New digs

I've moved! Point your bookmarks here.

What's new in civil rights?

Justice under Bush: the DOJ's Civil Rights Division has shifted its focus.

New hiring policies.

New cases.

Fewer offices.

via

Naming of Parts

From Henry Reed's Lessons of The War:

I. Naming of Parts
To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.

Re-liberation Theology: Imperialism, Insurrection, Insurgency

It's old news that the US is scaling back in Afghanistan. With NATO in charge, there seems little chance that various national caveats to the standard rules of engagment will enable the military forces there to beat back the warlords. I doubt that anyone even thinks that's a legitimate goal; most seem convinced that we need only wait until the world is distracted to pull out completely. Without security, the Afghans can never develop a functioning economy. Perhaps, though, they will be able to go back to their feudal system of mostly lowtech violence and homebred dictators. A small improvement, but an improvement nonetheless.

Speaking of old news: what happened to this story? US Plots 'New Liberation' of Baghdad was my pick for the August surprise. The notion was to work block by block, eliminating insurgents and installing or fixing infrastructure. This is basic politics, as well as good military strategy for a conquering nation. Frankly, a successful reliberation might win the Republicans the midterms. But the administration seems to have dropped this plan, or reference to it, completely. I suppose the vocabulary of 'second liberation' is all wrong. It makes it look like we didn't do a good job the first time. (News flash: we didn't.)

The core concept, however, wasn't about liberation in any grandiose way. It was about SWET: “sewage, water, electric, and trash.” This is the Fox News bread and butter: the painted schoolhouses pale in comparison to large-scale improvements in the average Iraqi's quality of life. I think of it as 'extending the green zone,' winning hears and minds in Iraq by giving them the things that all human beings want: a measure of comfort and security. This is liberation, or at least a prerequisite for it. So what happened? Since the April article, there have been no new mentions of a major military operation in Baghdad, and no new google hits on SWET or “sewage, water, electricity, and trash.” Either this is going to be a really big surprise, or the US was truly flummoxed by the Iraq VP's request that we withdraw.

Of course, there could be a deeper game afoot. Perhaps the US military is still working the carrot approach with this amnesty deal for insurgents. Yet the amnesty excludes any insurgents who actually fought, which seems unworkable, and only separates the wheat from the chaff (or the sheep from the wolves.) I'm no fan of imperial incursions, but I am a fan of logic and good strategy. I like to think that imperialism is a bad strategy, but I'm willing to be proven wrong on that front. Nonetheless, at the level of imperial tactics, it's a bad strategy to create a population of militants who can expect no reprieve. The US may not like admitting it, but most of those who attack and kill our soldiers in Iraq are defending their homeland from invasion. They're not religious extremists so much as cornered lions. It's convenient to think we're facing the same terrorists who masterminded 9/11, but that's simply not the makeup of the average footsoldier or suicide bomber. Why import zealots when you've got homegrown fanatics made desperate by the enemy's excesses?

The whole foreign-fighter argument has always led the US astray; we made the same mistake in Vietnam when we assumed our enemies were foreign-born Chinese communists rather than local nationalists fighting for their own liberation. The refusal to recognize freedom fighters when we meet them is what makes imperial powers stupid. This refusal to offer a blanket amnesty will only harden the hearts of our opponents, who would rather risk death in battle than the 'justice' of an invading army. Before this thing is over, I expect to hear many more violent arguments from Baghdad over the meaning of freedom.

"To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception"

My disposition is basically skeptical, but Kierkegaard cuts to the heart of skepticism's fault here:

"If it is true--as conceited shrewdness, proud of not being deceived, thinks--that one should believe nothing which he cannot see by means of his physical eyes, then first and foremost one ought to give up believing in love. If one did this and did it out of fear of being deceived, would not one then be deceived? [...] To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity. For usually... when there is talk about being deceived in love the one deceived is still related to love, and the deception is simply that it is not present where it was thought to be; but one who is self-deceived has locked himself out and continues to lock himself out from love." (Works of Love, Hong & Hong translation)

Am I right? It's like the romantic version of Pascal's Wager.

Oh, sorry for the hiatus: I've been traveling. ;-)

Pain as a Propositionless Attitude

The argument for a separate status for the mental extends ultimately to the claim that there is something it is like to hope, believe, or experience redly, and that this likeness is irreducible to any other form of explanation that depends only on third-person arguments. In one form, this can be seen in Peter Jackson's argument about Mary the color scientist who has never experienced color first-hand.

For our purposes, we shall take Mary and put her in a slightly modified situation. Let us imagine that, rather than a color scientist, Mary is a princess, and that her parents have proclaimed that she is never to experience pain. (This can be referred to, with tongue firmly in cheek, as Miller's "The Matter of Mary, the Pampered Princess" for further citation.) Now our Princess Mary has had maids constantly on the lookout for the slightest cause of pain, and they have been unusually successful. She never receives the slightest bump or bruise, even during the difficult process of learning to walk, because her surroundings are always perfectly padded and her falls are all safe because there are no sharp edges anywhere in the castle. Her meals are extremely regulated so as to prevent the pangs of hunger, and her exercise is moderated so as to keep her fit without ever experiencing the burn of lactic acid. Without exhaustively describing the measures these servants have used, let us assume that her life is free from suffering, as befits royalty.

However, it is also safe to assume that her parents’ indulgence would not stop at the mere prevention of pain, but also attempt as much as possible to please her. Inevitably, these prerogatives will come into conflict. One day Mary demands to know why she is never allowed to touch objects with corners, or play with her father's sword. When gentle explanations fail to dissuade her inquiries, her royal parents decide that too much resistance might lead to fit of adolescent pique, which would be emotionally painful for Mary. They decide to send her on a chaperoned visit of the castle infirmary, where she meets and discusses pain with many learned nurses and healers. Her interest only whetted, Mary continues her researches by chatting up the sick and dying, and listens with rapt attention to their blow by blow accounts of their aches and ailments. Going a step further, she demands entrance to the castle dungeons, where she becomes fast friends with the palace torturer, and wiles away many an afternoon devising new and gruesome torments for the enemies of the state imprisoned there. Let us now assume that Mary comes to know everything there is to know about pain from a third-person perspective: the biological, the functional, the behavioral, the poetic, the descriptive, and the practical. So now the question: when the revolution comes, and the palace torturer is ordered to put his old friend through her paces, why is no one, least of all her, surprised?

It’s not just that this horribly spoiled princess deserves to reap what she has sown, and knows it, but also that we have gone beyond the bounds of possibility in the formulation of the example. Surely Mary would have thought to pinch herself at some point, just to get a general clue of what sort of thing pain is. But this sort of objection doesn’t really address the heart of the problem. My claim, then, is not that nothing new is learned from the first-person perspective of pain, but that pain is so constitutive of the human experience that it is literally impossible to imagine life without it. Pretend that it were possible to really prevent pain over an extended duration like childhood. Let's say that, instead of all the elaborate techniques for avoiding injury, the King simply ordered his surgeons to install a neural shunt in his daughter’s cerebellum before she was born, preventing all pain messages from reaching her cortex. The agony of childbirth, the anxiety over her next meal, and the discomfort of a wet diaper would all fail to negatively stimulate her. They'd all be experienced purely functionally, without the aversive, attention-getting quality that makes pain unique. If our current suspicions on developmental psychology are correct, then Mary the child cyborg would never have a reason to cry. Because of that, she'd never have a reason to learn to articulate herself or make herself understood, and for all intents and purposes her father's concern for her well-being would drive her into autism. She'd certainly never learn anything articulable about pain, let alone everything, and even here it’s possible that some lonely part of her brain would bypass the neural shunt and send her into emotional convulsions of agonizing despair.

Now witness that, even more so than the color scientist who never experienced color, the pain-free princess appears to be an impossible example under the common sense understanding of childhood development. Even after all the moves that Jackson and his subsequent interpreters make to ensure that the color scientist’s life is truly color-free, the improbability of the example still cannot shelter its critics from the deep suspicion that some important point has slipped us by. Somewhere in the basic claim that one can have a fully functional understanding of color, that is, know everything about it, without ever having experienced it, we feel that we have fallen for an equivocation or a trick. Everything, after all, is an awful lot. With the similar claim about pain, the mind simply balks. In what is ultimately a fairly telling conviction from a political perspective, the prospect of a pain-free world seems literally unimaginable. Proponents of the color scientist example might claim that this is why color serves as a less contentious phenomenon than pain, lacking as it does all the salacious and sensational descriptions of torture. They might complain that the example is set up to fail. Instead, let us consider the possibility that the example gives us access to an important insight: pain's status is unique, and this uniqueness deserves to be analyzed.

At stake is the appropriate ontology of the mental; whether, following Brentano, ‘intentionality’ is the singular mark of the mental, or if instead the mental should be reduced the spectatorial like-ness that preserves in the space of the mental only the phenomenal qualia described by David Chalmers. Yet this raises the question: what is at stake in questions of ontological status? Occam’s razor, which cautions us not to multiply entities beyond necessity, is the general rule of thumb in these matters, but a lot rests on the status of necessity. Instead let us apply a different formulation of the standard: ontological distinctions should be noted whenever they are "differences that make a difference." Let us not prejudice ourselves as to which sorts of differences are worth noting and which are not. (For instance, a reductively functionalist approach.) Rather, let us seek distinctions where they suggest themselves and then ask after their productive quality. If this distinction makes that differentiation possible, then it is a valuable distinction, worthy of preservation.

As Searle has pointed out in his Mind, Language, and Society, the various forms of reductivism are just such prejudices: they are "nothing but" theories, committed to reducing conscious experience and propositional attitudes to other, supposedly more manageable forms. Minds might be "nothing but" bodies, qualia might be "nothing but" perceptions, intentions might be "nothing but" formulas for action, or sensations might be "nothing but" intentions. The problem, in all cases of reductivism, is that some important feature of experience is "boiled down" to some other characteristic or structure. In every case, the argument is made that reality can be described without this feature, yet the mere fact that the feature requires assistance to be explanatorily negated seems to suggest that some important difference is being effaced, and that the theory that results will be unable to account for effaced difference in some important set of situations. In the most popular example, the discovery of the biochemical bases for life eliminated "vitalism" but (thankfully!) did not successfully end debates over what makes life more valuable than non-life. The difference, life, makes a difference, value, while only the ground for that distinction changes.

In dealing with reductive approaches to qualia and intentionality, pain is instructive to the kinds of differences that one really ought to consider. For instance, Elaine Scarry has argued it should be considered as an intentional state without an object. For our purposes, this objectless intentional state will be called a propositionless attitude, since it does not correspond to the stucture of normal propositional attitudes like "I believe that S is P," but rather indicates an ungrammatical "I hurt" or even simply "Ow!" or a non-linguistic /pain/. A third-person perspective might allow for us to analyze such an event, like a nearly fatal beating, as a series of statements where a particular kick creates an intention: “Jose feels pain in his right shoulder,” and the next kick, and the next, and the baseball bat wielded by a second assailant, all follow this form. Here, the proposition, “pain in his lower back” and its cousins serve an important descriptive purpose, but lose their last vestiges of relation to the phenomenon of a total sensorium of pain. To say that pain is a color that also has the function of aversiveness and attention-getting is to miss the tension between aversion and attention. The attention of a person in large amounts of pain is completely “gotten,” consumed fully and totally, in a way that delocalizes it, while the aversion with which she is completely occupied work on her. According to Scarry, “I have an excruciating pain in my lower abdomen” is a luxury unavailable to those who experience the most extreme forms of pain.

Now, it is important to note that Elaine Scarry is an English professor whose interest in pain is far from abstract. Her book The Body in Pain aims to show the way in which this structure, and only this structure, can account for our curiously abominable capacities to kill, maim, and torture each other. Not satisfied with the explanation that pain's first person qualities make it simple to inflict on another, since one can ignore the effects, Scarry wonders how one could actually engage in careful, deliberate, and imaginative torture that was made famous in Chile, Brazil, Greece, the Philippines, and other locales during the seventies and eighties, usually by graduates of a US operation, the School of the Americas. Rather than ignoring the pain inflicted, a torturer must attentively monitor it, rejoice in a job well done, and perhaps even take pleasure in the suffering of another. The purpose and intention of the torturer, tied up as it so often is with interrogation, works to take away the victim’s capacity to think a thought like “I have a pain in my lower abdomen.”

Pain, Scarry claims, "is not of or for anything." Instead, it entails a "shattering of language." (5) Thus, Scarry's theorization of pain involves several important distinctions that remain questions in the philosophy of mind: whether thought or language is prior, whether the mental can be better encapsulated by qualia or intentionality, and how the body impinges on the mental. Although we are focusing on the second distinction, maintaining the qualia/intention split while preserving them both in same ontological plane, her conclusions on the other points are certainly germane.

In her usage of the phenomenological conception of "world," Scarry begins to unravel the thought/language distinction.

“It is the intense pain that destroys a person’s self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe. Intense pain is also language-destroying: as the content of one’s world disintegrates, so the content of one’s language disintegrates; as the self disintegrates, so that which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and its subject.” (35)

In one sense, pain serves as an impossible limit to the mental: truly intense, constant pain seems to negate itself as a phenomenon, taking the experiencing subject with it. Scarry argues that this phenomenon is purely encapsulated by torture, where voice and language are always part of the object of the torture, insofar as interrogation is ostensibly the purpose, and even inarticulate cries can be elicited without conscious thought. The difference between an interrogation using torture and a corporeal punishment is that the torturer must, in order to be effective, achieve a level of mastery that is only gestured towards in punishment. Scarry writes, “It is crucial to see that the interrogation does not stand outside an episode of torture as its motive or justification: it is internal to the structure of torture, exists there because of its intimate connections to and interactions with the physical pain.” (29) When a prisoner confesses to a crime or reveals information under torture, the confession that has been elicited indicates the success of the torture, but when that confession is not true or the information will cause harm to others, we tend to blame the victim, rather than the perpetrator. To act to end the pain by signing a confession to a crime one has not committed is, we feel, a moral failing equivalent to the actual crime. The status of confession as breaking under interrogation, rather than having one’s will broken, and as a betrayal (of oneself, one’s friends, one’s associates), rather than as an inevitable and expected portion of the torture process, demonstrates exactly what is at stake in an experience that should not be subsumed by third-person descriptive techniques. To ascribe breaking, rather than being broken, to the victim of torture is to take our assumptions of subjectivity and rational choice where they no longer belong. This is the only way we can understand a victim to have betrayed himself or others; that is, from the comfort of our own untrammeled first-person.

To resort to the syntax and logic of third-person descriptive techniques to describe phenomenal, first-person experience is to fall for exactly the same trick as reductive thinkers who are constantly trying to ignore the insistent first-person quality of their own lives. To say that mental events -must- have the status of propositional attitudes is to accept the status of the transcendental subject, before all the facts are in. The unspoken assumption behind intentionality is that there is an ethereal spectator, of some sort, who reviews intentions, affirming 'I believe that the Third Reich will reign for a thousand years' but refusing 'I hope that the Allies win this war.' Perhaps not until the Holocaust were there philosophers who were also victims of torture: the absence of a critical vocabulary of pain effectively obviates the speculation of those theorists of pain who have "only" experienced excruciating illness and near death. Those experiences lack the cruelty, the intentionality and intelligence that can maintain pain in ever increasing intensity, and the malevolent will to break a person.

Yet what is the consequence of dissolving or radicalizing the intentional syntax? Opposite to her conception of pain's proposition-less attitude, Scarry conceives of an attitudeless proposition, or what she calls a "state that is wholly its objects." She reserves this status for imagining, in which there is "no activity, no 'state,' no experienceable condition or felt-occurrence separate from the objects: the only evidence that one is imagining is that imaginary objects appear in the mind." (162) Pain's aversiveness is coupled with its world-shattering qualities to provide a model adequate to both a functional account of pain and a phenomenal one. At the same time, imagination combines the absence of immediate functionality with an overriding phenomenal aspect, and in so doing produces the function of making. World making and world shattering, the imagination and language take on a reciprocal relationship. When they work best, the imagination can complete the intentional state, providing an object for the objectless state of pain. This is why the vocabulary of pain inevitably involves what Scarry calls the ’language of agency,’ wherein a pain always takes on the characteristics of the visual agent of the pain, either it is ‘like’ a weapon that would cause such a sensation or ‘like’ the wound that would result. Hammering, drilling, burning, being torn open, flayed alive, stabbed, having one’s arm repeatedly broken; as Scarry writes, “pain only becomes an intentional state once it is brought into relation with the objectifying power of the imagination.” (164) Torture acts to destroy the victim's capacity to use the language of agency, to find a means to articulate and ground her suffering.

"The failure to express pain--whether the failure to objectify its attributes or instead the failure, once those attributes are objectified, to refer them to their original site in the human body--will always work to allow its appropriation and conflation with debased forms of power: conversely, the successful expression of pain will always work to expose and make impossible that appropriation and conflation." (14)

Unfortunately, the liberatory power of linguistic articulation is not often taken as one of the goals of a complete theory of the mental. My task here has been to argue that, in order for such a theory not to efface differences that make a difference, it is necessary to leave room for the sort of experiences that Scarry describes: the limit cases that make ordinary experiences possible. I believe this entails, at base, giving an account of the origins of intentionality precisely in the conjuction of the imagination and pain, both because it is our most fundamental concern and because doing so is politically liberating.

The two limit experiences appear as sorts of qualia, although with different valences: the qualia of pain are purely passive until they are brought together with the pure activity of imagination. Out of these building blocks, a more robust account of the mind becomes possible: one in which the mind's unique capacity for making and artifice, precisely as a means of escaping pain, becomes intelligible as something more than a stochastic process of trial and error. This requires the coexistence of qualia and intention as conceptually separate entities. To say that qualia are the building blocks of intentions is simply to say that there always exists a possibility for the violent demolition of the fragile structure of intention that constitutes the human.

Badiou and the Philosophy of Religion

Arts and Letters Daily has this piece on Alain Badiou. Badiou theorizes that there are four conditions of philosophy: science, poetry, love, and politics, and as many of his early adopters have pointed out, there's a clear bias against theological or religious truth in his work.

Mr. Badiou also took considerable interest in a question about why religion was excluded from the areas that he identifies as sites for the work of philosophy. He said that the question of why he had limited such areas to four came up often, and "my answer is that I don't find another."

He said he had concluded that religion was "a fable about an event, and not an event."

Badiou basically takes the Heideggerian critique of onto-theology as given. That is, he expects that his audience will agree with him that theologians are just bad metaphysicians, trapped by dogma. On this view, the work of the scholastics is entirely predicated on a simple mistake: all God-fearing thinkers will ultimately assume that Being is a being. They will find themselves speaking of God simultaneously as 'all that is,' the creator of 'all that is,' and the very 'is-ness' of 'all that'. In this moment, they short-circuit the ontological difference, an easily identified mistake in most cases, but hard to pinpoint in this ineffable realm. We know that this red apple is different from 'redness,' and moreover, we are generally intelligent enought not to go looking for the 'Red' from which all 'red' springs. Yet when it comes to 'Being'... we feel that there must be an actually existing entity responsible for the creation and maintenance of all beings.

Now, in various disciplines, 'phenomenologists' (whose actual titles have varied from priests to psychologists to neurologists, but all focus on an experience, so we'll stick with the 'phenomenon') have suggested a number of entries into theological experiences. Conversion experiences and mysticism, for instance, are right up Badiou's alley, insofar as they point to a moment of novelty, the 'creation of newness.' The real question would be: do these experiences in fact have religious content? I have tremendous respect for those who, like Martin Luther King, Jr, use religious language to accomplish truly revolutionary things in the political sphere. But how religious is desegregation, really? He often mentions that segregation models the theological conception of sin: 'separation from God.' I think this is beautiful, poetic, even. But did it 'cause' desegregation? Did the country become convinced of the truth of that analogy, and give up its sinful ways? Or is this just a specific mode of the 'suture' by which King brought a poetic truth (racism is ugly) and a political truth (racism is unjust) into conjunction, and thus created something new?

Sin supplies another interesting possibility for philosophical content: we all recognize badness, after all. At its best, sin seems to be a particular metaphysical account of badness, a conceptual regime of discipline mobilized in the service of personal relations (love) and social stability (politics). Insofar as love supplies the crucial metaphors of fidelity, (to the event of 'falling in love') from which contract theory derives its legitimacy, we might even say that all 'sin' is basically an extenstion of the truth conditions of love. It seems 'sin' could only supply an alternative modality of truth if we could recognize something as sin which violated the promises and expectations of neither the private nor the public sphere. I'm at a loss to think of a sin that qualifies.

Perhaps I'm being too reductionistic. The most impressive spiritual achievements I've encountered have been attributed to a grand concept, unnoticed by scientists, unmatched by politicians, misunderstood by poets, and inadequately matched by love. 'Faith,' they call it. It's what separates the truly spiritual from the simply religious. And I must admit, I've encountered a number of charismatic and serene individuals who definitely had something special going for them. Could it be something undreamt by Badiou's philosophy?

The thing about faith is that it isn't really a philosophically interesting concept. Certainly it can be described logically, using the structure of intentionality or as a critique of certain epistemological frameworks, but it's not a concept that bears as much scrutiny as the scholastics and latter-day theologians seem to think. "Don't know, believe it anyway." Is there much more to it than that?

Even Kierkegaard, who used a notion of theological singularity to puncture much of the pseudo-Hegelian metaphysics of the late nineteenth century... does his accomplishment really count as theology? Often, I have trouble differentiating the trappings of religion from the philosophical content beneath. This is why I find Aquinas so distasteful. But with Kierkegaard, it seems clear that the content of Christianity is much less important than the metaphysics of singularity. The man's greatest influence was Socrates, and his best work is on the inward turn of love. Most of his accounts of Christendom seem to have a political sweep to them: they are a call to arms to the boringly secular Danes, who have lost the intensity that Christian faith might supply. Ultimately, Kierkegaard confirms for me that the most important spaces claimed by religion are better expressed by set theory and psychoanalysis: in other words, by science and love.

Edited to add: it occurs to me that Badiou would describe the intensity of faith as a type of militancy. Thus, religion is easily parsed into his four conditions: theology is bad metaphysics, so it belongs to science; faith is misplaced fanaticism, so it belongs to politics; virtue (or sin) is strangely obligatory model for friendship and fidelity, so it belongs to love; scriptural exegesis and mystical experience both belong to poetry (art).

Mike Davis speaks in tongues

BLDGBLOG recently interviewed Mike Davis. This quote, about the rise of Pentacostal Christianity in South America, fascinates me:

Frankly, one of the great sources of Pentecostalism’s appeal is that it’s a kind of para-medicine. One of the chief factors in the life of the poor today is a constant, chronic crisis of health and medicine. This is partially a result of the World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programs in the 1980s, which devastated public health and access to medicine in so many countries. But Pentecostalism offers faith healing, which is a major attraction – and it’s not entirely bogus. When it comes to things like addictive behavior, Pentecostalism probably has as good a track record curing alcoholism, neuroses, and obsessions as anything else. That’s a huge part of its appeal. Pentecostalism is a kind of spiritual health delivery system.

Davis is a marxist, and most of his analyses are wonderfully creative elaborations of marxian structuralism. Here, I think he hits the thing exactly, which is why I believe there's still life left in the structuralist carcass. Certainly, the sense of a peripheral health system to address the most basic needs of an underserved population has some of the obvious flaws of all structural analyses: which are the 'basic' needs, how powerful are 'belief systems' in treating those needs? Yet we can't help but admit that the lives of the indigent are not so crushing as to make them impossible. There will always be enough food and shelter so that they can go back to work the next day. When there's not, this is evidence of a crisis which is destructive to the productive cycle of late-capitalism. Yet in the global economic order, this subsistence regimen is incapable of dealing with the predictable but non-daily demands of grinding work.

Many working-class fathers (my grandparents among them) found enough extra cash for a monthly or a weekly binge. Many poor mothers suffer from mental illnesses whose treatments, even for the richest people, involve reflection, medication, and the attention of an expensive expert, and may still be untreatable after all that. Faith-healing and pastoral counseling goes to the root of the problem, and attempts to mobilize the subject against her worst habits. As Davis argues, the improvement in the quality of life of the poor is substantial.

Moreover, this self-discipline is tremendously efficient: for a small tithe, the poor can receive a measure of relief, scaled to their community. Yet as Foucault has pointed out, these disciplinary techniques must be worked out amongst the middle and upper classes. The experimentation around theology, staging, and efficacy all happens in the pentacostal mega-churches of the US Bible Belt, from which it is exported to the more fertile ground of the southern hemisphere. The American middle class finds faith comforting and useful for many of the same reasons as the poor, but the institutions we develop are easily cast off when they become unsatisfying. The global South accepts our cast-offs in this, as in all other things. Yet they also make them uniquely their own.

Just as Catholicism's liberation theology has been a progressive force in much of Latin America, I predict that Pentacostalism will not long be satisfied with the status quo. Catholicism's hierarchical design has resisted dictatorial regimes in favor of a growing middle-class, an educated aristocracy. Most marixists admit this is a step in the right direction for countries like Venezuela, Ecuador, or Brazil. Pentacostalism's personality cults suggests that the political movements that emerge from this "spiritual health delivery system" will have a fascistic tinge, focused on the sovereign healer, his spectacular faith, and his connection to God.

Pentacostalism doesn't even have the American fundamentalist's faith that the sacred texts are democratically available to all for literal interpretation. Instead, power and prestige are distributed based on perceived faith, and faith is demonstrated by stunts and miracles. The first political leaders to emerge from this movement will have the force of fanaticism behind them. I do not imagine that this bodes well for the poor men and women seeking a bit of comfort from their dark existence.

The controversy over John Aravosis's "big girl" comment reminds me of this book, by Didier Eribon.

Aravosis argues that, amongst metropolitan gay men, these effeminate putdowns have no misogynistic overtones, and that, anyway, we should be worried about macropolitical action rather than the nuances of our insults. After all, it's this sort of infighting that makes the Left so weak. The women and men who are peeved at him think they should be able to expect that the leaders of the progressive internet movements would share their values and their taste. They don't like it that Aravosis doesn't understand, as one commentator wrote: "[the female] half of the population resents being the default insult." I've already said what I think of those with whom we don't share a common sense of humour and disparagement here: we live in different worlds.

The short of Eribon's argument (forgoing the Foucault exegesis) is that the culture of witty arguments and putdowns that erupted after Oscar Wilde is gay, even when the participants were straight. He argues "that gay culture and political movements flow from the need to overcome a world of insult in the process of creating gay selves." How do we do this? By beating our detractors to the punch, and by literally outwitting our opponents. I like this argument, especially for what it says about gay snobbery and gossip: give gay men a break for being so catty, because they've earned it.

The funny thing about Eribon's argument is the history: wars of wit were going on in salons and coffee shops long before anglophone homosexuals started making their way out of the closet. Perhaps many of the contributors were a bit effiminate, concerned as they were with letters and language rather than business and war, but their sex life wasn't the issue. These witty dialogues lead to the revolutions in the Americas and in France. Just think of the exchanges of letters between the Loyalists and the Patriots in the late eighteenth century that sparked the American Revolution. Alternatively, take Rousseau and his participation in War of the Buffonists, which eventually lead him to write the inspiring documents of the French Revolution: he went from unnatural music to anti-aristocratic philosophy. They rode the Enlightenment horse until it collapsed, gasping, to the ground.

What really drove the bourgeois public sphere, as Habermas tells it between the lines of his Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere, were the nasty, gossipy, wonderful women of the day. Here was a space in which women and men could interact and test their intelligence against each other. This is what I love about the Habermasian view: for him, wit and wisdom are inseparable. Deliberative democracy will always entail incivility, as we sharpen our minds by sharpening our tongues. It's not a structural argument so much as it is genealogical: that's just how it happened, and probably we should struggle for civility when we can.

As Chris Clarke puts it (I'm stealing a connection from Sentiments of Rationality here):

My point: it is not civil to discuss things quietly and collegially while people are dying because they can’t afford medicine. It is not civil to speak in even, chuckling sardonicism as one beleaguered wild place after another is paved for profit. It is not civil to calmly raise logical arguments against torture, against kidnapping, against using nuclear weapons on civilians to show our resolve.

Without the current context, the broader point stands. Politics is, and should be, about passionate convictions. While we don't want every debate about highway funding to end in civil war, we can also recognize that the regular flaring of passions and subsequent linguistic creativity is an important part of the legitimacy-formation of a government. People need the outlet of incivility if they are to avoid insurrection while making concrete steps towards their goals. Meanwhile, all this cussing and insult-slinging leads to a creative, wise class of people who can wield language to propogate policies, propagandize, and polemicize effectively. It's a good thing.

So:
1. Civility is bad.
2. Gays and women were responsible for the first strains of incivility in the contemporary democratic era. Yay!
3. Women and gays are now at each other's throats, at least a little bit, about an insult.

Aravosis should apologize, but he can't. He can't admit that effeminizing terms slung at a male (Senator Pat Robert, the real bad guy) are actually nothing to do with him, but rather aimed at women. To do so would be to deny his own experience, an experience of trauma that he and gay culture deal with by turning those terms right back at their oppressors. For Aravosis, the sting has been taken out of "big girl" by a practiced repetition amongst his friends, and the pleasure of that witty repartee is that he can now make Republican Senators squirm.

But what about all those women? They're justifiably angry to be represented by terms which the rest of us throw around as derogations. I've done it myself, and I know many women who do it, too. The idea, as for gay men, is to beat the oppressor at his own game. (I'll never forget the first time my boss, a tough lesbian ex-prosecutor, told a burly male investigator not to be "such a girl about things.") And that, I think, is the key: not to save "girlhood" from its wimpy connotations, but for women to distance themselves from it as well. Most of the professional women I know take exception to 'girliness' already; they're "women" and refuse any other appelation. Why should all the women who jumped at Aravosis' comment choose to re-associate themselves with pre-pubescent females? The picture of a Republican Senator as a small, long-haired child lacking pubes or external genitalia seems pretty funny to me. Would 'boy' have worked as well? Maybe. But, especially for a gay man, it's hard to turn that word into a meaningful insult.

I must speak from my own experience here, because that's all I have. When the real boys and girls fought it out on the playground, the girls always won. Before puberty, girls had the physical advantage over boys, and any attempt to denigrate the giggling gaggle would likely earn a young man a kick in the 'nads. So why don't we let girls fight their own battles? From what I've seen, they seem to do fine on their own.

if only...

"If only" is the frustrated utopian refrain of Oliver Ressler and David Thorne's absurdly dysfunctional URL addresses collectively titled "Boom!". Utilizing this ubiquitous textual format of the "new economy," "Boom!" rehearses the defense mechanisms of the neoliberal imagination as it confronts its own internal crises. The acknowledged incompleteness implied by "if only" situates these texts somewhere between a guilty confession, a plea of desperation, and an ideological strategy session. The texts set for themselves the task of neutralizing the "problems" - the dislocated and potentially antagonistic groups engendered by the free market - that threaten the realization of the utopian ideal, implicitly embodied by the owners of capital. But Boom!'s utopian address deliberately fails to elicit from the viewer a positive identification with its purported message, having gone too far in specifying the contents of the universal "freedom" to which it aspires. This failure of identification thus displaces the locus of the "problem" from those constructed as the threatening "outside" of the capitalist utopia to the exclusionary, crisis-ridden grounds of that utopia itself.

Originally designed for use as banners in anticapitalist demonstrations, Ressler and Thorne's texts reject the handmade, organic aesthetics of most conventional protest art. Instead, they share with earlier postmodern artists such as Barbara Kruger the appropriation of the graphic conventions of marketing to disrupt the smooth functioning of everyday forms of consumerist identification. But Ressler and Thorne's texts also bear a specific historical relation to the URL format, reinvesting it with traces of social divisions linked to the digital economy, of which the dot-com address has been a key visual and textual component. In the wake of the speculation-driven Internet bubble, the phrase "dot-com" already appears as an artifact of a ruined utopia, testimony to the destructive boom-bust cycle inherent to deregulated markets.

(Yates McKee, On Counterglobal Aesthetics; text from the catalogue: "Empire/State: Artists Engaging Globalization", Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Program Exhibition, New York, 2002)

Another day in paradise

Here's what we needed to know about the NSA wiretapping.

1. How it works.
2. How the telcos will try to get away with it.
3. Why they'll fail.

Thanks to MeFi and DKos for the links.

What the hell is making me smile at 7:35 in the morning?

Have you seen this video? Watch it all the way through; it starts slow, becomes funny, gathers steam towards surreal, ends in tragicomedy. Plus, it's got a catchy tune.

SKates comments on Andrew's post about anti-Spanish language sentiment among anti-immigrationists (and why haven't they found a name that's pro-something or other?):

This policy in no way harms the quality of anyone's life, nor does it judge anyone as lesser people. It does, however, ask people who are about to be gifted with alot of freebies/subsidized goods to make sure they offset the high cost of those goods as best they can. I don't think that's a terribly bad, and certainly not terribly racist, plan.

I've always found the supposition that the costs of immigration are higher than the value of the labor immigrants contribute to be suspicious. There's a lot of free-riding going all over the place, but surely the biggest free-riders are the employers who don't pay taxes and benefit from the direct and indirect market effects of illegal labor. An illegal immigrant gets irregular employment, for which he or she is paid below market wages, if at all, and has a fraught relationship with the state that combines occasional benefits with tremendous risks. A legal immigrant who pays his or her taxes will thus be contributing both to the labor pool, just like her illegal brethren, and to the funding-base of the so-called freebies he or she receives. Maybe we should call them 'paysies' in this situation... or, I dunno... 'rights'?

The statistics I've seen suggest we're quite lucky to be so close to such a motivated labor pool; our economic growth depends on this population of easily exploited workers. Who cares what language they speak?

Gov't taps ABC to root out leakers.

This strikes me as very important, at least domestically. ABC's calls are being tracked, or at least that's the claim.

We had all become comfortable with an uneasy cold war between the state and journalists, conducted with a string of double agents we called leakers and whistleblowers. The state was opposed to these unauthorized informants, of course, but in the way they oppose so many things, i.e. ineffectually. This kept leaking to a minimum, and only for important things. It also allowed various officials to use strategic leaks to release information that could not be challenged, as when Rove and Libby used leaking to propagandize for the war in Iraq.

Perhaps it's good that our officials must again practice the tradecraft that led Woodward and Bernstein to have discrete conversations in parking garages. I like a good spy novel as well as the next guy, but 007 has taken it too far in the direction of technology. Dead drops, crossword puzzle cryptograms, and some good old fashioned codebooks are what we really need. That's the stuff the NSA was built to combat, and it'll be fun to live in a world where only the unlucky and the incareful get caught and arrested on trumped up charges. If V for Vendetta and The Matrix taught us anything, it's that hostilities are sexiest when they're open. It robs insurrection of its revolutionary joy if there's confusion about who the underdogs are. I'm tired of the conservatives claiming all the Big Brother victimhood for themselves. Now we progressives can be victims too!

That said, it would also be nice if the legislature would pass laws protecting journalists and whistleblowers from persecution. Call it, I dunno, "freedom of the press" or something. It'd be significantly less sexy, but it also might go a long way towards preserving democratic legitimacy. If fidelity to principles sounds too boring, perhaps they could pass it off as a public relations ploy. Part of a brand new "America, Home of the Free" campaign. For the tourists, dontcha know.

If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire...the A-Team

Dear Bill Gates,
Please hire these guys to intervene in Darfur. I'll chip in.
Best,
Joshua
PS- The article says that 180,000 have died, while 400,000 is more realistic. Hope that helps!

De gustibus non disputandum est

Kant is famous for inverting the claim that "there is no disputing taste." Despite the fact that most people cannot imagine an argument for the pleasure or displeasure of flavors and foods, he supplies us a perspective from which we might establish a "common sense." Namely, that each of us, in tasting or experiencing, might imagine this experience through another's eyes, in another's mouth, on another's tongue. Yet this is an imaginative activity that is difficult to accomplish in everyday life: I do not regularly chastise my friend Steve for his distaste for leafy greens, but merely file this information away. On food, we share little common ground. Our friendship stands on our shared sense of pleasure in other experiences, primarily intellectual.

The same must be said for humor. Many of us literally cannot stomach jokes that take ethnic or sexual minorities as their target. Others fail to see the humor in sarcastically taking the national press to task. The argument for doing so, and feeling disappointed in the press for not laughing along, has to do with a simple assumption: these people are hamstrung by public opinion and the business model of political journalism. In other words, they share our tastes, but are unable to indulge their cravings for truth because they cannot afford the price of that meal.

That is, we have all assumed that journalists know, in their guts, that an antagonistic press is better for the country than lapdog co-propagandists. I've made the case in other forums that their bosses and employers, the editors, producers, and owners of the media, simply enforce the narrow relaying of presidential addresses and claims. The hope many progressives share is that it is simply economic issues that have hamstrung investigative and critical reporting. We assume that news agencies no longer have the budgets to rebut and investigate the absurd pandering and boldfaced manipulations of politicians, so they are forced to hope that other institutions will take up the slack. Thus, we put our faith in watchdog groups, in Comedy Central, and in the internet punditry: Salon, the blogs, etc.

Yet the Colbert performance was an opportunity for subversion, a moment when those reporters might have come out against the institutions that have turned them into little more than a presidential typing pool. Instead, they seem to have missed the joke. What that means, more than anything, is that we no longer share a "common sense." We cannot imagine what will be funny to each other, what will smell right, what will be stomachable or nauseating. The press, in their [mis]-apprehension of the funny, have shown themselves to be radically alien to our community. Perhaps we might agree on the pleasures of a good salad... but whatever would we talk about? We seem to live in very different worlds.

When Fortune Does Not Want Men to Oppose Her Plans, She Blinds Their Minds

In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli wrote,

"In order to make Rome greater and bring it to the greatness it attained, she [fortuna] judged it necessary to defeat it.... In ordaining this she prepared everything for its recovery [manipulating events] to form a great vanguard under a commander untainted by any shame of defeat and whose reputation was intact for the recovery of his homeland."

Machiavelli here evinces a faith in fortuna that situates the great deeds of a nation within the shifting uncertainties of contingency. He's concerned to point out that normal behaviors are inadequate to extraordinary times, and that average leaders will fail to stem the tide of disasters. Yet what I love about the passage is his great faith: he's shown the tendencies of regimes to devolve into corruption, but even though his own government has devolved from a republic to become a tyranny, he has only optimism for Italy's future. This passage foreshadows an account of the greatness to be found in returning to foundations, since the well-spring of origins supplies a much-needed boost to a regime's liberty, and never runs dry.

It's the logic of the perfect storm: a concatenation of factors combine to force a situation towards its breaking point. (The original perfect storm was fatal for all involved, remember.) A regime moves towards defeat and corruption, but in the name of greatness. So if we look at our government, a weak prince finds strength in a devastating attack, and the factional logic of divided sovereignty dissolves. Our weak prince goes on to assert broadly dictatorial power, making sweeping decisions in the face of ineffectual opposition.

For many, this seems like the end, a recipe for defeat which has been followed to the letter. Yet Machiavelli schools these storm-tossed citizen to "never give up: since they do not know [fortuna's] purpose and she travels by oblique and unknown paths, they should always hope, and, while hoping, not give up in the face of any Fortune and any travail they find themselves in." This is the space of virtù, the greatness available to men and women of action. Fortuna may well hamstring many normal efforts to oppose tyranny, but the virtuous citizen labors patiently, looking for an opening. And the conclusion will be a resurgence of
republic's greatness, as the luck-driven force of the tyrant meets the equally fortunate excellence of the tyrannicide.

It's all a matter of rhythm. That's why I think comedians have become the most public of our heroes in these times. They're somehow collecting the disaffection of the public under a vanguard of ironic detachment and sarcastic one-liners. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have none of the gravitas we've come to associate with great leaders. But they've got the one thing that politics has been missing, especially on the progressive or small 'd' democratic side: timing. Call it kairos, call it a sense of the zeitgeist, call it exploiting the moment for some laughs, whatever. They're acting at a time when all the mainstream politicians have been emasculated by contingent factors, using the one capacity that dictators have always found most difficult to combat: laughter.

When levity trumps the false spirit of gravity, a revolution of some sort isn't far behind. In this case, I think we'd all be satisfied with return to normal democracy, but maybe we'll get a little bit more. Maybe we'll have a chance to weigh in, to return to our roots and rebuild our republic. The novelty to be found in that sort of return is powerful. It's not new because radically different, but simply new because it is ours rather than our forefathers. It's the power to make a thing your own. And isn't that what democracy is supposed to be? Government "for, by, and of" the people?

"WWWSD?" Cultural relativists come from relativist cultures

I've spent the last semester sitting in on a seminar taught by a Vanderbilt philosopher named Robert Talisse. I'm not a student at Vanderbilt, so it was really great of him to let me sit in on his seminar. At the same time, despite the fact that one of my dissertation advisors is an analytically trained political philosopher, I've had minimum contact with the brand of epistemologically-founded political philosophy Talisse propounds. It was quite an enriching experience, frankly. It's also been a while since I've spent any time with someone who believes in capital 'T' Truth.

Actually, I should probably say that I've never seen Talisse capitalize 'truth' in that reifying way, so it's not a matter of him being some holy crusader convinced that he is right and righteous and willing to kill for his beliefs. Frankly, he was pretty cagey and slippery on these matters, as one expects from any good philosopher. But he has managed to maintain his epistemological commitments in the messy face of the polis. Living as we do in a country that can't agree on the facts of well-founded science, claims about truthiness are obviously subject to all sorts of strategy and manipulation. So to claim that something is T/true, a matter of established fact, has a strong rhetorical force, which I respect.

Truth-defenders believe we should give reasons for our propositions, that we should be willing to defend truth-claims or else admit defeat (and falsification.) Here too, I would side with epistemologically-minded citizens. Moreover, when the crusaders for truth point out that victors in disputation ought to be able to coerce losers, I can't help but agree. What good is power/knowledge if you're not 'supposed' to exercise it? The whole point to truth is to legitimate the suppression of epistemological minorities, to marginalize all the phlogiston-supporters and eugenics proponents.

What about when the dominant paradigm ignores the wisdom of mid-wives because the epistemological authority has escheated to medical doctors who thought they knew better (and didn't)? On Talisse's view, as I understand it, this is simply a case of maldistributed authority, not a real challenge to truthiness. After all, we now agree that the midwives were correct, right? How can we say that unless we believe in truth, just as the stupidly arrogant Victorian doctors did? Our disgust in this case is due to our certitude that ignoring women will lead to bad epistemological consequences, a truth-claim that we will defend at the expense of misogynists everywhere.

This strange dancing around poorly-won epistemologicaly victories requires a certain fallibilism, a willingness to subject one's own beliefs to correction and revision. Yet where Talisse parts company with my usual companions, forcing me to pick amongst my various 'wise friends,' is on the matter of our disposition towards this fallibilism. Ought we to hold our truths loosely, knowing they are contested and may someday be disproven? This seems to be the Rortyan move, insofar as it requires an ironic detachment from our deeply-held doctrines. Or ought we to struggle devoutly with our detractors in hopes of winning the battle for our dogmas? This is the line taken up by Chantal Mouffe, and perhaps in a different register, by Iris Marion Young.

Faced with the decision, a crossroads where various friends of wisdom part ways, I find myself forced to choose. As with all such decisions, it's a tough choice, and I feel torn by conflicting loyalties. Yet ironically, I think this is a moment where Talisse may part ways with himself. At times, he proports to be fighting an unflinching battle, as when he defends propositions about the grounds of truth or the structure of deliberation. At other times, however, he recommends 'epistemological modesty,' as when he questions the modesty of activists who organize in solidarity with policy-propositions without consulting with their political opponents. Is this a form/content problem? That is, must we be zealous in our defense of the grounds and dispositions of epistemological wrangling so as to preserve a space where disputation and contestation can happen safely and out the truth? This would paint Talisse as a fanatical fallibilist, a dogmatic relativist in good company with post-structuralists like my friends and I. This is the sort of corner into which analytic philosophers usually avoid painting themselves, the conversation they avoid at the cocktail party.

Here's what's wrong with truth: everything breaks down when we ask what sorts of reasons one should use to dispute epistmological claims. Are we required to use mutually-persuasive reasons? Can I pull out a copy of the journal Nature ? What about Derrida's Of Grammatology? Can someone else use the Bible? (Why isn't Bible italicized, by the way?) What if I stand up and proclaim that my momma told me not to take wooden nickels and not to invest social security in the stock market? My momma's got epistemic authority aplenty. Should that proclamation carry the same weight as economists? What happens when a presentation on global warming is greeted with jeers? "Lies, damn lies, and statistics!" they shout. Or, as Talisse himself is fond of asking: "What would the white supremacist say?" (We've shortened this to "WWWSD?" for concision.)

Rules for reason-giving break down because initiating someone into the culture of philosophical reason-giving is a long, slow process. If you will, Rome wasn't built in a day, and the Enlightenment didn't illuminate Europe overnight. People don't think rationally, as a demos. They respond to irrational authorities, like horoscopes, as easily as they do to scientific proclamations, because in both cases, the modeling and 'research' is beyond their specific ken. When it comes to moral propositions, most of us come to the world unarmed and defenseless, and we mostly find moral authorities who play on our basic intuitions, developing edifices of ethics that include inconsistencies and non sequiturs. Plus, even our moral authorities can't agree.

And at the limits, in the penumbral realm of politics, we all run into trouble. When does life begin? When does it end? Who should have the right to the privileges of citizenship? What do we owe to the suffering of strangers in the Sudan, in Louisiana, in Iraq? How much is too much money? How poor is too much poverty? What are our goals? Who gets to be an expert on morality? What sorts of reasons are good reasons?

I suspect that Talisse would agree that these are all problems. I suspect that he believes these are reasons to support representative democracy over direct action, and to ignore the demos whenever its demands become unreasonable. I'm not ready to become so cynical, nor am I sure that he really espouses some of the views he performed in the classroom. Yet where we definitely part ways is at the crossroads of his faith that there is a truth-of-the-matter for such questions. As my momma says, there's plenty of room for both of us to be right. I'm always willing to welcome him, if he comes over to my side of the argument.

Law Enforcement in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

On July 8, 2004, in my new home state of Tennessee, five Campbell County Sheriff's deputies used torture and intimidation to try to get a warrantless search form signed. For more than two hours, they beat and threatened Eugene Siler with, among other things, genital electrocution:

"...until you sign that form, its fixin to get ugly, because them batteries right there, I'm fixin to go out there and get some wires and hook 'em up to your fuckin balls. And if you don't think I will, you don't sign that form and watch what happens. So you best git signing."

When Mr. Siler continued to refuse, they beat him for a while longer and then began to offer an ambulance as a trade for signing the form. Still he refused to take the trade, so one of the officers explained the situation:

"Eugene, let me tell ya how this is gonna work, ok? We got here and guess what you did? You ran out the back door. We chased you ok? You fought with us, ok? We end up fighting with you. You 'bout whupped all our asses, so we had to fight back, ok?"

How do I know, you ask? Criminals lie about their crimes, after all. Why would I take the word of a felon drug dealer over that of five representatives of law enforcement? Because Mr. Siler's wife left a tape recorder running when the officers arrived. (Link contains transcript) All five officers were convicted and sentenced last July.

The question remains: how often does this happen without proof? How often do the Eugene Silers of the world relent, sign the form, and go to jail for illegal searches, with a bloody nose, bruised ribs, and maybe a broken finger or two? How often do police officers justify post-arrest beatings by inventing resistance? Personally, I've seen enough cases where 120 lb. weaklings "bout whupped" two or three 220 lb. cops to last a lifetime. Most of the time, I couldn't prove that they were lying, because their accuser was a felon. Many people decry the growing surveillance society, and they're not wrong to worry. But I suspect it may cut both ways.

Strong stomach? Listen to the audio.

Refugee Life

"We must... build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee." (Giorgio Agamben)

If the nation-state is in decline, it is principally because the nation-form, that coalition of fellow natives born of common blood and soil has given way to the denizen-foreigner: the resident-alien who through dint of illegal entry or barriers to naturalization inhabitants a land in which she is not granted the full rights of citizens. It has become popular to decry the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Men and of Citizens for failing to differentiate between human rights in general and those guaranteed only by the state to which one belongs, and no one has done a better job of pinpointing this failure than Hannah Arendt, in her book on totalitarianism, in her essays, and in her self-identification as a refugee without a home or the possibility of return.

Yet if we are to take Agamben's prescription to heart, we must go beyond the attempts to integrate the fluid populations of mobile workers and refugees of political turmoil into our already existing nation-states. Already, the EU begins to provide a model for a mobile citizenry, maintaining both national sovereignty and the right of transit for those lucky enough to have come from member-states rather than those pariah-states that supply Europe with cheap labor. Yet in size and in delimitation, the EU does nothing more than regionalize the state. It accomplishes no great advances in the science of regimes, it does nothing to reduce the problems of non-citizens or to replace or re-constitute politics around the figure of the refugee.

I find it interesting that the classic 'civic republicans' (Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau) all conceive of law-giving (constitution-writing, really) as an act of either a god or a foreign wiseman. A stranger must give a place its laws because only a stranger can be trusted to do so fairly; anyone who expected to be ruled by the law would naturally write laws to benefit herself. As such, the stranger appears a divine figure; he (and it is invariably a male figure) necessarily comes from another world, because the world he is constituting is by definition not the world in which he was born. Even Moses got his nation's laws from a non-Jew (his father-in-law) and his commandments from God. I would argue that we all appear as strangers to the world we would like to build for ourselves, and as such it is wholly consistent to give our neighbors an equal right to this self-rule.

The problem, here, goes beyond the practical question of the advantages sacrificed in order to share our democracy with strangers. In fact, we must really get rid of the notion of local self-governance if we are truly going to embrace the refugee; it is not simply a matter of naturalizing non-citizens who happen to inhabitant our space, but of remaking the juridical and political order so that fresh immigrants and unexpected guests are the equally empowered. This would be a democracy of those who have yet-to-arrive, which is my own version of Derrida's famous "democracy a-venir," the democracy-to-come or the future democracy.

And here I run into difficulties: what could it possibly mean to build a politics of those who are not present? I suspect it would involve a hearty embrace of the constitutional process, by which reconstitution was a regular activity rather than a hallowed moment in the dreary history books. Jefferson never thought the US Constitution would last: he figured we might have twenty years of peace before the slavery question, and the general orneriness of the states, drove us back to the bargaining table.

Yet the constitutional moment is also the most exciting indication of the human potential for political genius. It shows us the meaning of political novelty, since what the founders consituted were their own origins. They gave birth to themselves, which is what Arendt loves most about contrasting Heidegger's being-towards-death with natality. And in so doing they supplied us a potent model, worthy of repetition rather than simply homage and obsequious self-abnegation. And in many ways, that's exactly what's at stake in the tradition that treats the US Constitution as a living document, capable of re-interpretation and re-parsing, available for amendation, dripping with infinite meanings, intertextuality, and all the rest of the Lit. Crit. jargon that does away with certainty and literalism.

Of course, new modes of reading won't help us with the Swarzenegger problem, or the status of Latinos, or national language issues. But it tastes grand, doesn't it?

Sex and Judgment

So in the last post, I showed how the initial versions of Christian judgment were remarkably modest and fallibilist with regard to other people. This makes a certain amount of sense, since Augustine was attached to a fairly rationalist theology, and always gave both doctrinal and basically ethical reasons for his judgments. (For instance, with the Donatists.)

In On The Trinity, things become more complicated. Augustine begins by supplying a hierarchy that places the contemplative faculty above the will, and argues that the faculty “to judge of these corporeal things according to incorporeal and eternal reasons” such as ratio and shape, is “part of the higher reason.” Judgment, subsumed under contemplation, nonetheless provides the bridge by which contemplation accesses the corporeal. Augustine takes up this bridging through a sexual metaphor, identifying men and women with the faculties of contemplation and will, and noting that they “embrace” and become “one flesh” in the fashion of marriage and intercourse. Yet this sexing of the spirit’s relationship to the corporeal and the problem of action raises the problem of evil and temptation. Sex is supposed to be bad, right?

Augustine embraces this problem, and supplies a typology whereby all temptation can be read allegorically in the story of Eve’s temptation of Adam with the fruit of knowledge. While earlier in the text he appeared to assign the will the role of fulfilling contemplation’s commands, in order to mirror patriarchal dominance, this story forces him to rearticulate the relationship. So while it seems to his fellow Christians that contemplation and judgment are uniquely or archetypically masculine, he refuses to relegate men to passivity when their role in society shows that they should be assigned to an active principle.

This results in a then-progressive assignment of rational capacity to women. Augustine denies that contemplation and prayer are impossible for women, which will trouble the Catholic Church for centuries before it decides on the priest/nun distinction. In order to supply the requisite inadequacy in women, (for no progressive egalitarian can really stomach a loss of his own cherished superiority) Augustine charges them with a lack of moral turpitude. Females, he suggests, lack sufficient willfulness to resist temptation.

Yet what women might lack in will and power is offset by a corresponding lack of judgment and reasonableness in men. The will may command as a man would have commanded a woman, but the will can only command actions based on the options supplied by contemplation. In the household metaphor, the man stays comfortably ensconced within the home, while the woman goes out into the world and gathers provisions (sense data and perceptions). After her return, the feminine contemplation supplies a choice to the masculine will. However, this choice is something like a menu of options: "Potato chips or a salad?" Yet there remains the problem that some part of the mind must correctly discern that this is a decision that has a correct answer. The question is really: "Junk food or a healthy meal?" But is this capacity for discernment a feminine or a masculine trait? Who best understands the choice: "Sin or virtue?"

In responding to the claim that it is the senses that tempt the mind, and that therefore women are wholly corporeal and spiritually inadequate to salvation, Augustine invokes a trinity, assigning the senses the role of the serpent that tempted Eve. Here, the woman (reason) receives a tempting offer for an extra-marital affair (pleasure), and must decide to stay true to her husband (the will) or to revel in temptation (the senses). Every sin and every act of faith follows this model. In this formulation, again, the contemplative faculty is cast as Eve, in that the received sensory impressions that provide the serpent’s temptations are mediated by contemplation (in the form of judgment) before they proceed to tempt the will to act or remain chaste.

Augustine reaches the conclusion that there is and must be a “rational wedlock of contemplation and action,” which opposes the “hidden wedlock” (adultery) of sin. (OT, XII, 12) But how is the woman to decide between her secret lover and her lawful partner? Augustine calls the answer knowledge, "scientia," which for Augustine is the practical side of wisdom, "sapientia." If wisdom discerns the eternal law, than knowledge tells us what it means. Sapience gives us access to the rule, while science is the application of those rules to cases. This will come to be called judgment.

The result is a series of trinities, wherein the second term mediates between the first and third, and seems always to be feminine: perception-reason-will becomes reason-judgment-will. In the first case, the sexual binary makes woman the mediator: the judge who tempts the will. But in the second case, it is still the woman who chooses the lover over the husband or vice versa. Augustine gives up on the sexuation of the mind at this point, refusing to sex knowledge and wisdom, though he might easily have assigned men a superior cacacity for intellection of the divine here by supplying women with mere cleverness for worldly matters.

As the sexual metaphors breaks down, Augustine also points up the inevitable problem of subsuming judgment wholly under the mind’s other faculties. He had begun with identifying judgment with contemplation as such, but he runs into the problem of expansion: contemplation must contemplate itself at times. We must occasionally take our thoughts and think about them. Without a separate capacity, this seems likely to result in a sort of infinite undecidability. Judgment and contemplation cannot be simply utilized by the will, nor discerned by reason, but must actually act distinct from them, based both on experience and the courage of character or moral luck that allows a person to found her judgments of those experiences correctly.

After Phronesis

In the Confessions, Augustine argues that the capacity to judge is a capacity only available to those who have come to know God: “… we become new men in the image of our Creator. We gain spiritual gifts and can scrutinize everything—everything, that is, which is right for us to judge—without being subject, ourselves, to any other man’s scrutiny.” (C, XIII, 22) This power of scrutiny, available only to the reoriented soul who has learned to know God, is not applicable to “spiritual truths, which are like lights shining in the firmament, for it is not right for a man to call such sublime authority into question,” nor is it applicable to scriptural exegesis. Though given an extraordinary power, “approving what he find to be right and blaming what he finds to be wrong,” it is also inapplicable to those who do not belong to the community of believers, “those who still struggle without your grace.” Instead, the judge is given a special dominion over “only those things which he also has power to correct.” (C, XIII, 23) Augustine means by this that the priest can only judge the faithful in those outwards signs of faith that he can alter, but the jurisdictional limitations he exclaims here are particularly interesting given the way they are taken up by later theorists of judgment. The judge's jurisdiction is limited to his community and to the behavior of his fellow-citizens: we cannot, and should not, judge the activities of another community.

Law and War: Denouement

This guy has summarized the legal case against the war. So I don't have to. I tend to be more partial to the second half of the argument, which shows that we continue to wage the war illegally, than any claims about legal declarations (or non-declarations that involve the inception of active hostilities) of war. If we followed the law, no war would ever be legal. That was the point to all these international institutions in the first place. Sadly, however, humans seems unable to completely sublimate their aggression into professional sports.

However, by torturing war prisoners and acting with disregard for civilian casualties, we've satisfied minimum standards of immorality that should be sufficient for people like Malcolm Kendall-Smith to exercise their right to conscientiously object. He's a doctor and obviously takes his Hippocratic oath seriously. I can only hope the anti-war left in Britain will celebrate his sacrifice with as much fervor as Americans devoted to Cindy Sheehan's sweltering hot summer in Crawford, Texas.

Law and War

In the wake of Kendall-Smith's conviction, it seems as if the question of legality will again go underground. We can reasonably ask, as Antoinette does, "Why should we worry about legality when there's a political solution available?" Protest politics need not trouble itself with the weak fictions of international law, we might argue, since the moral infraction is clear. In the last fifty years, it has become conventional wisdom that the winners prosecute the losers for their war crimes while ignoring their own. Our behavior at Nagasaki, at Dresden, in the Falklands, at Abu Ghraib, among the Viet-Nam era Tiger Force, these things go unprosecuted because those who have been injured have no authority, and those who have the authority do not have the will.

No matter how damning the eventual loss, there's no question of war crimes tribunals for the coalition forces. Domestically, the most we can hope for is to punish the Iraq-hawks through politics: vote them out and sideline their legislative agendas. Why, then, should we care whether the war is illegal?

If it weren't for Kendall-Smith, I'd probably agree. But given the assymetrical influence of the soldiers and junior officers paying the price in this war and the citizens and politicians championing it, I suspect that the breakdown of this conflict must begin in the military's ranks. In order to preserve our sense of supporting the troops, we will have to be made to believe that our support is best expressed by bringing them home rather than leaving them there. As with any ongoing military campaign, the wear and tear of fatalities and retirements, combined with a considerable compunction at enlisting during active hostilities will degrade our effectiveness. The stop-loss policies in place (otherwise known as the backdoor draft) have already reduced morale and enraged military families.

So what happens when soldiers refuse to fight? If they have no legal recourse, the penalties will become increasingly stringent, and our all-volunteer fighting force will increasingly come to resemble an army of conscripts. If, on the other hand, soldiers can muster out with reference to their own moral judgments, becoming conscientious objectors after the fact, then the military will have to fight with fewer and fewer soldiers, and eventually they'll either institute a draft (if national security is actually at stake, which it clearly isn't) or declare strategic victory and a beat a retreat (sorry, an 'advance-towards-the-rear'.)

In this way, supporting the legal arguments against the war is a way of supporting the troops and hamstringing jingoistic politicians. So, I'll begin, and y'all can join in when you catch the tune: why is the war illegal? Well, to begin with, a war is illegal if it's either begun illegally or conducted illegally. Hmmm....

More later.

Kendall-Smith and Kant: Can the Critique of Practical Reason make you ethical?

Ever since Adolf Eichmann pretended that Kant's theory of ethics could be used to defend his actions, I've wondered whether moral philosophers really have any tendency to be better people, or to live better lives. As Arendt put it in Eichmann in Jerusalem, "He did his duty... he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law.... No exceptions--this was the proof that he had always acted against his 'inclinations,' whether they were sentimental or inspired by interest.... [Many Germans] must have been tempted not to murder... and not to become accompliced in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation."

Well, it looks like at least one British Royal Air Force officer has actually discerned his moral duty through the haze of propaganda and pathological temptations. Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, an RAF doctor who wrote a master's thesis on Kant, has argued that the illegality of Britain's participation in the invasion of Iraq required him to refuse an order to deploy to Basra, after serving two tours of duty in Iraq. My favorite line is a direct reversal of the Eichmannian formula: "I am a leader. I am not a mere follower to whom no moral responsibility can be attached."

Sadly, it would appear that he was not able to make the case for illegal warmaking, as the court martial argued, following Eichmann: "Such crimes cannot be committed by those in relatively junior positions such as that of the defendant." By stripping him of the responsibility and capacity for judgment that would be necessary to object to illegal orders, the court martial declared that only powerful and important people have the moral authority to understand their legal and moral obligations. In this, they set a precedent for many more incidents likes those at Abu Ghraib.

I applaud Kendall-Smith's refusal to sacrifice his own judgments for those of his superiors. I applaud his courage to stand for the moral law over the petty instantiation of it we saw in the court marshall. Would that others, on both sides of this conflict, had the same courage.

News in Review

Silly of me to post without checking out the breaking Sunday stories.

• WaPo has the US planning airstrikes on Iran. If this was Martin Sheen's White House, I'd know the story was coming while Stealth bombers flew towards their targets, and that Monday's news wouldn't be about planning the strikes, but about their effects. I have this terrible feeling that an expanded war with Iran would look terrific from the administration's point of view. It would cement our position in Iraq, bury both the NSA wiretap story and Libby's finger-pointing, and bolster those flagging approval ratings. Is this too cynical?
• NYTimes Magazine has this story on El Salvador. A lot of people like to point out the absurd contradiction of prosecuting doctors who perform abortions but not the women who seek them. They should stop pointing to the contradiction, and start wondering whether the right doesn't have farther reaching plans. I think the moment that hit me hardest was reading the phrase "forensic vagina inspectors" and knowing it was deadly serious. Don't think it can't happen here. Helps to put victimhood in perspective, too.
  
• This article in the Chicago Tribune made me laugh approvingly. What better way to point out the obvious: the difference between colonial genocide and cultural warfare is the difference between genetics and porn. In that battle, how can you not side with topless women and gay makeouts?
• To complete my continental sweep of the nation's news, the LA Times has a story about Arnold Schwarzenegger's practice of commemorating every California casualty of the war in Iraq. Sure he's a bad governor who has eight Humvees and is probably contributing more to the peak oil crisis than the Califonia divison of the Postal Service. But he models some good behavior for our less heroic leaders....
  

White Men and Victimhood

I've been having an ongoing conversation with a number of people about the supposed 'plight' of the well-educated white male. We've been searching for the non-existential root causes to the alienation that many left-leaning white men experience in US culture, especially the academy. The idea is that, while we are all human and troubled by our impending deaths in some fashion, our context has made that mortality feel different to white men than, perhaps, to anyone else. I find the discussion endlessly fascinating, probably because of my milky epidermis and my penchant for pants. But in light of the claim that social justice-types somehow fail to take up the perspective of the victim, I think we begin to hit on that element shared by white men of all political stripes. It's this: we are completely incapable of victimhood.

What I mean is this: we don't know how to be victims. We're not even sure what it looks like, except when we see it happen to someone else. I worked two blocks from the World Trade Center, I've had my car radio stolen, I've been punched in the face by a number of strangers, and I've never felt like a victim. It's not Stockholm syndrome, exactly, although that's the card that conservatives play. It's not that we side with the terrorists or the criminals: pasty boys like myself are more than happy to spit in the eye of the thief, trade jabs, and cry at the atrocities committed against our friends and colleagues.

We're not siding with the bad guys when we ask questions about causes and effects, or use our loss as an excuse to buy a really nice new stereo. It's just that we're imaginatively-impaired: we simply can't imagine that the experiences we've undergone are truly victimizing. Poverty, brutality, disease: when they happen to other people, they're the effect of social and economic conditions, tragic and unfair and inexcusably our fault. When they happen to us, they're still our own fault, the combination of failed ingenuity and lack of manly action. Why didn't I park closer to a doorman? Why did I support a government with such stupidly cruel mid-East policies? Why didn't I punch him first?

From this recognition, there are a number of different judgments available to white men and the theorists of race and gender. Many identify this sense of agency as an enviable characteristic that, like other social goods, should be shared more equitably throughout the population. They prescribe the arrogant presumption of us pale-skinned poppas to all the non-white, non-masculine, non-affluent, non-hetero victims. A world full of people who don't experience victimhood, they argue, is a world without victims. Those with the mentality of victimhood are thus to blame for their lack of agency, which is a particularly disturbing account of the problem of politics, and one that I often associate with Hannah Arendt, who I otherwise respect. The fault is not in our stars, this line of reasoning goes, but in our selves.

The other possibility is to take very seriously a structural notion of the constitution of subjectivity, such that action and passion, agents and victims, require each other, and support each other. On this model, in-groups require an Other in order to sustain their own solidarity, and cream-colored cocksmen need someone to dominate and victimize in order to realize their own potency. The family unit becomes a microcosm of power and passivity, and produces both strength and weakness.
As such, the world is constructed from these interlinked pairs: the heteronormative couple, the parent-child relation, bosses and their subordinates. These have macroscopic effects as well, based in larger social concatenations: the imperial hegemon and its provincial periphery, the developed and underdeveloped world, or the Global North and South.

If anything, the so-called 'plight' I described is simply a refusal of these relations without a coinciding sacrifice of the subject position of invulnerability. Neither stoically self-mastered, nor accepting of one's lot in the global hierarchy, today's bougeoius Caucasian male is caught between rejecting the racial/sexual contract and giving up the spoils of racist patriarchy completely. It's a tough situation, if you're moved by the tragic flaws of our Oedipal heroes (and probably you aren't). But since it's my blog, and "my" problem, I'll continue to work on it.

The solution may lie in the one possibility I ignored: what happens when dudes like me come to understand our own position as something for which we are not responsible? What happens when we take ourselves as victims, as passively undergoing the imprint of social and cultural forces beyond our control? When we take it as given that we are not the agents of our destiny, but rather the product of the work and efforts of others? To understand the victimhood suffered even by the top dog in a hierarchical society, we would have to sacrifice just that invulnerability that seemed most central to the masculine identity. In its place, however, it seems as if we might gain a responsiveness, a passivity on the other side of quiescent inertia that acts not of its own will, but at the nexus of social forces and as the plurality of calls of conscience.

What that means for the impassive non-victim is that we can imagine a type of subjectivity that is neither dominating nor submissive. It would replace the mythical invulnerability with which I began with something a bit more reasonable: a vulnerability which is neither frail nor weak. No longer committing gravitational absurdities like 'lifting ourselves up by our bootstraps,' we would have to acknowledge those who help us up, and what sorts of duties those helping hands engaged for us. I should like to think that this newly vulnerable character would still be animated, moved and moving, a vital part of the exchange of goods and ideas. Nor is it a matter of ceding the spotlight to women and minories, but of widening the spotlight until being enlightened ceases to be special. But the key to this vulnerable virility is to fundamentally alter our views of acting and undergoing: we have to change the way it feels to be ourselves, to perform our identities and undergo out educations. It's a phenomenological project, a matter of reforming the horizons of our worldliness.

Sadly, I'm concluding on something of an abstract note. But this third-way masculinity has always struck me as importantly inspirational, a principle waiting to be put into practice. Like most novel ideas, it is not my own: I'm actually cribbing from a half-dozen of Jacques Derrida's essays, and especially his book Aporias. Derrida himself is hardly an originator: his most important works were always readings, deconstructions, of the work of others. But if the idea is right, that imprint undergoes alterations to fit, and its transmission is never an exact repetition. It bears his patronym, but also my own signiature. The more of us who take up this style, write these ideas in our own voice and in our hand, the better off we'll all be.

Dom and I drop some more "science" on crime

Sentiments of Rationality is at it again. Dom seems to have convinced himself that conservatives are actually right about criminal justice, since they care about victims and safety more than liberals, and trust their authority figures. He goes on to suggest electric shocks in order to speed punishment and reduce incarceration time. Here's the gist:

If we want to deter crime, then, we can do so effectively by viewing it as an educational problem that requires cultivation of the proper habits, ones which are pro-social and lead to fuller self-development of individual, i.e., more freedom in a positive sense.

I'm glad Dom continues to push this line of argument vis a vis conservatism and criminal justice, because it's clearly fruitful. I've gotten two posts out of it, myself! However, anyone who's really fascinated by modern crime and punishment should read Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Though I often suspect Foucault of just the critically-edged nostalgia that troubles some of Dom's commentors, it's still the first book to differentiate the modern situation from the same old conversations that philosophers have been having since Socrates demanded a full pardon and a daily coolness stipend. Then, if you want to keep at it, take a look around the internet at prison statistics and the sorts of things that generally trouble "corrections officers" and prison reformers. I recommend the Prison Policy Intiative, this neat blog, or what the man himself says on the subject.

With nearly 80,000 inmates in the NY State system, (which is the only system I've encountered professionally) much of the concern surrounds costs and efficiency, as well as the injustices that efficiencies create. As with any discourse, getting your head around general moral principles won't help you much when you're faced with a rusty, decrepit system with out-of-control costs. It's more fun to talk about in the abstract, though....

So: in Arendtian fashion, I take issue with the paternalization of the state. Unlike schools, prisons generally deal with fully-formed adults. Much of what Dom says might apply to juvenile detention, except that we generally assume that more leniency is required for minors. (Maybe that's the root of the problem: if we could only draw and quarter a few teenage rapists, perhaps the rest would fall into line... but I'm just kidding, really.) Dom actually uses an elementary school example to make his point:

Some children have a nervous tendency to repeatedly tap their pen or pencil on their desk, making it difficult for others to concentrate. The most effective approach to dealing with this behavior would probably be a (literal) slap on the wrist, but even if we avoid corporal punishment entirely, it still seems the most reasonable response would be to punish the children in some other way (maybe even just telling them to stop, which puts a social pressure on them).

However, what some teachers have begun doing is giving the students drinking straws to tap instead. The problem is taken as some inflexible given, a natural disorder which requires educators to accommodate students rather than vice-versa. But this is bad for everyone involved. The child is reinforced in a bad behavior that, outside of the protective school environment, could lead to other bad consequences. Meanwhile, we have to take extra time and effort to see to the children's "special needs".

This pencil-tapping analogy threw me for a loop. I guess it's meant to be an exemplar of our impotent, libertine educators, but I think that it's a fatally bad example in this conversation. To go from that to "regularly administering electric shocks to prisoners over the duration of their sentence" seems like a major jump. (They are used, and inevitably cruelly and for the inappropriate enjoyment of the corrections officers) It suggests to me that he might be letting the examples do some of his reasoning for him.

Yes, I agree we should spank our children. But should we spank our adults? It seems to be poorly argued to say that the one follows from the other. We spank children in order to make them into responsible subjects; having become responsible subjects (who refuse to respond to authority), adults require different treatment. Just think about your own habits, and how much more difficult they are to change than they once were. Many claim that criminals put themselves in this diminutive position vis a vis the state by committing crimes. Yet they cannot argue this, through syllogistic and valid reasoning, so instead they talk around the problem, through the analogies Dom describes. They attempt to enforce a paradigm of criminal juvenality by constantly asserting the primacy of examples drawn from parenting and education. Meanwhile, the state gains tremendous powers to discipline and control the lives of its citizens, and becomes increasingly paternalistic.

I meant what I said in my last post: the truly criminal are lost to us. Lock them up, torture them, kill them, it doesn't matter, because they won't ever become good. But let's not for a second pretend that the state is so trustworthy that it won't find a way to extend its oversight of criminals to increasingly banal parts of our everyday lives. Drug use, sexual deviance, political dissent, whatever strikes the political fancy: the capacity of the legislature to criminalize activites is unlimited. We'd best be sure that the pseudo-criminals that bad governments produce aren't tortured along with the bad people we'd like to see punished.