Russia's Chalabi

I just read the gingerly New Yorker portrait of the old Yeltsin era crook and current fashionable Russian "dissident", Khodorkovskii. David Remnick loves Khodorkovskii, and so does the NYRB. He is their Chalabi. Of course, we have to overlook the blemishes in the past - which Joffe, his New Yorker Boswell, sketched with perhaps some trepidation (American liberals like not to dwell too much on the past of  their rich freedom fighters - a fraud here, an act of violence there, who cares?). I suppose the equation here is that since Putin is Hitler and the Devil, his opposition must be Gandhi and Solzhenitsyn rolled into one.  The problem, of course, is that the cleansing operation by which a Chalabi becomes a Charles De Gaulle and a Khodorkovskii becomes a "dissident" in a new Gulag (I do admire this - that the writers of a country, the US, that has the largest and one of the cruelest prison systems on the planet can calmly talk about the New Gulag) - the problem is that when you implant them back in their native country, the natives, puzzlingly, aren't enthusiastic. It took years for American journalists, always expecting a popular revolution in Iraq in Chalabi's favor, to get their heads around the fact that Iraqis thought he was a crook. When he received less than one percent of the vote in Iraq's 2007 presidential election, it was sort of funny, given that the vast majority of news stories about that election in the NYT and the Post had been about Chalabi. It was like some European paper betting on Dennis Kucinech being elected president in 2004. Khodorkovskii's reputation is being kept alive by the American press, with the same disregard for reality. Of course, Americans have never had a very firm grasp on the reality of any place outside of the strange American republic.  Even, it turns out, the highfliers at the New York Review of Books - who are definitely not the highfliers who used to be there. It is a funny thing - American intellectuals are more provincial, now, during the age of "globalisation", than they used to be before this vaunted time. Provincial n the sense that they could take facts and imagine how they were perceived in another society or culture. All that is dead, now, and replaced by howlers about human rights or new gulags.

opening - an objection

Among the chief ornaments of the romance of philosophy is the high place accorded to the open, or to openness. Open the understanding or the mind or the eye, openness as a state of being – these are all on the plus side of the ledger. Heidegger, of course, is the great poet of openness in this tradition, charging openness with a numinous relationship to being that you can take or leave – but he is only building on a vast previous structure.

Closing, perhaps as a consequence, is never given high marks by philosophers. Closing one’s eyes or one’s understanding is, automatically, a bad thing. Even in building an argument, to come to a conclusion – a close – is often transformed, in the text, into opening up.  After the Absolute spirit has tied itself in knots and done more tricks than Houdini, he at last is in a good place at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit. You would think that the absolute spirit would be able to close up shop and go fishing. But no!  He has to open up once again and go, in recollection, though the whole muddle again. No closing for it!

Such are the lessons of the masters. But Adam, ever the dissenter, disagrees.

A couple of months ago, he was with the orthodoxy. Back in those primitive days, he would often strain towards the door knob, or at best, hang from it, crying for the door to be opened.  This happened most often when Mama or Papa had made their exit. Sometimes, though, it was the principle of the thing.

In the last month, however, he has a, learned the word door knob, and b, figured out how to turn one. Having set himself up to join the grand tradition of opening, he, instead, has begun to close doors meticulously.

Of course, one of the things about being out in the open is that you can be seen. This is fun and spiritual if you want to be seen. If, however, you want to hide, closing is your friend.

However, closing seems to have more than a ludic value for my wee little pea. He seems to recognize, in a closed door, a symbol of a larger order. Thus, when settling in to bed and grudgingly accepting the turning off of the lights, he delays the onset of sleep by pointing to the door and demanding it be closed. The thing about this is that he often has already closed it. It is as if Adam recognizes further degrees of closure. There is the closure that you use to hide with in a game, but there might be other types. One is, perhaps, that opening invites people to leave a room. It introduces a certain selfish individuality among one’s courtiers, who might be inclined to go through the open door and go into another room and start watching Peppa Pig or Goodnight Gorilla on the computer – such unimaginable riches!

Now, from the romantic philosophical view, closing here might be a symbol of involuntary servitude. But from another point of view, say that of a two and a quarter year old, it might be a sign of solidarity. It is, definitely, something with a dimension beyond the mere physical closing, just as opening has its more numinous dimension. One of the irritating things about opening in the tradition is that it is often treated as a natural property. The open is the natural situation. But one could well argue that, for living things, opening is unnatural. Skin, tegument, eyelids, doors, drawers, pots, urns, bags, all the paraphernalia of closing shrewdly measure the heroism of opening against the cleverness of closing.

I am not saying that Adam doesn’t appreciate opening. In fact, once he has closed the door on me, he will open it himself, eventually, if I don’t make a sound or an approach to do so. And he points out, every day, how much he wants an outdoor basketball court. (He likes to say I want lately. After seeing a story about a little girl who wanted the moon, he also wants the moon, which he imagines would be a very big basketball.  I want the moon daddy. Cursed little girl!). So in the technical sense, he likes the open – the undomesticated, or at least the domesticated only to the degree that it has resulted in a basketball court and a park with a slide.

To wrap up this rap: Any child’s history of philosophy would have to cast a more skeptical eye on opening as a given and a good.    

photogenic and the twentieth century

Photogenic drawing was the phrase used  by Talbot Fox, among others, to describe the photographic method: chemically treating a sheet of paper so that the light falling on an object made an impression of that object on the paper.  Fox and Daguerre were contemporaries, and daguerrotype soon overtook photogenic drawing as the preferred term, to be overtaken in turn by photography. The word, from the Greek for product of light, was not forgotten, but came to be employed in technical contexts – for instance, in discussing light producting organisms like fireflies; but then it took a strange turn in its philological life history.

The first references to the new meaning of photogenic come from French cinema culture. Already, in 1921, in Cinea, Jean Epstein is connectng photogenie to a particular impression of a thing or a person on the screen:

“The cinema itself is movement, so much that even its natures mortes, telephones, factories, revolvers,  revive and pulsate. It isn’t a question of worrying about making them live: let it happen and it gives life.

But it is a particular life, a life of ideas, a life of sentiments. Note: everything that is witness of an exclusive thought: habit, tiredness, animality, distraction, plays with a marvelous photogeneity. The cinema is mystical. It attaches a uniquely important value to everything which represents, exteriorly, the signs of intelligence.”

It is probably the French use of the term which floated back to the US. In the twenties, as we all know, a new American literature was being written by expats in Paris. What is less remembered is that numerous American news bureaus sited themselves in Paris, and there was a strong trans-Atlantic flow of journalists. The earliest US source that I can find is a story from the Washington Post, dated April 23, 1922, entitled Parisian News and Views, from a special correspondant. The item recounts the movie mania sweeping France, and makes the usual coy with the American image of France as the home of dashing male lovers, who have all the lines:

“So much is this true that if Don Juan lived today the spiritual Clement Vautel is sure his classic lovemaking would be transfored into such simple words as: “you are so photogenic. Would you like for me to present you to one of my friends – who is a moving picture director?”

Photogenic operates in that paragraph as an exoticism, an introduced species, something with an accent. At about the same time, the word appears in New York Times stories with quote marks around it. God bless the New York Times for having had, since forever, a stick up its ass about formal and informal English. One can go back in the archive and find words that are currently accepted as standard, like ‘leak’ for a leak of information, and trace their gradual loss of the branding quote marks in NYT stories. The appearance of the word in a cluster of newspaper stories of this time shows that photogenic was taking off, that it filled a need. Like the starling, another introduced species, it found the environment in the US conducive to massive growth.

By the 1920s, the film industry had been around for around 30 years. As Ty Burr points out in his recent book on stardom, Gods Like Us, film stars and the star system had not been around that long. The first photoplays didn’t name the people who appeared – acted? – in them. As audiences for these things grew larger, the studios began to receive massive amounts of mail asking for names. Burr picks one actor as the first star: Florence Lawrence. It is evident that Burr doesn’t quite get Lawrence:

“Her very few surviving films reveal a stat uesque woman, attractive in the preferred Gibson Girl mode of the day, with a prominent nose, broad face, serene expression. Her acting is histrionic with out being over bearingly so, yet there’s little that makes her jump off the screen the way a movie star is supposed to.” 

“Jumping off the screen” is in the semantic neighborhood of Epstein’s terms in 1921 – reviving, coming to life, resurrection.  Epstein’s examples – the objects of ordinary life – temper, of course, the hijacking of photogenic as an attribute of stardom.  But the special correspondent to the Washington Post already caught the erotic charge, the personalization of the photogenic.

Surely we are encountering, here, one of the tripwires of modernity. Edgar Morin wrote, long ago, that the art that presents an image of reality injects that image into reality. What photogenic injected into reality was a new organization of appearances.  One should, I think, see the photogenic against another term - “aura” – which is also emerging, although in philosophical culture, with Bela Belazs in Visible Man and, most famously, in Walter Benjamin essay on Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

my problem with reductionism

I’ve never quite understood the reductionst program in the philosophy of science.

I’ve edited beaucoup papers and dissertations logically proving that, happily, the mental is a level wholly reducible to the molecular, or that the vital is reducible to the laws of physics without a remainder, and I’m the editor – I don’t interpose myself in the flow of argument and shout halt! These papers grudgingly reference the problems in the field, the fact that bridging principles seem to break down and that we still have no account that would explain the higher level phenomena completely, but in the end we can, on principle, correlate every mental and vital even to an underlying physical one, and that is all we need.

This is what they say. I begin to lose the thread with the word “underlying:.

Underlying. Higher and lower levels. In the arguments themselves these words are used with a, it seems to me, blissful unconsciousness. Because I still don’t know what level means, here.

It would seem that after we have done our tricks, we can abolish the level talk –and yet we can’t. The level itself, what it is, where it comes from, is the great stubborn residual here. Is it a fiction? I’ve not read a defense of the idea that the level is a fiction, and that underlying is simply a bow to rhetoric. Rather, it seems that we consider the level both a convenient conceptual device and a self-explanatory rhetorical conventionl. But it seems to me that the whole argument rests on there being a level that can be reduced.

If it is a rhetorical convention, it seems to me that it has sprung not from quasi-science or pre-science, but from the way the mind is. And if it is more than a convention – if it is sort of a natural fiction, like a mirage – then our story of reduction is certainly not finished if it can’t account for the mirage.

It is a puzzle, to me.

the tourist's world of contemporary liberalism

Tourist guides never advise tourists to go to working factories. Tourist guides avoid, as well, pointing out the wonders and spectacle of doctors’ and insurance offices, tire and brake repair places, janitorial supply warehouses, and loading docks. In other words, the world, seen through a tour book, is a world in which the sphere of production is shut out, and the sphere of circulation is severely abridged. The people who do work in the tourist’s country, who prepare food and bring it to the tourists table, who check the tourist into the hotel and change the sheets on the bed, who sell t shirts on the beach or post cards at the museum shop, are indeed working hard, to please the tourist. But the massive mechanism behind these people is simply assumed by the tourist. The tourist isn’t there to see it. If in fact the tourist comes into contact with this world – say in a car wreck, or because the tourist becomes ill – this is not part of the vacation. It is the part one subtracts from the vacation.

What, then, are we to make of this tourist world? A couple of things. Except for shows dealing with cops and criminals, it is a fair picture of the world television shows. Television used to show the blue collar world, but mainly that world has dried up, Nielson-wise. The other thing is that it is a fairly good take on the world of the contemporary liberal.  Up through the eighties, the old fashioned liberal – reporter, judge, politician, academic – used to have some very serious political connection with the working class. But as the unions diminished both as a moral force and a physical presence, those connection became nominal. The world of production and circulation is out there, but if you map the outrages and causes of the liberal onto it, you will find very large gaps, incredible gaps relative to what liberalism used to be. For instance, in my lifetime, there have been two extended periods of decline in black household wealth – during the Reagan years, and since 2007. The decline since 2007 is unbelievable: according to Pew Research, while median white household net worth is at 141,900 dollars, for black households, it is 11,000 dollars. In 1983, the figures were 100,000 dollars and  10,000 dollars.

In tourist America, however, this just hasn’t happened. In the sixties, liberals from RFK to the writers at The New Republic would have been all over this. But, in our post-deluge world, it is a tourist unfriendly fact. Tourist unfriendly facts only get to emerge as facts if they become excitingly voyeuristic – if we can stick a crime in there someplace. Who was the black actor who said that 90 percent of the time his job offers were to play criminals?

I think the effort to make this a tourist world is seriously chipping at the moment. But I fear that the liberal literati are not seeing it.  

confessions of a gnostic

The gospel version was: “in the beginning was the word.” That is a very attractive idea for the intellectual, the creature of formulas, chalkboards, debates, science, and all that stuff. The word gets a big advantage, heritage-wise, and can lord it over the rest of creation.

However, as we know, the Gospel of John touches on gnostic heresy. It is the most philosophical of the gospels. In Genesis, the star turn is taken by the creation of the heavens and the earth – not by the instrument God uses. Whereas there is a variant within gnostic belief (gnostic gathering together the mixed cosmic schemes of the first to third century A.D.) that I have some sympathy with. This variant took a dim view of the heavens and the earth. In a sense, in this view,  “in the beginning was the mistake.” The mistake was, precisely, to begin. And the reason that mistake was made was the subject of the colorful mythologies that we can extract from obscure texts by Origen and Iraneaus, who were always slagging Gnostic groups with delightful descriptions. For those with the kind of pre-disposition for it – those Blakeans among us – the heresies listed in Iraneaus or Origen are objects of revery. What if we lived in a culture where we believed that the seven heavens were guarded by seven totemic beasts?

(1) Michael the lion-like, (2) Suriel the bull-like, (3) Raphael

the serpent-like, (4) Gabriel the eagle-like, (5) Thautabaoth the bearlike,

(6) Erathaoth the dog-like, and (7) Thartharaoth (Celsus: Thaphabaoth) or Onoel the donkey-like. – Tuomas Rasimus, 18.

Onoel the Donkey-like is an entity I wouldn’t mind praying to. Donkeys are the most spiritual of animals. They have long been the philosophers friend. Giordano Bruni was especially fond of his donkey, and wrote a sort of spoof, an ass fest. Would that there were more of these.

It is no longer the case that the gnostics are simply obscure bogeymen of obscure theologians.  We know more, now, than we’ve known in 1500 years about them, or about the scattered heresies that have been categorized as Gnostic, due to the Nag Hammadi Library and other manuscript discoveries.

That almost all the heresies the early church fathers discuss are now called gnostic shows a very interesting interchange between the two terms, as though any deviation from Christian orthodoxy must become gnostic. Heresy is derived not from the Greek word for error, but from the word for choice: haireo. A heresy is perseverance in choice - which opposes it to perseverence in faith.  It has long been the reigning idea among heavy thinking conservatives that liberalism, and indeed, modernity itself, is a form of heresy - or gnosticism. Eric Voegelin  was the most famous proponent of this idea, and it allowed him to label both Marx and Nietzsche and the modernist everyman as gnostic. You can tell a gnostic, to make Voegelin sound a bit like J.Edgar Hoover on Communism, by the way he cuts off questions. Voegelin has a peculiar notion of what cutting off questions means. Because Voegelin wants to say that there is, at the foundation of society, a transcendence that he gets all mushy about in the usual philosophical way (At the opening of the soul—that is the metaphor Berg son uses to de scribe the event—the order of being be comes visible even to its ground and origin in the beyond, in the Platonic epekeina, in which the soul participates as it suffers and achieves its opening), he is making a claim. But it is made in the weird way that we get there from the  possibility  opened up by questioning whether man is just a part of nature, whether, that is, the social order does reflect something transcendent. Possibility is magically transmuted into a claim by way of the question: interrogation becomes assertion, and assertion becomes opening. Well, two can play at that game, and one wonders why we couldn’t open up the possibility that this isn’t so by questioning whether transcendence makes sense, opening up the possibilty of a world in which transcendence doesn't make sense. In Voegelin’s view, I guess, you can go up the staircase but not down it.

Voegelin might nevertheless be right that there is somethng distinctly gnostic about modernity. Voegelin’s notion is that the very notion of alienation is the clue that the gnostic hunter should be looking for, since for the gnostics, matter is the primal sin, and man is forced to live as matter and among matter like a prisoner.

But given the alchemy of questioning, this prison, for the modern gnostic, must be  a form of self-deception that does not actually ultimately fool the self, which has the power to question and can, as aforesaid, open itself wide.

Voegelin then draws up a model of self-deception or intellectual swindling in three moments:

“On the surface lies the deception it self. It could be self-deception; and very often it is, when the speculation of a creative thinker has cultur­ally degenerated and become the dogma of a mass move ment. But when the phenom non is apprehended at its point of origin, as in Marx or Nietzsche, deeper than the deception itself will be found the awareness of it. The thinker does not lose control of himself: the libido domi­nandi turns on its own work and wishes to master the deception as well. This gnostic turning back on itself corresponds spiritually, as we have said, to the philosophic conversion, the pe­riagoge in the Platonic sense. However, the gnostic movement of the spirit does not lead to the erotic open ing of the soul, but rather to the deepest reach of  persistence in the deception, where revolt against God is revealed to be its motive and purpose.”

There is definitely something to this, if we grant that deception is involved, here, rather than deflation of the grander claims of Platonism or Christianity – or any order footed, supposedly, in the transcendent. But I think that at a deeper level, it is this notion that the beginning was an irrevocable mistake with which we have to deal that makes up the real gnostic insight, and the base of gnostic reflection, and for this reason  I think we have to ultimately reject the idea that the majordomos of modern thought are gnostic.. Voegelin's rather heavy handed attempt to turn orthodoxy into paradox and heresy into orthodoxy is a common move on the right - Chesterton did a similar thing. In as much as heresy goes back to the notion of choice, however, I think the paradox can't be sustained, and the opening of the soul will always result in a credo, rather than the vigorous life of questioning. The latter is what the modern gnostic is, actually, much more about than his opponent, who will call the omni-questioner, the true gnostic, a nihilist.

he do the police in several voices - Kristen Ross's police conception of history

Kristin Ross, in her excellent book, May 68 and its afterlives, begins with a meditation on what she calls the police conception of history, riffing off Jacques ranciere. She begins in this way because she has noted a strong tendency in the 1990s to dismiss 1968 as a failed revolution. Nothing happened, is the refrain.

Nothing happened.” In a recent text, Jacques Ranciere uses that phrase—only in the present tense: “Nothing is happening”—to represent the functioning of what, broadly speaking,he calls “the police.”

“Police intervention in public space is less about interpellating demonstrators

than it is about dispersing them. The police are not the law that

interpellates the individual (the “hey, you there” of Louis Althusser)

unless we confuse the law with religious subjection. The police are

above all a certitude about what is there, or rather, about what is not

there: “Move along, there’s nothing to see.” The police say there is

nothing to see, nothing happening, nothing to be done but to keep moving,

circulating; they say that the space of circulation is nothing but the

space of circulation. Politics consists in transforming that space of circulation

into the space of the manifestation of a subject: be it the people,

workers, citizens. It consists in refiguring that space, what there is to do there, what there is to see, or to name. It is a dispute about the division

of what is perceptible to the senses.”

I’ve been giving this some thought in relation to the coverage about the Greek “crisis”. Friday’s agreement was immediately greeted by an overwhelming chorus of nothing happened in the press. The Greeks, poor dumb bastards, tried to turn the agreement in something that would end their economic depression – although no, it is never phrased that way. Would try to welsh on their debt – that is the preferred meaning. Since Europe has gotten bored with unemployment figures not seen since the end of World War II, it isn’t an issue.

Still, the rush to say, nothing happened, seems exactly the kind of thing Ranciere is talking about. Indeed, something did happen – the Greeks were able to hammer down the primary surplus required by the Germans – or, to do pretend talk, by the Troika. This is, as far as  can see, the first time one of the collapsed periphery nations – Ireland, Portugal, Spain – came away with a concession. One would think that there was something to see, there.

But, as if Wolfgang Schauble’s Id were dictating all the stories – from Bloomberg to the Guardian, from Le Monde to Liberation – the story was essentially that the Greeks failed, and that there was nothing to see.

The police fate awaiting mass movements has now become routinized in public response. If there is nothing to see, if the police win every time, then the fight beccomes futile, or becomes a spectacle. It is one of the unconscious vices of the critical school, of negative dialectics, that it can assist the police endeavor, or make it seem like, at most, the important thing is to resist.

Maybe the important thing, however, is to win. Maybe a negativity disconnected from any sense of victory quickly becomes a myth-machine.

Maybe – I am claiming that this is possible, not that this is always and everywhere what is happening.

Something is happening, however. Don’t move on. Watch. At the very least, watch.