“...everything … isn’t dead that is buried” – Heinrich Heine, Elemental spirits
In Psalm 95 we read: “For the LORD is a great God,/and a great King above all gods”. Justin, an early and influential father of the church, translated elohim, the word for gods, into daimonion, and from there on out it had a merry career – if you translate “above all gods” as “the gods of the heathens are demons”, you have a nice little program to interpret the stubbornly polytheistic world. Notice, however, that the program does not go so far as to say that the gods of the heathens don’t exist. The saying in Psalm 95 and the admonitions of the early church fathers were a powerful input into the demonization of the pagan gods. Ernst Robert Curtius, in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, is merely pressing an old, old historical key when he writes: “For the wedding of the Frankish king Sigebert and the Visigothic princess Brunhild (566) Fortunatus composed an epithalamium (VI, 1), in which Venus and Cupid bless the marriage. But in his metrical Vita s. Maritini (written 573-4) the same writer reports that the saint threatened the demons by calling them by their names; he said that Mercury was an especially evil enemy but that Jupiter was a stupid lout. Christianity did not allow the antique gods to die in peace. It had to degrade them into demons – because they lived on in the subconscious.”
Indeed, the myths of the Greeks actually encoded a myth of the overthrow of the gods. As did the myths of the Norse. A Götterdämmerung. Zeus and his siblings gained power only by killing the old God, Chronos, their father. And the threat that Zeus would be overthrown in turn is the basis of the Prometheus myth, which the romantics took up.
LI is interested in this cycle within the structure of myth because we take myths to be fundamental to roles and figures. Alan, commenting on LI’s happiness post the other day, justly criticized us for being rather vague about the place of the figure in our claim that figures “symbolize a human life through time." They both mediate between the social whole and the individual and operate as trans-individual myths. If you are looking around for them, look in the ad sections of newspapers – the help wanted sections and the personals ads, together, give you a sense of some of the mythical creatures that roam our America. The beautician, the banker, the administrative assistant, the SWM seeking SWF, the sexy middle aged man wants younger woman, here they are, demi-fabulous. One of my aims, in leveling an impossible, Quixote like lance against happiness, is to understand how these figures have changed over time.
Which is why I am going to do my next post about Heine’s funny little essay, the Gods in Exile.
But let’s put in a foreground note:
Paul Veyne wrote a fascinating book, Did the Greeks believe in their Myths, in which he contrasts the modern functionalist view of myth, which he dates back to Fontenelle in the late 17th century, with the Ancient philosophical view of myth, which saw them as stories arising, originally, from the acts of some heroic individual, and accruing legends over time. This was the Euhemerist idea, although as Veyne points out it, too, accepted the Greek division between the gods and the heroes.
“The Greeks distinguished between two domains; gods and heroes. For they did not understand myth or the mythmaking function in a general way but evaluated myths according to content. Criticism of the heroic generations consisted in transforming heroes into simple men and giving them a past that matched tht of what were called the human generations, that is, history since the Trojan war. The first step of this criticism was to remove the visible intervention of the gods from history. Not that the very existence of these gods was doubted in the least. But in our day the gods most often remain invisible to men. That was already the case even before the Trojan War, and the whole of the Homeric supernatural is nothing but invention and credulity. Criticism of religious beliefs indeed existed, but it was very different. Some thinkers purely and simply denied either the existence of a particular god or, perhaps, the existence of any of the gods in which the people believed. On the other hand, the immense majority of philosophers, as well as educated people, did not so much criticize the gods as seek an idea worthy of divine majesty.”
It is majesty – dignity, status, position – with which we are dealing here. When Justin and the early Christian fathers degraded the pagan gods, they were also making a comment on the whole of pagan culture. The nature of the gods was tied up with the decline or increase of a culture not just by the Psalmists or the Christian apologists, but also by pagan theologians. When Plutarch writes an essay about why the oracles have ceased to speak, he sets it in a conversation between, among others, Cleombrotus of Sparta, a traveler who has come back from Egypt, and one of his favorite interlocutors, Ammonius, a Pythagorean. First, Plutarch piously warns us away from a too iconoclastic view of myth:
“The story is told, my dear Terentius Priscus, that certain eagles or swans, flying from the uttermost parts of the earth towards its centre, met in Delphi at the omphalus, as it is called; fand at a later time Epimenides of Phaestus put the story to test by referring it to the god and upon receiving a vague and ambiguous oracle said,
Now do we know that there is no mid-centre of earth or of ocean;
Yet if there be, it is known to the gods, but is hidden from mortals
Now very likely the god repulsed him from his attempt to investigate an ancient myth as though it were a painting to be tested by the touch.”
Then he allows Cleombrotus to bring up a rather ridiculous theory of the degeneracy of the times – to wit, that the very year is decaying.
“He had recently been at the shrine of Ammon, and it was plain that he was not particularly impressed by most of the things there, but in regard to the ever-burning lamp he related a story told by the priests which deserves special consideration; it is that the lamp consumes less and less oil each year, and they hold that this is a proof of a disparity in the years, which all the time is making one year shorter in duration than its predecessor; for it is reasonable that in less duration of time the amount consumed should be less.”
Ammonius in particular shows that the explanation of the priests is ridiculous through use of an argument from plausibility – Occam’s razor before Occam was around – but the lamp story sets the stage for the discussion of why the oracles no longer speak. For the most likely explanation is that humanity has decayed. It is an explanation that is consistent with the notion that the heroic age is divided from the present age. But in the course of the conversation, Plutarch has Cleombrotus expound the notion of the daemons – the kind of spirits who became very popular in Meditteranean cultures around this time. That these words are put in Cleombrotus’ mouth might mean that Plutarch is not entirely committed to them. Still, this is a crucial passage in our mythical history.
"You are right," said Cleombrotus; "but since it is hard to apprehend and to define in what way and to what extent Providence should be brought in as an agent, those who make the god responsible for nothing at all and those make him responsible for all things alike go wide of moderation and propriety. They put the case well who say that Plato, by his discovery of the element underlying all created qualities, which is now called 'Matter' and 'Nature,' has relieved philosophers of many great perplexities; but, as it seems to me, those persons have resolved more and greater perplexities who have set the race of demigods [Demons – LI] midway between gods and men, and have discovered a force to draw together, in a way, and to unite our common fellowship — whether this doctrine comes from the wise men of the cult of Zoroaster, or whether it is Thracian and harks back to Orpheus, or is Egyptian, or Phrygian, as we may infer from observing that many things connected with death and mourning in the rites of both lands are combined in the ceremonies so fervently celebrated there. Among the Greeks, Homer, moreover, appears to use both names in common band sometimes to speak of the gods as demigods; but Hesiod was the first to set forth clearly and distinctly four classes of rational beings: gods, demigods, heroes, in this order, and, last of all, men; and as a sequence to this, apparently, he postulates his transmutation, the golden race passing selectively into many good divinities, and the demigods into heroes.
"Others postulate a transmutation for bodies and souls alike; in the same manner in which water is seen to be generated from earth, air from water, and fire from air, as their substance is borne upward, even so from men into heroes and from heroes into demigods the better souls obtain their transmutation. But from the demigods ca few souls still, in the long reach of time, because of supreme excellence, come, after being purified, to share completely in divine qualities. But with some of these souls it comes to pass that they do not maintain control over themselves, but yield to temptation and are again clothed with mortal bodies and have a dim and darkened life, like mist or vapour.”
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Death knell for the babydoll look. So why is LI not smiling?
After six years of a wholly fraudulent war on terror and thirty years of watching a wholly ludicrous and dangerous gated community world spring up before their eyes, a world in which have nots get the booby prize of obesity and – as a special treat – can send their kids to die, proudly, in our party like its Vietnam war for the Son of George, the people – remember the people? United? who will never be defeated? - are finally in revolt, according to the NYT:
“You tell me it’s the institution/why don’t you free your mind instead” as somebody once put it. It turns out that this here summer, folks, is another Summer of Love:
Of course, that drug induced haze will get you ten to fifteen years in East Texas. Except if you are white. But things are kinda free on the hip streets, according to the Times. A few years ago, as the internet destroyed the music industry, it was suggested that bands would now live by selling their paraphernalia – t shirts and such. Now the paraphernalia is selling the bands. It is all about detritus, baby. It always is.
“The naïveté and renegade spirit of the hippie period, if not its aesthetic, are also alive on Broadway in “Spring Awakening,” a dark rock musical about adolescent sexuality and rebellion in 19th-century Germany. And it lives on on the runways in collections as diverse as those of Marc Jacobs, whose secondary spring line pulsed with patchwork effects and mixed floral prints, and Roberto Cavalli, who paraded a sweeping gown with Art Nouveau flourishes and butterfly sleeves on his catwalk for fall.”
LI shouldn’t be a sourpuss. We are happy that the hippies are gravediggers of the babydoll look – long may it stay buried! We are just unhappy that the hippies have been replaced with pod people. A bummer, that. A fucking bummer.
“I sometimes walk into a showroom full of baby-doll dresses and ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ” said Lauren Silverstein, the owner of Amalia, a boutique in NoLIta. “ ‘Don’t you know people don’t want this anymore?’ ”
In its place her customers are craving a look she describes as “flowing, sensual, kind of sexy acid trip” — something akin to the dress Ms. Silverstein wore on Saturday afternoon, a sidewalk-sweeping halter dress from a line called Fourties, awash in Yellow Submarine tints of lemon mauve and green.
If those customers are in revolt, it is mostly against fashion literalism. Karin Bereson, a stylist and fashion retailer in New York, champions what she calls a hippie mix, “but one not done in a costume-y way.” Ms. Bereson, who favors clashing neon patterns that owe a debt to the psychedelia revived in the late ’80s at rave clubs in London, wears tailored men’s waistcoats layered over billowing maxidresses.
“My look is Pakistani tailor,” she said. At her downtown boutique, No. 6, she updates the flower-child style — all vintage Indian-printed voile dresses and bib-front coveralls — with unorthodox accents like unlaced white jazz shoes or studded gladiator sandals.”
“You tell me it’s the institution/why don’t you free your mind instead” as somebody once put it. It turns out that this here summer, folks, is another Summer of Love:
“It’s a new summer of love,” Ms. Hersh declared. “The look is Haight-Ashbury — straight out of the ’60s.”
“The resurrection of a style that first permeated the American mainstream in the mid-’60s and peaked in the sultry months of 1967, coincides with an influx of books, films and exhibitions commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love in San Francisco.
The florid romanticism — and drug-induced haze — of the vaunted psychedelic era is being revisited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in “The Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,” a show of concert posters from rock emporiums like the fabled Fillmore East in New York, the Fillmore West in San Francisco and clubs like UFO and Fifth Dimension in London.”
Of course, that drug induced haze will get you ten to fifteen years in East Texas. Except if you are white. But things are kinda free on the hip streets, according to the Times. A few years ago, as the internet destroyed the music industry, it was suggested that bands would now live by selling their paraphernalia – t shirts and such. Now the paraphernalia is selling the bands. It is all about detritus, baby. It always is.
“The naïveté and renegade spirit of the hippie period, if not its aesthetic, are also alive on Broadway in “Spring Awakening,” a dark rock musical about adolescent sexuality and rebellion in 19th-century Germany. And it lives on on the runways in collections as diverse as those of Marc Jacobs, whose secondary spring line pulsed with patchwork effects and mixed floral prints, and Roberto Cavalli, who paraded a sweeping gown with Art Nouveau flourishes and butterfly sleeves on his catwalk for fall.”
LI shouldn’t be a sourpuss. We are happy that the hippies are gravediggers of the babydoll look – long may it stay buried! We are just unhappy that the hippies have been replaced with pod people. A bummer, that. A fucking bummer.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
come back, bees!
LI hasn’t had a report from the bee front, recently.
So, here’s some catching up.
A story in the National Journal has everything you want from the mainstream media – smug entitlement, gross stupidity, and the idea that the environment – the planet in general – is a peanut compared to the awe-inspiring seriousness that goes on in D.C. If Richard Cohen’s heartfelt plea for Scooter Libby, today, has become an instant classic of the King Bush era – the lickspittle mentality etched in the illiterate-attacked-by-rabid-dog prose that the Washington Post editorial page is so proud of - the jokey National Journal story (“Summer's nearly here, and in the media that means science news, lots and lots of it. When the weather gets hot, the sources of "normal" news -- politics, government, business -- go on vacation. And into the void steps science, with its bottomless bag of discoveries about our bodies, the Earth, and the cosmos. Goodbye, Scooter Libby. Hello, stunning new findings about the moons of Jupiter.” Ha ha) is all about the clueless folks who think they rock our world.
After running through the terribly funny issue of the bee rapture, ticking off the points one two three, the article ends like this:
“4. Laugh. Jeff Pettis, a scientist at the federal Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md., likes to make fun of people's wild explanations. He told Garreau that his "favorite theory" is, "The bees are out there creating their own crop circles, working very hard, physically pushing the crops down with their little legs." He told the same story to the AP in May. The joke's getting a little old, but its lighthearted spirit seems just right. Why panic? It's summertime, and the science is easy.”
To which, of course, we can only summon up a heartfelt and sincere fuck you. So much for one Monsanto-head tool.
The Philadelphia inquirer has a better article:
Farmers survive the lost colonies; With hives decimated, sun and trucked-in bees save pollination by Sandy Bauers
Bauers reports on the use of bees in blueberry farming. The blueberry farmers have found hives, and are paying a bigger price. But there is, as always, the problem of stress. If stress is making bees more vulnerable to colony collapse, then the healthy bees that are being used, if possible, even more this summer are going to naturally be vulnerable.
“It's possible the bees are too busy. Many hives are now headed for Maine's blueberries; others will pollinate New Jersey's cranberries and cucumbers and Pennsylvania pumpkins.
"What I'm holding my breath for," vanEngelsdorp [Pennsylvania's acting state apiarist] said, "is when the bees come out of blueberries in Maine and what they look like next November. I think this sickness and collapse manifests itself after stress."
Poor bees. I suggest, to those colonies about to rapture, that you first surround the national journal and sting all the guys there. They deserve it.
So, here’s some catching up.
A story in the National Journal has everything you want from the mainstream media – smug entitlement, gross stupidity, and the idea that the environment – the planet in general – is a peanut compared to the awe-inspiring seriousness that goes on in D.C. If Richard Cohen’s heartfelt plea for Scooter Libby, today, has become an instant classic of the King Bush era – the lickspittle mentality etched in the illiterate-attacked-by-rabid-dog prose that the Washington Post editorial page is so proud of - the jokey National Journal story (“Summer's nearly here, and in the media that means science news, lots and lots of it. When the weather gets hot, the sources of "normal" news -- politics, government, business -- go on vacation. And into the void steps science, with its bottomless bag of discoveries about our bodies, the Earth, and the cosmos. Goodbye, Scooter Libby. Hello, stunning new findings about the moons of Jupiter.” Ha ha) is all about the clueless folks who think they rock our world.
After running through the terribly funny issue of the bee rapture, ticking off the points one two three, the article ends like this:
“4. Laugh. Jeff Pettis, a scientist at the federal Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md., likes to make fun of people's wild explanations. He told Garreau that his "favorite theory" is, "The bees are out there creating their own crop circles, working very hard, physically pushing the crops down with their little legs." He told the same story to the AP in May. The joke's getting a little old, but its lighthearted spirit seems just right. Why panic? It's summertime, and the science is easy.”
To which, of course, we can only summon up a heartfelt and sincere fuck you. So much for one Monsanto-head tool.
The Philadelphia inquirer has a better article:
Farmers survive the lost colonies; With hives decimated, sun and trucked-in bees save pollination by Sandy Bauers
Bauers reports on the use of bees in blueberry farming. The blueberry farmers have found hives, and are paying a bigger price. But there is, as always, the problem of stress. If stress is making bees more vulnerable to colony collapse, then the healthy bees that are being used, if possible, even more this summer are going to naturally be vulnerable.
“It's possible the bees are too busy. Many hives are now headed for Maine's blueberries; others will pollinate New Jersey's cranberries and cucumbers and Pennsylvania pumpkins.
"What I'm holding my breath for," vanEngelsdorp [Pennsylvania's acting state apiarist] said, "is when the bees come out of blueberries in Maine and what they look like next November. I think this sickness and collapse manifests itself after stress."
Poor bees. I suggest, to those colonies about to rapture, that you first surround the national journal and sting all the guys there. They deserve it.
Monday, June 18, 2007
the pursuit of unhappiness
This is a good time to stop for a breather in LI’s long march through the mythology, philosophy and history of the dispute between wisdom and happiness and pose the age old question: who the fuck cares?
LI’s notion, from the beginning, is that happiness is both an ambiguous concept and one that can’t, really, operate either to determine and organize our moods (thus making moods like sorrow or boredom into ‘negative’ moods) or to give a purpose to our life. On a social level, the critique of happiness is aimed at happiness triumphant, a socio-economic system that is embodied in the treadmill of production which is bringing us to the edge of environmental collapse. The connection between these two levels is in the figural structure – the ideal roles and persons that symbolize a human life through time. Finally, I am not interested in nostalgia, or in concealing the dialectical formation of these figures within the oppressive conditions of past societies. On the other hand, the figures that have replaced them are not only also connected to the oppressive conditions of the happiness triumphant society, but are drivers of an unsustainable collective system: forever young, forever greedy.
…
So, in the interest of this breather, I went to blog search on Google and looked around for posts on “the necessity of unhappiness”. I turned up … well, nothing. But looking around for the philosophy and psychology of happiness turned up quite a bit. The happiness gurus pullulate in the gated community – the Seligmans advance like some mythical core of smily faced reapers. However, they are merely the guard around a more core group, convinced that capitalism is and should be the end of history. The libertarians, the techno-utopians, that lot. Of the blogs I’ve found on this recently, one of my favorites was Will Wilkerson, who writes for the Cato Institute. Wilkerson’s idea about happiness is a perfect consort to neo-classical economics – which is why I found his review of a review of John F. Schumaker’s In Search of Happiness interesting. The review summarizes Schumaker’s argument like this:
“Schumaker argues that those who conceive of happiness as “subjective well-being” — comprised of the satisfaction of individual desires and the presence of high levels of positive affect (and minimal negative affect) — have failed to recognize that genuine happiness likely consists of more than satisfaction and pleasure. At the very minimum, we must recognize that the quality of a person’s happiness necessarily depends upon the kinds of values which inform a person’s understanding of happiness and thus set the parameters for how one pursues the happy life. On Schumaker’s view, the values of individualist, materialist cultures are far too shallow, amoral, and non-sustainable for their realization to lead to a genuinely happy life. Because of this, Schumaker declares that, “in reality I believe that a heart-felt happiness is beyond the reach of most people who regard consumer culture to be their psychological home”.
To which Wilkerson replies:
“This strikes me as just stupid. Why not simply say that if individidualist, materialist cultures lead to happiness in the “subjective well-being” sense, which they do (much more so than poor, collectivist cultures), then some forms of happiness are shallow, amoral, and unsustainable. The book might be more honestly titled Against What Brainwashed People Like You Think Happiness Is. I really can’t see the intellectual virtue of such a tendentiously moralized conception of happiness. From Pianalto’s review, it seems pretty clear Shumaker believes that material and cultural progress is immoral, and wants us to live more like hunter-gatherers.”
I find Wilkerson’s response revealing, especially in the reduction of bad faith or self deception to brain washing. This reduction says a lot about the libertarian notion of the self. For the libertarian, the self is not just ideally transparent to itself, not just ideally totally informed, not just ideally conflict free – it really is all of these things. Thus it is impervious to bad faith. The self knows more about itself than any outside observer, so the self has no intellectual or emotional issues that the outside observer could ever help it with. In essence, the libertarian self is like one of those car drivers who refuses to ask for directions, for doing so would unbearably injure his self regard.
Actually, though, bad faith is not brain washing. Sartre’s example of bad faith is useful to recall. A woman is having an intellectual discussion with a man, when the man puts his hand on her leg. The woman has a choice of calling attention to the copping of the feel, or ignoring it. But to ignore it, she has to disassociate herself, somehow, from the leg. In bad faith, that is just what she does. In this case, as in other cases of self-deception, the conflict between ideas and desires is solved by means of compromises that don’t look like brain washing, but look like wishful thinking, or selective ignorance, or the triumph of hope over experience. In real life, we recognize that the sincerity of a person’s feelings or ideas is not an accurate indicator of what that person will do or is capable of doing - thus, no matter how sincerely a man may promis a bank officer that he can and will pay off a loan, the bank will make its own judgment about his creditworthiness.
Because the libertarian self is self-sufficient to the point of autism, the libertarian has to come up with an explanation of the fact that, in life, people do help each other, that people sometimes require counseling and aid from another people. The libertarian bias is to emphasize the suspiciousness of anybody actually being altruistic enough and knowledgeable enough to help anybody else. The person external to the self who actually lends advice to the self is obviously, then, expressing his own need to control – his own power lust. This makes sense: if our picture of the completely self sufficient person is correct, the only way that person would allow someone else to suggest or aid him or her is under a kind of mind controlling influence. Thus, there are only two positions – one of complete self control, one of brainwashing.
This strikes me as a very poor interpretation of human interaction, but it does contain one truth. It is true that all selves bring with them their self interest and biases. It is true that no person who takes an interest in telling you about yourself is doing so on a completely disinterested basis. Anybody who has been around people in the helping professions – psychiatrists, social workers, etc. – will recognize how much the need to be boss is part of the core motive set.
For these reasons, Wilkerson’s criticism on the brainwashing front, then, seems to be a wash. A better criticism is that Schumacher, by making the traditional move of defining happiness in terms of higher and lower happinesses - happiness distinguished by its quality – a move made by Mill in Utilitarianism, and one that has roots in the Stoics – is actually moving the definitional goal posts. What we have, here, is conceptual creep – the use of a term to mean more than the term usually means.
What is behind this conceptual creep? The stubborn notion that social welfare is defined by the increase in happiness. The stubborn notion that, in other words, the goal is to avoid all unhappiness.
My view is that this seriously disconnects from the way lives are lived over time. To put it in a too compressed form: to remain true to the spirit of the enlightenment slogan of the pursuit of happiness, we have to turn it into something else: the ideal of a society in which every individual can afford unhappiness. Can afford to be sick. Can afford to grieve. Can afford to be sorrowful. Can afford to be bored. That affordance is about not bottoming out while doing something about the unhappiness, responding to it, experiencing it. Not efficiently negating it.
Which points us to another sociological fact. As societies become more affluent, the pursuit of unhappiness emerges pretty quickly, and not just in fringe cultures. The sullenness of adolescence, the mid-life crises of middle age, the goth music grad student culture, these aren’t accidents. Affluence allows for what you might call different climates of temperament. Unhappiness is the purest response to the very idea that happiness is the ultimate parameter by which to judge one’s life and one’s society. If the enlightenment notion of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ has any value, it is in the idea of the pursuit itself – an object that is desirable because it promises happiness is valued because its pursuit is correlated with unhappiness. The test or contest is encoded in the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself.
Schumacher puts himself in a conceptual and terminological straightjacket by repeating the happiness language, making it easy for Wilkerson to mock him. Far better to admit that as a social and individual ideal, happiness is fucked up.
LI’s notion, from the beginning, is that happiness is both an ambiguous concept and one that can’t, really, operate either to determine and organize our moods (thus making moods like sorrow or boredom into ‘negative’ moods) or to give a purpose to our life. On a social level, the critique of happiness is aimed at happiness triumphant, a socio-economic system that is embodied in the treadmill of production which is bringing us to the edge of environmental collapse. The connection between these two levels is in the figural structure – the ideal roles and persons that symbolize a human life through time. Finally, I am not interested in nostalgia, or in concealing the dialectical formation of these figures within the oppressive conditions of past societies. On the other hand, the figures that have replaced them are not only also connected to the oppressive conditions of the happiness triumphant society, but are drivers of an unsustainable collective system: forever young, forever greedy.
…
So, in the interest of this breather, I went to blog search on Google and looked around for posts on “the necessity of unhappiness”. I turned up … well, nothing. But looking around for the philosophy and psychology of happiness turned up quite a bit. The happiness gurus pullulate in the gated community – the Seligmans advance like some mythical core of smily faced reapers. However, they are merely the guard around a more core group, convinced that capitalism is and should be the end of history. The libertarians, the techno-utopians, that lot. Of the blogs I’ve found on this recently, one of my favorites was Will Wilkerson, who writes for the Cato Institute. Wilkerson’s idea about happiness is a perfect consort to neo-classical economics – which is why I found his review of a review of John F. Schumaker’s In Search of Happiness interesting. The review summarizes Schumaker’s argument like this:
“Schumaker argues that those who conceive of happiness as “subjective well-being” — comprised of the satisfaction of individual desires and the presence of high levels of positive affect (and minimal negative affect) — have failed to recognize that genuine happiness likely consists of more than satisfaction and pleasure. At the very minimum, we must recognize that the quality of a person’s happiness necessarily depends upon the kinds of values which inform a person’s understanding of happiness and thus set the parameters for how one pursues the happy life. On Schumaker’s view, the values of individualist, materialist cultures are far too shallow, amoral, and non-sustainable for their realization to lead to a genuinely happy life. Because of this, Schumaker declares that, “in reality I believe that a heart-felt happiness is beyond the reach of most people who regard consumer culture to be their psychological home”.
To which Wilkerson replies:
“This strikes me as just stupid. Why not simply say that if individidualist, materialist cultures lead to happiness in the “subjective well-being” sense, which they do (much more so than poor, collectivist cultures), then some forms of happiness are shallow, amoral, and unsustainable. The book might be more honestly titled Against What Brainwashed People Like You Think Happiness Is. I really can’t see the intellectual virtue of such a tendentiously moralized conception of happiness. From Pianalto’s review, it seems pretty clear Shumaker believes that material and cultural progress is immoral, and wants us to live more like hunter-gatherers.”
I find Wilkerson’s response revealing, especially in the reduction of bad faith or self deception to brain washing. This reduction says a lot about the libertarian notion of the self. For the libertarian, the self is not just ideally transparent to itself, not just ideally totally informed, not just ideally conflict free – it really is all of these things. Thus it is impervious to bad faith. The self knows more about itself than any outside observer, so the self has no intellectual or emotional issues that the outside observer could ever help it with. In essence, the libertarian self is like one of those car drivers who refuses to ask for directions, for doing so would unbearably injure his self regard.
Actually, though, bad faith is not brain washing. Sartre’s example of bad faith is useful to recall. A woman is having an intellectual discussion with a man, when the man puts his hand on her leg. The woman has a choice of calling attention to the copping of the feel, or ignoring it. But to ignore it, she has to disassociate herself, somehow, from the leg. In bad faith, that is just what she does. In this case, as in other cases of self-deception, the conflict between ideas and desires is solved by means of compromises that don’t look like brain washing, but look like wishful thinking, or selective ignorance, or the triumph of hope over experience. In real life, we recognize that the sincerity of a person’s feelings or ideas is not an accurate indicator of what that person will do or is capable of doing - thus, no matter how sincerely a man may promis a bank officer that he can and will pay off a loan, the bank will make its own judgment about his creditworthiness.
Because the libertarian self is self-sufficient to the point of autism, the libertarian has to come up with an explanation of the fact that, in life, people do help each other, that people sometimes require counseling and aid from another people. The libertarian bias is to emphasize the suspiciousness of anybody actually being altruistic enough and knowledgeable enough to help anybody else. The person external to the self who actually lends advice to the self is obviously, then, expressing his own need to control – his own power lust. This makes sense: if our picture of the completely self sufficient person is correct, the only way that person would allow someone else to suggest or aid him or her is under a kind of mind controlling influence. Thus, there are only two positions – one of complete self control, one of brainwashing.
This strikes me as a very poor interpretation of human interaction, but it does contain one truth. It is true that all selves bring with them their self interest and biases. It is true that no person who takes an interest in telling you about yourself is doing so on a completely disinterested basis. Anybody who has been around people in the helping professions – psychiatrists, social workers, etc. – will recognize how much the need to be boss is part of the core motive set.
For these reasons, Wilkerson’s criticism on the brainwashing front, then, seems to be a wash. A better criticism is that Schumacher, by making the traditional move of defining happiness in terms of higher and lower happinesses - happiness distinguished by its quality – a move made by Mill in Utilitarianism, and one that has roots in the Stoics – is actually moving the definitional goal posts. What we have, here, is conceptual creep – the use of a term to mean more than the term usually means.
What is behind this conceptual creep? The stubborn notion that social welfare is defined by the increase in happiness. The stubborn notion that, in other words, the goal is to avoid all unhappiness.
My view is that this seriously disconnects from the way lives are lived over time. To put it in a too compressed form: to remain true to the spirit of the enlightenment slogan of the pursuit of happiness, we have to turn it into something else: the ideal of a society in which every individual can afford unhappiness. Can afford to be sick. Can afford to grieve. Can afford to be sorrowful. Can afford to be bored. That affordance is about not bottoming out while doing something about the unhappiness, responding to it, experiencing it. Not efficiently negating it.
Which points us to another sociological fact. As societies become more affluent, the pursuit of unhappiness emerges pretty quickly, and not just in fringe cultures. The sullenness of adolescence, the mid-life crises of middle age, the goth music grad student culture, these aren’t accidents. Affluence allows for what you might call different climates of temperament. Unhappiness is the purest response to the very idea that happiness is the ultimate parameter by which to judge one’s life and one’s society. If the enlightenment notion of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ has any value, it is in the idea of the pursuit itself – an object that is desirable because it promises happiness is valued because its pursuit is correlated with unhappiness. The test or contest is encoded in the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself.
Schumacher puts himself in a conceptual and terminological straightjacket by repeating the happiness language, making it easy for Wilkerson to mock him. Far better to admit that as a social and individual ideal, happiness is fucked up.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
pain: a class issue
"He's gonna step on you again..."
Tina Rosenberg is an uneven writer – she wrote an excellent first book, about violence in Latin America, but since then her record is spotty – she wrote a very goofy piece on DDT a few years ago that swallowed every libertarian canard ever manufactured – as is well known, libertarian canards can be dangerous to your health. However, she is still hopping down the chemico-neural trail, and the result this time is better.
LI is an old fan of recreational percocet use, although now that we exist in the economic basement, we are content to groove on the lows procured from almost any storebought infusion of confusion. This here American culture is always coming up with more and more drugs to wipe out experience (the experience of wrinkles and impotence, for instance, which seem to truly bug your average householder), while at the same time we get bristly about pain pills – all of which points to what is at the root of the American soul: alcoholism. The only legitimate stupors are beer, wine, whisky or religion, and all else is hocus pocus that has to be justified by shrieks and years of organic damage.
Of course, given the inequality in the country, LI needs to modify this: the killing of pain, like anything else, is distributed in this country in a pattern that follows money. For the poorest, there are doctors like the central one in Rosenberg’s article, Ronald McIver - who is “a doctor who for years treated patients suffering from chronic pain. At the Pain Therapy Center, his small storefront office not far from Main Street in Greenwood, S.C., he cracked backs, gave trigger-point injections and put patients through physical therapy. He administered ultrasound and gravity-inversion therapy and devised exercise regimens. And he wrote prescriptions for high doses of opioid drugs like OxyContin.
McIver was a particularly aggressive pain doctor. Pain can be measured only by how patients say they feel: on a scale from 0 to 10, a report of 0 signifies the absence of pain; 10 is unbearable pain. Many pain doctors will try to reduce a patient’s pain to the level of 5. McIver tried for a 2. He prescribed more, and sooner, than most doctors.”
Eventually, playing near the edge, he fell in:
Caste crime is severely punished in this land of jails. If McCiver had been treating a higher caste of patients, he would, of course, still be practicing like a pain djinn.
There is one law for high-functioning executives and another law for you, reader.
As a drunk among nations, America is inclined, when sober and headachey, to resolve on radical cures. It’s best cure is always prohibition. Its an ace resolve, all the better because – of course – it is impossible to implement. Thus it can continue the cycle of sin and guilt, which is the whole point:
“Several states are now preparing new opioid-dosing guidelines that may inadvertently worsen undertreatment. This year, the state of Washington advised nonspecialist doctors that daily opioid doses should not exceed the equivalent of 120 milligrams of oral morphine daily — for oxycodone or OxyContin, that’s just 80 milligrams per day — without the patient’s also consulting a pain specialist. Along with the guidelines, officials published a statewide directory of such specialists. It contains 12 names. “There are just not enough pain specialists,” says Scott M. Fishman, chief of pain medicine at the University of California at Davis and a past president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine. And the guidelines may keep nonspecialists from prescribing higher doses. “Many doctors will assume that if the state of Washington suggests this level of care, then it is unacceptable to proceed otherwise,” Fishman says.”
"He'll stamp out your fire/he can change your desire/don't you know he can make you forget you're the man"
Tina Rosenberg is an uneven writer – she wrote an excellent first book, about violence in Latin America, but since then her record is spotty – she wrote a very goofy piece on DDT a few years ago that swallowed every libertarian canard ever manufactured – as is well known, libertarian canards can be dangerous to your health. However, she is still hopping down the chemico-neural trail, and the result this time is better.
LI is an old fan of recreational percocet use, although now that we exist in the economic basement, we are content to groove on the lows procured from almost any storebought infusion of confusion. This here American culture is always coming up with more and more drugs to wipe out experience (the experience of wrinkles and impotence, for instance, which seem to truly bug your average householder), while at the same time we get bristly about pain pills – all of which points to what is at the root of the American soul: alcoholism. The only legitimate stupors are beer, wine, whisky or religion, and all else is hocus pocus that has to be justified by shrieks and years of organic damage.
Of course, given the inequality in the country, LI needs to modify this: the killing of pain, like anything else, is distributed in this country in a pattern that follows money. For the poorest, there are doctors like the central one in Rosenberg’s article, Ronald McIver - who is “a doctor who for years treated patients suffering from chronic pain. At the Pain Therapy Center, his small storefront office not far from Main Street in Greenwood, S.C., he cracked backs, gave trigger-point injections and put patients through physical therapy. He administered ultrasound and gravity-inversion therapy and devised exercise regimens. And he wrote prescriptions for high doses of opioid drugs like OxyContin.
McIver was a particularly aggressive pain doctor. Pain can be measured only by how patients say they feel: on a scale from 0 to 10, a report of 0 signifies the absence of pain; 10 is unbearable pain. Many pain doctors will try to reduce a patient’s pain to the level of 5. McIver tried for a 2. He prescribed more, and sooner, than most doctors.”
Eventually, playing near the edge, he fell in:
Some of his patients sold their pills. Some abused them. One man, Larry Shealy, died with high doses of opioids that McIver had prescribed him in his bloodstream. In April 2005, McIver was convicted in federal court of one count of conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and eight counts of distribution. (He was also acquitted of six counts of distribution.) The jury also found that Shealy was killed by the drugs McIver prescribed. McIver is serving concurrent sentences of 20 years for distribution and 30 years for dispensing drugs that resulted in Shealy’s death. His appeals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and the Supreme Court were rejected.
Caste crime is severely punished in this land of jails. If McCiver had been treating a higher caste of patients, he would, of course, still be practicing like a pain djinn.
“But with careful treatment, many patients whose opioid levels are increased gradually can function well on high doses for years. “Dose alone says nothing about proper medical practice,” Portenoy [chairman of pain medicine and palliative care at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York] says. “Very few patients require doses that exceed even 200 milligrams of OxyContin on a daily basis. Having said this, pain specialists are very familiar with a subpopulation of patients who require higher doses to gain effect. I myself have several patients who take more than 1,000 milligrams of OxyContin or its equivalent every day. One is a high-functioning executive who is pain-free most of the time, and the others have a level of pain control that allows a reasonable quality of life.”
There is one law for high-functioning executives and another law for you, reader.
As a drunk among nations, America is inclined, when sober and headachey, to resolve on radical cures. It’s best cure is always prohibition. Its an ace resolve, all the better because – of course – it is impossible to implement. Thus it can continue the cycle of sin and guilt, which is the whole point:
“Several states are now preparing new opioid-dosing guidelines that may inadvertently worsen undertreatment. This year, the state of Washington advised nonspecialist doctors that daily opioid doses should not exceed the equivalent of 120 milligrams of oral morphine daily — for oxycodone or OxyContin, that’s just 80 milligrams per day — without the patient’s also consulting a pain specialist. Along with the guidelines, officials published a statewide directory of such specialists. It contains 12 names. “There are just not enough pain specialists,” says Scott M. Fishman, chief of pain medicine at the University of California at Davis and a past president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine. And the guidelines may keep nonspecialists from prescribing higher doses. “Many doctors will assume that if the state of Washington suggests this level of care, then it is unacceptable to proceed otherwise,” Fishman says.”
"He'll stamp out your fire/he can change your desire/don't you know he can make you forget you're the man"
Saturday, June 16, 2007
you know the routine...
That duplicity dogs the android is the puzzle around which La Mettrie’s Essay on Happiness winds itself, looking for an entrance, another metaphysician double crossed by metaphysics. As soon as they’ve dispensed with it and gotten down to hard reduction, the muses come back as curses, the slave emerges as a whole different zombie in the way La Mettrie and Hume set it up: the passions are unexpectedly discovered to be the masters, the body is one of those legendary slave ships where the slaves have taken over, and reason is demoted, begins its difficult career as an accompaniest, Kant’s transcendental caspar the friendly ghost, the x trailing a spectral glory behind the man machine as he goes merrily on his way to the mass grave and other more odorless triumphs. Still, even giving up the whole of the man machine to pleasure, folly’s great victory, doesn’t dispel the eeriness of pleasure itself, even if its climactic, the orgasm, is hidden within a literature of the obscene that adds another layer to the perplexing problem of feeling, which is another product of happiness triumphant, free from all the dodges now, the tooth fairy in the positional marketplace. And the problem of how the sage, by his clever engineering, managed to produce a theory that excluded sages, thus making a fool of himself forever after, sinks into a half remembered bed time story for dolts suffering the midlife crisis pangs.
Well, I’m going to make a leap, here, to William Burroughs. Burroughs because the man boldly tried to see the market economy in terms, primarily, of addiction, of which the secondary aspect is exchange. Which is in back of the routine, as he called them – not just riffs, but also the whole schtick of a life, doled out in the traps it makes for itself out of its rounds, its segments each being routines themselves.
The most famous of the routines is in Naked Lunch, and begins with a story from the infamous Doctor Benway:
“I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. "This ass talk had a sort of gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. "This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called 'The Better 'Ole' that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, 'Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?' "'Nah! I had to go relieve myself.' "After a while the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.”
In time, the asshole and the man came to be enemies, and a tug of war ensued to see who would be master:
"Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy incurving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: 'It's you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don't need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.' "After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly…”
Burroughs called the pieces out of which he made Naked Lunch routines. and he’d write them in letters to his friends. Where did routine come from? It is a burlesque/vaudeville word. The OED’s first citation for it as a stage term is from 1926, but that seems pretty late. Searching around in Google Books, I came upon Brett Page’s 1915 Writing for Vaudeville. Page footnotes the term routine, as though his readers may not have heard of it:
Routine – the entire monologue; but more often used to suggest its arrangement and construction. A monologue with its gags and points arranged in a certain order is one routine; a different routine is used when the gags or points are arranged in a different order. Thus routine means arrangement. The word is also used to describe the arrangement of other stage offerings – for instance, a dance: the same steps arranged in a different order make a new “dance routine”.
Page’s suggestion for writing the gags foreshadows Burroughs’ cut up method:
“Have as many cards or slips of paper as you have points or gags. Write only one point or gag on one card or slip of paper. On the first card write “Introduction,” and always keep that card first in your hand. Then take up a card and read the point or gag on it as following the introduction, the second car as the second point or gag, and so on until you have arranged your monologue in an effective routine.”
“Then try another arrangement…”
Well, I’m going to make a leap, here, to William Burroughs. Burroughs because the man boldly tried to see the market economy in terms, primarily, of addiction, of which the secondary aspect is exchange. Which is in back of the routine, as he called them – not just riffs, but also the whole schtick of a life, doled out in the traps it makes for itself out of its rounds, its segments each being routines themselves.
The most famous of the routines is in Naked Lunch, and begins with a story from the infamous Doctor Benway:
“I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. "This ass talk had a sort of gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. "This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called 'The Better 'Ole' that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, 'Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?' "'Nah! I had to go relieve myself.' "After a while the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.”
In time, the asshole and the man came to be enemies, and a tug of war ensued to see who would be master:
"Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy incurving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: 'It's you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don't need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.' "After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly…”
Burroughs called the pieces out of which he made Naked Lunch routines. and he’d write them in letters to his friends. Where did routine come from? It is a burlesque/vaudeville word. The OED’s first citation for it as a stage term is from 1926, but that seems pretty late. Searching around in Google Books, I came upon Brett Page’s 1915 Writing for Vaudeville. Page footnotes the term routine, as though his readers may not have heard of it:
Routine – the entire monologue; but more often used to suggest its arrangement and construction. A monologue with its gags and points arranged in a certain order is one routine; a different routine is used when the gags or points are arranged in a different order. Thus routine means arrangement. The word is also used to describe the arrangement of other stage offerings – for instance, a dance: the same steps arranged in a different order make a new “dance routine”.
Page’s suggestion for writing the gags foreshadows Burroughs’ cut up method:
“Have as many cards or slips of paper as you have points or gags. Write only one point or gag on one card or slip of paper. On the first card write “Introduction,” and always keep that card first in your hand. Then take up a card and read the point or gag on it as following the introduction, the second car as the second point or gag, and so on until you have arranged your monologue in an effective routine.”
“Then try another arrangement…”
Friday, June 15, 2007
do androids dream of electric orgasms
[Rapheal Dubois] observes that after having been decapitated, a cricket performs induced reflex and spasmodic movement both better and for a longer time than before. Referring to the work of Golz and H. Busquet (if one removes a frog’s superior centers, it immediately assumes the coital position normally adopted only in the spring), he wonders whtehr the mantis’s goal in beheading the male before mating might not be to obtain a better and longer performance of the spasmodic coital movements, through the removal of the brain’s inhibitory centers. In the final analysis, it would hence be the pleasure principle that compels the female insect to murder her lover – whose body she beings to ingest, furthermore, in the course of lovemaking itself.
These habits are so well-designed to disturb human beings that scientist for oce, to their credit, have abandoned their professional dryness. For example, in his recent monograph, La Vie de la mante religieuse, Leon Binet, professor of physiology at the Faculte de Medecine in Paris, seems visibly affected by them. IN any event, it is quite surprising to seem him briefly foreswear his scientific detachment to call the female a kind of ‘murderous mistress’… I myself shall take this revealing lapse as the basis for interpreting Binet’s conclusion: ‘This insect really seems to be a machine with highly advanced parts, which operate automatically. Indeed, it strikes me that likening the mantis to an automaton (to a female android, given the latter’s anthropomorphis) reflects the same emotional theme, if (as I have every reason to believe) the notion of an artificial, mechanical, inanimate and unconscious machine-woman – incommensurate with man and all other creatures – does stem in some way from a specific view of the relations between love and death and, in particular, from an ambivalent premonition of encountering one within the other.” – Roger Caillois, The praying mantis.
When Fellini made a film of Casanova, a figure he detested, he chose Donald Sutherland to play the lead because, as he described him to a journalist, he saw him as “a big sperm-full waxwork with the eyes of a masturbator.” LI implores the gods to just once have someone give me a recommendation with that phrase! Obviously, Casanova was not to Fellini’s taste – he in fact found him boring and infuriating. However, as everyone who has seen the film knows, there is one tender scene: when Casanova ‘seduces’ a mechanical doll. The scene is here, on the ever extraordinary YouTube.
I am mentioning these things to bring us back to another side of La Mettrie’s Epicureanism: the reduction of man to a machine, which La Mettrie derives from Descartes, using the same models as Descartes – who referenced automatons. La Mettrie’s age was also that of Vaucanson, the extraordinary clockwork figure-maker. La Mettrie references him in the Man-Machine: “[Man] is to the ape, the most intelligent of animals, as Huyghen’s planetary pendulum is to the Julien-le-Roi clock. If we need more instruments, more wheels, more clockworks for marking the movement of the planets than for marking the hours or repeating them; if Vaucanson needed more art in order to make his flutist than his duck, he would have to employ even more to make a speaker, a machine which can no longer be regarded as impossible, especially in the hands of a new Prometheus… If I am not mistaken, the human body is a clock, but an immense one …”
Combining this thesis with the thesis that happiness really can be separated from the intellect – that, as La Mettrie puts in in On Happiness, reflection is almost like remorse – one has to ask what kind of thing pleasure is. Orgasm, which is La Mettrie’s favored model of pleasure, might be the result of the clockwork – but if the clockwork can lead up to it, how can it feel it? Feeling, La Mettrie had proposed in The Man-Machine, might be something like electricity – a vibration of some kind. But in On Happiness, the human clockwork seems to have an inside and an outside which are – how to put this – distinguished by no external wall, but by a metaphysical limit, a line running through the mechanism that complicates the mechanical matter, and thus complicates pleasure itself:
“As a desired object is painted better in its absence than present - because reality offers limits to the imagination that it doesn’t know itself once it is abandoned to itself, similarly pictures are more vivid when one sleeps than when one is awake. Nothing then distracts the soul which, all thrown into the internal tumult of the senses, tastes the pleasures that penetrate it better, and more at length. Reciprocally, it is also more alarmed and frightened by specters which are formed, at night, in the brain, and which are never so scary when one is awake, because the objects of the outside soon dissipate them: black dreams, to which are subject those who, during the day, are accustomed to entertaining none but sad, lugubrious or sinister ideas, instead of chasing them off, as much as is possible.”
These thoughts cast some long shadows: that the purest pleasure might be felt within the doll when the doll is undistracted - this mannequin narcissism – directs us to a technostructure of isolated thrills, screen by screen, that appears in the war culture societies.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
dog bites man - U.S. fucks over Rocky Flats workers
In a touching story that will surely set them laughing in the executive suites at Bechtel and Halliburton and other places to which Uncle Sam routinely shunts money for shoddy and overcharged work, Uncle Sam decided, once again, to fuck the low use population that worked at the Rocky Flats plant, a radiation death trap that was part of the radiation death network upon which the benign hegemony of the world’s greatest democracy used to base its mad, serial killer threat to annihilate this planet. Is this sweet or what? Now, take another big heaping spoonful of shit, please. Come on, baby, open your mouth larger:
The law was set up in the sweetest possible way. First, douse it in a seemingly humanitarian purpose: those workers at the plant whose employment coincided with periods in which the radiation records are non-existent get a pass. This is a small number of workers, and as their bones crumble and the white blood cell counts mount, the government is seemingly doing right by paying for their deaths. But – as they taught us in the Southern Baptist Church in my youth – there is nothing like making good by doing good. In this case, the burden is then put on those who worked at the plant when there was a grossly deficient and even fraudulent radiation record being kept, so that as this part of the low use population goes through the procedures of trying to wring some cure or therapy out of our medical system, the government that so kindly killed them gets to check and recheck their records and qualifications for tasting the littlest bit of recompense. You can’t give low use people money, after all – who knows what they would spend it on!
Oh, a little dribbles on your chin, there! Uncle sam can’t have that. Eat all his wastes, every little bit. Meanwhile, high enders too are asking Uncle for money. Remember this hit from 2004, the year America affirmed its satisfaction in its paragon and son, George Bush?
Understandably, some feared that Uncle Sam was not going to stand for this gang rape of taxpayers – and that would send an anti-free enterprise message around the world. If even the government of George Bush hurt the meritocrats who run some of our great corporations, CEO heros, who would be next! But those fears were put aside in 2006:
Hopefully, this clears up the vexed question of who counts in America: working class scum, or important investors who are giving their all in a time of peril.
Open wide!
“LAKEWOOD, Colo., June 12— A federal advisory panel recommended Tuesday that thousands of former workers at a nuclear weapons plant be denied immediate government compensation for illnesses that they say result from years of radiation exposure there.
The recommendation is a significant setback for a large number of people once employed as plutonium workers at the plant, Rocky Flats, 16 miles northwest of Denver. Their union, the United Steelworkers of America, had petitioned the Department of Health and Human Services to allow more than 3,000 of them to bypass a complex federal evaluation and compensation process established by Congress in 2000.”
The law was set up in the sweetest possible way. First, douse it in a seemingly humanitarian purpose: those workers at the plant whose employment coincided with periods in which the radiation records are non-existent get a pass. This is a small number of workers, and as their bones crumble and the white blood cell counts mount, the government is seemingly doing right by paying for their deaths. But – as they taught us in the Southern Baptist Church in my youth – there is nothing like making good by doing good. In this case, the burden is then put on those who worked at the plant when there was a grossly deficient and even fraudulent radiation record being kept, so that as this part of the low use population goes through the procedures of trying to wring some cure or therapy out of our medical system, the government that so kindly killed them gets to check and recheck their records and qualifications for tasting the littlest bit of recompense. You can’t give low use people money, after all – who knows what they would spend it on!
“In that time-consuming process, sick workers from Rocky Flats and other American nuclear facilities may apply for $150,000 in compensation, plus medical benefits, if there is evidence that they suffer from any of 22 kinds of cancer linked to radiation. A worker must first file a claim with the Labor Department, a step that brings a lengthy investigation in which scientists from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, through records, research and interviews, determine eligibility by establishing the radiation dose incurred by the worker. If the scientists are unable to determine the dose, the worker may file for “special exposure cohort” status.
It was this status that was sought by the former Rocky Flats workers. But after more than two years of hearings and debate, the panel — the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — decided on a vote of 6 to 4 Tuesday that the occupational safety scientists could accurately determine dose exposure for almost all of the plant’s former workers.”
Oh, a little dribbles on your chin, there! Uncle sam can’t have that. Eat all his wastes, every little bit. Meanwhile, high enders too are asking Uncle for money. Remember this hit from 2004, the year America affirmed its satisfaction in its paragon and son, George Bush?
Auditors from the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General (CPA IG) have repeatedly and consistently criticized multiple aspects of Halliburton's activities in Iraq. In nine different reports, these government auditors have found widespread, systemic problems with almost every aspect of Halliburton's work in Iraq, from cost estimation and billing systems to cost control and subcontract management.
Key findings from these audits include the following:
· In December 2003, a DCAA draft audit reported that Halliburton overcharged the Defense Department by $61 million to import gasoline into Iraq from Kuwait through September 30, 2003. (4)
· On December 31, 2003, a DCAA "Flash Report" audit found "significant" and "systemic" deficiencies in the way Halliburton estimates and validates costs. According to the DCAA audit, Halliburton repeatedly violated the Federal Acquisition Regulation and submitted a $2.7 billion proposal that "did not contain current, accurate, and complete data regarding subcontract costs." (5)
· On January 13, 2004, DCAA concluded that Halliburton's deficiencies "bring into question [Halliburton's] ability to consistently produce well-supported proposals that are acceptable as a basis for negotiation of fair and reasonable prices," and it urged the Corps of Engineers to "contact us to ascertain the status of [Halliburton's] estimating system prior to entering into future negotiations." (6)
· In a May 13, 2004, audit, DCAA reported "several deficiencies" in Halliburton's billing system that resulted in billings to the government that "are not prepared in accordance with applicable laws and regulations and contract terms." DCAA also found "system deficiencies resulting in material invoicing misstatements that are not prevented, detected and/ or corrected in a timely manner." The report emphasized Halliburton's inadequate controls over subcontract billings. The auditors "identified inadequate or nonexistent policies and procedures for notifying the government of potential significant subcontract problems that impact delivery, quality, and price" and determined that Halliburton "does not monitor the ongoing physical progress of subcontracts or the related costs and billings." (7)
· On June 25, 2004, the CPA IG found that, as a result of poor oversight, Halliburton charged U. S. taxpayers for unauthorized and unnecessary expenses at the Kuwait Hilton Hotel. According to the IG, the overcharges would have amounted to $3.6 million per year. (8)
· A July 26, 2004, CPA IG audit report found that Halliburton "did not effectively manage government property" and that the company's property records "were not sufficiently accurate or available to properly account for CPA property items." The IG "projected that property valued at more than $18.6 million was not accurately accounted for or was missing." (9)
· In July 2004, GAO found ineffective planning, inadequate cost control, and insufficient training of contract management officials under LOGCAP in Iraq. GAO reported that, when Halliburton acted as a middleman for the operation of dining halls, costs were over 40% higher. (10)
· In an August 16, 2004, memorandum, DCAA "identified significant unsupported costs" submitted by KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary, and found "numerous, systemic issues . . . with KBR's estimates." According to DCAA, "while contingency issues may have had an impact during the earlier stages of the procurements, clearly, the contractor should have adequate supporting data by now." When DCAA examined seven LOGCAP task orders with a combined proposed value of $4.33 billion, auditors identified unsupported costs totaling $1.82 billion. (11)
· On November 23, 2004, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (formerly the CPA IG) examined a $569 million LOGCAP task order and found that Halliburton "did not provide . . . sufficiently detailed cost data to evaluate overall project costs or to determine whether specific costs for services performed were reasonable." The IG concluded that the Army "did not receive sufficient or reliable cost information to effectively manage" the task order. (12) Multiple criminal investigations of Halliburton's Iraq contracts are also ongoing. The Justice Department is investigating Halliburton's admission that two of its employees received up to $6.3 million in kickbacks to steer LOGCAP subcontracts to a Kuwaiti contractor. (13) The Defense Department Inspector General, the FBI, and the Justice Department are investigating allegations of fraud and overcharging for gasoline under the RIO contract. (14)
Understandably, some feared that Uncle Sam was not going to stand for this gang rape of taxpayers – and that would send an anti-free enterprise message around the world. If even the government of George Bush hurt the meritocrats who run some of our great corporations, CEO heros, who would be next! But those fears were put aside in 2006:
“Army to Pay Halliburton Unit Most Costs Disputed by Audit
By James Glanz
The New York Times
Monday 27 February 2006
The Army has decided to reimburse a Halliburton subsidiary for nearly all of its disputed costs on a $2.41 billion no-bid contract to deliver fuel and repair oil equipment in Iraq, even though the Pentagon's own auditors had identified more than $250 million in charges as potentially excessive or unjustified.
The Army said in response to questions on Friday that questionable business practices by the subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, had in some cases driven up the company's costs. But in the haste and peril of war, it had largely done as well as could be expected, the Army said, and aside from a few penalties, the government was compelled to reimburse the company for its costs.”
Hopefully, this clears up the vexed question of who counts in America: working class scum, or important investors who are giving their all in a time of peril.
Open wide!
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
the divorce of wisdom and happiness II
In my last post on this subject, we ended with the knots and nets of necessity: once you grant that the path of the wise man and the path of the fool are separate paths, you have granted the central condition for the hegemony of wisdom over pleasure – the ascetic ideology. That ideology is not annulled by asserting the hegemony of pleasure over wisdom, however – such is the primitive sense of epicurean materialism, as Lukacs understands it - since wisdom and pleasure, the wise man and the fool, are still kept at a distance from one another. However, there is a moment in that reversal that does not inevitably lead to embourgeoisement, or to the reign of happiness triumphant, the horror that currently bestrides our globe. Or at least that has been my hypothesis – embodied in a life in which, as hypotheses go, it has been rudely and roundly confuted by circumstances. Nevertheless, LI is a stubborn cunt and is going to hold to our glimmers and glimpses into the possibility that the path of the wise and the path of the foolish is the same path, but turns into a different path depending on whether you go forward on it or backwards.
…
So much for the mystagogic intro. Now, let’s get back to La Mettrie, the mythical monster. He was never admitted to the company of the philosophes – for Voltaire, who knew him, he was a fool. Diderot, who was afraid of the proximity of La Mettrie’s thought to his own, also classified him as a buffoon. And who but a buffoon would mistake an eagle for a pheasant, wolf it down, and consequently die of it? Yet I suspect that La Mettrie can’t be laid aside quite like that. He was rediscovered, in the late nineteenth century, for his thorough working out of the Man-machine idea, suggested by Descartes. And this makes him easy to put in a slot for intellectual history. But he does have readers, particularly in Germany who claim a higher status for him, and in particular like to say that the Essay on Happiness is his masterpiece. It certainly seems to prefigure Nietzsche, in tone as well as in certain of its thoughts. This, for instance, could easily fit into The Dawn:
“To live tranquilly, without ambition, without desire. To use our wealth, and not to enjoy it; to conserve it without worries, to lose it without regret, to govern it, in place of being the slave of it; to not be troubled nor moved by any passion, or rather not to have any; to be content in misery, as in opulence: in pain, as in pleasure… to disdain pleasure and voluptuousness; to consent to having pleasure as one is rich, without being too seduced by its agreeableness; to disdain live itself: at last, to arrive at virtue by the knowledge of truth, such is the theme that forms the sovereign good of Seneca and the stoics in general, and the perfect beatitude which follows from it.
How much this makes us Anti-stoic! Those philosophers are severe, sad, hard; we are soft, gay, compliant. All soul, they make an abstraction of their bodies; all body, we make an abstraction of our soul. They show themselves inaccessible to pleasure or to pain, we make it our glory to feel one and the other. Killing themselves to be sublime, they elevate themselves above all events, and don’t believe themselves to be men until they have ceased to be men. Ourselves, we do not have control over what governs us; we don’t command our sensations; avowing their empire and our slavery, we try to make ourselves agreeable, persuaded that this is the seat of the happiness of life: and, finally, we believe ourselves the happier the more we are human, or more worthy of being human.”
That beginning is obviously not going to go down well with the philosophes crowd, who inherited a clinging to the Stoics as a sort of secular religion. With La Mettrie, they were confronted with the crumbling of a hard won hedonism into the bottomless gulf of nothingness. La Mettrie starts several thoughts, in the essay on happiness, that bring us into contact with the Underground Man – whose teethgrinding is, in a sense, the height of hedonism. But the Underground Man’s embrace of the pleasure of pain is, from La Mettrie’s standpoint, simply the refusal to accept our essential slavery – a term that La Mettrie, either following Hume or independently of Hume, takes to describe the relation of reason to passion:
“We, we do not have the disposition of what governs us; we do not command our sensations; avowing their empire and our slavery, let’s try to render ourselves agreeable, persuaded that this is where the summit of happiness lies.”
Having an idea that the issues at play here derive from a sacramental economy that is falling prey to another economy, the grand transformation that is turning every sacrifice into a commodity, it is interesting that the old feudal notion slave emerges as though in a dumbshow to hint, in gestures, that the liberation of the philosophes, the “delices” of civilization, were actually in contradiction with their production – thus attacking the philosophe norm from a different direction than Rousseau. But the logic that La Mettrie follows is ultimately not that much of a departure from that pronounced in the Katha-Upanishad. La Mettrie, in the essay on happiness, takes the stoic theme that the truest happiness accrues to he who tires to find the truth and shows that it isn’t so. Happiness is quite independent from an intellectual search. Those who have no intellect to speak of can well be happy. And it is not possible to deny that they have some mysterious different and lower type of happiness, since that implies what remains to be proven – that the intellectual search for truth is the real, the essential form of happiness.
Rather, as La Mettrie points out, it seems to be the senses that give us pleasure, and pleasure that gives us happiness. Thus, that we receive pleasure from the senses should not shame us – we don’t need the stoic discipline. Quite the contrary. What we need is to lose our remorse for the pleasure of the senses.
“Since remorse is a vain remedy for our troubles, troubling even the clearest water without clarifying the most troubled, destroy it. … We are right to conclude that if those joys that are rooted in nature and reason are crimes, the happiness of man is to be a criminal.”
Writing things like this has made some wonder, of course, how much La Mettrie de Sade read.
One of the paradoxes of La Mettrie’s position is that he pretty much strips away the motivation for intellectual behavior. Which leaves us with two choices: either intellectual behavior is strange – expressing, as with Lucretius, the clinamen – or it isn’t what it seems. As the slave of the sensations, the intellect is, at least, distinct from the sensations. But the possibility looms that it isn’t even that – the slave fades to shadow.
The frontline is in D.C., and the casualties are carted off to less visible think tanks
Alas, I have no time today. But there is one link LI must urge on our readers. It is this story by Joshua Halland and Raed Jarrar, entitled Bush says “We’ll be in Iraq for 50 Years, Reporters don’t bother to ask Iraqis to Comment.” I had trouble reading it myself – lately, as I read things that make me unbearably angry, my neck starts to stiffen up. But I trooper on! Anyway, it has the goods on the Washington Post’s Ann Scott Tyson – although she only represents the Beltway Court Society in its Conventional Wisdom mode. Still. She writes a story suggesting that the U.S. is considering staying in Iraq for the next fifty years, South Korea style. She quotes a general, a GOP hack, a Bushie, a token Dem. So this happens:
When we reached the Washington Post's Ann Scott Tyson and asked her why there were no Iraqi voices in her story, she was somewhat taken aback by the question. She hadn't considered getting the views of any Iraqis, "because the story was focused on a shift in the administration's thinking here in Washington. It wasn't really focused on Iraqis, or their reaction." She later added: "There's a limited number of viewpoints you can include." Tyson explained that it wasn't always possible to reach people in Iraq for a quote before deadline. It's a valid point, except that several of the articles we reviewed were analyses written several days after talk of the Korea model started kicking around D.C. When we asked if that were true in this case, she said it wasn't -- it was primarily because the story wasn't "taking place in Iraq."
Ah, be still my swollen neck! The Iraq war is, after all, not really taking place in Iraq. This is the vampire’s most secret thought, his unconscious speaking.
When we reached the Washington Post's Ann Scott Tyson and asked her why there were no Iraqi voices in her story, she was somewhat taken aback by the question. She hadn't considered getting the views of any Iraqis, "because the story was focused on a shift in the administration's thinking here in Washington. It wasn't really focused on Iraqis, or their reaction." She later added: "There's a limited number of viewpoints you can include." Tyson explained that it wasn't always possible to reach people in Iraq for a quote before deadline. It's a valid point, except that several of the articles we reviewed were analyses written several days after talk of the Korea model started kicking around D.C. When we asked if that were true in this case, she said it wasn't -- it was primarily because the story wasn't "taking place in Iraq."
Ah, be still my swollen neck! The Iraq war is, after all, not really taking place in Iraq. This is the vampire’s most secret thought, his unconscious speaking.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
the divorce of wisdom and pleasure I
Li woke up with that Manu Chao song stuck in our head: me gustas tu. Who knows where the hell that came from? Perhaps because I heard on the radio last week they were coming to Austin…
But me gusta marijuana/ me gustas tu it seems wholly appropriate to today’s post, another in my interminable backasswards crawl towards my current obsession: the divorce between wisdom and happiness. And though I am sure that I have worn out the patience of all but the most hardcore masochists among you, I received a sweet email yesterday about the sage and the fool that made me think: all is not in vain!
So, let’s begin with death:
…
“Yama said: The good is one thing and the pleasant another. These two, having different ends, bind a man. It is well with him who chooses the good. He who chooses the pleasant misses the true end.
The good and the pleasant approach man; the wise examines both and discriminates between them; the wise prefers the good to the pleasant, but the foolish man chooses the pleasant through love of bodily pleasure.” – Katha Upanishad
The context for Death’s routine – Yama is death – is the following: Nachiketas is the son of Wajashrawas, a man who had reached that point in his life when becoming a sage took priority over all else. So he gave away his property. Nachiketas, like the young man in Lewis Carroll’s Father William ("You are old, Father William," the young man said,/"And your hair has become very white;/And yet you incessantly stand on your head--/Do you think, at your age, it is right?"), decided to bother the old man and asked “Father, have you given me to someone?” After being asked three times, Wajashrawas said yes, I’ve given you to Yama – death. Recall that Father William also became impatient with his young man after three questions ("I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"/ Said his father; "don't give yourself airs! /Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?/ Be off, or I'll kick you down-stairs!"). Nachiketas then proceeded to go to Yama’s house, and spent three days there without eating and drinking. Threes, by the way, haunt this story, as they haunt all stories involving wishes. Sure enough, Yama, impressed by Nachiketas’ ascetic regime, grants him three wishes. Nachiketas’ first wish is to be reconciled with his father. His second wish is for Fire. But Yama balks at his third wish, for Nachiketas wants to know if there is something after death. To know what comes after death puzzles even the gods. But Nachiketas insists. Thus begins the second chapter of the Katha Upanishad, with the verses I quoted above, with death making a primary distinction between the wise, who chose the path of the good, and the foolish, who chose pleasure. In the translation made by Shree Porohit Swami and Englished by Yeats, the verse goes; “Who follows the good, attains sanctity; who follows the pleasant, drops out of the race.” I take this to be teasing us with a sense of paths, tracks, traces – something that lets us follow. But I also like the translation I am quoting: “These two, having different ends, bind a man.” In Calasso’s “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”, there is a nice passage about Ananke’s net – Ananke being necessity:
“According to Parmenides, being itself is trapped by the “bonds of powerful Ananke’s net.” And in the Platonic vision of things, we find an immense light, “bound in the sky and embracing its whole circumference, the way hempen ropes are gound around the hulls of galleys.” In each case, knots and bonds are essential. Necessity is a bond that curses back on itself, a knotted rope (peirar0 that holds everything within its limits (peras). Dei, a key work, meaning ‘it is necessary’, appears for the first time in the Iliad: “why is it necessary (dei) for the Argives to make war on the Trojans?” That verb form, governed by an impersonal subject, the es of everything that escapes an agent’s will, is traced back by Onians to deo, ‘to bind’, and not to dea, ‘to lack’ as other philologists would have it. It is the same image, observes Onians, “that, without being aware of its meaning in the dark history of the race, we find in a common expression of our own language: ‘it is bound to happen.’
Tracks do form nets. Reading this, I thought surely Callaso would then reference Vernant and Detienne’s wonderfully mysterious book on Cunning among the Greeks, which teases out a variety of binding, rope twisting and corded words to fill in the semantic field of the ruse – of metis. But he doesn’t. Myself, I am reminded of the fact that civilization has long been identified with metalwork – the bronze age, the iron age – rather than work with fabric. When the Spaniards conquered the Incas, they conquered a culture that had inherited another set of assumptions entirely, deriving from knots and nets. Charles Mann makes this point in 1491, going over recent discoveries in Peruvian archaeology that point to the privileged place of netmaking and weaving from the earliest times. And, of course, there are the khipu, the Incan knot language that was assumed, until recently, to be a form of accounting. Gary Urton, a Harvard archaelogist, is the most prominent recent figure to say, not so – there’s words encoded in those knots and filaments. But such a base for civilization, such soft technology, blindsided the Europeans, who couldn’t even see that it was a technology. Even though, of course, knots, strings, fabrics, weaving do have a lively underlife from the Greeks through the Renaissance witches, and of course every marriage is a knot tied. (Although there is a counterknot to prevent marriage – the noueurs d’aiguillettes were persecuted by Parliamentary decree in France).
Everything here is so old that it happened in your dreams last night, from the three wishes to the division between the wise and the foolish, the path of the good and the path of pleasure, and the bewilderment that came over you as you went down the path until a wolf appeared…
que voy a hacer - je suis perdu…
But me gusta marijuana/ me gustas tu it seems wholly appropriate to today’s post, another in my interminable backasswards crawl towards my current obsession: the divorce between wisdom and happiness. And though I am sure that I have worn out the patience of all but the most hardcore masochists among you, I received a sweet email yesterday about the sage and the fool that made me think: all is not in vain!
So, let’s begin with death:
…
“Yama said: The good is one thing and the pleasant another. These two, having different ends, bind a man. It is well with him who chooses the good. He who chooses the pleasant misses the true end.
The good and the pleasant approach man; the wise examines both and discriminates between them; the wise prefers the good to the pleasant, but the foolish man chooses the pleasant through love of bodily pleasure.” – Katha Upanishad
The context for Death’s routine – Yama is death – is the following: Nachiketas is the son of Wajashrawas, a man who had reached that point in his life when becoming a sage took priority over all else. So he gave away his property. Nachiketas, like the young man in Lewis Carroll’s Father William ("You are old, Father William," the young man said,/"And your hair has become very white;/And yet you incessantly stand on your head--/Do you think, at your age, it is right?"), decided to bother the old man and asked “Father, have you given me to someone?” After being asked three times, Wajashrawas said yes, I’ve given you to Yama – death. Recall that Father William also became impatient with his young man after three questions ("I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"/ Said his father; "don't give yourself airs! /Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?/ Be off, or I'll kick you down-stairs!"). Nachiketas then proceeded to go to Yama’s house, and spent three days there without eating and drinking. Threes, by the way, haunt this story, as they haunt all stories involving wishes. Sure enough, Yama, impressed by Nachiketas’ ascetic regime, grants him three wishes. Nachiketas’ first wish is to be reconciled with his father. His second wish is for Fire. But Yama balks at his third wish, for Nachiketas wants to know if there is something after death. To know what comes after death puzzles even the gods. But Nachiketas insists. Thus begins the second chapter of the Katha Upanishad, with the verses I quoted above, with death making a primary distinction between the wise, who chose the path of the good, and the foolish, who chose pleasure. In the translation made by Shree Porohit Swami and Englished by Yeats, the verse goes; “Who follows the good, attains sanctity; who follows the pleasant, drops out of the race.” I take this to be teasing us with a sense of paths, tracks, traces – something that lets us follow. But I also like the translation I am quoting: “These two, having different ends, bind a man.” In Calasso’s “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”, there is a nice passage about Ananke’s net – Ananke being necessity:
“According to Parmenides, being itself is trapped by the “bonds of powerful Ananke’s net.” And in the Platonic vision of things, we find an immense light, “bound in the sky and embracing its whole circumference, the way hempen ropes are gound around the hulls of galleys.” In each case, knots and bonds are essential. Necessity is a bond that curses back on itself, a knotted rope (peirar0 that holds everything within its limits (peras). Dei, a key work, meaning ‘it is necessary’, appears for the first time in the Iliad: “why is it necessary (dei) for the Argives to make war on the Trojans?” That verb form, governed by an impersonal subject, the es of everything that escapes an agent’s will, is traced back by Onians to deo, ‘to bind’, and not to dea, ‘to lack’ as other philologists would have it. It is the same image, observes Onians, “that, without being aware of its meaning in the dark history of the race, we find in a common expression of our own language: ‘it is bound to happen.’
Tracks do form nets. Reading this, I thought surely Callaso would then reference Vernant and Detienne’s wonderfully mysterious book on Cunning among the Greeks, which teases out a variety of binding, rope twisting and corded words to fill in the semantic field of the ruse – of metis. But he doesn’t. Myself, I am reminded of the fact that civilization has long been identified with metalwork – the bronze age, the iron age – rather than work with fabric. When the Spaniards conquered the Incas, they conquered a culture that had inherited another set of assumptions entirely, deriving from knots and nets. Charles Mann makes this point in 1491, going over recent discoveries in Peruvian archaeology that point to the privileged place of netmaking and weaving from the earliest times. And, of course, there are the khipu, the Incan knot language that was assumed, until recently, to be a form of accounting. Gary Urton, a Harvard archaelogist, is the most prominent recent figure to say, not so – there’s words encoded in those knots and filaments. But such a base for civilization, such soft technology, blindsided the Europeans, who couldn’t even see that it was a technology. Even though, of course, knots, strings, fabrics, weaving do have a lively underlife from the Greeks through the Renaissance witches, and of course every marriage is a knot tied. (Although there is a counterknot to prevent marriage – the noueurs d’aiguillettes were persecuted by Parliamentary decree in France).
Everything here is so old that it happened in your dreams last night, from the three wishes to the division between the wise and the foolish, the path of the good and the path of pleasure, and the bewilderment that came over you as you went down the path until a wolf appeared…
que voy a hacer - je suis perdu…
Friday, June 08, 2007
bon diable, good Doctor, and very bad author
Julien Offray de La Mettrie is remembered today for his book Man-Machine – and by collectors of curiosa, for his paen to the sex, The Art of Orgasm (L’art de jouir – which is often translated as “come”, which takes the French term, with its sense of a radiant and sumptuous pleasure, a little too brutally out of its semantic field). In his day, he was considered a thoroughly disreputable figure – a doctor, he’d alienated the medical profession by writing satires of famous doctors; a philosopher, he seemed unacquainted with logic and all too willing to take an undignified and mocking tone towards the ancients; and he was unashamed and undisguised in his atheism, or so it seems – the issue of La Mettrie’s atheism is still debated. After his death, a French writer said that his writing read as though he’d written it while drunk. Voltaire, who knew him, said his talk was as like watching fireworks – a minute of startlingly brilliant, followed by ten minutes of boredom. Voltaire met La Mettrie at Frederick the Great’s court. He’d been brought there when his patron, Gramont, died on a battlefield and he was exposed to the malice of the doctors and the Church. Friedrich II was a collector, and he gathered many semi-scandalous names to his court. Lessing wrote that even the King was shocked by Le Mettrie’s anti-Seneque, ou Discours sur le bonheur, and tossed ten copies of it into the fire.
Carlyle quotes two sources in his biography of Frederick about the death of Le Mettrie – a death surely was an inspiration to De Sade latter on, who dramatized so many of de la Mettrie’s themes:
… [At this time there occurred,] with a hideous dash of farce in
it, the death of La Mettrie. Here are Two Accounts, by different
hands,--which represent to us an immensity of babble in the then
Voltaire circle.
LA METTRIE DIES.--Two Accounts: 1. King Friedrich's: to Wilhelmina.
"21st November, 1751. ... We have lost poor La Mettrie. He died for
a piece of fun: ate, out of banter, a whole pheasant-pie; had a
horrible indigestion; took it into his head to have blood let, and
convince the German Doctors that bleeding was good in indigestion.
But it succeeded ill with him: he took a violent fever, which
passed into putrid; and carried him off. He is regretted by all
that knew him. He was gay; BON DIABLE, good Doctor, and very bad
Author: by avoiding to read his Books, one could manage to be well
content with himself." [Ib. xxvii. i. 203.]
2. Voltaire's: to Niece Denis (NOT his first to her): Potsdam, 24th
December, 1751. ... "No end to my astonishment. Milord Tyrconnel,"
always ailing (died here himself), "sends to ask La Mettrie to come
and see him, to cure him or amuse him. The King grudges to part
with his Reader, who makes him laugh. La Mettrie sets out;
arrives at his Patient's just when Madame Tyrconnel is sitting down
to table: he eats and drinks, talks and laughs more than all the
guests; when he has got crammed (EN A JUSQU'AU MENTON), they bring
him a pie, of eagle disguised as pheasant, which had arrived from
the North, plenty of bad lard, pork-hash and ginger in it;
my gentleman eats the whole pie, and dies next day at Lord
Tyrconnel's, assisted by two Doctors," Cothenius and Lieberkuhn,
"whom he used to mock at. ... How I should have liked to ask him,
at the article of death, about that Orange-skin!" [
de Voltaire,
The ‘orange skin’ reference is to Friedrich saying that you squeezed a man like La Mettrie until you got the juice out of him, as you would an orange. And then you throw away the orange skin.
Of course, there is something mythical and mysterious about this death from eating a pie of disguised meat – to those with ears for the classical reference, one can’t help thinking of Thyestes, whose jealous brother, Atrios, served him a meat pie that Thyestes eagerly swallowed down. Then Atrios informed him that the meat of the pie was a mash made from the bodies of his two sons. Thyestes cursed the House of Atrios, with results well known in tragedy and psychoanalysis. It is to this famous pie-eating that Poe refers in the purloined letter - --“Un dessein si funeste, S'il n'est digne d'Atree, est digne de Thyeste”. Since the Purloined Letter is about substitution, too – in fact, seems to peer at the very nature of substitution, which is, of course, the very nature of myth – one can only ponder the eagle disguised as pheasant. The aristocratic bird disguised as the gourmand’s bird – which brings down the man whose essay on happiness, his attack on the stoic ethos that, since the rediscovery of the stoics in late Renaissance times, had been the hidden credo of the intellectuals, was one of the true scandals of the age. And for us – looking for the separation, the crack, the felure between wisdom and happiness – there is something going on in this substitution of meats in a pie.
Are these posts really going anywhere, the reader may well ask? And when are we going to get back to Danton’s Death?!!! Goddamn it. Sorry, but first we have to check out La Mettrie’s Discourse on happiness, which caused such offense to people like Diderot. And has been dropped from the canon since.
not paul berman again!
LI has tried to bite our tongue about the recent rash of Paul Berman. Poison ivy I take, stoically, to be part of summer fun. You will never uproot all of it. But Paul Berman is a skin infection of a different kind. He's a fraud, in our eyes, and not something we want to encounter when turning on the radio. It is hard to write about the man calmly - and calmness is all when you want to stick the knife in deep. There’s nothing like a too eager assassin to muff the job. But since the World radio broadcast insisted on broadcasting an interview about his latest screed in the TNR, my patience is over.
Berman has accrued a lot of media capital over the years by being a conscience. A conscience is such a great thing to cast yourself as. Especially when you can be the conscience not of the powerful, not of the CEOs, not of the plutocracy, but the conscience of dissent - indeed, he's an old Dissenter dinosaur. Being the conscience of dissent means that you get to whack away at, say, the crimes of the Sandanistas as the Reagan administration arms narco thugs in Honduras. It means that you look out at the old and established mafia of CIA ties and Islamic fundamentalism that drove the cold war in the Middle East and you see - liberal softness for Islamic fundamentalism. A conscience means that you reprove unnamed liberals for beamingly looking on as Moslem fundies surgically remove clits, stone women, and generally tread on our freedom to mock, re the famous cartoons of Mohammed - in the age of Guantanamo, Falluja, and Grozney. The age, to put not too fine a point upon it, of Western countries killing lots and lots of Moslems. And Moslems killing not very many westerners. Liberals, as "Conscience" Berman notes with shock, have even dared to criticize heroic women, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, while making poo-pooing sounds at the Bush administration for banning Tariq Ramadan from coming to the U.S. It is amazing what these non-freedom loving liberals will do – up to and including criticizing the U.S. from banning speech by Tariq Ramadan! Freedom of speech means denying freedom of speech for people who secretly don’t believe in freedom of speech. Don’t we all know this? We all know this at TNR. However, those not in that charmed circle of bile and bad faith can only look at these people with amazement.
The best summary of Paul Berman’s argument is here. (You'll have to scroll down several posts).
However, a recent news item from Iraq forcibly reminds us of what an absurd world this is, where arguments about freedom of speech mounted by warmongers who have not had one word to say about the increasing restrictions on freedom of speech in the West as they harp on freedom of speech issues in Islam-ia garner interviews on the World, while the real suppression of freedom of speech in the service of tyranny – occupation by a foreign power – doesn’t even elbow its way into, say, a decent position in the b section of the NYT. .
Mosul Mayor Sacked in Political Cartoon Fuss
Mayor Refused Demand He Close Newspaper that Printed Maliki-Rice Caricature
06/05/2007 6:24 PM ET
By Namir Huran
Mosul, June 5, (VOI)- Ninewa provincial council approved on Tuesday a decision to sack the mayor of Mosul city for not taking measures to close a newspaper that published a caricature picturing US Secrtetary of State Condoleezza Rice and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a senior official in Ninewa province said.
"The Ninewa provincial council approved the decision to sack the Mayor of Mosul city, Aamer Jihad al-Jerjeri, as it found reasons to dismiss him," the Head of the council General Salem al-Hajj Iessa told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).
"The decision was approved unanimously by the district local council," he noted.
A conflict erupted between the mayor and the head of the provincial council last year, when the latter issued a decision obligating the mayor to close "al-Mujtama a-Madani (The Civil Society)" newspaper after publishing a caricature of the U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice embracing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, but the mayor refused to close it, saying it violates press freedom.
Mosul, a Sunni city, is 402 km north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
Berman has accrued a lot of media capital over the years by being a conscience. A conscience is such a great thing to cast yourself as. Especially when you can be the conscience not of the powerful, not of the CEOs, not of the plutocracy, but the conscience of dissent - indeed, he's an old Dissenter dinosaur. Being the conscience of dissent means that you get to whack away at, say, the crimes of the Sandanistas as the Reagan administration arms narco thugs in Honduras. It means that you look out at the old and established mafia of CIA ties and Islamic fundamentalism that drove the cold war in the Middle East and you see - liberal softness for Islamic fundamentalism. A conscience means that you reprove unnamed liberals for beamingly looking on as Moslem fundies surgically remove clits, stone women, and generally tread on our freedom to mock, re the famous cartoons of Mohammed - in the age of Guantanamo, Falluja, and Grozney. The age, to put not too fine a point upon it, of Western countries killing lots and lots of Moslems. And Moslems killing not very many westerners. Liberals, as "Conscience" Berman notes with shock, have even dared to criticize heroic women, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, while making poo-pooing sounds at the Bush administration for banning Tariq Ramadan from coming to the U.S. It is amazing what these non-freedom loving liberals will do – up to and including criticizing the U.S. from banning speech by Tariq Ramadan! Freedom of speech means denying freedom of speech for people who secretly don’t believe in freedom of speech. Don’t we all know this? We all know this at TNR. However, those not in that charmed circle of bile and bad faith can only look at these people with amazement.
The best summary of Paul Berman’s argument is here. (You'll have to scroll down several posts).
However, a recent news item from Iraq forcibly reminds us of what an absurd world this is, where arguments about freedom of speech mounted by warmongers who have not had one word to say about the increasing restrictions on freedom of speech in the West as they harp on freedom of speech issues in Islam-ia garner interviews on the World, while the real suppression of freedom of speech in the service of tyranny – occupation by a foreign power – doesn’t even elbow its way into, say, a decent position in the b section of the NYT. .
Mosul Mayor Sacked in Political Cartoon Fuss
Mayor Refused Demand He Close Newspaper that Printed Maliki-Rice Caricature
06/05/2007 6:24 PM ET
By Namir Huran
Mosul, June 5, (VOI)- Ninewa provincial council approved on Tuesday a decision to sack the mayor of Mosul city for not taking measures to close a newspaper that published a caricature picturing US Secrtetary of State Condoleezza Rice and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a senior official in Ninewa province said.
"The Ninewa provincial council approved the decision to sack the Mayor of Mosul city, Aamer Jihad al-Jerjeri, as it found reasons to dismiss him," the Head of the council General Salem al-Hajj Iessa told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).
"The decision was approved unanimously by the district local council," he noted.
A conflict erupted between the mayor and the head of the provincial council last year, when the latter issued a decision obligating the mayor to close "al-Mujtama a-Madani (The Civil Society)" newspaper after publishing a caricature of the U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice embracing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, but the mayor refused to close it, saying it violates press freedom.
Mosul, a Sunni city, is 402 km north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Darwinian blowback
In the past fifty years, there have been enough national wars of liberation against a technologically superior occupier that we can see a distinct Darwinian pattern emerge. The resistance always consists of varied groups. The groups range, tactically, from the moderate to the extreme. The moderate group is characterized by a sensitivity to civilian casualties and a willingness to find other than military solutions to the occupation. The extreme group is relatively insensitive to civilian casualties and doubtful that any other than a military solution will end the occupation. It should be emphasized that these definitions are about tactics. Thus, the most conservative mujahadeen groups in the Afghanistan war count as the most extreme, and the most nationalist and rigid faction of the North Vietnamese communist party count as the most extreme.
Now, in any mass killing of living organisms, Darwinian laws of selection are going to apply. The case of the Americans in Vietnam and the Russians in Afghanistan are exemplary insofar as these occupations (which involved, in both cases, puppet governments) were so long and so fiercely fought, with the occupying power using conventional weapons in an unrestrained manner. What was obvious by the end of both the Vietnam war and the war in Afghanistan is that the occupying power had essentially selected out the moderates. They are softer targets precisely because they are more afraid of civilian death and make themselves more open to compromise. That openness makes them easier, for instance, to spot – and if you mount a mass assassination movement, as the U.S. did in South Vietnam with the Phoenix program, you can count on this to achieve your objective. In the internal politics between, say, the NVA and the NLF in South Vietnam, there was disagreement about what policies the NLF embraced. In the beginning, Ho was serious about the peaceful struggle for unification, but Diem’s ability to repress the party and its allies in the South made that a dead end. But by the end of the war, the strongest surviving players were those most committed to a militarily achieved reunification – and they got it in 1975.
In Vietnam’s case, luckily, the dynamic was such that the most extreme players had to contend, in North Vietnam itself, with a spectrum of other views in the party. To put it in terms consistent with my Darwinian metaphor – the occupiers did not own the whole landscape. Part of the landscape was owned by the North Vietnamese, which put a counterpressure on the Darwinian selection to the most extreme resistors. Thus, the very tactics the U.S. used to pursue the war made the continuance of the strategy of armed reunification inevitable. The Americans, in effect, eliminated all those who might negotiate with them. The end of the war brought about a lot of hardship to those who had supported the South Vietnamese government, but the period of revenge was not especially brutal – less so, in many ways, than the American revolution, which of course concluded with the brief British plan of freeing the slaves collapsing, and the slave order once again re-established in the South.
In Afghanistan, on the other hand, there was no safe and sovereign place from which the resistance to the Russians could operate. Where the resistance had refuge – in Pakistan – they were not sovereign. Here, Darwinian blowback was much fiercer. The Soviets, like the Americans, were hindered by few rules. Like the Americans, they attacked civilian and military alike. Like the Americans, the Soviets were particularly eager to pacify the villages by picking out the rebels. And like the Americans, the Soviets unconsciously acted as a force of selection, tilting the landscape to the most extreme resistors.
This is what is happening in Iraq at the moment. Those who, echoing Bush, tell us that withdrawal will lead to a bloodbath not only ignore the fact that the bloodbath is happening now – they ignore the fact that it is the occupation, operating with grim Darwinian efficiency, that is preparing the blood bath to come.
Now, in any mass killing of living organisms, Darwinian laws of selection are going to apply. The case of the Americans in Vietnam and the Russians in Afghanistan are exemplary insofar as these occupations (which involved, in both cases, puppet governments) were so long and so fiercely fought, with the occupying power using conventional weapons in an unrestrained manner. What was obvious by the end of both the Vietnam war and the war in Afghanistan is that the occupying power had essentially selected out the moderates. They are softer targets precisely because they are more afraid of civilian death and make themselves more open to compromise. That openness makes them easier, for instance, to spot – and if you mount a mass assassination movement, as the U.S. did in South Vietnam with the Phoenix program, you can count on this to achieve your objective. In the internal politics between, say, the NVA and the NLF in South Vietnam, there was disagreement about what policies the NLF embraced. In the beginning, Ho was serious about the peaceful struggle for unification, but Diem’s ability to repress the party and its allies in the South made that a dead end. But by the end of the war, the strongest surviving players were those most committed to a militarily achieved reunification – and they got it in 1975.
In Vietnam’s case, luckily, the dynamic was such that the most extreme players had to contend, in North Vietnam itself, with a spectrum of other views in the party. To put it in terms consistent with my Darwinian metaphor – the occupiers did not own the whole landscape. Part of the landscape was owned by the North Vietnamese, which put a counterpressure on the Darwinian selection to the most extreme resistors. Thus, the very tactics the U.S. used to pursue the war made the continuance of the strategy of armed reunification inevitable. The Americans, in effect, eliminated all those who might negotiate with them. The end of the war brought about a lot of hardship to those who had supported the South Vietnamese government, but the period of revenge was not especially brutal – less so, in many ways, than the American revolution, which of course concluded with the brief British plan of freeing the slaves collapsing, and the slave order once again re-established in the South.
In Afghanistan, on the other hand, there was no safe and sovereign place from which the resistance to the Russians could operate. Where the resistance had refuge – in Pakistan – they were not sovereign. Here, Darwinian blowback was much fiercer. The Soviets, like the Americans, were hindered by few rules. Like the Americans, they attacked civilian and military alike. Like the Americans, the Soviets were particularly eager to pacify the villages by picking out the rebels. And like the Americans, the Soviets unconsciously acted as a force of selection, tilting the landscape to the most extreme resistors.
This is what is happening in Iraq at the moment. Those who, echoing Bush, tell us that withdrawal will lead to a bloodbath not only ignore the fact that the bloodbath is happening now – they ignore the fact that it is the occupation, operating with grim Darwinian efficiency, that is preparing the blood bath to come.
if nature makes you a hog, vaunt yourself in the muck
“The truth and virtue says La Mettrie, are “existences that have value only insofar as they are service to someone who possesses them… But lacking such and such a virtue, such and such a truth, will science and societies suffer? Let that be so, but if I don’t garner any advantages from them, I will suffer. Thus, is it for me or for others that reason orders me to be happy?” This is his commentary on Fontenelle’s phrase: If I had my hand full of truths, I’d beware of opening it.” Le Mettrie is, on this point, clearer and more frank than Helvetius. Besides, he doesn’t deny any more than the latter that the elevated instincts carry man towards a conduct that is, apparently, disinterested; but, according to him, men are made variously, and they must conform to their nature: “if nature makes you a hog, vaunt yourself in the muck, like hogs do; for you are incapable of enjoying a more elevated happiness.” – Guyau, Le Morale d’Epicure.
Plutarch saw the Epicureans as the enemy, and wrote an essay against them - ‘Against Colotes, the Disciple and Favorite of Epicurus” – which preserves certain of Epicurus’ writings and sayings. One of them, which is quoted with the imputation that Epicurus was conceited, was a sentence from Epicurus’s letter to Idomeneus, in which Epicurus thanks Idomeneus for sending him fruits to feed his – Epicurus’ - ‘sacred body’. The paradoxes thicken here, of course – for how can there be a sacred dimension if the Gods exist in supreme indifference to man? And how can there be a body at all that is ‘mine’ when it is actually a collection of atoms, as little mine as the drops in a river would form something distinct from the river?
Martha Nussbaum takes Epicurus’ phrase to be referring specifically to something sacred about Epicurus – the sacred body being the center of a hero cult. Thus, it is identified with one particular body, and says nothing about other human bodies. In this way, Epicurus’ remarks about his body are similar to Jesus’ remarks about his body – it was the body of the hero, the divinity, that was sacred.
Let’s say that Nussbaum is right. When a particular body has been singled out as something sacred, we have, of course, a charismatic moment. In a sense, the whole positional economy tends towards the charismatic – it is the absolute level of positioning, the good that cannot be traded. But it can be shared – by symbolic cannibalism, by sex, by the word. That sharing is a sacrifice – the absolute sacrifice of the sacred is to annihilate itself on the altar of the sacred, and thus renew itself – in a triumph of romance over logic. But that avenue is blocked for the Epicurean. Which is why I’d hypothesize – boldly – that the sacredness is connected or coordinated with the Epicurean notion of pleasure.
Whether or not this has any validity in the ancient context, in the seventeenth century context, in which Epicurus served as both a counter to the ascetism of the Church and a counter to the dualism of Descartes, the libertin legitimated volupté by claiming that it had its root in Epicurus’ thought. Volupté, for Bayle, for instance, was a sort of philosophical calming of desires – la beatitude de l’homme consiste à etre à son aise. Here is the forerunner of bourgeois comfort, which already had its art in thousands of Dutch paintings. Bayle refuted the idea that Epicureanism would mean having impure commerce with women, gluttony, intoxication. Rather, the Epicurean struggles against the unruly passions. That form of ascesis clears Epicure, in Bayle’s view, of the scandals associated with ‘volupté”.
However, sixty years later, Le Mettrie is already writing about acting as a pig if it is your nature to act as a pig. We are already moving from the dawn of embourgeoisement to the ethics of Pere Karamazov. Volupté is not as simple as it seems.
Plutarch saw the Epicureans as the enemy, and wrote an essay against them - ‘Against Colotes, the Disciple and Favorite of Epicurus” – which preserves certain of Epicurus’ writings and sayings. One of them, which is quoted with the imputation that Epicurus was conceited, was a sentence from Epicurus’s letter to Idomeneus, in which Epicurus thanks Idomeneus for sending him fruits to feed his – Epicurus’ - ‘sacred body’. The paradoxes thicken here, of course – for how can there be a sacred dimension if the Gods exist in supreme indifference to man? And how can there be a body at all that is ‘mine’ when it is actually a collection of atoms, as little mine as the drops in a river would form something distinct from the river?
Martha Nussbaum takes Epicurus’ phrase to be referring specifically to something sacred about Epicurus – the sacred body being the center of a hero cult. Thus, it is identified with one particular body, and says nothing about other human bodies. In this way, Epicurus’ remarks about his body are similar to Jesus’ remarks about his body – it was the body of the hero, the divinity, that was sacred.
Let’s say that Nussbaum is right. When a particular body has been singled out as something sacred, we have, of course, a charismatic moment. In a sense, the whole positional economy tends towards the charismatic – it is the absolute level of positioning, the good that cannot be traded. But it can be shared – by symbolic cannibalism, by sex, by the word. That sharing is a sacrifice – the absolute sacrifice of the sacred is to annihilate itself on the altar of the sacred, and thus renew itself – in a triumph of romance over logic. But that avenue is blocked for the Epicurean. Which is why I’d hypothesize – boldly – that the sacredness is connected or coordinated with the Epicurean notion of pleasure.
Whether or not this has any validity in the ancient context, in the seventeenth century context, in which Epicurus served as both a counter to the ascetism of the Church and a counter to the dualism of Descartes, the libertin legitimated volupté by claiming that it had its root in Epicurus’ thought. Volupté, for Bayle, for instance, was a sort of philosophical calming of desires – la beatitude de l’homme consiste à etre à son aise. Here is the forerunner of bourgeois comfort, which already had its art in thousands of Dutch paintings. Bayle refuted the idea that Epicureanism would mean having impure commerce with women, gluttony, intoxication. Rather, the Epicurean struggles against the unruly passions. That form of ascesis clears Epicure, in Bayle’s view, of the scandals associated with ‘volupté”.
However, sixty years later, Le Mettrie is already writing about acting as a pig if it is your nature to act as a pig. We are already moving from the dawn of embourgeoisement to the ethics of Pere Karamazov. Volupté is not as simple as it seems.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
the withdrawal project blog starts
I've started the Withdrawal blog - the first step in the Withdrawal project. I hope to transfer all the posts on LI about Iraq - there must be three hundred of them at least - to the Withdrawal blog. Then I'm going to include much more inclusive links. Finally, the blog will then be open to those who want to contribute posts. They'll merely have to ask me for the password.
It is a small step. The Withdrawal project is certainly not about starting another fucking blog, but it needs a base. I haven't yet started the search for a power point pro. I need to put up some notices. Remember, readers, to send me suggestions.
It is a small step. The Withdrawal project is certainly not about starting another fucking blog, but it needs a base. I haven't yet started the search for a power point pro. I need to put up some notices. Remember, readers, to send me suggestions.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
emblems: There is a Fate beyond us
One of Tennyson’s poems describes the story of Persephone and Demeter. The beginning of the poem has that sensuous, Poussin-like beauty that was Tennyson’s greatest gift:
“Faint as a climate-changing bird that flies
All night across the darkness, and at dawn
Falls on the threshold of her native land,
And can no more, thou camest, O my child,
Led upward by the God of ghosts and dreams,
Who laid thee at Eleusis, dazed and dumb
With passing thro’ at once from state to state,
Until I brought thee hither, that the day,
When here thy hands let fall the gather’d flower,
Might break thro’ clouded memories once again
On thy lost self. A sudden nightingale
Saw thee, and flash’d into a frolic of song
And welcome; and a gleam as of the moon,
When first she peers along the tremulous deep,
Fled wavering o’er thy face, and chased away
That shadow of a likeness to the king
Of shadows, thy dark mate. Persephone!
Queen of the dead no more–my child! Thine eyes
Again were human-godlike, and the Sun
Burst from a swimming fleece of winter gray,
And robed thee in his day from head to feet–
‘Mother!’ and I was folded in thine arms.”
I put these verses here as an emblematic mark, an allegorical pattern to brood over, under which I aim to discuss the disunion of wisdom and happiness, a halving that has effects in more dimensions than the innocent householder might imagine. The path is full of emblems. The grid is full of omissions. There are zeros on the wire. The history that leads to the cultural exile of the sage is a part of the history of happiness and how the honey has soured in American mouths. In a sense, what LI is doing here is simply ripping off what Yeats’ did in the Vision – finding masks for a personal dissent, which becomes cosmic only as it merges private to public images in a single sweeping flame, and allows that flame to burn through all persona. Let the flame wear the masks.
So: if I quote this verse that begins with a migratory bird falling exhausted on the threshold, begins with the cost of the rhythms of nature, the infinite victimage, Lasalle's pendulum universe in all its parts askew, unbalanced – it is to put in place a mythical background to the disunion I’m tracing. And no, it is no father son affair. It strikes me that the decay of the sage and the triumph of an increasingly alien happiness is connected, by a multitude of subtle implications – to the disunion of Persephone and Demeter. For those of you not hip to the hop re this myth, here’s the drastic recap:
Persephone was playing with her friends, the daughters of Oceanus, gathering flowers in a Sicilian field, when she saw – as it says in the Homeric hymn to Demeter – “Earth with its wide roads gaped/and then over the Nysian field the lord and All-receiver,/the many-named son of Kronos, sprang out upon her with his immortal horses” – and that was it. She was gone in that moment, gone infinitely, in a sense – gone to the essence of gone, gone to the dead. Tennyson’s poem takes up the traditional narrative of her mother Demeter’s wandering as she roams the earth, in mourning, looking for her missing daughter. Here, Demeter comes upon the fates:
“On three gray heads beneath a gleaming rift.
‘Where’? and I heard one voice from all the three
‘We know not, for we spin the lives of men,
And not of Gods, and know not why we spin!
There is a Fate beyond us.’ Nothing knew.”
Well, the Fate beyond fate is extremely interesting to LI. We will come back to that later. Anyway, Demeter finally found out what happened to her daughter when she was sent a vision:
“… the God of dreams, who heard my cry,
Drew from thyself the likeness of thyself
Without thy knowledge, and thy shadow past
Before me, crying ‘The Bright one in the highest
Is brother of the Dark one in the lowest,
And Bright and Dark have sworn that I, the child
Of thee, the great Earth-Mother, thee, the Power
That lifts her buried life from gloom to bloom,
Should be for ever and for evermore
The Bride of Darkness.’”
In response to this rape, Demeter cursed the earth until Persephone was allowed to return to the earth for nine months of the year. The other three months are winter. Or so it goes in Tennyson's poem, a variant of that old myth.
To snap the allegory together, here: the sterility under which the earth groaned when Demeter learned of the rape of her daughter is the image of the sterility under which the Earth groans now, as a form of happiness ripped from all contexts, and especially its coupling with wisdom, reigns serenely over the highways, byways, shopping centers and fishless oceans – the fucked out world of late capitalism. While it is a mad and eccentric vector into the heart of our current disorders, LI’s obsession with the expulsion of the sage isn’t totally dimwitted.
Well, tomorrow’s post will be about the vexed problem of how to translate ‘volupté’.
“Faint as a climate-changing bird that flies
All night across the darkness, and at dawn
Falls on the threshold of her native land,
And can no more, thou camest, O my child,
Led upward by the God of ghosts and dreams,
Who laid thee at Eleusis, dazed and dumb
With passing thro’ at once from state to state,
Until I brought thee hither, that the day,
When here thy hands let fall the gather’d flower,
Might break thro’ clouded memories once again
On thy lost self. A sudden nightingale
Saw thee, and flash’d into a frolic of song
And welcome; and a gleam as of the moon,
When first she peers along the tremulous deep,
Fled wavering o’er thy face, and chased away
That shadow of a likeness to the king
Of shadows, thy dark mate. Persephone!
Queen of the dead no more–my child! Thine eyes
Again were human-godlike, and the Sun
Burst from a swimming fleece of winter gray,
And robed thee in his day from head to feet–
‘Mother!’ and I was folded in thine arms.”
I put these verses here as an emblematic mark, an allegorical pattern to brood over, under which I aim to discuss the disunion of wisdom and happiness, a halving that has effects in more dimensions than the innocent householder might imagine. The path is full of emblems. The grid is full of omissions. There are zeros on the wire. The history that leads to the cultural exile of the sage is a part of the history of happiness and how the honey has soured in American mouths. In a sense, what LI is doing here is simply ripping off what Yeats’ did in the Vision – finding masks for a personal dissent, which becomes cosmic only as it merges private to public images in a single sweeping flame, and allows that flame to burn through all persona. Let the flame wear the masks.
So: if I quote this verse that begins with a migratory bird falling exhausted on the threshold, begins with the cost of the rhythms of nature, the infinite victimage, Lasalle's pendulum universe in all its parts askew, unbalanced – it is to put in place a mythical background to the disunion I’m tracing. And no, it is no father son affair. It strikes me that the decay of the sage and the triumph of an increasingly alien happiness is connected, by a multitude of subtle implications – to the disunion of Persephone and Demeter. For those of you not hip to the hop re this myth, here’s the drastic recap:
Persephone was playing with her friends, the daughters of Oceanus, gathering flowers in a Sicilian field, when she saw – as it says in the Homeric hymn to Demeter – “Earth with its wide roads gaped/and then over the Nysian field the lord and All-receiver,/the many-named son of Kronos, sprang out upon her with his immortal horses” – and that was it. She was gone in that moment, gone infinitely, in a sense – gone to the essence of gone, gone to the dead. Tennyson’s poem takes up the traditional narrative of her mother Demeter’s wandering as she roams the earth, in mourning, looking for her missing daughter. Here, Demeter comes upon the fates:
“On three gray heads beneath a gleaming rift.
‘Where’? and I heard one voice from all the three
‘We know not, for we spin the lives of men,
And not of Gods, and know not why we spin!
There is a Fate beyond us.’ Nothing knew.”
Well, the Fate beyond fate is extremely interesting to LI. We will come back to that later. Anyway, Demeter finally found out what happened to her daughter when she was sent a vision:
“… the God of dreams, who heard my cry,
Drew from thyself the likeness of thyself
Without thy knowledge, and thy shadow past
Before me, crying ‘The Bright one in the highest
Is brother of the Dark one in the lowest,
And Bright and Dark have sworn that I, the child
Of thee, the great Earth-Mother, thee, the Power
That lifts her buried life from gloom to bloom,
Should be for ever and for evermore
The Bride of Darkness.’”
In response to this rape, Demeter cursed the earth until Persephone was allowed to return to the earth for nine months of the year. The other three months are winter. Or so it goes in Tennyson's poem, a variant of that old myth.
To snap the allegory together, here: the sterility under which the earth groaned when Demeter learned of the rape of her daughter is the image of the sterility under which the Earth groans now, as a form of happiness ripped from all contexts, and especially its coupling with wisdom, reigns serenely over the highways, byways, shopping centers and fishless oceans – the fucked out world of late capitalism. While it is a mad and eccentric vector into the heart of our current disorders, LI’s obsession with the expulsion of the sage isn’t totally dimwitted.
Well, tomorrow’s post will be about the vexed problem of how to translate ‘volupté’.
Monday, June 04, 2007
the pursuit of unhappiness is fundamental to liberty
“Thus, let us carefully keep the thirst for immortality within us from drying up; better to suffer gloriously in a great circle, than to be pierced by a thousand pins in some obscure corner of the world.” – Herault de Sechelles.
In following the figure of Epicure, and the notion of epicurean materialism, LI is following a thought that we have played with for some time. It is that the pursuit of happiness has distorted the civilizing metric that really counts, which is of the quality of one’s unhappiness. Only after a certain level of material comfort is achieved does the question of doing without that comfort take on a deliberate cast. To break the spell of that collection of habits that went into primitive accumulation requires having reached a point at which one can turn around – a point at which inversion is possible. To quote Buchner’s letter again: “The word must is one of the curses with which Mankind is baptized. The saying: It must needs be that offenses come; but woe to him by whom the offense cometh” is terrifying. What is it in us that lies, murders, steals? I no longer care to pursue this thought.” The must is stamped on that struggle to accumulate – it is stamped on the material economy. It is also stamped on the positional economy – and the place where the two meet is that which, in us, “lies, murders, steals”.
An essay by Pierre Hadot, “There Are Nowadays Professors of Philosophy, but not Philosophers,” picks up on the Epicurean strain in Thoreau’s Walden, especially in the account of the encroachment of labor, the habits of a utilitarian servility, upon the ‘vital heat' of the human.
If Thoreau thus leaves to live in the woods, this is evidently not only for maintaining his vital heat in the most economical way possible, but it is that he wants “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”11 “I wanted to live deep,” he writes, “and suck out all the marrow of life [. . .].”12 And among these essential acts of life, there is the pleasure of perceiving the world through all his senses. It is to this that, in the woods, Thoreau directs the largest part of his time. One never grows tired of rereading the sensual beginning of the chapter titled “Solitude”: “This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the
stony shore of the pond in my shirtsleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, ... all the elements are unusually congenial to me. [...] Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled.”13 In this chapter Thoreau wants, moreover, to show that, even alone, he is never alone, because he is aware (conscience) of communing with nature: “I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself.” “The most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object [. . .].”14 Hence he perceives in the sound itself of raindrops, “an infinite and unaccountable
friendliness.”15 Each little pine needle treats him as a friend, and he feels something
related to him in the most desolate and terrifying scenes of Nature. “Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?”16 Thus, the perception of the world extends itself into a sort of cosmic consciousness.17
All that I have written until now bears a remarkable analogy to Epicurean philosophy, but also to certain aspects of Stoicism. Firstly, we find again in Epicureanism this critique of the manner in which men habitually live that we encountered in the first pages of Walden. “Human beings,” says Lucretius, “never cease to labor vainly and fruitlessly, consuming their lives in groundless cares [. . .].”18
For the Epicureans of whom Cicero speaks, men are unhappy due to immense and hollow desires for riches, glory, and domination. “They are especially tormented when they realize, too late, that they pursued wealth or power or possessions or honour to no avail, and have failed to obtain any of the pleasures whose prospect drove them to endure a variety of great suffering.”19
Salvation (Le Salut) rests, for Epicurus, in the distinction between desires that are natural and necessary and that are related to the conservation of life; desires that are only natural, like sexual pleasure; and desires that are neither natural nor necessary, like [those for] wealth.20 Satisfaction of the first21 suffices, in principle, to assure man a stable pleasure and therefore happiness. This amounts to saying that, for Epicurus, philosophy consists essentially, as for Thoreau, in knowing how to conserve one’s vital heat in a wiser way than other men. With a certain desire for provocation analogous to the one of Thoreau, one Epicurean sentence in effect declares: “The cry of the flesh: not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold. Whoever enjoys this state and hopes to continue enjoying it can rival even God himself in happiness.”22 Happiness is, therefore, easy to attain: “Thanks be given to blessed nature,” one Epicurean sentence says, “which makes necessary things easily achievable, and those things which are difficult to achieve unnecessary.”23 “Everything easy to procure is natural while everything difficult to obtain is superfluous.”24
The American counter truth to the Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness is Thoreau’s invocation of living deliberately. Living deliberately is perennially in the worse position, however, since to live deliberately in an intense positional market either sets one up for failure or detachment from reality – a detachment that is either bogus (as with spiritualist movements and self help) or passionately irrelevant (which so often seems to be the mocking double of academic theory). These are the conditions under which the sage has been purged from our culture. To ask about these conditions is to ask about happiness itself, and its decay from an ideal to a spiel.
Which is why I am going on and on about Danton’s Death and Epicurus. In case you were wondering.
In following the figure of Epicure, and the notion of epicurean materialism, LI is following a thought that we have played with for some time. It is that the pursuit of happiness has distorted the civilizing metric that really counts, which is of the quality of one’s unhappiness. Only after a certain level of material comfort is achieved does the question of doing without that comfort take on a deliberate cast. To break the spell of that collection of habits that went into primitive accumulation requires having reached a point at which one can turn around – a point at which inversion is possible. To quote Buchner’s letter again: “The word must is one of the curses with which Mankind is baptized. The saying: It must needs be that offenses come; but woe to him by whom the offense cometh” is terrifying. What is it in us that lies, murders, steals? I no longer care to pursue this thought.” The must is stamped on that struggle to accumulate – it is stamped on the material economy. It is also stamped on the positional economy – and the place where the two meet is that which, in us, “lies, murders, steals”.
An essay by Pierre Hadot, “There Are Nowadays Professors of Philosophy, but not Philosophers,” picks up on the Epicurean strain in Thoreau’s Walden, especially in the account of the encroachment of labor, the habits of a utilitarian servility, upon the ‘vital heat' of the human.
If Thoreau thus leaves to live in the woods, this is evidently not only for maintaining his vital heat in the most economical way possible, but it is that he wants “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”11 “I wanted to live deep,” he writes, “and suck out all the marrow of life [. . .].”12 And among these essential acts of life, there is the pleasure of perceiving the world through all his senses. It is to this that, in the woods, Thoreau directs the largest part of his time. One never grows tired of rereading the sensual beginning of the chapter titled “Solitude”: “This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the
stony shore of the pond in my shirtsleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, ... all the elements are unusually congenial to me. [...] Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled.”13 In this chapter Thoreau wants, moreover, to show that, even alone, he is never alone, because he is aware (conscience) of communing with nature: “I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself.” “The most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object [. . .].”14 Hence he perceives in the sound itself of raindrops, “an infinite and unaccountable
friendliness.”15 Each little pine needle treats him as a friend, and he feels something
related to him in the most desolate and terrifying scenes of Nature. “Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?”16 Thus, the perception of the world extends itself into a sort of cosmic consciousness.17
All that I have written until now bears a remarkable analogy to Epicurean philosophy, but also to certain aspects of Stoicism. Firstly, we find again in Epicureanism this critique of the manner in which men habitually live that we encountered in the first pages of Walden. “Human beings,” says Lucretius, “never cease to labor vainly and fruitlessly, consuming their lives in groundless cares [. . .].”18
For the Epicureans of whom Cicero speaks, men are unhappy due to immense and hollow desires for riches, glory, and domination. “They are especially tormented when they realize, too late, that they pursued wealth or power or possessions or honour to no avail, and have failed to obtain any of the pleasures whose prospect drove them to endure a variety of great suffering.”19
Salvation (Le Salut) rests, for Epicurus, in the distinction between desires that are natural and necessary and that are related to the conservation of life; desires that are only natural, like sexual pleasure; and desires that are neither natural nor necessary, like [those for] wealth.20 Satisfaction of the first21 suffices, in principle, to assure man a stable pleasure and therefore happiness. This amounts to saying that, for Epicurus, philosophy consists essentially, as for Thoreau, in knowing how to conserve one’s vital heat in a wiser way than other men. With a certain desire for provocation analogous to the one of Thoreau, one Epicurean sentence in effect declares: “The cry of the flesh: not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold. Whoever enjoys this state and hopes to continue enjoying it can rival even God himself in happiness.”22 Happiness is, therefore, easy to attain: “Thanks be given to blessed nature,” one Epicurean sentence says, “which makes necessary things easily achievable, and those things which are difficult to achieve unnecessary.”23 “Everything easy to procure is natural while everything difficult to obtain is superfluous.”24
The American counter truth to the Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness is Thoreau’s invocation of living deliberately. Living deliberately is perennially in the worse position, however, since to live deliberately in an intense positional market either sets one up for failure or detachment from reality – a detachment that is either bogus (as with spiritualist movements and self help) or passionately irrelevant (which so often seems to be the mocking double of academic theory). These are the conditions under which the sage has been purged from our culture. To ask about these conditions is to ask about happiness itself, and its decay from an ideal to a spiel.
Which is why I am going on and on about Danton’s Death and Epicurus. In case you were wondering.
antoine de lasalle: an enlightenment eccentric
When Lukacs uses the phrase, epicurean materialism, to talk about the nature of the Dantonist resistance to Robespierre in Büchner’s play, he is following a theme which was taken up in the 19th century not only by Marx, but by the historians of the French revolution and of the enlightenment.
Emile Dard’s biography of Herault de Sechelles (1903), for instance, is titled “An epicurean under the terror.” When Büchner’s Robespierre denounces the wealthy and the refers to people who ‘used to live in garrets and now roll around in carriages and sin with former marquesses and baronesses’, he is referring – except for the garret – to hedonists like Herault, who was followed about, as he performed his revolutionary duties, including creating a constitution that gave foreigners the right to vote, by a few aristocratic groupies. And Robespierre’s denunciation of ‘vice” and those who ‘declare war on God and property” as a way of secretly supporting the King – whether they know it or not – he is sounding an old Left theme that has become perennial - the warning against the decadent life style - but that had peculiar resonances in the Revolutionary period, when the carry over from the 1780s was so sexualized. Mirabeau, for instance, was famous for his rather famous erotica before he was famous as the revolution's first great orator. The disabused spirit of the young bucks around Danton was simply an extension of the final moment of the Enlightenment – which, contra the philosophy crowd, was codified not in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, but in Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Herault moved in the Valois circle, which met in the Palais Royale, and included Laclos as well as Tallyrand, Sieyes, and others. As Dard puts it, Herault, on his sofa, would become enthusiastic for justice, 'the sole passion that could inflame the sceptics, on the condition that it did not disturb their leisure."
Which brings me to an eccentric philosophe mentioned by Emile Dard, a “savage” philosopher/ traveler named Antoine de Lasalle. Antoine de Lasalle was quite a character. Dard gives a sketch of the man – as a youth, he had sailed to America with the cod fishing fleet (“clumsy at hunting and fishing, despised by his rude companions, to whom he asked, for instance, if there did not exist three sexes in nature” ) and then an explorer of Asia, he came back to Paris (where he set up as a professor of Arabic), he wrote metaphysical tomes which were published thanks to Herault’s financing, in which he explained that he could shrink the important truths of metaphysics into a two word phrase: “Tout vibre” – everything vibrates. The universe was a pendulum composed of an infinity of smaller pendulums –“From which we get the aspect that we observe: an immense field of battle on which all beings, divided into two enemy lines, are the champions; the general battle is composed of an infinite number of particular combats, where the winners and losers succeed each other in a duel that is never finished.”
This double movement – towards an infinite vastness composed of smaller and equally infinite vastnesses – is a sort of Epicurean twist on Pascal’s infinities. Of course, it puts into question the place of God. God obviously did not make this pendulum for man.
Lasalle, who LI was unaware of before coming across his name in Dard’s book, was, like Rousseau, a great walker. His morality, which is derived entirely from his materialism, is an odd thing entirely. Here’s a passage from the beautifully named Méchanique morale: ou essai sur l'art de perfectionner et d'employer ses organes … : ”a sure means to lose happiness is to search for it everywhere; it is here and not there, it is in us, where it is in no part, no where… Thus, man is the softest of all the great beasts, the softness of his substance is for him the cause and the sign of a need to change; he is born perfectable, he perfections himself only by reflection, but these are changes that awaken the faculty of thought, which sharpens its instrument, and furnishes the best material; man is almost the only animal that can travel without hazard (impunement): man is thus a traveler-born; moreover, strangers are well received everywhere, as long as they don’t stay too long; as long as you are new, everything is great, nothing is more perfect than the man who came yesterday and leaves tomorrow; but if you hang around, they will soon get tired of you. Well, then, it is wise to pass one’s life as a stranger, a novelty and caressed as such…”
More to come in another post.
Sunday, June 03, 2007
the withdrawal project blog
LI cut off all our hair yesterday, to get prepared to be a peace soldier – and although it looks a little mange-y, what the hell. There is something startling about seeing the pale, dead skin under your hair…
So I am thinking I am going to take LimitedInc’s Iraq and war posts in the next week or so and transfer them to a new blog for the Withdrawal project. And then I will compartmentalize. Years ago, I started LimitedInc as an art project, and I had the crazy idea that I could use the blog as a venue for denunciations of the war that would resonate with the other elements in the project. But there is a downside to this: it limited the number of people who would read the anti-war stuff, because it was mixed in with material of no interest to a large group of people. That was fine with me – I wanted this to be outsider art from the beginning – but it is time to recognize that the anti-war stuff, if it isn’t going to continue to be an indulgence, needs its own place. My next post, for instance, is going to be about Enlightenment eccentric Antoine de Lasalle, Herault Sechelles, and the epicurean tradition – and that has zero resonance with the most of the audience that is truly riveted by the war and singed every day by America’s occupation of Iraq.
When I get the Withdrawalproject blog set up, I’m going to distribute the password to anybody who wants to contribute to it. As with all Withdrawal Project components, the only rule, at the moment, is to agree to the policy of zero American soldiers in Iraq in 2009. I have to make that a snazzier one liner, by the way. January 2009 is the deadline, but I don’t want to create such a narrow deadline that the movement automatically loses if – as is very likely – there are soldiers there in January, 2009. Withdrawal is withdrawal – if one loses the timetable battle, it doesn’t vitiate the fact that the soldiers shouldn’t be there, and that we should be pressing to get them all, every one of them, out.
I’ve been reading a lot about past social movements, and I wondering whether the Withdrawal project’s lack of a strict to do list – sign your name to this petition, give money to this organization – is a positive (as I think) or an invitation to entropy. To be goofy about it, I want the Withdrawal project to awaken an antiwar Kundalini – a physical and spiritual energy. And I suspect that petitions and donations are ways of putting that energy into a deep, deep sleep. But I may be totally fucked up on this.
So I am thinking I am going to take LimitedInc’s Iraq and war posts in the next week or so and transfer them to a new blog for the Withdrawal project. And then I will compartmentalize. Years ago, I started LimitedInc as an art project, and I had the crazy idea that I could use the blog as a venue for denunciations of the war that would resonate with the other elements in the project. But there is a downside to this: it limited the number of people who would read the anti-war stuff, because it was mixed in with material of no interest to a large group of people. That was fine with me – I wanted this to be outsider art from the beginning – but it is time to recognize that the anti-war stuff, if it isn’t going to continue to be an indulgence, needs its own place. My next post, for instance, is going to be about Enlightenment eccentric Antoine de Lasalle, Herault Sechelles, and the epicurean tradition – and that has zero resonance with the most of the audience that is truly riveted by the war and singed every day by America’s occupation of Iraq.
When I get the Withdrawalproject blog set up, I’m going to distribute the password to anybody who wants to contribute to it. As with all Withdrawal Project components, the only rule, at the moment, is to agree to the policy of zero American soldiers in Iraq in 2009. I have to make that a snazzier one liner, by the way. January 2009 is the deadline, but I don’t want to create such a narrow deadline that the movement automatically loses if – as is very likely – there are soldiers there in January, 2009. Withdrawal is withdrawal – if one loses the timetable battle, it doesn’t vitiate the fact that the soldiers shouldn’t be there, and that we should be pressing to get them all, every one of them, out.
I’ve been reading a lot about past social movements, and I wondering whether the Withdrawal project’s lack of a strict to do list – sign your name to this petition, give money to this organization – is a positive (as I think) or an invitation to entropy. To be goofy about it, I want the Withdrawal project to awaken an antiwar Kundalini – a physical and spiritual energy. And I suspect that petitions and donations are ways of putting that energy into a deep, deep sleep. But I may be totally fucked up on this.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
The view of the top 20 percent income bracket: the great American twenty first century
An interesting variable in U.S. elections is that the top 20 % does most of the talking - the media, the politicians, the "experts...
-
You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t... -
Ladies and Gentlemen... the moment you have all been waiting for! An adventure beyond your wildest dreams! An adrenaline rush from start to... -
LI feels like a little note on politics is called for. The comments thread following the dialectics of diddling post made me realize that, ...