Bollettino

Some crimes insist on remaining unsolved. Jack the Ripper's crimes are the paragon of such. The Black Dahlia case is another.

In the WP, see the article about Steve Hodel, an LA PI who claims to have solved the case. His solution is that... well, his Dad cut Elizabeth Short in two in 1947. Oddly enough, this is the same claim (although different father) made by another, earlier solver of the Black Dahlia case by Janice Knowlton.

The article exudes a jaded fascination not so much with the case as with the California obsession about murderous parents. Southern California has always advertised itself as a state of mind -- it came into being as a human entity only after it had been projected as a state of mind, notoriously enough. Perhaps for this reason, psychological aberrance so easily leaks into sociological norm. So this is the hotbed of repressed memory, the place where all the young and the restless -- if they are affluent enough - eventually remember that Dad murdered a playmate, or was an officer in the local Satanic Ritual Club and Rotary Cotillion. Who knew the conjunction of Freud and Raymond Chandler would lead to this? Still, there's an air of desuetude upon that meeting of Noir and the DSM. Haven't we rollerdexed our way through more fashionable syndromes? Repressing, on the way, the repressed memory one.

There is one paragraph in the piece that is unctuous and stupid and worthy of protest. Before describing what happened to Elizabeth Short, there's this sentence: "Children should stop reading here." As if. That children might be reading a newspaper, instead of playing the Black Dahlia video game or whatever, is improbable in itself. But that the paper feels called upon to censor the flow of its own information, such as it is, is bogus to the extent that any sensible child should mistrust the paper thereafter.

Bollettino

Of the essays I wish I�d written, one of them is by the Carlos Ginzburg, the Italian historian, and it has the wonderful title, Killing a Chinese mandarin. It was puvblished in Critical Inquiry in 1994, but I just came across it.

There�s a moral Gendankenexperiment that appears in several French texts. Ginzburg traces the figura in it to some texts of Diderot; he traces the idea of it back to Aristotle�s remarks on pity and distance, in time or space, in the Rhetoric.

The situation in Diderot is that a man murders another man in Paris. He then flies to China. At that difference, safe from the consequences of what he has done, does the murderer feel remorse? Would it be more natural to feel that the episode was simply closed, and unpleasant?

Ginzburg shows that Diderot recurs to this topic several times, most notably in Lettres sur les aveugles� There, Diderot makes the startling suggestion that if one is, structurally, incapable of distinguishing between a man pissing and a man bleeding to death, then the pity one feels is similarly diminished.

This is a variation of Aristotle�s point about natural law: it is natural to feel pity for those with whom one is close, but not for those who are far away. The largeness of the distance, or what I would call its familiarity or unfamiliarity, determines the moral emotion. And as the moral emotion is what is called upon in moral judgment, this makes it difficult to judge actions at a distance.

Ginzburg next moves to Chateaubriand, who gives us the classical form of the thought experiment in The Genius of Christianity: �Conscience! Is it possible that thou canst be but a phantom�? I ask my own heart, I put to myself this question: if thou couldst by a mere wish kill a fellow creature in China, and inherit his fortune in Europe, with the supernatural conviction that the fact would never be known, wouldst thou consent to form such a wish?

Balzac transforms this passage in several ways in Pere Goriot. Rastignac is tormented by the idea that he could become rich through a scheme that he knows will involve, indirectly, a murder. He meets his friend Bianchon and tells him of his doubts about this. Bianchon asks, �have you read Rousseau?�
�Yes.�
�Do you remember that passage in which he asks the reader what he would do if he could become wealthy by killing an old Chinese mandarin, without leavihg Paris, just by an act of will?�

Isn�t this, in one striking image, the whole history of European colonialism?

Ginzburg is quite aware of this. He develops the idea, further, with quotes from Hume and Benjamin. However, you will notice that I have done a little transforming of my own during the course of this reprise of Ginzburg�s essay. For at no point does he make the leap, as I have, from distance to familiarity.

It is a subtle part of the thought experiment that the victim be a Chinese mandarin. And not a French merchant, for instance, in Canton. I think there is a reason for this hint of exoticism. The distance between Paris and China is simply a metric fact leaving its impress on the imagination. But what kind of fact is the distance between a Frenchman and a Chinese Mandarin? Familiarity, I would like to claim, is inseparable from some image of proximity and distance. But these images point to a certain work � the calculating, as it were, work of sentiment. And that seems to violate the idea that pity is an immediate response. That pity requires no extra energy. That pity is, in a sense, free.

When, in fact, distance has been abolished � when the lyncher is face to face with the victim, or the tv viewer is face to face with the obliterated Iraqi soldier (admittedly, a different kind of elimination of distance), why doesn�t the natural law kick in?

One of the odder features of the age of lynching in the South was that, far from being a dirty secret, postcards were made of lynchings and sold door to door. The image of a strung up, gutted, burned black man, which can�t be seen without horror even by, presumably, Mississippi senators, was once a familiar popular image. I would say that image contributed to the spirit of lynching by affecting a form of de-familiarization. By compulsively asserting a metaphysical distance between lyncher and victim, pity was, as in an odd behavioralist experiment on reactions in rats, erased by being overloaded.

I�m still not sure that all pity is like this. The immediacy of pity seems such a standard characteristic of it that I am afraid of violating an essential semantic norm by saying that pity requires some calculating function. Still, let�s say I am right. The art, then, is to stimulate the great rat, Public Opinion, in just the right way. That didn't happen before the war. The management of stimulus was, frankly, a disaster. The press assumed the rat had been sufficiently stimulated, and then one day looked out its window and beheld a million peace marchers.

So how is the rat being treated now? The thing to look for, if you do want to manage pity � if you want to create a kind of horror, and you want a population to go along � the thing to manage, then, is the initial moment in which the image is received. In this, the Bush administration has been pretty brilliant. The last three weeks, as we keep getting told again and again, the other parts of the world were seeing a different kind of war than we were. The images flooding the airwaves in Pakistan, for instance, were all of Iraqis variously blown apart. Suddenly, however, these images have started flooding the American airwaves, too. Suddenly it is all right for the Sun, in Britain, to publish a huge photo of a burned Iraqi child. Because we have been through a ritual period of blaming all violence on the other side. Even that the other side resisted, the message is, makes them to blame for violence. That period has been successful. The press has been cooperative. And, consequently, this has become a war without casualties. A cakewalk.

America is an odd country for such things. We have decided that the familiarity of the images of 9/11 are a kind of gold standard of pity. No American really feels obliged to remember, say, the deaths in the Moscow theater which the Chechen rebels took last year. Those who mention such things are treated as fools. It is as if they were turning around the moral thought experiment: in this one, the Chinese mandarin kills the European. An odd thing about the Western notion of distance: it isn't commutative.

Bollettino

We�ve just finished a review of Niall Ferguson�s Empire for the National Post.
Ferguson is a fascinating historian. We took a few potshots at him in the review, since we don�t view being merely laudatory as an interesting response to a book this good. One of the things the book did remind us of was that the first wave of globalisation, which gained force in the latter half of the 19th century, was broken by the Conservatives, not be anti-globalizing leftists. Joseph Chamberlain devised a tariff happy Conservative-Unionist platform that lost to the Liberals in the Post Boer period, but that ultimately pointed British policy in the direction of setting up cozy Empire trade barriers. Ferguson is no ideologue about this issue. He points out that the trade barriers probably cushioned Great Britain from the magnitude of slump that afflicted both Germany and the U.S.

We aren�t ideologues on this issue, either. We�d like to see labor and environmental groups internationalized on the lines of capital � so we want globalization to proceed on one level, at least. However, it is hard not to see that the fads of the moment � the boycott of French goods, the pressure to annul Saddam�s debt, etc. � are crystallizing into the traditional nationalist objection to globalization; and that that objection is always poisonous. The NYT has been running a series of little articles about the War views of various CEOs. The conventional wisdom is that the lack of War views stems from the internationalization of these CEO�s companies. Well, watch out for what you wish for. When the Battle in Seattle was shaping up, we were all for the anti-globalizing forces. But we were for them as a brake on the impoverishment of the American working class. We find it very worrisome that anti free trade rhetoric is now being appropriated by the right. In fact, the much vaunted re-building of Iraq, if it happens (and we have our doubts that Iraq will be rebuilt anytime soon, especially under Smilin� Jay Garner � rebuilding is notoriously hard to do in the midst of insurgency), might be a tipping point for the retreat from free trade, especially as the American government tries to game the rules to punish European companies for European politics.

Ronnie Lipschutz has a provocative essay on this topic which begins:

"At the beginning of the 21st century," the history books of the future may record,
"the United States made its bid for Imperium. The attacks of September 11, 2001
brought home to Washington, DC the very real risks of a largely self-regulating global
market system, including both the disaffection it generated and the openings it
provided to those disaffected. In the wake of September 11th, Washington has been
putting in place a new global system in which the United States is not only hegemonic
but also establishes rules that will bind all other countries. Within Imperium,
international law is unnecessary because there is no longer an international system or
global republic, and there are no sovereign territories. This essay is intended more as
a provocation than a systematic analysis of a process underway. It raises questions
about the policies, methods, and intentions of the United States and argues that the bid
for Imperium is connected with the processes of globalization and the vulnerabilities
that it has created. The self-disciplining structure of global neo-liberal
governmentality has failed and, to remedy this, the Bush Administration is seeking to
re-establish sovereignty abroad and, perhaps, a police state at home.�

We are far from a police state yet � but the thesis that the neo-liberalism of the nineties is under concerted attack by the Bush administration bears looking into. We were especially reminded of pre-1914 rhetoric by today�s meeting in St. Petersburg of the Coalition of the Unwilling. It doesn�t seem to occur to American commentators that France and Germany could accrue any advantages outside of the American sphere. It is as if America tacitly owned the world. This is evidently not true. While it is true that French investors, like investors world wide, have put a large bet on the U.S. economy, it is evidently a mature economy. The disadvantages for France in disobeying the dictates of the Bush-ites have been much publicized, but just the gaudiness of the use of force has the effect of making France, Germany and Russia that much more bound together. The idea of hostile trade blocs smells like the 1920s all over again.

Bollettino

The British Medical Journal has published a scathing denunciation of the American torture of various prisoners of war. Naipaul has written of the irony of third world revolutionaries depending on the liberality of the system against which they operate. That irony, at least, is being systematically broken in the case of the American torture of Al qaeda operatives in Cuba. While Bush can threaten Iraq forces for harming American POWs, who is going to ensure the humane treatment of Afghanistan POWs? Surely not the Al qaeda leaders, who have shed the forms of legitimacy that would have provided some protection for their followers. Protection should be provided by our second thoughts -- by those reactions to our first, immediate anger by which civilization continues. That isn't happening, though.

"The New York Times and International Herald Tribune last month published apparently well founded accounts of the techniques applied to Abu Zubaydah and other Al Qaeda suspects in US custody. These included deprivation of food, water, sleep, and light; covering subjects' heads with black hoods for hours at a time; forcing them to stand or kneel in unnatural positions in extreme cold or heat; keeping them naked; prolonged chaining or shackling; hooking them up to sensors during serial interrogations; and denial of medical attention. There have been persistent reports of beatings at some US operated centres, and a military pathologist has determined that the deaths of two prisoners at Bagram, Afghanistan, last December were homicides. At Bagram "disorientation is a tool of interrogation and therefore a way of life." At Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where around 650 men continue to be held, largely in solitary confinement and beyond the jurisdiction of US law, there have been 20 suicide attempts so far."

The only good news, here, is that the barbaric treatment of these prisoners is consistent with the barbaric norm in the U.S. Our prisons are a standing scandal.

It is time to normalize the POW regime of these prisoners. And it is time to face up to the fact that, if they cannot be released, it is because the war in Afghanistan is still going on, in spite of the general media consensus that we won it in a cakewalk.

From our far flung correspondents

Our friend H. writes, from Germany:

"I am glad it is coming to an end. After all, as the old saying goes, tis
better to be rulled by a just infidel then an unjust muslim. But a few
points have been interesting for me. Folks oscillated between elation at
the fact that Saddam was gone and doing the traditional hitting of their
chest shi'ia rutine almost defiently. THen there was the matter of Iraqi
flag being toyed with by a few people at the base of the statue, and of
course the sand from Karbala or Najaf, can't quite remember (the exhibition
of which would have been a crime under Saddam) and yes, you are right in
observing that they know exactly what is expected of them. THis is standard
issue streetsmarts under authoritarian rule--something I was reminded again
while living in Tunis something still familiar to all working in any
American factory. And then, let us not forget the staged managed nature of
at least some of the activities for media consumption. Remeber, the Bush
and co were counting on these scenes to help dissipate the unprecedented
anger at the States. Don't think they would have left that to chance do you?
They are not called Psyops for nothing. Amazing what a few dollar bills
can accomplish.(same set up in Iran 1953)[an educated guess especially
supported by attack and looting today of the French cultural center and the
German embassy. Accidents? I doubt it.)

I would presume some are shell shocked, but this is the only thing that
truly puzzles me about the Iraqis. I can't read the faces of those damned
Iraqis. THey are calm, collected. I would have expected a bit more frenzy,
but they are proving inscrutable. And that, I was thinking, is a good sign.

I am assuming, in a few weeks, the Occupiers will find more than they
bargained for. Happens each and everytime you release pent up energies. I
sense they are conserving energy, and letting enemies duke it out. But once
the fear is shattered, no stopping the rapid explosion of hope, optimism and
want. THe only thing they appear excited about is looting...this is the
begining of a positive move and I doubt they can be easily
contained.(killing of the Shi'i clergies to start with).. Pity the price
though....it should be running in the tens of thousands(of dead). One thing
I am sure of. Stability is not what the neocons will get in the Middle
East.

Arabs once again will realize the only thing their rulers are good for is
being parasites...enjoying all the priviledges and running at the first
sight of trouble. And soon as the Islamic idiots too realize that the
suicide missions and the rush to heaven is the Islamic version of the old
Middle Eastern habit of the leaders using them as cannon fothers, who knows,
what they'll do...perhaps something good will come of this after all.

Bollettino

So what is up with the stock market? There we have a honey of a victory, hanging right above them, CNN and Fox news anchors dancing in the streets, and all they can come up with is 20 some measly points?

Perhaps they aren�t into the whacked optimism purveyed in today�s Floyd Norris column. Floyd, who likes the middle, has jabbed to the left (his exposes about Tyco) and jabbed to the right (his cheerleading about the ever enduring consumer), and here he is definitely in full apologia mode. However, the optimism is always tempered by the conditional modal -- might, may, could -- because nobody believes in Dow 36,000 any more. His guess is that the economy is now set to roar back. The consumer is ready� the businesses are ready� and the international situation is ready�

But we have our doubts. Maybe the traders were leafing through their Fortunes this week. The traditional Fortune 500 issue is the big seller. This year�s included the kind of downer article on American capitalism that even Marxists aren�t writing any more. How�s this for a set of figures? The Fortune 500 profits sank a whopping 62% last year. The explanation Fortune favors is that the previous years were bogus � a lot of revenue and profit inflatin� going on. This is the kind of thing to give us all the creeps � that feeling of the presence of the impalpable which overcomes Hamlet on spying his dead dad. The figures are incredibly bad, the more you press them. Here�s another one for the record books: �In fact, it appears that at least $310 billion of 2001�s energy related revenues were overstated.�

The question is this: is there a lag between stock prices and the �new� accounting? If there is � if it gradually begins to dawn on investors that not only is next year not going to get any better, but, retrospectively, the past is getting worse and worse -- well, then we will see the bottom of the market. And we won�t like it.

This should set a fine limit on Rumsfeld's colonialist fantasies. Although Rumsfeldians throughout history have bankrupted states pursuing the holy grail of absolute power, and there's nothing to say that the US is immune. There's surprisingly little concern about the new coalition of the unwilling -- France, Germany and Russia. The idea that the US, with Iraq, is gonna be coming into the big bucks any day now is absurd. If France and Germany truly re-orient themselves to Russia and China, this could be bad news for the US economy in the long run. To imagine that the Russian market pales in comparison to what Smilin' Jay Garner is gonna sweat out of those Iraqis is the kind of delusion that we thought George Bush, sr., whooped out of his boy in George Jr. drunk drivin' days. Perhaps not. Which will make the next year bitter for all of us.

Our far flung correspondents

My friend Tom makes a Lacanian analysis of the Baghdad statue destroying party yesterday. We were corresponding about coining a new word for throwing down statues (he suggested de-erection -- we suggested tumescoclasm) - and we referred him to Fred Kaplan's article in Slate. This is his reply.

"The crowds seemed to know what was expected of them. A man went up to one of the marines, whose tanks now controlled the circle and both sides of Sadoon Road, a main artery in east Baghdad, and asked for permission to destroy the statue."

Thanks for the hint toward Kaplan's piece - not bad for an on-the-spot report; esp. his comparative recollections from 1991. Of course, of course, I am looking forward to a somewhat more Lacanian reading of this type of event from Zizek. Like I always say (rather: I promise to say it like this from this point forward, for this is the inaugural use): while you can have too much psychotherapy, you can never have too much psychoanalysis because you can always be dead wrong.

Yes, damned right Fred Kaplan, that Marine is a "moron" for draping the stars and stripes over the face of the statue (let's skip the obvious issues of The Face and erasure here; they aint that much fun), but not for reasons of painting a "picture of neo-colonialism"; no, he is a moron for therapeutic reasons.

Lets face it, the picture of colonialism, neo-, retro-or other, is quite complete; it is developed, mounted, framed and hung for exhibition.

Let me back-up, step aside and circle away from my point. I'm thinking now of Zizek's Introduction to his book Tarrying With the Negative. I'm envisioning an image similar to the one he recalls in this Intro.: the celebrations in the streets of Bucharest after the overthrow of Ceausescu; a national flag waving above the crowd; the red star, the symbol of Communism, has been cut-out of the field. Z. declares that this is a "sublime" (yes, Kantanian sense) image: a moment just following the departure of the Master-Signifier, when It has yet to be replaced, an "open" moment, a moment of "becoming" wherein the incompleteness of the Big Other became apparent.

There is somewhere else in Zizek's books where he gives his account (his imaginings) of the beginning of the Iranian revolt against the Shah. He imagines a provincial police check-point where some one Irani defies the police, he will not follow the order to leave the area. Therefrom, the assembled crowd confronts the police and attack the police station. This is proposed as the first (given ordinal preference merely for conveniences of logical sequence) instance of the demise of the power of the absolute injunctions of the Big Other; that it is only from one such moment that the revolution could take place at all. The falling of statues comes only much much later.

From a statue to a gap in the flag (thus my proposal: de-erection). Whether it was Lenin or Stalin, whether it was brought down by hand tools or cranes or Finnish engineers contracted by Estonians, without drinking too deeply of fantasia, I think that it was done locally, by some version of "the people". Thus, those Iraqis in Firdouz square were (they have been and will be) deprived their "open" moment free of the previous concrete contingencies of threat and collaboration; they are occupied, the Master-Signifier is torn by an invading force, they had to ask permission to be granted but a moment of pleasure. The psycho-social trauma is perverse and boundless: the only relief granted by the "taking" of Baghdad is a relief from a compound terror (arbitrariness compounded): life under S.H. and foreign military violence; but terror remains in town. One species of inhumanity immediately replaced by another; inhumanities of epic proportions. The US (in the guise of the military) is the evil therapist: the one who needs the needs of the analysand; the one who establishes new dynamics of dependencies; the one who authors new fantasies under threat of violence.

Took me a long time to get not very far; these things sometimes steep for days, and then finally saturate me. Really, I promise, I have not converted to or taken vows as an orthodox Lacanian; its just a way for me to keep seeing the world as filled with people and pleasures and pains and not merely architecture.