the new mlch

While eating, they normally conceal themselves or else close their eyes.
- Doctor Brodies Report.

In Borges’ short story, Doctor Brodie’s Report, then narrator describes the habits of the Mlch - a Yahoo like people who perform all their ‘physical acts’ in open view except for eating. They have the delicacy to conceal the tiniest hints of mastication, even though they are coarse enough to enjoy devouring raw corpses.

Restaurants, for the Mlch, would be as shocking as would be, for us, emporiums designed to let parents to copulate in front of stangers and their own children. But Borges’ story isn’t simply about inverting customs. It plays with an image of the private and the public that registers in myth – an image that sees these as two opposite poles. From that socially false but mythically re-enforced idea flows the libertarian notion of capitalism as a system of private enterprises. In reality, privacy is always defined by reference to a public; it is not in opposition to that public, nor is it even particularly concealed from the public. The mythical ideal of privacy is, in the social sphere, mere autism.

To trace the menu and its effects, as the crow-like LI has been doing – or delaying doing - is just a little attempt to get a few steps into how myth and history split, here, and why, and what havoc it has wrought – to reckon up the beauty and the casualties.

The burden of LI’s insanity, over the last decade, can be summed up as the coming of the Mlch – the leap from myth to history made by the governing class that has administered privatizations worldwide in an attempt to destroy privacy. For the nature of privacy does not reside in its incommunicability, or its surveyed and absolutely defended property lines, but in the fact that privacy is about who one chooses to share space with, who one chooses to share time with. Privacy is not defined by solitude; rather, solitude as private time is derived from privacy as shared time. Only after Friday joins Robinson Crusoe does privacy come into the picture.

This is what makes the appearance of the menu such an interesting little fold in the disembedding of the economic. The menu comes out of the great houses, where the cooking is done by the servants on a scale appropriate to the notables of the ancien regime, and into the public sphere, in restaurants. It comes out of the houses as, what? A marker of the re-organization of the social? an insensible change in the way intimacy is transacted? a way of closing off space in the public for the private? as a constitution of preferences? Hey, a lot depends on the menu here. Too much to bite off, so to speak. But I suppose what should concern me is the link between intimacy and taste – and the role of individuating payment, which was one of the first and most striking things about menus. The rule in the inn was that how much you paid for the food depended solely on how many people were at the table – you did not pay for what you ate. The rule, after the restaurant was established

(- which here is the history, quickly: According to Rebecca Stang’s The Invention of the Restaurant, the first restaurant to call itself a restaurant was opened on Rue Saint-Honore, Hotel d’Aligre in Paris by Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau in 1766. The restaurant was about restoration of the health – the eighteenth century doctor, when not worried about rotting smells and onanism, was worried about the effect of heavy foods, such as those served in auberge, on women and gens des lettres. Along with the restaurant came the menu, for in the restaurant, unlike the auberge, the diners’ physiques were individually addressed)

was that each paid for what each ate. And this, of course, is a concept that could only be welcomed by the budding political economist, since it made the eating of food correspond more rationally to the actual market. Or seemed to. However, it rather shocked Rousseau, who recounts going to a restaurant in the fourth of the Reveries chez la dame Vacassin, restauratrice – Rousseau calls it going to dine “en manière de pique-nique” – and who missed the old custom. Even though the restaurant as an invention serving the public health was, as Herve Dumez points out, inspired by Rousseauist themes - the same concern with breastfeeding, with being natural, with getting rid of traditional, unhealthy urban customs. In fact, the Mathurin’s restaurant, originally, emphasized broths – simple instead of healthy foods.

“The framework of the establishment lent itself to the calm necessary for good digestion: for the first time, it would be possible to eat at a separate table, alone, en famille or with friends. One has here the three elements radically new of the restaurant: flexibility of the hours of dining, the choice, with the menu, and the mixture of a private intimacy made possible in a public place open to all. To which we should add a last point: the mixture of traditional cooking with innovation, simplicity (le bouillon) with sophistication. Quickly, but in the line of the maison de sante, the restaurant menus opened up to other dishes than simple soups: fruits and milk based desserts, notably rice pudding, inspired by the best seller, la Nouvelle Heloise.”

It should be pointed out that the idea that the inn simply offered common tables, here, is a myth. You could eat in your room, or you could eat at a table apart, depending on the capaciousness of the inn.

But LI has wandered into facts, here, taking us away from the bonds between taste, privacy, and intimacy. Hmm, that will be for another post.

menus, cartes, and where we are

In the OED, the first meaning of menu is – the common people. Sons of the menu seems to have been a seventeenth century phrase. The second meaning, a schedule or list, takes its first instance of menu in English from a book, in 1830, that refers to French cooking.

In his essay on Grimod de la Reynier’s Almanach in Consuming Culture, the arts of the French Table, Michael Garval (whose homepage links to a “menu of the month” ) describes the frontispiece, which presented a little semi-humorous cartoon of the gourmand, with the bibliotheque of the 19th gourmand (bookshelves overflowing with provisions), his meditations, the first duty of an Amphitrion “with the master of the house, in the kitchen, receiving a menu from his chef,” his dreams, his awakening, and then “le plus mortel ennemi du diner”, in “which the gourmand spoils his appetite by indulging in an overly copious lunch.” I am probably not the first person to see this as a parody of Descartes in the Discours, right? So I won’t flog the comparison. What is interesting, instead, is the appearance of this menu in the household. The civilizing process, man. From the aristocrat’s schedule to the bourgeois’s grand palaces of gourmandise to the driveby ‘can I take your order’, something is happening here. But do we know what it is?

Of course, it is menu in English, but carte gastronomique in the early nineteenth century. A carte is a map, which implies a referent in which one orients oneself – a space. But what kind of space is this – the space of cuisine?

Well, I could take a leap here into Kant’s essay on orientation, which is actually a pretty good intro to the always fascinating topic of left and right and might give us some anchors for the ur-text of preferences (remember, of course, that while menus and restaurants are appearing in Paris, Bentham is dividing the moral world into pleasures and pains, a binary over which one can calculate – in fact, LI, at this moment, has half a mind to claim an intimate connection between the origin of the political economic text, constitutions and menus – text types bound together in this moment, a disguised relationship that seems to have attracted few critics – yes, many are the ties that bind the U.S. Constitution to the menu at the Taco place up the street, and a true American deconstructor, or simply your average KritikDJ, would set about mixing one with the other, scratch scratch) but let’s stick, for a moment, with Grimod.

Ah, let's do that in our next post.

menus con't

Give me liberty, or give me death, and can you make that with extra cheese?” – Patrick Henry at the Burger King

When I cast my beady, crow’s eyes over the long stretch of modernity – in these dog, dead days, I have little else to amuse me – I see nothing that so aptly fits Polanyi’s model of the disembedding of the economy as the rise of the menu – the course of which is, appropriately, a blank as far as I can tell. No opus to light the weary traveler on his way. Just the kind of trace that makes my juices flow. At the same time, of course, LI is a humble blogger, no maker of opuses but a poker of holes: we aren’t going to build Rome in a thousand words or less, or give you the foundations of menu-ology here.

In the two scenes we picked out from two movies in our last post, it would be easy to leave the menus behind. Like the King in Las Meninas, or – a better comparison – like the anamorphic skull in Holbein’s Ambassadors, gracing Lacan’s Seminaire, volume 11, they are where the gazes are gathered and the source that builds the space the gazes all span. So, what royal personage is doing the looking here? Well, it is LI’s humble contention, and the root of the insanity that has obviously driven him mad, that the gaze that stares out from the menu is the fly’s gaze, one in which two hundred flavors of ice cream, thirty brands of corn flakes, eggs with rye toast or steak cooked to your preference and ten combinations of milk (soy, whole, or one percent) and coffee can be held in balance, equally. The restaurant ain’t no panopticon, but it is one of the many entrances to the fly’s world, the kingdom of Capital. And we do know the name of the Lord of the Flies, don’t we?

Not that LI is particularly kicking against Belzebuub. We are humble servitors, more humble, because more miserably unsuccessful, than most - we simply have a causist’s quibble with the definition of freedom in the fly’s kingdom. That definition is spelled out in preferences, and he who says preferences says a pricing and market mechanism before you can say “still working on that, sir?” Or, “do you want onions and pickle on that?” What better text for preferences is there, what better object of the neo-classical school than the menu? Belzebuub’s poetic conceit is that all that exists, exists to be put on a menu. It functions not only to separate and classify choices, but to civilize and educate. Just as the child’s growth as a biological entity is measured by yardsticks and charts, the child’s entry into the fly’s kingdom comes by way of learning about, well, entrees.

All of which is LI creeping towards his object and around it again, instead of making the bold pounce. Maybe I can make the pounce in the next, or the next, post.

for a history of the menu

When I wrote my master’s thesis on seriousness, I spoke, in the Pauline phrase, as a child – or rather as a child of French philosophy. Thus, I did not look hard enough at English sources to find references to seriousness. I did find that seriousness has never been seriously thematized in philosophy, even though it has been inherent since Socrates made his first wisecrack. Imagine my surprise, then, when I came across this while reading Hazlitt – who I read to strengthen my prose style. (My master’s thesis, by the way, is that seriousness never really forms an opposite – it is always a wildcard in the play of the dialectic, and thus functions both to maintain and to deconstruct the system of oppositions within metaphysics. About which I could go on at length, but… being in all things merciful to my readers … I won’t):

“To understand or define the ludicrous, we must first know what the serious is. Now the serious is the habitual stress which the mind lays upon the expectation of a given order of events, following one another with a certain regularity and weight of interest attached to them. When this stress is increased beyond its usual pitch of intensity, so as to overstrain the feelings by the violent opposition of good to bad, or of object to our desires, it becomes the pathetic or tragical. The ludicrous, or comic, is the unexpected loosening or relaxing this stress below its usual pitch of intensity, by such an abrupt transposition of the order of our ideas, as taking the mind unawares, throws it off its guard, startles it into a lively sense of pleasure, and leaves no time nor inclination for painful reflections.”

There is much that is wrong with this – and especially the naïve distinction between pain and pleasure – but the nice thing about it is that Hazlitt recognizes that the serious is distinct not just from the ludicrous, but from the tragic.

Now, myself, as a loser, I have found that every oracle in my life eventually pokes a big stick up my ass except for the ludicrous – and so I have followed it like my own personal destiny, and here I now sit, a crow in all but feathers, cawing over the corpse of the American culture in its Bushian phase, where painful reflection mixes inextricably with the clownish. That culture, as I grew up with it, I realize dimly, is an aspect of war culture, which has its zones and manners.

But on to the subject of this post, which is existential freedom, liberalism, and the menu.

…
A few days ago, LI was visiting our local video store when the clerks put on a movie that stands out, in our mind, for loathsomeness. Not the loathsomeness of catsup flecked fx, nor that of porno raunch, but a more dreadful, soul destroying loathsomeness, a glimpse into the dark abysm of the middle class soul. I am speaking, of course, of When Sally Met Harry. Or is it When Harry Met Sally? In any case, I was visiting just as Meg Ryan was seated with -- oh, what’s his name, the guy who plays Harry, that sadsack comic – and she was ordering something at a restaurant. And it flashed on my senses that this scene was obviously referencing the scene in Five Easy Pieces when Jack Nicholson tried to order breakfast at a diner. Now, while FEP isn’t my favorite piece of cinema, the anger in Nicholson has a didactic quality that LI likes – for here, in a nutshell, is the problem with social contract liberalism, with its notion that freedom is about preferences. The solution to that anger, in FEP, for this form of liberalism, is expanding the preferences – hence, the same scene in WHMS, in which we get glimpses of what the hippie revolution wrought in lifestyle America – a place where a decent latte is never too far away. Or something like that.

Now LI has long contended that freedom isn’t defined by preferences – that, in fact, the idea of identifying freedom in that technical, economic sense with political freedom per se is exactly where the libertarian goes wrong. There is a rather beautiful phrase is G. Baum’s book on Karl Polanyi: “This, then, is Polanyi’s orginal argument: the longing of the bourgeois conscience transcends the possibilities of bourgeois society. What this conscience calls for is the creation of a transparent society that allows its members to estimate the effects of what they are doing and thus assume ethical responsibility for their actions.”

I am not sure about the transparency, but I am sure about the longing and the anger when that longing is marginalized, or translated into mere preference mongering.

Now, one thing about both movies is that the scenes are centered around the interaction between a text and social action – the text being the menu. I have looked around, but in vain, for a history of menus. Menus are considered to be so obvious that the fact that menus weren’t present in places where people came to eat – inns, basically – until the start of restauranting in the late 18th century doesn’t really register as a historically interesting event. To see how people would enter an inn and order food or drink, look, for instance, at Don Quixote. Or the 18th century picaresque. No character brandishes a menu in these texts. In fact, the same thing is true in Dickens -- characters are continually being brought chops and beer, but you don't see the characters asking, well, what type of beer do you have? Although by this time, actually, that sentence was starting to make sense.

This is why my next post will be about Grimod de la Reyniere, the man who wrote the first popular restaurant guide, the Almanach des gourmands. Overshadowed by Brillat-Savarin, Grimod de la Reyniere is now experiencing a little renaissance of interest by pop culture scholars.

Or at least that is what I think the next post will be about.

my buds and companeros, the hummers

LI hopes readers haven’t found our last two posts intolerably dull. The thing is, the graphix novel we are working on does some projecting into the future. We have been dreaming of a period of great thirst, as the extent of glacial melting starts truly drying up drinking water sources, some time after 2040. Our little dystopian vision is of a Rwanda like situation in which the generation that drove cars (called "the Hummers") is systematically slaughtered by their offspring. How that fits into the plot remains to be seen. So, in any case, we are playing around with a vocabulary and vision. Sorry for the longeurs.

…

Ah, the symbols of the great glacier melt. Last week, the British papers had an interesting story about the reappearance of the body of a climber lost on Mount Blanc in 1989:

From the Daily Telegraph:

“THE mummified remains of a British mountaineer who vanished 17 years ago have been found in a melting glacier in the Italian Alps.
Michael Seavers, 31, was one of three British climbers who disappeared in a snowstorm with a German companion.

The bodies of William Ogburn, 32, and Leslie Lawrence, 29, were found within six months of the tragedy.

But Mr Seavers's body and that of his German companion Dirk Ziolkowske, 24, have not been found until now.

A guide said yesterday that he had seen their remains last Friday and mountain rescue teams recovered them from an altitude of 10,500ft, close to the Toula glacier on the Italian side of Mt Blanc.”

The alps are the scene of some geologically interesting stuff at the moment. They are actually growing again. As the weight of the alpine glaciers diminishes, the mountains grow inches taller. And how much is that weight going to diminish?

This is from Biotech week:

“Scientists consider glaciers to be among the best natural indicators of climate change and, therefore, monitor them closely. Rapidly shrinking glacier areas, spectacular tongue retreats, and increasing mass losses are clear signs of the atmospheric warming observed in the Alps during the last 150 years.

Michael Zemp and colleagues in the Department of Geography of the University of Zurich note that in the 1970s, about 5,150 Alpine glaciers covered a total area of 2,909 square kilometers [1,123 square miles]. This represented a loss of about 35% of glacial area from 1850 to that time. Accelerated loss of ice cover since then has resulted in a total loss of 50% of the 1850 area, culminating in a volume loss of 5 to 10% of the remaining ice during the extraordinary warm year of 2003.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an increase in summer air temperature of one to five degrees Celsius [two to nine degrees Fahrenheit] and a precipitation change between minus-20% and plus-30% by the end of the 21st century is a plausible scenario. The University of Zurich researchers say that for each one degree Celsius [two degrees Fahrenheit] increase in mean summer temperature, precipitation would have to increase by 25% to offset the glacial loss.”

There is a lake in the center of Austin. It wasn’t there one hundred years ago. It might well not be there a hundred years from now. But nobody is going to experience that span. Rather, our experiences are in the permanent. The way you make it home from work is permanent. The work you do is permanent. Sun rises permanently. Sun sets permanently. What is now is, of course, permanent. What is now always was and always will be.

Only fanatics – the kind of people who never say amen - could think otherwise.

cosmo-polemos

“Few polls were take to measure the air force’s success in public relations, but by June 1945 a Fortune survey indicated progress. As Fortune put it, “The people are sold on peace through air power.” On more subjective grounds, the air force also had reason for optimism as 1945 appraoched because doubts ere arising within the military establishment about public support for a large peacetime ground army. Arnold believed that Americans would support in its place a powerful air foce making few demands on manpower and responding to public anxieties, nourished by the air force itself, about defending against future Pearl Harbors.” The Rise of American Air Power: the creation of Armageddon by Michael Sherry

He sew his eyes shut
Because he is afraid to see – Nine Inch Nails

The conclusion I draw from my last post is nothing so facile as that all wars are one war. That is an analytic dead end. But I’d suggest that the set of wars that have taken place between 1939 and, say, the beginning of the Heat Death era, around 2040, form a distinct, unified historical epoch. And that war, here, has to include events that are usually segregated from it – the mass transformation of infrastructure that appeared all across the globe (dams, irrigation systems, road systems, the dispersal of urban areas into subways), the great scientific and technological research systems, the psychology-education complex – etc.

We are citizens of the wars. War men and women, war races. Human product among low use populations – this should be the caption for much of our history at the moment. We have devised elaborate plots behind which the parts actually fit together, the hidden patterns come alive, and we love them. We are entertained infinitely by our own destruction. And such has been the creation of cosmo-polemos.

This is why I find articles like Ralph’s fascinating. It begins with those events that have been rather forgotten relative to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“On the night of 9 March 1945, 325 B-29 ‘Superfortresses’, based in the Marianas and under the command of Major General Curtis E. LeMay, dropped 1665 tons of bombs, all of which were incendiaries,on the heart of residential Tokyo. The bombs generated a ferocious, unstoppable firestorm that consumed 15.8 square miles of the city and killed a roughly estimated 100 000 of its citizens. The targeted residential zone bordered a large manufacturing sector of the city: consequently 22 numbered industrial targets were destroyed and struck from the target list the next morning. By official Japanese estimates, 267 171 buildings were levelled (one-quarter of the city), and 1 008 005 Japanese were left homeless.2 Viewed as a massive success by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), the Tokyo raid kicked off a firebombing campaign. that laid waste to more than 60 of Japan’s largest cities and killed hundreds of thousands of its civilians by the end of the Second World War.”

Historians of the war confront a puzzle, here. U.S. air policy, laid out in the 1930s, was very clear about what the Brits called ‘area bombing.’ Roosevelt, in a speech in 1939, said:

“The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population during the course of the hostilities which have raged in various quarters of the earth during the past few years, which has resulted in the maiming and in the death of thousands of defenseless men, women and children has sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.”

Roosevelt wasn’t just engaging in rhetoric. The U.S. air power policy developed in the thirties specifically aimed at destroying the industrial fabric of enemy power. In the air war over Germany, the U.S. tried, at least, to adhere to this policy. When, in 1945, Dresden was destroyed by an Anglo-American fleet of bombers, a British officer, C.M. Grierson, suggested at a press conference that the purpose was to kill civilians, it disturbed the American command. In fact, the destruction of German cities, Operation Clarion, was discussed and disputed with these issues in mind:

“Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, former commander of the 8th Air Force in Germany, wrote to Lieutenant General Carl Spaatz (who was then co-ordinating Clarion) and asked him not to carry out the attack: ‘We should never allow the history of this war to convict us of throwing the strategic bomber against the man in the street.’12 Spaatz went ahead with Clarion anyway, but remained, according to one general’s diary, ‘determined that the American Air Forces will not end this war with a reputation for indiscriminate bombing’.”

Given this dialogue in the European theater, why was the Pacific theater so different?

Ralph’s structured answer gives weight to the logical development, out of precision bombing, of a terror bombing policy. But in practice, terror bombing was enacted due to the interplay between Curtis LeMay and General ‘Hap’ Hapgood Arnold. It was not planned, but emerged as an improvisation from a context in which it was dialectically prefigured -- by which I simply mean that the boundaries that defined the industrial attrition policy were always subject to change, and were never anchored to any logical constant. Both LeMay and Hapgood knew that they were facing a potential crisis: peace. Hapgood was a strong advocate of strengthening the Air Force and keeping it independent from the army. Independence meant resources.

The Committee assessing the air war over Japan, as Ralph describes it, went from advocating the destruction of industry according to the thirties strategic framework to consideration of the “intriguing idea,” as one General put it, of promoting “complete chaos” in six cities by killing “584,000 people.” But this was put in terms of its economic effects – for killing people as people did make one feel a bit of a heel. Rather, the 584,000 would be workers. Human product. Subtract workers and you effect the economy.

These thoughts, then, were in the Air Force mind. And there were threats closing in:

“The pressure to do ever more for the purpose of air force independence manifested itself in many ways. First to feel it were those within the B-29 programme. As mentioned above, Arnold had risked his career for this US$3 billion endeavour. It was the B-29 that could grant air force independence, because it was the weapon that could deliver fire-power in ways the army and navy could not. But Arnold constantly risked losing his B-29s to the insatiable needs of the army and navy. In early 1944 Arnold specifically designed the 20th Air Force (which would contain the XX and XXI Bomber Commands) to be as far removed from other branches of the military as possible. In a novel fashion, the 20th reported not to the army, but directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Arnold, a member of the JCS, was both commanding general of the 20th as well as executive agent for the JCS in the Pentagon.36 The JCS created the broad strategic framework, but within that framework Arnold
could do essentially whatever he wanted.37

“Command freedom did not guarantee wartime independence, however. Arnold was very candid in his memoirs about his fears that the Air Forces would be subordinated in the Pacific theatre. He recalled that Admiral King, the highly effective commander of the US Fleet, said, ‘Trouble with all this rearrangement and reorganization is your Air Force, Hap. If you would take your Air Force and bring it over to the Navy, then the Navy … would be the largest and most powerful force in the world.’38 Arnold certainly had no desire to follow this plan, and was instead determined to keep his 20th as far from naval operations as possible. But even if Arnold maintained an independent air arm, he still would have to prove he was achieving results with his B-29s in order to keep them.”

Keeping what you got – this is the essence of great drama. Arnold, like the Golem in Lord of the Rings, wanted his precious. And the navy was threatening to take his precious away. And what stood between him and his loss? A buncha Japanese civilians.

These rivalries have become a thing of comedy. However, the 584,000 Japanese, in addition to contributing to the war effort, were notoriously humorless, which meant that, as they were dying, they wouldn’t be dying of laughter. Which is funny, since laughter is the best medicine.

So, 1944 was coming to a close, and the precision bombing campaign, which Arnold had entrusted to the man who developed the precision bombing strategy, Hansell, had been pounding Japan. Precision bombing depended on the relatively primitive guiding technology the air force had, and on weather. The publicity was bad about the bombing of the steel factories that were targeted according to the earlier protocol, since they stubbornly withstood bombardment. In the meantime, over in China, Curtis LeMay was doing wonders. Somehow, his B-29s were getting to their targets in Japan at twice the rate of Hansell’s.

So it all started to click. If precision bombing depended on such complexities, perhaps one could considering widening the cone of destruction. Hansell was asked to make a whole incendiary strike on Nagoya. The purpose was specifically to kill civilians. Hansell answered back:

“I have with great difficulty implanted the principle that our mission is the destruction of selected primary targets by sustained and determined attacks using precision bombing methods … We are just
beginning to get results … I am concerned that a change to area bombing of the cities will undermine the progress we have made.”

Well, this resistance was no good.

“Arnold did not want to hear about any more problems from Hansell; he was impatient, and wanted reports of big results. As he said himself, the ‘best evidence of how you are getting along is the pictures of the destruction that you have accomplished against your primary targets’.53 Hansell was not providing these pictures. Shortly after Hansell’s interview, Arnold made the decision to relieve Hansell and replace him with LeMay. Norstad delivered the news to Hansell in person on 6 January. Again, Hansell was shocked, but now also extremely disappointed. General Arnold wrote to him soon after, explaining his reasoning for the change in command: ‘The job from now on is no longer planning and pioneering. It has become one of operating. LeMay … should be our best qualified operator.’54 This small statement is most revealing. Arnold did not want a planner in charge of his B-29s: he needed someone who would just get things done; again, he wanted results – and fast.”

One often reads about how the Truman White House had its eye on the Soviets during the last phase of the war against Japan. Or that the main point, vide Paul Fussell, was to save American lives. But we should also remember how many eyes were turned to Boeing. And how easily we can go from precision bombing to ‘area bombing.’ In fact, it seems to be the history of the use of American air power after WWII.

war culture in the heraclitean framework

After it became apparent that the Israeli strategy of using air power to make Lebanon Hezbollah-rein had failed, a curious paen to air power appeared in the Washington Post, filed by their military analyst, William Arkin.

“If you've been reading my commentary on the Israel-Hezbollah war here, you know that I am a fan of airpower. To me, modern precision airpower is the epitome of discriminate warfare, which is to say, that it uniquely allows armed forces to discriminate between combatants and civilians. That is, short of two armies consenting to deploy to an unpopulated battlefield -- sort of like what Saddam Hussein did in 1990 after his invasion of Kuwait when he dug his army into the Kuwaiti and Iraqi desert.

I've heard the howls of protest -- Dresden, Tokyo, London -- before, but again, to reiterate, modern airpower, with its new precision weapons, allows an unprecedented degree of discrimination.”

There are many interests that converge in the War Culture, and one of the most difficult tasks for the analyst is to separate them and sort them by their various ‘degrees of discrimination’. And if this task wasn’t difficult in itself, there is a philosophical difficulty that is rarely mentioned, at least by historians, foreign policy think tankers, and political philosophers. The difficulty goes back to the standard assumption that war is derivative from the State. First we have the state, then we have the wars between states, just as first we have teams, then we have baseball. However, that assumption is rarely argued for. In LI’s opinion, you could just as well have war first – ontologically and historically, Hobbes’ war of all against all – and then the state. In this view, states derive from war, rather than the other way around. Just as Mallarme thought that everything strives to be written in a book, every war, striving to be part of the one war, leaves in its path fragments of itself. Those fragments are states. But war is the shaper. The more powerful the state, the more the culture becomes a war culture.

The philosophical warrant for this goes back to Heraclitus. The Heraclitean view is expressed in a cluster of fragments recently re-translated, along with the whole corpus of Heraclitus’ work, by Charles Kahn in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Fragment 51 reads: “Homer was wrong when he said “Would that Conflict might vanish from among gods and men!” For there would be no attunement without high and low notes nor any animals without male and female, both of which are opposites.” 52 reads: “One must realize that war is shared, and Conflict is Justice, and that all things come to pass (are are ordained?) in accordance with conflict. And 53, the most famous of the fragments on war, reads: War is the father of all and king of all; and some he has shown as gods, others men; some he has made slaves, others free.”

Kahn’s commentary on these fragments is interesting. According to him, the criticism of Homer is that he, like most men, cannot see how, behind appearance, there is a hidden fitting together of all things. According to Kahn, in these fragments, Heraclitus formulates four responses to the question: ‘What is it that most men do not comprhend.’

1. “One must realize that War is common (xynos, shared)’. “…in the place of the familiar thought that the fortunes of war are shared by both sides and that the victor today may be vanquished tomorrow, Heraclitus takes xynos, ‘common’ in his own sense of ‘universal’, ‘all-pervading’, ‘unifying’, and thus gives the words of the poets a deeper meaning they themselves did not comprehend. The symmetrical confrontation of the two sides in battle now becomes a figura for the shifting but reciprocal balance between opposites in human life in the natural world…”

2. “Conflict is Justice”. “Vlastos is clrearly right to insist that Heraclitus’ conception of cosmic justice goes beyond that of Anaximander [one of whose phrases is echoed in Heraclitus’ phrase], since he construes dike not merely as compensation for crime or excess but as a total pattern that includes both punishment and crime itself as necessary ingredients of the world order.

3. ‘All things come to pass in accordance with conflict.’ Kahn points out that this echoes the notion of all things coming to pass in logos. Come to pass can also be understood as birth – which then gives us the strange reversal of the 53rd fragment, since birth here comes from the father, not the mother.

4. “And all things are ordained by conflict.” Kahn thinks that the word for ordained is corrupt. But if it is ordained, he sees the ordination as that proper to an oracle.

If one has the heraclitean framework in mind, the idea that war solely serves the interests of states gives place to the question of what interests are being served by war. And this is a useful thing, insofar as states are not homogenous units. Although we are familiar with trans-national corporations, we still seem to grope when trying to understand transnational interests, which are usually attributed to the hegemonic ambition of a given state. And then, too, there is the definition of wars. We like to count them as distinct things, having beginnings and endings. However, we all know that wars might well have continuities disguised by the ceasefires or intervals of peace that supposedly define them into separate wars, and sometimes we acknowledge this by talking of world wars, or of the sixty or hundred years war.

I hope this isn’t a too utterly philosophical introduction to the topic I am going to discuss in the next post – William W. Ralph’s essay, in the latest issue of War in History, entitled: “Improvised Destruction: Arnold, LeMay, and the Firebombing of Japan,” which argues a thesis that might well explain the motivation for Arkin’s column – or at least one abiding, institutional motivation within the American War Culture.