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?