Asia Times: Tarnished 'truth' - by Nicholas Kiersey
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JH02Dj02.html
Asia Times Aug 2, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
Tarnished 'truth'
The New Paradigm for Financial Markets by George Soros
Reviewed by Nicholas Kiersey
The root of Soros's complaint is just this: while the methods of natural science may be appropriate for studying the stuff of the natural world, such as nuclear physics, they often produce misleading results when applied to realm of human affairs. For the study of human life is confounded by the dilemma of "interference reflexivity". That is, because students of human affairs are also participants in the ongoing processes which they are trying to study they can never completely remove their preconceived prejudices from their analysis.
See also:
http://agonist.org/tjfxh/20080802/tarnished_truth_the_new_paradigm_for_financial_markets_by_george_soros
short video: Lisa Witter, The Capitalism Conundrum
This economist likes capitalism, but her critique is interesting because she is talking about more than distributive justice. She not only challenges inequality but laments how all human relations are seen as transactional today. This was what bothered Marx, too, when he came up with his labor theory of value. For the younger Marx anyway, the thing that made us human was our ability to labor. Mankind is the only species, as he noted, that could change its very species being (ants work but don't *labor* in this sense, if I remembering the nomenclature correctly). Labor is how we express who we are, and who we might become. So in this sense there is a qualitative virtue to labor that can't be captured simply by measuring its value in a wage. Instead, the whole process is rendered vulgar as the system obliges workers to go to the market with their 'wage hours' for sale. Given that the capitalists are required to make profit, they will want to hire the minimal labor required at the minimal price. As such, the capitalist system creates a labor market wherein the workers compete with each other for these relatively scarce jobs. The result is that the workers develop the habit of thinking that life is about work, not labor. This is the great tragedy for Marx: for if we are all to be workers, then there shall be no more poetry in the world. That is to say, we are reduced to robots and lose our ability to truly think. What communism is supposed to achieve, if nothing else, is to finally give us the true value of what we labor on. In other words, the 'wage' for our work plus our share of the 'profit' that the market says our product is actually worth. With all that extra capital in the laborer's pocket, he/she is free to work fewer hours in the day: to write poetry, to create music, to create wonderful new recipes for food, to explore the world of science, philosophy, go fishing, snow board, plant a beautiful garden, help in the production of lovely public spaces, etc.
So life would be less vulgar if we all got the true value of the 'wage hour'. But if that happened, there would be no profit left for the capitalist, and so the wheel turns...
NiK
Leo Marx: The Idea of Nature in America
The Idea of Nature in America
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3671/is_200804/ai_n25419913/print?tag=artBody;col1
But it also should be said that the word nature is a notorious semantic and metaphysical trap. As used in ordinary discourse nowadays, it is an inherently ambiguous word. We cannot always tell whether references to nature are meant to include or exclude people. Besides, the word also carries the sense of essence : of the ultimate, irreducible character or quality of something, as for example, 'the nature of femininity' or, for that matter, 'the nature of nature.' When this meaning is in play, the word tacitly imputes an idealist or essentialist hence ahistorical - character to the particular subject at hand, whether it be femaleness or nature itself. The word's multiple meanings testify to its age : its roots go back (by way of Latin and Old French) to the concept of origination of being born. As Raymond Williams famously noted, nature is probably the most complex word in the English language. And when, moreover, the idea of nature is yoked with the ideologically freighted concept of American nationhood, as in the historian Perry Miller's sly allusion to America as Nature's Nation, the ambiguity is compounded by chauvinism.
Dear Dr. Kierkegaard
Lord of the Memes
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: August 7, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/opinion/08brooks.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.On that date, media displaced culture. As commenters on The American Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status.Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)
ASM: What is a Prostitute?
American Sexuality Magazine
http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/MagArticle.cfm?Article=885&ReturnURL=1
In Egypt the oldest profession isn't just a sex-for-cash exchange
By L.L. Wynn
In short, it was not the injection of money into a sexual relationship that defined it as prostitution. While everyone agreed that “prostitutes” probably did accept money in exchange for sexual acts, the exchange wasn’t seen as fundamentally different from that of an unmarried woman who had sexual relationships with boyfriends who supported her financially. Both were seen as existing on a continuum of immoral sexuality, but that didn’t necessarily mean the women were “prostitutes.”Nor was “prostitution” even necessarily about sex, since a woman could be labeled a prostitute when there was no proof that she was sexually active at all. For example, sometimes Zeid and Lina would have disputes over whether a particular friend of Lina’s was a “prostitute” or not. Zeid, for example, claimed that one of Lina’s childhood friends was a prostitute because she drove around alone after midnight. Lina argued, “She’s just bored! She’s so innocent, you can’t believe it—she’s never even been kissed!”
Studying Nietzsche from the toilet and other cold, hard truths.
How My Father Taught Me to Talk Jive
BY SAMSON KAMBALU | TheRoot.com
Studying Nietzsche from the toilet and other cold, hard truths.
But my father did not mind looking like a scarecrow. He said he was a philosopher and walked with his head held high in the sky like a giraffe. His favorite study was the bathroom. Apart from the fact that it was the only private space in the house, he believed that it was from the bathroom, and specifically the toilet, that all great ideas came. It was not a coincidence, he said, that Martin Luther conceived the Reformation while on the toilet. Our bathroom was therefore usually stuffed with an eclectic mix of books from his huge two-part bookshelf in the living room, which he called the diptych.Many of the books were by his favorite writer, the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. My father said that Nietzsche was the perfect philosopher for the toilet because of his searing aphoristic style and cold truths. Among the piles of paperbacks by the side of the toilet, he had every book that Nietzsche had ever written: The Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations, Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, The Gay Science, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Nietzsche vs. Wagner, The Will to Power, Ecce Homo and even My Sister and I, the book he is supposed to have written when he went mad toward the end of his life.
Have to wonder what Walter Benjamin would have made of this!
~Nicholas Kiersey
Biopolitics, War & Political Economy
With this in mind, here is a link to a very early draft of my own work in this regards. While I had not yet read Birth of Biopolitics when I wrote this, it may be worth posting regardless because it serves as a kind of case study in the difficulties of specifying the concept of biopolitical security without the clarifications on the market as a "site of veridiction" which appear in the book.
Both Scalable and Historical; In Defense of the Biopolitical Contribution to the “Debate About Empire”
You may also be interested to read Jan Selby's provocative piece which I think, while not itself shaped by Birth of Biopolitics, presents an important series of questions to which the new text may provide some important clarifications.
New York Sun: Robert Nozick and the Coast of Utopia
BY DAVID LEWIS SCHAEFER April 30, 2008 URL: http://www2.nysun.com/article/75572
Yet Nozick's libertarianism, which compares income taxation to forced labor, suffers from a corresponding defect of its own. Nozick never acknowledges the need for a liberal regime to guarantee some level of social security and educational benefits to all citizens, to the extent its circumstances allow, if only to ensure the continued loyalty of the poor to that regime. Like Rawls, Nozick sought to impose an abstract vision of justice on political life, relegating considerations of feasibility (i.e., of conformity with the likely demands of actual human beings) to be resolved by others, in the spirit of Immanuel Kant's dictum, "let justice triumph, even if the world perishes by it."
and:
Ironically, however, Nozick himself ultimately acknowledges that his entitlement theory is insufficient to refute demands for a redistributionist state, since it can never be demonstrated that existing holdings derive from an unbroken series of voluntary transfers: Doesn't every people's collective title to their land derive from some original act of unjust conquest? Hence, surprisingly, he ends up suggesting that something like Rawls's difference principle is morally required after all, in the name of "rectification," on the dubious premise that those currently least-well-off have the highest probability of being descended from previous victims of injustice.
Eurozine: The politics of the global movement
Magnus Wennerhag
The politics of the global movement
It could be claimed that the protests, criticisms and demands of the global justice movement are expressions of a will to renegotiate the different forms of political autonomy. In the closing years of the twentieth century, the movement has emerged in part from criticism of the negative social and political effects of economic globalization, in part from a desire to make the globalization process more socially sustainable and democratic. We are thus talking about criticism not only of the democratic deficit among supranational and global institutions, but also of the market-orientated economic policies with which these institutions have been linked. New communication technology has facilitated the linking up of the various organizations, networks and movements which have this critical stance and certain political goals in common. In this way, the movement has become a rallying point for a multiplicity of actors such as trade unions, environmentalists, church groups, organizations promoting international solidarity, women's organizations, new organizations such as ATTAC, political parties, and others. The movement's concrete statements in the public sphere have mainly consisted of mass protests and, since 2001, large alternative conferences, so called social forums. At the global level, the World Social Forum has been held in Porto Alegre, Mumbai, Nairobi and other cities, but many social forums have also been arranged at continental, national and local levels.
and:
The global justice movement can be seen as a political response to this in a double sense. Firstly, the movement exposes the democratic shortcomings of nation states and the democratic deficit in global institutions. Secondly, the movement formulates what can be seen as the social question of our time, namely the growing inequalities arising from the more market−oriented policies of global institutions and nation states. The common good as well as a will to democratize global power is used to stem the wave of privatization.
Counterpunch: In Praise of Hippies
Ignorant History
In Praise of Hippies and the Counter-Culture
By BILL HATCH
One of the great achievements of the hippies is that they have never been a part of either faction in terms of ideology, sexual or otherwise. Although they are capable of a social cohesion at times, under certain specific circumstances (from a good party to a political action), hippies are firm believers in the individual's right to private property and will fight any timber corporation to prevent encroachment on it. I didn't even understand Peter Coyote's statement, quoted reverently by De Groot, "Any structure is mutable, but once you've chosen it, you have to accept it -- if you're ever going to get any depth. Because depth only comes in the struggle with limits." But, I have no doubt whatsover that Ringolevio, by Diggers founder Emmett Grogan and Coyote's leader, was the best book ever written on the Haight Ashbury, generally considered to be the fountainhead of lamentable "anarchist excesses." A second take always worth rereading, is the series of articles written by Nick Von Hoffman and illustrated by the great photography of Elaine Mayes, on the anarchic market in marijuana in the Haight. It could not be organized even by organized crime, which tried.
John Yoo on Clausewitz
NiK
TITLE: Deconstructing John Yoo
DEPARTMENT: No Comment
BY: Scott Horton
PUBLISHED: January 23, 2008
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/01/hbc-90002226
Once again, poor John Yoo, the author of the original torture memorandum and steady defender in public fora of waterboarding and crushing the genitalia of small children, feels he is being persecuted. This has been a steady theme of his writings in the Journal, in which he has lashed out against former Attorney General Ashcroft, the Supreme Court in its Rasul and Hamdan decisions, and his colleagues in academia. This time the victimizer is his own alma mater. A Yale Law School clinic has supported a lawsuit filed against him in federal court in San Francisco seeking nominal damages ($1 plus attorney’s fees and costs) on behalf of Jose Padilla. The Wall Street Journal and other organs of the Neoconservative world (of which the soft-spoken Yoo is a card-carrying member) reacted promptly and in unison. This law suit is a ludicrous act of harassment, they say, blasting away against Yale Dean Harold Koh and a series of additional windmills who have nothing to do with it.
Amartya Sen: More on "Imperial Illusions"
by Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen responds to Niall Ferguson's letter about the legacy of British imperial rule in India.
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=42348eec-0823-4c4b-8b86-c2d9db78cc46
Even after overlooking that misattribution, it can, however, be asked whether Ferguson should be so sure that India could have done little of the kind that Japan did. His comparisons with "Qing China" and "Ottoman Turkey" are certainly worth considering, but does he not overlook here the extent to which there were early industrial and financial developments, as well as global affiliations, already in India? I commented on this in my essay: "When the East India Company undertook the battle of Plassey and defeated the Nawab of Bengal, there were businessmen, traders, and other professionals from a number of different European nations already in that very locality. Their primary involvement was in exporting textiles and other industrial products from India, and the river Ganges ... on which the East India Company had its settlement, also had (further upstream) trading centers and settled communities from Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Prussia, and other European nations." Despite the early history of industrial and financial developments in India, we cannot, of course, be sure what would have happened there in the absence of British conquest, but Ferguson's ridicule of what he calls "Meiji India" avoids the important issues involved.
DN: Frances Fox Piven on 'progressive' candidates
FRANCES FOX PIVEN: ... I wanted to comment on the question of program that everybody—all of us have brought up. Whose program do we like? Who is stronger, Hillary or Barack? Or was it Edwards in an earlier phase? I think that, look, these are all ambitious people. They all take money from unsavory sources. They’re all determined to win, to beat out their competitors. They all evade the troublesome issues in American society, if they can. The question of whether—who we should support is a question, rather, of which of these candidates is more likely to encourage and then be vulnerable to the movement politics, which sometimes sets presidents straight. You know, in 1932, FDR didn’t run with a good program; he ran with the same program the Democrats had run with in 1924 and 1928, and that wasn’t a good program. But nevertheless, his rhetoric encouraged people who were suffering as a result of the Depression—working people, the unemployed—and helped to fuel the movements, which then forced FDR to support initiatives which he otherwise would not have supported, including the right to organize. And I think you can see the same pattern in JFK, LBJ, so we—people who are our movement leaders don’t get to this stage of a presidential campaign.
Helmling: Adorno Public and Private
Steven Helmling
University of Delware
http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/17.3helmling.html
Review of:
Adorno, T.W. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
---. Letters to His Parents: 1939-1951. Ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
---, and Thomas Mann. Correspondence 1943-1955. Ed. Christoph Gödde and Thomas Sprecher. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
Gerhardt, Christina, ed. "Adorno and Ethics." Special issue of New German Critique 97 (Winter 2006).
Clip:
"When students excited by "The Culture Industry" or some other Adorno reading ask how to get a larger grip on Adorno overall, I finally have a good answer:History and Freedom, Adorno's previously unpublished 1964-1965 lectures at Frankfurt. There are now several of these collections: in the 1960s, tape recorders were usually running when Adorno was speaking; and these lectures, addressed (from notes but without script) to undergraduates, are far more accessible than the self-consciously "difficult" writings addressed to fellow-adepts. Buzz on these lectures always mentions that they were given while Adorno was composing Negative Dialectics; History and Freedom is among the collections that can be read as a collateral draft of parts of that "late" work. Actually History and Freedom reprises Adorno's whole career: the lectures continue the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment (the opening lecture is called "Progress or Regression?"); along the way, two lectures elaborate the crucial early essay, "The Idea of Natural History," and no fewer than four extend the hints in "The Actuality of Philosophy" on "the transition from philosophy to interpretation." All of Adorno's major career investments are here except "the aesthetic": there are, indeed, many asides on art especially in the lectures on interpretation, but "the aesthetic" connects with the main theme mostly via Hegel's "end of art.""
Washington Post: The Church Doctrines of Pope Ron Paul
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/11/AR2008011101859_pf.html
What's wrong with libertarianism?
By Michael Kinsley Saturday, January 12, 2008; 12:00 AM
Libertarians get patronized a lot. Chipmunky and earnest, always pursuing logical consistency down wacky paths, they pose no real threat to the established order. But the modest success of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas in the presidential campaign entitles them to some answers to the questions they raise. They say: People should be free to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn't hurt other people. If you agree, how do you justify (let's pick just two): 1) laws that forbid private behavior, such as recreational drugs; 2) government programs that redistribute one person's money to someone else?
Why Rudy Giuliani loves Norman Podhoretz
Norman's Conquest
Why Rudy Giuliani loves Norman Podhoretz
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Podhoretz was born in 1930 into a lapsed Orthodox Jewish family, the son of a sixty-dollar-a-week milkman. He grew up in Brownsville, a Brooklyn neighborhood that profoundly shaped his character. In his book Ex-Friends, Podhoretz describes Norman Mailer, who grew up near him and attended the same high school, as a similar product of the local street culture: "Like me, and practically every Brooklyn boy I had known, he was direct and pugnacious and immensely preoccupied with the issue of manly courage." Podhoretz was a member of a gang called Club Cherokee and hung out with gamblers and other riffraff as a child. It was an environment in which, he recalled in a 1999 television interview, "the main desideratum was to be tough and not to back down from a fight. And to be a sissy, as people used to say, or a coward was probably the worst possible condition into which you could fall." It was the credo Podhoretz would follow all his life.
Review of Terry Eagleton: Terry Eagleton Presents Jesus Christ - The Gospels [Verso, 2007]
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John...and Terry.
By Andrew McGowan
In the book trade, it has been a better year or two for Jesus than for God. God has suffered the indignities of forays into pulp non-fiction by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others. Jesus has had wildly different treatments at the hands of everyone from Pope Benedict XVI to Jack Spong, or more locally from Peter Jensen to John Carroll, but Jesus’ reviews are uniformly glowing.
It might seem God needed Terry Eagleton’s attention more; in fact his review of Dawkins The God Delusion in the London Review of Books has become the stuff of legend – I can’t resist quoting the opening line:
“Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology”.
Read on...
The Paris Principle—Politics are sooo hot.
STEPHEN DUNCOMBE
The Nation
October 29, 2007 issue
It's because we know that we need to care. This celebration of ersatz aristocracy, as paradoxical as it sounds, is genuinely popular culture. People is the most profitable magazine in the United States, and E! (the CNN of celebrity gossip) reaches more than 89 million homes. If progressives want their politics to appeal to a majority of the population--which they should in a democracy--they ignore or misunderstand the popularity of celebrity at their peril. What would it mean to create a politics that speak to this fascination? Instead of bemoaning the narcissism of young people who spend hours managing their public selves on Facebook, we need to see it for what it is: the desire to be someone in our mediated age. This popular desire for recognition demands a change in the way progressives do politics
Fascism in America: Who's afraid of Naomi Wolf?
http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/whos-afraid-of-naomi-wolf/2007/10/05/1191091363953.html
Who's afraid of Naomi Wolf?
Mark Coultan
October 6, 2007
She writes: "I am not comparing the United States in 2007 to Nazi Germany, or Bush to Hitler. There will not be a coup in America like Mussolini's March on Rome or a dramatic massacre like Hitler's Night of the Long Knives."But she does see historical echoes everywhere. Bush supporters burning Dixie Chicks CDs are comparable to the Nazis burning books. The Administration's creation of the Department of Homeland Security is compared to the Nazi use of the term Heimat, "the Homeland".The Administration embedded reporters in the military. The Nazis embedded reporters and camera crews with its armed forces. Vice-President Dick Cheney said America was on a war footing after September 11, 2001. Nazi leaders said that after the Reichstag fire Germany was on a permanent war footing. The Administration unloads coffins of dead American soldiers at night and forbids pictures being taken. The Nazis did the same.
And...
Wolf concedes that some of her critics are more comfortable with the term "authoritarian" than "fascist", and says some people even view authoritarianism as attractive in what they see as a time of national emergency.But she says that the difference between authoritarianism and a fascist shift is when state terror is directed against individuals.Before she wrote the book, she asked an accountant to comb through her tax, employment and other records to identify anything that could be used against her, or distorted."Those in the public eye who are afraid to be forceful in opposition because of a secret they want to keep had better talk to their families or their constituencies, or their lawyers and accountants, painful as that might be in the short term," she says.Is this paranoia, or just sensible precaution? She seems surprised that someone would question her decision to investigate herself. "No one I've talked to in America thinks this is an overstatement. We are really scared here. Really scared.
RUSHKOFF on 9/11 conspiracy theorists
RUSHKOFF on 9/11 conspiracy theorists
Posted by arthur magazine staff
CONSPIRACIES OF DUNCES by Douglas Rushkoff (from Arthur No. 26)
And...9-11 theorists are unwittingly performing as the unpaid minions of the administration’s propaganda wing. (At least most of them are unpaid; no doubt, some of the loudest are working as contractors for the same agencies whose activities they pretend to deconstruct.) That’s why, instead of nodding along with their long-winded, preposterous yarns under the false belief that any critique is better than no critique, we—the informed, intelligent, and reasonable members of the war resistance—must instead disassociate ourselves from this drivel. In other words, we must draw the line between the kind of analysis done by Greg Palast and that done by Pilots for Truth. If we don’t apply discipline to our thinking, we risk falling into the trap that even some of our best intellectuals have—like Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, who on reading a bit too much 9-11 conspiracy, has concluded that it all has some merit.
And that’s where I suspect all this theorizing really takes us: to the heart of a racist jingoism worse even than the triumphalism justifying our foreign policy to begin with. They can’t bring themselves to accept that our big bad government can really be so swiftly outfoxed by a dozen relatively untrained Arab guys. And rather than go there, they’d prefer to maintain the myth of American hegemony. On a certain level, it feels better to believe that we are only vulnerable by our leaders’ sick choice—not by our adversarsies’ increasing strength and prowess.
Eurozine: Counter-revolution against a counter-revolution
G.M. Tamás
Counter-revolution against a counter-revolution
Eastern Europe today
State socialism in eastern Europe, though intolerably authoritarian, offered security and the opportunity for upward mobility, writes G.M. Tamás. Members of the middle class resist becoming déclassé but cannot identify with the communist institutions to which they owe their status. In order to defend social relations before 1989 without losing face, they portray the neoconservative destruction of the welfare state as the work of communists. The new counter revolutionaries can, then, be described both as left- and as rightwing – as the anti-communist enemies of communist privatizers and globalizers.
Dissent: Who Named the Neocons?
Who Named the Neocons?
By Benjamin Ross
SUMMER 2007
The Rosetta Stone that unlocks this linguistic puzzle is the next appearance of neoconservative in Dissent. It was in Fall 1975, just as Daniel P. Moynihan’s appointment as ambassador to the United Nations began to propel the word into prominence. An article by John P. Diggins used it to describe William F. Buckley’s early collaborators Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, Will Herberg, and James Burnham.[10] The conservative writer B. Bruce-Briggs demurred in the Spring 1976 issue: "One must quibble with his use of the term “neoconservatives” to label the ex-Marxists who went over to the right before 1950. In contemporary usage, “neoconservative” labels those liberals who would not accept the “New Politics” shift during the mid1960s; they are careful to keep their distance from the premature antiliberals of Buckley and company. On the right, as the left, sectarianism demands scrupulous care in nomenclature." A neoconservative, for the Dissenters of the early 1970s, was either someone with a new variant of conservatism or a former leftist who had moved right. The term was applied to the group that evolved into today’s neocons, simply because they were the new conservatives of immediate concern. But its meaning was not limited to them. It was elsewhere that neoconservatism became a name rather than a description. Scientists know that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can sometimes trigger a hurricane on the other side of the earth. In this case, fluttering on the West Side of Manhattan is connected to a hurricane three decades later in Iraq. For the butterfly that has thus flown into history, scrupulous care in taxonomic nomenclature is indeed demanded.
Review of Mearsheimer & Walt's new book
BY SCOTT McLEMEE Special to Newsday
September 16, 2007
At the same time, they are wedded to the notion that the U.S. and Israel have distinct national interests - with the American interest defined, more or less, as sustained access to Middle Eastern oil. They reject the idea that Iraq was occupied in pursuit of oil. Hence, that policy was an effect of the Israel lobby's efforts on behalf of a different national interest. Here, we see the real limits of their analysis. After 1993, by their own account, the major focus of Israel's concern about its own security was Iran, not Iraq. But it was the American neoconservatives - defined by the authors as part of the Israel lobby - who drew up the plans for attacking Iraq. This scheme did win support among the Israeli public in 2002 and '03, but it's hardly a matter of subordinating American policy to another country's interests.
Mearsheimer & Walt: Seven Questions: The Israel Lobby Revisited
Posted September 2007
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt made waves in 2006 when they argued that a powerful “Israel lobby” distorts U.S. policies in the Middle East. Back with a new book expanding on the same topic, these noted realist scholars sat down with FP to explain why they are speaking out.
All politicians are sensitive to interest groups, whether it’s the farm lobby, or drug companies, or energy companies, or the National Rifle Association. Clearly, groups like the Israel lobby tend to exert their most profound influence on Capitol Hill, but they also wield considerable influence—like other special interest groups—over the executive branch. This is not to say that any of these organizations control U.S. policy, just that they exert a very powerful influence on it. And one of the ways you see that is in the presidential campaign that’s currently going on. American Middle East policy is clearly in trouble, and you would expect presidential candidates to be discussing and debating what ought to be done on a wide range of Middle East issues. But when it comes to Israel, all you get from presidential candidates is a competition for who can demonstrate the greatest devotion to Israel and willingness to back it almost unconditionally.
LRB: Anderson: Depicting Europe
Perry Anderson
http://lrb.co.uk/v29/n18/print/ande01_.html
9/20/07
Perry Anderson's review of some Europhile works, new and not so new, contains some interesting comments. Certainly the current path of the 'project' of the European Union is overshadowed by some serious problems: racial integration; brain drain from the East; Turkey; and the all pervasive issue of the Transatlantic Alliance. But perhaps the most troubling problem of all, and here Perry is quite right, is that the Europhile's have incredibly high notions of themselves, and the moral role of the Union:
Self-satisfaction is scarcely unfamiliar in Europe. But the contemporary mood is something different: an apparently illimitable narcissism, in which the reflection in the water transfigures the future of the planet into the image of the beholder. What explains this degree of political vanity?
I addressed this in my classroom last autumn. We were reading Rifkin's book and I have to admit, there were moments when I felt extremely uncomfortable with my decision to put in on the syllabus. While the work does an excellent job of explaining in very accessible terms the 'problem of modernity', and the particular advantages of the 'European' socio-economic model in dealing with this problem, the author seems far too comfortable with his rather monolithic assumptions. To be sure, 'Europe' is a decidedly ambiguous project. On the one hand, it is driven by a Functionalist logic of integration. The results of this for the marginal are perfectly represented by Perry:
The role configured by the new East in the EU, in other words, promises to be something like that played by the new South in the American economy since the 1970s: a zone of business-friendly fiscal regimes, weak or non-existent labour movements, low wages and – therefore – high investment, registering faster growth than in the older core regions of continent-wide capital. Like the US South, too, the region seems likely to fall somewhat short of the standards of political respectability expected in the rest of the Union. Already, now that they are safely inside the EU and there is no longer the same need to be on their best behaviour, the elites of the region show signs of kicking over the traces. In Poland, the ruling twins defy every norm of ideological correctness as understood in Strasbourg or Brussels. In Hungary, riot police stand on guard around a ruler unabashed at vaunting his lies to voters. In the Czech Republic, months pass without parliament being able to form a government. In Romania, the president insults the prime minister in a phone-in call to a television talk-show. But, as in Kentucky or Alabama, such provincial quirks add a touch of folkloric colour to the drab metropolitan scene more than they disturb it.
We Europeans in America complain ad nauseum about the average American's lack of basic knowledge about their society. Yet how many Europeans are aware of the basic strategization of their own society? The answer to this question must be disappointing for the Rifkins of this world, as the following quote reveals.
In the syrup of la pensée unique, little separates the market-friendly wisdom of one side of the Atlantic from the other, though as befits the derivative, the recipe is still blander in Europe than America, where political differences are less extinct. In such conditions, an enthusiast can find no higher praise for the Union than to compare it to ‘one of the most successful companies in global history’. Which firm confers this honour on Brussels? Why, the one in your wallet. The EU ‘is already closer to Visa than it is to a state’, declares New Labour’s Mark Leonard, exalting Europe to the rank of a credit card.
So, Europe is now referred to as something akin to a corporation, one clear hint as to why its police forces might now be in the business not simply of dispensing justice but also maintaining the corporation's bottom line. With this stated, the next obvious question is what we really mean by the 'European Dream,' and whether or not there might somehow be a way to creatively intervene in its machinations:
Transcendence of the nation-state, Marx believed, would be a task not for capital but for labour. A century later, as the Cold War set in, Kojève held that whichever camp achieved it would emerge the victor from the conflict. The foundation of the European Community settled the issue for him. The West would win, and its triumph would bring history, understood categorically – not chronologically – as the realisation of human freedom, to an end. Kojève’s prediction was accurate. His extrapolation, and its irony, remain in the balance. They have certainly not been disproved: he would have smiled at the image of a chit of plastic. The emergence of the Union may be regarded as the last great world-historical achievement of the bourgeoisie, proof that its creative powers were not exhausted by the fratricide of two world wars, and what has happened to it as a strange declension from what was hoped from it. Yet the long-run outcome of integration remains unforeseeable to all parties. Even without shocks, many a zigzag has marked its path. With them, who knows what further mutations might occur.
Yes. But in a sense, this is just where the debate starts. On the one hand, Zizek warns us not to fall into the same psychological dilemma of 'false choice,' as confronted by the Amish teenagers. On the other, Negri, Alliez, et al., pushing for a more centralized (yet 'centerless'?) Europe, the sooner to beget the global Empire, the final obstacle to global democracy.
Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein: Sin Patrón
http://lavaca.org/seccion/actualidad/1/1593.shtml
Sin Patrón
Stories from Argentina's worker-run factories
Preface, Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein
There were many popular responses to the crisis, from neighbourhood assemblies and barter clubs to resurgent leftwing parties and mass movements of the unemployed, but we spent most of our year in Argentina with workers in "recovered companies." Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over traditional businesses that have gone bankrupt and are reopening them under democratic, worker management. It's an old idea reclaimed and retrofitted for a brutal new time. The principles are so simple, so elementally fair, that they seem more self-evident than radical when articulated by one of the workers in this book: "We formed the cooperative with the criteria of equal wages, making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work, we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders."
Borders, language, and the future of European integration: insights from the 19th century Habsburg Empire
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/362
Max-Stephan Schulze
Nikolaus Wolf
7 July 2007
The key hypothesis concerns the importance of ethno-linguistic networks for trade. If ethno-linguistic networks were an important factor, then the intensification of networks among members of the same ethno-linguistic group, and the simultaneous decline of transportation costs, should have produced a border effect inside the Empire. That is, all else equal, two cities with little or no ethno-linguistic differences will tend to trade more with each other than cities with larger differences.
Two Pieces Critical of Ariel Levy's 'Girls Gone Wild' Thesis
ARTICLE 1:
http://alternet.org/rights/28237/?page=1
Feminism Is a Failure, and Other Myths
By Jennifer Baumgardner, AlterNet. Posted November 17, 2005.
While Dowd's book has some feminists of my acquaintance furious ("I don't recognize the world she is describing at all," a 35-year-old editor at the Washington Post told me), Levy's is more dangerous. Intentional or not, Levy contributes to that mean finger, pointed only at girls, that says "You think you are being sexy, you think you're cool and powerful, but you're not. You're a slut and people are making fun of you."
The first piece is most harsh. But Levy is not pointing her fingers at Girls Gone Wild participants and shouting 'slut'. Instead, she is posing an interesting question: to what extent does GGW exploit a trope within current interpretations of feminist liberation that plays into the hands of male-dominated corporate greed?
ARTICLE 2:
http://www.alternet.org/story/51416/
Feminism in the Era of 'Girls Gone Wild'
By Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet. Posted May 5, 2007.
If young women are doing fine by themselves by picking up the books and working hard and presenting a very real challenge to male dominance, then what should we make of the "Girls Gone Wild" stereotype? The notion that college age women are wasting their potential somehow by acting like nothing more than sex objects is paralleled neatly by the notion that the kindergarten set of girls that are supposedly rejecting their feminist parents in order to embrace the fluffy princess phenomenon, pushed mostly by the Disney company. In fact, the princess marketing has something of a "gotcha" element to it, as if the miles of pink and lace present an irresistible temptation for the inner delicate flowers of young girls. The more likely story is that the relentless drumbeat of marketing the Princess line has made girls feel that they're missing out if they aren't a part of it.
Now, this second piece is a little less harsh on Levy. But I think it makes a mistake insofar as it seems to suggest that we have only two options: 1) forwards (which necessarily comes with at least a little bit of GGW); 2) backwards (into Disney princess-land). Marcotte is right to suggest that we do women a disservice to think that we have entered an era of "college age women are wasting their potential somehow by acting like nothing more than sex objects". But I think Levy's argument is more sophisticated than that. There has been an 'en masse' conflation of liberation with an ideology of free self-expression which inadvertently plays into male power. This is not to say that all free self-expression is intrinsically bad, however. There are multiple ways this can be done - not all of which might reinforce male hegemony.
Either way, it is a fascinating debate. I don't think I know all the answers. But I do get suspicious when women seem to internalize male-driven ideologies of what counts as sexuality and then voluntarily reproduce those ideologies under the banner of 'liberation' - it just appears to be a trap. And I wonder if women are benefitting.
A silly review of the new Foucault 'Madness' translation...
Andrew Scull
http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25347-2626687,00.html
Foucault’s research for Madness was largely completed while he was in intellectual exile in Sweden, at Uppsala. Perhaps that explains the superficiality and the dated quality of much of his information. He had access to a wide range of medical texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – English, Dutch, French and German – as well as the writings of major philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza. A number of the chapters that now appear for the first time in English make use of these primary sources to analyse older ideas about madness. One may object to or accept Foucault’s reconstructions, but these portions of his argument at least rest on readings of relevant source material. By contrast, much of his account of the internal workings and logic of the institutions of confinement, an account on which he lavishes attention, is drawn from their printed rules and regulations. But it would be deeply naive to assume that such documents bear close relationship to the realities of life in these places, or provide a reliable guide to their quotidian logic. There are, admittedly, references to a handful of archival sources, all of them French, which might have provided some check on these published documents, but such material is never systematically or even sensibly employed so as to examine possible differences between the ideal and the real. Nor are we given any sense of why these particular archives were chosen for examination, what criteria were employed to mine them for facts, how representative the examples Foucault provides might be. Of course, by the very ambitions they have set for themselves, comparative historians are often forced to rely to a substantial extent on the work of others, so perhaps this use of highly selective French material to represent the entire Western world should not be judged too harshly. But the secondary sources on which Foucault repeatedly relies for the most well-known portions of his text are so self-evidently dated and inadequate to the task, and his own reading of them so often singularly careless and inventive, that he must be taken to task.
Kroker on Baudrillard
If we now mourn the death of Jean Baudrillard, it is also with the knowledge that his intellectual presence in the world always was in the way of an early announcement that the twenty-first century will surely unwind precisely in the way he envisioned -- a political conflagration of mutually antagonistic, equally fascinating, reality-principles. When reality is exposed as simulation, theory as artifice, the sign as terror, and bodies as only apparent perspectives, then we can finally know that Baudrillard's thought had about it that certain pataphysical quality of always descending to the heights of the void, always, as Virilio would say, "falling upwards" into the desert of the real.
Armitage on Baudrillard
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0703/msg00024.html
For Baudrillard, the failure of modern sociology was not necessarily its faith in its ideal type, the perfect society or even its blindness concerning symbolic exchange. Rather, its breakdown was and is its powerlessness in the face of the demise of both semiotics and the material world. In other words, each significant move in Baudrillard's writings, indeed, every stride he made away from semiotics and materialism and towards an understanding of the symbolic order was a kind of resistance to our sign-dominated contemporary society. Yet he did not automatically contest postmodern social principles. Instead, he was prepared to challenge their symbolic presence and characteristics, to set his analytical sights on the forbidden features of enchantment and seduction, brutality and abrupt reversibility that lie at the core of contemporary consumption and expenditure. In this sense, Baudrillard's postmodern sociology continues to provide a much-needed critique of semiotic society. For what had been outlawed more or less in principle up until his arrival on the modern sociological scene was the fact that the age of restricted production and accumulation was over and that the era of limitless consumption and expenditure had begun.
Plawiuk: Capitalism Creates Global Warming
To the topic at hand: When it comes to global warming, capitalism is the 800 pound gorilla in the debating chamber. This article reminds us of the power of Marx's critique of technology in the production process and how, ultimately, there is still reason to think that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction.
http://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2007/02/capitalism-creates-global-warming.html
It is this centralization of capitalism that allows for the centralization of administration and planning through the governance of a self managed society which is what socialism is. And only with the socialization of production and consumption can we solve this ultimate crisis of capitalism which is the challenge of living without producing waste and its resulting environmental and ecological imprint which is what global warming is.
Reviving the Clash of Civilizations...
Appointment in Mesopotamia
Iraq's problems existed long before 2003.
By Christopher Hitchens
Iraq was in our future. The specter, not just of a failed state, but of a failed society, was already before us in what we saw from the consequences of sanctions and the consequences of aggressive Sunni fascism at the center of the state. Nobody has ever even tried to make a case for doing nothing about Iraq: Even those who foresaw sectarian strife were going by a road map that was already valid and had been traveled before. Thus it seems to me quite futile to be arguing about whether to blame the Iraqis—or indeed whether to blame the coalition. Until recently, no Iraqi was allowed to have any opinion about the future of his or her country. How long did we imagine that such a status quo would have remained "stable"?
Zizek: In You More Than Yourself
In You More Than Yourself
The revolutionary potential of the Internet is far from self-evident
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
The actual couple of man and woman are thus haunted by the bizarre figure of a frog embracing a bottle of beer. What modern art stages is precisely this underlying spectre: One can easily imagine a Magritte painting of a frog embracing a bottle of beer, with a title “A man and a woman” or “The ideal couple.” (The association here with surrealist Luis Bunuel’s famous “dead donkey on a piano” is fully justified.) Therein resides the threat of cyberspace gaming at its most elementary: When a man and a woman interact in it, they do so under the spectre of a frog embracing a bottle of beer. Since neither of them is aware of it, these discrepancies between what “you” really are and what “you” appear to be in digital space can lead to murderous violence. After all, when you suddenly discover that the man you are embracing is really a frog, aren’t you tempted to squash the slimy creature?
NYT: ZIZEK: Denying the Facts, Finding the Truth
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Denying the Facts, Finding the Truth
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
London
In a similar way, Saddam Hussein’s regime was an abominable authoritarian state, guilty of many crimes, mostly toward its own people. However, one should note the strange but key fact that, when the United States representatives and the Iraqi prosecutors were enumerating his evil deeds, they systematically omitted what was undoubtedly his greatest crime in terms of human suffering and of violating international justice: his invasion of Iran. Why? Because the United States and the majority of foreign states were actively helping Iraq in this aggression.And now the United States is continuing, through other means, this greatest crime of Saddam Hussein: his never-ending attempt to topple the Iranian government. This is the price you have to pay when the struggle against the enemies is the struggle against the evil ghosts in your own closet: you don’t even control yourself.
FT: Behold Marx's twitch
Any thoughts anyone?
Behold Marx's twitch
By John Thornhill
Published: December 28 2006 02:00 | Last updated: December 28 2006 02:00
What does it take to kill an idea whose time has passed?
However, Marx would surely have been grumpy about his new-found status as an analyst of our times rather than as an agitator for revolutionary change. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it," he wrote.
A Tribute to Hannah Arendt
A Tribute to Hannah Arendt
Edited by Ben Naparstek
For some, Arendt was not Jewish enough, for others, she was all-too Jewish. Her critique of the nation-state, and, in particular, political Zionism, appeared to many—among them, Isa-iah Berlin and Gershom Scholem—to be an exercise in vacuous moralism. But for the neo-Marxist members of the Frankfurt School, Arendt was too particularistic and culturalist in her analysis of totalitarianism and modern evil. This, however, is the heart of Arendt’s cosmopolitanism, which fundamentally represents an attempt to hold together moral universalism and civic republicanism in one. Thus, Arendt perspicaciously argued that the persecution of Jews merely prefigured the emergence of stateless people and refugees on a global scale. Since no nation-state could be trusted to protect the rights of its members, and since every human being had a right to “belong to some community,” she claimed that “the right to have rights” of every individual had to be guaranteed by humanity as a whole.
IAS: CLIFFORD GEERTZ 1926-2006
http://www.ias.edu/Newsroom/announcements/Uploads/view.php?cmd=view&id=354
PRINCETON,
N.J., October 31, 2006 -- Clifford Geertz, an eminent scholar in
the field of cultural anthropology known for his extensive research
in Indonesia and Morocco, died at the age of 80 early yesterday
morning of complications following heart surgery at the Hospital of
the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Geertz was Professor Emeritus
in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced
Study, where he has served on the Faculty since 1970. Dr. Geertz's
appointment thirty-six years ago was significant not only for the
distinguished leadership it would bring to the Institute, but also
because it marked the initiation of the School of Social Science,
which in 1973 formally became the fourth School at the
Institute.Dr. Geertz's landmark contributions to social and cultural theory have been influential not only among anthropologists, but also among geographers, ecologists, political scientists, humanists, and historians. He worked on religion, especially Islam; on bazaar trade; on economic development; on traditional political structures; and on village and family life. A prolific author since the 1950s, Dr. Geertz's many books include The Religion of Java (1960); Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (1968); The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973, 2000); Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (1980); and The Politics of Culture, Asian Identities in a Splintered World (2002). At the time of his death, Dr. Geertz was working on the general question of ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world.
Peter Goddard, Director of the Institute, said, "Clifford Geertz was one of the major intellectual figures of the twentieth century whose presence at the Institute played a crucial role in its development and in determining its present shape. He remained a vital force, contributing to the life of the Institute right up to his death. We have all lost a much loved friend."
"Cliff was the founder of the School of Social Science and its continuing inspiration," stated Joan Wallach Scott, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute. "His influence on generations of scholars was powerful and lasting. He changed the direction of thinking in many fields by pointing to the importance and complexity of culture and the need for its interpretation. We will miss his critical intelligence, his great sense of irony, and his friendship."
Dr. Geertz's deeply reflective and eloquent writings often provided profound and cogent insights on the scope of culture, the nature of anthropology and on the understanding of the social sciences in general. Noting that human beings are "symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animals," Geertz acknowledged and explored the innate desire of humanity to "make sense out of experience, to give it form and order." In Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988), Geertz stated, "The next necessary thing...is neither the construction of a universal Esperanto-like culture...nor the invention of some vast technology of human management. It is to enlarge the possibility of intelligible discourse between people quite different from one another in interest, outlook, wealth, and power, and yet contained in a world where tumbled as they are into endless connection, it is increasingly difficult to get out of each other's way."
Dr. Geertz was born in San Francisco, California, on August 23, 1926. After serving in the Navy from 1943 through 1945, he studied under the G.I. Bill at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he majored in English. His internship as a copyboy for The New York Post dissuaded him from becoming a newspaper man. "It was fun but it wasn't practical," he said in an interview with Gary A. Olson ("Clifford Geertz on Ethnography and Social Construction," 1991), so he switched to philosophy, partly because of the influence of philosophy professor George Geiger, "the greatest teacher I have known."
"I never had any undergraduate training in anthropology [Antioch didn't offer it at the time] and, indeed, very little social science outside of economics," Geertz told Olson. "Finally, one of my professors said, 'Why don't you think about anthropology?'"
After receiving his A.B. in philosophy in 1950, Geertz went on to study anthropology at Harvard University and received a Ph.D. from the Department of Social Relations in 1956. It was a heady time, according to Geertz. "Multi- (or 'inter-' or 'cross-') disciplinary work, team projects, and concern with the immediate problems of the contemporary world, were combined with boldness, inventiveness, and a sense that things were, finally and certainly, on the move."
Geertz recounted that he was exposed to a form of anthropology "then called, rather awkwardly, 'pattern theory' or configurationalism.' In this dispensation, stemming from work before and during the war by the comparative linguist Edward Sapir at Yale and the cultural holist Ruth Benedict at Columbia, it was the interrelation of elements, the gestalt they formed, not their particular atomistic character that was taken to be the heart of the matter."
At this point, Geertz became involved in a project spearheaded by cultural anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, who headed Harvard's Russian Research Center. Geertz was one of five anthropologists assigned to the Modjokuto Project in Indonesia, sponsored by the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it was one of the earliest efforts to send a team of anthropologists to study large-scale societies with written histories, established governments, and composite cultures.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, anthropology was torn apart by questions about its colonial past and the possibility of objective knowledge in the human sciences. "For the next fifteen years or so," Geertz wrote, "proposals for new directions in anthropological theory and method appeared almost by the month, the one more clamorous than the next. I contributed to the merriment with 'interpretive anthropology,' an extension of my concern with the systems of meaning, beliefs, values, world views, forms of feeling, styles of thought, in terms of which particular peoples construct their existence."
Dr. Geertz began his academic career as a Research Assistant (1952-56) and a Research Associate (1957-58) in the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and also served as an Instructor in Social Relations and as a Research Associate in Harvard University's Laboratory of Social Relations (1956-57). In 1958-59, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California.
From 1958 to 1960, he was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, after which time he was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago (1960-61), and was subsequently promoted to Associate Professor (1962), and then Professor (1964). He was later named Divisional Professor in the Social Sciences (1968-70). At Chicago, Dr. Geertz was a member of the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations (1962-70), its Executive Secretary (1964-66), and its Chairman (1968-70). Geertz was also a Senior Research Career Fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health from 1964 to 1970.
Consultant to the Ford Foundation on Social Sciences in Indonesia in 1971, he was Eastman Professor at Oxford University from 1978 to 1979, and held an appointment as Visiting Lecturer with Rank of Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University from 1975 to 2000.
In 1970, Geertz joined the permanent faculty of the School of Social Science at the Institute, and was named Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science in 1982. He transferred to emeritus status in 2000.
Dr. Geertz is the author and co-author of important volumes that have been translated into over twenty languages and is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and scholarly awards. He received the National Book Critics Circle Prize in Criticism in 1988 for Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, and was also the recipient of the Fukuoka Asian Cultural Prize (1992) and the Bintang Jasa Utama (First Class Merit Star) of the Republic of Indonesia (2002). Over the years, he received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton universities, from Antioch, Swarthmore, and Williams colleges, and from the University of Cambridge, among other institutions.
He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science; a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy; and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Dr. Geertz was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.
Dr. Geertz's fieldwork was concentrated in Java, Bali, Celebes, and Sumatra in Indonesia, as well as in Morocco. In May 2000, he was honored at "Cultures, Sociétiés, et Territoires: Hommage à Clifford Geertz," a conference held in Sefrou, Morocco, where he had conducted work for a decade. It was particularly gratifying, commented Geertz, because "Anthropologists are not always welcomed back to the site of their field studies."
Dr. Geertz is survived by his wife, Dr. Karen Blu, an anthropologist retired from the Department of Anthropology at New York University; his children, Erika Reading of Princeton, NJ, and Benjamin Geertz of Kirkland, WA; and his grandchildren, Andrea and Elena Martinez of Princeton, NJ. He is also survived by his former wife, Dr. Hildred Geertz, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University.
A Memorial will be held at the Institute for Advanced Study. Details will be announced at a future date.
Lakoff: When Cognitive Science Enters Politics
by George Lakoff
A Response to Steven Pinker’s Review of Whose Freedom? in The New Republic
http://www.tnr.com/doc_posts.mhtml?i=20061009&s=pinker100906
These questions matter in progressive politics, because many progressives were brought up with the old 17th Century rationalist view of reason that implies that, if you just tell people the facts, they will reason to the right conclusion — since reason is universal. We know from recent elections that this is just false. “Old-fashioned … universal disembodied reason” also claims that everyone reasons the same way, that differences in world-view don’t matter. But anybody tuning in to contemporary talk shows will notice that not everybody reasons the same way and that world-view does matter.
Gilpin: War is Too Important to Be Left to Ideological Amateurs
~NiK
War is Too Important to Be Left to Ideological Amateurs
http://ire.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/19/1/5
Robert Gilpin, Princeton University
International Relations, Vol. 19, No. 1, 5-18 (2005)
The 2003 American attack against Iraq was engineered by two powerful groups within the Bush Administration, the ultra-nationalists and the neo-conservatives. The ultranationalists’ motive was to gain control of the oil reserves in the Middle East and elsewhere in the region in order to gain and sustain American global primacy. While the neo-conservatives shared this objective, they also wanted a radical restructuring of geopolitical relations in the area in order to promote the long-term security of Israel. Supporting the Administration were powerful domestic constituencies, especially evangelical Christians. Opposition to the war was expressed by leaders of three professional services responsible for American security: the American army and marines, the Foreign Service, and Middle East experts in the CIA. Opponents of the war believed that there was no threat posed to the US by Iraq; they also believed that the civilian leadership of the Pentagon was not competent and that planning for securing and pacifying postwar Iraq was inadequate. The opponents of the Iraq War have proved correct.
Fascist, Fascist, Who’s A Fascist?
The article's position seems common enough. After World War Two Helmut Schmidt commented that WWII was “totally started, led, and lost by Adolf Hitler”. But doesn't this ignore the essentially democratic nature of Germany's transformation into a fascist state? By analogy, is it not possible that such scenes as Abu Ghraib in our present context speak to the emergence of a certain fascism? Many 'liberals' strain their voices trying to argue that Bush ordered Abu Ghraib or that his minions somehow ordered it. And it would be a scary thought to think that this were true. But isn't it essentially a more terrifying position to think that maybe Bush didn't order it? That this was a more locally organized phenomenon?
If fascism emerges from the micro-level of our own politics, then the fundamental terrain of our combat with it is essentially ourselves. Fascism is a potential in all of us. To suggest otherwise is somehow to absolve ourselves of our own complicity in its reproduction.
~NiK
Fascist, Fascist, Who’s A Fascist?
[10 October 2006]
The term "fascism" is being appropriated, inappropriately, by a range of political interests in the US – including the Republican Party.
by Robert R. Thompson
However one reads it, I don’t think the use of the label “fascist” by Bush opponents or supporters does anything but, as Pollitt suggests, inflame emotions, conjure up images of Nazism, and poison our politics. It may be, as Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes in the 24 September 2006 The New York Times, “no phrase has crashed and burned as fast as the President’s most recent entry into the foreign policy lexicon: Islamic fascists, or, Islamo-fascism.” She also suggests that while the terms “have disappeared from Mr. Bush’s oratory—they were nowhere to be found in his 9/11 anniversary speeches, for instance—questions about the phrases have not … All of which leaves the central problem—what to call the enemy—unresolved.” (Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Islamo-Fascism Had Its Moment”, The New York Times, 24 September 2006).
The fact that questions and criticisms regarding the use of fascist terminology linger among those who’ve lived through a fascist regime demonstrates that “what to call the enemy” is far from the central problem. The brunt of the debate continues to be the deliberate use of language and images of the last century’s political brutality to score political points, and to confront (and define) the new century’s turmoil. Will the ploy succeed or fail? Only time will tell.
Learning to Love Again: An Interview with Wendy Brown
We need to go back to Marx once again. In the early work, Marx insists on the inseparability of individual and collective freedom. You can read much of his quarrel with Hegel through that problematic. Where Hegel has an individual consciousness, making its way through history, making its way toward freedom, Marx spies the impossibility of freedom without a collectivization of not just the modes of production, but all the conditions that produce both inequality and unfreedom for the individual. Thus Marx’s appreciation of the social as the domain which has to be revolutionized, which has to be transformed to produce something other than libertarian formulations of freedom. Foucault sounds the same theme. It is the powers that circulate through the social—whether they are for Marx ‘capital’, or for Foucault ‘discipline’ or other forms of ‘biopower’—that have to be transformed in order to produce something other than freedom from one another, freedom from the state, or freedom from something that makes you miserable. It is Marx’s notion of freedom with others that is compelling. Of course, Marx gets this from Aristotle, but he does a lot to it, and Rousseau also develops this in quite beautiful, if finally limited, ways. If you were to ask me what God I believed in in political philosophy, it would be the notion that there is no such thing as individual freedom, that human freedom is finally, always a project of making a world with others. This ‘truth’ expresses, in Marxist terms, our species-nature, in Aristotelian terms our distinct life-form—that is why Aristotle calls the polis ‘natural’ to man. It is also a Spinozist theme. You can, of course, get a limited form of liberty through liberal formulations of freedom, but because of our interdependence and relationality, not only in labour, but in a whole other set of media, we can’t find freedom against one another—it finally will be with. I think this is the altar at which I still intellectually worship.
wendy brown
Wendy Brown: Regulating Aversion
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s8306.html
Having seen Ms Brown speak at the APSA conference last weekend in Philadelphia, and the high profile folks that were in the room, I can tell you that her book is the hot topic in political theory circles right now. Unlike many theorists, she is an eloquent speaker on her feet and has an ability to really generate rapport with her audience. Check it out!
How did tolerance become a beacon of multicultural justice and civic peace at the turn of the twenty-first century? A mere generation ago, tolerance was widely recognized in the United States as a code word for mannered racialism. Early in the civil rights era, many white northerners staked their superiority to their southern brethren on a contrast between northern tolerance and southern bigotry. But racial tolerance was soon exposed as a subtle form of Jim Crow, one that did not resort to routine violence, formal segregation, or other overt tactics of superordination but reproduced white supremacy all the same. This exposé in turn metamorphosed into an artifact of social knowledge: well into the 1970s, racial tolerance remained a term of left and liberal derision, while religious tolerance seemed so basic to liberal orders that it was as rarely discussed as it was tested. Freedom and equality, rather than tolerance, became the watchwords of justice projects on behalf of the excluded, subordinated, or marginalized.
wendy brown
empire
The IDF reads D&G
IDFCritical theory has become crucial for Nave’s teaching and training. He explained: ‘we employ critical theory primarily in order to critique the military institution itself – its fixed and heavy conceptual foundations. Theory is important for us in order to articulate the gap between the existing paradigm and where we want to go. Without theory we could not make sense of the different events that happen around us and that would otherwise seem disconnected. […] At present the Institute has a tremendous impact on the military; [it has] become a subversive node within it. By training several high-ranking officers we filled the system [IDF] with subversive agents […] who ask questions; […] some of the top brass are not embarrassed to talk about Deleuze or [Bernard] Tschumi.’10 I asked him, ‘Why Tschumi?’ He replied: ‘The idea of disjunction embodied in Tschumi’s book Architecture and Disjunction (1994) became relevant for us […] Tschumi had another approach to epistemology; he wanted to break with single-perspective knowledge and centralized thinking. He saw the world through a variety of different social practices, from a constantly shifting point of view. [Tschumi] created a new grammar; he formed the ideas that compose our thinking.11 I then asked him, why not Derrida and Deconstruction? He answered, ‘Derrida may be a little too opaque for our crowd. We share more with architects; we combine theory and practice. We can read, but we know as well how to build and destroy, and sometimes kill.’12
deleuze
guattari
anti-german commentary on present crisis
http://asayake.blogspot.com/2006/07/when-grass-is-cut-snakes-will-show.html
A piece here that I think needs careful reading. While I am not sure how I feel about the anti-German program, insofar as I have not yet been able to decide for myself if they are too easily conflating Hezbollah's popularity with fascism, I think there is much of merit here. Soon I will try to post Tim Luke's article on constructing Islamo-Facism. I'd be interested to see if it has any thoughts on current events.
NiK
anti-german
Butler: No, it's not anti-semitic
Judith Butler
It may be that Summers has something else in mind; namely, that the criticism will be exploited by those who want to see not only the destruction of Israel but the degradation or devaluation of Jewish people in general. There is always that risk, but to claim that such criticism of Israel can be taken only as criticism of Jews is to attribute to that particular interpretation the power to monopolise the field of reception. The argument against letting criticism of Israel into the public sphere would be that it gives fodder to those with anti-semitic intentions, who will successfully co-opt the criticism. Here again, a statement can become effectively anti-semitic only if there is, somewhere, an intention to use it for anti-semitic purposes. Indeed, even if one believed that criticisms of Israel are by and large heard as anti-semitic (by Jews, anti-semites, or people who could be described as neither), it would become the responsibility of all of us to change the conditions of reception so that the public might begin to distinguish between criticism of Israel and a hatred of Jews.
AlterNet: Cheney Starts New Cold War Over Oil
Posted on June 1, 2006, Printed on June 1, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/36881/
It seemed crazy at the time, but looking at the big picture... is it? Putin was widely criticized for post-Beslan moves to cancel gubernatorial elections. But put in this context, it seems like a genuine wartime move to consolidate power in the face of an attack. Not Chechen attacks. But American Cold War-II attacks.
[Note: this is a very interesting piece detailing the recent history of US geopolitical involvement in central Asia. Contrary to people like John Mearsheimer, there is actually a LOT of evidence to suggest that the US is pursuing an oil-motivated strategy in the region. That said, I still tend to agree with the Retort group, which argues that the 'blood for oil' thesis is too narrowly focused on key strategic actors. A better thesis, as they suggest, would bring into relief "the imperatives of capital accumulation" as a whole - NiK.]
Salon: Everybody loves Spinoza
Atheist Jew, champion of modernism, and kind and sociable man, the 17th century lens grinder who was "drunk on God" continues to win hearts and minds with his breathtaking philosophical vision.
By Laura Miller
Bertrand Russell declared the 17th century lens grinder Baruch Spinoza to be "the noblest and most loveable of the great philosophers." To judge from several recent books, he's not alone in that opinion. The neurologist Antonio Damasio made the philosopher's thought a keystone of his 2003 book on emerging theories of emotion and consciousness, "Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain." In "Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity," philosophy professor and novelist Rebecca Goldstein declares herself to have loved Spinoza since the first time she heard him decried in the Orthodox yeshiva high school she attended as a girl. Matthew Stewart, a management consultant turned freelance historian of philosophy, makes Spinoza the supreme champion of modernism in his tale of intellectual rivalry, "The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza and the Fate of God in the Modern World." Even Einstein, when asked if he believed in God, replied, "I believe in Spinoza's God."
Steve Wright paper from Immaterial Labour conference
One of the more interesting papers was presented by Steve Wright, author of Storming Heaven (a seminal work surveying the development of Autonomist Marxism in Italy in the 70's).
You can read his paper here:
There and back again: mapping the pathways within autonomist Marxism
by Steve Wright
He notes that the term 'Autonomist Marxism' was coined by Harry Cleaver, who defined it thus:
What gives meaning to the concept of ‘autonomist Marxism’ as a particular tradition is the fact that we can identify, within the larger Marxist tradition, a variety of movements, politics and thinkers who have emphasized the autonomous power of workers – autonomous from capital, from their official organizations (e.g. the trade unions, the political parties) and, indeed, the power of particular groups of workers to act autonomously from other groups (e.g. women from men). By ‘autonomy’ I mean the ability of workers to define their own interests and to struggle for them – to go beyond mere reaction to exploitation, or to self-defined ‘leadership’ and to take the offensive in ways that shape the class struggle and define the future.
And the following quote from Sergio Bologna indicates the fractured and multiple nature of the origins of Operaismo:
I believe above all that operaismo was an exaltation – sometimes uncritical – of the working class, but also a great exaltation of power. Operaismo was born, not by chance, with Operai e capitale. It’s not clear which was greater: the paean to the working class, or that to the capitalist capacity of subsuming this working class from the point of view of its components. So it was not by chance that many of its theorists later became theorists of the State, and today are only theorists of governability. And I don’t believe that we can call the latter traitors, because this eulogy of capital’s power [potenza] is a risk within operaismo, which later became the eulogy of the power of the political as such, of the autonomy of the political. This is an extremely coherent consequence, I believe. It is not some leap, a moment of transformation: in my opinion, it is a logical consequence.
Fukuyama: new afterword to “end of history”
But while modern liberal democracy has its roots in this particular cultural soil, the issue is whether these ideas may become detached from these particularistic origins and have a significance for people who live in non-Christian cultures. The scientific method, on which our modern technological civilisation rests, also appeared for contingent historical reasons at a certain moment in the history of early modern Europe, based on the thought of philosophers like Francis Bacon and René Descartes. But once the scientific method was invented, it became a possession for all of mankind, and was usable whether you were Asian, African, or Indian.
The question is, therefore, whether the principles of liberty and equality that we see as the foundation of liberal democracy have a similar universal significance. I believe that this is the case, and I think that there is an overall logic to historical evolution that explains why there should be increasing democracy around the world as our societies evolve. It is not a rigid form of historical determinism like Marxism, but a set of underlying forces that drive human social evolution in a way that tells us that there should be more democracy at the end of this evolutionary process than at the beginning.
Review of Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch
Remembering Resistance: A Review of Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004)
By Fiona Jeffries
The Rain 4:1 (Winter 2006): 3
EXCERPT:
“Whatever their weaknesses,” wrote Protestant leader Martin Luther in the mid-sixteenth century amidst the European Witch-Hunts, “women possess one virtue that cancels them all: they have a womb and they can give birth.” Luther’s comments were far from shocking at the time. Rather they echoed a powerful current of thought that linked population growth to national wealth. So argues Silvia Federici in her impressive book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, that this connection between church and the state power and the production of labour power in early capitalism launched the Witch-Hunts that peaked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe and the Americas. Federici’s book is a crucial contribution to the long history of resistance to the violence of the global capitalist enclosures. The long-time anti-empire, feminist activist and scholar situates the Witch-Hunts within a history of five centuries of capitalist globalization. The Witch-Hunts, her book argues, were as foundational to the production of the modern proletariat and global capitalism as the expropriation of the European peasantry, the genocidal campaigns of colonization in the Americas and the African slave trade. Caliban presents a sprawling global history, not of nations but of a collection of places connected through an historical web of exploitation and resistance. Caliban, the anti-colonial rebel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, she explains, is a symbol of the world proletariat and proletarian body as a site of resistance to capitalism. The figure of the witch at the centre of this story is an embodiment of a world that had to be destroyed for capitalism to flourish. The book sets out to answer several core questions: What fears prompted this concerted policy of genocide? Why was such savage violence asserted? And why were women its principal targets?
For more, read: http://www.rainreview.net/rain-040103.html