New digs

I've moved! Point your bookmarks here.

What's new in civil rights?

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

New hiring policies.

New cases.

Fewer offices.

via

Naming of Parts

From Henry Reed's Lessons of The War:

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

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

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

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

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

Re-liberation Theology: Imperialism, Insurrection, Insurgency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pain as a Propositionless Attitude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Badiou and the Philosophy of Religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Davis speaks in tongues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

if only...

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

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

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

Another day in paradise

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

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

Thanks to MeFi and DKos for the links.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gov't taps ABC to root out leakers.

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

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

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

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

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

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