Dem Wahren, Schönen, Guten

Translated from the German

2007-02-08T15:42:00.000+11:00

Translated from the German is a blog that "accretes short texts and excerpts translated" well, from the German. Und zwar by a friend of ours. So far the accretions include Goethe, Adorno, Bodoni (from the German?!) and a "phonic imitation" of a text by Mahler, that begins thus:

Venn mine shuts, hocked sight mucked,
Fur licker hocked sight mucked,
Hub BIC mine ant row, rig an’ tug!
Gay hick in mine gamma line,
Do inkless gamma line,
Vine, an’ vine, ooo! Mine an’ shuts,
Ooo! Mine, an lea, ban shuts!

Robin 'Ood? Or just Hamburg(l)ers, "plain and simple"?

2006-05-18T14:50:00.000+10:00

'Robin Hood’ gang rob gourmet stores in bid to feed Hamburg’s poor
Tony Paterson
Independent - May 09, 2006

They dress up in pink catsuits, have names like “Spider Mum” and feel a social obligation to plunder the most expensive restaurants and gourmet delicatessens in town as part of a campaign to help the poor.

Last week the well-heeled citizens of Hamburg’s Altona district got a taste of their antics when 30 of them marched into the city’s luxury “Fresh Paradise Goedeken” supermarket and walked out five minutes later with €15,000 (£10,000) worth of stolen goods...

[via, where more reports]

Where Anarchy threatens, we must of course remind ourselves of the Laws of Propriety, and resist the Chaos Within. A police spokesman was heard to say, as if to convince himself as much as anyone else: “Whatever their motives, they are thieves, plain and simple.” "Plain and simple": which is to say, any other interpretation of these antics would be inconceivable. Who said "Robin Hood"? It's just thievery. Onto the leaky ships with them! Sentence: Australia, 7 years transportation.

Securing an irrational society

2006-03-03T14:08:00.000+11:00

"To frame the introduction of radical security legislation as simply a matter of getting the balance right between security and individual liberties is to prejudge the issue."

Since 1959 the government of Singapore has been determined by elections that, observers agree, are free and fair. And yet in 2001 the People's Action Party won nearly all the seats, as it had done for the previous 42 years. This time 82 out of 84. In order to consistently achieve such remarkable results the PAP has pursued a number of strategies for neutralizing criticism and shoring up popular acquiescence in its rule. It has made judicious use of a close relationship with intelligence and police agencies, of defamation suits to bankrupt opponents, and of laws requiring that political communication and activities be licensed, allowing the party to keep tabs on any growth of civil society outside the highly integrated party and governmental bureaucracy and to stop any developing opposition in its tracks. Some critics have been detained without charge for over twenty years, like Chia Thye Poh, who was elected in 1966 for the Socialist Front and subsequently arrested and held for long periods in solitary confinement.

But extravagant if secretive examples of political persecution are exceptional in Singapore. Strong economic growth, the leadership's self-conscious invocation of what it calls Asian values (like obedience to authority), and its sharp criticism of anyone deemed to be a threat to its version of "consensus" have combined to discourage most Singaporeans from risking frostbite in the decidedly chilly public sphere. The carrot of opportunity and dimly pervasive awareness of a big, but shadowy stick have created a thoroughly depoliticized environment with an edge of fear. Within it Singaporeans practise in docile fashion what Terence Lee, drawing on Michel Foucault, calls the art of auto-regulation. I am put in mind of Alexis de Tocqueville's reflections---written in 1833---on the perils of administered democracy to the culture of public life. Above the people comes to stand

an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labours, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances? What remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

With the passage of the Anti-Terrorism Act (No. 2) 2005 Australia moves one step closer to the Singapore model of acclamatory democracy. Ours will no doubt resemble the real thing even more closely, for we have two teams of spin doctors on the television, not one. The formal and procedural protections of individual liberties for which classical liberalism argued (but which can be traced back through many struggles, all the way to to the signing of Magna Carta in 1215) did not only ensure equality before the law, preventing the harassment of marginalized groups and individuals by state agencies acting in the name of the majority. They also protected a space where different versions of our common political life could be tried out, practised and nurtured. Politics in this full sense is a creative, messy business that cannot be quarantined off from what we call life: from our work, our speech, our love and our play. It involves struggle and an exercise of freedom, which makes it risky and calls us to responsibility. Thus to frame the introduction of radical security legislation as simply a matter of getting the balance right between security and individual liberties is to prejudge the issue. It is temptingly easy to make the argument that it is alright if a few innocent people get detained or searched if it prevents a serious terrorist attack. Easy and short-sighted, because the argument fails to appreciate the slow and subtle process by which the well-springs of democratic life are choked, managed, and administered out of existence, while blinding us to the price of this democratic failure.

We have achieved a level of material comfort and security of which former ages could never have dreamt. We can be glad of these and yet still realize that the only lasting achievement has eluded us: to let reason rule through a living democracy---reason as a struggle, a risk, an exercise of freedom, and a call to responsibility. Our specialized technical rationalities may be highly developed (and eminently suited to the production of surveillance technologies and methods of psychological torture) but the promise that we will some day attain sovereignty over our common enterprises and productive capacities, that we will become the subjects of history and not its victims, has so far gone unfulfilled. Our irrational society consumes, diverts and renders powerless the human creativity and energy, the capacities for critical self-reflection and self-awareness upon which we must be able to draw if we are to escape our global trap. The Singaporean example demonstrates that democracy means more than just elections. The concept demands nothing less than that our lived conversation about what we need and want, about what is right and good, should be the main political event. Instead what passes for political debate and "news" dresses the windows of institutionalized power, power that is nonetheless paralysed in the face of economic injustice and impending ecological crisis. But the tendencies that hinder democracy's realization are contingent, not necessary features of human social organisation. All political projects have the potential either to bolster or erode the place of reason in our public life: they must be calmly, rigorously and courageously scrutinized from that perspective.

Secrecy and spectacle in the wide brown land

2006-03-03T13:33:00.000+11:00

What is the Australian anti-terror legislation all about? 1920s–style mass neurosis with a twist of James Bond 007.

We are going to have to put our thinking caps on. The changes wrought by the slew of security legislation reform—over thirty pieces of legislation over the past four years, just at the federal level—mean that the thing that we’ve been used to calling "representative democracy" no longer fits that description. It is true that given Australia’s low levels of social solidarity and highly concentrated media ownership the label was already strained, but now we really are going to have to try and come up with some new names for our peculiar system of government.

Any ideas?

Perhaps the legislation itself can inspire us. Its basic themes include secrecy and, in technocratese, the "management" of information. A "managed democracy" perhaps? It fits, at least, the way the new legislative regime clamps down on freedoms of speech and information at so many levels—whether by prohibiting, on pain of lengthy imprisonment, informed public discussion of the detention and interrogation of individuals by ASIO and the police, or by giving government powers to prevent the disclosure of evidence to defendants in criminal trials in the name of "national security". Of course it is now considered impolite to point out the concomitant dangers: merely by hinting that such extravagantly powers constitute an irresistible temptation to governments whose fate can and should depend on information becoming public, one risks exposure to a wounded look, if not to a show of indignation from our "managers"—erm, "representatives"—ahem, well, managers (they do call themselves that, after all). The big-brotherly "trust us, we know best" posture works in spite of the fact that we patently do not trust these governments. As if capitulating to an advertisement for ice-cream, we "indulge ourselves" in the "guilty pleasure" of civic irresponsibility. In any case, the laws’ critics are hobbled before they even begin: the expanded realm of secret executive decision-making and practice means that cultures of abuse can thrive unseen (forget not the Department of Immigration and its private contractors).

But while "managed democracy" captures some of the banality of this evil, it misses other aspects. The impeccably timed and reported pre-dawn raids on suspects’ homes last November, and the images of Guantanamo Bay that are let into the public domain demonstrate that the flipside of the cloak of invisibility around executive detention is the spectacle of state power. So "spectacular democracy"? No doubt about it: this War on Terror business is downright sexy. Aside from passing the buck for policy choices to unaccountable agencies with a special interest in the laws, there is a not-so-hidden innuendo to the talk of "giving law enforcement the tools they need". I mean come on: we’ve seen James Bond 007. We all know that sex, dastardly baddies, being above the law, and being well equipped with "tools" go hand-in-hand. I can see the Cultural Studies theses rolling in already, with good reason for titles like ‘ASIO and the Politics of Desire’, ‘Spectacle and the Bonded Imagination’.

The federal Criminal Code now even provides that in "urgent" circumstances warrants for house arrest can be requested and issued "by fax, email, or other electronic means". Consider the typically Nullarborian monotony of most legislative drafting, and you’ll be able to guess at the thrills that rippled through the Attorney-General’s department late one Noodle-Box night as these provisions were drafted. The terrorists are hip and postmodern, they drum into us (as if we needed to be reminded; what else would a terrorist be in this age of ironic consumption?) and so, it seems to follow with über-syllogistic inevitability, must we be too. It’s heady stuff, and it makes the mutual restraint of Mr. Ruddock and the security and police chiefs all the more remarkable: their talent for giddily churning out what must for them be the most arousing kinds of laws whilst in public maintaining straight faces and clean pants is truly mesmerising. But then again, Mr. Ruddock’s performance at DIMIA had already put us on notice that he might in fact be Belial without the good looks, seeming "for dignity composed" but all "false and hollow," and able, through his masked and monotonous delivery, to "make the worse appear the better reason".

When it comes to sex we are sado-masochists at heart. Masochists because we get excited by the Dirty Harry fantasies engendered when the powerful use the phantom menace as a pretext for tearing to shreds our procedural protections, the very checks and balances that we carved out through centuries of struggle—"freedom-loving societies", anyone? We take a deliciously infantile, Jazz Age pleasure in the intoxication we feel when cheering on our own downfall; maybe "acclamatory democracy" is the phrase we need. We’re sadists, however, insofar as we identify with Big Papa Government and the other destroyers, whether they do it with bombs or laws—destroyers of those difficult liberal institutions that, we say, require of us more than we are capable; as if we had already tried in earnest to make them live, instead of asking only what they can do for us.

But perhaps we’re not like that, not, at least, "at heart"; perhaps only contingently, by our failure to grasp opportunities to live the good life of social-political engagement. This alternative is not decidable theoretically, in advance, for which version turns out to be true depends on us, depends on how we choose to act.

We’ve been drawing for too long on our line of democratic credit, and now that Kim "let me join with the Prime Minister in saying...." Beazley and the Federal and State oppositions have thrice denied the cause of the self-determination of our society, we are going bust. There are facts we must realize: we are the opposition. We are—still in larval form—the government as well. Sovereignty lies in us. That is why the sedition laws are so absurd: for the only way that the sovereign will be "called into contempt" in this country is if we continue our own slide into the contemptibility of collective impotence, by mistaking someone who lives in a palace in another country for "the Sovereign," or the people in Canberra for "the Government of the Commonwealth." For me to write this article and for you to read it are modest beginnings. But we have many resources near to hand, if only we do ourselves the honour of grasping them.

East Timor and Justice

2006-01-13T14:54:00.000+11:00

This week Australia and East Timor signed a treaty providing for a temporary resolution to negotiations over the oilfields in the Timor Gap.

East Timor (Timor Leste) attained independence in 2002. Since that time it has been negotiating with its neighbours for the establishment of permanent maritime boundaries. The disputed area is rich in oil: in particular the Golden Sunrise oilfield promises oil deposits worth many billions of dollars.

The map below shows the relevant areas of the Timor Sea.

The diplomatic history of the disputed areas is rather complex. (The flash presentation at the top right of this page makes it quite clear.) Suffice to say that Australia currently recieves oil royalties from the exploitation of resources in the the Joint Petroleum Development Area, under a temporary agreement signed by the two countries in 2002 on the day East Timor became a country.

The new agreement signed this week still does not permanently resolve East Timor's maritime boundaries. Instead it provides that "each country will take half the revenue from the Greater Sunrise Field and any negotiations on maritime boundaries will be postponed for up to 50 years." [source] The deal to split the revenues 50/50 makes for a good soundbite; out of context it sounds fair. But one can only assume that substantive fairness was never the principle guiding Mssrs. Howard and Downer. The original offer made by Australia was that East Timor should receive 18% of royalties. And in any case, the 50% that it will now receive is 50% less than that which, according to the prevailing view on the applicable international law, East Timor ought to receive. International law does envisage a 50/50 split, one achieved by drawing a line at an equal distance from the mainland coasts of both countries. All of the disputed areas, to which Australia has now succeded in making claims lie on the East Timor side of the line. Even if international law is taken as the baseline of fairness, this should be enough to put the lie to Howard's rhetoric. On Thursday he said that

"there's great affection in Australia for East Timor, there's great sympathy for the people of East Timor, there is a great desire on the part of the people of Australia that the people of East Timor have a strong secure future." [source]

But the words ring even more hollowly when one recognizes that the budget of the East Timor government stands at about U.S. $80 per capita, that of Australia's government at $10 000. Or should that make no difference?

The answer to the question depends on the concept of justice. It's a notion that both sides to this debate have been claiming for their own. Some of the critics of the Howard government have gathered togeether under the banner of the `Timor Sea Justice Campaign'. Mr. Howard himself called the treaty "a fair and just outcome."

What theories of justice stand behind these statements? If we look to the history of Australian policy (including that of previous Labor governments) we must conclude that the only theory of justice operating has been the one encapsulated in the phrase "might is right". Since 1972 Australia has used its superior diplomatic clout to get its way--first with Indonesia and, since 2002, with East Timor. Each successive agreement has thus been a treaty in the true sense--a codification of the power relation obtaining between the parties at the time. The most recent agreement is no exception. Australia's retreat from its original 18% offer resulted from the pressure--read: power--that other actors were able to exert, both activists working through the Australian media and diplomatic actors from East Timor and the international community.

The defining characteristic of such a process is that it is blind. Various actors operate stragically with the power that they find themselves able to command. But the outcome is not one which any single actor would have produced, had they been entrusted with its design. Indeed it is possible that the result may be far removed from one which could best satisfy the needs of all the protagonists. This tendency is compounded further when many of the most powerful actors are in fact institutions, themselves the products of similarly irrational struggles for influence.

In contrast to the Australian government, the "Timor Sea Justice Campaign believes that East Timor should control all of the gas and oil fields it is entitled to under current international law, by the establishment of a permanent maritime boundary." [source] This is a concept of justice as "justice according to law". In 2002, just two months before East Timor became a sovereign nation, the Australian government emphatically signalled its rejection of this view by withdrawing its consent to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice on matters affecting maritime boundaries. In so acting, Australia takes its place beside other nations--very many of them, but most prominently the economic powerhouses like the United States--who co-operate with international institutions if and for so long as it suits their narrowly-conceived idea of self-interest. The justifications usually given for isolationist policy give a clue as to the mechanism that makes it appear obligatory: policy-makers fear that by committing to a co-operative stance they will leave their state open to exploitation by others who refuse to co-operate. But the fetishizers of Realpolitik see necessity where it does not exist. Australia could give East Timor everything north of the median line. Hell, we could give them a few hundred extra kilometres out of "our" side to boot. This would effect Australian's no doubt, but it is a misrepresentation to say that it would not be open to Australia to do so.

The notion of "justice according to law" would have achieved a different outcome in this case: in all likelihood had the ICJ adjudicated on the matter it would have applied the median line rule and hence given East Timor rights to all of the Greater Sunrise field. The difference between this avenue and that pursued by the Australian government, between international law and "might is right" appears, under the spell of socially necessary illusion, to be one of very great magnitude. It is largely the difference in aspiration between the "Left" and "Right" of mainstream politics. But insofar as the law itself is the product of political processes that are themselves ultimately irrational justice according to law is blind too. It operates as another tool in the struggle over power. The outcomes it produces appear "just" only for so long as we put our trust in structures that operate beyond our control and according to their own logic. There is another notion of justice, summed up like this: "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs". That would provide the basis of any politiccal logic that served human interests. It is not impossible to apply such thinking at all points of contemporary political reality, no matter how far we might currently be from living up to it--the Timor Gap controversy would be no exception. But one thing is for sure, so long as we orient ourselves according to "might is right" and even "justice according to law", we cannot really speak of progress.

"Sich von der eigenen Ohnmach nicht dumm machen lassen"

2005-12-26T15:05:00.000+11:00

I recently attended a seminar devoted to discussion of the raft of new Australian legislation that radically extends the powers of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation and police agencies. Four speakers gave short papers, conducted a panel discussion, and then engaged in discussion with the rest of us attendees. The legislation was criticized from a variety of perspectives, and fairly quickly one could recognise that nearly all in attendance had reasons for dismay at its enactment. Thus the discussion soon turned to matters of strategy: what were the best kind of arguments to use in seeking to prompt a general public opposition to the legislative agenda? One speaker put his case with particular force: the arguments that ought to be emphasized are those that draw on vocabularies like those of human rights, civil liberties, and freedom of speech. In essence his contention was that, however flawed such discourses may be, they form part of the bedrock of the self-understanding of our political institutions, and still enjoy wide appeal, despite, on the one hand, their immanent critique by Hegel and Marx and, on the other, the more recent attempts to demolish them outright in the name of a security-state that emphasizes technique and denies the political nature of its own claims to legitimacy.

I must confess that I found something encouraging about the atmosphere generated by the apparent consensus signalled by the speedy turn to pragmatic considerations. Far too often I've felt a lack of confidence in articulating the objections to the legislation that I think are decisive. But this feeling is part of my reason for questioning the approach outlined above. In discussion with friends and family members I had already found myself appealing to the arguments based in a philosophy of individual liberties, simply because I seem to have assumed that those principles circle widely in arguments that are readily understood by people who have never heard of Hegel or de Tocqueville or Weber, and---so I naively assumed---enjoy a kind of axiomatic status: while they might be susceptible to immanent critique, even those who reject that critique will still have to take them as the point of departure. My assumption was no doubt encouraged by a certain view of political history: the philosophy of rights as the product of the English common law tradition and the bourgeois revolutions, standing in for the default or uncontroversial position, even for conservative lawyer types, who, except for the fact that it appeared to involve a breach of the common law right of habeas corpus, might never have been too concerned about the MV Tampa case; and the critique of liberal rights discourse as, philosophically speaking, drawing out the implications of that discourse, a move that had yet found neither general acceptance nor its historical realization.

It is a curious fact that precisely those who have accepted its immanent critique find themselves driven to invoke the philosophy of liberalism. In the aftermath of the ideological battles of the Cold War the neo-conservatives have divested themselves of liberalism's inconvenient idealism. Those who would resist them let themselves be made stupid, at least in public discourse, by the apparent hegemony of their critics. They concede the real debate---between two different rejections of liberalism---in order to warm up arguments that last got our blood up in 1789. Such defeatism is not only self-fulfilling; it is downright rude. By remaining silent about one's real reasons one is obliged to take on the smooth-talking but empty-worded technique of the career politician who uses foggy soundbites to sell a platform. One makes one's interlocutor into an audience, which is to say an object of manipulation to which one appeals for assent but not involvement. This is the typical posture found on the opinion pages. Even in the name of strategy, it is not good strategy: it simply arouses distrust of tricksy "elites". And it neglects the urgent task of articulating the radical arguments, which is to say, those that go to the root of the matter.

Back at the Desk

2005-12-12T18:01:00.000+11:00

I've been away from the desk for a few days, and have just now managed to catch up on a few bits and pieces of reading. In lieu of something substantial from me, here's a few pointers to what I've been looking at.

Fieldmouse over at Burn the Phoenix continues reflecting on the prospects of our Handlungsfähigkeit, or capacity for action, in the face of the presently unfolding ecological disaster.

Phonics, extreme and otherwise, is under consideration at crikey.com.

Some have taken the riots at Sydney's Cronulla for an opportunity to call the multicultural project into question (see comments to this post at Margo Kingston's Webdiary). On the other hand, Stephen Feneley asks whether Sunday's flag-waving but violent Australians might not be good test cases for the Attorney-General's new legislation.

Off the screen I've been enjoying the digressive and rhetorically loaded prose of Thomas de Quincey, including an essay on rhetoric itself (my use of which term just now de Quincey would probably fault). Incidentally, it was my search for texts of his that led me to supervert.com, and got them a guernsey in our links bar. That said, there's much more available at gutenberg.org. Try the essay on the English Mail-Coach.

The Negotiating Table

2005-11-09T19:25:00.000+11:00

Imagine a situtation involving two parties, A and B, whether individuals or groups. Assume that it is open to the parties to peacefully co-exist under whatever terms they are able to negotiate. Negotiation happens at the negotiating table, where the employment of non-discursive force is not an option. The alternative to negotiation is that one or both parties can refuse to come to the table and instead seek to make the other party submit to its will by applying any kinds of force that are de facto available to it. For the sake of the example we will imagine that A and B stand in an asymmetrical relationship. Their respective needs and capacities, and hence the kinds of force which they are able to exploit, are not identical.

There are at least three possible narratives.

(1) Party A offers party B terms that are “just”. Party B comes to the table.
(2) Party A, for whatever reason, offers party B terms that are “unjust”. Party B, for which co-existance, even on such “unjust” terms, happens to be better than estrangement, comes to the table nevertheless.
(3) Party B does not come to the table, claiming that the terms offered by party A are “unjust”.

Narrative (3) reveals the difficulty of this situation. How are just terms to be judged? Where, as in (2), the costs to B of refusing to come to the table are too great, the fact that an accord has been reached will be no guarantee of its justice. Even the good faith of A will be able to provide no such guarantee for as long as A insists on giving B what is “just” but no more. For the risk is very great that party A, in attempting to guage its offer by an objective standard, will end up reflecting in it the contingencies of the asymmetrical relationship, including those “objective” factors which make it preferable for B to come to some agreement rather than none at all. (The juridical notion of “equity” as opposed to “law” attempts to come to terms with this state of affairs.)

The social contract that the Hobbesian defenders of civilization (as opposed to their Schmittian critics) offer is like this negotiating table. The plotline has not yet been determined once-and-for-all. The process of rationalization described by Max Weber threatens to achieve what the Hobbesians had argued for, namely the monopolisation of non-discursive means of negotiation by one of the parties, “the state”.

Pessimism

2005-11-09T18:57:00.000+11:00

"Pessimism doesn't have to be a negative feeling, like an absense, it's the acknowledgement that things could be better, and that it is only by random tragedy and petty obstinance that things are they way they are. Pessimism requires thus creativity and energy." [here]

The Winter's Tale, V.i

2005-11-09T10:03:00.000+11:00

Paulina. True, too true, my lord:
If, one by one, you wedded all the world,
Or from the all that are took something good,
To make a perfect woman, she you kill'd
Would be unparallel'd.
Leontes. I think so. Kill'd!
She I kill'd! I did so: but thou strikest me
Sorely, to say I did; it is as bitter
Upon thy tongue as in my thought: now, good now,
Say so but seldom.

I think so.

Now, most often: "I thìnk so." Stress falling on the tentativeness and impotence of thought. "I might think so, but I could well be proven wrong."

Slightly less often: "Ì think so." The petulant, relativistic I. "I think so, regardless; let there be no more discussion."

Least often, as a sort of relative pronoun (?), or a synonym for 'the same', to express straight agreement, as in the quoted passage. "I think sò." (Although notice that in the passage the metrical stress falls on "think". Something could be done with this in relation to my little theory, I'm sure, but I haven't time. Stress only falls on the third "so", so far as I can reckon.) "Yes, I think this, as well." Mutuality.

2005-10-27T20:53:00.000+10:00

Resources on the so-called anti-terror legislation in Australia since 2002.

2005-10-17T13:50:00.000+10:00

So you thought we died out of cyberspace. At least we're trying to. It's been an interesting few months. As far as those things go which get little coverage here, I can say that I moved house at least once, tutored a subject and even dragged the horse's tail over the cat's guts a few times:

Of course, books were read, discussions had, theories refuted and tea was drunk, and all before lunch. Some of us even went to Thailand.

Do not despair!

2005-09-28T15:42:00.000+10:00

We've been working hard, but we shall return...

Oy...

2005-08-06T20:49:00.000+10:00

Some excellent person is progressively translating Franz Kafka's diaries as a weblog. Start from the bottom.

Two Types of Critique

2005-08-05T15:25:00.000+10:00

"X fails to live up to the standard which it posits for itself." -- immanent critique (for examples see Hegel, Marx and others).

"X is shit." -- excrement critique.

2005-08-03T19:44:00.000+10:00

"niqash is a space for Iraqi citizens to exchange views on the current political process and to debate the processes that are shaping the Iraqi society. Its main focus is on issues relevant to the drafting of the new Iraqi constitution. Its main goal is to facilitate a public and popular debate on the current political process in Iraq. In order to do so, niqash provides background information, organizes expert exchanges on current topics, and offers every visitor the possibility to participate in discussions or even create a personal web-diary (blog). A newsletter keeps registered users updated." [via]

I was interested to learn that the site is funded by the German Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation.

Still Colonialists?

2005-07-28T12:18:00.000+10:00

I'm a bit slow, but a while back Detrimental Postulation had this to say:

"In other words, even after such significant events, the focus of our attention remains on the West: what it has done, what it can do about it. Whether you celebrate or blame, it’s still not a discussion about the world and/or its cultural, political and psychological configurations; it’s a discussion about the West. (I also love Butler’s implication that the actual aim of the “War on Terror” is, basically, to be able to forget the rest of the world again, like the Good Old Days.)

[...]

"9/11, the London bombings: such events do and should immediately interpellate us: they call us with unavoidable fact that we exist in the world in all kinds of deeply entangled ways. Like good scholarship, we know that we cannot ever completely disentangle such relationships, but we also know that it is worth having a crack if only for what doing so throws up. That our arguments, still, can cross some oceans but not others, that we still don’t give significant political or evidential attention to the unWest even when we act like we’re talking about it, are crucial flaws on all sides of contemporary political discourse."

But go and read this first.

More gold from the same source.

Little Bang

2005-07-28T01:43:00.000+10:00

From E. L. Doctorow, Reporting the Universe:

"Henry James, in his essay 'The Art of Fiction,' suggests how fiction is made and the source of its genius as a system of knowledge. Speaking of the 'immense sensibility ... [that] takes to itself the faintest hints of life ... [and] converts the very pulses of the air into revelations," he celebrates the novelists intuitive faculty that, for example, would inspire a writer "who has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost" to write a book about the military. So that she might, as I extrapolate, walk past an army barracks and, hearing a fragment of soldiers' conversation, go home and write a credible novel about army life. This accords with my experience. I know I can hope to write well about places I've never seen and times before I was born and in voices other than my own. What is secret in all of this is not necessarily the power, as James describes it, "to guess the unseen from the seen." The secret may be that the discipline itself is capacitating, or as we've taken to saying lately, empowering. I have argued elsewhere that "a sentence spun from the imagination, that is, a sentence composed as a lie, confers on the writer a degree of perception or acuity or heightened awareness that a sentence composed with the strictest attention to fact does not." Why and how this is I don't know, but everyone from the writers of the ancient sacred texts to James himself has relied on that empowering paradox. It involves the working of our linguistic minds on the world of things-in-themselves, when, our perception shot through with memory, our consciousness haunted by dreams, we ascribe meaning to the unmeant and the sentence forms with such synaptic speed that the act of writing, when it is going well, seems no more than the dutiful secretarial response to a silent dictation.

"But let's return to the idea that from one fragment of conversation overheard by the writer a whole life and culture can be projected. And of course it can be something else than a conversational fragment, it can be an image, a phrase of music, a felt injustice--any private excitement of the writer's mind so mysteriously evocative that it flowers into a novel. This, in microcosm, reminds me of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, which proposes that from the infinitesimal happenstance of a singular moment/thing the entire universe blow out into its dimensions, exploded in one silent flash into the volume and chronology of space-time.

"Is this an outlandish comparison? Perhaps it would be less so if we brought God into the discussion; because if we are made in his image, then it is a truism that every work of art mimics God's cosmic creativity. (In the beginning was the Word.) The Big Bang is our newer more sophisticated though perhaps too flippant metaphor, and the intuitive use of the smallest amount of information to create a fictional world suggests more accurately, more precisely the little bang of the writer's inspiration. And if we recall Emerson's faculty of reporting (that's us) and the possibility of being reported (that's the univeerse), clearly the origin of the universe and the origin of every reported universe in the mind of the writer are isodynamic.

"I'm satisfied that the ancient storytellers of the oral tradition, whose systematic fictions were to be eventually recorded in the sacred texts, would have attributed those fictions, or their inspiration, to God, would have attributed to God the consequential revelatory understandings that come of the practice of storytelling when it is done righteously, that is, in the belief that it is a system of knowledge.

"Therefore, when I speak of the narratives of the Judeo-Christian heritage as fictions, and their historical communities of believers as fiction readers given, in Coleridge's phrase, to a "willing suspsension of disbelief," I am not speaking pejoratively, I am speaking as a writer about writing and reading, one who knows and can attest to the power of the not entirely rationally derived truths of good storytelling to affect mass consciousness and create moral constituencies."

2005-07-25T14:32:00.000+10:00

"La Base is not an organization, but a fund of productive capital owned in common. Access to this resource is universal but entails an obligation to ensure its sustainability for all, now and in the future.

[...]

"La Base is a creation of the non-profit organization "The Working World", and "The Working World" is currently the executor of La Base. As the executor, The Working World does not control La Base but is bound to ensure that the obligations of La Base's charter are fulfilled. The resources of La Base can never be used for the benefit of any individual, especially those of the executor. Failing these obligations, "The Working World" relinquishes all connection to La Base and another executor must be chosen. Every individual should watch that the executor carries out its obligation.

"Argentina is at the fore of a growing movement of economic autonomy and it is the current home of La Base. In support of individual autonomy and group democracy, La Base has offered its resources to independent producers and worker cooperatives in Argentina, including the "recovered factory" cooperatives."

A Lifestyle Choice!

2005-07-23T15:52:00.000+10:00

People sometimes ask me why I chose to study law at the University of Melbourne.

They say, "did you want to use the power of the law to fight tyranny, aid the oppressed, and work to improve from within the system that keeps them down?"

To these people I sneeringly retort: "Studying law at Melbourne is not just an educational choice, it's a lifestyle choice."

Such people bore me. They obviously have no idea that for those of us getting "the Melbourne LLB experience" law is all about the babes.

Logic of irrationality

2005-07-05T17:18:00.000+10:00

It is distressing to hear our elected representatives making blunders of rationality that would put a first-year economics student to shame. It's worse when the blunder is presented in defence of legislative changes that threaten the vitality of a part of our public sphere. This is what Australian federal Liberal MP Tony Smith did yesterday when he addressed the Australian Liberal Students Federation on the subject of voluntary student unionism.

The Liberal Party's policy is to make student union membership non-compulsory. Tony Smith clothes the proposal in the language of choice:

We are told, on the one hand, that student unions provide a range of vital and critical services to students, and, on the other, that students would not join a union if they were given the choice.

Students can be entrusted with buying every possible good or service in the global economy, with one exception: a student union membership.

Smith's argument is that because, given the choice, students would not join a union, they therefore ought to be given that choice. Merely restating the argument in that form is enough to raise the suspicion of sophistry (it is evident that the "therefore" conceals a swathe of possibly imprudent assumptions). The sophistry can be grasped if we recognize Smith's apparent failure to appreciate the problems of perverse rationality. These problems come in many forms (including the so-colled "tragedy of the commons" and the "prisoner's dilemma") but common to them all is the way that, given certain real-world situations, individuals pursuing their interests rationally but independently of each other can in fact end up frustrating their commonly held interest.

Voluntary student unionism provides a case in point. Union fees can in this instance be understood as a kind of tax. Even though I am thoroughly aware of the public benefits accrued through the application of these funds (just as I am aware of the public benefits ensured through the exaction of taxes by government) I know that, as a student, it would be rational of me to choose not to pay union fees if they became non-compulsory. For in that case, to pay when only a few others would be likely to do the same, would be to act against my own interest twice, as it were. I would be directing money to a project that in all likelihood would be doomed to failure. In Smith's terms I would be paying for a "good or service" without actually receiving it.

In this version of the tragedy of the commons what is risked in the abscence of a public mechanism to regulate the actions of individuals is not a finite natural resource like fish stocks or mineral deposits but a part of the public sphere itself: the space in which the democratic will-formation takes place that is the sine qua non of any possibility of public regulation in the common interest. Student union fees are used to fund clubs, societies, student welfare services, newspapers, and discussion groups. One function of these institutions is to facilitate the free circulation of ideas and arguments upon which a system of government by and for the people must crucially depend. Once we are aware of it, the perverse logic illustrated by the tragedy of the commons provides one of the central motivations for democratic government. Only in public-reached agreement on the common good can we find the means to avoid having our private--though publically guaranteed--interests frustrated.

This is not difficult stuff. As I said, any first-year economics student will be able to explain it. The more charitable interpretation of Smith's speech is to say that he has yet to grasp the problem. The alternative interpretation is that a member of parliament , and perhaps the government generally, is hell-bent either on making spaces for public discussion and deliberation into commodities--and hence robbing them of their essential "publicness"--or on silencing voices that in the past have often proven resistant to Liberal Party policies, or both. But that interpretation is really too horrible to contemplate.

Defeatism of reason

2005-06-30T14:59:00.000+10:00

The Bush folks, like most conservatives, tend to emphasise non-material causes of poverty: corrupt governments, perverse incentives, institutions that crush freedom. Conservatives appreciate the crooked timber of humanity - that human beings are not simply organisms within systems, but have minds and inclinations of their own that usually defy planners. You can give people mosquito nets to prevent malaria, but they might use them instead to catch fish.

The above from an article published yesterday in The Age, in which New York Times columnist David Brooks criticises Jeffrey Sachs' approach to the problem of poverty in much of Africa. According to Brooks, in Sachs' new book he makes the mistake of giving himself away as a "child" (read: dupe) of the enlightenment, an intellectual movement which Brooks variously demeans as "18th century" (read: passé) and, apparently even worse, "French" (read: crazy and socialist).

In the Gospel according to Brooks the cardinal sin of the enlighteners--of which Sachs is also accused--was to want "to refashion reality so that it would conform to reason". By extension one can only conclude that Brooks' cardinal virtue is to want to refashion reason so that it would conform to reality. The injunction to "be reasonable" would therefore simply be another way of saying: pull your head in, and stop demanding that which is (as we, the so-called experts, tell you) impossible. This posture attempts to dignify itself with the appearance of pietistic asceticism. It suggests that its adherents are to be admired for their ability to suppress the desires for change--which, they assure us, they share just as passionately as everyone else--in order to make room for partial, "gradualist" solutions. The implicit assertion is that we, the members of the immature multitude, must ulitmately cede to those who have the maturity and strength to relinquish grand plans and ideals--oh so reluctantly, but utterly none the less--in favour of an allegedly sober realism, which has as its actual content the subordination of all ends to the immediately and easily available means.

Interesting, then, that Brooks draws on the language of one of the enlightenment's greatest thinkers, Immanuel Kant, in elaborating this point, when, in the above passage, he cites Kant's image of the the "crooked timber of humanity". To begin with, Kant objected forcefully (in his 1784 essay What is Enlightenment?)to the implicit elitism of Brooks' position, to the "guardians who have kindly taken upon themselves the work of supervision", leaving the rest of us free of the burden, if only we will place our trust in those who have installed themselves on the throne of maturity. Despite the fact that Kant did share in a certain scientistic asceticism of knowledge, he tenaciously insisted that real priority must be accorded to reasonable ends over technical means. His optimism was rooted in a refusal to let the dour sheep-herders of humanity have their way. Deep in the epistemological trenches of his first great work, Kant's language suddenly takes flight:

The Republic of Plato has become proverbial as a striking
example of a supposedly visionary perfection, such as can exist only in the brain of the idle thinker; and Brucker has ridiculed the philosopher for asserting that a prince can rule well only in so far as he participates in the ideas. We should, however, be better advised to follow up this thought, and, where the great philosopher leaves us without help, to place it, through fresh efforts, in a proper light, rather than to set it aside as useless on the very sorry and harmful pretext of impracticability. A constitution allowing the greatest possible human freedom in accordance with laws by which the freedom of each is made to be consistent with that of all others -- I do not speak of the greatest happiness, for this will follow of itself -- is at any rate a necessary idea, which must be taken as fundamental not only in first projecting a constitution but in all its laws. For at the start we are required to abstract from the actually existing hindrances, which, it may be, do not arise unavoidably out of human nature, but rather are due to a quite remediable cause, the neglect of the pure ideas in the making of the laws. Nothing, indeed, can be more injurious, or more unworthy of a philosopher, than the vulgar appeal to so-called adverse experience. Such experience would never have existed at all, if at the proper time those institutions had been established in accordance with ideas, and if ideas had not been displaced by crude conceptions which, just because they have been derived from experience, have nullified all good intentions. The more legislation and government are brought into harmony with the above idea, the rarer would punishments become, and it is therefore quite rational to maintain, as Plato does, that in a perfect state no punishments whatsoever would be required. This perfect state may never, indeed, come into being; none the less this does not affect the rightfulness of the idea, which, in order to bring the legal organisation of mankind ever nearer to its greatest possible perfection, advances this maximum as an archetype. For what the highest degree may be at which mankind may have to come to a stand, and how great a gulf may still have to be left between the idea and its realisation, are questions which no one can, or ought to, answer.

Kant was deeply indebted to the pietist tradition; he considered human beings fallen angels, or "crooked timber", as he wrote in his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent, and thus susceptible to Brooks' "corrupt governments, perverse incentives" and "institutions that crush freedom". But this anthropology never led him to stoop to endorse a defeatism of reason, one that makes a virtue of its own poverty. This becomes clear upon a reading of the Universal History essay: in it Kant seeks to elaborate the preconditions for a political constitution in which individuals might grow straight and tall. For Kant, the crooked timber of humanity presented a challenge and not an excuse.

I'd put a title here if I could think of one

2005-06-23T18:12:00.000+10:00

To coin a phrase, I've not been feeling at all blog.

This is something I'm very happy about. What it means is that I'm getting some real thinking and reading done. I don't find that real thinking and reading translate at all well into the curious kind of publicness proper to the webblog form.

Truth be known, I've been struggling with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (again). The old Prussian hasn't been making things easy; nevertheless, I'm not about to present you with my difficulties. Even assuming that you've read and overcome the passages in question--and it does seem to be a question of overcoming or of being overcome--what could I gain by having the riddles solved for me? Or what, conversely, could you possibly gain from being presented with the few solutions that I have managed to piece together (unless, perhaps, you've attempted solutions and they are significantly different to mine)?

(Still, I have this advice to those beginning to read the Phenomenology--as I do each and every semester break, as it seems: pay very close attention to the finely nuanced distinctions between what at first might appear to be synonomous terms. If you're not careful you could be fooled into thinking that Hegel has the same object in mind each time, when in fact different modes or manifestations of the `same' object, and hence, in a sense, different objects are meant. Reaching for the corresponding passage in the Encyclopaedia or the Logic can sometimes help elucidate the distinctions.)

It occurs to me that--as far as my contributions are concerned--this blog represents a barometer measuring the pressure applied to the objects of my efforts elsewhere. It's an inverse relation: more posts here would equal less real work there. This theorem is borne out by the number of my past posts which, in accordance with the grunge fashion going back to Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, whine and agonise in the face of acts that instead they really ought to be carrying out directly. "Dear Blog, I've been neglecting you again. Let me tell you about it..."

Update

2005-06-15T19:56:00.000+10:00

(Isn't that what electronic media are for? 'Updating' things? That is to say, not cultivating them, deepening them---just adding a little bit on here and there.)

The most excellent thing I have to call your attention to are the new photographic images that have been posted at Conflagrations. The Otways, where they were taken, is an area in south-western Victoria.

Less exciting is the fact that, while Gary Sauer-Thompson has been posting busily (also here and here) and somewhat provocatively on Adorno and the question of moral philosophy, I have yet to put my thoughts on the matter into an eloquent, or, at the very least, a coherent form.

Which means the Dem Wahren remains void, at least as concerns recent 'updates', of the kind of posts which Dem Belanglosen, Niedrigen, rein Technischen was meant to make room for (sorry, by the way, if that name stretches the believability of my German competence). But this is not to say that I have not been engaging in other thoughtful pursuits, beyond the Blogger post-screen, with its blue-pill ('Save as Draft') -- orange-pill ('Publish Post') dilemmas.

Is Your Hero A Woman?

2005-06-10T19:02:00.000+10:00

See the Women's Guerilla History Project.

See here for a description of the poster's text.

"Mechanically preserved visions"

2005-06-08T18:01:00.000+10:00

The exposé continued, completed

2005-05-25T01:12:00.000+10:00

Dear readers, I carried out the aforementioned changes to the profile previously mentioned, and discovered that while few people on Blogger claimed an interest in Flaubert, there were about twenty or thirty people, or perhaps fewer, I did not count them, who cited Madame Bovary as a Favourite Book.

These results should be considered nothing other than provisional. They are part of an ongoing sociology of the admissions of individuals to practices of literary consumption.

Somewhat irrelevant

2005-05-25T01:07:00.000+10:00

I just updated my profile folks, and I have discovered that I am the only person on Blogger who will admit to having an "interest" in Flaubert. I shall try changing it to "Gustave Flaubert", and perhaps try "Madame Bovary" as my favourite book, and report back to you, the avid readers.

2005-05-25T00:45:00.000+10:00

"Nothing was said on the way down. For the little they knew of the little they felt could with no more propriety be acknowledged than denied. ... But politeness and candour run together, when one is not fitting neither is the other. Then the occasion calls for silence, that frail partition between the ill-concealed and the ill-revealed, the clumsily false and the unavoidably so."
-S. Beckett, Murphy. (ch. 12)

File Under: Boring But Really Rather Useful

2005-05-24T17:46:00.000+10:00

A bibliography of (philosophy) bibliographies! Feel the power.

2005-05-23T16:31:00.000+10:00

Essay time has come around again, so if the pickings get a little slim around Dem Wahren during the next two weeks, you'll know why.

In the mean-time, you should take a peek at Long Sunday, a collaborative blog where, amongst other eminent writers, the Young Hegelian has re-entered the blogosphere. I will certainly be watching with some curiosity, to see what they can make of such a project. I have been cultivating some doubts (cf. Nietzsche and I Cite) about the weblog form for some time now, which need allaying.

German capitalism-debate

2005-05-19T21:22:00.000+10:00

And it's not academics, it's pollies!

It seems that the party president of the German Social-Democrats (SDP), Franz Müntefering, has stirred up a hornet's nest by suggesting that international strategies for profit-maximisation--gasp!--"constitute a continual danger to democracy".

For German readers here are some early reports of Müntefering's original speech [1, 2] plus Die Zeit's special Kapitalismuskritik page.

Others will have to make do with Newsweek's scoffing report, Capitalism? Nein!.

(Thanks to à Gauche for pointing this one out.)

2005-05-19T19:35:00.000+10:00

I've just come across something remarkable at the Newsweek site. It's a news story from a photographer, Chris Hondros, in Iraq. Two things struck me about it.

The first the way the story is conveyed: it is a slide-show of about 15 photographs accompanied by captions and an audible commentary by the photographer. Perhaps you've seen such a thing already.

The second was the acutely distressing nature of the story itself. The scene is dusk in the city of Tal Afar on January 18 of (one assumes) this year. According to Hondros, the story is as follows:

A squad of U.S. soldiers seeks to stop an approaching car. The car does not stop, and so after firing warning shots, the squad fires into the front of the car. The car rolls to a halt. The troops discover 6 children in the back of the car with at worst minor injuries. In the front however, both of their parents are dead.

I can't provide a direct link because it's a javascript page, but you can try getting there from this page, where I found the link in the right-hand sidebar, under the heading `Instantly Orphaned'.

The content of the story shook me, for sure. I have little to say about that here. But I was also unsettled by the manner of its delivery. To photograph these children as they screamed, splattered in their parents' blood seemed, to be one more (maybe comparatively insignificant) violation of their dignity. Further, the selection of this story from out of the deluge of violence that has been visited on the inhabitants of Iraq is no doubt a well-calculated one. And yet I do not doubt that if I had been there with a camera I would have done all I could to make a record of the event and to make it known as widely as I could. I doubt my or anyone's capacity to build up a comprehensive and coherent experience of what has been taking place in that country. A story like this is probably not an entirely unsuitable emblem.

2005-05-13T16:06:00.000+10:00

I founded the multicultural women's mag HUES (Hear Us Emerging Sisters) in 1992, and published it for seven years. My twin sister Tali and our friend Dyann Logwood started HUES as a class project when we were 19 years old. With the help of some awesome woman-power, we expanded it into a full-color national glossy. [...] The first issue of HUES was a tiny, TV Guide-sized local zine, which we distributed on campus. Grants from a few student organizations allowed us to print 1,000 copies. We produced 3 more local issues, then decided to go national when Tali and I graduated in 1994. [more] (via Sappho's Breathing)

Search for translated books

2005-05-13T15:04:00.000+10:00

The Index Translationum is a list of books translated in the world, i.e. an international bibliography of translations.

You can search the Index.

The site claims that the database covers monographs translated from 1979 to 2002.

* * *

Your query was: sl=Dt and l=Epo 38 records found in Index Translationum database 21/38 Pausewang, Gudrun: La lastaj infanoj de Oldrovalo: aŭ cu tiel aspektos nia estonteco?: rakonto [Epo] / Joachim Giessner / Högsby: K. Rohdin, 1987. 77 p. DT: Die letzten Kinder von Schewenborn 22/38 Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich: Manifesto de la Komunista partio [Epo] Moskva: Progress, 1990. 82 p. ill. RUS [orig. DT: Manifest der kommunistische Partei ] 23/38 Pausewang, Gudrun: La lastaj infanoj de Oldrovalo au... cu tiel aspektos nia estonteco?: rakonto [Epo] / Joachim Giessner / Paderborn: Esperanto-Centro, 1987. 77 p. DT: Die letzten Kinder von Schewenborn; oder, ... Sieht so unsere Zukunft aus 24/38 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Hermano kaj Doroteo: eposo idilia [Epo] / Benno Küster / Saarbrücken i.e. St. Ingbert : Iltis-Eldonejo, 1990. 76 p. DT: Hermann und Dorothea 25/38 Weizsäcker, Richard von: Parolado okaze de la ŝtata akto por la tago de la Germana unueco en la Berlina Filharmonio la 3an de oktobro 1990 [Epo] / Reinhard Haupenthal / Saarbrücken: Iltis, 1991. 1 v. DT: Rede anlässlich des Staatsaktes zum Tag der Deutschen Einheit in der Philharmonie zu Berlin am 3. Oktober 1990 26/38 (Eichholz, Rüdiger): Esperanta bildvortaro [Epo] Bailieboro Ont.: Esperanto Press, 1988. 880 p. ill. (some col.) DT: Duden Bildwörterbuch der deutschen Sprache 2, vollständig neu bearb Aufl Mannheim : Dudenverlag des Bibliographisches Instituts, [1958] 27/38 Preussler, Otfried: La Malgranda Sorcistino [Epo] / Lothar Eckert; et al. / Maribor: Inter-kulturo, 1994. 129 str. ilustr. DT: Die kleine Hexe 28/38 Klag, Anna: Kiel mi travivis la Duan Mondmiliton: reverkita surbaze de la germana originalo kaj kompletigita lau novaj informoj de la autorine de Valter Klag patre kaj filo [Epo] Wien: Klag, 1995. 32 p. ill. DT: Wie ich den Zweiten Weltkrieg erlebte 29/38 Pausewang, Gudrun: La infanoj en la arboj [Epo] / Nora Caragea / Maribor: Inter-kulturo, 1995. 56 p., 5 p. ill. DT: Die Kinder in den Bäumen 30/38 Kahlau, Heinz; (Ertl, István): Kaj ni solas : (libro kun poemoj) [Epo] Bellinzona: H. Dubois, 1991. 65 S. DT

Nietzsche's Attack on Blogging

2005-05-12T18:38:00.000+10:00

"But, after all, why must we proclaim so loudly and with such intensity what we are, what we want, and what we do not want? Let us look at this more calmly and wisely; from a higher and more distant point of view. Let us proclaim it, as if among ourselves, in so low a tone that all the world fails to hear it and us! Above all, however, let us say it slowly ... This preface comes late, but not too late: what, after all, do five or six years matter? Such a book, and such a problem, are in no hurry; besides, we are friends of the lento, I and my book. It is not for nothing that one has been a philologist, perhaps one is a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading:—in the end one also writes slowly. Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also to my taste—a malicious taste, perhaps?—no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every sort of man who is “in a hurry.” For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow—it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of “work,” that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to “get everything done” at once, including every old or new book:—this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers ... My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well!"

-- The Dawn, preface to the second edition of 1887.

The Sensible Thing

2005-05-12T15:06:00.000+10:00

Ought political engagement be about trying to grasp the universal interest and then using what little influence you have to help bring it about? I do think that in our time anything else, however passionately pursued, is doomed to reproduce the universal catastrophe-complex. But still I have much sympathy for what this piece at Crooked Timber had to say:

You see, it’s entirely laudable and sensible to vote for someone who will spend morning noon and night tirelessly plodding away making incremental gains on your behalf and trying to smooth over one or two of the little inconveniences that make life slightly, but tangibly and materially, more difficult to live. The sensible thing to do would be to continue to vote that way, and hope for gradual and marginal progress toward a better tomorrow for our grandchildren.

But that’s living small. Living small, in the sense of knuckling down and grinding away at a system which is based on a hierarchy that has you at the bottom of it, accepting your place in that hierarchy and beavering away at the task of making your position at the bottom of the pile as tolerable as possible. [more] (via Detrimental Postulation)

Lies and Bullshit

2005-05-05T15:40:00.000+10:00

Harry G. Frankfurt introduces some useful categories for distinguishing between "liars" and "bullshitters".

Here's the distinction, as summarised by Graham Larkin:

First published as an essay in 1988, Frankfurt’s splendid study is largely an effort to distinguish between lies and bullshit. A liar, Frankfurt notes, acknowledges truth-systems yet tries to pass off information that is not true. “Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth,” he tells us, “are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game.” The bullshitter, by contrast, fails to really acknowledge the validity of any truth-claims or truth-systems.

The author concludes that “the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it.” [more]

On those definitions it would seem that lies are rather out of fashion, but bullshit is, well, the new black.

2005-05-05T14:48:00.000+10:00

Infinte Thought relates a story about being in a nightclub toilet cubicle and having the door kicked down by what seemed to be an Australian woman. I sigh: why is it that we always seem to turn up only in the worst places? I'm feel mildly amused yet discomfited when the only references to Australia that I find in, say, Adorno's writings, are to the good old White Australia Policy and the like. (There's one in, I think, section 49 of Minima Moralia; Kant also drops the odd reference here and there. To Australia, that is, not, of course, to the WAP.)

* * *

Meanwhile, I've been researching Karl Kraus's die Fackel (The Torch), a journal that he published, and almost single-handedly wrote, from 1899 until shortly before his death in 1936. Kraus was an excellent literary troublemaker and egotist. Ah, to live in Vienna at the turn of the century!

If you read German, then the most comprehensive collection of information on the web would seem to be the wikipedia page. The English wikipedia article is still only a stub. Try Stephan Natschläger's page instead.

A Real Possibility

2005-05-02T19:13:00.000+10:00

From Lenin's Tomb:

What if, by contrast, we treat socialism as a real, material possibility, a future hibernating in the penumbral recesses of the present? How if, for instance, we think of socialism as not merely providing a stoical stock of answers to the acknowledged failures of capitalism, but actually of being a material force which is adequate to the situation in the right hands? For I say we underestimate the accomplished facts of socialism and overstate the hegemony of capitalism - which is, guarding all proportions, fulfilling every promise of The Communist Manifesto, particularly in battering down all walls, Chinese walls included." [more]

Thank-you, Lenin, for a breath of fresh air.

To Be An Idyllist

2005-05-02T14:19:00.000+10:00

For Lem:

Much of what catches the eye as obsolete in Aesthetic Theory is what would be new if it were not blocked; here what is perceived as old hat masks the disappointment of what can no longer be hoped for. Aesthetic Theory wants to be what is German that is not German, and if it finds real resonance here, it will be with what is American that is not American, none of which could be put on a list of national character traits.

-- Robert Hullot-Kentor, translator's introduction to Aesthetic Theory by Theodor W Adorno.

A Jewish folk tale

2005-05-02T14:02:00.000+10:00

A man was offered a rouble a month by his community council to stand at the outskirts of town so that, when the time came, there would be someone present to greet and welcome the Messiah. He accepted the position. When a friend said to him, 'But the pay is so low!', the man replied, 'That's true; on the other hand, the job is permanent.'

First question for Habermasians

2005-05-01T16:04:00.000+10:00

My first question on Habermas pertains to his critique (if that's what it is) of Marx in the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit). Habermas suggests that Mill and Tocqueville have it over Marx insofar as Marx, like the Physiocrats before him still put his faith in a natural order (naturliche Ordnung, ordre naturel), a realm of objectively determinable processes, knowledge of which could be made the starting point of collective decision-making on the right ordering of social life.

It is important for Habermas (as far as my limited understanding goes) that there be something that can anchor public debate in this way: the role which in his later theory of communicative action he would assign to the norms of intersubjective understanding (I think). Whatever it may be that fills this role, it is important for Habermas that it does get filled; otherwise public debate will not be able to fulfill its promise of dissolving (discursive) coercion in rational deliberation.

In the section on Mill and Tocqueville Habermas rather baldly states that their critical value vis-á-vis Marx lies in their rejection of his reliance on an idea of a natural order. Now it may well be that the critical theory elaborated by Marx is highly ambivalent, shifting between negativity (as critique of political economy) and positivism (as an examination of the laws of capitalism's development). But I don't get the idea that this is what Habermas has in mind in these sections of Strukturwandel. At least, it is a very baldly stated objection, which puzzles me. I haven't been able to gather precisely what it was that Habermas had in mind.

Here's the offending passage:

Während nun die Sozialisten der Idee der bürgerlichen Öffentlichkeit nachweisen, daß ihre Basis diesen Voraussetzungen nicht genügt und, um ihnen zu genügen, auf eine andere Basis gestellt werden muß, nehmen die Liberalen die Erscheinungen des gleichen Widerspruchs zum Anlaß, die Voraussetzungen einer Naturbasis, auf denen die Idee der politisch fungierenden Öffentlichkeit überhaupt beruht, selber in Zweifel zu ziehen - um dann allerdings der Konservierung einer relativierten Gestalt bürgerlicher Öffentlichkeit desto entschiedener das Wort zu reden.
(page 210)

Basically what he says here is that Marx had demonstrated that the bourgeois public sphere was not living up to its idea (the convergence of public opinion with reason; the transformation of government from the disposition over human beings into the collective disposition over things), because its prerequiste conditions were not being fulfilled. Thus Marx proposed that the real basis of the public sphere be altered to allow those conditions to be met. Mill and Tocqueville, on the other hand, drew different conclusions from the same starting point. They doubted the possibility that such a basis could be given to the public sphere at all. Nevertheless, they defended the conservation of a relativised version of it.

Habermas wants to steer a path between these two. He agrees with the liberal critique of Marx, but remains unsatisfied with their pursuit of a relativised version of the public sphere, which amounts to jettisoning precisely all that was worthwhile in the idea to begin with.

My problem is that I am unable to see why Habermas finds the liberals' critique of Marx compelling at this point. He gives one precious little to go on, although from the 1990 preface one might get the idea that it was the historical failure (already evident in 1962, when Strukturwandel was published) of "really existing communism" to make government into an objective science liberated from interest which, for Habermas, "disproved" the possibility of a communistically founded public sphere.

2005-04-29T18:42:00.000+10:00

"STURTEVANT, Wis., April 27 - Plastic Toys "R" Us swords were nixed for fear the guards might misconstrue them as real weapons. Gloucester's pouch was filled with metal washers, rather than pennies, because money is barred inside the barbed wire.

The two-and-a-half-hour production of Shakespeare's "King Lear" ran without intermission so that the audience of 100 inmates would not be idle in a big room. And, shortly after their curtain call on Tuesday night to a standing ovation, the actors lined up again, this time against the gymnasium wall, for one of the six daily head counts here at the Racine Correctional Institution."

2005-04-28T11:11:00.000+10:00

I should like to write more posts in the style of this one at the weblog. It is a kind of working-out-what-people-are-saying-and-how-I-stand-towards-it post. It's what one does all the time in one's head while reading/thinking, but putting it into text is really helpful. I'm currently reading Habermas, for the first time really, so maybe I'll get one together on him. I have a number of questions for any Habermasians who might be about.

In the mean-time though, I'd better finish off my long-promised appraisal of Downfall.

Arbitrary chain

2005-04-27T15:09:00.000+10:00

Typing the untypeable over at alienated.net is a nice post, about K. Vonnegut, of whom I was recently reminded in slightly other circumstances as well. Here he writes about fossil fuel exhaustion. I got on to alienated through Brick magazine, which it occurs to me I should also link.

Rhetoric

2005-04-27T13:10:00.000+10:00

Mark Kaplan has put together Notes On Rhetoric, a catalogue of all you ever need to know in order to become an invincible blog warrior:

‘…is itself an example’ - E.g: : ‘”stale cliché” is itself a stale cliché’ ‘”I’m using no rhetorical ploys” is itself a rhetorical ploy’; 'your remarks on logical incoherence were themselves..". You get the idea. Endlessly adaptable. Creates the impression that your opponent has refuted himself, thus sparing you the trouble of doing so. c.f. 'unwitting'; 'precisely my point'.

2005-04-27T01:47:00.000+10:00

Dem Wahren is still charting the Adorno-related odds and ends strewn about the back-alleys of the internet.

Here's a site by Ueli Raz, which includes essays on Adorno and a useful chronology of his early writings on music (1919-1932).

Of course, our other collection of Adorno-links is here.

Schopenhauer on "our own fate"

2005-04-27T01:11:00.000+10:00

The presentation of a great misfortune is alone essential to tragedy. But the many different ways in which it is produced by the poet can be brought under three typical characteristics. It can be done through the extraordinary wickedness of a character, touching the extreme bounds of possibility, who becomes the author of the misfortune. Examples of this kind are Richard III, Iago in Othello, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Franz Moor, the Phaedra of Euripides, Creon in the Antigone, and others. Again, it can happen through blind fate, i.e., chance or error; a true model of this kind is the King Oedipus of Sophocles, also the Trachiniae; and in general most of the tragedies of the ancients belong to this class. Examples among modern tragedies are Romeo and Juliet, Voltaire's Tancred, and The Bride of Messina. Finally, the misfortune can be brought about also by the mere attitude of the persons to one another through their relations. Thus there is no need either of a colossal error, or of an unheard-of accident, or even of a character reaching the bounds of human wickedness, but characters as they usually are in a moral regard in circumstances that frequently occur, are so situated with regard to one another that their position forces them, knowingly and with their eyes open, to do one another the greatest injury, without any one of them being entirely in the wrong. This last kind of tragedy seems to me far preferable to the other two; for it shows us the greatest misfortune not as an exception, not as something brought about by rare circumstances or by monstrous characters, but as something that arises easily and spontaneously out of the actions and characters of men, as something almost essential to them, and in this way it is brought terribly near to us. In the other two kinds of tragedy, we look on the prodigious fate and the frightful wickedness as terrible powers threatening us only from a distance, from which we ourselves might well escape without taking refuge in renunciation. The last kind of tragedy, however, shows us those powers that destroy happiness and life, and in such a way that the path to them is at any moment open even to us. We see the greatest suffering brought about by entanglements whose essence could be assumed even by our own fate, and by actions that perhaps even we might be capable of committing, and so we cannot complain of injustice. Then, shuddering, we feel ourselves already in the midst of hell.
-- A Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, §51.

More on Downfall

2005-04-25T13:22:00.000+10:00

Not the promised argument yet; instead more links to discussion.

Observing the Observer will have it that the film provides an antidote to the "often involuntary propaganda used to turn Fascism and Nazism into useful taboos behind which the rest of the West (and arguably post-war Germany too) can hide their totalitarianisms, war crimes and genocide". [more]

For Klaus Neumann, the film is "the product of Joachim Fest's obsessive fascination with Hitler. Like much of his earlier writings, Fest's book about the last days in the bunker is informed by the self-serving memoirs of the convicted war criminal and efficient organiser of Germany's war machine, Albert Speer (which were first published in 1969 after being written with Fest's help). Not surprisingly, Downfall depicts Speer in a sympathetic light." [more].

The Age's reviewer produces a rather pedestrian account of the film.

Form and Tyranny

2005-04-22T14:15:00.000+10:00

I have been looking occasionally at a book by a Russian writer, Abram Tertz (1925-?) called A Voice From The Chorus, written while he was interned in a labour camp. It's not really a novel, but seemingly a constellation of reflective prose passages, arranged by Tertz (presumably after his release) out of letters that he wrote to his wife. It's clear that he had to be quite careful about what he was saying, for a number of different reasons (one of which is given in the first lovely sentence of the book: "I shall speak straight out because life is brief.")

Here are some passages that have particularly struck me so far.

"Everything here is a little fantastic - both faces and things. It is rather a "storybook world". The air is thick with expectations (of the end of one's sentence, of the end of life, or of the world) and this lends an unusually frenetic quality to the slightest thing. When the sun is low on the horizon the shadows are longer." [I don't know if the Russian has the ambiguity or pun on "sentence".]

"... Your own life comes and goes. You are merely form. The contents are not you, are not yours. Remember, you are merely form!"

"... When anything of interest happens within or around me I make a mental note to tell you about it, and it is this habit of thinking of things in connection with you that gives them their meaning."

"I always imagine there is some book which absolutely must be read, only I can never find out which one it is..."

(tr. Kyril Fitzlyon and Max Hayward.)

Stop press: MARX LOVES CAPITALISM

2005-04-22T11:25:00.000+10:00

Following is something I wrote for publication in another context. Some of you may recognise the influence of one M Berman.

Stop press! Marx loves capitalism!

What? You think I'm kidding?

No, really, it's true. Go back and read the Communist Manifesto again.

There, did you notice?

No? Here, let me show you.

It's in the first section, the one about "Bourgeois and Proletarians" where he says all that stuff about the history of all hitherto existing society being the history of class struggles. That's a bit of a caricature, but Marx meant something special when he wrote "history", so we'll let it go for now. The real fun begins a little further down, where we get this:

"The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part."

The bourgeoisie? But aren't they the capitalists? -- Yes, they are. Well, but didn't Marx have it in for capitalism? Wasn't he totally against it? -- Well, now, you see, the answer to that is: `yes' ...

And ... `no'.

The thing is that, in the section following on from the line quoted above, Marx elaborates a glittering tribute to the bourgeoisie. What we get here is catalogue of the triumphs and wonders of modern industry, science and technology. The bourgeoisie "has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together." Marx is gushing: "Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation" -- whole continents! -- "canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground": the bourgeoisie responsible for all this? Marx can't get enough! They way that capitalism not only revolutionises what he calls the productive forces, but actually entrenches revolution as the norm, makes him go bananas.

But it's not only the productive forces that capitalism has changed beyond recognition: as Marx notes, social relations, what he calls the relations of production, also get turned on their head. And it's here that he points out the fundamental difference between the way that modern and pre-modern societies function. Capitalism, according to Marx, has "pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors'". What he has in mind are all the old rationalisations for hierarchy and privilege; the idea that the social order which keeps you out in a cold hut looking after the pigs while I laze around in my fine castle eating pork, the idea that such an order gets God's stamp of approval, that idea is out! as soon as the bourgeoisie come on the scene.

But surely that can't be the end of the story? Of course, you're right; it's not the end of the story. Marx is also one of capitalism's most trenchant critics, and this is how we tend to think of him. What usually gets neglected is the way that he develops his criticism of capitalism out of the internal conditions of capitalism itself. Marx was a romantic and a cosmopolitan: he wasn't interested in kibbutzes. He shared with other writers of the 19th century a vision of an abundantly creative human being. What excited him about capitalism was the way it puts human development into overdrive, expanding the reach of both human needs and human capacities. But, having bought the product, he gets really annoyed when if fails to live up to the hype. And he doesn't just want a refund: he wants what he paid for. Under capitalism the needs and capacities of the human species are generalised, but the capacities of individual human beings are crippled (for Marx this is just as much the case for the capitalist bent on infinite accumulation as for the worker, bent over the machine) and their real needs go unmet. Communism, as he conceives it, would be getting what we paid for.

This then is the tragedy which Marx recounts: the tragedy of one-sided development. When he spoke of communism what he meant was that he wanted to take the broken pieces of the human being and put them together again, by giving control over the productive powers of human society back human beings themselves. Marx didn't thereby mean to change the revolutionary nature of modern production, just to change our relationship to it. Seen in this light, the problem facing Marx's vision of communism is not the failure of miserably backward and totalitarian experiments like the U. S. S. R., but rather the question of whether a society such as he envisions could be maintained against the threat of its own inner energy, or whether, in the end, the candle would burn too brightly.

It was money

2005-04-20T10:33:00.000+10:00

At Salon.com, a nice history of money in literature. To its detriment it leaves out Gaddis' JR, which I have not read, but to which I am strangely drawn, as to the sights in the window of an expensive restaurant when passing it in the street.

Is this "working through the past"?

2005-04-19T13:53:00.000+10:00

Hitler has been a monster for too long. And the Nazis, for too long, his fanatical followers. Two new German films, Downfall (Der Untergang) and Napola (Napola - Elite für den Führer), do us this service: they allow us to see the similarity of Hitler and the National-Socialists with characters who we know only too well.

Viewing these films is in some ways an entirely new and surprising experience. The issues surrounding the country's history are still a very sensitive matter in German life and politics. To my knowledge, never before have German films dealt this directly with the National-Socialist period. German intellectuals have long called for Germany to undertake the work of consciously examining and working throught the past. In 1959 Theodor W. Adorno, a German philosopher and sociologist, gave a lecture in which he examined the tendencies to deny or repress knowledge of the past, and to distance oneself from it by means of euphemistic circumlocutions and like techniques. At issue was a widespread failure of the capacity for experience and memory, of that which could provide the basis for a process of coming to terms with the full significance of the horrors, namely the administrative murder of millions. But the thorough engagement that Adorno and others called for failed to materialise. If some in older generations are still unwilling to face a past that they lived through, if younger ones would rather not hear about something that took place before they were born, then the task remains, even today, unfinished.

It was in this context that Downfall and Napola took to the cinemas last year in Germany. Over four million saw Downfall. The film, which depicts the taking of Berlin by the Russians in April 1945, as seen from inside Hitler's bunker, unleashed a deluge of commentary in Germany and in other countries in which it screened. Is this the long hoped-for work, finally getting under way? The answer to this question is ambivalent, at best.

Downfall uses all the tricks of the Hollywood trade to rattle viewers' very insides. One leaves the cinema feeling overwhelmed, as if one has been given immediate exposure not only to the shocks of modern urban warfare, but also to the death-throes of an aristocracy in decline. As the imminent fall of Berlin becomes clear to the bunker's inhabitants a delirious Eva Braun throws a party, despairing army generals trip over themselves to get Hitler to leave Berlin, while other officers secretly disobey orders in order to stave off further civilian deaths and suffering. One feels close to history: indeed, it is all there on the super-screen and in the giant rumbles of the Russian shells.

And yet the question must be asked: is this the kind of experience upon which a meaningful engagement with the National-Socialist period of our history (for it is our history too, even in Australia) can be founded?

I'll try to post my answer to this question shortly, and clear up the somewhat cryptic reference in the first paragraph.

In the mean-time, here are some related discussions:

English

English reporting of the Downfall's German release, like this from the China Daily, or this from the BBC, tends to state that there is a debate, without giving a very good account of the positions.

Here's the film's official site.

German

Balsam für die Volksseele - Eichingers Film 'Der Untergang' - a critique of the film originally published in ak - analyse + kritik - Zeitung für linke Debatte und Praxis.

Skepsis bis offene Ablehnung: Das Unwohlsein am "Untergang" - discusses in some depth the debate about the film in France.

Excerpts from Franzen

2005-04-16T19:53:00.000+10:00

Opening paragraphs of The Corrections:

"The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat.
"Three in the afternoon was a time of danger in these gerontocratic suburbs of St. Jude. Alfred had awakened in the great blue chair in which he'd been sleeping since lunch. He'd had his nap and there would be no local news until after five o'clock. Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred. He struggled to his feet and stood by the Ping-Pong table, listening in vain for Enid.
"Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety. It was like one of those big cast-iron dishes with an electric clapper that send schoolchildren into the street in fire drills. By now it had been ringing for so many hours that the lamberts no longer heard the message of 'bell ringing' but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequence of percussion with a keening overlay of overtones; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background except at certain early-morning hours when one or the other of them awoke in a sweat and realized that a bell had been ringing in their heads for as long as they could remember; ringing for so many months that the sound had given way to a kind of metasound whose rise and fall was not the beating of compression waves but the much, much slower waxing and waning of their consciousness of the sound. Which consciousness was particularly acute when the weather itself was in an anxious mood. Then Enid and Alfred—she on her knees in the dining room opening drawers, he in the basement surveying the disastrous Ping-Pong table—each felt near to exploding with anxiety."

And from Strong Motion, his previous novel:

"Exiting from route 128 in Lynnfield, they left the daylight behind and entered a suburban twilight of shadowing trees, of still and bluely glowing lawns and fields of air untorn by any sound more violent than the swish of passing tires. Nature's appearance was inexpressibly benign here in the suburbs. She lay down and whispered like the warm surf between the black-bottomed sea and parched land: between the scarred and mourning woods, and the city where a new nature had taken nature's place. Lawns freely gave away their smell of grass and earth, lay comfortably naked beneath a sky that could be trusted. Each house was like a mother, silent, set back from the roads with windows lit, as an object always welcoming and sheltering, but as a subject always betraying consciousness of the truth that children stop being children, that they'll leave and that an enclosure that welcomes and shelters will ache with their absence, will have ached all along because it's an object."

I think, particularly in view of the previous paragraph, that somebody should write something about the role of dumbstruck awe and overloaded clauses in late-modern American prose. Think of DeLillo's regular use of "The whole ..." or "The sense that..." "That whole ... something ... etc". Has anybody written something on this?

Intelligent, furious women

2005-04-15T23:49:00.000+10:00

Andrea Dworkin ought to be the patron saint of fiercely intelligent, creative, furious women everywhere. [...] Andrea Dworkin, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Catharine MacKinnon, Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Alice Walker, Germaine Greer, Marilyn Frye: these are the writers who nurtured my radical feminism. I had no plan for reading, and I wasn't reading these writers in school (except for Frye and MacKinnon, later) - I simply read what I found. Dworkin taught me who to read and how to write; I've always admired her aggressive prose and her willingness to speak truths most wouldn't countenance. Read in one light, her words sound like hyperbole. She was a skillful rhetorician. But tilt your head and adjust the lamp, and her words read like bald-scrubbed truth, terrifying. [more]

Sappho's Breathing honours Andrea Dworkin much better than I am able.

An internet-based public sphere for Asia?

2005-04-14T13:29:00.000+10:00

I'm taking a subject this semester about `Law and Civil Society in Asia'. Today Ye Olde Blog came up in the seminar as we debated the potential for the internet to breath life into emergent public spheres in places like Singapore, Malaysia and China, countries where public discussion and the free exchange of information tend to get curbed by restrictive and nervous governments.

To this end I've been checking out:

Screenshots, a Malaysian blog about "governance issues";

Malaysiakini.com, a sort of clearing-house for Malaysian press and political issues;

on a different tack, North Korea zone is a blog by North Korea watchers, aiming for "discussion and information exchange";

and then there's Global Voices Online, which seems to be doing its darndest to keep track of the expansion of the "online conversation".

The Malaysian case is an interesting one. Essentially the non-internet press is tightly controlled in Malaysia, but because the Malaysian government is keen to attract IT business to its Malaysian shores (for which purpose it is going so far as to set up Cyberjaya, a kind of Silicon Valley of South-East Asia) the rules relating to internet-based information exchange are considerably more liberal. Most Malaysians are still, however, particularly wary of subscribing to malasiakini.com, at least while they're living in the country.

Another interesting source is Reporters without Borders (who campaign internationally for press freedom) and their blog awards. Apparently 76 'cyberdissidents' have been arrested, mostly in China. Now that people are getting arrested, the Beeb is getting excited too. I can just hear Bill Hicks' bit: "'We think internet technology is gonna save us, Bill!' Awwww, yeah, right! Just like science did!..."

Screening the Errant

2005-04-14T11:03:00.000+10:00

Having just read Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, this in The New York Times struck some sort of chord.

"Surveys have found that about 16 percent of Americans - or as many as 46 million people - suffer from depression at some point. And by some estimates, depression costs the nation $44 billion a year in lost work and disability - more than any other illness, including heart disease. ... Dr. Sederer said that once doctors were convinced that a quantitative score worked in recognizing depression, they would be more open to using similar measures for other areas of mental health. Still, he acknowledged that "nobody likes to be measured" ..."

Here is a good interview with the apparently handsome Franzen, conducted by Donald Antrim. The Corrections is a good, very funny novel that I found difficult not ingest in a single swallow. If testimonials were lacking from the back, back inside, front inside or front covers, I would offer the following: "Its hybrid style, like gourmet pizza, is a symptom of our time; unlike the pizza's, though, the novel's diagnosis is unflinching."

Andrea Dworkin's texts online

2005-04-13T11:17:00.000+10:00

Go here for a selection of substantial extracts (i.e. chapters) from Andrea Dworkin's books.

The following passages are from Chapter 7 of Intercourse:

"Intercourse occurs in a context of a power relation that is pervasive and incontrovertible. The context in which the act takes place, whatever the meaning of the act in and of itself, is one in which men have social, economic, political, and physical power over women."

"There is a deep recognition in culture and in experience that intercourse is both the normal use of a woman, her human potentiality affirmed by it, and a violative abuse, her privacy irredeemably compromised, her selfhood changed in a way that is irrevocable, unrecoverable. And it is recognized that the use and abuse are not distinct phenomena but somehow a synthesized reality: both are true at the same time as if they were one harmonious truth instead of mutually exclusive contradictions. Intercourse in reality is a use and an abuse simultaneously, experienced and described as such, the act parlayed into the illuminated heights of religious duty and the dark recesses of morbid and dirty brutality. She, a human being, is supposed to have a privacy that is absolute; except that she, a woman, has a hole between her legs that men can, must, do enter. This hole, her hole, is synonymous with entry. A man has an anus that can be entered, but his anus is not synonymous with entry. A woman has an anus that can be entered, but her anus is not synonymous with entry. The slit between her legs, so simple, so hidden-- frankly, so innocent-- for instance, to the child who looks with a mirror to see if it could be true--is there an entrance to her body down there? and something big comes into it? (how?) and something as big as a baby comes out of it? (how?) and doesn't that hurt?--that slit which means entry into her-- intercourse--appears to be the key to women's lower human status."

"Life can be better for women--economic and political conditions improved-- and at the same time the status of women can remain resistant, indeed impervious, to change: so far in history this is precisely the paradigm for social change as it relates to the condition of women. Reforms are made, important ones; but the status of women relative to men does not change. Women are still less significant, have less privacy, less integrity, less self- determination. This means that women have less freedom. Freedom is not an abstraction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more of it is not enough either. Having less, being less, impoverished in freedom and rights, women then inevitably have less self-respect: less self-respect than men have and less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life. Intercourse as domination battens on that awful absence of self-respect."

Andrea Dworkin (26.07.1946 - 9.04.2005)

2005-04-12T18:14:00.000+10:00

The Guardian has a version of the story.

But don't read that, go to the library and get out Intercourse.

(Thanks, E, for breaking the sad news.)

Oh my!

2005-04-12T13:28:00.000+10:00

Fort Kant is coming up with the goods. Get over there now and read this.

After that, read some Burn the Phoenix.

Penny For Your Thoughts

2005-04-06T16:16:00.000+10:00

I spent the evening last at C's house for a reading group, the theme of which is `Philosophy and Religion'. The focus is on reading the text aloud; discussion is welcome, but entirely incidental to the focus on reading. It's a good way to experience philosophical and literary works, quite unlike having them echo round your head while you're alone in your Stube.

After the reading I stayed on for a bit of a chat. C has been attending seminars for the students of his PhD supervisor. They are all reading in continental European philosophy. C complained of the tendency in such circles to reduce discussion to the psuedo-activity associated with name-dropping. It is a tendency I have become aware of, and I've noted that I'm not immune to it either. Especially in Continental circles, it seems, names of pihlosophers--Kant, Nietzsche, Derrida; pick your favourite--come to stand for the aggregate of opinions attributed to them. The names operate as a kind of shorthand which no doubt has benign uses, but all too quickly becomes a crutch and an excuse for sloppy communication and sloppy thinking. Sloppy communication, because by invoking a name I assume, rather than enable, your concrete understanding of what I intend. Sloppy thinking, because the passing of these well-worn coins, the names, connecting them up, arranging them, and so forth, comes to stand in for a proper engagement with the objects of thinking. I'm reminded of Simmel's story (in The Philosophy of Money) of money's capacity to dissolve the links between the individual and things by making everything equally available. The violinist shapes, even disciplines, who she is by long periods of practice at her instrument. She becomes bound to it. But money, according to Simmel, brings all things closer, meanwhile hollowing out our relationships to them, so that they cannot get a hold on us. Money means freedom to Simmel, but freedom means being free from being able to play the violin. The same `freedom' seems to be at work in our lazy approaches to philosophers, as objects of our interest. Instead of really trying to understand, say, Schopenhauer on his own terms, one is content to subsume him under the catalogue of his similarities and differences with, say, Kant. Of course, such comparisons and delimitations can be helpful, but they ought not distract from the primary tasks of thinking.

It may well be the case that this process of thought's ossification takes place just as much in the circles we call analytic, although it would be my suspicion that it takes place there in somewhat different ways (i.e. that it doesn't so much centre around philosophers' ouevre's as monolithic things).

My brother also expressed to me the other day his exasperation with the vices of academe: especially with the racket that gets produced by the perpetuum mobile of compulsive publishing. Indeed, so much seems to get said by way of introduction and summing up, in surveys of the literature, and in marking out and defending one's own corner of the intellectual sandpit, that it's a wonder any real thinking gets done at all.

This leads me to consider the difficulty of finding a language in which to think properly, without sacrificing, to the rules of either academic or of popular communication, the differentiation of thought (and hence language) required by its objects. The writers who have best succeeded at this task seem to me to be those who demand the most of the reader, whose every sentence demands be thought along with, rather than merely registered. But the limits of our attention-span for such writers grow narrow.

Languagehat

2005-04-05T14:22:00.000+10:00

I've just discovered languagehat which looks like a rather wounderful mountain of a blog in which to start digging for linguistic gems.

Quid pro quo

2005-04-03T17:39:00.000+10:00

From the Code of Hammurabi (ancient Mesopotamia, ca. 1700 B.C.):

196. If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.

197. If he break another man's bone, his bone shall be broken.

198. If he put out the eye of a freed man, or break the bone of a freed man, he shall pay one gold mina.

199. If he put out the eye of a man's slave, or break the bone of a man's slave, he shall pay one-half of its value.

200. If a man knock out the teeth of his equal, his teeth shall be knocked out.

201. If he knock out the teeth of a freed man, he shall pay one-third of a gold mina.

202. If any one strike the body of a man higher in rank than he, he shall receive sixty blows with an ox-whip in public.

203. If a free-born man strike the body of another free-born man or equal rank, he shall pay one gold mina.

204. If a freed man strike the body of another freed man, he shall pay ten shekels in money.

205. If the slave of a freed man strike the body of a freed man, his ear shall be cut off.

206. If during a quarrel one man strike another and wound him, then he shall swear, "I did not injure him wittingly," and pay the physicians.

207. If the man die of his wound, he shall swear similarly, and if he (the deceased) was a free-born man, he shall pay half a mina in money.

208. If he was a freed man, he shall pay one-third of a mina.

209. If a man strike a free-born woman so that she lose her unborn child, he shall pay ten shekels for her loss.

210. If the woman die, his daughter shall be put to death.

211. If a woman of the free class lose her child by a blow, he shall pay five shekels in money.

212. If this woman die, he shall pay half a mina.

213. If he strike the maid-servant of a man, and she lose her child, he shall pay two shekels in money.

214. If this maid-servant die, he shall pay one-third of a mina.

The Bleeding Obvious

2005-04-02T14:01:00.000+10:00

It is high time that we finally came to see how the differences between the intentions of happiness, which belonged to previous social utopias, and of dignity, which belonged to previous theories of natural law, are functionally connected and surmounted. This much is certain: There is just as little human dignity without the end of misery as there is happiness without the end of all old and new forms of subjugation. It is precisely at this point that the best contributions of the Enlightenment enter the picture in a way that does not permit them to be pushed aside again. This book is offered as a historical and, more importantly, thoughtful contribution to what is right and just and yet still outstanding: the problem of the upright carriage.

This from a book by Ernst Bloch that has been translated into English, Natural Law and Human Dignity.

Identity and Non-Identity

2005-04-01T15:55:00.000+10:00

"Aus dem Lande der Menschenfresser. - In der Einsamkeit frißt sich der Einsame selbst auf, in der Vielsamkeit fressen ihn die vielen. Nun wähle."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches Allzumenschliches. Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche.

"ZU WENIG. Man ist mit sich allein. Mit den anderen zusammen sind es die meisten auch ohne sich. Aus beidem muß man heraus."

-- Ernst Bloch, Spuren.

I can't lay my hand on translations at the moment. The Nietzsche is section 348 of Mixed Maxims and Opinions. As I read it I couldn't help but think of Bloch's aphorism from the beginning of Spuren (which is translated as what, `Tracks'? `Traces'? Is it even available in English?).

I should like to try and give translations of these, but they're pretty tricky. Nietzsche goes something like:

"From the land of the cannibals. - In solitude the solitary one devours himself, amongst the multitude he is devoured by the many. Now choose."

And Bloch:

"TOO LITTLE. One is alone with oneself. Together with the others most are without themselves as well. One has to get out of both."

Suffering Physical (II)

2005-03-29T19:07:00.000+10:00

'There is no difference between a warm, cosy room and this ward,' said Dr Ragin. 'A man's peace of mind and contentment are not outside him, but within him.'
'You mean?'
'An ordinary man expects to find good or evil outside him, that is, from his marriage or his studies; but a thinking man expects to find them within himself.'
'You'd better go and preach that philosophy in Greece, where it's warm and the air is full of orange blossoms. Here it doesn't agree with the climate. Who was I talking about Diogenes to? Was it you?'
'Yes, yesterday.'
'Diogenes was not in need of a study and warm rooms. There it's hot, anyhow. Lie in your barrel and eat oranges and olives. But if he had lived in Russia, he would have been glad to be taken to a room, not only in December but even in May. He would have been doubled up with cold, I shouldn't wonder.'
'No, sir. It is possible not to feel cold, like any other pain. Marcus Aurelius said: "Pain is merrely the vivid conception of pain: change this conception by an effort of will, shake it off, stop complaining, and the pain will disappear." That's true. A sage, or simply the thinking, inquiring man, is distinguished by his contempt of suffering; he's always content and isn't surprised at anything.'
'Then I must be an idiot, for I'm suffering, I'm discontented, and I'm surprised at human baseness.'
'You shouldn't be, you know. If you thought more deeply about it, you'd realise how trivial all the external things that agitate you are. You must strive to comprehend life, for in that comprehension is true happiness.'
'Comprehension...' Gromov repeated with a frown. 'External, internal... I'm sorry, but I don't understand it. All I know is,' he said, getting up and looking crossly at the doctor, 'all I know is that God created me out of warm blood and nerves. Yes, sir. And organic tissue, if it's live tissue, must react to every kind of irritation. And I do react! I respond to pain with tears and cries, to baseness with indignation, to abomination with disgust. To my mind that is really what's called life. ... A doctrine that preaches indifference to riches and comforts, contempt for suffering and death, is utterly incomprehensible to the vast majority, who've never known either riches or comforts. To them, despising suffering can only mean despising life itself. Man's whole existence consists of the sensations of hunger, cold, insults, bereavements, and a Hamlet-like horror of death. ...

From "Ward 6", by Anton Chekhov (tr. David Magarshack).

International Law and Politics

2005-03-29T15:16:00.000+10:00

International law and politics? Try Opinio Juris:

"Hostility to internationalism as a strategy is short-sighted. But actually listing international legal processes along with terrorism as a vulnerability is a sad comment on the current state of affairs."
(Does International Law Threaten the U.S.?, commenting on a comment in the 2005 National Defense Strategy attributed to Donald Rumsfeld.)

A discussion continued

2005-03-29T14:38:00.000+10:00

Jochen,

Du hast ein Paar sehr wichtige Fragen aufgeworfen, und zwar die Frage, ob es sich überhaupt noch lohnt, sich mit Hegel zu beschäftigen; und die, inwiefern es heute dem Denken ansteht, sich negativ zu verhalten. Ich möchte versuchen, zumindest auf die Richtung einer Antwort auf diese Fragen hinzuweisen.

Da ich weiß, dass Du Kants Größe anerkennst, möchte ich von ihm ausgehen. Ich meine aber, dass wir uns im Klaren sein sollten, dass die Rede von »Kants Größe« sehr schnell Lippendienst werden kann. Es gibt nämlich Stellen, z. B. in der Kritik der reinen Vernunft (KrV), wo wir zu dem Schluss leicht verführt werden können, dass der alte Kant die Kritik nicht weit genug führt, dass er in anthropozentrische Metaphysik zurückfällt. Die Begriffe des Dings an sich und der Idee wären zwei solche stellen.

Das Ding an sich und die (Kantische) Idee markieren die Grenze von Verstand und Vernunft. Sie ist bestimmt eine aporetische Stelle. Das Ding an sich ist etwas, was, Kant zufolge, gedacht werden muss, wovon wir aber nicht erst sagen können, dass es eine Einheit bildet, oder dass es gar existiert. Seine Ideenlehre besagt, "daß unsere Vernunft natürlicher Weise sich zu Erkenntnissen aufschwinge, die viel weiter gehen, als daß irgen ein Gegenstand, den Erfahrung gegeben werden kann, jemals mit ihnen kongruieren könne, die aber nichtsdestoweniger ihre Realität haben und keineswegs bloße Hirngespinste sein." (KrV A314/B371) Die übliche Kritik besteht gerade darin, die Realität der Ideen zu leugnen, und die Notwendigkeit zu leugnen, etwas wie ein Ding an sich »hinter« den Erscheinungen denken zu müssen. Die Kantische Pointe aber ist, dass Denken unvernünftig wird, sobald es sich von dieser Notwendigkeit (denn sie ist letztendlich eine) ausgenommen wähnt. Kant ist nicht bereit, zugunsten einer positivistischen Auffassung des Denkens, die es nicht wagt, über das bloß Gegebene hinaus zu denken, die Perspektive auf das Ganze (und das heißt bei ihm: auf das Vernünftige, Menschliche) aufzugeben.

Wer sich also nicht mit einer Welt zufrieden geben will, in der die Mündigkeit (wir erinnern uns, dass Aufklärung ist, Kant zufolge, der "Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit") nur noch begrenzt, nicht ganz verwirklicht ist, findet in Kant einen mächtigen und anhaltenden Versuch, utopisch zu Denken, ohne in subjectivistische Unverbindlichkeiten zu geraten. Sein Denken will mehr sein, als mechanisch-logisches Rechnen; denn ein solches Denken gibt sich einem Spiel preis, das ihm nur Ersatzbefriedigungen liefern kann. (Auch Wittgenstein hat in dem Tractatus erkannt, dass ein solches Spiel eigentlich etwas sinnloses sei; dass es uns nichts zeigen könnte, was uns wirklich betreffen würde.) Kant findet sich also darauf hingewiesen, einen Weg in die oben skizzierte Aporie hinein zu finden.

Und da langen wir bei Hegel an, der Geist selber mit der "ungeheure[n] Macht des Negativen" identifizierte. "Diese Macht ist er [Geist] nicht, als das Positive, welches von dem Negativen wegsieht, wie wenn wir von etwas sagen, dies ist nichts oder falsh, und nun, damit fertig, davon weg zu irgend etwas anderem übergehen; sondern er ist diese Macht nur, indem er dem Negativen ins Angesicht schaut, bei ihm verweilt" (Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hamburg (1980) 27). Echter Optimismus ist in einer falschen Welt nur als negatives Denken, als Denken, das dem Negativen ins Angesicht schaut und ihm Ausdruck verschafft, also als Dialektik, möglich. Ja, das ist eben der emphatische Begriff von Denken selbst, wie Hegel es entwickelt: Denken wiederholt nicht bloß das Gegebene, sondern fasst das Sein in Beziehung mit seinem Nichtsein auf. Gerade diese Erzeugung einer Distanz zwischen dem, was wir sind, und dem, was wir einmal sein könnten, zwischen dem wahren Begriff und der unzulänglichen Erscheinung, ist es, was Negation genannt wird. Sie kritisiert das Bestehende, überführt es seiner Unvernunftigkeit im Namen einer vernunftigen Beziehung der Menschen zu ihrer Welt und zu sich selbst.

Die Größe Kants ist also dem Hegels verwandt. Es ist den Philosophen ernst um die Philosophie, denn sie verstehen sie noch als praktische Vernunft, als eine Verhaltensweise, ja, sogar eine Praxis der Welt gegenüber und in sie eingreifend. Denken, das im Namen ihrer Behaglichkeit den Menschen beruhigen möchte, indem es ihnen einzureden versucht, alles sei ja nicht so schlecht, ist apologetisch. Anstatt das Grauenvolle selbst zu kritisieren, damit wir es erkennen and abschaffen können, verdummt es sich und die Menschen, damit nicht zu dem wirklichen Leid ein anderes hizugefügt wird: dasjenige, das im Erkennen der Sinnlosigkeit des Leides besteht. Daher die Aktualität des Theodizeeproblems, dessen Lösung--die Verklärung des Leidens durch seine theologische Auslegung--immer noch fortbesteht in positivistischen Denkrichtungen. Diese setzt aber in jener Lösung gerade das voraus, ein kohärentes, der Vernunft durchsichtiges Ganzes, das anzugeben, sie an anderen Orten schüchtern ablehnt.

Na, das wird als Anfang einer Diskussion vielleicht genügen müssen, falls Du Lust hast, dies weiter zu diskutieren. Du weißt schon, wie das geht...

Adornospotting

2005-03-24T15:45:00.000+11:00

Fort Kant describes New York as "schematized in advance". Is that an echo of Adorno and Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, perhaps in the chapter on the culture industry? I'm sure it's there somewhere.-

It was a nice post, by the way.

And hey, go easy on me. I'm still getting back into this blogging caper. I'm working up to something. Any minute now something really excellent is going to appear here. Your best bet would be to wait for the next essay deadline to make its presence felt, then, hey presto! ...

Theodor W. Adorno -- texts available online

2005-03-21T14:42:00.000+11:00

I once posted some links to Adorno's writings. There's not a whole lot of Teddy's stuff about. There was once a lot on textz.com, including the whole of Minima Moralia, but that got taken down after legal action was threatened. Here is a slightly more comprehensive catalogue of what can still be found online (there's another):

BOOKS
Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer, 1947)
The Culture Industry. Enlightenment as Mass Deception (excerpt). [also available here, and here].
Philosophy And The Division Of Labour (excerpt).

Minima Moralia. Reflexions From Damaged Life (1951)
Paragraph 122 - Monograms
Paragraph 151 - Theses Against Occultism
More selections

Negative Dialectics (1966) Dennis Redmond's translation.
The Supramundane Character of the Hegelian World Spirit (excerpt from Ashton translation).
Dialectics Not A Sociology Of Knowledge (excerpt).

ESSAYS
'On Popular Music' (1941)

'The Culture Industry Reconsidered'

'Music and Language. A Fragment' (1956)

'Late Capitalism or Industrial Society' (1968)

LECTURES
Problems of Moral Philosophy (excerpt on theory and practice).

MISCELLANY
Ralph Dumain's autodidactproject.org has a collection of Teddy extracts and related texts.
Evelyn Wilcock has made some quotations available.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES
William Barker has prepared a useful bibliography of Adorno's works. Especially useful if you're looking for that elusive translation that has only been published in a journal.
Suhrkamp, the publisher of most of Adorno's works in Germany lists what they carry.
There's a Zeittafel.

Continental Philosophy bulletin board | Adorno

Here's a site by Ueli Raz, which includes essays on Adorno and a useful chronology of his early writings on music (1919-1932).

Last updated February 8th, 2007. Leave a comment if you've found something not listed here.

Readings in classical modern philosophy

2005-03-21T14:31:00.000+11:00

J. Carl Mickelsen has put together a rather excellent collection of links to texts by modern philosophers, from Giordano Bruno to Hegel and Schelling.

To be young was very heaven

2005-03-16T18:25:00.000+11:00

So where have we been?

Well, Lem has, as you may have gathered from the last post, been engaging in Bildung activities like learning French. It seems to be coming on apace. Over at Lem's house you might also be able to find signs of Moby Dick being read and the fiction of the future being written.

I cannot claim to have been so focussed. I feel like I'm trying to do a billion things at once, like co-ordinate Dollar A Metre, my Mum's walk for the MS Society, learn about the economy and society of mediaeval Europe and get a grip on international law in general and labour rights discourse in international law in particular. Of course, this means reading Kant and Hegel and then trying to work out what the world means in the face of them, to paraphrase one of Adorno's studies of Hegel, rather than the other way around.

I'm pursuing this line of thinking for a subject I'm taking on international law. Tending to find, as does Martti Koskenniemi, that international law gets stuck between a bad (that is, empty) utopianism on the one hand and an apology for a bad reality on the other, I've been led to eschew the standard set essay topics on the emerging jurisprudence of the ICJ. The ongoing crisis of a law that is not law as we know it at the level of modern nation-states is far too interesting. So I'm off looking up everything I can find on natural law thinking and the time in which it emerged. I'll do my best not to end up writing about Kant again. I promise. But I can't promise not to get distracted along the way. Today I ended up amongst the shelves reading Friedrich Schiller on the Dutch war of independence. The man was so excited, and had laid down such effervescent prose! If only I could let the world be the world, and spend days of indolence reading such words!

I realise that this post signifies not much more than another addition to the endless and thoroughly polluted stream of collective consciousness that is the web, but who knows, maybe it points beyond itself to a return to the modest form that we here had developed.

Longtemps, je n'ai pas écrit ici

2005-02-22T22:53:00.000+11:00

Further public education.

During what has thus far passed for 2005, I have been teaching myself some sort of French (from a book called Teach Yourself French). I am up to about lesson 13, hooray, and in the 'translate to French' exercises I often run into difficulty in selecting exactly which past-tense construction to use (those I have learned being, I believe, passé simple, passé composé, and passé anterieur). For example, should I write "Le train ont tué les chevaux", or "Le train tuait les chevaux"? Anyway, I decided to shop around for some outside free advice, and typed "past tenses in french" into Google. I found my way to About.com, the first result in Google's list, and found some advice about French literary tenses. Consider this:

"At one time, these tenses were used in spoken French, but they have gradually disappeared. When they are used, they raise the speaker's register to an extremely refined (some might even say snobbish) level of French. They may also be used for humorous effect. For example, in the French movie Ridicule, the aristocracy use literary tenses in their word games, in order to make themselves sound more educated and refined. ...

"Because literary tenses are not used in spoken French, you need to be able to recognize them, but you will most likely never need to conjugate them. ... However, for the linguists and academics out there..." [Followed by a link to the table of literary tenses.]

The full article here. Remarquez, sil vous plait, the purple "what do you think" box.

Kant and the "general injustice"

2005-02-09T13:03:00.000+11:00

I had criticised Kant's position on beneficence, but now I read something that complicates the matter, indeed seems to put Kant somewhere in the vicinity of what I was trying to say in my post on the Australian response to the tsunamis on Boxing Day. Quoted in Allen Wood's introduction to the Cambridge edition of Kant's Practical Philosophy I find this, taken, as far as I can tell, from Kant's lectures or correspondence:

One always talks so much of virtue. One must, however, abolish injustice before one can be virtuous. One must set aside comforts, luxuries and everything that oppresses others while elevating myself, so that I am not one of those who oppress their species. Without this conclusion, all virtue is impossible (AK 20:151).

Further, this:

Many people take pleasure in doing good actions, but consequently do not want to stand under obligations toward others. If one only comes to them submissively, they will do everything; they do not want to subject themselves to the rights of people, but to view them simply as objects of their magnanimity. It is not all the same under what title I get something. What properly belongs to me must not be accorded me as something I beg for (AK 19:145).

And then:

In accordance with [benevolence], people are merciful to others and show beneficence to them after they have earlier taken from them, even though they are conscious of no injustice to anyone. But one can participate in the general injustice, even if one does no one any injustice according to civil laws and institutions. Now if one shows beneficence to a wretch, then one has not given him anything gratuitously, but has given him only what one had earlier helped to take from him through the general injustice. For if no one took more of the goods of life than another, then there would be on rich and no poor. Accordingly, even acts of generosity are acts of duty and indebtedness, which arise from the rights of others (AK 27:416).

I had assumed that, for Kant, a civil constitution was not merely necessary but rather sufficient to enable a just ordering of society, and thus that the unfreedom present in modern 'liberal democracies' (as people operating with particularly impoverished concepts of 'liberty' and 'democracy' like to call them) were to be tolerated and considered not to affect the radical inner freedom of moral life. I think I got this idea from my reading of Idea toward a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim. I am glad to have been proved wrong, to some extent. (Although I'm still quite sure that there is a tension here in Kant's thought, expressed at various points, but perhaps most pointedly in the Critique of Pure Reason's Third Antinomy, between his desire to pronounce human beings free, here and now, and his recognition that freedom belies its concept for so long as it exists in particular instances amongst the general unfreedom. It may well be that his various positions cannot be reconciled; that would accord with Adorno's reading.)

I still find, as I did before, Kant's proof that beneficence is a duty rather strange. Showing that, if made into a universal law, a maxim of self-interest would be self defeating--or would "conflict with itself", as Kant puts it (Metaphysics of Morals, §30)--seems an especially empirical path for the transcendental philosopher to take. But the passages Wood quotes throw a different light on Kant's concept of beneficence, the duty to "promote according to one's means the happiness of others in need, without hoping for something in return". I took it to refer to charity as a kind of optional extra. The mere fact that Kant calls it a duty should have put paid to that interpretation, which But with the talk of the "general injustice" in mind we can say that working (as either an activist or a theorist) to alleviate the kind of economic inequality that Kant seems to mean by that expression would seem to fall under this duty. The further question needs, however, to be raised: does "according to one's means" include "according to one's best understanding, even if it is inadequate"? If that were the case we would seem to be let off the hook once more. Whether it is or not probably depends on which Kant you ask: the ascetic moral task-master, or the more indulgent old man who thinks that it's all right because you meant well (I'm thinking here of the first sentence of the Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals).

I suppose I oughtn't to have been surprised at Kant's critique of society under a civil constitution. But I was. I mean, some of what Kant has to say might lead you to call him an arch-bourgeois thinker and be done with it. In On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct In Theory, But It Is Of No Use In Practice he argues in defence of a concept of citizenship which does away with feudal qualifications according to rank, but excludes from the franchise women and workers:

He who has the right to vote in this legislation is called a citizen [...]. The quality requisite to this, apart from the natural one (of not being a child or a woman), is only that of being one's own master (sui iuris), hence of having some property (and any art, craft, fine art, or science can be counted as property) that supports him [...]. A domestic servant, a shop clerk, a day laborer, or even a barber are merely operarii, not artifices (in the wider sense of the word) and not members of the state, and are thus also not qualified to be citizens (Practical Philosophy, 295).

But, while noting that Kant sets out from a bourgeois world, as the atmosphere of his thought, it is important to remember that he is an arch-bourgeois thinker, that he approached his task--thinking--in earnest, and that thought, according to the concept of it which he and others developed through the practice of their theory, is what negates the world in which it finds itself, and points beyond it. If one reads Kant fairly, then, it is true, one is often faced with the choice to go along with him or to disagree with him, but rarely, if ever, is one enabled to dismiss him out of hand while remaining in good faith. When taken unreflectingly, Kant's theses appear as conservative outrages to our liberal, modern sensibility. "Argue as much as you want, but obey!" Marriage: a contract for the use of another's sexual organs to avoid the unfreedom inherent in sexual passion. -- Yet it is only by cutting short reflection, or avoiding it altogether that we can maintain our smug self-satisfaction vis-á-vis old Kant. All too often, the result of such reflection is to show that following the second alternative--disagreeing with him--means a capitulation to the "general injustice" of the world, which almost never measures up to the standards it confronts in Kant's utopian, arch-bourgeois thought. The capitulation is all the more odious when it girds itself as enlightened, democratic opinion.

WordCount

2005-02-01T11:04:00.000+11:00

This is quite pretty, although [376] knows how accurate.

Kant is 17987. Marx is 4415. Nietzsche is at 14718, closely followed by "whitehouse".

2005-01-26T14:16:00.000+11:00

The posts at Crumbling Loaf seem to have a rather transient quality, so you'd better get over there before the latest batch evaporates.

From Kant to Hegel

2005-01-24T16:11:00.000+11:00

According to Hegel, consciousness

is not a thing, a determinate Dasein [existent]; it is always beyond itself; it goes beyond, or transcends, itself. This transcendental requirement constitutes the nature of consciousness as such. Was this not the case in some respects for Kantian philosophy? If truth is defined as an accord between subject and object, it is not clear how this accord is ascertainable, since representation cannot step out of itself to give proof of its conformity or nonconformity to its object. Yet if the object is not posited beyond representation, truth loses its transcendental signification for consciousness, while, if this transcendence is absolutely maintained, representation is radically cut off from its object. The immanence of the object in common consciousness on the one hand and radical transcendence on the other equally make it impossible to pose the problem of truth. But for Kant, that which made the objectivity of the object was immanent not, to be sure, in common consciousness but in transcendental consciousness. Thus, the object was transcendent to common, or finite, consciousness but immanent in transcendental consciousness. The problem of truth was shifted away from the relation between consciousness and its object to the relation between common consciousness and that within common consciousness that goes beyond it--transcendental consciousness. Now every common consciousness is also a transcendental consciousness, and every transcendental consciousness is also necessarily a common consciousness; the first is realized only in the second. This is to say that common consciousness goes beyond itself; it transcends itself and becomes transcendental consciousness. But the movement of transcend itself, of going beyond itself, is typical of consciousness as such. Every consciousness is prperly more than it thinks it is, and because of this its knowledge divides: it is certainty (subjective) and as such is contraposed to (itself as) truth (objective). Thus, since it must continually go beyond itself knowledge is disquieted. And this disquiet, which Hegel describes in existential terms, is unassuaged so long as the end point of the process in not reched, an end point set necessarily b the "given" of the problem: "The goal is the point at which knowledge need not go beyond itself, the point at which it discovers itself and at which concept corresponds to object and object to concept. Hence, the progression toward this goal also has no possible resting place and is not satisfied with stopping prior to the goal" (Phenomenology: Baillie, 137-8; Hoffmeister, 69). Consciousness's knowledge is always knowledge of an object; and if by concept we mean the subjective side of knowledge and by object its objective side, its truth, then knowledge is the movement of self-transcendence which goes from concept to object. But the whole of the Phenomenology shows, precisely, that this opposition is revesible. The object is the object for consciousness, and the concept is the knowledge of itself, the self-consciousness of knowledge. But this consciousness is deeper than it thinks; it finds the object insufficient, inadequate to it; and we can also say, even more properly, that it is the object which must be identical to the concept. In either case, this discrepancy, present in common consciousness itself, is the hear of the phenomenological development and directs it inexorably toward its goal. Thus, this whole development is characterized by an immanent finality, which the philosopher glimpses. Phenomenology is characterized in relation to ontology (the science of the absolute in-and-for-itself which will first be presented by the Science of Logic) precisely by this discrepancy between consciousness and its concept, a discrepancy that is but the requirement of a perpetual transcendence.

-- Jean Hyppolite, 'Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit'.

Change comes from the gym

2005-01-21T10:44:00.000+11:00

And just quickly re the previous, a nuggety bit of analysis discovered while on a quick sortie through the steamy Einsteinium-Jungles of Blogalia IV: Communist chic

Kant's Dialectics

2005-01-21T10:41:00.000+11:00

The critique of the thing in this chapter [the chapter on perception] of the Phenomenology [of Spirit] is as much a critique of substance (which is not subject) as of the "thing-in-itself" [Ding an sich], a notion that haunts more or less every perceiving consciousness. In the Encyclopaedia Hegel tells us that Kant's philosophy grasped spirit mainly at the level of perception; we might say that it analyzed perceiving consciousness without discovering the dialectic at the heart of that very analysis. The thing is a web of contradictions. As for the "thing-in-itself," it is but the absolute abstraction of pure thought made real as object, the final end point of every "thingism."
-- Jean Hyppolite, 'Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit', p. 102

Change World, Right Now!

2005-01-21T10:18:00.000+11:00

Ways that you can do so:

Join the revolution
About the revolution
JOIN THE REVOLUTION

And furthermore, you can "Join the Revolution!"

Failed revolutionaries agree: the real revolution will be more musical.

Ok, this transmission from Planet Sardon is complete. Continue fighting for the galaxy.

2005-01-18T16:19:00.000+11:00

Hegel is supposed to have said of the series of systems published by the precocious Schelling that the latter was "educating himself in public".

Methinks the barb could with justification be aimed at our blog.

2005-01-12T19:41:00.000+11:00

Why, according to the U.S. Legal Code, Iraqi "insurgents" (don't forget the quotation marks) would be justified in making pre-emptive attacks on the Bush administration: A Tiny Revolution.

Believe Me

2005-01-08T13:58:00.000+11:00

It seems like Mr. Gonzales is not the only one keen to emphasize his membership of the human race. On Thursday, in response to the tsunami disaster, Australian Prime Minister John Howard protested: "I'm like any other person, I'm human..."

Just in case, one imagines, we were tempted to think he was actually an alien from a remote corner of the Gorsh system, who, in 1959, took over the body of a Young Liberal called Winston. Now how might we have gotten that idea?

As

2005-01-07T11:38:00.000+11:00

"Pressed by Mr. Specter on his reaction to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, some documented in photographs, Mr. Gonzales replied that "as a human being, I am sickened and outraged." "

And yet: "Mr. Gonzales said he remained convinced that it had been correct not to confer full protections of the Geneva Conventions to captured Al Qaeda suspects. "It would honor and reward bad conduct," he said, asserting that strictly adhering to the Conventions would have made it easier for terrorists to share information and plot new attacks."

Can we presume then that Mr Gonzales is not at all times a practicing human being? This being so, is it wise (even in this era of casualisation) to appoint to the office of attorney general a person who likes to 'as' his way out of the species every now and then?

(New York Times)

Word-mortar

2005-01-06T19:15:00.000+11:00

Just quickly, here's a word from Badiou (whom, incidentally, I've never read) that I picked up second hand on The Weblog.

"For the American superpower is nothing but the deadly guarantee of the obscene accumulation of wealth. The American army is the instrument of the Race of 'Western' lords against the wretched of the entire planet."

That packs a punch.

Lenin's Tomb

2005-01-05T15:30:00.000+11:00

Lenin writes on Iraq, Weber, the Indian Ocean tsunami...

The obstacle

2005-01-02T13:53:00.000+11:00

"...'Then why do you do it? Nobody asks you to.'
'I told you,' he said. 'I wanted to be with you. And besides, I always imagine that somehow I'll be able to penetrate the interior of somewhere. Usually I get just about to the suburbs and get lost. I don't think there is any interior to get to any more. I think all you drinkers are victims of a huge mass hallucination.'
'I refuse to discuss it,' Kit said haughtily, climbing down from the bed and struggling her way through the folds of netting that hung to the floor.
He rolled over and sat up.
'I know why I'm disgusted. It's something I ate. Ten years ago.'
'I don't know what you're talking about. Lie down again and sleep,' she said, and went out of the room.
'I do,' he muttered. He crawled out of the bed and went to stand in the window. The dry desert air was taking on its evening chill, and the drums still sounded. The canyon walls were black now, the scattered clumps of palms had become invisible. There were no lights; the room faced away from the town. And this was what he meant. He gripped the windowsill and leaned out, thinking: 'She doesn't know what I'm talking about. It's something I ate ten years ago. Twenty years ago.' The landscape was there, and more than ever he felt he could not reach it. The rocks and the sky were everywhere, ready to absolve him, but as always he carried the obstacle within him. He would have said that as he looked at them, the rocks and the sky ceased being themselves, that in the act of passing into his consciousness, they became impure. It was slight consolation to be able to say to himself: 'I am stronger than they.' "

- Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

And Another...

2004-12-31T13:50:00.000+11:00

The Weblog.

Tyranny of Form

2004-12-30T21:50:00.000+11:00

"The price of being an artist is to experience that which all non-artists call form, as content, as 'the real thing' (die Sache selbst). Then however one belongs to an inverted world; because now the content, our own life included, becomes something merely formal."

-Nietzsche (somewhere. Quoted in Marcuse.)

The Responsibility of Form

2004-12-30T21:35:00.000+11:00

Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension (Die Permanenz der Kunst) (ch III):

"The artist's desperate effort to make art a direct expression of life cannot overcome the separation of art from life. Wellershoff states the decisive fact: 'unbridgeable social differences exist between the can factory and the studio of the artist: Warhol's factory'; between action painting and the real life which is going on around it. Nor can these differences be bridged by simply letting things happen (noises, movements, chitchat, etc.) and incorporating them, unaltered, into a definite 'frame' (e.g., a concert hall, a book). The immediacy thus expressed is false inasmuch as it results from a mere abstraction from the real-life context which establishes this immediacy. The latter is thus mystified: it does not appear as what it is and does—it is a synthetic, artistic immediacy.

"The realease and desublimation which occur in anti-art thus abstract from (and falsify) reality because they lack the cognitive and cutting power of the aesthetic form; they are mimesis without transformation. Collage, montage, dislocation do not change this fact. The exhibition of a soup can communicates nothing about the life of the worker who produced it, nor of that of the consumer. Renunciation of the aesthetic form does not cancel the difference between art and life—but it does cancel that between essence and appearance, in which the truth of art has its home and which determines the political value of art. The desublimation of art is supposed to release spontaneity—of both the artist and the recipient. But just as, in radical praxis, spontaneity can advance the movement of liberation only as mediated spontaneity, that is, resulting from the transformation of consciousness—so also in art. Without this dual transformation (of the subjects and their world) the desublimation of art can lead only to making the artist superfluous without democratizing and generalizing creativity.

"In this sense, renunciation of the aesthetic form is abdication of responsibility. It deprives art of the very form in which it can create that other reality within the established one—the cosmos of hope."

A calculation

2004-12-30T21:11:00.000+11:00

Marcel Duchamp (transcribed from "The Creative Act", in Aspen no. 5 + 6):

"... in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap, —representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention—this difference between what he intended to realise and did realise, is the personal art coefficient contained in the work. In other words, the personal art coefficient is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended, and the unintentionally expressed."

Pas Au-Delà

2004-12-30T20:33:00.000+11:00

Try Pas Au-Delà. (Sorry if that sounds like I'm recommending chewing-gum). I especially liked the recent review of Terry Eagleton's After Theory.

Kant's Redlichkeit

2004-12-30T18:16:00.000+11:00

Reading yesterday the First Analogy, I noticed how much Kant's arguments want to slip over into the dialectic Hegel describes in the second chapter of the Phenomenology. The crucial moment comes when Kant's static thought tries to grasp the nature of identity in change. In Kant's account the accidents or determinations of substance take on a responsibility that is more than they can manage. On the one hand, they belong to substance: they are merely "particular modes of its existence". On they other, they turn out to lead an existence independent of the substance in which they are said to inhere. Substance remains, thus guaranteeing the identity of the object, while the accidents change.

Kant notes, with some dismay, that this separation of the accidents from the substance is necessary due to "the conditions of the logical exercise of our understanding". This is because the concept of substance is precisely the concept of that which endures and does not change. To fail to separate from substance its (changing) determinations would be to offend against the law of non-contradiction. And yet it is only because substance endures that we can recognise change at all:

"Origin and extinction are not changes of that which originates or becomes extinct. Change is but a mode of existence, which follows on another mode of existence of the same object; hence all that changes is permanent, and only the condition thereof changes. Now since this mutation affects only determinations, which can have a beginning or an end, we may say, employing an expression which seems somewhat paradoxical: only the permanent (substance) is subject to change; the mutable suffers no change, but rather alternation, that is, when certain determinations cease, others begin." (My emphasis.)

Any change involves three inseparable moments: the old determination, the new determination, and the substance which forms their background, without which they would bear no relation to one another.

What amazes me is how close Kant comes to elaborating a dialectic like the one in Hegel's perception chapter. He even seems to recognise it himself in the bit about the "somewhat paradoxical" expression. This is the sort of thing that Adorno means when he talks, often, about the Redlichkeit, or integrity in Kant's thinking: that he comes to express even those thoughts which run counter to the stated aims of his own project.

Aspen

2004-12-30T16:16:00.000+11:00

"... a web version of Aspen, a multimedia magazine of the arts published by Phyllis Johnson from 1965 to 1971. Each issue came in a customized box filled with booklets, phonograph recordings, posters, postcards — one issue even included a spool of Super-8 movie film. It's all here".

Includes work by Susan Sontag, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Roland Barthes, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and lots of other goodies.

Susan Sontag

2004-12-30T15:56:00.000+11:00

Susan Sontag died on Tuesday. Unacquainted with her work, I found Steve Wasserman's obituary in the LA Times excellent. Even better was Sontag's own essay on the aesthetics of silence.

Human sentiments

2004-12-30T15:26:00.000+11:00

"Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would react upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would, too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effect which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these human sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would accasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep to-night; but provided he never saw them, he would snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren."
-- Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

The point seemed to me rather pertinent in the face of the reaction reflected in the Australian media (try the Herald Sun) to the tsunami in south and south-east Asia. Our popular newspapers and television news services groan under the weight of images and reports of deaths and injuries, missing people and the destruction of property. Radio stations broadcast on the hour the donation hotlines of aid agencies trying to ameliorate the crisis. The Herald-Sun editorial demands that individuals and their governments "open their hearts and wallets". It indulges in an orgy of pity for communities "that needed ideal conditions just to put food on the table" now "reduced to the most primitive state imaginable."

Smith's man of humanity is not exactly matched by the consumer of Australian media. The latter has a connection with the disaster, one the papers have been quick to emphasize by giving stories of the handful of "Lost Aussies" pride of place. Many here have toured Thailand and Indonesia and made at least a passing acquaintence with their citizens. And even those who have not can at least see the carnage, and the grief on the faces in the papers and on the screen. Our neighbours, whose lives most of us can but with an effort imagine, and then only dimly, have at least been made starkly visible to us in their need.

What is disquieting is the disparity between the cascade of reporting in this instance and the dearth of images or information representing other crises in our time, say in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. There deaths caused directly or indirectly by wars and conflicts have long been counted in the tens of thousands and displaced persons in the millions. But only if you listen really hard in Australia might you be lucky enough to catch a report about the complex but deadly situation unfolding in, say, Sudan. There are precious few column inches dedicated to this kind of news.

Why the glaring inconsistency? Why the outpouring of expressions of sympathy and sorrow in the one case, and a deathly silence in the other? The difference is not explained by a difference in the magnitudes of the disasters. If we measure those magnitudes purely by the numbers of people killed or affected, then only today has the estimated death toll in Asia risen to a level that challenges that of the conflicts in Sudan or Uganda. What is strikingly different in the two cases is the cause and the quality of the deaths and displacements. We have, on the one hand, a "natural disaster": a unique, discrete event inflicted on unprepared populations by impersonal forces. True, better warning systems might have prevented thousands of deaths, but at worst this is a negligent omission and one that one hopes will be rectified to prevent a repeat occurence. The African conflicts, on the other hand, as most of us dimly understand them, seem to be the insoluble offspring of religious hatred and governmental corruption. We think there is little that we or our governments can do. The trickle of reports that do reach us only manage to reinforce a sense of despair, and to reawaken the nagging consciousness of guilt we associate with "Africa". We worry that if we sat down for a minute to think about it we might conclude that it is perverse to enjoy our peace and relative prosperity without rousing ourselves to help our fellows. Deeper down, if we will admit it to ourselves, we might even harbour the concern that our governments, past and present, have contributed to foreign misery, and that the continued performance of our economies depends on them. Perhaps, if we were to inform ourselves, the outlines of the necessary steps to improvement might become manifest. The notion that the requisite policies might require effort or sacrifice on our part is enough to scare us off. Our suspicions are never really elucidated and tested, and the conclusions are never squarely faced. The catastrophe continues, and yet we continue to flatter ourselves that we are morally superior to the Germans who, in the 1930s, didn't want to know what was happening to their Jewish neighbours.

At least the tsunami has given us an opportunity to salve our conscience by a week of fine philosophy and fair expression.

* * *

News outlets
Sudan: BBC - The Guardian
Uganda: BBC - The Guardian
Democratic Republic of Congo: BBC- The Guardian

Nutrition information in crisis situations: UN Standing Committee on Nutrition