against another iteration of the drug war

I am definitely hoping that Phillip seymour hoffmann's death isn't sucked into yet another iteration of the drug war. This has happened before. when Len Bias, a basketball player, died of a crack overdose under Bush i, giving that senile oligarch the perfect opportunity to up his popularity and overcome his wimpness by various acts of violence - panama, one strike you are out laws, etc.. To that death, thousands, hundreds of thousands of mostly black lives have been sacrificed as the new version of american apartheid, the penal system, reinstituted Jim Crow in a way we could all be comfortable with, getting on with our lives of humanitarian intervention and boycotting Israel and shit - fun stuff that allows us not to look at what has been happening in fortress america, But I digress... I am already seeing signs of a pumped up moral panic. For instance, this nyt article about heroin, which incidentally tells us that the heroin death toll is dwarfed by the deaths from painkillers - in other words, the legal pills generated by Big Pharma. I'm sensing the production of a groundswell to jail dealers - but not of course corporate heads, like the head of Purdue Pharma, which has paid doctors to conduct pediatric trials of their oxycontin drug, which is facing a huge crisis - the patent for it is ending.
Here is a stat that is buried in the NYT story:
The most recent federal data show 19,154 opioid drug deaths in 2010, with 3,094 involving heroin and the rest painkillers.

If we want to do something about drug abuse, how about going against the corporate pushers? 

another sunday, another bit of mystification

“Senior quotes thesociologist Viviana A. Zelizer, who describes today’s children as “economicallyworthless but emotionally priceless.” Senior explains: “Every debate we havehad about the role of parents — whether they should be laissez-faire or interventionist‘Tiger Moms,’ attachment-oriented or partial to the rigors of tough love — canbe traced back to the paring down of mothers’ and fathers’ traditional roles.”  

I had to read andrew soloman’s review of senior’s book on parenting in the NYT – somehow, we are talking about one of life’s irresistable topics for a certain class of punter. However, this quote from Zelizer, whose book on household money I liked quite a bit, is a big disappointment – a truism that somehow misses being truthful, even though a sentiment like it is repeated endlessly in the mags and thumbsuckers, as though here, here we had drilled down to the materialist nexus of things. One would think that a sociologist, especially, would not think in terms of a bourgeois individualist ideology that posits a “we” but not a class – a “we” that can talk and talk to itself about how “our” children are economically worthless, because they don’t bring in household income, but how we loves em anyway.

As Zelizer well knows, economic value extends beyond immediate household revenue. Even granting that for most middle class american families today, children don’t bring in revenue (unlike, say, my family experience, where my brothers from the age of nine and myself from the age of eleven were, actually, crucially important to the running of my old man’s ice company – and this was not in the dark ages, but the 1970s) – still, they ride on a demand based economy that can’t do without the demand generated by new generations. A society that can’t physically reproduce itself gets into all kinds of trouble, including economic trouble. One can look at a society like Japan and it jumps into your eyes  that there are  total effects of population decrease, many of which are certainly economic. The “we” that speaks – in Senior’s book, as described by Solomon, by Solomon, and by the New York Times – is a minority “we”, an upper 20 percent we, plus that part of the middle class with large amounts of cultural capital – mainly academics.  It considers itself a we, a space of trends, it considers itself a demographic, it flatters itself with names like the “creatives” – but what it really is is a class, or mostly a subclass, an instrument of capital, and as such finds its conditions hedged in by an  implicit act of violence .  And its generalizations are hedged in by a systematic avoidance of that fact, a systematic buffering, where the other ‘we’s drop out. Those we’s manufacture things in China. Although actually these wes administer to your desires at the cash register, they sweep the streets and wipe your baby’s ass. China my foot.  Solomon does quote some time surveys which, at least, seem to imply a cross class sampling, but mostly this cod sociology is skewered by the paradox it can’t address – on the one hand, an analysis that is based on the individual as the final and appropriate unit of the social whole, and on the other hand, a mysterious collective “we”, which reccognizes that this individual is not, in fact, a social atom at all.  There are no social atoms.

the revolving door

Pushing against the way official history is being made by and distributed is always a futile business. It is like pushing the wrong way against a revolving door. The very design of the door works against you. Of course, its builders claim that this design reflects the facts. It is a fact-based narrative. But this is only true to the extent that the narrative includes some legitimating facts. It excludes the inconvient, the outlier, and most of all, those incidents that it is too dangerous and upsetting to reflect upon. Those who do reflect on these things sometimes mistake the irresistable push back as an apocalyptic instrument, a conspiracy; they sometimes put too much stock on the outliers. But they are certainly correct that the narrative is not primarily fact-based, but rather a manner of manipulating facts to support a narrative whose motifs are already in place. The direction of the revolving door has been set. And the more people who pass through it, the more obvious it seems. After a while, though, maybe in say three hundred years, the resistors will get their chance. Revisions will be made. “New” facts will be discovered – or rather, will be promoted to key positions within a new narrative. Reflections will be made. By this time the door has gotten squeaky, it doesn’t push as well. Traffic has moved on to other doors. At this point some average person can actually push against and break the old door. What do you know, people will say, there weren’t any witches. What do you know, people will say, perhaps 500,000 Africans died in transit or on plantations in Saint-Domingue alone in the Age of Reason. What do you know, they will say, one of the impulses of the American  Revolution was that there wasn’t enough being done by the British to exterminate the American Indians. What do you know? But by this time the direction of the revolving dooor wil have become part of history – the way history is taught, the way expections for other parts of the story have been set. The French Revolution, for instance, had the terror, leading straight to the Gulag – a narrative repeated over and over during the Cold War and since - and the American revolution, in this same script, was the forerunner of moderate democracy. The slaves and the Indians will figure, at best, as a rediscovered sideshow, moral detritus.  

counterfactual 9.11

Sometimes the news makes me all counterfactually itchy, or, uh, it makes me itchy to explore a counterfactual. In the case of Edward Snowden, it makes me especially itchy. The discussion so far is defined by those who say Snowden’s revelations are necessary, and his sacrifice is heroic, and those who say that his revelations have damaged our intelligence agencies, and his actions are treasonous. But who among us is saying that his actions have damaged our intelligence agencies and made us safer?

I am. Imagine (counterfactual time) that 9/11 had been prevented. Obviously, the Patriot act and the setting up of special courts would not have ensued, and we wouldn’t have the Snowden revelations.So it is worth asking: would the prevention of 9/11 been brought about by less transparency about what the executive branch and the intelligence agencies were up to, or more?

Now, there is a large answer to this, in which one tediously goes over the history of the CIA and the Middle East, exploring the construction of the jihadist networks in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s. Then one shoots forward to 2001 and the peculiar way that intelligence agencies and their executive branch managers (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et al) bungled the information that they had, which would have led to rounding up the 19 hijackers before they were even trained in how to fly a plane, but not to land one. Or there is a short answer to this: suppose a Snowden figure had gotten hold of the briefing papers Bush was given in August 2001, which famously reported that Osama bin Laden was planning on attacking America, and had given them to the papers – and the papers had published them.  Of all the ways in which Mohammed Atta could have been thwarted, in my opinion, this would have been the single most efficient one. It would have been impossible for Bush not to alert the Transportation secretary, and it would have been unlikely that the suspicious behavior of the hijacking crew would have passed unnoticed.

What we should be asking is: why can’t we have more Edward Snowdens? 

more warhawk shit in the new yorker

Jon Lee Anderson  has a reputation  as one of the finest foreign correspondents in the US. He thoroughly trashed that reputation during the Iraq war, and yet, astonishingly, he is regularly published in the New Yorker as an “expert” on what is happening in Iraq. The recent and wholly predictable eruption ofviolence by the Sunnis against Malaki’s government is subject to one of thisthumbsuckers on the  New Yorker site thisweek, and it is typically dreadful. Mark Danner, in 2006, wrote something simple and essential about the American  image of what was happening in Iraq. After retailing the story of a state department official who assured  him that the people of Falluja would turn out in surprising numbers to vote for the Iraq constitution, who seemed wholly convinced of his own story and who proved wholly wrong, the dime dropped for Danner:

“You know, though you spend your endless, frustrating days speaking to Iraqis, lobbying them, arguing with them, that in a country torn by a brutal and complicated war those Iraqis perforce are drawn from a small and special subset of the population: Iraqis who are willing to risk their lives by meeting with and talking to Americans. Which is to say, very often, Iraqis who depend on the Americans not only for their livelihoods but for their survival. You know that the information these Iraqis draw on is similarly limited, and that what they convey is itself selected, to a greater or lesser extent, to please their interlocutor. But though you know that much of your information comes from a thin, inherently biased slice of Iraqi politics and Iraqi life, hundreds of conversations during those grueling twenty-hour days eventually lead you to think, must lead you to think, that you are coming to understand what’s happening in this immensely complicated, violent place. You come to believe you know. And so often, even about the largest things, you do not know.”

Before  we get to Anderson’s post about al qaeda in Falluja in 2014, let’s go back to the way he  "explained" the insurgency in 2004, while Falluja was being devastated by the Americans. In an interview with Amy Davidson published on the New Yorker website he said:

"In a sense, the Iraqi insurgency began in advance of the arrival of American troops in Baghdad on April 9, 2003. Arab jihadis from other countries—volunteer would-be martyrs, mostly religious Muslims—had been flowing into the country, at the instigation of Saddam’s government, in the weeks before the invasion. The idea was that they would carry out suicide operations as part of Saddam’s strategy to hold the capital and to weaken the Americans, as what Saddam imagined would be a siege of Baghdad began."

This is, of course, almost pure Cheneyism, a desperate attempt to save an ill-motivated war of aggresion by sprinkling it with the terrorist-bogeyman fairy dust. In fact, Anderson has evidence for no such thing.  The discredited link between Saddam and al qaeda is replayed here as propaganda to divert the attention of the American public from the fact that the Iraqis did not feel "liberated" by the Americans.

Flash forward ten years and you will see that Anderson is still a great believer in what Danner correctly labeled the “imaginary war”. That is the war which Americans fantasized, and sought collaborators among Iraqis to validate their fantasies. (Danner made this point in 2005, while I made the same point on my blog in 2003, before the war started.

Anderson anchors his piece to a quote from his 2005 interview with the American ambassador to Iraq. He then asks if, in terms of the Ambassador’s remark – that the thought of a violent Sunni-Shiite war made him shudder – we should now be taking stock. Taking stock? Where was the stocktaking in 2005? The two "battles" of Fallujah were in many ways the most inhumane thing the Americans did in a long and criminal war. Not only did they practically raze the city in Grozny-esque fashion, but they forced 200000 to flee it without providing a tent or a cot. Of course, this isn’t how Anderson remembers his famous battles – rather, in his current post, he has the audacity to provide casualty counts solely on the Americans killed in Falluja. In other words, Anderson still does not understand the most basic thing about the war in Iraq – that it was about the Iraqis. Maybe, in the stocktaking mood in 2005, could have asked the American ambassador how a former Ba'athist torturer, Allawi, got dubbed our De Gaulle in "liberated" Iraq - after the sad failure of our other de Gaulle, Chalabi, to, well, gain traction.

Well, there are endless stocktaking questions that Anderson is ten years late in asking. And he still doesn’t understand why. Myself, I don’t understand why David Remnick’s foreign correspondents in the Middle East have been taken from the same tired hawks who were wrong about Iraq: George Packer, Dexter Filkins, George Packer. Danner once wrote for the New Yorker. Maybe they should put all the Iraq news in his account.  

Or perhaps me. Danner’s revelatory moment that made him realize that the American image of the war in Iraq was very different from the war in Iraq came in 2005. But I knew this even before the war started. The debate about the war in the press at the time was unbelievable, in as much as the part of the belligerants were defending the upcoming war in terms that had nothing to do with the war that Bush was proposing and that the Americans were supposed to enact. I picked on Hitchens at lot at the time, since he was the worst of the pro-war polemicists. In February23, 2003, I wrote on my Limited Inc blog:

“One of the oddities of the upcoming war (may Popeye avert it!) is that those opposing it are accused of having no "solution" to the situation in Iraq. Usually this accusation is made by supporters of the war, like Salman Rushdie , who support an entirely different war than the one justified by Bush and Blair. LI thinks it is fair to assume that Bush and Blair will not invite Rushdie, or Hitchens, or any of the rest of them, into their counsels of war when the invasion begins. So arguing about the Rushdie/Hitchens war is a pointless exercise: that war is neither contemplated nor likely to be fought.

However, the idea that we, who speak no Arabic, or Kurnamji, who have no stake in Iraq, and who have no sense of the fabric of the culture, come up with "solutions" to how Iraq should be governed is... curious. It is one of those problems that remind me of why, in spite of my overall disagreement with Hayek, I am sympathetic to some of his grander themes. Hayek's objection to centrally planned economies was that planning diverges from reality at just that key point where reality is lived -- because that is the point of accident, of emergence, of unexpected outcomes, of intangible knowledge, of everything that falls in the domain of acquaintance, as William James puts it, rather than propositional knowledge.”

It turned out that I wasn’t wholly right to dismiss the imaginary war, because this is how the American establishment not only justified itself before the public, but also how, in one part of their mind, they actually thought. Like all monsters, they became terminally prey to doublethought.

balls

So two months ago, to reward Adam for undergoing a visit to the doctor and shots, I bought him a ball, a blue plastic thing I’d spotted in a shop window near the pediatrician’s office. When I brought it home and rolled it to him, however, he let it roll by. He had other business to attend to. Then, suddenly, last week, he starts getting interested in the ball. He clips after it when I roll it. He likes to see it go down the stairs. The ball, it has connected.

The ball.

“Your toddler is starting to have a ball – first by rolling that curious round thing you’ve handed him or her… and then by attempting to throw it – or more likely, dropping the ball and watching in delight as it moves across the floor.”

What to expect the second year: from 12 to 24 months, by Heidi Murkoff

….

Since we joined the Y, I’ve decided to make a go of living a healthier lifestyle. The first week that meant swimming – and I’m not a good or dedicated swimmer – the running machine, the rowing machine, this torture machine in which you move your thighs to make some weights go up a bit in the air. However, in the back of my mind I was thinking of the racket court. Unfortunately, I don’t know anybody in Santa Monica who plays racketball, but I decided to get some balls and today I just played myself for an hour. Winded myself. I was surprised by how slow I was. On the other hand, I play racketball with instincts shaped by tennis, which I played manically between the ages of 11 and 21, and thus there was always this phantom length of racket that the racket ball would go through, there were these angles and speeds that were twists on the tennis ball, enough like it to fool me.

There is a tremendous literature about sports in the 20^th and 21^st century, but really little about the ball. The ball itself. Yet the ball is fascinating. The hardness, the compression of the racket ball balls is satisfying, but I can’t get myself into one of those balls. By contrast, that is what I spent my time trying to do between 11 and 21, playing tennis. I was a steady player, but mediocre. I was paired with another such player on the high school team – not for me the thrill of starting as a single. On the other hand, I was good enough that I could sometimes defeat our single player – not the Swedish ringer, but my buddy, W. – in a match. In tennis, sometimes you have a growth spurt – you play above the level of your play, you get it in a new way, the ball is your second self. But I could never climb to that level and stay there. Not enough dedication. Even so, I knew that when I played well, it was about the ball. The racket, the beautiful racket, followed, obeyed, it was a part of you, but it wasn’t idiosyncratic, it didn’t have a free will, it wasn’t a ball.

It is odd that economists don’t consider the ball. All the activity, the immense labor, that is woven around balls. Because why? Because you want to win, and to win means doing your thing with the ball, which is the thing – the object and the symbol – between you and your opponent.

Balls have evidently been around a long time, but they don’t get the study that, say, coins do. They should, though. Take, for instance, the American football. That ball is grotesque. It is less ball than projectile. If Adorno had had a sportif bone in his flabby kritikdrenched body, he would have recognized the intimacy between the football and Hiroshima. In fact, football is a tremendously interesting game, but it is interesting the way the war in the Pacific, circa 1941-1945, is more interesting than the Thirty years war.

On the other hand, you have the baseball, which is all Renaissance, a thing of beauty that would have been recognized by Alberti or by da Vinci. The stitching and the whiteness and the generally regal bearing of that ball, the great materials it is made of, mystically color the entire game.

Yet even so – there is the ball – not the individual balls. Oddly, all of these balls are inter-substitutable. One doesn’t play a ball game with the individual ball in mind. There are, of course, balls that are fetishistically claimed – bowling balls, for instance. But mostly the balls are disposable in their very essence. You might try to live on the tennis ball during the game, you might try to clear your mind of everything else, but in the end, you have no affection for the ball qua that particular ball.

…

Children’s encyclopedia’s retail glorious myths about the invention of fire, or of the wheel, or the pully, or bronze – but they never both to imagine the invention of the ball. The ball, in fact, seems part of nature. A pebble, a nut. Yet the ball is surely the very symbol of culture – it is the very symbol of the symbol. In itself, it is nothing. But in play, it becomes more than itself. It starts to mean. It is Victor Turner’s symbolic object, and as such, it defines spaces and limits. It creates a passage, traversing a space that is charged with meaning. But unlike those objects – human beings – who also go through passages, the ball can mean but it can’t express. This, of course, brings us back to the afore mentioned fact that balls do not earn our affection, as say a piece of furniture, a house, a car do. A ball is always being subsumed into the great collective of balls.

…

Enough about balls.  

There's an article in the NYT today that exemplifies my exasperated sense that white Americans, whether they are conservative or liberal or "left", seem unconscious of their vulnerable moral positions as they pronounce on the rest of the world.

The article http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/does-immigration-mean-france-is-over/?ref=opinion is written by a man who is apparently a specialist in the philosophy of history. This is bad news for his students, as he seems blithely unaware of social science methods since Compte's day. Instead, he takes his pronunciamentos as evidence, along with what he has heard from taxi cab drivers and read in Le Monde's Weekend ideas section.

I won't go into the shot at Derrida, except to say that it follows the NYT line, which is that Derrida is outre, a barely known figure in France. Now, this is the kind of thing we have easy measurements for. Look up the number of articles concerning Derrida in, say, the Persee or Cairn base of academic journals. Citations, quoi. I get 2753 citations for Derrida on Cairn, and, for the most famous analytic philosopher in France that I can think of, Jacques Bouveresse, I get 421 results. I don't care if you think Derrida is a mystagogue or a genius, he is 'worked' on as much as any major philosopher of the past in France - say Sartre, who gets 5200 hits.


Smith, like many a good American academic, takes racism to be a thing of sentiments. I think that racism is certainly a thing of sentiments, but it is also a thing of structures. Without taking into account its double aspect, you will simply not understand it. 

Myself, I think that the US governing elite has spent a lot of admirable energy fighting racist sentiments - while at the same time reinforcing and aggravating racist structures. The result is that the US, structurally, is the most racist county  in the developed world. From the penitentiary apartheid that was white America's response to the fall of Jim Crow - is it one out of six black males that have been processed through an American jail, or is the percentage higher? - to elevated rates of child mortality and in general shitty healthcare doled out to the minority population to wealth and education disparities that are entrenched to preserve white privilege, the US is no country from which to launch any moral crusade. To exhaust my bile here, this is true even of condemning Israel. The latest boycott called for by the ASA might have had some weight if the ASA, while the US was ravaging Iraq to the tune, now, of some 450000 dead and 2 million refugees, had called for a boycott of the US. Nary a boycott have I heard of. Rather, these righteous Americanos, much like their mirror image, the neo-cons, seem unconsciously certain that the US is a beacon, a city on the hill. 

Smith is right that french attitudes are often very racist, but when the american writer indicates how racial profiling by French police show how 'racist' the society is compared to america's, I think I'm dreaming. Are you kiddin' me? Because one judge in NYC slapped the hand of the cops when it came to hassling black people, the US is not suddenly a beacon of pc attitude. It is a bottomless pit of racist shit.

barthes

My darling, knowing my heart with its eleven year old’s thirst for encyclopedias and atlases, bought me what I really wanted this Christmas: the complete works of Roland Barthes. Sturdily made paperbacks, published by Seuil, divvying up the work chronologically.

So the plan is, read Barthes this year.

Beginning at the beginning, the first thing to notice is that Barthes has comparatively little juvenilia. There he is, in 1951, in his first major essay, Michelet, history and death (published in Esprit) and we are already off. Like a horse race, there’s no warm up steps, just an out of the gate sprint, one of course that will lead us through five volumes to Barthes death in 1980.

The essay is one of those amazing, monumental texts which even as you read seems to slip from your grasp. You advance across it continually losing your baggage, continually needing to stop and to note, inscribe on some piece of paper of your own a comment, a quote. According to his biographers, Barthes wrote this essay, and eventually the book on Michelet (1954), while a student, and then while in the sanatorium, recovering from a recurring case of tuberculosis.  In the sanatorium, he would spread out his index cards – legend speaks of one thousand – over a table, or tables, index cards on which he’d written his text, displaying it like a fortunetelling spreading her cards, aligning and rearranging fates. This way of going about writing – in which the profound connections are achieved through contiguity – leaves its impress on all of Barthes’ writing. You can say of him what he said of Michelet’s history of France: “the order of events is not, properly speaking, either logical or chronological: it is geographic: each fact is a locality tied to the rest of historical space by the body of the historian-voyageur himself.”

Barthes great struggle – which was either with the demon or the objective god – was to find a way to renounce or transcend the prestigitator’s role, to return to a logic and a chronology that did not refer to Barthes. Before the death of the author was a thesis, it was a way out.   

comments and games

“Flies

… to let them live…

What is more difficult?” – Paul Valery

One of the loveliest apps of our day is the lowly technology that allows for  comments sections on the Web. I think it is lovely because, among other things, it materializes a phenomenon that is usually oral and uncaptured – the ways of argument. In fact, the ways of argument are much more mysterious, since the advent of omni-pornography, than the ways of a man with a maid, or a maid with a man, or a man with a man, or a man with a maid with a maid with a man, etc.  We have all seen every variety of corporeal groping, but have we all pondered every variety of rhetorical poking? That’s what I aim to do here.

My starting point is a post that recently appeared on the Crooked Timber blog. This blog has a certain returning constituency, among which I count myself. We’ve been with the blog through the Iraq war, through the great recession, through Bush and Blair and Brown and Obama. In a sense, then, the responses to any post are already semi-structured – those who comment will, we know from previous comments, take up certain positions that are consistent with the positions that they have taken up before, and will take up those positions with their own idiosyncratic styles.  The post was a meta-approach to the Israeli-Palestinianconflict, pondering the question of why the issue raises such a heat rash amongpeople who are neither Palestinian nor Arab nor Jewish in the way that, say,the conflicts between the Kurds and the Turks or the Russians and theCircassians don’t.

The post, in other words, presented a theory of the way that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is argued that relied heavily on analysing the motifs and situations of the arguing agents. I would call this an analysis of the “game” that is being played.

Sure enough, in the comments sections, certain moves were made by those offended by the meta tone of the post.  As one of the respondents said: this is not a game. The “this-is-not-a-game” strategy makes the assumption that the game is called off by a series of referential moves. These are almost always not trivial references, but strive to point to more and more absolute, knock me down referents – from massacres to children starting to concentration camps. The trumping referent does two things – shows that the referrer is serious, and that his meta opponent is a phoney. But the absoluteness of the referent, its inevitable excess, shows something else as well – that the player is authentic.

Against that authenticity, the original poster also proceeded to make a number of familiar moves. These moves sought to dissolve the authentic players referents into rhetoric. Instead of phoniness, the game analyst seeks, here, to show that the authentic player is actually a bumbler, a dunderhead. At the same time, the game analyst is also, in a sense, playing a “this-is-not-a-game” strategy – as if his original gambit and subsequent moves had a space outside of the game he is commenting on. In keeping with the game analyst’s rhetorical turn, this strategy tends towards irony – irony is the preferred style for remaining both detached and within the game.

These are not the only two poles of the game, of course. I don’t have a sense of how many entrances there are in the game, but I do know that one can imagine at least one other player – who I will call the sceptic. The sceptic asks two questions: a., what is the meaning of the game? And b., is this a winnable game? The latter question has some bearing on the former, since if the game can be won, then we are that much further towards defining it, or at least understanding it. And certainly the absolutist and the ironist are playing the game as though to win it, which is why there is such energy in their mutual denigration one of the other. But if the game is not a winnable game – if it is something like playing house, or whirling around and getting dizzy – then the moves made by both are delusional. Perhaps they are necessarily delusional.

What is common to all three players, I think, is the sense that the limits of the game are available, so that one can understand when one is in it and when one is out of it.  But is it that kind of game?

a history of the little

World history, Ludwig Schlözer wrote in 1787, was synonymous with the history of “Erfindung” – a word that can mean either discovery or invention. 
“Everything that makes for a noble progress or regress among mankind, every new important idea, every new kind of behavior, pregnant with consequences, which the rulers, priests, fashion or accident enduringly bring among a mass of men should be called by us, out of a lack of a more appropriate word, invention.” [67 Weltgeschichte]

Invention or discovery – this, Schlözer thought, was the secret hero of history. Not the discoverer, necessarily: “The inventors (alphzai) themselves are mostly unknown. Often they don’t deserve to be eternalized,for, not seldom, simple accident leads a weak head to a discovery, that only later generations learned to use.”

This is  the secret of Europe’s dominance. For small Europe was the ground zero of discovery. Europe, not coincidentally, defined discovery – the verb preeminently described the European act or gaze. America, to use the most obvious instance, may have been seen by millions of its children, and yet it was only when it was seen by Europeans that it was discovered. Crack open the word discovery and you find universal history itself before you. 

It is a curiously non-heroic heroic history. Schlözer, one of Germany’s truly Enlightened intellectuals, was ruthlessly mocking of an older, heroic history that placed kings merely because they were kings at the center of historical action. 

“It goes back to the decadent taste for the deathgames (Mordspielen) of old and new man-murderers, named heros! Lets not rejoice any longer in the smoking war histories of conquerors (Eroberer), that is, over the passionate story of these evil doers who have lead nations by the nose! But for the present believe that the still musing of a genius and the soft virtue of a wise man has brought about greater revolutions than the storms of the greatest bloodthirsty tyrant; and that many happier paradoxes have more ornamented the world than the fists of millions of warriors have desolated it.”

Given this shift in the emphasis on what history – world history – is about, it isn’t surprising that Schlözer wants us to see the “little things” as the great ones: “… the discovery of fire and of glass, carefully recounted, and the advent of smallpox, of brandy, of potatoes in our part of the world, shouldn’t be left unremarked, and so one shouldn’t be ashamed to take more notice of the exchange of wool for linen in our clothing than to seriously and purposefully deal with the dynasties of Tze, Leang, and Tschin.” 

Schlözer’s separation of the ‘little things that one shouldn’t be ashamed of noticing’ and the deathgames of the tyrants would not, of course, survive the scrutiny of a master of world history like Marx. He would notice that deathgames are ingrained in those little things, and those little things are engrained in the deathgames. We kidnap Africans to raise sugar cane to make rum to intoxicate the sailors who kidnap Africans. This circle of biota, human bodies, taste buds, brain cells, and money can be named circulation, lightly lifting up the name given by Harvey to the movement of blood in the body. The Enlightenment gesture that seeks to separate histories in order to enforce moralities - to, essentially, discover uplift in history - is not simply a fiction, but a mask that gives us discovery without bloodshed, mastery without the system of oppression that supports it. 

a pageant for our military heroes this holiday! Led by the New York Times

“Denn uns fehlt der kritische Blick für uns selbst.”

“…alle kriegführenden Staaten noch unter den bösen Geistern zu leiden haben, denen sie selber den Weg freigegeben haben.”

Carl von Ossietzky.

As we were disembarking from our plane, yesterday, the steward made a few of the standard announcements about baggage and transfers and thanking us for choosing Southwestern. He then wished us a good stay in Los Angeles and assured us that this holiday, Southwestern Airlines was keeping our “military heros” in their thoughts. I stopped looking under the seat for various things Adam had scattered for a second, so dumbstruck was I by the intrusion of “military heros” into a simple arrival. I thought that I never keep our military “heros” in my thoughts, but wished, instead, that if we were going to remind each other of the series of aggressions that the US has committed over the last fifty years, that we would turn our thoughts to the victims of those aggressions. Now that would be a holiday wish! “and be assured, we keep in mind the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, and all others who have suffered and died due to the chosen military actions of this great country of ours.

Of course, I was coming home from Atlanta Georgia on a Dallas based airline, so  that may partially explain the note of jingoism. But the next day – today – I am reading through the NYT and I come to the column by the public editor in which it is explained that the NYT knew for seven years that RobertLevinson, an ex fbi man who “disappeared” in Iran in 2007, was working for the CIA. It knew this and decided not to report it – because, in a bizarre excuse that could only be accepted by the kinds of simple hearts who shed patriotic tears about all our military heros on the holidays – the family believed it would hurt him. As if Iranians would be puzzling their head for seven years about whether the man was spying for the CIA or was just the kind of tourist who liked to ask questions about strategy and military preparedness in all the hot middle eastern vacation spots. So worn out is this excuse that the family, for whom the NYT has been extending such noble pity, has been suing the CIA in court about Levinson – a real coverbreaker, that.

Yet the bottom of the affair is not the coverup, but the lying:

“As the website Gawker has pointed out, The Times has repeatedly and without attribution falsely described Mr. Levinson as being on a business trip to Iran when he was captured. Two of those mentions were glancing ones in editorials; one was in a news story. In other cases, The Times attributed the “business trip” reference to family members or to the government.”

So nice of the Times not only to want to dry the tears of his bereaved relatives, but to lie as well to the rest of us. For after all, what does it matter to us if the actions of the Iranian government are portrayed as unprovoked aggression or the common response of nation’s to being spied upon? Get down too far into the granular level and we won’t be able to wage our good wars with our good military heros with a clear conscience!

 Lately, I’ve been thinking a bit of the sentimental militarism that so sickeningly pervades American society at the moment in relation with a hopeful immune response against it – the inability of the powers that be to persuade the majority of the American public that Edward Snowden is a filthy traitor. Instead, a considerable portion of the population considers him a hero. His situation has been compared in the press to that of Daniel Ellsburg, but in my opinion the more interesting comparison is with Carl von Ossietzky.

Ossietzky, a committed anti-militarist, was the editor of one of Weimar Germany’s most famous lefty intellectual journals: the Weltbuehne. He was roundly hated by the right and the paramilitaries that formed after the German defeat in 1918. But what sent them overboard was a number of articles he published in 1932. Here’s a good summary from an article about the Weltbuhne by James Joll:

“Die Weltbühne not only accepted Germany’s responsibility for the war, it also repeatedly embarrassed successive governments by pointing out their failure to observe the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles and by reporting secret rearmament which was going on contrary to the terms of the peace settlement. To utter such criticisms or to draw attention to such matters led at once to the editors and contributors of Die Weltbühne being labeled as traitors by wide sections of the German public and by the nationalist press.

In 1932 the then editor, Carl von Ossietzky, and a contributor, Walter Kreiser, were charged with high treason (“Landesverrat“) and espionage because they had three years earlier pointed out that some of the activities of the Lufthansa Airline were being subsidized by the War Ministry and Admiralty and were in fact of a military nature forbidden by the peace treaty. Ossietzky was sentenced to eighteen months and although he might have left the country as Kreiser had done, he courageously went to jail.”

Ossietzky was not, incidentally, pardoned for making his “homeland” vulnerable to its foes even after World War II, although he’d been sent to a concentration camp when Hitler took power in 1933. His was definitely a case of “premature fascism”, and in the Cold war period it wouldn’t do to encourage such lack of patriotism. In fact, there is a whole slew of books blaming people like Ossietzky and his co-editor, Tucholsky, for Hitler – if only these lefties had been more understanding of the difficulties the Weimar Republic was withstanding! Luckily, in this country, we have no need to fear an Ossietzky at the NYT. Or, to quote from the infinitely mockable public editor’s article, when Jill Abramson, the NYT’s executive editor, was asked about the lies that the NYT had published ..

“Ms. Abramson called the unattributed statements that appeared in The Times “regrettable.””

holmes 1

One of the great ideas of childhood is spying.

The conceptual schema you use when you are eight is far from a computer program, with its tight binaries. It resembles, instead, a bunch of brightly colored hot air balloons, trailing strings that you crush in your hot little palm.

Spying was a particularly grand balloon. There were two types of spying: one was on animals, the other on humans. Spying on animals meant lurking behind a tree or stepping carefully down a path to view a dog or a cat or a raccoon or a bird doing something doggish, cattish, raccoonish or birdish that, presumably, would have been disturbed if your approach had been sensed. The other kind of spying was on sisters, brothers, neighborhood kids, and sometimes grownups like at a party where the party was upstairs in your house and the kids were supposed to be downstairs gathered around the tv and instead you were hiding in the shadow of the hallway taking in adult laughter and jokes and shit.

Spying is a peculiar form of seeing and hearing. Usually the senses are mere vehicles for capturing sense objects, but in spying, the objects were given a somewhat spurious glamour by being observed or heard without the object knowning that she or he was being observed or being heard. A remnant of this is still with me. When I go into a store and I look at the monitor that broadcasts what the cameras throughout the store are showing, the store looks automatically more interesting, more tabloid, more like a crime scene, rather than a buncha trails to the peanut stand and the cooler with the beers.

The glorious idea of spying was eventually combined with the glorious pasttime of reading. This happened at some point in the fifth or sixth grade, and I know exactly the point of fusion: the study in scarlet. Or perhaps another Sherlock Holmes stories. I devoured them all at that age.

Now, by then I was fairly well acquainted, as a faithful Baptist Sunday School goer, with the Bible. The Bible was a great book partly because certain sentences were supposed to leap off the page and lodge in your memory and conscience. It was that kind of book – biblical, you might say. It turned out that the Sherlock Holmes saga was the same kind of thing. Certain situations, certain dialogues, certain sayings of Holmes carried that same talismanic weight. I can still recall being blown away when Holmes, in The Study in Scarlet, disclaims any knowledge of the heliocentric theory of the solar system, about which Watson has just informed him:

"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."

"To forget it!"

"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

In spite of the fact that my bent was to the fool’s position – I was a boy who liked nothing better than an odd fact, or any fact, the population of Bristol, Virginia, for instance –this struck me as a view to contend with, rather like offering your right cheek to a person who had just slapped you on the left cheek.

There were, as well, Holmes’ hints about how to go about spying on people – or being a detective, which came to the same thing. In a Case of Identity – a rather obscure story, really, the one about the typist with the inherited income whose stepfather tries to prevent her from marrying and moving her income away from home -  Holmes’ presents the difference between observation and seeing that was, to me, as the burning coal was to Isaiah:

“You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room.”
“Frequently.”
“How often?”
“Well, some hundreds of times.”
“Then how many are there?”
“How many? I don’t know.”
“Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed.”
This little passage has clung to me ever since I read it, in almost irritating way, and I think of it often when I climb the stairs from the garage to our apartment. I’m old enough now to suspect that there are some steps missing in this parable of the steps. For instance, it is obviously possible to know the number of the steps and never to have seen them – in which case I am not sure we would speak of observation. This problem leads us to the necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing seeing from observation, and perhaps leads us to doubt Holmes’s pat common sense.

This, of course, leads us to Holmes’ famous method. First, a little excursis.

In the great age of the British Renaissance, which stretches – if one pulls hard enough – from Bacon to Newton, the most advanced thinkers wanted to free science from the cage of logic. Following Bacon, the way they did so is subordinate deduction to induction. The latter was what let us out of the dreary deducing of what is the case, and freed us to observe what is the case, or to bend circumstances in such a way that we could observe it in experiment. In this sense Newton – to the embarrassment of philosophers of science since – was quite serious about his hypothesi non fingo – I make no hypotheses. In the nineteenth century, this became a problem, because philosophers – notably Mill – were worried about what science was doing outside the cage of logic. In the twentieth century, of course, attacking induction became something like target practice for philosophers, who from Mach to Popper were down on it. And yet the hypothetical-deductive model, to us, seems more than a little musty, since we have crept back toward’s induction’s corner, with our little Bayesian nets all aquiver. 

a story from texas

There are few states in the Union that love Jesus as much as Texas. And there is no state in the nation that loves rich people as much as Texas. But there’s always been a debate as to whether Texas loves Jesus or rich people more.  As a subtheme to this debate, there is the vexing question of Jesus’s own pronunciamento that it is more difficult for a rich man to enter heaven than a camel to go through the eye of a needle Texas Christians fasten, instead, to the parable of the talents as a more reasonable picture of Jesus’s own Texashood – for surely the point of the parable of the talents – that is the one in which the bad servant buries the money his master gave him before going on a trip instead of investing it –  is that Jesus wants you to be rich. Jesus, wept – but that’s the problem with using a metaphor among a group of literalist monomaniacs.

In any case, the solution to the problem of what Texas loves most was recently solved in Dallas, where Judge Jean Boyd, one of God’s own Party, heard the case of Ethan Couch, a sixteen year old who, drunk on stolen beer, plowed into a car by the side of the road and killed four people, while injuring a handful of others. One of the killed was a youth minister. Now, we know a little about Texas justice: we know, for instance, that a black man or even a cracker from a broken household would not be allowed to run over and kill a man of God without condign punishment. But in Couch’s case, Judge Boyd faced a real dilemma: Couch was the son of a very wealthy man, Fred Couch, the owner of Cleburn Metal Works in Fort Worth. Thus you can see the knotty value problem: does Texas love the rich more than Jesus?

Well, in the end it was no contest. Harder it is to obey Jesus’s injunctions about the rich than it is for the savior to slip into an exlusive Fort Worth country club (Jesus, ahem, was a, ahem, Jew): Couch was punished, as the whole world knows now, by being sentenced to a resort/therapy center, with a cost of 450 thou a year.

He will not serve in a Texas jail because, as his lawyer pleaded, he had a case of affluenza – so wealthy are his parents and so spoiled is the child that he doesn’t understand how to be responsible.

“Affluenza” has quickly become a laugh word – but before it was a Dallas psychiatrist’s diagnosis, it was a term of art employed, in the nineties, to criticize the result of “selfish capitalism” – it was defined as a sort of keeping up with the Trump’s disease, which resulted in outbreaks of minimansions and SUVs. Couch’s psychiatrists and Judge Boyde, however, have troped this idea brilliantly by making being rich not only a condition better than any  other on earth, but, as well, a get out of jail card to be employed whenever the rich get into trouble, since it proves they are abnormal. Indeed, they are – that is the whole meaning of being in the one percentile class.

However, the cause of this cause celebre, Ethan Couch, obviously has some good years ahead of him. He is already the stuff out of which successful private equity movers and shakers are made.  There’s something Romneyesque about the lad, who will go far.

Marx and modernity's sensorium

Like any other writer, Marx is not all one block, even though he is often received as one block, labeled Marx. Marx often changes his mind, or at least his perspective, for instance, revamping the way he used alienation in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts to how he uses the notion in the German Ideology and again in Capital, vol. 1. However,  Marx never simply erases or annuls the conceptual contents he has used in the past – rather, he continually switches from the content to the form and back again to both ironize a content and locate it in a conceptual system that is always at work, one way or another, in the practices of everyday life. It is usual to attribute this method to Hegel, but myself, I think that is being much too philosophisch. Lenin once remarked that “Communism equals Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country” – and I would say, along similar lines, that Marx’s method equals Hegelian dialectic plus the railroad. That may seem like a bit of an exaggeration, of course, but Marx was well aware that one of the unintended results of technology was a revolution in perspective. While it is easy enough, abstractly, to dream of going sixty miles an hour in a vehicle from point a to point b, the “industrial experience” (to use Schivelbusch’s term) of being a railroad passenger and seeing something never seen by human beings before – to wit, a landscape going by at sixty miles an hour - was a distinct and disturbing sensation, one that had to be absorbed by nineteenth century populations, along with other industrially created perceptual experiences. The list of technological improvements in the Communist manifesto is also a list of changing sensory models. Thus, if Marx takes over and revamps the technostructure of Hegel’s dialectic, it is in coordination with the questions posed by modernity’s sensorium. 

the wilderness of piss and a story

In one of the non-serious seasons of my life – I’m referring, of course, to the grad student years – I too was arrested in a protest aimed at getting the University of Texas to divest from investments in what was then apartheid dominated South Africa  - which, in retrospect, was rather like protesting a leech to give up blood. But it was worth the old college try.

In New Orleans, in my pre graduate student days, I’d been a member of an organization dedicated to keeping Reagan out of Nicaragua, which meant in effect making a sign and waving it bravely as we marched down Canal street, while on the other end of Canal street, anti-Castro Cuban emigrants waved their own sign and hankered for our blood. A good time was had by all, and if we weren’t entirely successful, we did provide gainful employment to the not so undercover cops who’d hang in the demonstration and try to secretly photograph us – an art in which they’d been imperfectly instructed. I fear these guys, otherwise, would have had to make their living the honest way, by selling their blood to the blood bank – we aren’t talking a high level of competence here.

But when I went to UT I became pretty politically indifferent. Of course, I was a grad student, so I considered myself terribly political and radical, deconstructing the whole Western order of things, which, all things considered, did not make them quake in their boots at the highest levels of the FBI.

Still, I did go to some demos. As I remember the sequence, probably wrongly, it all started when my friend, Janet, along with some other friends of hers, was arrested by the UT security cops for speaking up to loudly to a small crowd in the shadow of UT’s Phallic symbol. I remember a photograph splashed in the UT student newspaper, and it seemed from the photo that the cop was getting an earful. Perhaps, one can hope, a lifechanging experience! This, then, was the inspiration for making the world historical leap from savaging John Stuart Mill’s little known Essay on Liberty and the Bubble Gum Trade (an obscure work that was obviously the key to the whole oeuvre) to practice, which I spelled praxis at that time.

The divestment issue got mixed up, quickly, with the free speech issue. When my friend was arrested, the rule was that you couldn’t have any demonstration in the shadow of the Phallic Symbol because it would disturb the post-prandial slumber of UT’s president, whose inspirations came out of these afternoon naps – new advances in East Austin for the University, destroying poor folks’ rentals right and left – cutting down on extra costs by eliminating insurance for TAs – just wonderful stuff. At the time, the administration had the right to ban anything or anyone at anytime on the campus. The rules for UT had been written, apparently, by the same committee Enver Hoxha used in Albania, with outstanding results vis a vis law and order and all.

Well, critical mass was soon achieved, as everybody who hung out in the student union café got arrested protesting South African investments and free speech. It was a glorious moment. Myself, I was particularly proud of the fact that we – that I – was actually handcuffed. Admittedly, they used these plastic handcuffs that underestimated my dangerous nature – hadn’t I just shown that John Stuart was being racist phallocentric and centrophallic about the bubble gum trade? To quote Nietzsche, I was obviously dynamite. However, I consoled myself that they underestimated Clark Kent, too. The upshot was that the Enver Hoxha advisory board came up with new rules of engagement on the UT campus for free speech – an area was actually designated! A victory that was heard round the world.

Meanwhile, of course, as we now know, a crewe of hoodlums and halfwits, also known as Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy team, were banding together with the racist South African army to throw back “soviet aggression” in Southern Africa. The endgame, however, was exactly the reverse of what Reagan’s hoods were expecting – as soon as the “soviet threat” as well as the soviet union ceased, the thousand year reich of whiteness in South africa crumbled. In the post cold war era, there has been a distinct lack of moral leaders – in fact, as I was writing this, I was trying to think of one besides Mandela. Vaclev Havel was the only other person who sprang to mind, and Havel, notoriously, became a true blue supporter of the occupation of Iraq, which sorta puts him out of running in the moral sweepstakes, unless you excuse the mere 450 thou dead Iraqis and the two million refugees. I don’t.

But we all know that we’ve been living in a piss wilderness since 1990 or so: the turn inward, to private liberations, and the great advance of public squalor, are the hallmarks of our not so great times. This, I think, is why Mandela’s death is being felt so much. 

the drain

The day starts again, and all that is familiar has to be redone – for instance, you have to put together again the two huge faces, the one with the long hair that you like to grab and that when you grab it a giggle exactly the size of a bubble floats up in your throat and the other face with the toy on his nose – a nose so big it goes from your nose to your chin! – that you grab when he isn’t looking and that you then cluster your fingers around tight but that he unpries – a good game, although not as good as with the hair. And then you are floating down the stairs, dressed, your feet dangling, each step one that you will have to remember scrambling up it later peering down and laughing at the faces – now you remember, mama and dada – and challenging them to hurry in their ungainly way and catch you. Then the seat and the strap, the end of which you have to think about and the way you think is to suck it, which you do gravely while Dada is in the kitchen and he’s pouring water into the machine that makes the glugging sound and smells and he is always drinking what happens to it, and so does Mama but not as much, and to get things moving you throw a few sounds at him, and he’ll throw some back and some of them you will ponder while sucking the strap. He favors Ah, and da, and um, and he puts it together – ah-da-um – like he’s made a big discovery and he keeps poking you and saying it. But that is alright, because he has given you a piece of bread, which is better than the strap. You lift it carefully and then you chew it. Meanwhile Mama and Dada are at the table and they are making sounds at each other. Dada is nice, but Mama is funnier. Why isn’t Dada so funny? Still, there’s enough of these sounds they are making at each other, you have to intervene, throw in a few sounds yourself, kick your legs, maybe toss away the bread – there’s always more bread, and when you are crawling on the floor, later, maybe you’ll find the bread you tossed away and put it in your mouth and Dada will say, okay, let me have it, and then he’ll take a broom and sweep up under the chair. You like the broom too, you like to grab it and tilt it and watch it fall whack on the floor.  But to return to now, now the machine appears on which you can see cartoons of les crocodiles and the meunier qui dort. Then Mama plays a game where she goes out the door and she hides for a long time. When you are tired of the chair you go lulululurrrrrrr and shake your head from side to side, and that does the trick. You float into your playpen.

Then the day breaks down into a million events and…

Well, one of them is the drain. There’s the door, the floor, the window, the curtains, the lamp, the wires, and the beat goes on, but let’s concentrate on the drain, and if we get through the drain that will be enough, a lecon, comme on dit, for today.

Drains are recent. When you look back, usually you were bathed in plastic tubs. But now in California there’s a real tub, an adult tub, and instead of the water being poured out of it by Mama or Dada – an operation to which you weren’t really privy, since you were in the other room wiggling away from one of them trying to trap your arms and legs and cover your privates, which eventually they do no matter what tricks you think up to defend yourself. But now you float over the water and down you go, feet first, lately you resist being sat somewhere, you stick out your legs and stand until you sit, but this sitting is your sitting, it isn’t their sitting. The water is warm, and there’s a blue blob – a whale – and a yellow blob – a duck – that bob around when you sit, and that you can chase while the bottle comes out and soap gets in your hair and is rubbed all over you, which hardly seems worth it because then it is splashed off by the water, but there you go.At first this was an awkward thing, you’d gingerly totter in the tub, and Dada’s hands would convey that he too was awkward, but lately things have gotten much better, you can sit there by yourself a little, and explore around. One day you spotted the white thing with the ring in it that was under the water at the front of the tub and you pulled it out. You had to think about what it was, and the best way to think about a thing is to put it in your mouth, so this is what you did. Then you slapped it on the surface of the water, which is like a big sheet of something. Then you noticed that the blue blob and the yellow blob went to the front of the tub and started twirling around. The got dizzy, and the water got less, and then – you had to reach out your hand to touch this just to understand the mechanics of the thing – the water bunched up and creased around this hole under the water. When you put your hands on the hole it tries to pull you in, but it is a weakling, it is weaker than a baby. And just as things get interesting you are suddenly floating again and plopped in a towel.

That’s a drain.

the use of imprecision

A beautiful passage from Proust, in his preface to Paul Morand’s Tendres Stocks:

“The sole reproach that I am tempted to make to Morand is that sometimes he has images that are other than inevitable. However, all images that are approximative don’t count. Water, under normal circumstances, boils at one hundred degrees celsius. We don’t see that phenomenon produced at  98 or 99.  Thus, it is better then to have no images.”

I find this faith in precision beautiful, modernist, and at the same time classic. And that it should be so decisively illustrated (the image of boiling water is as precise as you can get) makes it sound like something pre-Socratic, something oracular.

However, I don’t believe it. I believe that images “ à peul près” are sometimes incredibly useful – like smudges in a drawing, they can help the sketcher to open up a dimension of fantasy that would otherwise be lacking, that would otherwise make the drawing merely a banal copy.

Yet I love the way Proust says this.