Bollettino

“On September 15,1883, Dr. Hippolyte Bernheim (1840–1919), professor on the faculty of medicine at Nancy, France, reported the following experiment in post-hypnotic suggestion:

I instructed S that he would come back and see me after thirteen days at ten in the morning. Awake, he remembered nothing. On the thirteenth day, at ten in the morning, he was present . . . He told me that he had not had this idea during the preceding days. He did not know that he was supposed to come. The idea presented itself to his mind only at the moment at which he was required to execute it. (Bernheim,1883–1884, pp. 555–556)”

So begins a fascinating article in this Spring’s Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences with the Hollywood friendly title “THIRTEEN DAYS: JOSEPH DELBOEUF VERSUS PIERRE JANET ON THE NATURE OF HYPNOTIC SUGGESTION by Andre Leblanc.

Hypnotism – that unspeakable seduction of all the guardians of the subject’s boundaries – was very much in the air in the 1880s. The proletariat in Western Europe was becoming restless. A small detachment of the intelligentsia – journalists, autodidacts, the like – were dreaming of bombings and assassinations. The abolition of slavery was, according to the positivists as well as the Blakean prophets, all about breaking the mind forged manacles of mankind, and that image of slavery as a stage of history that had been positively negated seemed to prove that the political economy of capitalism was the expression of freedom – even if the more advanced avatars of inequality were adducing Darwinian reasons for the inferiority of one class and the material superiority of another. Still, how about the coal miners in Germinal?

The very existence of such a thing as a post-hypnotic suggestion implied that the mind’s struggle with its manacles had an unexpectedly tentacular and shadowy side. If the political economy had substituted self-interest for the libido, and if Victorians wove that substitution into its manners, the repressed was returning, oh so faintly, all along the line in the 1880s. Those who had eyes to see wrote novels. Nana was afoot in France, and George Du Maurier’s Trilby was about to be unleashed in England.

Leblanc’s article is about a controversy that occurred when Paul Janet questioned the whole notion of a post hypnotic suggestion. Where, Janet wanted to know, would such a thing be stored in the consciousness? Janet’s nephew, Pierre, who is better known to the intellectual historian, came up with one answer:

“Pierre Janet (1886) proposed the existence of a dissociated consciousness that remembered the suggestion and kept track of time without the main consciousness being aware of it. This was the origin of his concept of dissociation, which has become so prominent in recent years with the epidemic of multiple personality disorder, renamed dissociative identity disorder in 1994.”


Bernheim and Delboeuf had a different idea. They believed that the consciousness lapsed, periodically, falling into a dream-like state (perhaps for nano-seconds) in which the post-hypnotic suggestion was revived. As Leblanc puts it, while Bernheim suggested that there were alternations between consciousness and unconsciousness, Janet held that they ran concurrently.

What was this dream-like state? For Bernheim it was synonymous with the highest state of conscious concentration: “… we do precisely the same thing whenever we concentrate on recalling something or on creating a deep impression. The sensation disappears when we scatter our attention onto several objects at a time but immediately
reappears when we refocus our concentration. “The hypnotic state is not an abnormal state,” Bernheim added. “It does not create new functions or extraordinary phenomena . . . it exaggerates in favor of a new psychic modality the normal suggestibility that we all possess
to a certain degree. . .” (1886a, p. 103).”

All of these Proustian doctor types hung around Salpêtrière. like characters in one of De Sade’s less sexually charged contes, experimenting on hysterics. Delboeuf’s theory of altenration depended on the amnesia experienced during hypnosis being available to the waking state. His theory was that hypnosis was no different, in this regard, than sleep – just as we forget dreams due to the phase shift form one set of circumstances to a radically different one, so, too, the hypnotic subject forgets the hypnosis. To prove it, he found, inevitably, a subject to work on:

“Delboeuf first demonstrated his theory with Blanche Wittman, the star subject of the Salpêtrière. He and Charles Féré (1852–1907), one of Charcot’s pupils, abruptly woke Wittman in the middle of a hypnotic hallucination in which she was frantically attempting to extinguish her scarf that had caught fire. “On seeing her scarf intact,” Delboeuf wrote, “she wore the physiognomy of a person emerging from a distant dream and cried (the moment was solemn for me, and her words engraved themselves indelibly in my mind): “My God! It was a dream that I had! It’s strange. That is the first time that I remember what I did while a somnambule. It’s strange. I remember absolutely everything”

This, by the way, is a method we would urge on the Pentagon, which seems to be crowded with this century’s equivalent of Salpêtrière’s hysterics – namely, the neocons.

Janet disagreed with B & D He redid the experiment with poor Blanche, and proved to his own satisfaction that “…it was a priori impossible to remember one’s somnambulic state while awake. As far as he was concerned, amnesia upon waking is a characteristic trait of somnambulism and if this trait is lacking, it is because the somnambulism never occurred:”

As the debate between Janet and B & D went on, Delboef began to change his mind about the reality of hypnosis. Gradually, he began to think that hypnosis was a game enacted between the doctor and the patient. The patient’s apparent obedience to suggestion was rooted, in actuality, in a deep desire to please the doctor.

Post hypnotic suggestion, of course, suggests a refined version of the ring of Gyges. Instead of ring with the power to make one invisible, the ability to implant a suggestion in someone else’s head seems to make it possible for a person to do things without being a bodily actor. Since Gyges used his ring to rob, rape, and usurp, couldn’t hypnosis lead to criminal activity?

“When Paul Janet first raised the problem of post-hypnotic suggestion in August 1884, he severely criticized Bernheim, the country physician Ambroise A. Liébeault (1823–1904) and the law professor Jules Liégeois (1833–1908)—all from Nancy—for failing to show that their hypnotic subjects were either hysterics or afflicted with some other nervous condition. This was the first round in the famous war between Nancy and the Salpêtrière. Paul Janet’s paper was based on an earlier critique of a paper by Liégeois in the Séances et Travaux de l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in the spring of 1884.11 Liégeois’ paper presented hypnotic experiments in which subjects had obeyed criminal suggestions and urged that existing laws be revised to protect hypnotic subjects from being blamed for crimes engineered by unscrupulous hypnotists. This paper launched another well-known debate over whether or not subjects could be made to obey criminal suggestions (Gauld, 1992, pp. 494–503; Laurence & Perry, 1992; Plas, 1989). It so happens that Liégeois’ most formidable opponent was none other than Delboeuf. The problem of post-hypnotic suggestion is therefore intimately related to the problem of criminal suggestion, and as we shall see, Delboeuf went on to develop an extremely subtle analysis of the problem of simulation that plagued them both.”

For how that argument turns out, LI’s readers will have to read the article.

Bollettino

Our motto in Iraq

Finally, the U.S. has come up for a motto for its splendid little bloodletting in Iraq. In a story about the after-effects of trying to dislodge a murderous thug in Najaf, on the behest of a murderous thug in Baghdad, we came across the verbal stylings of one Carrie Batson:

“Capt. Carrie Batson, a spokeswoman for the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, said that the pace of payments for injuries, death and damage had picked up and that more than $1 million had been given out. "We will pay for damage, death, injury caused by us," she said.”

There it is: We will pay for damage, death, injury caused by us. Incisive, isn’t it, with just that hint of being against frivolous lawsuits which we know is the hallmark of the Bush interregnum.

Meanwhile, history is moving with lightning speed in the frivolous war. We no longer read headlines about Chalabi, our former man in Iraq, who has been making advances to Moktada al-Sadr. Oddly enough, Chalabi is now trying to find a place as a representative of the overwhelming anti-American feeling in Iraq. Trust a con man to change with the wind.


Juan Cole recently had an interesting account of the current state of play in Iraq. It is the default in the Ameerican press that the U.S. represents the spread of freedom and dignity in Iraq -- a default that has so far resisted reality. Item: Freedom and dignity currently appear to be best served by reviving – Saddam’s secret police. There is no low point for the Bush regime – there is always a lower coming up ahead. Cole’s post begins with a report about who is arresting whom in Baghdad, taken from Middle East Online:

“Brig. Gen. Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, the head of the Iraqi secret police, has charged 27 employees in the Iranian embassy in Baghdad with espionage and sabotage. He blames them for the assassination of over a dozen members of the Iraqi secret police in the past month. He claims to have seized from "safehouses" Persian documents that show that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its militia, the Badr Corps, served as Iranian agents in helping with the assassinations.”

That the U.S. is stirring up the old Baathist anti-Iranian faction might be the most criminal thing done by the freedom loving occupiers yet. Especially as the last time Iran and Iraq fought, the casualty rate went to a half a million. Of course, not being American lives, they don’t really count, except on certain photo op occasions. So it is that the Americans will dig up a mass grave and show proper shock that this is how Saddam did things, and then quietly re-animate Saddam’s secret police, a move entirely consistent with the past bios of the Pentagon pumphouse gang. Meanwhile, these things go on beneath a vow of silence on the part of the major media, which spends its time publishing pieces by reporters lamenting that they can't get out in the country anymore, due to the risk of being scooped up and beheaded, or blown up, or simply shot. None of these pieces, of course, draw the obvious conclusion that maybe, if you accept being embedded with the forces of an invading army at the beginning of a war, you will be seen as synechdotes of that army as the war proceeds. However, it is funny that the press corps can't bestir itself to inquire about Shabwani – especially if, as Cole contends, he’s being groomed as second puppet in command, in case Allawi succumbs to the mortar laced atmosphere of freedom and security that currently swathes Baghdad.

“Shahwani is an old-time Baath officer. In 1990 he broke with Saddam, who is said to have killed three of Shahwani's children in revenge. Shahwani came out of Iraq and to join US efforts to overthrow the dictator. This summer, he was appointed head of the Mukhabarat or Iraqi secret police, which the US Central Intelligence Agency is rebuilding with $3 billion. Shahwani is alleged to be a long-time CIA asset who is being groomed as a replacement for caretaker Prime Minister Iyad Allawi should the latter be assassinated.”

LI used to comment extensively on Chalabi’s friend, Christopher Hitchens (who has fallen strangely silent about the man he called brother in his last book), but it is rather like shooting fish in a barrel anymore. It is one thing to adopt the politics of Robert Novak, and quite another thing to start writing like him. Unfortunately, Hitchens not only changed his philosophy, but exchanged the texture of his prose for a lifetime supply of old ham. Usually, the style is the true politics, the Ariadne’s thread that leads one through the maze. Hitchens snipped his thread – more’s the pity. However, we did read with interest the recent “debate’ between Hitchens and Tariq Ali on Democracy Now, partly because we just finished, with maximum dissatisfaction, Ali’s screed, Bush in Babylon. We will talk more about that debate in another post.



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Bollettino -- this is the last of three posts. Sorry, campers. I couldn't resist a long series today. To make sense of this, go back to the first post and read upward, I guess.

Con't
“An enormous power plant south of Baghdad was shut down last weekend by coordinated attacks on fuel and transmission lines, American and Iraqi government officials said Tuesday. The sabotage raised new fears that insurgents were beginning to make targets of major sectors of the infrastructure as part of an overall plan to destabilize the interim Iraqi government.
At full production, the plant is capable of supplying nearly 20 percent of the entire electrical output of Iraq. But after the war, the plant's output plunged to nearly zero, and it is still generating only a fraction of its maximum output, said Raad al-Haris, deputy minister for electricity.
An official with the Coalition Provisional Authority, which is scheduled to hand over sovereignty to a new Iraqi government on June 30, confirmed that an oil pipeline south of Baghdad was struck in the last week. A second senior official in the Electricity Ministry said that the weekend attack was the latest in a series in the same area, and that repairs on the lines had repeatedly been followed by new strikes. This official said the pipeline also delivered crude oil to at least one major refinery, whose operations had also been affected.”
These reports could be due to the fact that the Iraqis hadn’t got their own puppet to lead them, of course. As transition neared, there was a bit of unbuttoning. Some of the CPA promises had, perhaps, in a manner of speaking, that is, not that any mistakes whatsoever were ever made, gone a bit South. James Glanz, in a ruminative article about the outstanding success of our occupation, June 30, 2004, which was guided solely by the principles of democracy that show, once again, what a force for good America is in the world., releases some interesting little stats:
“More than a year into an aid effort that American officials likened to the Marshall Plan, occupation authorities acknowledge that fewer than 140 of 2,300 promised construction projects are under way. Only three months after L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator who departed Monday, pledged that 50,000 Iraqis would find jobs at construction sites before the formal transfer of sovereignty, fewer than 20,000 local workers are employed.”
Forget that, though. Everything changed when the Iraqis took over their own governing, or as the Times put it on July 4, “Iraqis Watch With Wary Pride As Little Changes, and a Lot.”

With wary pride, Iraqis then got to watch a lot of things: American forces destroying Najaf, for instance. In fact, things got a little shaky, so Colin Powell went to buck up the morale of the puppet.. uh, free and autonomous government of Iraq, on July 31. The story about that visit contains a rather startling paragraph:

“His one tangible promise was to speed up the flow of the $18 billion in American reconstruction aid, less than $500 million of which has been released so far, so that Iraqis could see the realization of long-promised improvements in water, electricity and other areas.”

Promises, promises. But on September 21, under the headline “Iraqis Warn That U.S. Plan to Divert Billions to Security Could Cut Off Crucial Services,” we learn that Powell was not totally on track with today’s thinking. Why spend that money on electricity for Iraqis when there are other priorities? So the plan changes, but not because of any mistake ever made by any official in the Bush administration. Let’s be clear about this. It is all because of thirty five years of devastation unleashed by Saddam’s tyranny (a phrase that has to be included in every report filed by Glanz, it appears, under some strange stylebook rule), and of course the Clinton administration.
“In the original view, restoring Iraq's physical infrastructure assumed an importance equaled only by the American-led military action in creating a stable democratic country and winning the sympathies of ordinary citizens. Propounded again and again by L. Paul Bremer III, the top American civilian administrator here until an Iraqi government took over on June 28, that approach assumed that once the conduits for electricity, water, sewage, oil and information were in place, an efflorescence of industrial and national institutions would follow.
But with little actually being built and the deteriorating security situation making it doubtful that anything dramatic would happen if it were, a much more conventional set of nation-building priorities were put in place with the arrival last June of John D. Negroponte, the United States ambassador to Iraq. Those priorities are security, economic development and democracy building.”
All of which leads us up to this Saturday story in the Times.

Under the headline
“In Iraq Chaos, Uphill Struggle to Bring Power” James Glanz, bringing his perpetual optimism to the task, again is embedded with a heroic group of Americans. We did like this paragraph:
“More than any other sector of the infrastructure, it is the electrical grid that fills officials with hope. True, virtually every project is behind schedule, and few goals have been met. Indeed, officials involved with reconstruction expend great effort revising the overly optimistic projections made by the American occupation authorities in previous months. But there are, finally, more megawatts on the grid than before the invasion, and with a number of big projects under way behind the scenes, officials say it is just the start.”
That goal that was just over the horizon in June, 2003 is now really, really approaching. Really.

LI, for one, felt warmer just reading the article.

con't

In a peppy article on October 23, 2003, the NYT, under the headline For Hussein's Ouster, Many Thanks, but Iraqis Are Expecting More, interviewed the man in the street in Baghdad and elsewhere, finding:
“Stability -- in the sense of an absence of attacks on Americans and Iraqis -- appears a long way off. But in dozens of recent interviews in Baghdad with ordinary Iraqis, it was clear that there is a reservoir of good will toward Americans in Iraq, or at least a weary expectation that they will, in the end, leave Iraq better than they found it.”
Mysteriously, those pre-war electricity levels seemed elusive:
''America is a great nation -- I think they can do anything,'' said Khanaan Abdul Majeed, 53, a welder in Baghdad. ''I think they can restore security and electricity and everything, but they are slow in their job.''
Mr. Majeed is also an example of another class of Iraqis generally supportive of the United States: those who benefit directly. He spoke outside his small metalwork shop, where he is building 130 beds for Americans here. He has hired six new welders and four painters. (Though an American-paid job cuts both ways: Iraqi policemen and government officials are regular targets.)” One hopes Mr. Majeed didn’t suffer for talking to the NYT. One hopes he is alive. But that is getting ahead of our timeline.
A year ago, during Ramadan, our American general in charge, General Sanchez, showing the high degree of intelligence with which Americans were stamping out the few terrorists fighting against the freedom loving people of Exxon, uh, Iraq, called the car bombings ''an operationally insignificant surge.' Is it any wonder he got along in the Rumsfeld Pentagon?
On Nov 30, 2003, the NYT did its usual “embedded with the selfless Americans restoring infrastructure story: Rebuilding Iraq Takes Courage, Cash and Improvisation.
“As the shadow of violence lengthens across the desert landscape of Iraq, reconstruction quietly continues. For some, the pace has been too slow. For others, success is more rightly measured in small moments -- as when, whether by skill or sacrifice, an irrigation system goes back online.
What is certain, though, is that when the United States begins spending the roughly $13 billion in new money earmarked earlier this month for the organs of Iraq's vitality -- water and sewage treatment, transportation, electricity and communications networks, oil production -- it will have to use the past six months as a vast how-to manual. It is a guidebook that, even today, remains decidedly ad-hoc and governed by the bald, decrepit and sometimes dangerous realities encountered on the ground.”
One wonders – the numbers get so confusing – whether this 13 billion is the same as the mythical 18 billion that is now earmarked for the same purpose, of which 1 to 2 billion has been disbursed. One also wonders – is that 13 billion coming, ultimately, from the freedom loving privatization of Iraqi oil?
The article quotes Tom Wheelock, the head of the US AIDS Iraqi reconstruction program. Here is the optimistic Mr. Wheelock, proclaiming mission nearly accomplished:
''There's a lot going on that's not manifest now,'' Mr. Wheelock said. ''We're on the cusp of impacts to people's quality of life.''
Then, on Dec. 13, 2003, the NYT visited a suburb of Baghdad, Ghazalia:
“Ghazalia is a neighborhood on edge.
Random violence and roadside bombs aimed at American patrols make the streets unsafe after dark. On the local council, Shiites and Sunnis squabble. Jobs are scarce, and prices are soaring. The electricity fails daily, and cooking gas, a necessity here, has grown scarce.
In ways large and small, life in this neighborhood of 150,000 people has worsened in the eight months since the United States toppled Saddam Hussein. Now the residents of Ghazalia, a suburban neighborhood that is in many ways a microcosm of the city, are nearly out of patience.”
In a report on General Sanchez on January 11th of this year, there is a startling little throwaway. We are embedded with the great general himself, flying over a country which, basically, loves us. He and our reporter look out the window and what do they see?
“On the helicopter's flank, workmen were stringing cables from utility towers, restoring electricity that collapsed during the April looting. ''That's the first time I've seen that; that's great,'' he said.”
Eight months after the looting that caused Rumsfeld some rare and well deserved moments of hilarity, they are getting the cables up again? What about Bremer’s ukase in June of 03?
Must be a momentary glitch. As we all know, at that time, after Saddam’s capture, it was certainly time that the truth be told about Iraq -- about all the GOOD we are doing in Iraq. And this was what the NYT came up with.
On March 1, 2004, NYT headlines more good news: “Iraq Oil Industry Reviving as Output Nears Prewar Levels”.

“Iraq's oil industry has undergone a remarkable turnaround and is now producing and exporting almost as much crude oil as it did before the war, according to officials with the American-led occupation and the Iraqi oil ministry.”

Oddly enough, however, with things going merrily along in April (although that temporary surge in car bombings back in October was proving a little more, hmm, lasting), GE and Bechtel shut down operations:

April 22, 2004:
“Spokesmen for the contractors declined to discuss their operations in Iraq, citing security concerns, but the shutdowns were confirmed by officials at the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity, the Coalition Provisional Authority and other companies working directly with G.E. and Siemens in Iraq.
''Between the G.E. lockdown and the inability to get materials moved up the major supply routes, about everything is being affected in one way or another,'' said Jim Hicks, a senior adviser for electricity at the provisional authority.
The suspensions and travel restrictions are delaying work on about two dozen power plants as occupying forces press to meet an expected surge in demand for electricity before the summer. Mr. Hicks said plants that had been expected to produce power by late April or early May might not be operating until June 1.”
Then, as summer heat hovers, our man James Glanz, the same reporter who, the year before, reported on the success of American engineers in restorin’ the infrastructure, files this report on June 9, 2004:

Bollettino

On April 20, 2003, the NYT, under the headline From Power Grid to Schools, Rebuilding a Broken Nation, reported:
“United States military officials here make the point that the precision of the smart-bombs dropped on Baghdad limited damage to the most important infrastructure, including power and water facilities. Col. Mike Marletto, commanding officer of the 11th Marines regimental combat team, who also coordinates with Iraqis and aid groups here, said Iraqi electrical engineers told him that the damage this time was far less than during the gulf war in 1991, when power and water plants were direct targets for bombing.
''They say this is a piece of cake compared to what they had to do in 1991,'' he said.”
On May 3, 2003, reporting on the appointment of Philip J. Carroll, of Dutch Shell, to “advise” the oil ministry, the Times reported:

“The revival of Iraqi oil production, even partially, is crucial to restoring power and with it, water purification, as power plants here burn oil to generate electricity. That improvement in living conditions would greatly advance the Bush administration's goal of winning over average Iraqis, experts said.
''The most important thing we have to realize is that, apart from security issues, our time is running out,'' said Lawrence J. Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation. ''With electricity and water, we don't have time. We have to get to it right now.'
On June 21, 2003, The NYT’s headline was:
“The electricity system of Iraq, already damaged by the war, is now being torn apart by systematic looting and possibly by sabotage.
Not far from the Bayji power plant in northern Iraq, high-tension cables that run to Baghdad now either hang like spaghetti or have disappeared altogether.”
Near the southern city of Basra, dozens of the biggest electric towers have been toppled in the past few weeks and now look like giraffes with their necks broken.” Interestingly, the day before they had reported that Bremer had promised to “privatize” all Iraqi industry. This is an interesting decision for a non-Iraqi to make, especially as it would immediately benefit the invading nation.
On July 23, 2003, The NYT headline read “U.S. to Outline 60-Day Plan For Iraq Rebuilding Projects.” Apparently, Bremer, multitasking from his main goal, which was to rob Iraq blind for a consortium of American companies –uh, no, I mean to deliver democracy to freedom loving Iraqis, decided to concentrate the beams of his intelligence on the pesky power problem:
“The top American civilian administrator in Iraq is to announce on Wednesday a 60-day plan for that nation, including restoring power to prewar levels, resuming criminal courts, awarding mobile-telephone licenses, and distributing revised textbooks to newly opened schools.”
This was the day after the report on Wolfowitz’s tour of ‘vindication’ in Iraq:
“In the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in south-central Iraq -- despite a tense confrontation between Americans and crowds of Iraqis supporting a young ayatollah in Najaf over the weekend -- American marines have worked closely with tribal and religious leaders to win their trust. At one point, Mr. Wolfowitz gloated that many of the dire predictions of ''uninformed commentators'' and Middle East experts that Shiites would rise up against the American occupation forces have so far not materialized.”
Of course not. Those uninformed commentators would be, of course, astonished at the urban renewal American forces affected in Najaf a year later, as Wolfowitz’s vindication just got deeper and deeper. But that is getting ahead of this little timeline.
On August 16, 2003, with our 60 day plan plugging ahead, and free enterprise in the very air of the country, stirring up the patriotism of Iraqis willing to make any sacrifice to increase the stock values of American companies… er, to show freedom loving people everywhere that freedom loving Iraqis love freedom, John Tierney issued a joshing report, Baghdad on the Blackout: A Path to Enlightenment? He gathered kids say the darndest things quotes from Iraqis advising Americans coping with the heat without a/c on what to do about the electrical situation. Of course, the importance of the situation was that real human beings (Americans) were suffering.
“But even as they smiled at divine justice, Iraqis showed their generous side. To Americans panicked by a few hours without air-conditioning in 90-degree weather, they offered survival strategies coolly developed on 125-degree days.”
Of course, since there were absolutely no mistakes made by the Bush administration, a point often underlined by the man in charge, the electricity must have been restored by the end of September, 03, right? By that time, Bremer should be concentrating his eagle eye on divvying up the oilfields to Exxon and Gulf and other great Iraqi firms, in the quest for freedom, as in free lunches for big businesses, for the freedom loving. But something – don’t call it a mistake, call it treason on the part of the Democratic party – seems to have held up the plan.

Bollettino

If you can get to it, read the Independent’s profile of Anna Politkovskaya. She is a Russian dissident, dur et pur.

There are many reminders in the profile, actuated by the publication of a collection of pieces on Putin’s Russia, of just why Putin and Bush do see soul to soul. They are the same dreary blend of blinking, staring autocrat. Theirs are the souls that bloom like ragweed among cockeyed schemes for the big killing, the failure of which is inevitably narcotized by the intervention of some family friend, or bloat in the declining era of the organs of repression, looking for patrons. They both had their big chances not because of who they were, but because of who they weren’t. Bush wasn’t a Gingrich Republican; Putin was a policeman, but not the type to nab his boss (Yeltsin) for stealing the billion or so dollars his family made off with. A pair made in heaven.


"My heroes are those people who want to be individuals but are being forced to be cogs again," she [A.P.] said. "In an Empire there are only cogs." Once upon a time, the individuals who were sent to salt mines by the cogs, bugged by the cogs, imprisoned in mental asylums by the cogs, or exiled by the cogs, found an audience in the West. No longer. Probably not one person in one hundred, even among the readers of the NYRB, are aware of Politkovskaya’s existence. We are, because we read her book of reportage about the war in Chechnya. Never averse to the Zola trick, the j’accuse, Politskovskaya had the guts to show that the Russian military’s operation in Chechnya was little more than a war crime. We’d love some American reporter who would do the same in reporting on the American ‘strategy’ in Sadr City or Fallujah. It is little more than Grozny with a chocolate bar – or, I forgot, a paint job on the local school, after one has kindly blown up the local fathers and strewed the brains of some little juniors about on the street.

Here’s one of Ms. Politkovskaya’s observations:
"Because Putin, a product of the country's murkiest intelligence service, has failed to transcend his origins and stop behaving like a lieutenant- colonel in the KGB. He is still busy sorting out his freedom-loving fellow countrymen; he persists in crushing liberty just as he did earlier in his career."

"We no longer want to be slaves, even if that is what best suits the West. We demand our right to be free." Poking fun at Mr Putin, she compares him to the humble Tsarist clerk, Akaky Akakievich, a famous literary creation of Russian author Nikolay Gogol. The wretched Akakievich believed the key to being successful and popular lay with his expensive overcoat. He was concerned only with his own image but when the overcoat was stolen he discovered that his own soul was empty. Politkovskaya told The Independent: "Putin is like Gogol's Akaky Akakievich. He is a small grey person who really wants not to be grey. Putin had a historic chance to be great and not to be grey but he is still grey."

LI’d previously linked to a story about how she’d been poisoned in the days around the Beslan crisis. There’s more on that story in the profile:

“On 1 September she phoned her rebel contacts and pleaded with them to allow Aslan Maskhadov, former Chechen president and rebel leader, to journey to Beslan and persuade the hostage-takers to release their captives. Having agreed to fly to Beslan and negotiate a safe passage for Maskhadov she set off for the airport. "My last contact with Maskhadov's people was ten minutes before I got on the plane. I suppose I did more than a journalist normally does. I then got on the plane and drank some tea and then ... nothing."

Bollettino

My friend T. tells us that we should certainly move on from the Derrida issue. And we agree, but having started up the old philosophic engine – disinterred from the grease and newspapers in the garage – we’ve been thinking more of philosophers than of, say, those two great purveyors of philosophy, George W Bush (ardent student of Jesus H. Christ) and John Kerry (ardent student of Walter Lippman and Donald Duck’s secret lovechild). There was an op ed piece in the NYT this morning by Mark Taylor to balance out the Derrida as abstruse charlaton obit on Sunday. Taylor gets off to a rocky start by making Derrida one of the three great 20th century philosophers – Wittgenstein and Heidegger get to be the other two. That’s plainly nonsensical – whatever one claims for Derrida, he is not a figure in the same league as Husserl, or Russell. And of course there’s the little problem that making up these lists is time that could be spent more profitably masturbating. Taylor does do some nice abbreviated explaining, but then he spoils it all with a soft focus exit all about Derrida buying Halloween masks for his kids when he visited him in Paris one year. This, he claims, is deconstruction in action. This, LI would claim, is academia in full bourgeois decline.

Then there is Jerry Fodor’s essay on the LRB. We were referred to it through the Crooked Timber site. Fodor’s essay is about what happened to Analytic Philosophy, and his short answer is Kripke.

We always look forward to Fodor’s essays for the LRB. He’s turned into a model of lucidity. He begins his essay with a nice, unphilosophical question:

“Sometimes I wonder why nobody reads philosophy. It requires, to be sure, a degree of hyperbole to wonder this. Academics like me, who eke out their sustenance by writing and teaching the stuff, still browse in the journals; it's mainly the laity that seems to have lost interest. And it's mostly Anglophone analytic philosophy that it has lost interest in. As far as I can tell, 'Continental' philosophers (Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Heidegger, Husserl, Kierkegaard, Sartre and the rest) continue to hold their market. Even Hegel has a vogue from time to time, though he is famous for being impossible to read. All this strikes me anew whenever I visit a bookstore. The place on the shelf where my stuff would be if they had it (but they don't) is just to the left of Foucault, of which there is always yards and yards. I'm huffy about that; I wish I had his royalties.”

Money, here, is a joke. Still, there is something about it that concentrates the mind at least as much as hanging. The upshot is this:

“So sometimes I wonder why nobody (except philosophers) reads (Anglophone, analytic) philosophy these days.

"But, having just worked through Christopher Hughes's Kripke: Names, Necessity and Identity, I am no longer puzzled. That may sound as though I'm intending to dispraise the book, but to the contrary; I think it's a fine piece of work in lots of ways. To begin with, the topic is well chosen. By pretty general consent, Kripke's writings (including, especially, Naming and Necessity) have had more influence on philosophy in the US and the UK than any others since the death of Wittgenstein. Ask an expert whether there have been any philosophical geniuses in the last while, and you'll find that Kripke and Wittgenstein are the only candidates.”

Fodor spends the rest of the article explaining why Kripke’s genius was expended in differing a challenge to the very basis of conceptual analysis posed by Quine’s essay, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In a large sense, what Quine did in that essay was challenge a distinction between the synthetic and the analytic that has a conceptual kinship with the challenge Derrida posed to the Saussurian distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic. In both cases, the distinctions are supplemented by shoring up work that, upon examination, is always insufficient:

“In a nutshell, Quine argued that there is no (intelligible, unquestion-begging) distinction between 'analytic' (linguistic/conceptual) truth and truth about matters of fact (synthetic/contingent truth). In particular, there are no a priori, necessary propositions (except, perhaps, for those of logic and mathematics). Quine's target was mainly the empiricist tradition in epistemology, but his conclusions were patently germane to the agenda of analytical philosophy. If there are no conceptual truths, there are no conceptual analyses either. If there are no conceptual analyses, analytic philosophers are in jeopardy of methodological unemployment.”

LI has never liked Kripke, although we find Naming and Necessity to be at least an interesting, and sometimes useful, book. However, we’ve never trusted the thesis of substituting a theory of possible worlds to explain proper names. Much of it, to us, seems like so much trickery, dressed up as counterfactuals. John Burgess at Princeton has a nice explanation of Kripke’s motives for devising a theory of modal necessity to explain names, laying out the salient elements of the dirty deed. First, Burgess explains the classical exampled learned by all first year philosophy grad students – the evening star and the morning star example. Here’s Burgess:

“…The puzzle that Russell (following Frege) addresses is this. Given that ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ denote the same individual, how can the following be true?

(2.1) It is a substantive astronomical discovery that Hesperus is Phosphorus.

According to Russell, this would be impossible if each of ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ were name in the ideal sense of ‘a simple symbol directly designating an individual which is its meaning’. For if the meaning of each name is simply the individual it designates, then since both denote the same object, the two have the same meaning, from which it would seem to follow that ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ has the same meaning as ‘Hesperus is Hesperus’. And that, surely, is no substantive astronomical discovery! In the statement of the puzzle one may replace ‘substantive astronomical discovery’ by ‘not analytic’ or ‘not a priori’ — or if George is an astronomical ignoramus, by ‘not known to George’ or ‘not believed by George’.

Russell offered a famous theory of descriptions intended to explain why the puzzle does not arise in the case of descriptions as opposed to names. But even without going into Russell’s theory it is perhaps obvious that

(2.2) It is a substantive astronomical discovery that the brightest celestial object regularly seen near the western horizon after sunset is the same as the brightest celestial object regularly seen near the eastern horizon before sunrise.

can easily be true. (Certainly Frege, who did not have Russell’s theory of descriptions, found it so.)
Russell’s solution to the puzzle is that ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’, and more generally names in the ordinary sense, are not names in his ideal sense. Rather, each is associated with some description that constitutes its definition…”

Well, as you can imagine, that is a theory that needs some work. Things change over time, and that means that any description one comes up with will be inaccurate at least to the extent that something has changed – in other words, descriptions are always vulnerable to the effects of before/after. The refutation of Russell’s theory, taken as a strict identity between a proper name and a canonical definition, is easily available. Go to your local grocery store, look in the back of the Redbook, and notice the advertisement for the dietary supplement that shows Mrs. Smith at 300 pounds in 1999, and Mrs. Smith at a svelte 150 now.

It is important to keep your eye on the temporal dimension of this refutation. It is the object of the Kripke school to overlook it. To get back to Burgess, later in the paper he returns to the Hesperus/Phosphorus dilemma from Kripke’s side:

“Kripke has yet another argument against descriptive theories of names. A passing comet might have dislocated the planets, so that while Venus was still the brightest celestial object regularly seen near the western horizon after sunset, Mars rather than Venus was the brightest celestial object regularly seen near the eastern horizon before sunrise. But even so, Venus, alias, Hesperus, alias Phosphorus, would not have been anything other than itself, Venus, alias Phosphorus, alias Hesperus. Thus

(7.1) Hesperus is the brightest celestial object regularly seen near the eastern horizon before sunrise. would have been false, while

(7.2) Hesperus is Phosphorus.

still would have been true. This is so even if, in the counterfactual situation being contemplated, it were Mars that was called ‘Phosphorus’, while it were still Venus that was called ‘Hesperus’. It follows that Phosphorus is not by definition the brightest celestial object regularly seen near the eastern horizon before sunrise (and by similar reasoning, Hesperus is not by definition the brightest celestial object regularly seen near the western horizon after sunset).”

Before we go on, notice something about the method here. This is something Fodor doesn’t mention, but something that should strike anybody who has ever read any analytic philosophy. That is the inference, from the affordances of some language in some particular grammatical structure, to a metaphysical argument that supposedly makes those affordances understandable. This is called intuition, by the analytics.

For those not familiar with the term affordances – its from engineering. Donald Norman book, The Psychology of Everyday Things, popularized the word, which he claims to have taken from J.J. Gibson. Here’s what he has to say about it:

“The word "affordance" was invented by the perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson (1977, 1979) to refer to the actionable properties between the world and an actor (a person or animal).
…
In POET, I argued that understanding how to operate a novel device had three major dimensions: conceptual models, constraints, and affordances. These three concepts have had a mixed reception.
To me, the most important part of a successful design is the underlying conceptual model. This is the hard part of design: formulating an appropriate conceptual model and then assuring that everything else be consistent with it. I see lots of token acceptance of this idea, but far to little serious work. The power of constraints has largely been ignored. To my great surprise, the concept of affordance was adopted by the design community, especially graphical and industrial design. Alas, yes, the concept has caught on, but not always with complete understanding.”
Here’s a plain jane example:
“The computer system already comes with built-in physical affordances. The computer, with its keyboard, display screen, pointing device and selection buttons (e.g., mouse buttons) affords pointing, touching, looking, and clicking on every pixel of the screen.”

The affordances of the proper name give us various tagging affordances. It isn’t, we think, the purpose of the proper name to imply a moment of pure presence to itself, to use the Derridean term. It is to provide an affordance across changing circumstances. The philosophic assumption must be –oh, then it is about an unchanging thing, or what remains the same, over changing circumstances. But why should we assume that? Mrs. Smith wants to show that she has changed, not that she has remained the same.
...

Damn, what's the time? We should be writing on our novel. So we will abruptly cut this here.