There's an article in the NYT today that exemplifies my exasperated sense that white Americans, whether they are conservative or liberal or "left", seem unconscious of their vulnerable moral positions as they pronounce on the rest of the world.

The article http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/does-immigration-mean-france-is-over/?ref=opinion is written by a man who is apparently a specialist in the philosophy of history. This is bad news for his students, as he seems blithely unaware of social science methods since Compte's day. Instead, he takes his pronunciamentos as evidence, along with what he has heard from taxi cab drivers and read in Le Monde's Weekend ideas section.

I won't go into the shot at Derrida, except to say that it follows the NYT line, which is that Derrida is outre, a barely known figure in France. Now, this is the kind of thing we have easy measurements for. Look up the number of articles concerning Derrida in, say, the Persee or Cairn base of academic journals. Citations, quoi. I get 2753 citations for Derrida on Cairn, and, for the most famous analytic philosopher in France that I can think of, Jacques Bouveresse, I get 421 results. I don't care if you think Derrida is a mystagogue or a genius, he is 'worked' on as much as any major philosopher of the past in France - say Sartre, who gets 5200 hits.


Smith, like many a good American academic, takes racism to be a thing of sentiments. I think that racism is certainly a thing of sentiments, but it is also a thing of structures. Without taking into account its double aspect, you will simply not understand it. 

Myself, I think that the US governing elite has spent a lot of admirable energy fighting racist sentiments - while at the same time reinforcing and aggravating racist structures. The result is that the US, structurally, is the most racist county  in the developed world. From the penitentiary apartheid that was white America's response to the fall of Jim Crow - is it one out of six black males that have been processed through an American jail, or is the percentage higher? - to elevated rates of child mortality and in general shitty healthcare doled out to the minority population to wealth and education disparities that are entrenched to preserve white privilege, the US is no country from which to launch any moral crusade. To exhaust my bile here, this is true even of condemning Israel. The latest boycott called for by the ASA might have had some weight if the ASA, while the US was ravaging Iraq to the tune, now, of some 450000 dead and 2 million refugees, had called for a boycott of the US. Nary a boycott have I heard of. Rather, these righteous Americanos, much like their mirror image, the neo-cons, seem unconsciously certain that the US is a beacon, a city on the hill. 

Smith is right that french attitudes are often very racist, but when the american writer indicates how racial profiling by French police show how 'racist' the society is compared to america's, I think I'm dreaming. Are you kiddin' me? Because one judge in NYC slapped the hand of the cops when it came to hassling black people, the US is not suddenly a beacon of pc attitude. It is a bottomless pit of racist shit.

barthes

My darling, knowing my heart with its eleven year old’s thirst for encyclopedias and atlases, bought me what I really wanted this Christmas: the complete works of Roland Barthes. Sturdily made paperbacks, published by Seuil, divvying up the work chronologically.

So the plan is, read Barthes this year.

Beginning at the beginning, the first thing to notice is that Barthes has comparatively little juvenilia. There he is, in 1951, in his first major essay, Michelet, history and death (published in Esprit) and we are already off. Like a horse race, there’s no warm up steps, just an out of the gate sprint, one of course that will lead us through five volumes to Barthes death in 1980.

The essay is one of those amazing, monumental texts which even as you read seems to slip from your grasp. You advance across it continually losing your baggage, continually needing to stop and to note, inscribe on some piece of paper of your own a comment, a quote. According to his biographers, Barthes wrote this essay, and eventually the book on Michelet (1954), while a student, and then while in the sanatorium, recovering from a recurring case of tuberculosis.  In the sanatorium, he would spread out his index cards – legend speaks of one thousand – over a table, or tables, index cards on which he’d written his text, displaying it like a fortunetelling spreading her cards, aligning and rearranging fates. This way of going about writing – in which the profound connections are achieved through contiguity – leaves its impress on all of Barthes’ writing. You can say of him what he said of Michelet’s history of France: “the order of events is not, properly speaking, either logical or chronological: it is geographic: each fact is a locality tied to the rest of historical space by the body of the historian-voyageur himself.”

Barthes great struggle – which was either with the demon or the objective god – was to find a way to renounce or transcend the prestigitator’s role, to return to a logic and a chronology that did not refer to Barthes. Before the death of the author was a thesis, it was a way out.   

comments and games

“Flies

… to let them live…

What is more difficult?” – Paul Valery

One of the loveliest apps of our day is the lowly technology that allows for  comments sections on the Web. I think it is lovely because, among other things, it materializes a phenomenon that is usually oral and uncaptured – the ways of argument. In fact, the ways of argument are much more mysterious, since the advent of omni-pornography, than the ways of a man with a maid, or a maid with a man, or a man with a man, or a man with a maid with a maid with a man, etc.  We have all seen every variety of corporeal groping, but have we all pondered every variety of rhetorical poking? That’s what I aim to do here.

My starting point is a post that recently appeared on the Crooked Timber blog. This blog has a certain returning constituency, among which I count myself. We’ve been with the blog through the Iraq war, through the great recession, through Bush and Blair and Brown and Obama. In a sense, then, the responses to any post are already semi-structured – those who comment will, we know from previous comments, take up certain positions that are consistent with the positions that they have taken up before, and will take up those positions with their own idiosyncratic styles.  The post was a meta-approach to the Israeli-Palestinianconflict, pondering the question of why the issue raises such a heat rash amongpeople who are neither Palestinian nor Arab nor Jewish in the way that, say,the conflicts between the Kurds and the Turks or the Russians and theCircassians don’t.

The post, in other words, presented a theory of the way that the Israeli-Palestinian issue is argued that relied heavily on analysing the motifs and situations of the arguing agents. I would call this an analysis of the “game” that is being played.

Sure enough, in the comments sections, certain moves were made by those offended by the meta tone of the post.  As one of the respondents said: this is not a game. The “this-is-not-a-game” strategy makes the assumption that the game is called off by a series of referential moves. These are almost always not trivial references, but strive to point to more and more absolute, knock me down referents – from massacres to children starting to concentration camps. The trumping referent does two things – shows that the referrer is serious, and that his meta opponent is a phoney. But the absoluteness of the referent, its inevitable excess, shows something else as well – that the player is authentic.

Against that authenticity, the original poster also proceeded to make a number of familiar moves. These moves sought to dissolve the authentic players referents into rhetoric. Instead of phoniness, the game analyst seeks, here, to show that the authentic player is actually a bumbler, a dunderhead. At the same time, the game analyst is also, in a sense, playing a “this-is-not-a-game” strategy – as if his original gambit and subsequent moves had a space outside of the game he is commenting on. In keeping with the game analyst’s rhetorical turn, this strategy tends towards irony – irony is the preferred style for remaining both detached and within the game.

These are not the only two poles of the game, of course. I don’t have a sense of how many entrances there are in the game, but I do know that one can imagine at least one other player – who I will call the sceptic. The sceptic asks two questions: a., what is the meaning of the game? And b., is this a winnable game? The latter question has some bearing on the former, since if the game can be won, then we are that much further towards defining it, or at least understanding it. And certainly the absolutist and the ironist are playing the game as though to win it, which is why there is such energy in their mutual denigration one of the other. But if the game is not a winnable game – if it is something like playing house, or whirling around and getting dizzy – then the moves made by both are delusional. Perhaps they are necessarily delusional.

What is common to all three players, I think, is the sense that the limits of the game are available, so that one can understand when one is in it and when one is out of it.  But is it that kind of game?

a history of the little

World history, Ludwig Schlözer wrote in 1787, was synonymous with the history of “Erfindung” – a word that can mean either discovery or invention. 
“Everything that makes for a noble progress or regress among mankind, every new important idea, every new kind of behavior, pregnant with consequences, which the rulers, priests, fashion or accident enduringly bring among a mass of men should be called by us, out of a lack of a more appropriate word, invention.” [67 Weltgeschichte]

Invention or discovery – this, Schlözer thought, was the secret hero of history. Not the discoverer, necessarily: “The inventors (alphzai) themselves are mostly unknown. Often they don’t deserve to be eternalized,for, not seldom, simple accident leads a weak head to a discovery, that only later generations learned to use.”

This is  the secret of Europe’s dominance. For small Europe was the ground zero of discovery. Europe, not coincidentally, defined discovery – the verb preeminently described the European act or gaze. America, to use the most obvious instance, may have been seen by millions of its children, and yet it was only when it was seen by Europeans that it was discovered. Crack open the word discovery and you find universal history itself before you. 

It is a curiously non-heroic heroic history. Schlözer, one of Germany’s truly Enlightened intellectuals, was ruthlessly mocking of an older, heroic history that placed kings merely because they were kings at the center of historical action. 

“It goes back to the decadent taste for the deathgames (Mordspielen) of old and new man-murderers, named heros! Lets not rejoice any longer in the smoking war histories of conquerors (Eroberer), that is, over the passionate story of these evil doers who have lead nations by the nose! But for the present believe that the still musing of a genius and the soft virtue of a wise man has brought about greater revolutions than the storms of the greatest bloodthirsty tyrant; and that many happier paradoxes have more ornamented the world than the fists of millions of warriors have desolated it.”

Given this shift in the emphasis on what history – world history – is about, it isn’t surprising that Schlözer wants us to see the “little things” as the great ones: “… the discovery of fire and of glass, carefully recounted, and the advent of smallpox, of brandy, of potatoes in our part of the world, shouldn’t be left unremarked, and so one shouldn’t be ashamed to take more notice of the exchange of wool for linen in our clothing than to seriously and purposefully deal with the dynasties of Tze, Leang, and Tschin.” 

Schlözer’s separation of the ‘little things that one shouldn’t be ashamed of noticing’ and the deathgames of the tyrants would not, of course, survive the scrutiny of a master of world history like Marx. He would notice that deathgames are ingrained in those little things, and those little things are engrained in the deathgames. We kidnap Africans to raise sugar cane to make rum to intoxicate the sailors who kidnap Africans. This circle of biota, human bodies, taste buds, brain cells, and money can be named circulation, lightly lifting up the name given by Harvey to the movement of blood in the body. The Enlightenment gesture that seeks to separate histories in order to enforce moralities - to, essentially, discover uplift in history - is not simply a fiction, but a mask that gives us discovery without bloodshed, mastery without the system of oppression that supports it. 

a pageant for our military heroes this holiday! Led by the New York Times

“Denn uns fehlt der kritische Blick für uns selbst.”

“…alle kriegführenden Staaten noch unter den bösen Geistern zu leiden haben, denen sie selber den Weg freigegeben haben.”

Carl von Ossietzky.

As we were disembarking from our plane, yesterday, the steward made a few of the standard announcements about baggage and transfers and thanking us for choosing Southwestern. He then wished us a good stay in Los Angeles and assured us that this holiday, Southwestern Airlines was keeping our “military heros” in their thoughts. I stopped looking under the seat for various things Adam had scattered for a second, so dumbstruck was I by the intrusion of “military heros” into a simple arrival. I thought that I never keep our military “heros” in my thoughts, but wished, instead, that if we were going to remind each other of the series of aggressions that the US has committed over the last fifty years, that we would turn our thoughts to the victims of those aggressions. Now that would be a holiday wish! “and be assured, we keep in mind the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, and all others who have suffered and died due to the chosen military actions of this great country of ours.

Of course, I was coming home from Atlanta Georgia on a Dallas based airline, so  that may partially explain the note of jingoism. But the next day – today – I am reading through the NYT and I come to the column by the public editor in which it is explained that the NYT knew for seven years that RobertLevinson, an ex fbi man who “disappeared” in Iran in 2007, was working for the CIA. It knew this and decided not to report it – because, in a bizarre excuse that could only be accepted by the kinds of simple hearts who shed patriotic tears about all our military heros on the holidays – the family believed it would hurt him. As if Iranians would be puzzling their head for seven years about whether the man was spying for the CIA or was just the kind of tourist who liked to ask questions about strategy and military preparedness in all the hot middle eastern vacation spots. So worn out is this excuse that the family, for whom the NYT has been extending such noble pity, has been suing the CIA in court about Levinson – a real coverbreaker, that.

Yet the bottom of the affair is not the coverup, but the lying:

“As the website Gawker has pointed out, The Times has repeatedly and without attribution falsely described Mr. Levinson as being on a business trip to Iran when he was captured. Two of those mentions were glancing ones in editorials; one was in a news story. In other cases, The Times attributed the “business trip” reference to family members or to the government.”

So nice of the Times not only to want to dry the tears of his bereaved relatives, but to lie as well to the rest of us. For after all, what does it matter to us if the actions of the Iranian government are portrayed as unprovoked aggression or the common response of nation’s to being spied upon? Get down too far into the granular level and we won’t be able to wage our good wars with our good military heros with a clear conscience!

 Lately, I’ve been thinking a bit of the sentimental militarism that so sickeningly pervades American society at the moment in relation with a hopeful immune response against it – the inability of the powers that be to persuade the majority of the American public that Edward Snowden is a filthy traitor. Instead, a considerable portion of the population considers him a hero. His situation has been compared in the press to that of Daniel Ellsburg, but in my opinion the more interesting comparison is with Carl von Ossietzky.

Ossietzky, a committed anti-militarist, was the editor of one of Weimar Germany’s most famous lefty intellectual journals: the Weltbuehne. He was roundly hated by the right and the paramilitaries that formed after the German defeat in 1918. But what sent them overboard was a number of articles he published in 1932. Here’s a good summary from an article about the Weltbuhne by James Joll:

“Die Weltbühne not only accepted Germany’s responsibility for the war, it also repeatedly embarrassed successive governments by pointing out their failure to observe the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles and by reporting secret rearmament which was going on contrary to the terms of the peace settlement. To utter such criticisms or to draw attention to such matters led at once to the editors and contributors of Die Weltbühne being labeled as traitors by wide sections of the German public and by the nationalist press.

In 1932 the then editor, Carl von Ossietzky, and a contributor, Walter Kreiser, were charged with high treason (“Landesverrat“) and espionage because they had three years earlier pointed out that some of the activities of the Lufthansa Airline were being subsidized by the War Ministry and Admiralty and were in fact of a military nature forbidden by the peace treaty. Ossietzky was sentenced to eighteen months and although he might have left the country as Kreiser had done, he courageously went to jail.”

Ossietzky was not, incidentally, pardoned for making his “homeland” vulnerable to its foes even after World War II, although he’d been sent to a concentration camp when Hitler took power in 1933. His was definitely a case of “premature fascism”, and in the Cold war period it wouldn’t do to encourage such lack of patriotism. In fact, there is a whole slew of books blaming people like Ossietzky and his co-editor, Tucholsky, for Hitler – if only these lefties had been more understanding of the difficulties the Weimar Republic was withstanding! Luckily, in this country, we have no need to fear an Ossietzky at the NYT. Or, to quote from the infinitely mockable public editor’s article, when Jill Abramson, the NYT’s executive editor, was asked about the lies that the NYT had published ..

“Ms. Abramson called the unattributed statements that appeared in The Times “regrettable.””

holmes 1

One of the great ideas of childhood is spying.

The conceptual schema you use when you are eight is far from a computer program, with its tight binaries. It resembles, instead, a bunch of brightly colored hot air balloons, trailing strings that you crush in your hot little palm.

Spying was a particularly grand balloon. There were two types of spying: one was on animals, the other on humans. Spying on animals meant lurking behind a tree or stepping carefully down a path to view a dog or a cat or a raccoon or a bird doing something doggish, cattish, raccoonish or birdish that, presumably, would have been disturbed if your approach had been sensed. The other kind of spying was on sisters, brothers, neighborhood kids, and sometimes grownups like at a party where the party was upstairs in your house and the kids were supposed to be downstairs gathered around the tv and instead you were hiding in the shadow of the hallway taking in adult laughter and jokes and shit.

Spying is a peculiar form of seeing and hearing. Usually the senses are mere vehicles for capturing sense objects, but in spying, the objects were given a somewhat spurious glamour by being observed or heard without the object knowning that she or he was being observed or being heard. A remnant of this is still with me. When I go into a store and I look at the monitor that broadcasts what the cameras throughout the store are showing, the store looks automatically more interesting, more tabloid, more like a crime scene, rather than a buncha trails to the peanut stand and the cooler with the beers.

The glorious idea of spying was eventually combined with the glorious pasttime of reading. This happened at some point in the fifth or sixth grade, and I know exactly the point of fusion: the study in scarlet. Or perhaps another Sherlock Holmes stories. I devoured them all at that age.

Now, by then I was fairly well acquainted, as a faithful Baptist Sunday School goer, with the Bible. The Bible was a great book partly because certain sentences were supposed to leap off the page and lodge in your memory and conscience. It was that kind of book – biblical, you might say. It turned out that the Sherlock Holmes saga was the same kind of thing. Certain situations, certain dialogues, certain sayings of Holmes carried that same talismanic weight. I can still recall being blown away when Holmes, in The Study in Scarlet, disclaims any knowledge of the heliocentric theory of the solar system, about which Watson has just informed him:

"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."

"To forget it!"

"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

In spite of the fact that my bent was to the fool’s position – I was a boy who liked nothing better than an odd fact, or any fact, the population of Bristol, Virginia, for instance –this struck me as a view to contend with, rather like offering your right cheek to a person who had just slapped you on the left cheek.

There were, as well, Holmes’ hints about how to go about spying on people – or being a detective, which came to the same thing. In a Case of Identity – a rather obscure story, really, the one about the typist with the inherited income whose stepfather tries to prevent her from marrying and moving her income away from home -  Holmes’ presents the difference between observation and seeing that was, to me, as the burning coal was to Isaiah:

“You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room.”
“Frequently.”
“How often?”
“Well, some hundreds of times.”
“Then how many are there?”
“How many? I don’t know.”
“Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed.”
This little passage has clung to me ever since I read it, in almost irritating way, and I think of it often when I climb the stairs from the garage to our apartment. I’m old enough now to suspect that there are some steps missing in this parable of the steps. For instance, it is obviously possible to know the number of the steps and never to have seen them – in which case I am not sure we would speak of observation. This problem leads us to the necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing seeing from observation, and perhaps leads us to doubt Holmes’s pat common sense.

This, of course, leads us to Holmes’ famous method. First, a little excursis.

In the great age of the British Renaissance, which stretches – if one pulls hard enough – from Bacon to Newton, the most advanced thinkers wanted to free science from the cage of logic. Following Bacon, the way they did so is subordinate deduction to induction. The latter was what let us out of the dreary deducing of what is the case, and freed us to observe what is the case, or to bend circumstances in such a way that we could observe it in experiment. In this sense Newton – to the embarrassment of philosophers of science since – was quite serious about his hypothesi non fingo – I make no hypotheses. In the nineteenth century, this became a problem, because philosophers – notably Mill – were worried about what science was doing outside the cage of logic. In the twentieth century, of course, attacking induction became something like target practice for philosophers, who from Mach to Popper were down on it. And yet the hypothetical-deductive model, to us, seems more than a little musty, since we have crept back toward’s induction’s corner, with our little Bayesian nets all aquiver. 

a story from texas

There are few states in the Union that love Jesus as much as Texas. And there is no state in the nation that loves rich people as much as Texas. But there’s always been a debate as to whether Texas loves Jesus or rich people more.  As a subtheme to this debate, there is the vexing question of Jesus’s own pronunciamento that it is more difficult for a rich man to enter heaven than a camel to go through the eye of a needle Texas Christians fasten, instead, to the parable of the talents as a more reasonable picture of Jesus’s own Texashood – for surely the point of the parable of the talents – that is the one in which the bad servant buries the money his master gave him before going on a trip instead of investing it –  is that Jesus wants you to be rich. Jesus, wept – but that’s the problem with using a metaphor among a group of literalist monomaniacs.

In any case, the solution to the problem of what Texas loves most was recently solved in Dallas, where Judge Jean Boyd, one of God’s own Party, heard the case of Ethan Couch, a sixteen year old who, drunk on stolen beer, plowed into a car by the side of the road and killed four people, while injuring a handful of others. One of the killed was a youth minister. Now, we know a little about Texas justice: we know, for instance, that a black man or even a cracker from a broken household would not be allowed to run over and kill a man of God without condign punishment. But in Couch’s case, Judge Boyd faced a real dilemma: Couch was the son of a very wealthy man, Fred Couch, the owner of Cleburn Metal Works in Fort Worth. Thus you can see the knotty value problem: does Texas love the rich more than Jesus?

Well, in the end it was no contest. Harder it is to obey Jesus’s injunctions about the rich than it is for the savior to slip into an exlusive Fort Worth country club (Jesus, ahem, was a, ahem, Jew): Couch was punished, as the whole world knows now, by being sentenced to a resort/therapy center, with a cost of 450 thou a year.

He will not serve in a Texas jail because, as his lawyer pleaded, he had a case of affluenza – so wealthy are his parents and so spoiled is the child that he doesn’t understand how to be responsible.

“Affluenza” has quickly become a laugh word – but before it was a Dallas psychiatrist’s diagnosis, it was a term of art employed, in the nineties, to criticize the result of “selfish capitalism” – it was defined as a sort of keeping up with the Trump’s disease, which resulted in outbreaks of minimansions and SUVs. Couch’s psychiatrists and Judge Boyde, however, have troped this idea brilliantly by making being rich not only a condition better than any  other on earth, but, as well, a get out of jail card to be employed whenever the rich get into trouble, since it proves they are abnormal. Indeed, they are – that is the whole meaning of being in the one percentile class.

However, the cause of this cause celebre, Ethan Couch, obviously has some good years ahead of him. He is already the stuff out of which successful private equity movers and shakers are made.  There’s something Romneyesque about the lad, who will go far.