Bollettino

LI feels pretty shamefaced that we are way behind a breaking story. Corinne Maier is an economist at Electricité de France. She works part time. She usefully used her free time to write a guide to fooling around at work, Bonjour Paresse, or Hello Laziness. Sensibly enough, she knows most of us, while filled with bitterness and mockery towards the corporate behemoths, still labor in our little cubicles to make them happy. What are we to do – become revolutionaries? That’s a bit out of date, and they pick you up and put you in unpleasant prisons and whatnot. So Maier advises the art of reading the newspaper discretely, missing meetings, taking long lunches, and leaving early. Also – never go out in the hall without a file under your arm.

The poor woman somehow attracted the attention of the bosses. Her pamphlet was published by a small press, but somebody must have slipped a copy under some muckety muck’s door. According to Liberation:

En mai, Corinne Maier, chercheuse économiste d'EDF, publie un pamphlet sur le monde de l'entreprise : Bonjour paresse, de l'art et de la nécessité d'en faire le moins possible en entreprise (1) (Libération du 10 mai). Deux mois après, elle est convoquée pour un entretien en vue d'une sanction. Motif : «Non-respect de l'obligation de loyauté manifestée à plusieurs reprises : lire le journal en réunion, quitter les réunions de groupe, révélateur de la stratégie individuelle clairement affichée dans l'ouvrage Bonjour paresse, visant à gangrener le système de l'intérieur.» [Aiming to gangrene the system from within? Shades of Stalin’s wreckers!!!] Et avoir fait état de sa qualité d'agent EDF sans autorisation.
Prétextes. «Depuis douze ans, je suis une salariée sans histoire, s'étonne Corinne Maier. Et subitement, ils découvrent que je suis une pétroleuse car je sèche une réunion...» Les motifs affichés par la direction ne sont que des prétextes, estime l'intersyndicale montée pour l'occasion : de nombreux chercheurs EDF écrivent articles et livres sans jamais être inquiétés. «Quant à lire son journal en réunion, n'en parlons pas, rigole Yann Cochin, de SUD Energie. Arriver avec une pile de dossiers et travailler dessus en pleine réunion pour montrer qu'on est débordé, c'est le top du top... [As for reading her newspaper at meetings, don’t even say it,” chuckles Yan Cochin, of SUD Energy. “You come with a pile of files and you work on them in plain sight to show how overwhelmed you are, that’s the top of the top]. Au mieux, la réaction de la direction est un gag grotesque. Au pire, un acte liberticide : l'entreprise veut tenir un rôle grandissant dans la société et nous n'aurions pas le droit de la critiquer ?»

Another article about her is in the Telegraph, which gives the colorful list of her chapter titles: “Chapter titles include "The cretins who sit next to you", "Business culture my arse" and "Why you lose nothing by resigning".

Googling her name, I discovered that she is, all so discretely, a Lacanian. Who says the Lacanian Maos are dead? We are just sleeping, darlin'.

“…nay, is not the Universe itself, at bottom, properly an Intrigue?” – Thomas Carlyle

In the late nineties, Norma Baig was in trouble. She had, for instance, the FBI on her tail. They were interested in whether she had tried to defraud her mother, Asma Bagain, by claiming that her mother’s house was her own in order to borrow money against it. Then there was the court complaint that she had beat her mother in law and threatened to kill her, which was part of the general mess, apparently, of being married to John Toliopoulos. During one of her separations from Toliopoulos, she stayed with a woman named Brandy Murphy. According to the Australian paper The Age, Brandy only learned that she was living with a genius when Norma left:

"Norma left Chicago on the Labour Day weekend in August 1999. I had been her best friend for five years. We were inseparable. I thought I knew everything about Norma, so when she left I was really upset. I used to sit in her room and cry."
…

"She once told me that she was writing a book," Ms Murphy said, "but that it was too private and personal to show me. After she left, I found some things she had written which were pure fantasy about her father, and how she wanted to die and thought she was evil. It was really heartbreaking stuff."

One likes to hear stories like this. It is like an anecdote in Vasari – one of those about a famous artist who was discovered, all naïve and shepherding and shit, drawing some perspective laden scene by another artist, and taken up and educated in a studio. For Norma’s little sketch pointed to the larger life ahead of her as a Fake. Not a minor fake, not an everyday seller of promises that never pan out, not a down on her high heels confidance man – no, that wasn’t Norma. The sketch about being, to use Alice Walker’s disgusting verb, incested, was all about an instinct. Yes, in the early nineties, if you were going to make it big in the confession game, incest was what it was all about. Daddy peeping in on you, Daddy and you in the shower, the return of all your repressed memories via the wonders of modern therapy, with its rediscovery of an innocence within children of all sexual knowledge that a psychoanalyst could only gape at. Roll over Sigmund Freud and tell Mrs. Grundy the news. This was when we were living in a nation that believed, in its tiny little heart, that day care centers could double as Satanic cult drive-ins; this was a nation willing to arrest, in one case, almost a whole police force (in Olympia, Washington), on the charge that they had been making with the big cloven hoofed guy and forking babies and such. This, as we now know, was the acme of progress and Western Civilization.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Norma left that sketch behind because, I believe, she knew, with the instinct of a great artist, that the time for mere tales of sodomizing were past. The fake’s art consists of finding just the right combination for the historical moment. Norma, fleeing the US with her husband in 1999, arrives in Australia. And then – another Norma appears. Norma Khouri. This Norma has a heartfelt tale to tell, a tale to make you cry. It is an especially heartwarming and shocking tale in the age of the new Crusade, the Post 9/11 era when the West discovered how civilized it was, after all, especially compared to the Middle East. In the era of the New Crusade, the right, which formerly gave its considered opinion about feminism by coining the term femi-nazi, was suddenly very, very upset at the condition of women in Moslem countries. In the Clinton years, Wendy Shalit could write a feeble anti-feminist book that ends on a note of respect for the Taliban’s enforcement of the laws of chador, and that book would be praised by no less than George Will; but in the era of the New Crusade, it turns out that feminism is one of the things that make us Good – as compared to the Bad, which was, in general, anything Middle Eastern (save Israel). Whether from instinct or from sheer brilliance, Norma Baig dropped the memoir about being ‘incested’ and wrote a book that conformed perfectly to the new victim vogue. How much better to show how much better we were than our enemies -- who, it turns out, weren't even Christian! So was born a seering memoir of Norma’s adventures in Lebanon, and the death of her best buddy Dalia. Dalia, the ravishing daughter of a Moslem brute, falls in love with a Christian. Secret, chaste meetings ensue, but Daddy (borrowing the murderous patriarch theme from Norma’s previous sketch) lurks, dagger in hand, in the shadows. With twelve blows of the dagger he dispatches his fair daughter, with only Norma left to tell the tale.

And so Norma’s memoir appears, and Norma is everywhere – Norma Khouri, the woman who fled from Lebanon. Tears spring to her eyes, a fund is mounted for the victims of honor killing, there are readings in high schools and art festivals, and appearances on American tv to promote Honor Lost – the title of the book for the American market – and everything is going swimmingly. In the background, it is true, there is the nattering of Arab women – Jordanian women, actually. According to the Christian Science Herald:

“The National Commission for Women in Jordan had independently discovered more than 70 errors in her book and sent this information earlier to Random House and to Simon & Schuster. Random House replied at the time that they stood by their author after being satisfied that she had changed names and places to protect people in Jordan.”

Alas, as the spirit of the New Crusade has dwindled, we have discovered a lot of, uh, intelligence errors. That first fine bloom of Western Civ triumphalism – that period after 9/11 when some of our greatest intellectuals, like Italian prime minister Berlusconi, proclaimed the unadulterated superiority of the West, or that portion of it with white faces, over the East, a sneaky and retrograde part of the Earth that needs a good invasion to set it straight – has rather wilted.

And so too has Norma’s story. The Sydney Herald investigated Norma Khouri and found Norma Baig. They found a married woman, not a single one; they found a refugee from Chicago and debt, rather than Lebanon and honor killing. And they published the story.

In so doing, they have elevated Norma Khouri. As a victim, Khouri was minor. As a Fake, however, she’s become a Rorschach test for the Zeitgeist. The crossing over of a particularly malignant strand of liberal decay – therapeutic liberalism, with its blind identity of victimhood with goodness – with conservative resentment finds its great artistic achievement in Norma. Her book could be praised not only by Ms. magazine, but by the National Review. A particularly heartfelt review of the book appeared in the American Outlook, penned by a NR contributor, Katherine Lopez. It begins with the standard Rightwing windup:

“To most Americans, and Westerners generally, it is inconceivable. A father kills his daughter because she fell for the wrong guy. But move East, and in some cultures that is just what is done. A reality no one speaks of.
Norma Khouri can’t stand the silence. She’s written Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan in honor of her best friend, Dalia. Dalia and Khouri met when they were three, and, as Khouri tells it, were nearly inseparable for the next twenty-two years. They were always challenging their culture, Dalia’s religion, and her father. They managed to convince him to allow them to open a hair salon in Amman. It was in the salon where she found the happiness that would ultimately lead to her death penalty.

Dalia, twenty-six years old, was killed—stabbed twelve times with a kitchen knife—for the sake of her family’s honor. Her scandalous behavior? She was seen in public with a Catholic man.”

You will not see such an outpouring of sympathy from the NRO about, say, the statesponsored kidnapping of the children of lesbians in this country, or the stabbing to death of some prostitute and the malign neglect of the ensuing police investigation. But for one brief shining moment, the party of Phyllis Schlafley was on the barricades with Gloria Steinem.
This was not simply an accident. Norma’s book, like all great Cons, is designed to confirm the beliefs of its marks. There is a delicacy in these things that shouldn’t be underestimated. There are two parts of Norma’s work that are particularly beautiful and must be saluted.

One was the creation of Dalia. As the daughter of a Moslem, of course she longs for fairer, Christian men. The opera must go on! But if Norma’s drama were set in, say, America, Dalia would have probably been, shall we say, physically intimate with her Christian knight. But no – Dalia, in her twenties, was entirely chaste! For a crowd that advocates the teaching of abstinence with truly Taliban like fervor, this was a dream come true. However much the New Crusaders vaunted the freedom of women, briefly, in that small post 9/11 moment, they were still the standard anti-abortion, anti-sex, and pro-family crowd we’ve all come to know and love. The same people who consider the showing of Janet Jackson’s nipple a major cause for legal reform. Norma’s infallible instinct here is truly dialectical. It elevates her, to my mind, from mere con artist to artist, period.

An artist, as opposed to a con artist, longs for a signature. And this is the second brilliant thing about Norma. In that wicked Eastern land where, unlike the U.S. or Australia, men are brutes to women, a certain dream logic takes hold. Just as Shakespeare set one of his romances in a Bohemia with a seacoast, so, too, Norma’s individuality revolts in her very text and discretely devises a signal that says: I am the maker of this thing. This supposed refugee from Lebanon gives her country a border with Kuwait.

The New York times ran an op ed piece by an Australian writer who asked the question: how did she get away with it? For Norma was more than a writer – she was a personality. She loved the spotlight. One is reminded of Carlyle’s essay on the Affair of the Necklaces. That affair was recently a movie, starring Hilary Swank – which is how we get our history out here in the sticks. Jean de la Motte, aka Valois, tricked the Cardinal de Rohan into buying a diamond necklace, ostensively for Marie Antoinette. Jean found some strumpet to play Marie, pocketed Rohan’s money, and sold the diamonds before she was caught. Ever afterwards people have wondered how Rohan could fall for such an obvious dupe, and how Jean could have hoped to get away with it. Carlyle writes:

“Cheerfully admitting these statements to be all lies; we ask, How any
mortal could, or should, so lie?

The Psychologists, however, commit one sore mistake: that of
searching, in every character named human, for something like a
Conscience. Being mere contemplative recluses, for most part, and
feeling that Morality is the Heart of Life, they judge that with all the
world it is so. Nevertheless, as practical men are aware, Life can go
on in excellent vigour, without crotchet of that kind. What is the
essence of Life? Volition? Go deeper down, you find a much more
universal root and characteristic: Digestion. While Digestion lasts,
Life cannot, in philosophical language, be said to be extinct: and
Digestion will give rise to Volitions enough; at any rate, to Desires
and attempts, which may pass for such. He who looks neither before
nor after, any farther than the Larder and State-room, which latter is
properly the finest compartment of the Larder, will need no Worldtheory,
Creed as it is called, or Scheme of Duties: lightly leaving the
world to wag as it likes with any theory or none, his grand object is
a theory and practice of ways and means. Not goodness or badness
is the type of him; only shiftiness or shiftlessness.”

Which is all there is to say about Norma, probably. One so hopes she doesn’t spoil everything by reverting to plan A (Daddy abused me). An artist should not go back on her work. At the moment, she is in seclusion, compiling evidence that she really has been living on the coast of Bohemia. A parallel news story caught our eye, however, as we were relishing Norma. Among the complaints about Norma is that the money that has supposedly been collected, through her agency, to help the suffering victims of honor killings in Jordan has seemingly disappeared en route. In keeping with Norma’s perfect sense of the Zeitgeist, the WP, similarly, reported that the U.S., tenderly stewarding the oil wealth of Iraq for the Iraqis, has inezplicably spent that money (who’d have thought it!) on big American defense contractors:

“For the first 14 months of the occupation, officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority provided little detailed information about the Iraqi money, from oil sales and other sources, that it spent on reconstruction contracts. They have said that it was used for the benefit of the Iraqi people and that most of the contracts paid from Iraqi money went to Iraqi companies. But the CPA never released information about specific contracts and the identities of companies that won them, citing security concerns, so it has been impossible to know whether these promises were kept.
The CPA has said it has awarded about 2,000 contracts with Iraqi money. Its inspector general compiled records for the major contracts, which it defined as those worth $5 million or more each. Analysis of those and other records shows that 19 of 37 major contracts funded by Iraqi money went to U.S. companies and at least 85 percent of the total $2.26 billion was obligated to U.S. companies. The contracts that went to U.S. firms may be worth several hundred million more once the work is completed.”
Surely, if Norma is utterly shamed in Australia, she should have a job waiting for her at the Pentagon.

Bollettino

LI can’t pretend to understand the atrocity unfolding in Sudan – the latest atrocity. The “government” of Sudan is a criminal organization that happens to run a state – or at least fulfill the one state function of directed violence. The direction had been towards fighting the South – with the division between Arab Moslem and African Christian being the rubric by which bystanders tried to make sense of the thing.

It was obvious, however – and we noted this in our posts on Libya in December – that the next problem in Sudan was going to be in the West. What is happening there is a more traditional mass murder, on ethnic lines. We recommend the article by John Ryle in this week’s NYRB on “the harrowing of Darfur.”

“In the case of the south, where the victims were non-Muslims, the official rhetoric justifying the attacks used the vocabulary of holy war, of jihad. Murahaliin were transformed into Mujahideen. But the unofficial rhetoric of the conflict was racial, employing the terms abid (slave) and zurga (literally "blue," meaning black, i.e., not Arab, in Sudanese language), words that bear the weight of a history of discrimination and exploitation in Sudan, where ethnic groups claiming Arab descent assume a superiority over others. In the case of Darfur, the inhabitants are all Muslim, with the exception of some displaced southerners, but the province is a patchwork of Arab and non-Arab groups, of which the Fur are one of many. In the present conflict, in the absence of religious difference, it is racial rhetoric that has come to the fore. Adherents of the two rebel movements, the SLA and the JEM, are drawn, in varying proportions, from the three major non-Arab or "African" groups in the province, the eponymous Fur, the Massaleit, and the Zaghawa, while the Janjawiid are drawn from a number of pastoral Arab tribes who move in the same territory and compete for natural resources and political power.”

What we are seeing in Darfur is actually a window into the forces that have made world history – if we take away the helicopters and the automatic weapons, this is how the conquistadors came into the New World, how the slavers populated that new world with an enchained labor force, and how the loss of the population that made up that labor force, wrenched by the millions from an Africa in which the traditional forms of bondage and warfare were refunctioned to “fit” an international machine, made the various kingdoms and tribes of Africa vulnerable to further conquest by the Europeans. The same thing happened in the North, in Morrocco, for instance, and on the East Coast, with Arab slavers. Of course, once Europeans had accumulated enough capital, through genocide and theft, to move on to the next ‘stage” of civilization, they reversed themselves on the question of slavery, and used it as an excuse to conquer, colonize, and further exploit Africa – a neat trick.

Interestingly, according to Ryle, the scrim by which we on the outside understand what is happening in Darfur – another atrocity underwritten by radical Islamicists – distorts the actuality of Darfur. Both the Darfur rebels and the Khartoum government are animated by some Islamicist ideology:

“The current military regime of General Omar al-Bashir, which is known as the Ingaz (Salvation) government, came to power in a military coup in 1989, after overthrowing the elected government of Sadiq al-Mahdi, grandson of the Mahdi. The power behind the throne in the Salvation government, until a split in 2001, was the Islamist thinker Hassan al-Turabi, who is Sadiq's brother-in-law. Turabi was the architect of a new Islamist program that reached beyond the Arab elites to include Muslim African peoples in Darfur and elsewhere. But Turabi now languishes in Kober prison in Khartoum, accused of links to one of the rebel groups in Darfur, the Justice and Equality Movement. The Salvation government, like its civilian predecessor, seems to have reverted to an Arabist agenda, attempting to control the west of the country, as it attempted to control the south, by divide and rule.”

Bollettino

I’ve wanted to do a post about Joseph Glanvill for a while. Glanvill’s name has fascinated me ever since, as a kid, I encountered it in Poe’s story, Ligeia. That story is a typical Poe atmospheric, in which the matter seems to condense briefly out of a dense mental fog and proceed intermittently to some shocking horror that always just escapes the visceral. It is this flickering aspect of Poe that makes his stories seem like the way we remember our dreams – which is mostly what we mean by dream-like. Here’s how Poe begins the story:

“I CANNOT, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia. Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering. Or, perhaps, I cannot now bring these points to mind, because, in truth, the character of my beloved, her rare learning, her singular yet placid cast of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musical language, made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and stealthily progressive that they have been unnoticed and unknown. Yet I believe that I met her first and most frequently in some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine.”

Notice the counterpoint between the tactile fact and the dreamlike doubt. The narrator starts out by not remembering something – an exceedingly odd way to begin a story. The confession of feebleness in the second sentence – which contests the pre-supposition of the narrator’s narrative competence that the reader brings to the reading of a story -- is in turn contested by the third sentence, which puts into doubt the epistemological grasp of narration itself – the Lady Ligiea “effect”, to use Barthes term, is produced at a level below that of the larger, grosser themes by which ‘story” grasps reality. And then the fourth sentence, a masterpiece of fogginess, descends to fact only to shirk before a proper name. The narrator ‘believes,” instead of remembers, that there were a series of meetings – where? In some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine. In other words, in one of a fifty or more places. The decay of the city is underlined by the absence of the proper name – for as we all know, the extreme point of a city’s decay is when the proper name is forgotten. And we all knew that even better in the Romantic era, with its vogue for ruins and digs.

One of Poe’s stylistic tricks is to always leave a discrepancy, a perceptible gap, between what the reader knows and what his sentences say. The sentences accumulate on the page, and properly one knows that these sentences should each be adding details to a picture beyond the text, should be making clearer some essential content, just as one knows about how to be awake without being taught -- waking being a natural state, rather than learned condition . Mysteriously, though, as the sentences pile up, the reader feels that he is being left behind, as in one of those dreams in which one walks and walks and, due to some unbearable, invisible weight, some supervenient heaviness, one never gets anywhere – one’s position in the road becomes an agonizing, incremental crawl, one’s attempt to climb the stairs becomes a sweaty effort to lift one gigantic foot up and forward, leveraging forward with paralyzed slowness.

This is the effect in Ligeia, just as it is in Pit and the Pendulum, or even the Fall of the House of Usher. In other stories, of course, the normal relationship between reader and information is maintained. In the Purloined Letter, for instance, Dupin will leap ahead of the reader with information about what happened and then (with the reader neatly eavesdropping somewhere outside the door the police commissioner has hastily closed as he rushes out to inform the Queen) lounge in his chair and tell us all about it. The logic of sequence is preserved.

Ligeia is a much sicker story – it is narrative infected with the sickness unto death. Given this kind of story, Glanvill’s name can’t but acquire a certain glamour for the reader. A phrase of Glanvill’s is placed as the epigraph for the story (and we all know how important his quotations were to Poe – his most analyzed story, The Purloined Letter, ends on one of those culled masterpieces of eccentric erudition), and as the story jerks into its start and stop motion, with Poe’s description of the “beauty’ of Lady Ligeia’s face one of his better jokes: his description shows us not a beauty, but a nightmarish monster, a face with long raven hair and distended eyes mounted upon a tall, emaciated figure. A haunt before her death, dying she utters Glanvill’s words: "Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will," which keys the entire fixation of the rest of the story.

Like the narrator of this story, my memory is feeble through much suffering, not to mention late payments for rent, and this splitting headache from the vodka cocktail last night. However, I believe I first read this story in a crumbling, suburban town, redolent every autumn of high school football fervors, near the banks of the Chattahoochee. I didn’t follow up that reading until years – and leaf driven years – and still more years – later. But in the decline of my mortal frame, I’ve sort of had a thing for reading 17^th century prose writers. And naturally I was lead, by this habit, to take down, in a figurative sense, or download, in a literal one, a volume or two of Joseph Glanvill’s.

Well, let’s get to that in the next post, shall we?

Bollettino

There is an aspect about the argument over the causes of the invasion of Iraq that bugs LI. The arguments, pro and con, over the Bush administrations justifications for the war systematically ignore the larger context of the war. In the rush to subject the minutia of justification to microscopic analysis, the connection of these minutia to the overall schema, as well as the outlines of that schema, are silently forgotten.

To my mind, the standard can’t just be: Iraq presented a gathering threat. It has to be closer to what Bush has said himself: in the post 9/11 world, we need to evaluate these threats differently. If we use that standard, then we have to ask: were all the claims to justify the invasion consistent with the larger context of winning the war against the particular network of terrorists that attacked us on 9/11? If, in fact, the time and circumstances of the war in Iraq were separate from, or even diversionary from, the larger context, than the growing threat justification is not only annulled, but we have grounds for thinking that the invasion was actually an invidious thing, the untimely intrusion of an ideological scam that has deteriorated the real and only reason the U.S. should be using its military power, and an ontological failure symptomatic of an ossified foreign policy world view that is disastrously out of synch with the reality that -- 9/11 happened. To put a Heideggerian spin on it, the Bush adminsitration has, in one and complete gesture, memorialized and forgotten 9/11.

Of course, the gesture of memorializing and forgetting is central to the News. That is what News is. However, even if something is News, it doesn't necessarily exclude the fact that something happens. That is the problem with the news -- distinguishing true events from false ones. Which is why Being and Time should be on the syllabus for Journalism students... but I digress.

For this reason, it strikes me that the major reason for going into Iraq has to have been that Saddam Hussein had ties with Al Qaeda that were significant enough to pose a threat to the U.S. In other words, that the ties to Al Qaeda were major, supportive, and continuing.

That is the importance of the Bush claim, in his Cincinnatti speech in 2002, that "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases." And Powell’s reiteration of that claim before the UN in 2003.

The NYT has mapped, for the last couple of months, the rise and collapse of that claim. Their very informative little article, today, on the retracting of that claim by the one Al Qaeda operative who made it, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, shows both how weak the original claim was and how the press failed to press for details in their original coverage of the Bush case.

We draw, however, a larger moral from this story. The real question posed by the invasion of Iraq goes back to 9/11. To put it one way: how did 9/11 happen? For the Bush administration – especially the Pentagon crew – there is a fundamental, but unspoken assumption at work in everything they have done since: that 9/11, however much it serves as a pretext for policy, was an aberration. In other words, Al Qaeda and various networked terrorist groups aren’t important. Their withering will be a collateral effect of following a foreign policy that was devised without them in mind, and that will proceed in spite of them. For Wolfowitz, et al, terrorists aren’t even players. In other words, for these people, Bush’s contention – that the post 9/11 landscape is different – isn’t true. They are still where they were on 9/10. They still believe that a mature foreign policy should not be disturbed by the actions of subordinate, extra-state players. They still don’t get it.

We think that the pre 9/11 Bush adminsitration and the post 9/11 is, contrary to surface appearance, pretty consistent with itself. The way the Pentagon underestimated the resistance in Iraq was predictable from the way it underestimated terrorism in August, 2001. The same mechanism is at work. It is top down thinking. It is quintessentially bureaucratic thinking. I think we see, here, the difference between traditional conservatism, with its Burkean respect for social order, and the neo-conservatives, with their contempt for any social order except the ones upon which they have put their stamp of approval. With that contempt comes an under-estimation of the resistance that the social order in Iraq – and indeed, throughout the Arabic world – is able to mount. This has proven fatal to Bush’s Middle Eastern policy. It is why it has not only delivered a chaotic Iraq on the verge of becoming, once again, a Military Security State, but has, in addition, allowed the threat of terrorism throughout the Middle East to metastasize.

Bollettino

The man who isn’t there

There’s an article by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker about the bombings in Madrid that dilates into an examination of the current state of play in the terrorist world. Here’s a clip from it:

“On April 15th, the voice of Osama bin Laden spoke again. “This is a message to our neighbors north of the Mediterranean, containing a reconciliation initiative as a response to their positive reactions,” bin Laden said on the Arab satellite channel Al Arabiya. Now it was the Al Qaeda leader who cast himself in the role of a rational political actor. “It is in both sides’ interest to curb the plans of those who shed the blood of peoples for their narrow personal interest and subservience to the White House gang.” He proposed a European committee to study “the justice” of the Islamic causes, especially Palestine.

…

The fact that bin Laden was addressing nations as an equal showed a new confidence in Al Qaeda’s ability to manipulate the political future. Exploiting this power will depend, in part, on convincing the West that Al Qaeda and bin Laden remain in control of the worldwide Islamist jihad. As long as Al Qaeda is seen as being an irrational, unyielding death cult, the only response is to destroy it. But if Al Qaeda—amorphous as that entity has become—has evolved into something like a virtual Islamist state that is trying to find a permanent place for itself in the actual world, then the prospect of future negotiations is not out of the question, however unlikely or repellent that may sound to Americans. After all, the Spanish government has brokered truces with ETA, which has killed four times as many people in Spain as Al Qaeda has, and the accelerated withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq following the train bombings has already set a precedent for accommodation, which was quickly followed by the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Last year, Germany paid a six-million-dollar ransom to Algerian terrorists, and the Philippines recently pulled its fifty troops out of Iraq in order to save a hostage from being beheaded.”

It has been almost three years, now, since Osama bin Laden successfully planned an attack on the U.S. and got away with it. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, his name was in the mouth of every politician in America. Contrast this to 2004. I’ve listened, off and on, to speeches at the Democratic Convention, which is an indulgence in an uncharacteristic masochism on my part.  So far, no mention of the man. And so we ape the CoC, who, since “winning” in Afghanistan in 2002, took the low and dirty route of  letting Osama bin Laden's escape go unresponded to, diverting money from the Afghanistan operation to Iraq in a maneuver of dubious legality and imbecilic strategy, and tacitly handing over the “problem” of Osama to Pakistan. In Bushworld, if it isn't spoken, it doesn't exist; if it is spoken, it hyper-exists. Thus the fight for democracy in Iraq consists of saying the fight is for democracy in Iraq, which satisfies the Federalist's requirements on the matter as far the administration is concerned. On the other side of the ledger, the victory over Al Qaeda is signalled by crossing out the name Osama whenever it occurs in the drafts of the prez's speechwriters. A terrorism that is so utterly vulnerable to liguistic fiat takes on the strange proportions of a kind of spirit, Bush's own Harvey; for this reason, he can make up stories about his imaginary friend and expect us to give them our complete belief -- as in the administration's contention that the  heart of the battle of terrorism is Iraq. Of course, that doesn't make sense. There were no Iraqis on those four flights. There was no connection between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. There is no reason to think that even if the U.S., by some miracle, "wins" against terrorism in Iraq, that this will have any effect on Al Qaeda whatsoever. In American politics, only Howard Dean has shown any encouraging skepticism about this claim, and even Howard Dean, last night, seemed more than willing to give a speech that was simply a feel good speech about voting – a rah rah speech that was all about the process and the ego, and not at all about the goal and the problem.

So let’s state the obvious, shall we? As I count the stats on the “war on terrorism”, I find them depressing: Osama bin Laden survived Tora Bora; his organization successfully regrouped in Pakistan; affiliates of his organization staged more attacks in 2003 than they did in the whole period between the embassy bombings and the attack on the Cole; the range of the attacks broadened, from the Moslem world all the way to Spain. Our own Homeland Security Department thinks that the organization or its affiliates could be planning something along the lines of 9/11 even now, with agents in the U.S.

The Dems are petrified that Bush will somehow ‘get’ Osama for an October surprise. Who knows, he might. The point is, the point that should be driven home with a sharpened wooden stake and a mallet, Bush doesn’t ‘get” terrorism at all – he seems, three years after the 9/11 attack, to be still as clueless as he was before the attack, a man perpetually reading a children's book to a class that, uncomfortably enough, has grown to include the country.  He is heading (astonishingly) the third administration that has mistaken moving Al Qaeda for destroying it.  This is why the Dems, rather than hoping Americans have forgotten Al Qaeda, should be shouting the name from the rooftops. There was a window of opportunity in 2002. There was the real possibility of taking the fight to Al Qaeda, of creating a symbolic defeat that could have been followed by real political defeats. That window closed. We now know just how ignominiously the players played their parts. We now know there is no "marshall plan" for Afghanistan, which has sunk into warlordism and opium traffic. We now know that there is no serious effort even to coordinate with our allies about terrorist suspects. We now know that Rumsfeld didn't like the war in Afghanistan because he couldn't find "targets" -- it is a mountainous country, after all, and our billion dollar toys work best in desert landscapes.

 Those who support the war in Iraq were the first to accuse Spain of retreating after the Madrid bombing – which means, logically, that those who support the war in Iraq have to explain the strategy of allowing a freerange terrorist group to make a flanking movement that knocks out an American ally. Since these are the same people who routinely suggested that Osama's continuing existence was no big deal, that he was a spent force, perhaps they should explain why they were terribly wrong, once again, to underestimate Al Qaeda. In fact, their underestimation is almost a compulsive repetition of the mindset pre 9/11, as we have had it detailed by the Commission. It is as if they are hardwired not to get it. This has to be laid at the foot of the arrogant and incompetent pumphouse Pentagon crew, urged on by an intellectual whose main previous accomplishment was to serve as an apologist for one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century, Suharto -- Paul Wolfowitz, come on down please! It has to be laid at the feet of exactly the kind of thing that Bush, in one of those moments of extreme disconnect that should disqualify him as a serious choice for president to anyone who pays attention, said he was opposed to: civilians second guessing the military in a war. Bush was referring, in his interview on Meet the Press, to Vietnam. It was one of those moments, frequent under this administration, when astonishment, indignation, and frustration mesh together in a perfect rush: never, never has there been a war in which the civilian command at the Pentagon so countered any serious input from the military high command as the war in Iraq. Never, never has there been a war that was so interrupted for political, rather than military reasons as the war against Al Qaeda. Never has there been a president who so joins together ignorance and unctuousness as Bush. He beats Warren Harding hands down.

 

The upshot is: the opportunity of spring, 2002, is gone. This president failed in the elementary duty of defending the U.S. against an enemy that was minor but vicious. His failure was not innocent – rather, it was part of a political strategy that year to capitalize on his “triumph” after Tora Bora to promote another war, one that had nothing to do with the immediate American interest in dispersing our real enemy. This president turned a blind eye to the metastasizing of that enemy. This president set us up to fail in the Middle East, with consequences that we can count in lives and explosives in Istanbul, Casablanca, Riyadh, and Madrid. This president has shifted the duty that should fall on the shoulders of the 400 billion dollar plus US military to the billion dollar minus Paki military. This president has shown no interest in the intersections between Kashmir jihadis, Al Qaeda, and various affiliates around the Mediterranean.

So for us, here is the challenge to Kerry. If, following Bush, he takes the child’s way out – banishing Osama’s name from his speeches as a magical placebo for thwarting Al Qaeda – we think he will miss a golden opportunity himself. And it is that kind of thing which can really bring him down this election.  No -- scratch that. Bring on the thunder. It is more than the loss or gain of an election that is at stake. This is about shame, dignity, the dim knowledge that the culture is at risk, the ability to resist the sly insinuations of a class of pimps -- political consultants (who would serve the commonwealth better as real pimps, every blackhearted one of em) and to listen to the unpopular murmurs of his heart -- which has to be there somewhere, in the middle distance, even after the cheesy senatorial life. This is not some cutrate tv sitcom, this is fullblown shakesperian tragedy. Kerry's challenge is to recognize that.

 

Bollettino

When LI ruminated this joint into being, we decided that we were not going to spend our time exclusively referring people to other blogs. Our idea was that the Internet is so incredibly big that we could wander through it the way a Borges character might wander through the Library of Babel, randomly pulling out sites, spilling contents, going on eccentric and timewasting tangents. In this library, there is definitely a place for blogs (and for porno, and for pictures of cats, and for listservs, etc., etc.) and we try to sneak in links to those blogs we like or those that have caught our interest for some reason; but the blogosphere is so intensely inward looking that we felt that we couldn’t compete with those bloggers who do this much better.  For this reason, we’ve never constructed a permanent list of links, since the goal was, and is, to embed the shock of recognition contained by the link in the post.  LI has been re-thinking that of late. Should we surrender to the common format? Readers, tell us what you think.

Since the Dem and Republican conventions invited bunches of political bloggers to report on them, there has been another run of “what are blogs”” article in the press, and another run of blog triumphalism in the sphere. I’m rather sick of that. In the meantime, go to this link:  the Bureau of Public secrets  

BOPS is a website run by some old situationalist – or perhaps by some young fan of the situationalists. Lately, they have been doing something very very cool – they have been putting up Kenneth Rexroth’s poems and essays semi-officially, after contacting New Directions. We read Rexroth’s fascinating essay on D.H. Lawrence’s poetry last night,  and have been mulling over this paragraph. It comes after Rexroth makes the obvious comparison of Lawrence to Hardy, with particular reference to one of Lawrence’s early poems, ‘The Hymn to Priapus’:

“Hardy was a major poet. Lawrence was a minor prophet. Like Blake and Yeats, his is the greater tradition. If Hardy ever had a girl in the hay, tipsy on cider, on the night of Boxing Day, he kept quiet about it. He may have thought that it had something to do with “the stream of his life in the darkness deathward set,” but he never let on, except indirectly.”

This led me, following that Library of Babel riff, on a search for Lawrence’s poems. Go in particular to this crazy Danish site, which throws copyright law to the wind and publishes six collections of Lawrence’s poetry (including his worst – the Pansies collection).
Here’s one of the poems that torches a whole lyrical tradition. This is the kind of prophetic anger Rexroth is after, in which a vast, over-reaching cultural despair is poured into a situation so stylized by the love lyric as to have become numb. Lawrence's great idea is to pull out the pliers and work on the numb until he hits a shrieking nerve.  So he progresses from a poor first stanza, with its waxy flower/sunshine image, to heap up images of default, of natural and supernatural catastrophe, until one balked moment -- a moment of impotence -- becomes a blinding stroke of lightning in which the annihilating power of the system of enlightenment -- that butcher's power that systematically strips the animal from the man -- is revealed as a hideous commonplace -- as the implacably cruel intention behind the seeming kindness, the seeming morality, of the civilizing process.  

Last Words to Miriam

 

 

Yours is the sullen sorrow,

       The disgrace is also mine;

Your love was intense and thorough,

Mine was the love of a growing flower
5
       For the sunshine.

 

You had the power to explore me,

       Blossom me stalk by stalk;

You woke my spirit, you bore me

To consciousness, you gave me the dour
10
       Awareness — then I suffered a balk.

 

Body to body I could not

       Love you, although I would.

We kissed, we kissed though we should not.

You yielded, we threw the last cast,
15
       And it was no good.

 

You only endured, and it broke

       My craftsman's nerve.

No flesh responded to my stroke;

So I failed to give you the last
20
       Fine torture you did deserve.

 

You are shapely, you are adorned

       But opaque and null in the flesh;

Who, had I but pierced with the thorned

Full anguish, perhaps had been cast
25
       In a lovely illumined mesh

 

Like a painted window; the best

       Fire passed through your flesh,

Undrossed it, and left it blest

In clean new awareness. But now
30
       Who shall take you afresh?

 

Now who will burn you free

       From your body's deadness and dross?

Since the fire has failed in me,

What man will stoop in your flesh to plough
35
       The shrieking cross?

 

A mute, nearly beautiful thing

       Is your face, that fills me with shame

As I see it hardening;

I should have been cruel enough to bring
40
       You through the flame.

 

Bollettino

My God! Somebody gets it!

Last week, the NEA issued a report, "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America." The report lamented the decline of the reading of novels and poetry and such in America. The reports about the report lamented the same thing. Party line about reading is that it is always a good thing in itself.

Carlin Romano’s column in the Chronicle of Higher C. examined the report, and found some of the statistics not so dire. That is interesting, but what rivets yours truly, a book reviewer who desperately wants out of the trade, is the end of Romano’s article. I could hardly believe it. They are almost word for word what I have been telling people forever – in fact, what I told the book editor at the Austin Chronicle just last week. 
  
"Almost nothing in our culture," the distinguished New York book editor Elisabeth Sifton memorably observed in a Harper's symposium years ago, "encourages the private moment of reading."I love that line. I also believe in its ironic, absurdist corollary: "Almost nothing in the modern American newspaper and magazine encourages the private moment of reading." Owners slash space for book reviews and coverage at the same time that they bemoan their own loss of readers. Then they order the remaining readers to do anything -- ANYTHING -- but read in their spare time. True, the three highest-circulation seven-day-a-week newspapers in America are also the three with the most powerful book coverage. But the NEA isn't worried in "Reading at Risk" about beneficiaries of the enlightened managers of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.So we're left with a general media environment in which the readerly commit a kind of cultural suicide in pursuit of the less readerly. In magazine and newspaper offices across the country, well-educated editors stuff their publications with pieces about trash movies, hip-hop hotties, reality-TV spinoffs, and ingénue profiles -- then go home and read a book. As print people drive their hordes toward nonprint media, TV folks -- supposedly a dimmer breed -- cleverly ignore the competition, rarely acknowledging what's in the local papers and almost never devoting a minute to a nonpresidential book.”

LI wrote something similar to the book editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where Romano works, a few years ago. That editor had written us a very depressing letter about the state of book reviewing – based on the cuts he had to make in the section’s size – and we wrote back:

“That is sad, X… The ice age is all around us, I'm afraid. I hope that after this terrible quarter is over and advertising resumes at some reasonable level, papers will resume running their cultural sections. I don't think that is just optimism -- I mean, books are not only a 20 billion dollar industry in themselves, but they generate movies, music, the public discourse -- they have incalculable benefits. Ironically, just as corporations are discovering intangible assets, i.e. the intricate web of know how among their employees -- newspapers are doing their best to pretend that books, which are the body and substance of that know-how, are a minor part of the whole, dispensable extras. They are cutting their own throats. Those people who don't read books will stop reading newspapers. That's a Q.E.D. To encourage a lively book page is to seed the newspaper readers of the future.”
  
Michael Dirda’s piece on the report in the WP today is less thought provoking.  
  
Dirda says some smart things in the piece, and some stupid things. The smart thing he says is that the literate person can’t just read today’s best sellers. Reading a book that was published this year, without having any knowledge of books that have been written over the centuries, is like examining an ice cube without any knowledge of water. The dumb thing he says is that the Internet is hogging reading time with its daily plethora of boring, trivial matter. Weblogs and such. He makes this charge in spite of the fact that he confesses to not using the Web much.

If he did use the web, then he would discover that, in fact, the Internet has reanimated literary life in ways the survey is designed not to show. When I lived in Gwinnett County Georgia a few years ago I discovered that if I went to the County’s main library and looked for, say, Mill on the Floss, I was shit out of luck – as my pap used to say. The books on display dealt with astrology, investing in real estate, the romances  of Princess Di, and how Jesus could save you from perversion, alcoholism, and bad teeth. The one thing that was systematically absent from the shelves were books (saving the Bible) that had been written earlier than say 1980.

So I went home and looked it up on the web. Sure enough, I found a copy of Mill on the Floss on a Princeton U. site. There is now a national library – in fact, there are several. There is Gutenberg. There is Black Mask. There is the Liberty Library. There is Constitution.org. There are Athena, ABU, Gallica, Les Classiques des sciences socials, etc. etc. Dirda instances his recent reading of Clarissa to show how important it is to read in depth – but where are you going to get a copy of Clarissa in Dothan, Alabama? in Niles, Michigan? In Nederland, Texas? You will get it here. 

The instrumental interpretations of the report are interesting, as far as they go. But LI has long been interested in the fate of reading literature in a modernity characterized by a systematic hostility to ritual. If one uses Victor Turner’s definition of ritual - "prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in mystical beings and powers" – it describes at least one aspect, a very important one, of reading novels and poems. And it also helps one get a grip upon the ambivalent triumph of the novel over the poem in the in the West – in France, Britain, and the U.S. –  that makes Americans, provincially, believe that poetry is some romantic remnant form. That isn’t true – if you ever talk to Russians, or Bulgarians, or Turks, or Arabs, you soon realize that cultures differ in their preferred literary form, with some cultures being poetry cultures (Turkey, for instance), some novel cultures (the U.S.) and some mixed (Russia). We think that the decline in reading has to be thought of in conjunction with what reading does. Romano points out that there is really a shift in the place of reading, with the survey’s exclusion of reading in the classroom and at work being, perhaps, an overlooked factor in the overt decline in non-leisure reading.  We will do another post about reading and ritual soon. 

 

 

Bollettino

Our fave learned journal, Common Knowledge, has published it’s summer issue. There is a special section devoted to “Neo-Stoic Alternatives, c.1200-2004: Essays on Folly and Detachment.” The dates are a little optimistic. For scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, it has gradually become apparent that understanding the intellectual patterns in these centuries in terms of the opposition between the Aristotelianism of the schoolmen and Galileo’s science is grossly insufficient. Some of the most interesting work of modern scholarship has centered  around the rediscovery of, or perhaps it would be better to say the appropriation of, stoicism, such as one sees it in Montaigne’s essays. 

 We especially like one of the articles, Unmasking The World: Bruegel's Ethnography, by Art Historian Joseph Leo Koerner. Koerner’s goal is to run a couple of themes through Bruegel’s work. One of the themes is this: “The ethics of this neo-Stoicism urged pleasure in the experience of distance—of distance from, though curiosity about, the lifeworld of one's time and place. The neo-Stoic is the ethnographer at home, observing his culture invent its lifeworld and then behave as if it were nature's own.” We wonder about these terms – ethnography, lifeworld - and the alien feel of them to that humanistic vocabulary that meditated on curiosities, and sought keys to hieroglyphs. Still, Koerner’s words seem to work for Bruegel’s work, in which the necessity to expand in scope – and thus to assume a distance – is derived from the multitudinous activities that he has to picture.
Koerner’s a great see-er of pictures. Here he is on a bit of Bruegel’s painting of “Fight between Carnival and Lent:”

“Behind Lent's cart, a boy with a basket on his head is busy munching bread, carrying shoes and pretzels, and staring out at us. His humanizing distance from his function in the ritual dramatizes what Bruegel's painting everywhere confirms. Bruegel seems to document, more than to create, the symbolism of which his painting consists. The peculiar detachment of his performance as a painter from the performances that he records finds a reflection in the represented actors themselves. Shown to stand just outside their own activity, they, like the painter, contribute to our sense that we peer behind their masks to an underlying personality. To further complicate matters, however, Carnival and Lent are themselves both masquerades and rituals of unmasking. Cousin to the dramatic form of the antimasque, Carnival reveals the true nature of people and society by mocking their covering illusions: its bizarre costumes and practices aim at a brief but subversively realistic portrayal of the physical and social body. Lent, in turn, banishes Carnival's travesties by reintroducing with a vengeance the drab infirmity of everyday life. Whereas Carnival unmasks life by giving it a temporarily unrestrained expression, Lent unmasks death—hence, in Bruegel's picture, the several corpses that later collectors masked by painting over them. Even as Bruegel distances himself from these ritual forms, he carries into his picture their negative labor.”

Indeed, there is something to this weighing of distances. We don’t see distance transformed into the heraldic past (as we do in the background of hundred of Annunciations); we don’t see this distance as a divine usufruct; we see this distance as the condition of a certain curiosity. Ethnographic, Koerner thinks – and that works. The participant/observer ambiguity is certainly there. Bruegel, Koerner says, was enrolled into a myth after his death – that he was a peasant. The modern take is that he was a sophisticate. But the myth reads at least part of that distance right. 

Last year, in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Perez Zagorin began an essay on Bruegel with a note on the divergent, contradictory interpretations that his work evokes:

“Since the late nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century, when Pieter Bruegel ceased to be seen simply as the naive artist Pieter the Droll and Peasant Bruegel, chosen, as his first biographer Carel van Mander said, "from among the peasants" to be "the delineator of peasants,"  he has been generally ranked among the foremost artists of the Netherlands and northern Renaissance as well as one of the greatest of European painters. His oeuvre is broad, consisting of moral allegories and satires, panoramic landscapes, religious and biblical themes, and a variety of genre and secular scenes. Anyone who looks attentively at his forty-odd paintings, his drawings, and the prints made after the latter is likely to notice not only their strong formal structure and outstanding skill in organizing pictorial space, their command of the complex disposition of large masses of figures, and their masterly sureness and economy of figural draftsmanship in the depiction of human beings in every kind of posture and action, but also that many of them seem to be animated by some idea. Gazing at such engrossing and intensely vital images of human life and nature as his paintings of proverbs and children's games, festive peasants, the seasons, and religious subjects like the tower of Babel, Christ on the road to Calvary, and the triumph of death, the viewer is bound to recognize that the painter, in the words of Edward Snow, quoting Cezanne, was "a thinker in images." works known through thousands of reproductions, have elicited very divergent readings….  They have been variously perceived as comic and sympathetic representations of peasant life by a humane observer, as detached and accurate descriptions by an objective recorder, as graphic allegories of human folly, as visions of an organic community which is passing away, as products of a literary and pictorial genre of satirical commentaries on peasant crudity, gluttony, and lechery, and as an expression of the social condescension and moral superiority which humanist intellectuals and the dominant landed and urban classes of the painter's time are said to have felt toward peasants and popular culture.”

Simply listing those ideas damasks them – somewhat unfairly, since the list’s very heterogeneity allows Zagorin to avoid committing himself to acts of individual criticism. Since Koerner’s essay is printed in a special section of Common Knowledge dedicated to neo-stoicism, another “idea” is being at least claimed to be countenanced by the painter’s work. Of course, painters have several ideas. They think they’ll put some purple in that corner; they think it is time for a brewsky; they think that armed revolution would be a good thing; they think their girlfriends are betraying them… and so on. Famously, as Zagorin points out, Bruegel – as well as Bosch -- has been the subject of a story started by a critic of the thirties, Charles de Tonay, that he belonged to a millennial sect, the Family of Love. And that sect was a sext sect – to the pure all things are pure, I am pure, ergo, let’s get down.
Koerner has a welcome knack for seeing that a painting isn’t a space that is given all at once. His interpretation of Bruegel’s paintings depends on the fact that the eye tours the surface. In other words, the seeing of the painting exists in time. Too often this aspect of perspective – its deferring function – is neglected. There is a line of painting, going through the minimalists, that takes the painted surface as a means of seizing the eye’s seeing in something that is impossible to tour – and thus throwing the eye back on itself and its present. This is the claim of the purely painterly, and it is present as an element in every painting.  Here is Koerner doing the phenomenon of seeing a Bruegel painting, Jesus Carrying the Cross:
“A viewer needs to remember his or her first impression of Bruegel's picture to recognize its radical design. An initial experience goes something like this. We enter the picture through the grand sweep of the landscape. Bruegel plots this sweep through the flow of figures from the sunken distance on the left, past a middle ground, to a higher distance on the right. There, in the spatial and narrative full stop of the circular crowd, we notice that the cross of Christ is missing and we are sent back to the foreground, to a scene we perhaps noticed but slipped past due to its formal reserve. Yet here, where we expect to find him among his followers, Christ is still absent. The stake and wheel at the far right, together with the skull at its base, help trick us into thinking that the crucifix rises next to the Virgin, on Golgotha, hill of the skull. Between the skull and the wheel, however, a second group of mourners nudge us back into the landscape. Some wear contemporary dress; the man in the red cap at furthest to the right (who, like us, observes the landscape with the stake just to his side) is believed to be a self- portrait. In any case, it is around now that, tossed back into the agitated movement of the crowds, we seek and at last discover the tiny figure of Christ.

Dwarfing him in the expansive landscape, crowding him out by a teeming humanity, Bruegel performs the world's nonrecognition of Christ—also the subject of several of paintings by Bosch. Love of the world, for Bosch, caused everyone to overlook Christ in heaven. Yet whereas in works like Bosch's Hay Wain our own perspective as viewers of the triptych remains aligned with a salvific structure, in Bruegel's Jesus Carrying the Cross our place is inside the sinful parade, not only because Bruegel offers no external standpoint from which to view it with impunity, but also because he assures us that our world is the same. Realism, the sense we get that "this is how people actually look and act" repeats both our knowing the world and our not knowing Christ.”

We love the fancy stepping here. To see in, to go further, to back up – these are not in particular the stages of a narrative, which is, of course, the temptation with Bruegel, and an increasingly over-used trope in criticism -- everything must be narrativized this season. But Koerner's description of the viewer's passage through the painting is a narrative about a non-narrative reality. The narrative, here, is outside of the painting. It was suffered through by Christ.  Inside is the observer’s moment –and the observer’s gains and losses, shuffles and ducks.  

Bollettino

LI recommends Richard Cohen’s column in the WP this morning. Most of the re-assessments of the supporters of the Iraq war have cast their positions, both then and now, in the light of their smooth and consistent use of reason. Meritocrats all, they added up reasons pro and con and do their little checklists, they read the journals, they know all about the history. Except of course they know nothing about the history, the checklists consisted of bogus items, and they wrote for the journals they read – groupthink in monad-land. There are, remember, no windows in monads. Cohen is not having any of this, and he chooses a clever image to make his point: that recent issue of the New Republic that featured a lot of hedging liberal hawks:

“I mention anthrax for the simple reason that no one does anymore. It's a curious silence since, along with the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, it all but dominated the news. Some of us did not get mail deliveries and, when they resumed, we went into secure rooms where we donned latex gloves and face masks before opening letters. On a tip, I asked my doctor early on to prescribe Cipro for me, only to find out that, insider though I thought I was, nearly everyone had been asking him for the same thing. People made anthrax-safe rooms, and one woman I know of had a mask made for her small dog. I still don't know if that was a touching gesture or just plain madness.

My point is that we were panicked. Yet that panic never gets mentioned. Last month the New Republic published a "special issue" in which a bevy of very good writers wondered whether they had been wrong to support the war in Iraq. Most of them admitted to having erred about this or that detail or in failing to appreciate how badly George Bush would administer the war and the occupation. But none confessed to being seized by the zeitgeist. I read the magazine cover to cover and unless I somehow missed it, the word anthrax never appeared. Imagine! Not once! Not a single one of these writers admitted to panicking over anthrax.”

According to the Forth Worth Star Telegram, Ashcroft’s DOJ report on the Patriot Act claims that it "has charged 310 defendants with criminal offenses as a result of terrorism investigations" since 9-11, and that 179 have been convicted.

The thirty five of that number who were charged in Iowa have turned out to be a fiercesome group of dedicated jihadists, according to a story in the Des Moines Register (via Atrios). The story, picked up by the Omaha paper, lists some of the villains:

“Included among the 35 cases were:

• Four American-born laborers who omitted mention of prior drug convictions or other crimes when they were assigned by a contractor to a runway construction project at the Des Moines airport or when they applied for manual-labor jobs there.

• Five Mexican citizens who stole cans of baby formula from store shelves throughout Iowa and sold them to a man of Arab descent for later resale.

• Two Pakistani men who entered into or solicited sham marriages so that they and their friends could continue to live in the Waterloo area and work at convenience stores there.”

Our favorite quote in the article comes from Ashcroft’s prosecutor on the spot, Richard Murphey. Surely Murphey was suckled on J. Edgar Hoover’s You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communist). Tough as nails, the man’s x ray vision saw right through that baby food scam, and what he saw sent shivers through his spine: the attack on Western Civilization:

“Prosecutors stressed that many of the Iowa cases were classic examples of illegal activities that are perpetrated by terrorist groups. And though any evidence of terrorist connections or motives was rarely mentioned in the courtroom, officials implied that some of the suspects might still be under suspicion, even since their release.

"'Bona fide' terrorism is a matter of semantics," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Murphy, who heads the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Cedar Rapids. "I don't think you can draw conclusions based on what a person is convicted of."

Murphy has started a strike force to target jaywalking by anyone with a terrorist sounding last name. There are also the terrorist shop lifters to go after – especially the ones that ‘boost’ gateway products, like lipstick and hair dye. In a memo that LI has obtained from the famed prosecutor’s office, he explains: “Lipstick and hair dye look trivial to the civilian eye. The fellow travelers and soft on crime crowd will yell and whine. But remember: yesterday’s thefts of Maybelline TN-100 lead to tomorrow’s thefts of aluminum tubes and yellowcake uranium. There are no gray areas here. You are with us, or against us.

Just yesterday there was report of an Arab looking fellow cheating a McDonald’s take out cashier of a buck fifty. This guy is loose in America. He could meet your daughter tomorrow. Think about it.”

Bollettino
 
This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead - all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.
– Michel Foucault,  Discipline and Punish 
  
 
There is an aspect of the Bush administration’s conservatism that has not often enough been scrutinized: its attachment to the engineering achievements of the late nineteenth century. Hence its love affair with the internal combustion engine, the coal burning power plant, and the test.
 
Bush naïve fondness for testing is like a man who judges the success of his dentist by the amount of pain the man inflicts.  From what we know of Bush’s academic career, he was never a good taker of tests. He took away from that experience a certain awe of them. Tests, in his mind, are powerful idols that must be placated. If you placate them with enough sacrifice, you receive a good grade. And if you receive a good grade, you must have learned something. Given this chain of reasoning, it is no wonder that his educational initiative is perhaps the most concentrated expression of testmania in American history.
 
LI is, on the contrary, an old skeptic of tests. We have taught classes, given tests, and graded them. Indeed, usually our grades did correspond with our intuitions about the relative merits of our students – their grasp of the subject, their willingness to work, and their acquaintance with the elements of English grammar. However, as an instrument for assessing learning, we find testing highly suspect. Like all assessments of human performance, its advocates like to cast over it the aura of objective measurement. But because assessment is embedded in social activity, the measurement, here, inevitably effects the thing measured. While the cloth is indifferent to the ruler the seamstress lays over it to cut off a given length, humans are not at all indifferent to measurements that will reward or punish them, and will change their behavior accordingly. Teaching the test instead of teaching, the numbers achieved by American kids may go up, but the quality of what they learn will certainly go down. This, we think, makes testmania a disaster for U.S. education.
 
That disaster emerges from two things: the qualitative change brought about in the social nature of knowledge from the quantitative change in knowledge itself, which necessitates that shedding of a context of schooling adapted for the assembly line rather than the network; and the nature of the test itself, as a disciplinary, rather than a learning, tool, as it has developed in the American classroom.
 
More later. 
  
 

Bollettino
 
But I will never believe that all natural Knowledge was shut up in Aristotle's Brain, or that the Heathen only invaded Nature, and found out her Strength. We know that Time and not Reason, Experience and not Art both taught the Causes of such Effects, as that Sowerness doth Co[...]gulate Milk; but ask the Reason why and how it does it, and Vulgar Philosophy cannot satisfie you; nor in many Things of the like Nature, as why Grass is green rather than red. Man hardly discerns the Things on Earth; his Time is but short to learn, and begins no sooner to learn than to dye: Whose Memory has but a borrowed Knowledge; understanding nothing truly, and is ignorant of the Essence of his own Soul; which Aristotle could never define, but by effects, which all Men know as well as he. – Sir Walter Raleigh
 
The prestige of the  experiment
In 1877, John Tyndall gave an address in Belfast that was emblematic of the high and confident positivism of the time. In one passage, he violates one of the canons of Victorian gentility – the Oxford variety – by aligning himself with the gloriously vulgar tradition, going back to Francis Bacon, of using Aristotle, conceived of as the father of  a lot of a priori nonsense, as an all purpose punching bag:  
 
“…in Aristotle, as in Goethe, it was not, I believe, misdirection, but sheer natural incapacity which lay at the root of his mistakes. As a physicist, Aristotle displayed what we should consider some of the worst attributes of a modern physical investigator: indistinctness of ideas, confusion of mind, and a confident use of language, which led to the delusive notion that he had really mastered his subject, while he had as yet failed to grasp even the elements of it. He put words in the place of things, subject in the place of object. He preached Induction without practising it, inverting the true order of inquiry by passing from the general to the particular, instead of from the particular to the general. He made of the universe a closed sphere, in the centre of which he fixed the earth, proving from general principles, to his own satisfaction and to that of the world for near 2,000 years, that no other universe was possible. His notions of motion were entirely unphysical. It was natural or unnatural, better or worse, calm or violentóno real mechanical conception regarding it lying at the bottom of his mind. He affirmed that a vacuum could not exist, and proved that if it did exist motion in it would be impossible. He determined a priori how many species of animals must exist, and shows on general principles why animals must have such and such parts. When an eminent contemporary philosopher, who is far removed from errors of this kind, remembers these abuses of the a priori method, he will be able to make allowance for the jealousy of physicists as to the acceptance of so-called a priori truths. Aristotle's errors of detail, as shown by Eucken and Lange, were grave and numerous. He affirmed that only in man we had the beating of the heart, that the left side of the body was colder than the right, that men have more teeth than women, and that there is an empty space at the back of every man's head.
There is one essential quality in physical conceptions which was entirely wanting in those of Aristotle and his followers. I wish it could be expressed by a word untainted by its associations; it signifies a capability of being placed as a coherent picture before the mind. The Germans express the act of picturing by the word vorstellen, and the picture they call a Vorstellung. We have no word in English which comes nearer to our requirements than Imagination, and, taken with its proper limitations, the word answers very well; but, as just intimated, it is tainted by its associations, and therefore objectionable to some minds.”

Tyndall’s groping attempt to put his chemical stained fingers around a term to distinguish a distinct, yet under-conceptualized  mental act  – and can’t one feel him almost painfully balance just on the edge of the unknown word, like Watson trying to follow one of Holmes’ points – eerily points to the need that was met ten years later, when just the thing emerged under the pen of a German physicist, Ernst Mach. The Gedanken-experiment was born.

Ever since, it has been retrospectively accorded to other times and conceptual schemes, as I’ve tried to point to in previous posts. I’ve also tried to point to the problem in taking the thought experiment seriously as an experiment.

We don’t kid ourselves that our objections will squelch the word. We don’t want to. The relation between the thought experiment and the experiment is like the relation between the red breasted American thrush and the English robin: they look enough alike that English settlers in the New World called the thrush a robin. Lexically, only a pedant would object to that – taxonomically, it is a disaster. 

A common defense of thought experiments, among philosophers, is that thought experiments are a common element of science. In fact,  we have read claims that in certain scientific discourses, they have an essential function. LI doesn’t doubt it. However, the move from saying that that class of things that we call “thought experiments” play a role in science to saying that they are indeed a type of experiment is not dependent on a clear view of experiments, but on the prestige of science, which is considered to be ultimately experimental. In other words, we are eye to eye with a vicious circle. Prestige, here, underwrites this logical leap. What it tells us is two things: we are dealing, first of all, with myth; and secondly, we are dealing with myth in terms of a the archaic system of legitimation that consists in referring to authority, rather than rationality.

Our protest against the prestige of thought experiments in philosophy stems from our sense of what experiment meant in the first place. Tyndall’s cool evaluation of Aristotle might not be textually correct re the man himself, but it is certainly correct about the spirit of Aristotelianism. The introduction of the experimental method in Europe in the seventeenth century was about one thing: the art of discovery. The point was to get outside of your head. That the world outside could be discovered was a tremendously exciting and hazardous thing.

The mania for thought experiments cruelly inverts this moment. Reflection, instead of being forced to confront the obdurant outlines of some irrepressible piece of exteriority, contents itself with the soft and pleasing task of creating bad fictions in the image of its desires. The movement from Bacon, whose death as a ‘martyr to experimentation’ is well described by Macaulay – see our little note – to  the spectacle of a Chalmers, doing “consciousness science’ by means of infantile fantasies of zombies, is a painful indicator that civilization ain’t what it used to be.

In  a conference on thought experiments that was published in the 1992 PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Ian Hacking, one of LI’s favorite philosophers, commented on the papers presented that defended the validity of the thought experiment. He conceded the force of many of the arguments for thought experiments, but his emphasis was on the fact that he felt, in the presence of the thought experiment, unmoved. That is, he felt that the experiment was not explicative. Experiments, in Hacking’s account, have a life – thought experiments exist frozen in their pictorial essence. Referring to Thomas Kuhn’s essay on thought experiments, Hacking points to the character of good thought experiments:
 
“… thought experiments are rather fixed, largely immutable. That is yet another respect that thye are like mathematical  proofs, but good proofs have proof ideas that can be used over and over in new contexts – which is not, in general the case with thought experiments. They have just one tension to expose. Of course there are false starts, and the exposition gets neater over time. And here the prescience of Kuhn’s paper comes to the fore. The reason that people wrestle with thought experiments, use thme for exposition and pu-down argument, is that they can reveal tensions between one vision of the world and another. They can dislodge a person from a certain way of describing the worlds. They can replace one picture by another. That is their job, their once and future job.”
 
This is all we really feel like saying about thought experiments. Campers, come home! We’ll talk about something less elevated in our next post. Promise.
 
Note: Macaulay’s description of Bacon’s death:
It had occurred to him that snow might be used with advantage for the purpose of preventing animal substances from putrefying. On a very cold day, early in the spring of the year 1626, he alighted from his coach near Highgate, in order to try the experiment. He went into a cottage, bought a fowl, and with his own hands stuffed it with snow. While thus engaged he felt a sudden chill, and was soon so much indisposed that it was impossible for him to return to Gray's Inn. The Earl of Arundel, with whom he was well acquainted, had a house at Highgate. To that house Bacon was carried. The Earl was absent; but the servants who were in charge of the place showed great respect and attention to the illustrious guest. Here, after an illness of about a week, he expired early on the morning of Easter-day, 1626. His mind appears to have retained its strength and liveliness to the end. He did not forget the fowl which had caused his death. In the last letter that he ever wrote, with fingers which, as he said, could not steadily hold a pen, he did not omit to mention that the experiment of the snow had succeeded "excellently well"   

Bollettino

In his comments to my little note on thought experiments, Paul made two challenges. The second of those challenges is not, I think, a real problem. Paul asks whether my criteria for an experiment – that there be a performative stage in it – wouldn’t be fulfilled in going through a syllogism, thus collapsing the distinction between experiment and logic. There are two things to say here. One is that performance in and of itself isn’t sufficient to make an experiment, even though I maintain that it is necessary condition on any experiment. The second is that the material performance of the experiment must be such that it is somehow connected to the design of the experiment. That connection is what the risk in the experiment is all about. So, to use the example of the experiments made on humans in light deprived environments, the performance of the experiment put at risk a hypothesis about the length of human’s circadian rhythm. This is quite different from positing that all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, or that all dogs are born of bitches, and Lassie is a dog, etc., etc. The inscription of such sentences is not in itself a performance that puts at risk the logical connection between variables and functions one wishes to demonstrate.

It is always possible to transform a thought experiment into some sort of performance. I could easily make a cartoon, for instance, out of Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment. But the making of a cartoon does not fulfill the performative function of the experiment, which is “about” a man matching Chinese symbols with English symbols.

Paul’s first objection seems similar, but it is, I think, a more potent balestra. He asks whether something like proofs in Euclid’s geometry aren’t performative in just the way I’m maintaining. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Paul is echoing a comment of Lakatos, as cited in this excellent overview of thought-experiments by Michael Stoeltzner at the University of Pittsburg’s Philosophy of Science site.

“Interestingly, Mach held that the purest thought experiments occur in mathematics which, on his account, was economically ordered experience. A similar connection was introduced into modern philosophy of mathematics by Imre Lakatos who contraposed the informal mathematical thought experiment to the formal Euclidean proof. “Thought-experiment (deiknymi) was the most ancient pattern of mathematical proofs.” (1976, p. 9 fn.1) The terminological parallel, to be sure, was drawn by Lakatos because the cited book of Árpád Szabó interprets deiknymi as “to make the truth or falsity of a mathematical statement visible in some way;” (1978, p. 189) with the progress of Greek mathematics deiknymi developed into the technical term for formal proof.”

Why does this differ from the syllogism example? I think the Euclidean proof, viewed in this way, could well be the ancestor of the computer simulation. Computer simulations have an uneasy relationship with the experimental tradition. However, I accept the fact that simulations can produce valid results, can be designed, like experiments, and can have a performative term that encodes risk as in experiments. I accept, in other words, that simulations can be a sub-species of experiment. However, my instinct is that the demonstration is not a computer simulation, because the analogy between design, performance, and result is imperfect.

When I say that the performative term is an encounter with risk, I am merely saying, in my own peculiar way, something that is a commonplace of teaching experimental design. If you look at courses in universities where e.d. is taught, you will notice that it is taught in terms of statistics. This was the great 19th century synthesis. While the popular image is still of the one experiment that proves this or that, the laboratory truth is that the results of iterated experiments vary to some extent, and that experiments themselves are usually grouped together by varying certain elements in the e.d. In other words, instead of a singular phenomenon, the experiment is usually part of a collection of experiments, over which one sums using orthodox statistical methods. I have been trying to avoid highlighting observation, the usual key phrase in talking about experiment, because observation tends to obscure both the performative term of the experiment and the risk inherent to that term – its encoding of such form as would make it statistically available. While computer simulations can be analyzed from this perspective, it is hard to see how Euclidian proofs fit this schema.

To return to the estimable Stoeltzner, he cites some considerable philosophic meandering around this very point by those who make the strong case for thought-experiments as experiments:

“… where are thought experiments located on the scale between theory and experiment? On Norton’s account, they are closer to theory, or at least to the argumentative analysis of an experiment, and they can accommodate rather general philosophical principles into a scientific argument. Andrew D. Irvine holds that “the parallel between physical experiments and thought experiments is a strong one.” (1991, p. 150) All assumptions of a thought experiment must be supported by independently confirmed observations and it typically has repercussions on a certain background theory. On Irvine’s account, the fact that “many thought experiments are meant to precede real experiments in which the original thought experiment’s premises are actually instantiated” (Ibid., p. 151) and the fact that some elements of a thought experiment are assumed to be true, proves that it typically contains some but not only counterfactual elements. Ronald Laymon proposes to render benign the counterfactual character of thought experiments involving frictionless surfaces and the like by treating them as “ideal limits of real experimentation.” (1991, p. 167)”

LI’s case against the thought experiment as experiment depends, in part, on showing that thought experiments aren’t very much like experiments. But we are not experts in experimentation. We’ve pointed to obvious problems that would occur to anyone. We are, however, sensitive to status cues in texts, and we are going to turn, in our next post on this topic, to the prestige of the experiment. Our hypothesis is that the pullulation of thought experiments in philosophy has less to do with the epistemological advantages of experimentation and more to do with the prestige accrued by the image of the experiment – what Barthes would call the myth of the experiment.

Bollettino

LI urges our readers to go to James Meek’s article about Siberia and Russia in the LRB, here: He takes down, with exemplary disdain, a Brookings Institute study by two residents, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, of Russia’s climate problem – which problem being the results of two centuries of Russian empire building that has left a considerable portion of the population in a part of the world where temperatures shift from the merely nippy, on the odd June day, to the deeper pockets of the frost-bite zone. Stalin’s mad and cruel relocating of significant masses of Russians to Siberia, in order to hack out the natural wealth of the region, has left Russia as a country that resembles an efficiency apartment connected to an industrial sized freezer.

This, at least, is an observation that binds him to the people in the book he is reviewing. But he is unbound from the book by retaining a humanity that escapes the untrammeled and witless rationality of people in think tanks. We like, for instance, these two grafs:

Hill and Gaddy's conclusion - that the coldest and most remote parts of Russia, as currently developed, are a constraint on the country's prosperity and happiness - is correct. Some of their insights are useful. Yet their tone is condescending, their methodology flawed and their central recommendation to the Russian government smacks of the same callous social engineering that made Siberia such a mess in the first place.

'The government should place a priority on relocating Siberia's youth,' Hill and Gaddy declare. 'While it may seem harsh, the challenge of maintaining the stranded elderly population of Siberia is something of a finite proposition.' Well, it does seem harsh. To subsidise the young to flee Siberia, leaving their parents and grandparents behind to die off in the land of ice and snow? When Hill and Gaddy know perfectly well that the Russian bureaucracy is not yet capable of exercising a proper duty of care to the weakest members of society, and that the elderly are often dependent on their families for support? What if there had been a team from the Brookings Institution on board the Titanic? 'Young, able-bodied males and females first! The rest of you finite propositions, carry on dancing.'

We also were cheered by the scoring off the Yanks that occurs in the last graf. Hmm, we wonder if his conclusions could be transposed to other, um, recend foreign policy disasters?

“Not the least of the attractions of The Siberian Curse is that it shows how little US academia has learned from its clumsy interventions in Russian economic policy in the early 1990s, when a flood of America-knows-best advisers introduced unscrupulous Russians to the Pandora's box of shareholder capitalism without taking any real interest in the checks and balances - trade unions, subsidies, lobby groups, public transport, welfare - which enable the 'free' market to work without complete brutality, even in the US.”

Bollettino
“During one of my visits with Iranian war victims last summer, one veteran -- plastic tubes pumping oxygen into his body through his nostrils -- asked me why there was no international outrage when Iraq used chemical weapons. "Why did the world look the other way?" he asked imploringly. The United States and the international community should urge the Iraqi governing council to "look the other away" no more. All victims of Saddam's foreign wars should be included in the indictment, not just those who happen to be allies of the United States.

All over the world, too many people think of Washington's human rights approach as selective, based on national interest, not moral imperative. Here's an opportunity to prove the naysayers wrong and do what is morally right -- as quaint a notion as that may be in international affairs. Now is the moment when Washington could step forward and urge the Iraqi governing council to include Iran's victims in the criminal docket in Hussein's trial.” – Afshin Molavi Washington Post

LI’s post, July 1: “In the typical hamhanded fashion of the CPA, Hussein is being charged with the crime of invading Kuwait, but not Iran, thereby sending the message that if you are going to wage a war of disastrous aggression and kill 500,000 people, be sure to buy your arms from approved Western dealers.”