01/28/17

Reminiscences of Famished Chickens on the Edge of a Machine

(by Zhao Yuanren/Yuen-ren Chao)

唧唧雞，雞唧唧。几鸡挤挤集矶脊。幾雞擠擠集磯脊。机极疾，鸡饥极，鸡冀己技击及鲫。機極疾，雞飢極，雞冀己技擊及鯽。机既济蓟畿，鸡计疾机激几鲫。機既濟薊畿，雞計疾機激幾鯽。机疾极，鲫极悸，急急挤集矶级际。機疾極，鯽極悸，急急擠集磯級際。继即鲫迹极寂寂，继即几鸡既饥，即唧唧。

01/26/17

La Recherche de la Vérité

Si l’on craignait, un temps, qu’il manquât à l’administration Tr*mp une politique de la vérité, ce vide est maintenant comblé. La vérité ne ressortit pas de l’examen des faits, de la confrontation des arguments, de l’accord rationnellement établi et sujet à révision. Elle est tout simplement ce qu’on réussit à extorquer d’une victime par la souffrance. Le consentement libre? Hypothèse inutile.

Pas besoin de dire que cette nouvelle ligne est digne de Goebbels.

On voit, par là, le lien profond qui unit les initiatives diverses de l’équipe Tr*mp en matière d’environnement, du commerce, des relations internationales, de l’éducation, de la communication, de politique intérieure, de violences sexuelles. C’est le projet de réduire les êtres humains (hormis quelques-uns) à la désespérance, et donc à la dépendance; de leur ôter la possibilité de résister à l’autorité; d’en faire de la chair à canons et de l’argile sous la main du tyran.

Cela fait également ressortir la parenté essentielle de certaines parties de l’ordre libéral-démocratique. La discussion ouverte, sans coercion, est ce qu’ont en commun l’universitaire et le citoyen lambda. Nous avons tous intérêt à maintenir l’espace de la contestation. C’est quand même mieux que les fers.

01/22/17

Maurice Blanchot Était à la Marche des Femmes

À un certain moment, face aux événements publics, nous savons que nous devons refuser. Le refus est absolu, catégorique. Il ne discute pas, ni ne fait entendre ses raisons. C’est en quoi il reste silencieux et solitaire, même lorsqu’il s’affirme, comme il le faut, au grand jour. Les hommes qui refusent et qui sont liés par la force du refus, savent qu’ils ne sont pas encore ensemble. Le temps de l’affirmation commune leur a précisément été enlevé. Ce qui leur reste, c’est l’irréductible refus, l’amitié de ce Non certain, inébranlable, rigoureux, qui les rend unis et solidaires.

Maurice Blanchot, “Le refus,” dans L’Amitié, pp. 130-131; merci à Michael Holland pour l’avoir cité dans un bel article, “Quand l’insoumission se déclare: Maurice Blanchot entre 1958 et 1968,” Communications 99 (2016).

01/21/17

Pas de pronostics. Examen de conscience et inventaire.

Je me suis décidé de m’en tenir aux langues étrangères pour tout commentaire sur les actualités américaines. D’abord parce que cela servira de filtre: les idiots qui ont choisi un minable dictateur à leur image, et qui s’évertuent à remplir de leurs déjections toute espace qui ne soit pas dédiée à l’admiration de leur idole, trouveront dans l’emploi d’une langue étrangère un blocus à leur (faible) curiosité. Ensuite parce que, par besoin de perspective, déjà je me parle à moi-même assez souvent dans une autre langue, retrouvant dans les réflexes et les associations verbales de ces langues une contre-partie à l’appauvrissement du discours anglophone et spécialement américain quand il s’agit de la chose publique. Et troisièmement parce que je veux témoigner, tant qu’il me reste des forces pour le faire, en faveur de l’idéal cosmopolite, de l’idée que l’on naît peut-être citoyen de tel ou tel pays, mais que sa véritable nationalité se trouve partout. “Nul n’est une île.” (J’allais oublier ma règle d’éviter l’anglais.) Par les temps qui courent, il faut rappeler de telles évidences.

Je suis, naturellement, très inquiet. Il a fallu quelques 70 ans pour que les fachos trouvent le code pour casser de l’intérieur le mécanisme démocratique (le vote, l’opinion publique, et tout ça). Il a fallu de gros moyens: du bourrage de crâne, l’invention de scandales et de crises non-existantes, le passage de lois permettant à quelques-uns d’être au-dessus des lois qui condamnent les autres, la manipulation savante d’une petite dissatisfaction pour en faire le levier d’un gros recalibration du pouvoir, et l’évacuation de l’espace public américain d’un discours si peu soit-il critique à l’égard du véritable pouvoir (le business). N’oublions pas, tant qu’on y est, les faiblesses constitutionnelles qui ont permis à un candidat qui a gagné moins de votes que l’autre de recevoir l’investiture. Et à la fin ça a marché.

Les enjeux, pourtant, sont grands. Je n’ai jamais pensé que les USA étaient justifiés dans tout ce qu’ils faisaient. Comme d’autres, j’ai manifesté, j’ai signé des pétitions, j’ai donné de l’argent pour exprimer mon opposition au génocide, à la guerre décidée au hasard, à l’usage des armes de destruction massive contre les populations, à la violence routinière des juntas et des caudillos chéris par Washington. Je n’ai pas applaudi les drones. J’ai toujours pensé que le droit international, au besoin la police internationale, étaient suffisants pour résoudre tant de différends que “l’unique superpuissance existante” préférait régler de façon unilatérale. À la place de Manning et de Snowden, je pense que j’aurais fait de même. J’ai donc protesté. J’ai été mauvais patriote. Il y allait de l’honneur de mon pays.

Toutes ces critiques (et j’en ai des centaines d’autres dans mon sac, mais je vous en fais grâce) sont en toutes dirigées sur une hypocrisie typiquement américaine: l’hypocrisie qui consiste à dire que nous soutenons le droit international, mais que nous n’y sommes pas soumis. Erreur. Mais l’erreur symétrique, qui consisterait à nier en principe le droit international, est pour moi l’horreur sans fond.

C’est ce qu’on voit se profiler derrière toutes les mesures préconisées par le nouvelles administration. On fera fi des lois existantes– de toute façon on trouvera un candidat à la Cour Suprême qui entérinera les entorses. Des traités internationaux, on s’en fout. Les alliances, pfft! L’honneur, c’est un truc verbal pour faire gagner du temps à un menteur obstiné.

Dans ce moment de crise, ceux qui vivent sous les structures créées à la fin de la deuxième guerre mondiale pour permettre d’éviter une nouvelle guerre vont devoir les refaire, peut-être sans les États-Unis. Ce ne sera pas facile. Mais imaginons-nous que l’OTAN n’existe plus. Que l’Union Européenne s’écroule. Que les Nations Unies soient rebattues comme un jeu de cartes. Que le commerce international faiblisse. Que la diplomatie tire sa révérence. Que tout se décide à coups de missiles et de tanks. Sans parler de l’effondrement de la calotte polaire. Tout le monde, même les heureux habitants (heureux par définition) de la Corée du Nord, bénéficie de ces institutions menacées, et de quelques institutions encore à naître, qui ont pour mission de préserver la paix du monde et d’enrayer les menées violentes de quelques-uns. L’abolition de ces institutions-là valait-elle vraiment la préservation d’avantages fiscaux dont bénéficient une ou deux centaines de milliers de personnes (ce qui était, j’en suis persuadé, la véritable raison de l’écartement d’un gauchiste de la primaire du parti démocrate et de l’élévation à la présidence d’un fraudeur narcissique)?

Certains qui aiment prendre le ton de la diseuse de bonne aventure proclament “le siècle américain” fini. À moi qui ne croyais déjà pas au siècle américain, ça ne me fait ni chaud ni froid. J’aimerais que le siècle des nationalismes fût clos. Nos problèmes dépassent le cadre de la nation, et la nation ne nous aidera pas à les résoudre, alors pourquoi rester dans ce cadre désuet? Eh bien, parce que ça donne un sentiment de certitude, ça évite de se poser trop de questions.

Posons-les.

11/24/16

Just Some Facts

Dr. Samuel Johnson to the podium! “Of the uncertainties of our present state, the most dreadful and alarming is the uncertain continuance of reason.” (Rasselas, the conclusion of the episode of the mad astronomer.)

I’m not concerned about going mad, which was a constant fear of Dr. Johnson’s. I’m worried about collective reason and the fragility of our ability to find out what is really going on in the world and to devise means of responding. For that’s what’s at stake with the whole “post-truth” thing and the attack on educated people and institutions as being an “élite” with self-serving aims. People without experience of advanced education don’t know how it works. They think it’s like sales talk: arm-waving, smoke and mirrors. Just, like, your opinion, man. Etc. And if those are the terms, who can blame them for being skeptical?

But those aren’t really the terms. Peer-reviewed scholarship is the best means we have of understanding history, biology, geology, physics, and culture. This is not to affirm that it is infallible; infallibility isn’t what it’s about. Rather, the institutions of scholarship devised since the Royal Society began meeting in the middle seventeenth century are designed to gainsay any claim to authority by Fearless Leaders or Thought Leaders of any kind. That’s what “nullius in verba,” the Society’s motto, means– “we don’t take anybody’s word for it.”

Reason is not maintained by isolated Cartesians sitting in heated rooms (or unheated attics for that matter). It requires publicly accessible institutions where the rule is that anyone is allowed to speak as long as the basis of speaking is facts and reason. That rule permits us to keep the best of what’s been discovered, as long as it hasn’t been rebutted, and to make room for innovations, however shocking.

Business, however, likes to secure monopolies, and tyrannies brook no rivals.

The fantasy of the power to create truth– you remember the bit in the interview a few years ago about that? “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. … We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Those words seemed to me a damning enough condemnation of the fool who said them, but in many other minds, they represent a maximum desideratum. (Like the quip about pussy-grabbing.)

So I am not too happy about the bossy voluntarists and anti-science people who are propelling themselves into positions from which they can do damage to the American economy of knowledge creation. (The envy of the world, need I say? And suffering from the usual condition of the prophet in its own country.) Wile E. Coyote can tell you a few things about what it’s like to go post-truth. Unfortunately, the mistakes made by this gang of post-truthers are going to fall back on all of us. We need to resist them in whatever way we can.

So, before we all get hysterical about the future, a few facts.

  1. The majority of the country did not vote for Trump. So hold off on all those ethnographies of poor whites and the left-behinds of globalization. The breakdown is: about half of eligible voters didn’t bother to vote at all (so blame them if you want to blame somebody); under a quarter voted for Clinton; even fewer than that voted for Trump, but with razor-thin margins in a few strategic states that counted big in the Electoral College; and a small percentage for the third-party candidates. So talk of a “mandate” is definitely misplaced. (That will not moderate the behavior of the people who think they have the Electoral College majority, though– they are going all-out with their most extreme nutcase people and policies.)
  2. Those who did vote Trump were, in part, the meth-addicted denizens of food-stamp counties, but also religious fundamentalists, Gamergaters and wealthy people just looking for another tax cut. It’s a funny alliance of people with little in common but resentment and a desire for power. You won’t find much in the way of principles here. Therefore, don’t ascribe an ideology where none is proven– and above all, don’t suppose that it’s a coherent, overarching ideology.
  3. Certain institutions can serve as a brake on radical policy change. The Constitution exists for a reason (there are more amendments than the Second); the courts will have their word to say, whatever happens to the Supremes; even the markets are invested in the rule of law and the stability of contracts, and the class of people owning property is much larger than in your usual kleptocracy. Don’t assume that whatever comes out of the mouth of Trumputin is what is going to happen. And donate to the civil-society institutions that have been protecting the Bill of Rights since long before your time. They will put the money to good use.
  4. This sort of thing has happened before. Read the testimony. I was lucky to find Victor Klemperer’s Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten, two volumes, in the Seminary Coop the other day. A fellow academic, a philologist, chronicling the erosion of language and reality-testing over the twelve years of the third Reich. You can take heart from the survival of such a document. (Plus, it’s printed on paper, and when I open it, it doesn’t spy on me.)

There will be a price for protecting reason and equality. Know that. People from Eastern Europe have been through this before. Some gave up; some didn’t. Be as honorable as you can. Denounce the flux of false news and the sudden respectability of racism, scapegoating and paranoia. Find people who share your values and be ready to disregard some issues (no two people agree about everything) while joining with them to rebuild the conditions for a fact-based, democratic political order.

That’s all I have for the moment.

11/19/16

The Antidote

In Washington DC with my three small boys. Breakfast dispatched, and it’s off to Air & Space! Where else, you may ask. It was a sunny, mild day on the National Mall, a barker sold my six-year-old a baseball cap, and soon we were looking at rockets, spy planes, biplanes, jets and telescopes.

And any visit to a big science museum requires an Imax. The thing on offer was “Journey to Space.” The little guys were restless and the 3-D glasses kept falling off. I couldn’t tell you how long it lasted: it was like a trance. Long perspectives on mountains, coastlines, lit-up cities at night, from an aerial and then from a space perspective. Teams of engineers working together on making things go: folks who understand the concepts of truth, consistency, operability and experiment. Teams of astronauts floating around in space, running experiments, exercising, having a laugh. Handshakes and hugs between members of different national astronaut teams: in space, it doesn’t matter what country you’re from, human company is rare and precious. The weightlessness of the bodies and the omnidirectionality of the corridors inside the ISS (up and down are matters of convention) matched the mannerisms of the men and women sharing the craft: cheerful, competent, tolerant, non-hierarchical, task-focused people.

I’m one of those Americans whose belief in this country is aspirational: my patriotism connects with a set of ideals and not with “my country right or wrong.” Knowing how massively we have failed, over time, to honor high-sounding commitments, I can’t imagine living in a self-congratulatory narrative about “the greatest country on earth” that depends on obliterating memories of slavery, murder, genocide, fraud, and theft. Even the space program, I know, was cooked up out of military objectives and public relations. We need to know ugly history. The uglier, the better for our morals. But watching crews of science-minded people creating amazing adventures for our whole species, with indifference to the race, gender or income of the scientific talent brought to bear, allowed me to forget for a few minutes of blissful relief the ignorance, resentment, bigotry and sheer non-fact-based screaming that seem to have overtaken “the American way.”

A few hours later, it comes to me that a Miltonic Satan would look on that pragmatic, inquisitive, open-minded, multinational group in zero-gravity not with admiration but with envious resentment, and find satisfaction in the explosions that killed fourteen members of that “élite.”

11/17/16

Credunt quia absurdum

A sensible analysis of the disposing conditions to a certain voting pathology. Lofton gets to the point without invoking trailer parks, missing teeth or deer carcasses.

http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2016/11/07/trumping-reality/

 

 

11/17/16

Diagnostic

Do you think that wife-beating, gay-baiting and race-raging are what make a Real Man Real?

Or do you find that a Real Man, by definition, despises and combats such activities?

If you answered yes to the first question, you must be a Trump supporter.

If you answered no to the first question and yes to the second one, congratulations, you are a normal person.

Hold onto that insight.

11/17/16

The Ex-Files

It’s one of the most famous Gotcha! moments in the history of the social sciences. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) presented language, economy, and kinship as variants on the same logical “structures”: the exchange of messages, the exchange of goods, the exchange of women. Women might suspect something strange was going on with their transformation into analogues of messages or objects, with men doing all the exchanging, but Simone de Beauvoir reviewed the book graciously and added: “although a woman is something other than a sign, she is nonetheless, like language, something that is exchanged.” Then Gayle Rubin questioned the objectivity of Lévi-Strauss’s description, making it complicit with the objectification of women (“The Traffic in Women,” 1975). Levi-Strauss’s feminist cred was not augmented by the fact that, as Jean-Pierre Mileur observes, in Tristes Tropiques (1955) it is “only after around three hundred pages” that Lévi-Strauss “gets around to mentioning that his wife accompanied him on his expeditions– and then to say that she fell ill and he had to leave her behind.”

What a dreadful pig, you may be saying. But another piece of the puzzle emerges from Emmanuelle Loyer’s biography (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paris: Flammarion, 2016). Lévi-Strauss wrote Tristes Tropiques at top speed during several months in 1955, typing up his reflections and old notes with constant advice, input and critical reading from his wife Monique, who received every batch of thirty pages fresh from the machine and returned them with interleaved commentary (Loyer, 415-17). A partner in dialogue. But the “wife” who fleetingly and belatedly appears, like a suppressed excuse, in TT is not Monique but the first wife, Dina. Could it be that an unwillingness to dwell on his ex and the collapse of his first marriage in this sustained communication with his second wife accounts for Dina’s near-invisibility? If a marriage is an exchange of women between groups of men, already a scandalous idea, the exchange of a woman (or of a sign representing her) between a man and a woman must be so complicated a matter that it can hardly be allowed to happen. In the fuller account of the book’s composition, it’s not that women are invisible, it’s that one woman is a topic that the male narrator would like to avoid in his address to another woman. The two women are thus both out of the frame–but in two different ways and for two different reasons. The invisible omnipresence of the one explains the near-invisibility and near-absence of the other.

10/6/16

No Such Thing as Offshore

A recent interview with Nancy Fraser points up the “crisis of care” in societies like our own.

It’s assumed that there will always be sufficient energies to sustain the social connections on which economic production, and society more generally, depend. This is very similar to the way that nature is treated in capitalist societies, as an infinite reservoir from which we can take as much as we want and into which we can dump any amount of waste. In fact, neither nature nor social reproductive capacities are infinite; both of them can be stretched to the breaking point. Many people already appreciate this in the case of nature, and we are starting to understand it as well in the case of “care.”

The controversial bit is where Fraser says,

But there’s still a deep and disturbing question about what role feminism has played in all of this. Feminists rejected the ideal of the family wage as an institutionalization of female dependency—and rightly so. But we did so at just the moment when the relocation of manufacturing kicked the bucket out from under the idea economically. In another world, feminism and shifts in industry might not have reinforced one another, but in this world they did.

What I would like to worry is the proximity of “relocation” and “in another world.” Of course by “another world” Fraser means “in another possible world,” calling on a Leibnizian or Wheelerian imaginary of differently branching causal series, but there’s an overtone in “relocation” that suggests where the space of the “we” lies.

Given the acuteness of this crisis of social reproduction, it would be utopian, in the bad sense, for the left not to be focusing on this. The idea that we could somehow bring back manufacturing, that’s what’s utopian—again, in the bad sense. Unlike the idea that you could build a society that assumes every adult is a person with primary care responsibilities, community engagements, and social commitments.

Bring it “back”? Shorthand for “bring it back from China and other low-wage places.” It would be good to investigate what kinds of “crises of care” people are undergoing in the places where manufacturing has certainly not taken a vacation–and where it is often women who are doing the manufacturing, not for a very heavy wage. Fraser isn’t negligent: her answers in the interview often come back to the plight of people in the countries where financial capital is not domesticated. But perhaps as an effect of this being an election year, when our minds are concentrated on the issues that keep being mentioned, often to the accompaniment of a wagging finger, I think Fraser’s good universalism could be spread a little more thickly.

09/28/16

Can You Follow The Numbers for me please?

President Paul Kagame of Rwanda gave a talk the other day at Yale. I’m far from discounting the good that Kagame has been able to do in heading up a government with a low corruption index and efficient ministries, with visible effects in raising the level of access to health care, in fostering an economy that feeds and houses Rwandans, in standing athwart any attempts to reawaken the genocidal rages of 1993-4– and yes, I know that this was accomplished by ensuring ‘political stability,’ to use a technical term for a monopoly on power. I don’t much like this form of stability, accompanied as it is by repression (in whatever degree– a lesser degree in Rwanda’s case than in most of its neighbors’). But if the alternative is civil war upon civil war, then let’s not condemn Kagame’s government too harshly for doing what they thought was necessary. Obviously in an ideal world, multi-party democracy would flourish and no one would be put at any kind of risk for articulating an opinion or running for office.

I’m not writing to excuse Kagame (though the protestors who turned up at his talk might think so), however. I’m writing to suggest that we examine critically one of the claims he made, which may have struck you as self-serving. President Kagame held that his government’s human rights record is really no one else’s business, and that HR organizations are swimming in the wake of old-fashioned colonialism.

When it comes to Africa especially there is a great deal of continuity with certain negative assumptions widely shared across governments, media, and academia, not only in this country but more generally. … I can hardly blame you, students and others, for being sometimes confused as to what is true about Rwanda or Africa. The manner in which you receive information, and have it validated, is designed to sow confusion and not build understanding…. There is a culture of making up one’s mind about Africa by borrowing assumptions, prejudices, and judgements, from trusted intermediaries, who, by the way, tend to look the same, as you may have noticed.

“The same”– i.e., white, I suppose.

For centuries, the West has preferred to relate to Africa and similar places from a position of moral superiority. There is a word for this, which I won’t use, to avoid unnecessary distraction. But let’s agree that it reveals a stunning failure of moral imagination and human empathy, apparently so profoundly embedded that it requires no further justification, even as it implicitly guides both foreign policy and higher education.

The word must have been “colonialism”– as you see, I said it already. Now the argument that only Africans are reliable sources of information, or have a right to an opinion on Africa, isn’t a good one, and if applied more broadly would be fatal to any international cooperation. It sounds self-serving. And hearers sensitive to possibilities may worry that this betokens a readiness to continue running Rwanda without the inconveniences of democracy, à la Mugabe. This is certainly worth worrying about in any situation where someone has power and might not relinquish it.

But the argument that those who are interested in human rights in Africa are leading some kind of expeditionary corps of journalists and activists, hoping to dominate and control Africa, might be tested empirically, rather than just thrown out as an emotional ploy. Someone with access to databases of charitable and political giving could, I think, easily answer the following question:

— What percentage of those who contribute to international human-rights organizations (e.g., Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) also contribute to free-speech or human-rights organizations in their home country (e.g., for US citizens, the ACLU, NESRI, the Innocence Project, the Heartland Foundation, and so on)? What’s the dollar ratio between international and domestic giving?

If it turns out the donors are primarily interested in human-rights activism abroad, that shows us that HR organizations need to think about their priorities. If it turns out that the donors are trying to repair injustices both at home and abroad, then I say hooray for them and let’s have more of this. Because, unfortunately, a national border doesn’t keep abuse out and justice in.

09/27/16

Stampede

Yes, my fellow Americans, it’s time to mount a vast public campaign to raise awareness of the illegitimacy of tattoo-removal services. Didn’t you know that a tattoo is supposed to be permanent? If people can just go and get their tattoos removed, what is the meaning of having a tattoo in the first place? An insincere, non-binding tattoo must be the most abject thing on earth. No wonder public morals have declined! And those poorly sourced Chinese characters you’ve repented of, those political slogans that you’ve realized were spelled incorrectly, those cartoon characters and commercial brands you’ve grown out of– well, if life has given you bad tattoos, turn them into lemonade! There must be consequences; the individual’s history must be legible and indelible. Five years’ imprisonment for the person seeking to have their tattoos removed; life behind bars for any individual procuring, facilitating, or offering to perform tattoo removal. For tats are, by definition, forever.

Get this on the ballot in referendum-friendly states, bribe a few congresspeople, go on the talk shows frothing at the mouth, and while the frenzy is at its peak, slip in a repeal of Citizens United and a real single-payer health system. Thanks.