Bollettino

Wow. There go my twenties…
An egocentric response to the death of Ronald Reagan, the man whose presidency defined almost all of my politics between the ages of 21 and 29. I don’t think Reagan ever proposed a policy or a program, espoused a bill or advocated an idea that I didn’t think was shabby, bogus, illegal, immoral, or simply dumb. From supporting the death squads in El Salvador to the money he wasted on the anti-missile defense – a trillion dollar monument to our now dead pharaoh, which will outlive us all, and never, ever work – Reagan’s presidency galvanized me, at least.

Not that I don’t have a sneaking affection for the guy. There was something so Hollywood corrupt from the thirties about him, like a Raymond Chandler character who, inexplicably, was NOT involved in a murder. A Terry Lennox with permanently ink black hair and – unlike Lennox – a good woman (and a good woman’s astrologer) to guide him through the rough times. I could never get mad at Reagan the person. This, perhaps, was the famous Teflon. Listening to Bush do his usual lipsynch speech – has there ever been a president less able to make a simple speech? – I thought about how smoothly Reagan would have responded, in his salad days, to the news of his own death. The man knew how to talk. Bush, I despise. Reagan has earned some retrospective respect.

Memories, memories. I landed in New Orleans in 1983, just back from a year in France, and plunged, as much as I could plunge, into politics. I joined CISPES, for one – a now defunct organization, then devoted to stopping the support of the contras, and the support of El Salvador’s death squads. Little did I, or anybody, know that the real trouble would be coming from the CIA station in Islamabad, with its gleeful and insane support of a jihad that we are all now paying for. That was way too far away for me. In 83, many of my friends, or friends of friends, in N.O. were – for complicated reasons I won’t get into here – doctors, and they all loved Ronnie. This made sense to me. They were all ferocious about the tax cuts, ferociously investing in various of the schemes that had been let loose in the national bloodstream by the loosening of all regulatory rules. In my part of the country, that meant setting up S&Ls and diverting billions into the pockets of crooks. It was a party.

But the real love for Reagan came from a different strata of people, who could only have been invented by Don Delillo. I mean the truly sinister clique, the retired CIA people, the states rights racists, the ones with the murky pasts. I’d lived in Louisiana off and on for years. Louisiana is different. It is the kind of state that would produce both Lee Harvey Oswald and David Duke. Oswald bothered me, like a shadow out of the corner of my eye, whenever I went out with my comrades to protest against another Yanqui atrocity in Central America downtown. Oswald was not the doppelganger of my preference – I prefer to think of myself as a poete assassine, rather than a poete assassin. Those demos -- such scenes – plainclothesmen hovering around, openly displaying video cameras and recorders, rumors of rightwing Cubans with batons massing on other streets, and the chants which we would bellow out: the people/united/will never be defeated.

A prediction that has been falsified countless times, bellowed with the enthusiastic convinction of mice bitching about mousetraps. Nice to march to in the street, but, as a practical slogan, worthless.

New Orleans press was fiercely for the contras. I remember the Picayune doing a big series about Guatamala in which it was pretty overtly suggested that mass murder might be in order. Can’t have communism on our doorstep. It was that kind of time. Perhaps we should remember 50,000 some Guatamalan peasants were slaughtered, while Reagan’s administration provided their slaughterers with military aide.

Well, there is one thing that keeps small powerless leftist splinter groups going: the bottomless faith of the FBI in their dangerousness. The “mutual delusions of each vice/such are the gates of paradise”, to parody Blake. So it was with CISPES. The New Orleans group started to crumble in 1984. The FBI had penetrated it – as if there were anything to penetrate – and had cornered one young guy from El Salvador. This guy was illegal. Now, at the time, sending someone like that back to El Salvador was equivalent to murdering him. So the FBI said that was what they were going to do, if he didn’t ‘name names.” Next thing I knew, one of the people I worked with at Tulane ( a man I shall call Peter) was receiving calls from the FBI – at work. Peter was an ardent leftist, but in terms of his subversive potential, the FBI had the wrong man – his sneakiness was devoted less to overthrowing our liberties than to cheating on his girlfriend. However, his girlfriend, who was the Nicaraguan consul to New Orleans, was eventually picked up too, and expelled from the country for spying. Supposedly, she had made a map of the New Orleans harbor. Even now, that makes me laugh – the only spying she was doing was following around Peter, to find out if he was cheating on her. If she could draw a map to her house from two blocks away, I would be astonished. We are not talking about a cartographically endowed woman.

Of course, LI loved the idea that the FBI was closing in – it validated both our sense of self importance and our idea of what the FBI does. Alas, even after he made elaborate precautions – telling the neighbors, for instance, that if the FBI came for him, he was going to ‘call them over as witnesses” – there was no party.

Later, reading the Times, we put it together. The FBI just wanted to pre-empt CISPES threatened demonstrations against Reagan at the Republican convention in Dallas.

And now he is dead in L.A. God rest his bones.

Bollettino

In our last post, we said that we wanted to ponder, at length, elites and elitism.

Let’s start with our all too brief remarks about the doctrine of double truth. If the philosopher writes texts with double messages – a public one for the vulgar, and a hidden one for the elite – one wonders: why does the elite need to hide?

In the Republic, Plato dreamed of a philosopher king – but in the Apology, Plato shows the philosopher’s real fate, the most inglorious of murders at the hands of the state. From Plato to Nietzsche, the philosopher posed a problem by his very existence in a society structured by the three functions: workers, priests, nobles. The philosopher was the free agent – or the cursed portion, the shit, kindling, the nomadic. The inability to socially stabilize the philosopher’s power became the philosopher’s theme – picked up again in the early modern era, and finding its most extreme expression in Nietzsche, where it became the single greatest symbol of the culture of nihilism that has grown secretly inside Western culture.

So okay, this is where we are. In this post, we want to approach those topics with our usual exemplary obliqueness, like a sidewinding snake, through an article in the Fall, 2003, Studies in Romanticism: “The politics of permanent parabasis,” by Michel Chaouli. A lovely article about that unlikely paragon of the problem we are addressing, Friedrich Schlegel.

Chaouli’s problem is this: how did we come to think that the “link between artistic practice and political ideology” determines the “correct” interpretation of artistic texts?

Chaouli refers to two ways of thinking about romanticism – either as a set of sinister political ideas encoded in a set of aesthetic ideas, or as a set of sinister political ideas that are transformed into utopian ideas in aesthetic practice. Either the Frankfurt School or Ernst Bloch.

About this, he writes: “both strategies therefore find themselves unable either to consider or to test the hypothesis that one of the crucial accomplishments of romanticism may lie precisely in the weakening or breaking of this link. This is not to suggest that the romantics did not hold political views, nor that their poetic works do not engage important political questions. It does suggest that their most radical innovations in poetic practice and aesthetic theory can only be recognized and absorbed by later writers if those innovations are not constrained by the demands placed upon a political theory or social model. The line of reasoning I propose assumes that romanticism, far from furthering a mutual implication of art and politics (or art and religion, or art and philosophy), promotes their differentiation. With romanticism, art (and not politics, religion, or philosophy) increasingly decides what art should be.”

In our next post: Schlegel and Kant

Bollettino

‘My daughter please understand I am displaying your great uncles in a bad light they was wild and often shicker they thieved and fought and abused me cruelly but you must also remember your ancestors would not kowtow to no one and this were a fine rare thing in a colony made specifically to have poor men bow down to their gaolers. – The True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey.

LI’s politics starts from a simple principle, which is that, no matter what the advantage, poor men should not bow down to their gaolers. It gets more complicated after that.

We’ve been thinking about elites and about the famous “noble lie” principle. It is famous now because of the Straussians. But according to Steve Fuller, in his Thomas Kuhn, a philosophical history, the noble lie principle, or the double truth principle, was not direct from Plato to Leo Strauss. Fuller’s book, an all out assault on Kuhn, mentions other famous 20th century figures who held the principle, and implies that it is integrated into the way Kuhn perceived the history of science.

The principle goes like this: the philosopher who writes the truth, in a state or culture where the truth is placed under various interdictions, risks punishment. One strategy, then, is to write so that a certain audience – who Fuller calls the elite – can understand you, but also so another audience – the vulgar (and – by some inexplicable turn of events – the rulers) can understand you. Both versions will contain some truths, but only the elite version, the secret writing, will contain comprehensive truths.

Now, before we talk about elites – and that is what we want to do – a few words about Fuller. We generally agree with Fuller’s assault on Kuhn (for his unbearable mediocrity, for encoding a seemingly revolutionary perspective on science, one that separates it from truth, to effect a really reactionary program in science, one that preserves what Weber called the legitimation of authority – of, in Kuhn’s words, normal science – in the one social domain where rationality can never be radical enough, etc. etc.). We also like the way Fuller tackles philosophy on the level of gossip (of which his footnotes are full) as well as making larger metaphysical-political claims. Fuller is a radical Popperian, with views that seem close to Feyerabend’s. He is not a radical sociology of science guy – he has no time for Latour.

Okay. That’s Fuller. In the end, we were more interested in Fuller’s idea of elites – elites in the sciences, for instance – than we were in Fuller’s radical Popperianism.

Our next post is going to be about elitism. What is it? Are we against it? Is elitism alien to poor men not bowing down to their jailors -- or are those poor men ineradicably elitist?

Bollettino

Notes
First, note that LI’s New Yorker review of Marilyn Yalom’s Birth of the Chess Queen is now on-line, here.

Second, note that LI desperately needs editing work. Reasonable prices (“you’ll think we are CRAZY to charge these prices!”) and all that. Go here – if you have IE5 up –to check out our editing site.

Third, we’ve been reading Steve Fuller’s book on Thomas Kuhn – or supposedly about Thomas Kuhn. It is fascinating, gossipy, and ultimately, to us, unconvincing – not about Kuhn’s mediocrity, which was pretty much an open scandal, but about Fuller’s alternative, which is in the radical Popperian tradition. A post about the ‘double truth’ and elites is even now forming in our belly. Go here to read Fuller’s very funny comparison of Kuhn with Chance the Gardner, in Being There.

Bollettino

This is how Mr. Ruskin approached Venice:

“The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of black weed separating and disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving shoal, under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of our own northern waves, yet subdued into a strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry pallor into a field of burnished gold, as the sun declined behind the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly named “St. George of the Seaweed.” As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-colored line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows: but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole horizon to the north—a wall of jagged blue, here and there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices, fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the barred clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as the quick silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer.”

This passage from the Stones of Venice is, among many other things, beautiful. But to say that is not to explain how, say, the balance of soft and hard terms in the passage (bosom/bleak, bright mirage/craggy peaks) resolve into two different movements, one of the eye gliding over the whole horizon, with its mountains and light and water, and the other of the gondola being “paced” – as though the passive had erased the human labor that did the pacing, as though the eye’s instant power and the invisible gondoliers’ sprang from the same root -- it is not an explanation of it beauty, but an explanation of the power of its particular use of language. In other words, to say that it is beautiful is one thing, a judgment dependent, in the end, on a whole system of judgments, but to pose the question of how that beauty was achieved, rather than to bow before its effect, is another thing entirely, and the finest thing that the critic does.

LI has been thinking about beauty since reading James Woods exercise in stripping the skin from an academic factotum in the LRB. The factotum, Randall Stevenson, seems to be of that dreary species that invaded English departments in the 80s, and – in a dialectical twist that makes LI’s head spin – cried up a didactic, identity-heavy literature using the tools of a post-structuralism that emphasized play, the tensions that create and dissolve binaries, supplements, sex, abjection, and the interminable deferring of identity. Wood flays this sort of thing. Here’s a graf in which every stroke is strong, and every stroke cuts:

Randall Stevenson's volume in the Oxford English Literary History, which provides an account of 1960 to 2000, prompts these thoughts [about aesthetics, which we will be coming to – LI] because his book has no interest in aesthetic intention and no interest in aesthetic success. It is a purely academic account of hundreds of literary forms created almost entirely by non-academics. In more than six hundred pages, it is hard to detect the author, who teaches at Edinburgh University, making a single evaluative judgment. In a moment of daring, he calls A House for Mr Biswas 'much-admired', but since he also reserves that epithet for 'The Whitsun Weddings', which he appears not to like, one is left in the dark. This evaluative reticence is not timidity, however. He does have likes and dislikes, and they emerge steadily. He likes poetry and fiction that draw attention to their own procedures: 'self-reflexive, postmodern' forms are what excite him, and the authors of these seem politically 'progressive' to him. This is why he likes J.H. Prynne's verse, but not Larkin's, and why he writes enthusiastically about Rushdie but treats A Dance to the Music of Time as if it were just a handbook of toff sociology.”

Sociology is the key word. Post-structuralism gave one very big gift to the identity theorists who followed them by attacking the formalist presupposition that one could bracket the utterance from the utterance situation. For the post-structuralists, the iterability of utterance did not indicate some fine Platonic preservation of sense, but rather a network of contexts in which the purity of the utterance is actively worked for. The quotation mark, in other words, marks not only the artifice of the Platonic form, but also the start of an investigation of agendas, motives, and unconsciousnesses.

What the identity people did was take that to mean that we must contextually bind utterance – in other words, track down the class and ethnic origin of the utterers, which will tell us all we need to know about the utterance. In a sense, they simply shifted the Platonic moment from sense to the social. This is a dumbfounding move, since it recuperates an attempt to think through a truly naturalistic philosophy of sense by diverting it into a didactic and very familiar frame of subordinating sense to a set of social ends. In hijacking the aesthetic for the ethical, the identity people re-enact a pattern that has cycled throughout the modern age – roughly from 1600 – the puritan’s revenge on license.

Kierkegaard, we think, made a true sociological trouvaille with his division of the social into the ethical, the aesthetic, and the religious. The aesthetic is the “weak” dimension – forever being transformed into an instrument by the ethical and the religious. Yet its weakness is compensated for by the innumerable secret strategies it employs to preserve its autonomy. When Dante, for instance, magnified the dispute between petty Tuscan factions into dramas that spanned hell, purgatory and heaven, the ethic0-political shed its smaller context to clothe itself in a larger and transforming context – one that is bound up with the poetry itself.

But to get back to beauty…

Wood is wholly right to go after Stevenson, and the hunting is good. What interests us as much, however, are Wood’s preparatory remarks. Wood observes the divergence between the Schoolman’s interest in art and the artists interest in it. The Schoolman divests art of intention, and – according to Wood – even of what interests us: its success or failure. The artist, on the other hand, clings to intention and the question: how good is it?

We wonder about Wood’s notion of intention. While the artist is as prone as the carpenter to say things about the intentional structure of the work (I planned this part of my novel to symbolize x, and this part to symbolize y), the artist is also prone to vaguer, de-intentionalizing talk about “inspiration.” This is so deeply embedded in Western art, and so “primitive,” that the Schoolman – and Wood – mostly let it be.

Instead, Wood opts for a realism that seems to have problems of its own:

“Writers are intensely interested in what might be called aesthetic success: they have to be, because in order to create something successful one must learn about other people's successful creations. To the academy, much of this value-chat looks like, and can indeed be, mere impressionism. Again, theory is not the only culprit. A good deal of postmodern thought is suspicious of the artwork's claim to coherence, and so is indifferent or hostile to the discussion of its formal success. But conventional, non-theoretical criticism often acts as if questions of value are irrelevant, or canonically settled. To spend one's time explaining how a text works is not necessarily ever to talk about how well it works, though it might seem that the latter is implicit in the former. Who bothers, while teaching The Portrait of a Lady for the nth time, to explain to a class that it is a beautiful book? But it would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that, for most writers, greedy to learn and emulate, this is the only important question.”

Notice how Wood easily couples “explaining” with “beauty.” In fact, I would like to know how one would explain that the P.of L. is a beautiful book without talking, as Schoolmen do, about how its beauty is achieved? In other words, the beauty of the Portrait of a Lady is mediate. The writer’s value judgments, in terms of success and failure, are about that mediacy: how beauty is achieved. And that takes us back, inevitably, to the utterance’s context. Although, like Derrida, LI believes that ‘context’ is a tease, a provisional fiction.

However, that’s enough for one day.

Bollettino

So somebody chose the new Iraqi P.M. – unless he is unchosen in the next couple of days. NPR’s Marketplace interviewed an American correspondent, just back from Iraq, who was uncharacteristically frank for an American correspondent. He said, briskly, that Allawi is hugely corrupt, and hugely unpopular.

LI, thinking about legitimacy, power, and the foundations of democracy, decided to search the new issue of the Journal of Democracy, a neo-con deal, for pointers. The new issue has an astonishing ratio of hot air to footnotes. The first article was a performance that would have earned a charitable C from yours truly, during our T.A.-ing years. It proclaimed that, if we don’t watch it, this might be the century of Anti-Americanism. The piece was almost entirely devoid of references, but these were made up for by that perpetual companion of buncombe, the passive voice. My hand got that red pencil urge, confronted with the ‘some have said”s and “there is now a consensus that”s strewn about the page. Among the murk, one thing was clear: anti-Americanism was anti-democratic. Also, mind you, anti-Jewish. Europeans, decadent ones, opinion leaders, were nourishing this anti-Americanism. The one actual person alluded to in the piece was, of course, Francis Fukuyama, that master of the unsupported generalization and the skewed statistic. Well, my surprise was mighty at seeing his name on the byline of the next article. The Journal of Democracy goes in for this kind of group-think, apparently.

So we stopped leafing through the Journal of Democracy. And started leafing through the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.

There we read a charming review of a recent tempest in the teapot of Italian historiography. Robert Putnam, the man who wrote about bowling alone, wrote a book in 1993 about building democracy that praises the Italian city states for creating social capital through institutions that, in a sense, built the relationships that made trust possible. Or perhaps this is a relationship of mutual dependence – the relationships came with the trust, and the trust came with the relationships. In 1999, in the J.I.H., there was a symposium dedicated to pondering Putnam’s theses. Such is the stately, if not glacial, pace of academic pondering that Mark Jurdjevic, in the current issue, now reviews the reviewers in an article entitled, Trust in Renaissance Electoral Politics.

There is some parallel between the happenings in Florence in 1370 and the happenings in Baghdad now. In Florence, there was a poisonous thirst for political position. Jockeying, disguised by appeals to the “natural rise” of this or that person or party, was fierce. The Italian city states dealt with the ambition partly by unloading the inevitable hostility on a third party: fortuna. Accident was a way of randomizing power. Nowhere was this done with such panache as in Venice. LI humbly urges the CPA, in its wisdom, to consider the way they used to elect council members in Venice:

Consider the safeguards against corruption employed in the Venetian electoral system. The Great Council lay at the heart of the Venetian electoral politics, administering 831 posts in the city and the terraferma. Membership was limited to patricians aged twenty-five and older and usually numbered around 1,000. Four nominating committees compiled lists of possible candidates, each of whom would be subject to a vote in the Council. To determine who the nominators would be, patricians filed past an urn that contained sixty gold balls, plus as many silver balls as were necessary to ensure one ball per patrician. Only those patricians who drew a gold ball were entitled to continue to the next electoral stage. Significantly, anyone in the family of someone who drew a gold ball was also disqualified from proceeding in the election. The sixty patricians who advanced filed past another urn, this time containing thirty-six gold balls and the requisite number of silver ones. The winners divided into four nominating committees and retreated to separate rooms to compose their lists.”
Unfortunately, the CPA’s proconsular tendencies aren’t mitigated by a sense of style so gaudy; these conquerors of Baghdad belong to less ornamental set. But they trust the electorate no more than the Venetian upper class. The conventional wisdom, in the States, is that we are over in Iraq to teach the people about democracy. But as St. Paul liked to say, we see now, as in a mirror, darkly. More bluntly, the conventional wisdom inverts the truth. The real lessons in democracy should be given, first, to Bremer’s set at the CPA, who seem only distantly aware of how the thing works, and definitely opposed to all of its distasteful products. In fact, we have never sent a single individual over there who has ever been elected to any office, including dog-catcher. The inevitable result: we have a bunch of people over there who don’t hesitate to game the justice system, ban papers, and try to game the very mechanism for choosing representatives. In other words, we’ve sent over your typical D.C. lobbyists, and asked them to create a democracy. They have as much chance of doing it as a spayed dog has of birthing pups.
…

Bollettino

Marc Reisner’s 1986 Cadillac Desert occupies a unique space in LI’s mental bookshelf. We first read that book in 1992. This was three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. C.D. caused a wall to fall in our own mind – essentially, C.D. destroyed our faith in the central tenet of what you might call the positive economic aspect of Marxism. That tenet, for one hundred years, had been that rationality in economics was the equivalent of finding a way to minimize the social cost of economic activity, which in turn required government planning. No book that we have ever read has presented a more scathing picture of the largescale effects of government planning. If you read, say, interviews with Hayek, the man whose life work was devoted to attacking central planning, you will find that he retained the 20th century’s touching faith in the government’s ability to engineer the environment. Hayek expressly approved of such government programs as the dam building, largescale irrigation, and the lot. What C.D. did is put into question the results of those programs.

We are just beginning to understand those results. If presidential campaigns were truly about our real, long term problems, in 2000 Al Gore and George Bush would not only have mentioned Osama bin Laden at least once in their debates (did they? LI doesn’t have time to check), they would surely have talked, at length, about the disappearance of the Louisiana coast. We’ve already devoted several posts to this topic, and its multiple causes.

Another symptom of the coming of large scale environmental problems directly linked to the government’s engineering of the environment has been just over the horizon of visibility in the West. For the past five years, the West has suffered from a drought that could be more than a drought – it could be a change in the very equilibrium of the climate system in the West, a change to a much drier weather pattern. That would be eerily parallel to the beginning of C.D., which is a pondering of the end of the Anasazi Indian culture in the Southwest. That culture flourished over hundreds of years within a climate that favored agriculture – a climate that was suddenly transformed into a much drier climate.

Ed Quillen, in a retrospective review of C.D., quotes a marvelous paragraph from Reisner’s concluding chapter:

"We didn't have to build main-stem dams on rivers carrying vast loads of silt; we could have built more primitive offstream reservoirs, which is what many private irrigation districts did -- and successfully -- but the federal engineers were enthralled by dams. We didn't have to mine a hundred thousand years' worth of groundwater in a scant half century, any more than we had to keep building 5,000-pound cars with 450-cubic-inch V-8's. We didn't have to dump eight tons of dissolved salts on an acre of land in a year; we could have forsworn development on the most poorly drained lands or demanded that, in exchange for water, the farms conserve as much as possible. But the Bureau [of Reclamation] sells them water so cheaply they can't afford to conserve; to install an efficient irrigation system costs a lot more....

"But the tragic and ludicrous aspect of the whole situation is that cheap water keeps the machine running; the water lobby cannot have enough of it, just as the engineers cannot build enough dams; and how convenient it is that cheap water encourages waste, which results in more dams."

I do wonder how we will look back, in a hundred years time, at such social phenomena as Las Vegas, the fastest growing city in the U.S., perched in the fastest growing desert – for deserts do grow with climate cycles – in the West. Surely the hunger for water, in the next decade, is going to make large scale water projects irresistible – like selling Alaskan water, or Canadian Water, to the Las Vegas or Phoenix municipalities. Mining water like that will extend the unsustainable project of maintaining millions of more people in a desert environment to which they refuse to adapt. At least the Anasazi worked, as well as they could, with what they knew. We don’t have that excuse.