Remedies and Cure-alls

New digs

2006-08-08T16:46:00.000-05:00

I've moved! Point your bookmarks here.

What's new in civil rights?

2006-07-25T11:16:00.000-05:00

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

New hiring policies.

New cases.

Fewer offices.

via

Naming of Parts

2006-07-16T11:08:00.000-05:00

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

2006-07-09T16:22:00.000-05:00

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"

2006-07-05T22:04:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-12T17:06:00.000-05:00

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

2006-06-05T02:05:00.000-05:00

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

2006-05-31T10:23:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-05-23T13:46:00.000-05:00

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...

2006-05-18T09:52:00.000-05:00

"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

2006-05-17T12:54:00.000-05:00

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?

2006-05-17T04:17:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-05-16T17:52:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-05-15T11:25:00.000-05:00

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

2006-05-10T23:36:00.000-05:00

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

2006-05-07T11:55:00.000-05:00

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

2006-05-05T10:14:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-29T11:20:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-26T10:21:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-24T19:38:00.000-05:00

"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

2006-04-23T12:05:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-22T10:12:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-22T09:21:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-20T13:24:00.000-05:00

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?

2006-04-18T11:19:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-09T13:25:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-09T10:02:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-08T14:31:00.000-05:00

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"

2006-04-03T13:36:00.000-05:00

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?

2006-04-02T20:17:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-02T12:09:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-01T23:22:00.000-06:00

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

2006-04-01T16:18:00.000-06:00

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?"

2006-04-01T11:15:00.000-06:00

"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?

Natural Law, Divine Rights, and the political theology of Carl Schmitt

2006-03-30T12:39:00.000-06:00

Antoinette points out that property law is an innovation required by feudalism, insofar as the monarch and his lords required a means to transfer use and possession of the land to the peasantry while maintaining their fundamental sovereignty (understood by the phrase, "Every man's home is the King's castle.") She suggests that the capacity to promise is jurisprudentially and historically prior to property relations. I like this account, if only because it shows the fundamental difference between Roman juridical theory and the Anglo-European legal theory.

While I don't know much about Roman jurisprudence except what I've learned from Giorgio Agamben, I suspect that the Romans would have been primarilty interested in potencies and powers, and thus focused on the contract as the instantiation of the potent and profoundly human ability to speak for the future. The rights-discourse that liberalism favors is only possible under the auspices of the Christian God, who leases out properties like intelligence or goodness, but expects a return on his investment! Check out the parable of the talents, for instance.

The strange interplay in political philosophy between social contract theory and natural law still requires some explication, however. I think the solution has to do with the way that Hobbes and Locke posit natural rights as prior to the contract. Especially for Locke, and arguably for Hobbes, the naturalness or God-given nature of rights serves to delimit the sorts of things that a culture can contract away, and puts some common sense limits on the expected law 'n' order required in exchange for allegiance to a sovereign.

This brings up an interesting point from my earlier post, which is that the state's stabilization of the flux and flow of social life does not account for its unique decisive power. Beyond the mere reflection or correspondance of the state to the general situation, the institutions of the state develop the capacity to intervene, to create a new situation through policy dictates and legislation. Political thinkers like Hegel argue that this power to intervene reflects a corresponding power in one subsection of the people: the rich, acting together, can engage in projects that have similar decisive power. They can hire mercenaries, engage in large scale projects for the public good, keep a staff of firefighters, etc. On this account, the state takes on this role at the behest of the noble rich, basically coordinating their efforts.. Our allegiance to the sovereign or our obedience to the executive is dependent upon his continued respect for the contract we have made to provide these services. Under liberalism, we only make such contracts in order to further preserve and cultivate our property.

But I've been reading a lot of Carl Schmitt, lately, so I'm much more attuned to another element of state institutions, one that has again become obvious to us after 9/11. States can take decisions that do not meet with the approval of their constituents. Hegel thought that the monarchical executive was unavoidable, because committees and oligarchies are hamstrung by their plurality. The will is necessarily singular, even when it governs a nation-state. But Hegel thought that the executive would tend to support the rule of law, maintaining basic class divisions while attempting to preserve his own legitimacy by ruling wisely and well. Schmitt says, quite simply, "What if he doesn't?" What if the King, or the president, or the chancellor, takes up the reins of power and jerks them sharply?

Given the appropriate occasions (a fire in the Reichstag, a group of airplanes used as bombs, a war we are losing) the executive can justifiably say that we need to turn on a dime, do things drastically differently, and that there is no time for discussion and dithering and incessant chatter. "I made a decision. America will not wait to be attacked again. We will confront emerging threats before they fully materialize," could just as easily become Hitler's defense of the Night of Long Knives: "If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people."

I'm not equating Bush with Hitler (though the parallels are pretty spooky), but I think it is clear that executives become more powerful under states of exception, and only the executive can declare that state of exception. This strange interruptive power will always upset the regular order of governance, and it seems to be built into the basic structure of the decision. So when Heidegger turns to eventuation, you might say that he's simply pointing to an inadequacy in the metaphysics of Being that seeks to suppress Becoming. You can't hold back the event, so why get comfortable with the world as it is when it'll inevitably change? It's not that we need to amend the executive's powers, it's that the decision regarding wartime powers and executive privileges will eventually fall to someone. It'll eventually be the swing-voter on the Supreme Court, or that one Congressman, or somebody, who actually makes the decision. It may be a moving target, but wherever it lands, that's the sovereign.

During the month of November, 2000, the sovereignty of the United States of America switched from Florida swing-voters, to Katherine Harris, to Sandra Day O'Connor! They made the decision, and the rest of us watched, and because we couldn't fathom the loss of the rule of law, and everything the state stands for and against, we went along with the decision. That's how decisions work, and all because the state isn't simply a reflection of the people, but rather constitutes the people that it reflects. Like a son who looks like his father, the people see their will reflected in the actions of the State because they have been molded by it. It's not really sufficient, then, to say that its sovereignty is simply on loan from the people.

I'm not sure I like the direction that line of thought goes.

If I could do one thing other than write my dissertation...

2006-03-28T16:52:00.000-06:00

...it would be to run deliberative polls, or to assist in running them, or just to participate in one.

Some questions for Professor Fishkin: how much does this cost? Do you generally run polls on public or private money? My idea is to get a bunch of rich philanthropists into a deliberative poll about deliberative polls themselves. You can have Richard Posner present the case against deliberation, then trounce him and take all that money and give me a job. It'll be fabulous.

On the title "Liberal"

2006-03-27T21:29:00.000-06:00

I can never decide whether to call myself a 'liberal.' A lot of the time, you're only presented with two options, and I think in those situations it's okay to glom on to some basic party affiliation: Democrat/Republican, leftist/rightie, progressive/conservative, etc. But when you're writing about yourself, you've got the power to present yourself in your own terms, so there seems to be no reason to settle for easy dichotomies. In those situations, I'm still not entirely sure how to refer to myself.

As for liberalism, my objection generally is that it's a misnomer. I suspect that most people who read this are aware of the difference between the liberalism of Locke and Mill, and the current usage of the term. In a nutshell, liberalism simply indicates a regime guided by constitutional restrictions on state intrusion into the private sphere and a respect for property. (Property is both a bundle of rights and the archtypical right: all rights are 'properties' of individuals, and all rights generally reflect the exclusion, use, transfer, or possession of something, like one's speech or one's body.)

Beyond the homophone problem, I often disagree with the version of rights and property that sustains pretty much the entire political spectrum in this country. So far as I've been able to discern, I have too thick a sense of the Good to be a strict libertarian. I suspect that there are many matters in which communally organized governance should involve itself, whether that be civic and moral education, or environmental and labor regulation. I oppose home schooling and the strange usage of the 'takings' clause that many Republican jurists favor in order to combat community oversight.

Yet it seems like the strategy of identifying 'liberal' with 'libertine' has been wholly successful: the thin liberty by which one requires the government to leave one to enjoy one's privacy gets too easily conflated with the licentiousness we are supposedly engaging in that privacy. So whenever I hear a fellow-traveler accused of 'liberalism' in that particular snearing tone that suggests that she has inappropriate relations with her pets, I want to stand in solidarity with liberals. After all, bourgeois property-rights were very progressive when the King effectively owned everything and loaned it out to his subjects until the whimsy struck him to take it back. I'm glad Locke spent the time to deflate the supposed divinity of the sovereign, too. (And watch out during this NSA wiretapping scandal for the Supreme Court to remind us that the executive's power is unified and came directly from the English monarchy! Never mind that we, like, had a revolution.)

Anyway, back to being a 'liberal.' Sometimes I prefer the term 'progressive,' because the implication is that I'm hoping things will get better. But this is a little like calling oneself an optimist; it's not a political position, it's a mood. Certainly I suspect that many conservatives are driven by a cynical convinction that things will keep getting worse unti the world ends, so the best course of action is to stem the tide of modernity. That's why they try to conserve traditional values, and hew to settled hierarchies and business models that have worked ages and ages, or at least for several fiscal quarters in a row. But I'm actually a bit suspicious of progress, too. I suspect that we've lost a lot, especially compared to the Greek polis, or even the heady days of the American Revolution.

On the other hand, I've got these perhaps irrational pockets of hopefulness. I'm optimistic that some developments might improve our situation. I hope that we Americans will someday learn that it is always wrong to torture people, for instance, the same way I hope that my friend's baby will learn to walk and talk and control her own bowels, like a big girl! But I'm skeptical enough of progress that I think it would be a bit disingenuous to call myself a progressive (since I once thought that our country had already learned to control its own bowels... I mean, its intelligence community.)

The term that has the most promise, from my perspective, is 'egalitarian.' I wish a lot more people referred to themselves this way, especially politicians. In the US, egalitarian populism often meets with the charge of 'class warfare,' as if making corporations and rich people pay taxes was the same as throwing Molotov cocktails and disseminating seditious literature. But frankly, I like class warfare, (and seditious literature, actually) or at least I think it's uniquely important to what politics really is, rather than what it's come to look like. For one thing, the Democratic big three, race, gender, and sexuality, strike me as categories worthy of attention insofar as they have import for class. If non-whites weren't predominantly poor, or women too often relegated to a strange secondary class of housework, I wouldn't be as interested in feminism and post-colonial studies. A lot of people complain that there is a collusion between class issues and cultural production, such that we repress and avoid canonizing the work of non-whites and women, and I'm willing to go along with that too, if only because it means that there might be some good seditious literature to be had.

The funny thing about homosexuality, of course, is that it's not really a class or cultural issue. As Sedgwick puts it, "Not only have there been a gay Socrates, Shakespeare, and Proust, but their names are Socrates, Shakespeare, and Proust." Rich people seem to be gay about as frequently as anybody else (though there are more poor gays because there are more poor people.) Still, given the role that marriage plays in accumulating capital, it does seem that disallowing marriage has had some impact on the microeconomic situation of homosexuals. But I'm just saying that so I don't have to admit that I object to restricting marriage for basically liberal reasons. The other way to put this position is that legalizing gay marriage is a matter of equality of opportunity (even if it's simply the opportunity to be overfed, bored, and vaguely dissatisfied.)

So, call me an egalitarian. I won't duck the other labels when I don't have to, but at least now we're clear.

Skin to Skin: Between Logos and Flesh

2006-03-26T15:31:00.000-06:00

Sometimes when I read too much I get very quote heavy; rather than letting my own voice through in my writing, I can't think of a better way to say it than the way I just read it. So when Merleau-Ponty explains the problem with Husserl's project in two pages in the midst of The Visibile and the Invisible, I can't think of a better way to proceed than to copy his words down.

"It is by considering language that we would best see how we are to and how we are not to return to the things themselves....

The philosopher speaks, but this is a weakness in him, and an inexplicable weakness: he should keep silent, coincide in silence, and rejoin in Being a philosophy that is there ready-made. But everything comes to pass as though he wished to put into words a certain silence he hearkens to within himself....

[What he seeks] would be a language of which he would not be the organizer, words he would not assemble, that would combine through him by virtue of a natural intertwining of their meaning, through the occult trading of the metaphor--where what counts is no longer the manifest meaning of each word and of each image, but the lateral relations, the kinships that are implicated in their transfers and their exchanges.... If language is not necessarily deceptive, truth is not coincidence, nor mute....

Because he has within himself the need to speak, the birth of speech as bubbling up at the bottom of his mute experience, the philosopher knows better than anyone that what is lived is lived-spoken, that, born at this depth, language is not a mask over Being, but--if one knows how to grasp it with all its roots and all its foliation--the most valuable witness to Being....

Philosophy is an operative language, that language that can be known only from within, through its exercise, is open upon the things, called forth by the voices of silence, and continues an effort of articulation which is the Being of every being." (VI, 125-7)

The best and the worst thing about this text is that it seems to be the last word on the topic. A statement of openness that forecloses discussion, it was work like this that seemed to spell the end of philosophy. But Merleau-Ponty discouraged that kind of talk, so I think he's blameless of the hubris of people like Heidegger or Strauss, who seemed to believe that the only interesting way to do philosophy was their way. Instead, he's simply culpable for being so damned good.

I find inspiration in the notion of a project that grasps language in its 'natural intertwinings,' that seeks 'lateral relations' rather than 'manifest meanings.' What are the lateral relations within the vocabulary of governance and justice? How can words be 'naturally' intertwined? How can the ontological difference (the Being of every being) be understood as an 'effort of articulation'?

M-P concludes that this is only possible if we give up the potency/actuality, real/ideal distinction that drives post-Aristotelian metaphysics. In its place he pushes the fleshy, embodied metaphors that cut through phenomena/noumena in favor of a "sensible world" that "emigrates... into another less heavy, more transparent body, as though it were to change flesh, abandoning the flesh of the body for that of language, and thereby would be emancipated but not freed from every condition." (VI, 153) The flesh of politics brings the body politic into sharp focus. Bodies are characterized by health, strength, and beauty, rather than justice, power, or virtue. Is there a specifically active, communal sense of health that should guide governance, perhaps one that takes the notion of constitution to be a substantial rather than simply formal matter?

Whether building fortresses, and many other things that rulers frequently do, are useful or not

2006-03-25T15:25:00.000-06:00

From the NYRoB:

"A critical mistake was made," observed the American security analyst Anthony Cordesman as early as September 2003. "By creating US security zones around US headquarters in Central Baghdad, it created a no-go zone for Iraqis and has allowed the attackers to push the US into a fortress that tends to separate US personnel from the Iraqis."

The Green Zone has apparently become an idyllic suburban transplant in the midst of a Baghdad that resembles the Beirut of the 80's. Private security forces are supplanting the American military, and the rich and white population travel in heavily armed convoys. You'd have thought those silly neo-conservatives would have read their Machiavelli.

"The best fortress a ruler can have is not to be hated by the people: for if you possess fortresses and the people hate you, having fortresses will not save you, since if the people rise up there will never be any lack of foreign powers ready to help them." (The Prince, Chapter 20)

The military likes bases and safe spaces, and I can't blame them for that. So do I! The problem with the Green Zone is that it divides the country into safe (green) and unsafe (red) spaces. The goal ought to have always been to make the whole country green! As the matter stands, the average Iraqi is stuck out in the Red Zone with the insurgents, and can only preserve his or her own safety by siding against the Western invaders.

You know, everyone says that conversatives are supposed to be better at making war than liberals. I don't buy it. The bad Straussians in this administration are just smart enough to trick the rest of us into doing something we ought to have known better about, but still too stupid to realize that all the liberal 'whining' and 'cowardice' was in fact wisdom.

States as persistent political entities

2006-03-22T18:40:00.000-06:00

What is the relationship between the state of things and the political State? This is Badiou’s question, after you take away all his mathematical obfuscations. Machiavelli suggests the initial connection: starer, the verb for persistent existence. From this we derive the 'state,' the thing that lasts beyond particular politicians. Politics, after all, doesn't mean what we think it means: for a long time, political questions were questions about the best regime. Only recently have we decided that politics is the lottery-cycle by which we select the next party to run our specifically democratic/capitalist regime.

Does the ontological difference between beings and Being have a political expression? Perhaps Jean-luc Nancy starts this conversation with the difference between the various freedoms (from fear, from want, to pray, to speak) and Freedom itself. Indeed, Nancy takes the relationship to be quite perfect, since freedom comes to resemble the becoming or happening of events, rather than a particular human's action. Freedom stands in for the novelty or instability at the heart of futurity. Is there a crucial distinction, then, between esserer and starer? Is this a false distinction? Between lo stato, the state, and mode of persistent standing characterized by starer, we can perceive an analogous difference. It is not the same, however. In English and French, this is expressed by “going” or “aller.” "Ca va?" ("How’s it going?") becomes in Italian or Spanish, "Come stai? Sto bene." ("How does it stand with you? It stands well.") This persistent state of being is the ‘way it’s going,’ the trend or prevailing movement.

In politics, this trend is supposed to be manifest or set into law through state institutions: the king’s whims, the people’s will, are both subject to all sorts of manipulations and perturbations. The State suspends those perturbations a bit, but not completely. The State's laws are not static, nor is the rule of law an utterly consistent, wholly unchangeable situation. In fact, thus understood, stasis itself takes on a different flavor: it is no longer the immortal and unchangeable, but rather simply the persistent and locally prevailing state of things. To stand is not to stand immobile, but rather to stand still. It does not preclude movement, but nor is it characterized by flux.

Heidegger’s notion of ec-stasis, standing-outside-oneself, initially intended to show the internal motion at the heart of stasis: the reaching forward (projection) and backward (throwness) of temporality, as well as the spatial diffuseness and plurality of every identity that claims to be sui generis or authentic. Yet at some point, it appears that Heidegger became more interested in the breaks and novelties of eventuations than the persistence of the work or the constancy of the product.

Note that the State doesn’t resist the dynamic flow of events: it simply has a tendency to steady them, to stabilize them, often by managing and regulating flows. From the regulator's perspective, a flow of currency or goods looks like a steady stream. Its velocity becomes a known and calculated quantity, and only the acceleration or deceleration of its flow remains to be quantified and stabilized. Large events, like accidents, assassinations, disasters, or even revolutions cannot destroy the state. They can alter it, sometimes even transform it into an unrecognizably new form, but the new political entity will tend to persist. A series of such insurmountable surprises will tend to institute l’etat de siege, the state of exception. Yet even when martial law sacrifices the patterns of authority for the brutal reign of physical force, it only does so in an attempt to discover what persists in the tumult: violence.

Terror alerts and polling data

2006-03-17T15:53:00.000-06:00

JuliusBlog reminds us about the way the Bush administration abuses terror alerts.

Dems want freedom to speak

2006-03-16T23:06:00.000-06:00

Ed Kilgore writes:

I think both sides in the usual intraparty debates are guilty of excessive "the enemy is listening" fears, and that we need to create a free-speech zone with some simple rules of civility (e.g., I won't call you crazy, and you won't call me spineless, just because we disagree).

The question of civility can only be addressed by a particular, relatively delimited community. This was the lesson of the 90's iteration of this conversation, though then it was called 'flame wars.' It's quite easy to gather a thoughtful group of civil adults that can discuss and debate strategy; simply set up an identity verification program (a small credit card transaction, for instance) and moderate discussions. (The WELL does this quite... erm, well.) If you guarantee that -some- real democratic strategists, with the ears of real politicians, are reading the posts, they will probably be very thoughtful indeed. They will also be very careful, very reverent, and not only civil, but obsequious.

If someone out there starts such a forum, I'd love to be invited. I can't imagine why they'd want me, though. I'm nobody special. Thankfully, blogs don't work on 'specialness'; here, anonymous strangers by the millions throw their ideas at the wall, and sometimes something sticks. They talk about cross-stitching, cross-dressing, and cross-burning with equal fervor and unequal intelligence. Early adopters gained readers and popularity, quit their day jobs, and started looking like the establishment. But there's always some new writer adopting Hunter S. Thompson's style or keeping a daily diary devoted to demography and statistical modeling. And the novelty, the energy, the otherness, and the insight will drive us to seek them out, probably with the help of some hyper-literate friend who scans blogs in her spare time.

This is all to the good; but for every undiscovered prodigy there are going to be thirty (or maybe three hundred) name-calling, misspelling, grammar- trashing, outraged fifteen year-old trolls posing as adults. Many of them will learn something from the experience of being schooled or ignored by serious-minded bloggers. All the same, so long as we are anonymous, there will be middle-schoolers acting like stock market analysts, men pretending to be women, conservatives posing as liberals, dogs and cats living together.... You get the picture. We can't keep them out, and frankly, we shouldn't want to. Cybernetic free-speech zones are just as preposterous as their real-world counterparts.

Spectacular Politics and Rancière's Radical Egalitarianism

2006-03-13T19:08:00.000-06:00

The other night, my friend Steve Maloney was asking me whether politics, and specifically political theory, has been reduced to public relations. I like to think that, while it may be that our task is PR, (a) it may always have been, and (b) that doesn't have to be a bad thing. Peter Hallward has an article in the January/February New Left Review that where he basically takes up the same problem. It's entitled "Rancière's Theatrocracy," (sorry, paying subscribers only) and mostly deals with the work Rancière has done on the the relation between liberation politics and the staging of equality. In this "staging," we're meant to pick up a double entendre: both the theater and civil society involve a crucial staging. Public relations shades into pretending, costuming, and play-acting.

The Platonic critique of the poets and actors has always been closely associated with his distaste for Athenian democracy, since the same audience that could so easily be moved by the narrative manipulations of the tragedians could also be persuaded by passionate rhetoric and illogical sophistry. Many contemporary progressives find, in the light of democracy's recent failures to supply satisfying electoral outcomes, that democracy may not be all it's cracked up to be. The democratic penchant for short, assymetrical conflicts, combined the resurgence of the spoils system, suggest to these fair-weather progressives that a poorly-educated populace may not always be the best group to consult. In a number of different contexts, I've seen a creeping elitism amongst people who would once have cringed at the thought of hierarchies. As I understand it, the original neo-conservatives followed this same trajectory, moving from vanguardist communism to meritocratic rule-of-law.

This is where Rancière comes in. Like many of the other students of Althusser (Badiou, Balibar, Foucault, etc.) he has been trying to account for emancipatory politics without utopian teleology or deterministic materialism, the collapsed havens of orthodox marxists. The question that drives these thinkers, and my own thought, is how to side with the dispossessed, the dominated, the invisible, without falling into despair? Rancière began answering it by turning towards the pre-Marxists workers communes and proletarian self-emancipation projects theorized by Marx the scholar, and celebrated by Marx the pamphleteer. Rancière's first presumption is that Marx's efforts have come to stand in for the various and sundry projects that inspired them; by returning to the original source material, he hoped to wipe the slate of the tyrannical nation-state capitalisms of the Stalin and Mao, the absurd in-fighting and orthodoxies of the French Communist Party (PCF), and the association of communism with fascism and totalitarianism. His goal, in other words, has been to find what was lost in the institutionalization of these private and local liberations.

The best text for deriving his theory of emancipation remains his book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, which takes up the theories of Joseph Jacotot, exiled from France when the monarchists came back into power during the Second Restoration. Stuck in Belgium, Jacotot still managed to teach poor children, with whom he did not share a language, to read Flemish. He developed an egalitarian pedagogical theory that levels the last bastion of elitism: intellectual superiority. He located supposed differences in capacity in the poor distribution of attention and knowledge, such that even motivational deficiencies can be charged to the inadequate expectations of the teacher. The trick Jacotot is famous for is showing illiterate parents how to teach their children to read! This removes even the supposed expertise of the teacher, and is definitely a spiritual ancestor (though apparently not an acknowledged contributor) to John Dewey's methods. This is radical egalitarianism indeed: you can see now the opposition I was pushing earlier between the vanguardist Trotskyists, who in their despair at the unteachable proletariat became corporate neo-conservatives, and a thoroughgoing equality that trusts the demos.

Hallward notes that this trust of the audience is partially dependent on removing even the distinction between actor and viewer: thus, the political demonstrations of recent globalization and antiwar protestors look more like Rancière's definition of politics than anything that happens between Russ Feingold and the GOP. Participation and festivity are key elements of the democratic theater Rancière wishes us to embrace. Being part of a crowd, demonstrating to yourself and each other the potency possible even to the disenfranchised, is the space where egalitarian staging takes place. This equality can be dissipated in an instant, of course, just as a crowd can be quickly whipped into a directed frenzy by a skilled orator, losing its self-direction along with its anarchism by submitting to the manipulations of a leader.

So long as it persists, however, this spectacular politics entails a Rousseauist carnival of freedom. No masters, no slaves, just a public, relating to itself without mediation. Rancière says, "All my work on workers' emancipation showed that the most prominent of claims put forward by the workers and the poor was precisely the claim to visibility, a will to enter the political ream of appearance, the affirmation of a capacity for appearance." As Hallward himself notes, this model of political action is incapable of sustaining or institutionalizing itself; it is spontaneous and ephemeral, improvised and aleatory. It happens and then subsides, leaving no great documents or lasting legislation. The real question is why we ever thought that emancipation could come by cementing our powers for collective action in established bureaucracies whose task is to suppress the very spontaneity that founded them?

Quashing nasty rumours

2006-03-13T16:05:00.000-06:00

There's a rumour going around, perpetuated by bumper stickers and politicians, that "God is pro-life." It's an interesting claim, and since everyone seems to want God (i.e. the heavy guns) on their side, I thought I'd examine it.

Michael Sandel, (yes, that Sandel) while working on the presidential Council on Bioethics, wrung this statement from expert witness John M. Opitz, MD:

Sandel: "...[W]hat percent of fertilized eggs fail to implant or are otherwise lost?"
Opitz: "Estimates range all the way from 60 percent to 80 percent of the very earliest stages, cleavage stages, for example, that are lost."

Hmmm.... so, in 2003, there were about 4 million babies born in the United States. Given the most conservative estimate of 60% lost before parturition, that means that 6 million embryos were destroyed by natural causes. This is convenient, as it is the most popular estimate for Jewish deaths during the Shoah (Holocaust). Since I've previously railed against the equation of abortion with genocide, this seems apropos.

If I can find some global population statistics that chart total human population throughout history, I'm thinking of putting up a running total: Abortions: God v. Man. This would be especially interesting given plague and disaster death rates, plus historical v. current infant mortality rates. Sadly, I'm not a statistician, I'm a philosopher, so I'll continue to depend on the experts. The CDC recorded 857,000 abortions in 2000, so, to keep the numbers round, let's say 1 million.

For 2003:
Humans: 1 million
God: 6 million

I would argue that any God worthy of invocation (i.e., an intelligent designer, deist or participatory) would not design a system with such a lousy success rate if this deity were concerned primarily with the survival of all embryos. Thus, God is objectively not pro-life. If you believe in predestination or election, then all conceivable omnipotent and omniscient creator-Gods must be understood as pro-choice (not ours, though) and pro-death.

2006-03-11T15:13:00.000-06:00

A fellow PSU alumnus, Dom Eggert over at Sentiments of Rationality, has been worrying about those crazy South Dakotans' test-ban on abortions. He cites the reluctance of conservatives to actually criminalize abortion in the way that seems consistent with their views, i.e. by charging mothers who seek abortions with murder. The upshot of the famous "Fire in the Fertility Clinic" test (which would you save, a freezer full of embyos or an unconscious nurse?) is, for my colleague, that pro-lifers must fully prosecute abortions if they want to ban it at all. It is not sufficient to prosecute the doctor who performs the procedure if we allow the mother seeking it to go free.

I like this argument, (since it's sound) but I have some concerns. I suspect I missed a talking points memo, because I've seen similar arguments popping up throughout the liberal blogging community. Obviously, there's been some strategizing over on the fundie side of things, and they're starting small. The liberal response has been mostly from the gut, however. I can't help wondering if the apparent contradiction between what pro-lifers think they can pull off politically and what their position entails is a gap we should be exposing.

The thing is, "embryos are human-beings," is a first-order proposition for these people. It's the primary principle of their moral and political identities. That's why they can call abortion genocide without investing equal energy and political capital into curtailing the Sudanese genocides, for instance. Militant pro-lifers, militant marxists, militant feminists, and militant cross-stitchers all derive a crucial sense of self from their position: they can't sacrifice those positions just because they are absurd. Instead, they'll twist the rest of their reality to fit the endangered proposition.

Won't pin-pointing contradictions in their position only help them to clarify it? When my students are trying to figure out how to be existentialists, I'll often work with them through this kind of maieutics. That's because I'm basically on their side... and that's what they pay me for. Right now, fundamentalists everywhere are trying to figure out how to deal with their new political hegemony. Why should we help them formulate their policies? I know it seems like we're making them look like fools, but that's not the effect I anticipate. When they realize they can't outlaw abortion without prosecuting mothers, they'll simply convince themselves to prosecute the mothers. And the result will be some self-satisfied, internally consistent fundamentalists, and a bunch of unwanted children with felons for parents.

Actually, politics is the experimental wing of political philosophy....

2006-03-10T15:14:00.000-06:00

"Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools."

--Notes from a talk by Clay Shirky(?)

Shirky compares a Buffy fansite to Slashdot and suggests that moderated listservs are tyrannical. Ok, fine: troubling if true. But he's not just grandiose, he seems to be on to something.

2006-03-09T12:32:00.000-06:00

I'm very interesting in the way questions are framed. Here's an interesting set of questions from the Guardian's Gary Younge, who seems similarly interested:

Do you think of yourself as white or British or both? Does it worry you that you got your job just because of your race? Where are you from? No, but really? Since this is where you live, don't you think you should try and integrate with other races more? Is your first loyalty to your God, or to your country? Is it true what they say about white guys? Given the genocide, slavery and colonialism unleashed in the name of Christianity over the last two centuries, do you feel your religion is compatible with democracy? Mr Grant, do you think of yourself as a white actor or an actor who happens to be white? I don't mind white people, but if they want to live here then why shouldn't they have to fit in with our traditions? Shouldn't the police be doing more to tackle white-on-white crime? Given the objectification of women in your culture and the rise in teenage pregnancies, don't you think it's time to ban young girls wearing make up? What do you make of the tribal conflict in Ukraine? I thought you asked for flesh-coloured tights? Don't you feel that this politically correct belief that we have to respect white people's feelings has stifled honest discussion and debate? Isn't it a shame that white people cannot pick more responsible leaders? What do you mean, you can't Morris dance? Don't you ever worry about being pigeonholed as a white person? Why aren't you doing more to check the rise in Christian fundamentalism? Who are your community leaders? Why should we balance our belief in human rights with our tolerance for Christians? What do white people think about Jews? How would you define "white" style? Mr Amis, why do you write about white people all the time? Don't you find that limiting? What are you doing for your people? Have you seen what the Bible says about women? Are you the token white guy? Don't take this personally, but why are white men so aggressive? Now the Olympics are over, can we finally admit that white people are genetically equipped to excel in archery and rowing? What is it with white people and homophobia? You know what white women are like, don't you? I understand that as a white person you come at this from a particular place, but can't you try to look at it objectively for a moment? Why do you people have such a chip on your shoulder? Don't get offended, I was only asking.

Perpetual Peace

2006-03-09T09:30:00.000-06:00

The Enlightenment project was, if not exactly founded upon, at least encouraged and made international, by the challenge of Saint-Pierre's A Project for Settling an Everlasting Peace in Europe. All of the eighteenth century's philosophers took it up, and while they disagreed on the exact means, all felt that reason could lead the way. Saint-Pierre and Rousseau were persuaded that only an international federation, which brought together various European nations and restricted their sovereigns in military matters, could overcome the amour-propre (overweening self-regard) of monarchs. Voltaire challenged the notion that the rule of law would be sufficient to eliminate colonial violence, since he argued that the worst barbarities were performed by Christians against those whose religions they could not tolerate. In this, Voltaire demonstrates a keen grasp of the growing exportation of violence to the empires of the various European states, and argues that toleration for difference, inculcated through the unprejudiced use of reason, is the only solution. ("Peace, without toleration, is a chimera.") Yet Kant did him one better, arguing that understanding and logic alone could not enforce toleration, but that specifically moral reason must be cultivated: he eventually recognized that this would require a cabal of reason, a sort of secret Masonry that would attempt to change religious and political institutions from within by exerting slow, but constant, rational pressure. Neither rules nor education alone could accomplish world peace: it would be necessary to change both the institutions and the culture simultaneously, which could only happen over time.

In the twentieth century, we've largely given up on the association of reason with pacifism. It has become popular to show that Enlightenment sensibilities bring their own, much more deeply embedded reasons for intolerace and barbarity, such that Voltaire's hoped-for transition from religion to reason is the primary obstacle to peace. Perhaps the most famous argument for this view is Foucault's book Madness and Civilization, where he argues that our pathologization of difference has gained the respect of medical experts, who allow their prejudices to become diagnoses, and then torture their subjects in an attempt to make them 'well.' Foucault's work sparked a major shift in psychiatric practice, and his general concerns were popularized by novels like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Catch-22: today, we seem unwilling to electrocute those who make us uncomfortable.

Yet after two world wars, and in the midst of the Cold War, there did not seem to be any hope for a cessation of violence as such: just a softening of the domestic injustices that were close enough and small enough for a citizen to intervene. We have washed our hands of reason, since it seems only to supply firmer resolve in war and more dangerous weapons with which to fight it. What happened to any hope that an international federation like the UN might suppress hostilities? Obviously, the UN can't accomplish anything without abridging the sovereignty of its member-states, just as Saint-Pierre initially proposed. What about education? Well, with such ambivalence amongst the world's educators regarding the desirability of violence, it's no surprise that our children come out as divided as their parents and teachers. What about the cabal of reasonable men and women, committed to ending violence a little bit at a time? In this case, I think the pacifists are losing ground to the neo-conservative, fundamentalist, and totalitarian cabals, since the major problem with secrecy is that it always confounds the means of reasonable discourse.

The fact that reasonable people (libertarians, egalitarians, and thoughtful conservatives) are more concerned with marginal tax rates, identity politics, and electoral mishaps than with sharing their freedom from domination with the rest of the world, means that they've abandoned the most important part of their participation in reason. They've lost track of which goals are worth striving for and devoting your life to, and which ones are simply amusing or interesting diversions. The fact that many Americans think that freedom can be shared at the business end of a rifle means that they've misunderstood the entailment relationship between means and ends. We need, I think, a new course of study in teleological reasoning.

International Women's Day

2006-03-08T13:29:00.000-06:00

So today is International Women's Day, smack dab in the middle of Women's History Month. Yet most people probably kicked off their month thinking about Ash Wednesday (or recovering from their first Mardi Gras without New Orleans,) celebrating Spring Break, or focusing on their studies, and I guess a lot of my friends are looking forward to St. Patrick's Day. So who's really taking the time to think about women or their history? GWB (the Great White Beast) took a moment to point out that he'd heard of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, and to make cracks about gendered language (haha, "ambassadresses"). Makes you wonder how 'international' women are faring with the gag rule on abortion, doesn't it?

As much as I like the notion of the holiday, the festive or serious commemoration of a struggle or a cause, I can't help wondering what we've got to celebrate. If you can't take a vacation day to go march in protest, why bring it up at all? And has anyone noticed that Women's History is playing second fiddle to the Red Cross, Irish Americans, Peanuts, Frozen Foods, Crafts, and Music in Our Schools, all of which also celebrate the month of March?

Duh... Terrorism is an 'ism'

2006-03-06T11:26:00.000-06:00

The entry for "terrorisme" in the 1989 Encyclopaedia Universalis begins: "To terrorize does not mean to 'terrify,' to 'strike with fear,' but following [the nineteenth centurty lexicographer] Littré 'to establish terrorism, the rule of terror." (my translation) This usage of the word originated in the revolutionary government of France, specifically a period between September 1793 and July 1794 when the entire government was subsumed under the Committee for Public Safety, lead by Maximilien Robespierre, and thousands of people were put to death by Guillotin's beheading machine. This explains why the French still think of terrorism primary as government through arbitrary violence and state-sanctioned murder perpetrated on its own citizens. What we have come to call in English 'terrorism,' with its international and domestic (but unsanctioned) sub-divisions, is apparently unrelated, a false cognate.

When we reserve the term 'terrorism' for institutional violence directed at domestic enemies, the actions of contemporary bombers and guerrillas appear to fit within the category of crimes. Indeed, even in the contemporary context there are good arguments for describing militant zealots and suicide bombers as criminals, guilty of crimes against humanity, or acts of genocide. It is not clear what the notion of 'terror' adds to our understanding of their aims and purposes, save that, like all crime, we fear becoming its victim.

This redescription does not even preclude waging the ‘war' on terrorism that the US administration coined following the 9/11 attacks: the so-called terrorists of Al-Quaeda are simply war criminals, part of ad hoc and non-territorial militaries who have attacked without a formal declaration of war. In either case (war or crime), we need not have invented new categories like 'enemy combatant' or 'terrorism.'

I usually point to G.W.F. Hegel to justify this alternative typology, since his reading of the French Revoluton is so crucial for me. Using the events of that revolution to critique the work of Jean-Jacques Rouuseau, he perfectly sums up the theoretical conflict that we would come to apply to the Nazis and the Soviets. Terror, for Hegel, was explicitly the weapon of the victorious faction. That is, it was intended to designate an instrument of the state in its claim to represent the general will, based on its failure to do so perfectly. Fear of death, which has been the absolute master from the first encounter between individuals resulted in physical conflict to determine superiority, is not the same as terror in Hegel’s use.

Terror is the specific fear of death by state sanction for opposing the will of the people in thought or action. It is a kind of subservience to the claim of universality that threatens to cause the individual to allow herself to be enslaved in body and mind. In practice, Terror is the result of fatal forms of punishment used injudiciously but in a juridical mode, rather than the gratuitous and random acts of deadly violence unleashed by factions with no state support at all.

On Hegel’s account, it is difficult to see why a suicide bomber would be called a terrorist, except perhaps that they espouse a cause. A politically motivated hijacker is no more than a criminal who, by his methods, denies the very notion of law or universal rule. Without state legitimacy, it cannot live up to the real fearfulness of a power that kills out of suspicion of intention rather than as punishment for an action. The very indiscriminateness of modern-day terrorist fatalities denies this possibility. Much closer to Hegel’s definition of terror would be the fear of being singled out as a potential politically motivated criminal; this fear of suspicion and accusation carries all the significant signs of terror.

Another sort of connection can be made between state-sanction and terrorism, both as a definitional matter and in practice. The myth of an outlaw billionaire mastermind, our current model for Osama bin Laden, corresponds best with the absurd arch-enemies that confront James Bond. Frankly, it is quite impossible to be a billionaire, or even a millionaire, without governmental support. Not only must those millions be issued as currency by nation-states and stored in banks, but they must be amassed with the assistance of political power and against the possibility of taxation or regulation. The weapons and training needed to commit acts of terrorism are only available at the behest, or through the willful ignorance, of nation-states and international regulatory bodies. In the case of al-Quaeda, both bin Ladin's initial fortune and his subsequent support can be traced to two nations, militaries, and covert espionage agencies: the USA and Saudi Arabia.

In a very real sense, then, the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01 were state-supported, and the 'rule of terror' instituted came with the implicit sanction of at least one nation-state: Saudi Arabia. Just as Robespierre, who was convicted and put to death on the guillotine using the same spurious rules he had instituted, did not know exactly what targets would be chosen by the terroristes, but merely gave them the justification that led to his own execution, my claim is not that either the US or Saudi governments expected the most recent attacks. However, part of my argument is that the reasonable expectations of bureaucracies fall far short of those occurrences for which they ought to be seen as the cause. Providing the tools, motivation, and financing for the murder of innocents is a necessary (and perhaps even sufficient) condition for those murders: it is a cause, and not an insignificant or approximate one.

Now, if Hegel's typology separates criminals from state-actors, and domestic state-actors from international ones, such that all acts of violence must be understood as either crime, state-terror, or warfare, what is the value in this new amalgamation that drives the so-called 'war' on 'terror'? Why move from clear distinctions to murky ambiguities? The answer, I believe, is that we have systematically participated in an error in judgment. By telling ourselves we are fighting terrorism, when in fact we're waging war, we've created a confused set of expectations and restrictions. Basically, we don't know what we are doing.

It's that simple: we wage war as if we are enforcing the law; we fight for freedom from mortality and danger, against organizations that do nothing to restrict our liberty, and we savor the irrational fear that notorious masterminds and fanatical bogeymen may be out to get us. In so doing, we separate ourselves from the thoughtful work that past generations have left us to deal with these problems: piracy and the hostis humanitis, suspicion of increasing our own state's powers for interminable emergencies, and the racial/religious intolerances that only bolster our own sense of righteousness. If the context were Protestants v. Catholics, or whites v. blacks, we'd know that these techniques don't work. For some reason, we think that this time, for this conflict, we've managed to discover an exception.

For the antidisestablishmentarian in each of us

2006-02-23T11:20:00.000-06:00

So, if the last post was all vitriol and false hope, today I want to focus on options. Specifically, what's possible today that was unimaginable a century ago?

1. Communes without communal bathrooms.

Look, the real problem with communism is that half of the population are slobs. Yet the appeal of the commune is the community, the group of folks living and work together, making their own culture primary, raising their children in that culture, and generally having a ball with their isolationism. Basically, you figure out who you like and exclude everybody else. This'd be perfect if it weren't for the fact that somebody's got to do the dishes, clean the toilets, and take out the trash. In cyberspace, the strictly delineated individual predominates, and it becomes possible to manage your own space while simultaneously belonging to a community. Of course, these are tenuous, fractious, anemic communities: there's no flesh-and-blood connection, so everything's a bit removed. But these are communities predicated on solidarities much more basic than the network of relationships based in proximity. Common interests, common beliefs, and common lifestyles can form coalitions and blocs. We'll never be a social movement, but at least we know where to go to find a sympathetic ear, a provocative conversation, or a good game of chess.

2. We can eavesdrop on our enemies.

Look, we're not going to get anything done out here in cyberland. But making friends that are worth meeting in real life, making plans that are worth executing in real life, and finding solidarities that would never have grown up in real life are not bad approximations of getting things done. Moreover, the honesty of millions of lonely bloggers means that, more than ever, we can finally get a look into the psyches of our enemies. What's it like to be a fundamentalist? Check out his livejournal. How about a racist? They've got a web ring. Wanna know what makes child molesters tick? They're anonymous, but they're out there. What's the Republican party planning for 2006? Well, if you'll check out their listserv, you'll see....

Most progressives don't like to do this sort of research, because these are not necessarily the most pleasant heads to get inside of. But believe me, conservatives are doing it: they get a vicarious thrill and a sense of superiority out of reading about our tawdry lifestyles and loose mores. What they learn affirms their positions and gives them plenty of ammo, so it's probably about time for us start playing the same game.

3. Text is good.

If video killed radio, and the internet manages to trump both without losing out to Second Life, The Sims, and World of Warcraft, we could be in for a resurgent literate age. Literacy is the best possible skill: reading and writing are symmetric, anonymous, and linear. Rhetoric loses more often to logic in the written word than anywhere else. Intelligence and wit are victorious, sensibility and tolerance win the day.

Compared to a world ruled by sound-bites, beauty, false controversy, and the advertiser's "What I tell you thirty times is true," the world ruled by the printed word is a reasonable, free, and relatively just. Display the words on computer monitors, hyperlink them and gussy them up with some cool fonts, and you just increasr their power.

4. Islam is going to shake things up.

I'm of two minds on Islam, most of the time. The only culture to resist usury remains embroiled in gender roles and dress codes. They don't drink, but they relate to the written word as if it were carved out by Allah himself. The tradition of divine untranslatability is a bit scary: it means God speaks Arabic. The Christians (with the help of their own Lutheran rebels) talked the Jews into giving up on the whole divine language thing, which is good. If God only talks the way my forefathers did, there's a tendency towards a false sense of theological entitlement. If God can speak any language, however, what she's saying can't be exclusive.

Anyway, the West needs to figure out how to incorporate Islam, and Muslims are increasingly learning how to live with us. We've reached a detente with the Chinese, conquered the Japanese, and driven the Southeast Asians into financial ruin. But the Arab diaspora is situated in the middle of everything that's interesting about the world: the oil, the money, and most of the world's remaining undeveloped resort spots. Come what may, I want to spend my fiftieth wedding anniversary in Egypt, so it had better be safe and cosmopolitan, and they'd better be taking Visa. What that means is that we're going to have to be speaking the same language politically and financially. (I'm happy to learn Arabic in my dotage; just don't make fun of my accent!) And that can't just be a one-way transfer; we're going to have to spend some time working on the lingua franca, the esperanto, that will make the interface between Occident and Orient viable.

5. Engineers are this century's vanguard of the revolution.

I dunno what the killer-app will be, but I read so many cyberpunk novels as a teenager that my faith in technology's disruptive powers is unshakeable. Somewhere along the line, somebody's going to develop a killer political app: some combination of social-networking, cheap gizmos, and hipster cachet that busts the political sphere open. All I can say for sure is that it's not flash-mobs, and it's not $100 laptops. But maybe it'll be a pill that turns your epidermis a lovely mocha color and destroys the last vestiges of racism. Maybe it'll be a matter-printer that allows anybody to turn junk atoms into Versace watches indistinguishable from the originals, which will destroy the still invasive sense of class. High-yield soy bean seeds, nootropics that poor kids can take to learn Latin and calculus, lie detector TiVos that catch candidates in the act, mass-produced bullet-proof underwear to de-weaponize law enforcement (imagine if Diallo had survived: "I told them to stop firing. Thanks to Fruit of the Loom, they'll be hearing from my lawyer!"), RFID employment credentials so that the US will recognize its immigrant population instead of criminalizing them.

Of course, the list of troubling state-tech that will make us less free is lot less fantastic: GPS cell phones, face recognition, less-than-lethal chemical weaponry (Gay Gas, anyone?), Amber alerts, terrorist gene testing, content-with-the-status-quo drugs, rigged electronic polling booths, subliminal advertising, and superior air power are all already leading us down to primrose path to self-confinement and democratic authoritarianism. All I can say, is: "Where the danger grows, there also lies the saving power."

When did it all change?

2006-02-22T19:27:00.000-06:00

Look, I'm not one for golden-age narratives. However, it has become increasingly clear to me that things are fucked in a manner unique to this place and time. Of course, there are all new possibilities, novel reasons to hope, that come out of this unique dilemma. But it also seems as if some of the old stand-by solutions are gone. So, without further ado:

1. Revolution ain't what it used to be.

As somebody or other once said, "You can't start a revolution in a country without cobblestones. What'll you throw at the cops?" Though it's a constant refrain with me, this will be the first time (though not the last) that I'll say it in this space: we can no longer imagine an old-school regime change in most of the developing or developed world. I don't care how many riots you incite, how many molotov cocktails you throw, it won't happen here, or in most of the other places that count as power centers. Perhaps in shoddy third-world countries they'll throw a cocktail party that looks like a revolution, and invite the journalists and the humanitarians, the political paparazzi and the bankers. But in all likelihood, even in those out-of-the-way places, the so-called revolt will have been predicted by intelligence agents (i.e. spies) and either supported or quashed by the US/Europe. What we'll watch on our televisions and net-casts, what will be blogged, videoed, op-edited, TiVo'd, celebrated, villified, and ignored, will be a media event: a teleplay with the narrative boiler-plate already written.

Perhaps you're holding out for an Iranian student insurrection? Fuggedabodit. If it happens, it'll turn out the major players were trained at the School of the Americas. A viable third party in the US? Nope: it's all spoilers and flame-outs from here to the horizon. Oh! I know: Chinese democracy? Ha! More like feudal capitalism, with the world's first-ever state-run open-market.

What's happened to this place we call home? Where did all the options go? It was technology that did them in: railroads, radios, telephones and televisions.

2. The Internet won't save representative democracies from their dwindling legitimacy.

If the most cited complaint in a century of American letters is that politics isn't fun anymore, then the most popular solution in the past twenty years has been the internet. Yet I've got to ask: where are our electronic town halls? Why is computerized voting still the biggest boondoggle since the days of Gangs of New York? Why doesn't my White House answer my e-mail?

Moveon.org and the DFA (and probably twice as many Republican groups) want you to believe that these innovative technologies will change the parties. They want us to think that their little polls and daily talking points mean that we're closer to the process, that we've finally recovered the agrarian democracy that Jefferson championed, only without the slaves and the sunrise wake-up calls.

However, we still live in a society of wolves and sheep, and most of us remain sheep, though all too aware of that fact. This is the worst position for a democracy to be in: if Aristotle is right, it's the exact opposite of the ideal. Rather than a hard-working society where we're too busy to realize that the few (the aristoi) are running things, we've all got plenty of leisure time (though increasinly less) and a deep-seated sense of alienation from our government.

Frankly, there's nothing we can do about this. The whole shebang is too darned big. It doesn't matter what techniques and media you use to aggregate preferences for decision-making: there's just the one federal government, and every time it scratches, a few million of us citizen-fleas feel slighted. There's not room for us all to see eye-to-eye, anymore; there hasn't been for the whole 20th century. Instead, we've got the mass-media. First it was syndicated newspapers, then radio, then movies and television, all doing the same thing. We can't see each other, but we can all listen to the same music and watch the same soap-operas. We all get the same advertisements, and we all drink the same colas.

Meanwhile, the producers of these things consolidate and consolidate. They create monopolies and cartels, and then they merge with each other, until there's just the two soft drink/sports shoe/media conglomerates. Niche marketing doesn't mean an end to this asymmetry: it just means that the same companies finally know enough about us that they can drop mass-production without losing market-share or profitability. Nowhere is this fantasy less true than with the political parties. They may have figured out how to retail their message to consumers, but they're not about to give up the spoils of the two-party system, nor are they willing to seriously broaden the policy debates. If I sound like I'm channeling Noam Chomsky, it's because he's right. No point in re-inventing the wheel.

The reason the good ol' info superhighway won't make a difference is simple: there aren't any paving stones here, either. Nothing happens here. The scale of action remains too small: we can do all sorts of things on the local level, get all sorts of support. But we've got no mechanism for getting things done that we didn't have before. New ways to organize, new modes of communication, and even some pretty nifty new ways to engage in collective action. But none of it hits up against the old-style political sphere: none of it makes Kings and Councillors sit up and take notice.

They ignored Seattle, didn't they? Why shouldn't they ignore our e-petitions?

Which leads me to...

3. Theorists of justice will remain as ineffective as they've been for the last fifty years.

Since the Cold War started, we've had a rash of provocative, thoughtful, and wonderfully argued theories of justice. From Rawls to Nozick, from Sandel to Habermas, one thing has remained clear throughout: philosophers aren't politicans. Good books do not get turned into equally good policies. In fact, most of the good books were written as attacks or apologies on the institutions of the welfare state. After the fact, if you will, they argued for extensions or retractions of this wonderful and frightening system. But so far as I can tell, the last theorist of note that anybody paid any attention to was Walter Lippmann. Maybe John Dewey, if you count his newspaper articles.

Thinking about justice, it turns out, is not a particularly just thing to do. As much as I'd like to believe that the various social movements succeeded or failed based on thoughts and theories, it seems as if strategies and techniques played a larger and more important role. The Civil Rights movement didn't tell us anything we didn't already know: it just found the right levers to push on (civil unrest and collective violence, mostly) to make us act. Activists of all stripes (fundamentalist and queer, feminist, pacifist, or anti-globalist) have depended on old strategies, and increasingly, these strategies, rather than the theories that justify them, have begun to seem attenuated and weak. Again, it's a matter of getting leverage, of making things happen, and as even Archimedes would admit, the bigger the world, the bigger the lever required. Justice theorists seem to think it's sufficient to supply a place to stand.

And...

4. "Reasonable" doubt is the new conservatism.

My colleague Dom Eggert has point this out in his blog recently, and it's true. Increasingly, political rhetoric is all about "getting to maybe." Once you've gotten there, every decision seems, at least, plausible. So Bush claims to be balancing security and freedom, or NAFTA balances the lost industrial jobs with tech sector gains. Climate change, intelligent design, domestic surveillance, etc. all have one thing in common: there are at least two different ways to look at it. "Opinions differ" will increasingly be administration-speak (both Republican and Democrat) for "We're gonna do what we want, even if you don't want us to." And we bloggers will just fuel the fire by contributing to the doubt.

Phew.... I'm exhausted from this fit of cynicism. Tune in later for some caffeinated optimism.

Justice and Justifications: The Duty to Deliberate and the "Barrel of Reasons"

2006-02-20T10:00:00.000-06:00

"I am not one of those who may be questioned about their Why. Do my experiences date from yesterday? It is a long time since I experienced the reasons for my opinions. Should I not have to be a barrel of memory, if I wanted to carry my reasons, too, about with me?" Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Lately it has come to my attention that some political theorists would rather not have to justify themselves all the time. Frankly, I've never met a philosopher who couldn't give you ten arguments for his favorite breakfast cereal, let alone for important political decisions. Yet a certain stripe of liberal takes it to be a priori offensive that he might ever be coerced, even socially, to provide justifications for his political positions. A lot of this debate comes out of the deliberative politics discussion, especially the claims made by Gutmann and Thompson that while justifications are required of citizens in order to grease the wheels of institutional design and legitimate self-governance, only some reasons are acceptable.

The restriction on properly moral reasons, rather than on simply selfish preferences, is not obviously offensive. "Because I said so!" has long been taken as an unacceptable sort of reason, and even Catholics can agree that "Because the Pope said so!" isn't the sort of reason likely to be persuasive to non-Catholics. Even the Pope provides reasons and justifications for his positions in his encyclicals, and it is the mark of a good, thoughtful Catholic to repeat these arguments rather than simply the conclusions. I take it to be the mark of any successful religion that you occasionally concern yourself with persuasion instead of simply inculcating your own youth with the faith through parental and pastoral domination.

So the real obstacle to deliberative duties, it seems, are the libertarians. If freedom is your main concern, then it makes sense that you would prefer not to instantiate a duty to deliberate even if this is in the service of your other liberties. Having to make arguments, as Nietzsche points out, may actually be something of a burden for your average assault-rifle toting survivalist nut-job. Or, I guess, for the exhumed remains of Robert Nozick's dessicated corpse.

Now my response to this objection may well be a bit 'prudential.' (As my friend Steven Maloney argues.) I'm a prudent sort of fellow, though, so I've got little else to add. Real libertarian types tend to associate justice with freedom, and so they don't take prudence as a sufficiently persuasive arguement: this is actually a good move on their part, since I'd say the same to them while supporting a distributive model of justice. But, as the saying goes, "Ought implies Can," and if your model of the good/free society is plum impossible, you ought to shut up and write crappy science-fiction like your hero Robert Heinlein. And I think it is demonstrably the case that a society cannot survive without coercive measures, and that in fact the least coercive measures would be an enforceable duty to defend your positions. (It's another thing to say that these defenses should be reasonable or should require reciprocity or mutual respect... but I'm getting there.)

This argument is the same one I used to use on my Italian anarchist friends: when the government steps aside, organized criminals take up the slack. Whether it's the Mafia or the Triads or Hamas, the mixture of corruption and humanitarianism is a lot closer than many think. The leap from mobster to politician is an easy one, and the coercive possibilities of the state must be limited in such a way to make the two identities radically incompossible. Berlusconi isn't so bad so long as he doesn't break people's legs when they don't pay their taxes.

So, if we're stuck with the State, (and we are, damnit, because I said so if for no other reason!) then we should try to create a State whose coercions are the least offensive. History seems pretty clear on this: people who aren't concerned with, say, consistency or rationality like to take power so they can enforce their particular brand of nonsense on the rest of us; whether it's Papists or Levelers, Communists or Creationists, they'd all rather argue from a position of authority than from a position of reason. We can be most free if we apply the coercive powers of the State in order to assure that the only authority recognized by the majority of our citizens is that of reason. Once we've accomplished that, the only duty to justify oneself will be a duty derived from a shared understanding of the basic necessities of communication. At that point, people will laugh as hard when you cite the Bible as they do today when you cite medical research paid for by the tobacco companies.

Apples, Potatos, Politics: One of these things doesn't belong

2006-01-12T22:16:00.000-06:00

Take the group of things we call 'apples'. Let's not get too technical, but merely admit that we mostly know what that word entails, and that we can therefore select members of the group from non-members when we go to the grocery store. We know not to put a potato on an elementary teacher's desk, for instance, unless she is a French teacher, in which case the potato would serve as a joke: "pomme de terre" ha ha.

What group does this grouping itself belong to? The word 'apples' belongs to a number of hierarchically related linguistic groups: nouns, words, etc. Apples themselves belong to a number of hierarchically related biological groups: fruits, plants, things, etc. The sound apples bridges the gap, since it belongs to a special group of sounds called phonemes (meaningful sounds) and then from there bridges off through the physical group to join apples in the realm of things.

In one sense, this is the materialist/idealist problem in a nutshell. Boring, eh? It gets interesting again when we admit that none of these groups belongs to itself, except language. That is, the linguistic construction 'thing' is not itself a thing: it's an idea or somesuch. But the linguistic construction 'language' is linguistic. It's a set to which the set itself belongs. I think that's cool, but it's still not very interesting.

When I go around talking about politics, though, I'm actually making a lot of claims regarding this kind of set theory. I talk about the Democrats and the Republicans and I call myself a political philosopher. There's this French cat named Alain Badiou, however, who disagrees. "That's not politics," he argues. It's partisan wrangling for management of state institutions. Yet if American and European political parties have succeeded in identifying that partisan wrangling with politics tout court, if we've come to believe that they supply the only viable modes of political action and devote all our energies to partisan elections, than the set of politics has beeen covered over, replaced. It's as if we've all begun to think of potatos when someone says 'apples.' A good trick... and in fact, it's a political trick. In essence, (and this is a bit more of another Frenchie, Jacques Ranciere) the political set is made up of tricks like this: setting the viable actions and restricting the terms of debate. "Tax relief" instead of "tax cuts." "Saving Social Security" vs. "fixing the entitlements system." "Gay marriage" vs. "equal rights." That's politics.

The Dems and Reps have been such good politicians that we forget to pay attention to politics, which would maybe be something like campaign finance reform (remember that?) or voting rights for felons, or the institutional requirements of capitalism like the status of regulation as a 'taking,' or the relationship between public goods and private property, or the role of common citizens in the habituation of their children. The parties engage each other in these debates, and so a few thousand people spell out the basic shape of the political landscape, and then stage these massive PR campaigns for bipartisan representation as a governmental form. Politically, we're all of us vegetarians: we've stopped thinking that the meat of politics is healthy for regular folks to consume, and left it to the policy wonks and party strategists.

Do you need set theory to say that? I dunno, but the right has made a lot of progress by publicizing their understanding of the true nature of politics amongst the party faithful. That's the whole liberal media bias meme in a nutshell: demonstrating the various attempts to set the terms of a debate on the part of the left. (I'm thinking of the absurdly named "No Spin Zone.") Maybe we could use a bit of that, ourselves.