Bollettino
There’s a Crooked Timber post about Hitchens article about Falluja. We haven’t read the latest outburst from Mr. Hitchens – after a while, it gets depressing to watch a man with no motor control trying to thread a needle. What interested us about the post was the end of it. After taking Hitchens to task for writing that the lynching in Falluja proved just how right we were to invade Iraq, the CT writer adds:
“… it seems appropriate to ask of everyone who seems certain of the rightness of their position on the war, whether there are any developments that would lead them to say, “OK, I was wrong.” For instance, if there is a functioning and independent Iraqi democracy within two years, which lasts for at least a further five, then I think that ought to shake the convictions of hardened opponents. But I don’t think that’s likely.”
On the face of it, what could be more reasonable than to apply the pragmatic principle of success or failure to positions that are, after all, built lock and stock in the context of social action? Yet this seems to LI to be a profoundly misleading move, one that a., denies agency to the Iraqis, b., misunderstands the deep and various levels of objection to the war in the first place, and c., posits an objectionable, and in the end pseudo-scientific relationship between politics and history. Wring those bland and seemingly reasonable words a bit, in other words, and you get a bad and typical thing, indicative of how deeply embedded in the intellectual mindset is that model of control and planning which developed in the 18th century and still defines the political role of the thinker in the West.
Let’s go to a. One of the more startling things about the Iraq invasion has been the framing racism of it all. Look, for instance, at the Washington Post’s Portrait of the Fallen – pictures of the casualties in Iraq – and you will notice … no Iraqis. Not only has the Defense department made no effort to collect information on Iraqi deaths, but the systematic downplaying of those deaths actually impedes any effort to understand what is happening there through the sieve of Western media. The values accorded to life and death, here, are the biopolitical substratum of the traditional racist images that have been set into motion by the occupation of Iraq. And not just by the Bush side, either. The great bien-pensant meme on the liberal side has been for more troops, or international troops, in conjunction with a suspension of Iraqi self-rule, so we can teach these people autonomy. It is the usual parent/child image, with the non-Western Iraqis playing the part of the recalcitrant child. As children, of course, they are too emotional, they complain all of the time, they are superstitious, and they are violent. Best, then, to spread a grid of soldiers over them commanded by adult Western bureaucrats. The endless stories about “teaching” policemen and soldiers all hammer in the same theme – these people are children that we have to take care of. Get out the stick, or the helicopter, or the tank, when they get unruly. In the meantime, of course, the Westerners doing all of this training can remain superbly indifferent to the very language the Iraqis speak, and certainly to their history – how can children have a history? – and their desires, all tuned to that frequency of the libido that makes them grumblers and rioters.
The racist substratrum conditions c., the control and command model. That accident, unexpected outcomes, and struggle might have as much to do with Iraq becoming a democracy, or not, as any central plan created by D.C. bureaucrats is simply made invisible by the options proposed by CT’s post – the right or wrong, the “proofs” that legitimate a position taken according to time and circumstances. This is where LI feels Burkian conservative twinges – a conservatism that has almost disappeared in the world. Burke’s objection to “theorists” in politics is just to this kind of attitude. It takes social action as, essentially, mechanical. And so you take an attitude at time x, the attitude is informed by principle y, and then history happens – the machine grinds out a result – and you proof your attitude.
Foucault, bless his baldheaded heart, was onto this kind of thing in Surveiller et Punir. For LI, a position is an adaptation to circumstances, rather than an idea that hovers above them. It is LI’s own form of anti-intellectualism.
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Sunday, April 04, 2004
Bollettino
Continuing from the last post.
Dispensing with the “Weberian fantasy” of state power, Wedeen starts off with a abridged history of modern Yemen:
“President Ali Abd Allah Salih has been in power for twenty-five years, as the leader of North Yemen since 1978, and of unified Yemen since its inception in 1990. Yet in spite of the regime’s durability, the Weberian fantasy of a state that enjoys a monopoly on violence—legitimate or otherwise—is not remotely evident. In a country of 18.5 million people, there are an estimated 61 million weapons in private hands.2 The state is incapable, moreover, of providing welfare, protection, or education to the population.”
The state – or at least the faction in charge of the state – was capable, in 1999, or mounting an election. Wedeen’s description of it is interesting as much for the analogy to Iraq, and what one suspects the CPA would like to do, as for its Yemeni context. Ali Abd Allah Salih’s government disqualified the one opposition candidate that could threaten it even in a minor way – a man named Muqbil. Instead, they appointed their opposition. It did not go unnoticed that this simple maneuver made the “opposition” meaningless:
“To replace the opposition’s candidate, the regime nominated one of its own Southern members, Nagib Qahtan al-Shaƒbi. The son of its first President, who was deposed and imprisoned in 1969 during a coup
d’état carried out by socialists, Nagib and his family had fled to Cairo where they had received support and protection for years from the anti-socialist North. Election day, then, offered people the choice between two candidates from the same party, the ruling President from the North, and the puppet-like contender whose origins were identifiably Southern. One published cartoon depicted Nagib as a wind-up toy. Ajoke echoed this sentiment: “Nagib is elected and is then asked, “What is the first thing you are going to do?’” He replies: “Make “Ali Abd Allah Salih President.”
Perhaps this was the model that the CPA was thinking about in their first draft of the ‘elections’ that would legitimate the occupation after June 30. Wedeen’s point, however, isn’t merely that the government both embraced democracy and made a mockery of it, but that the state’s assertion of power here was excessive – unnecessary. . Muqbil didn’t have a chance of winning, given the fact that the state exerted rigid control over the election procedure. It is the margin of over-control that puzzles Wedeen. Her answer is that we have to throw out the Weberian model of rationality and understand power, here, in terms of the logic of excess. That is, excessive acts, by gaining compliance, actually function to make the citizen “see” him or her self in terms of the state – as belonging to the state by voting for, or pretending to vote for, who runs the state. That important distinction – the essential instability of the place of the ruler in a democracy – is replaced by the merger of ruler and state, with the state’s democratic self-definition being something more in the nature of one of those entrenched boasts that identify the powerful. By the logic of excess “The elections communicated this absence of actual alternatives by presenting a bogus one.” We couldn’t help but think of the coalition’s own use of democracy. Again, there is the refusal to separate the state from its rulers – to accept the central instability at the heart of democracy. Again, there was the curious attempt to deform the process and form of election into a ritual of confirmation that would signal the absence of alternatives. In the CPA case, the original idea was to create caucuses of American vetted committees that would select slates that Americans had previously approved of. The American project in Iraq failed on this preliminary point, since the Shi’ites – through the intervention of al-Sisteni – blocked them. In doing so, the Shi’ites have been subjected to the kind of propagandistic treatment one expects in the American press – have been accused, basically, of wanting solely to gain power. The accusation has had the effect of disguising the fraudulence of the only American plan for democratizing Iraq -- by the radical and thorough extension of anti-democratic power. The caucuses were meant to make Iraqis complicitous in the American fraud -- to see themselves as subservient to the American scheme. But it didn't work.
The second thing we should point to in Wedeen’s essay is the issue of security. In Yemen’s case, the security issue came up in the course of a private crime, not a guerilla war. Still, the confrontation between the state’s use of direct power to perpetuate itself and its inability to exert power to protect its citizens is relevant to the Iraqi case. In fact, we suspect that the inability of the Americans to prevent the bombings in Baghdad and in Najaf in recent months have, more than anything else, undermined the acceptance of the occupation in Iraq. On the one hand, the CPA’s power is based on that most direct use of violence, invasion; on the other hand, their day to day use of that power is directed mainly towards protecting … Americans. The loss of life of Iraqi civilians is given amazingly short shrift in, say, the NYT, where more attention will be focused on the death of four American mercenaries than on the death of 200 Iraqis or 100 or 50 that are blown up or fired upon in any number of incidents over the past four months. This isn’t just the inherent racism that frames the entire US/Iraq encounter – it is centrally about the logic of excess by which the CPA has installed itself in Iraq.
But let’s turn to Yemen.
Here’s the story:
“The “murders in the morgue” case became public knowledge on 10 May 2000,when two mutilated female bodies were discovered at San’ a University. Two days later, police arrested a Sudanese mortuary technician at the medical school, claiming that he had confessed to raping and killing five women.
Muhammad Adam U’mar Ishaq (whose full name was rarely reported) was a forty-five-year-old Sudanese citizen who allegedly admitted to an increasing number of murders—sixteen in Yemen and at least twenty-four in Sudan, Kuwait, Chad, and the Central African Republic (The Observer, 11 June 2000). The Nasirist newspaper reported stories that he had killed up to fifty women (al-Wahdawi, 16 May 2000). It was said that Adam also implicated members of the university’s teaching staff who, he said, were involved in the sale of body parts. According to Brian Whitaker’s account in The Observer one month later, Adam “had enticed women students to the mortuary with promises of help in their studies, then raped and killed them, videotaping all of his actions. He kept bones as mementos, disposed of some body parts in sewers and on the university grounds, and sold others together with his victims’ belongings” (11 June
2000).”
Wedeen shows that the story of these killings, reported in different forms in different newpapers, provoked outrage not just at the killer, but at the state itself. There were street demonstrations as well as editorials; there were student demands; there were articles in the Army paper. All of which she shrewdly analyzes:
“Debates in newspapers, in the streets, during Friday mosque sermons and qat chews, and in government offices laid bare how easily civic terror can be generated by perceptions of ineffective state institutions, and how public appeals can be made on the basis of the moral and material entitlements that citizens of
even the most nominal of nation-states felt were due them (see Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). People were outraged that the university had not done more to protect its students or to investigate the disappearances. Criticisms focused on the incapacities of the state, the corruption and potential complicity of the regime, and the need for the seeming elusive but desirable “mu’assasat aldawla” (state institutions). In one qat chew I attended someone went so far as to claim that serial killings could never happen in the developed United States (a point I hastened to correct).”
The press, lately, has concentrated on the meme of the ‘complaining Iraqi’ – the Weekly Standard, which alternates between bile and hubris, sent Fred Barnes to Iraq (another neo-con cruise – surely some travel agency should take advantage of these pilgrims), and he returned to report that everything was going swimmingly, but that the Iraqis were distressingly ungrateful. They complain and complain.
The distance that has opened up between the American p.o.v. and the Iraqi p.o.v. is where the action will take place in the next phase of the occupation – its meaningless abdication on June 30 to a council that will still takes its orders from the CPA.
Wedeen’s essay concludes with such a rich expansion of the concept of “belonging” that we urge our readers to go and read it, especially for the way in which she takes discourse as a distributor of “belonging to” – a rather brilliant stroke. Alas, however, it is time for this post to stop.
Continuing from the last post.
Dispensing with the “Weberian fantasy” of state power, Wedeen starts off with a abridged history of modern Yemen:
“President Ali Abd Allah Salih has been in power for twenty-five years, as the leader of North Yemen since 1978, and of unified Yemen since its inception in 1990. Yet in spite of the regime’s durability, the Weberian fantasy of a state that enjoys a monopoly on violence—legitimate or otherwise—is not remotely evident. In a country of 18.5 million people, there are an estimated 61 million weapons in private hands.2 The state is incapable, moreover, of providing welfare, protection, or education to the population.”
The state – or at least the faction in charge of the state – was capable, in 1999, or mounting an election. Wedeen’s description of it is interesting as much for the analogy to Iraq, and what one suspects the CPA would like to do, as for its Yemeni context. Ali Abd Allah Salih’s government disqualified the one opposition candidate that could threaten it even in a minor way – a man named Muqbil. Instead, they appointed their opposition. It did not go unnoticed that this simple maneuver made the “opposition” meaningless:
“To replace the opposition’s candidate, the regime nominated one of its own Southern members, Nagib Qahtan al-Shaƒbi. The son of its first President, who was deposed and imprisoned in 1969 during a coup
d’état carried out by socialists, Nagib and his family had fled to Cairo where they had received support and protection for years from the anti-socialist North. Election day, then, offered people the choice between two candidates from the same party, the ruling President from the North, and the puppet-like contender whose origins were identifiably Southern. One published cartoon depicted Nagib as a wind-up toy. Ajoke echoed this sentiment: “Nagib is elected and is then asked, “What is the first thing you are going to do?’” He replies: “Make “Ali Abd Allah Salih President.”
Perhaps this was the model that the CPA was thinking about in their first draft of the ‘elections’ that would legitimate the occupation after June 30. Wedeen’s point, however, isn’t merely that the government both embraced democracy and made a mockery of it, but that the state’s assertion of power here was excessive – unnecessary. . Muqbil didn’t have a chance of winning, given the fact that the state exerted rigid control over the election procedure. It is the margin of over-control that puzzles Wedeen. Her answer is that we have to throw out the Weberian model of rationality and understand power, here, in terms of the logic of excess. That is, excessive acts, by gaining compliance, actually function to make the citizen “see” him or her self in terms of the state – as belonging to the state by voting for, or pretending to vote for, who runs the state. That important distinction – the essential instability of the place of the ruler in a democracy – is replaced by the merger of ruler and state, with the state’s democratic self-definition being something more in the nature of one of those entrenched boasts that identify the powerful. By the logic of excess “The elections communicated this absence of actual alternatives by presenting a bogus one.” We couldn’t help but think of the coalition’s own use of democracy. Again, there is the refusal to separate the state from its rulers – to accept the central instability at the heart of democracy. Again, there was the curious attempt to deform the process and form of election into a ritual of confirmation that would signal the absence of alternatives. In the CPA case, the original idea was to create caucuses of American vetted committees that would select slates that Americans had previously approved of. The American project in Iraq failed on this preliminary point, since the Shi’ites – through the intervention of al-Sisteni – blocked them. In doing so, the Shi’ites have been subjected to the kind of propagandistic treatment one expects in the American press – have been accused, basically, of wanting solely to gain power. The accusation has had the effect of disguising the fraudulence of the only American plan for democratizing Iraq -- by the radical and thorough extension of anti-democratic power. The caucuses were meant to make Iraqis complicitous in the American fraud -- to see themselves as subservient to the American scheme. But it didn't work.
The second thing we should point to in Wedeen’s essay is the issue of security. In Yemen’s case, the security issue came up in the course of a private crime, not a guerilla war. Still, the confrontation between the state’s use of direct power to perpetuate itself and its inability to exert power to protect its citizens is relevant to the Iraqi case. In fact, we suspect that the inability of the Americans to prevent the bombings in Baghdad and in Najaf in recent months have, more than anything else, undermined the acceptance of the occupation in Iraq. On the one hand, the CPA’s power is based on that most direct use of violence, invasion; on the other hand, their day to day use of that power is directed mainly towards protecting … Americans. The loss of life of Iraqi civilians is given amazingly short shrift in, say, the NYT, where more attention will be focused on the death of four American mercenaries than on the death of 200 Iraqis or 100 or 50 that are blown up or fired upon in any number of incidents over the past four months. This isn’t just the inherent racism that frames the entire US/Iraq encounter – it is centrally about the logic of excess by which the CPA has installed itself in Iraq.
But let’s turn to Yemen.
Here’s the story:
“The “murders in the morgue” case became public knowledge on 10 May 2000,when two mutilated female bodies were discovered at San’ a University. Two days later, police arrested a Sudanese mortuary technician at the medical school, claiming that he had confessed to raping and killing five women.
Muhammad Adam U’mar Ishaq (whose full name was rarely reported) was a forty-five-year-old Sudanese citizen who allegedly admitted to an increasing number of murders—sixteen in Yemen and at least twenty-four in Sudan, Kuwait, Chad, and the Central African Republic (The Observer, 11 June 2000). The Nasirist newspaper reported stories that he had killed up to fifty women (al-Wahdawi, 16 May 2000). It was said that Adam also implicated members of the university’s teaching staff who, he said, were involved in the sale of body parts. According to Brian Whitaker’s account in The Observer one month later, Adam “had enticed women students to the mortuary with promises of help in their studies, then raped and killed them, videotaping all of his actions. He kept bones as mementos, disposed of some body parts in sewers and on the university grounds, and sold others together with his victims’ belongings” (11 June
2000).”
Wedeen shows that the story of these killings, reported in different forms in different newpapers, provoked outrage not just at the killer, but at the state itself. There were street demonstrations as well as editorials; there were student demands; there were articles in the Army paper. All of which she shrewdly analyzes:
“Debates in newspapers, in the streets, during Friday mosque sermons and qat chews, and in government offices laid bare how easily civic terror can be generated by perceptions of ineffective state institutions, and how public appeals can be made on the basis of the moral and material entitlements that citizens of
even the most nominal of nation-states felt were due them (see Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). People were outraged that the university had not done more to protect its students or to investigate the disappearances. Criticisms focused on the incapacities of the state, the corruption and potential complicity of the regime, and the need for the seeming elusive but desirable “mu’assasat aldawla” (state institutions). In one qat chew I attended someone went so far as to claim that serial killings could never happen in the developed United States (a point I hastened to correct).”
The press, lately, has concentrated on the meme of the ‘complaining Iraqi’ – the Weekly Standard, which alternates between bile and hubris, sent Fred Barnes to Iraq (another neo-con cruise – surely some travel agency should take advantage of these pilgrims), and he returned to report that everything was going swimmingly, but that the Iraqis were distressingly ungrateful. They complain and complain.
The distance that has opened up between the American p.o.v. and the Iraqi p.o.v. is where the action will take place in the next phase of the occupation – its meaningless abdication on June 30 to a council that will still takes its orders from the CPA.
Wedeen’s essay concludes with such a rich expansion of the concept of “belonging” that we urge our readers to go and read it, especially for the way in which she takes discourse as a distributor of “belonging to” – a rather brilliant stroke. Alas, however, it is time for this post to stop.
Saturday, April 03, 2004
Bollettino
John Burns is one of the New York Times most intelligent foreign correspondents. The Times usually slathers an aggressive, heedless neo-liberal ideology on its foreign news, picking its stringers, in such places as Venezuala, from among the most notorious class of exploiters, and in general sending out people whose framework is a sort of rightwing Friedmanism. This makes it very hard to know what is happening in the rest of the world. In the case of Iraq, the NYT has been notoriously supportive of a mere propagandist, Judith Miller. She isn’t even a competent propagandist. Her famous article about the unnamed, disguised Iraqi scientist pointing to spots in the sand where WMD are buried could be used as a freshman journalism class joke. Miller is a throwback to the Hearst reporters that went to Cuba to supply America with grounds for a war with Spain, except that she doesn’t spread that rara avis plumage of jingoistic prose – no Richard Harding Davis she. Rather, she prefers the mothballed clichés of the Wolfowitz set.
Burns, however, went into hiding because of the toughness of his reporting about Saddam Hussein’s insane leadership of his country. So it was all the more jolting to read his analysis of the recent events in Fallujah. It was not only wildly misleading, but childish in its tones and theme. The theme is: why aren’t the Iraqis grateful to us Americans? The tone was like the whining of some sullen twelve year old heir whose gifts of his old clothes to the maid’s son still hasn’t convinced the boy to play with him. Such generosity! Such complaining people, these Iraqis! After all the electricity we’ve got going for them too.
As for the misleading part: the whole history of the American/Iraqi encounter in Fallujah was set by the massacre of 17 to 30 Iraqis in the occupying of the town. Why this happened still remains a mystery, although it is easy to guess that American trigger happy nervousness had a lot to do with it. What did not occur, however, was a ‘firefight’ – which is how Burns describes it.
That theme of gratitude/ingratitude reflects the deeper, entrenched racism that frames the whole neo-imperialist enterprise, with its unconscious (or sometimes conscious) presentation of Iraqis as “children”. The parent/child image has been a standard legitimating trope in the colonialist discourse since the Spanish waded ashore on Hispanola. In Iraq, its late efflorescence has caused the CPA to act in enormously irrational ways. That the horror of the lynching of the four mercenaries in Fallujah touches off a similar response in Burns, who should know better, does not bode well for US/Iraq relations. So instead of asking such journalist questions as: why is the Army using mercenaries in the Sunni triangle, and why were these four guys going into a town the army wouldn’t enter in an unarmored vehicle, he gives us his shock and dismay.
From the beginning, we have maintained that the top down implementation of civil change, such as was envisioned by all the Defense Department planners, goes against everything we know about the failures of central planning. That is hard earned knowledge for the left. Lately, we’ve been wondering what it means to combine the benefit of a welfare state with bottom up self organization – the kind of foreign policy that the left should be vigorously exploring. In thinking about this, we keep bumping into the name James C. Scott, the man who wrote “Seeing Like A State.” So we went to an essay in Studies in Comparative Society and History for a recent essay by Lisa Wedeen, entitled “Seeing like a Citizen”. Since the essay is about the interplay between state and culture in Yemen, we thought that it might have some suggestions about what the progressive project in Iraq would be like.
Wedeen discusses three events in Yemn. One is the first direct presidential election, held on September 23, 1999. The second is the tenth anniversary celebration of national unification, on May 22, 2000. And the third is the career of a serial killer who did his killings in a University setting. Here is how Weedon sees a community of thematic interest in these different threads:
Each of the events betrays a note of irony. The election was widely heralded
as “the first free direct presidential election” ever held in Yemen, and there was
never any doubt about the ability of the incumbent to capture a majority of the
vote. Yet the ruling party, on dubious legal grounds, barred the opposition’s
jointly chosen challenger from the race and then appointed its own opponent.
President ƒAli ƒAbd Allah Salih had a chance to win what the world would have
regarded as a fair and free election, but chose instead to undermine the process,
using the apparently democratic form to foreclose democratic possibilities. In
the case of the unification anniversary, both the preparations and the event itself
required the regime to introduce state-like interventions in domains where
they had never been seen before. In areas of everyday practice, such as garbage
collection and street cleaning, the state made itself apparent to citizens in ways
that could only serve to remind them of how absent it usually was. Finally, the
revelation that a shocking series of murders had taken place inside the state-run
university produced communities of criticism in which people found themselves
sharing a sense of belonging to a nation the existence of which was merely
imputed by the failure of the state to exercise its expected role of protecting
its citizens.”
As you can see, gentle reader, these are familiar themes in the Iraqi context. Wedeen wants to know why, firstly, a party in power would overreach to the extent of delegitimating its democratic standing for no apparent gain; secondly, why the state can come spasmodically to life, spending money on a ritual celebrating itself to the extent that it points its citizens to that expenditure – for instance, in cleaning up the streets before the celebration – and so points to its incompetence both before and after the celebration; and thirdly, why a ruling elite that exists in terms of its assertion of direct power can still leave the citizens of the state feeling unprotected. To put the third question less clumsily: why is the state so inefficient at security, given its emergence from an overtly militarized context?
Wedeen uses the word "belonging" -- a term that has grown suspiciously popular in the social sciences -- to link up to her titular image of seeing to make her general point: “Yemen demonstrates how events of collective vulnerability can bring about episodic expressions of national identification.”
We’ll get back to this essay in our next post.
John Burns is one of the New York Times most intelligent foreign correspondents. The Times usually slathers an aggressive, heedless neo-liberal ideology on its foreign news, picking its stringers, in such places as Venezuala, from among the most notorious class of exploiters, and in general sending out people whose framework is a sort of rightwing Friedmanism. This makes it very hard to know what is happening in the rest of the world. In the case of Iraq, the NYT has been notoriously supportive of a mere propagandist, Judith Miller. She isn’t even a competent propagandist. Her famous article about the unnamed, disguised Iraqi scientist pointing to spots in the sand where WMD are buried could be used as a freshman journalism class joke. Miller is a throwback to the Hearst reporters that went to Cuba to supply America with grounds for a war with Spain, except that she doesn’t spread that rara avis plumage of jingoistic prose – no Richard Harding Davis she. Rather, she prefers the mothballed clichés of the Wolfowitz set.
Burns, however, went into hiding because of the toughness of his reporting about Saddam Hussein’s insane leadership of his country. So it was all the more jolting to read his analysis of the recent events in Fallujah. It was not only wildly misleading, but childish in its tones and theme. The theme is: why aren’t the Iraqis grateful to us Americans? The tone was like the whining of some sullen twelve year old heir whose gifts of his old clothes to the maid’s son still hasn’t convinced the boy to play with him. Such generosity! Such complaining people, these Iraqis! After all the electricity we’ve got going for them too.
As for the misleading part: the whole history of the American/Iraqi encounter in Fallujah was set by the massacre of 17 to 30 Iraqis in the occupying of the town. Why this happened still remains a mystery, although it is easy to guess that American trigger happy nervousness had a lot to do with it. What did not occur, however, was a ‘firefight’ – which is how Burns describes it.
That theme of gratitude/ingratitude reflects the deeper, entrenched racism that frames the whole neo-imperialist enterprise, with its unconscious (or sometimes conscious) presentation of Iraqis as “children”. The parent/child image has been a standard legitimating trope in the colonialist discourse since the Spanish waded ashore on Hispanola. In Iraq, its late efflorescence has caused the CPA to act in enormously irrational ways. That the horror of the lynching of the four mercenaries in Fallujah touches off a similar response in Burns, who should know better, does not bode well for US/Iraq relations. So instead of asking such journalist questions as: why is the Army using mercenaries in the Sunni triangle, and why were these four guys going into a town the army wouldn’t enter in an unarmored vehicle, he gives us his shock and dismay.
From the beginning, we have maintained that the top down implementation of civil change, such as was envisioned by all the Defense Department planners, goes against everything we know about the failures of central planning. That is hard earned knowledge for the left. Lately, we’ve been wondering what it means to combine the benefit of a welfare state with bottom up self organization – the kind of foreign policy that the left should be vigorously exploring. In thinking about this, we keep bumping into the name James C. Scott, the man who wrote “Seeing Like A State.” So we went to an essay in Studies in Comparative Society and History for a recent essay by Lisa Wedeen, entitled “Seeing like a Citizen”. Since the essay is about the interplay between state and culture in Yemen, we thought that it might have some suggestions about what the progressive project in Iraq would be like.
Wedeen discusses three events in Yemn. One is the first direct presidential election, held on September 23, 1999. The second is the tenth anniversary celebration of national unification, on May 22, 2000. And the third is the career of a serial killer who did his killings in a University setting. Here is how Weedon sees a community of thematic interest in these different threads:
Each of the events betrays a note of irony. The election was widely heralded
as “the first free direct presidential election” ever held in Yemen, and there was
never any doubt about the ability of the incumbent to capture a majority of the
vote. Yet the ruling party, on dubious legal grounds, barred the opposition’s
jointly chosen challenger from the race and then appointed its own opponent.
President ƒAli ƒAbd Allah Salih had a chance to win what the world would have
regarded as a fair and free election, but chose instead to undermine the process,
using the apparently democratic form to foreclose democratic possibilities. In
the case of the unification anniversary, both the preparations and the event itself
required the regime to introduce state-like interventions in domains where
they had never been seen before. In areas of everyday practice, such as garbage
collection and street cleaning, the state made itself apparent to citizens in ways
that could only serve to remind them of how absent it usually was. Finally, the
revelation that a shocking series of murders had taken place inside the state-run
university produced communities of criticism in which people found themselves
sharing a sense of belonging to a nation the existence of which was merely
imputed by the failure of the state to exercise its expected role of protecting
its citizens.”
As you can see, gentle reader, these are familiar themes in the Iraqi context. Wedeen wants to know why, firstly, a party in power would overreach to the extent of delegitimating its democratic standing for no apparent gain; secondly, why the state can come spasmodically to life, spending money on a ritual celebrating itself to the extent that it points its citizens to that expenditure – for instance, in cleaning up the streets before the celebration – and so points to its incompetence both before and after the celebration; and thirdly, why a ruling elite that exists in terms of its assertion of direct power can still leave the citizens of the state feeling unprotected. To put the third question less clumsily: why is the state so inefficient at security, given its emergence from an overtly militarized context?
Wedeen uses the word "belonging" -- a term that has grown suspiciously popular in the social sciences -- to link up to her titular image of seeing to make her general point: “Yemen demonstrates how events of collective vulnerability can bring about episodic expressions of national identification.”
We’ll get back to this essay in our next post.
Friday, April 02, 2004
Bollettino
The Black and White world
In the 1730s, a French monk, Louis Bertrand Castel, invented a color ‘clavecin.” Following a suggestion by Athanasius Kircher that arrangements of colors corresponded to arrangements of sounds, the clavecin was designed to create color harmonies synchronized to music. That Kircher was invoked should tell us that Castel was an anti-Newtonian, which he was -- il doutait 'que Monsieur Newton n'eut jamais manié de prisme' – of the profound sort – Castel, like Kircher, still lived in a world in which science was an exquisite web of analogies. The kind of reductionism and mathematical method that Newton applied, without any pre-determining analogies, seemed like a desecration of that web. Blake had that same sentiment a century later, although by then the pre-modern understanding of nature had been irreversibly lost, along with the culture that sustained it. Castel’s example influenced the ever-peculiar Russian composer, Scriabin, in the 20th century.
Well, this is an odd starting place for a post about the world of black and white films and photographs – the world of technical photo-reproduction for most people from the mid nineteeth to the mid twentieth centuries. We start here because we want to touch the folk science of color -- the system of folk beliefs that contain schematics for the correspondence of color to words, sounds, moods, crimes and virtues. We’ve been thinking about that world because, somehow, we came across this exhibition of tabloid photographs. We find photos like this enormously and mysteriously appealing. In fact, it is hard to think of the modern era – from around 1900 through the 1950s – without thinking, unconsciously, in black and white. Kennedy’s assassination, for me, is in black and white, although I’m not really sure the Zapruder film was black and white. I’ve often wondered why nobody has explored how the optical values of the historical iconography spill over into our larger historical imagination.
It isn’t simply that black and white is a color scheme – as human things, colors in their mutual relations one with the other have human significances even as they do the "job" of blocking in figures that philosophers assign to them. There’s an old philosophical bias towards the figural and against color. Color is considered accidental, transitory, way too mutable. Here the old schematic bias, the old logocentrism, as Derrida puts it, flashes into sight and as quickly vanishes.
Try to imagine, for instance, the photo of the wifebeater on the ninth page of the exhibit in different colors. For me, this is almost impossible. Even if I saw the image colorized, it would revert to black and white in my memory, just as certain events -- say World War I -- happen in black and white in my memory. I cannot see it, mentally, in technocolor. The effect of the alleged wifebeater photo is all in the heavy face of the smiling husband, the blocked out head of the wife, and the hand holding -- a gesture that suddenly seems sinister. LI has remarked before, on some post, about the tension between caption and picture. This one has a caption that is a Dashiell Hamlett short story in a sentence: “William Charles November 28, 1947 Friday Held on suspicion of wife-beating.” Can he possibly not be guilty? No, every nuance here proclaims his guilt. But this is where we find the black and white world particularly eerie – it is as if those colors were not only necessary to his representation, but the secret determinants of his crime. It is as if those colors had the pervasive influence of the fates upon Mr. Charles – as if when he beat his wife, the act itself must have been in black and white.
...
On another note -- LI has finally made the Paypal thing work. Check it out.
The Black and White world
In the 1730s, a French monk, Louis Bertrand Castel, invented a color ‘clavecin.” Following a suggestion by Athanasius Kircher that arrangements of colors corresponded to arrangements of sounds, the clavecin was designed to create color harmonies synchronized to music. That Kircher was invoked should tell us that Castel was an anti-Newtonian, which he was -- il doutait 'que Monsieur Newton n'eut jamais manié de prisme' – of the profound sort – Castel, like Kircher, still lived in a world in which science was an exquisite web of analogies. The kind of reductionism and mathematical method that Newton applied, without any pre-determining analogies, seemed like a desecration of that web. Blake had that same sentiment a century later, although by then the pre-modern understanding of nature had been irreversibly lost, along with the culture that sustained it. Castel’s example influenced the ever-peculiar Russian composer, Scriabin, in the 20th century.
Well, this is an odd starting place for a post about the world of black and white films and photographs – the world of technical photo-reproduction for most people from the mid nineteeth to the mid twentieth centuries. We start here because we want to touch the folk science of color -- the system of folk beliefs that contain schematics for the correspondence of color to words, sounds, moods, crimes and virtues. We’ve been thinking about that world because, somehow, we came across this exhibition of tabloid photographs. We find photos like this enormously and mysteriously appealing. In fact, it is hard to think of the modern era – from around 1900 through the 1950s – without thinking, unconsciously, in black and white. Kennedy’s assassination, for me, is in black and white, although I’m not really sure the Zapruder film was black and white. I’ve often wondered why nobody has explored how the optical values of the historical iconography spill over into our larger historical imagination.
It isn’t simply that black and white is a color scheme – as human things, colors in their mutual relations one with the other have human significances even as they do the "job" of blocking in figures that philosophers assign to them. There’s an old philosophical bias towards the figural and against color. Color is considered accidental, transitory, way too mutable. Here the old schematic bias, the old logocentrism, as Derrida puts it, flashes into sight and as quickly vanishes.
Try to imagine, for instance, the photo of the wifebeater on the ninth page of the exhibit in different colors. For me, this is almost impossible. Even if I saw the image colorized, it would revert to black and white in my memory, just as certain events -- say World War I -- happen in black and white in my memory. I cannot see it, mentally, in technocolor. The effect of the alleged wifebeater photo is all in the heavy face of the smiling husband, the blocked out head of the wife, and the hand holding -- a gesture that suddenly seems sinister. LI has remarked before, on some post, about the tension between caption and picture. This one has a caption that is a Dashiell Hamlett short story in a sentence: “William Charles November 28, 1947 Friday Held on suspicion of wife-beating.” Can he possibly not be guilty? No, every nuance here proclaims his guilt. But this is where we find the black and white world particularly eerie – it is as if those colors were not only necessary to his representation, but the secret determinants of his crime. It is as if those colors had the pervasive influence of the fates upon Mr. Charles – as if when he beat his wife, the act itself must have been in black and white.
...
On another note -- LI has finally made the Paypal thing work. Check it out.
Thursday, April 01, 2004
Bollettino
“Beauty should not happen”
LI received a letter from our friend T. in NYC regarding our “beautiful woman” posts. It was addressed to the character in our novel, Holly Sterling – and like a spur in the ribs, it reminded us that we have not been writing the novel in the last week or two. T. has been a regular reader – with red pencil in hand – of the novel.
(Our excuse, our regular excuse, is that since we are close to being kicked out of our apartment, losing our electricity, and in general deprived of the amenities – like a slug under the salt, in other words -- we have other things on our mind. Samuel Johnson, in our humble opinion, might have been wrong – the threat of imminent hanging doesn’t wonderfully concentrate the mind – it fatally scatters it. Of course, we don’t claim to have the highwayman’s strong character. Or perhaps we have a different sense of the drama of our ending. Its sheer pettiness is insurmountable).
But to get back to T.’s letter – if you haven’t read the Beautiful Woman posts, it won’t make any sense to you. Go and read them – they begin two posts back.
We’ve edited and shortened the letter a bit.
"Holly dear,
You must obviously wonder of this intrusion. Its true that it is embarrassment that is at the forefront of my mind as I write to you; I ask and assume too much of your attention. After all, our first and only meeting was so brief that you can’t possibly remember this admirer, I could not have made any impression whatever; and, after all, you were already dead.
Although you are dead, I've heard stories of your beauty. Secondhand stories, its true, and none of them ever mentioned the color of your hair, and a few told me of your accent, but the last fact was not presented as integral to your beauty. No, I actually do not know how beautiful you were, but I can imagine....the fewer and sparer the tales, the more space for my imaginings. Anyway, I'm rather appreciative of beautiful women, and I've recently read a little book that gave me much cause to think about beauty, and divinity, and divinely beautiful women....I thought I might share this with you.
Will I offend you so much if I speak of Pierre Klossowski; will you be offended if I even merely invoking a few references in order to tell you a bit about beauty? Realize that as a beauty, you perhaps have little to say beyond the seeming affect it has had on others. That is your first person (if you will have one at all). My first person account is as pure as it can be on this matter. A reasonable concern of yours: Is what he [LI] has to tell me merely scopic? Perhaps; some would argue “Indeed and only.” Well, then, since you cannot have even a taste of the scopic (according to those who say “Indeed and only”), then I will offer a few observations from that place that cannot be yours.
I swear Holly, I'm not a pervert, but an author that dares to contemplate possible conclusions to the saga of Diana at her Bath as PK, is an author that I need more of in my life. Will you be offended by that possibility that Acteon, not quite all a stag, left hand still in human form, groping Diana’s breast, at the brink of penetrating the goddess in human form whereupon he is set upon by the ravenous hounds that rip him apart, drenching Diana in blood; or, alternatively, Acteaon wearing the bloody head of a stag upon his own, seduced by the goddess, rapturously on top of her….
No, I am not a pervert, but give me myth, Holly dear, just don't ask too much of my faith; engage me in tales of wondrous plausibility, and I will never demand that you tarry with the truth; you are dead Holly, which renders this the beginning and the end of our correspondence, but let me know the story of your beauty.
Divinity unto uselessness, if you prefer a theme.
Did the persona behind Limited, Inc. ever tell you one tale of the Invisible Woman? No, well, LI should have, for it might inform you of what is to come, and what becomes of you. The beautiful woman, such as yourself, need not be here, or there, exactly; its (please excuse and pardon me: your) presence is not always a matter of proximity, but intimate contact, at a distance or otherwise.
That sensation when one is before beauty, when one espies it, that then one is nearer to the "religious gravity" that Barthes finds the Lover provides. I am a far less discerning man; I need not the magnitude of a Lover – any beautiful woman will do. Contact at a distance; contact without the often unavailable or inconvenient facts and particularities of proximity; such is the space that I am trying to explain; I’m sure you have occupied that space, knowingly or not; think back to times before your demise…the attention of their conversation… the casual embrace….the touch at your wrist or shoulder…a glance from across the room: all of them abstract and indistinct in their formality, seemingly ordinary.
Preceeding that space?: Waiting. It is an unknown; that one, beknowst to one or not, is always waiting for beauty - that one is there only because one should not be there. Beauty should not happen; there is no apparent teleology to the encounter, it is rare and awkward and unusual. Although miracles surely do happen, one cannot predict them for they have no place amidst the rigors of prediction and verification; brilliant and extreme (the dictionary indicates of ‘beauty’ (etymologically related to 'bounty')); but it is all so much a matter of what beauty DOES - thus the examples that one might mine from the History of Western Lit., from Helen to Mademoiselle Marnaffe and to a more current date (the Dulcinea del Tobloso is a peculiar case, to be sure, but enough of my parody of erudition!). A beautiful woman does nothing for me, she is superfluous, unnecessary; yet she immediately ends that waiting and therefrom does that impressionistic sense of space and color ensue - wholly human for she is seen as a beautiful woman, but also ethereal; thus, a moment formally sublime.
What did your beauty do Holly? That is the story that I want to hear.
There is, of course, never anything normal about the peculiar charms of a beautiful woman - arms ever too long, face far to piqued, nose rather askew, hands very much too small, etc… but usually a disorganization well short of anything that might be a fetish. What is IT? Yes, what is it? It is, at least, that rare moment of apperception wherein one finds oneself amid both those things that are real and their unreal relations and affiliates, where simulacra are welcomed, as are shadows and echoes; where poses and masks are intimate and alluring.
“Beauty” as a word can only emerge (as it did), don't you think, Holly dear, after all the bother of the period of courtly love? One does not take on burdens and challenges inspired by beauty, one does no great deeds intoxicated by beauty for beauty, no matter how delirious one might become in the presence of beauty, there is neither obedience, nor loyalty, nor service to beauty (unless, of course, one is engaged in some part of the all so pernicious "beauty industry"; but that is far far apart from my fixation at present), while there may be inspiration in the seeing, there is nothing particularly ennobled by such inspiration. Ah, ideals, and idealistic and idyllic ways of telling of them!
A small confession, Holly dear, I am a limited man, a man devoid of grand themes and epic scales, without even the slightest hope of a Form. I have only and merely my few tales, fewer of which I know very well at all. I write to you only as an admirer of beautiful women.
The beauty that recurs as opposed to the fashion of a time; the beauty that remains, adorned or not; yes, that's the one. While a pretty girl may be like a melody, a beautiful woman is a requiem.
Perhaps, Holly dear, you became only a motif or a type. But be of good courage: becoming a woman of substance was never in your stars… to your benefit, if I don’t say-so myself. You will, like every other beauty, remain at a distance, connected to me no matter that distance, in fictive space, or otherwise. My shame, indeed, should either of us take the guise of the Object – that is reserved for my indiscretion: that I might become a nusiance and bother, interrupting your view of what it is that is of you attention.
Diana at her Bath? Pierre Klossowski? How might I get from mere beauty to the divine? All reasonable questions Holly dear.
“Only divinity is happy with its own uselessness.” There is, for us mere mortals, a terrifying vertigo to this aimless and useless existence; we require obscurity and false clarity. Here is the intimacy of divinity and beauty: beauty is its own uselessness; beauty requires as little relation to the sexual act as does love or the needs of procreation, as does any divine one.
Apprehending beauty is the end of the waiting that is integral to every other moment not proximate to beauty (moments unto that ceaseless cycle).
Again, under threat of boredom: What does beauty DO? The same question might be posed to divinity of mythological time: the tale of the gods is what they DO. “This mountainous horizon, these woods, this vale and these springs, do they thus have no reality except in her absence? […] The more absorbed I become in the appearance of these objects, the better I see what the breeze is tracing: her forehead, her hair, her shoulders – unless a more blustery wind is creasing her tunic farther into the hollow of her thighs, above her knees. […] More than ever I experience the dignity of the space as the most reasonable enjoyment of my mind, the moment her forehead, her cheeks, her neck, her throat and her shoulders take shape there and dwell there, the moment her unendurable gaze explores and her nimble fingers, her palms, her elbows and legs slice and strike the air.”
From the affect of beauty on the beholder, to Diana’s visage at her bath: “…yet this body, in which she will manifest herself to herself, she actually borrows from Actaeon’s imagination.”
I, in the company of a beautiful woman can no more dominate her than I might submit myself to the her; I can only be submitted by that unknown force of beauty and that made that moment of the encounter inevitable.
One visage of that force is the Daemon, the intermediary between the god and man, between the beautiful and the beholder: “It is I who teach you this, O Actaeon, I whose external form, malleable to the will of the gods, so well lends iteslf to espousing their unfathomable intentions in order to give your senses proof of their arbitraty existence.” Beauty interrupts the continual and recurring flow of obscurity unto arbitrariness. In mythological cases, the Daemon functions as the interruption, in other more temporal and far less dramatic moments, beauty does so.
Such an interpretation: the encounter of Acteon and Diana at her Bath: “This incidence still belongs to the world of irreversible and uninterrupted space: the danger, the risk – like that of the hunt and the bath after the hunt – lies in the fact that the sacred grove of Diana’s bath is situated in this same space, and that numerous paths which seem to lead nowhere run into that very place.”
Yes, it is that “morose delectation” of Actaeon that I savor every so often.
“’What I saw, I cannot say what it was.’ Not that what one cannot say, one might not more fully understand, nor that one cannot see what one does not understand. Actaeon, in the myth, sees because he cannot say what he sees: if he could say it, he would no longer see. Yet Actaeon, meditating in the grotto, confers on Actaeon suddenly busting into the sacred in which Diana is bathing, the following remark: I shouldn’t be here, that’s why I’m here. The real experience, however, would boil down to an absurd proposition: I was supposed to be here because I was not supposed to be here.”
Nunc tibi me posito visam velamine rares
Si poteris narrare, licet - Ovid
[Now you may tell you saw me here unclothed,/If you can tell at all.]
“As soon as one analyzes these words, one notes in them both the provocation and the irony […] The provocation: Say it, then, describe Diana’s nudity, describe my charms, that no doubt what you’re waiting for, what your fellow men would love to know. The irony: If you can tell at all!”
A beautiful woman, then, is a fragment that is not of a whole, before or after the encounter with her. The “system” of her beauty is never wholly psycho- or social. Her beauty is without the obligations of language and consciousness (thus, speechless and thoughtless). “She is a beauty, no matter her features.” – Diana Vreeland. If you can tell at all. The particular features of a beautiful woman are accidental; she is a phantasm without essence. As a phantasm, possession is without concept.
Yes, Holly dear, you are sterling, like every beautiful woman; never once did you go lightly or gently.
But now my imagination has taken-over, trespassing both beauty and fantasy. I have failed to even indicate the beauty of a woman that arises only in conversation; you and I, of course, will never converse.
I remain,
T.
“Beauty should not happen”
LI received a letter from our friend T. in NYC regarding our “beautiful woman” posts. It was addressed to the character in our novel, Holly Sterling – and like a spur in the ribs, it reminded us that we have not been writing the novel in the last week or two. T. has been a regular reader – with red pencil in hand – of the novel.
(Our excuse, our regular excuse, is that since we are close to being kicked out of our apartment, losing our electricity, and in general deprived of the amenities – like a slug under the salt, in other words -- we have other things on our mind. Samuel Johnson, in our humble opinion, might have been wrong – the threat of imminent hanging doesn’t wonderfully concentrate the mind – it fatally scatters it. Of course, we don’t claim to have the highwayman’s strong character. Or perhaps we have a different sense of the drama of our ending. Its sheer pettiness is insurmountable).
But to get back to T.’s letter – if you haven’t read the Beautiful Woman posts, it won’t make any sense to you. Go and read them – they begin two posts back.
We’ve edited and shortened the letter a bit.
"Holly dear,
You must obviously wonder of this intrusion. Its true that it is embarrassment that is at the forefront of my mind as I write to you; I ask and assume too much of your attention. After all, our first and only meeting was so brief that you can’t possibly remember this admirer, I could not have made any impression whatever; and, after all, you were already dead.
Although you are dead, I've heard stories of your beauty. Secondhand stories, its true, and none of them ever mentioned the color of your hair, and a few told me of your accent, but the last fact was not presented as integral to your beauty. No, I actually do not know how beautiful you were, but I can imagine....the fewer and sparer the tales, the more space for my imaginings. Anyway, I'm rather appreciative of beautiful women, and I've recently read a little book that gave me much cause to think about beauty, and divinity, and divinely beautiful women....I thought I might share this with you.
Will I offend you so much if I speak of Pierre Klossowski; will you be offended if I even merely invoking a few references in order to tell you a bit about beauty? Realize that as a beauty, you perhaps have little to say beyond the seeming affect it has had on others. That is your first person (if you will have one at all). My first person account is as pure as it can be on this matter. A reasonable concern of yours: Is what he [LI] has to tell me merely scopic? Perhaps; some would argue “Indeed and only.” Well, then, since you cannot have even a taste of the scopic (according to those who say “Indeed and only”), then I will offer a few observations from that place that cannot be yours.
I swear Holly, I'm not a pervert, but an author that dares to contemplate possible conclusions to the saga of Diana at her Bath as PK, is an author that I need more of in my life. Will you be offended by that possibility that Acteon, not quite all a stag, left hand still in human form, groping Diana’s breast, at the brink of penetrating the goddess in human form whereupon he is set upon by the ravenous hounds that rip him apart, drenching Diana in blood; or, alternatively, Acteaon wearing the bloody head of a stag upon his own, seduced by the goddess, rapturously on top of her….
No, I am not a pervert, but give me myth, Holly dear, just don't ask too much of my faith; engage me in tales of wondrous plausibility, and I will never demand that you tarry with the truth; you are dead Holly, which renders this the beginning and the end of our correspondence, but let me know the story of your beauty.
Divinity unto uselessness, if you prefer a theme.
Did the persona behind Limited, Inc. ever tell you one tale of the Invisible Woman? No, well, LI should have, for it might inform you of what is to come, and what becomes of you. The beautiful woman, such as yourself, need not be here, or there, exactly; its (please excuse and pardon me: your) presence is not always a matter of proximity, but intimate contact, at a distance or otherwise.
That sensation when one is before beauty, when one espies it, that then one is nearer to the "religious gravity" that Barthes finds the Lover provides. I am a far less discerning man; I need not the magnitude of a Lover – any beautiful woman will do. Contact at a distance; contact without the often unavailable or inconvenient facts and particularities of proximity; such is the space that I am trying to explain; I’m sure you have occupied that space, knowingly or not; think back to times before your demise…the attention of their conversation… the casual embrace….the touch at your wrist or shoulder…a glance from across the room: all of them abstract and indistinct in their formality, seemingly ordinary.
Preceeding that space?: Waiting. It is an unknown; that one, beknowst to one or not, is always waiting for beauty - that one is there only because one should not be there. Beauty should not happen; there is no apparent teleology to the encounter, it is rare and awkward and unusual. Although miracles surely do happen, one cannot predict them for they have no place amidst the rigors of prediction and verification; brilliant and extreme (the dictionary indicates of ‘beauty’ (etymologically related to 'bounty')); but it is all so much a matter of what beauty DOES - thus the examples that one might mine from the History of Western Lit., from Helen to Mademoiselle Marnaffe and to a more current date (the Dulcinea del Tobloso is a peculiar case, to be sure, but enough of my parody of erudition!). A beautiful woman does nothing for me, she is superfluous, unnecessary; yet she immediately ends that waiting and therefrom does that impressionistic sense of space and color ensue - wholly human for she is seen as a beautiful woman, but also ethereal; thus, a moment formally sublime.
What did your beauty do Holly? That is the story that I want to hear.
There is, of course, never anything normal about the peculiar charms of a beautiful woman - arms ever too long, face far to piqued, nose rather askew, hands very much too small, etc… but usually a disorganization well short of anything that might be a fetish. What is IT? Yes, what is it? It is, at least, that rare moment of apperception wherein one finds oneself amid both those things that are real and their unreal relations and affiliates, where simulacra are welcomed, as are shadows and echoes; where poses and masks are intimate and alluring.
“Beauty” as a word can only emerge (as it did), don't you think, Holly dear, after all the bother of the period of courtly love? One does not take on burdens and challenges inspired by beauty, one does no great deeds intoxicated by beauty for beauty, no matter how delirious one might become in the presence of beauty, there is neither obedience, nor loyalty, nor service to beauty (unless, of course, one is engaged in some part of the all so pernicious "beauty industry"; but that is far far apart from my fixation at present), while there may be inspiration in the seeing, there is nothing particularly ennobled by such inspiration. Ah, ideals, and idealistic and idyllic ways of telling of them!
A small confession, Holly dear, I am a limited man, a man devoid of grand themes and epic scales, without even the slightest hope of a Form. I have only and merely my few tales, fewer of which I know very well at all. I write to you only as an admirer of beautiful women.
The beauty that recurs as opposed to the fashion of a time; the beauty that remains, adorned or not; yes, that's the one. While a pretty girl may be like a melody, a beautiful woman is a requiem.
Perhaps, Holly dear, you became only a motif or a type. But be of good courage: becoming a woman of substance was never in your stars… to your benefit, if I don’t say-so myself. You will, like every other beauty, remain at a distance, connected to me no matter that distance, in fictive space, or otherwise. My shame, indeed, should either of us take the guise of the Object – that is reserved for my indiscretion: that I might become a nusiance and bother, interrupting your view of what it is that is of you attention.
Diana at her Bath? Pierre Klossowski? How might I get from mere beauty to the divine? All reasonable questions Holly dear.
“Only divinity is happy with its own uselessness.” There is, for us mere mortals, a terrifying vertigo to this aimless and useless existence; we require obscurity and false clarity. Here is the intimacy of divinity and beauty: beauty is its own uselessness; beauty requires as little relation to the sexual act as does love or the needs of procreation, as does any divine one.
Apprehending beauty is the end of the waiting that is integral to every other moment not proximate to beauty (moments unto that ceaseless cycle).
Again, under threat of boredom: What does beauty DO? The same question might be posed to divinity of mythological time: the tale of the gods is what they DO. “This mountainous horizon, these woods, this vale and these springs, do they thus have no reality except in her absence? […] The more absorbed I become in the appearance of these objects, the better I see what the breeze is tracing: her forehead, her hair, her shoulders – unless a more blustery wind is creasing her tunic farther into the hollow of her thighs, above her knees. […] More than ever I experience the dignity of the space as the most reasonable enjoyment of my mind, the moment her forehead, her cheeks, her neck, her throat and her shoulders take shape there and dwell there, the moment her unendurable gaze explores and her nimble fingers, her palms, her elbows and legs slice and strike the air.”
From the affect of beauty on the beholder, to Diana’s visage at her bath: “…yet this body, in which she will manifest herself to herself, she actually borrows from Actaeon’s imagination.”
I, in the company of a beautiful woman can no more dominate her than I might submit myself to the her; I can only be submitted by that unknown force of beauty and that made that moment of the encounter inevitable.
One visage of that force is the Daemon, the intermediary between the god and man, between the beautiful and the beholder: “It is I who teach you this, O Actaeon, I whose external form, malleable to the will of the gods, so well lends iteslf to espousing their unfathomable intentions in order to give your senses proof of their arbitraty existence.” Beauty interrupts the continual and recurring flow of obscurity unto arbitrariness. In mythological cases, the Daemon functions as the interruption, in other more temporal and far less dramatic moments, beauty does so.
Such an interpretation: the encounter of Acteon and Diana at her Bath: “This incidence still belongs to the world of irreversible and uninterrupted space: the danger, the risk – like that of the hunt and the bath after the hunt – lies in the fact that the sacred grove of Diana’s bath is situated in this same space, and that numerous paths which seem to lead nowhere run into that very place.”
Yes, it is that “morose delectation” of Actaeon that I savor every so often.
“’What I saw, I cannot say what it was.’ Not that what one cannot say, one might not more fully understand, nor that one cannot see what one does not understand. Actaeon, in the myth, sees because he cannot say what he sees: if he could say it, he would no longer see. Yet Actaeon, meditating in the grotto, confers on Actaeon suddenly busting into the sacred in which Diana is bathing, the following remark: I shouldn’t be here, that’s why I’m here. The real experience, however, would boil down to an absurd proposition: I was supposed to be here because I was not supposed to be here.”
Nunc tibi me posito visam velamine rares
Si poteris narrare, licet - Ovid
[Now you may tell you saw me here unclothed,/If you can tell at all.]
“As soon as one analyzes these words, one notes in them both the provocation and the irony […] The provocation: Say it, then, describe Diana’s nudity, describe my charms, that no doubt what you’re waiting for, what your fellow men would love to know. The irony: If you can tell at all!”
A beautiful woman, then, is a fragment that is not of a whole, before or after the encounter with her. The “system” of her beauty is never wholly psycho- or social. Her beauty is without the obligations of language and consciousness (thus, speechless and thoughtless). “She is a beauty, no matter her features.” – Diana Vreeland. If you can tell at all. The particular features of a beautiful woman are accidental; she is a phantasm without essence. As a phantasm, possession is without concept.
Yes, Holly dear, you are sterling, like every beautiful woman; never once did you go lightly or gently.
But now my imagination has taken-over, trespassing both beauty and fantasy. I have failed to even indicate the beauty of a woman that arises only in conversation; you and I, of course, will never converse.
I remain,
T.
Sunday, March 28, 2004
Bollettino
The principal objections to democratical or popular
government, are taken from the inequalities which arise among men
in the result of commercial arts. And it must be confessed, that
popular assemblies, when composed of men whose dispositions are
sordid, and whose ordinary applications are illiberal, however
they may be intrusted with the choice of their masters and
leaders, are certainly, in their own persons, unfit to command.
How can he who has confined his views to his own subsistence or
preservation, be intrusted with the conduct of nations? Such men,
when admitted to deliberate on matters of state, bring to its
councils confusion and tumult, or servility and corruption; and
seldom suffer it to repose from ruinous factions, or the effect
of resolutions ill formed or ill conducted. – Adam Ferguson
Ill formed resolutions, and ill conduct in carrying them out, were at the heart of the Clarke controversies this week. LI watched with our most jaundiced eye as the Bush administration tried out a defense compounded of contradiction, denigration, and denial. None of them have worked very well, because they rebound against a solid fact: before 9/11, the mind of the Bush administration gave less thought to Al Qaeda then they did to raising the acceptable level of arsenic in drinking water. It was a non-agenda item.
However, the real question is whether the Bush mindset has changed in such a way as to secure us against terrorist attack. Us, in the narrow continental sense, and us, in the sense of the U.S. and its allies.
Although we generally avoid the vaguely repulsive experience of reading the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer – he is one of those columnists who seems to spit as he writes – his column about Clarke made the one sensible case against him, even as it buried the case in the usual Right Wing rolodex calumny. Clarke, in fact, should have apologized to the families of the WCT, because he, more than anyone else, was the architect of Clinton’s failed anti-terrorism initiatives.
“It is only March, but the 2004 Chutzpah of the Year Award can be safely given out. It goes to Richard Clarke, now making himself famous by blaming the Bush administration for Sept. 11 -- after Clarke had spent eight years in charge of counterterrorism for a Clinton administration that did nothing.”
Unfortunately, Krauthammer undermines his own point by exaggerating it to the point of caricature. Still, the Clinton administration did not do enough. And what it did do should have been done differently. There, we would have to agree. The problem is, what Clinton did wrong – responding with military force to Al Qaeda without jacketing that force in the full panoply of political pressures on those states in which Al Qaeda operats -- has been taken up by the Bush administration as a strategic panacea. The result of taking the Clinton doctrine to absurd extremes is shown in the overthrow of the one country in the Middle East that we know was not, in any major way, connected with the jihadists in Afgahanistan. All the eagerness that Bush’s apologists have shown in trying to pin some connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein stands in almost comical contrast with what we know about the connections between Al Qaeda and two of our allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. We know, and the whole Arab world knows, that if we are really trying to justify a war with a country on the basis of known, prolonged and sustaining relationships between that country and Al Qaeda, our soldiers would be in Riyadh and Islamabad.
Clarke’s failure, we think, comes from his obsession that Al Qaeda could only be dealt with by military force. We think that the Clinton administration should have been out there shaking its finger at the Saudis, at Pakistan, at Malaysia, at Indonesia, at Egypt – at every country where the terrorists have comfortably found niches.
Clinton didn’t do it. Bush, with the evidence before his eyes that something had to change, decided to relapse into the old groove. Clarke has surprised LI by showing that Bush shared the Iraq obsessions of his Defense Department subordinates. We assumed that Bush was more, well, sane than the Rumsfeld crew. We are still not sure we buy Clarke’s evaluation of Bush’s motives. But post 9/11, we have watched as the Bush administration, behind its rhetoric about a new kind of warfare, are engaging in just the kind of mistaken strategy that shows they have learned nothing from the past. The justification of this is comic: the war on terrorism, we are told, is going to last thirty years, fifty years, a century. Actually, it should have lasted precisely two years. By this time, Al Qaeda networks should really have been rolled back. Instead, they have further embedded themselves in the Mediterranean periphery.
Clarke’s claims about the Bush policy were being tested out even as he spoke last week. Unfortunately, the press was only interested in the sensational side of it, and soon let it sink to page B-12 or whatever. Two things happened in Pakistan. They are summarized by a Week in Review piece in the NYT:“On March 18, Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, gave a television interview in which he described a pitched battle between Pakistani soldiers and 400 to 500 militants and set off expectations that Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been surrounded.
Two days later, military officials were playing down talk of Mr. Zawahiri's encirclement as "conjecture." And by the end of this week, a fresh audiotape message purportedly from Dr. Zawahiri emerged - taunting the government with a defiant call for General Musharraf's overthrow.”
The October surprise in the current election was supposed to be the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden. But it looks increasingly like another surprise, one not so pleasant for Bush, might occur – the toppling of the Mussharef regime. In fact, Pakistan is the one country in which stateless terrorism could actually metastasize to encompass the organs of the state. If this happened, or even if there is a bloody revolt, the Bush doctrine would not only take a fatal hit – it would open up a threat both to this country and to India that is a level larger than any terrorist threat ever before.
So, next week, we will do another post on Pakistan -- October Surprise II
The principal objections to democratical or popular
government, are taken from the inequalities which arise among men
in the result of commercial arts. And it must be confessed, that
popular assemblies, when composed of men whose dispositions are
sordid, and whose ordinary applications are illiberal, however
they may be intrusted with the choice of their masters and
leaders, are certainly, in their own persons, unfit to command.
How can he who has confined his views to his own subsistence or
preservation, be intrusted with the conduct of nations? Such men,
when admitted to deliberate on matters of state, bring to its
councils confusion and tumult, or servility and corruption; and
seldom suffer it to repose from ruinous factions, or the effect
of resolutions ill formed or ill conducted. – Adam Ferguson
Ill formed resolutions, and ill conduct in carrying them out, were at the heart of the Clarke controversies this week. LI watched with our most jaundiced eye as the Bush administration tried out a defense compounded of contradiction, denigration, and denial. None of them have worked very well, because they rebound against a solid fact: before 9/11, the mind of the Bush administration gave less thought to Al Qaeda then they did to raising the acceptable level of arsenic in drinking water. It was a non-agenda item.
However, the real question is whether the Bush mindset has changed in such a way as to secure us against terrorist attack. Us, in the narrow continental sense, and us, in the sense of the U.S. and its allies.
Although we generally avoid the vaguely repulsive experience of reading the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer – he is one of those columnists who seems to spit as he writes – his column about Clarke made the one sensible case against him, even as it buried the case in the usual Right Wing rolodex calumny. Clarke, in fact, should have apologized to the families of the WCT, because he, more than anyone else, was the architect of Clinton’s failed anti-terrorism initiatives.
“It is only March, but the 2004 Chutzpah of the Year Award can be safely given out. It goes to Richard Clarke, now making himself famous by blaming the Bush administration for Sept. 11 -- after Clarke had spent eight years in charge of counterterrorism for a Clinton administration that did nothing.”
Unfortunately, Krauthammer undermines his own point by exaggerating it to the point of caricature. Still, the Clinton administration did not do enough. And what it did do should have been done differently. There, we would have to agree. The problem is, what Clinton did wrong – responding with military force to Al Qaeda without jacketing that force in the full panoply of political pressures on those states in which Al Qaeda operats -- has been taken up by the Bush administration as a strategic panacea. The result of taking the Clinton doctrine to absurd extremes is shown in the overthrow of the one country in the Middle East that we know was not, in any major way, connected with the jihadists in Afgahanistan. All the eagerness that Bush’s apologists have shown in trying to pin some connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein stands in almost comical contrast with what we know about the connections between Al Qaeda and two of our allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. We know, and the whole Arab world knows, that if we are really trying to justify a war with a country on the basis of known, prolonged and sustaining relationships between that country and Al Qaeda, our soldiers would be in Riyadh and Islamabad.
Clarke’s failure, we think, comes from his obsession that Al Qaeda could only be dealt with by military force. We think that the Clinton administration should have been out there shaking its finger at the Saudis, at Pakistan, at Malaysia, at Indonesia, at Egypt – at every country where the terrorists have comfortably found niches.
Clinton didn’t do it. Bush, with the evidence before his eyes that something had to change, decided to relapse into the old groove. Clarke has surprised LI by showing that Bush shared the Iraq obsessions of his Defense Department subordinates. We assumed that Bush was more, well, sane than the Rumsfeld crew. We are still not sure we buy Clarke’s evaluation of Bush’s motives. But post 9/11, we have watched as the Bush administration, behind its rhetoric about a new kind of warfare, are engaging in just the kind of mistaken strategy that shows they have learned nothing from the past. The justification of this is comic: the war on terrorism, we are told, is going to last thirty years, fifty years, a century. Actually, it should have lasted precisely two years. By this time, Al Qaeda networks should really have been rolled back. Instead, they have further embedded themselves in the Mediterranean periphery.
Clarke’s claims about the Bush policy were being tested out even as he spoke last week. Unfortunately, the press was only interested in the sensational side of it, and soon let it sink to page B-12 or whatever. Two things happened in Pakistan. They are summarized by a Week in Review piece in the NYT:“On March 18, Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, gave a television interview in which he described a pitched battle between Pakistani soldiers and 400 to 500 militants and set off expectations that Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been surrounded.
Two days later, military officials were playing down talk of Mr. Zawahiri's encirclement as "conjecture." And by the end of this week, a fresh audiotape message purportedly from Dr. Zawahiri emerged - taunting the government with a defiant call for General Musharraf's overthrow.”
The October surprise in the current election was supposed to be the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden. But it looks increasingly like another surprise, one not so pleasant for Bush, might occur – the toppling of the Mussharef regime. In fact, Pakistan is the one country in which stateless terrorism could actually metastasize to encompass the organs of the state. If this happened, or even if there is a bloody revolt, the Bush doctrine would not only take a fatal hit – it would open up a threat both to this country and to India that is a level larger than any terrorist threat ever before.
So, next week, we will do another post on Pakistan -- October Surprise II
Friday, March 26, 2004
Bollettino
“The most remarkable letter came from a woman who signed herself Thérèse M***, who asked the Courrier des spectacles to call on women to join together to "unveil this madness and force her to appear for what she is, so that visible beauty no longer be humiliated by hidden ugliness." It seems that Thérèse's husband was so taken by this "spectacle held up as the triumph of [the female] sex" that he demanded that she make herself invisible, having no further communication with him except through acoustic horns protruding from a globe of glass. "You can easily imagine that a woman of 23, not badly treated by nature, would not accommodate herself with facility to such a condition," wrote the disconcerted wife. Nevertheless, she explained, she would give anything in the world to know this secret, for, she realized, "it is enough to be invisible, however ugly one is, to receive the most flattering compliments." – Jann Matlock, The Invisible Woman and her secrets unveiled.
We can’t do it. We can’t leave the discussion so up in the air.
Jann Matlock, like any good cultural studies theorist, has read her Benjamin, and her Ginzberg, and her Foucault. She is fortunate enough to work on French culture, especially the roots of modernity – which, for French scholars, are easy to trace. You go to the French Revolution, you go to Paris, and you read the papers. Perhaps this is how she found the marvelous Invisible Woman.
This is the layout of the Invisible Woman exhibit of 1800. Spectators file into a room in which a glass ball hangs from the ceiling. Four acoustic horns jut out of the ball pretty far. The spectators can listen, if they wish, to the voice that speaks through these horns. It is the voice of a woman. And the woman’s implicit and explicit claim is to be in the room.
In other words, an invisible woman.
The contrivance is as rich in dialectical possibilities as the Turkish chessplayer to which Walter Benjamin refers in the Theses on history. That chessplayer enters the canon of modernity via Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote a detecting essay about it. Benjamin, no doubt, found the essay through Baudelaire’s translation of Poe.
Just as that chessplaying automaton possessed a solution, so, too, the Invisible woman possesses a solution. Matlock quotes an anonymous demystifier:
“We know today how the show worked thanks to a number of texts published to capitalize on the popularity of this and similar shows. The most remarkable of these, a pseudonymous pamphlet of 1800, entitled "The Invisible Woman and her Secrets Unveiled," was most likely published by Robertson himself and sold to viewers of the rival show at Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois (fig. 5). Decrying the miracle of the Invisible Woman as deriving from "a puerility," the pamphlet proclaimed that its author had no scruples about dissipating "the marvel that fascinates the eyes of the blind multitude": "we believe rather that we should get credit and glory for giving the following recipe for effecting the false miracle that enraptures every day." 48 Anyone wishing to replicate this magic was directed to build an acoustic contraption in a room below another room connected only by a slit in the floor, explained the author of the pamphlet. One should then hang a glass box above the hole in the ceiling of the lower room to distract the public from the point through which they might be seen. "Place in the above room on cushions, so her movements make no noise, a girl who puts her eye to this oblong opening in the floor of her room so she can see the objects presented to her . . . and then name them by applying her lips to the opening in the hidden tube." From her hidden room, the girl would regale the crowd with what she saw in a room where she was supposed to be residing, invisibly, amidst the acoustic paraphernalia that conducted her voice. "You will thus have the magic," declared the pamphlet, "of the Invisible Woman." “
How can LI resist this image, since it lays out so exactly, so suggestively, the situation of the beautiful woman in the novel? Indeed, one feels – or at least the writer fields, with his irritable, extended sensibility, his ludicrous antennae -- the woman on her cushions in the chamber below her description. The words come out, the crowd is, as it wants to be, mystified, and no woman appears in the glass ball, which sways slightly. No one notices the slit in the floor.
As Mattlock remarks, invisibility – from invisible rays to invisible powers – was a popular topic of the late Enlightenment. Remember, this is the period both of Mesmer and Mozart’s Magic Flute. The naturalization of what, in a previous epoch, would have been considered the work of demons or angels, did not so much destroy the power of the invisible as transfer it to another field, and another regime of legimation.
We loved the instruction in sleight of hand that Mattlock finds:
For Robertson [the exhibitor of the IW], the Invisible Woman Show was not an "experiment" of invisibility but rather a demonstration of acoustics like those displayed in Fitz-James's ventriloquism act. 53 Indeed, the Invisible Woman managed to hold the attention of audiences through several decades of the nineteenth century in shows throughout Europe and the United States because the illusionists in whose cabinets she appeared increasingly made claims about the scientific significance of the acoustic system on which the show was based. As Jacques Lacombe remarked in his Dictionnaire des amusemens of 1792, in order to dupe the public one had not only to have several ways to do the same trick but a way of turning arguments about one's tricks to one's advantage. Lacombe particularly cited illusionist Henri Decremps's advice that, when performing tricks before an audience of enlightened individuals, one should always avoid claiming one's powers magic or supernatural, but rather should suggest that they came from "an uncommon source that was extraordinary although natural."
This image and its semantic field, all of which Mattlock so expertly discloses, seems to LI to give us a sense of why it is so difficult to create a beautiful woman in a story. And why, perhaps, it wasn’t so difficult in an epoch that bore the painful detachment from magical beliefs in its recent collective memory. As Mattlock puts it, “As one newspaper article noted, spectators may well have left the show aggravated by its failure to satisfy their curiosity, but they nevertheless repeatedly told others that "in your life you have never been shown anything so beautiful as the woman that one does not see.”
Holly, je pense a vous!
“The most remarkable letter came from a woman who signed herself Thérèse M***, who asked the Courrier des spectacles to call on women to join together to "unveil this madness and force her to appear for what she is, so that visible beauty no longer be humiliated by hidden ugliness." It seems that Thérèse's husband was so taken by this "spectacle held up as the triumph of [the female] sex" that he demanded that she make herself invisible, having no further communication with him except through acoustic horns protruding from a globe of glass. "You can easily imagine that a woman of 23, not badly treated by nature, would not accommodate herself with facility to such a condition," wrote the disconcerted wife. Nevertheless, she explained, she would give anything in the world to know this secret, for, she realized, "it is enough to be invisible, however ugly one is, to receive the most flattering compliments." – Jann Matlock, The Invisible Woman and her secrets unveiled.
We can’t do it. We can’t leave the discussion so up in the air.
Jann Matlock, like any good cultural studies theorist, has read her Benjamin, and her Ginzberg, and her Foucault. She is fortunate enough to work on French culture, especially the roots of modernity – which, for French scholars, are easy to trace. You go to the French Revolution, you go to Paris, and you read the papers. Perhaps this is how she found the marvelous Invisible Woman.
This is the layout of the Invisible Woman exhibit of 1800. Spectators file into a room in which a glass ball hangs from the ceiling. Four acoustic horns jut out of the ball pretty far. The spectators can listen, if they wish, to the voice that speaks through these horns. It is the voice of a woman. And the woman’s implicit and explicit claim is to be in the room.
In other words, an invisible woman.
The contrivance is as rich in dialectical possibilities as the Turkish chessplayer to which Walter Benjamin refers in the Theses on history. That chessplayer enters the canon of modernity via Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote a detecting essay about it. Benjamin, no doubt, found the essay through Baudelaire’s translation of Poe.
Just as that chessplaying automaton possessed a solution, so, too, the Invisible woman possesses a solution. Matlock quotes an anonymous demystifier:
“We know today how the show worked thanks to a number of texts published to capitalize on the popularity of this and similar shows. The most remarkable of these, a pseudonymous pamphlet of 1800, entitled "The Invisible Woman and her Secrets Unveiled," was most likely published by Robertson himself and sold to viewers of the rival show at Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois (fig. 5). Decrying the miracle of the Invisible Woman as deriving from "a puerility," the pamphlet proclaimed that its author had no scruples about dissipating "the marvel that fascinates the eyes of the blind multitude": "we believe rather that we should get credit and glory for giving the following recipe for effecting the false miracle that enraptures every day." 48 Anyone wishing to replicate this magic was directed to build an acoustic contraption in a room below another room connected only by a slit in the floor, explained the author of the pamphlet. One should then hang a glass box above the hole in the ceiling of the lower room to distract the public from the point through which they might be seen. "Place in the above room on cushions, so her movements make no noise, a girl who puts her eye to this oblong opening in the floor of her room so she can see the objects presented to her . . . and then name them by applying her lips to the opening in the hidden tube." From her hidden room, the girl would regale the crowd with what she saw in a room where she was supposed to be residing, invisibly, amidst the acoustic paraphernalia that conducted her voice. "You will thus have the magic," declared the pamphlet, "of the Invisible Woman." “
How can LI resist this image, since it lays out so exactly, so suggestively, the situation of the beautiful woman in the novel? Indeed, one feels – or at least the writer fields, with his irritable, extended sensibility, his ludicrous antennae -- the woman on her cushions in the chamber below her description. The words come out, the crowd is, as it wants to be, mystified, and no woman appears in the glass ball, which sways slightly. No one notices the slit in the floor.
As Mattlock remarks, invisibility – from invisible rays to invisible powers – was a popular topic of the late Enlightenment. Remember, this is the period both of Mesmer and Mozart’s Magic Flute. The naturalization of what, in a previous epoch, would have been considered the work of demons or angels, did not so much destroy the power of the invisible as transfer it to another field, and another regime of legimation.
We loved the instruction in sleight of hand that Mattlock finds:
For Robertson [the exhibitor of the IW], the Invisible Woman Show was not an "experiment" of invisibility but rather a demonstration of acoustics like those displayed in Fitz-James's ventriloquism act. 53 Indeed, the Invisible Woman managed to hold the attention of audiences through several decades of the nineteenth century in shows throughout Europe and the United States because the illusionists in whose cabinets she appeared increasingly made claims about the scientific significance of the acoustic system on which the show was based. As Jacques Lacombe remarked in his Dictionnaire des amusemens of 1792, in order to dupe the public one had not only to have several ways to do the same trick but a way of turning arguments about one's tricks to one's advantage. Lacombe particularly cited illusionist Henri Decremps's advice that, when performing tricks before an audience of enlightened individuals, one should always avoid claiming one's powers magic or supernatural, but rather should suggest that they came from "an uncommon source that was extraordinary although natural."
This image and its semantic field, all of which Mattlock so expertly discloses, seems to LI to give us a sense of why it is so difficult to create a beautiful woman in a story. And why, perhaps, it wasn’t so difficult in an epoch that bore the painful detachment from magical beliefs in its recent collective memory. As Mattlock puts it, “As one newspaper article noted, spectators may well have left the show aggravated by its failure to satisfy their curiosity, but they nevertheless repeatedly told others that "in your life you have never been shown anything so beautiful as the woman that one does not see.”
Holly, je pense a vous!
Thursday, March 25, 2004
Bollettino
Two announcements:
One is that LI will be coming out much more erratically in the upcoming weeks, if at all. We talked to a man about a job today -- he actually had one. Seven bucks an hour, telemarketing. If you told LI when he was twenty that he'd be working for seven bucks an hour when he was forty seven, well, perhaps we would have opened the vein right there and then. But so it goes in this ruin of an economy.
Second is that LI has a small piece coming out in the New Yorker. Small as in Books in Brief small. A review of Marilyn Yalom's book. It should be published in the next couple of weeks. These guys have such class -- they are eager to pay me. Unlike some places that I can't name, that have floated me for two months and caused my ability to eat, turn on lights, and talk on phones serious damage.
Alas, we won't have time to examine the conceptual strain in the use of the word 'object' in feminism. Throw it on the fire, boys.
Two announcements:
One is that LI will be coming out much more erratically in the upcoming weeks, if at all. We talked to a man about a job today -- he actually had one. Seven bucks an hour, telemarketing. If you told LI when he was twenty that he'd be working for seven bucks an hour when he was forty seven, well, perhaps we would have opened the vein right there and then. But so it goes in this ruin of an economy.
Second is that LI has a small piece coming out in the New Yorker. Small as in Books in Brief small. A review of Marilyn Yalom's book. It should be published in the next couple of weeks. These guys have such class -- they are eager to pay me. Unlike some places that I can't name, that have floated me for two months and caused my ability to eat, turn on lights, and talk on phones serious damage.
Alas, we won't have time to examine the conceptual strain in the use of the word 'object' in feminism. Throw it on the fire, boys.
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
Bollettino
Beautiful women
We’ve reached the fourteenth chapter of our novel. At this point, we have to describe Holly Sterling. Holly’s death is the event that sets in motion the whole plot, and her corpse has been drained and buried since at least the third chapter. Eventually, we knew that we would have to show her in life – we would have to go backwards. And we knew that we had a problem. Holly Sterling is beautiful. Her reputation is held in that adjective. Beauty is one of her assets.
But between the saying of the thing and its credibility lies the whole sad mechanism of art. A mechanism that is as prone to breakdowns as one of those early versions of the horseless carriage. The ones with the engines you had to crank.
The figure of the beautiful woman lies at the very limit of the descriptive powers of the novel. At that limit, it defines the describable. What can be described is everything up to the beautiful woman. She, however, by being so purely descriptive, escapes description. This has been so for a long time. In the Iliad, the events are set in motion by a beauty contest and the seizure of a beautiful woman, Helen. In other words, from the very beginning of Western literature, the beautiful woman has been that figure from which the action flows. If Helen had been another smudged helot, and Paris had been a horny shepherd, who would have cared? In fact, we would have cared -- this question inaugurates another tradition – comedy – and is explored by, among others, Moliere in Amphytiron, as well as Shakespeare in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Class – status – is, in other words, written into the contract between reader and writer that sets the terms of the beautiful woman, and in its clauses we shift from comedy to tragedy and back.
But this is the theoretical fog that hovers over the facts in the case. In fact, how is Helen beautiful?
In that paleo age of the mirror, Homer’s answer is surprisingly modern. Or perhaps I should say that the answer is caught in a mode of representation that operates as a sort of invariant throughout Western literature. He constructs a negative space around Helen – that is, he shows her effect upon her beholders. It is not Helen who is beautiful – or at least, her beauty requires a mirror. It is a relation, not a Platonic form. Her most famous entrance is in the third book, where the elders behold “white armed Helen” at the gates, while the troops assemble below to battle:
Forthwith she veiled her face in shining linen, and hastened from her
chamber, letting fall a round tear; not unattended, for there followed
with her two handmaidens, Aithre daughter of Pittheus and ox-eyed
Klymene. Then came she straightway to the place of the Skaian gates. And they that were with Priam and Panthoos and Thymoites and Lampos and
Klytios and Hiketaon of the stock of Ares, Oukalegon withal and Antenor, twain sages, being elders of the people, sat at the Skaian gates. These had now ceased from battle for old age, yet were they right good orators, like grasshoppers that in a forest sit upon a tree and utter their lily-like [supposed to mean "delicate" or "tender"] voice; even so sat the elders of the Trojans upon the tower. Now when they saw Helen coming to the tower they softly spake winged words one to the other: "Small blame is it that Trojans and well-greaved Achaians should for such a woman long time suffer hardships; marvellously like is she to the immortal goddesses to look upon.”
Notice how beauty is not only in the eyes of the beholders, here, but is described almost entirely with reference to those eyes, and that effect. The woman herself – white armed, shedding some tears, covered with a cloak – has no real descriptive distinction to set her looks apart from ox eyed Kymene and Aithre. She is filled in, so to speak, by being filled in.
Every writer feels that something is surrendered here. But the defeat is obscure. The stakes of the battle are the writer’s own powers, but what are the means by which one recovers from the certain defeat that ensues from testing those powers on beauty?
That’s a very material question for LI.
However, contrast Homer with Balzac’s managing of the first encounter of Mademoiselle Marnaffe and Baron Hulot in Cousine Bette (note: most early translations of Balzac are bowdlerized. Better to read him in a good Penguin translation, if you don't read French):
Au moment où le baron Hulot mit la cousine de sa femme [poor cousin Bette] à la porte de cette maison, en lui disant: "Adieu, cousine!" une jeune femme, petite, svelte, jolie, mise avec une grande élégance, exhalant un parfum choisi, passait entre la voiture et la muraille pour entrer aussi dans la maison. Cette dame échangea, sans aucune espèce de préméditation, un regard avec le baron, uniquement pour voir le cousin de la locataire; mais le libertin ressentit cette vive impression qu'éprouvent tous les Parisiens quand ils rencontrent une jolie femme qui réalise, comme disent les entomologistes, leurs desiderata, et il mit avec une sage lenteur un de ses gants avant de remonter en voiture, pour se donner une contenance et pouvoir suivre de l'oeil la jeune femme, dont la robe était agréablement balancée par autre chose que ces affreuses et frauduleuses sous-jupes en crinoline.
- Voilà, se disait-il, une gentille petite femme de qui je ferais volontiers le bonheur, car elle ferait le mien.
Quand l'inconnue eut atteint le palier de l'escalier qui desservait le corps de logis situé sur la rue, elle regarda la porte cochère du coin de l'oeil, sans se retourner positivement, et vit le baron cloué sur place par l'admiration, dévoré de désir et de curiosité. C'est comme une fleur que toutes les Parisiennes respirent avec plaisir, en la trouvant sur leur passage. Certaines femmes attachées à leurs devoirs, vertueuses et jolies, reviennent au logis assez maussades, lorsqu'elles n'ont pas fait leur petit bouquet pendant la promenade.
La jeune femme monta rapidement l'escalier. Bientôt une fenêtre de l'appartement du deuxième étage s'ouvrit, et elle s'y montra, mais en compagnie d'un monsieur dont le crâne pelé, dont l'oeil peu courroucé, révélaient un mari.
Sont-elles fines et spirituelles, ces créatures-là!... se dit le baron, elle m'indique ainsi sa demeure. C'est un peu trop vif, surtout dans ce quartier-ci. Prenons garde.
Surely it is the dress, that robe which shows an agreeable motion produced by something other than those “affreuses et frauduleuses” crinoline slips – caused, in other words, by the motion of the thing itself, Marnaffe’s ass – which anchors our sense, from the very beginning, of Marnaffe as a woman who has a carnality that makes Helen’s white arms seem very pale, indeed. Cousine Bette is a novel of vengeance. The vengeance is effected by a very plain woman – Cousine Bette – on a beautiful woman – her cousin, Baronne Hulot – by means of a ‘jolie” woman – Marnaffe. It, too, is about an abduction of a sort, except this time it is a man, Baron Hulot, who is abducted. His abduction is in exchange for the abduction of Cousine Bette’s love, the sculptor Wenceslas Steinbock, who is stolen by the Hulot family for the daughter, Hortense. So we are not, after all, so far from the Illiad. But the emotional values in this story all emerge out of Hulot’s descent into the very delirium of pussy and ass – a delirium measured by the expenditure of money – for banquets, dresses, apartments, jewelry, the draining away the Hulot family fortune. Hulot’s taste for lying between Marnaffe’s cheeks is a ruinous passion, and in its ruin, a perversely heroic one. For all of Henry Miller’s poetic of the Land of Fuck, Hulot seems the truer inhabitant of the flesh. Balzac’s concept of the flesh is to oppose it radically to thought – this is the flesh you find around the bone. This is the pure flesh of the dick: unthinking, its will all rushes and retreats of blood.
But one could well ask: haven’t we slipped off the rails? Is Marnaffe more than “jolie”? For Balzac, beauté is ascribed to Baronne Hulot – Hulot’s wife. Her beauty is made up of the fact that she is a great soul. Her great soul is proven by the enormity of her sacrifices – in effect, she sacrifices the family estate to her husband’s appetite for Marnaffe. This sacrifice entails ruining her children, so that Marnaffe can devour the family fortune. Balzac precedes Zola in Nana in making the voracity of the whore – eating and sex, that everlasting duo -- play into a metaphor of money being spent. Nana eats, at a certain delirious point, whole railroad companies. Marnaffe mearly gulps down the Hulot real estate.
Helen, of course, cries and smiles – but does she eat? Does Baronne Hulot?
Baronne Hulot is nearing fifty. Balzac had a rather charming obsession, even when he was twenty, with forty to fifty year old women. He compares Adeline to her daughter, at the beginning of the novel, and tells us that 'amateurs of sunsets" would prefer the mother. But he fails to make the contract with the reader stick. Baronne Hulot’s beauty is affirmed at the limit of our imagination – we can believe in it, as we can believe in God, through a labyrinth of metaphors. But the thing itself – as a good thing, something as palpable as Marnaffe’s ass – always escapes us.
Next post I’m going to use Jann Matlock’s essay on The Invisible Woman and her Secrets Unveiled, and an ethnographic study of cocktail waitresses by Lorraine Bayard de Volo, to go a little further with this.
Beautiful women
We’ve reached the fourteenth chapter of our novel. At this point, we have to describe Holly Sterling. Holly’s death is the event that sets in motion the whole plot, and her corpse has been drained and buried since at least the third chapter. Eventually, we knew that we would have to show her in life – we would have to go backwards. And we knew that we had a problem. Holly Sterling is beautiful. Her reputation is held in that adjective. Beauty is one of her assets.
But between the saying of the thing and its credibility lies the whole sad mechanism of art. A mechanism that is as prone to breakdowns as one of those early versions of the horseless carriage. The ones with the engines you had to crank.
The figure of the beautiful woman lies at the very limit of the descriptive powers of the novel. At that limit, it defines the describable. What can be described is everything up to the beautiful woman. She, however, by being so purely descriptive, escapes description. This has been so for a long time. In the Iliad, the events are set in motion by a beauty contest and the seizure of a beautiful woman, Helen. In other words, from the very beginning of Western literature, the beautiful woman has been that figure from which the action flows. If Helen had been another smudged helot, and Paris had been a horny shepherd, who would have cared? In fact, we would have cared -- this question inaugurates another tradition – comedy – and is explored by, among others, Moliere in Amphytiron, as well as Shakespeare in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Class – status – is, in other words, written into the contract between reader and writer that sets the terms of the beautiful woman, and in its clauses we shift from comedy to tragedy and back.
But this is the theoretical fog that hovers over the facts in the case. In fact, how is Helen beautiful?
In that paleo age of the mirror, Homer’s answer is surprisingly modern. Or perhaps I should say that the answer is caught in a mode of representation that operates as a sort of invariant throughout Western literature. He constructs a negative space around Helen – that is, he shows her effect upon her beholders. It is not Helen who is beautiful – or at least, her beauty requires a mirror. It is a relation, not a Platonic form. Her most famous entrance is in the third book, where the elders behold “white armed Helen” at the gates, while the troops assemble below to battle:
Forthwith she veiled her face in shining linen, and hastened from her
chamber, letting fall a round tear; not unattended, for there followed
with her two handmaidens, Aithre daughter of Pittheus and ox-eyed
Klymene. Then came she straightway to the place of the Skaian gates. And they that were with Priam and Panthoos and Thymoites and Lampos and
Klytios and Hiketaon of the stock of Ares, Oukalegon withal and Antenor, twain sages, being elders of the people, sat at the Skaian gates. These had now ceased from battle for old age, yet were they right good orators, like grasshoppers that in a forest sit upon a tree and utter their lily-like [supposed to mean "delicate" or "tender"] voice; even so sat the elders of the Trojans upon the tower. Now when they saw Helen coming to the tower they softly spake winged words one to the other: "Small blame is it that Trojans and well-greaved Achaians should for such a woman long time suffer hardships; marvellously like is she to the immortal goddesses to look upon.”
Notice how beauty is not only in the eyes of the beholders, here, but is described almost entirely with reference to those eyes, and that effect. The woman herself – white armed, shedding some tears, covered with a cloak – has no real descriptive distinction to set her looks apart from ox eyed Kymene and Aithre. She is filled in, so to speak, by being filled in.
Every writer feels that something is surrendered here. But the defeat is obscure. The stakes of the battle are the writer’s own powers, but what are the means by which one recovers from the certain defeat that ensues from testing those powers on beauty?
That’s a very material question for LI.
However, contrast Homer with Balzac’s managing of the first encounter of Mademoiselle Marnaffe and Baron Hulot in Cousine Bette (note: most early translations of Balzac are bowdlerized. Better to read him in a good Penguin translation, if you don't read French):
Au moment où le baron Hulot mit la cousine de sa femme [poor cousin Bette] à la porte de cette maison, en lui disant: "Adieu, cousine!" une jeune femme, petite, svelte, jolie, mise avec une grande élégance, exhalant un parfum choisi, passait entre la voiture et la muraille pour entrer aussi dans la maison. Cette dame échangea, sans aucune espèce de préméditation, un regard avec le baron, uniquement pour voir le cousin de la locataire; mais le libertin ressentit cette vive impression qu'éprouvent tous les Parisiens quand ils rencontrent une jolie femme qui réalise, comme disent les entomologistes, leurs desiderata, et il mit avec une sage lenteur un de ses gants avant de remonter en voiture, pour se donner une contenance et pouvoir suivre de l'oeil la jeune femme, dont la robe était agréablement balancée par autre chose que ces affreuses et frauduleuses sous-jupes en crinoline.
- Voilà, se disait-il, une gentille petite femme de qui je ferais volontiers le bonheur, car elle ferait le mien.
Quand l'inconnue eut atteint le palier de l'escalier qui desservait le corps de logis situé sur la rue, elle regarda la porte cochère du coin de l'oeil, sans se retourner positivement, et vit le baron cloué sur place par l'admiration, dévoré de désir et de curiosité. C'est comme une fleur que toutes les Parisiennes respirent avec plaisir, en la trouvant sur leur passage. Certaines femmes attachées à leurs devoirs, vertueuses et jolies, reviennent au logis assez maussades, lorsqu'elles n'ont pas fait leur petit bouquet pendant la promenade.
La jeune femme monta rapidement l'escalier. Bientôt une fenêtre de l'appartement du deuxième étage s'ouvrit, et elle s'y montra, mais en compagnie d'un monsieur dont le crâne pelé, dont l'oeil peu courroucé, révélaient un mari.
Sont-elles fines et spirituelles, ces créatures-là!... se dit le baron, elle m'indique ainsi sa demeure. C'est un peu trop vif, surtout dans ce quartier-ci. Prenons garde.
Surely it is the dress, that robe which shows an agreeable motion produced by something other than those “affreuses et frauduleuses” crinoline slips – caused, in other words, by the motion of the thing itself, Marnaffe’s ass – which anchors our sense, from the very beginning, of Marnaffe as a woman who has a carnality that makes Helen’s white arms seem very pale, indeed. Cousine Bette is a novel of vengeance. The vengeance is effected by a very plain woman – Cousine Bette – on a beautiful woman – her cousin, Baronne Hulot – by means of a ‘jolie” woman – Marnaffe. It, too, is about an abduction of a sort, except this time it is a man, Baron Hulot, who is abducted. His abduction is in exchange for the abduction of Cousine Bette’s love, the sculptor Wenceslas Steinbock, who is stolen by the Hulot family for the daughter, Hortense. So we are not, after all, so far from the Illiad. But the emotional values in this story all emerge out of Hulot’s descent into the very delirium of pussy and ass – a delirium measured by the expenditure of money – for banquets, dresses, apartments, jewelry, the draining away the Hulot family fortune. Hulot’s taste for lying between Marnaffe’s cheeks is a ruinous passion, and in its ruin, a perversely heroic one. For all of Henry Miller’s poetic of the Land of Fuck, Hulot seems the truer inhabitant of the flesh. Balzac’s concept of the flesh is to oppose it radically to thought – this is the flesh you find around the bone. This is the pure flesh of the dick: unthinking, its will all rushes and retreats of blood.
But one could well ask: haven’t we slipped off the rails? Is Marnaffe more than “jolie”? For Balzac, beauté is ascribed to Baronne Hulot – Hulot’s wife. Her beauty is made up of the fact that she is a great soul. Her great soul is proven by the enormity of her sacrifices – in effect, she sacrifices the family estate to her husband’s appetite for Marnaffe. This sacrifice entails ruining her children, so that Marnaffe can devour the family fortune. Balzac precedes Zola in Nana in making the voracity of the whore – eating and sex, that everlasting duo -- play into a metaphor of money being spent. Nana eats, at a certain delirious point, whole railroad companies. Marnaffe mearly gulps down the Hulot real estate.
Helen, of course, cries and smiles – but does she eat? Does Baronne Hulot?
Baronne Hulot is nearing fifty. Balzac had a rather charming obsession, even when he was twenty, with forty to fifty year old women. He compares Adeline to her daughter, at the beginning of the novel, and tells us that 'amateurs of sunsets" would prefer the mother. But he fails to make the contract with the reader stick. Baronne Hulot’s beauty is affirmed at the limit of our imagination – we can believe in it, as we can believe in God, through a labyrinth of metaphors. But the thing itself – as a good thing, something as palpable as Marnaffe’s ass – always escapes us.
Next post I’m going to use Jann Matlock’s essay on The Invisible Woman and her Secrets Unveiled, and an ethnographic study of cocktail waitresses by Lorraine Bayard de Volo, to go a little further with this.
Monday, March 22, 2004
Bollettino
Our far flung correspondents
The following is from Paul Craddick, who runs a weblog that we strongly recommend, Fragmenta Philosophica. We want to thank him for letting us publish this letter.
Roger,
You're beginning to strike me a bit like Hegel - the architectonic is in need of serious repair, but that doesn't prevent you from unearthing shining gems of insight.
I thoroughly enjoyed your latest "Bollettino" - it had real historical sweep, was superbly written, and provocatively argued.
I think you're definitely on to something with your notion that the "bourgeoisification" or the "proletariat" has been helped along rather well by the easy availability of consumer credit, and I can't recall any other writer coming at it from quite the same angle as you. There's definitely food for thought there.
But - surprise! - I do think you omitted something essential in your analysis.
The fountainhead of (economic) social mobility is none other than the market's wealth-creating dynamo: investment for profit. Thereby the productive process is "refined" such that now the same product can be offered at a lower price than before, or a "better" (= more variegated, complex, featureful, etc.) product can now be offered at the same price as was an inferior one previously. Hence even if nominal wages remain static, over the longer term those wages "appreciate" and thus go further and further: purchasing power is extended. My own favored definition of "economize" - informed by the "praxeological" postulates of the Austrians - is "choice reducing its own costs." The market, as the most economical of economies, inherently reduces costs, the corollary of which is that it enriches (economic) choice. Ergo the lot of the worker will tend to improve of the longer haul. (Please don't misunderstand me as an unabashed "supply-sider," but the role of entrepreneurial investment is fundamental no matter what stand one takes on that question).
Though I won't be holding my breath, one could imagine a state of affairs in which instead of issuing ever larger standard notes ($20's, $50's, $100's) a central bank actually divided the smaller units - imagine "deci-pennies."
This puts an interesting gloss on "soak the rich" schemes - and, generally, those interventions into the market order which encourage aversion to risk: the shorter term is purchased at the cost of the longer term. That's my take on the dialectical interplay between socialism and capitalism - infusions of the former's ethos cause the latter to feed off of its own reserves, vitiating self-sufficiency in numerous respects.
The remarkable thing - detailed, for example, in one of my favorite books, Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy - is the resilience of the "capitalist" engine in the face of punitive taxation, wage and price controls, and other interventions that are difficult to metabolize (one of my heroes, Wilhelm Roepke, distinguishes between "assimilable" and "unassimilable" interventions, but that's another matter). The price we've paid for the "mixed economy" is the further encouragement or "evocation" of Big Business - the large-scale concerns can better weather the storms/tolerate the most parasites - and further ourselves down the lamentable road of the "cult of the colossal"; not to mention further disturb economic equilibrium, and risk exemplifying Mises' dictum ("Middle of the road policy leads [logically, though not necessarily existentially] to socialism"). Our impending health care crisis is surely an illustration of the latter.
So there!
On another note, a while back I posted about the political designations "Left" and "Right" in a rather halting and "dialectical" - vs. didactic - manner. I'm sure you'd have some very valuable things to say about this, so if the spirit moves you please have a look and comment (I'd be glad to know your thoughts).
Best,
Paul
Our far flung correspondents
The following is from Paul Craddick, who runs a weblog that we strongly recommend, Fragmenta Philosophica. We want to thank him for letting us publish this letter.
Roger,
You're beginning to strike me a bit like Hegel - the architectonic is in need of serious repair, but that doesn't prevent you from unearthing shining gems of insight.
I thoroughly enjoyed your latest "Bollettino" - it had real historical sweep, was superbly written, and provocatively argued.
I think you're definitely on to something with your notion that the "bourgeoisification" or the "proletariat" has been helped along rather well by the easy availability of consumer credit, and I can't recall any other writer coming at it from quite the same angle as you. There's definitely food for thought there.
But - surprise! - I do think you omitted something essential in your analysis.
The fountainhead of (economic) social mobility is none other than the market's wealth-creating dynamo: investment for profit. Thereby the productive process is "refined" such that now the same product can be offered at a lower price than before, or a "better" (= more variegated, complex, featureful, etc.) product can now be offered at the same price as was an inferior one previously. Hence even if nominal wages remain static, over the longer term those wages "appreciate" and thus go further and further: purchasing power is extended. My own favored definition of "economize" - informed by the "praxeological" postulates of the Austrians - is "choice reducing its own costs." The market, as the most economical of economies, inherently reduces costs, the corollary of which is that it enriches (economic) choice. Ergo the lot of the worker will tend to improve of the longer haul. (Please don't misunderstand me as an unabashed "supply-sider," but the role of entrepreneurial investment is fundamental no matter what stand one takes on that question).
Though I won't be holding my breath, one could imagine a state of affairs in which instead of issuing ever larger standard notes ($20's, $50's, $100's) a central bank actually divided the smaller units - imagine "deci-pennies."
This puts an interesting gloss on "soak the rich" schemes - and, generally, those interventions into the market order which encourage aversion to risk: the shorter term is purchased at the cost of the longer term. That's my take on the dialectical interplay between socialism and capitalism - infusions of the former's ethos cause the latter to feed off of its own reserves, vitiating self-sufficiency in numerous respects.
The remarkable thing - detailed, for example, in one of my favorite books, Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy - is the resilience of the "capitalist" engine in the face of punitive taxation, wage and price controls, and other interventions that are difficult to metabolize (one of my heroes, Wilhelm Roepke, distinguishes between "assimilable" and "unassimilable" interventions, but that's another matter). The price we've paid for the "mixed economy" is the further encouragement or "evocation" of Big Business - the large-scale concerns can better weather the storms/tolerate the most parasites - and further ourselves down the lamentable road of the "cult of the colossal"; not to mention further disturb economic equilibrium, and risk exemplifying Mises' dictum ("Middle of the road policy leads [logically, though not necessarily existentially] to socialism"). Our impending health care crisis is surely an illustration of the latter.
So there!
On another note, a while back I posted about the political designations "Left" and "Right" in a rather halting and "dialectical" - vs. didactic - manner. I'm sure you'd have some very valuable things to say about this, so if the spirit moves you please have a look and comment (I'd be glad to know your thoughts).
Best,
Paul
Saturday, March 20, 2004
Bollettino
The alterations of general economic perspectives must lead to alterations of the relationship between the workers and their employers. The suddenly change of circumstances coincided with many strikes that had already begun, and with many more, that were being prepared. Doubtless, they will be proceed in spite of the Depression and will lead to even higher wages. The factory owners will argue that they are not in the position to pay higher wages, to which the workers will respond that the cost of living has become higher, and so the two arguments will equally weigh against each other. In case of the Depression lengthening, which is what I assume will happen, the workers will soon receive the whole brunt of it, and they will – without intending it – have to struggle against the fall of wages. Then their activity will flow into the political plane, whereby the new economic organizations created by the strike will be of invaluable worth to them. – Marx, the New York Tribune, 27. September 1853
Marx was writing at the time of the Crimean War. The railroad frenzy in England had collapsed (as has been often remarked, the political and economic consequences of the oversupply of rail and of the oversupply of optic fiber cable, one hundred forty some years later, display remarkably similar trajectories). Britain’s war was being fought for cloudy reasons, and had no visible exit to it. The economy was in Depression – a term that has been daintily replaced, in the modern lexicon, by recession, euphemism being the last resort of economists when all else fails. Marx, at this time, was stuffing himself with despair, beer, lust for house maids, and blue-books. As James Buchan, I believe, has noted, with the job for the Tribune, and his other writings, Marx wasn’t making bad money – yet his household was always near the very end of its financial tether.
Here’s what he says in a letter to Engels written about the same date:
Above all I want to slay the fellows with my pen, the moment being propitious, and if at the same time you keep me supplied with material, I can spin out the various themes over longer periods.
Why the quotes from Marx? Well, we’ve been pondering an article in Slate by Chris Suellentrop about the Spanish socialists. No, it isn’t about whether they have definitively leaped off the Good Ship Lollipop and joined the Barbary Corsairs (leave that to the ever ignorant Christopher Hitchens). It is about the hollowed out status of European Socialism:
“Despite what you may have heard, socialism isn't dead. It's undead, a zombie that still roams the earth uncertain what to do with itself since its demise. It was sighted again this week, somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula, though some observers dismissed the reports. Sure, a group named the Socialist Workers Party won the elections in Spain, and a Socialist named José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is slated to become the country's next prime minister. But it says something about the state of small-"s" socialism—in addition to the state of the world—that conservatives are attacking Zapatero for his response to terrorism, not his attitude toward capitalism.”
That is fair enough play with the specter that haunted Europe. And it is certainly true that Zapatero’s ministers assured the financial markets that the election of socialists does not entail the implementation of socialism – which is what socialists have been doing since Ramsay McDonald assured the City that he had no intention of producing policies that would actually benefit the working class, or chip even the slightest percent from the Bank’s bonds. Suellentrop is right to say that the neo-liberal agenda, in Europe, almost always advances in the Trojan horse of socialist parties.
“In One Hundred Years of Socialism, the historian Donald Sassoon notes that over the course of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, European socialists went from wanting to get rid of capitalism to declaring "that they were the ideal managers of it."
But Zapatero, Blair, and Schröder are taking this a step further: They're dropping much of the socialist project of economic interventionism. The vestige of socialism they cling to is the commitment to a strong social safety net that can balance the inequities of unbridled capitalism. Schröder may be going the furthest: He's trying to cut Germany's welfare state in order to save it. (Americans might be amused that some Germans are outraged because they now pay $12.40 each time they visit the doctor.) Zapatero's shift toward market economics is understandable: He has to live up to the stellar performance of his predecessor. As the Wall Street Journal Europe noted this week, during José Maria Aznar's eight years as Spain's prime minister, unemployment dropped from 20 percent to 11 percent, and the country created 40 percent of the European Union's new jobs, 4.2 million of them. During the Socialists' 20-year reign from 1976 to 1996, the country's job growth netted out at zero.”
However, the crowing tone is rather odd, given that in the current Depression, the U.S. economy is being supported by a mortgage market that is, in effect, guaranteed by the government and financed through huge public/private corporations; that the record trade and spending deficits are being underwritten by Asian central banks – not least the central China bank, which is controlled by the Communist party of China; and that the most conservative president we have ever seen is running partly on a record that includes running up Medicare entitlements some five hundred billion dollars.
As for job growth – well, perhaps U.S. job growth shouldn’t exactly be bragged about right now. During Bush’s three year reign, the country’s job growth netted out as a loss of 3 million jobs, and that is probably a conservative estimate.
On the first point – as Hamish McDonald put it in the Sydney Morning Herald:
“Asia's depressed currencies and massive US dollar reserves are a recipe for an American recession...
Despite some evident misgivings about his rising level of indebtedness, US President George Bush's bankers of last resort are continuing to lend him the funds to pay for vital necessities like tax cuts, the war in Iraq and missile defence.
Toshihiko Fukui and Zhou Xiaochuan no doubt have their disagreements about Mr Bush's priorities, but as governors of the central banks of Japan and China, respectively, they are continuing to build up already massive holdings of US Treasury securities.”
Thus Lenin’s supposed dictum is neatly inversed. The capitalists, you remember, were supposed to sell the communists the rope with which they were to be hung. It appears that the communists are now doing the rope selling, and the capitalists are busy weaving it into nets to engage in hugely expensive adventures in neo-colonialism. Nowadays, you can’t tell the weaver from the weave.
But it is the trade deficit that points to an underlying story about the end of socialism as a “new economic arrangement that emerges on the political plane.” We have always thought that the decline in socialism, including the decline in labor unions, worked in tandem with the invention of the expanded consumer credit market. In short, the Bank America card was the potent weapon that destroyed Das Kapital.
This is a thesis that we have never seen pursued. This is odd. It is only by retaining that penumbra of credit that American families, in the early 80s, were able to initiate their middle class lifestyle survival technique, which consisted of pouring women into the marketplace. It is only by retaining their ability to take out mortgages on ever easier terms that the American consumer has floated even the weak American economy we see at present. In the meantime, what would appear to be the best opening for union activity in the past fifty years – the revelation after revelation of the gouging of corporations by top management – has resulted in nothing. If anything, a shift towards a lower and lower union membership.
We wonder whether the strains in this system are going to continue to deliver the benefits of social welfare under the aegis of New Economy capitalism, or not. The system itself has retained a stubborn invisibility – it does not seem to have occurred to any economic historian to inquire about the macroscopic effects of expanded consumer credit on the cultures of the Western countries even as economists push for policies that require an ever greater credit market to finance an ever greater level of demand.
There’s a nice moment in the French Lieutenant’s Woman (LI is reading John Fowles at the moment, since we’ve been hired to write a review of a John Fowles biography). The time is 1865. Sam, a valet, tells his employer, Charles, a fairly well to do scion of an aristocratic house, that he wants to get married and set up a shop. Sam claims that he has saved up 30 pounds – an incredibly good sum, over two years, considering that it is more than a fourth of his pay. To set up a shop, he needs 200 pounds. Where is he going to get it? He applies to Charles, naturally.
Today, Sam would probably apply to a bank. More than that, however: Sam would have been able to live above the immediate purchase power of his salary because he is surrounded by the invisible, omnipresent means to do so. In 1865, or 1853, banks would simply not loan money to the likes of Sam. In order to borrow money, Sam has to turn to his very human network – his family, his employer, his friends.
We underestimate the massiveness of these exchanges. It was in getting credit, as well as higher wages, that the working class came to know the bourgeoisie. It was face to face knowledge, it was indelible, and the hostility it created ensured the creation of further hostilities all over the West for two hundred years. The collapse of this face to face encounter erased a factor that played a huge role in the creation of class consciousness. In its place has come a form of mimetism – the imitation of the wealthier by the less wealthy. This is the prevailing mode in our everyday symbolic interactions.
The long implementation of the new form of capitalism, in the sixties and seventies, provoked a crisis of authenticity among the left’s intellectuals of the period. It is this that partly explains the popularity of total systems of control – whether it is Foucault’s regime of surveillance, or Galbraith’s technostructure. By removing the traditional modes of hostility from the relationship between the working class and the management class -- by removing, in effect, the theater of the negotiation -- the system, in effect, paralyzed the working class, and put its intellectuals into an untenable position. The smartest of them, like Foucault, realized that the dialectical truth of the moment was not simply that control had achieved a greater level of penetration and invisibility, but that it had suddenly created both the means and the necessity of producing pleasure.
Well, we will see if this system can overcome its contradictions. One thing is for sure: the death of socialism was not a victory for capitalism. Both were utterly transformed in that struggle. To tell you the truth, the struggle still goes on. In spite of Suellentrop’s crowing.
The alterations of general economic perspectives must lead to alterations of the relationship between the workers and their employers. The suddenly change of circumstances coincided with many strikes that had already begun, and with many more, that were being prepared. Doubtless, they will be proceed in spite of the Depression and will lead to even higher wages. The factory owners will argue that they are not in the position to pay higher wages, to which the workers will respond that the cost of living has become higher, and so the two arguments will equally weigh against each other. In case of the Depression lengthening, which is what I assume will happen, the workers will soon receive the whole brunt of it, and they will – without intending it – have to struggle against the fall of wages. Then their activity will flow into the political plane, whereby the new economic organizations created by the strike will be of invaluable worth to them. – Marx, the New York Tribune, 27. September 1853
Marx was writing at the time of the Crimean War. The railroad frenzy in England had collapsed (as has been often remarked, the political and economic consequences of the oversupply of rail and of the oversupply of optic fiber cable, one hundred forty some years later, display remarkably similar trajectories). Britain’s war was being fought for cloudy reasons, and had no visible exit to it. The economy was in Depression – a term that has been daintily replaced, in the modern lexicon, by recession, euphemism being the last resort of economists when all else fails. Marx, at this time, was stuffing himself with despair, beer, lust for house maids, and blue-books. As James Buchan, I believe, has noted, with the job for the Tribune, and his other writings, Marx wasn’t making bad money – yet his household was always near the very end of its financial tether.
Here’s what he says in a letter to Engels written about the same date:
Above all I want to slay the fellows with my pen, the moment being propitious, and if at the same time you keep me supplied with material, I can spin out the various themes over longer periods.
Why the quotes from Marx? Well, we’ve been pondering an article in Slate by Chris Suellentrop about the Spanish socialists. No, it isn’t about whether they have definitively leaped off the Good Ship Lollipop and joined the Barbary Corsairs (leave that to the ever ignorant Christopher Hitchens). It is about the hollowed out status of European Socialism:
“Despite what you may have heard, socialism isn't dead. It's undead, a zombie that still roams the earth uncertain what to do with itself since its demise. It was sighted again this week, somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula, though some observers dismissed the reports. Sure, a group named the Socialist Workers Party won the elections in Spain, and a Socialist named José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is slated to become the country's next prime minister. But it says something about the state of small-"s" socialism—in addition to the state of the world—that conservatives are attacking Zapatero for his response to terrorism, not his attitude toward capitalism.”
That is fair enough play with the specter that haunted Europe. And it is certainly true that Zapatero’s ministers assured the financial markets that the election of socialists does not entail the implementation of socialism – which is what socialists have been doing since Ramsay McDonald assured the City that he had no intention of producing policies that would actually benefit the working class, or chip even the slightest percent from the Bank’s bonds. Suellentrop is right to say that the neo-liberal agenda, in Europe, almost always advances in the Trojan horse of socialist parties.
“In One Hundred Years of Socialism, the historian Donald Sassoon notes that over the course of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, European socialists went from wanting to get rid of capitalism to declaring "that they were the ideal managers of it."
But Zapatero, Blair, and Schröder are taking this a step further: They're dropping much of the socialist project of economic interventionism. The vestige of socialism they cling to is the commitment to a strong social safety net that can balance the inequities of unbridled capitalism. Schröder may be going the furthest: He's trying to cut Germany's welfare state in order to save it. (Americans might be amused that some Germans are outraged because they now pay $12.40 each time they visit the doctor.) Zapatero's shift toward market economics is understandable: He has to live up to the stellar performance of his predecessor. As the Wall Street Journal Europe noted this week, during José Maria Aznar's eight years as Spain's prime minister, unemployment dropped from 20 percent to 11 percent, and the country created 40 percent of the European Union's new jobs, 4.2 million of them. During the Socialists' 20-year reign from 1976 to 1996, the country's job growth netted out at zero.”
However, the crowing tone is rather odd, given that in the current Depression, the U.S. economy is being supported by a mortgage market that is, in effect, guaranteed by the government and financed through huge public/private corporations; that the record trade and spending deficits are being underwritten by Asian central banks – not least the central China bank, which is controlled by the Communist party of China; and that the most conservative president we have ever seen is running partly on a record that includes running up Medicare entitlements some five hundred billion dollars.
As for job growth – well, perhaps U.S. job growth shouldn’t exactly be bragged about right now. During Bush’s three year reign, the country’s job growth netted out as a loss of 3 million jobs, and that is probably a conservative estimate.
On the first point – as Hamish McDonald put it in the Sydney Morning Herald:
“Asia's depressed currencies and massive US dollar reserves are a recipe for an American recession...
Despite some evident misgivings about his rising level of indebtedness, US President George Bush's bankers of last resort are continuing to lend him the funds to pay for vital necessities like tax cuts, the war in Iraq and missile defence.
Toshihiko Fukui and Zhou Xiaochuan no doubt have their disagreements about Mr Bush's priorities, but as governors of the central banks of Japan and China, respectively, they are continuing to build up already massive holdings of US Treasury securities.”
Thus Lenin’s supposed dictum is neatly inversed. The capitalists, you remember, were supposed to sell the communists the rope with which they were to be hung. It appears that the communists are now doing the rope selling, and the capitalists are busy weaving it into nets to engage in hugely expensive adventures in neo-colonialism. Nowadays, you can’t tell the weaver from the weave.
But it is the trade deficit that points to an underlying story about the end of socialism as a “new economic arrangement that emerges on the political plane.” We have always thought that the decline in socialism, including the decline in labor unions, worked in tandem with the invention of the expanded consumer credit market. In short, the Bank America card was the potent weapon that destroyed Das Kapital.
This is a thesis that we have never seen pursued. This is odd. It is only by retaining that penumbra of credit that American families, in the early 80s, were able to initiate their middle class lifestyle survival technique, which consisted of pouring women into the marketplace. It is only by retaining their ability to take out mortgages on ever easier terms that the American consumer has floated even the weak American economy we see at present. In the meantime, what would appear to be the best opening for union activity in the past fifty years – the revelation after revelation of the gouging of corporations by top management – has resulted in nothing. If anything, a shift towards a lower and lower union membership.
We wonder whether the strains in this system are going to continue to deliver the benefits of social welfare under the aegis of New Economy capitalism, or not. The system itself has retained a stubborn invisibility – it does not seem to have occurred to any economic historian to inquire about the macroscopic effects of expanded consumer credit on the cultures of the Western countries even as economists push for policies that require an ever greater credit market to finance an ever greater level of demand.
There’s a nice moment in the French Lieutenant’s Woman (LI is reading John Fowles at the moment, since we’ve been hired to write a review of a John Fowles biography). The time is 1865. Sam, a valet, tells his employer, Charles, a fairly well to do scion of an aristocratic house, that he wants to get married and set up a shop. Sam claims that he has saved up 30 pounds – an incredibly good sum, over two years, considering that it is more than a fourth of his pay. To set up a shop, he needs 200 pounds. Where is he going to get it? He applies to Charles, naturally.
Today, Sam would probably apply to a bank. More than that, however: Sam would have been able to live above the immediate purchase power of his salary because he is surrounded by the invisible, omnipresent means to do so. In 1865, or 1853, banks would simply not loan money to the likes of Sam. In order to borrow money, Sam has to turn to his very human network – his family, his employer, his friends.
We underestimate the massiveness of these exchanges. It was in getting credit, as well as higher wages, that the working class came to know the bourgeoisie. It was face to face knowledge, it was indelible, and the hostility it created ensured the creation of further hostilities all over the West for two hundred years. The collapse of this face to face encounter erased a factor that played a huge role in the creation of class consciousness. In its place has come a form of mimetism – the imitation of the wealthier by the less wealthy. This is the prevailing mode in our everyday symbolic interactions.
The long implementation of the new form of capitalism, in the sixties and seventies, provoked a crisis of authenticity among the left’s intellectuals of the period. It is this that partly explains the popularity of total systems of control – whether it is Foucault’s regime of surveillance, or Galbraith’s technostructure. By removing the traditional modes of hostility from the relationship between the working class and the management class -- by removing, in effect, the theater of the negotiation -- the system, in effect, paralyzed the working class, and put its intellectuals into an untenable position. The smartest of them, like Foucault, realized that the dialectical truth of the moment was not simply that control had achieved a greater level of penetration and invisibility, but that it had suddenly created both the means and the necessity of producing pleasure.
Well, we will see if this system can overcome its contradictions. One thing is for sure: the death of socialism was not a victory for capitalism. Both were utterly transformed in that struggle. To tell you the truth, the struggle still goes on. In spite of Suellentrop’s crowing.
Thursday, March 18, 2004
Bollettino
Shell Comes clean
By THE ASSOCIATED NEWS
Published: March 18, 2004
LONDON (AN) -- In a surprise step, the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Cos. said Thursday that it hadn’t been in the oil business for twenty years. “All our profit comes from selling clothes to second hand clothes stores,” new CEO “Crazy” Jan van Alpers admitted. “Jeans and sh*t like that. Also, we are into selling returnable bottles. My vice president just made like 10 Euros this morning, man. We slapped that right in the profit column. It is like these bottle are just sitting out there. People put ‘em in their trash cans, can you believe that sh*t?” As to the reasons for the announcement, van Alpers claims “we used to go out and look for oil and that kind of sh*t, but it was so expensive, dude.” Reducing its estimated reserves of oil by an additional 250 billion barrels, van Alpers added, “the only oil left in this company is olive oil. We mix it with a little feta cheese, a little vinegar, briskly shake it up, and pour it over our salads at the board meets before we light up a blunt. Do you want some?”
Shell Comes clean
By THE ASSOCIATED NEWS
Published: March 18, 2004
LONDON (AN) -- In a surprise step, the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Cos. said Thursday that it hadn’t been in the oil business for twenty years. “All our profit comes from selling clothes to second hand clothes stores,” new CEO “Crazy” Jan van Alpers admitted. “Jeans and sh*t like that. Also, we are into selling returnable bottles. My vice president just made like 10 Euros this morning, man. We slapped that right in the profit column. It is like these bottle are just sitting out there. People put ‘em in their trash cans, can you believe that sh*t?” As to the reasons for the announcement, van Alpers claims “we used to go out and look for oil and that kind of sh*t, but it was so expensive, dude.” Reducing its estimated reserves of oil by an additional 250 billion barrels, van Alpers added, “the only oil left in this company is olive oil. We mix it with a little feta cheese, a little vinegar, briskly shake it up, and pour it over our salads at the board meets before we light up a blunt. Do you want some?”
Bollettino
LI is writing a review of Niall Ferguson’s new book for the National Post. And so we’ve been thinking about vedette English historians. And that got us thinking about AJP Taylor. We are shamefully ill versed in Taylor, and so we’ve been eagerly making up for our ignorance. He is a famously wonderful writer, who favors a crisp military organization of the sentences in his paragraphs. They have that imperative ring, like Napoleon’s dispatches to his troops. Except the imperatives, here, are about sorting through the on-coming mass of historical detail to charge through the progress of characters and their downfalls in endless traps of irony, accident and misunderstanding. Taylor is Rorty’s kind of historian – he has a weather eye for contingency. For him, the story of what caused WWI has to take into account that, on a simple level, it was caused by the assassination of a non-descript archduke and his frowsy wife in a peripheral town. The great structure of underlying causes remains, in Taylor’s view, petrified if the contingent act – and its prolongation in other contingent acts – does not come to free them. An essay on Taylor by John Boyer puts it well: Namier [ Taylor’s mentor] enabled Taylor to use the ‘great men and nation state” model of Central European political history in a way which revolutionized it twice over, once by the idea of catastrophe rather than progress as the principle mode of continuity and evolution in Central Europe, and again by contingency and accident as a new kind of individualism in political history. For what Taylor did to central European history of he neo-Rankean mode was to stand it on its head. He retained the idea of evolution but converted it into a catastrophic pattern for Germany rather than an optimistic providential one…”
Taylor begins one of his essays with a parable/joke that explains a little bit how a catastrophe can be a mode of continuity. A man is asking his parish priest about miracles, and he says, well, if I fell off the cathedral to the ground and was unhurt, what would that be? The priest replies, an accident. Well, says the man, what if I did it a second time. It would still be an accident, the priest replied. Okay, said the man, what if I did it a third time. Then it would be a habit, says the priest.
Such a view, at the moment, is in heavy disfavor. We live in a moment in which all the lumbering, bogus historical models that had their great moments in the 19th century, and after WWI, have been dusted off. Representative of this: a few years ago, Paul Kennedy wrote an essay in the Atlantic about Taylor that was an assault on the anti-generalist history he represented. The causes, in this return to a romantic historical philosophy, discover their moments, lurking underneath, as Intentional as the Furies, and only the shallow mind claims it is all accident or habit.
Well, too much looking for what is underneath or above does tend to distract one from what is right before one’s eyes. When Spain, this week, pretty much signaled that it is an unwilling member of the coalition of the willing, much rightwing indignation was spilled about appeasement. We thought the appeasement charge was bogus, but we also thought of Taylor’s description of a proposed alliance between Germany and England in 1905: ‘What the British wanted was an ally against Russia in the Far East. They would provide a navy, and the ally would provide the men. Very nice for the British. But from the German point of view it was an insane proposition… to commit themselves to a largescale war, a war of life and death, for the sake of British investments in Shanghai and the Yangtse valley.”
Exactly. Only a nation that mistakes the interests of its policy elite for morality itself would ask such a thing. We won’t draw the parallels any further.
LI is writing a review of Niall Ferguson’s new book for the National Post. And so we’ve been thinking about vedette English historians. And that got us thinking about AJP Taylor. We are shamefully ill versed in Taylor, and so we’ve been eagerly making up for our ignorance. He is a famously wonderful writer, who favors a crisp military organization of the sentences in his paragraphs. They have that imperative ring, like Napoleon’s dispatches to his troops. Except the imperatives, here, are about sorting through the on-coming mass of historical detail to charge through the progress of characters and their downfalls in endless traps of irony, accident and misunderstanding. Taylor is Rorty’s kind of historian – he has a weather eye for contingency. For him, the story of what caused WWI has to take into account that, on a simple level, it was caused by the assassination of a non-descript archduke and his frowsy wife in a peripheral town. The great structure of underlying causes remains, in Taylor’s view, petrified if the contingent act – and its prolongation in other contingent acts – does not come to free them. An essay on Taylor by John Boyer puts it well: Namier [ Taylor’s mentor] enabled Taylor to use the ‘great men and nation state” model of Central European political history in a way which revolutionized it twice over, once by the idea of catastrophe rather than progress as the principle mode of continuity and evolution in Central Europe, and again by contingency and accident as a new kind of individualism in political history. For what Taylor did to central European history of he neo-Rankean mode was to stand it on its head. He retained the idea of evolution but converted it into a catastrophic pattern for Germany rather than an optimistic providential one…”
Taylor begins one of his essays with a parable/joke that explains a little bit how a catastrophe can be a mode of continuity. A man is asking his parish priest about miracles, and he says, well, if I fell off the cathedral to the ground and was unhurt, what would that be? The priest replies, an accident. Well, says the man, what if I did it a second time. It would still be an accident, the priest replied. Okay, said the man, what if I did it a third time. Then it would be a habit, says the priest.
Such a view, at the moment, is in heavy disfavor. We live in a moment in which all the lumbering, bogus historical models that had their great moments in the 19th century, and after WWI, have been dusted off. Representative of this: a few years ago, Paul Kennedy wrote an essay in the Atlantic about Taylor that was an assault on the anti-generalist history he represented. The causes, in this return to a romantic historical philosophy, discover their moments, lurking underneath, as Intentional as the Furies, and only the shallow mind claims it is all accident or habit.
Well, too much looking for what is underneath or above does tend to distract one from what is right before one’s eyes. When Spain, this week, pretty much signaled that it is an unwilling member of the coalition of the willing, much rightwing indignation was spilled about appeasement. We thought the appeasement charge was bogus, but we also thought of Taylor’s description of a proposed alliance between Germany and England in 1905: ‘What the British wanted was an ally against Russia in the Far East. They would provide a navy, and the ally would provide the men. Very nice for the British. But from the German point of view it was an insane proposition… to commit themselves to a largescale war, a war of life and death, for the sake of British investments in Shanghai and the Yangtse valley.”
Exactly. Only a nation that mistakes the interests of its policy elite for morality itself would ask such a thing. We won’t draw the parallels any further.
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
Bollettino
Since LI has gone hardcore about the missing Osama bin Laden (day 921 since the promise of his capture), we’ve gotten some flack for putting a premium on his capture or death.
There’s an interesting story in the Chronicle of Higher Education about terrorist cells. According to Jonathan David Farley, a mathematician, the connectionist idea that was so popular in the wake of 9/11, according to which one terrorist are nodes on a graph, connected by links, understates the organizational resiliency of cells:
“When FBI agents arrest a few members of a terrorist cell, how can they know if the cell has been disabled? Several scholars have brought mathematical tools to bear on that crucial question. Social scientists have imagined individual terrorists as nodes on a graph, most of whom are connected to only one or two other nodes. Using such cellular graphs, the scholars have proposed ways of estimating whether a chain of relationships has been effectively shattered, even when some of its members elude capture. But those models are too simple and too optimistic, according to Jonathan David Farley, a visiting associate professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the November-December issue of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Mr. Farley proposes an alternative method. We should imagine terrorist cells not as graphs but as ordered sets, he says. "Lattice theory, my field, is the abstract study of order and hierarchy. In terrorist organizations, hierarchy appears to matter."
As LI understands it, there are two major kinds of networks – egalitarian networks, in which the ordering is non-hierarchical, and hubs, in which networks form around or through 1+ intersections, with a disproportionate number of short distance lengths from the intersection to other links in the network compared to other links. Farley’s idea is that using the model of weak ties between cell members as a template for rolling up terrorist groups ignores the importance of hierarchical structure in sustaining and regenerating cells.
Here’s the money shot graf:
“Mr. Farley offers an equation for calculating the probability that a given cell has been disrupted. His formula is gloomier than the "graphic" models offered recently by other scholars. In an example in
which four members of a 15-member cell have been captured, he says,
the standard graphic model would suggest a 93-percent probability that
the cell had been broken; Mr. Farley's equation yields only a
33-percent probability. "I'm not selling mathematical snake oil,
suggesting that we can actually make exact predictions," he says. The
point is instead to give law-enforcement agencies a rough idea of how
to allocate their resources.”
My guess is that Bush’s comments (rare as they have been) about having killed or captured ¾ of the Al Qaeda organization is using an extrapolation from a graph model of the kind Farley is countering. We are not mathematical enough to even pretend to compute Farley’s equation, but we can make common sense of his assumption about hierarchy – it is the old chain of being metaphor equipped with plastic explosives.
Is it true? Well, we’d guess that it is at least plausible. The NYT contains Kerry’s first shot against Bush, and it is a hopeful one. Poor Kerry – since the Dems rolled on their belly before Bush in 2002, he has to break the shell of invincibility that has been woven around Bush since 9/11 on his own. It isn’t going to sink in immediately. Let’s hope Kerry realizes that he has to keep attacking here. Bush’s unwillingness to go for the kill – in fact, his frank disinterest in the only terrorists that really threaten the U.S., since Tora Bora – could undo our woeful Childe Bush by the fifth act.
Since LI has gone hardcore about the missing Osama bin Laden (day 921 since the promise of his capture), we’ve gotten some flack for putting a premium on his capture or death.
There’s an interesting story in the Chronicle of Higher Education about terrorist cells. According to Jonathan David Farley, a mathematician, the connectionist idea that was so popular in the wake of 9/11, according to which one terrorist are nodes on a graph, connected by links, understates the organizational resiliency of cells:
“When FBI agents arrest a few members of a terrorist cell, how can they know if the cell has been disabled? Several scholars have brought mathematical tools to bear on that crucial question. Social scientists have imagined individual terrorists as nodes on a graph, most of whom are connected to only one or two other nodes. Using such cellular graphs, the scholars have proposed ways of estimating whether a chain of relationships has been effectively shattered, even when some of its members elude capture. But those models are too simple and too optimistic, according to Jonathan David Farley, a visiting associate professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the November-December issue of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Mr. Farley proposes an alternative method. We should imagine terrorist cells not as graphs but as ordered sets, he says. "Lattice theory, my field, is the abstract study of order and hierarchy. In terrorist organizations, hierarchy appears to matter."
As LI understands it, there are two major kinds of networks – egalitarian networks, in which the ordering is non-hierarchical, and hubs, in which networks form around or through 1+ intersections, with a disproportionate number of short distance lengths from the intersection to other links in the network compared to other links. Farley’s idea is that using the model of weak ties between cell members as a template for rolling up terrorist groups ignores the importance of hierarchical structure in sustaining and regenerating cells.
Here’s the money shot graf:
“Mr. Farley offers an equation for calculating the probability that a given cell has been disrupted. His formula is gloomier than the "graphic" models offered recently by other scholars. In an example in
which four members of a 15-member cell have been captured, he says,
the standard graphic model would suggest a 93-percent probability that
the cell had been broken; Mr. Farley's equation yields only a
33-percent probability. "I'm not selling mathematical snake oil,
suggesting that we can actually make exact predictions," he says. The
point is instead to give law-enforcement agencies a rough idea of how
to allocate their resources.”
My guess is that Bush’s comments (rare as they have been) about having killed or captured ¾ of the Al Qaeda organization is using an extrapolation from a graph model of the kind Farley is countering. We are not mathematical enough to even pretend to compute Farley’s equation, but we can make common sense of his assumption about hierarchy – it is the old chain of being metaphor equipped with plastic explosives.
Is it true? Well, we’d guess that it is at least plausible. The NYT contains Kerry’s first shot against Bush, and it is a hopeful one. Poor Kerry – since the Dems rolled on their belly before Bush in 2002, he has to break the shell of invincibility that has been woven around Bush since 9/11 on his own. It isn’t going to sink in immediately. Let’s hope Kerry realizes that he has to keep attacking here. Bush’s unwillingness to go for the kill – in fact, his frank disinterest in the only terrorists that really threaten the U.S., since Tora Bora – could undo our woeful Childe Bush by the fifth act.
Monday, March 15, 2004
Bollettino
930 days since Osama has not been brought in Dead or Alive.
Where is your promise, George Bush?
We usually avoid referring to certain popular rightwing weblogs on this site. There are plenty of other sites to do that. But we couldn’t help but peek at the Instapunditry about Spain. Naturally, they were bummed. Andrew Sullivan’s comment was the most typical.
He begins: “It’s a spectacular result for Islamist terrorism…” Of course. The Spanish people were moved, after having 200 of their fellow citizens blown into nothingness, to embrace Islamic fundamentalism. Or no – it turns out that they were embracing something else: fear. Sissies all, unlike the testosterone fueled Sullivan.
But to go on and spray paint over the low level of Sullivan’s dull tabloid-isms is unworthy of this blog. Let’s skip to his point, which is here:
“But there’s a real ironic twist: if the appeasement brigade really do believe that the war to depose Saddam is and was utterly unconnected with the war against Al Qaeda, then why on earth would Al Qaeda respond by targeting Spain.”
Let’s also skip the “appeasement brigade” thing. LI is tempted to respond “…crypto-fascist…” but that would be, as George Bush might piously say, wrong. Let’s go into those verb tenses, shall we? The “is and was” thing? There were two schools about the invasion of Iraq. The larger school had not opposed the invasion of Afghanistan. Why? Because they felt that the U.S. had the right to respond to an attack. The attackers were located in Afghanistan, and they were protected by the Taliban. Hence, to get them, one had to overthrow the protecters. Which was done. Horribly enough, after that was done, the Wrong Way brigade, as we will call, for convenience sake, Bush’s administration and his supporters, did not finish the job. No, they left Osama bin Laden to hang there. Bush, by relentlessly and consistently refusing to pronounce his name in any of his speeches over the past six months, seems to believe that he disposed of him.
Now notice, here, that it was the right that made a big point of disparaging Kerry’s idea that terrorism should be dealt with as a law enforcement matter. And notice what they did: they treated catching Osama bin Laden as a law enforcement matter.
Let’s hypothesize, for a moment, that Osama bin L. was really connected to Saddam before the invasion. Then wouldn’t it be logical, before the invasion, to mop up with the central symbol of the terrorist threat, which after all could be carried into the backyards of any of the Coalition of the Willing?
Of course it would. But then again, these people didn’t really believe their own propaganda. This is why they have left us pretty much unprotected while they took a turn in the “war on terrorism” that had nothing to do with terrorism.
End of hypothesis. Back in 2001, Al Q. had minimal contact with Iraq – although as we know, it had great contacts with our ally, Pakistan. That Al Qaeda is now willing to embrace the cause of Iraq has everything to do with something Sullivan seems to have forgotten: Saddam H. is in prison. Yes, time marches on. Because Sullivan wants to confound the ‘is” with the “was,” here, he ignores the very history he has been busy celebrating elsewhere. You have to go back to Clinton to find a more interesting use of the meaning of “is.”
A child of five could see through Sullivan’s rhetoric. That is when, I believe, Piaget claims that children begin to understand the difference between the truth and lying. But the arguments of such as Sullivan are starting to play badly with the rest of the world. They are starting to sound like the robotic repetitions of a cult, with its wearying faith in the bogus messiahs of the American Defense Department . One is reminded of an old psychology classic – the Seven Christs of Ypsilanti. Seven men, each of whom was possessed of the delusion that he was Jesus Christ, were put into a room together. Cruel, I know. The results were interesting. Each came up with a highly entertaining version of the delusions entertained by the others in the company, as in possession by the devil, electrode implanted in the brain, and so on. Sullivan has never been a logical guy, but this raving is more in the range of that kind of experiment. However, reality is starting to shudder through the cult. Suddenly, Osama can loom as an issue again – and not as the captive at George Bush’s convention feast, but as the man who got away, and has been away for 930 days. I believe that is the count. I am going to begin keeping that count on my log. I think that the question of the lapse of U.S. vigilance, as the pursuit of private ideological ends dragged us into Iraq, will possibly skew in ways which will not be pleasant to the Right. Even if, as seems probable, Bush is stirred to finally fulfill his promise. Too late. Too late, in that the network has ramified. Too late, in that the Bush people have cynically concluded that the American people won’t pay attention to the increasing cycle of violence. Too late, in that the claim that 2/3 of Al Q. has been rendered inoperative turns out to be a big lie. Another big lie.
930 days since Osama has not been brought in Dead or Alive.
Where is your promise, George Bush?
We usually avoid referring to certain popular rightwing weblogs on this site. There are plenty of other sites to do that. But we couldn’t help but peek at the Instapunditry about Spain. Naturally, they were bummed. Andrew Sullivan’s comment was the most typical.
He begins: “It’s a spectacular result for Islamist terrorism…” Of course. The Spanish people were moved, after having 200 of their fellow citizens blown into nothingness, to embrace Islamic fundamentalism. Or no – it turns out that they were embracing something else: fear. Sissies all, unlike the testosterone fueled Sullivan.
But to go on and spray paint over the low level of Sullivan’s dull tabloid-isms is unworthy of this blog. Let’s skip to his point, which is here:
“But there’s a real ironic twist: if the appeasement brigade really do believe that the war to depose Saddam is and was utterly unconnected with the war against Al Qaeda, then why on earth would Al Qaeda respond by targeting Spain.”
Let’s also skip the “appeasement brigade” thing. LI is tempted to respond “…crypto-fascist…” but that would be, as George Bush might piously say, wrong. Let’s go into those verb tenses, shall we? The “is and was” thing? There were two schools about the invasion of Iraq. The larger school had not opposed the invasion of Afghanistan. Why? Because they felt that the U.S. had the right to respond to an attack. The attackers were located in Afghanistan, and they were protected by the Taliban. Hence, to get them, one had to overthrow the protecters. Which was done. Horribly enough, after that was done, the Wrong Way brigade, as we will call, for convenience sake, Bush’s administration and his supporters, did not finish the job. No, they left Osama bin Laden to hang there. Bush, by relentlessly and consistently refusing to pronounce his name in any of his speeches over the past six months, seems to believe that he disposed of him.
Now notice, here, that it was the right that made a big point of disparaging Kerry’s idea that terrorism should be dealt with as a law enforcement matter. And notice what they did: they treated catching Osama bin Laden as a law enforcement matter.
Let’s hypothesize, for a moment, that Osama bin L. was really connected to Saddam before the invasion. Then wouldn’t it be logical, before the invasion, to mop up with the central symbol of the terrorist threat, which after all could be carried into the backyards of any of the Coalition of the Willing?
Of course it would. But then again, these people didn’t really believe their own propaganda. This is why they have left us pretty much unprotected while they took a turn in the “war on terrorism” that had nothing to do with terrorism.
End of hypothesis. Back in 2001, Al Q. had minimal contact with Iraq – although as we know, it had great contacts with our ally, Pakistan. That Al Qaeda is now willing to embrace the cause of Iraq has everything to do with something Sullivan seems to have forgotten: Saddam H. is in prison. Yes, time marches on. Because Sullivan wants to confound the ‘is” with the “was,” here, he ignores the very history he has been busy celebrating elsewhere. You have to go back to Clinton to find a more interesting use of the meaning of “is.”
A child of five could see through Sullivan’s rhetoric. That is when, I believe, Piaget claims that children begin to understand the difference between the truth and lying. But the arguments of such as Sullivan are starting to play badly with the rest of the world. They are starting to sound like the robotic repetitions of a cult, with its wearying faith in the bogus messiahs of the American Defense Department . One is reminded of an old psychology classic – the Seven Christs of Ypsilanti. Seven men, each of whom was possessed of the delusion that he was Jesus Christ, were put into a room together. Cruel, I know. The results were interesting. Each came up with a highly entertaining version of the delusions entertained by the others in the company, as in possession by the devil, electrode implanted in the brain, and so on. Sullivan has never been a logical guy, but this raving is more in the range of that kind of experiment. However, reality is starting to shudder through the cult. Suddenly, Osama can loom as an issue again – and not as the captive at George Bush’s convention feast, but as the man who got away, and has been away for 930 days. I believe that is the count. I am going to begin keeping that count on my log. I think that the question of the lapse of U.S. vigilance, as the pursuit of private ideological ends dragged us into Iraq, will possibly skew in ways which will not be pleasant to the Right. Even if, as seems probable, Bush is stirred to finally fulfill his promise. Too late. Too late, in that the network has ramified. Too late, in that the Bush people have cynically concluded that the American people won’t pay attention to the increasing cycle of violence. Too late, in that the claim that 2/3 of Al Q. has been rendered inoperative turns out to be a big lie. Another big lie.
Sunday, March 14, 2004
Bollettino
I’ve been having an interesting email fire fight with my friend B., a Bush supporter. Yes, Virginia, I know Bush supporters. Plenty of them. Some people I know have expressed shock -- myself, I think if you don't know anybody who supports Bush, you are living in a bit of a bubble, no? Anyway, like other Bush supporters I’ve met, there is one area in which they respond as though bitten by a snake: that is the accusation that Bush has displayed vast incompetence as a military leader.
It has become a default in American politics that Republicans are strong on defense, as the press likes to say – strong War-makers, to be less euphemistic – and we are worried that Kerry, who is a process Democrat, is going to let that reputation go unscathed. He shouldn’t. He should scathe it every chance he gets, and stuff his inclination to reference the U.N. like a maniac every time talks about U.S. Foreign Policy. Process is for cheese sandwiches, Senator. Attack is what is called for.
The latest NYT story about the selling of weapons by Pakistan is a perfect illustration of the Bush administration’s failure to mount a competent war. Our critical dependence on Pakistan has been aggravated by Bush’s decision virtually to suspend the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and the difficult work of capturing important Al Q operatives, in order to invade Iraq. Bush’s decision was made all the easier by the process politics favored by the Dems. Instead of sustaining a count down, on the model of the hostage crisis count down, of days that Osama bin Laden has escaped the force Bush promised would bring him in, dead or alive, the Dems have basically given Bush a pass. That pass is going to cost them in this election.
It doesn’t have to. Here’s how Bush's masked timidity has played out in the crucial Central Asian area.
1.By allowing Osama bin Laden to play the traditional game of bandit leader, Bush's victory over the Taliban looks increasingly hollow. Don't mistake me -- that the Taliban regime no longer rules from Kabul is a good thing. But the Taliban was a secondary goal. They never attacked the U.S. -- they confined themselves to bombing age old and precious statues of the Buddha. Their sole role, in this game, was to protect Al Qaeda. That is why they went down. Al Q. didn't. The bandit leader wins, in this game, by transforming his mere survival into a symbol. After Osama's group attacked on 9/11, the world, and especially the Central Asian world, expected Osama's group to suffer. They have, but in proportion to their crime, they remain remarkably intact as a force. And that survival is a recruiting advantage. Bringing down Osama bin wasn't going to end attacks against the U.S, but it would make them look increasingly ridiculous. Instead of pursuing this course, Bush has presided with his usual sublime oblivion over a spate of violence that has extended, now, from Saudi Arabia to Madrid. His only response has been to assure Americans that two thirds of the Al Q. force has been captured or killed. Unlikely, we reply. The main issue is to discourage Al Q. -like groups from multiplying. That Al Q. itself is wounded means little, if its spin offs, using the same networks, are able to work within the umbrella of its symbolic power.
2. Osama is not the only beneficiary of the hiatus in the war against Al Q. Think the Pakistan military. With the withdrawal of focal American forces to fight in Iraq, we have been thrown on the tender mercies of the most sophisticated network for diffusing under the table nuclear materials in the world. Of course, God knows what else they have diffused. Or no... we don’t have to consult the almighty on the question of diffusing aid dollars to Swiss bank accounts. We’ve known about that for some time.
3.So now we are in a political season in which Bush is surely going to rekindle the search for Osama, meaning that he is stuck sucking up to the Pakistanis, with the full approval of a Republican propaganda machine that went into motion against Saddam because of a vague threat to assassinate an ex president ten years ago. Well, in comparison, the incineration of Tokyo is peanuts. It is easy to predict that the lag between threat and realisation has allowed Osama to accrue the kind of symbolic power that will make the result of his capture destabilizing. Unlike Saddam Hussein, Osama is a hero in some parts of the world –namely, among the poorer people of Pakistan. Capturing Osama might well read to such a revolt in Pakistan that the leadership could either be damaged or brought down. We all know that Bush’s hopes reside on some outstanding reminder, to the American people, of how successful he has been as a War leader. The affection that will flow to Bush from the capture of Osama could certainly carry him into a second term. But that capture, if it isn’t timed right, could easily be overshadowed by the unexpected consequences deriving from his real incompetence – from the lag between the vow to capture Osama and the reality of the capture.
Kerry can’t counterpunch Bush by reverting to the genial mush of foreignpolicy speak. If he doesn’t use this time to frankly mount those attacks on Bush’s foreign policy leadership that will impact here, at the crux of the issues that engage us emotionally, Bush will Aznar him – polticize a terrible mistake into an electoral victory.
I’ve been having an interesting email fire fight with my friend B., a Bush supporter. Yes, Virginia, I know Bush supporters. Plenty of them. Some people I know have expressed shock -- myself, I think if you don't know anybody who supports Bush, you are living in a bit of a bubble, no? Anyway, like other Bush supporters I’ve met, there is one area in which they respond as though bitten by a snake: that is the accusation that Bush has displayed vast incompetence as a military leader.
It has become a default in American politics that Republicans are strong on defense, as the press likes to say – strong War-makers, to be less euphemistic – and we are worried that Kerry, who is a process Democrat, is going to let that reputation go unscathed. He shouldn’t. He should scathe it every chance he gets, and stuff his inclination to reference the U.N. like a maniac every time talks about U.S. Foreign Policy. Process is for cheese sandwiches, Senator. Attack is what is called for.
The latest NYT story about the selling of weapons by Pakistan is a perfect illustration of the Bush administration’s failure to mount a competent war. Our critical dependence on Pakistan has been aggravated by Bush’s decision virtually to suspend the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and the difficult work of capturing important Al Q operatives, in order to invade Iraq. Bush’s decision was made all the easier by the process politics favored by the Dems. Instead of sustaining a count down, on the model of the hostage crisis count down, of days that Osama bin Laden has escaped the force Bush promised would bring him in, dead or alive, the Dems have basically given Bush a pass. That pass is going to cost them in this election.
It doesn’t have to. Here’s how Bush's masked timidity has played out in the crucial Central Asian area.
1.By allowing Osama bin Laden to play the traditional game of bandit leader, Bush's victory over the Taliban looks increasingly hollow. Don't mistake me -- that the Taliban regime no longer rules from Kabul is a good thing. But the Taliban was a secondary goal. They never attacked the U.S. -- they confined themselves to bombing age old and precious statues of the Buddha. Their sole role, in this game, was to protect Al Qaeda. That is why they went down. Al Q. didn't. The bandit leader wins, in this game, by transforming his mere survival into a symbol. After Osama's group attacked on 9/11, the world, and especially the Central Asian world, expected Osama's group to suffer. They have, but in proportion to their crime, they remain remarkably intact as a force. And that survival is a recruiting advantage. Bringing down Osama bin wasn't going to end attacks against the U.S, but it would make them look increasingly ridiculous. Instead of pursuing this course, Bush has presided with his usual sublime oblivion over a spate of violence that has extended, now, from Saudi Arabia to Madrid. His only response has been to assure Americans that two thirds of the Al Q. force has been captured or killed. Unlikely, we reply. The main issue is to discourage Al Q. -like groups from multiplying. That Al Q. itself is wounded means little, if its spin offs, using the same networks, are able to work within the umbrella of its symbolic power.
2. Osama is not the only beneficiary of the hiatus in the war against Al Q. Think the Pakistan military. With the withdrawal of focal American forces to fight in Iraq, we have been thrown on the tender mercies of the most sophisticated network for diffusing under the table nuclear materials in the world. Of course, God knows what else they have diffused. Or no... we don’t have to consult the almighty on the question of diffusing aid dollars to Swiss bank accounts. We’ve known about that for some time.
3.So now we are in a political season in which Bush is surely going to rekindle the search for Osama, meaning that he is stuck sucking up to the Pakistanis, with the full approval of a Republican propaganda machine that went into motion against Saddam because of a vague threat to assassinate an ex president ten years ago. Well, in comparison, the incineration of Tokyo is peanuts. It is easy to predict that the lag between threat and realisation has allowed Osama to accrue the kind of symbolic power that will make the result of his capture destabilizing. Unlike Saddam Hussein, Osama is a hero in some parts of the world –namely, among the poorer people of Pakistan. Capturing Osama might well read to such a revolt in Pakistan that the leadership could either be damaged or brought down. We all know that Bush’s hopes reside on some outstanding reminder, to the American people, of how successful he has been as a War leader. The affection that will flow to Bush from the capture of Osama could certainly carry him into a second term. But that capture, if it isn’t timed right, could easily be overshadowed by the unexpected consequences deriving from his real incompetence – from the lag between the vow to capture Osama and the reality of the capture.
Kerry can’t counterpunch Bush by reverting to the genial mush of foreignpolicy speak. If he doesn’t use this time to frankly mount those attacks on Bush’s foreign policy leadership that will impact here, at the crux of the issues that engage us emotionally, Bush will Aznar him – polticize a terrible mistake into an electoral victory.
Friday, March 12, 2004
Bollettino
Our friend B. writes from Spain (B. asked us to clean up the grammar of this letter. No need to. It is perfectly clear as is):
"Aznar wishes it is ETA, but it does seem to be Al
Qaeda now. It is the Spanish Gov. the one that is
actually bombing us with lame propaganda. The reason
everyone believed immediately that it was ETA is
because of the escalating tension that we have been
living in during the electoral campaign (Elections
this sunday!). My reading is that this terrorist
attack is Ben Laden getting back at Aznar for his
support to Bush. This afternoon Aznar gave a pathetic
press conference: he had to read a paper, because he
was not even capable of memorizing a few sentences. He
sounded like it was his goodbye speech, thanking the
police for their great job (!) against ETA during
these past eight years... This is the image that he
will leave behind. Today he was reaping the fruits of
his policy. The National TV is still intoxicating us
with interviews about ETA, people complaining about it
and so forth while INTERNET is already carrying the
news that Al Qaeda has lready called an Arabian paper
in London to acknowledge this attack.
The ETA subplot here began in January 4th. A Catalan
leftist politician (the equivalent of a PRIME MINISTER
of the Catalan Gov.) had a secret meeting with ETA in
Southern France. This rendezvous was later denounced
by a Spanish newspaper ABC, and the Catalan prime
minister had to resign. The funny thing is that he
left the government to run for the current elections
for the Spanish Congress. This infuriated Aznar. A
week later, ETA announced a special truce only for
Catalonia. This is new in ETA history. They had never
singled out a territory before. They claimed that we
were cool because our government was leftist and
independentist. This, as you can imagine, infuriated
Aznar even more. Last week, this is the third turn of
the screw, the Spanish police arrested two ETA
terrorist who were heading towards Madrid, driving a
van full of dinamite. They had plans to bomb Madrid.
This is why everyone assumed it was ETA right away.
The question is if ETA has emulated Al Qaeda by
bombing without warning (they usually warned before if
they attacked civilians) and by planning a massacre.
More people died in Madrid today than were killed by
ETA in the last 20 years, I think.
This is the story so far. Spain has not finished
fighting an inside demon and is already facing a new
screen, a larger scale terror. Aznar will pay a big
price for it."
Note: the Economist mentions a similar set of facts (although B. is the first to put them in English, that I am aware of).
Our friend B. writes from Spain (B. asked us to clean up the grammar of this letter. No need to. It is perfectly clear as is):
"Aznar wishes it is ETA, but it does seem to be Al
Qaeda now. It is the Spanish Gov. the one that is
actually bombing us with lame propaganda. The reason
everyone believed immediately that it was ETA is
because of the escalating tension that we have been
living in during the electoral campaign (Elections
this sunday!). My reading is that this terrorist
attack is Ben Laden getting back at Aznar for his
support to Bush. This afternoon Aznar gave a pathetic
press conference: he had to read a paper, because he
was not even capable of memorizing a few sentences. He
sounded like it was his goodbye speech, thanking the
police for their great job (!) against ETA during
these past eight years... This is the image that he
will leave behind. Today he was reaping the fruits of
his policy. The National TV is still intoxicating us
with interviews about ETA, people complaining about it
and so forth while INTERNET is already carrying the
news that Al Qaeda has lready called an Arabian paper
in London to acknowledge this attack.
The ETA subplot here began in January 4th. A Catalan
leftist politician (the equivalent of a PRIME MINISTER
of the Catalan Gov.) had a secret meeting with ETA in
Southern France. This rendezvous was later denounced
by a Spanish newspaper ABC, and the Catalan prime
minister had to resign. The funny thing is that he
left the government to run for the current elections
for the Spanish Congress. This infuriated Aznar. A
week later, ETA announced a special truce only for
Catalonia. This is new in ETA history. They had never
singled out a territory before. They claimed that we
were cool because our government was leftist and
independentist. This, as you can imagine, infuriated
Aznar even more. Last week, this is the third turn of
the screw, the Spanish police arrested two ETA
terrorist who were heading towards Madrid, driving a
van full of dinamite. They had plans to bomb Madrid.
This is why everyone assumed it was ETA right away.
The question is if ETA has emulated Al Qaeda by
bombing without warning (they usually warned before if
they attacked civilians) and by planning a massacre.
More people died in Madrid today than were killed by
ETA in the last 20 years, I think.
This is the story so far. Spain has not finished
fighting an inside demon and is already facing a new
screen, a larger scale terror. Aznar will pay a big
price for it."
Note: the Economist mentions a similar set of facts (although B. is the first to put them in English, that I am aware of).
Thursday, March 11, 2004
Bollettino
We don’t understand what happened in Spain.
Politics promotes a certain emotional viciousness, which consists in the immediate assimilation of an event into an intellectual scheme. And that scheme gives us, automatically, villains and victims. The scum who did it – always scum, always the name hurled after the bomb.
We don’t understand why the train station was bombed. We don’t understand why instant understanding is conveyed in the reports of the bombing, as if we already knew all about it, as if we already knew that ETA did it, as if we already knew the bombs were there, as if we already knew the number of victims and their names, as if we already knew about every wound, as if we already knew all about the shock, as if we had already read the script, as if we were already bystanders and survivors, as if we already knew all about surviving, as if we had earned any of this.
We already know so much about 9/11 that we have no interest in knowing about 9/11 – and so the story of how that happened, and what happened, and how they did it, a story that has deviated more and more from what we already knew (as in, for instance, just what weapons Mohammed Atta’s group possessed) doesn’t concern us.
And so we will already know in the weeks ahead all about the bombing in Madrid. Such endless knowing, such endless ignorance, such an endless train of ghosts.
We don’t understand what happened in Spain.
Politics promotes a certain emotional viciousness, which consists in the immediate assimilation of an event into an intellectual scheme. And that scheme gives us, automatically, villains and victims. The scum who did it – always scum, always the name hurled after the bomb.
We don’t understand why the train station was bombed. We don’t understand why instant understanding is conveyed in the reports of the bombing, as if we already knew all about it, as if we already knew that ETA did it, as if we already knew the bombs were there, as if we already knew the number of victims and their names, as if we already knew about every wound, as if we already knew all about the shock, as if we had already read the script, as if we were already bystanders and survivors, as if we already knew all about surviving, as if we had earned any of this.
We already know so much about 9/11 that we have no interest in knowing about 9/11 – and so the story of how that happened, and what happened, and how they did it, a story that has deviated more and more from what we already knew (as in, for instance, just what weapons Mohammed Atta’s group possessed) doesn’t concern us.
And so we will already know in the weeks ahead all about the bombing in Madrid. Such endless knowing, such endless ignorance, such an endless train of ghosts.
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