Remora

We at Limited Inc are not vindicative people. Some readers have asked us why we have never given a whole spot to Berlusconi, especially since we derided his comment about the superiority of Western Civilization to Islam. But at the moment, it is very hard to take umbrage at a man who finds himself playing a bit part, a swab, an Igor, to world historic events. There's a story about him in today's NYT, and these two grafs say it all.

"After Mr. Berlusconi, who is Italy's richest man, was not invited to a meeting of French, British and German leaders just before today's summit meeting, he showed how much he minded. At a news conference, he said he could not have fit the meeting into his schedule anyway, because he had a previous engagement with center-right leaders from Spain, Austria, and Luxembourg.

Of that group, he boasted that he was "the leader of the most important country."

More important than Austria? More important than Luxemborg? The heart swells. As for what Spain thought about Berlusconi claiming that to be king of the tree house, Lord only knows.

One of the odder characteristics of Braggart B. is how much he operates like a throwback to an earlier era. Weber, in Politics as a Vocation, an essay I am drawn to, lately, makes the point that politicians, just like artists, were invented in the Enlightenment, although of course they have their roots in the humanists of the Renaissance. And, like artists, politicians became autonomous as they separated themselves from patronage. That is, as they learned to live on the fruits of office, rather than having the office bought for them, or using it as a lookout from which to spy venues of pillage. A slow process, of course, which hasn't yet made its appearance here in Texas, but I trust in Weber -- modernity is a-comin'. Berlusconi, from all accounts, has made use of his own fortune and properties in order to run the prime ministers office -- in everything from holding meetings at his own villa in Rome to reimbursing certain of his deputies out of his own pocket. He operates, in other words, like a Medici. And that is very unusual.

Perhaps those who say the nation is disappearing are right, however. In which case all kinds of primitive political formations should start to appear.

Dope
I had drinks with Alan a couple of nights ago. I was celebrating keeping this site going for threee months, and writing, almost every day, five hundred words on various topics. We talked a bit about what I was trying to do with this site: attract an audience? What kind of audience? In self-critical mode, I said I realized that sometimes I can't get off of a topic. For instance, the war, maybe I keep returning to it, maybe I am getting boring about it. And Alan said, oh, well, I don't usually read the posts that aren't about the war.

Whoah. Okay, Limited Inc. does go on an occasional esoteric bender, and maybe we should just keep doing war stuff. But screw it -- we never promised you a rose garden, reader. Sometimes the itch to talk about Plutarch or Ernst Junger gets to be too much. So yesterday I thought I'd push the envelope and post a complicated discussion of Gabriel Tarde.

Unfortunately, midway through the post, I looked at what I had written and thought -- this sounds like academic philosophy.
Do I want to do academic philosophy? No, clearly no.

So I decided to write about Bruno Latour instead.

The Connection is this: on his site, which is wonderfully stocked with essays, Latour has an essay, in English, entitled Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social.


In this essay, Latour discusses Tarde's turn to Leibnitz. What interests me is what attracts Latour to Tarde. I think the answer is Deleuzian: for Tarde, what metaphysics does best, its function in the culture, is lay out the combinations in which reality will come this time. That is, it forges categories as a way of creating schematic space, and then populates that space with concepts. It isn't that these categories aren't founded in reality -- how could they not be? it isn't that the categories are subjective -- on the level of their creation, subjectivity hasn't, itself, been created, been conceptually molded, so to put the discourse in terms of subjectivity and objectivity is a form of philosophical anachronism; but what metaphysics does well is carve out schematic spaces. The hidden relationship of metaphysics and politics is found in the list -- that ur-text of state power.

That's my intro to this quote from Latour :

"Agency plus influence and imitation, is exactly what has been called... an actor-network. [limitedinc note - ANT, actor network theory, was a sociological school associated with Latour and John Law in the 90s.] The link of the two ideas is essential to understand his theory : it is because he is a reductionist �even of a strange sort� that he does not respect any border between nature and society, and because he does not stop at the border between physics, biology and sociology that he does not believe in explaining the lower levels by the higher levels. Such is the key difficulty : human societies are not specific in the sense that they would be symbolic, or made of individual, or due to the existence of a macro organisations. They seem specific to us for no other reasons that, first, we see them from the inside and, second, that they are composed of few elements compared to any of the other societies we grasp only from the outside.



Let�s get slowly here : to begin with, we have to understand that �society� is a word that can be attributed to any association :



" But this means that every thing is a society and that all things are societies. And it is quite remarkable that science, by a logical sequence of its earlier movements, tend to strangely generalise the notion of society. It speaks of cellular societies, why not of atomic societies ? not to mention societies of stars, solar systems. All of the sciences seem fated to become branches of sociology.��p.58.

Instead of saying, like Durkheim, that we ��should treat social facts as a thing��, Tarde says that ��all things are society��, and any phenomenon is a social fact."

Now that last sentence might set off warning flares for the group that thinks the humanists are pulling some fast and loose stuff with the sciences. This group, led by Paul Gross, is especially worried about the phrase 'social construction'. As in the slogan, social construction of reality. Is Latour a social constructionist, as Gross has accused him of being?

Lingua Franca, in 1994, published a profile of Latour BY David Berreby. It is still a handy guide to a sometimes infuriating thinker. I found these three paragraphs particularly enlightening:

"For instance, the Louis Pasteur who emerges in Latour's The Pasteurization of France (Harvard, 1988) -- a study of how Pasteur succeeded in winning over France to his germ theory of disease -- is a thinker-politician, a skilled manipulator of the g overnment and the press as well as a great researcher. All of his skills are important. "Pasteur went to blind wine tastings to demonstrate his theory of fermentation," Latour says. "That's not just showmanship. That's why he's such a good scientis t."

This egalitarianism is reflected in a favorite Latourian word: "symmetry." To understand symmetry, consider, again, The Pasteurization of France. To say that Pasteur succeeded because his discovery was true about nature, for instance, suggests that "nature," a realm neatly separated from society, can be used to explain the causes of activities within society -- that once some discovery about "nature" is shown to be true, society rearranges itself to conform to this truth. According to Latour, this is asymmetrical, because it suggests that an understanding of nature is somehow more powerful, more dispositive, more fundamental, than an understanding of society. On the other hand, one might discard the idea of truth entirely and argue that Pasteur's s uccess can be explained entirely through the lens of "society" -- that, say, the hygienic regulations that stemmed from Pasteur's work were in fact enacted in order to give those in power a new way to control the lower classes. This explanation, Latour ar gues, is a mirror image of the first. Instead of saying that the truth of nature determines social arrangements, it says that social arrangements determine what is construed as nature's truth.

Both views are equally na�ve, Latour says, because both proceed from the assumption that "nature" and "society" are somehow divisible. The symmetrical way to see Pasteur, Latour argues, is to see the split between nature and society as false. Thus, p art of Pasteur's success was his alliance, in the social world, with hygienists, for whom he provided a good explanation of the diseases they fought. But part of his success was also his alliance, in the natural world, with the microbes themselves, for wh om he became spokesman and interpreter. In other words, Latour rejects neither insight: not the insight into society nor the insight into nature. He simply claims that neither should be used to explain the other. It is a position of radical humility: poi nting out an asymmetry does not require the pointer to stand on some higher theoretical ground. It's a gesture not unlike pointing out that a painting in a hallway is hanging crooked."

In other words, Latour's point is not the social constructionist point, with their wierd intersubjective idealism. His point is that the era of the nature/culture divide is over. This is, indeed, the collapse of an enduring meta-narrative, but not one post-modernists envisioned sapping. What is happening in Latour, what connects his with the thinkers Deleuze first connected together, in a sort of geneology of disjunction, is that they see the exhaustion in the heart of dialectics since Hegel - that exhaustion of the subject and the object. Even at the time, it was a reactionary division, created as a sort of degenerate theology, an endrun around natural science in order to produce some secular version of redemption. Since then, it has become an impediment to thinking. And its last, ridiculous embodiment, in the naive realism of certain physicists, and the narcissism of social constructionists, signals the dialectics collapse. It is a ponzi scheme, now, and the concepts populating it are all greater fool ideas - they can have value only if you can sell them to greater fools, ie, students (for the academically entrenched social constructionists) and taxpayers (for the physicists, with their billion dollar plus laboratories).

Remora
Our eyes have turned to the NYT Story in the biz section today
Canada Overrides Patent for Cipro to Treat Anthrax
by Amy Harmon and Robert Fear.
Lede graf:
"Canada, taking an unusual step that the United States has resisted, said yesterday that it had overridden Bayer's patent for Cipro, an antibiotic to treat anthrax, and ordered a million tablets of a generic version from a Canadian company."

This rings a bell. In August, Brazil decided to put the screws to Roche, the Swiss drug manufacturer. It declared a national emergency to break the patent on nelfinavir, an AIDS drug. The US reaction to Brazil's patent policies in general has been aggressive, as in this WP story:

"Last February, the United States filed a claim against Brazil with the World Trade Organization over Brazil's intention to produce generic versions of patented AIDS drugs. The United States later withdrew its complaint under heavy international criticism.

But Washington's complaint had mainly centered on a more controversial Brazilian law that allowed Brazil to to produce generic drugs -- including those not related to AIDS -- if companies did not begin producing the drugs in Brazil within three years of patent. Though that law remains on Brazil's books, the action announced today is being taken under different legislation that permits domestic production of internationally patented drugs during national emergencies."

The Financial Times, in Patent Nonsense, an editorial published at the time of the Brazil contratemps, spills the beans on what is at stake:

"In richer countries it is broadly accepted that the high cost of drugs includes the price of progress. But a general erosion of patent rights could jeopardise that consensus. "

Yes, what is at stake is monopoly power and the concept of "fair return," which has been turned into a cash cow by pharmaceutical companies, software companies, and any company that wants to fork over a satisfactory level of campaign contribution in order to get its patents "extended." Canada's action is probably not going to have the immediate repercussion of putting the patent monopoly system into question, but it is going to add to pressure in this country, surely.

One sign of that pressure. There's a public letter from Nader to Tommy Thompson that should take all the hair off Thompson's body, if he were pervious to shame. Of course, he isn't. Thompson claimed that he had no authority to have a generic version of Cipro made in the US. Nader reminds him that, in fact, he does have that authority. Here's a nice bite sized graf:

"In the absence of adequate government stockpiles, families who cannot afford the hundreds of dollars per month per family member for ciprofloxacin risk not having access to this product, should the need arise. This is an unethical and unnecessary form of rationing. Some government officials and those who can afford the high prices have secure supplies of ciprofloxacin. It is your duty to see that all taxpayers and especially those who are less affluent are protected, and are protected as soon as is possible, not as soon as it is possible for one firm, Bayer, to supply the market. And it would make sense to have redundant sources of supply, for all of the obvious reasons. "

Remora

Not to brag, but, uh... well, to brag. LimitedInc, if you go back to October 6th, was all about the terrorist-pirate analogy. It has since been picked up (probably, we suspect, because IMPORTANT MEDIA PEOPLE are secretly reading this weblog for pointers -- you know who you are!) all over the place. Latest is Chris Mooney's piece in the American Prospect, which is a little more specific about America's war with the Barbary pirates. Nobody has yet picked up on our point that piracy required sponsoring nations, at first, and actually contributed to nation-building. Somebody will inevitably get to that, though.

Dope

Tomorrow, I am going to cut the throat of my popularity -- look, I've had as many as ten people visit this site in one day! -- and do a little foray into the philosophy of Gabriel Tarde. Since I mentioned Tarde in a review I wrote for Green Magazine last year - June, I believe it was -- of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, I'm going to paste the review here, for reference. Steve Johnson, the very handsome Steve Johnson whose Feed, alas, seems to be no more, interviewed Gladwell about that book at this link. .

As I said in some earlier post, right now I have a peculiar interest in the ruins and monuments of the 90s. Gladwell's work at the New Yorker wove a little filagree of old psychological experiments and new sounding science around the New Economy mantra. The first article of his I remember reading and going, wow, (and isn't that the quintessential, trend-driven, hyperinfantile response that people report as though it meant something? which I could have said bitchin, or I could have said, right on, or I could have said, great, and the way I packaged the awe would tell you where and when I am ) was the one on the Coolhunt. A lot of people picked up on that article. Luckily, it is in his archive.

I have to include Gladwell's intro graf, so that you get a feel for the man. If you haven't read him.

"Baysie Wightman met DeeDee Gordon, appropriately enough, on a coolhunt. It was 1992. Baysie was a big shot for Converse, and DeeDee, who was barely twenty-one, was running a very cool boutique called Placid Planet, on Newbury Street in Boston. Baysie came in with a camera crew-one she often used when she was coolhunting-and said, "I've been watching your store, I've seen you, I've heard you know what's up," because it was Baysie's job at Converse to find people who knew what was up and she thought DeeDee was one of those people. DeeDee says that she responded with reserve-that "I was like, 'Whatever' "-but Baysie said that if DeeDee ever wanted to come and work at Converse she should just call, and nine months later DeeDee called. This was about the time the cool kids had decided they didn't want the hundred-and-twenty- five-dollar basketball sneaker with seventeen different kinds of high-technology materials and colors and air-cushioned heels anymore. They wanted simplicity and authenticity, and Baysie picked up on that. She brought back the Converse One Star, which was a vulcanized, su�de, low-top classic old-school sneaker from the nineteen-seventies, and, sure enough, the One Star quickly became the signature shoe of the retro era. Remember what Kurt Cobain was wearing in the famous picture of him lying dead on the ground after committing suicide? Black Converse One Stars."

Okay, now for my review of his book.

The Tipping Point: how little things can make a big difference by Malcolm Gladwell Little Brown, $24.95

reviewed by Roger Gathman


At the end of the nineteenth century, an idiosyncratic Frenchman named Garbriel Tarde wrote a series of book in which he hypothesized that human history could be understood in terms of two principals: imitation and opposition. Writing in the wake of Pasteur�s discovery of the germ theory, Tarde envisioned "imitation waves" which propogated themselves limitlessly through human space until they met some countervailing force.

Tarde, by all accounts, was a contrarian fellow, and he died young. His work, ironically, did not spawn any great imitator. Instead, sociologists followed Durkheim, or Weber. Tarde�s weighty tomes were shuffled to the dustier regions of the library, where they sit today, mostly unread. But his insight into "imitation waves" has been revived, even if the current crop of pop philosophers are seemingly unfamiliar with Tarde�s name. The current fad for crossing the old idea of mimesis with information theory goes back to Richard Dawkins, the famed neo-Darwinist, who coined the term "meme" for a particle of content that leaps from mind to mind. The inevitable analogy with genes is invoked to give this idea a semi-scientific status. The term "meme" itself has leaped, at least, from the pages of one glossy magazine to another.

Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer, has gone back to the analogy with contagion that fascinated Tarde. In his new book, he offers a theory of collective human behavior defined as one vast, multi-tiered map of routes of exposure. The content of that exposure can be syphillis, or it can be the Hush Puppie, those brushed suede shoes that suddenly became fashionable in 1995. Gladwell wants to show us how, like germs, certain ideas, fads, or products can suddenly take off. The tipping point is the threshold between a linear increase in quantity and an epidemic increase. It is that moment when the purely numerical is lifted to a whole other order, transforming random incidences into a whole system.

A disease, according to Gladwell, needs three factors in order to become an epidemic.

First, it needs a core group of carriers. We think of disease as a linear process: I have a cold, I give it to x, who gives it to y, and so on. But an epidemic radiates these linear routes of infection off a small core group of intensely connected people. These are typhoid Mary figures, whose inclinations have lead them into professions or pursuits which involve numerous human relationships across a broad range of social clusters. Extrapolating from disease to any fashion, we have Gladwell�s "rule of the few:" a few people, who are connectors, expose a broad range of people to some contagious content, be it a message, a product, a style or an illness. These connectors alone aren�t sufficient, however. Among the few, we also have mavens, informal information collectors who are disposed to teach other people what they know, and pursuaders, or salesmen.

The second factor in epidemics is degree of contagiousness. Gladwell uses the marketer�s term, "stickiness." A sticky content can be explained by some intrinsic structure of the content, such as the highly infectious nature of the bug that carried the Spanish influenza, but it can also be designed. Gladwell spends a good part of the book talking about certain big features of human psychology to explain how we are peculiarly vulnerable to some contents, and how marketers, or persuaders of any kind, can use those vulnerabilities to produce "tipping points." Gladwell shows how the diffusion of a successful innovation shows a regular and predictable pattern: first it becomes popular among a core group of innovators, who spread it to a larger, but still relatively small, group of early adopters, who spread it out into a much larger group researchers have labeled the "late majority."

Even with the connectors in place and a "sticky" content, however, we also require favoring circumstances. Gladwell calls this the power of context. He uses the context of New York City in the eighties and nineties to highlight the difference between the spike in crimes which occurred in the eighties and the sudden, decisive drop which occurred in the nineties. The spike, Gladwells says, had to do with a general neglect of small features of the urban landscape. Here, Gladwell is picking up on the "broken windows" theory of crime, which predicts that the negligent enforcement of laws against quality of life crimes, like littering and vandalism, will nourish larger, more serious crimes, like robbery and murder.

Gladwell is one of those writers who can actually capture you in the very rhythm of his thought. When I finished The Tipping Point, I briefly became a Gladwell "maven," pressing the book upon my friends with missionary fervor.

But there also exists a cooler, critical spirit inside of me - otherwise I wouldn�t be a book reviewer, n�est-ce pas? That spirit spotted two flaws in Gladwell�s encompassing thesis.

One is that Gladwell sometimes willfully reduces conditions to causes. It is a condition of successfully lighting a kitchen match that it not be wet, but the effective cause of the flame that results when I scratch one across the side of the matchbox is bracketed within a much narrower band of factors. Although this might seem like metaphysical niggling, when Gladwell writes, for instance, summing up his New York crime example: "Clean up graffiti and all of a sudden people who would otherwise commit crimes suddenly don�t," he�s magnified my niggling into a valid objection. In this instance, we know that the crime drop wasn�t confined to New York City. It has happened, for instance, in Washington D.C., where nothing like the Broken Windows program was instituted. What we want is some means of filtering out those conditions which are necessary, but not sufficient, from those which are both. Gladwell is simply too sloppy about this.

The second objection is to Gladwell�s subtitle: "how little things can make a big difference." Basically, Gladwell often performs a sort of analytic hocus-pocus to make us think that there is one little thing which is the tipping point for his "epidemics." Take his example of the epidemic of STD�s in Baltimore in the nineties. He quotes three people with three different explanations of why it occurred, and he points out that, in all of the explanations, the precipitating factor was relatively minor. However, he soft pedals the fact that there are, after all, three different explanations. In almost all his examples, in fact, he relies on one dimension and the small changes within it to forward his thesis, when the important thing is that a complex order emerges from the interrelation of a number of small factors. This is why a person using Gladwell�s book to design, say, a marketing scheme is bound to be frustrated. Although minor changes in initial conditions can cause major systematic shifts, those conditions usually extend through temporal, causal, and physically specific dimensions - what the ecologists call an "adoptive landscape" - which limit the determinateness with which one can predict those shifts.

What do these objections add up to? Really, I am only reiterating the old saw that the devil�s in the details - and that Gladwell hasn�t quite caught that devil yet.

Remora
Nick Cohen makes some very nice points in this Guardian article (which I went to by way of this weblog -- abrightcolddayinapril-- some nice bits on it, too)


First graf of Cohen's article:

"The bombing of Afghanistan must stop. To say so isn't to appease mass murderers by pretending they are misunderstood fighters against imperialism. You can think, as I do, that the sum of human happiness would inflate exponentially if the Taliban and their Arab allies were driven from power. You can believe that the atrocities of 11 September changed the world and made hitherto unthinkable expedients necessary. You can even fall in love with Tony Blair's mythical America which stood 'side by side with us' in the Blitz of 1940, rather than staying out of the Second World War until 1941, and was 'born out of the defeat of slavery', rather than a declaration of independence by, among others, slave owners. "

That's a bracing return to reality. I think the bombing must stop pretty soon, too, Cohen is right that there is a crisis looming here. It sounds all too much like Somalia redux. Warlords, famine, troops, terrorism. There is a book by David Halberstam out right now, re Clinton and the generals, War in a Time of Peace, which traces, in that inimitably smarmy Halberstam style, the rise of TAC - tactical air command -- over SAC in the nineties. Halberstam gets the insiders to tell about who conceived the convergence of smart tech and rapid response air power and how it changed the whole mindset in the Pentagon. (for a review of this book, see this Slate exchange.) But TAC has limitations, and we are going to see them, I think, in Afghanistan. The more the military tries to make this a replay of Kosovo, the less bang for the buck, or buck for the bang, we are going to get. Unless you can get the men in the training camps that we are really trying to stop to line up -- say, post some convincing announcement re Calisthenics and anthrax training at 0900 h -- air power is going to have to be subordinate, eventually, to more traditional military strikes. This is the nightmare that Bush, understandably, wants to avoid.

But I am putting Cohen's message in a narrow context. In the larger context of this war, in the way it is being turned, at least for now, in the Arab world into a war where American blood is precious, and our blood is water -- as some Egyptian housewife interviewed by the Times put it, I thought rather snappily -- the bombing has to cease pretty soon, and the attention to famine has to be put first.

Remora
Peter Hitchens is Christopher Hitchens brother. In England, he is a famous Thatcherite, waxing scornful at the leftist tide undermining civilization and stealing the family silver. To read a truly, truly bonkers article, you must take this link . The Spectator.co.uk It is hilarious. I particularly liked the line about the European Union being a smiley faced USSR. "Take me to your balaikas ringing out, Mr. Schroder," type of thing.
Of course, being a Tory of the old school -- I mean very old school, I mean I am pretty sure the guy is still pissed at the frogs for that Willian the Conquerer chap -- Hitchens doesn't content himself with knocking the usual left suspects -- no no no, the meat of the piece, rare and juicy, is dedicated to the proposition that Bush has gotten wobbly. In short, he's operating like the Manchurian candidate. Surely the smileyfaced KGB have been waving cards in front of his face. I'm not joking. An attack on Bush for being a lefty -- will wonders never cease! Here's a beautiful graf:

"This war is easy for the Left to like. By limiting his offensive to �terrorism with a global reach�, President Bush has specifically excluded the IRA from his wrath, robbing the campaign of its alleged founding principle and disillusioning those who fooled themselves into thinking that recent events in Colombia might have weakened American support for Sinn Fein."

Soft on the IRA, and next thing you know the commissars are boarding soldiers in your bedroom.
I can tell that Peter Hitchens is going to be my guiding star through this war. I've always had an unfortunate weakness for lunacy.