"clearness, simplicity, no twistified or foggy sentences, at all."

LI recommends William Logan’s article on Whitman in this season’s Virginia Quarterly Review: Prisoner, Fancy-Man, Rowdy, Lawyer, Physician, Priest: Whitman's Brags. (inexplicably, they don’t have the toc up on their site).

A brag comes, Logan claims, from the Scot’s practice of flyting:

"Whitman's poetry treated American English—I mean the English that Americans spoke—as more than a dialect, not tbe literary English of literary men. Literary English was a censored language, but not all America was censored. Listen:

I'm a Salt River roarer! I'm a ring-tailed squealer! I'm a reg'lar screamer from
the ol' Massassip'i WHOOP! . . . I'm half wild horse and half cock-eyed alligator and the rest o' me is crooked snags an' red-hot snappin' turkle. I can hit like fourth-proof lightnin' an' every lick I make in the woods lets in an acre o' sunshine. I can out-run, out-jump, out-shoot, out-brag, out-drink, an' out-fight,
rough-an'-tumble, no holts barred, ary man on both sides the river from Pittsburgh to New Orleans an' back ag'in to St. Louiee. Come on, you flatters, you bargers, you milk-white mechanics, an' see how tough I am to chaw!

“Come on you flatters, you bargers, you milk-white mechanics. Tbat's Wbitman's talk. But it's not Wbitman; it's a brag reputedly by Mike Fink, tales of whom were current wben Wbitman was a boy. (The rest o' me is crooked snags—that might bave been Wbitman's motto.) The Americans sometimes called such boasting a brag; but Scottisb poets in the sixteenth and later centuries knew it as a flyting, a bout of cursing or poetic invective, a slanging match between two poets who swaggered or slandered as they chose. The brag echoed Homeric vaunts before battle, the boasts of Beowulf, the bowls of the sagas. Such word battles must bave reached tbe American binterland early, possibly with Scotcb-Irish settlers who drew upon their literary tradition or the tavern duels on wbich their poets once had eavesdropped.”

I wonder about the “echoing of Homeric vaunts”, here. I imagine it is more likely that the brag comes from the same source – the warrior end of society, its ethos refined among those for whom language is always there, the song on the tongue. American Indians no doubt had their own tradition of the brag, and certainly it overflows in hip hop; and struggles, obscurely, in advertisement, porno, and among salesmen. From Mike Finn to Bush’s “bring it on,” it is both central to the American self perception and the alienated child of twentieth century suburbia, a partaker in American good and evil, the Hiroshima locked inside the Statue of Liberty.

Logan isn’t giving us a radically new look at Whitman in his essay, but he nicely sees that the vulgar tongue is not free of genre – far from it.

The freak show ideology of big government conservatism

My friend Paul wrote me a while ago to recommend that I visit Right Reason. He said that it was a site aiming at becoming a sort of rightwing version of Common Timber. So I visited the site, but was shocked to find that I knew some of the writers. In fact, I had T.A.-ed for one in the long ago.

My acquaintance entailed strong and negative extra-ideological opinions. However, I do believe the writers there that I know are highly intelligent. All the more reason to find the site rather shocking. If you compare an average week of posting on Right Reason with, say, an issue of National Review from 1966, you will find a catastrophic lowering of the intellectual level. In the age of big government conservatism, the freak show faction, which has always played a large role in practical conservative politics, has taken over the brain. Gangrene has set in.

What happened? American conservatism in 1966 was embedded in a struggle with world wide communism – as it saw it – and that struggle gae the movement and its thinkers an aura of some nobility, gave its scope some grandeur, even if you suspected that much of the struggle was delusive. There were reasons to be Manichean, in 1966. Besides which, European and American intellectuals who had been forged in the leftist culture of the thirties and forties and then converted, by way of anti-communism, to some version of Burkean conservatism, infused the movement with an intellectual vigor and scrupulousness that made the National Review, in its heyday, one of the great American journals.

This is all, apparently, gone. In its place, the writers at Right Reason spend their time tirelessly debating such questions as: is analytic philosophy conservative? or high culture? Or Stilton Cheese…

A real conservative would recognize this style for what it is – the kind of factionalism that, from the conservative point of view, inevitably marks the decline of a culture when, as Burke said, the ‘theorists’ gain power. The condemnation of factions runs from Swift to Burke to Disraeli as a constant in conservative thinking; it is a constant derived from the central theme and the central problem of modern conservatism.

The central theme, in conservative thought, is order. And the central problem is progress.

That there is progress in human affairs conservatives do not deny. Rather, they specify its temporal limits. Progress is what happens on a secondary cultural level – the level, for instance, of science, or of opulence. The conservative, having firmly in mind the difference between the real of human nature and the realm of social processes, is always looking for ways to subordinate progress in society – or, rather, limit it to its proper sphere. This is the reason that the ‘classic’ is of peculiar importance for the conservative. The classic takes the immediate struggles which mark the sphere of social process – the sphere in which progress has its mythical justifications – and endows it with that perspective (regardless of the artist’s particular technique) that hints at a higher order which no social process can overturn.

But at Right Reason, such conservatism is dross. This is a conservatism uniquely dedicated to having no standards at all, on the principle that my opinion is as good as your opinion. This is why the posts on “high culture’ are particularly without merit – odd, on a site that includes, as a writer, Roger Kimball.

Perhaps it is appropriate that today’s conservatives are busy erecting a large tombstone over yesterday’s conservatives – in fact, destroying themselves from within. The theology of the visceral, preached by evangelicals, is the dead opposite of conservative – the kind of emotional orgy that has haunted the conservative imagination throughout its history. The embrace of the revivalist meeting is the end of real conservatism, period. Only its zombie like corpse remains.

This doesn’t mean conservatism is really dead – it is simply dead at the top. Right Reason is the perfect blog for the era of big government conservatives: it is bold, brassy, and speaks in talk radio vulgate for the vulgar. Like Emerson (who was, at one time, a litmus test for old line conservatives – the instinctive dislike of Emerson was a sort of party badge of American conservatism), LI believes conservatism is as perennial as the temperament that gives rise to it. The way ideological space has been divvied out during the Bush years, however, it is obvious that the conservative temperament is and will be for the foreseeable future more at home on the left than on the right.

Another fine colonial war you've got us into, Stanley!

“Keep the dogs hungry and they will follow you.” That, according to journalist Chris Kutschera, was the motto of Sultan Said bin Taimur, who ruled Oman and Muscat, as it was called, from 1932 to 1970. Kutschera’s color piece tells a lot about Oman at the time.

“There were, in all Oman and Dhofar, three primary schools and not a single secondary school. Students who wanted to pursue their studies had to leave their country illegally and start a long life of exile in the Persian Gulf or Kuwait. It was forbidden to build new houses, or to repair the old ones; forbidden to install a lavatory or a gas stove; forbidden to cultivate new land, or to buy a car without the Sultan’s permission.

No one could smoke in the streets, go to movies or beat drums; the army used to have a band, but one day the Sultan had the instruments thrown into the sea. A few foreigners opened a club: he had it shut, “probably because it was a place where one could have fun”, says one of his former victims. Three hours after sunset, the city gates were closed.

No foreigner was allowed to visit Muscat without the Sultan’s personal permission, and sailors on ships anchored at Muscat could not land. Not a single paper was printed in the country. All political life was prohibited and the prisons were full. Sultan Said was surrounded by official slaves in his palace at Salalah, where time was marked in Pavlovian fashion by a bell which rang every four hours. But one day the dogs got too hungry, and they tore the Sultan almost to death.”

The politics of the Arabian Peninsula in the fifties and through the sixties were shaped by a number of rivalries: that between the Saudis and Nassar; that between the Americans and the Russians; and that latent and silent struggle between the declining colonial power of Britain and the Americans. It was part of the last named rivalry that Britain took the side of Oman in its border dispute with Saudi Arabia – which regarded Oman much the way Saddam Hussein regarded Kuwait. Sultan Taimur was an anglophile. Although foreigners, including Brits, were not welcomed to roam the country, British military men provided the real security advice and structure in Oman. It was the British who helped Taimur put down various revolts against his power. What the British couldn’t quench, immediately, was a revolt that sprang up in Dhofar, that region of Oman that bordered The Democratic Republic ofYemen. The original insurgency was simply that of the aggrieved, but it evolved into that third world special, Marxist revolutionaries. The two division of what eventually became known as the “Popular Front for the Liberation of the occupied Arabian Gulf” were named after Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara – names that are a little hoary, now, but that, in the sixties, had enormous magical power. The Marxists wanted to secularize, provide health care and education for women, etc., etc. – all of the things that Western policy in the Middle East was dead against for fifty years. So naturally the British had to do something. What they did was “loan” Oman use of the SAS, and build the Sultan (who had forbidden the use of glasses as an intolerable modern affront) an air force. There’s a nice, Kipling-esque account of the war on this Small Wars site. It would probably be accurate to call the Dhofar war the last classic colonial struggle undertaken by the British.

The impediment to stopping communist subversion in the Persian gulf, it turned out, was the incorrigibly backwards Taimur. So he was overthrown in a coup that is surrounded by the usual Cold War murk – the Brits most likely pulling the strings, but no chain of evidence leading directly to any order. Thus they elevating his British educated son, the present Sultan, Qaboos, and kicked the war into higher gear.

“By July 1970, the province of Dhofar in western Oman was almost entirely in the hands of Communist-backed rebels belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG). The Sultan of Oman had failed to recognise the danger and had done little to gain support among the indigenous people of Dhofar. The province was ideal guerrilla country, being dominated by a range of mountains in which the Sultan's Armed Forces found it difficult to operate. On 23rd July, the Sultan's son Qaboos bin Said, seized power in a palace coup to try and save his inheritance. He immediately introduced policies based on British counter-insurgency operations (COIN) and new government agencies were set up, designed to modernize Oman and persuade the ordinary people that the Sultan was worth supporting. Elements of 22 SAS were sent to help the expanded SAF defeat the PFLOAG.”

However, the British ability and willingness to sustain a war in the Arabian peninsula in the seventies was dependent on the rotten financial situation of the British economy, as well as emergencies closer to home, as in Northern Ireland. So Sultan Qaboos turned elsewhere – namely, to the Shah of Iran. Not only was a generation of British military men trained in the Dhofar war – by the end, it became an exercise field for the planes the Americans had sold the Shah .

The Dhofar War

LI’s memory was pinged, recently, when we read a jolly, he’s-a-mercenary-so-he’s-okay interview by Thomas Catan with the head of an agency of hired killers, Alistair Morrison, in the Financial Times. Here’s how the article starts:

“As a waiter leads me to the table where Alastair Morrison is sitting, I brace myself for a bone-crushing military hand grip and a sergeant-major greeting.

I needn't have worried. For a former SAS hardman - famous for storming a Lufthansa airliner in 1970s Mogadishu and liquidating the hijackers onboard - he has a pleasant, soft-spoken way about him. Immaculately dressed in a dark blazer and tie, he sits in a neat, self-contained manner, his back against the wall. I find myself leaning nearly halfway across the table to hear what he is saying.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Morrison pioneered the modern- day private military industry (a term he dislikes), which has since burgeoned into a multi-billion pound global business. "I never envisaged the market growing to this size," he says, shaking his head.”

There are buzzards, which are ugly, carrion eating birds with scrawny necks; and there are buzzard flatterers, which are completely off the scale, zoologically speaking.

Morrison, it turns out, “has been a continuous presence in the industry and a force behind many of the companies now operating in Iraq: Erinys, Hart Group, ArmorGroup and Kroll.” It would take us a little off course to link to articles about each and every one of these companies. Suffice it to say that, of ArmorGroup, the American division now wholly independent and providing our troops in Iraq with their famous armor, with which the troops are unpatriotically dissatisfied, and in England, they are even more tentacularly busy -- this is from the Scotsman:

”A PRIVATE security company headed by former Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind is making millions from a contract to protect Foreign Office staff working in Iraq, it emerged last night.

ArmorGroup, the biggest ‘mercenary’ security firm working in Iraq, is one of two companies that have raked in a total of £15m between them for providing round-the-clock cover in the treacherous environment of post-war Iraq during the past year.

Rifkind, the Tory candidate in Kensington and Chelsea, sparked protests from political opponents last month when he took over the chairmanship of ArmorGroup, which has 700 employees in Iraq.

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has admitted they are paying the company - along with Control Risks - £50,000 every day to protect its bureaucrats stationed in Iraq, amid mounting concerns about the safety of civilians in the war-torn country.”

However, that Morrison is a white devil and that Catan never posed any questions about the questionable influence of his companies in the government isn’t the point, here. We were intrigued, instead, by this sentence: “He fought in the Dhofar war to defeat communist rebels in Oman, then served in Northern Ireland. He turned his hand to counterterrorism in the mid-1970s, when airline hijackings were almost as prevalent as beige and bell-bottoms.”

What Dhofar war? So we decided to research it, and we found a surprising lack of information about the war. Yet it appears that the war was a first blood experience for many Brits – the present Air Force Chief (who bears a name out of Evelyn Waugh -- Sir Jock Stirrup) served, according to his official bio, “on loan with the Sultan of Oman’s Air Force, operating Strikemasters in the Dhofar War.”

So what was this war against “communist insurgents,” and how did it serve the cause of freedom, justice, and democracy in the Middle East? We will leave that to our next post.

Federalism

When John Adams was defending a tri-partite government, he did so by first surveying the political facts as given to him by history. It seems to LI that this is a good way to start talking about politics. We don’t have to invent ideals at the beginning and apply them, because we already have a history of applied ideals. What we do have to see is how the application of those ideals has worked. If we find a discrepancy between the animating principles of an ideal and its consequences, we should then ask whether either the animating principles are wrong, or whether they disguise some other, real principles, or whether the application is wrong.

The case for federalism rests, for some people, on the idea that the smaller the scale of government, the larger the voice of the people in directing it. In other words, there is a correlation between scale and democratic participation.

So much for theory. But when we survey the political facts on the ground in America, we find something startling. Given that one’s vote should count more on a small scale than on a large scale, we would expect the smallest elections to have the largest turnouts, and those elections dealing with more national officers to have the smallest turnouts. But it is precisely the opposite that happens.

In fact, local politics – of the city or the state – turns out to be the venue in which a determined minority has the most say, since it is also the politics that seems to evoke the most indifference among the governed.

Adams noticed this too, even if he didn’t put it in terms of indifference. He put it in terms of an owed deference. He has a long defense of inequality in which this regularly occurring phenomena is looked at, by him, as one of the ways politics can reflect the natural order:

Let us now return to M. Turgot's idea of a government consisting in a single assembly. He tells us our republics are "founded on the equality of all the citizens, and, therefore, 'orders' and 'equilibriums' are unnecessary, and occasion disputes." But what are we to understand here by equality? Are the citizens to be all of the same age, sex, size, strength, stature, activity, courage, hardiness, industry, patience, ingenuity, wealth, knowledge, fame, wit, temperance, constancy, and wisdom? Was there, or will there ever be, a nation, whose individuals were all equal, in natural and acquired qualities, in virtues, talents, and riches? The answer of all mankind must be in the negative. It must then be acknowledged, that in every state, in the Massachusetts, for example, there are inequalities which God and nature have planted there, and which no human legislator ever can eradicate. I should have chosen to have mentioned Virginia, as the most ancient state, or indeed any other in the union, rather than the one that gave me birth, if I were not afraid of putting suppositions which may give offence, a liberty which my neighbors will pardon. Yet I shall say nothing that is not applicable to all the other twelve.

In this society of Massachusettensians then, there is, it is true, a moral and political equality of rights and duties among all the individuals, and as yet no appearance of artificial inequalities of condition, such as hereditary dignities, titles, magistracies, or legal distinctions; and no established marks, as stars, garters, crosses, or ribbons; there are, nevertheless, inequalities of great moment in the consideration of a legislator, because they have a natural and inevitable influence in society. Let us enumerate some of them:--1. There is an inequality of wealth; some individuals, whether by descent from their ancestors, or from greater skill, industry, and success in business, have estates both in lands and goods of great value; others have no property at all; and of all the rest of society, much the greater number are possessed of wealth, in all the variety of degrees between these extremes; it will easily be conceived that all the rich men will have many of the poor, in the various trades, manufactures, and other occupations in life, dependent upon them for their daily bread; many of smaller fortunes will be in their debt, and in many ways under obligations to them; others, in better circumstances, neither dependent nor in debt, men of letters, men of the learned professions, and others, from acquaintance, conversation, and civilities, will be connected with them and attached to them. Nay, farther, it will not be denied, that among the wisest people that live, there is a degree of admiration, abstracted from all dependence, obligation, expectation, or even acquaintance, which accompanies splendid wealth, insures some respect, and bestows some influence. 2. Birth. Let no man be surprised that this species of inequality is introduced here. Let the page in history be quoted, where any nation, ancient or modern, civilized or savage, is mentioned, among whom no difference was made between the citizens, on account of their extraction. The truth is, that more influence is allowed to this advantage in free republics than in despotic governments, or than would be allowed to it in simple monarchies, if severe laws had not been made from age to age to secure it. The children of illustrious families have generally greater advantages of education, and earlier opportunities to be acquainted with public characters, and informed of public affairs, than those of meaner ones, or even than those in middle life; and what is more than all, an habitual national veneration for their names, and the characters of their ancestors described in history, or coming down by tradition, removes them farther from vulgar jealousy and popular envy, and secures them in some degree the favor, the affection, and respect of the public. Will any man pretend that the name of Andros, and that of Winthrop, are heard with the same sensations in any village of New England? Is not gratitude the sentiment that attends the latter, and disgust the feeling excited by the former? In the Massachusetts, then, there are persons descended from some of their ancient governors, counsellors, judges, whose fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, are remembered with esteem by many living, and who are mentioned in history with applause, as benefactors to the country, while there are others who have no such advantage. May we go a step farther,--Know thyself, is as useful a precept to nations as to men. Go into every village in New England, and you will find that the office of justice of the peace, and even the place of representative, which has ever depended only on the freest election of the people, have generally descended from generation to generation, in three or four families at most. The present subject is one of those which all men respect, and all men deride. It may be said of this part of our nature, as Pope said of the whole:--

"Of human nature, wit her worst may write, We all revere it in our own despite."

Unlike Adams, we are not at all happy with the inequalities of wealth and birth. But like Adams, we do see that this is a subject that “all men respect.” This is the reason we have never been particularly moved by the argument for smaller scale government, since it seems to us that this move magnifies, rather than mitigates, oligarchical power.

Given that general case, progressives in the 20^th century have mostly mounted their programs with reference to national entities – the federal government. On the national scale, a progressive organization can summon resources that are sometimes unavailable on the local scale – plus, of course, there is the little fact that the ‘respect’ Adams speaks of is reinforced by real fear – of job loss, of public shaming, of police power, etc., etc. This progressive strategy has, unfortunately, developed a sort of pro-government, meaning Federal government, instinct in progressives. It is the instinct of the homeowner for his home. Which is all well and good – but when the homeowner is kicked out of his home, continuing to act as the homeowner isn’t a forgiveable foible – it is pathology.

We think this is why progressives are so flummoxed by the Bush culture, and thrash about trying to ‘frame’ issues. Really, the issues are framed for you. And the issue that has been framed for the progressives, that stares your Democratic party consultant in the face, is that the government, at the moment, equals the Republican party. Which signals rhetorical opportunity. Since the Repubs have sowed anti-governmental propaganda ever since white Little Rock residents were forced to send their kids to school with blacks. And the Repubs have been the minority party since Roosevelt’s day. They are now the majority party. They are now the government. They are now enjoying the usufructs of being the government – spending money like drunken sailors, destroying rules they don’t like among various states, looking for ways of shunting FICA tax dollars into the pockets of their cronies, etc, etc.

So it is time for progressives to start using anti-government rhetoric, because the government is using anti-progressive power. Simple. This is the program. It isn’t the Republicans, or Bush, who want to steal your social security – it is the Government. It isn’t Tom Delay or the President (whose heart was rung by a white Floridian dying in his brother’s state in ways that the death of ten Democratic voting Indians would never match) who wants to stand between you and your loved ones’ desire not to be reduced, by massive surgery and interminable feeding tubes, to a mass of simple vital signs in Hospital hell for decades – it is the Government. It is the Government that is sending Americans off to die pointlessly in the Middle East, the Government that is siding with credit card companies in an attempt to reduce you to peonage, the Government that is encouraging the depredations of the corporations upon your well being, your environment, and your property.

That’s the deal. Switch strategies accordingly.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Continuing LI’s Menckenish ecumenicalism (now there’s a phrase, and that’s the only defense I can make of it), on this Good Friday we have searched out some article that can warm our somewhat tepid belief. We found one in the Winter Issue of Common Knowledge: The Presence of Objects by Caroline Walker Bynum – link here to Bynum’s President’s Address to the AHA. The article begins with a small but startling artifact found cemented in the wall of a church in Sternberg, Germany. It is a block of stone with footprints in it. What miracle is attested by those footprints? Well, it seems in 1496, a Jewess stole the eucharist and attempted to drown it. Her attempts were unavailing, and the divinity sunk her feet into stone. It seems, in fact, that the Jews around Sternberg were always bludgeoning eucharists, making them bleed, and in general showing their hard heartedness. A corrupt priest, it was said, delivered a lot of consecrated hosts to the Jews to redeem items pawned by his concubines, and of course they started sticking these things with knives, as was their habit. Hard hearted, these folks. To test just how densely the fibers of their hearts were contracted, the church had sixty five of them tortured, burned twenty seven of them on a hill still known as Judenberg, and expelled the rest.

Such is the history of the Catholic church in a less than life lovin' mode. But these things happened long ago (although certain Catholic bishops, notably the one appointed by the Church to serve the Argentine military, have hopes of reviving Jew-baiting any day now). Bynum’s inventory of objects in the Sternberg church include, quaintly, the heavily scored table at which the Jews assembled to attack the hosts, the iron pot that the concubine got back after the delivery of the hosts, and even a container in which the hosts were stored. The question, of course, is what is one to make of these things now?

In Sternberg, the answer has been, partly, to enroll these objects in the indictment both of the small, distant massacre of the Jews in 1492 and the larger one in the 1933-1945 period. Bynum reports that, in Sternberg’s economic history, the 1492 massacre was no small thing – it made Sternberg the site of a pilgrimage. Sternberg was not alone – it was a common late medieval motif, this of desecrating Jews and miraculously rescued hosts. According to Bynum’s reconstruction, the story of the desecrating Jews as a cause of a pogram is an innovation – in an earlier epoch, the chronicles would recount things like: visitation of grasshoppers, Jews all killed. Afterwards, the desecration story would be woven – not so much to excuse killing Jews, a self explanatory Christian act, but to attract pilgrims, an profitable source of income.

Bynum’s survey leads into Bynum’s argument – that the mass of anti-Jewish objects created in Germany between the 14^th and 16^th centuries should not be destroyed. They should be preserved both to be studied and as probes, as it were, of past cultures. With this argument, LI agrees, even if Bynum’s argument about the aura of objects (Bynum adduces her mother’s old wooden pie rollers) seems, partly, to be the rationalization of an inveterate pack rat impulse.

Now, I could imagine someone pointing out that the Church is no longer a center of anti-Semitism, and has repented quite extensively of its past role. That's true. And, of course, it is also true that the Church is much bigger than its bigotries. To think that it isn't is the mistake, ultimately, of such as Mencken -- it is a foreshortening of the imagination, the critic's vice.

On the other hand, one must remember that the motive for repentence (of certain of those bigotries) came from outside the church – the horror at intolerance, the horror at anti-semitism, were sentiments generated by liberal, secular thinkers, promoted by their controversial disciples, transmitted via outlaw organisations and bohemian enclaves (well, sometimes), and fought against, bitterly, by the Church for two hundred years. Liberal secular thinkers did the Church a favor – in a sense, they brought it much closer to the teachings of Jesus. Moral is: don’t give up now, liberal secularists.

The sedulous flycatcher

There was a faction, after the Bush victory in November, that urged a more compassionate approach to heartland America, outreach on divisive social issues, and even the well tempered expression of faith, on appropriate occasions. LI says to hell with that. Ourselves, we believe that the liberal/left strategy should be one of the fiercest and most unmitigated contempt for the logrollers from the confederacy who are now straddling our necks and digging in their spurs. You will find, here and there, expressions of mild surprise that the rightwing set seems to want to expand the federal government in several ways, and seems headed, as an objective correlative of their real politics, for eight solid years of record deficits. The idea that conservatives once foolishly elevated to power would deny the human impulse to self-aggrandizement to which all conservative theology admiringly refers in the chaste pursuit of small government is, itself, a cause for some amazement: are the depths of human gullibility ever to be plumbed? When a man seeks to reform our vices by throwing himself into the profession of pimp, suspect the purity of grasping heart. And so it is with the chorus of neo-conmen in Congress, who sweat to think that somewhere in America, someone is having some pleasure that they haven't passed a law to suppress -- a fear that ranks with one that sometimes renders them flaccid in the arms of their mistresses, the mighty panic of having, somehow, somewhere, offended a business lobbying group.

LI has little to say about the Schiavo ordeal except that the eructation of Tom Delay on the American scene was diagnosed, in its essence, for all time by H.L. Mencken’s coverage of the Scopes Trial, and his obituary of William Jennings Bryan. From that obituary, we would like to lift a phrase that is even more apposite for a man who sprayed DDT for a living before he decided there had to be an easier way to make a buck and went to that Valhalla of chislers, egomaniacs, and penny ante geniuses, D.C. – the “seduluous flycatcher.” We rip it from perhaps the most marvelous passage ever to open an obituary:

“Has it been marked by historians that the late William Jennings Bryan’s last secular act on this earth was to catch flies? A curious detail, and not without its sardonic overtones. He was the most sedulous flycatcher in American history, and by long odds the most successful. His quarry, or course, was not Musca domestica but Homo neandertalensis.”

And then there is this description of Bryan at the Scopes trial, which pretty much captures the Delay persona as it trails clouds of talk radio heartburn.

“One day it dawned on me that Bryan, after all, was an evangelical Christian only by sort of afterthought -- that his career in this world, and the glories thereof, had actually come to an end before he ever began whooping for Genesis. So I came to this conclusion: that what really moved him was a lust for revenge. The men of the cities had destroyed him and made a mock of him; now he would lead the yokels against them. Various facts clicked into the theory, and I hold it still. The hatred in the old man's burning eyes was not for the enemies of God; it was for the enemies of Bryan.

Thus he fought his last fight, eager only for blood. It quickly became frenzied and preposterous, and after that pathetic. All sense departed from him. He bit right and left, like a dog with rabies. He descended to demagogy so dreadful that his very associates blushed. His one yearning was to keep his yokels heated up -- to lead his forlorn mob against the foe.”

Maggie Valley is a resort town in the mountains of North Carolina. It is distinguished by one dance hall, seasonally shuttered (the Stompin’ Ground), one main drag, Soco Road, upon which the Stompin Ground is strategically located, numerous rental cabins, four or five hotels including the Four Seasons, also on Soco Road, one now defunct amusement park (Ghost Town), which is for sale, according to the billboard on the property formerly occupied by the enterprise, and a ski resort, the Cataloochee, with a beginners, an intermediate, and a best slope – the best slope being accessed by a ski lift going up (the eye estimates) maybe two thousand and a half feet. It was open Friday, Saturday and Sunday last week. Then it was closing for the season. The employees there say that the busier season, in Maggie Valley, is the summer, anyway.

I headed for Maggie Valley with my brother last Thursday. My other brother had already rented a cabin (with, as he was eager to point out on the phone, a porch jacuzzi), and the aim was to ski Friday and hike Saturday. The resort was on the verge of packing it in, but it looked like there had been snow and sleet in the mountains, so we were figuring that the pack wouldn’t be all artificial.

Since we were going to be staying in a cabin, we packed a few things into my brother’s car, including a bag of kindling and logs – for the fireplace. Then we set out, ate at a steak place, and made the drive from Atlanta in three and a half hours. During two and a half of those hours, I was feeling a bit of pain in my chest. I decided it was heart burn, although to tell you the truth, I have never quite understood the nature of heart burn, that evocative and mysterious term stamped into my brain from an early age by the very successful tv ad campaigns mounted by various patent medicine companies who, from the days of radio to the days of cable, have underwritten so much of the mental referential undergrowth for those raised during that period when tv consisted of the big three and a few public stations. So, we approach Maggie Valley at around ten at night. We are both looking for signs of snow, but it is, of course, dark. We find the cabin, and my other brother in deep repose mode in the Jacuzzi, a snifter of rum in his hand. We unpack, watch a movie (Apollo 13) and I notice that this heart burn is spreading and giving me a frightening empathy with the astronauts encaged in their apparently doomed lunar lander module. I am lying there, understanding the close bond between me and my heart. And, this night, I am not liking it. Still, it is merely severe heart burn. We all agree to go to sleep, what with the big day ahead of us.

At around three, I am filled with intimations of my mortality – intimations in spades that have spread into my shoulder and down my side. A small child’s plastic figurine – an elephant, a giraffe – is being stuffed, by invisible fingers, into one of my aorta. It is not very much fun. So I drag myself up the cabin’s hallway to one of my brother’s door, knock, and when he drags himself out of bed, I explain that I might be dead tomorrow morning. This alarms him. Luckily, my brother has seen enough medical shows on tv to prescribe for these situations: take two aspirins and call him in the morning.

I do. In the morning, I do feel better. However, whenever I laugh, my chest hurts. I discovered a fact about myself: I laugh quite a bit. I resolve to stop laughing so much in the future. I say that I think I can go with them to the Cataloochee, but I am not sure that I can ski. Well, we go on up there, and – whether it is the thinner air or some random anxiety I harbor that, if I do have to go to the hospital, I will never for the rest of my life be able to pay off the resulting medical bill – having no insurance, no assets, and a mere thousand bucks in the bank – my heart starts doing the business with the small plastic animal figurines again. So my brothers pursuade me to go to the medical tech people at the resort. One of them, a trim, handsome man, blue eyes, perfect hair, obviously once a ski jockey and now a med tech jockey who wants to get into medical management, takes my pulse, takes my blood pressure, and advises me to go to the urgent care clinic. He also gives me the helpful information that men in their forties have a greater risk of dying from heart attack then men in their fifties and sixties. He explains this factoid, but I am not, unfortunately, in reportorial mode. Therefore, I can't tell you the cause of the differential. So off I go, leaving one brother behind to ski, and with my unfortunate other brother in tow. We wait for a long time at the clinic, which is like a meeting place for every citizen of Maggie Valley that has a sneeze or cough, reviving, to my mind, that old medical term, miasma. And then I wait in a cubicle and get examined by an echelon of the medically trained, from the woman who takes my pulse up to the chief doctor.

I thought I’d get this down. I’m going to use that pain for some character or another.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/21/arts/music/21cnd-short.html?pagewanted=2&hp

Sadness has descended on this office once again: Bobby Short, saloon singer extraordinaire, singer of saloon songs, saloon singer, the most high, is dead.
There is a peculiar annoyance that those who live in NYC and love NYC and those that love NYC who do not live in NYC can share intimately: the loathing of Woody Allen's particular version of the island of Manhattan. Mr. Short, of course, appears in a few occasions in WA’s version.

Nevertheless, if you ever had the chance to squat in that small room at The Carlyle during one of Mr. Short's performances, you would know that his presence, his manner, and his style were things grander than Woody's simple sentimentality.

I can imagine at least two types of obituaries: the one that reminds one of what has been lost, and the one that informs one of what one never knew. The obitiuaries that I read today reminded me only of what has been lost.

I can just now hear Mr. Short's sad soulful rendition of "Bye Bye Blackbird" - it is beautiful; it is one of the saddest songs that I know. Not quite so much like Nina Simone’s broken version. Nor quite like the Miles/Coltrane version, in its virtuosity. No, his offers a much more soulful sense of loss. His offers a sense of loss that is a sense that no one occasion is for the first nor the last time that one will feel a loss, that the sense of loss is ever present, that loss is ever happening; the sense of the lost ‘thing’ is a self-same sense of wondering what it is that has been lost – what was it and how was it lost at all?

Inconsolably, bye bye blackbird......

It’s a sad day at Limited, Inc. All the staff left early today: boss is out of town. None of them, though, left to get an early start to reveries for St. Patrick; no, theirs are somber drinks tonight: Lil’ Kim was convicted of perjury.

In lieu of an introduction, I will jump to the conclusion:

“For a long time, the chapter I have just written was at the tip of my pen, but I kept rejecting it. I had promised myself that in this book I would display only the cheerful aspect of my soul; but this plan slipped out of my hands, like so many others: I hope that the sensitive reader will forgive me for having asked a few tears of him; and if anyone finds that in all truth I should have cut this chapter, he can tear it out of his copy, or even throw the book on the fire.” Xavier de Maistre – A Journey Around My Room

This is not LI. This is odd.

If R. is to LI what Johnny Carson was to The Tonight Show, then….. I am, as a guest host, seated behind the familiar desk…. who? John Davidson? Joey Bishop? Joan Rivers? Jay Leno? Oh fer fucks' sake! Let us hope, altogether now, that I'm not Jay Leno and that this nightmare analogy might quit my thoughts!

This is odd. The problem of the address. The problem of the typing of a conversation with one’s self.....the bullet in the barrel of the transference gun..…

So, no more about me, let's return to Badiou......today's lesson:
Slavoj Zizek on Badiou, and, later, Derrida. Please open your copy of The Ticklish Subject, and please turn to page 132..... No, I really ought to promise no more Badiou. No, no, and no more Badiou! [but please do go to ‘The Lacanian Subject’, page 158, of this book if you want to get to why LI is not on the side of Badiou; LI, as has been stated previously, remains on the side of Derrida, and Zizek gives one version of an account as to why – or, of course, you can take the path of patience and wait for the return of the founder and proprietor of LI for an account of on which side LI remains, and, perhaps, why it remains so].

No, no more Badiou; this is not to be Art, as Truth or otherwise, any more than it will be an Event, either horizonless or immanent.

Instead, an anecdote: many years ago, when he was a younger man, this correspondent was given this advice by a hard-drinking, long-travelled, scruff-bearded Dutchman at Fanelli’s Bar, on Prince Street: every man should visit a prostitute at least once in his life so that he might know that particular shame that one feels upon leaving her room. Why? Because, in the Dutchman’s jovial opinion, that shame was necessary to any condition that might be called ‘human’.

Whatever one makes of this perhaps not so well-remembered suggestion, whether or not one knows that particular shame, a more general but no less sincere account of where one might find one’s self is offered by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work – the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from the outside – the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within – that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be a good man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick – the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.” The Crack-up

Shitter. Something has gone wrong. The Event has returned. I suppose that LI has its own gravity.

No time left to sketch an alternate conclusion. This day is nearly done, afternoon is long since past. Raise a glass to Myles na gCopaleen.

Badiou (the end, temporarily)

LI is going to pick up the thread of the Badiou posts next week. Since we are taking a vacation, our friend, T., has agreed to put together a few LI posts. This should shake up this site, which suffers a bit from the arteriosclerosis of our egotism.

Okay, a few more notes.

The sensible is transformed into the Event of the Idea in Art. So it stands written. One wants to know:

1. What is the function of the sensible, here? Here, surely, we have wandered into the very traditional categories of aesthetics, in which one way of working with the sensible – say, measuring the sensation of sound – is taken to be science, while another way of working with it – say, creating an opera with those sounds – is taken to be art. The difference is not, however, in the measuring, surely – in the techniques. Mozart has to measure sound to achieve his goal as surely as an audiologist has to measure his sound to achieve his goal. And then there is the problem of those forms of art – poetry, for instance – in which the model of the sensible doesn’t work too well. A poem could consiste of writing la la la muchly – or a poem can be the Iliad. In order to fit the poem into the sensible model, the sensible is quietly rearranged – where the sensible is the medium for listening to Mozart, the sensible is “appealed to” by the poem – not just by the sound of it, but by the images and the narrative – the mythos – that appeals to the passions. The double place of the sensible in aesthetics, both as what gives us the object and as what the object appeals to, is certainly preserved in Badiou.

2. What does the transforming? The artist? Remember, Badiou’s theses are about contemporary art, in which the artist has a primary function – the death of the artist notwithstanding. Badiou seems uncomfortable with the artist’s survival of that philosophically mandated death – as is LI. But the place where the transformation of the sensible takes place seems to demand some kind of artist. And some kind of audience. The transformation of sandstone into rock formations of astonishing beauty took place millions of years ago in the Southwest U.S., but this was not quite the transformation of the sensible – since the wind, rain, and earth were, presumably, not sensitive, in the philosopher’s sense, to what was happening. However, Badiou makes it clear that the sensitivity of the artist must be just right – the artist must not be a fetishist, must not be too personal, must not be too ethnic, etc. So, there is a gradient here in the artist’s sensibility.

3. finally – Why not just transform the sensible into an Idea? why throw in the event? What does it add, or clarify, to talk about an Idea-event?

LI has to leave it there.

Events

"Thesis 3: The truth of which art is the process is always the truth of the sensible qua sensible. Which means: transformation of the sensible into the event of the Idea." - Badiou

We don’t have much time today. So: a few notes about events. Which, in a later post, we will tie in with Badiou.
…

LI has an idea about a certain dissatisfaction we feel with analytic philosophy. Here’s the problem:

In Physics, it is true that what Wenger famously called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences has been borne out by the success of physics. That success – the applicability of mathematics, it turns out, to not only describe relations in nature, but to describe it in such a way that it can be built upon and can make predictions possible. Mathematics is different, in that sense, from any other instrument we know of – it is like a human tracker, it seems to have an intuition for its prey.

It was natural, back in the days when logicians were keen about encoding the axioms of mathematics into logic, that it might be the case that language, whether formal or natural, would, with the proper conceptual tools, do the same thing for philosophers. Thus the infinite worrying of language one finds in analytic philosophy papers – the respect for the (usually English) vernacular rendition of reality. Whereas the applicability of mathematics to nature is, actually, the kind of thing that has proven itself, so far in physics, the parallel applicability of language to reality has proven, in our opinion, a dud. Not that there aren’t wonderful things that have been done in philosophical semantics, but on the whole, it has never given us any more reason to believe that this is the royal route to reality than, say, Hegel, or Gurdjieff.

That said, we do think that event ontology as done in the analytic tradition has made some fascinating suggestions about problems with quantifying over events, about event parts, and about how language filters events through its various luxurious mechanisms. We’d particularly recommend Jonathan Bennett’s Events and their Names for a discussion of most of the major analytic theories – Davidson’s, Quine’s, Kim’s, Vendler’s, etc. Or you can read the first chapter of Speaking of Events, Pianesi and Varzi, (pdf), here. It outlines the sundry views – starting with the view that events are universals (which, on one reading, would make recurring events interesting – if I take a walk every evening, can somebody else take my walk? Which is a nice philosopher’s question). It outlines the more common view that events are particulars. Here’s a typical passage:

“This is the account of those philosophers, such as Jaegwon Kim, who construe events as property exemplifications:

We think of an event as a concrete object (or n-tuple of objects) exemplifying a property (or n-adic relation) at a time. (1973: 8)

Exactly what is meant by the locution ‘exemplifying’ is a delicate issue. Moreover, there is some uncertainty about what is to count as a property in the relevant sense. Presumably running and stabbing count, whereas being self-identical or greater than five do not count, but there are no obvious criteria for making a thorough demarcation (see Kim 1976). At any rate, leaving these issues aside, it is clear that this account tends to multiply the number of events far beyond the thick account of Quine. John’s swimming the Hellespontus, his catching a cold, and his counting his blessings are regarded as three distinct events in
Kim’s account insofar as they involve exemplifications of distinct properties; and clearly enough, identical events must be exemplifications of the same properties (or relations) by the same objects (or n-tuples) at the same time. Likewise, when we speak of Brutus’s stabbing of Caesar, we are not, in this account, speaking of his killing of Caesar: for the first event is the exemplification (by Brutus and Caesar) of the binary relation expressed by the predicate ‘stabbing’, whereas the second event is an exemplification (by the same Brutus and Caesar) of the relation expressed by the predicate ‘killing’. Since these two relations are
distinct, so are the events. In fact, by the same pattern, Brutus’s stabbing of Caesar is to be distinguished also from his violent stabbing of Caesar, his knifing of Casear, his murderous knifing of Caesar, and so on. All of these are to be counted as different events (rather than different descriptions of the same event)
because they are exemplifications of different properties.”

While Badiou does like to yoke together the truths of mathematics and the truths of ontology, his Eventiment is not amenable to this sort of fine grained sifting. Or so it would seem. Partly this is because his work is in the tradition that requires truth to be disclosure – as we pointed out in a previous post. Although perhaps we are committing ourselves too hastily – after all, truth is a fourfold field, for Badiou, and there are different truth processes appropriate for each of those fields. But the “event of the Idea” (as opposed to its non-lieu, one supposes – that moment of procrastination in which LI seems to live) is supposed to give us the truth of Art – which would suggest that art’s truth is performative, a matter of the proper assertion of its authority.

Let’s leave it at that for the moment.

LI urges readers to go to the article about Arthur Ransome in the Guardian. Ransome is in the heroic line of English children’s book authors – but he is rather unknown in the United States. More interesting, from the American point of view, is that he saw the heroic core of the October Revolution and helped the Bolsheviks out in their wholly just war against the White Reactionaries. Applause all around. He also – being a son of the British governing class – informed the British secret service of what he was doing. Well, you can only stretch your character so far…

In a comment on a recent post, LI’s perpetual friend and foil, Mr. Craddick, asked our opinion of the Soviet Union’s level of barbarity. We cheerfully gave it – nobody should ever diminish the evil of the Gulag. However, there is another side to our opinion of the Soviets. That side is that the world does not need superpowers. It does not need leadership. And the U.S., while not a particularly bad country – in fact, a very good country in many ways – is drawn, by the logic of power, into doing bad things as a superpower. This is why we think that the spies that gave Stalin the means to make an atom bomb were essentially right to do so – although it was also right, or justifiable, for the U.S. to punish them as traitors. Fundamentally, we can’t think of any political reason to countenance the seizing of excessive world power by any nation. It has always puzzled us that the right, which doesn’t trust the state to deliver mail, trusts the state with the means of ending the human species. This, indeed, is straining at the gnat and swallowing the ICBM missile. LI’s view is that there is something wrong with a theory of the state that starts out with an anti-statist ideological coloration while having no real philosophy of governance – that is, having no recognition that governance is in question in every organization, and doesn’t, at the fundamental level, divide between public and private entity – that is a derivative difference.

Returning us to our point of origin – the accidentally adventurous Mr. Ransome. In a sense, his reaction to the Russian Revolution – and the reaction of the Bloomsbury crowd – was conditioned by their descent from the people who ran the British colonies. You will find that almost all the Bloomsbury group, and most of the Fabians, were connected, somehow, to the Indian Civil Service. That group had been imbued with the wholly whiggish view (represented by Lord Macauley and Mill, two India House employees) that the state could actually design a society. That, of course, was the whole point of the “India” project, and it is no surprise that, through that perspective, the Russian revolution looked like what the Brits thought they did in India – rationalizing a superstitious society. The descendents of this group think they are doing the same thing in the Middle East. Plus ca change …

LI received a letter from a friend yesterday. We’d asked what he thought about the Badiou posts, and he said he’d comment after he knew where we were going.

Where are we going?

As we said before, the thing that concerns us here is what Badiou could mean, as a philosopher, by claiming that there are four independent domains that generate different truth procedures. These domains are: science, politics, art, and love.

Now, whether or not one thinks that science is defined by its truth procedures, it is easy to figure out what that claim would mean. Whether you take truth to be correspondence to an object – hence, the fight over whether realism, which claims the objects of science are real, or anti-realism, which claims that they are somehow artifices – or whether you take truth to be correspondence – thus, the debate over whether science consolidates its ‘discoveries” in such a way that coherence with previous discoveries and theories is preserved, or whether it proceeds by discontinuous paradigms, each themselves coherent, you can still easily understand what Badiou is talking about.

There is, however, a third school which has a different idea about the truth. This truth is the Capital T truth. In this school, represented by Heidegger in the last century, truth depends on disclosure. A positivist reading of such a claim would say, sure, the chain of evidence has to be clear, and clearly the clues for understanding the truth of an event refer to something that can’t, strictly, be present, so disclosure, as a secondary factor, is important in discovering the truth. But Heidegger was making a stronger point. It is disclosure itself, unveiling, apokalupsis, that never to be preserved moment, which is what makes the truth the truth. In other words, the truth isn’t affirmed by referring its claim to those canons of logic that would make revelation legitimate – no, the moment itself, the presenting of the present, is the truth. Derrida, with that exemplary malice of his, wrote an essay on this moment as the apocalyptic moment, with apocalypse, by various forced etymologies, leading us back to the moment that the bride is stripped bare by the exemplary bachelor, the groom. A bareness that is both instantiated and ceremonially represented by the removal of the veil. It is, in Derrida’s account, a sexual event – or constitutive of the truth of sex, and the irreducible sexual supplement of the truth.

However, let’s suspend our Derrida talk. The important thing is to see that the disclosure notion of truth is the point of convergence for, on the one side, logic, and on the other side, events. This is important for Badiou. The eventimential (which we will call it, dragging a term with a slight change of letters from the French into the English) – the eventimential turn – is how we know that Badiou is not a sixties philosopher, and why a philosopher like Deleuze fascinates and repels him. We seem, here, to have finally jimmied truth out of that depressing job it has been doing since the logical positivists decided to try to make it a mere function in a formal language (which, famously, never succeeded). The truth, since then, has been working like a princess in a hamburger joint. It is exciting to think that the Truth can be rescued from the infinite abjection, not to mention the French fry smell, of such circumstances.

There is also an analytic tradition of interpreting events. We will cover a bit of that in the next post, then go on and finish up this Badiou stuff.

At the end of Un, Multiple, an examination of Deleuze’s work in response to critics of his book on Deleuze, the Clamor of Being, Badiou gives his sotie/enemy (G-D) a backhanded compliment:

“Let’s recall that in our eyes, one of Deleuze’s cardinal virtues is to have hardly ever utilized, in his own name, all the ‘modern’ deconstructionist train [tout l’attirail déconstructiviste"moderne"] and to have been, without the least complex, a metaphysician (or, more than this, a physicist, in the presocratic sense of the term).”

There’s a cautionary note for the writers of a blog named after one of Derrida’s essays. In fact, we are going to put in place some of that deconstructive machinery in spite of Badiou’s evident horror of it. Reader, beware.

As we said in our last post, Badiou’s theses on art interest us as much for what they tell us about Badiou’s peculiar sense of truth as for his aesthetics. Formally, what Badiou might object to here is that, once again, deconstruction obstinately refuses to allow the author the freedom to decide the topic and its order – in other words, it grounds its critique of mastery in a pointless preliminary struggle with the master before he has even made a claim to that status, confusing vandalism and guerilla warfare, mugging and wrestling with Jacob's angel. But let’s put that objection aside for a moment, even as we reluctantly note its pertinence. Here, in LI’s translation, are the first six theses.

Theses on contemporary art

1. Art is not the sublime descent of the infinite into the finite abjection of the body and the genitals. On the contrary, it is the production, by the finite mean of a material subtraction, of an infinite subjective series.
2. Art can’t be the expression of the particular, be it ethnic or egoist [moïque]. It is the impersonal production of a truth which addresses itself to all [qui s’address a tous].
3. The truth of which art is the process is always the truth of the sensible qua sensible. Which means: transformation of the sensible into the event of the Idea.
4. There is necessarily a plurality of arts, and whatever may be the imaginable intersections among them, no totalisation of this plurality is, itself, imaginable.
5. All art came from an impure form, and the purification fo that impurity composes the history both of the artistic truth and its extenuation.
6. The subjects of an artistic truth are the works that compose it.

Notice, first, that these are not axioms or aphorisms. As theses, they have a semi-logical coherence – they hang together, even if their order is not logically deductive. Yet, as much as a thesis is so carved out of human conversation as to be more like a ritual utterance in a courtroom than a dialogue, Badiou has chosen to start off with a negation that is clearly dialogical. One wants to ask: who said art is the sublime descent into bodies and genitals (the genital portion might be a better translation of sexe, here)?

We could name the names. Badiou even supposes that we could. He himself doesn’t, though, isolating the enonce from the agent, the reference, the proper name, all the irritating paraphernalia that would load us down – the attirail -- which actually produced it. Isn't this, according to Marx, the mark of the birth of ideology -- when men bow down to the idols of their brains? But let's try to be more sympathetic, here. If, indeed, the "not" is an obvious not -- if Badiou is beginning with a topic that is known to the extent that anyone reading him can be presumed to know all about it, than the name would merely add an undeserved authority to the propostion. The name could, of course, be Bataille. But as it is, it is an x, no name.

So what, one wants to know, is the truth about the “sublime descent of the infinite into the finite abjection of the body and the genitals, ‘ and what would be the procedure for determining it? And would this procedure be artistic – or would it be about art, deriving from somewhere else -- say, philosophy?

LI’s idea is that a lot depends on the infinite, here. We are given a hint by the yoking together of sublime and descent – an inversion of the Kantian sublime, which is an ascent, indeed, an incommensurability, rather than a vertigo. Perhaps it is out of the proportions, or disproportions, forged in that Kantian sublime that the disproportion between the infinite – which may be an object of Reason, here – and the finite – that downward direction – takes place, or rather – is denied its place. Whatever it is, it isn’t art. The glance downward – a deconstructionist such as LI can’t help but think of the moment in Restitutions in which Derrida quotes Freud’s essay on fetishism, which postulates the (male) infant's upward gaze meeting the impossible object, Mother without a penis, and so looks, immediately, downward, to Mother’s foot – and the series that follows that archetypal moment of looking away. It is, of course, a boobytrapped series: it is boobytrapped by its finiteness, by the object that satisfies it only by provoking the hollowest orgasm, the one that builds around dissatisfaction, the boob that is, indeed, a trap, an exploding cigar, a shoe, panties, hose.

So: this odd thesis that reads like a reply to a fragment of conversation, and the sign that delimits art: no fetishists allowed. The material subtraction (of what?) will have to be faced. There is a reward for that, too: an infinite subjective series. This is where the infinite is supposed to go, then. Leaving, for the moment, the question unanswered: where are these truths uncovered?

If the first thesis separates the (little) boys from the fetishists, the second thesis pushes us, the receivers of the thesis, into the universal by another subtraction, this one of the expression of the particular. This, it turns out, is something art can’t be (ne saurait être). The “can not” in English doesn’t exactly correspond to the phrase in French. But it seems clear enough that, by forebidding another slot in the possible slots of things that art can be, we are getting somewhere. However, what is this movement? On the one hand, perhaps this is a fancy way of saying, identity politics is boring and makes art boring. But this statement is stronger than that. It isn’t just that art that mixes identity politics into the mix is bad – it isn’t art at all. So art, here, is detached from its sociological status, which would say, this is art merely because it is so indicated by the institutions that make art. Badiou is using truth, then, to pull us into a game that we have seen played before. Played, in fact, in the nineteenth century. In this game, the definition contains, in itself, the norms that give us an ideal of the object. The badness in art, then, is that thing in the art that pulls it away from being art. So that the truth of art, the truth made by art, the truth through which art is, will separate itself by its being itself from the untruth that art is not, the personal, the ethnic, the egotistical – the confession that does not rise above the quality of a note passed between students in a high school class, for instance.
Since this is a thesis about contemporary art, we could, to see if this statement is true, compare it to contemporary art practices – this would, in fact, be the critical thing to do. If we look at art from, say, 1900 on, it seems, on the surface, to be doing something different from Badiou’s claim for contemporary art – it seems to be continually searching for ways to be in relation to what isn’t art, and those ways have consisted, in part, of the ethnic, the sexual, the personal. Robert Lowell’s poems, Kiki Smith’s sculptures, or even Robert Walser’s Bleistiftschriften come to mind. Plus, of course, the curious inversion created by excluding bad art from good art in the definition of an art seeking the outside of art – for doesn’t this mean that art will seek bad art as its forbidden other? And isn’t this a return to the perversion from which, in our first thesis, we were seeking liberation?

But basta! LI doesn’t do this very often, but, what the hell. We will move from these theses to the theses on the Universal tomorrow, if we can, to explain -- or complain -- about Badiou's concept of the event.

Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper. Frege's idea could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life. And the same, of course, could be said of any propositions: Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing. And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs.

But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we have to say that it is its use. – Wittgenstein


To read Badiou for the first time is a confusing experience. The vocabulary, for one – it seems to mix terms of art from radically different spheres. There is something especially daunting about the use of mathematical terms and concepts. Partly, this is due to LI’s shaky knowledge of mathematics – the last time we did a geometric proof was about the same time we were drooling over the girls on the Drill Team. We’ve never been highly math literate. However, as the years go by, we have acquired some knowledge about the philosophy of mathematics. If we have no talent for equations, we like to think we are ace in the pattern recognition department.

But partly this is also due to our sense that the intrusion of terms of art, here, is unwarranted. We are reminded of Johnson’s strictures on the metaphysical poets:

“Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.”

Or, to quote that scene in Apocalypse now:

WILLARD
" They told me that you had gone totally insane and that your
methods were unsound."

KURTZ
" Are my methods unsound?"

WILLARD
" I don't see any method at all, sir."


Badiou has written about this reaction to his work:

“My father was an old student of the Ecole Normale Superieure specializing in mathematics; my mother was an old student of the Ecole Normale Superieure specializing in French. I am an old studend of the Ecole Normale Superior specializing in.. well, what? Philosophy, meaning, without a doubt, the only possibility of assuming that double filiation, of circulating freely between literary maternity and paternal mathematics. It is a lesson for philosophy itself, as I conceive it, and that I have summed up in the following declaration: the language of philosophy always occupies, or always constructs, its own space between the matheme and the poem, between the mother and the father, that’s all.

"There is someone who has seen this very well: my colleague Jacques Bouveress of the College du France. In a recent book where he did me the honor of speaking of me, he compared me to a hare with eight paws and said, in substance: this eight legged hare, Alain Badiou, hurries as quickly as he can in the direction of mathematical formalism, and then suddenly, under the impulse of some incomprehensible aim, he turns around exactly and with the same speed hurries to throw himself into literature.” Well, yes, this is how, with a mother and father like mine, one becomes a hare.”

For LI, this is an important passage – not philosophically important, but important insofar as it allows us to have a retain a certain patience with Badiou. And it especially explains the way in which, in his mathematical mode, Badiou can sometimes appear to be a martinet -- one imagines the math teacher in the provinces bearing down on his charges.

It is easy to be impatient with philosophers – first, they write in atrocious jargon, and second, they often say things that seem so obviously wrong that the first impression becomes impenetrable. The French, obviously, haven’t adopted the tales of Uncle Remus to their heart – as they have Edgar Allan Poe – or the natural reference, here, would have been to Bre’r Rabbit and the Tarbaby, one of LI’s favorite of all tales. In my dictionary, lievre is defined as a “mammifère qui vit en liberté.” Well, like Elmer Fudd, we are going to catch that wabbit, but we are also going to pursue it with the full knowledge that there is something cartoon like about the whole hunting metaphor.

Next post (perhaps) is going to be about Badiou’s idea about ‘truth” and art. We’ll look at what he has to say in this interview, as well as in his fifteen theses. We are more concerned by the place held by truth in his philosophy than his aesthetics Badiou’s peculiar conceptualization of truth is the core of what makes us think that Badiou is not, philosophically, on our side, much as we'd like him to be.

Who was it who described wrote about the “melancholic tradition of mimeticism” which gave us all those Greek anecdotes about pigeons pecking at Apelles paintings of fruit and the like? One of those anecdotes is Leonardo da Vinci’s claim – which LI culled from Schiller’s article in the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences – about an artist who painted a picture that was so vivid that anyone who stood in front of it was bound to yawn – since it was a picture of a yawning man.

Yawning is, of course, one of those mysterious mimetic behaviors – Aristotle compared its apparent contagiousness in men to the donkey’s irresistible inclination to urinate if it spots another donkey urinating. Which, given LI’s limited contact with donkeys lately, we haven’t been able to scientifically validate. However, there is something entrancingly meta about a painting of a behavior that is popularly considered mimetic framed by a discourse that considers painting to be modeled on certain canons of imitation.

Schiller’s essay cites another, more ambiguous response to the mimetic situation in animal studies:

“This brings us back to the oral aggressiveness of yawning. It finds a surprizing parallel in the experimental field, including the sexual aspect. Thus two Nigerian Patas monkeys, a male and female, produced what looked like yawning when they were exposed to mirrors, either fixed or hand held. They would also lick and chew them. The male displayed penile erection or masturbation at the same time. Yawning was repeated up to 23 times in rapid succession and would gradually diminish to a total of 67 yawns in 10 minutes as the mirror was losing its sense of novelty (Hall, 1962).”

That yawning or masturbation is the primal response to self examination is, from a philosophical perspective, a rather unpleasant thought. However, skipping bravely ahead, LI is bringing up the yawning topic to warn our readers that we are planning a post about the French philosopher Badiou. The mention of philosophy usually clears the room around here – so be warned.

When we vanished from graduate school (grad students, much more than old soldiers, don’t die, they just fade and fade and fade away), we had finished a master’s thesis that dealt with such French philosophes as Derrida and Deleuze. Lately, in taking a gingerly stroll around the web, we’ve discovered that today’s continentals are all about Badiou. Or at least there are a lot of excellent sites about him: Undercurrent (which, malheureusement, has gone under), is a good place to start. There is also a really smart philosophical site, Charlotte Street, which we’ve been planning on adding to our blogdex or whatever the hell you call the links section. We’ve already added Infinite Thought to our blogdex. The deleuzian journal, The Pli, introduction.html often has articles on Badiou-ian topics.

As for the man himself, he is widely distributed over the Net. We’ve included his site on contemporary French philo on our blogfuckingdex already. We particularly recommend reading his autobiographical sketch, The Philosopher’s Pledge (l’aveu du philosophe) and his 8 Theses on the Universal (like Luther, Badiou has a weakness for nailing up theses. It is an interesting early modern genre – mixing the axiomatic with the polemical, and allowing a certain hurried simultaneity of propositions – rather like a confused but inspiriting charge across a battlefield – in which all are held in semi-isolation, the logic of their dependence one on the other being, it seems, partly up to the reader to decide). Here, to continue the theses theme, are 15 theses on art – which is what LI will probably be discussing.

In the last two or three months, you could squeeze the NYT as hard as you like but you wouldn’t produce a tenth of the news about Iraq that you get from, say, one visit to the daily war news blog. The new propaganda phase re America’s loveable situation comedy version of the Chechnya war, set in a Mesopotamia far, far away, where darling women show their little purple smudged fingers and are surely preparing to embrace Jesus if we only let them, is not to report it at all. So, for instance, where is the report that the British transport plane that was shot out of the sky in December might have been brought down from a height of 15,000 feet? –the first example of the use of the shoulder mounted anti-aircraft missiles that we all know are out there, distributed like popcorn to various jihadists by the CIA in the Afghan liberation thing (remember how we were all for Islam back in the day? ah, our sweet semi alliance with Osama, before islamo-anticommunism – so good, and good for you, unless you happen to be a woman without a burkha -- became islamofascism – so bad, and unliberty lovin’), and surely available for the taking from weapons dumps that the American soldiery was too understaffed to guard – getting more understaffed as the weapons so looted were turned upon that soldiery.

Well, who cares? Three soldiers one day, four the next – the best way to support the troops is to forget about em, let em die anonymously, fuck em, remember not to clutter up good newsprint with their names when you have to devote as much time as possible to faux news such as Martha Stewart’s transition into a parole officer’s problem, take every lie and misstatement doled out by the Central Command and treat it like holy writ if you write anything until the time limit is up on journalistic brown-nosing – oh, some hardhitting report on what really happened might be in order in a decade or two, or in somebody’s book – tie that yellow ribbon round the family credit card that the widows will have to pay off, maybe a little on your back work, with the hearty support of the Republican congress, now brought to you by Visa, as the country goes back to the ownership society ideals exemplified by Jim Crow and our founding father’s willingness to treat that labor problem with the overseer’s whip. Which is, apparently, the new meaning of the conservative fondness for original intent.

LI’s NYC correspondent, T., went to a Fortean meeting – or rather, a meeting of a dissident Fortean group. The meeting was, he thought, scheduled to be held in a Times Square bar he fondly remembered. Here is the report:

Oh my, was I wrong. First of all, I had this image in my mind of the joint - that I had been there, drank there.... - nope. Generally non-descript Greek diner and non-descript "bar" that looked just like the mauve/floral print/fake redwood diner. The "meeting" was not; it was, rather, a couple of people getting together for dinner. I mean: I prepared some material! So, after three of four minutes of disappointment, I began to enjoy the company.

I met and had some very nice conversations with, in particular, Joe and Sam [not their real names- ed.]. Joe is a big fine kind gentlemen who has a particular interest in the vagaries of the human condition. Specifically, he told me about his meetings with Otherkins - those who believe themselves to be descended from, variously, angels, dragons, vampires, elves etc....those who have overdosed on Tolkien. Sam shared his stereoscopic photos from the annual Guy Fawkes celebration: lots of anti-Papist feeling and lots of bonfires and explosions - looks like a hell of a lot of fun. He then shared some more photos, the subject of which looked very familiar to me, but not exactly. Yes, its him, rather older than the last time I saw him, but he, one of my most favorite writers: Samuel R. Delaney. I quickly learned that Sam is working on a documentary film on SRD. So we "talked shop" about his books for a time.

Which brings me to a point to be made: these Forteans (insiders, outcasts, pseudo-, whatever), these factions - they, in a sense, know their "stuff" too well; they very rarely have anything that you might term a 'context' for the stuff that interests them; and, for this I am generally a bit sad, they are too often surprised that a non-Fortean might share an interest in and a knowledge of their "stuff".

As for the factional feelings of these outcasts toward The International Fortean Society: it seems that its got everything to do with a well-known phenomena: the legacy of the founder and access to that source. Additionally, it seems that the guardian of the Fortean flame is a real pill; if these few have characterized her even remotely accurately, she is unpleasant on a good day.

Most uncharacteristically, I suggested as I was leaving that we do this again. I suggested further (oh no!) that some materials should be prepared by someone and presented at the next gathering. If this role falls on me (as it should since I was the dumbass that suggested it), I think that I'll do a few minutes on Hacking's stuff on multiple personality: I think that his method of analysis would be very helpful to this crowd.”

T. is lucky he didn’t fall into a “window area” – a term of art coined by Fortean John Keel to explain the strange doings in Point Pleasant, West Virginia that he made semi famous in his book, Prophecies of the Mothman:

Certain areas appear to be routinely visited by Fortean events. Depending upon your interests, these locales may be called “haunted places,” “monster countries,” “spook light sites,” “triangles,” or “windows.” John Keel created the concept and indeed coined the word, as well as certainly popularizing the notion of “windows” when he first talked about them menacingly and humorously in his articles and books of the 1970s. Although he introduced the idea in UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse in 1970, most people relate the term “window” to the area around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Keel’s book about it, The Mothman Prophecies (1975).

“The phenomena he records,” wrote Jerome Clark in High Strangeness (1996), “exemplify the window at its bizarre best: Over a period of many months UFO activity is frequent, sometimes so frequent that people go UFO-hunting on a nightly basis with reasonable expectations of sighting something. The sightings include events ranging from distant observations to close encounters. Paranormal activity of other sorts often amplifies as well; the Point Pleasant area was also a hotbed for encounters with men in black and a monstrous creature known as Mothman. This full panoply of phenomena accompanies some long-term, narrow-distribution waves; in others the window opens wide enough to admit only UFOs.”


On the other hand, the experience of deja non-vu – T.’s thinking it was one bar, when it turned out to be another – might be a variant of the window area – call it the “tinted window” effect. We’ll be following this story closely, and bringing our readers late breaking bulletins if anything happens – or, more critically, if anything doesn’t.

“The raccoon penis is a reminder of his hustler times at truck stops across southern America - the pendant is a sexual talisman in the southern states…” – The Observer.


Umm. The British still don’t quite, shall we say, understand primitive peoples outside their island. But LI does like the idea that the good bourgeois in the Red States, after fixing up the raccoon stew, have just that special use for the thang bone.

While the Observer goes on to celebrate the cult genius of a writer, JT Leroy, who seems to be spooning out the usual mixture of prostitution and transvestitism – closing that infinitesimal gap between Jerry Springer and William Burroughs – LI has been reading another Stephen Wright novel, Going Native.

Stephen Wright has not had a large output: Meditations in Green, M31: A Family Romance, and Going Native across a stretch of thirty years. The first novel won the Maxwell Perkins award, the very name of which has an antique air of virtue – one imagines a mix of John O’Hara and John Cheever going off to teach creative writing, for all eternity, in Iowa. Surely one of the hells designed for writers in some religion or other.

Wright was interviewed by Contemporary Literature in 96, after Going Native came out. Here is what he says about coming back here, after serving in Vietnam:

“Q. I was struck by your comment, "It was the big event." That remark reminds me of Hemingway and Mailer.
A. I think it is still the big event. I think it explains everything going on politically, culturally, and economically. I think it's pretty pathetic, actually. I can't even think about it for too long without getting infuriated. Why did we have all these years of this Republican crap, and this whole turn to conservative nonsense, and the kind of gloom and mean-spiritedness that is pervading the country? I don't even know when it's been like this before. It comes from being pissed off. I think it starts with "We lost a war." I just feel like saying, "Let's grow up." I mean, really! I've reached a point where I think that this is in many ways a pretty gutless country. You know, Americans like to think of themselves as one of the finer examples of the human species on the planet--that we represent everything that's good and fine and true in the human character. But what I see around me is a lot of gutlessness on every level. I think what we're going through is a very bad, long, and troubled adolescence, and I think Vietnam was puberty. I just hoped it would end sooner. It doesn't even seem as though it's going to end. “

And this is what he says about writing:
Q. Tell us what you aim for in your writing.
A. I forget where Virginia Woolf says this, but it's the best explanation, something that I agree with 100 percent. She says something to the effect that the good reader reads for vision and power. And that's it. Period. It's not for politics, it's not for social mores, it's not to fulfill some thesis you're working on in your head or to justify your way of life--that's a bad reader. A good reader reads for vision and power. And vision and power is in Charles Dickens as much as it's in Samuel Beckett. The technique is irrelevant. All this stuff about considering that writing is advancing or going somewhere, and then you have to discard this and attach that--it's all nonsense.”

Is there any question as to why LI loves this writer? Later in the interview Wright makes the interesting point that he is influenced by TV and David Hume – and that seems to work. Imagine a Humean horror show, in which the horror is the disconnect between cause and effect separating characters into victims – trying desperately to knit those categories back together, or ignoring the rip altogether – and travelers – who exploit that disconnection – and you get a fair sense of Going Native and M31. Then read the final chapter in M31, when the sky lights up with ectoplasmic space ships over DC. Or read, as a piece of sheer movement, the crack chapter in Going Native. This is CD, who, with Lateisha, is the centerpiece of the chapter:

‘He had come into the room to either retrieve an object or relate something important to Lateisha, neither of which was apparent to him now; he returned to the bathroom to see if what he had lost could be found there. Then he was back, staring at the clothes at his feet and a strange pair of black briefs. Men’s. Holding the article daintily aloft between two curled fingers, he searched through the house. Latisha was nowhere to be found. In the kitchen he checked and rechecked the locks on the windows, then became absorbed in cleaning the panes with a homemade mixture of ethanol and the juice of four lemons purchased weeks ago as a preventative against scurvy. He stood at the back door for the longest time. He swept the floor. Passing through the living room, he was diverted by the black oak out there on the lawn. There was a man hiding behind the trunk. While he waited for the man to show himself again, he took his pulse. The beat seemed rapid, rapid but not excessively so, already perhaps steady and strong, certainly lacking the telltale squishy note of a perforated chamber or malfunctioning valve or clogged artery. He had to stop the smoking tomorrow. He couldn’t go on like this.”

To LI’s mind, the crack cocaine here, is almost peripheral – or, rather, operates to amplify the zoo trance in which humanoids can spend their days, in whatever cages they find themselves in, the electric work of habit laying down lines of automatism that track through every environment, under the clothes and down the arteries, the brain’s spatter of constant channel changing as one day is piled up on top of the next in aimless, wobbly piles until we dump the whole thing in a hole in the ground or burn it and put the bone splinter ashes in an urn.

Which sounds like a gloomy magic trick, and is certainly not all there is to Wright or the human condition. The vision and power are the rings of light around even such as CD. So pick up one of the guys novels and read it, will you?

LI was never a Maoist. Although we have a lot of contempt for the way the Western powers, for decades, subvented the Nationalist fascist forces, who were as bent on mass murder as Mao, but less successful at holding power, we’ve always thought Maoism was rural idiocy’s revenge on Marx. However, according to this scolding article in the NYT, have to credit Mao’s heirs with an activity that contains at least a true relic or two of good old Marx, not to mention Adam Smith. They are destroying the American constructed international IP standards.

We love it. IP is a misnomer – intellectual property is what Adam Smith called monopoly. In the nineteenth century, there was a gradual acceptance of the need for very limited monopolies of intellectual products – books, music, designs. However, the sponsors of monopoly were very clear about what this entailed – the capture of an economic gain through a state supported monopoly does not and should not have the characteristic of ‘property rights” – it is a lease, rather, and it is founded on that rarest of justifications for capitalist activity, ‘fairness.” You will notice that fairness only comes out of the mouths of economists when it favors the class for which they labor – the propertied classes. Otherwise, you hear the word efficiency. One thing a state monopoly does is create massive inefficiencies – hence, the price of those drugs still under patent.

As is the way of state monopoly, the monopolists invest some of their profits in the political market, buying senators, representatives, and presidents. These investments have created such absurdities as the extension of copyright to close to a century, sponsored by the late, unlamented Sonny Bono.

China, however, has taken the healthy view taken throughout the nineteenth century by Americans – IP is a rip off. So they have coolly ripped off American designs, copyrights, etc. Good for them. It is unfortunate that other countries in the third world aren’t strong enough to do the same. Nothing would please us more than to see some African country manufacture, at a much cheaper price, every drug that is now under patent in the U.S. Pull the completely corrupt system down to the ground, pour gasoline and piss on it, and light a bic.