"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.

Conservative Criminal "Science"

Dom, over at Sentiments of Rationality writes:

"A good psychologist knows that punishments are most effective if they are swift, certain, and severe. In our current system, this is often not the case with punishments. It's easy, particularly for first-time offenders, to get off with a light sentence or no sentence at all. It would be in our interest (and theirs!), however, to discourage first-time offenders from getting into a habit of committing crimes. If they can get away with it, that serves as an incentive to repeat criminal activities."

I fail to see how incarceration could ever accomplish the kinds of Skinner-box results that he describes. We use these strategies on children because adults can more often perceive the infractions that need punishment and supply appropriate, and swift, punishments. But how can a prison sentence be swift or severe, when it's only a period of time in a box? Incarceration was never intended to be purely punitive, insofar as there's quite a bit of confused language about rehabilitation thrown into the mix. Moreover, the vague fear and potent reality of rape and beatings forms a sort of aleatory punishment that sometimes succeeds in doling out just deterrents, but also frequently encourages tribalistic loyalities, hazing behavior, and other gang-activity.

I've worked in the criminal justice system, and as far as I can tell, it is an utter failure on any level larger than a small town. In such a small social unit, social pressures and individual attention can weed the stupid sociopaths (the ones that get caught) from the misguided moralists (for whom a healthy psyche may someday emerge). On any larger scale, it becomes impossible to differentiate favoritism and bigotry from attention to specific cases; rule-following and generic prescriptions take the place of rehabilitation.

Once we recognize this failure, the incarceration strategy seems about as good as any other for supplying a punishment acceptable to non-criminals. If we can't fix people (and we can't) then we should just separate them from the regular folks. At that point, the leftist concern for avoiding false or bigoted outcomes is the paramount goal. Key to this defeatism and its attendant concerns for justice (even over victim's rights) is a simple insight: macroscopic social factors are much more important to shaping the individual psyche than the deliberate manipulations of paternalistic psychologists and rehabilitationists. Better, then, to avoid systematic racism and its wholesale effects on an entire demographic than to retail good behavior to every prisoner, most of whom are not equipped to buy.

Worse than Nixon?

Anonymous Liberal has a nice wrap-up of the relative strength of the NSA's wiretapping program as compared with Nixon's wiretapping efforts. The conclusion: Nixon had a better case than Bush, and still lost. All the arguments for executive authority were basically demolished when Congress instituted the FISA court to oversee domestic wiretapping warrants. I suspect that any movement for Bush will come either from the Republican's political hegemony or from a peculiar judicial blindness to the 'unified executive' doctrine, which my last post discusses.

Jurisprudence and Governmentality

So the 1936 case, US v. Curtiss-Wright Corp, contains some real gems of fascist legal philosophy sewn amongst highly turgid references to other decisions and statutes. It helps to understand the current battle over the unified executive doctrine, however, so we're stuck wading through Sutherland's poorly-reasoned and poorly-written prose.

"Rulers come and go; governments end and forms of government change; but sovereignty survives. A political society cannot endure without a supreme will somewhere. Sovereignty is never held in suspense. When, therefore, the external sovereignty of Great Britain in respect of the colonies ceased, it immediately passed to the Union."

This is the problem of governmentality in a nutshell. As much as we would like sovereignty to inhere in the people, or to credit the dissolution of social contracts, there are those like Carl Schmitt or Justice Sutherland who ascribe sovereignty with the immortal metaphysical baggage of the Catholic soul. Yet this is also absurd: the Declaration's authors had no authority to sever their allegiance to King George except what they gained from their power to represent the people. Moreover, that popular representation only gained validity after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War: had we lost to the Red Coats, we would say that the Declaration of Independence had no more validity than the imperial proclamations of Emperor Norton.

At one point, Sutherland cites the Preamble's "...in order to form a more perfect union..." as proof that the unified states were merely perfecting the Articles of Confederation, which merely elaborated on the Declaration. By this argument, the states were never several or self-sufficient, and never had any hope of going it alone, legally. Yet he skips over the crucial first words: "We, the People of the United States, in order to form...." I can't imagine a more spurious line of argument, mixing bad textualism with bad political theology.

Of course, this part of Curtiss-Wright may well be taken for dicta... not the Justice speaking as arbiter of the law regarding the substantial holding, but simply describing some personal opinions which have no bearing on the case. Perhaps this is true. But he follows it up with a paragraph that still counts as good law:

"Congressional legislation... must often accord to the President a degree of discretion and freedom from statutory restriction [in foreign matters] which would not be admissible were domestic affairs alone involved. Moreover, he, not Congress, has the better opportunity of knowing the conditions which prevail in foreign countries, and especially is this true in time of war. He has his confidential sources of information. He has his agents in the form of diplomatic, consular and other officials. Secrecy in respect of information gathered by them may be highly necessary, and the premature disclosure of it productive of harmful results."

This is what is going trip up Feingold's resolution, I suspect. This is not a legal question, his bipartisan opponents will argue, but a practical one. Only the Executive has the necessary knowledge of matters of national security, and, echoing Schmitt: "The sovereign is he who decides on the exception." In this way, the President's supporters seek to sidestep the legal question. He cannot give up the power to torture, or to surveil the nation's enemies, both foreign and domestic, since this would be to abrogate his duties as Commander-in Chief. Overzealously? Perhaps... but not censure-worthy.

Yet by acting against the explicit will of the legislator, as he does on matters of torture and domestic surveillance, the executive finds "his power is at its lowest ebb." This was the pronouncement of Justice Jackson in Youngstown Co. V. Sawyer. He goes on to argue that powers delegated to the President as C-in-C ought notto be universally "advanced as support for any presidential action, internal or external, involving use of force, the idea being that it vests power to do anything, anywhere, that can be done with an army or navy."

Jackson goes on to say:

"No doctrine that the Court could promulgate would seem to me more sinister and alarming than that a President whose conduct of foreign affairs is so largely uncontrolled, and often even is unknown, can vastly enlarge his mastery over the internal affairs of the country by his own commitment of the Nation's armed forces to some foreign venture."

Thank you! What better expression of the problem of an executive whose decisions could potentially arrogate infinite sovereignty to himself and his deputies? This is the problem par excellence. Sadly, it comes as a concurring opinion in a long line of concurrences... as easily ignored as Sutherland's zany ramblings about George III and the monarchy of FDR.

As others have pointed out, it would be difficult to bring a lawsuit against the Executive anyhow. With the NSA wiretapping, no one could be shown to have suffered an injury, and with torture... well, those people don't generally get out alive. This is the problem of indefinite detention decided for the government in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld:

"If the Government does not consider this unconventional war won for two generations, and if it maintains during that time that Hamdi might, if released, rejoin forces fighting against the United States, then the position it has taken throughout the litigation of this case suggests that Hamdi’s detention could last for the rest of his life."

We're left with shaky checks on the madness of our own Kings, George or otherwise.

Five Years Isn't Enough

Today I went to see Spike Lee's Inside Man. It was a wonderful film: Lee is really quite good at letting his awestruck adoration of New York City shine on the screen, though it wasn't quite as lovely as 25th Hour. Most of the film was shot near Exchange Street, which is very close to where I used to work; in fact, they show the Trinity Church graveyard at one point, which is where I ate most of my lunches during the summer. Anyway, great film, nice heist, well-written characters.

The trailers sucked.

Paul Greengrass, who made the second Bourne movie, has apparently made a film about United Flight 93, which was the plane that was hijacked on 9/11 but crashed in Pennsylvania due to the resistance of the passengers. This is completely unacceptable. It's too soon! To start with, I shouldn't have to face that when I go to the movies. Thinking about that day brings tears to my eyes. I shouldn't be forced to watch those images. More to the point, though, the producers and actors shouldn't be profiting from those events!

It is the worst, most exploitative insanity. It's not being done with reverence or as some form of memorial, as Anne Nelson's The Guys was done. (I wasn't happy with that film, either, but at least it tried to be respectful.) It's about taking a national tragedy and scripting it as an action film. This was an event partially inspired by action films, which takes everything that action films stand for to task for their horrible, gory fantasies.

As a nation, it's clear that we're not yet distanced from what happened that day. Most Americans still believe that Iraq, the country with which we are currently at war, had something to do with the attacks. Our emotions and experiences are still raw enough to provoke real political action: to turn them into entertainment is to abuse those possibilities in the name of profit. Filmmakers should know the difference between their art and what journalists and documentarians do. They aren't here to write the first or even the second drafts of history; at their best, they can take all those drafts and create lyrical restatements. Film has too much power to shape the public's imagination of a true event to apply that power to something like this, so soon. When it does, our already fragile sense of the difference between the real world and the one on-screen becomes frayed, both on the edges and at the rough spots like that day.

Sadly, the most I can hope for is that it will bomb miserably. But it also looks like Greengrass's film is just the first in a series of 9/11 movies to the theaters. Oliver Stone has something on the WTC attack coming out this year as well, which will also likely catch me during previews when I least expect it. So basically, I'll be booing and throwing things at the screen a lot for a while, or else skipping the previews for the next eight months.

I know Hollywood has little sense of shame or propriety, but I thought that their anxieties about the market would be sufficient to hold them in check. This isn't exactly a 2000-year old crucifixion, you know? I'm not sure how long I expected them to wait, but I think ten years is about right. Perhaps the studios would be willing to shelve these films until 2011? Oliver Stone's movie, starring Nicholas Cage, might even be good. So let's watch it at the ten-year reunion. This other film, the one exploiting UAF 93, that can go direct to video, and end up paired with Air Force One in the bargain rack. How's that for a solution?

Emergencies

I still haven't solved the problem of governmentality, but I do have some more things to say about the Schmittian sovereign and the status of exceptional powers. If we compare the New Deal with the Patriot Act, we can see that emergencies don't have to necessarily supply the executive with one-way options for action. It's not necessarily the case that the Prince will always choose war over compassion, for instance. (Roosevelt seems to have chosen both, though to be fair, we can't entirely blame him for WWII.) In this way, we can imagine that sequential executives would push their growing powers in vaguely egalitarian/populist directions, and then in more acutely militant or aristocratic ways in about equal measure. This would form another sort of hyper-equilibrium, such that we could sacrifice notions of progress for a roughly acceptable stability.

Yet one of the interesting things about contemporary capitalism is that we have excised the economic emergency as best we can. We have found ways to spread Depressive effects over long periods and to export them to the global South (i.e. Argentina) and various other underdeveloped areas (i.e. Thailand). This isn't to say that we've got economic issues licked; I think the system is relatively brittle with regard to peak-oil or major environmental catastrophe. But especially given the way we handled the crash of the "Asian Tigers" in the late nineties, I suspect that we've found ways to manage the flow of currency and investments such that we will never again suffer from a global depression like that of the 1930s.

At the same time, military emergencies seem to be unmanageable in this way. Attacks on civilians, assymetric warfare strategies, and the general increase in explosive destructiveness all suggest that our near future will be filled with alerts and pseudo-alerts that will tempt the executive into action. We can only surmise that the decisions the executive makes will all press the governance towards militance, towards dictatorship. This armed and terrorized mobilization of sovereignty seems likely to continue. This, perhaps, is the genius of the strategy that has embroiled us in imperial occupation of an insurrectionist and internally divided nation half-way around the world. The threats to national security will be a constant well-spring of hawkish rhetoric. Whether it's combat vets like John Kerry or Wesley Clark, or big-talking Republicans who receive a pass on their non-service like the Great White Beast, our nation's electoral conversation will be ruled by military issues for the forseeable future.

"Madge, maybe I'm nuts, but John Bolton, at the U.N.? Can that be right?"

"I think we should lay down our differences, and have a revolution. I am wondering if July 14 works for everyone."

Anne Lamott suggests, rather tongue in cheek, that we should all get together and have a revolution on Bastille Day. From the sound of it, it'll definitely have dancing, so I'm thinking yeah. Save the date, eh?