Bollettino
The last issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy contained a number of articles about democratic theory and pragmatism. John Dryzek, who has written extensively about what he calls, after Habermas, the ‘deliberative public’ – of which such things as the blogosphere would be subsets – poses an interesting question in his article, Pragmatism and Democracy:
“On one interpretation of pragmatism, which can appeal to Dewey as well as to Peirce, the idea would be to make the public as it confronts social problems much more like a scientific community in terms of its commitment to the pursuit of truth. The real world of politics does of course feature plenty in the way of partisanship, inequality, self-interest, ideology, strategizing, deceit, and the raw exercise of power. So would a pragmatist program for public deliberation have to involve an attack on these pervasive yet deeply problematic aspects of politics?”
Dryzek’s article is couched as a reply to another article in the journal by Cheryl Misak, who “believes that truth in the sense of indefeasible collective judgments is a proper aspiration in politics, such that there are right answers if only we deliberate long enough and well enough about a particular problem.”
Dryzek has a deep objection to this way of thinking:
“Without the preparedness to give up a belief in the face of decisive counterarguments, Misak says we will get "the degradation of belief to mere opinion." But in politics, opinion is not mere. What we mean by "public opinion" can be more or less distorted, more or less defensible. But do we really want to convert "public opinion" into "public belief"? The problem is that under any realistic time constraints, opinion cannot be eliminated. But even without such constraints, there would, as Hannah Arendt (1958) has argued, be something very peculiar about a politics that sought to exchange opinion for truth. Implicit in a situation where moral truth is sought is an incipient danger of the eventual silencing of the differing opinions that are the very grist of politics, especially if, as Misak puts it, "disagreement implies a mistake on somebody's part." A pragmatic defense against silencing here would be that all individuals should accept that they are as likely to be in error as their opponent in an argument. But opinions are not like truth claims in science, and here the pragmatist's view of continuity between science and democratic politics starts to look suspect. Opinions differ in large part because experiences and thus identities differ, and experiences may never be fully accessible to those who have not shared them. Such a view can find support in Rorty's pluralistic interpretation of pragmatism, which highlights linguistically-constituted variety. Asking an identity to be provisional and capable of being discarded if an argument is lost means the identity is not a core part of being—it is not an identity at all.”
LI thinks that Dryzek instinct is correct, here, but his analysis is deficient. His instinct is that opinion must be defended against the old Platonic ideal of the Republic. However screwed up Popper’s analysis of Hegel and Marx is, Popper was right to see a common thread in all political theories that seek to create a polity that emulates some kind of scientific, or truth-centric, ideal. Silencing the false, under this perspective, is the very goal of the policy maker. Dryzek is also right, to an extent, to see that the problem with this goal is that it conflicts with identity – with the heterogenous array of positions over social space. The social is the anti-universal, to put it in the briefest possible space. But his analysis falls short when it comes to living fact of identity, insofar as he emphasizes identity as a given, rather than as a struggle over time. In this way he makes identity into an untouchable – it becomes a Disneyland of difference. This, we think, expresses the deep desire of a certain form of East Coast liberalism, which is the latest stage in an ideology that goes back in American history to the early nineteenth century, and the establishment of a certain sense of decorum as a means by which the elite preserved their status positions both economically and culturally. This liberalism has a horror of depth, because depth is where the struggle goes on. Although we don’t, in the end, think Melville was fair to Emerson, we think that he sensed, in the Emerson of cliché, something of this same horror, and this same ossificiation of the plural. Here is a passage from one of the great letters:
“I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr Emerson. I had heard of him as full of transcendentalisms, myths & oracular gibberish; I had only glanced at a book of his once in Putnam's store -- that was all I knew of him, till I heard him lecture. -- To my surprise, I found him quite intelligible, tho' to say truth, they told me that that night he was unusually plain. -- Now, there is a something about every man elevated above mediocrity, which is, for the most part, instinctuly perceptible. This I see in Mr Emerson. And, frankly, for the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool; -- then had I rather be a fool than a wise man. -- I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plumet that will. I'm not talking of Mr Emerson now -- but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.”
Monday, June 28, 2004
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Bollettino
My friend S., who turned me on to Complex Adaptive Systems theory, is presently bringing to a close her magnum opus and dissertation in one last pageheavy burst of scribbling. Although I know she will never read these words – S. has better things to do than look at the sad evidences of my graphomania – still, I dedicate this post to her.
Salut, S.!!!
In the last post, LI laid out the problems, as we see them, with consequences, and consequently with consequentialism. If you will remember, we wrote that the problem, as we saw it, started with counting over the consequences of actions. This is the robust, quantitative approach to the problem, approved of by all analytic philosophers. We further said that the problem had a superficial aspect – that of giving good reasons for containing consequences – and a deeper, structural aspect – that of giving an account of actions such that consequences are considered a necessary effect of actions.
The example we gave, here, to illustrate what we meant by the containment problem derives from Morehead’s book on the Gallipoli campaign. In that book, we are told that Churchill, on August 3, 1914, decided to impound two Turkish battleships that were being built in British shipyards. We traced a plausible chain of consequences from this action to the events of October, 1914, when the Allies delivered an ultimatum to the Turks, which was refused. That refusal effectively aligned the Turks with the Germans.
Our chain included some peculiar items. For instance, the Germans supplied the Turks with two ships and crews immediately after Churchill announced his decision. Was this really a consequence of Churchill’s decision? Isn’t it possible that the Germans would have acted in the same way even if Churchill hadn’t made this decision? And finally, a question that always pops up in these kinds of discussions, how could Churchill know that the Germans would act as they did once he had acted as he did?
I’m afraid we haven’t done with the superficial problem of containment. As is hinted at by my last question, we like to divide consequences into intended and unintended. This division implies that there exists some rough means that justifies attaching the two labels to consequences of, at times, the same act.
I am not going to claim that the label has no usefulness in certain situations. But there is a limit to its meaningfulness. Take, for instance, our second question. The Germans “saw” what Churchill did. Social action is rarely such that it occurs only between a Crusoe agent and some indigenous Friday singelton. Rather, the social matrix within which actions occur is such that the consequences of the action, insofar as those consequences are attendant upon the perception of the action, can ramify rapidly. The social agent knows this – in fact, we often consider that, in certain situations, part of his responsibility is communicative. Every lovers quarrel eventually hinges on such things. In Churchill’s case, he certainly knew that the Germans were perceiving his act. Their subsequent actions in response to that act, then, must be prefigured in the motives for the act, to some degree. That prefiguring is, largely, guesswork. The intention that an act have a certain consequence, which seems so clear, gets muddier as we seek to embed the action in the social matrix. The edge between intention and the unintended is not, really, a clear and distinct thing at all times. And, in principle, this lack of clarity is possible for any act. Intentions can always be argued about. Although there “must have been a mistake,” Joseph K. can be arrested at any time, because no Joseph K. can ever give an account of his actions such that we know precisely the limits of his intention.
The moral fact that the containment of consequences is indeterminable forms the basis for one of the principle themes of the mystic. When Blake says that the hot needle that pokes out the eye of the songbird darkens the stars, he is merely alluding to the infinite ramification of consequences that, in a drier tone, is considered by Donald Davidson in the Essays on Actions and Events. When Jesus of Nazareth claims that God knows even the fall of the smallest sparrow, he is saying either: a, that all events in one unified throb surge up against the divine, or, b., that all events are distributed to their place and function by the infinitely fine consciousness of our Heavenly Father.
Counting consequences, a dry topic for analytic philosophers to rattle about in their small journals, is also the cry of the messiahs and the lyric poets. LI might be a dry rattler, but at least this topic puts us in good company.
Next post – or some post next week – we will return to the deeper structural problems, and try to show how the original, petty stimulus for this wildly expanding topic – Hitchens supposition that he can strip consequences from acts as he goes backwards to make pronouncements about the moral/political errors of Michael Moore – shows that Hitchens has abandoned one view of history, that of struggle, associated with Marxism, for a very vulgar Whig view. And, in so showing, points out certain questions about democracy itself. Fun, fun, fun.
My friend S., who turned me on to Complex Adaptive Systems theory, is presently bringing to a close her magnum opus and dissertation in one last pageheavy burst of scribbling. Although I know she will never read these words – S. has better things to do than look at the sad evidences of my graphomania – still, I dedicate this post to her.
Salut, S.!!!
In the last post, LI laid out the problems, as we see them, with consequences, and consequently with consequentialism. If you will remember, we wrote that the problem, as we saw it, started with counting over the consequences of actions. This is the robust, quantitative approach to the problem, approved of by all analytic philosophers. We further said that the problem had a superficial aspect – that of giving good reasons for containing consequences – and a deeper, structural aspect – that of giving an account of actions such that consequences are considered a necessary effect of actions.
The example we gave, here, to illustrate what we meant by the containment problem derives from Morehead’s book on the Gallipoli campaign. In that book, we are told that Churchill, on August 3, 1914, decided to impound two Turkish battleships that were being built in British shipyards. We traced a plausible chain of consequences from this action to the events of October, 1914, when the Allies delivered an ultimatum to the Turks, which was refused. That refusal effectively aligned the Turks with the Germans.
Our chain included some peculiar items. For instance, the Germans supplied the Turks with two ships and crews immediately after Churchill announced his decision. Was this really a consequence of Churchill’s decision? Isn’t it possible that the Germans would have acted in the same way even if Churchill hadn’t made this decision? And finally, a question that always pops up in these kinds of discussions, how could Churchill know that the Germans would act as they did once he had acted as he did?
I’m afraid we haven’t done with the superficial problem of containment. As is hinted at by my last question, we like to divide consequences into intended and unintended. This division implies that there exists some rough means that justifies attaching the two labels to consequences of, at times, the same act.
I am not going to claim that the label has no usefulness in certain situations. But there is a limit to its meaningfulness. Take, for instance, our second question. The Germans “saw” what Churchill did. Social action is rarely such that it occurs only between a Crusoe agent and some indigenous Friday singelton. Rather, the social matrix within which actions occur is such that the consequences of the action, insofar as those consequences are attendant upon the perception of the action, can ramify rapidly. The social agent knows this – in fact, we often consider that, in certain situations, part of his responsibility is communicative. Every lovers quarrel eventually hinges on such things. In Churchill’s case, he certainly knew that the Germans were perceiving his act. Their subsequent actions in response to that act, then, must be prefigured in the motives for the act, to some degree. That prefiguring is, largely, guesswork. The intention that an act have a certain consequence, which seems so clear, gets muddier as we seek to embed the action in the social matrix. The edge between intention and the unintended is not, really, a clear and distinct thing at all times. And, in principle, this lack of clarity is possible for any act. Intentions can always be argued about. Although there “must have been a mistake,” Joseph K. can be arrested at any time, because no Joseph K. can ever give an account of his actions such that we know precisely the limits of his intention.
The moral fact that the containment of consequences is indeterminable forms the basis for one of the principle themes of the mystic. When Blake says that the hot needle that pokes out the eye of the songbird darkens the stars, he is merely alluding to the infinite ramification of consequences that, in a drier tone, is considered by Donald Davidson in the Essays on Actions and Events. When Jesus of Nazareth claims that God knows even the fall of the smallest sparrow, he is saying either: a, that all events in one unified throb surge up against the divine, or, b., that all events are distributed to their place and function by the infinitely fine consciousness of our Heavenly Father.
Counting consequences, a dry topic for analytic philosophers to rattle about in their small journals, is also the cry of the messiahs and the lyric poets. LI might be a dry rattler, but at least this topic puts us in good company.
Next post – or some post next week – we will return to the deeper structural problems, and try to show how the original, petty stimulus for this wildly expanding topic – Hitchens supposition that he can strip consequences from acts as he goes backwards to make pronouncements about the moral/political errors of Michael Moore – shows that Hitchens has abandoned one view of history, that of struggle, associated with Marxism, for a very vulgar Whig view. And, in so showing, points out certain questions about democracy itself. Fun, fun, fun.
Saturday, June 26, 2004
Bollettino
My friend T. wants to know why I keep going on and on about Christopher Hitchens, who he thinks is an unworthy Moby Dick to my Ahab.
Well -- I happen to think that Hitchens is a writer. As opposed to the usual buffoon. That's about it, for a reason. Reason not the obsession -- if the sun itself reached out a hand and struck me on my face, I would strike back -- to answer in the most Ahab-like way.
But also, also ... this isn't heading towards a tit for tat thing about C.H. I'm after an even bigger whale -- how we argue about politics.
Now, to continue. Let me take off the Ahab mask and put on the T.A. mask.
No moral theory can ground itself absolutely on consequences, since there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about a consequence; no moral theory can entirely ignore consequences, since absolutely separating moral categories from actions is like absolutely separating words from meaning.
Kant, who comes closest to the absolute anti-consequentialist position, summed that position up in the phrase, “the moral worth of an action does not lie in the effect expected from it, nor in any principle of action which requires to borrow its motive from this expected effect.” However, in order to make this proposition plausible, Kant trumps consequences with a notion of the universal that encodes a timeless schema of consequences. The famous example of the lie is the place where Kant makes his stand:
“The shortest way, however, and an unerring one, to discover the answer to this question whether a lying promise is consistent with duty, is to ask myself, "Should I be content that my maxim (to extricate myself from difficulty by a false promise) should hold good as a universal law, for myself as well as for others? and should I be able to say to myself, "Every one may make a deceitful promise when he finds himself in a difficulty from which he cannot otherwise extricate himself?" Then I presently become aware that while I can will the lie, I can by no means will that lying should be a universal law. For with such a law there would be no promises at all, since it would be in vain to allege my intention in regard to my future actions to those who would not believe this allegation, or if they over hastily did so would pay me back in my own coin. Hence my maxim, as soon as it should be made a universal law, would necessarily destroy itself. “
The idea that one’s act “should be a universal law” is a long, pious way around consequences, but it amounts to elevating a model taken from a particular realm of consequence – the model developed in law from precedent – and purifying it of the contingent character of consequence to reach its logical core.
In our own view, there are other problems with consequences from a moral view that lie in the nature of social action itself. The problem is: how are we supposed to “count over” consequences, as the analytic philosophers would put it?
This is a technical problem that goes back, historically, to the Stoic protest against Aristotelian logic, and the connection of paradox to ethics (which is rather puzzling to the modern sensibility – that is why Cicero’s Paradoxes is such a weird text to read). At the beginning of the twentieth century, as it became evident that logic could be completely redone and its power extended by using Cantor’s set theory, the stage was set for rediscovering the force of the scattered ethical insights of the Stoics. Deleuze, in the Logique du sens, realized this in the sixties. It is still LI’s favorite among Deleuze’s books.
The technical problem has a superficial aspect and a deep, structural essence. The superficial aspect is: how to count consequences. Here is an example, from Alan Moorehead’s book, Gallipoli. On August 3, 1914, Winston Churchill informed the Turkish government that the two battleships that the Turks had ordered from the British, which were so close to the point of completion that the Turks had already sent crews to England, were being impounded. As Europe teetered on the brink of war, Churchill was afraid of the use the Turks could make of those battleships. However, Turkey was allied neither with the British nor the Germans.
On of the consequences of that act was that the Germans had a chance to move in with two of their own battleships, which they ‘ceded’ – along with the crews – to the Turks. One of the commanders of one of those ships then took it upon himself, unilaterally, to put a blockade across the Bosphorus, thus preventing Russian ships from supplying Russia with grain, armaments, and other stuffs. In consequence, the government of Turkey had to either identify with that act or renege on it. In consequence of being forced to choose, the Turks chose to identify with the act, and so allied themselves, in Allied eyes, and then officially, with the Axis.
How many of these ‘consequences” are really the consequence of Winston Churchill’s act? The superficial problem, here, is that, depending on how one construes the world, it is difficult to disinter all the consequences of any act – as difficult as it is to pick out snowflakes from an avalanche. Nevertheless, we do it all the time – in trials, in domestic life, at work. We use conventions, and we think in terms of short ranges of time, etc. Yet no sane person, looking back over his life, trusts those conventions absolutely. We all feel like there are consequences of certain things we’ve done or had done to us that we didn’t understand at the time. We all think effects are, in reality, very hard to peg to a timeline.
So much for the superficial counting over of consequences. In the next post, I want to approach the deeper problem – which is the problem of complexity itself. But I thought I’d end this post with a translation, from the French, of a couple of grafs from Cicero’s third paradox, Les fautes ont toutes la même valeur, comme les bonnes actions – “Faults all have the same value, just like good actions” – to show that the Stoics were alive to the quantitative problem in ethics. They were interested in what we now call the problem of the continuous and the discrete:
The thing is without gravity, they say. But the culpability (culpa) is great; for the faults (peccata) ought to be evaluated not according to events, but according to the defaults (vitiis) of the persons. What makes for the commission of a fault can be more or less important: however one approaches the problem, the committed fault is one. That a pilot navigates a shipload of gold or straw into a shipwreck makes for a large enough difference between the facts, but none in the incompetence of the pilot. That someone violently mistreats a plebian woman: our emotional response to this is much less than if someone struck a woman from a respectable and noble family, but the agent has not less committed a fault, since to commit a fault reduces, essentially, to going over a limit (transire lineas): when one takes a step across it, the fault is established; it doesn’t matter how far one then advances in the fault, nothing contributes more to aggravate the transgressed interdiction. It isn’t permitted to anyone, certainly, to commit a fault (peccare). Thus, what isn’t permitted holds itself in a single block (in hoc uno), if it is proven that it isn’t permitted. If the interdiction cannot exist in terms of more or less gravity, or greater or lesser – since, if the interdiction has been pronounced, the fault (peccatum) resides in the fact that it is always one and identical – then it is necessary that the faults issuing from that interdiction must be equal (aequalia) to it.”
I’d urge anyone interested to read Cicero’s crazy little treatise, which is pretty short.
My friend T. wants to know why I keep going on and on about Christopher Hitchens, who he thinks is an unworthy Moby Dick to my Ahab.
Well -- I happen to think that Hitchens is a writer. As opposed to the usual buffoon. That's about it, for a reason. Reason not the obsession -- if the sun itself reached out a hand and struck me on my face, I would strike back -- to answer in the most Ahab-like way.
But also, also ... this isn't heading towards a tit for tat thing about C.H. I'm after an even bigger whale -- how we argue about politics.
Now, to continue. Let me take off the Ahab mask and put on the T.A. mask.
No moral theory can ground itself absolutely on consequences, since there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about a consequence; no moral theory can entirely ignore consequences, since absolutely separating moral categories from actions is like absolutely separating words from meaning.
Kant, who comes closest to the absolute anti-consequentialist position, summed that position up in the phrase, “the moral worth of an action does not lie in the effect expected from it, nor in any principle of action which requires to borrow its motive from this expected effect.” However, in order to make this proposition plausible, Kant trumps consequences with a notion of the universal that encodes a timeless schema of consequences. The famous example of the lie is the place where Kant makes his stand:
“The shortest way, however, and an unerring one, to discover the answer to this question whether a lying promise is consistent with duty, is to ask myself, "Should I be content that my maxim (to extricate myself from difficulty by a false promise) should hold good as a universal law, for myself as well as for others? and should I be able to say to myself, "Every one may make a deceitful promise when he finds himself in a difficulty from which he cannot otherwise extricate himself?" Then I presently become aware that while I can will the lie, I can by no means will that lying should be a universal law. For with such a law there would be no promises at all, since it would be in vain to allege my intention in regard to my future actions to those who would not believe this allegation, or if they over hastily did so would pay me back in my own coin. Hence my maxim, as soon as it should be made a universal law, would necessarily destroy itself. “
The idea that one’s act “should be a universal law” is a long, pious way around consequences, but it amounts to elevating a model taken from a particular realm of consequence – the model developed in law from precedent – and purifying it of the contingent character of consequence to reach its logical core.
In our own view, there are other problems with consequences from a moral view that lie in the nature of social action itself. The problem is: how are we supposed to “count over” consequences, as the analytic philosophers would put it?
This is a technical problem that goes back, historically, to the Stoic protest against Aristotelian logic, and the connection of paradox to ethics (which is rather puzzling to the modern sensibility – that is why Cicero’s Paradoxes is such a weird text to read). At the beginning of the twentieth century, as it became evident that logic could be completely redone and its power extended by using Cantor’s set theory, the stage was set for rediscovering the force of the scattered ethical insights of the Stoics. Deleuze, in the Logique du sens, realized this in the sixties. It is still LI’s favorite among Deleuze’s books.
The technical problem has a superficial aspect and a deep, structural essence. The superficial aspect is: how to count consequences. Here is an example, from Alan Moorehead’s book, Gallipoli. On August 3, 1914, Winston Churchill informed the Turkish government that the two battleships that the Turks had ordered from the British, which were so close to the point of completion that the Turks had already sent crews to England, were being impounded. As Europe teetered on the brink of war, Churchill was afraid of the use the Turks could make of those battleships. However, Turkey was allied neither with the British nor the Germans.
On of the consequences of that act was that the Germans had a chance to move in with two of their own battleships, which they ‘ceded’ – along with the crews – to the Turks. One of the commanders of one of those ships then took it upon himself, unilaterally, to put a blockade across the Bosphorus, thus preventing Russian ships from supplying Russia with grain, armaments, and other stuffs. In consequence, the government of Turkey had to either identify with that act or renege on it. In consequence of being forced to choose, the Turks chose to identify with the act, and so allied themselves, in Allied eyes, and then officially, with the Axis.
How many of these ‘consequences” are really the consequence of Winston Churchill’s act? The superficial problem, here, is that, depending on how one construes the world, it is difficult to disinter all the consequences of any act – as difficult as it is to pick out snowflakes from an avalanche. Nevertheless, we do it all the time – in trials, in domestic life, at work. We use conventions, and we think in terms of short ranges of time, etc. Yet no sane person, looking back over his life, trusts those conventions absolutely. We all feel like there are consequences of certain things we’ve done or had done to us that we didn’t understand at the time. We all think effects are, in reality, very hard to peg to a timeline.
So much for the superficial counting over of consequences. In the next post, I want to approach the deeper problem – which is the problem of complexity itself. But I thought I’d end this post with a translation, from the French, of a couple of grafs from Cicero’s third paradox, Les fautes ont toutes la même valeur, comme les bonnes actions – “Faults all have the same value, just like good actions” – to show that the Stoics were alive to the quantitative problem in ethics. They were interested in what we now call the problem of the continuous and the discrete:
The thing is without gravity, they say. But the culpability (culpa) is great; for the faults (peccata) ought to be evaluated not according to events, but according to the defaults (vitiis) of the persons. What makes for the commission of a fault can be more or less important: however one approaches the problem, the committed fault is one. That a pilot navigates a shipload of gold or straw into a shipwreck makes for a large enough difference between the facts, but none in the incompetence of the pilot. That someone violently mistreats a plebian woman: our emotional response to this is much less than if someone struck a woman from a respectable and noble family, but the agent has not less committed a fault, since to commit a fault reduces, essentially, to going over a limit (transire lineas): when one takes a step across it, the fault is established; it doesn’t matter how far one then advances in the fault, nothing contributes more to aggravate the transgressed interdiction. It isn’t permitted to anyone, certainly, to commit a fault (peccare). Thus, what isn’t permitted holds itself in a single block (in hoc uno), if it is proven that it isn’t permitted. If the interdiction cannot exist in terms of more or less gravity, or greater or lesser – since, if the interdiction has been pronounced, the fault (peccatum) resides in the fact that it is always one and identical – then it is necessary that the faults issuing from that interdiction must be equal (aequalia) to it.”
I’d urge anyone interested to read Cicero’s crazy little treatise, which is pretty short.
Thursday, June 24, 2004
Bollettino
The importance of being wrong
Christopher Hitchens’ mission, in his article in Slate on the “Lies of Michael Moore”, is as delicate a one as, say, the work of a police snitch. Hitchens shuffled off his leftist convictions and became a firm Bush supporter over the last couple of years, which some might call a conversion, and some might call a flip flop. But while he will allow himself the freedom of gaily adapting his opinions to suit his view of circumstances, he isn’t so tender minded about Moore – hence, the heavy sarcasm about Moore’s changing beliefs about the war in Afghanistan.
After demonstrating, to his own satisfaction, that if Moore’s pacifism is over-ridden by an unexpected hostility to Al Qaeda and Bush’s decision not to make a major effort to destroy it in the spring of 2002, then the change of heart must be prompted more by the vicious desire to hit out at Bush rather than any nobler motive, Hitchens gets down to what he takes to be lies in Moore’s film.
LI hasn’t seen the film, and doesn’t have a large stake in it. Hitchens thinks that it is proven that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD in 2002, that he was allied to Al Qaeda, and that the Bush administration’s interest in democracy has guided the entire American occupation. This is, nowadays, a pretty lonely position, and if the Lies of Michael Moore depend on the Truths of George Bush, I don’t think Hitchens is going to win the debate. But that isn’t our point. What interests us is a larger question brought up by his last paragraph:
“If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq.”
We will overlook – except for this catty aside – that Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq if Christopher Hitchens had had his way in 1991, since he, too, opposed the first Gulf War. So did LI. What is more interesting to us is whether we are supposed to judge someone’s belief’s by matching them, point by point, with their consequences. There are two themes here, actually. One is: how well does consequentialism work as an ethical – or, as Derrida would say, an ethico-political - theory? The other theme is more dialectical: is there a value in having and expressing an erroneous opinion?
We are gonna talk about that in the next post.
The importance of being wrong
Christopher Hitchens’ mission, in his article in Slate on the “Lies of Michael Moore”, is as delicate a one as, say, the work of a police snitch. Hitchens shuffled off his leftist convictions and became a firm Bush supporter over the last couple of years, which some might call a conversion, and some might call a flip flop. But while he will allow himself the freedom of gaily adapting his opinions to suit his view of circumstances, he isn’t so tender minded about Moore – hence, the heavy sarcasm about Moore’s changing beliefs about the war in Afghanistan.
After demonstrating, to his own satisfaction, that if Moore’s pacifism is over-ridden by an unexpected hostility to Al Qaeda and Bush’s decision not to make a major effort to destroy it in the spring of 2002, then the change of heart must be prompted more by the vicious desire to hit out at Bush rather than any nobler motive, Hitchens gets down to what he takes to be lies in Moore’s film.
LI hasn’t seen the film, and doesn’t have a large stake in it. Hitchens thinks that it is proven that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD in 2002, that he was allied to Al Qaeda, and that the Bush administration’s interest in democracy has guided the entire American occupation. This is, nowadays, a pretty lonely position, and if the Lies of Michael Moore depend on the Truths of George Bush, I don’t think Hitchens is going to win the debate. But that isn’t our point. What interests us is a larger question brought up by his last paragraph:
“If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq.”
We will overlook – except for this catty aside – that Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq if Christopher Hitchens had had his way in 1991, since he, too, opposed the first Gulf War. So did LI. What is more interesting to us is whether we are supposed to judge someone’s belief’s by matching them, point by point, with their consequences. There are two themes here, actually. One is: how well does consequentialism work as an ethical – or, as Derrida would say, an ethico-political - theory? The other theme is more dialectical: is there a value in having and expressing an erroneous opinion?
We are gonna talk about that in the next post.
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Bollettino
In order to judge whether Iraq stood out as some heinous partner of Al Qaeda, we need to have some metrics.
Let's use money and Logistic support as our measures.
Let’s compare what we know about the Iraqi funding of Al Qaeda to the funding it received from other states.
Saudi Arabia
We have, according to a cache of docs recovered from the Taliban government, a money trail that leads to the Saudis.
Newsweek reported that there is documentation, for instance, of a bin Laden associate,
Jon Juma Namagani, receiving two million dollars in Saudi “aids” on Nov. 21, 1999.
According to testimony before the house by Matthew Epstein and Stephen Kohlman, the flow of funds to Al Qaeda went through many channels that have been associated, in the past, with Saudi Arabia. One should remember that charities, in Saudi Arabia, have traditionally had a strong government direction. It would be unlikely, for instance, that a charity directed at helping Israeli victims of suicide bombings would endure the House of Saud's disapproval. In an authoritarian theocracy that has officially embraced an interpretation of Islam as its doctrine, the distinction between private religious charities and public expenditures is narrowed. Often the distinction exists in order to establish deniability rather than as an expression of the origin of the charitable impulse. The U.S. government has used that distinction itself, running money to the anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan through the jihadi networks in the eighties, and then -- after the defeat of the jihad -- leaving those networks be. However, we feel comfortable in supposing that if there were charities headquartered in Baghdad in 1999 running money to bin Laden, it would have provoked massive U.S. directed uproar.
Epstein’s list includes the Muslim league and The BIF. I urge the reader to take these testimonies with some caution – terrorism “experts” rely on facts that often reduce into assertions from unnamed sources in newspaper stories which often suffer the further diminishment of having been propounded, in the first place, by the terrorism experts themselves. It is that vicious circle in which proof is replaced by punditry, and proof by the journalistic version of “truth” - a hook or a scoop. Given their prejudices, the testimony seems pretty unexaggerated. The Muslim League, according to Epstein and Kohlman, opened a branch in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the eighties to support the jihadis in Afghanistan. The office was subsidized by Usama bin. The Muslim League evolved something called the Rabita Trust in Pakistan. According to the U.S. Government post 9/11, it provided financial and logistic support for bin Laden and was designated as an illegal corporation.
Another organization, hq-ed in Jeddah, the International Islamic Relief Organization, maintained a military training camp in Afghanistan in 2000.
Yemen
The Jamestown Foundation, which has shined the kind of unblinking eye on Putin’s insalubrious record in Chechnya that, in another context, would drive a typical Poe character to murder, has a nice interview with Jonathan Winer on the situation in Yemen. Winer mentions that the Afghanistan vets embedded themselves in the Yemen security
force. This is interesting in itself, since it shows us the vehicle by which Al Qaeda sympathizers can escape surveillance.
TM: Could you comment on terrorist financing as it relates specifically to Yemen, including any links with government officials?
JW: There are three or four main strands when it comes to this subject. One is the honey trade, with Abu Zubaidah and Khalil al Deek - both al-Qaeda members - who have been linked to the honey business. This is one sector.
The second sector involves the entities Osama bin Laden got going a decade ago in Yemen, including companies dealing with electrical appliances, ceramics, and publishing. These were operated through middle men and were linked to certain tribes: the Sana'a, the Sa'dah, and the Abayan. It is difficult to know a decade later to what extent these operations still exist.
There is also a huge amount of activity related to the Palestinians, especially Hamas, with the president of the country openly encouraging Yemenis to send arms and money to that group as recently as 2003. Charities and religious institutions have also been linked to support for terrorism. [...] Another aspect of the problem is the hawala dars [informal network for money transfer], who are tied to narcotics traffickers. They also have links to money launderers in the US, especially in New York.
TM: Were there strong ties to Afghanistan prior to September 11?
JW: Yes, with the most prominent and important links being those involving Sheikh Abdul Majid al-Zindani, who has been very close to Osama bin Laden. Zindani is a major player in Yemeni politics and has likely been as significant a threat as has existed to Salih's control of the country. He was the central figure sending Yemenis to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban and the central figure training and recruiting them as well. Zindani was designated as a global terrorist by the U.S. Treasury this February, and Yemen was asked to freeze all of his assets. Treasury has charged him with actively recruiting for al-Qaeda training camps and purchasing weapons on behalf of al-Qaeda and other terrorists. He was a leader of the Islamic Front, formed to channel Yemeni volunteers to the Afghan Jihad while enhancing Riyadh's influence in Yemen. The Islamic Front in turn evolved into the Islah party. Although Islah is part of the current government, it and Zindani also represent a major source of covert and overt opposition to Salih's government .
TM: Were there strong ties between members of the Yemeni government and Al Qaeda prior to September 11?
JW: Yemen was a prime location for the building of al-Qaeda in the early 1990's with Zindani and his Al-Iman University playing a substantial role in recruitment. Yemen also housed a number of Osama bin Laden's business interests. It's difficult to determine from the outside how governmental and private business interests relating to al-Qaeda were intertwined in Yemen prior to September 11. The government of Yemen has been largely run by and for a small group close to the president of the country. Corruption is rampant in the private and public sector, extending to the higher levels and exemplified by government conferred monopolies and contracting and licensing abuses. So to the extent that bin Laden had businesses in Yemen, senior officials or friends of the government of Yemen likely played some facilitation role at least. Separately, it is also pretty clear that there was senior support for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in Yemen's police, security and military services prior to September 11.”
Dubai
Douglas Farah, the Washington Post reporter whose book on the Blood Diamonds is sitting on my desk, the victim of an interview project that never got off the ground, had this to say about the intermediaries between the money al q.’s auxiliaries were making in Africa and the use of that money by Al Qaeda:
"Since it is exempt from international reporting requirements for financial transactions, gold is a favored commodity in laundering money from drug trafficking, organized crime and terrorist activities, U.S. officials said. In addition, Dubai, one of seven sheikhdoms that make up the United Arab Emirates, has one of the world's largest and least regulated gold markets, making it an ideal place to hide.
"Dubai is also one of the region's most open banking centers and is the commercial capital of the United Arab Emirates, one of three countries that maintained diplomatic relations with the Taliban until shortly after Sept. 11. Sitting at a strategic crossroad of the Gulf, South Asia and Africa, Dubai has long been a financial hub for Islamic militant groups. Much of the $500,000 used to fund the Sept. 11 attacks came through Dubai, investigators believe.
' "All roads lead to Dubai when it comes to money," said Patrick Jost, who until last year was a senior financial enforcement officer in the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. "Everyone did business there." When the U.S. bombs began pounding Taliban and Al Qaeda targets last autumn, the rush of gold and money out of Afghanistan intensified.
The Pakistani financial authorities said that $2 million to $3 million a day is usually hand-carried by couriers from Karachi to Dubai, mostly to buy gold. Late last year that amount increased significantly as money was moved out of Afghanistan, they said."
Iraq
Let’s do this Donald Rumsfeld style.
Were there any charities in Iraq funneling money to Al Qaeda? No. No charities have popped up equivalent to the Muslim League, et al, which functioned in Saudi Arabia.
Did the government of Iraq send money or arms to Al Qaeda? Here is a nice line from the 9/11 commission : “The September 11th commission report said that a senior Iraqi intelligence official reportedly met with bin Laden in 1994 in Sudan, and bin Laden "is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded."
Have any news reporters asked this simple question of Dick Cheney? No.
Will any news reporters ask this question of Cheney or Bush? No.
Why? Reporters have one parameter above all others: never embarrass the powerful unless you are sure they are absolutely unable to get revenge. There is a pretence in the press that there is a difference between celebrity journalism and hard journalism. There isn't.
Logistics
Support for Al Qaeda can be financial, moral, or logistical. Logistical support is rather mixed with financial support – the two can’t be completely separated. But for LI’s purposes, we will take logistics to be about training or any kind of military or intelligence cooperation with Al Qaeda.
Pakistan
Since so much has been made of the supposed contact between some Iraqi official and Mohammed Atta, a contact that the FBI has pretty much scotched – to believe it, one has to believe that Atta somehow had such foreknowledge of his posthumous reputation that he deliberately seeded a cut out in the U.S. to cover his connection to the Iraqis, which is standard logical procedure for Kennedy assassination conspiracy freaks – lets look at a connection for which the administration has supplied much less publicity – that between the chief of the Pakistan ISI, Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad, who by coincidence was in the U.S. on 9/11, and Atta, who was also, as we know, in the U.S. that day – no cutouts need apply.
Here’s the story that the Times of India broke in the wake of 9/11:
“NEW DELHI: While the Pakistani Inter Services Public Relations claimed that former ISI director-general Lt-Gen Mahmud Ahmad sought retirement after being superseded on Monday, the truth is more shocking.
Top sources confirmed here on Tuesday, that the general lost his job because of the "evidence" India produced to show his links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the World Trade Centre. The US authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 were wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan by Ahmad Umar Sheikh at the instance of Gen Mahumd.”
This is aid with a vengeance. Ahmad Umar Sheikh at that time was pretty much unknown to Americans. However, he’s become known since, as the organizer of the murder of Daniel Pearl. In fact, he is in captivity in Pakistan. Apparently, the U.S. government is superbly uninterested in whether the Indian secret service story is correct. One would think that the war on terrorism, or the 9/11 commission, or someone might be interested in a man who, it is claimed, sent money to Atta in the pre 9/11 period. Especially as we are willing to go to war on the claim that Atta might have met an Iraqi agent, if he had the power of supernatural co-location and could have existed in Virginia and Prague at the same time.
Here’s a recent story about the Sheikh:
“ISLAMABAD, January 19 (Online): Authorities plan to interrogate a convicted man in the murder plot of US journalist Daniel Pearl over his group’s possible involvement in an assassination attempt on President General Pervez Musharraf, security officials said on Sunday.
The British-born, Ahmad Saeed Umar Sheikh is to be shifted to Rawalpindi "soon", the official said on condition of anonymity. Investigators probing the Christmas day attempt on Musharraf’s life believe one of the suicide bombers identified as Muhammad Jamil, from Rawlakot in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, belonged to the Harkat Jihad-e-Islami, which is blamed in Pearl’s murder, he added.”
The connection between the Pearl murder and 9/11 is Bernard Henri-Levy’s obsession – which is perhaps why the assertion is better known in France than in the U.S.
The question is, what would give that accusation credibility? And, more importantly, if the Iraq connection to Al Qaeda turns out to be much less significant than the Pakistan connection – down to a possible financing of the feat – why don’t we ask questions of the Cheney’s and Bush’s about the matter?
We will do another post soon on the ISI.
In order to judge whether Iraq stood out as some heinous partner of Al Qaeda, we need to have some metrics.
Let's use money and Logistic support as our measures.
Let’s compare what we know about the Iraqi funding of Al Qaeda to the funding it received from other states.
Saudi Arabia
We have, according to a cache of docs recovered from the Taliban government, a money trail that leads to the Saudis.
Newsweek reported that there is documentation, for instance, of a bin Laden associate,
Jon Juma Namagani, receiving two million dollars in Saudi “aids” on Nov. 21, 1999.
According to testimony before the house by Matthew Epstein and Stephen Kohlman, the flow of funds to Al Qaeda went through many channels that have been associated, in the past, with Saudi Arabia. One should remember that charities, in Saudi Arabia, have traditionally had a strong government direction. It would be unlikely, for instance, that a charity directed at helping Israeli victims of suicide bombings would endure the House of Saud's disapproval. In an authoritarian theocracy that has officially embraced an interpretation of Islam as its doctrine, the distinction between private religious charities and public expenditures is narrowed. Often the distinction exists in order to establish deniability rather than as an expression of the origin of the charitable impulse. The U.S. government has used that distinction itself, running money to the anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan through the jihadi networks in the eighties, and then -- after the defeat of the jihad -- leaving those networks be. However, we feel comfortable in supposing that if there were charities headquartered in Baghdad in 1999 running money to bin Laden, it would have provoked massive U.S. directed uproar.
Epstein’s list includes the Muslim league and The BIF. I urge the reader to take these testimonies with some caution – terrorism “experts” rely on facts that often reduce into assertions from unnamed sources in newspaper stories which often suffer the further diminishment of having been propounded, in the first place, by the terrorism experts themselves. It is that vicious circle in which proof is replaced by punditry, and proof by the journalistic version of “truth” - a hook or a scoop. Given their prejudices, the testimony seems pretty unexaggerated. The Muslim League, according to Epstein and Kohlman, opened a branch in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the eighties to support the jihadis in Afghanistan. The office was subsidized by Usama bin. The Muslim League evolved something called the Rabita Trust in Pakistan. According to the U.S. Government post 9/11, it provided financial and logistic support for bin Laden and was designated as an illegal corporation.
Another organization, hq-ed in Jeddah, the International Islamic Relief Organization, maintained a military training camp in Afghanistan in 2000.
Yemen
The Jamestown Foundation, which has shined the kind of unblinking eye on Putin’s insalubrious record in Chechnya that, in another context, would drive a typical Poe character to murder, has a nice interview with Jonathan Winer on the situation in Yemen. Winer mentions that the Afghanistan vets embedded themselves in the Yemen security
force. This is interesting in itself, since it shows us the vehicle by which Al Qaeda sympathizers can escape surveillance.
TM: Could you comment on terrorist financing as it relates specifically to Yemen, including any links with government officials?
JW: There are three or four main strands when it comes to this subject. One is the honey trade, with Abu Zubaidah and Khalil al Deek - both al-Qaeda members - who have been linked to the honey business. This is one sector.
The second sector involves the entities Osama bin Laden got going a decade ago in Yemen, including companies dealing with electrical appliances, ceramics, and publishing. These were operated through middle men and were linked to certain tribes: the Sana'a, the Sa'dah, and the Abayan. It is difficult to know a decade later to what extent these operations still exist.
There is also a huge amount of activity related to the Palestinians, especially Hamas, with the president of the country openly encouraging Yemenis to send arms and money to that group as recently as 2003. Charities and religious institutions have also been linked to support for terrorism. [...] Another aspect of the problem is the hawala dars [informal network for money transfer], who are tied to narcotics traffickers. They also have links to money launderers in the US, especially in New York.
TM: Were there strong ties to Afghanistan prior to September 11?
JW: Yes, with the most prominent and important links being those involving Sheikh Abdul Majid al-Zindani, who has been very close to Osama bin Laden. Zindani is a major player in Yemeni politics and has likely been as significant a threat as has existed to Salih's control of the country. He was the central figure sending Yemenis to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban and the central figure training and recruiting them as well. Zindani was designated as a global terrorist by the U.S. Treasury this February, and Yemen was asked to freeze all of his assets. Treasury has charged him with actively recruiting for al-Qaeda training camps and purchasing weapons on behalf of al-Qaeda and other terrorists. He was a leader of the Islamic Front, formed to channel Yemeni volunteers to the Afghan Jihad while enhancing Riyadh's influence in Yemen. The Islamic Front in turn evolved into the Islah party. Although Islah is part of the current government, it and Zindani also represent a major source of covert and overt opposition to Salih's government .
TM: Were there strong ties between members of the Yemeni government and Al Qaeda prior to September 11?
JW: Yemen was a prime location for the building of al-Qaeda in the early 1990's with Zindani and his Al-Iman University playing a substantial role in recruitment. Yemen also housed a number of Osama bin Laden's business interests. It's difficult to determine from the outside how governmental and private business interests relating to al-Qaeda were intertwined in Yemen prior to September 11. The government of Yemen has been largely run by and for a small group close to the president of the country. Corruption is rampant in the private and public sector, extending to the higher levels and exemplified by government conferred monopolies and contracting and licensing abuses. So to the extent that bin Laden had businesses in Yemen, senior officials or friends of the government of Yemen likely played some facilitation role at least. Separately, it is also pretty clear that there was senior support for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in Yemen's police, security and military services prior to September 11.”
Dubai
Douglas Farah, the Washington Post reporter whose book on the Blood Diamonds is sitting on my desk, the victim of an interview project that never got off the ground, had this to say about the intermediaries between the money al q.’s auxiliaries were making in Africa and the use of that money by Al Qaeda:
"Since it is exempt from international reporting requirements for financial transactions, gold is a favored commodity in laundering money from drug trafficking, organized crime and terrorist activities, U.S. officials said. In addition, Dubai, one of seven sheikhdoms that make up the United Arab Emirates, has one of the world's largest and least regulated gold markets, making it an ideal place to hide.
"Dubai is also one of the region's most open banking centers and is the commercial capital of the United Arab Emirates, one of three countries that maintained diplomatic relations with the Taliban until shortly after Sept. 11. Sitting at a strategic crossroad of the Gulf, South Asia and Africa, Dubai has long been a financial hub for Islamic militant groups. Much of the $500,000 used to fund the Sept. 11 attacks came through Dubai, investigators believe.
' "All roads lead to Dubai when it comes to money," said Patrick Jost, who until last year was a senior financial enforcement officer in the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. "Everyone did business there." When the U.S. bombs began pounding Taliban and Al Qaeda targets last autumn, the rush of gold and money out of Afghanistan intensified.
The Pakistani financial authorities said that $2 million to $3 million a day is usually hand-carried by couriers from Karachi to Dubai, mostly to buy gold. Late last year that amount increased significantly as money was moved out of Afghanistan, they said."
Iraq
Let’s do this Donald Rumsfeld style.
Were there any charities in Iraq funneling money to Al Qaeda? No. No charities have popped up equivalent to the Muslim League, et al, which functioned in Saudi Arabia.
Did the government of Iraq send money or arms to Al Qaeda? Here is a nice line from the 9/11 commission : “The September 11th commission report said that a senior Iraqi intelligence official reportedly met with bin Laden in 1994 in Sudan, and bin Laden "is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded."
Have any news reporters asked this simple question of Dick Cheney? No.
Will any news reporters ask this question of Cheney or Bush? No.
Why? Reporters have one parameter above all others: never embarrass the powerful unless you are sure they are absolutely unable to get revenge. There is a pretence in the press that there is a difference between celebrity journalism and hard journalism. There isn't.
Logistics
Support for Al Qaeda can be financial, moral, or logistical. Logistical support is rather mixed with financial support – the two can’t be completely separated. But for LI’s purposes, we will take logistics to be about training or any kind of military or intelligence cooperation with Al Qaeda.
Pakistan
Since so much has been made of the supposed contact between some Iraqi official and Mohammed Atta, a contact that the FBI has pretty much scotched – to believe it, one has to believe that Atta somehow had such foreknowledge of his posthumous reputation that he deliberately seeded a cut out in the U.S. to cover his connection to the Iraqis, which is standard logical procedure for Kennedy assassination conspiracy freaks – lets look at a connection for which the administration has supplied much less publicity – that between the chief of the Pakistan ISI, Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad, who by coincidence was in the U.S. on 9/11, and Atta, who was also, as we know, in the U.S. that day – no cutouts need apply.
Here’s the story that the Times of India broke in the wake of 9/11:
“NEW DELHI: While the Pakistani Inter Services Public Relations claimed that former ISI director-general Lt-Gen Mahmud Ahmad sought retirement after being superseded on Monday, the truth is more shocking.
Top sources confirmed here on Tuesday, that the general lost his job because of the "evidence" India produced to show his links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the World Trade Centre. The US authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 were wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan by Ahmad Umar Sheikh at the instance of Gen Mahumd.”
This is aid with a vengeance. Ahmad Umar Sheikh at that time was pretty much unknown to Americans. However, he’s become known since, as the organizer of the murder of Daniel Pearl. In fact, he is in captivity in Pakistan. Apparently, the U.S. government is superbly uninterested in whether the Indian secret service story is correct. One would think that the war on terrorism, or the 9/11 commission, or someone might be interested in a man who, it is claimed, sent money to Atta in the pre 9/11 period. Especially as we are willing to go to war on the claim that Atta might have met an Iraqi agent, if he had the power of supernatural co-location and could have existed in Virginia and Prague at the same time.
Here’s a recent story about the Sheikh:
“ISLAMABAD, January 19 (Online): Authorities plan to interrogate a convicted man in the murder plot of US journalist Daniel Pearl over his group’s possible involvement in an assassination attempt on President General Pervez Musharraf, security officials said on Sunday.
The British-born, Ahmad Saeed Umar Sheikh is to be shifted to Rawalpindi "soon", the official said on condition of anonymity. Investigators probing the Christmas day attempt on Musharraf’s life believe one of the suicide bombers identified as Muhammad Jamil, from Rawlakot in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, belonged to the Harkat Jihad-e-Islami, which is blamed in Pearl’s murder, he added.”
The connection between the Pearl murder and 9/11 is Bernard Henri-Levy’s obsession – which is perhaps why the assertion is better known in France than in the U.S.
The question is, what would give that accusation credibility? And, more importantly, if the Iraq connection to Al Qaeda turns out to be much less significant than the Pakistan connection – down to a possible financing of the feat – why don’t we ask questions of the Cheney’s and Bush’s about the matter?
We will do another post soon on the ISI.
Monday, June 21, 2004
Bollettino
The Bush administration’s spin on the absence of any evidence of alliance between Al Qaeda and Iraq has been covered by the word “relationship” in the normal, deceitful way in which the Bush administration has chosen to talk about all foreign policy matters in the last three years. A point amply made by Fred Kaplan in Slate, who is repenting for his support for the war not by engaging in the Newspeak of such as the New York Times, retreating glacially from their record of misreporting while supporting ardently their misreporters, but by acts of real contrition. Making him almost unique in the press.
Why, however, don’t reporters uncover the meaning of the word “relationship” by asking simple comparative questions? As for instance – who was closer to al qaeda in 2001 – the government of Pakistan or the government of Iraq?
Who supplied al qaeda with more money – Saudi Arabia or Iraq?
Who supplied al qaeda with more weapons – the Pakistan Secret Service or Iraq?
Simple questions. Which, of course, will never be asked.
The Bush administration’s spin on the absence of any evidence of alliance between Al Qaeda and Iraq has been covered by the word “relationship” in the normal, deceitful way in which the Bush administration has chosen to talk about all foreign policy matters in the last three years. A point amply made by Fred Kaplan in Slate, who is repenting for his support for the war not by engaging in the Newspeak of such as the New York Times, retreating glacially from their record of misreporting while supporting ardently their misreporters, but by acts of real contrition. Making him almost unique in the press.
Why, however, don’t reporters uncover the meaning of the word “relationship” by asking simple comparative questions? As for instance – who was closer to al qaeda in 2001 – the government of Pakistan or the government of Iraq?
Who supplied al qaeda with more money – Saudi Arabia or Iraq?
Who supplied al qaeda with more weapons – the Pakistan Secret Service or Iraq?
Simple questions. Which, of course, will never be asked.
Sunday, June 20, 2004
Bollettino
One of LI’s favorite of all passages in English literature is that ending of Sir Thomas Browne’s Gardens of Cyprus:
“Though Somnus in Homer be sent to rouse up Agamemnon, I find no such effects in the drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.”
LI found his intellectual antipodes, Matthew Arnold, yesterday. We were mulling another shot at this interminable discussion of elitism. So far, LI had been concerned with elitism from the constructive perspective of the artist. But how about the perspective of the critic? Since Arnold famously thought that ‘all the best that has been thought and said” should be the standard of art, we decided to dip into the Works. Dipping, here, it turns out, should be done with one's bowler hat on.
Now, we have always liked Dover Beach. But Arnold’s prose is a rather unpleasant chore. One vibrates from a choking dislike of the man whose tone is so pervasively Pecksniffian. Arnold strangled the artist within him in favor of a critic who is, above every other consideration, desperately respectable. Not only that -- Arnold is an expert practitioner of what I call Kaelism – Kael-ism avant le Kael. Kaelism, as Pauline Kael, the movie critic, practiced it, is a critical form that concentrates firstly on the audience that one imagines is being enticed to a movie, or enjoys it; secondly, on what other critics have said about the movie; and only thirdly on the thing itself. It is envious of those pleasures it cannot participate in. It is exclusive about those pleasures it does experience. It is an amalgam of uninformed sociology and prejudice, and at its best creating negative images of what it dislikes.
It is also perhaps the dominant reviewing style of our time. It has never been the case that the critic can ignore the audience – and guilt by association is sometimes too irresistible not to indulge in. But it is a weakness, not a strength. Kaelism is particularly good at creating and maintaining cliques. This – end excursus – is why reviews are so often the most boring part of a magazine or newspaper.
Arnold’s clique was, of course, the Victorian professional class. A good example of Arnold at his dimmest is his essay, On Translating Homer, in which he considers criteria for good translation – should the translation mirror the original, or should it transpose the original so into the English language as to make the work seem native? He dismisses both of those goals in favor of another one: a translation should please those who can read in both languages. In other words, it should please the scholars – or the scholars of Oxford and Cambridge:
“Let not the translator, then, trust to his notions of what the ancient Greeks would have thought of him; he will lose himself in the vague. Let him not trust to what the ordinary English reader thinks of him; he will be taking the blind for his guide. Let him not trust to his own judgment of his own work; he may be misled by individual caprices. Let him ask how his work affects those who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry; whether to read it gives the Provost of Eton, or Professor Thompson at Cambridge, or Professor Jowett here in Oxford, at all the same feeling which to read the original gives them. I consider that when Bentley said of Pope’s translation, “it was a pretty poem, but must not be called Homer,” the work, in spite of all its power and attractiveness, was judged.”
In other words – let the mortician tell you the cause of death.
Luckily, the deathly hand of Jowett – that mummified respectability – does not lie upon the great Victorian and Edwardian translations – Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat, Burton’s Arabian Nights, Garnett’s Dostoevsky. Actually, I rather like Jowett’s translations of Plato, but the idea that success in translation depends upon the judgment of “experts” is just the type of thing that LI blindly dislikes.
The mass of Arnold’s criticism is a continual attempt to clean the sink – getting rid of the vulgar wherever it showed itself. Unfortunately, literature has an unfortunate addiction to vulgarity. Only sieved through the proper filters, those scholars at Oxford who, by the sympathetic magic of contact with the wealthy and aristocratic, are themselves respectable, can such things be enjoyed. This is how Arnold starts off his essay on Keats. It is an essay that almost makes one wish old Matt was still alive – so he could take a good punch in the nose. I am going to quote four grafs:
Poetry, according to Milton's famous saying, should be 'simple, sensuous, impassioned.' No one can question the eminency, in Keats's poetry, of the quality of sensuousness. Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous; the question with some people will be, whether he is anything else. Many things may be brought forward which seem to show him as under the fascination and sole dominion of sense, and desiring nothing better. There is the exclamation in one of his letters: 'O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!' There is the thesis, in another, 'that with a great Poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.' There is Haydon's story of him, how 'he once covered his tongue and throat as far as he could reach with Cayenne pepper, in order to appreciate the delicious coldness of claret in all its glory---his own expression.' One is not much surprised when Haydon further tells us, of the hero of such a story, that once for six weeks together he was hardly ever sober. 'He had no decision of character,' Haydon adds; 'no object upon which to direct his great powers.'
Character and self-control, the virtus verusque labor so necessary for every kind of greatness, and for the great artist, too, indispensable, appear to be wanting, certainly, to this Keats of Haydon's portraiture. They are wanting also to the Keats of the Letters to Fanny Brawne. These letters make as unpleasing an impression as Haydon's anecdotes. The editor of Haydon's journals could not well omit what Haydon said of his friend, but for the publication of the Letters to Fanny Brawne I can see no good reason whatever. Their publication appears to me, I confess, inexcusable; they ought never to have been published. But published they are, and we have to take notice of them. Letters written when Keats was near his end, under the throttling and unmanning grasp of mortal disease, we will not judge. But here is a letter written some months before he was taken ill. It is printed just as Keats wrote it.
'You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving---I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you. I should be afraid to separate myself far from you. My sweet Fanny, will your heart never change? My love, will it? I have no limit now to my love. ... Your note came in just here. I cannot be happier away from you. 'Tis richer than an Argosy of Pearles. Do not threat me even in jest. I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion---I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more---I could be martyred for my Religion---Love is my religion---I could die for that. I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet. You have ravished me away by a Power I cannot resist; and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often "to reason against the reasons of my Love" I can do that no more---the pain would be too great. My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.'
A man who writes love-letters in this strain is probably predestined, one may observe, to misfortune in his love-affairs; but that is nothing. The complete enervation of the writer is the real point for remark. We have the tone, or rather the entire want of tone, the abandonment of all reticence and all dignity, of the merely sensuous man, of the man who 'is passion's slave.' Nay, we have them in such wise that one is tempted to speak even as Blackwood or the Quarterly were in the old days wont to speak; one is tempted to say that Keats's love-letter is the love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice. It has in its relaxed self-abandonment something underbred and ignoble, as of a youth ill brought up, without the training which teaches us that we must put some constraint upon our feelings and upon the expression of them. It is the sort of love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice which one might hear read out in a breach of promise case, or in the Divorce Court.”
LI can find nothing to mock in this passage, so superbly does it mock itself – from the Miltonic flourish of earnestness with which Arnold falsely associates himself – Milton himself, with his most vulgar whooping it up for the death of Charles I, would certain have met with the schoomaster’s frown – to that final ending up in the Divorce Court. To write your love letter with an eye to posterity seems to be Arnold’s ideal. It is the ideal of a Gentleman’s tailor – if we are going to exchange status jabs – who takes his bride out to meet his clients. It is Arnold to the t.
Interestingly, the way in which Arnold rescues Keats’ seriousness is by showing that Keats could insult women. Misogyny is, in Arnold’s view, a step in the right direction. No underbreeding here.
“It is curious to observe how this severe addiction of his to the best sort of poetry affects him with a certain coldness, as if the addiction had been to mathematics, towards those prime objects of a sensuous and passionate poet's regard, love and women. He speaks of 'the opinion I have formed of the generality of women, who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar-plum than my time.' He confesses 'a tendency to class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats---they never see themselves dominant'; and he can understand how the unpopularity of his poems may be in part due to 'the offence which the ladies,' not unnaturally 'take at him' from this cause. Even to Fanny Brawne he can write 'a flint-worded letter,' when his 'mind is heaped to the full' with poetry:--- 'I know the generality of women would hate me for this; that I should have so unsoftened, so hard a mind as to forget them; forget the brightest realities for the dull imaginations of my own brain. ... My heart seems now made of iron---I could not write a proper answer to an invitation to Idalia.'
The truth is that 'the yearning passion for the Beautiful,' which was with Keats, as he himself truly says, the master-passion, is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental man, is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental poet. It is an intellectual and spiritual passion. It is 'connected and made one,' as Keats declares that in his case
it was, 'with the ambition of the intellect.'”
Arnold’s gross and naked transposition of his status anxieties into a criteria for knowledge, or into a standard of judgment on art, makes it a puzzle, to LI, how he ever acquired the reputation that he undoubtedly has. I suppose one of these days we will have to read Trilling’s study of the guy.
One of LI’s favorite of all passages in English literature is that ending of Sir Thomas Browne’s Gardens of Cyprus:
“Though Somnus in Homer be sent to rouse up Agamemnon, I find no such effects in the drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.”
LI found his intellectual antipodes, Matthew Arnold, yesterday. We were mulling another shot at this interminable discussion of elitism. So far, LI had been concerned with elitism from the constructive perspective of the artist. But how about the perspective of the critic? Since Arnold famously thought that ‘all the best that has been thought and said” should be the standard of art, we decided to dip into the Works. Dipping, here, it turns out, should be done with one's bowler hat on.
Now, we have always liked Dover Beach. But Arnold’s prose is a rather unpleasant chore. One vibrates from a choking dislike of the man whose tone is so pervasively Pecksniffian. Arnold strangled the artist within him in favor of a critic who is, above every other consideration, desperately respectable. Not only that -- Arnold is an expert practitioner of what I call Kaelism – Kael-ism avant le Kael. Kaelism, as Pauline Kael, the movie critic, practiced it, is a critical form that concentrates firstly on the audience that one imagines is being enticed to a movie, or enjoys it; secondly, on what other critics have said about the movie; and only thirdly on the thing itself. It is envious of those pleasures it cannot participate in. It is exclusive about those pleasures it does experience. It is an amalgam of uninformed sociology and prejudice, and at its best creating negative images of what it dislikes.
It is also perhaps the dominant reviewing style of our time. It has never been the case that the critic can ignore the audience – and guilt by association is sometimes too irresistible not to indulge in. But it is a weakness, not a strength. Kaelism is particularly good at creating and maintaining cliques. This – end excursus – is why reviews are so often the most boring part of a magazine or newspaper.
Arnold’s clique was, of course, the Victorian professional class. A good example of Arnold at his dimmest is his essay, On Translating Homer, in which he considers criteria for good translation – should the translation mirror the original, or should it transpose the original so into the English language as to make the work seem native? He dismisses both of those goals in favor of another one: a translation should please those who can read in both languages. In other words, it should please the scholars – or the scholars of Oxford and Cambridge:
“Let not the translator, then, trust to his notions of what the ancient Greeks would have thought of him; he will lose himself in the vague. Let him not trust to what the ordinary English reader thinks of him; he will be taking the blind for his guide. Let him not trust to his own judgment of his own work; he may be misled by individual caprices. Let him ask how his work affects those who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry; whether to read it gives the Provost of Eton, or Professor Thompson at Cambridge, or Professor Jowett here in Oxford, at all the same feeling which to read the original gives them. I consider that when Bentley said of Pope’s translation, “it was a pretty poem, but must not be called Homer,” the work, in spite of all its power and attractiveness, was judged.”
In other words – let the mortician tell you the cause of death.
Luckily, the deathly hand of Jowett – that mummified respectability – does not lie upon the great Victorian and Edwardian translations – Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat, Burton’s Arabian Nights, Garnett’s Dostoevsky. Actually, I rather like Jowett’s translations of Plato, but the idea that success in translation depends upon the judgment of “experts” is just the type of thing that LI blindly dislikes.
The mass of Arnold’s criticism is a continual attempt to clean the sink – getting rid of the vulgar wherever it showed itself. Unfortunately, literature has an unfortunate addiction to vulgarity. Only sieved through the proper filters, those scholars at Oxford who, by the sympathetic magic of contact with the wealthy and aristocratic, are themselves respectable, can such things be enjoyed. This is how Arnold starts off his essay on Keats. It is an essay that almost makes one wish old Matt was still alive – so he could take a good punch in the nose. I am going to quote four grafs:
Poetry, according to Milton's famous saying, should be 'simple, sensuous, impassioned.' No one can question the eminency, in Keats's poetry, of the quality of sensuousness. Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous; the question with some people will be, whether he is anything else. Many things may be brought forward which seem to show him as under the fascination and sole dominion of sense, and desiring nothing better. There is the exclamation in one of his letters: 'O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!' There is the thesis, in another, 'that with a great Poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.' There is Haydon's story of him, how 'he once covered his tongue and throat as far as he could reach with Cayenne pepper, in order to appreciate the delicious coldness of claret in all its glory---his own expression.' One is not much surprised when Haydon further tells us, of the hero of such a story, that once for six weeks together he was hardly ever sober. 'He had no decision of character,' Haydon adds; 'no object upon which to direct his great powers.'
Character and self-control, the virtus verusque labor so necessary for every kind of greatness, and for the great artist, too, indispensable, appear to be wanting, certainly, to this Keats of Haydon's portraiture. They are wanting also to the Keats of the Letters to Fanny Brawne. These letters make as unpleasing an impression as Haydon's anecdotes. The editor of Haydon's journals could not well omit what Haydon said of his friend, but for the publication of the Letters to Fanny Brawne I can see no good reason whatever. Their publication appears to me, I confess, inexcusable; they ought never to have been published. But published they are, and we have to take notice of them. Letters written when Keats was near his end, under the throttling and unmanning grasp of mortal disease, we will not judge. But here is a letter written some months before he was taken ill. It is printed just as Keats wrote it.
'You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving---I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you. I should be afraid to separate myself far from you. My sweet Fanny, will your heart never change? My love, will it? I have no limit now to my love. ... Your note came in just here. I cannot be happier away from you. 'Tis richer than an Argosy of Pearles. Do not threat me even in jest. I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion---I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more---I could be martyred for my Religion---Love is my religion---I could die for that. I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet. You have ravished me away by a Power I cannot resist; and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often "to reason against the reasons of my Love" I can do that no more---the pain would be too great. My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.'
A man who writes love-letters in this strain is probably predestined, one may observe, to misfortune in his love-affairs; but that is nothing. The complete enervation of the writer is the real point for remark. We have the tone, or rather the entire want of tone, the abandonment of all reticence and all dignity, of the merely sensuous man, of the man who 'is passion's slave.' Nay, we have them in such wise that one is tempted to speak even as Blackwood or the Quarterly were in the old days wont to speak; one is tempted to say that Keats's love-letter is the love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice. It has in its relaxed self-abandonment something underbred and ignoble, as of a youth ill brought up, without the training which teaches us that we must put some constraint upon our feelings and upon the expression of them. It is the sort of love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice which one might hear read out in a breach of promise case, or in the Divorce Court.”
LI can find nothing to mock in this passage, so superbly does it mock itself – from the Miltonic flourish of earnestness with which Arnold falsely associates himself – Milton himself, with his most vulgar whooping it up for the death of Charles I, would certain have met with the schoomaster’s frown – to that final ending up in the Divorce Court. To write your love letter with an eye to posterity seems to be Arnold’s ideal. It is the ideal of a Gentleman’s tailor – if we are going to exchange status jabs – who takes his bride out to meet his clients. It is Arnold to the t.
Interestingly, the way in which Arnold rescues Keats’ seriousness is by showing that Keats could insult women. Misogyny is, in Arnold’s view, a step in the right direction. No underbreeding here.
“It is curious to observe how this severe addiction of his to the best sort of poetry affects him with a certain coldness, as if the addiction had been to mathematics, towards those prime objects of a sensuous and passionate poet's regard, love and women. He speaks of 'the opinion I have formed of the generality of women, who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar-plum than my time.' He confesses 'a tendency to class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats---they never see themselves dominant'; and he can understand how the unpopularity of his poems may be in part due to 'the offence which the ladies,' not unnaturally 'take at him' from this cause. Even to Fanny Brawne he can write 'a flint-worded letter,' when his 'mind is heaped to the full' with poetry:--- 'I know the generality of women would hate me for this; that I should have so unsoftened, so hard a mind as to forget them; forget the brightest realities for the dull imaginations of my own brain. ... My heart seems now made of iron---I could not write a proper answer to an invitation to Idalia.'
The truth is that 'the yearning passion for the Beautiful,' which was with Keats, as he himself truly says, the master-passion, is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental man, is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental poet. It is an intellectual and spiritual passion. It is 'connected and made one,' as Keats declares that in his case
it was, 'with the ambition of the intellect.'”
Arnold’s gross and naked transposition of his status anxieties into a criteria for knowledge, or into a standard of judgment on art, makes it a puzzle, to LI, how he ever acquired the reputation that he undoubtedly has. I suppose one of these days we will have to read Trilling’s study of the guy.
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Bollettino
When LI was in a graduate school in philosophy, one of the philosophers we didn’t read was Leo Strauss. We did read, and we continue to read, a lot of the great conservative writers. There’s no better tonic for a lefty. But Strauss never struck us as an essential figure.
Well, he struck others as one – notably conservatives. So we should have paid more attention. And we have, in a scattered fashion, tried to get some idea of Strauss.
This is why we were interested by a link on Eric Alterman’s blog to this exposition of Strauss by Nicholas Xenos, on . It is an unrelievedly hostile assessment of Strauss from an unapologetically liberal viewpoint. We have nothing against this. Xenos knows his sources, obviously, and is familiar with the “Straussians.” Yet Xenos seems not to understand, or to willfully misunderstand, the ways and customs of conservative thought in the post World War I period in which Strauss came to maturity as a thinker. His root fault is to confuse fascism with any form of opposition to democracy. True, right wing thought since, probably, the period of the Dreyfus trial overlaps the crystallization of fascist thought, and shares certain characteristics. But it would be a mistake to think that fascism succeeded in monopolizing the conservative ‘conceptual space’ of the period.
In Strauss’ case, Xenos’ most damning evidence is a letter that Strauss sent Karl Lowith , after Hitler’s takeover of Germany. Here is Xenos’ translation of a passage in that letter:
“Just because Germany has turned to the right and has expelled us,” meaning Jews, “it simply does not follow that the principles of the right are therefore to be rejected. To the contrary, only on the basis of principles of the right—fascist, authoritarian, imperial [emphasis in original]—is it possible in a dignified manner, without the ridiculous and pitiful appeal to ‘the inalienable rights of man’ to protest against the mean nonentity,” the mean nonentity being the Nazi party. In other words, he [Strauss] is attacking the Nazis from the right in this letter. He wrote that he had been reading Caesar’s Commentaries, and valued Virgil’s judgment that, “under imperial rule the subjected are spared and the proud are subdued.” And he concluded, “there is no reason to crawl to the cross, even to the cross of liberalism, as long as anywhere in the world the spark glimmers of Roman thinking. And moreover, better than any cross is the ghetto.”
However, Strauss, by this time, was developing a conservatism that was the antithesis of fascism. Xenos doesn’t see this, partly because of the way he interprets Strauss’ Hobbes book:
“Also in 1932, he wrote an extended review of a book by the German legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt entitled The Concept of the Political, in which Schmitt articulated his notion that the core of the political problem is the distinction between friends and enemies. Schmitt later became a member of the Nazi party and a leading figure in the main legal organization of the Third Reich. In Strauss’s review, he criticized Schmitt from the political right. He argued that “the critique introduced by Schmitt against liberalism can . . . be completed only if one succeeds in gaining a horizon beyond liberalism. In such a horizon Hobbes completed the foundation of liberalism. A radical critique of liberalism is thus possible only on the basis of an adequate understanding of Hobbes.” His point was that Schmitt was, in his criticisms of liberalism, working within the bounds of liberal society because liberalism had become so dominant that it was difficult see beyond it anymore, and it was thus necessary to go back to Hobbes to see what was there before. What was there before was a very strong sense of the absolute dichotomies of good and evil. For Strauss, Hobbes represents the foundation of liberalism and modernism in the claim that these notions of good and evil are nominalist; they simply do not exist in anything other than our judgment about them. So Strauss was suggesting that you had to go back before liberalism to reconnect with the sort of absolutist distinctions upon which Schmitt was attempting to ground the political.”
Xenos, we think, misses the point. Hobbes was a revelation to Strauss not because of some notion of the relativity of good and evil that he saw in Hobbes. Rather, it was because Strauss believed that Hobbes was the first political thinker to shape his philosophy consistently on the notion of Will. It was Will – whether the Will of the People, in Rousseau, or the Will of the Leader, in Fascism, that Strauss felt had to be resisted; and the state and law gains legitimacy only insofar as it resists the temptation to represent it, or, rather, to give him his due, transforms it through those processes that make for natural order. Far from being a fascist, Strauss’ conservatism objected to the first and pretty much only principle of fascism: the Fuhrerprinzip. Hence, the references to the imperial in that letter have to be read in the context of the Nazi contempt for imperial Germany – the Wilhelmine society and its aristocracy that Hitler abhorred. One can think – I think – that Strauss’ nostalgia here is crazy, but it is certainly not nostalgia for a charismatic leader, but for the world before the Bolshies and the Nazis..
Xenos submerges Strauss’s texts with his own language, which is so full of the language of absolutes and cultural relativisms – so full, that is, of the language in which contemporary Straussians like to fire their popguns and charge – that it is easy to confuse with Strauss’ own. But I would suggest another language to understand what is going on with Strauss in the thirties. It is from Max Weber. Weber’s distinction between three ideal types of domination seems particularly apposite both to Strauss’ objection to Hitler and to liberalism. In fact, as odd as it might seem to Xenos, in the 30s there were many conservatives who thought that Hitler was the deviant endpoint of liberalism, with his all embracing state planning, and his way of intruding the state into the private economic affairs of the individual. If I were to make a grand typological generalization about conservatism, or at least the European variety, I would explain in terms of two moments: one is the synthesis, from the conservative’s viewpoint, of the charismatic mode of domination – in the modern era, the will – with what Weber called the rational, or legal mode of domination. The other is the anxiety this arouses. For other conservatives, there is, ultimately, only the pitting of varieties of two modes of domination. One consists of varieties of order, or tradition, the other consists of varieties of charisma, or the will. The conservative – and in this, Strauss is typical – fears the world becoming all too human. He seeks a hedge – nature or God – a limit to the human. He seeks the in-human. One can see this a bit even in a fundamentally liberal thinker like Hayek, with his emphasis on self-organization – that organization that is emergent, rather than planned.
I am no expert on Strauss, and don’t know how he carried through on his program in America. From the little I’ve read, Strauss seemed to suffer from the same adolescent nostalgia as Heidegger. Adolescent nostalgia is for what I have missed; middle aged nostalgia is for what I have done. You can’t have missed something as absolutely as the Golden age of Greek philosophy – hence the dislike for the modern, hardening sclerotically into a dogma.
Thinking about Xenos’ piece, I thought about other conservative writers of the twenties and thirties. In particular, about Bernanos. So I went back and read a 49 memorial elegy on the great Georges, by a man named Ernst Erich Noth. At the same time Strauss was seeking a way to meet Maurras, Bernanos was breaking with him – a break completed by the howl of anguish about Franco’s atrocities in Spain, Les grandes cimetieres sous la lune. Noth doesn’t bother to disguise Bernanos’ place in a line of French thinkers who were “prophetic”, but also anti-semitic, beginning with the odious Drumont. But Bernanos was closer to Bloy – the weirdest of all anti-semites, who seemed to actually believe that persecuting the Jews made the Jews holier – and hence, it was the gentile duty to persecute them. Or something like that. What Bernanos had that Strauss never had was a belief in prophecy. A belief, ultimately, that the in-human really is God. Here’s a quote from Bernanos, via Noth:
Oh, we are not exactly a race of prophets, like the Jews, we do not utter prophecies, but we fulfill them very well. We are not a race of prophets, to such a degree that our prophets themselves are scarcely distinguishable from other citizens, and we perform miracles only at the last minute, when there is no way of doing anything else…
When LI was in a graduate school in philosophy, one of the philosophers we didn’t read was Leo Strauss. We did read, and we continue to read, a lot of the great conservative writers. There’s no better tonic for a lefty. But Strauss never struck us as an essential figure.
Well, he struck others as one – notably conservatives. So we should have paid more attention. And we have, in a scattered fashion, tried to get some idea of Strauss.
This is why we were interested by a link on Eric Alterman’s blog to this exposition of Strauss by Nicholas Xenos, on . It is an unrelievedly hostile assessment of Strauss from an unapologetically liberal viewpoint. We have nothing against this. Xenos knows his sources, obviously, and is familiar with the “Straussians.” Yet Xenos seems not to understand, or to willfully misunderstand, the ways and customs of conservative thought in the post World War I period in which Strauss came to maturity as a thinker. His root fault is to confuse fascism with any form of opposition to democracy. True, right wing thought since, probably, the period of the Dreyfus trial overlaps the crystallization of fascist thought, and shares certain characteristics. But it would be a mistake to think that fascism succeeded in monopolizing the conservative ‘conceptual space’ of the period.
In Strauss’ case, Xenos’ most damning evidence is a letter that Strauss sent Karl Lowith , after Hitler’s takeover of Germany. Here is Xenos’ translation of a passage in that letter:
“Just because Germany has turned to the right and has expelled us,” meaning Jews, “it simply does not follow that the principles of the right are therefore to be rejected. To the contrary, only on the basis of principles of the right—fascist, authoritarian, imperial [emphasis in original]—is it possible in a dignified manner, without the ridiculous and pitiful appeal to ‘the inalienable rights of man’ to protest against the mean nonentity,” the mean nonentity being the Nazi party. In other words, he [Strauss] is attacking the Nazis from the right in this letter. He wrote that he had been reading Caesar’s Commentaries, and valued Virgil’s judgment that, “under imperial rule the subjected are spared and the proud are subdued.” And he concluded, “there is no reason to crawl to the cross, even to the cross of liberalism, as long as anywhere in the world the spark glimmers of Roman thinking. And moreover, better than any cross is the ghetto.”
However, Strauss, by this time, was developing a conservatism that was the antithesis of fascism. Xenos doesn’t see this, partly because of the way he interprets Strauss’ Hobbes book:
“Also in 1932, he wrote an extended review of a book by the German legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt entitled The Concept of the Political, in which Schmitt articulated his notion that the core of the political problem is the distinction between friends and enemies. Schmitt later became a member of the Nazi party and a leading figure in the main legal organization of the Third Reich. In Strauss’s review, he criticized Schmitt from the political right. He argued that “the critique introduced by Schmitt against liberalism can . . . be completed only if one succeeds in gaining a horizon beyond liberalism. In such a horizon Hobbes completed the foundation of liberalism. A radical critique of liberalism is thus possible only on the basis of an adequate understanding of Hobbes.” His point was that Schmitt was, in his criticisms of liberalism, working within the bounds of liberal society because liberalism had become so dominant that it was difficult see beyond it anymore, and it was thus necessary to go back to Hobbes to see what was there before. What was there before was a very strong sense of the absolute dichotomies of good and evil. For Strauss, Hobbes represents the foundation of liberalism and modernism in the claim that these notions of good and evil are nominalist; they simply do not exist in anything other than our judgment about them. So Strauss was suggesting that you had to go back before liberalism to reconnect with the sort of absolutist distinctions upon which Schmitt was attempting to ground the political.”
Xenos, we think, misses the point. Hobbes was a revelation to Strauss not because of some notion of the relativity of good and evil that he saw in Hobbes. Rather, it was because Strauss believed that Hobbes was the first political thinker to shape his philosophy consistently on the notion of Will. It was Will – whether the Will of the People, in Rousseau, or the Will of the Leader, in Fascism, that Strauss felt had to be resisted; and the state and law gains legitimacy only insofar as it resists the temptation to represent it, or, rather, to give him his due, transforms it through those processes that make for natural order. Far from being a fascist, Strauss’ conservatism objected to the first and pretty much only principle of fascism: the Fuhrerprinzip. Hence, the references to the imperial in that letter have to be read in the context of the Nazi contempt for imperial Germany – the Wilhelmine society and its aristocracy that Hitler abhorred. One can think – I think – that Strauss’ nostalgia here is crazy, but it is certainly not nostalgia for a charismatic leader, but for the world before the Bolshies and the Nazis..
Xenos submerges Strauss’s texts with his own language, which is so full of the language of absolutes and cultural relativisms – so full, that is, of the language in which contemporary Straussians like to fire their popguns and charge – that it is easy to confuse with Strauss’ own. But I would suggest another language to understand what is going on with Strauss in the thirties. It is from Max Weber. Weber’s distinction between three ideal types of domination seems particularly apposite both to Strauss’ objection to Hitler and to liberalism. In fact, as odd as it might seem to Xenos, in the 30s there were many conservatives who thought that Hitler was the deviant endpoint of liberalism, with his all embracing state planning, and his way of intruding the state into the private economic affairs of the individual. If I were to make a grand typological generalization about conservatism, or at least the European variety, I would explain in terms of two moments: one is the synthesis, from the conservative’s viewpoint, of the charismatic mode of domination – in the modern era, the will – with what Weber called the rational, or legal mode of domination. The other is the anxiety this arouses. For other conservatives, there is, ultimately, only the pitting of varieties of two modes of domination. One consists of varieties of order, or tradition, the other consists of varieties of charisma, or the will. The conservative – and in this, Strauss is typical – fears the world becoming all too human. He seeks a hedge – nature or God – a limit to the human. He seeks the in-human. One can see this a bit even in a fundamentally liberal thinker like Hayek, with his emphasis on self-organization – that organization that is emergent, rather than planned.
I am no expert on Strauss, and don’t know how he carried through on his program in America. From the little I’ve read, Strauss seemed to suffer from the same adolescent nostalgia as Heidegger. Adolescent nostalgia is for what I have missed; middle aged nostalgia is for what I have done. You can’t have missed something as absolutely as the Golden age of Greek philosophy – hence the dislike for the modern, hardening sclerotically into a dogma.
Thinking about Xenos’ piece, I thought about other conservative writers of the twenties and thirties. In particular, about Bernanos. So I went back and read a 49 memorial elegy on the great Georges, by a man named Ernst Erich Noth. At the same time Strauss was seeking a way to meet Maurras, Bernanos was breaking with him – a break completed by the howl of anguish about Franco’s atrocities in Spain, Les grandes cimetieres sous la lune. Noth doesn’t bother to disguise Bernanos’ place in a line of French thinkers who were “prophetic”, but also anti-semitic, beginning with the odious Drumont. But Bernanos was closer to Bloy – the weirdest of all anti-semites, who seemed to actually believe that persecuting the Jews made the Jews holier – and hence, it was the gentile duty to persecute them. Or something like that. What Bernanos had that Strauss never had was a belief in prophecy. A belief, ultimately, that the in-human really is God. Here’s a quote from Bernanos, via Noth:
Oh, we are not exactly a race of prophets, like the Jews, we do not utter prophecies, but we fulfill them very well. We are not a race of prophets, to such a degree that our prophets themselves are scarcely distinguishable from other citizens, and we perform miracles only at the last minute, when there is no way of doing anything else…
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Bollettino
What is an elite, and how does it differ from, say, any group?
This is the question that any artist has to ask himself about his audience. There is a disconcerting habit, in this country, to confuse the scale of one’s audience with the issue of elitism, as though only those works of art that extend to the largest scale – the movie Titanic, for instance – are truly “popular.” In one sense, this idea is sheer nonsense – we know that the manipulation of the audience actually produces less popular art, insofar as that art then gets run through a bureaucracy of ‘experts’ in public taste. The result is that a smaller set of themes and variations, and a smaller set of makers, gets chosen to produce the supposedly more ‘popular’ works or art. This leads, too, to thinner and thinner responses – art that doesn’t please immediately is selected out, in favor of art that does. The immediacy of effect and the popularity of the artwork are malignly coupled – deadending in the MTV video, the 30 second advertisement, the celebrity. In fact, as that immediacy becomes more compulsive, it becomes more “mine-able” by the artist – which is why, for instance, Andy Warhol’s Jackie Kennedys and Elvis Presleys still have an undeniable power.
In another sense, however, this idea, grotesque from the viewpoint in the above paragraph, is, from another viewpoint, absolutely correct. The audience for an artwork is not contingent to the artwork, but necessary to its internal structure. The audience is inseparable, in other words, from the making. The process of selection is already encoded in the artwork, exists there rather like Mephistopheles in Faust – as the necessary demon of art. And insofar as elitism is about some process of selection, there is no getting away from the question on the aesthetic plane. While morality is burdened down with the Universal – there is no process of selection going on, ideally, in, say, speaking the truth or not killing – the aesthetic only exists by way of various processes of selection. Which is why the ethical so often stands in a relation of envy to the aesthetic.
Chaouli’s essay about Schlegel displays the confusions surrounding the notion of elitism. Before, much to my friend T.’s chagrin, we quoted Chaouli’s thesis that the romantic art might be taken to found, not a political art, but art as an autonomous structure. Art for art’s sake, T. says. Here’s Chaouli talking about Schlegel’s lectures about Greek tragedy, given in Paris around 1805. First, we have to understand that Schlegel is moving from an earlier, much more revolutionary stance, which Chaouli claims for a perhaps unacknowledged predecessor of certain leading themes in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory:
“Such a judgment would find corroboration in the young Schlegel's sympathetic view of the French Revolution, his engagement for the emancipation of women, and his violation of erotic taboos (for example in Lucinde), which have led some readers to celebrate his kind of romanticism as "a continuation of the bourgeois revolution in the field of ideology." (16) That Schlegel at this point supports the French Revolution is well-documented (17): when reflecting on letters from Caroline Bohmer, a fierce supporter of both the Revolution and the short-lived Mainz Republic (who would marry, first, Schlegel's older brother, August Wilhelm, and later Schelling), the twenty-one-year-old Friedrich Schlegel confesses to be "drunk" with "this enthusiasm for a great public matter." (18) A few years later, in 1796, he writes the deeply anti-republican August Wilhelm: "I don't want to deny that republicanism is still a bit closer to my heart than divine criticism and the most divine poetry."
In that state of drunkenness, appropriately enough, Schegel formulated a ‘republican’ theory of Greek tragedy against which Nietzsche reacted later:
“One important element of what he calls the "republicanism of tragedy" (28) is the fact that the chorus constitutes the "representation of the people." (29) But crossing the barrier of the proscenium and placing the people on both its sides--as members of the audience, as members of the chorus--can become problematic in unfavorable political conditions:
“ The boundaries of the dramatic sphere are determined by the
strongest will of the mass of the audience which necessarily dominates and
guides dramatic representation. When for example higher estates or
the will of the Few rules, then they will establish as law their
conventional and accidental concepts; their pettiness becomes the boundary
of art. Limits of this kind would then be decency etc. These limits
disturb the freedom of art. But if the will were really public and if there
were only the law that the representations should be civil,
republican, public: that really imposes no limits on the poet. (30)”
So much for Chaouli, who has selected some very key citations. Schlegel’s last sentence has been repeated, with little variation, since Schlegel’s time by every artistic movement that has tried to move away from some, as it perceived it, hegemonic and sterile predecessor. Interestingly, this gesture parallels one spotted by Strauss in Hobbes as the characteristic move of the modern era – the move towards a Politics of Will. Just as the politician represents, somehow, the will of the people, so, too, the new artwork, the new way of making art, represents the will of the people in its own way – infinitely explained in the various manifestos that have marked art movements since 1900.
We will end this post with a long quote from Chaouli, and return to the theme of elitism and irony later.
“Schlegel provides us--or, more precisely, the four lone members of his audience at his lectures on The History of European Literature--with his own derivation of the trope of parabasis, which is worth attending to:
The only difference [between Greek comedy and tragedy]
consists in parabasis, a speech that in the midst of the play was held by
the chorus in the name of the poet to the people. Yes, it was a complete
interruption and dissolution of the play, during which (just as in the
play itself) the greatest licentiousness reigned and the chorus, which had
stepped out to the outer limits of the proscenium, said the grossest
vulgarities to the people. The name is derived from this stepping out
(ekbasis) (39)
Schlegel does not consider this "complete interruption and dissolution" of the performance to have harmed the unity of the comedy. It lies in the very form of comedy, as "pure comedy," to "dissolve in itself all ends and all intention"; in comedy "nonform itself is ... the highest art."
… Chaouli goes on to quote the rest of Schlegel’s passage:
“…then wit must be boundlessly free. This freedom is to be permitted
when it is meant for a small audience which has the right to take
part in such freedom. Under no circumstances is this for the mixed
crowd which is entirely unworthy of this freedom, where the most
unpleasant, the most pernicious consequences could be feared. (42)”
About which, Chaouli gives us a dense and stimulating reading. LI fears we are quoting too much of his essay, but this passage is absolutely crucial, so please excuse us.
“Athens, where the highest form of comedy was available, is an example of such abuse. "The magistrate was really forced," Schlegel notes, "to ban both the personal satire and the chorus with parabasis. But this coincides with the decline of republicanism and democracy." (43) The point is not whether at the time and place that he utters these sentences--Paris, 1803-04--Schlegel supports or condemns republicanism. What is crucial is that this line of reasoning reproduces the logic of the arguments from 1795 about the dependence of poetry for its freedom on democracy that I quoted earlier. While its evaluation may have changed, the basic point remains that a tight, indeed causal, link is assumed between political freedom (promoted by republicanism and democracy) and the boundless freedom required for the operations of parabasis and Witz, required, in short, for unrestrained irony.
To understand its exact political consequences, we need to look more closely at the trope of parabasis. Elsewhere I have proposed reading Schlegel's experimental poetics together with the language of late eighteenth-century chemistry, which furnishes Schlegel with countless metaphors and images. (44) I have argued that the very precariousness of chemistry--a field perched between the phlogiston and oxygen theories, between magical and rational explanations, between the machine-like logic of combinatorics and the anthropomorphic theory of affinity--makes it into a particularly fitting allegory of the poetical model Schlegel develops. The chemical model has the further virtue of allowing him--and us--to think about poetic entities without immediately pinning them to particular psychic or historical referents. We can thus avoid the temptation to think of the textual irony in mental terms, which would provide us with a second, "higher" consciousness "staging" the irony (even if permanent irony) for our benefit. Permanent parabasis is, so to speak, the inverse of the process of combinatorial coupling that yields poetic forms, for a recombination is only thinkable if we assume a momentary state of pure potential in which all valences are open and anything can happen. This chaotic state, in which substances are thrown into disarray (recall, in the Elective Affinities, the Captain's talk of A "flinging" itself at D) needs to occur before a new combination can form. Interruption is not an intrusion from outside (not a second voice), but rather a defining feature of the progression of the process itself. As Blanchot puts it, "[i]nterupted, it goes on." (45)
In such a state, distinguishing process from interruption is no trivial task. We could turn the usual understanding on its head and say that the chemical process consists of a long series of fluctuating states interrupted by the occasional stable compound. As in Wittgenstein's and Escher's famous drawings of Gestalt switches, we can flip the interruptions from the foreground into the background. In this precise sense, they are permanent, a series of uninterrupted interruptions.
When Schlegel writes that the poetry of Witz is "meant for a small audience" worthy of such boundless freedom, we are likely to frown upon such elitism. This gesture would certainly have the advantage of permitting us to congratulate ourselves on our great courage in standing on the side of republicanism and democracy and against the limitations of freedom. It may, however, have the disadvantage of obscuring our view to the pitfalls of transferring the poetic project to the political realm, and hence of missing the most advanced features of the poetic theory.”
Which brings us around again to the vexing question of what art is for. To which we will return in another post.
What is an elite, and how does it differ from, say, any group?
This is the question that any artist has to ask himself about his audience. There is a disconcerting habit, in this country, to confuse the scale of one’s audience with the issue of elitism, as though only those works of art that extend to the largest scale – the movie Titanic, for instance – are truly “popular.” In one sense, this idea is sheer nonsense – we know that the manipulation of the audience actually produces less popular art, insofar as that art then gets run through a bureaucracy of ‘experts’ in public taste. The result is that a smaller set of themes and variations, and a smaller set of makers, gets chosen to produce the supposedly more ‘popular’ works or art. This leads, too, to thinner and thinner responses – art that doesn’t please immediately is selected out, in favor of art that does. The immediacy of effect and the popularity of the artwork are malignly coupled – deadending in the MTV video, the 30 second advertisement, the celebrity. In fact, as that immediacy becomes more compulsive, it becomes more “mine-able” by the artist – which is why, for instance, Andy Warhol’s Jackie Kennedys and Elvis Presleys still have an undeniable power.
In another sense, however, this idea, grotesque from the viewpoint in the above paragraph, is, from another viewpoint, absolutely correct. The audience for an artwork is not contingent to the artwork, but necessary to its internal structure. The audience is inseparable, in other words, from the making. The process of selection is already encoded in the artwork, exists there rather like Mephistopheles in Faust – as the necessary demon of art. And insofar as elitism is about some process of selection, there is no getting away from the question on the aesthetic plane. While morality is burdened down with the Universal – there is no process of selection going on, ideally, in, say, speaking the truth or not killing – the aesthetic only exists by way of various processes of selection. Which is why the ethical so often stands in a relation of envy to the aesthetic.
Chaouli’s essay about Schlegel displays the confusions surrounding the notion of elitism. Before, much to my friend T.’s chagrin, we quoted Chaouli’s thesis that the romantic art might be taken to found, not a political art, but art as an autonomous structure. Art for art’s sake, T. says. Here’s Chaouli talking about Schlegel’s lectures about Greek tragedy, given in Paris around 1805. First, we have to understand that Schlegel is moving from an earlier, much more revolutionary stance, which Chaouli claims for a perhaps unacknowledged predecessor of certain leading themes in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory:
“Such a judgment would find corroboration in the young Schlegel's sympathetic view of the French Revolution, his engagement for the emancipation of women, and his violation of erotic taboos (for example in Lucinde), which have led some readers to celebrate his kind of romanticism as "a continuation of the bourgeois revolution in the field of ideology." (16) That Schlegel at this point supports the French Revolution is well-documented (17): when reflecting on letters from Caroline Bohmer, a fierce supporter of both the Revolution and the short-lived Mainz Republic (who would marry, first, Schlegel's older brother, August Wilhelm, and later Schelling), the twenty-one-year-old Friedrich Schlegel confesses to be "drunk" with "this enthusiasm for a great public matter." (18) A few years later, in 1796, he writes the deeply anti-republican August Wilhelm: "I don't want to deny that republicanism is still a bit closer to my heart than divine criticism and the most divine poetry."
In that state of drunkenness, appropriately enough, Schegel formulated a ‘republican’ theory of Greek tragedy against which Nietzsche reacted later:
“One important element of what he calls the "republicanism of tragedy" (28) is the fact that the chorus constitutes the "representation of the people." (29) But crossing the barrier of the proscenium and placing the people on both its sides--as members of the audience, as members of the chorus--can become problematic in unfavorable political conditions:
“ The boundaries of the dramatic sphere are determined by the
strongest will of the mass of the audience which necessarily dominates and
guides dramatic representation. When for example higher estates or
the will of the Few rules, then they will establish as law their
conventional and accidental concepts; their pettiness becomes the boundary
of art. Limits of this kind would then be decency etc. These limits
disturb the freedom of art. But if the will were really public and if there
were only the law that the representations should be civil,
republican, public: that really imposes no limits on the poet. (30)”
So much for Chaouli, who has selected some very key citations. Schlegel’s last sentence has been repeated, with little variation, since Schlegel’s time by every artistic movement that has tried to move away from some, as it perceived it, hegemonic and sterile predecessor. Interestingly, this gesture parallels one spotted by Strauss in Hobbes as the characteristic move of the modern era – the move towards a Politics of Will. Just as the politician represents, somehow, the will of the people, so, too, the new artwork, the new way of making art, represents the will of the people in its own way – infinitely explained in the various manifestos that have marked art movements since 1900.
We will end this post with a long quote from Chaouli, and return to the theme of elitism and irony later.
“Schlegel provides us--or, more precisely, the four lone members of his audience at his lectures on The History of European Literature--with his own derivation of the trope of parabasis, which is worth attending to:
The only difference [between Greek comedy and tragedy]
consists in parabasis, a speech that in the midst of the play was held by
the chorus in the name of the poet to the people. Yes, it was a complete
interruption and dissolution of the play, during which (just as in the
play itself) the greatest licentiousness reigned and the chorus, which had
stepped out to the outer limits of the proscenium, said the grossest
vulgarities to the people. The name is derived from this stepping out
(ekbasis) (39)
Schlegel does not consider this "complete interruption and dissolution" of the performance to have harmed the unity of the comedy. It lies in the very form of comedy, as "pure comedy," to "dissolve in itself all ends and all intention"; in comedy "nonform itself is ... the highest art."
… Chaouli goes on to quote the rest of Schlegel’s passage:
“…then wit must be boundlessly free. This freedom is to be permitted
when it is meant for a small audience which has the right to take
part in such freedom. Under no circumstances is this for the mixed
crowd which is entirely unworthy of this freedom, where the most
unpleasant, the most pernicious consequences could be feared. (42)”
About which, Chaouli gives us a dense and stimulating reading. LI fears we are quoting too much of his essay, but this passage is absolutely crucial, so please excuse us.
“Athens, where the highest form of comedy was available, is an example of such abuse. "The magistrate was really forced," Schlegel notes, "to ban both the personal satire and the chorus with parabasis. But this coincides with the decline of republicanism and democracy." (43) The point is not whether at the time and place that he utters these sentences--Paris, 1803-04--Schlegel supports or condemns republicanism. What is crucial is that this line of reasoning reproduces the logic of the arguments from 1795 about the dependence of poetry for its freedom on democracy that I quoted earlier. While its evaluation may have changed, the basic point remains that a tight, indeed causal, link is assumed between political freedom (promoted by republicanism and democracy) and the boundless freedom required for the operations of parabasis and Witz, required, in short, for unrestrained irony.
To understand its exact political consequences, we need to look more closely at the trope of parabasis. Elsewhere I have proposed reading Schlegel's experimental poetics together with the language of late eighteenth-century chemistry, which furnishes Schlegel with countless metaphors and images. (44) I have argued that the very precariousness of chemistry--a field perched between the phlogiston and oxygen theories, between magical and rational explanations, between the machine-like logic of combinatorics and the anthropomorphic theory of affinity--makes it into a particularly fitting allegory of the poetical model Schlegel develops. The chemical model has the further virtue of allowing him--and us--to think about poetic entities without immediately pinning them to particular psychic or historical referents. We can thus avoid the temptation to think of the textual irony in mental terms, which would provide us with a second, "higher" consciousness "staging" the irony (even if permanent irony) for our benefit. Permanent parabasis is, so to speak, the inverse of the process of combinatorial coupling that yields poetic forms, for a recombination is only thinkable if we assume a momentary state of pure potential in which all valences are open and anything can happen. This chaotic state, in which substances are thrown into disarray (recall, in the Elective Affinities, the Captain's talk of A "flinging" itself at D) needs to occur before a new combination can form. Interruption is not an intrusion from outside (not a second voice), but rather a defining feature of the progression of the process itself. As Blanchot puts it, "[i]nterupted, it goes on." (45)
In such a state, distinguishing process from interruption is no trivial task. We could turn the usual understanding on its head and say that the chemical process consists of a long series of fluctuating states interrupted by the occasional stable compound. As in Wittgenstein's and Escher's famous drawings of Gestalt switches, we can flip the interruptions from the foreground into the background. In this precise sense, they are permanent, a series of uninterrupted interruptions.
When Schlegel writes that the poetry of Witz is "meant for a small audience" worthy of such boundless freedom, we are likely to frown upon such elitism. This gesture would certainly have the advantage of permitting us to congratulate ourselves on our great courage in standing on the side of republicanism and democracy and against the limitations of freedom. It may, however, have the disadvantage of obscuring our view to the pitfalls of transferring the poetic project to the political realm, and hence of missing the most advanced features of the poetic theory.”
Which brings us around again to the vexing question of what art is for. To which we will return in another post.
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Notes
My friend, the Brooding Person, publishes a rather hasty epistle from LI.
Bollettino
“It is manifest that the sociology of knowledge is concerned with problems which have had a long prehistory. So far is this true, that the discipline has already found its first historian, Ernst Gruenwald. As he properly indicates, some of its dominant conceptions are simply more systematic and more clearly formulated restatements of views which found expression in the writings of Francis Bacon (see his discussion of the Idola), to trace them no further back. In this same tradition, marking the intellectual optimism of the Enlightenment in asmuch as it assumed that man is capable of acquiring valid knowledge concerning all problems but does not do so merely because of disturbing factors, is Voltaire’s doctrine of the priestly lie. From this view that man, who can know the truth, Is lead to conscious dissimulation by his interests (economic, the will to power, etc.), it is not a far cry to the doctrine that ideas are the outcome of profound interests which unwittingly tincture and distort every phase of man’s thought. Nietzsche starts out from this basis but adds a new facet: the fact that a judgment is false does not necessarily preclude its utility. This distinction between truth and utility finds further expression in the works of Vahihnger, Sorel, Pareto and G. Adler.” – Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Knowledge, 1937
Back to the ever diminishing returns of Friedrich Schlegel.
I will not tolerate groaning from the back row! You there, after class, I will want the floor mopped and the erasers cleaned!…
Merton’s famous essay introduced American audiences to continental controversies that have since made themselves home on the American campus. Rather like learning not to spit tobacco juice on the carpet, generations of American freshmen and sophomores have learned, at least temporarily, that there is more to the theory of truth than George Washington knew when he cut down that cherry tree. And they have put this knowledge merrily to use, producing a world of shabby advertisements, sham celebrities, and bogus political contests.
So it goes.
The early twentieth century American sociologists were bothered by the idea of the penetrative power of democracy. That is, they were worried that the governing class in all of its fields would have to contend with a public grown so recalcitrant as to refuse to obey.
The changes wrought on this theme by the New Deal were interesting. The image of the public was re-sentimentalized, and the image of the governing class was recast as the class of experts. This is still true today, with the word elite conjuring up a haughty, sniffing set of port drinkers ordering about the servants, while “experts” are standard copy in newspapers and magazines, to be quoted slavishly and questioned only by … other experts.
However, whether it was the worry that the elites were losing their coercive power or the worry that experts were being interfered with, the confidence that the truth could be discovered and communicated was still in the zone of G. Washington’s.
Merton’s essay was part of the gradual cultural undermining of this confidence. Merton used part of the essay to examine Mannheim’s very influential Ideology and Utopia. The idea that “ideology,” or a framework of assumptions and habits, could so distort the knowledge of ‘experts’ that it would close off the vivifying shock of reality was explored by Mannheim to the extent that it begins to play the role of Descartes’ malin genie – for couldn’t ideology distort every attempt at describing reality, or acting with reasonable expectations within it? Mannheim’s answer, according to Merton, can be recognized as an ancestor of the contemporary attempt, by some post-modernists, to find a place of ‘nomadic’ thought:
“Inasmuch as Mannheim has severely delimited, if not eliminated, the realm of valid thinking, he is compelled, as were his predecessors, to justify his own observations as true and not merely ideological. This he strives to accomplish by indicating that there is an “unanchored, relatively classless stratum, the socially unattached intelligentsia”, (sozialfreischewbende Intelligenz), who can, by virtue of their detachment, transcend class perspectives and attain valid thought, which integrates the various partial points of view.”
Well, we still haven’t gotten to Schlegel. No cheering in the back, by God I will have order in this classroom! We will, I promise, soon.
My friend, the Brooding Person, publishes a rather hasty epistle from LI.
Bollettino
“It is manifest that the sociology of knowledge is concerned with problems which have had a long prehistory. So far is this true, that the discipline has already found its first historian, Ernst Gruenwald. As he properly indicates, some of its dominant conceptions are simply more systematic and more clearly formulated restatements of views which found expression in the writings of Francis Bacon (see his discussion of the Idola), to trace them no further back. In this same tradition, marking the intellectual optimism of the Enlightenment in asmuch as it assumed that man is capable of acquiring valid knowledge concerning all problems but does not do so merely because of disturbing factors, is Voltaire’s doctrine of the priestly lie. From this view that man, who can know the truth, Is lead to conscious dissimulation by his interests (economic, the will to power, etc.), it is not a far cry to the doctrine that ideas are the outcome of profound interests which unwittingly tincture and distort every phase of man’s thought. Nietzsche starts out from this basis but adds a new facet: the fact that a judgment is false does not necessarily preclude its utility. This distinction between truth and utility finds further expression in the works of Vahihnger, Sorel, Pareto and G. Adler.” – Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Knowledge, 1937
Back to the ever diminishing returns of Friedrich Schlegel.
I will not tolerate groaning from the back row! You there, after class, I will want the floor mopped and the erasers cleaned!…
Merton’s famous essay introduced American audiences to continental controversies that have since made themselves home on the American campus. Rather like learning not to spit tobacco juice on the carpet, generations of American freshmen and sophomores have learned, at least temporarily, that there is more to the theory of truth than George Washington knew when he cut down that cherry tree. And they have put this knowledge merrily to use, producing a world of shabby advertisements, sham celebrities, and bogus political contests.
So it goes.
The early twentieth century American sociologists were bothered by the idea of the penetrative power of democracy. That is, they were worried that the governing class in all of its fields would have to contend with a public grown so recalcitrant as to refuse to obey.
The changes wrought on this theme by the New Deal were interesting. The image of the public was re-sentimentalized, and the image of the governing class was recast as the class of experts. This is still true today, with the word elite conjuring up a haughty, sniffing set of port drinkers ordering about the servants, while “experts” are standard copy in newspapers and magazines, to be quoted slavishly and questioned only by … other experts.
However, whether it was the worry that the elites were losing their coercive power or the worry that experts were being interfered with, the confidence that the truth could be discovered and communicated was still in the zone of G. Washington’s.
Merton’s essay was part of the gradual cultural undermining of this confidence. Merton used part of the essay to examine Mannheim’s very influential Ideology and Utopia. The idea that “ideology,” or a framework of assumptions and habits, could so distort the knowledge of ‘experts’ that it would close off the vivifying shock of reality was explored by Mannheim to the extent that it begins to play the role of Descartes’ malin genie – for couldn’t ideology distort every attempt at describing reality, or acting with reasonable expectations within it? Mannheim’s answer, according to Merton, can be recognized as an ancestor of the contemporary attempt, by some post-modernists, to find a place of ‘nomadic’ thought:
“Inasmuch as Mannheim has severely delimited, if not eliminated, the realm of valid thinking, he is compelled, as were his predecessors, to justify his own observations as true and not merely ideological. This he strives to accomplish by indicating that there is an “unanchored, relatively classless stratum, the socially unattached intelligentsia”, (sozialfreischewbende Intelligenz), who can, by virtue of their detachment, transcend class perspectives and attain valid thought, which integrates the various partial points of view.”
Well, we still haven’t gotten to Schlegel. No cheering in the back, by God I will have order in this classroom! We will, I promise, soon.
Saturday, June 12, 2004
News
Somebody came to the site this week and -- deciding that I knew a language or two besides English -- contracted with me to do translation work.
This is good. This is not enough. My fault, really. LI's little advert for the RWG Editing service is real, and we should point to it periodically. Check it out. I'm even going to be overcoming my habitual sloth and using the code my friend D. sent me to make the page Mozilla friendly, so that those who are using a better browser can actually use my little drop down table to see some of my work. In the meantime, I discovered, amusingly enough, that some institute in Florida that calls itself the Vargas Llosa Org has stolen one of the reviews I wrote for Newsday. Here is the link.
Somebody came to the site this week and -- deciding that I knew a language or two besides English -- contracted with me to do translation work.
This is good. This is not enough. My fault, really. LI's little advert for the RWG Editing service is real, and we should point to it periodically. Check it out. I'm even going to be overcoming my habitual sloth and using the code my friend D. sent me to make the page Mozilla friendly, so that those who are using a better browser can actually use my little drop down table to see some of my work. In the meantime, I discovered, amusingly enough, that some institute in Florida that calls itself the Vargas Llosa Org has stolen one of the reviews I wrote for Newsday. Here is the link.
Thursday, June 10, 2004
Bollettino
Napoleon once remarked that that, if he had been king, he would have thrown Beaumarchais in prison for writing the Noces de Figaro. “The Marriage of Figaro is already the revolution in action.”
Astute of Napoleon to notice – and symptomatic of the tyrant’s syndrome of mistaking the symbol for the fact. The conditions that would precede the revolution in action were happening in the countryside; repressing the symbol becomes, itself, a symbol of the essential narcissism of the court. Figaros in the fields were already claiming equality with his absentee owners by the admittedly less artistic means of putting their houses to the torch. By the time that kind of censorship is needed, it is already too late for that kind of censorship.
If the Bourbons had been treated to a collective lobotomy, you might get something like the Sauds. This family arose from wretched origins, captured power through deceit and mass murder, and has kept it the way a pirate captain keeps order on a ship: by the timely distribution of spoil. This isn't to say that the American embrace of the family wasn't a very clever move. In the post war period, it seemed like an obvious move. Having frozen our relationship to Saudi Arabia to what it was in 1957, however, we have become, so to speak, inadaptive to the Middle Eastern landscape. It is rather like betting on the dinosaurs. We now have two unpalatable alternatives in Saudi Arabia -- supporting the Sauds, which is unviable in the long run, or supporting their overthrow, which is unviable in the short run.
In the aftermath of 9/11, there were several articles exchanged between right wing think tanks about the dispensability of the Sauds. While think tankers were confidently asserting that we didn’t need the dirty oil of the Sauds, Bush was doing what he could to help the ruling family get through the storm of blame that would ensue when it finally sank in that the 9/11 atrocity was committed mainly by Saudis, financed by Saudis, and had its root causes in the politics of Saudi Arabia. The think tankers put out white papers with such silly ‘facts” as the one they loved, about how the U.S. received only 17 percent of its oil, or some such figure, from Saudi Arabia. Thus, if the country went off line, we would only have to make up for a 17 percent loss, right? As though the 83 percent of the rest wouldn’t create a massive competition in other oil fields for the more than 70 percent of overseas oil we need annually. The think tankers, for all their commitment to capitalism, have an oddly naïve view of it. If the price of gas shoots up to 10 dollars a gallon, do they really think the president, of whatever party, is going to endure the fallout? In fact, the Sauds did the usual favor to the American regime du jour, and in the aftermath of 9/11, kept the price of oil down. The quid pro quo was sustained.
There were two articles this weekend in the British press about the coming revolution in Saudi Arabia. It has been predicted over and over that the Saud family is falling, but so far they have enjoyed a very vivacious decrepitude. They always have the outlet of massacring Shiites to relieve tension in the kingdom. But the Kingdom's problems just keep ticking away. In the nineties, the Saud family quietly replaced the officers in the air force after the discovery of numerous conspiracies to overthrow the royals. Saudi Arabia usually stifles news of internal dissent, and international papers, who are happy to spotlight problems elsewhere – say, the dictatorial aspects of Chavez’s presidency in Venezuala – have obliged the Saudis by pretty much ignoring conditions within the Kingdom. But it is going to be hard to ignore those conditions when they start involving dead Americans, as in the murder two days ago of an American security contractor; or when they involve attacks on the infrastructure. It is the latter which just might provide the biggest surprise in the election season here, bigger even then the capture, if capture is possible, of Osama bin Laden. The Sunday Times published a piece by Tony Allen-Mills that begins with a scenario taken from Baer’s book on Saudi Arabia – an attack on Ras Tanura, the largest oil terminal in the world.
Here is the news hook: “The murders of 22 foreigners -one of them a Briton whose body was tied to a car and dragged through the streets by his attackers -provoked an instant spike in oil prices and forced western governments to re-examine their contingency plans.
The prospect of a catastrophic interruption of oil supplies from the world's largest producer is once again haunting the West.”
The NYT reported last week that there was a Saudi radio discussion about when and where one could mutilate the body of one’s enemy in Saudi Arabia a couple of weeks ago. As the Times noted, even the most anti-American imams in Iraq condemned the mutilation of the American contractors in Fallujah. But this isn’t the way Saudi’s ‘theologians’ think of the problem.
Perhaps the Figaro moment was that odd hostage crisis last week. As Allen-Mills describes it:
“Others argue that such speculation is unduly alarmist; that Al-Qaeda is a spent force, the oilfields are well-defended, and that Crown Prince Abdullah and senior members of his family remain unshakably in charge.
That was certainly Abdullah's message after Saudi commandos stormed the Oasis compound last Sunday and freed 50 hostages held by a small group of gunmen.
"Security forces will, God willing, deal with them and others like them by force," the country's de-facto ruler announced. Yesterday a religious edict was issued calling on all Saudis to "inform on anyone planning an act of sabotage".
"But that was not the message conveyed by the bizarre ending to the siege at al-Khobar, where hundreds of Saudi police and commandos surrounded the compound yet somehow allowed all but one of the terrorists to escape. Suspicion of collusion between terrorists and security forces continues to undermine western confidence in the regime.”
The other article, by the Independent’s Mark Hollingsworth, focused less on worst case scenarios than on Saudi Arabia’s financial power. For those who think the U.S. can simply shrug off that power, there were some interesting facts and figures.
“The Saudis also keep an estimated $1trillion (pounds 550bn) on deposit in US banks and another $1trillion or so in the stock market. If they were to suddenly withdraw their investments, it would have a catastrophic impact on the US economy.”
LI thinks we will look back at the Bush response to 9/11 with puzzlement. How could we be so clueless as to have gone to war with Iraq, rather than engaging Al Qaeda? While Osama is both alive and well in a Pakistan that has proven, this spring, that it doesn’t have the strength to dislodge the terrorists, the real threat to the U.S. is growing in a Saudi Arabia where Osama has become a folk hero. While Al Qaeda’s point man for Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz al-Moqrin, crows about the latest attacks on foreigners in the country, the Saud’s keep up their policy of bribery to the tune of subsidizing the thousands of Saud “princes” to the tune of 19,000 dollars per month. Meanwhile, the Saud underclass gets nothing.
The revolution is in action already in the oil fields. We are heading for the falls, captain.
Napoleon once remarked that that, if he had been king, he would have thrown Beaumarchais in prison for writing the Noces de Figaro. “The Marriage of Figaro is already the revolution in action.”
Astute of Napoleon to notice – and symptomatic of the tyrant’s syndrome of mistaking the symbol for the fact. The conditions that would precede the revolution in action were happening in the countryside; repressing the symbol becomes, itself, a symbol of the essential narcissism of the court. Figaros in the fields were already claiming equality with his absentee owners by the admittedly less artistic means of putting their houses to the torch. By the time that kind of censorship is needed, it is already too late for that kind of censorship.
If the Bourbons had been treated to a collective lobotomy, you might get something like the Sauds. This family arose from wretched origins, captured power through deceit and mass murder, and has kept it the way a pirate captain keeps order on a ship: by the timely distribution of spoil. This isn't to say that the American embrace of the family wasn't a very clever move. In the post war period, it seemed like an obvious move. Having frozen our relationship to Saudi Arabia to what it was in 1957, however, we have become, so to speak, inadaptive to the Middle Eastern landscape. It is rather like betting on the dinosaurs. We now have two unpalatable alternatives in Saudi Arabia -- supporting the Sauds, which is unviable in the long run, or supporting their overthrow, which is unviable in the short run.
In the aftermath of 9/11, there were several articles exchanged between right wing think tanks about the dispensability of the Sauds. While think tankers were confidently asserting that we didn’t need the dirty oil of the Sauds, Bush was doing what he could to help the ruling family get through the storm of blame that would ensue when it finally sank in that the 9/11 atrocity was committed mainly by Saudis, financed by Saudis, and had its root causes in the politics of Saudi Arabia. The think tankers put out white papers with such silly ‘facts” as the one they loved, about how the U.S. received only 17 percent of its oil, or some such figure, from Saudi Arabia. Thus, if the country went off line, we would only have to make up for a 17 percent loss, right? As though the 83 percent of the rest wouldn’t create a massive competition in other oil fields for the more than 70 percent of overseas oil we need annually. The think tankers, for all their commitment to capitalism, have an oddly naïve view of it. If the price of gas shoots up to 10 dollars a gallon, do they really think the president, of whatever party, is going to endure the fallout? In fact, the Sauds did the usual favor to the American regime du jour, and in the aftermath of 9/11, kept the price of oil down. The quid pro quo was sustained.
There were two articles this weekend in the British press about the coming revolution in Saudi Arabia. It has been predicted over and over that the Saud family is falling, but so far they have enjoyed a very vivacious decrepitude. They always have the outlet of massacring Shiites to relieve tension in the kingdom. But the Kingdom's problems just keep ticking away. In the nineties, the Saud family quietly replaced the officers in the air force after the discovery of numerous conspiracies to overthrow the royals. Saudi Arabia usually stifles news of internal dissent, and international papers, who are happy to spotlight problems elsewhere – say, the dictatorial aspects of Chavez’s presidency in Venezuala – have obliged the Saudis by pretty much ignoring conditions within the Kingdom. But it is going to be hard to ignore those conditions when they start involving dead Americans, as in the murder two days ago of an American security contractor; or when they involve attacks on the infrastructure. It is the latter which just might provide the biggest surprise in the election season here, bigger even then the capture, if capture is possible, of Osama bin Laden. The Sunday Times published a piece by Tony Allen-Mills that begins with a scenario taken from Baer’s book on Saudi Arabia – an attack on Ras Tanura, the largest oil terminal in the world.
Here is the news hook: “The murders of 22 foreigners -one of them a Briton whose body was tied to a car and dragged through the streets by his attackers -provoked an instant spike in oil prices and forced western governments to re-examine their contingency plans.
The prospect of a catastrophic interruption of oil supplies from the world's largest producer is once again haunting the West.”
The NYT reported last week that there was a Saudi radio discussion about when and where one could mutilate the body of one’s enemy in Saudi Arabia a couple of weeks ago. As the Times noted, even the most anti-American imams in Iraq condemned the mutilation of the American contractors in Fallujah. But this isn’t the way Saudi’s ‘theologians’ think of the problem.
Perhaps the Figaro moment was that odd hostage crisis last week. As Allen-Mills describes it:
“Others argue that such speculation is unduly alarmist; that Al-Qaeda is a spent force, the oilfields are well-defended, and that Crown Prince Abdullah and senior members of his family remain unshakably in charge.
That was certainly Abdullah's message after Saudi commandos stormed the Oasis compound last Sunday and freed 50 hostages held by a small group of gunmen.
"Security forces will, God willing, deal with them and others like them by force," the country's de-facto ruler announced. Yesterday a religious edict was issued calling on all Saudis to "inform on anyone planning an act of sabotage".
"But that was not the message conveyed by the bizarre ending to the siege at al-Khobar, where hundreds of Saudi police and commandos surrounded the compound yet somehow allowed all but one of the terrorists to escape. Suspicion of collusion between terrorists and security forces continues to undermine western confidence in the regime.”
The other article, by the Independent’s Mark Hollingsworth, focused less on worst case scenarios than on Saudi Arabia’s financial power. For those who think the U.S. can simply shrug off that power, there were some interesting facts and figures.
“The Saudis also keep an estimated $1trillion (pounds 550bn) on deposit in US banks and another $1trillion or so in the stock market. If they were to suddenly withdraw their investments, it would have a catastrophic impact on the US economy.”
LI thinks we will look back at the Bush response to 9/11 with puzzlement. How could we be so clueless as to have gone to war with Iraq, rather than engaging Al Qaeda? While Osama is both alive and well in a Pakistan that has proven, this spring, that it doesn’t have the strength to dislodge the terrorists, the real threat to the U.S. is growing in a Saudi Arabia where Osama has become a folk hero. While Al Qaeda’s point man for Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz al-Moqrin, crows about the latest attacks on foreigners in the country, the Saud’s keep up their policy of bribery to the tune of subsidizing the thousands of Saud “princes” to the tune of 19,000 dollars per month. Meanwhile, the Saud underclass gets nothing.
The revolution is in action already in the oil fields. We are heading for the falls, captain.
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
Bollettino
Well, my post about elites seems doomed to perpetual postponement. First Reagan dies, which I had to lament; then there was Schlegel to explain; and lately I’ve been getting epistles from my friend T. honing in with an evil eye on two sentences from the essay of Chaouli’s I quoted. The offending passage reads: “The line of reasoning I propose assumes that romanticism, far from furthering a mutual implication of art and politics (or art and religion, or art and philosophy), promotes their differentiation. With romanticism, art (and not politics, religion, or philosophy) increasingly decides what art should be.”
To which my friend, knowing that I was slyly inching towards some beret headed affirmation of the autonomy of art myself, the dangerous doctrine of art for the sake of art, made the following crabby but just remarks:
the “for the sake of" is in my craw (wherever that is)....either (i) the artist knows for what it is that the item is executed and such knowledge is not articulated in any way save for the item executed - this in the sense of 'I have been to the promised land and return with this mere indication of what is the bounty to be had there'; and perhaps (ii) I am merely a vessel for that which generally flows - in the sense of 'I have no choice but to make that which is made merely through my hands'. Each in its own way a narcissism which is ever reproached for it lack of accountability (read: dichotomously claiming authorship and messengership). "For the sake of" as a justification beyond formal terms of evaluation (yes, I'm thinking of Clem Greenberg) and/or execution.”
Well, T. had caught me. I was hoping to sneak through this without running into that cursed slogan. I agree with my friend that it is a wretched idea, and replied:
“… But here is what I was thinking. Politicians and artists appear, historically, about the same time in the early modern period. Their appearance is all about social folds unknown in the medieval period, such that a man could seek power independently of his rank -- like Walpole or Ben Franklin -- just as a man could write or paint or compose independently of his institutional patronage.
Okay, now what you say about for the sake of sticking in your craw -- well, it sticks in the craw of every artist, partly because it is a misplaced generalization. Art is not for the sake of art, but for the sake of this or that artwork. It eradicates, in other words, the punctum -- the now of the artwork, within the confines of which one works -- in favor of the universal -- where there is no confining, and no work, and no fun.
But that is also not entirely true. Art absorbs art. Now when you make the choices i and ii, I think: hmm, does the artist know? I like the ineffability of the known object -- it is the earth, it is promised, and don't bother me with the contracts and the lawyers -- but I keep thinking, knowing about art is not the business of the artist, but the critic or the philosopher.”
That’s a shifty reply, I admit it. My move – to highlight the cognitive side of the word “know” – is not completely above board.
T., as a matter of fact, had a premonition of my move, and wrote me back:
“…not what the artist knows, but what the artist does (thinking, at this very moment, of Twombly's pencil marks on pigment adjacent to raw canvas). “
This discussion made me wonder about the phrase art for art’s sake, which I vaguely attributed to Gautier. I looked it up and found, on this site, some interesting background:
“The expression,” the site claims, “of art for the sake of art appears for the first time in Frence in 1818, in series of lectures by Victor Cousin, entitled ‘on the foundation of the absolute ideas of the true, the beautiful and the good.”
A few paragraphs down, we come to Gautier:
But it is the preface to the novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834) that appears to be the first manifesto of the art for the sake of art school. Of course, a flagrant desire to shock the bourgeois is no stranger to Gautier’s attitude, with the “multiple love affairs of the diva, Madeleine de Maupin (Garnier: 1930,. p. 42). But at the same time he wants to vindicate his opposition to certain moralizing clichés of romanticism. Gautier reproaches the “moral journalists” with their hypocrisy, for, on the one hand, contemporary literature has nothing approaching the licentiousness of certain comedies of Moliere and Marivaux, and, on the other hand, “Books follow the morals of the time and the morals don’t follow the books.” But he really gets indignant at the utilitarian critics who ask, “what purpose does this book serve?” : There is nothing really beautiful that can serve anything else, for everything that is useful is ugly, being the expression of some need, and the needs of men are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and infirm nature. The most useful place in the house is the bathroom. ( « Il n’y a de » vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir ; tout ce qui est utile est laid, car c’est l’expression de quelque besoin, et ceux de l’homme sont ignobles et dégoûtants, comme sa pauvre et infirme nature. – L’endroit le plus utile de la maison, ce sont les latrines » (p. 28).”
Perhaps it is an appropriate fate that the apostle of such a high brow doctrine should be generally known, in this country, as one of the fathers of the Mummy story – Gautier’s Novel (or Romance) of the Mummy was one of the first uses of the mummy returns motif in the 19th century. This site, with its story of the typically arrogant English amateurs entertaining Victorian audiences by ‘unrolling” mummies in front of them, ought to contextualize Gautier’s orientalism. I never found the Mummy a frightful creature when I was a boy. But I’ve always found the decay of the human body frightful. The Mummy, all trussed up with bandages like the cartoon of some Dagwood in the hospital, seemed terminally silly. It would be hard to mistake this genre for anything remotely highbrow – although I admit that I haven’t read the novel. I’m going to, though – it occurred to me that I should read at least one of Gautier’s novels. I’ve downloaded it – as you can too, gentle reader, here .
Well, my post about elites seems doomed to perpetual postponement. First Reagan dies, which I had to lament; then there was Schlegel to explain; and lately I’ve been getting epistles from my friend T. honing in with an evil eye on two sentences from the essay of Chaouli’s I quoted. The offending passage reads: “The line of reasoning I propose assumes that romanticism, far from furthering a mutual implication of art and politics (or art and religion, or art and philosophy), promotes their differentiation. With romanticism, art (and not politics, religion, or philosophy) increasingly decides what art should be.”
To which my friend, knowing that I was slyly inching towards some beret headed affirmation of the autonomy of art myself, the dangerous doctrine of art for the sake of art, made the following crabby but just remarks:
the “for the sake of" is in my craw (wherever that is)....either (i) the artist knows for what it is that the item is executed and such knowledge is not articulated in any way save for the item executed - this in the sense of 'I have been to the promised land and return with this mere indication of what is the bounty to be had there'; and perhaps (ii) I am merely a vessel for that which generally flows - in the sense of 'I have no choice but to make that which is made merely through my hands'. Each in its own way a narcissism which is ever reproached for it lack of accountability (read: dichotomously claiming authorship and messengership). "For the sake of" as a justification beyond formal terms of evaluation (yes, I'm thinking of Clem Greenberg) and/or execution.”
Well, T. had caught me. I was hoping to sneak through this without running into that cursed slogan. I agree with my friend that it is a wretched idea, and replied:
“… But here is what I was thinking. Politicians and artists appear, historically, about the same time in the early modern period. Their appearance is all about social folds unknown in the medieval period, such that a man could seek power independently of his rank -- like Walpole or Ben Franklin -- just as a man could write or paint or compose independently of his institutional patronage.
Okay, now what you say about for the sake of sticking in your craw -- well, it sticks in the craw of every artist, partly because it is a misplaced generalization. Art is not for the sake of art, but for the sake of this or that artwork. It eradicates, in other words, the punctum -- the now of the artwork, within the confines of which one works -- in favor of the universal -- where there is no confining, and no work, and no fun.
But that is also not entirely true. Art absorbs art. Now when you make the choices i and ii, I think: hmm, does the artist know? I like the ineffability of the known object -- it is the earth, it is promised, and don't bother me with the contracts and the lawyers -- but I keep thinking, knowing about art is not the business of the artist, but the critic or the philosopher.”
That’s a shifty reply, I admit it. My move – to highlight the cognitive side of the word “know” – is not completely above board.
T., as a matter of fact, had a premonition of my move, and wrote me back:
“…not what the artist knows, but what the artist does (thinking, at this very moment, of Twombly's pencil marks on pigment adjacent to raw canvas). “
This discussion made me wonder about the phrase art for art’s sake, which I vaguely attributed to Gautier. I looked it up and found, on this site, some interesting background:
“The expression,” the site claims, “of art for the sake of art appears for the first time in Frence in 1818, in series of lectures by Victor Cousin, entitled ‘on the foundation of the absolute ideas of the true, the beautiful and the good.”
A few paragraphs down, we come to Gautier:
But it is the preface to the novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834) that appears to be the first manifesto of the art for the sake of art school. Of course, a flagrant desire to shock the bourgeois is no stranger to Gautier’s attitude, with the “multiple love affairs of the diva, Madeleine de Maupin (Garnier: 1930,. p. 42). But at the same time he wants to vindicate his opposition to certain moralizing clichés of romanticism. Gautier reproaches the “moral journalists” with their hypocrisy, for, on the one hand, contemporary literature has nothing approaching the licentiousness of certain comedies of Moliere and Marivaux, and, on the other hand, “Books follow the morals of the time and the morals don’t follow the books.” But he really gets indignant at the utilitarian critics who ask, “what purpose does this book serve?” : There is nothing really beautiful that can serve anything else, for everything that is useful is ugly, being the expression of some need, and the needs of men are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and infirm nature. The most useful place in the house is the bathroom. ( « Il n’y a de » vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir ; tout ce qui est utile est laid, car c’est l’expression de quelque besoin, et ceux de l’homme sont ignobles et dégoûtants, comme sa pauvre et infirme nature. – L’endroit le plus utile de la maison, ce sont les latrines » (p. 28).”
Perhaps it is an appropriate fate that the apostle of such a high brow doctrine should be generally known, in this country, as one of the fathers of the Mummy story – Gautier’s Novel (or Romance) of the Mummy was one of the first uses of the mummy returns motif in the 19th century. This site, with its story of the typically arrogant English amateurs entertaining Victorian audiences by ‘unrolling” mummies in front of them, ought to contextualize Gautier’s orientalism. I never found the Mummy a frightful creature when I was a boy. But I’ve always found the decay of the human body frightful. The Mummy, all trussed up with bandages like the cartoon of some Dagwood in the hospital, seemed terminally silly. It would be hard to mistake this genre for anything remotely highbrow – although I admit that I haven’t read the novel. I’m going to, though – it occurred to me that I should read at least one of Gautier’s novels. I’ve downloaded it – as you can too, gentle reader, here .
Sunday, June 6, 2004
Bollettino
A few notes on Schlegel
Chaoli’s article, as we said, takes off from a reply made by Friedrich Schlegel to an essay, On Perpeutal Peace, written by Kant. The translation of the essay is here:
It is interesting that the phrase of Kant’s that attracted Schlegel’s attention, Die bürgerliche Verfassung in jedem Staate soll republikanisch seyn, is translated as The Civil Constitution of Every State Should Be Republican." This disguises the force of bürgerliche, even though civil is a pretty good equivalent, since it derives from civus, OF the city. . However, there is a definite overtone of the concept of class – the class of the city’s worthies, to use the older English term - in the word that is rather lacking in its English equivalent. The citizen is not simply an inhabitant – which the American reader, product of the struggle for universal suffrage, might unthinkingly assume.
Schlegel is not well known to American readers. He isn’t, frankly, that well known to LI. But we’ve been reading up on him. He and his brother, August, formed part of the nucleus of German romantics. He was twice married, the second time, after a long cohabitation, to Moses Mendelssohn’s daughter. Schlegel was responsible for the turn towards India in German intellectual culture. He was an Orientalist. He was also the critic whose conception of Greek drama was attacked later, by Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy.
Such is his outline. We looked up a famous putdown of Schlegel by Heine, in his book, The Romantic School. Here is what Heine has to say: “ .. I have to mention here [in the second volume of his book] that many French people have complained about how I have treated the Schlegels, (mainly August Wilhelm), with rather acrid words. But I think such complaints betray a lack of exacter acquaintance with German literary history. The French mainly know A.W. Schlegel from his place in the works of Madame de Staël, his noble defender. Most recognize only his name. The name sounds in the memory as something honorably famous, rather like the name Osiris, about whom we only know, that he was a wonderfully queer kind of God, honored in Egypt. What other curious similarities there might be between A.W. Schlegel and Osiris are little known to my French readers.
Since I once belonged to the academic scholars of the old school, one might consider that I should show some forbearance to them. However, did A.W. Schlegel show any mercy to old Bürger, his literary father? No. He dealt with him according to his own uses and traditions. Because in literature, just as in the woods inhabited by the North American savages, the fathers are murdered by the sons, as soon as they get old and weak.
I’ve already observed in a previous chapter that Friedrich Schlegel was more significant than August. In fact, the latter only fed on the ideas of his brother, and only understood the art of working through them. Fr. Schlegel was a deep thinking man. He knew all the glories of the past, and he felt all the pains of the present. But he had no conception of the holiness of these pains and their necessity for the future healing of the world. He saw the sun set and blinked tearfully at the place where it set and complained bitterly over the spreading darkness of night, but failed to spot the new dawn reddening on the opposite horizon. Fr. Schlegel once called the historian an “inverted prophet”. This phrase is the best description for he himself. He hated the present, was shocked by the future, and only exercized his revelatory vision on the past, which he loved. Poor Fr. Schlegel never saw that the pains of our time are the pains of rebirth; he mistook them for the agonies of death. Out of this fear of death he flew into the tottering ruins of the Catholic Church, which was, when all is said and done, the best place of refuge for a man of his sentiments. All things considered, he was full of the kind of animal spirits that should have made him bolder in life, but he finally decided these were sinful, and as sins, could only be repented. So this is the impulse that drove the writer of “Lucinde” inexorably towards Catholicism. Lucinde is a novel, and outside of his poems and one drama on the Spanish model, Alarkos, it is the single original work of art he left behind him. Recently, the honorable Schleiermacher has published a few enthusiastic letters about Lucinde. There are even critics who praise this novel as a masterpiece, and who prophecize, that someday it will be valued as one of the great books in the German canon. By order of the government one should take these people and treat them as they treat prophets in Russia, who prophecize some public catastrophe: they put them in prison until the time that their predictions come true. No, the gods will protect our literature from this particular piece of bad news. Just as Schlegel’s novel is currently neglected, it is fated to be condemned in the future, for the same reason: because of its trivial lasciviousness.
A few notes on Schlegel
Chaoli’s article, as we said, takes off from a reply made by Friedrich Schlegel to an essay, On Perpeutal Peace, written by Kant. The translation of the essay is here:
It is interesting that the phrase of Kant’s that attracted Schlegel’s attention, Die bürgerliche Verfassung in jedem Staate soll republikanisch seyn, is translated as The Civil Constitution of Every State Should Be Republican." This disguises the force of bürgerliche, even though civil is a pretty good equivalent, since it derives from civus, OF the city. . However, there is a definite overtone of the concept of class – the class of the city’s worthies, to use the older English term - in the word that is rather lacking in its English equivalent. The citizen is not simply an inhabitant – which the American reader, product of the struggle for universal suffrage, might unthinkingly assume.
Schlegel is not well known to American readers. He isn’t, frankly, that well known to LI. But we’ve been reading up on him. He and his brother, August, formed part of the nucleus of German romantics. He was twice married, the second time, after a long cohabitation, to Moses Mendelssohn’s daughter. Schlegel was responsible for the turn towards India in German intellectual culture. He was an Orientalist. He was also the critic whose conception of Greek drama was attacked later, by Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy.
Such is his outline. We looked up a famous putdown of Schlegel by Heine, in his book, The Romantic School. Here is what Heine has to say: “ .. I have to mention here [in the second volume of his book] that many French people have complained about how I have treated the Schlegels, (mainly August Wilhelm), with rather acrid words. But I think such complaints betray a lack of exacter acquaintance with German literary history. The French mainly know A.W. Schlegel from his place in the works of Madame de Staël, his noble defender. Most recognize only his name. The name sounds in the memory as something honorably famous, rather like the name Osiris, about whom we only know, that he was a wonderfully queer kind of God, honored in Egypt. What other curious similarities there might be between A.W. Schlegel and Osiris are little known to my French readers.
Since I once belonged to the academic scholars of the old school, one might consider that I should show some forbearance to them. However, did A.W. Schlegel show any mercy to old Bürger, his literary father? No. He dealt with him according to his own uses and traditions. Because in literature, just as in the woods inhabited by the North American savages, the fathers are murdered by the sons, as soon as they get old and weak.
I’ve already observed in a previous chapter that Friedrich Schlegel was more significant than August. In fact, the latter only fed on the ideas of his brother, and only understood the art of working through them. Fr. Schlegel was a deep thinking man. He knew all the glories of the past, and he felt all the pains of the present. But he had no conception of the holiness of these pains and their necessity for the future healing of the world. He saw the sun set and blinked tearfully at the place where it set and complained bitterly over the spreading darkness of night, but failed to spot the new dawn reddening on the opposite horizon. Fr. Schlegel once called the historian an “inverted prophet”. This phrase is the best description for he himself. He hated the present, was shocked by the future, and only exercized his revelatory vision on the past, which he loved. Poor Fr. Schlegel never saw that the pains of our time are the pains of rebirth; he mistook them for the agonies of death. Out of this fear of death he flew into the tottering ruins of the Catholic Church, which was, when all is said and done, the best place of refuge for a man of his sentiments. All things considered, he was full of the kind of animal spirits that should have made him bolder in life, but he finally decided these were sinful, and as sins, could only be repented. So this is the impulse that drove the writer of “Lucinde” inexorably towards Catholicism. Lucinde is a novel, and outside of his poems and one drama on the Spanish model, Alarkos, it is the single original work of art he left behind him. Recently, the honorable Schleiermacher has published a few enthusiastic letters about Lucinde. There are even critics who praise this novel as a masterpiece, and who prophecize, that someday it will be valued as one of the great books in the German canon. By order of the government one should take these people and treat them as they treat prophets in Russia, who prophecize some public catastrophe: they put them in prison until the time that their predictions come true. No, the gods will protect our literature from this particular piece of bad news. Just as Schlegel’s novel is currently neglected, it is fated to be condemned in the future, for the same reason: because of its trivial lasciviousness.
Saturday, June 5, 2004
Bollettino
Wow. There go my twenties…
An egocentric response to the death of Ronald Reagan, the man whose presidency defined almost all of my politics between the ages of 21 and 29. I don’t think Reagan ever proposed a policy or a program, espoused a bill or advocated an idea that I didn’t think was shabby, bogus, illegal, immoral, or simply dumb. From supporting the death squads in El Salvador to the money he wasted on the anti-missile defense – a trillion dollar monument to our now dead pharaoh, which will outlive us all, and never, ever work – Reagan’s presidency galvanized me, at least.
Not that I don’t have a sneaking affection for the guy. There was something so Hollywood corrupt from the thirties about him, like a Raymond Chandler character who, inexplicably, was NOT involved in a murder. A Terry Lennox with permanently ink black hair and – unlike Lennox – a good woman (and a good woman’s astrologer) to guide him through the rough times. I could never get mad at Reagan the person. This, perhaps, was the famous Teflon. Listening to Bush do his usual lipsynch speech – has there ever been a president less able to make a simple speech? – I thought about how smoothly Reagan would have responded, in his salad days, to the news of his own death. The man knew how to talk. Bush, I despise. Reagan has earned some retrospective respect.
Memories, memories. I landed in New Orleans in 1983, just back from a year in France, and plunged, as much as I could plunge, into politics. I joined CISPES, for one – a now defunct organization, then devoted to stopping the support of the contras, and the support of El Salvador’s death squads. Little did I, or anybody, know that the real trouble would be coming from the CIA station in Islamabad, with its gleeful and insane support of a jihad that we are all now paying for. That was way too far away for me. In 83, many of my friends, or friends of friends, in N.O. were – for complicated reasons I won’t get into here – doctors, and they all loved Ronnie. This made sense to me. They were all ferocious about the tax cuts, ferociously investing in various of the schemes that had been let loose in the national bloodstream by the loosening of all regulatory rules. In my part of the country, that meant setting up S&Ls and diverting billions into the pockets of crooks. It was a party.
But the real love for Reagan came from a different strata of people, who could only have been invented by Don Delillo. I mean the truly sinister clique, the retired CIA people, the states rights racists, the ones with the murky pasts. I’d lived in Louisiana off and on for years. Louisiana is different. It is the kind of state that would produce both Lee Harvey Oswald and David Duke. Oswald bothered me, like a shadow out of the corner of my eye, whenever I went out with my comrades to protest against another Yanqui atrocity in Central America downtown. Oswald was not the doppelganger of my preference – I prefer to think of myself as a poete assassine, rather than a poete assassin. Those demos -- such scenes – plainclothesmen hovering around, openly displaying video cameras and recorders, rumors of rightwing Cubans with batons massing on other streets, and the chants which we would bellow out: the people/united/will never be defeated.
A prediction that has been falsified countless times, bellowed with the enthusiastic convinction of mice bitching about mousetraps. Nice to march to in the street, but, as a practical slogan, worthless.
New Orleans press was fiercely for the contras. I remember the Picayune doing a big series about Guatamala in which it was pretty overtly suggested that mass murder might be in order. Can’t have communism on our doorstep. It was that kind of time. Perhaps we should remember 50,000 some Guatamalan peasants were slaughtered, while Reagan’s administration provided their slaughterers with military aide.
Well, there is one thing that keeps small powerless leftist splinter groups going: the bottomless faith of the FBI in their dangerousness. The “mutual delusions of each vice/such are the gates of paradise”, to parody Blake. So it was with CISPES. The New Orleans group started to crumble in 1984. The FBI had penetrated it – as if there were anything to penetrate – and had cornered one young guy from El Salvador. This guy was illegal. Now, at the time, sending someone like that back to El Salvador was equivalent to murdering him. So the FBI said that was what they were going to do, if he didn’t ‘name names.” Next thing I knew, one of the people I worked with at Tulane ( a man I shall call Peter) was receiving calls from the FBI – at work. Peter was an ardent leftist, but in terms of his subversive potential, the FBI had the wrong man – his sneakiness was devoted less to overthrowing our liberties than to cheating on his girlfriend. However, his girlfriend, who was the Nicaraguan consul to New Orleans, was eventually picked up too, and expelled from the country for spying. Supposedly, she had made a map of the New Orleans harbor. Even now, that makes me laugh – the only spying she was doing was following around Peter, to find out if he was cheating on her. If she could draw a map to her house from two blocks away, I would be astonished. We are not talking about a cartographically endowed woman.
Of course, LI loved the idea that the FBI was closing in – it validated both our sense of self importance and our idea of what the FBI does. Alas, even after he made elaborate precautions – telling the neighbors, for instance, that if the FBI came for him, he was going to ‘call them over as witnesses” – there was no party.
Later, reading the Times, we put it together. The FBI just wanted to pre-empt CISPES threatened demonstrations against Reagan at the Republican convention in Dallas.
And now he is dead in L.A. God rest his bones.
Wow. There go my twenties…
An egocentric response to the death of Ronald Reagan, the man whose presidency defined almost all of my politics between the ages of 21 and 29. I don’t think Reagan ever proposed a policy or a program, espoused a bill or advocated an idea that I didn’t think was shabby, bogus, illegal, immoral, or simply dumb. From supporting the death squads in El Salvador to the money he wasted on the anti-missile defense – a trillion dollar monument to our now dead pharaoh, which will outlive us all, and never, ever work – Reagan’s presidency galvanized me, at least.
Not that I don’t have a sneaking affection for the guy. There was something so Hollywood corrupt from the thirties about him, like a Raymond Chandler character who, inexplicably, was NOT involved in a murder. A Terry Lennox with permanently ink black hair and – unlike Lennox – a good woman (and a good woman’s astrologer) to guide him through the rough times. I could never get mad at Reagan the person. This, perhaps, was the famous Teflon. Listening to Bush do his usual lipsynch speech – has there ever been a president less able to make a simple speech? – I thought about how smoothly Reagan would have responded, in his salad days, to the news of his own death. The man knew how to talk. Bush, I despise. Reagan has earned some retrospective respect.
Memories, memories. I landed in New Orleans in 1983, just back from a year in France, and plunged, as much as I could plunge, into politics. I joined CISPES, for one – a now defunct organization, then devoted to stopping the support of the contras, and the support of El Salvador’s death squads. Little did I, or anybody, know that the real trouble would be coming from the CIA station in Islamabad, with its gleeful and insane support of a jihad that we are all now paying for. That was way too far away for me. In 83, many of my friends, or friends of friends, in N.O. were – for complicated reasons I won’t get into here – doctors, and they all loved Ronnie. This made sense to me. They were all ferocious about the tax cuts, ferociously investing in various of the schemes that had been let loose in the national bloodstream by the loosening of all regulatory rules. In my part of the country, that meant setting up S&Ls and diverting billions into the pockets of crooks. It was a party.
But the real love for Reagan came from a different strata of people, who could only have been invented by Don Delillo. I mean the truly sinister clique, the retired CIA people, the states rights racists, the ones with the murky pasts. I’d lived in Louisiana off and on for years. Louisiana is different. It is the kind of state that would produce both Lee Harvey Oswald and David Duke. Oswald bothered me, like a shadow out of the corner of my eye, whenever I went out with my comrades to protest against another Yanqui atrocity in Central America downtown. Oswald was not the doppelganger of my preference – I prefer to think of myself as a poete assassine, rather than a poete assassin. Those demos -- such scenes – plainclothesmen hovering around, openly displaying video cameras and recorders, rumors of rightwing Cubans with batons massing on other streets, and the chants which we would bellow out: the people/united/will never be defeated.
A prediction that has been falsified countless times, bellowed with the enthusiastic convinction of mice bitching about mousetraps. Nice to march to in the street, but, as a practical slogan, worthless.
New Orleans press was fiercely for the contras. I remember the Picayune doing a big series about Guatamala in which it was pretty overtly suggested that mass murder might be in order. Can’t have communism on our doorstep. It was that kind of time. Perhaps we should remember 50,000 some Guatamalan peasants were slaughtered, while Reagan’s administration provided their slaughterers with military aide.
Well, there is one thing that keeps small powerless leftist splinter groups going: the bottomless faith of the FBI in their dangerousness. The “mutual delusions of each vice/such are the gates of paradise”, to parody Blake. So it was with CISPES. The New Orleans group started to crumble in 1984. The FBI had penetrated it – as if there were anything to penetrate – and had cornered one young guy from El Salvador. This guy was illegal. Now, at the time, sending someone like that back to El Salvador was equivalent to murdering him. So the FBI said that was what they were going to do, if he didn’t ‘name names.” Next thing I knew, one of the people I worked with at Tulane ( a man I shall call Peter) was receiving calls from the FBI – at work. Peter was an ardent leftist, but in terms of his subversive potential, the FBI had the wrong man – his sneakiness was devoted less to overthrowing our liberties than to cheating on his girlfriend. However, his girlfriend, who was the Nicaraguan consul to New Orleans, was eventually picked up too, and expelled from the country for spying. Supposedly, she had made a map of the New Orleans harbor. Even now, that makes me laugh – the only spying she was doing was following around Peter, to find out if he was cheating on her. If she could draw a map to her house from two blocks away, I would be astonished. We are not talking about a cartographically endowed woman.
Of course, LI loved the idea that the FBI was closing in – it validated both our sense of self importance and our idea of what the FBI does. Alas, even after he made elaborate precautions – telling the neighbors, for instance, that if the FBI came for him, he was going to ‘call them over as witnesses” – there was no party.
Later, reading the Times, we put it together. The FBI just wanted to pre-empt CISPES threatened demonstrations against Reagan at the Republican convention in Dallas.
And now he is dead in L.A. God rest his bones.
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