style

We bought a big semi-transparent plastic box in which to stash Adam’s growing stash of toys – his treasures, except that Adam is still too young to have even a glimmering of the meaning of primitive economics and its symbols Although perhaps it is I who am the prisoner of my concepts, here, since Adam thinks through his body as the neurons bloom there way inside, and he immediately knew that this box was itself a toy. It quickly became one of his favorites (besides the quickly snatched away electric chords and the dustpan that he has access to when his parents let down their guard and allows him in the kitchen).Adam uses the sides of the box to pull himself almost all the way to a standing position, and there he will totter for a moment, and then come down with a plop back into sitting position, pulling the box with him. At a tilt, all the objects in the box are accessible to his probing hands, and so the fun begins. Gently burbling to himself – and sometime making loud squawking sounds or ak ak sounds, as if disagreeing with someone – he’ll pull the things out.
The pulling out is what interests him. Once they are out, he has a way of casting them aside with a perfect indifference that would break Melanie Klein’s heart. This is not the angry flinging away of breast substitutes, condemning the male child to futile quests and depression in the life-course. No, this is something else – this is the beginning of style.
Style, after all, is merely the ritualization of selection. The very emblem of style is the way the practiced smoker, having consumed as much as he wants of the cigarette, flicks away the butt. Now, Adam’s way of flinging things shouldn’t be mixed together as though it were one gesture. There is, for instance, the way he will simply drop over his shoulder the things that we thrust upon him that interest him in no way shape or form. Heartbreakingly, the soft animal dolls don't even get tossed over the shoulder, but are dropped immediately on the floor – Adam, from the heights of his baby futurism, has no time for the bourgeois fetishes of his parents. On the other hand, a plastic cap – ah, the functionality of it – will fascinate him. He’ll tenderly turn it around, and then gingerly put it in his mouth, unless his uncomprehending parents snatch it from him first.
The end result of the plastic box game looks, to me, like the pointless strewing of objects across the room. But what exactly is a “point” – and isn’t that suspension of the point what style is all about? The point as I clumsily cling to it is some catch in the structure that entropy has inexorably condemned to dissipation. Or something like that. Adam, however, is unperturbed by the adult panic codified in the purpose. Nor is this strewing a fort/da strewing. Fort/da objects are special things, like the pacifier. He’s simply squandered his treasure and moved on, hunter gatherer style. And what lottery ticket winner among us can blame him?

a stroll through the past...

Finally, in India he had, as he thought, found his ideal realised. There, with whatever shortcomings, there was at least a strong Government; rulers who ruled; capable of doing business; of acting systematically upon their convictions; strenuously employed in working out an effective system; and not trammelled by trimming their sails to catch every [316]temporary gust of sentiment in a half-educated community. His book, he often said, was thus virtually a consideration of the commonplaces of British politics in the light of his Indian experience. He wished, he says in one of his letters, to write about India; but as soon as he began he felt that he would be challenged to give his views upon these preliminary problems: What do you think of liberty, of toleration, of ruling by military force, and so forth? 

At the beginning of our last series of wars, in 2001, I became interested in the interconnected problems of empire and central planning. At the time, I thought of war in the normal way – as derivative of the state. I am now not so sure that war isn’t, as Heraclitus thought, primary, and the state secondary, something dragged behind the one human organization that will always be with us.

At the time, there was a spate of essays in the thumbsucking journals assuring us that America was an empire and it was time to get with the white man’s burden. It was spring time for Niall Ferguson, in other words.

I noticed that one emblematic figure from history was sometimes mentioned in these Imperialist pep rallies – Pilate. Tony Blair, perhaps the most unctuous figure in recent history, had mentioned Pilate with some sympathy in a speech lauding “humanitarian intervention” – a beautiful phrase that was as meaningless as, say, loving rape, or charitable robbery. A conman’s phrase, in other words. Conman’s phrases go through the thumbsucking journals like berries through the belly of a goose – they come in all sweet and gooey, and they come out shit.

I found, I thought, the definitive topos on the Pilate as tragic colonial governor – or tragic humanitarian intervenor – in an obscure Victorian book, Liberty Equality Fraternity, by Virginia Woolf’s uncle, Fitzjames Stephen. The more I learned about Stephen, who is mentioned by a lot of late nineteenth century worthies – for instance, William James – the more I thought he was the kind of marginal figure through which major currents of history flowed in an exemplary fashion.

Well, my essay on Pilate, and on the imperialist effect on politics in the twentieth century, fell by the wayside. But I remembered it recently when I saw an allusion in the TLS to Leslie Stephen’s biography of his brother, and looked up the chapter on the book. I was impressed – the chapter is a minor classic in sorting out various currents in the philosophy of law and politics which we have all but forgotten, having decided, by warrant of the 101 class, that utilitarianism runs straight through John Stuart Mill and then gets taken up by various analytic ethicists in the 1950s and 60s, thus missing its whole historical effect.

To which I have to return…

placebo

In his book, Bad Medicine, David Wootton makes an interesting remark about the symbolism of the stethoscope. It was invented in 1816 by René Laennec out of a problem in gender politics: the norm for female patients of the all male doctor fraternity was to be examined with their clothes on. Thus, the doctor could not lay his head against the chest of the patient and listen to the sound of what was going on inside. Laennec was concerned with phthisis, a nosological category that has now been subsumed as tuberculosis. The stethoscope was a true advance: doctors became much better at diagnosing phthisis. But therein lies the historical burden of Wootton’s book:

“Phthisis no longer exists as a disease: we now call it tuberculosis because we think of it as an infectious

disease caused by a specific micro-organism. The same sounds in  a stethoscope that would once have led to a diagnosis of phthisis now leads to tests to confirm tuberculosis. But there is an important difference between our diagnosis of tuberculosis and Laennec’s diagnosis of phthisis: we can cure tuberculosis (most of the time), while his patients died of phthisis––he died of it himself. Until 1865 (when

Lister introduced antiseptic surgery) virtually all medical progress was of this sort. It enabled doctors to get better and better at prognosis, at predicting who would die, but it made no difference at all to

therapeutics. It was a progress in science but not in technology.”     

The gap between the ability to diagnose and the ability to cure, or even to understand the cause of a disease, or its etiology, is easy to forget. I often edit articles about medicine, or public health, in the pre-twentieth century period. Some of these articles concern the medical culture of native peoples. And even with the best anti-colonialist will in the world, often the authors simply assume that there is a contrast between a rational and curative Western medicine and a ritualistic and non-curative folk medicine. In fact, folk medicine was medicine up into the twentieth century, and often continues to be today. Western medicine as therapy was largely either fraudulent or depended on the placebo effect. The latter is a real effect, of course.

“But the fact that there was no progress––far too little to have any systematic impact on life expectancy––and the fact that medical intervention did more harm than good, does not mean that doctors

did not cure patients. Modern studies of the placebo effect show that it is a mistake to think that there are some therapies that are effective and others which though ineffective work on those who respond

to the placebo effect. Even effective medicine works partly by mobilizing the body’s own resources, by invoking the placebo effect: one estimate is that a third of the good done by modern medicine is

attributable to the placebo effect.

When patients believe that a therapy will work, their belief is capable of rendering it surprisingly efficacious; when doctors believe a therapy will work their confidence is consistently transferred

to the patient. There are all sorts of studies that show this in practice. Thus if a new and better drug comes out, the drug it replaces begins to perform consistently less well in tests, merely

because doctors have lost confidence in it.”

Ah, transference! Surely this is a fact about human nature that goes beyond pharmacopeia.  

the accident

Western man, according to some accounts, was born out of a traffic altercation. It was the same kind of thing you can see any day at the intersection of Wiltshire and Lincoln. Here comes the geezer with the bigass Lincoln, and here comes the young hotshot with the convertible Lexus. The argument about who yields the right of way proceeds to murder, of course, and then a future that includes incest and the fall of a principality for the young hotshot. It is no surprise, to the Gnostic historian (who takes coincidences seriously) that psychoanalysis and the automobile arose at the same time. And thus it is that Western man with the parricide watermark floating in his unconscious takes to the road.  Look for details in Ballard’s Crash.

Myself, I’ve never been much for Western man – I keep saying to Western man, don’t you come around. But imagos to us humans are like mousetraps to the meezes: we are so entranced by the bait that we don’t recognize that we’ve crossed into the danger zone until it is too late. I tried to avoid getting a licence when I came of age, at sixteen, in Georgia because did I want this shit? But peer and parental pressure intervened, and thus, from the Marxo-Freudian viewpoint, the collective reproduced its neurosis in my soul. However, in the course car driver class, there was something that disturbed me, and that I’ve come to dislike more and more: the emphasis on “defensive driving”.

This phrase, as we can immediately see if we are wearing the right glasses, is definitely connected to the change of names that signaled the Cold War from War Department to Defense Department. At that moment, anything was possible. Similarly, driving prudently is one thing, but regarding all fellow drivers as enemies is something else. We must free ourselves from the delusion that we killed pa and slept with ma – that it is Mann gegen Mann und Gott gegen Alles out there on the highway. No, in actual fact, drivers are brothers and sisters. They are a community. We must help one another.

It is rather a paradox that in the age of Identity, the car driver still lacks one. Still lacks, that is, the imaginative community that is, according to Benedict Anderson, the framework for the romantic state – a collective of narratives and symbols that bind a disparate people together.

Yet because a social reality has not be socially constructed in the sense that I can say it is here or there doesn’t mean it doesn’t practically exist. Driving would be massively impossible if we didn’t depend each on the other in our hot little driver’s seats.Yes, of course each is dimly aware that the highways began as military projects and are imbued with a military rationality. But we are more than onward merging soldiers. We do sense a fleeting relationship to one another, although it is rare to express it. Drivers are very quick to label one another cretin, fucking idiot, etc. But where is the gasp of admiration when a particularly elegant solution is enacted to a particularly sticky driving problem?  Driving is a feat, performed in a metal cave at speeds 20 to 30 times one’s normal walker and jogger speeds. We are ballerinas, even though it is as though we have safes and iron balls attached to our ankles.  And we mostly do it well – the parking, the turning, the stopping and starting, the staring ahead through the windshield and the use of a mirror system (upon which our lives depend) that would have fascinated the natural philosophers of the Isle of Laputa.

I wrote the above while sitting waiting for two hours in the DMV in Santa Monica. Then I paid my dues, got a photo made of myself that makes me look like I’m on serious crack, and passed the test with its sometimes irrelevant questions – who cares what percentage of alcohol in your blood makes you legally intoxicated? I’ve never met the drinker yet who took blood samples between cocktails.  The DMV is a bordel, an immense waste, and I have a distinct feeling that never in its history has someone sat in one of its plastic scoop seats and had the best day of his or her life. But at least we are in this together, eh?

I hate having to write posts about another fucking war

As in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, the world war ii analogy has been let loose to justify the bombing/whatever of Syria.

Famously, there are huge problems with arguments by analogy. But if we brush those to one side, for a second, the biggest problem with the perpetually recurring analogy to WWII is that it is an analogy of form that represses the content of the analogon. But as any Hegelian or Freudian can tell you, it is the destiny of the repressed to return.

World War IIs are not cheap. They require, for one thing, an immense mobilization of the population. In the U.S., all males between 18 and 30 had to sign up for the selective service. Taxes were hiked to the world war I level, and they did not substantially fall again until 1960. The occupations that ended the war were manned at a militarily appropriate level. The end of the war itself caused a fallout among the victorious allies, which led to a series of wars during the long cold war period.

In brief, the analogy should show us that World War IIs aren’t cheap.

This, however, is not a conclusion that the hawk establishment in D.C. wants to face. Partly this is due to the fact that this establishment is conservative, and true World War IIs – which involve the mass mobilization of people – lead, usually, to socialistic programs in peace time – in healthcare, education and housing.

Mostly, however, this is due to the fact that the hawks in D.C. have a very incomplete grasp of the dialectic of war in modern times.

Alas, those hawks are in power. In Iraq, it was obvious from the get go that the force invading Iraq was about a fourth of the size it should be. Furthermore, the Bush administration had, with the logic of a mad candy store operator, decided to hold a war and cut taxes at the same time.

Now, even before the war in Iraq took place, there were people – myself for instance – who knew that the whole thing was fucked from a military point of view. In other words, if the military-humanitarian intervention (to use that oxymoron for a moment) was serious, then its means would have to be serious. And if the means were serious, the domestic population of Americans in whose name the war was hatched would have to sacrifice, and not fatten themselves on SUV tax discounts.

I’ll quote myself, from 2006, re Iraq:

This [ a passage from an analysis of Iraq by Tom Ricks, a wapo reporter] misses the bloody crux, the structure, the very moral economy of the American way of warfare. If forces are kept to a minimum and if force is proportioned to some threshold point beyond which you antagonize the population, you will, inevitably, suffer much higher casualties. If American soldiers winnow through a village, looking only for insurgents, they are much likely to be injured or killed than if they plow through the village in the balls out, mega-American way. And the soldiers know that. The American soldier has been trained to think that the preservation of his life is the prime objective. He has been raised in the spirit of McLellan, and advances with the firepower of Grant, which is why America always wins the wars that it loses. This is why the American soldier is good in a battlefield situation such as presented itself in WWII, or in the First Gulf War, and entirely sucks at counterinsurgency. And will always suck. Because the higher risk brings with it the question: what am I doing here? Since American interests have nothing to do with the Iraq war – it was commenced and continued solely to serve the vanity of a small D.C. clique – the only way to keep waging it as what it is in reality – the usurpation of American forces for mercenary purposes on the part of a power mad executive – is to wage it with as few American deaths as possible. The Bush doctrine converges with the Powell doctrine – overwhelming force = lucrative contracts to war contractors + lack of visible sacrifice to the Bush base.

The logic here is inexorable. Either a greater number of Americans die, or a greater number of Iraqis die. Americans have decided to pretend that the greater the number of Iraqi deaths, the more the Americans are winning. That, of course, is bullshit. Which is why the argument that the U.S. troops should stay in for humanitarian reasons is bullshit – the logic of American strategy will continue to maximize the number of Iraqi deaths, or it will have to face the repulsion of American public opinion as American deaths go racheting up. It won’t do the latter. The rulers actually fear the American population in their nasty, prolonged wars. Fear that the population doesn't want to fight. This is their worry. This is what they work at. Both parties, it goes without saying. This is what all the bogus talk about "will" is about.”