in the american grain

When the news reached London of General Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga in 1778, Lord Chatham made a speech in the House of Commons, the like of which will never be made by any of the senatorial scum who currently prod the American Republic down the slope to hell. Here’s part of what he said:

“No man thinks more highly than I of the virtue and valour of British troops; I know they can achieve anything except impossibilities; and the conquest of English America is an impossibility… You cannot conquer America… You may swell every expense and every effort still more extravagantly… traffic and barter with every pitiful Geram prince that sells his subjects to the shambles of a foreign power; your efforts are forever vain and impotent, doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely, for it irritates to an incurable resentment the minds of your enemies… If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I would never lay down my arms, never – never – never!”

A good jumping off point for discussing the recent Blackwater massacre in Baghdad, and the American response. It is hard to respond when you are either brain dead or in deep freeze, so the American response has been, of course, a big lukewarm zilch. We can’t disturb the drift as we float ever closer to the Niagara, no matter how much faith we have put in short term memory loss and attention deficit disorder – this country’s favorite hobbies – to get us through the dark night of our Britneyized soul, another possum superpower hoping to avoid the broken mirror’s curse that comes from massacring the innocents. And there’s always Christmas. .

That America will never conquer Iraq, and seems intent on destroying the supports that all power must rely on – the intangible and presumptive threat of efficient force, rationally directed – has been a given at LI since 2003. We’ve ceased to write much about it – for who, among the lobotomized zombies of the electorate, the tranquilized slugs of the opposition, with the miles of bacon fat wrapped around the moral indignation or any morality whatsoever, who cares? So watching these ghouls maintain, at one and the same time, that we have to attack Iran and that we also don’t have one thousand American soldiers to replace a security force with the mores and moves of your average prison gang – I mean Blackwater – is a matter for House of Usher comedy, pedaled B movie laughter, the big fuck you in the closing moments as the hero takes out his cock and wiggles it. I can feel, every day, the corruption and filthiness of the chords that bind me, in thousands of ways, to this sickened country and its toxic momentum, but these chords are like those that bound Doctor Jekyll to Mr. Hyde – you can’t dissolve them without dissolving the motherfucking whole. Still, occasionally a mockingbird will whistle and jeer just for the pleasure of cussing, and LI will kick out with the spasmodic motion of a hanged man, crap running down our legs. So here’s the windup and here’s the pitch…

Way back when we started this blog, we wrote several posts about Angola – the alliance between the Marxist president of Angola and the Bush administration which led to the gunning down of Reagan’s favorite freedom fighter, Jonas Savimbi, struck us as an almost perfect post-Cold War fable… oh the synergies… On the one side, the always disgusting and corrupt ‘Marxist’ left, historically on the side of the slave traders, but with piped in neo-folk music. On the other side, the paymaster right, which of course the Marxy crowd could appreciate – after all, wasn’t profit and loss the be-all and end all of the dialectic? and thus both parties happily thriving on blood diamonds, blood oil, and blood ballots. A marriage truly made in hell, and to put a corpse on top of the wedding cake, apartheid South Africa’s old friend ambushed by ‘Angolan’ forces. Two excerpts from posts we made about this back on June 17 and June 21, 2002:

“A scandal identi-kit.

It works like this. The detective parks his car across the street from the warehouse, he gets out his camera, he takes pictures of men carrying briefcases meeting and exchanging them. The detective follows cars, he takes pictures of meetings in parks and under bridges.

We've seen this, right? The pictures, the movie, the implied plot. So here are a few pictures.

One would show Jacques Chirac meeting with George Bush on December 18, 2000 in Washington, DC at the French Embassy. One would show a former US supported "Freedom fighter," Jonas Savimbi, with fifteen bullets in him, gripping a gun. One would show Eduardo Dos Santos, the president of Angola and former hardline Marxist foe of Savimbo, being feted at a White House dinner shortly after Savimbo's assassination. And one would show an arms dealer named Pierre Falcone (whose wife Sonia, a former Miss Bolivia, is Laura Bush's friend) getting together $20,.000 to contribute to Bush's presidential campaign through his wife's beauty products corporation, Essante. In all, $100,000 was contributed during the campaign, and then, in 2001, returned when Falcone went to jail.

Falcone is not unknown to Chirac -- or to his old rival, Mitterand. In fact, he is one of the central figures in one of those simmering French scandals that would destroy the regime in another country: the arms trafficing scandal that involved Mitterand's son, Jean-Christophe, and huge, unaccounted for sums, as well as a mafioso style Russian arms dealer, Arkadi Gaydamak.

This isn't a story we've seen covered in the NYT. It runs through Angola and traces the surprising fault lines of the New World Order. How new worldish it is can be gauged by what happened to Jonas Savimba.

In the old days -- the eighties -- Savimbi was a right wing hero. Probably the only black man Jesse Helms ever willingly ate with, he was praised by Reagan as a George Washington type figure. His UNITA guerrillas were fed with American money, trained (as far as they had any training) by the CIA, and armed by the CIA, too.

But when the Soviet threat dissolved, Savimbi was undone by the economic facts on the ground. Those facts were about oil. The suddenly capitalistic dos Santos could deliver the oil. Savimbi, the loser of the first post-communist election, could only deliver his mad dog personality. And suddenly that personality wasn't in demand. The invites to the Helms house were on permanent hold. Savimbi retires with his guys to the bocage, of course, and forays out to attack airliners, murder villagers, rape women, and do all the stuff that made him George Washington in the first place. Well, how inconvenient. So he is tracked down -- perhaps with American help -- and killed:

"Fifteen bullets in all -- one in the neck, two in the head, the others in the chest, legs and arms -- finally overcame the boss of UNITA, who is dead at 67 years of age, Friday at 3 p.m. on the banks of the Luvuie River at Moxico." So read the announcement of his unhappy death this February. Another old cold warrior bites the dust, gangster style."

The way American intelligence agencies leave their assets around -- Savimbi in Angola, bin Laden in Afghanistan -- it is like some drunk Texas trucker throwing beer cans out the cab. Human litter, but somebody has to pick it up.

However, never let it be said that Savimbi's less glorious years had no function or meaning. With UNITA threatening him, dos Santos, backed by various American petro-chemical companies, such as Dick Cheney's Haliburton, needed arms. The desire for arms and drugs is the only unlimited desire known to mankind. Luckily, in this world, an embattled dictator can always find somebody to sell him a few hundred million dollars worth of weaponry; this is where Falcone, with his buddy Gaydamak, and his connections with Chirac and his faithful friend, Jean-Christophe Mitterand, fits in. As does ( scumbags of the world display the most touching solidarity) Clinton's good friend, Marc Rich, the on the run moneybags whose company, Glencore, deals in oil.”

Angola (part 2)

I know the names of those responsible for the slaughter
I know the names of those responsible for the slaughters
I know the names of the summit that manipulated
I know the names of those who ran
I know the names of the powerful group who
I know the names of those who, between on mass and the next, made provision and guaranteed political protection
I know the names of the important and serious figures behind who are behind the ridiculous figures who
I know the names of the important and serious figures behind the tragic kids who
I know all these names and all the acts (the slaughters, the attacks on institutions) they have been guilty of
- Pier Paolo Pasolini

This passage, from one of Pasolini's hallucinatory articles in the early seventies - the articles that possibly led to him being lured to a beach and murdered - is quoted in Peter Robb's excellent Midnight in Sicily, to which we have previously referred in our post on Sciascia. Pasolini, Robb says, went on to explain that he knew, but he didn't have proof. He knew, however, because "I am a writer and an intellectual who tries to follow what goes on, to imagine what is known and what is kept quiet, who pieces together the disorganized fragments of a whole and coherent political picture, who restores logic where arbitrariness, mystery and madness seem to prevail."

The American writer, burdened with a less active imagination, and a set of cliches that tend either to Hollywood or to the pisspoor identity kit politics that has narcotized academia for the past ten years, usually pieces together nothing but a homemade prejudice, a narcissistic grievance.

And LI is an American writer, all right? So don't ask me to rise to the heights.

Still, the quote seems appropriate as LI pulls back, these days,. Have you been getting the full heady rush of the world of blowback in your nostrils, your skin, your nerves, your blood, reader? …
…

Yes, that's the basic gripe, the root of the anti-corporate movement: the fear that the globalizing world is returning us to the calm regard of the beast. We would no longer ask how it works -- just as we accept any of the improbable crap we see in typical Hollywood action flicks. The discontinuity, the shallowness, or non-existence, of character, the one note motives. Those films, the malls, the traffic, the talk radio -- all of it is about culture sinking to its lowest, dumbest level. It is the debauched image of the romantic ideal, life without questions, except for the unfortunate few -- okay, the vast majority -- who have been left outside of the all the golden gated communities.

…

For instance, we think that the story of what happened, and has been happening, in Angola, has something ghoulishly exemplary about it. The events that flow into and out of the death of Jonas Savimbi, madman and murder that he was, the George Washington of dirty diamonds, the strong right arm of evangelical Christians (2)(some of whose leaders, like Pat Robertson (3), have strong and secret ties in this region of the world with diamond dealers, arms merchants, and some of the bloodiest tyrants of recent history), show that once again, Africa is where the white man lets down his pants, as Celine once wrote, and takes a dump. It seems to have been little remarked that Cheney is the first Vice President ever to have hired a mercenary army in a foreign land. Is this the Oliver North syndrome or what? Yes, as head of Haliburton, which includes the giant engineering firm, Brown and Root, Cheney was involved, no doubt at a distance, with a South African company named Executive Outcomes. Executive Outcomes -- which has dissolved, and reformed under a different name, last year -- was a PMC -- a private military company. Oh, it wasn't anything as tawdry as a group of hired killers. There's a rather laudatory article about EO in the magazine of the College of the Army, Parameters. Here's a list of such PMCs:

"A 1997 study by the private Center for Defense Information lists dozens of such organizations with international operations. South Africa has been the leading home of international security companies, including Executive Outcomes, Combat Force, Investments Surveys, Honey Badger Arms and Ammunition, Shield Security, Kas Enterprises, Saracen International, and Longreach Security. International military firms based in other parts of the world include Alpha Five, Corporate Trading International, Omega Support Ltd., Parasec Strategic Concept, Jardine Securicor Gurkha Services (Hong Kong), Gurkha Security Guards (Isle of Man, UK), Special Project Service Ltd. (UK), Defence Systems Ltd. (UK), Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Vinnell Corporation (US), and Military Professional Resources Inc. (US). Executive Outcomes (South Africa) has been described as "the world's first fully equipped corporate army."

Isn't that something? a fully equipped corporate army. Press on the pedals, bring out the irony. Savimbi's UNITA army was undone by dos Santos by these guys, with Heritage Oil being, apparently, the middleman. The EO guys once fought for UNITA -- back in the days when dos Santos was a Marxist threat. Now, of course, dos Santos is merely a highly corrupt billionaire, and EO is happy to do the dirty in his employ. Heritage Oil meanwhile maintains its own little connections with the Bush family. There's an article in the Observatoire de Afrique Centrale this week that fingers Tony Buckingham, a Canadian diamond merchant and soldier of fortune, as the man behind Heritage's African explorations in petrowealth. Heritage also holds stock in one of the PMC's that murdered protestors at a mine in Papua New Guinea in 1997. Cheney's associates, in other words, happen to have a little blood on their cuffs, but that's all right. Who's going to ask any questions about it? It 's a matter of keeping the natives under control, and lately isn't the mood changing? Isn't imperialism the new new thing?

I know the names. We all know the names. But do we really give a fuck?”

Since 2002, innocent days, the milk not even dry in our mouths, we have learned a lot. For instance, we know that the fix is in re the thugs. We know that they are keepers – the House likes them, the ever in the background House, by which I mean the owners of the casino, the Bosses. Just as their great great grandfathers loved the thugs

One should remember the anti-union police of the turn of the century, and their police friends, for these are the spiritual ancestors of Blackwater. The same mix of sadism and righteousness went into these para-militaries: the ones that were hired by Republic Steel to break strikes in the 1930s, the Baldwin-Felts detective force, made famous in Sayers film, Matewan. This is from Robert Michael Smith’s From Blackjacks to Briefcases: A history of commercialized strikebreaking:

One of the largest mine operators in this part of the state [of West Virginia], Justus Collins, first turned to this agency for guards to protect his property in 1893. Less than ten years later, he utilized these same men to break a UMWA-sponsored strike. After joining his fellow operators, who agreed to enfoce a thirty-day lockout, in June of 1902 he broke ranks by bringin in one hundred and fifty scab workers. Protected by forty Baldwin-Felts men, who guarded the iron gates to themine and manned searchlights and a machine gun mounted upon the coal tipple, he reaped a fortune…

Found in nearly every mining community in the sounthern part of West Virginia by 1930, Baldwin-Felts guards provided the mine owners with a feudal like control over their workers. Under the order of the mine operators these men policed the remote mining camps, guarded the payroll, collected rents, and often determined access to company towns… Once able to move freely around the state – after 1907 – Baldwin Felts thugs harassed union organizers from the time they stepped off the train until they left.”

As with Blackwater and Co. in Iraq, the Baldwin Felts people signaled their dominance and contempt for the miners and people of West Virginia, by drive by shootings. In a congressional inquiry, … senators heard that one night in early February 1913 the local sheriff, a coal operator, and fourteen guards machine gunned a striker’s tent colony at Holly Grove from an armored train known as the Bull Moose Special.”
...

That long and twisty authoritarian American character, the scab and the strikebreaking cop - just as the twenties returned everywhere in the nineties, so too did the characters from the twenties. The return of the repressed has been formidable, and the repressed characters only got more grotesque and psychotic from their stays in the underworld - hence, a bug like Cheney. And hence the industry cops and their media mouthpieces - among whom, of course, is Ted Koppel, well known for his copcrush on Blackwater. Koppel's op ed piece was pointed to, in 2006, as a kind of unconscious satire. But it is a deadly one. This is how the establishment thinks:

"There is something terribly seductive about the notion of a mercenary army. Perhaps it is the inevitable response of a market economy to a host of seemingly intractable public policy and security problems.

Consider only a partial list of factors that would make a force of latter-day Hessians seem attractive. Among them are these:

• Growing public disenchantment with the war in Iraq;

• The prospect of an endless campaign against global terrorism;

• An over-extended military backed by an exhausted, even depleted force of reservists and National Guardsmen;

• The unwillingness or inability of the United Nations or other multinational organizations to dispatch adequate forces to deal quickly with hideous, large-scale atrocities (see Darfur and Congo);

• The expansion of American corporations into more remote, fractious and potentially hostile settings.

Just as the all-volunteer military relieved the government of much of the political pressure that had accompanied the draft, so a rent-a-force, harnessing the privilege of every putative warrior to hire himself out for more than he could ever make in the direct service of Uncle Sam, might relieve us of an array of current political pressures."

Here's the genuine voice of D.C., the consensus of the policymakers centered around the likes of George Bush and Hilary Clinton. Here's the voice of William Tyndale, four hundred years ago, explaining God's punishment on the wicked:

"… as soon as the word is once openly preached, and testified or witnessed, unto the world, and when he hath given them a season to repent, is ready at once to take vengeance of his enemies, and shooteth arrows with heads dipt in deadly poison at them; and poureth his plague from heaven down upon them; and sendeth the murrain and pestilence among them; and sinketh the cities of them; and maketh the earth swallow them, and compasseth them in their wiles, and taketh them in their own traps and snares, and casteth them into the pits which they digged for other men; and sendeth them a dazing in the head; and utterly destroyeth them with their own subtle counsel."

Which, saving the deity, is pretty much my conviction as to what will happen to a country that turns its prison system into a 'solution' to the political pressures coming from the collapse of Jim Crow - apartheid by Jena-like jury - that sends violent psychopaths into other countries to mow down the innocent, and that elects the crookedest and the stupidest of tyrants.

Another quote, and I'm done here:

he good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword, said the black.

The judge smiled, his face shining with grease. What right man would have it any other way? he said.

The good book does indeed count war an evil, said Irving. Yet there's many a bloody tale of war inside it.

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way. - Blood Meridian

Two euphorics: Mr. T and Stephanie's Id

I am feeling grim about the mouth lately. A sickness I caught in Georgia has left behind a persistent, puzzling headache and cough - and then of course there is the day to day living in Blackwater’s USA, Bush’s America, which is a puling, putrid kind of thing to do.

So I’ve been looking around for things to cheer me up. Here are two of them.

the first is my friend T., his wife Kiyoko, and his baby Takeo-chan here:


The second is this band, Stephanie’s ID. Just some kids in Asheville, NC making music – great garage music - instead of trying to make celebrity industry vampire music, eventually to be glued to some monster and useless product to make the joyless little suicide of a life enjoyed by the viewing audience that much more cluttered. This band is pure, and I love the voice of this woman, Stephanie Morgan.

Danto on Rorty

In the introduction to his Truth and Progress, Richard Rorty signals his appreciation of Donald Davidson’s work on truth:

“The greatest of my many intellectual debts to Donald Davidson is my realization that nobody should even try to specify the nature of the truth. … Whether or not one agrees with Davidson that it is important to be able to give a definition of “true in L” for a given natural language (by means of a Tarski-type “truth theory” for that language), one can profit from his arguments that there is no possibility of giving a definition of “true” that works in all such languages.”

Yet, a page later, Rorty is breaking his vow of agnosticism in order to make the claim that “truth is not the goal of inquiry” for all the intellectual ‘progress’ we may have made:

“How do we know that the greater predictive power and greater control of the environment (including a greater ability to cure diseases, build bombs, explore space, etc.) gets us closer to the truth, conceived of as an accurate representation of how things are in themselves, apart from human needs and interests?”

It is between the renunciation of an absolute specification of truth and the attack on a specification of truth that Rorty, for people like me, runs aground. I admit that I am not very thrilled about reified notions of truth, and rather buy Tarski’s structural notion, which depends on a schema of language use rules, out of which arise a criteria of success encoded in the semantic function of truth. This does not look like the mirror of nature; instead, the truth becomes a device for the organization of conventions. Tarski published his paper in the forties, which was the seed time of organizations and cybernetics. Just as the U.S. government was reclassifying its citizens as Human Products, the targets for experiments with radioactive materials, the idea of truth as having some higher and more piercing meaning was being shrunk to its semantic function referencing variable places related through sentiential connectives. In other words, that some things are always true and some things are passingly true no longer has a first order significance for truth. Rather, truth is absorbed into a given construct language with no more fuss and bother than the successor function or the equivalence function. As Tarski writes of objections to his theory:

“As a typical example let me quote in substance such an objection.23 In formulating the definition we use necessarily sentential connectives, i.e., expressions like "if . . ., then," "or," etc. They occur in the definiens; and one of them, namely, the phrase "if, and only if" is usually employed to combine the definiendum with the definiens. However, it is well known that the meaning of sentential connectives is explained in logic with the help of the words "true" and "false"; for instance, we say that an equivalence, i.e., a sentence of the form "p if, and only if, q," is true if either both of its members, i.e., the sentences represented by 'p' and 'q,' are true or both are false. Hence the definition of truth involves a vicious circle.

If this objection were valid, no formally correct definition of truth would be possible; for we are unable to formulate any compound sentence without using sentential connectives, or other logical terms defined with their help. Fortunately, the situation is not so bad.

It is undoubtedly the case that a strictly deductive development of logic is often preceded by certain statements explaining the conditions under which sentences of the form "if p, then q," etc., are considered true or false. (Such explanations are often given schematically, by means of the so-called truth-tables.) However, these statements are outside of the system of logic, and should not be regarded as definitions of the terms involved. They are not formulated in the language of the system, but constitute rather special consequences of the definition of truth given in the meta-language. Moreover, these statements do not influence the deductive development of logic in any way. For in such a development we do not discuss the question whether a given sentence is true, we are only interested in the problem whether it is provable.

On the other hand, the moment we find ourselves within the deductive system of logic -- or of any discipline based upon logic, e.g., of semantics -- we either treat sentential connectives as undefined terms, or else we define them by means of other sentential connectives, but never by means of semantic terms like "true" or "false." For instance, if we agree to regard the expressions "not" and "if . . ., then" (and possibly also "if, and only if") as undefined terms, we can define the term "or" by stating that a sentence of the form "p or q" is equivalent to the corresponding sentence of the form "if not p, then q." The definition can be formulated, e.g., in the following way:

(p or q) if, and only if, (if not p, then q).
This definition obviously contains no semantic terms.”

LI was thinking of these things reading Danto’s review of Rorty’s last published work, here. Davidson himself said that Rorty’s problem was that, although he acknowledges that there is a difference between truth and justification, he continually conflates the two. Thus, the oddity of saying about any research program that its goal is the truth. Only research programs in philosophy take truth as their goal – most research programs take proof as their goal. This, I think, is the ‘irritating’ thing about Rorty – Danto’s review is less about Rorty’s essays – in fact, I am not sure Danto read them – than an elaboration of the fact that Danto found Rorty irritating.

As a rule, Rorty used the word true the way everyone else does, but if you were to ask him for his theory of truth, he would say something outrageous. He did so because he believed we all know when and how to use the word true, but no one has—or needs—a theory of truth to be able to do so: “Everybody knows that the difference between true and false beliefs is as important as that between nourishing and poisonous foods,” he writes in “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” one of thirteen essays from the last ten years collected in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, the fourth volume of his Philosophical Papers published by Cambridge. So philosophers who seek a theory of truth are wasting their time. When he quotes a philosopher who says something he agrees with, that doesn’t mean that he believes everything—or anything else—the cited philosopher says. This implies that he doesn’t really need the philosopher anyway. But it helps bring together the two sides of Rorty’s character—that of the likable, even lovable philosopher, with the exemplary values and virtues he indisputably possessed, and that of the saboteur of philosophical sobriety, a role he adopted for himself after the immense success of his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, published in 1979. He demonstrates that not one of his admirable attributes is grounded in a piece of philosophy, since philosophy in no way explains any of them. The writing is a kind of performance, the purpose of which is to dramatize philosophy’s impotence. He liked to say that he never tried to rebut positions he opposed—he merely sneered at them.”

Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick has called the fifties and sixties the era of the cybernetic fold – the era of the structure and the variable. I think that is very accurate. Some came out of it command and control freaks - like Robert McNamara. People like Rorty lived near the heart of the cybernetic fold and came out of it marked for life. They were the cybernetic dissidents, but their dissent was strongly marked by the inescapable truths of cybernetic city – truths that have now become our environment, from the pixel characters in our movies to the humble orgies of cheesecake and ipod sanctioned by the credit card industry, the anti-union that has yearly raised our anti-wages for a village usurer’s price. The virtual invades the actual only after the actual discovers, like some burning and irremovable ulcer, its constitutional structuralism. Only then is it completely vulnerable. Slothrop's erections exactly predict the sites the V-2 will hit because Slothrop's dick - and indeed Slothrop - have been put together again, in a Primal Scene II laboratory, exactly as they were, except that - they are recombinants. And so our recombinant orgies are absolutely anti-Sadean in that they do not aim at the cold mastery of desire, but subserve a commuter-office slavery, a routine so hideous that no Josephine has arisen from us human product mousepeople to sing it.

Oliver Twist asks for more modalization, please

I have always liked the idea of the linguistic middle man – the guy who can go stalking deep into the technical jargon of some specialty and come back out and explain it in a ordinary language. Now, this isn’t really a knock against technical jargon – every groupuscule has one, from beggars to ex presidents. But the faith of the great middle men (o those incorrigible whigs!), the Edmund Wilson types, is that the technical jargon is merely a preliminary stage in intellectual discovery. Some of that jargon should slip under the bars and become vulgate. Some must remain behind. And, of course, the vulgar shouldn’t be so shit ignorant that they use a little unfamiliarity as an excuse to keep their heads firmly stuck up their asses.

All of which is to say that I am worried that, in my previous posts, I haven’t quite explained what I mean by modalization.

Now that is bad. It is bad because I need the term to explain the history of a social phenomena – the creation and diffusion of a way of speaking of emotions, feelings, and attitude that organizes these things according to whether they are positive or negative. That history is riven – the motives of the participants in it are distinct, and their objects are distinct, even as the model they created eventually melted together those distinctions and erased the differences.

Those various motives and objects can be organized by looking at them modally. And, as I said in my modal post, by modally I am not speaking just of the logician’s idea of modal. I am thinking, instead, of the semiotician’s use of the term, which is slightly different. So, to make this clearer, let me quote a nineteenth century philosopher, John Stuart Mill’s friend, William Hamilton. In Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, he writes:

“Pure propositions are those in which the predicate is categorically affirmed or denied of the subject, simply, without any qualification; Modal, those in which the predicate is categorically affirmed or denied of the subject, under some mode or qualifying determination. For example, - Alexander conquered Darius, is a pure, - Alexander conquered Darius honourably, is a modal proposition.”

Hamilton adds that he finds this distinction bogus: “Nothing can be more futile than this distinction. The mode in such a proposition is nothing more than a part of the predicate.”

He then takes up the more strict use of modal by logicians:

‘But logicians, after Aristotle, have principally considered as modal propositions those that are modified by the four attributions of Necessity, Impossibility, Contingence and Possibility.”

However, Hamilton still isn’t buying it: “But, in regard to these, the case is precisely the same; the mode is merely a part of the predicate, and if so, nothing can be more unwarranted than on this accidental, on this extra-logical, circumstance to establish a great division of logical propositions.”

In the 20th century, Quine agreed with Hamilton, Carnap disagreed, and in general philosophers decided this question on the basis, I think, of boredom: since analytic philosophy discovered everything it was going to discover by 1950, they took on modal logic because they had nothing else to do… Oh oh, I’m being unfair. I’m only joking! I’m only making with the funny business!

Still, disregarding Hamilton’s dismissal of modals, his account of them is what is behind modalization in semiotics – a merging of the rhetorical account of modals and the logical account. The higher level, in semiotics, is logical, with the next level having to do with cognitive and affective attitudes.

There, does that make sense? Are we out of the thickets? Can I say modalization without feeling like I’m resorting to some abracadabra? Yes, I think yes, yes she said yes…

the thrill of superstition

Alexis de Tocqueville landed in America in May, 1831 and spent nine months there; out of that experience he wrote Democracy in America and became famous.

Charles Poyen never quite became famous, and is now utterly forgotten. He came to America by a convoluted journey worthy of a Greek hero – his itinerary was littered with omens, pronounced by somnambulists. He consulted a somnambulist, Madame Villetard, in Paris, looking for a cure for a chronic pain he suffered from. Her remarkable knowledge of his disease- which, we are assured in his memoir, The Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England, was not altogether beyond Poyen’s own comprehension, since he was a medical student – led him to ask her about his proposed journey to Guadaloup, where part of his family resided, apparently as plantation owners. Madame Villetard gave her approval, so off our hero went, to convalesce and further explore the mysteries of somnambulism. He did so, using some ‘colored servants’ as subjects, and proving to his own satisfaction that the mesmeric trance touched on something universal: …the human soul was gifted with the same primitive and essential faculties among every nation and under whatever skin, black red or white, it may be concealed.”

Admirable sentiments. However, the somnambulists of Guadaloup predicted that his illness would not resolve itself any time soon, so he set off for New England, where he had relatives. He went to Maine. He went to Lowell. He taught French. And, admiring his new country, he resolved to plunge into its difficulties, writing a book that ‘was calculated to avoid all social commotions and give equal satisfaction to the parties interested.’ This was in the 1830s, and it was to be expected that a plantation owning Frenchman would attack abolitionism – but, of course, not in the meantime defending slavery. Then Poyen turned his hand to translating and lecturing on animal magnetism. Of course, he felt the heat of prejudice – after all, the theory had been exploded by the ‘great Franklin’ fifty years before, alluding to the committee, including Franklin, Bailly, Lavoisier, Thouvet and other notables that investigated Mesmer, under the direction of the royal government in 1784, which concluded that Mesmeric effects were the result of pure suggestion. It was patriotic to disbelieve in animal magnetism. But the enlightenment America of Franklin’s time had disappeared. Paine, coming back to America in 1803, had already written bitter articles about the narrow and bigoted class that had supplanted the enlightened colonial elite. Poyen didn’t find the class particularly bigoted, except, of course, among the establishment medical men.

Poyen was just the kind of enterprising individual that America in the age of the Great Awakening tended to embrace. He had a story of sickness. He had a story of a cure. And the cure was not simply a cure, but a metaphysics, a cosmology, the beginning of a new world. From our diseases we make our discoveries.

Poyen confesses that he himself could not ‘magnetize’, but he quickly found a countryman of his, a Monsieur Bugard, a French teacher, who could. Thus began a practice that was also an exhibit.

It wasn’t that Poyen was the first Mesmerist in America, but he was the first well known Mesmerist missionary. And he had an effect in America that was, in some ways, larger than Tocqueville’s. He attracted a number of New England mechanicals who put down their tools and took up magnetic cures. Among them was a Mr. Phineus Quimby – the very name is like a Jules Verne character! – who heard Poyen lecture in Belfast, Maine, where Quimby worked as a clockmaker. Poyen saw that Quimby was a natural, and Quimby believed him, so like many a disciple, Quimby gave up his former life and embarked on a new one as a healer. Among those Quimby operated upon was Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.

Between Poyen’s stay in America and Quimby’s own practice, certain parts of the mesmeric doctrine melted away – or rather merged with other intellectual currents in New England. It is no accident that Poyen was attracted to the slavery debate – abolitionism and other social causes – woman’s suffrage, temperance, etc. - and spiritualism were joined at the hip in pre-bellum America. As was the intellectual culture that, for Edgar Allan Poe, was the only ‘aristocracy’ in America.

Poe, in the 1840s, took up mesmerism as a convenient device for producing uncanny effects. It worked – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in a fan letter to Poe, mentioned that ‘Valdemar’ had produced a sensation in England. Indeed, it produced a sensation in mesmeric circles in general. The story begins with a pitch perfect reproduction of the tone of the animal magnetism pamphleteer, with its mixture of personal experience and scientific ‘fact’:

“My attention, for the last three years, had been repeatedly drawn to the subject of Mesmerism; and, about nine month ago, it occurred to me, quite suddenly, that in the series of experiments made hitherto, there had been a very remarkable and most unaccountable omission:—no person had as yet been mesmerized in articulo mortis. It remained to be seen, first, in such condition, there existed in the patient any susceptibility to the magnetic influence; secondly, whether, if any existed, it was impaired or increased by the condition; thirdly, to what extend, or for how long a period, the encroachments of Death might be arrested by the process. There were other points to be ascertained, but these most excited my curiosity—the last in especial, from the immensely important character of its consequences.”

Of course, the experiment in magnetic influence is held upon M. Ernest Valdemar – who is, of course, originally a Frenchman now resident in Manhattan. Poe has a lot of his usual fun setting up his joke: Valdemar, skinny and dying, is prevailed upon to allow himself to be subject to the mesmeric influence during his ‘dissolution’. Startlingly, after his death, Valdemar still communicates with the mesmerist:

“… here were two particulars, nevertheless, which I thought then, and still think, might fairly be stated as characteristic of the intonation—as well adapted to convey some idea of its unearthly peculiarity. In the first place, the voice seemed to reach our ears—at least mine—from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth. In the second place, it impressed me (I fear, indeed, that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended) as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch.
I have spoken both of "sound" and of "voice." I mean to say that the sound was one of distinct—of even wonderfully, thrillingly distinct, syllabification. M. Valdemar spoke—obviously in reply to the question I had propounded to him a few minutes before. I had asked him, it will be remembered, if he still slept. Now he said:
"Yes;—no;—I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead."
The story was published as a true account, originally, in England, although Poe didn’t intend it as a hoax. Poe’s own obsession/compulsion was with erotic resurrection. Always a great griever, Poe found a woman who reminded him of his dead wife – one Sarah Helen Whitman. She knew of him from common friends, one of whom had written to her about his ‘uncanny’ ways – ‘the strangest stories are told, and what is more believed, about his mesmeric experiences.’ He had talked to her a total of one time when, in 1848, he received a Valentine from her. That prompted one of his spookiest love letters, an outpouring that even ‘Helen’, as he decided to call her, must have found daunting. This includes this passage:
“Immediately after reading the Valentine, I wished to contrive some mode of acknowledging – without wounding youy b6y seeming directly to ackowledge – my sense – oh, my keen – my exulting – my ecstatic sense of the honour you had conferred on me. To accomplish as I wished it, precisely what I wished, seemed impossible, however; and I was on the point of abandoning the idea, when my eyes fell upon a volume of my own poems; and then the lines I had written, in my passionate boyhood, to the first purely idea love of my soul – to the Helen Stannard of whom I told you – flashed upon my recollection. I turned to them. They expressed all – all that I would have said to you – so fully – so accurately and so exclusively, that a thrill of intense superstition ran at once through my frame.”

Poe to Hitchcock - it is the same thrill of superstition that runs through Vertigo – oh, the male desire for the resurrected femme fatale!

And so this note of gloom and ecstacy became their intimate medium, if their letters are any evidence. As he writes in another letter to her:

“I am calm and tranquil, and but for a strange shadow of coming evil which haunts me I should be happy. That I am not supremely happy, even when I feel your dear love at my heart, terrifies me. What can this mean?”

Huh. Pursuing the modalizations that converged in PAM means pursuing the convergence of trans Atlantic cultures, which take us to strange places.

Here’s to the naked years, Takeo-chan!

If Douglas Sirk had worked in the Soviet Union, he would have made Slave of Love, the 1976 movie by Nikita Mikhalkov I saw last night. The movie depicts a film crew trying to make a melodrama starring the silent film star Olga Voznesenskaya in the South of Russia, on territory still held by the Whites. The camera man, Victor Pototsky, a handsome, Lermontovian dandy type with a car, obviously has a thing for the actress, who is publicly involved with her co-star on other films, a man named Maksakov. Maksakov is held up in Red Moscow, but expected to arrive momentarily – although he never does. During the course of the film we learn that the supposedly devil may care Pototsky is actually filming White atrocities.

Well. There is a small scene in the film in which Olga and Victor go walking through a park. The two are wearing Great Gatsy-ish clothing, and the light is falling at the right angle for sundrenched love love love, and they have gotten to that point in the age old ritual when Victor is about to explain himself – his wound in 1914, his war - when suddenly the sunlight dims, and a storm comes up. The storm is preceded by a blast of wind. In that blast, Victor tells Olga, “you want to live in the comfortable world you’ve been used to, but its no more. It’s been caught by the throat, in a deadly grip. … A new world is being born, and you are dying of an abominable boredom and ruin.” But Olga is distracted by the wind, which takes one of her veils and blows it away, and doesn’t hear him. As the wind calms down, we see Victor grimace – he knows he has said too much, and he knows he’s said it badly, stupidly, melodramatically - and then the camera pulls away to show Victor walking away, while Olga yells after him that he (dear enigmatic Victor) is only jealous of Maksakov, but shouldn’t be.

Speaking of ruin in a great wind to nobody seems to be an appropriate allegory for the last decade for those of us with ears to hear. If Olga had listened, of course, the events that unfold in the movie would have been different. And yet, perhaps not. For ourselves, for us American living in that national resort, the U.S.A., the wind blows elsewhere in the world at the moment, even if it has been unleashed by us. Meanwhile, what golden American days! What an amazing paradise of stuff and stuffing, and how cheap the most expensive things are! We can live as no human beings have ever dared to live, and we can unconsciously expend as much energy in a year as a whole peasant community would have expended in a year in 1800 – or 1900. The crazy geeks that are screaming as though they are in a great blast must simply seem delusional, and let’s admit it, they have a lousy record, always predicting ruin, and always things get better and better. Every ruin is a fixer up opportunity at zero percent down! But the geeks aren’t totally bats. There is something tedious, something artificial, something deadly about all of this embalming golden light, soothing us into thinking that we have only to perpetuate this sensation of drifting, that we only have to make sure that nothing disturbs it, that we have only to make sure not to look at what it is built on, in order for it to continue forever. Everything from the past cries out against this tendency.

This might seem like a downer speech to give to greet a little nouveau-né, but it is quite the contrary. Our far flung correspondent, Mr. T.'s ever golden wife, K., had a baby yesterday: Takeo-chan. What we are struggling to say, here, is that Takeo-chan, born in a peculiarly poisonous decade, will grow up in a better time, surely, one that will see the inevitable overthrow of the white magic and the zombie death drive that undergirds our massively sedated lives, one that will strip away the marbled fat and the toxins, apocalyptic jam on the highways, mental prison industries and universal yapping, throw it all away and be a little more naked. Or quite a bit more. Here’s to the naked years, Takeo-chan! And forgive those of us, Olgas all, who haven’t quite comprehended what our lives are all about.

a rough passage

One of the great contributions of Greimas’ semiotics to the world at large, or – more to the point - to the petty world maintained here by LI, is the notion of modalization, which is, briefly, that there are instances in discourse in which modals overdetermine descriptive utterances. Now, those of you who have taken a foreign language know what modal verbs are. They are verbs of ability, obligation, necessity, belief, and knowing, which usually take as their objects other verbs. Thus, ‘he goes’ can be turned into ‘he can go’, ‘he needs to go’, ‘he wants to go’, ‘he may go’, or even ‘he knows that he can go’, ‘he believes he needs to go,’ and so on. In logic, modals are about degrees of possibility, which highlights the linguistic modals around ‘can’ in our example – but in Greimas’ scheme, possibility leads us to the objective and subjective theories of possibility, which in turn leads us to knowing, believing, desiring, feeling – the propositional attitudes.

Now, LI is making this foray into the Antarctica of the arid for a reason. It is by using the notion of modalization that one is able to, as it were, crack the code of the polar affect model. A code that is rooted in the geneology of the ascription of positive or negative to feelings. As we noted in a previous post, the three sources that seem to be of interest in the development of this Sprachestil go back to the utilitarians, the energetics models of the 19th century physicists, and the language of animal magnetism. What is interesting, with relation to the latter, is that animal magnetism stands at the beginning of the great American idea of ‘positive thinking’. Positive and negative thinking arises out of the mixture of religious, therapeutic and social discourse in 19th century America, particularly in the North. It was made popular by that peculiar semi-religious precursor of New Age thinking called New Thought – the first self-conscious self help movement in the U.S. That movement was imprinted with the vocabularies of Christian science and a faint echo of transcendentalism, and was characterized by that thing that pops up in America again and again – the peculiar elasticity and availability of fact in the face of thought. Positive thought implicitly references the mentalist idea that the world is thought, and so thought can do things in the world – change the world. Now, there are many roots for this notion, but one of them is definitely animal magnetism. I am going to write a post about the voyage of Dr. Charles Poyen to these here states in 1839 – a little transatlantic epic that would have fascinated Charles Olson. But my larger point – for my essay – is that the polar model as it is used in everyday life now is dialectically divided between two modalizations, one inflecting ‘thought’, the other ‘feeling’, which are borne along by antithetical presuppositions.