the revolving door

Pushing against the way official history is being made by and distributed is always a futile business. It is like pushing the wrong way against a revolving door. The very design of the door works against you. Of course, its builders claim that this design reflects the facts. It is a fact-based narrative. But this is only true to the extent that the narrative includes some legitimating facts. It excludes the inconvient, the outlier, and most of all, those incidents that it is too dangerous and upsetting to reflect upon. Those who do reflect on these things sometimes mistake the irresistable push back as an apocalyptic instrument, a conspiracy; they sometimes put too much stock on the outliers. But they are certainly correct that the narrative is not primarily fact-based, but rather a manner of manipulating facts to support a narrative whose motifs are already in place. The direction of the revolving door has been set. And the more people who pass through it, the more obvious it seems. After a while, though, maybe in say three hundred years, the resistors will get their chance. Revisions will be made. “New” facts will be discovered – or rather, will be promoted to key positions within a new narrative. Reflections will be made. By this time the door has gotten squeaky, it doesn’t push as well. Traffic has moved on to other doors. At this point some average person can actually push against and break the old door. What do you know, people will say, there weren’t any witches. What do you know, people will say, perhaps 500,000 Africans died in transit or on plantations in Saint-Domingue alone in the Age of Reason. What do you know, they will say, one of the impulses of the American  Revolution was that there wasn’t enough being done by the British to exterminate the American Indians. What do you know? But by this time the direction of the revolving dooor wil have become part of history – the way history is taught, the way expections for other parts of the story have been set. The French Revolution, for instance, had the terror, leading straight to the Gulag – a narrative repeated over and over during the Cold War and since - and the American revolution, in this same script, was the forerunner of moderate democracy. The slaves and the Indians will figure, at best, as a rediscovered sideshow, moral detritus.  

counterfactual 9.11

Sometimes the news makes me all counterfactually itchy, or, uh, it makes me itchy to explore a counterfactual. In the case of Edward Snowden, it makes me especially itchy. The discussion so far is defined by those who say Snowden’s revelations are necessary, and his sacrifice is heroic, and those who say that his revelations have damaged our intelligence agencies, and his actions are treasonous. But who among us is saying that his actions have damaged our intelligence agencies and made us safer?

I am. Imagine (counterfactual time) that 9/11 had been prevented. Obviously, the Patriot act and the setting up of special courts would not have ensued, and we wouldn’t have the Snowden revelations.So it is worth asking: would the prevention of 9/11 been brought about by less transparency about what the executive branch and the intelligence agencies were up to, or more?

Now, there is a large answer to this, in which one tediously goes over the history of the CIA and the Middle East, exploring the construction of the jihadist networks in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s. Then one shoots forward to 2001 and the peculiar way that intelligence agencies and their executive branch managers (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et al) bungled the information that they had, which would have led to rounding up the 19 hijackers before they were even trained in how to fly a plane, but not to land one. Or there is a short answer to this: suppose a Snowden figure had gotten hold of the briefing papers Bush was given in August 2001, which famously reported that Osama bin Laden was planning on attacking America, and had given them to the papers – and the papers had published them.  Of all the ways in which Mohammed Atta could have been thwarted, in my opinion, this would have been the single most efficient one. It would have been impossible for Bush not to alert the Transportation secretary, and it would have been unlikely that the suspicious behavior of the hijacking crew would have passed unnoticed.

What we should be asking is: why can’t we have more Edward Snowdens? 

more warhawk shit in the new yorker

Jon Lee Anderson  has a reputation  as one of the finest foreign correspondents in the US. He thoroughly trashed that reputation during the Iraq war, and yet, astonishingly, he is regularly published in the New Yorker as an “expert” on what is happening in Iraq. The recent and wholly predictable eruption ofviolence by the Sunnis against Malaki’s government is subject to one of thisthumbsuckers on the  New Yorker site thisweek, and it is typically dreadful. Mark Danner, in 2006, wrote something simple and essential about the American  image of what was happening in Iraq. After retailing the story of a state department official who assured  him that the people of Falluja would turn out in surprising numbers to vote for the Iraq constitution, who seemed wholly convinced of his own story and who proved wholly wrong, the dime dropped for Danner:

“You know, though you spend your endless, frustrating days speaking to Iraqis, lobbying them, arguing with them, that in a country torn by a brutal and complicated war those Iraqis perforce are drawn from a small and special subset of the population: Iraqis who are willing to risk their lives by meeting with and talking to Americans. Which is to say, very often, Iraqis who depend on the Americans not only for their livelihoods but for their survival. You know that the information these Iraqis draw on is similarly limited, and that what they convey is itself selected, to a greater or lesser extent, to please their interlocutor. But though you know that much of your information comes from a thin, inherently biased slice of Iraqi politics and Iraqi life, hundreds of conversations during those grueling twenty-hour days eventually lead you to think, must lead you to think, that you are coming to understand what’s happening in this immensely complicated, violent place. You come to believe you know. And so often, even about the largest things, you do not know.”

Before  we get to Anderson’s post about al qaeda in Falluja in 2014, let’s go back to the way he  "explained" the insurgency in 2004, while Falluja was being devastated by the Americans. In an interview with Amy Davidson published on the New Yorker website he said:

"In a sense, the Iraqi insurgency began in advance of the arrival of American troops in Baghdad on April 9, 2003. Arab jihadis from other countries—volunteer would-be martyrs, mostly religious Muslims—had been flowing into the country, at the instigation of Saddam’s government, in the weeks before the invasion. The idea was that they would carry out suicide operations as part of Saddam’s strategy to hold the capital and to weaken the Americans, as what Saddam imagined would be a siege of Baghdad began."

This is, of course, almost pure Cheneyism, a desperate attempt to save an ill-motivated war of aggresion by sprinkling it with the terrorist-bogeyman fairy dust. In fact, Anderson has evidence for no such thing.  The discredited link between Saddam and al qaeda is replayed here as propaganda to divert the attention of the American public from the fact that the Iraqis did not feel "liberated" by the Americans.

Flash forward ten years and you will see that Anderson is still a great believer in what Danner correctly labeled the “imaginary war”. That is the war which Americans fantasized, and sought collaborators among Iraqis to validate their fantasies. (Danner made this point in 2005, while I made the same point on my blog in 2003, before the war started.

Anderson anchors his piece to a quote from his 2005 interview with the American ambassador to Iraq. He then asks if, in terms of the Ambassador’s remark – that the thought of a violent Sunni-Shiite war made him shudder – we should now be taking stock. Taking stock? Where was the stocktaking in 2005? The two "battles" of Fallujah were in many ways the most inhumane thing the Americans did in a long and criminal war. Not only did they practically raze the city in Grozny-esque fashion, but they forced 200000 to flee it without providing a tent or a cot. Of course, this isn’t how Anderson remembers his famous battles – rather, in his current post, he has the audacity to provide casualty counts solely on the Americans killed in Falluja. In other words, Anderson still does not understand the most basic thing about the war in Iraq – that it was about the Iraqis. Maybe, in the stocktaking mood in 2005, could have asked the American ambassador how a former Ba'athist torturer, Allawi, got dubbed our De Gaulle in "liberated" Iraq - after the sad failure of our other de Gaulle, Chalabi, to, well, gain traction.

Well, there are endless stocktaking questions that Anderson is ten years late in asking. And he still doesn’t understand why. Myself, I don’t understand why David Remnick’s foreign correspondents in the Middle East have been taken from the same tired hawks who were wrong about Iraq: George Packer, Dexter Filkins, George Packer. Danner once wrote for the New Yorker. Maybe they should put all the Iraq news in his account.  

Or perhaps me. Danner’s revelatory moment that made him realize that the American image of the war in Iraq was very different from the war in Iraq came in 2005. But I knew this even before the war started. The debate about the war in the press at the time was unbelievable, in as much as the part of the belligerants were defending the upcoming war in terms that had nothing to do with the war that Bush was proposing and that the Americans were supposed to enact. I picked on Hitchens at lot at the time, since he was the worst of the pro-war polemicists. In February23, 2003, I wrote on my Limited Inc blog:

“One of the oddities of the upcoming war (may Popeye avert it!) is that those opposing it are accused of having no "solution" to the situation in Iraq. Usually this accusation is made by supporters of the war, like Salman Rushdie , who support an entirely different war than the one justified by Bush and Blair. LI thinks it is fair to assume that Bush and Blair will not invite Rushdie, or Hitchens, or any of the rest of them, into their counsels of war when the invasion begins. So arguing about the Rushdie/Hitchens war is a pointless exercise: that war is neither contemplated nor likely to be fought.

However, the idea that we, who speak no Arabic, or Kurnamji, who have no stake in Iraq, and who have no sense of the fabric of the culture, come up with "solutions" to how Iraq should be governed is... curious. It is one of those problems that remind me of why, in spite of my overall disagreement with Hayek, I am sympathetic to some of his grander themes. Hayek's objection to centrally planned economies was that planning diverges from reality at just that key point where reality is lived -- because that is the point of accident, of emergence, of unexpected outcomes, of intangible knowledge, of everything that falls in the domain of acquaintance, as William James puts it, rather than propositional knowledge.”

It turned out that I wasn’t wholly right to dismiss the imaginary war, because this is how the American establishment not only justified itself before the public, but also how, in one part of their mind, they actually thought. Like all monsters, they became terminally prey to doublethought.

balls

So two months ago, to reward Adam for undergoing a visit to the doctor and shots, I bought him a ball, a blue plastic thing I’d spotted in a shop window near the pediatrician’s office. When I brought it home and rolled it to him, however, he let it roll by. He had other business to attend to. Then, suddenly, last week, he starts getting interested in the ball. He clips after it when I roll it. He likes to see it go down the stairs. The ball, it has connected.

The ball.

“Your toddler is starting to have a ball – first by rolling that curious round thing you’ve handed him or her… and then by attempting to throw it – or more likely, dropping the ball and watching in delight as it moves across the floor.”

What to expect the second year: from 12 to 24 months, by Heidi Murkoff

….

Since we joined the Y, I’ve decided to make a go of living a healthier lifestyle. The first week that meant swimming – and I’m not a good or dedicated swimmer – the running machine, the rowing machine, this torture machine in which you move your thighs to make some weights go up a bit in the air. However, in the back of my mind I was thinking of the racket court. Unfortunately, I don’t know anybody in Santa Monica who plays racketball, but I decided to get some balls and today I just played myself for an hour. Winded myself. I was surprised by how slow I was. On the other hand, I play racketball with instincts shaped by tennis, which I played manically between the ages of 11 and 21, and thus there was always this phantom length of racket that the racket ball would go through, there were these angles and speeds that were twists on the tennis ball, enough like it to fool me.

There is a tremendous literature about sports in the 20^th and 21^st century, but really little about the ball. The ball itself. Yet the ball is fascinating. The hardness, the compression of the racket ball balls is satisfying, but I can’t get myself into one of those balls. By contrast, that is what I spent my time trying to do between 11 and 21, playing tennis. I was a steady player, but mediocre. I was paired with another such player on the high school team – not for me the thrill of starting as a single. On the other hand, I was good enough that I could sometimes defeat our single player – not the Swedish ringer, but my buddy, W. – in a match. In tennis, sometimes you have a growth spurt – you play above the level of your play, you get it in a new way, the ball is your second self. But I could never climb to that level and stay there. Not enough dedication. Even so, I knew that when I played well, it was about the ball. The racket, the beautiful racket, followed, obeyed, it was a part of you, but it wasn’t idiosyncratic, it didn’t have a free will, it wasn’t a ball.

It is odd that economists don’t consider the ball. All the activity, the immense labor, that is woven around balls. Because why? Because you want to win, and to win means doing your thing with the ball, which is the thing – the object and the symbol – between you and your opponent.

Balls have evidently been around a long time, but they don’t get the study that, say, coins do. They should, though. Take, for instance, the American football. That ball is grotesque. It is less ball than projectile. If Adorno had had a sportif bone in his flabby kritikdrenched body, he would have recognized the intimacy between the football and Hiroshima. In fact, football is a tremendously interesting game, but it is interesting the way the war in the Pacific, circa 1941-1945, is more interesting than the Thirty years war.

On the other hand, you have the baseball, which is all Renaissance, a thing of beauty that would have been recognized by Alberti or by da Vinci. The stitching and the whiteness and the generally regal bearing of that ball, the great materials it is made of, mystically color the entire game.

Yet even so – there is the ball – not the individual balls. Oddly, all of these balls are inter-substitutable. One doesn’t play a ball game with the individual ball in mind. There are, of course, balls that are fetishistically claimed – bowling balls, for instance. But mostly the balls are disposable in their very essence. You might try to live on the tennis ball during the game, you might try to clear your mind of everything else, but in the end, you have no affection for the ball qua that particular ball.

…

Children’s encyclopedia’s retail glorious myths about the invention of fire, or of the wheel, or the pully, or bronze – but they never both to imagine the invention of the ball. The ball, in fact, seems part of nature. A pebble, a nut. Yet the ball is surely the very symbol of culture – it is the very symbol of the symbol. In itself, it is nothing. But in play, it becomes more than itself. It starts to mean. It is Victor Turner’s symbolic object, and as such, it defines spaces and limits. It creates a passage, traversing a space that is charged with meaning. But unlike those objects – human beings – who also go through passages, the ball can mean but it can’t express. This, of course, brings us back to the afore mentioned fact that balls do not earn our affection, as say a piece of furniture, a house, a car do. A ball is always being subsumed into the great collective of balls.

…

Enough about balls.  

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?