sounds

Kant, in one of his obscure works (an essay entitled Speculations on the Beginning of Human History) writes that communication begins in the human desire to spread abroad one’s ego.
“ The instinct to communicate must first have moved the solitary person to proclaim his existence to  other living creatures outside them, chiefly to those who produced a sound which he imitated and which he by and by used as a name. A similar effect of this instinct can be seen even now in children and thoughtless people, who through snarling, screaming, whistling, singing, and other noisy activities (and also similarly in likeminded groups) disturb the more thoughtful part of the community. Because I see no other motivation here than that they want to proclaim their existence all over the place.”

In this passage, as in so much of the Gesammelte Werke of I. Kant, one sees the outlines of the rather sour Konigsberg bachelor emerging from beneath the verbiage of the scholar and one time Pietist. However, even though I can’t imagine that Kant ever paid too much attention to children, especially the whistling ones, there is certainly something in the idea that communication – or rather, utterance, soundmaking – derives originally from the instinct of self-assertion. Self aggrandizement. Snarling, whistling, singing and other noisy activities make one bigger. I would add cursing, which is definitely the way adults make themselves bigger, and shouting.
Since Adam has been going to school, and his mornings and afternoons have been peeled away from his Pop’s, he’s becoming much more verbal. He is full of surprises, coming out with thank you Dadi when I change his diaper (and I am told he said this, too, to Miss Tawana at school when she similarly cleaned him up) morning when I wheel him in the stroller in what is, indeed, morning, duck and truck and my. Oh what a lot of  my-s, settling especially around my ball.  Still, these words and phrases are caught in his other sounds, his private language, which is a crossword puzzle of sounds, the clues to which are too obscure for me to decypher them.
In the passage from Kant, one notices the subtle and not wholly coherent switch between imitation and assertion. This, too, is consistent with what I’ve seen with Adam. I can spend five minutes saying something that Adam will refuse to repeat after me – happy birthday, Maman, or toy, etc. – and then there will be times that Adam catches me by surprise by repeating after me when I was not trying to get him to repeat after me – especially when I am cussing for some reason. But mostly, Adam will address me with his blue gaze and go off into a presentation of obviously  conversationally purposed but purely opaque phonetic strings. The intonations are recognizable: question, statement, kidding, story.  And then there are the sounds that obviously he likes because he can make them - not crying, which is an ambiguous object (it makes you bigger to show that you are smaller), but screams and whoops that accompany a lot of running around and giggling. I love these sounds. I love all of Adam's sounds, really. And this is in contradiction to the global tendency of my old age, which is increasingly intolerant of noise, especially in restaurants (which I think of as an American disease, spreading across the world - the way everybody at every table screams like they want to get a message across to the viewing audience. There is no viewing audience, honey.)
I have doubts this makes me one of the thoughtful people in the community. It is sheer age and grouchiness.

ISIS son of surge

ISIS, son of surge

In today’s New Yorker, one of the several liberal hawks in the stable, George Packer, dons his favorite style – more in sorrow than in anger, burdened by the tragic task of bringing civ to the uncivilized, etc. – and asks what are the lessons of the fall of Saigon for Obama, facing ISIS. The short answer is that Packer gets an F – he seemingly is incapable of learning a lesson that goes against his burning desire to benefit all humanity by way of the Pentagon. Because of course we must, Packer thinks, get into the struggle against ISIS. And he hopes our president will be clear about what that means: “But he also needs to tell the country bluntly that there will almost certainly be more American casualties, and that the struggle against ISIS—against radical Islam generally, but especially in this case—will be difficult, with no quick military solution and no end in sight.”

Now, another person might think, hmm, no end in sight, struggle against radical Islam in general, American blood – well, the lesson of Vietnam is we not engage in anything that pointless. But not our masterthinker.

Why America is supposed to struggle against radical Islam is pretty unclear, especially as America – as Packer haughtily overlooks – is allied to radical Islam and has been for a long time (which is maybe why Packer doesn’t even talk about Saudi Arabia, much less the UAE). But not to worry, at least the struggle will be long and without any clear purpose. Sounds like a plan!

The rhetoric of the liberal hawks is the same old same old, same with the old hawks, but it is starting to penetrate the public and get them ready for another episode in America’s pointless wars. The terms in this  episode, like the last one, will be that those who oppose the war actually support ISIS, and chopping off heads, etc.

So, here are the futile facts. It is today's hawks who physically supported ISIS by making sure the Syrian rebels were good and armed, including arms that came from Libya. And it is by no means apologizing for ISIS to wonder about the meaning of the fact that ISIS, which at its largest is a twentieth the size of the Iraqi army, rolled over that army. The Iraqi army, remember, was armed with billions of dollars worth of US weapons and trained through other billions of dollars worth of aid. Thirty billion is an often mentioned figure. And what did they do? Why, they fled, in their hundred thousands, from ISIS's thousands. And what did the conquered population think? Well, as far as I can tell, the Sunni majority in the regions ISIS conquered are definitely glad not to be subject to the Shia militias protected by the Maliki government or the minions of that government who made a habit of  kidnapping, torturing and killing Sunnis in the old  fashioned way.

And why did this situation come about? More generally, of course, it was the occupation. But more particularly, the Sunni-Shiite split was ratified and frozen by the surge. You remember the triumphant surge, trumpeted in the press as our victory in Iraq? It came in two parts. One was surrender to the Sunni insurgents in their territory, plus bribery of the tribes. The other was creating physical barriers separating neighborhoods in urban centers. This accelerated and put an official stamp on the segregation of Sunni and Shiite, which, before the occupation, was officially verboten. From that segregation naturally arose a consciousness, among both parties, of themselves as separate entities. This, of course, has led to the current situation, which is a combination of ISIS and a good old fashioned Sunni rebellion. Ba’athist military men, not exactly a mainstay of “radical” Islam, joined ISIS. They joined because they wanted to fight the power in Baghdad.

So, Packer is proposing that we agree to fight a nebulous enemy instead of a specific and complex one, in a landscape devoid of any history except the American one – which consists of Americans heroically rescuing their Vietnamese pals, or their Iraqi pals, etc.

Here are the questions the  war hawks should answer: how can you couple defeating ISIS and reconciling the Iraqi Sunnis with the Iraqi Shiite state; how can you fight against Syria while simulataneously asking Syria to fight against ISIS; how can you defeat an enemy that has morale and skill with a foreign force from the air;  how can you restrain the landgrabbing of your allies, like Kurdistan; how can you restrain the resourcing of ISIS by your other allies in the Gulf?

My prediction is that none of these questions will even be asked, and that an empty and ultimately disasterous moral gesture  will take thousands of lives and produce exactly nothing.

But at least we will have done something! And isn’t that the sweetest little sop to our narcissism?

nabokov and a cold war trope

Sometimes, a phrase, an image, a reference, a term will catch one’s eye, revealing – not with the flag-like pomp of a theme, but like a firefly in the back yard as evening falls – some moment in history, some corner of the vast dark we call public opinion or the forces of history, which is not so much lit up as flickered up, unshadowed a bit. The master tracker of such firefly ideas is Carlos Ginsberg, who has shown how they can twist and turn – or be twisted and turned – over the longue duree, and how they can be connected, the historian’s construction being the promise that some living thing, some beat, is actually there. Parataxis promises continuity, our ellipsis waits for the pencil that draws the line between dot “a” and dot “b”, we feel the breathing of influence, but not, oh never, the palpable push of cause.   

 It is one of those ideas that I have been toying with ever since I caught it, again, in  Nabokov’s lectures on Russian history. Specifically, this is what tugged at my eye, or perhaps I should say ear – since I seemed to confront an echo here. An echo of something I had heard before.

“ In the sixties and seventies famous critics, the idols of public opinion, called Pushkin a dunce, and emphatically proclaimed that a good pair of boots was far more important for the Russian people than all the

Pushkins and Shakespeares in the world.”

Nabokov here is repeating in condensed form an argument he had put in the mouth, or rather in the book, written by his character Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in The Gift. The book, a mock biography of Chernyshevsky, stamps its way through Chapter 4 of the book. Although mock is the tone intended, the prose often descends into mere dismissal and scurillity – it would really be worth comparing, some day, Nabokov’s pillorying of Chernyshevksy in Berlin, 1937, where much of the book was written, with the Stalinist denunciation of bourgeois writers, since the choice of insults seem to converge, and there is the same microscoping skewing and vengeful hewing of the writer’s corpus – in both senses. At one point, Nabokov makes fun of Chernyshevsky’s physical awkwardness in the Tsarist labor camp he was condemned to – which even his admirers might blanch at, this being written at a time when physically maladroit intellectuals were being processed in labor camps both in Germany and the Soviet Union. In the Lectures, he informs his poor students that Pushkin was condemned equally by Tsarist dunderheads and radical ones – which is an argument one could make, rather easily, about Nabokov’s own judgments (Thomas Mann was condemned both by the Nazis and by VN).Of course, my argument that there is something of the Stalinist purge rhetoric in Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s is also making a parallelism argument – borrowing the moral opprobrium we devote to one to the other. Hey, we are all human. However, in Pushkin’s case, try as he might, Nabokov can’t make the  parallel lines meet. But such is the wonder of art: due to a trick of the eye, they can be made to seem to.

This is a phrase from  Nabokov has his fictitious author say  about the radical’s views of Pushkin:  “When Chernyshevski or Pisarev called Pushkin’s poetry “rubbish and luxury””, thus, again, letting the quotation gently drift there, where it seems to be on the verge of emerging from the pen of Chernyshevsky or Pisarev but… ends up emerging from the hybridization of them. However, in actual fact, a quotation is like a kite – it can’t get up into the air unless there is a solid figure at one end of it. Usually this figure runs around a bit, works up a sweat, and finally – the kite, or the quote, is aloft. But not here. For all Nabokov’s love for “divine details”, this quote, in quite a philistine way, is simply daubed in, and we will decide later who was on the other end of it. But the Lectures on Russian Literature shows that the plight of our quote has worsened, and now there is a host of shadows on the other end of the diminishing of poor Pushkin, who – we are to suppose – is much better for the Russian people than boots.

This unattached quotation – how it manages to fly through the literature on Russian writers during the Cold War era! What is interesting is not only how it varies in being attributed to this or that figure, but how the quote itself can’t decide between Pushkin and Shakespeare. In Marc Slonim’s An Outline of Russian Literature (which, coming out in 1959, may have been cribbed by some of Nabokov’s students before he quit Cornell), it is Pisarev who, in a parenthesis, writes “A pair of boots is more useful than a Shakespeare play.” In Berdaiev’s The Origin of Russian communism (1937, a little before the Cold War), the boots are retained, but Pushkin is pushed aside for Shakespeare: Pisarev’s nihilism announced that ‘boots are higher than Shakespeare’ – an oddly phrased quote that attributes a phrase not to an author, but to an author’s ideas, as though the ideas were also writing articles and announcing values and appraising boots – no doubt in the same manner as the nose in Gogol’s story dons a uniform. Leszek Kolakowski takes the line that  we can attribute to Pisarev the remark that “a pair of boots is worth more than all the works of Shakespeare” –  an expansion of Berdaiev’s sentence, and making Marc Slonim’s quote look modest. Ronald Hingley, in the 1969 Nihilists: Russian radicals and revolutionaries in the reign of Alexander II, 1855-81, dispenses with the whole problem of attribution by writing that “a good pair of boots was worth more than the whole works of Pushkin” was a common saying of the 1860s period. What we have here is a phenomenon that also occurs in currency trading in a de-regulated regime: equivalents tend to disequilibrium, as one of the parts inflates in value – which of course brings up the question if the whole works of Shakespeare are worth the whole works of Pushkin. But I will be brave and not pursue every question that jumps up in my head. Instead, I will finish this woefully incomplete collage of quotations with Isaiah Berlin in Russian Thinkers (1979) who grabs the kite by the tale, or the quote by the source, correctly attributing the phrase “a pair of boots is in every sense better than Pushkin” to Dostoevsky, and speculates that Dostoevsky might have been inspired by one of Pushkin’s letters, in which he wrote that he looked at his poems “as a cobbler looks at a pair of boots that he has made.” This feat of quotation correcting occurs in the very narrow space of a footnote, but when we think  of what a lordly career the phrase has had, it seems to deserve something more.

 

  

ISIS is not a terrorist outfit

I am sick to death of the definitional inflation of the word terrorist. Villifying one's enemies goes a long way back, but I think the modern use of terrorist to mean any enemy whatsoever was started by the Nazis, who labelled all resistance to them in the countries they conquered terrorist. Now, they could have called it simply resistance, but such a name would imply that a total project could be resisted. I think that is where the terrorist idea gets its hot air from.
In the case of ISIS, the difference between them and the "moderate rebel" groups the West supports is that they aren't moderate, that they are successful, and that they are gobbling up Iraq. These may well be good reasons for the US and its allies to try to destroy ISIS, War is about this kind of thing. But one must be clear about what is happening. For instance, ISIS is not attacking the US, the US is attacking ISIS. When one reads these panic inducing reports that ISIS may strike at US territory, thus ISIS is a terrorist group, I think: no, ISIS, like any group that is attacked by a state, may attack that state back.
It should be unnecessary to say that the fact that I consider ISIS another paramilitary group does not mean I am somehow for ISIS, or find its beheadings groovy. But I am against linguistic slipperiness which, in the end, has allowed the US for the past couple wars to skirt around the international covenants and treaties it has signed about fighting war. And, indeed, skirt around the constitutional language that sets up strict procedures for warmaking (and which have been ignored by the political establishment since 1945 - if only americans were as strict constructionist about war as they are about owning handguns!).
If ISIS threatens US interests to the extent we have to bomb them, well, lets have a discussion about that. But lets not falsify the discussion from the beginning by pretending the ISIS - unlike, say, the Libyan paramilitaries who we aided in overthrowing Qaddafi - are terrorists. They aren't.

the mush in France

I read the thumbsucker pieces about the Socialist Party in Le Monde’s Ideas section yesterday, including the manifesto by the 200 Hollande loyalists from the National Assembly. What did I get for my labors? It was like plowing through a swamp of earwax – it was like being gnawed by weasals while trying to escape from melting tundra. It was in other words a completely unenlightening and vaguely disgusting experience, with an avoidance of the issue at hand that would be frightening if it weren’t so yawn-worthily predictable.

Here’s the issue at hand. The PS is at a record level of unpopularity. Thus, the question at hand is what strategic sense it makes to be unpopular and at the same time utterly shed one’s principles, embracing their contradiction – neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, austerian economics and a very public palling around with the malefactors of great wealth. It is one thing to be unpopular because of one’s principles, and quite another to be unpopular and adopt the opposition’s principles. It is, in short, a cretinous strategy.

But it hasn’t been done by the PS alone. Time after time over the past seven years, since the depression began, leftist parties in Europe have abandoned everything they stood for and adopted austerianism. The results of this move are in. The results are: the leftist party is rolled at the general election by the standardbearer for the right, and are even rolled by the populist anti-immigrant anti-European parties, which, while strictly right on race and social matters, adopt a leftist economic stance.

If this were a simple footrace, what the PS is telling its militants is that it is better to run it with a fifty kilo weight tied around your neck.

These observations, which are extremely banal but at least relevant to the issue of the party, are never even touched on by the neo-liberal former Mitterand minister (and former payer of a half million dollar fine in the US for shady business practices), the haughty poli sci prof, and the 200. Instead, they serve up great gobs of rhetoric and re-heated third way malarky, signifying absolutely nothing.

Why would an elite become so braindead that it can’t even gain clarity about its own interests? This is a historical situation that pops up often: think of the 1940 French military strategy, or the 2003 American Iraq occupation strategy. Think of the crash of 2008.  On this scale, the demise of the PS is a minor matter, but it is still gruesomely interesting to watch.

the parody of socialism in France

The debacle of the French socialist party – which seems well on its way to achieving a place in the museum of extinct parties, next to the Frei Democratische party in Germany – can be explained, in large part, as a phenomenon of the class struggle.

Class struggle! Haven’t we all gone beyond that since Reagan and Thatcher freed the free world?

Well, one would think so as class becomes the absent category in sociology and theory. But its sinking into the collective unconscious doesn’t make it any less so.

The postwar years, from the late forties to the early eighties, saw an almost Hegelian progression: the wage class and its unions triumphed in the construction of the welfare state all over the developed world. That very triumph, however, produced the children who buried the wage class – the technocrats and meritocrats whose natural sympathies were for Capital, not Labor. They looked like business execs and they thought like business execs, and if they climbed through the channels of the Socialist Part (or the SPD or the Labour party), they had no sympathy or understanding for the culture and existences of the wage class. However, in the class system, certain kinds are spinkled at random in the top and the bottom: especially women and gays. In that respect, these technocrats did liquidate that old lefty puritanism and patriarchal attitudes. What was never sprinkled at random in the top was, of course, Africans or arabs, and one notices that they are still not sprinkled in any ratio to their population through the top no matter what flavor the government is.

The triumph of the technocrat type meant, long ago, that the Socialist party, founded as the party of the workers, was progressively hollowing out. The parody of a socialist party that now rules France, with a neo-conservative foreign policy, a neo-liberal economic policy, and a dog-whistle social policy (see the Nouvelle Obs for the story of how the PS muckety mucks are using Najat Vallaud-Belkacem http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/politique/20140827.OBS7342/quand-hollande-fait-croasser-la-droite-boutin.html as a dogwhistle to the left, the way George Bush used to appoint evangelicals as a sucker call to the right) will, I assume, come in behind the FN and the UMP in 2017, when, if Hollande’s austerity policies are put in place, unemployment should be reaching around 15 percent – it worked so well for Spain, why not try it for France! The meritocrats who read their Mankiew, their Chicago school economists, and have long ago replaced Marx with Hayek, will not be touched by the unemployment – there is always more room in investment banking for the meritocratic-lings, their darling daughters and sons. Magic Fabius money for everyone! Interestingly, it will be the FN that will surely present a more leftist economic platform, or at least a dirigiste one, and I expect even the UPM will show some concern for the unemployed, rather than basking in the glow of MEDEF.

 

It is hard to imagine France without a left, but apparently this is what is happening. We have to call the European project a complete success in that regard – reinstating the gold standard in the form of the Euro, it was the product and generator of the unbounded rule of speculative capital. You can try to vote against that rule: you will fail.

on a passage in Nabokov 1

I was licked into shape by the Cold War. It was my mother and my father, and I am still a piece of it as I advance towards my death in a world that is no longer moored to it. Vast upheavels have the effecct of making their survivors posthumous people, carrying about obsolete maps and concerned with dead issues – themselves a sort of dead issue. For this reason I follow lines of thought or seize on details that that seem pointless or defunct to those who are under a certain age, and have grown up with a certain set of post Berlin Wall references, and who have never dreamed, as children, of atom bombs dropping from the sky. Similarly, I find it difficult to understand the events and idees recues of the present, I have difficulty being “contemporary” – I have to translate them, clumsily, into their historic “place”, dissolving them so utterly into their causes that I entirely lose their effects – I understand them to death, and don’t understand them at all.

I think of  Nabokov as a supremely cold war writer, or rather, as a writer whose reputation is inseperable from the cold war, just as Orwell’s was. When Bend Sinister was published by Time Life in 1964, with a special forward by Nabokov, the connection was made explicit – here was a more another allegorical attack on totalitarianism, ie the Soviet Union – although, as the “editors of Time Life” note in the preface, there is a lot of word play in the book that even they hadn’t noticed at first.

The cold war atmosphere comes comes across particularly when you read the non-fiction – which is studded with opinions delivered in Nabokov’s best Des Esseintes style, something that at first seems striking – like someone insisting that artificial flowers are better than real ones – and that eventually become an instance of how the manic pursuit of good taste eventually destroys the very foundation of taste, substituting a game of more sophisticated than thou – a game for feebs. This aestheticism was something that seemed very familiar in the fifties, when Nabokov first started becoming known in America. Michael Wood once wrote of how, in Speak Memory, Nabokov’s elegy to “Sirin” – a Russian émigré writer who happened to be Nabokov’s pseudonym – has a certain beauty in its place: “Remember that Nabokov wrote this passage in English, in America, in 1950, having left Europe ten years before. So, it is an elegy for a lost self, a Nabokov who was once called Sirin and who once wrote in Russian, and who did truly vanish "as strangely as he had come." But there is a further delicacy. When Nabokov wrote these words, he was an obscure American writer, still making his way in American letters. “

Nabokov, in 1950, was actually a rather coddled émigré, teaching at Harvard and friends with the American mandarin of mandarins, Edmund Wilson. His opinions were reliably anti-communist, a stance that he wrapped up in aesthetics – he basically considered anything to the left of his father’s classical liberalism to be posh’lust, which he expressed in a Paris Review interview by saying that mentioning Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Vietnam in the same breath is “seditious posh’lust” – thus perhaps reinflating the czarist notion of  sedition for the last time. In the introduction to the lectures on Russian writers, he claims that no writers of any note flourished under the Soviets, and quotes Gladkov as a typical Soviet writer – thus throwing Isaac Babel and Yuri Olesha, among others, under the truck. 

TBC