the golden hairs of her armpits...

"Et, lorsque Nana levait les bras, on apercevait, aux feux de la rampe, les poils d’or de ses aisselles."


Nana attaching itself by a hundred strings to a prearranged table of kinships, heredities, transmissions, is the vast crowded epos of the daughter of the people filled with poisoned blood and sacrificed as well as sacrificing on the altar of luxury and lust; the panorama of such a “progress’ as Hogarth would more definitely have named – the progress across the high plateau of pleasure and down the facile descent on the other side.” – Henry James.


Offenbach’s career is neatly divided by 1870. In that year, he had to disappear from France for a while, since he was originally from Germany. The collapse of Napoleon III’s court, and the Second Empire, and the commune, and the establishment of the third republic created, at least for a while, a puritanical atmosphere in which Offenbach’s operas were looked upon as symptoms of decay, if not causative agents in themselves. And of course there was the matter of Offenbach’s connections in the imperial entourage.

Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels not only portray the corruption working through the genealogical tree of one family, but – by implication – the corruption that, on a macro level, brought about Le Debacle – France’s defeat at the hands of a surging Germany. On last page of Nana, in which Zola puts an end to her with that favorite of sentimental novelists, the unmentionable disease, one hears, in the streets, the stir and celebration of the crowds, receiving the news that war has been declared. Madness mirrors madness.

“A red crust, parting from the cheek, invaded the mouth, spread in an abominable smile. And on that horrible and grotesque mask of nothingness, the hair, the beautiful hair, guarding its solar like flames, flowed in a stream of gold. Venus decomposed. It seems that the virus she caught in the sewer, on all those tolerated corpses, this ferment by which she had empoisoned a whole people, had mounted to her face and utterly corrupted it.
The room was empty. A great desperate wind came up from the boulevard and swelled the curtain.
- To Berlin! To Berlin!”

Momento Mori and all that – death being the moralist’s great hat trick.

This, then, is Zola’s judgment on the subversive content of Offenbach’s operas – for subversion buttressed the order by creating a space in which all that was solid melted into money, and money became both a value and the mocker of all value.

Es gab alles, alles! Das hinderte nicht, daß sich die meisten wie Sarcey durch die Operette in ein Traumreich entführt glaubten. Sie träumten selber. Wären sie wach gewesen, so hätten sie (…) die unwahrscheinliche Wirklichkeit ihres Daseins wiedererkannt. – Kracauer

“It had everything, everything! But that didn’t get in the way of the fact that most, like Sarcey [a critic] felt themselves enticed by the operetta into a dreamland. They dreamed themselves. If they had been awake, they would have recognized… the improbably reality of their own existences.”

In European history, there were three occasions, that I can think of, in which the theater really played an important political role: The Marriage of Figaro, The Three Penny Opera, and the two mytho-farces of Offenbach, Orpheus in Hell and Beautiful Helen. In all three instances, a society went to see itself unmasked – and found the spectacle terribly funny. One of the inspirations for Canetti’s Crowds and Power was the opening night of the Three Penny Opera:

“It was the exactest expression of this Berlin. The people were howling up themselves, this was what they were and they were happy about it. Erst kam ihr Fressen, dann kam ihre Moral – nobody could have said it any better, they took it literally… Against the sweet forms of the Viennese operetta, in which the people could calmly find everything that they wished, here was another, which put on a Berliner form, with all its hardness, rascality and banal justifications, that they wanted no less than, and probably more than that sweetness.”

The dreamworlds in which the dreamers become aware of what they are wishing for batter against the constitutive principle of dreaming, at least according to Freudian theory. The dream takes its form from condensation, from the active intervention of the censor on the wish and that glitch in the libido's program: it can't say no. Dreams, in other words, require a latent content, an opacity. This is how the human dreamer humanly dreams. Otherwise, we get … animals. And the movement is, indeed, to the animal here, at least with Zola and Canetti.

That there is censorship outside of dreams, in the state or the corporation, is an important social evidence for the felt notion that art can be subversive in some manner – can corrupt morals or overthrow institutions. But this social evidence is, LI would contend, about the whole art system – no one work operates to subvert faith in the state, the gods, or money. So that rare moment when one work seems to have gathered into itself, by some genius, a real look at ‘what we are and why we are well pleased with ourselves’ – those are definitely worth looking at. Especially as their prestige has been lent, by a multitude of critics, to the drabbest and most commonplace of movies, books, paintings and novels.

Well, let’s end this with the beginning from Nana. Zola obviously bases Nana’s first appearance as Venus on Offenbach’s La Belle Helene. Here’s one translation:

“The traditional three knocks were given, and among the returning throng, attendants, laden with pelisses and overcoats, bustled about at a great rate in order to put away people’s things. The clappers applauded the scenery, which represented a grotto on Mount Etna, hollowed out in a silver mine and with sides glittering like new money. In the background Vulcan’s forge glowed like a setting star. Diana, since the second act, had come to a good understanding with the god, who was to pretend that he was on a journey, so as to leave the way clear for Venus and Mars. Then scarcely was Diana alone than Venus made her appearance. A shiver of delight ran round the house. Nana was nude. With quiet audacity she appeared in her nakedness, certain of the sovereign power of her flesh. Some gauze enveloped her, but her rounded shoulders, her Amazonian bosom, her wide hips, which swayed to and fro voluptuously, her whole body, in fact, could be divined, nay discerned, in all its foamlike whiteness of tint beneath the slight fabric she wore. It was Venus rising from the waves with no veil save her tresses. And when Nana lifted her arms the golden hairs in her armpits were observable in the glare of the footlights.”

It is rather funny that even now the translation above, on an etext server in Australia, is censored. After the Amazonian bosom Zola writes: “sa gorge d’amazone dont les pointes roses se tenaient levées et rigides comme des lances” – but the nipple talk was all too much for the English translators all the way up to the sixties. To LI, however, the most important part of this description is the golden hairs of the armpits. Which I will return to, I hope.

Oh, and do go to the Mery Laurent page where I stole my photograph of la belle Helene.

the art in subversion

One must have ideas and tunes that are as genuine as hard cash. – Offenbach

Offenbach has always had heavy fans – Nietzsche, Karl Kraus, Kracauer. Kracauer wrote about Orphee aux enfers, the first Offenbach opera to mock the Gods, that in it Offenbach was calling out to the bourgeoisie:

“Confess that you are just as bored as the gods, and follow the lead that they are giving. What was the lead the gods were giving? They were setting about making a revolution… And so that their anger might be given a thorough contemporary note, the orchestra [strikes] up the Marseillaise, which in the days of the Second Empire was very definitely a revolutionary song. The challenge was plain enough.” (Quoted in Michael Chanon, from Handel to Hendrix)

Of course, boredom is a two edged butter knife, and if we make revolution from boredom, what will we do when we are bored with revolution?

Kracauer, thank god, lived in the days before the verb subvert entered the critical vocabulary like a radical chic diva. LI has read with interest – although not with a complete thoroughness, since it was sometimes hard to keep up with all the threads – Le Colonel Chabert’s many sword fights on her own site and the Parodycenter concerning 300, a movie LI is never going to see, as it sounds infinitely boring, and some David Lynch movies, which we might see, and Baudrillard, who we are bracketing or we will drown in themes. What interests us is the set of assumptions that circulate around the convergence of politics and art. We are interested because we find that, mostly, these discussions make art subservient to politics, which we strongly disagree with, while at the same time pursuing a sort of mock politics through art, which we find, to say the least, a funny way to engage in politics. Not that this is new, of course - these themes are as old as the Second International. Anyway, LCC’s comments reminded us a bit of the problem Zola had with Offenbach. All of which fits into our fait divers theme, in its own odd way.

The beginning of Nana is a rather scathing description of La Belle Helene, which you can see in these youtube clips: here (I love Paris in this clip!) and then follow the thread. Zola called it La Blonde Vénus and he had every reason to begin Nana’s adventures here. Those who love their Zola will recall that Nana was first seen as a little girl with daring eyes who watches her Mom go to bed with her lover, who is renting a room from the family, while her father lies in a drunken stupor in his own vomit on his bedroom. If you read the Penguin translation of Nana, Douglas Parmee, who introduces it, writes Offenbach… “whose witty subversion of the regime Zola quite failed to grasp, viewing him instead, with great distaste, purely as the impudent representative of frothy frivolity.” Subversion, subversion, and the failure to grasp it (or its failure to grasp) being at the heart of the LCC controversy, we thought it might be interesting to ask what about a wholly other era and genre – although one that involves Greeks and their mythology – whether Zola failed to grasp subversion, here, or loathed it in the grasping.

Which is something we will revisit in another post.

how many times do I have to tell you, America?

“A dry wind of the high places in the wilderness toward the
daughter of my people, not to fan, nor to cleanse,

Even a full wind from those places shall come unto me: now
also will I give sentence against them.”

The escalation in all its glory:

“The two men showed up on Tuesday afternoon to evict Suaada Saadoun’s family. One was carrying a shiny black pistol.

Ms. Saadoun was a Sunni Arab living in a Shiite enclave of western Baghdad. A widowed mother of seven, she and her family had been chased out once before. This time, she called American and Kurdish soldiers at a base less than a mile to the east.
The men tried to drive away, but the soldiers had blocked the street. They pulled the men out of the car.

“If anything happens to us, they’re the ones responsible,” said Ms. Saadoun, 49, a burly, boisterous woman in a black robe and lavender-blue head scarf.

The Americans shoved the men into a Humvee. Neighbors clapped and cheered as if their soccer team had just won a title.

The next morning, Ms. Saadoun was shot dead while walking by a bakery in the local market.”

No amount of salty water, or of blood, or of bile, will ever be enough to clean the stain of this war from this fuckin generation. The sentence has been given about America. The arrogance that cheerfulness once balanced has become unbalanced, while the cheerfulness has become, increasingly, the manic expression of a national carbs and proteins overload; the mad lust for power that showed itself in winds, indeed, winds full of fallout, budgets full of death, sixty years of them, webs of filth woven across the face of the continent, and the children of lynch parties voting in those who proposed lynching on a wider scale, world class lynchings, this is the Old Found Land where the milk soured on our tongues.

What is to be done, then?

I was more than happy to see the Democrats pass an appropriation bill with a pull out date. But as LI has said before, the demand for an immediate pull out shouldn’t hypnotize those who demand it into paying no attention to the occupation as it is – which, in effect, has happened. Year by year, the occupation has been allowed to drift by, in America, while the conversation revolves around the beginning of the invasion and the putative future pullout. No cry for justice, for a ceasefire, for peace.

LI hopes that those who read this site do read the Iraqi bloggers. On March 19, Treasure of Baghdad published an excellent survey of Iraqi bloggers asking about the state of the war. One of the respondents stood out, in my mind: Zeyad, from Healing Iraq. Even though I think his response depends, too much, on a rule enforcing mechanism that doesn’t exist, he floats two crucial ideas: amnesty and reconciliation, which need to be part of a ceasefire process (which will, in fact, recognize that the rule enforcing mechanisms that now exist – government, militia, insurgent – must come to a point where they can create the rule enforcing mechanism – the state – in Iraq. The state does not exist in Iraq right now - since a real state can't depend on a foreign power to enforce its writ, or allow that power to dictate its policies).

“What was your opinion when the US decided to invade Iraq in 2003?
I was supportive of the war. I was living a meaningless life of despair under Saddam's regime and I naiively believed that the U.S. was sincere and had a viable plan to improve our lives and bring us "freedom and democracy." I was mistaken, of course, and those terms only bring a wry smile to my face now.
It has been four years since the invasion. Has your opinion changed since then? Why?
My opinion started gradually changing not long after the invasion. It was a combination of reasons: The U.S. mishandling of the war, the destruction and the looting, the vengeful steps taken against a large portion of the population by both the U.S. and returning exiles, the growing insurgency, the empowerment of Islamic fundamentalists, the establishment of a political system based on sectarian and ethnic quotas, building security forces that are more loyal to sectarian warlords than the state, the sectarian violence, the huge toll on Iraqi lives, the massive and underreported refugee crisis, the displacement and breakup of families, the division of once harmonious communities, the mistrust between Iraqis, etc.
Whom do you blame for the insecurity in Iraq? Why?
It is very popular these days to blame the victim, but I believe that everyone shares some of the blame. The U.S., the international community, the U.N., Iraqi politicians, power-hungry clerics, the Iraqi people, the former regime, Iran, Saudi Arabia. Instead of assigning blame, I think it is better to work out solutions.
What do you think should be done to quell the violence there?
1- The U.S. should immediately work with regional countries (including Syria and Iran, yes) and the international community to broker an agreement between the warring factions to find agreeable methods on sharing power, wealth and resources. The current government can continue to operate meanwhile as a caretaker government until such an agreement is reached. Corrupt politicians who want to work from London or Teheran should be relieved of their positions.
2- An unconditional amnesty should be offered for all militant groups and militias in the country. An effective campaign to completely disarm the population should follow immediately. Militias and paramilitary forces, including the small private militias of politicians and religious leaders, should be disbanded. No exceptions. No "red lines." No excuses.
3- Former Ba'athists, bureaucrats, and military officers should be pardoned and brought back into the fold as part of a country-wide national reconciliation effort. The Iraqi security forces that the U.S. has recruited should be investigated thoroughly and purged. Reintroducing military conscription could be a solution to limit the infiltration of rogue elements that do not work for the state.
4- Then, schedule a new date for parliamentary elections with direct international supervision. No sectarian or ethnic slates should be allowed. No clerics should be allowed to give spiritual "blessings" for any candidates or lists. A new constitution should be written after that. Postpone all contentious issues until after that. No sneaky U.S.-sponsored privatization and oil laws should be passed until that period.
5- The U.S. should clearly announce a timetable for withdrawal of its troops. No excuses.

Do you think the US should withdraw its forces from Iraq now or not? Why?

The U.S. should at least set a timetable for withdrawal but not after the above steps are made. The occupation can not go on forever, because it is obvious that its presence is fueling further chaos and violence. Military solutions have proven their futility.

Do you think the war was worth it? Why?

It will not be readily obvious if the war was worth it or not. The toll in lives has been enormous so far. Future generations will be scarred forever as a result of this war, and they are the ones who are supposed to make a change for the better.”

Dominique Kalifa

Okay, we’ve seen Barthes, we’ve seen Mallarme, is it time yet to go to the concession stand and buy the kids peanuts, and what does this have to do with our Bush era beeswax anyway, honey?

Let’s turn, shall we, he said medically, to this essay by Dominique Kalifa, a French historian very interested in the symbiotic relationship between crime and the press. Kalifa pushes back to the 1830s the “mediatic era”, seeing three things come together then: a cheap, mass circulation press; second, a press in which more can be printed (the initiative comes here from the editor Gervais Charpentier, who lead his« révolution » in 1838. Thanks to the technical possibilities opened by the mechanical presses, he created a new format, the so called « in-18 jésus » (18,3 x 11,5 cm), which permitted the offer of much more text for a price reduced by half: 3,50 francs au lieu de 7. The totality of bookstores were constrained to align themselves, engaging from than on, little by little, in the path which lead to the cheap book). And finally, another technical innovation, the illustration, where engravings, vignettes and lithographs became more and more numerous, doing their working on the writing of the text itself.”

Kalifa then jumps to the 1860s, the decade of decay (and as I’ve pointed out before, Louis Napoleon’s era holds eerie resemblances to our own – down to the coup that began it all. Henri Rochefort said, about Napoleon II, that there was a curious enthusiasm for him in prisons, among thieves. I do wonder if thieves or conmen look at Bush as a brother). Napoleon II began lifting censorship rules on the press. Thus, more radical press popped up and like that. The working class got to speak out and like that. But a funny thing happened on the way to the revolution.

“But the initiatives of the 1860s were not limited only to the universe of reading. Modernisation touched the world of spectacles (spectacle I translated, in that Mallarme piece, as side show), which entered into the industrial regime under the Second Empire. This is the case of the café-concert, which is structured in a hierarchised network of programs and venues, and it is also that of theater, of which the production diversified, attaining in 1867 an exceptional level of grosses. In the remodeled, hausmannized city, a new social spectacle outlines itself, the strolls of loiterers, the rushes on the boulevards or the refluxes of the crowd coming out of the department stores in which is specified that public taste for reality that the cinema is going to soon capture. But the most significant expample is without doubt that of the 1867 l'Exposition universelle, which welcomed to Paris 11 million visitors, the double of that of 1855. It is besides there, in that curious enterprise which conjoins social pedagogy and industrial exhibition, mixes commercial, political and aesthetic functions, where W. Benjamin wanted to see the christening of the spectactle industry.”

Which brings us up to the case of Tropmann, the famous murder whose crimes and execution were considered symbolic of the sinister atmosphere of Second Empire decay and corruption. And which we consider to be among the most significant of private murders for merging the political and the sensational in a way that was felt, even then, to be new.

side show act, interrupted

We all work to one effect, some willingly, and with a rational
apprehension of what we do: others without any such knowledge.
As I think Heraclitus in a place speaketh of them that sleep,
that even they do work in their kind, and do confer to the general
operations of the world. One man therefore doth co-operate after
one sort, and another after another sort; but even he that doth murmur,
and to his power doth resist and hinder; even he as much as any
doth co-operate. – Marcus Aurelius

LI was going to directly plow into our Barthes quote – in the post before the last post – to suss out this “immanence” and the strangely intimate world of the news as it is sliced, diced, produced, and repeated on the tv news broadcast that forms the basis for your average American householder’s feel for the world outside of the perimeter. And also the world at the urban center, the fear of the black planet world. Our idea is that the ‘idiocy’ at play in the defense of the Iraq war as something that could best be described in terms of American crime – and not any old American crime, but the crime associated with black metropoles – is a kiss away from the forms and figures of the newscast, from the mentality shaped by those news casts.

But then we said to ourselves: what’s with the fuckin’ directness, LI? Don’t you always say, by indirection I will find direction out? Or something like that, you mumbly old prick? LI likes to diversify meetings of the editorial board with a little insult, to break up the monotony of there being only one editor. I’m cracking myself up here, folks. I’ll be in Omaha on the 5th, and then a two week engagement at the Bismark, North Dakota Holiday Inn with the Dakota Polka Nation. …

Instead, I’m going to cut from Barthes to Mallarme. There’s a cut for ya. Mallarme was fascinated by the fait divers, which was blooming in the late and degenerate last decade of the farce Napoleon. The ‘interrupted side show’, as I am going to translate the following piece of prose, figures in his final collection, Divagations, subsumed under the title of Grands faits divers. Translating Mallarme is a classic mug’s game. It can’t be done, it destroys the destruction wrought on the French language in the French – for like any good modernist prose, Mallarme’s works by wrecking. How, for instance, to reproduce Mallarme’ habitual inversion of the order of anaphora, so that the “this” referred to comes after its anaphoric marking. Like I am supposed to know what this would sound like in English! I’m a babbler here meself. But I found this piece to have, a, on odd match with the line from Marcus Aurelius, and b., something to do with the notion of the brief, intense episode that catches fire with its own elements and burns itself out.

An interrupted side show act.
How far is civilization from procuring the joys attributable to that estate! One has to be astonished, for example, that there does not exist an association between dreamers sojourning in every great city to support a newspaper which would take note of events in the proper light of the dream. Reality is an artifice, made for sticking the middle intellect between the mirages of a fact; but it reposes for that very reason on some universal entente: let’s see if it is not, in the ideal, a necessary aspect, evident, simple, which serves the type. I wish, for myself alone, to write as it struck my poet’s gaze, an anecdote in the state it was in before reporters divulged it to the crowds prepared to assign to each thing its common character.
The little theater of PRODIGALITES adds to the exhibition of a living cousin of Atta Troll or of Martin its classic fairy pantomime the Beast and the Genie; I have, in order to recognize the invitation of a double ticket some ending up yesterday at my place, posed my hat in the vacant auditorium in the seat next to me, an absence of friends testifying to the general taste for avoiding this naïve spectacle. What happens before my eyes? Nothing, save that: from amidst the evasive palenesses of muslin finding shelter on twenty pedestals in architecture imitative of Baghdad there jumps out a smile and open arms to the sad weight of a bear: while the hero, a clown, evoker of these sylphids and their guardian, in his high silver nudity, rallied the animal with our superiority. What a break, to enjoy like the crowd the myth, all banality added, and without anyone sitting nearby to whom to pour out these reflections; to see the ordinary and splendid eve of the act discovered on the ramp by my research saturated with fantasies or symbols. A stranger to the many reminiscences of evenings like this, the brand newest of accidents! suscitated my attention: one of the numerous salves of applause distributed according to the enthusiasm for the illustration before us of the authentic privilege of man, having just, broken by what? ceased all at once, with a fixed fracas of glory at its peak, unable to expand itself. All ears, when what was needed was all eyes. At the puppet’s gesture, a bent palm in the air opening five fingers, I understood that he had brilliantly captured all sympathies by the air of trapping on the wing something, the figure (and that is all) of the facility which one is taken by an idea; and that moved by the light breeze caused by the gesture, the bear rhythmically and gently rose up, questioned that exploit, one claw posed on the ribbons of the human shoulder. No one breathed, so much did this situation pose some grave consequences for the honor of the race: what was going to happen? The other paw fell, supple, against an arm extended along the silver suit; and one sees, a couple united in some secret understanding, how an inferior man, beefy, good natured, standing on two hairy, slightly apart legs, squeezes to learn here the practices of genius, and his black muzzled cranium only gets halfway there, the butt of his brilliant and supernatural brother: but who, himself! lifting up, the mad mouth of a vagueness, a terrible head moving by a visible string a golden paper fly in the horror of true denials. An act of a clarity transcending the vast sawdust strewn stage, with this gift, proper to art, of lasting for a long time: in order to make it complete in its entirety I let tacitly stream out of the rejection from the Polar regions a forbidden discourse, without letting myself be put off by the probably fatal attitude taken by the mime, repository of our pride. “Be good enough (this was the sense) to not lack the charity to explain to me the virtue of this atmosphere of splendor, of dust and voices, where you have taught me to move. My request, my pressing request, is simply that you don’t seem, in an anguish that is not only faked, to be able to respond to it; o subtle older brother, throw yourself on the regions of wisdom, to me, still dressed for an informal stay in the caves where I replunge, in the night of humble epochs, my latent force, in order for me to free you. Let us authenticate, by this narrow hug, before the multitude sitting here to this end, the pact of our reconciliation.” The absence of any breath united to space, in what an absolute spot I lived through one of those dramas of astral history electing, in order to produce itself, this modest theater! the crowd was effaced, all, in the emblem of its spiritual situation magnifying the scene: modern dispenser of ecstasy, only, with the impartiality of an elementary thing, the gas, up in the ceiling of the auditorium, continuing a luminous expectant sound.
The charm was broken: this is when a piece of meat, nude, brutal, traversed my vision directed from the wings, in advance by some moments on the recompense, the mysteriousness of the ordinary after these scenes. A substitute rag bleeding by the bear who, instincts that were anterior to a higher curiosity with which the stage lights had endowed him now rediscovered, fell on his four paws and, as though the silence has carried one away, went to sniff it in the stuffed animal march of his kind, in order to sink his teeth into it, this prey. A sigh, almost exempt of deception, soothed incomprehensibly the assembly: of which the lorgnettes, by rows, searched, glinting with their refined lenses, the game of that splendid imbecile evaporated in his fear; but they see an abject meal preferred perhaps by the animal to the same thing that he had needed to do at first to our image, in order to taste it. The curtain, hesitating up to now in the worry of increasing the danger or the emotion, suddenly let fall its daily round of prices and common places. I got up like everybody else, in order to breath outside, astonished not to have felt, again, the same genre of impression as my fellows, but serene: for my way of seeing, after all, had been superior, and even true.”

that dog don't hunt... the right way, sir

Sometimes the liberal bloggers remind us of so many untrained coon hounds out on the hunt, baying for anything – skunk, squirrel or sparrow – except coon. So it seems at least with the Berube post over at Crooked Timber and the resulting comments rush, in which LI elbowed into the queue, hollerin’ for a stake.

Now to my mind there’s one and only one coon in the hunt: the war culture. Since the whole thing started on the level of a feud between Cockburn and Berube on the credentials of Berube’s anti-war stance (about which Cockburn is wrong, apparently) this was probably a rush that was gonna go wrong from the beginning. And in fact Cockburn’s fucking point, at the beginning of his article, doesn’t get a look: “Pick almost any date on the calendar and it’ll turn out that the US either started a war, ended a war, perpetrated a massacre or sent its UN Ambassador into the Security Council to declare to issue an ultimatum. It’s like driving across the American West. “Historic marker, 1 mile”, the sign says. A minute later you pull over and find yourself standing on dead Indians. “On this spot, in 1879 Major T and a troop of US cavalry “

So the point is the American normalization of the war culture, and its effects. But in the liberal anti-war coon hunt, the whole notion that it is somewhat crooked and downright fucked that the U.S. spends the sums it does on war, engages in so many wars, encircles the globe with its troops, and keeps trying to jimmy the rules so that its missiles dominate this planet with the threat of cruel annihilation goes and sits on a log and has a beer while we all bark all over the woods. In place of an honest discussion of the war culture there is always a discussion of the perfect war, the one we all like to imagine where nobody can say it isn’t right and good and just the thing to do. It’s the Beach Boy’s immortal hit, wouldn’t it be nice if we were married, except not about marriage, but about war. This alluring possibility remains, of course, a little abstract, and none of the participants or promoters have the slightest inclination to actually get into one of these dreamy wars or even look at the gross pictures of people fucked up by it – the scoriated torsos, extruded eyes, the wriggly spill of bowels in lovely pixel.

I’ve been reading Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore this week. The preface was written in 1962. By this time, Wilson was in his mandarin autumn. He’d been there in 1932, voting communist. He’d been there in the fifties, swatting down Agatha Christie in the New Yorker book section. At this point he could take a long squint at the course of American history, and he saw: wow, a lot of war. And the abiding delusion that all these wars were forced upon a peaceseeking Columbia – even, as some senator said before we invaded Mexico in 1845, it was the non-aggressiveness of the Mexicans that had forced our hand. Wilson disposes of the question of right and wrong with an image that he boosts, perhaps unconsciously, from the beginning of Dreiser’s the Financier. “In a recent Walt Disney film showing life at the bottom of the sea, a primitive organism called a sea slug is seen gobbling up a smaller organism through a large orifice at the end of its body; confronted with another sea slug of only a slightly lesser size, it ingurgitates that, too.” Wilson sees the repression of the Southern states, the war against Mexico, the first World War, etc. – all the way up to the recent hostility to Castro – as part of the same blind pattern of expansion. With that idea, he sees Lincoln as a figure like Bismark and Lenin. He ends the intro with a survey of the harm done by the cold war to our fundamental liberties. It is a nice thorough job.

The liberal in me protests, though, against the sea slug. Surely we can put that god damn sea slug on a vegetarian diet, dip that orifice into... g-green technology! or some damn thing if we really try. Although the realist thinks that, most likely, the slug is in a phase of fatal overstretch that will set much harsher limits to its very ability to continue this insane thirst for lesser sea slugs.

iraq and the world of the fait-divers

LI often wonders about a particular form of the defense of the Iraq war that we come across in comments threads, and that seems pretty common the margins of conservative political talk. The defense goes like this: Iraq is mostly peaceful, and the violence there is no greater than violence in a major U.S. metropolis. The metropolis chosen is, of course, always predominantly black. Here’s an example from last week’s news:

During an interview Monday with WILS-AM in Lansing, Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Tipton, said the returning troops he has talked with "indicate to me that 80 to 85 percent, in a conservative fashion, of (Iraq) is reasonably under control, at least as well as Detroit or Chicago or any of our other big cities. That's an encouraging sign."
Program host Jack Ebling remarked, "I've never heard Iraq compared to Detroit before."

Walberg responded: "Well, in fact, in many places it's as safe and cared for as Detroit or Harvey, Illinois, or some other places that have trouble with armed violence that takes place on occasion."

Detroit and Chicago had higher rates of murder, assault, robbery, burglary and car theft than the nation as a whole in 2005, according to FBI statistics. Harvey is an economically depressed suburb of Chicago with about 30,000 residents — about 80 percent of whom are black, the same proportion as in Detroit.”
…
Walberg was born in Chicago, grew up on the city's south side and is an ordained minister. He is in his first term in the U.S. House, serving a district that includes Branch, Eaton, Hillsdale, Jackson and Lenawee counties, and parts of Calhoun and Washtenaw counties.

The district in south central Michigan is 90.1 percent white and 5.7 percent black, with other races and mixed-race persons comprising the remainder, according to 2000 U.S. Census data.

Walberg spokesman Matt Lahr said in a statement that the congressman "frequently shares sentiments expressed to him by the soldiers and veterans he meets at Walter Reed Hospital or the (Veterans Affairs) hospital in Battle Creek.
"These soldiers have expressed optimism to the congressman about the safety and security of the majority of Iraq. There are still major challenges in Iraq, especially in the Anbar province and Sadr City," said Lahr, who declined to respond to the comments from the Detroit mayor's office.”

LI gets impatient with this sort of thing, since it is so obviously bogus. To take a simple example ... No. Countering an argument like this, as I was about to do, is pointless. It is the non-argumentive character of the argument that is the whole point. The thread is so obviously pointless that one begins to wonder about the long term mental effects of fallout, and whether they weren’t a lot more severe than we were ever told.

But here’s a thought. Maybe the answer is given by an old essay of Roland Barthes. Instead of the isotopes in the milk solution, that is.

Perhaps this comparison, which seems to willfully isolate the speaker from the reality of war in any sense, is the result of conditioning. After all, the Walbergs out there grew up turning on the news at ten and watching a fifteen minutes of murder stories, mostly, with the rest of the time devoted to sports and weather. In other words, they grew up in the world of the faits-divers.

Which gets us to Roland Barthes’ essay on the fait-divers. In order to explain the structure of the fait-divers, Barthes makes an initial move that I am not entirely happy with – but that does work towards the point he is making. He compares the story of a murder to the story of a political assassination. I am not entirely happy with that comparison, because I think it inscribes a certain class hierarchy, in terms of what is and what is not serious, into a supposedly neutral distinction between narrative types. On the other hand, it does seem to work – and it does explain the isolating effect given by the comparison of Iraq to Detroit. The effect is two-fold: it both points at the isolation of the speaker and it tries to enforce a certain isolation, a certain political passivity, on the hearer.

But let’s not jump the gun here. Here’s Barthes:

The difference appears as soon as we compare our two murders. In the first (the assassination) the event (the murder) necessarily refers to an extensive situation outside itself, previous to and around it: “politics”; such news cannot be understood immediately, it can be defined only in relation to a knowledge external to the event, which is political knowledge, however confused; in short, a murder esacpes the fait-divers whenever it is exogenous, proceeding from an already known world; we might then say that it has no sufficient structure of its own, for it is never anything but the manifest term of an implicit structure which pre-exists it: there is no political news without duration, for politics is a transtemrpoaral category; this is true, moreover, of all news proceeding from a named horizon, from an anterior time: it can never constitute faits-divers; in terms of literature, such items are fragments of novels, insofar as every novel is itself an extensive knowledge of which nay event occurring within it is nothing but a simple variable.

Thus an assassination is always, by definition, partial information; the fait-divers, on the contrary, is total news, or more precisely, immanent; it contains all its knowledge in itself; no need to know anything about the world in order to consume a fait-divers; it refers formally to nothing but itself; of course its content is not alien to the world: disasters, murders, rapes, accidents, thefts, all this refers to man, to his history, his alienation, his hallucinations, his dreams, his fears: an ideology and psychoanaysis of the fait-divers are possible, but they would concern a world of which knowledge is never anything but intellectual, analytical, elaborated at second-hand by the person who speaks of the fait-divers, not by the person who consumes it; on the level of reading, everything is given within the fait-divers; its circumstances, its causes, its past, its outcome; without duration and without context, it constitutes an immediate, total being which refers, fformally at least, to nothing implicit; in this it is related to the short story and the tale, and no longer to the novel. It is its immanence which defines the fait-divers.1

… whatever its content’s density, astonishment, horror, or poverty, the fait-divers begins only where the news divides and thereby involves the certainty of a relation; the brevity of the utterance or the importance of the information, elsewhere a guarantee of unity, can never efface the articulated character of the fait-divers: five million dead in Peru? The hoorr is total, the sentence is simple; yet the notable, here, is already the relation between the dead and a number. Granted, a structure is always articulated; but here the articulation is internal to the immediate narrative, whereas in political news, for example, it is transferred outside the discourse to an implicit context.

1. Certain faits-divers are developed over several days; this does not violate their constitutive immanence, for they still imply an extremely short memory.

I’ll have more to say on this in my next post

a medical question

Democrat Proposes Making Withdrawal Date Secret
Only Congress, White House and Iraqi Government Would Know Plan - Headline, Washington Post

I'm pretty sure repeated bouts of convulsive, sardonic laughter have been implicated in lung cancer. So, if the good citizens of Mississippi can take AJ Reynolds for ten billion or so, do you think LI can sue WAPO for, say, 100,000 plus a gift card at the good for a lifetime supply of xanax?

edna st. vincent millay and hart crane

The Werepoet has been glorifying Edna St. Vincent Millay lately .

I’m a latecomer to Millay. In the summer of 2001, I contacted Inside New York to write a review of the Millay bio, Savage Beauty, that came out that season. Then I went to Mexico. I brought the book with me and read it as I did what I did in Mexico, and after a while, Inside NY got pissed with me. Where was the review? So I did it fast, and I wrote way over the word limit, and the editor, justly, said you have screwed the pooch, son.

So I dint make the easy on that, did I? But the bio turned me onto the work. And I fell for Edna. This was unexpected. See, I’d been suckled, or not exactly suckled, more like inducted into poetry in high school through reading the modernist masters. Admittedly, I did not understand Wallace Stevens – but I lapped up Eliot and Pound. When I played tennis with my best friend K. – glorious autumns at the Dekalb County Junior College tennis courts – I used to amuse him by spouting off bits of Gerontion. Patched and peeled in London. I am an old man in an old house. Waiting for rain. I’m not going to look and see if that is right, but it was right back then. Used to amuse the cross country team – I was a sporty little fuck – with the first ten lines of the Wasteland. Etc. My mom had more sentimental tastes in poetry. O captain my captain our fearful trip is done. Sort of thing. Funny thing, I’m her age now, and I, too, get tearful about o captain my captain.

So this wasn’t the kind of upbringing in which Edna st. Vincent Millay would figure as anything but a figure of fun, an uncool leftover. The sexist bias has slowly sloughed off over the years. Now, mind you, I’m not blaming the modernists. I understand how, buried beneath the vesuvius of marmelade out in the sticks, one kicks out – however, I do expect a little retrospective wisdom. I picked up the Library of America edition of Hart Crane, poetry and letters, today, and turned to the index, wondering what he’d say about Millay. Just one notice, in a letter to a friend back where he came from, Ohio. It was disappointing, but not surprising:

“I can come half way with you about Edna Millay – but I fear not much further. She really has genius in a limited sense, and is much better than Sara Teasdale, Marguerite Wilkinson, Lady Speyer, etc. to mention a few drops in the bucket of feminine lushness that form a kind of milky way in the poets firmament of the time (likewise all times), indeed I think she is every bit as good as Elizabeth Barrett Browning. … I can only say that I do not care for Mme Browning. And on top of my dislike for this lady, Tennyson, Thompson, Chatterton, Byron Moore Milton and several more, I have the brassiness to call myself a person of rather catholic admirations.”

Remember, you needed dynamite to become modern, or so it seemed, in 1921. Alas, the purge of poets was less excusable when all the cold war broody critics of the 50scontinued in H.C.’s vein., all those men and women with hornrims and a pessimistic view of human nature and going on portentously about the Great Tradition,

There is a certain funny turn here, since Crane, proclaiming his “esoteric’ taste for Donne, misses the fact that Millay’s street ballad style reaches back to John Tyler the Water Poet and the songs of the levelers and the diggers. Take Recuerdo, for instance. Millay effortlessly does something that Crane strives for in The Bridge:

We were very tired, we were very merry--
We had gone back and forth all night upon the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable--
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on the hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry--
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and the pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

I am only a little baffled by the line about the sun – it seems too easy. But otherwise, how completely elbows out is this poem? And we gave her all our money but the subway fares is so goddam perfect that, I hope, I don’t have to point out its perfection.

Alas, blinded by the need to kick out, Crane couldn’t see this. Plus of course he is the classic Midwestern type who comes to NYC and begins to judge among the quick and the unsophisticated. It is his way of getting an edge.

Why LI Hates the Left (echo echo)

LI has very simple reasons for hating the Left (there should be an echo effect every time that nasty little term is uttered): whenever the Left (echo echo) is part of the title of some essay, the alleged Leftist is surely going to use the occasion to support the war in Iraq, or support stuffing the Washington Consensus down the throat of Latin American, or denounce Chavez, or do variations on the power elite dance that are indistinguishable, in the end, from policies advocated by the Cato Institute (which is, actually, more antiwar than the Left (echo echo)) or the Heritage foundation.

Take a gander at a magazine like Dissent (or, if you have a stronger stomach, Democratiya – which by the way, what fucking dick came up with that title? do those people entirely lack a sense of humor?). The current online issue offers for your entertainment and progressive reading pleasure an article analyzing the Mexican elections (you guessed it – Lopez Obrador is an authoritarian, the future is in markets, there was no election fraud, blah blah blah) by Angel Jaramillo – a New School student specializing in (o Lord, take me now!) Leo Strauss.

There is also the editor’s intro to Dissent, which begins by pointing out, through the wisdom of a poll conducted by CNN, that the elections (ritual expression of gratitude for the Dems win) don’t represent some leftward tending by the electorate. Heaven forbid. The Left (echo echo) stands firmly committed to a third way that triangulates from the really conservative feelings of the vast majority of the population – and if the vast majority starts expressing a yen for lefty-liberal programs, it will certainly mess up the triangulation.

And then the editor (one Mitchell Cohen) proceeds to shovel this poop:

“Some of the toughest questions will concern foreign policy. Consider Iran’s aggressive ambitions. Here is a militant theocracy pursuing nuclear weapons, calling for genocide against a member of the UN, and seeking hegemony in a rattled region. It’s rattled, in part, thanks to disheartening U.S. policy. The United States has a long record of stumbling when it comes to Iran. Think of Washington’s support for the 1953 coup. Remember the utter incompetence of Jimmy Carter’s policies. In this issue we publish a remarkable speech made in Tehran by Joschka Fischer, Germany’s ex–foreign minister. He presents the stakes with candor. In addition, we feature a symposium on Iran and the West. The problems raised in the symposium have frightening implications. People on the left need to be thoughtful and not clichéd in approaching them. See Fred Halliday’s critical article on the romance of some leftists with Islamic extremists—the jihadism of fools. Not that there are wise holy wars.”

Then there is Halliday’s article. I hope he did a twofer with this one - it would fit so well with our comrades over at Telos! I'd go into it, but how much stupidity do I have to suffer for the sake of my readers? Okay, begin with muttering about widespread approval on the Left (hiss hiss – this is the bad left that cheers for the wolf instead of Red Riding Hood, the one that is being rescued by the good left, the Halliday-Cohen-Hitchens left, calling out to all comrades at sea) of the 9/11 attacks. Then the usual humanitarian intervention, Halliday fighting, of course, the fourth world war from an ultra Marxy perspective! It will be a killing field, boys, but fifty years from now, women will be freed from the veil. Mention Iran as a theocracy. That's a good one. That will show em. A dictatorship no less. And so, in the manner of the beloved Soviet Union before him, Halliday and his ilk temporarily form a popular front with the Cheney daughters.

Your average radio talkshow bigneck can do a better job with these threads and pieces than Halliday, but such is the sum of that thing called Dissent. Irving Howe, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you... oo oo oo.

My suggestion is: the LEFT (echo echo) should slit its throat with a big rusty razor. Basta! I know just how Robespierre felt. But have no fear, fearless Leftyites, you will be propped up for decades for your usefulness in creating a counterfeit ideology to flood the market. Case in point: look at, or weep over, the tender Saturday profile of the insufferable Kenan Makiya, the man who who wrote that the the bombs being dropped by American aircraft on Baghdad was "music to his ears" in 2003, as he wrestles with the demons of Iraq in the dangerous precincts of Cambridge, Mass. He is ... doing an analysis! I shiver and shake, thinking of the radical things that might come out of that! But let's see, I'll look in my crystal ball for a moment and find - everything he believed before the invasion was right! he was let down by the people. That's what I'd bet. Hitchens just reviewed his own support for the war and found it was right, too. I was so nervous - I thought he might think he screwed the pooch. So reassuring.

And so it goes, Leftyism serving the war culture in every way.

Surely some budding Sartre should somewhere should write a Naissance d'un guachiste as a matching set with Naissance d'un chef. The first phase would be the ultra phase. Capitalism must be overthrown. The rhetoric in this phase is all ruddy and bloody, the demands, oh, how they pile up! Our lefty is in full imperative mode. He knows that the people united will never be defeated. Phase two, of course, is the upward trajectory. The invites to write articles. Here, our lefty is mr. strategist. Ah, how he casts his sharp eye upon the field of forces! phase three is the NGO or the Academic post. Now comes the era of taking the temperature of the Left. He is continually sticking a thermometer in its, or his, ass, and reporting on the important numbers. By this time, of course, Left is his brand. But it turns out that not overthrowing capitalism right away has had advantages. The credit card, the tenure track, the kids' schooling. So time for phase four, which is democracy - or democratiya, for by this time the Leftist has lost any sense of humor, and finds the least hint of irony to be a bad sign - cynicism afoot and like that. Now he can bring his immense credentials, the threat he once posed to the whole capitalist system, to the crying need for human rights in some place that has to be at least two thousand miles from where he lives - and the rhetoric swells with the accustomed absolutes! But the battle now is against comrades who are allied with fascists - say it ain't so! but sadly, it is. All those comrades with the poster up of Mohammad Atta - oh, they may seem invisible, they may seem non-existent, but comrades, they swarm in the night!

And so on. As a career track move, I highly recommend Leftyism to the budding student out there. It pays richly, both in the moral butter one can swim in in the twenties, and the fat of the land one gets to enjoy later on.

But me? This is why I hate the Left (echo echo).

A troop of baboons in hummers

John Dupre, in an nifty little takedown of the use of rational expectations theory as the master key to all the social sciences in Human Nature and the Limits of Science, noted the convergence of the ideology of the theory with the ideology of evolutionary psychology – both emanating from a conservative view of human nature, the one derived from Adam Smith’s notion that we are designed to truck and barter, the other finding justificatory fables in nature for social hierarchies which, in reality, we see dissolve all of the time.

There’s a nice article by Amanda Rees that explores the primatology behind evolutionary psychology in the Fall issue of the History of Science. As anybody knows who has read comments threads on feminist sites, or any site that ventures into that classic boobish trope, men vs. women (why do women do this? why do men do that?), sooner or later the male as hunter and sperm sprinkler will emerge – extra points for the comedic effect of those whose only experience of being a hunter is buying hamburger in a grocery store trying to analogize working in an office with spearchucking on the savannah.

So where did the images come from? Rees points to the influential work of Sherwood Washburn and Irven Devore, who, in the fifties, studied and filmed baboons. Why baboons? Not because human beings have a close dna kinship. Such taxonomies were undreamt of in the fifties, anyway.

“Baboon social structure and ecology resembled the conditions thought to be characteristic of early man: both species lived in relatively large social groups, including related and unrelated animals of both sexes and all ages; both species had come down from the trees, abandoning the forest for the open savannah. Baboon life, it was thought, was likely therefore to mirror the experiences of early humans. Baboons too would have to learn to manage the tensions inherent in group life when that group includes individuals of different status and conflicting needs, and they would have to face the challenges of life on the plains. Forest primates had the option of disappearing into the trees to escape predators: animals in the open, like early humans, must have developed different defence mechanisms.”

Rees notes the presuppositions in Washburn and Devore’s work:

“When the baboon group moves from one place to another, they suggested, troop members were distributed in such a way as to give the greatest protection to the most vulnerable members. In their own words,
As the troop moves, the less dominant adult males, and perhaps a large juvenile or two occupy the van. Females and more of the older juveniles follow, and in the centre of the troop are the females with infants, the young juveniles, and the most dominant males. The back of the troop is a mirror image of its front, with
the less dominant males at the rear. Thus, without any fixed or formal order, the arrangement of the troop is such that the females and young are protected at the center.”

As they also stressed in a later publication, this arrangement provides maximum protection for the weaker members — approaching predators would be met by large, aggressive adult males on both the troop’s periphery and in the centre, before they could reach the vulnerable animals at the troop’s heart. This model not only reflected the ‘man-the-hunter’ model that dominated anthropology at that time — casting, as
it did, the males as the primary sources through which group integrity was derived and maintained — but it was also based on the assumption that it was possible to identify a single primate pattern (essential if one was to be able to generalize from primate to human behaviour), an assumption that derived from the search for species typical behaviour that was central to classical ethology, one of primatology’s
parental disciplines.”

One has to remember that Washburn and Devore are working at the height of the Cold war, when troops of the analogues to baboons – humans – were being planified into cars that drove on highways (in which the weak were crushed) that made possible suburbs that possibly dispersed the urban target from the potential missile hit. It was a man’s man’s man’s baboon world, and those who could not be attracted to buttocks that were inflamed with the right red white and blue as they worked at SAC – or the Soviet colors, as they worked at the Semipalatinsk Test Site – were not members of the order. Oddly enough, female primatologists found a different order indeed. Washburn and Devore’s student, Rowell, found something different: “Rowell’s work on forest baboons in Uganda found no sign of the typical pattern of troop movement: instead, she noted that when danger threatened, the troop’s response was “precipitate flight, with the big males well to the front and the last animals usually the females carrying the heavy babies”. Well, we can’t have deadbeat and cowardly Dad’s in the geneology, can we?

Rees’ account ends without primatology crystallizing around one paradigm. It includes the saga of Sarah Hrdy’s observations of infanticide, and how these were denied – which has become a little parable in primatology, much like Galileo’s condemnation by the Inquisition projected an aura of heroism on physics – but it turns out that infanticide is still a much more disputed event, in its meaning and evolutionary function, than the heroic story would make out.

what the world needs now is... more about Joseph Joubert!

“God is God; the world is a place; matter is an appearance; the body is the mold of the soul; life is a beginning.

All being come from little, and it would only take a little for them to have come from nothing. An oak comes from a gland, a man from a drop of water. And in that gland, in that drop of water, how much superfluity! Every seed occupies only one point. The too much contains the enough; the former is the necessary place for the latter, and its indispensable food, at least in the beginning. The enough must suffer nothing in itself; [Nul ne doit le souffrir en soi] but it is necessary to love it in the world; for nowhere would there be enough nothingness, if there had not always been a little too much of each thing in each space.” – Joubert

LI’s animadversions about Blanchot, in yesterday’s post – the humble pointing out of a codicil that was wrong here, and perhaps not enough attention paid to this point here, cher maitre – received a couple of emails yesterday boxing our ears. Now, our point wasn’t really to diss Blanchot – honestly, while LI may be a puffed up idol of his own bad self, we aren’t so puffed up that we think the battle of LI against Blanchot, like the battle of Baal with Jehovah, would end in anything other than our complete route and desolation. Our suggestion is merely that Joubert’s project for a great book is, in the end, not a Mallarmeene project, and that perhaps there is reason to look at the function of literature within various lives not as a thing segregated or sacrificed for, but as an unpredictable force in a social set up in which rumor has a large place.

There is much in Joubert that suggests a turn to Pascal, especially in the use of conceptual analysis as a sort of fable – that is, a story with a moral point. The implicit nihilism of conceptual analysis – its way of dethroning traditional glories – beauty, large views, principalities and powers, the noble – becomes the way of ascesis, science here, serving as the puppet of theology, to re-coin a phrase. In Joubert’s case, conceptual analysis is always about atomizing the large, and then atomizing the atoms, until you have, on the one hand, the hardly anything at all, and on the other hand, a sort of potential immensity – God, in other words. The way this comes out in Joubert is oddly similar to passages in the Upanishads.

But the turn to Pascal is sorted through the very non-Pascalian history Joubert lived through.

“It is just by the face that one is oneself. The body shows the sex more than the person; the species more than the individual.

Below the head, the shoulders and the chest begins the animal, or that part of the body where the soul ought not to please itself.

There is, in the face, something luminous, which isn’t found in the other parts of the body.“

…

So far, in my sketch of the poisonous relation of Joubert and Restif de la Bretonne, I’ve cast Restif’s wife, Agnes Lebegue, in the shadows. But Agnes deserves better – poor woman, she never got it during her lifetime. There is a word that is frequently used about the way Restif treated her – avilissement. To make something or someone vile. Restif’s fame, which rested on his neurotic (and premeditated) confessing, makes Agnes’ fate peculiarly horrible. If she had lovers, that fact was exploited by Restif immediately. As we have seen, he even wrote a book about her entitled The Cheating Wife. As the estimable Beaunier puts it, she was “not that “whore’ [catin] who Restif too much insulted.” Restif and Agnes endured a lot of poverty before Joubert ever met them. Agnes kept the family going, sometimes, by her work as a seamstress making fashionable clothes. Sometimes, she moved back to Joigny, her village, and sold hats.

Touchingly, the affair between Joubert and Agnes began – and we have the proof in the letters Restif stole from his wife and published – in literature. This wasn’t Paolo and Francesca, however. Rather, Agnes claims to have been annihilated by the cares of marriage, the continual needlework, the racking poverty. “Dear friends,” she writes – supposedly to both Joubert and Fontanes – “you have opened my soul; you have shown me that I have the faculty of thought, of writing! I will consecrate to you the firstborn of that precious faculty.” Which she proceeded to do, daily – Joubert advised her to improve her style by writing him a daily letter. She is exaggerating, however, Joubert’s effect on her. In fact, when Restif met her she was a writer. Restif systematically denigrated the productions of her pen, just as he systematically exaggerated her ‘fredaines’ – her love affairs. When Restif published her letters, he was, in a way, finally publishing her writing – but in order to truly put the mindfuck in, he added to the letters comments denigrating him, her husband, while changing the addressee to make it look like she was writing to several lovers at once, thus making her out to be the kind of Marquise de Merteuil.

In fact, things had reached the point between Restif and Agnes that Agnes left the household. Joubert connected her to a lawyer, Stigmatin de Lamarque, not only to take care of the possible divorce, but to deal with the rumors, and the passing around of the manuscript of The Cheating Wife. However, the couple still had daughters. Evidently, Agnes still spent time in the apartment in Paris. Which is how, one night, Agnes, alone in her room, is intruded upon by her raging husband [“my hand, gesticulating, touched her hair two or three times,” as he put it, in a self justifying retrospective]. At the end of that night, she gave up. She wanted peace. She would give up Joubert.

But Restif won’t. He declares war on Joubert. He even declares war on the man with the false fingers, La Reyniere, who – in this battle – had taken Restif’s side against his wife. La Reyniere’s crime was to counsel against publishing The Cheating Wife.

“The end of the Cheating Wife is an astonishing thing. It had to be finished. Restif imagines, for an epilogue and apotheosis, the death of Restif. M. Marivert writes to Madame Marivert. [two characters in the book] He has come to Paris: “I came to see our friend. I found the two sisters in tears: he had just passed away. …” Madame Jeandevert (Agnes) gave out heavy signs of grief; an instant afterwards, she had a dry eye and a serene air. Thus, it is necessary that this crime be punished. And Restif narrates the death of his widow, the burial of his widow.
Morality: “This work is an arsenal for the defense of some persons actually living…” And those persons, it is only Restif, who, dead and buried, admits that he lives still. “Finally, it was necessary to make … the Milpourmils and the Nairesons [Milpourmil is the name of a friend of Joubert, Naireson is Joubert] ashamed, in showing them nakedly the woman for whom they sacrificed the friendship they had vowed to her husband.”

Joubert certainly found that even in the little apartment, the little circle about a little writer, there was enough superfluous emotion to explode in his face. There is a letter from his friend Fontanes, who is in London, at the end of the year 1785, responding to a question from Joubert, who wanted to know if, as Restif said, his novel, Paysan Perverti, were a bestseller in England. Fontanes assures him he hasn’t found the novel in the bookshops.

LI wonders why Joubert asked that question. We have a theory.

Ceasefire in Iraq now

Zeyad at healing iraq has pictures of what is in the garbage in Baghdad. Take a look.

The most important thing that can happen in Iraq is a ceasefire - because the violence will have no military end. The enemy will never be thoroughly killed. And of course, we don't even know who the enemy is, although if I was Iraqi, I would suspect that foreign power that invaded four years ago. An American escalation simply tests the fungibility of violence. The main thing is to stop it.

We are headlining this post with the traditional lefty imperative, such as you shout during demonstrations, thus demonstrating to all and sundry the disconnect between the infinite resources of language and the powerlessness of the demonstrator. Everybody is happy about that. At the moment, however, the tantrum has become the standard verbal form for ... well, peace love and understanding. That rather condemns the current state of the civilization, don't it?

The current state of civilization...

Let's spend no more money ripping apart thousands of Iraqi bodies, or continuing to promote the structure that helps Iraqi groups to rip each other apart. How is that for a long slogan?

what maurice blanchot never told you...

LI has been thinking about life and letters.

As we said in the last post, Maurice Blanchot and Paul Auster both wrote about Joseph Joubert in terms of the solitary writer, the man who goes back to the beginning, over and over again: dreaming of the great book that never comes. What comes, instead, is fragments that point towards that book, fragments that may, in the end, actually be that book, or as much of that book as there can be, in the same way that the man who sits before the gate of the law in Kafka's story discovers, in the end, that the gate was just for him, which in a sense is a triumph of the man over law - or, perhaps, is another trick of the law, erecting an impenetrable portal. This is one of the heroic images of writing, with the heroism arising within the writing itself, rather than being impressed upon the writing from the outside – as, for instance, in the heroism of Byron or Shelley or Hugo. And, as we all know, Derrida pitched his tent there, on the notion of a marked and surveyed boundary between the life and the letter, to demonstrate the oddity of it, and its incapacity to account for itself.

Blanchot in particular is a partisan of the fragment, and enlisted on his side Joubert as the kind of self effacing figure for whom the fragment is both the torture and the goal of writing. In The Book to Come he writes:

“It seems that the real experience (l'expérience proper) of the work remain incommunicable, the vision by which it begins, the kind of off the pathness it provokes, and the queer relations it establishes between the man we can meet every day and who precisely writes a journal of himself and that other being we see lifting itself up behind every great work, of that work and for the writing of it.”

However, Joubert’s case is, if anything, I’d say, a countercase to that of Blanchot's ideal writer. For Joubert, as Blanchot and Auster inexplicably do not mention, saw himself pretty much depicted in a hastily written book by Restif de la Bretonne. The book, “The cheating wife”, was written and published while Joubert was having an affair with poor Agnes, Restif’s much abused wife. The book was so close to the man we can meet every day that it included fragments of letters from Joubert to Agnes (and vice versa) that Restif had procured, using his oldest daughter to steal them from his wife, who at that point had moved out of the menage. To these letters Restif added his own malicious comments and insertions. Not only that, but he gave the Agnes figure in the book another lover - making it seem that Agnes had not only cuckolded himself, but Joubert. The scarifying experience of seeing oneself denounced as a parasite, a libertine, a housebreaker and a cuckold, with one’s love letters flaunted about by an accusing husband, might just have something to do with Joubert’s notion of the power held by the written word.

So: to take up the threads of this thing, as they are recorded by the ever excellent André Beaunier in La Jeunesse de Joubert. It is 1785. Joubert and his best friend, Louis de Fontanes, are now members of the extended circle around Restif. One thing to note about Joubert – he easily makes friends with the powerful. For Matthew Arnold, in the 19th century, this is a mark of his essential soundness – for, of course, Arnold has a pretty benevolent view of the class of worthies. But it is not altogether clear how Joubert makes these connections. In any case, he has made a connection to one of the era’s leading eccentrics. As we have noted, Restif saw his existence as a vast occasion for confession. He had a genius for vulgarity, for every type of perversion – even though he often set himself up as the enemy of perversion. Hence, the quarrel with Sade. He was a famous walker – like Diderot, it was his habit, come rain or come shine, to see what was up in the cafes of Paris. Finally, he was what we would now call a graffiti artist. It was his pride to write upon the stones of the Ile de France. He would write slogans on those stones, commemorate the great events in his life. Mes Inscriptions – this is what he called them. They were talismanic parts of his life. Later, in breaking with Joubert, one of his angriest accusations is that Joubert went and erased some of the inscriptions. Beaunier considers the evidence, and thinks it may be plausible that Agnes sent her lover to erase certain of Restif’s inscriptions, specifically the ones that proclaimed her a whore.

Already I hope you are getting a sense that Joubert’s education in the writer’s life, here, is much different from that life that is in ascent behind the great work. It is hard to find a form of writing more mixing of the life and the work than graffiti, especially as it singles out a certain person for insult.

As you will remember, Restif – perhaps to impress his young companion, perhaps because, like Father Karamazov, Restif was so debauched that his speech became a delicious species of perversity – told Fontanes a story about his accidental incest. Coming to his senses, latter, Restif realized that this story could send him to the Bastille – Restif’s nightmare – if related to the authorities. Restif began to suspect that Fontanes was planning on doing just that. Certainly he thought Fontanes had communicated the story to Joubert, and Joubert to his wife, Agnes. Now, Agnes did have two daughters with Restif, and Beaunier speculates that Joubert might have decided, on the basis of Fontanes’ story, that Agnes should know the danger posed to them by Restif.

And so the story will rest until my next post…

joubert and a troubled family: a story

“The world was made like a spider’s web: God pulled it out of his breast, and by his will he carded the filaments, unrolled them, and strung them up. What we call nothingness is his invisible fullness; his power is a ball of thread, but a substantial ball, containing an inexhaustible whole, which divides itself at every moment, in remaining always entire. In order to create the world, he needed merely a grain of matter; for all that we see, that mass which terrifies us, is nothing but a grain that eternity created and put to work. By its ductility, by the hollow that it punched and the art of the worker, it offers, in the decorations that came out of it, a sort of immensity. Everything seems full to us, everything is empty; or, better, everything is hollow. The elements themselves are hollow; God alone is full. But where was this grain of matter? It was in the breast of God, as it remains.” - Joubert.

Joseph Joubert - as I pointed out in the last post - wrote in such a way - as though he had to begin at the very beginning - that the mad, especially, can understand him. Which is simply to say that he wrote alone. This can and has been exaggerated. Blanchot, in particular, represented Joubert as a writer in the geneology of the great solitaries – of Kafka writing the Judgment and watching the dawn come up, of Proust in the famous and overfamous cork lined room. In reality, Joubert was one of the circle around… well, around the people we have been mentioning during the last couple of weeks. Around Restif de la Bretonne, for one, who was the friend of our friend, Grimod de Reyniere, the man with the postiche droigts – artificial fingers. An essay about Restif by Gerard de Nerval rescued his reputation, or at least sealed it, in the nineteenth century.

Restif met Joubert in 1783. Joubert was impressed by the always harried anti-pornographer. We have his notes to Restif’s “The last adventure of a forty five year old man” – and what adventure can us middle aged types hope for but a love affair?

Except things quickly took a different turn in 1783. Joubert was young. Restif’s wife, Agnes, was in her forties. At some point Joubert and his friend found a new apartment in Paris, and… unbeknownst to Restif … paid for it with Restif’s own money. Or at least Agnes’. There does seem to be a tradition among French writers of the older woman. Rousseau. Balzac. Joubert falls into this pattern, too. At first, the little things. A dinner invitation to Restif’s table for Joubert and his friend, Fontanes. On the part of Restif – except, oddly, he didn’t know about it. Agnes is happy to see them, though. And little gifts. Clothing. Food.

And so a picture is assembled. There is Restif’s family, who live on the money Restif makes by, basically, exhausting his secrets – he is a compulsive confessor. As Nerval latter notes, Restif is invited to the houses of the great to read, or perform, his confessions – a sort of ancien regime Spaulding Gray – but the great are surprised by the fact that, sooner or later, they become part of the confessions. The spider web reaches out, but remains always itself, entire. Here is the young, thoughtful Joubert, who Restif tells people is working on the ‘metaphysics of language.’ Here’s Agnes, whose bienfaits are a little excessive. Here are the family friends, like the man with the clawlike hands. Americans have so little sense of history that they are always thinking they have discovered things that happened in the 18th century: thus, the fascination with the personal matter that is divulged on blogs, showing, supposedly, an exhibitionism never before seen. Well, this was Restif’s bread and butter. He finds a letter to his wife from Joubert, and, changing it slightly, he publishes it. Restif isn’t a man who exactly welcomes being cuckolded, but he knows good copy when he sees it.

One should remember – Restif, moving in the circles of the philosophes, and writing semi-erotic literature, always was – or believed himself to be – a step away from the Bastille. As he begins to see the connection between Joubert and Agnes, he begins to get paranoid about further, political betrayals.

Restif has some reasonable fears. According to Beaunier, one evening, after dinner, strolling with Fontanes, “Restif recounted that a lot of things had happened to him in his life, and notably this: he had had during his youth a mistress. Having forgotten her for fifteen years, he reencountered her and didn’t recognize here. That woman had a daughter, Zephire, extremely pretty, who already lived ‘in disorder’. Restif fell in love with her, dreamed of marrying her and provisionally made her his mistress. “There was never such a love before.” Zephire dies. And Restif found out – the world is so small – that Zephire, his adored mistress, was his daughter. As he was completely depraved, he added, speaking to Fontanes, “that apparently the paternal tenderness amalgamated in his heart with physical love, making, in this mixture, a delicious sentiment.” Fontanes, visibly, did not like this anecdote.”

Well, I will get return to this later.

an audience of madmen

Ensor, les bons juges

I am not dying this year and may not even die the next year. Waiting for death year in and year out, I am growing restless. While death does not come, woes are approaching. Yet those woes are not approaching fast enough! – Li Chih (Li Zhi)

“You would even have agents, inspectors, who would send back to their houses those people who did not have the grimace of happiness stamped upon their lips.” – Baudelaire

LI likes to think that this blog follows certain secret themes, and that I invent those themes. I am the master. But any being that follows is, in one respect at least, not the master – viz, that it follows. This is not merely a play on rhetorical convention, as that random master who wakes up to his throat being cut by his footman, his maid, his garbageman, any of that lower level host, finds out in the end.

So I have been following a theme recently that is not even strong enough to be a theme. That is, strong enough to be subject to the truth table, where they strap down themes and take out their hearts and weigh them. From Wittgenstein to the Egyptian book of the dead, you know, is only a wink.

Well, that was my thought: all that we touch turns into mythology.

And into this I wanted to bring Gerard de Nerval, who, more than most, was hyperconscious of the mythological touch – he was the Midas of it among poets. And that brought me to Baudelaire, and that brought me to Baudelaire kicking the shit out of Jules Janin in a letter he never sent, and that I promised to publish.

But then I thought – hmm. Perhaps there is a whole geneology, one of those secret genealogies, who have had the thought, everything we touch turns to mythology. In their own ways.

Which made me think of the French writer Joseph Joubert, whose fans include Matthew Arnold, Maurice Blanchot, and Paul Auster, who translated him.

Well, here’s an anecdote from the essay by Paul Auster about Joubert. The translation was recently republished by NYRB books. But it first came out from North Point Press in 1983. Well, it didn’t exactly have a noble run – 800 copies were sold. But Auster loaned it to his friend, David Reed, an artist who had a friend in Bellevue. Reed left it with this friend: ‘Two or three weeks later, when the friend was finally released, he called David to apologize for not returning the book. After he read it, he said, he had given it to another patient. That patient had passed it on to yet another patient, and little by little Joubert had made his way around the ward. Interest in the book became so keen that groups of patients would gather in the day room to read passages out loud to one another and discuss them.”

There is nothing more flattering to a writer than an appreciative group of madmen. The mystery of the writer and the audience is second to the ways of the woman with the man, etc. Anyway, there is a rather hard to translate bit from Joubert about the presque rien that I’m going to translate in my next post for you lucky inmates.

Ceasefire in Iraq Now

Northanger left a comment in my last post (i think this is the first time i've ever heard anyone use the word "ceasefire" for the Iraq war) that made me ashamed. I haven’t paid the attention to the War that I normally do. At least, I haven’t been writing the war posts. This is due to fatigue. But let’s say a few things here.

- I have no doubt that there will be American troops in Iraq in 2009.
- While it is a good idea to demand the unrealistic – withdrawal of American troops now – there should be a broadening of unrealistic demands. As I’ve said over and over, in LI’s view, politics is about setting conditions. Or at least, the kind of politics LI can do. Movement politics.
- The unrealism is wholly political, and has nothing to do with American or Iraqi 'security'. The political elite in this country have a death grip on their favorite mistake. See the Washington Post editorial yesterday on Iraq. There is no one way to break that death grip. But it is important to see that the reality of it consists in its absolute refusal to face reality.
- And as important as withdrawing the troops is the demand for a ceasefire.
- A ceasefire would be about two things. First, freezing in place the current state of Iraq. Government troops would not try to oust Sunni insurgents in Anbar. American soldiers would not move into any more neighborhoods in Baghdad or elsewhere. Negotiations with only two conditions: no aggressive moves, and self-policing, should begin. All participants (unfortunately but realistically, this would even include Americans) should be invited to make their cases. Self policing would be an opportunity for all forces, insurgent, shi’ite militia, government police, to purge the ranks of criminals.
- Finally, the government should be willing to consider major changes to its organization. The clearly illegal constitution shouldn’t, in other words, get in the way of real peace talks.

There are plenty of things to criticize about the specifics of the ceasefire as outlined above, but none of them vitiate the need for a ceasefire. A ceasefire would, actually, condition an American exit. I don’t see an exit without one. It would allow the Iraqis, who overwhelmingly want the Americans to leave, to get their wish.

poets vs. policymakers

Re: the poets

I went to the Boston Review site, to a symposium held in Spring, 2006 about exiting from Iraq. The symposium centered around an essay by Barry Posen, a war intellectual. There were replies from politicians and experts, like Senator Biden and Lawrence Korb. There was also a reply by Elliot Weinberg, a poet who has been writing about Iraq for the LRB. Unsurprisingly, to me, almost everything said by the politicians and the war intellectuals – for instance, their assurance that by late 2007 the U.S. was going to be pulling troops out of Iraq – has turned out to be wrong. Posen proposed what will be the Hilary Clinton policy, one of perpetual stationing of U.S. troops in the Middle East under cover of fictitious threats – for instance, the “threat” posed by Iran to Iraq:


“American military planners should be directed to develop “over the horizon” strategies for the defense of Iraq against conventional aggression. The United States should exploit its command of the sea, space, and air to develop credible threats against conventional aggressors. Its ability to mount devastating attacks from the air, in particular, has been demonstrated several times in the Persian Gulf since the 1991 war; Iraq can benefit from American carrier aviation, strategic bombers, and bases in the region. (Iraq may wish to maintain ready air bases to aid rapid reinforcement by American land-based aircraft, as Saudi Arabia did in the 1980s.) American intelligence agencies and the U.S. Special Operations Command should maintain relationships with their official and unofficial Iraqi counterparts among the Kurds, the Shia, and the Sunni to help them act in their own interests despite the meddling of neighboring states.

An interval of 18 months provides ample time for the United States to help the Iraqis complete the project of training and organizing an army capable of maintaining internal security. In effect, this means training Shia-dominated security forces capable of policing and defending Baghdad and Shia-majority areas to the south. (The Kurds already have functioning police and military forces.) The prospect of taking responsibility for their own security will surely focus the attention of Iraqi politicians—especially the Shiites. Because the United States will continue to be responsible for Iraq’s external defense after the withdrawal, and because the insurgents operate in small groups, it is not necessary to train an army capable of large-scale mechanized operations; infantry units fortified with small amounts of artillery and armor and capable of a limited repertoire of operations at the level of brigade, battalion, and company should prove sufficient. Such a force has not yet been created. But if Iraqis—especially the Shiites—are motivated by the knowledge that they will soon be on their own, they can achieve such a capability with a year’s hard work. Iraq is now full of individuals who have had some kind of military training or experience.”

The poet makes an irresponsible reply to this to do list with an irresponsible reminder that, actually, the United States doesn’t own Iraq or seem to have any intention of understanding Iraqis, making all to do lists so much D.C. garbage.

“Posen’s arguments are couched in terms of “American interests,” as though he were trying to persuade Republicans on their own grounds. This strikes me as a futile gesture, however noble. In the undoubting group-mind of the Bush junta, the United States isn’t going anywhere. It wants the bases and it wants the oil, particularly as its think-tank cohorts, not unrealistically, see the future as a long economic, possibly even military, war with China over vanishing resources. (By the way, Posen’s statement that “the interest of the United States in oil is not to control it in order to affect price or gain profit” may be theoretically true but is inapplicable to the Bush crowd.) Even if the Rapture were to come to Washington tomorrow and Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and all the rest were to ascend to the big War Room in the sky, we’d still be left with the Democrats, among whom not a single major figure has called for an immediate end to the occupation, and all of whom seem to be auditioning for an election-year remake of Clueless.

"This is an academic debate of imagined scenarios, but I don’t quite see how Posen’s “new strategy” is more realistic than any other. The idea of a loose federation of Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia semi-autonomies crashes on the rocks in Baghdad unless there is some sort of divided city on the model of Jerusalem or the former Berlin, which will only create more barriers, checkpoints, and tensions. (And what to do about Kirkuk?) It is unlikely that the Shia will allow the Sunnis to have their own army, and unlikely that the Shia will gather many recruits for the military and security forces when recruits have been precisely the targets of insurgent attacks. Moreover, the strategy envisions that these armies, after having been trained by the Americans—a dismal failure so far, but sure to succeed after “a year’s hard work”—would continue to “maintain relationships” with U.S. intelligence agencies and U.S. Special Operations Command, which in the future would somehow become more welcome than they are now. I find unconvincing the military threat from neighboring countries (excepting, of course, Turkey, if Kurdistan declares its independence) that the United States would police. The strategy tends to treat the three groups as monoliths and does not account for the many “Sushis” (mixed Sunni-Shia marriages), nor for the divisions and rivalries within each group, nor for the surprising temporary alliances between groups, such as Muqtada al-Sadr and the Sunnis in Fallujah, that are sure to occur. And Posen does not say a word about reconstruction.”

This has proven to be a much shrewder analysis of the real setpoints of the Bush administration than Posen gives. And Weinberger comes up with an on the fly scheme that would be much better, all the way around, for all parties, save the War Industry party in these here states:

“We need to stop thinking about U.S. interests—in the name of which the world is being bulldozed—and start thinking about human interests. There is no possibility of stability and peace in Iraq as long as the Americans are there. (And “Americans” means not only troops, but the tens of thousands of unregulated mercenaries and the corrupt legionnaires of the corporations that are pocketing billions for doing nothing.) In an ideal world, the United States would declare an immediate cease-fire—no more missions, no more leveling of cities like Fallujah and Ramadi in the futile attempt to “flush out” insurgents—and begin to dismantle the huge wall around the Green Zone and the endless checkpoints and barricades. This would be followed by an accelerated withdrawal of all American troops and the introduction of UN peacekeeping forces in the hope of warding off open civil war. Simultaneously, the withdrawal of all American corporations, with reconstruction projects turned over to nations not associated with the Coalition of the Willing, most obviously France, Germany, and China. (Given what is happening in China now, the Chinese could probably rebuild Iraq in ten minutes.)”

The only thing I’d disagree with is the corporation withdrawal – while as a moral move, this is irreproachable, in reality, you are never going to get Americans do anything without promising them candy. The ideal should approach the real insofar as America has to be part of ceasefire talks. The word “ceasefire” has still not passed the lips of any American politician of national repute – in fact, it is hardly even mentioned by the so called anti-war movement. General Petraeus has, however, hinted at it, and eventually it will either come or the American driven catastrophe will get infinitely worse, and not to the betterment of any American interest – even those of the WarIndustry. In the long run, they depend on the mass American delusion that we win all wars, and that all the wars we fight are moral. Not that the War Industry people give a shit about the long run, of course.

the west is the best...

A little collage today. This is from a review of three books about the slave trade by Peter Ackroyd in the Times:

Two hundred years after the House of Commons voted for the abolition of the slave trade (although not of slavery itself) a number of books are being published to celebrate the anniversary. If their focus is largely on England, that is because slave trading became a thoroughly English business. Half of the ships crossing the Atlantic with their infamous cargo came from English ports, the three most prominent being London, Bristol and Liverpool. They left carrying goods for African merchants; in return they acquired slaves, the remnants of conquered tribes. Once the human merchandise had been sold in the Americas, the ships returned laden with sugar and tobacco. In the 1780s alone, 794,000 Africans were transported. It can safely be estimated that many tens of millions made the fatal journey.

Not all of them arrived. Approximately 15 per cent of them died during the Atlantic voyage. They were chained together in the holds of the ships, trussed up like bundles of kindling wood. They died from dysentery and a host of other infectious diseases. They died of thirst, when the drinking water ran out. They died of despair. Those left alive were often in mortal peril. There is a famous case of one English captain who threw overboard many living slaves, so that he could claim on insurance.

And this is from an essay-reply to another book review, Timothy Garton Ash’s review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book in the NYTBR, which provoked an attack on Ash and Ian Buruma (who wrote a book about the murder of Theo van Gogh) by Pascal Bruckner. Various replies and counter-replies are piling up on the Sight and Sound Site. This one is by a Dutch professor of jurisprudence, Paul Cliteur:

For many years, the official credo of the Dutch government was multiculturalism, an approach that fitted well with Dutch history and culture. Multiculturalism is nowadays affiliated with a postmodern outlook. The pivotal ideas of this vision of life are relativism (cultural relativism, in particular), a negative attitude toward Western political tradition, the cultivation of collective guilt for the transgressions of the colonial past, and other real or presumed black pages in Western history.

For multiculturalists, European civilization has been fundamentally on the wrong track since the Enlightenment. The Holocaust, Nazism, communism, slavery - these are seen not as deviations from the generally benign development of Western culture but as inevitable products of the European mind, which is inherently oppressive.


Multiculturalists also reject the universality of Enlightenment ideas of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, viewing them instead as isolated preoccupations of no universal appeal. It is preposterous and a manifestation of cultural arrogance, on this view, to invade foreign countries to export democracy and other Western ideals; it is likewise ridiculous to expect that religious and ethnic minorities in Western societies should be expected to adopt these ideas and integrate into liberal democracy. Minorities should live according to their own customs; and, insofar as national culture is at variance with non-Western ideas, the national culture should adapt itself to new conditions. This attitude has grave consequences for the way liberal society is organized. Think of the principle of free speech. The answer of postmodern cultural relativism is: refrain from criticism. Be reticent to comment on unfamiliar religions. Let reform come from within and avoid provocation and polarization.

Ackroyd:

T

he owners of slaves were no less brutal. They raped, mutilated or murdered the human beings in their charge. We know this from their own testimony. One of their number, Thomas Thistlewood, arrived in Jamaica in the summer of 1750; he kept a diary, in which inadvertently he left a record of his slow degradation. "Had him well flogged and pickled," he wrote on May 26, 1756, of a slave who had been caught eating sugar cane. "Then made Hector shit in his mouth." To be "pickled" was to have raw wounds marinated in a concoction of pepper and lime juice.

The bodies of all the slaves were at Thistlewood's disposal. He whipped and tortured the recalcitrant, raped any woman who caught his eye and, as a matter of routine, maltreated every slave as if by right. The bodies of the abject and dispossessed were simply another commodity to be bought and sold. It was a matter of commercial economy. Yet he feared his slaves. Blacks outnumbered whites by a ratio of ten to one. Any successful uprising would have led to great slaughter on both sides. So the whole system was of fear compounded by brutality. It was corrosive and destructive.

Cliteur:

Postmodernism does not hold the Western tradition of rationality in high esteem, but would it also deny the right of the Western world to defend itself? The whole outlook that advocates the ideals of the Enlightenment, including democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, is to be replaced by the glorification of "otherness," by non-Western cultures, and especially by the conviction that all cultures are equally valuable.”

Ackroyd:

It was a thriving trade, AS newspaper advertisements from 1787 can testify. "To be sold for want of employment. A healthy Negro wench of about twenty-one years old .
. . she has a female child of nigh three years old, which will be sold with the wench if required." Or the reader might have preferred "a well-made good tempered black boy, he has lately had the small-pox, and will be sold to any gentleman".

Cliteur:

A good illustration of this outlook on life can be found in the work of Stuart Sim, a professor of critical theory at the University of Sunderland (UK). The core of the problem is fundamentalism, a concept he was inspired to analyze after the attack on the World Trade Center. So far, so good. But, like other postmodern cultural critics, Sim has a very broad definition of fundamentalism. In his book "Fundamentalist World: The New Dark Age of Dogma", alongside religious fundamentalism, Sim discerns "market fundamentalism," "political fundamentalism," "national fundamentalism," and more. For Sim, every single set of ideas that is not completely relativistic is fundamentalist. So the only way to escape from the indictment of "fundamentalist" and "fundamentalism" is to adopt the postmodern relativistic outlook that Sim himself favors.

Of course, LI should declare a parti pris. We consider Cliteur a complete and utter idiot, who seemingly doesn't even understand the "multiculturalism" he is criticizing, and gives the most far fetched account possible of its origin and influence. Multiculturalism doesn’t come out of some mass hypnotic reading of Orientalism, but out of the material history that made it the case that a small piece of land shored off from the ocean was able to control, for three centuries, and much to its profit, a large piece of land, now called Indonesia. Or rather, it started in the system that made that possible, a complicated process of empires battling empires, with poor European states leveraging small advantages in arms and transport technology and a large hunger for the wealth that the Europeans couldn't produce themselves into global colonial empires. It wasn't Edward Said, but Christopher Columbus, who started multiculturalism as an ongoing and ever present global fact.

Somehow, nobody in Holland was worrying about the immigration problem in 1800 or 1900. See, there were a lot of emigrant Dutch. They were immigrants in, say, Java. Instead of congregating in small ghettos and competing for menial jobs, however, they were overthrowing the government, killing native Javanese, taking control of their land and produce, and shipping the profits to Amsterdam. In comparison, the Muslim immigrants to Amsterdam today are models of civilized behavior. Never has an immigrant community been so polite, so peaceful, so full of good will. They ahve arrived as a result of the fact that, uh, the labor market is global. It is mobile, flexible, revved up by capitalism. Cliteur doesn't like it, and to that LI sayS: tough tittie.

As for the image of the world turned upside down promoted by Bruckner and company, it would be to laugh if it wasn’t all so sad. Let’s see. We have the Soviet attack on Afghanistan. We have the Russian attack on Chechnya. We have the Serbian attack on Bosnia. We have the American attack on Iraq. By my count, in this horrid uprising of those Islamic beasts, somehow the casualty count at the moment stands in a ratio of Christians 1 to Muslims 10. The colonialist mentality of the Bruckners (oh so Leftist in his anxiety to spread, uh, secularism, that’s it – the secularism of the bulletjacket and the phantom fighter jet) and the Cliteurs is the icing on the mass murder cake.

Not that LI would call them fundamentalist, because … we don’t care! These are sticks and stones that are not even worth throwing. But we did like Cliteur's use of "benign" to describe the rise of the West. So fucking benign we are all in awe.

One scholarly note, however, is in order. The enlightenment was as relativistic a movement as any Cliteur deplores. The Early modernists - from Leibnitz to the great Orientalist, William Jones - had a deep appreciation of non-European cultures. As well they should. The stupid universalism of the Cliteur type is actually a reaction against that relativism, which began in the romantic, conservative reaction to the French Revolution. Please, if you are going to defend Europe's intellectual history, at least learn a little bit about it.