furthering a mutual implication of art and politics (or art and religion, or art and philosophy), promotes their differentiation. With romanticism, art (and not politics, religion, or philosophy) increasingly decides what art should be.”
In our next post: Schlegel and Kant
Thursday, June 03, 2004
Bollettino
‘My daughter please understand I am displaying your great uncles in a bad light they was wild and often shicker they thieved and fought and abused me cruelly but you must also remember your ancestors would not kowtow to no one and this were a fine rare thing in a colony made specifically to have poor men bow down to their gaolers. – The True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey.
LI’s politics starts from a simple principle, which is that, no matter what the advantage, poor men should not bow down to their gaolers. It gets more complicated after that.
We’ve been thinking about elites and about the famous “noble lie” principle. It is famous now because of the Straussians. But according to Steve Fuller, in his Thomas Kuhn, a philosophical history, the noble lie principle, or the double truth principle, was not direct from Plato to Leo Strauss. Fuller’s book, an all out assault on Kuhn, mentions other famous 20th century figures who held the principle, and implies that it is integrated into the way Kuhn perceived the history of science.
The principle goes like this: the philosopher who writes the truth, in a state or culture where the truth is placed under various interdictions, risks punishment. One strategy, then, is to write so that a certain audience – who Fuller calls the elite – can understand you, but also so another audience – the vulgar (and – by some inexplicable turn of events – the rulers) can understand you. Both versions will contain some truths, but only the elite version, the secret writing, will contain comprehensive truths.
Now, before we talk about elites – and that is what we want to do – a few words about Fuller. We generally agree with Fuller’s assault on Kuhn (for his unbearable mediocrity, for encoding a seemingly revolutionary perspective on science, one that separates it from truth, to effect a really reactionary program in science, one that preserves what Weber called the legitimation of authority – of, in Kuhn’s words, normal science – in the one social domain where rationality can never be radical enough, etc. etc.). We also like the way Fuller tackles philosophy on the level of gossip (of which his footnotes are full) as well as making larger metaphysical-political claims. Fuller is a radical Popperian, with views that seem close to Feyerabend’s. He is not a radical sociology of science guy – he has no time for Latour.
Okay. That’s Fuller. In the end, we were more interested in Fuller’s idea of elites – elites in the sciences, for instance – than we were in Fuller’s radical Popperianism.
Our next post is going to be about elitism. What is it? Are we against it? Is elitism alien to poor men not bowing down to their jailors -- or are those poor men ineradicably elitist?
‘My daughter please understand I am displaying your great uncles in a bad light they was wild and often shicker they thieved and fought and abused me cruelly but you must also remember your ancestors would not kowtow to no one and this were a fine rare thing in a colony made specifically to have poor men bow down to their gaolers. – The True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey.
LI’s politics starts from a simple principle, which is that, no matter what the advantage, poor men should not bow down to their gaolers. It gets more complicated after that.
We’ve been thinking about elites and about the famous “noble lie” principle. It is famous now because of the Straussians. But according to Steve Fuller, in his Thomas Kuhn, a philosophical history, the noble lie principle, or the double truth principle, was not direct from Plato to Leo Strauss. Fuller’s book, an all out assault on Kuhn, mentions other famous 20th century figures who held the principle, and implies that it is integrated into the way Kuhn perceived the history of science.
The principle goes like this: the philosopher who writes the truth, in a state or culture where the truth is placed under various interdictions, risks punishment. One strategy, then, is to write so that a certain audience – who Fuller calls the elite – can understand you, but also so another audience – the vulgar (and – by some inexplicable turn of events – the rulers) can understand you. Both versions will contain some truths, but only the elite version, the secret writing, will contain comprehensive truths.
Now, before we talk about elites – and that is what we want to do – a few words about Fuller. We generally agree with Fuller’s assault on Kuhn (for his unbearable mediocrity, for encoding a seemingly revolutionary perspective on science, one that separates it from truth, to effect a really reactionary program in science, one that preserves what Weber called the legitimation of authority – of, in Kuhn’s words, normal science – in the one social domain where rationality can never be radical enough, etc. etc.). We also like the way Fuller tackles philosophy on the level of gossip (of which his footnotes are full) as well as making larger metaphysical-political claims. Fuller is a radical Popperian, with views that seem close to Feyerabend’s. He is not a radical sociology of science guy – he has no time for Latour.
Okay. That’s Fuller. In the end, we were more interested in Fuller’s idea of elites – elites in the sciences, for instance – than we were in Fuller’s radical Popperianism.
Our next post is going to be about elitism. What is it? Are we against it? Is elitism alien to poor men not bowing down to their jailors -- or are those poor men ineradicably elitist?
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
Bollettino
Notes
First, note that LI’s New Yorker review of Marilyn Yalom’s Birth of the Chess Queen is now on-line, here.
Second, note that LI desperately needs editing work. Reasonable prices (“you’ll think we are CRAZY to charge these prices!”) and all that. Go here – if you have IE5 up –to check out our editing site.
Third, we’ve been reading Steve Fuller’s book on Thomas Kuhn – or supposedly about Thomas Kuhn. It is fascinating, gossipy, and ultimately, to us, unconvincing – not about Kuhn’s mediocrity, which was pretty much an open scandal, but about Fuller’s alternative, which is in the radical Popperian tradition. A post about the ‘double truth’ and elites is even now forming in our belly. Go here to read Fuller’s very funny comparison of Kuhn with Chance the Gardner, in Being There.
Notes
First, note that LI’s New Yorker review of Marilyn Yalom’s Birth of the Chess Queen is now on-line, here.
Second, note that LI desperately needs editing work. Reasonable prices (“you’ll think we are CRAZY to charge these prices!”) and all that. Go here – if you have IE5 up –to check out our editing site.
Third, we’ve been reading Steve Fuller’s book on Thomas Kuhn – or supposedly about Thomas Kuhn. It is fascinating, gossipy, and ultimately, to us, unconvincing – not about Kuhn’s mediocrity, which was pretty much an open scandal, but about Fuller’s alternative, which is in the radical Popperian tradition. A post about the ‘double truth’ and elites is even now forming in our belly. Go here to read Fuller’s very funny comparison of Kuhn with Chance the Gardner, in Being There.
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Bollettino
This is how Mr. Ruskin approached Venice:
“The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of black weed separating and disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving shoal, under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of our own northern waves, yet subdued into a strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry pallor into a field of burnished gold, as the sun declined behind the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly named “St. George of the Seaweed.” As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-colored line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows: but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole horizon to the north—a wall of jagged blue, here and there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices, fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the barred clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as the quick silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer.”
This passage from the Stones of Venice is, among many other things, beautiful. But to say that is not to explain how, say, the balance of soft and hard terms in the passage (bosom/bleak, bright mirage/craggy peaks) resolve into two different movements, one of the eye gliding over the whole horizon, with its mountains and light and water, and the other of the gondola being “paced” – as though the passive had erased the human labor that did the pacing, as though the eye’s instant power and the invisible gondoliers’ sprang from the same root -- it is not an explanation of it beauty, but an explanation of the power of its particular use of language. In other words, to say that it is beautiful is one thing, a judgment dependent, in the end, on a whole system of judgments, but to pose the question of how that beauty was achieved, rather than to bow before its effect, is another thing entirely, and the finest thing that the critic does.
LI has been thinking about beauty since reading James Woods exercise in stripping the skin from an academic factotum in the LRB. The factotum, Randall Stevenson, seems to be of that dreary species that invaded English departments in the 80s, and – in a dialectical twist that makes LI’s head spin – cried up a didactic, identity-heavy literature using the tools of a post-structuralism that emphasized play, the tensions that create and dissolve binaries, supplements, sex, abjection, and the interminable deferring of identity. Wood flays this sort of thing. Here’s a graf in which every stroke is strong, and every stroke cuts:
Randall Stevenson's volume in the Oxford English Literary History, which provides an account of 1960 to 2000, prompts these thoughts [about aesthetics, which we will be coming to – LI] because his book has no interest in aesthetic intention and no interest in aesthetic success. It is a purely academic account of hundreds of literary forms created almost entirely by non-academics. In more than six hundred pages, it is hard to detect the author, who teaches at Edinburgh University, making a single evaluative judgment. In a moment of daring, he calls A House for Mr Biswas 'much-admired', but since he also reserves that epithet for 'The Whitsun Weddings', which he appears not to like, one is left in the dark. This evaluative reticence is not timidity, however. He does have likes and dislikes, and they emerge steadily. He likes poetry and fiction that draw attention to their own procedures: 'self-reflexive, postmodern' forms are what excite him, and the authors of these seem politically 'progressive' to him. This is why he likes J.H. Prynne's verse, but not Larkin's, and why he writes enthusiastically about Rushdie but treats A Dance to the Music of Time as if it were just a handbook of toff sociology.”
Sociology is the key word. Post-structuralism gave one very big gift to the identity theorists who followed them by attacking the formalist presupposition that one could bracket the utterance from the utterance situation. For the post-structuralists, the iterability of utterance did not indicate some fine Platonic preservation of sense, but rather a network of contexts in which the purity of the utterance is actively worked for. The quotation mark, in other words, marks not only the artifice of the Platonic form, but also the start of an investigation of agendas, motives, and unconsciousnesses.
What the identity people did was take that to mean that we must contextually bind utterance – in other words, track down the class and ethnic origin of the utterers, which will tell us all we need to know about the utterance. In a sense, they simply shifted the Platonic moment from sense to the social. This is a dumbfounding move, since it recuperates an attempt to think through a truly naturalistic philosophy of sense by diverting it into a didactic and very familiar frame of subordinating sense to a set of social ends. In hijacking the aesthetic for the ethical, the identity people re-enact a pattern that has cycled throughout the modern age – roughly from 1600 – the puritan’s revenge on license.
Kierkegaard, we think, made a true sociological trouvaille with his division of the social into the ethical, the aesthetic, and the religious. The aesthetic is the “weak” dimension – forever being transformed into an instrument by the ethical and the religious. Yet its weakness is compensated for by the innumerable secret strategies it employs to preserve its autonomy. When Dante, for instance, magnified the dispute between petty Tuscan factions into dramas that spanned hell, purgatory and heaven, the ethic0-political shed its smaller context to clothe itself in a larger and transforming context – one that is bound up with the poetry itself.
But to get back to beauty…
Wood is wholly right to go after Stevenson, and the hunting is good. What interests us as much, however, are Wood’s preparatory remarks. Wood observes the divergence between the Schoolman’s interest in art and the artists interest in it. The Schoolman divests art of intention, and – according to Wood – even of what interests us: its success or failure. The artist, on the other hand, clings to intention and the question: how good is it?
We wonder about Wood’s notion of intention. While the artist is as prone as the carpenter to say things about the intentional structure of the work (I planned this part of my novel to symbolize x, and this part to symbolize y), the artist is also prone to vaguer, de-intentionalizing talk about “inspiration.” This is so deeply embedded in Western art, and so “primitive,” that the Schoolman – and Wood – mostly let it be.
Instead, Wood opts for a realism that seems to have problems of its own:
“Writers are intensely interested in what might be called aesthetic success: they have to be, because in order to create something successful one must learn about other people's successful creations. To the academy, much of this value-chat looks like, and can indeed be, mere impressionism. Again, theory is not the only culprit. A good deal of postmodern thought is suspicious of the artwork's claim to coherence, and so is indifferent or hostile to the discussion of its formal success. But conventional, non-theoretical criticism often acts as if questions of value are irrelevant, or canonically settled. To spend one's time explaining how a text works is not necessarily ever to talk about how well it works, though it might seem that the latter is implicit in the former. Who bothers, while teaching The Portrait of a Lady for the nth time, to explain to a class that it is a beautiful book? But it would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that, for most writers, greedy to learn and emulate, this is the only important question.”
Notice how Wood easily couples “explaining” with “beauty.” In fact, I would like to know how one would explain that the P.of L. is a beautiful book without talking, as Schoolmen do, about how its beauty is achieved? In other words, the beauty of the Portrait of a Lady is mediate. The writer’s value judgments, in terms of success and failure, are about that mediacy: how beauty is achieved. And that takes us back, inevitably, to the utterance’s context. Although, like Derrida, LI believes that ‘context’ is a tease, a provisional fiction.
However, that’s enough for one day.
This is how Mr. Ruskin approached Venice:
“The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of black weed separating and disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving shoal, under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of our own northern waves, yet subdued into a strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry pallor into a field of burnished gold, as the sun declined behind the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly named “St. George of the Seaweed.” As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-colored line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows: but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole horizon to the north—a wall of jagged blue, here and there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices, fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the barred clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as the quick silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer.”
This passage from the Stones of Venice is, among many other things, beautiful. But to say that is not to explain how, say, the balance of soft and hard terms in the passage (bosom/bleak, bright mirage/craggy peaks) resolve into two different movements, one of the eye gliding over the whole horizon, with its mountains and light and water, and the other of the gondola being “paced” – as though the passive had erased the human labor that did the pacing, as though the eye’s instant power and the invisible gondoliers’ sprang from the same root -- it is not an explanation of it beauty, but an explanation of the power of its particular use of language. In other words, to say that it is beautiful is one thing, a judgment dependent, in the end, on a whole system of judgments, but to pose the question of how that beauty was achieved, rather than to bow before its effect, is another thing entirely, and the finest thing that the critic does.
LI has been thinking about beauty since reading James Woods exercise in stripping the skin from an academic factotum in the LRB. The factotum, Randall Stevenson, seems to be of that dreary species that invaded English departments in the 80s, and – in a dialectical twist that makes LI’s head spin – cried up a didactic, identity-heavy literature using the tools of a post-structuralism that emphasized play, the tensions that create and dissolve binaries, supplements, sex, abjection, and the interminable deferring of identity. Wood flays this sort of thing. Here’s a graf in which every stroke is strong, and every stroke cuts:
Randall Stevenson's volume in the Oxford English Literary History, which provides an account of 1960 to 2000, prompts these thoughts [about aesthetics, which we will be coming to – LI] because his book has no interest in aesthetic intention and no interest in aesthetic success. It is a purely academic account of hundreds of literary forms created almost entirely by non-academics. In more than six hundred pages, it is hard to detect the author, who teaches at Edinburgh University, making a single evaluative judgment. In a moment of daring, he calls A House for Mr Biswas 'much-admired', but since he also reserves that epithet for 'The Whitsun Weddings', which he appears not to like, one is left in the dark. This evaluative reticence is not timidity, however. He does have likes and dislikes, and they emerge steadily. He likes poetry and fiction that draw attention to their own procedures: 'self-reflexive, postmodern' forms are what excite him, and the authors of these seem politically 'progressive' to him. This is why he likes J.H. Prynne's verse, but not Larkin's, and why he writes enthusiastically about Rushdie but treats A Dance to the Music of Time as if it were just a handbook of toff sociology.”
Sociology is the key word. Post-structuralism gave one very big gift to the identity theorists who followed them by attacking the formalist presupposition that one could bracket the utterance from the utterance situation. For the post-structuralists, the iterability of utterance did not indicate some fine Platonic preservation of sense, but rather a network of contexts in which the purity of the utterance is actively worked for. The quotation mark, in other words, marks not only the artifice of the Platonic form, but also the start of an investigation of agendas, motives, and unconsciousnesses.
What the identity people did was take that to mean that we must contextually bind utterance – in other words, track down the class and ethnic origin of the utterers, which will tell us all we need to know about the utterance. In a sense, they simply shifted the Platonic moment from sense to the social. This is a dumbfounding move, since it recuperates an attempt to think through a truly naturalistic philosophy of sense by diverting it into a didactic and very familiar frame of subordinating sense to a set of social ends. In hijacking the aesthetic for the ethical, the identity people re-enact a pattern that has cycled throughout the modern age – roughly from 1600 – the puritan’s revenge on license.
Kierkegaard, we think, made a true sociological trouvaille with his division of the social into the ethical, the aesthetic, and the religious. The aesthetic is the “weak” dimension – forever being transformed into an instrument by the ethical and the religious. Yet its weakness is compensated for by the innumerable secret strategies it employs to preserve its autonomy. When Dante, for instance, magnified the dispute between petty Tuscan factions into dramas that spanned hell, purgatory and heaven, the ethic0-political shed its smaller context to clothe itself in a larger and transforming context – one that is bound up with the poetry itself.
But to get back to beauty…
Wood is wholly right to go after Stevenson, and the hunting is good. What interests us as much, however, are Wood’s preparatory remarks. Wood observes the divergence between the Schoolman’s interest in art and the artists interest in it. The Schoolman divests art of intention, and – according to Wood – even of what interests us: its success or failure. The artist, on the other hand, clings to intention and the question: how good is it?
We wonder about Wood’s notion of intention. While the artist is as prone as the carpenter to say things about the intentional structure of the work (I planned this part of my novel to symbolize x, and this part to symbolize y), the artist is also prone to vaguer, de-intentionalizing talk about “inspiration.” This is so deeply embedded in Western art, and so “primitive,” that the Schoolman – and Wood – mostly let it be.
Instead, Wood opts for a realism that seems to have problems of its own:
“Writers are intensely interested in what might be called aesthetic success: they have to be, because in order to create something successful one must learn about other people's successful creations. To the academy, much of this value-chat looks like, and can indeed be, mere impressionism. Again, theory is not the only culprit. A good deal of postmodern thought is suspicious of the artwork's claim to coherence, and so is indifferent or hostile to the discussion of its formal success. But conventional, non-theoretical criticism often acts as if questions of value are irrelevant, or canonically settled. To spend one's time explaining how a text works is not necessarily ever to talk about how well it works, though it might seem that the latter is implicit in the former. Who bothers, while teaching The Portrait of a Lady for the nth time, to explain to a class that it is a beautiful book? But it would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that, for most writers, greedy to learn and emulate, this is the only important question.”
Notice how Wood easily couples “explaining” with “beauty.” In fact, I would like to know how one would explain that the P.of L. is a beautiful book without talking, as Schoolmen do, about how its beauty is achieved? In other words, the beauty of the Portrait of a Lady is mediate. The writer’s value judgments, in terms of success and failure, are about that mediacy: how beauty is achieved. And that takes us back, inevitably, to the utterance’s context. Although, like Derrida, LI believes that ‘context’ is a tease, a provisional fiction.
However, that’s enough for one day.
Saturday, May 29, 2004
Bollettino
So somebody chose the new Iraqi P.M. – unless he is unchosen in the next couple of days. NPR’s Marketplace interviewed an American correspondent, just back from Iraq, who was uncharacteristically frank for an American correspondent. He said, briskly, that Allawi is hugely corrupt, and hugely unpopular.
LI, thinking about legitimacy, power, and the foundations of democracy, decided to search the new issue of the Journal of Democracy, a neo-con deal, for pointers. The new issue has an astonishing ratio of hot air to footnotes. The first article was a performance that would have earned a charitable C from yours truly, during our T.A.-ing years. It proclaimed that, if we don’t watch it, this might be the century of Anti-Americanism. The piece was almost entirely devoid of references, but these were made up for by that perpetual companion of buncombe, the passive voice. My hand got that red pencil urge, confronted with the ‘some have said”s and “there is now a consensus that”s strewn about the page. Among the murk, one thing was clear: anti-Americanism was anti-democratic. Also, mind you, anti-Jewish. Europeans, decadent ones, opinion leaders, were nourishing this anti-Americanism. The one actual person alluded to in the piece was, of course, Francis Fukuyama, that master of the unsupported generalization and the skewed statistic. Well, my surprise was mighty at seeing his name on the byline of the next article. The Journal of Democracy goes in for this kind of group-think, apparently.
So we stopped leafing through the Journal of Democracy. And started leafing through the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.
There we read a charming review of a recent tempest in the teapot of Italian historiography. Robert Putnam, the man who wrote about bowling alone, wrote a book in 1993 about building democracy that praises the Italian city states for creating social capital through institutions that, in a sense, built the relationships that made trust possible. Or perhaps this is a relationship of mutual dependence – the relationships came with the trust, and the trust came with the relationships. In 1999, in the J.I.H., there was a symposium dedicated to pondering Putnam’s theses. Such is the stately, if not glacial, pace of academic pondering that Mark Jurdjevic, in the current issue, now reviews the reviewers in an article entitled, Trust in Renaissance Electoral Politics.
There is some parallel between the happenings in Florence in 1370 and the happenings in Baghdad now. In Florence, there was a poisonous thirst for political position. Jockeying, disguised by appeals to the “natural rise” of this or that person or party, was fierce. The Italian city states dealt with the ambition partly by unloading the inevitable hostility on a third party: fortuna. Accident was a way of randomizing power. Nowhere was this done with such panache as in Venice. LI humbly urges the CPA, in its wisdom, to consider the way they used to elect council members in Venice:
Consider the safeguards against corruption employed in the Venetian electoral system. The Great Council lay at the heart of the Venetian electoral politics, administering 831 posts in the city and the terraferma. Membership was limited to patricians aged twenty-five and older and usually numbered around 1,000. Four nominating committees compiled lists of possible candidates, each of whom would be subject to a vote in the Council. To determine who the nominators would be, patricians filed past an urn that contained sixty gold balls, plus as many silver balls as were necessary to ensure one ball per patrician. Only those patricians who drew a gold ball were entitled to continue to the next electoral stage. Significantly, anyone in the family of someone who drew a gold ball was also disqualified from proceeding in the election. The sixty patricians who advanced filed past another urn, this time containing thirty-six gold balls and the requisite number of silver ones. The winners divided into four nominating committees and retreated to separate rooms to compose their lists.”
Unfortunately, the CPA’s proconsular tendencies aren’t mitigated by a sense of style so gaudy; these conquerors of Baghdad belong to less ornamental set. But they trust the electorate no more than the Venetian upper class. The conventional wisdom, in the States, is that we are over in Iraq to teach the people about democracy. But as St. Paul liked to say, we see now, as in a mirror, darkly. More bluntly, the conventional wisdom inverts the truth. The real lessons in democracy should be given, first, to Bremer’s set at the CPA, who seem only distantly aware of how the thing works, and definitely opposed to all of its distasteful products. In fact, we have never sent a single individual over there who has ever been elected to any office, including dog-catcher. The inevitable result: we have a bunch of people over there who don’t hesitate to game the justice system, ban papers, and try to game the very mechanism for choosing representatives. In other words, we’ve sent over your typical D.C. lobbyists, and asked them to create a democracy. They have as much chance of doing it as a spayed dog has of birthing pups.
…
So somebody chose the new Iraqi P.M. – unless he is unchosen in the next couple of days. NPR’s Marketplace interviewed an American correspondent, just back from Iraq, who was uncharacteristically frank for an American correspondent. He said, briskly, that Allawi is hugely corrupt, and hugely unpopular.
LI, thinking about legitimacy, power, and the foundations of democracy, decided to search the new issue of the Journal of Democracy, a neo-con deal, for pointers. The new issue has an astonishing ratio of hot air to footnotes. The first article was a performance that would have earned a charitable C from yours truly, during our T.A.-ing years. It proclaimed that, if we don’t watch it, this might be the century of Anti-Americanism. The piece was almost entirely devoid of references, but these were made up for by that perpetual companion of buncombe, the passive voice. My hand got that red pencil urge, confronted with the ‘some have said”s and “there is now a consensus that”s strewn about the page. Among the murk, one thing was clear: anti-Americanism was anti-democratic. Also, mind you, anti-Jewish. Europeans, decadent ones, opinion leaders, were nourishing this anti-Americanism. The one actual person alluded to in the piece was, of course, Francis Fukuyama, that master of the unsupported generalization and the skewed statistic. Well, my surprise was mighty at seeing his name on the byline of the next article. The Journal of Democracy goes in for this kind of group-think, apparently.
So we stopped leafing through the Journal of Democracy. And started leafing through the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.
There we read a charming review of a recent tempest in the teapot of Italian historiography. Robert Putnam, the man who wrote about bowling alone, wrote a book in 1993 about building democracy that praises the Italian city states for creating social capital through institutions that, in a sense, built the relationships that made trust possible. Or perhaps this is a relationship of mutual dependence – the relationships came with the trust, and the trust came with the relationships. In 1999, in the J.I.H., there was a symposium dedicated to pondering Putnam’s theses. Such is the stately, if not glacial, pace of academic pondering that Mark Jurdjevic, in the current issue, now reviews the reviewers in an article entitled, Trust in Renaissance Electoral Politics.
There is some parallel between the happenings in Florence in 1370 and the happenings in Baghdad now. In Florence, there was a poisonous thirst for political position. Jockeying, disguised by appeals to the “natural rise” of this or that person or party, was fierce. The Italian city states dealt with the ambition partly by unloading the inevitable hostility on a third party: fortuna. Accident was a way of randomizing power. Nowhere was this done with such panache as in Venice. LI humbly urges the CPA, in its wisdom, to consider the way they used to elect council members in Venice:
Consider the safeguards against corruption employed in the Venetian electoral system. The Great Council lay at the heart of the Venetian electoral politics, administering 831 posts in the city and the terraferma. Membership was limited to patricians aged twenty-five and older and usually numbered around 1,000. Four nominating committees compiled lists of possible candidates, each of whom would be subject to a vote in the Council. To determine who the nominators would be, patricians filed past an urn that contained sixty gold balls, plus as many silver balls as were necessary to ensure one ball per patrician. Only those patricians who drew a gold ball were entitled to continue to the next electoral stage. Significantly, anyone in the family of someone who drew a gold ball was also disqualified from proceeding in the election. The sixty patricians who advanced filed past another urn, this time containing thirty-six gold balls and the requisite number of silver ones. The winners divided into four nominating committees and retreated to separate rooms to compose their lists.”
Unfortunately, the CPA’s proconsular tendencies aren’t mitigated by a sense of style so gaudy; these conquerors of Baghdad belong to less ornamental set. But they trust the electorate no more than the Venetian upper class. The conventional wisdom, in the States, is that we are over in Iraq to teach the people about democracy. But as St. Paul liked to say, we see now, as in a mirror, darkly. More bluntly, the conventional wisdom inverts the truth. The real lessons in democracy should be given, first, to Bremer’s set at the CPA, who seem only distantly aware of how the thing works, and definitely opposed to all of its distasteful products. In fact, we have never sent a single individual over there who has ever been elected to any office, including dog-catcher. The inevitable result: we have a bunch of people over there who don’t hesitate to game the justice system, ban papers, and try to game the very mechanism for choosing representatives. In other words, we’ve sent over your typical D.C. lobbyists, and asked them to create a democracy. They have as much chance of doing it as a spayed dog has of birthing pups.
…
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Bollettino
Marc Reisner’s 1986 Cadillac Desert occupies a unique space in LI’s mental bookshelf. We first read that book in 1992. This was three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. C.D. caused a wall to fall in our own mind – essentially, C.D. destroyed our faith in the central tenet of what you might call the positive economic aspect of Marxism. That tenet, for one hundred years, had been that rationality in economics was the equivalent of finding a way to minimize the social cost of economic activity, which in turn required government planning. No book that we have ever read has presented a more scathing picture of the largescale effects of government planning. If you read, say, interviews with Hayek, the man whose life work was devoted to attacking central planning, you will find that he retained the 20th century’s touching faith in the government’s ability to engineer the environment. Hayek expressly approved of such government programs as the dam building, largescale irrigation, and the lot. What C.D. did is put into question the results of those programs.
We are just beginning to understand those results. If presidential campaigns were truly about our real, long term problems, in 2000 Al Gore and George Bush would not only have mentioned Osama bin Laden at least once in their debates (did they? LI doesn’t have time to check), they would surely have talked, at length, about the disappearance of the Louisiana coast. We’ve already devoted several posts to this topic, and its multiple causes.
Another symptom of the coming of large scale environmental problems directly linked to the government’s engineering of the environment has been just over the horizon of visibility in the West. For the past five years, the West has suffered from a drought that could be more than a drought – it could be a change in the very equilibrium of the climate system in the West, a change to a much drier weather pattern. That would be eerily parallel to the beginning of C.D., which is a pondering of the end of the Anasazi Indian culture in the Southwest. That culture flourished over hundreds of years within a climate that favored agriculture – a climate that was suddenly transformed into a much drier climate.
Ed Quillen, in a retrospective review of C.D., quotes a marvelous paragraph from Reisner’s concluding chapter:
"We didn't have to build main-stem dams on rivers carrying vast loads of silt; we could have built more primitive offstream reservoirs, which is what many private irrigation districts did -- and successfully -- but the federal engineers were enthralled by dams. We didn't have to mine a hundred thousand years' worth of groundwater in a scant half century, any more than we had to keep building 5,000-pound cars with 450-cubic-inch V-8's. We didn't have to dump eight tons of dissolved salts on an acre of land in a year; we could have forsworn development on the most poorly drained lands or demanded that, in exchange for water, the farms conserve as much as possible. But the Bureau [of Reclamation] sells them water so cheaply they can't afford to conserve; to install an efficient irrigation system costs a lot more....
"But the tragic and ludicrous aspect of the whole situation is that cheap water keeps the machine running; the water lobby cannot have enough of it, just as the engineers cannot build enough dams; and how convenient it is that cheap water encourages waste, which results in more dams."
I do wonder how we will look back, in a hundred years time, at such social phenomena as Las Vegas, the fastest growing city in the U.S., perched in the fastest growing desert – for deserts do grow with climate cycles – in the West. Surely the hunger for water, in the next decade, is going to make large scale water projects irresistible – like selling Alaskan water, or Canadian Water, to the Las Vegas or Phoenix municipalities. Mining water like that will extend the unsustainable project of maintaining millions of more people in a desert environment to which they refuse to adapt. At least the Anasazi worked, as well as they could, with what they knew. We don’t have that excuse.
Marc Reisner’s 1986 Cadillac Desert occupies a unique space in LI’s mental bookshelf. We first read that book in 1992. This was three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. C.D. caused a wall to fall in our own mind – essentially, C.D. destroyed our faith in the central tenet of what you might call the positive economic aspect of Marxism. That tenet, for one hundred years, had been that rationality in economics was the equivalent of finding a way to minimize the social cost of economic activity, which in turn required government planning. No book that we have ever read has presented a more scathing picture of the largescale effects of government planning. If you read, say, interviews with Hayek, the man whose life work was devoted to attacking central planning, you will find that he retained the 20th century’s touching faith in the government’s ability to engineer the environment. Hayek expressly approved of such government programs as the dam building, largescale irrigation, and the lot. What C.D. did is put into question the results of those programs.
We are just beginning to understand those results. If presidential campaigns were truly about our real, long term problems, in 2000 Al Gore and George Bush would not only have mentioned Osama bin Laden at least once in their debates (did they? LI doesn’t have time to check), they would surely have talked, at length, about the disappearance of the Louisiana coast. We’ve already devoted several posts to this topic, and its multiple causes.
Another symptom of the coming of large scale environmental problems directly linked to the government’s engineering of the environment has been just over the horizon of visibility in the West. For the past five years, the West has suffered from a drought that could be more than a drought – it could be a change in the very equilibrium of the climate system in the West, a change to a much drier weather pattern. That would be eerily parallel to the beginning of C.D., which is a pondering of the end of the Anasazi Indian culture in the Southwest. That culture flourished over hundreds of years within a climate that favored agriculture – a climate that was suddenly transformed into a much drier climate.
Ed Quillen, in a retrospective review of C.D., quotes a marvelous paragraph from Reisner’s concluding chapter:
"We didn't have to build main-stem dams on rivers carrying vast loads of silt; we could have built more primitive offstream reservoirs, which is what many private irrigation districts did -- and successfully -- but the federal engineers were enthralled by dams. We didn't have to mine a hundred thousand years' worth of groundwater in a scant half century, any more than we had to keep building 5,000-pound cars with 450-cubic-inch V-8's. We didn't have to dump eight tons of dissolved salts on an acre of land in a year; we could have forsworn development on the most poorly drained lands or demanded that, in exchange for water, the farms conserve as much as possible. But the Bureau [of Reclamation] sells them water so cheaply they can't afford to conserve; to install an efficient irrigation system costs a lot more....
"But the tragic and ludicrous aspect of the whole situation is that cheap water keeps the machine running; the water lobby cannot have enough of it, just as the engineers cannot build enough dams; and how convenient it is that cheap water encourages waste, which results in more dams."
I do wonder how we will look back, in a hundred years time, at such social phenomena as Las Vegas, the fastest growing city in the U.S., perched in the fastest growing desert – for deserts do grow with climate cycles – in the West. Surely the hunger for water, in the next decade, is going to make large scale water projects irresistible – like selling Alaskan water, or Canadian Water, to the Las Vegas or Phoenix municipalities. Mining water like that will extend the unsustainable project of maintaining millions of more people in a desert environment to which they refuse to adapt. At least the Anasazi worked, as well as they could, with what they knew. We don’t have that excuse.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Bollettino
Surely those who keep the institutional memory going in the Company are having a rush right now. The controversy around Chalabi is looking increasingly like a controversy that swirled around another Arab figure who briefly convinced an American government to back him, with the help of a story woven by entrenched D.C. honchos. This earlier character was named Nasser.
That Nasser met with the CIA and received CIA support for overthrowing pro-British King Farouk is a story that has been told by Miles Copeland, his CIA handler, in The Game of Nations and his autobiography (which LI has only read bits of, on the web. Like here). Perhaps the operative word isn’t really told – like a donut, a spook story is impossible to separate from its central hole. But Copeland has broadly hinted that the CIA was convinced that the American problem in the Middle East – the perennial tension between supporting Israel and acquiring the necessary amount of petroleum – could be alleviated by Nasser, who would quietly adopt an Israel friendly, or less unfriendly, policy.
Copeland should know, since he spread the story himself. It turned out to be not so. So much American cleverness in the Middle East turns out to be not so.
This isn’t to say that Chalabi has anything like Nasser’s weight as an important figure. Nasser’s constituency was, at the beginning, pretty much the whole Arab world; Chalabi’s, from the beginning to the end, has consisted of a demimonde of family and sleazy family retainers, and a vociferous neo-con lobbying group. As far as the Iraqis are concerned, Chalabi ranks, in popularity, below al-Sad’r, Saddam Hussein, and Darth Vader.
The interesting thing here is that the strategic agenda being pursued, in 1956 and in 2003, is the same. The public side of that agenda was about modernizing the Middle East –democratizing, globalizing, etc., etc. The essence of it, though, was to recreate Nixon’s tripartite structure in the Middle East, with Iraq taking the place of the Shah’s Iran.
Even this is quietly being abandoned. In 2004, as David Ignatius has pointed out in a recent column, the Sauds, far from being slightly shaken from their key position, have seen that position reinforced. In one sense, one wonders: did the Pentagon strategist seriously think they could shake the Saudis with… nothing? They were trying to send a message to Saudi Arabia, but a threat that is couched in terms of an irreality so gross and obvious is less a threat than a sign of weakness. One of the lessons of 9/11 is that the Saudi elite got away with it. Not that they planned it, but they certainly nurtured the ideology that created the hijackers, certainly conveyed the money to the people who paid them, and certainly put the safety of their own hegemony over any other consideration. In all of these things, they have been vindicated. I can’t remember where I ran across the description of Bush, in the week after 9/11, giving Pakistan “an offer it couldn’t refuse.” It made me laugh. Pakistan, after playing bagman for the Saudis, after constructing the Taliban, after mismanaging foreign loans to the extent that they were on the verge of serious IMF action, were given this offer: “here’s three billion dollars in aid, no questions asked.” Wow, I am sure they were all suitably awed by the display of American strength. So the “war on terrorism” that was, in part, a war of terrorists on the U.S., is being played out in two asymmetric parts. The terrorists are doing rather well, considering that they attacked the most powerful nation on earth. They continue to stage attacks, they repel the army of the nation in which they are encamped, and they can even afford to help their old patrons, the Taliban, in the Afghan guerilla war. Their collaborators, the Pakistani secret service and military, have once more managed to get the money flowing from America. And then there are the Saudis. Once again, we are depending on the Saud family to increase the supply of oil. Once again, we are scrambling around to make the Sauds happy.
Yes, but on the other side of the war on terrorism, Bush, having chosen not to fight the war on terrorism, is entangled in a war in Iraq that has everything to do with occupation and a strategy that should have been decorously strangled in the pages of Foreign Policy, rather than enacted in the deserts and the cities.
Kaus, a Republican who has to continually claim he’s a Democrat – it is part of his cred – has been harping for months that the Dem elders will replace Kerry. Kerry is, admittedly, a suck candidate. However, isn’t it about time for the GOP elders to look at Bush? He is not only a bad candidate, but a clear and present danger to some basic American interests that GOP elders should care about.
Surely those who keep the institutional memory going in the Company are having a rush right now. The controversy around Chalabi is looking increasingly like a controversy that swirled around another Arab figure who briefly convinced an American government to back him, with the help of a story woven by entrenched D.C. honchos. This earlier character was named Nasser.
That Nasser met with the CIA and received CIA support for overthrowing pro-British King Farouk is a story that has been told by Miles Copeland, his CIA handler, in The Game of Nations and his autobiography (which LI has only read bits of, on the web. Like here). Perhaps the operative word isn’t really told – like a donut, a spook story is impossible to separate from its central hole. But Copeland has broadly hinted that the CIA was convinced that the American problem in the Middle East – the perennial tension between supporting Israel and acquiring the necessary amount of petroleum – could be alleviated by Nasser, who would quietly adopt an Israel friendly, or less unfriendly, policy.
Copeland should know, since he spread the story himself. It turned out to be not so. So much American cleverness in the Middle East turns out to be not so.
This isn’t to say that Chalabi has anything like Nasser’s weight as an important figure. Nasser’s constituency was, at the beginning, pretty much the whole Arab world; Chalabi’s, from the beginning to the end, has consisted of a demimonde of family and sleazy family retainers, and a vociferous neo-con lobbying group. As far as the Iraqis are concerned, Chalabi ranks, in popularity, below al-Sad’r, Saddam Hussein, and Darth Vader.
The interesting thing here is that the strategic agenda being pursued, in 1956 and in 2003, is the same. The public side of that agenda was about modernizing the Middle East –democratizing, globalizing, etc., etc. The essence of it, though, was to recreate Nixon’s tripartite structure in the Middle East, with Iraq taking the place of the Shah’s Iran.
Even this is quietly being abandoned. In 2004, as David Ignatius has pointed out in a recent column, the Sauds, far from being slightly shaken from their key position, have seen that position reinforced. In one sense, one wonders: did the Pentagon strategist seriously think they could shake the Saudis with… nothing? They were trying to send a message to Saudi Arabia, but a threat that is couched in terms of an irreality so gross and obvious is less a threat than a sign of weakness. One of the lessons of 9/11 is that the Saudi elite got away with it. Not that they planned it, but they certainly nurtured the ideology that created the hijackers, certainly conveyed the money to the people who paid them, and certainly put the safety of their own hegemony over any other consideration. In all of these things, they have been vindicated. I can’t remember where I ran across the description of Bush, in the week after 9/11, giving Pakistan “an offer it couldn’t refuse.” It made me laugh. Pakistan, after playing bagman for the Saudis, after constructing the Taliban, after mismanaging foreign loans to the extent that they were on the verge of serious IMF action, were given this offer: “here’s three billion dollars in aid, no questions asked.” Wow, I am sure they were all suitably awed by the display of American strength. So the “war on terrorism” that was, in part, a war of terrorists on the U.S., is being played out in two asymmetric parts. The terrorists are doing rather well, considering that they attacked the most powerful nation on earth. They continue to stage attacks, they repel the army of the nation in which they are encamped, and they can even afford to help their old patrons, the Taliban, in the Afghan guerilla war. Their collaborators, the Pakistani secret service and military, have once more managed to get the money flowing from America. And then there are the Saudis. Once again, we are depending on the Saud family to increase the supply of oil. Once again, we are scrambling around to make the Sauds happy.
Yes, but on the other side of the war on terrorism, Bush, having chosen not to fight the war on terrorism, is entangled in a war in Iraq that has everything to do with occupation and a strategy that should have been decorously strangled in the pages of Foreign Policy, rather than enacted in the deserts and the cities.
Kaus, a Republican who has to continually claim he’s a Democrat – it is part of his cred – has been harping for months that the Dem elders will replace Kerry. Kerry is, admittedly, a suck candidate. However, isn’t it about time for the GOP elders to look at Bush? He is not only a bad candidate, but a clear and present danger to some basic American interests that GOP elders should care about.
Saturday, May 22, 2004
Bollettino
“I was expressing my aversion to disputes: Mr. Hume, who very gratefully admires the tone of Paris, having never known any other tone, said with great surprise, "Why, what do you like, if you hate both disputes and whist?" – Horace Walpole
Indeed, after pouring out the vials about the War, I am feeling rather disgusted with dispute myself.
Walpole wrote this in a letter in the high summer of the enlightenment, visiting Paris in the summer of 1765. He professed to love France, but wished he could “wash it” – having a very Anglo Saxon aversion to filth. He was amused that the French were in the midst of one of their crazes, this one for things anglais – such as Hume, who was (much to Hume’s own surprise) being made much of. Walpole was the son of the Prime Minister who pretty much made Whiggism the cultural default in England; he was, therefore, naturally averse to Hume’s quirky toryism, and makes various catty remarks about his History in his letters. He is also shocked by the French licence in dispute. For instance, here he is dining with some of the nobility:
“The French affect philosophy, literature, and free-thinking: the first
never did, and never will possess me; of the two others I have long been
tired. Free-thinking is for one's self, surely not for society; besides
one has settled one's way of thinking, or knows it cannot be settled,
and for others I do not see why there is not as much bigotry in
attempting conversions from any religion as to it. I dined to-day with a
dozen _savans_, and though all the servants were waiting, the
conversation was much more unrestrained, even on the Old Testament, than
I would suffer at my own table in England, if a single footman was
present.”
The concern for the footman is such an authentic English note that it is hard not to laugh – and Walpole, who was a sly correspondent, perhaps intended to raise that laugh. On the other hand, the concern with the moral well being of the servants, while having a conservative side, also has an egalitarian side – a concern for what the servants think. And there is the English sense of proportion. The sense of proportion is a sense for the frame of things, ossifying into a sense that the things and the frame under which they are perceived be so organically united that another frame, another perspective, is, trivially, perverse, and, persisted in, a sort of treason to nature:
“What strikes me the most upon the whole is, the total difference of
manners between them and us, from the greatest object to the least.
There is not the smallest similitude in the twenty-four hours. It is
obvious in every trifle. Servants carry their lady's train, and put her
into her coach with their hat on. They walk about the streets in the
rain with umbrellas to avoid putting on their hats; driving themselves
in open chaises in the country without hats, in the rain too, and yet
often wear them in a chariot in Paris when it does not rain. The very
footmen are powdered from the break of day, and yet wait behind their
master, as I saw the Duc of Praslin's do, with a red pocket-handkerchief
about their necks. Versailles, like everything else, is a mixture of
parade and poverty, and in every instance exhibits something most
dissonant from our manners. In the colonnades, upon the staircases, nay
in the antechambers of the royal family, there are people selling all
sorts of wares. While we were waiting in the Dauphin's sumptuous
bedchamber, till his dressing-room door should be opened, two fellows
were sweeping it, and dancing about in sabots to rub the floor.”
Dancing about in sabots! One can imagine Pasolini being utterly delighted by that image -- the Pasolini who signed off his darkest film, Salo, with the image of two fascist lads doing a brief two step. It would be interesting to compare Walpole’s letters from France – which were private letters to friends, but written with such talent that you know Walpole knew they would be passed around – with Voltaire’s letters from England – letters, of course, only formally, since they were meant to be chapters in a book. There is something so deeply, culturally foreign, to the Anglo, and eventually the American mind, to the kind of gesture implied by the servants dancing in their sabots. In Hume’s correspondence, which the invaluable Library of Liberty has put on line, there is a footnote about the Anglomania of the time that points to the other side of the story:
… the first Lord Holland [visited Paris about this time]. 'The French concluded that an Englishman of his reputation must be a philosopher, and must be admired. It was customary with him to doze after dinner, and one day at a great entertainment he happened to fall asleep. " Le voilà !" says a Marquis, pulling his neighbour by the sleeve, "Le voilà qui pense!"'
Although Hume was at political odds with Walpole – for interesting reasons that I’d like to get into some time – he shared the spirit of witty negligence out of which Walpole created his persona as letter writer. In 1765, Hume was earning a lot of money from the sale of his History. In fact, when his publisher urged him to write another volume, going from 1688 into the present, Hume made the classic reply: “I’m too old, too fat, too lazy and too rich” to attempt it.
1765 was a year before Hume’s quarrel with Rousseau. Hume’s reception in philosophic circles that were in love – love at a distance – with English liberty is a curious thing. At home, Hume was known for his partiality against the ‘friends of liberty’, as the inheritors of the Glorious Revolution liked to style themselves. It is easy to forget that Hume was a Scot. For him, the heirs of the Glorious Revolution were the presbytery. From that point of view, it is easy to see how he took a rather jaundiced view of the Puritans. Add to which the considerable part played in Hume’s life by the imp of the perverse. It isn’t that his skepticism wasn’t serious – Hume’s seriousness wasn’t serious. Which is why LI loves him.
Hume’s enjoyment of Paris was augmented by his sense that he was living at a cultural moment. Here is an extract from a letter to his friend, Strahan:
“…there is a general Tranquillity establishd in Europe2; so that we have nothing to do but cultivate Letters: There appears here a much greater Zeal of that kind than in England3; but the best & most taking works of the French are generally publishd in Geneva or Holland, and are in London before they are in Paris4…. I have not lost view of continuing my History6. But as to the Point of my rising in Reputation, I doubt much of it7: The mad and wicked Rage against the Scots, I am told, continues and encreases, and the English are such a mobbish People as never to distinguish. Happily their Opinion gives me no great Concern.8”
This was the era, you will remember, of the Scots favorites of George III. In consequence, the Scots were no favorites of the London mob. But otherwise, in Hume’s view, and the view of his friends like Smith and Robertson, civilization was undoubtedly improving. And, when one comes to think of it, the Scot in Hume would be much more at home in Paris, at this time, then the Briton in Walpole.
There’s a footnote in Hume’s correspondence that quotes that unutterably miserable traitor to the philosophe cause, Grimm. Grimm, in 1766, had not yet shown his true colors. However, he is a spiteful spirit, given to random malice. This is his Hume:
'M. Hume doit aimer la France; il y a requ l'accueil le plus distingué et le plus flatteur. Paris et la cour se sont disputé l'honneur de se surpasser….Ce qu'il y a encore de plaisant, c'est que toutes les jolies femmes se le sont arraché, et que le gros philosophe écossais s'est plu dans leur société. C'est un excellent homme que David Hume; il est naturellement serein, il entend finement, il dit quelquefois avec sel, quoiqu'il parle peu; mais il est lourd, il n'a ni chaleur, ni grace, ni agrément dans l'esprit, ni rien qui soit propre à s'allier au ramage de ces charmantes petites machines qu'on appelle jolies femmes.'
Walpole saw the sights in Paris. He saw the great monster of Gevaudan – an ‘absolute wolf” -- in Marie Antoinette’s corner of the palace. He liked Rousseau’s opera, and disliked the Italian. And the charmantes petites machines – Grimm is all over that phrase – took to Walpole, just as they had to Hume. The effect went to his head – just as it did with Hume. Here he is, revealing his success in another letter in January, 1766:
It would sound vain to tell you the honours and
distinctions I receive, and how much I am in fashion; yet when they come
from the handsomest women in France, and the most respectable in point
of character, can one help being a little proud? If I was twenty years
younger, I should wish they were not quite so respectable. Madame de
Brionne, whom I have never seen, and who was to have met me at supper
last night at the charming Madame d'Egmont's, sent me an invitation by
the latter for Wednesday next. I was engaged, and hesitated. I was told,
"Comment! savez-vous que c'est qu'elle ne feroit pas pour toute la
France?" However, lest you should dread my returning a perfect old
swain, I study my wrinkles, compare myself and my limbs to every plate
of larks I see, and treat my understanding with at least as little
mercy.
Walpole was famously ridden by gout, and one wonders how he managed to hobble around Paris so much. But he did.
I find no mention in his letters from that time of Adam Smith. But, by coincidence, Smith was also visiting Paris in 1765 – and warning his intimate friend Hume not to settle there:
'A man is always displaced in a forreign Country ... They [the French]-live in such large societies, and their affections are dissipated amongst so great a variety of objects, that they can bestow but a very small share of them upon any individual.'
On that note, let’s end this little divertimento.
“I was expressing my aversion to disputes: Mr. Hume, who very gratefully admires the tone of Paris, having never known any other tone, said with great surprise, "Why, what do you like, if you hate both disputes and whist?" – Horace Walpole
Indeed, after pouring out the vials about the War, I am feeling rather disgusted with dispute myself.
Walpole wrote this in a letter in the high summer of the enlightenment, visiting Paris in the summer of 1765. He professed to love France, but wished he could “wash it” – having a very Anglo Saxon aversion to filth. He was amused that the French were in the midst of one of their crazes, this one for things anglais – such as Hume, who was (much to Hume’s own surprise) being made much of. Walpole was the son of the Prime Minister who pretty much made Whiggism the cultural default in England; he was, therefore, naturally averse to Hume’s quirky toryism, and makes various catty remarks about his History in his letters. He is also shocked by the French licence in dispute. For instance, here he is dining with some of the nobility:
“The French affect philosophy, literature, and free-thinking: the first
never did, and never will possess me; of the two others I have long been
tired. Free-thinking is for one's self, surely not for society; besides
one has settled one's way of thinking, or knows it cannot be settled,
and for others I do not see why there is not as much bigotry in
attempting conversions from any religion as to it. I dined to-day with a
dozen _savans_, and though all the servants were waiting, the
conversation was much more unrestrained, even on the Old Testament, than
I would suffer at my own table in England, if a single footman was
present.”
The concern for the footman is such an authentic English note that it is hard not to laugh – and Walpole, who was a sly correspondent, perhaps intended to raise that laugh. On the other hand, the concern with the moral well being of the servants, while having a conservative side, also has an egalitarian side – a concern for what the servants think. And there is the English sense of proportion. The sense of proportion is a sense for the frame of things, ossifying into a sense that the things and the frame under which they are perceived be so organically united that another frame, another perspective, is, trivially, perverse, and, persisted in, a sort of treason to nature:
“What strikes me the most upon the whole is, the total difference of
manners between them and us, from the greatest object to the least.
There is not the smallest similitude in the twenty-four hours. It is
obvious in every trifle. Servants carry their lady's train, and put her
into her coach with their hat on. They walk about the streets in the
rain with umbrellas to avoid putting on their hats; driving themselves
in open chaises in the country without hats, in the rain too, and yet
often wear them in a chariot in Paris when it does not rain. The very
footmen are powdered from the break of day, and yet wait behind their
master, as I saw the Duc of Praslin's do, with a red pocket-handkerchief
about their necks. Versailles, like everything else, is a mixture of
parade and poverty, and in every instance exhibits something most
dissonant from our manners. In the colonnades, upon the staircases, nay
in the antechambers of the royal family, there are people selling all
sorts of wares. While we were waiting in the Dauphin's sumptuous
bedchamber, till his dressing-room door should be opened, two fellows
were sweeping it, and dancing about in sabots to rub the floor.”
Dancing about in sabots! One can imagine Pasolini being utterly delighted by that image -- the Pasolini who signed off his darkest film, Salo, with the image of two fascist lads doing a brief two step. It would be interesting to compare Walpole’s letters from France – which were private letters to friends, but written with such talent that you know Walpole knew they would be passed around – with Voltaire’s letters from England – letters, of course, only formally, since they were meant to be chapters in a book. There is something so deeply, culturally foreign, to the Anglo, and eventually the American mind, to the kind of gesture implied by the servants dancing in their sabots. In Hume’s correspondence, which the invaluable Library of Liberty has put on line, there is a footnote about the Anglomania of the time that points to the other side of the story:
… the first Lord Holland [visited Paris about this time]. 'The French concluded that an Englishman of his reputation must be a philosopher, and must be admired. It was customary with him to doze after dinner, and one day at a great entertainment he happened to fall asleep. " Le voilà !" says a Marquis, pulling his neighbour by the sleeve, "Le voilà qui pense!"'
Although Hume was at political odds with Walpole – for interesting reasons that I’d like to get into some time – he shared the spirit of witty negligence out of which Walpole created his persona as letter writer. In 1765, Hume was earning a lot of money from the sale of his History. In fact, when his publisher urged him to write another volume, going from 1688 into the present, Hume made the classic reply: “I’m too old, too fat, too lazy and too rich” to attempt it.
1765 was a year before Hume’s quarrel with Rousseau. Hume’s reception in philosophic circles that were in love – love at a distance – with English liberty is a curious thing. At home, Hume was known for his partiality against the ‘friends of liberty’, as the inheritors of the Glorious Revolution liked to style themselves. It is easy to forget that Hume was a Scot. For him, the heirs of the Glorious Revolution were the presbytery. From that point of view, it is easy to see how he took a rather jaundiced view of the Puritans. Add to which the considerable part played in Hume’s life by the imp of the perverse. It isn’t that his skepticism wasn’t serious – Hume’s seriousness wasn’t serious. Which is why LI loves him.
Hume’s enjoyment of Paris was augmented by his sense that he was living at a cultural moment. Here is an extract from a letter to his friend, Strahan:
“…there is a general Tranquillity establishd in Europe2; so that we have nothing to do but cultivate Letters: There appears here a much greater Zeal of that kind than in England3; but the best & most taking works of the French are generally publishd in Geneva or Holland, and are in London before they are in Paris4…. I have not lost view of continuing my History6. But as to the Point of my rising in Reputation, I doubt much of it7: The mad and wicked Rage against the Scots, I am told, continues and encreases, and the English are such a mobbish People as never to distinguish. Happily their Opinion gives me no great Concern.8”
This was the era, you will remember, of the Scots favorites of George III. In consequence, the Scots were no favorites of the London mob. But otherwise, in Hume’s view, and the view of his friends like Smith and Robertson, civilization was undoubtedly improving. And, when one comes to think of it, the Scot in Hume would be much more at home in Paris, at this time, then the Briton in Walpole.
There’s a footnote in Hume’s correspondence that quotes that unutterably miserable traitor to the philosophe cause, Grimm. Grimm, in 1766, had not yet shown his true colors. However, he is a spiteful spirit, given to random malice. This is his Hume:
'M. Hume doit aimer la France; il y a requ l'accueil le plus distingué et le plus flatteur. Paris et la cour se sont disputé l'honneur de se surpasser….Ce qu'il y a encore de plaisant, c'est que toutes les jolies femmes se le sont arraché, et que le gros philosophe écossais s'est plu dans leur société. C'est un excellent homme que David Hume; il est naturellement serein, il entend finement, il dit quelquefois avec sel, quoiqu'il parle peu; mais il est lourd, il n'a ni chaleur, ni grace, ni agrément dans l'esprit, ni rien qui soit propre à s'allier au ramage de ces charmantes petites machines qu'on appelle jolies femmes.'
Walpole saw the sights in Paris. He saw the great monster of Gevaudan – an ‘absolute wolf” -- in Marie Antoinette’s corner of the palace. He liked Rousseau’s opera, and disliked the Italian. And the charmantes petites machines – Grimm is all over that phrase – took to Walpole, just as they had to Hume. The effect went to his head – just as it did with Hume. Here he is, revealing his success in another letter in January, 1766:
It would sound vain to tell you the honours and
distinctions I receive, and how much I am in fashion; yet when they come
from the handsomest women in France, and the most respectable in point
of character, can one help being a little proud? If I was twenty years
younger, I should wish they were not quite so respectable. Madame de
Brionne, whom I have never seen, and who was to have met me at supper
last night at the charming Madame d'Egmont's, sent me an invitation by
the latter for Wednesday next. I was engaged, and hesitated. I was told,
"Comment! savez-vous que c'est qu'elle ne feroit pas pour toute la
France?" However, lest you should dread my returning a perfect old
swain, I study my wrinkles, compare myself and my limbs to every plate
of larks I see, and treat my understanding with at least as little
mercy.
Walpole was famously ridden by gout, and one wonders how he managed to hobble around Paris so much. But he did.
I find no mention in his letters from that time of Adam Smith. But, by coincidence, Smith was also visiting Paris in 1765 – and warning his intimate friend Hume not to settle there:
'A man is always displaced in a forreign Country ... They [the French]-live in such large societies, and their affections are dissipated amongst so great a variety of objects, that they can bestow but a very small share of them upon any individual.'
On that note, let’s end this little divertimento.
Friday, May 21, 2004
Bollettino
The good news is that LI appears to be wrong about the neo-con support for Chalabi. We misread the appointment of Chalabi’s nephew as the chief prosecutor of Saddam Hussein – it signified, not the recrudescence of the old reprobate, but his last hurrah – at least as Wolfowitz’s favorite Iraqi.
This is good. But irony always follows at good news at a mocking distance. Chalabi’s pronouncements, during the last month, have made a lot of sense. The Iraqi government needs to take control of its money and its foreign policy, come June 30. Anything else will be a farce.
For a good look at how crooked Chalabi is, the reader should check out Andrew (or is it Patrick?) Cockburn’s article at Counter-Punch. Entertainment can also be extracted from the NYT article and the WP article, neither of which mention the role they played in puffing Chalabi, with Judith Miller in the NYT being notorious in her guileless belief in the wonderful stories spun by the man – which, incidentally, corroborated what her friend Laurie Mylroie was saying, while Sally Quinn’s article about what a sexy devil this Arab we can deal with can be was a sort of high point of neo-con chic – Chalabi having learned how to Mau Mau a few flak catchers himself as he tripped from one party to another in Republican D.C. See our November 24, 03 post, and this link. Quinn’s article is such a pip that it is worth saving. Memorials of the madness, or what I did during the Bush years.
The good news is that LI appears to be wrong about the neo-con support for Chalabi. We misread the appointment of Chalabi’s nephew as the chief prosecutor of Saddam Hussein – it signified, not the recrudescence of the old reprobate, but his last hurrah – at least as Wolfowitz’s favorite Iraqi.
This is good. But irony always follows at good news at a mocking distance. Chalabi’s pronouncements, during the last month, have made a lot of sense. The Iraqi government needs to take control of its money and its foreign policy, come June 30. Anything else will be a farce.
For a good look at how crooked Chalabi is, the reader should check out Andrew (or is it Patrick?) Cockburn’s article at Counter-Punch. Entertainment can also be extracted from the NYT article and the WP article, neither of which mention the role they played in puffing Chalabi, with Judith Miller in the NYT being notorious in her guileless belief in the wonderful stories spun by the man – which, incidentally, corroborated what her friend Laurie Mylroie was saying, while Sally Quinn’s article about what a sexy devil this Arab we can deal with can be was a sort of high point of neo-con chic – Chalabi having learned how to Mau Mau a few flak catchers himself as he tripped from one party to another in Republican D.C. See our November 24, 03 post, and this link. Quinn’s article is such a pip that it is worth saving. Memorials of the madness, or what I did during the Bush years.
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
The nineteenth century Ottoman rulers in Baghdad were Sunnis. Sometimes a Baghdad governor would try to gain semi-independence from Istanbul. However, the Sultans, sporadic Westernizers, pulled back and tried, on the French model, to centralize. Though they failed in Egypt, in Iraq they dislodged the Ma’ud Pasha by armed force, and restored the governorship to its subordinate status with relation to the Porte.
Meanwhile, in Karbala, the Shiite elite had, through negotiation, the desire for protection, and mutual interest, made an accord with various powerful gangs. The Shiites did little more than pay lip service to their Ottoman overlords. Finally, a conservative governor in Baghdad had enough of this. Muhammed Nejib Pasha decided to subdue Karbala, in spite of the Iranian warning that Karbala was sacrosanct. Their were reports that the more powerful gangs had gotten out of control, had raped and murdered with impunity, and were disrespectful of the authority of the Shiite clergy. That, at least, is what Nejib Pasha claimed. So he gathered a force of Turks who marched on Karbala in December, 1842. They parleyed with the leaders of Karbala, but the leadership was divided. In the city, the inhabitants gave credence to various millennial dreams and portents. And the gangs, who could look back on successfully repulsing two earlier forces, had reason to think they could resist Nejib. On January 12, 1843, Nejib blasted through the Najab and Khan gates. In the assault on the 13th, the Turks succeeded in gaining entrance to the city. The gang leadership and its mercenary army fled, while the Turks fought street to street. The Turks lost 400 men. The townspeople lost 3,000, with another 2,000 mercenary Arabs dead.
I gained these facts from an excellent little paper by Juan Cole and Moojan Momen, published in 1986 in Past and Present, entitled "Mafia, Mob and Shi`ism in Iraq: The Rebellion of Ottoman Karbala 1824-1843." What is fascinating here -- a sort of Edward Said nightmare of Orientalism enacted before our very eyes -- is that the same social formations, the same vocabulary, and even the same battle formations have emerged under the American occupation. The point, however, isn’t to demonstrate the timelessness of Shiite society, but to demonstrate the continuity between the perceptions of the conquerors – Ottoman and American.
More on the Shiites in my next post.
Meanwhile, in Karbala, the Shiite elite had, through negotiation, the desire for protection, and mutual interest, made an accord with various powerful gangs. The Shiites did little more than pay lip service to their Ottoman overlords. Finally, a conservative governor in Baghdad had enough of this. Muhammed Nejib Pasha decided to subdue Karbala, in spite of the Iranian warning that Karbala was sacrosanct. Their were reports that the more powerful gangs had gotten out of control, had raped and murdered with impunity, and were disrespectful of the authority of the Shiite clergy. That, at least, is what Nejib Pasha claimed. So he gathered a force of Turks who marched on Karbala in December, 1842. They parleyed with the leaders of Karbala, but the leadership was divided. In the city, the inhabitants gave credence to various millennial dreams and portents. And the gangs, who could look back on successfully repulsing two earlier forces, had reason to think they could resist Nejib. On January 12, 1843, Nejib blasted through the Najab and Khan gates. In the assault on the 13th, the Turks succeeded in gaining entrance to the city. The gang leadership and its mercenary army fled, while the Turks fought street to street. The Turks lost 400 men. The townspeople lost 3,000, with another 2,000 mercenary Arabs dead.
I gained these facts from an excellent little paper by Juan Cole and Moojan Momen, published in 1986 in Past and Present, entitled "Mafia, Mob and Shi`ism in Iraq: The Rebellion of Ottoman Karbala 1824-1843." What is fascinating here -- a sort of Edward Said nightmare of Orientalism enacted before our very eyes -- is that the same social formations, the same vocabulary, and even the same battle formations have emerged under the American occupation. The point, however, isn’t to demonstrate the timelessness of Shiite society, but to demonstrate the continuity between the perceptions of the conquerors – Ottoman and American.
More on the Shiites in my next post.
Sunday, May 16, 2004
Bollettino
(seventh in series)
The form of our government, which gives every man, that has leisure, or curiosity, or vanity, the right of inquiring into the propriety of publick measures, and, by consequence, obliges those who are intrusted with the administration of national affairs, to give an account of their conduct to almost every man who demands it, may be reasonably imagined to have occasioned innumerable pamphlets, which would never have appeared under arbitrary governments, where every man lulls himself in
indolence under calamities, of which he cannot promote the redress, or thinks it prudent to conceal the uneasiness, of which he cannot complain without danger. – Samuel Johnson
2. The Kurds
Pity the peoples that encountered a superpower during the Cold War. From the Hmong to the Misquito, such encounters resulted in the socially dissolving shock of gung ho activists organizing military activity at the expense of undermining tradition; a phase of activity usually ending in some rout that, for realpolitik reasons, had to be either countenanced or suppressed by the host power. It was one thing for nineteenth century Victorians to wipe out the Tasmanians; twentieth century Americans, armed with liberal ideals, did quite as much trying to wipe out Communism, an ideology premised on abolishing a capitalism that was little more than a dream to the tribe; while twentieth century communists, with the gospel of Marx, and its scorn for rural idiocy, to support them, could operate on a scale of inhumanity that would have made Pizzaro blush.
Among these unfortunates, the Kurds have figured largely in the American liberal conscience. Among Kissinger’s most brutal ideas was to use the Kurds as a shock force against what he considered the Soviet proxy in the Middle East – Iraq. In agreement with the Shah of Iran, between 72 and 75 a rebellion by Mustafa Barzani was covertly backed against Saddam’s Ba’ath regime. One of the ironies of the situation was, of course, that our two co-conspirators of the time, Israel and Iran, had no use or sympathy themselves for the Kurds. Barzani had actually wrung concessions from Saddam’s government for the Kurds that far outdid what was allowed to Iranian or Turkish Kurds. In 1975, the Shah made peace with Saddam, the price of which was paid by waves of massacre in Northern Iraq. The oppression increased during the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s, but the news of Kurds being gassed did not penetrate the policy being designed by the Reagan administration, which allowed Saddam’s regime billions in credits and shared intelligence with Saddam’s military. There’s an interesting and in some way counter-argument to the orthodox version of this made here, by the way. And Kissinger’s defense is excerpted here.
Peter Galbraith (who LI has interviewed, and who came across as an immensely likeable man), was an investigator for the Senate who went to Northern Iraq in the late eighties, saw the devastation being visited upon the Kurds, and became, in that moment, the Kurd’s great advocate in Washington. He wrote the first bill that sanctioned Iraq – only to see it shot down by the Reagan administration. The liberal hawks last year were surely moved, in great part, by the memory of Saddam’s genocide of the Kurds, and that narrative was moved and originally shaped in D.C. by Galbraith.
However, the oppression of the Kurds shouldn’t obscure the salient fact, in the history of Northern Iraq, that the struggle for Kurdish independence has never been a struggle for democracy. Since liberals like their romantic national struggles to be all of a piece, this fact has tended to get lost in the shuffle, and it remains irretrievable to a media that suffers, when it comes to foreign parts, from a sad case of chronic short term memory loss. Galbraith’s NYRB article about getting out of Iraq, which has caused a large stir, weaves about certain lacuna with a master laceworker’s skill. To make this point, Galbraith wittingly skips over the history of Northern Iraq in the 90s. Let’s quote, for the sake of abridgement, two grafs:
‘The Kurds, however, are well organized. They have an elected parliament and two regional governments, their own court system, and a 100,000 strong military force, known as the Peshmerga. The Peshmerga, whose members were principal American allies in the 2003 war, are better armed, better trained, and more disciplined than the minuscule Iraqi army the United States is now trying to reconstitute.”
“Since 1991, Kurdistan has been de facto independent and most Iraqi Kurds see this period as a golden era of democratic self-government and economic progress. In 1992 Kurdistan had the only democratic elections in the history of Iraq, when voters chose members of a newly created Kurdistan National Assembly. During the last twelve years the Kurdistan Regional Government built three thousand schools (as compared to one thousand in the region in 1991), opened two universities, and permitted a free press; there are now scores of Kurdish-language publications, radio stations, and television stations. For the older generation, Iraq is a bad memory, while a younger generation, which largely does not speak Arabic, has no sense of being Iraqi.”
Galbraith’s method here is to select certain facts, and cast others into the shadows. For instance, how is it that the same golden era of democratic self-government is also the era in which, according to every newspaper account from 1995 and 1996, the Kurds experienced a civil war? Perhaps that war, in fact, has something to do with the mysterious mention of two “regional governments.” The uninstructed reader conjures up visions of Texas and Louisiana – just two friendly states – instead of a touchy concord between two armed parties, loyal to two warlords.
Galbraith’s idea is that Iraq should survive as a very loose confederation, giving a lot of autonomy to the three major regions. This might be a good idea. However, its extension, that “we” should ‘divide” Iraq into three separate nations to prevent civil war, is wholly pernicious. First, on the grounds of logic. If civil war were preventable by the division of one country into an undetermined number of countries, why, civil war would never happen. This is much like saying we should prevent ‘4” by adding 2 + 2.
Second, on the grounds of the we – what we are we talking about, and what authority does this ‘we’ have? It is definitely the conqueror’s we that is being bandied about here.
Because the Kurds have born an insupportable amount of oppression from governments based in Baghdad, I could understand the Kurdish desire for independence. But it is impossible to envision that desire becoming real without a war. The worst result of CPA rule may be this: building the conditions for a long and bloody civil war, from insisting on provisions in the constitution that seem designed to block Iraq from operating as a sovereign nation -- a constitution that reminds one of one of those legendarily insidious microsoft codes, where the company can use its knowledge to peek into what its users are doing, with the company here being the U.S.A.-- to allowing the disproportion in armed forces to which Galbraith alludes.
Next post: the Shiites.
(seventh in series)
The form of our government, which gives every man, that has leisure, or curiosity, or vanity, the right of inquiring into the propriety of publick measures, and, by consequence, obliges those who are intrusted with the administration of national affairs, to give an account of their conduct to almost every man who demands it, may be reasonably imagined to have occasioned innumerable pamphlets, which would never have appeared under arbitrary governments, where every man lulls himself in
indolence under calamities, of which he cannot promote the redress, or thinks it prudent to conceal the uneasiness, of which he cannot complain without danger. – Samuel Johnson
2. The Kurds
Pity the peoples that encountered a superpower during the Cold War. From the Hmong to the Misquito, such encounters resulted in the socially dissolving shock of gung ho activists organizing military activity at the expense of undermining tradition; a phase of activity usually ending in some rout that, for realpolitik reasons, had to be either countenanced or suppressed by the host power. It was one thing for nineteenth century Victorians to wipe out the Tasmanians; twentieth century Americans, armed with liberal ideals, did quite as much trying to wipe out Communism, an ideology premised on abolishing a capitalism that was little more than a dream to the tribe; while twentieth century communists, with the gospel of Marx, and its scorn for rural idiocy, to support them, could operate on a scale of inhumanity that would have made Pizzaro blush.
Among these unfortunates, the Kurds have figured largely in the American liberal conscience. Among Kissinger’s most brutal ideas was to use the Kurds as a shock force against what he considered the Soviet proxy in the Middle East – Iraq. In agreement with the Shah of Iran, between 72 and 75 a rebellion by Mustafa Barzani was covertly backed against Saddam’s Ba’ath regime. One of the ironies of the situation was, of course, that our two co-conspirators of the time, Israel and Iran, had no use or sympathy themselves for the Kurds. Barzani had actually wrung concessions from Saddam’s government for the Kurds that far outdid what was allowed to Iranian or Turkish Kurds. In 1975, the Shah made peace with Saddam, the price of which was paid by waves of massacre in Northern Iraq. The oppression increased during the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s, but the news of Kurds being gassed did not penetrate the policy being designed by the Reagan administration, which allowed Saddam’s regime billions in credits and shared intelligence with Saddam’s military. There’s an interesting and in some way counter-argument to the orthodox version of this made here, by the way. And Kissinger’s defense is excerpted here.
Peter Galbraith (who LI has interviewed, and who came across as an immensely likeable man), was an investigator for the Senate who went to Northern Iraq in the late eighties, saw the devastation being visited upon the Kurds, and became, in that moment, the Kurd’s great advocate in Washington. He wrote the first bill that sanctioned Iraq – only to see it shot down by the Reagan administration. The liberal hawks last year were surely moved, in great part, by the memory of Saddam’s genocide of the Kurds, and that narrative was moved and originally shaped in D.C. by Galbraith.
However, the oppression of the Kurds shouldn’t obscure the salient fact, in the history of Northern Iraq, that the struggle for Kurdish independence has never been a struggle for democracy. Since liberals like their romantic national struggles to be all of a piece, this fact has tended to get lost in the shuffle, and it remains irretrievable to a media that suffers, when it comes to foreign parts, from a sad case of chronic short term memory loss. Galbraith’s NYRB article about getting out of Iraq, which has caused a large stir, weaves about certain lacuna with a master laceworker’s skill. To make this point, Galbraith wittingly skips over the history of Northern Iraq in the 90s. Let’s quote, for the sake of abridgement, two grafs:
‘The Kurds, however, are well organized. They have an elected parliament and two regional governments, their own court system, and a 100,000 strong military force, known as the Peshmerga. The Peshmerga, whose members were principal American allies in the 2003 war, are better armed, better trained, and more disciplined than the minuscule Iraqi army the United States is now trying to reconstitute.”
“Since 1991, Kurdistan has been de facto independent and most Iraqi Kurds see this period as a golden era of democratic self-government and economic progress. In 1992 Kurdistan had the only democratic elections in the history of Iraq, when voters chose members of a newly created Kurdistan National Assembly. During the last twelve years the Kurdistan Regional Government built three thousand schools (as compared to one thousand in the region in 1991), opened two universities, and permitted a free press; there are now scores of Kurdish-language publications, radio stations, and television stations. For the older generation, Iraq is a bad memory, while a younger generation, which largely does not speak Arabic, has no sense of being Iraqi.”
Galbraith’s method here is to select certain facts, and cast others into the shadows. For instance, how is it that the same golden era of democratic self-government is also the era in which, according to every newspaper account from 1995 and 1996, the Kurds experienced a civil war? Perhaps that war, in fact, has something to do with the mysterious mention of two “regional governments.” The uninstructed reader conjures up visions of Texas and Louisiana – just two friendly states – instead of a touchy concord between two armed parties, loyal to two warlords.
Galbraith’s idea is that Iraq should survive as a very loose confederation, giving a lot of autonomy to the three major regions. This might be a good idea. However, its extension, that “we” should ‘divide” Iraq into three separate nations to prevent civil war, is wholly pernicious. First, on the grounds of logic. If civil war were preventable by the division of one country into an undetermined number of countries, why, civil war would never happen. This is much like saying we should prevent ‘4” by adding 2 + 2.
Second, on the grounds of the we – what we are we talking about, and what authority does this ‘we’ have? It is definitely the conqueror’s we that is being bandied about here.
Because the Kurds have born an insupportable amount of oppression from governments based in Baghdad, I could understand the Kurdish desire for independence. But it is impossible to envision that desire becoming real without a war. The worst result of CPA rule may be this: building the conditions for a long and bloody civil war, from insisting on provisions in the constitution that seem designed to block Iraq from operating as a sovereign nation -- a constitution that reminds one of one of those legendarily insidious microsoft codes, where the company can use its knowledge to peek into what its users are doing, with the company here being the U.S.A.-- to allowing the disproportion in armed forces to which Galbraith alludes.
Next post: the Shiites.
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