8.21.2006
More about No Interest in Traveling
I'm certainly not against traveling (I went to a Jamacian resort this winter and got "crunked" which was "sweet") I just don't think if I was about to plummet to my doom down a crevass that spontaneously opened in the earth revealing the magma beneath I would shout, "I never got to see Paris!" (except with some other city than Paris because I have been to Paris). Rather, I think I would lament not being drunk at the time, or not having gotten one more opportunity to masturbate in. Actually, I have thought numerous times since being "employed" that one of the most depressing things I could think of is dying on my way home from a full day of work, because that would mean I spent the last 9 hours of my life working, rather than doing something I liked. But that is just one of the hazards of life I suppose, that sometimes you have to invest in order to get returns, and sometimes you go out at the bottom of a downswing. I suppose the most conservative plan would be to always be drunk at work just to be safe (or masturbate constantly), but I guess I am just the sort of person that throws that kind of caution to the wind.
Good Movie Dialogue
It's kind of embarrassing but...
Go ahead.
I had a dream about this place.
Oh boy.
You see what I mean...
Okay, so you had a dream about this place. Tell me.
Well ... it's the second one I've had, but they were both the same......they start out that I'm in here but it's not day or night. It's kinda half night, but it looks just like this except for the light, but I'm scared like I can't tell ya. Of all people you're standing right over there by that counter. You're in both dreams and you're scared. I get even more frightened when I see how afraid you are and then I realize what it is - there's a man...in back of this place. He's the one ... he's the one that's doing it. I can see him through the wall. I can see his face and I hope I never see that face ever outside a dream... That's it.
So, you came to see if he's out there?
To get rid of this god-awful feeling.
Go ahead.
I had a dream about this place.
Oh boy.
You see what I mean...
Okay, so you had a dream about this place. Tell me.
Well ... it's the second one I've had, but they were both the same......they start out that I'm in here but it's not day or night. It's kinda half night, but it looks just like this except for the light, but I'm scared like I can't tell ya. Of all people you're standing right over there by that counter. You're in both dreams and you're scared. I get even more frightened when I see how afraid you are and then I realize what it is - there's a man...in back of this place. He's the one ... he's the one that's doing it. I can see him through the wall. I can see his face and I hope I never see that face ever outside a dream... That's it.
So, you came to see if he's out there?
To get rid of this god-awful feeling.
No Interest to Travel
I know it makes me a bad privledged upper-middle classer and a bad Grinnell kid but besides all that is it weird that I have almost no interest in traveling anywhere in the world? I mean, why the fuck would I want to hire a seat in a plane to fly me halfway around the earth? Fly over all that water and shit. Humans don't fly, they walk. Maybe it is because this country is strange enough for me that I have no interest in trying another country that will be just as weird but I won't understand what they say. I read all these plans about people going to every place in the world I could imagine, but I just don't really see the attraction. Frankly, it sounds hard and expensive and alot of work just to come back again in a week/month/year. It's not like I've never been anywhere either. I've been lots of places, and yeah they are all different, but I mean its just somewhere else. "Exotic", "culture", "unique", etc don't really describe anything, because wherever you could go in the world somebody else has probably lived their entire life there and would like to leave as much as you would like to go there. I think it might have something to do with the fact that people never look at the ground or the sky when they walk, or even where they are going alot of the time. I think if it came down to it I wouldn't mind having a house and spending the rest of my life exploring every inch of ground, building, and sky between there and the nearest park. How many of you have been all those places, huh? I'll send you a fucking postcard.
8.17.2006
Invasion of Lebanon
Keep checking Seige of Lebanon and Electronic Lebanon because at this point I'd just be copying everything from them.
6.08.2006
Science Wars Revisited
[campbel2][jungesam] I'm beginning to hate this conversation as much as I hate philosophy. Yet because for some reason I can't stop...
But I have revised my position a bit, in typical Grinnell fashion, from my original polemic. Alot of what you two have say has been quite good, and made me think about it all deeper than I did originally. Sorry that this is so long, but I'm going to try and rephrase what I think the issue is using Kant, simply because it is fresh in my mind, certainly applicable, and also fairly logical, which I think is also appropriate. I'll understand if you guys get bored and fade out, I totally understand why nobody except for me really likes this stuff.
[campbel2] "It seems to me that the goal of any good scientist is to discover the way nature works, and the mode of expression of any scientific discovery is simply dictated by the nature of the discovery." I don't think I agree with the second half. If the nature of the discovery dictated the mode of expression, then it would be a simple, apparent statement that is readily obvious. It would be an analytic statement, such as the famous, "gold is yellow". The expression in quotes is simply dictated by the nature of the discovery. Now, while in a sense, by the mode of "the scientific method" science attempts to maintain "objectivity" (quotes do not indicate irony here), so it is attempting to portray itself as simply an extension of an analytic statement. Thus any person will take the statement that "gold has 79 protons" as an simple, descriptive statement. However, logically, it is not. It is not given to representation as such. No one has ever seen a proton. This does not mean, as many would portray the "post-modern" argument to conclude, that "gold has 79 protons" is false, nor does it mean that the statement can never be proven. The statement is synthetic, because it takes a collection of analytic judgments and synthesizes them together following a logical pattern. In other words, it uses the scientific method. The scientist constructs a well-thoughtout experimental hypothesis, records data, attempts to find any weak point that could cause conflicting data, and at the end of the experiment presents whether s/he believes the hypothesis is proven. If... then... right? If I bombard an element with protons, then the atoms will split into these elements, provided I have understood the sub-atomic structure correctly. And, if the scientist is good (as is almost anyone who has worked in the field long enough to earn qualification) then the experiment will be repeatable, because the logical synthesis given in the hypothesis will logically be true, as a logical expression of the analytically verified end conditions of various supplied beginning analytically verifiable conditions.
My point is that while there is a basis of analytically verifiable conditions behind any fact of nature (we can easily get a consensus that gold is yellow) the fact that an experiment is necessary to verify the truth of scientific claims, not simply an experience, is a signal that a seperate logical process is going on in conjunction with "nature", and it is not simply nature working itself out before our eyes. The proof of this is that we have a scientific method which scientists take very seriously, because that is the only way to maintain "objectivity" in the sense of a consensus of people looking at the logical process of the experiment and concluding that the logical synthesis corresponds not only to analytic data available (e.g. the number of mg of solute that results) but also to the synthetic process of HUMAN logical thought (IF the chromatograph reads 760... THEN the element is... , IF an electron jumps an orbit, THEN the molocule releases a photon... , IF there is an impurity in the crystal, THEN the weight will NOT be indicative of... etc).
And this scientific method is deeply a human condition. Yet, a logical condition that allows us to have such an important thing such as truth. Even if the definition of the atom is evolving, that does not mean that atoms themselves are altered, becuase "atoms themselves" must maintain a static "truth" in order to be conceived as nature, because we cannot see them for ourselves. And you are correct, thanks to the scientific method, we can perceive of a static idea of the "real" atom, because we know that the scientists are using a logical method that means that as much as we have need to interact with things on an atomic level, we will be interacting with them according to a logical pattern (i.e. their true nature as we conceive of it) which is always "approximated based on the best current objective evidence," as you put it (and we create static terms accordingly to use as tools). And so we were able to build the atomic bomb, because we could put our ingenuity to work in nature to build things, to create and destroy (altough the law of thermodynamics prevents it) technology and nature in addition to our conceptions of those cateogories of physical existence.
This gets into what you said, [jungesam] (personally, I think your problem is that you have read "post-moderns" without reading very far into Kant, but I don't really want to get into that). Because our logical construction of the world, although heavily tied to the "world" itself through various perceptive organs, often gets a little ahead of itself, or gets confused. Simply, sometimes we are wrong. Sometimes we make a mistake in our logical process, and don't realize it until some perceptual apparatus brings us information which causes us to go back and correct ourselves. Sometimes we perceive something "wrong" and so don't realize that the coat over the chair is not a person until we see that there is no face. Or sometimes we think we understand the way something "works", (antibacterial soaps stop us from getting sick) until we find something intruding upon that understanding (I'm puking because I have a virus, shit I didn't think about that). The problem is not that someone is being illogical, the problem is that their logic has taken a wrong turn. Newton was not wrong when he developed his physics, because it worked. Now that we have more information, we can add and change our logical conception of gravity. Someone who believes in a god is not logically wrong, they have more likely than not experienced what they believe to be evidence that logically proves for them the fact of god. Although in the latter there is obviously no general consensus. But, as we see now, people are finding plenty of "evidence" that evolution is "illogical". One of the things humans are best at is ignoring things and forgetting things. And so our logic, while a very powerful process that guides our complete existence in the world, is so subjectively strong that sometimes it takes turns down strange paths. Let's not forget little gems of history like hydrotherapy, eugenics, and phrenology that at one time had plenty of very logical people believing in their truth.
This is just as true in any social science as it is in hard science. Any philosopher is attempting to logically argue a point. Even someone as poetic as Irigaray, even someone as verbose as Guattari. I don't think that either of them fail logically. I can follow their logic perfectly well. What they may fail at is expressing their logical pathways and syntheses in a way that can convince a consensus of people of their validity. Which, according to the scientific method, would make them not true (not untrue, just not true). I would not agree, Sam, that physics does not have a choice about its use of jargon, whereas philosophy does. I think that physics presents its universally logical statements in a way that makes the impact of the statements only useful to people who are in a small circle. On the other hand, philosophy's universal statements are directed in the context of having a wide, world-changing impact, and so there seems, at least to you, to be some expectation of preparing a discourse for the masses. The problem however, as I see it, is that the discourse of the masses is precisely the problem in a large number of cases. Take race for example. You and I both know (and scientists have proved, for that matter) that race is not real. However, for billions of people it is, and in all different ways. Therefore, how do you objectively discuss something that is not objectively real? This is why alot of sociology is not very useful, in my opinion. So there is going to be some disconnect in a discourse that is attempting to logically argue something directed at people who in a contrary logical context (cf. Marxism's history as a discourse...). Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that Guattari is justified in breaking the dictionary twice a sentence, but it does mean that there are going to have to be alot of new ideas and new terms that are quite unfamiliar to the common person, and its going to be a difficult adjustment for anyone picking up the text, perhaps even from the last book they read. Although philosophy maintains a grounding in the "world", alot of its material comes from within the logical processes itself. Continuing to use Kant as an example, I don't think there is a person that could argue that the First Critique is not logical. It is perhaps the most logically argued and thoughtout book I have ever read. Yet it uses less than 10 real world examples in the entire text. That is because its focus is on the way we think, not on anything in the "world". That is its whole point, its "Copernican Turn", and why it has been so influential for so long. By deeply critiquing our understanding of how we think, he describes a new way of thinking on the basis of how we already think, despite how complex the idea and the actual substance of the book are.
Now, sticking with Kant, the reason he wrote the book was to answer the problems of the Rationalists and the Empiricists. One relied upon god's order to maintain the truth of the world, the other believed that there was no truth at all beyond individual experience. Kant's middle ground was basically the ideas I've been articulating here (although remember, I didn't do too well in the course!!!). The result was that we could trust scientists like Newton while still being able to continue experimenting. I've mentioned Husserl's critique of naturalism a couple of times. What this is about is basically reminding us about Kant. Naturalism is what happens when science forgets that objectivity is a logical process, and not a world that exists, waiting for us to uncover it. It is not normally a terrible problem, except when it prevents logical progress in science because by the failure in the scientific method of objectivity (As I started, Charlie, which is above all NOT derived from nature but occurring in our own logical processes) to imagine the possibility that its entire process is guiding it not towards the buried truth, but towards a fake, idealized truth that is getting us further and further from the actual problem we are concerned with. Husserl was mainly concerned with perception, which opens a whole other can of worms that would require me to rephrase everything I've said so far (Merleau-Ponty says it better than I ever could in Phenom. of Percept anyway), but just as a quick example, take Heidegger, Husserl's student. Heidegger became so obsessed by his pursuit of metaphysics as the true Dasein that he allowed himself to believe that the Nazi regime was the path towards it. Even apart from the horrible consequences of the Nazi's Heidegger soon became disappointed in the academic future of the 3rd Reich because he misunderstood that this movement was fascist, and constituted largely on anti-semitism. It simply did not occur to him that the "triumph of the will" was not actually about the metaphysical destiny of nations, and that it was actually about hatred and social control. And of course, we know that Heidegger had forgotten his Kant, after Being in Time that is... (god I'm a nerd with no life).
This is what I see the problem being. I think that in tossing aside philosophy science forgets that it is a philosophy, a philosophy of nature. Important in that philosophy is the self-critique that comes in every philosophy, whether it is in the context of post-structuralism or the scientific method. That's what "post-modernism" is, after all, a backlash of critique, albeit often immature and poorly organized, directed at the forces of modernism that allowed society to head down such poor logical pathways in the last century because it was so convinced of its truth that it didn't stop to consider its truth might be horrible error. This doesn't mean that "post-modernism" is correct above all, and that it doesn't have its own considerable logical errors. But a conservative retreat of science to the modern trends will not solve the problem, it will only continue the cycle. I really think that philosophers and scientists need to work together on this, and people like Sokal and Dawkins only widen the rift.
But I have revised my position a bit, in typical Grinnell fashion, from my original polemic. Alot of what you two have say has been quite good, and made me think about it all deeper than I did originally. Sorry that this is so long, but I'm going to try and rephrase what I think the issue is using Kant, simply because it is fresh in my mind, certainly applicable, and also fairly logical, which I think is also appropriate. I'll understand if you guys get bored and fade out, I totally understand why nobody except for me really likes this stuff.
[campbel2] "It seems to me that the goal of any good scientist is to discover the way nature works, and the mode of expression of any scientific discovery is simply dictated by the nature of the discovery." I don't think I agree with the second half. If the nature of the discovery dictated the mode of expression, then it would be a simple, apparent statement that is readily obvious. It would be an analytic statement, such as the famous, "gold is yellow". The expression in quotes is simply dictated by the nature of the discovery. Now, while in a sense, by the mode of "the scientific method" science attempts to maintain "objectivity" (quotes do not indicate irony here), so it is attempting to portray itself as simply an extension of an analytic statement. Thus any person will take the statement that "gold has 79 protons" as an simple, descriptive statement. However, logically, it is not. It is not given to representation as such. No one has ever seen a proton. This does not mean, as many would portray the "post-modern" argument to conclude, that "gold has 79 protons" is false, nor does it mean that the statement can never be proven. The statement is synthetic, because it takes a collection of analytic judgments and synthesizes them together following a logical pattern. In other words, it uses the scientific method. The scientist constructs a well-thoughtout experimental hypothesis, records data, attempts to find any weak point that could cause conflicting data, and at the end of the experiment presents whether s/he believes the hypothesis is proven. If... then... right? If I bombard an element with protons, then the atoms will split into these elements, provided I have understood the sub-atomic structure correctly. And, if the scientist is good (as is almost anyone who has worked in the field long enough to earn qualification) then the experiment will be repeatable, because the logical synthesis given in the hypothesis will logically be true, as a logical expression of the analytically verified end conditions of various supplied beginning analytically verifiable conditions.
My point is that while there is a basis of analytically verifiable conditions behind any fact of nature (we can easily get a consensus that gold is yellow) the fact that an experiment is necessary to verify the truth of scientific claims, not simply an experience, is a signal that a seperate logical process is going on in conjunction with "nature", and it is not simply nature working itself out before our eyes. The proof of this is that we have a scientific method which scientists take very seriously, because that is the only way to maintain "objectivity" in the sense of a consensus of people looking at the logical process of the experiment and concluding that the logical synthesis corresponds not only to analytic data available (e.g. the number of mg of solute that results) but also to the synthetic process of HUMAN logical thought (IF the chromatograph reads 760... THEN the element is... , IF an electron jumps an orbit, THEN the molocule releases a photon... , IF there is an impurity in the crystal, THEN the weight will NOT be indicative of... etc).
And this scientific method is deeply a human condition. Yet, a logical condition that allows us to have such an important thing such as truth. Even if the definition of the atom is evolving, that does not mean that atoms themselves are altered, becuase "atoms themselves" must maintain a static "truth" in order to be conceived as nature, because we cannot see them for ourselves. And you are correct, thanks to the scientific method, we can perceive of a static idea of the "real" atom, because we know that the scientists are using a logical method that means that as much as we have need to interact with things on an atomic level, we will be interacting with them according to a logical pattern (i.e. their true nature as we conceive of it) which is always "approximated based on the best current objective evidence," as you put it (and we create static terms accordingly to use as tools). And so we were able to build the atomic bomb, because we could put our ingenuity to work in nature to build things, to create and destroy (altough the law of thermodynamics prevents it) technology and nature in addition to our conceptions of those cateogories of physical existence.
This gets into what you said, [jungesam] (personally, I think your problem is that you have read "post-moderns" without reading very far into Kant, but I don't really want to get into that). Because our logical construction of the world, although heavily tied to the "world" itself through various perceptive organs, often gets a little ahead of itself, or gets confused. Simply, sometimes we are wrong. Sometimes we make a mistake in our logical process, and don't realize it until some perceptual apparatus brings us information which causes us to go back and correct ourselves. Sometimes we perceive something "wrong" and so don't realize that the coat over the chair is not a person until we see that there is no face. Or sometimes we think we understand the way something "works", (antibacterial soaps stop us from getting sick) until we find something intruding upon that understanding (I'm puking because I have a virus, shit I didn't think about that). The problem is not that someone is being illogical, the problem is that their logic has taken a wrong turn. Newton was not wrong when he developed his physics, because it worked. Now that we have more information, we can add and change our logical conception of gravity. Someone who believes in a god is not logically wrong, they have more likely than not experienced what they believe to be evidence that logically proves for them the fact of god. Although in the latter there is obviously no general consensus. But, as we see now, people are finding plenty of "evidence" that evolution is "illogical". One of the things humans are best at is ignoring things and forgetting things. And so our logic, while a very powerful process that guides our complete existence in the world, is so subjectively strong that sometimes it takes turns down strange paths. Let's not forget little gems of history like hydrotherapy, eugenics, and phrenology that at one time had plenty of very logical people believing in their truth.
This is just as true in any social science as it is in hard science. Any philosopher is attempting to logically argue a point. Even someone as poetic as Irigaray, even someone as verbose as Guattari. I don't think that either of them fail logically. I can follow their logic perfectly well. What they may fail at is expressing their logical pathways and syntheses in a way that can convince a consensus of people of their validity. Which, according to the scientific method, would make them not true (not untrue, just not true). I would not agree, Sam, that physics does not have a choice about its use of jargon, whereas philosophy does. I think that physics presents its universally logical statements in a way that makes the impact of the statements only useful to people who are in a small circle. On the other hand, philosophy's universal statements are directed in the context of having a wide, world-changing impact, and so there seems, at least to you, to be some expectation of preparing a discourse for the masses. The problem however, as I see it, is that the discourse of the masses is precisely the problem in a large number of cases. Take race for example. You and I both know (and scientists have proved, for that matter) that race is not real. However, for billions of people it is, and in all different ways. Therefore, how do you objectively discuss something that is not objectively real? This is why alot of sociology is not very useful, in my opinion. So there is going to be some disconnect in a discourse that is attempting to logically argue something directed at people who in a contrary logical context (cf. Marxism's history as a discourse...). Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that Guattari is justified in breaking the dictionary twice a sentence, but it does mean that there are going to have to be alot of new ideas and new terms that are quite unfamiliar to the common person, and its going to be a difficult adjustment for anyone picking up the text, perhaps even from the last book they read. Although philosophy maintains a grounding in the "world", alot of its material comes from within the logical processes itself. Continuing to use Kant as an example, I don't think there is a person that could argue that the First Critique is not logical. It is perhaps the most logically argued and thoughtout book I have ever read. Yet it uses less than 10 real world examples in the entire text. That is because its focus is on the way we think, not on anything in the "world". That is its whole point, its "Copernican Turn", and why it has been so influential for so long. By deeply critiquing our understanding of how we think, he describes a new way of thinking on the basis of how we already think, despite how complex the idea and the actual substance of the book are.
Now, sticking with Kant, the reason he wrote the book was to answer the problems of the Rationalists and the Empiricists. One relied upon god's order to maintain the truth of the world, the other believed that there was no truth at all beyond individual experience. Kant's middle ground was basically the ideas I've been articulating here (although remember, I didn't do too well in the course!!!). The result was that we could trust scientists like Newton while still being able to continue experimenting. I've mentioned Husserl's critique of naturalism a couple of times. What this is about is basically reminding us about Kant. Naturalism is what happens when science forgets that objectivity is a logical process, and not a world that exists, waiting for us to uncover it. It is not normally a terrible problem, except when it prevents logical progress in science because by the failure in the scientific method of objectivity (As I started, Charlie, which is above all NOT derived from nature but occurring in our own logical processes) to imagine the possibility that its entire process is guiding it not towards the buried truth, but towards a fake, idealized truth that is getting us further and further from the actual problem we are concerned with. Husserl was mainly concerned with perception, which opens a whole other can of worms that would require me to rephrase everything I've said so far (Merleau-Ponty says it better than I ever could in Phenom. of Percept anyway), but just as a quick example, take Heidegger, Husserl's student. Heidegger became so obsessed by his pursuit of metaphysics as the true Dasein that he allowed himself to believe that the Nazi regime was the path towards it. Even apart from the horrible consequences of the Nazi's Heidegger soon became disappointed in the academic future of the 3rd Reich because he misunderstood that this movement was fascist, and constituted largely on anti-semitism. It simply did not occur to him that the "triumph of the will" was not actually about the metaphysical destiny of nations, and that it was actually about hatred and social control. And of course, we know that Heidegger had forgotten his Kant, after Being in Time that is... (god I'm a nerd with no life).
This is what I see the problem being. I think that in tossing aside philosophy science forgets that it is a philosophy, a philosophy of nature. Important in that philosophy is the self-critique that comes in every philosophy, whether it is in the context of post-structuralism or the scientific method. That's what "post-modernism" is, after all, a backlash of critique, albeit often immature and poorly organized, directed at the forces of modernism that allowed society to head down such poor logical pathways in the last century because it was so convinced of its truth that it didn't stop to consider its truth might be horrible error. This doesn't mean that "post-modernism" is correct above all, and that it doesn't have its own considerable logical errors. But a conservative retreat of science to the modern trends will not solve the problem, it will only continue the cycle. I really think that philosophers and scientists need to work together on this, and people like Sokal and Dawkins only widen the rift.
6.05.2006
Alan Sokal Sucks (A.S.S)
[This post is a response to primarily Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, through the review of their book by Richard Dawkins. I use only Sokal's name for simplicity. This may make this a poor academic response, but it is a rant not a response anyhow.
PISSED:
[jungesam][campbel2] [although this rant is really not directedly at either of you]: Sokal is alot of bullshit. So he fooled some editors. This doesn't prove anything (although as Charlie mentioned, perhaps the fact that they still have jobs does). The fact is that Sokal is guilty of precisely the same thing that he is accusing philosophers; that is, using elements of others' actual work in paraphrased form merely to further a meaningless discourse AND one's own career.
Let's take a look at some of Sokal's work before he began his much more well-known career as a professional debunker (from which I'm guessing he sold a shit more books). Let's choose, say, his april 2002 piece, entitled "Transfer Matrices and Partition-Function Zeros for Antiferromagnetic Potts Models III. Triangular-Lattice Chromatic Polynomial". I quoth from the "abstract":
"We study the chromatic polynomial P_G(q) for m \times n triangular-lattice strips of widths m <= 12_P, 9_F (with periodic or free transverse boundary conditions, respectively) and arbitrary lengths n (with free longitudinal boundary conditions). The chromatic polynomial gives the zero-temperature limit of the partition function for the q-state Potts antiferromagnet. We compute the transfer matrix for such strips in the Fortuin--Kasteleyn representation and obtain the corresponding accumulation sets of chromatic zeros in the complex q-plane in the limit n\to\infty. We recompute the limiting curve obtained by Baxter in the thermodynamic limit m,n\to\infty and find new interesting features with possible physical consequences. Finally, we analyze the isolated limiting points and their relation with the Beraha numbers."
Whoa! And they get paid for that bullshit?!?!? Tell me THAT isn't the most pretensious thing you've ever read!!! I can't even understand a word! "m,n\to\infty" isn't in any dictionary I've ever seen! Who are Fortuin and Kasteleyn? Some of Sokal's cronies in the "cult of physics" no doubt, who probably have cushy jobs because of their supposed "ability" to write in this "theoretical" (theoretical means "made-up" in case you didn't know!) literary style. Somebody kick these guys out on their asses, and get to work trading bonds or some other job involving REAL things, fer crissakes!!
So I can't understand high-level math that describes physical environments measured on some "invented" scale. I can accept that there is a history of research that people have been working together very hard to build. So then, why should the theorists who trying to describe the workings of your subjectivity on a unconscious and pre-language level have to write for a 5th grade reading level? Because, for the simple fact that these sorts of physicists who would take time off from their VERY important research to critique a field that they know nothing about are pretenious pricks who have to further their ego by "defending" their field against the "threat" of philosophy. Read how happy that Dawkins shithead is about Sokal's book. You'd think someone proved String Theory isn't a gigantic... "theory"! I bet he had alot of sticky late-night pleasure when he got to talk about "erectile organs" and square roots in the same sentence. I for one have never taken any stock in Lacan's logic squares simply because I knew right off the bat that seeing as how I knew nothing about logic, I couldn't decide whether Lacan's lectures were worthwhile or not. But it seems like Dawkins couldn't even have gotten that far, because anyone who has opened the first five pages of "Lacan for Dummies" could have understood that the Phallus as a structure has nothing to do with the penis. If you think you can understand a psychoanalyst (Guattari, Lacan, or the one you might visit four times a week), or even a psychiatrist, conducting a theoretical discussion just because you walked into a room or opened a book to a random page, then you should try landing a plane, because that looks really easy on TV.
This is the trouble with people. They think they understand things. "Sure, I know how a cell phone works. They make it out of plastic, intergrated circuits, and other complicated electronics in Malaysia, I sign up for a bill for which I pay once a month, and then they beam calls to my phone from the national network through those towers I see by the interstate. But my phone is broken for no reason! It just broke! I didn't even drop it!" This is why people kick machines when they are broken, why they talk louder to people who don't speak their language, and why hundreds of people "who know how to drive" are stranded at the side of the road every year because they didn't change their oil or ran out of gas. It is the assholic nature of humanity to assume that if they can't understand something, FATE must be fucking with them, because god knows there SIMPLY COULD NOT be something outside of the understandable-realm of their own little mal-adjusted world. This is also why we have religion, by the way.
And while Sokal's has a prepubescent emerging-stump of a argument going with the whole "science out of context" thing, he totally loses it in his knee-jerk quotations. Sure, Irigaray gets a little happy with her fluids. But THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT!!!! If he had took a look at any serious literature on Irigaray, he would find other key elements about the nature of literature, the necessary departure from form, from substance, from science, from the world, etc etc etc etc. It is not supposed to be about science, as in what you learn in the lab. It is supposed to be about science as naturalism, as in the way that we think. She's not talking about the science you do at a lab bench, she's talking about the science of our thought. If you had done the work, and read Irigaray, Heidegger, and Husserl, or even had some concept of what post-modern means, you would already know this. Otherwise, you just assumed that you knew, even though you didn't. Did you know what I meant when I said "naturalism"? Maybe you thought you did. Maybe you thought you did, and then misinterpreted what I said, or thought my sentence didn't make sense, because you didn't know. Then again, maybe I made it up, or I got it wrong. What do I know anyway, I only have a half a master's degree in this sort of thing. However, that's more than you have, so I'm going to take my word for it. After all, this is not Reading Rainbow.
I don't really need to go back into the whole literary value of printed-word thing again, where I try and simplify really complicated big-kid ideas in to recognizable "small-words" to argue the fairly basic fact that literature and poetry are more important to human life than any hard science since building fires. I really don't care in the end if anyone gets it, least of all some asshole that has already made up his mind, and moreover made money off a book he published demonstrating his own idiocy. Because if he ever faltered in that idiocy, he'd probably have to give that money back, or at least stop getting more of it.
Yeah, I'm pissed off. But I really get tired of this sort of thing. I don't know why it is such a scandal that it might be harder than voting to be political, it might require more work to be right than publishing a book or being on TV, and why it might take language that you wouldn't find in a sportscast vocab to describe the feelings, emotions, and patterns of behavior in something as simply as, oh, say sex. And the other end of things is no better, when some prick with a piece of paper on his wall thinks that because he is good at describing some things, goddammit, he must be good at describing everything! And therefore, he should! Especially when he can influence other pricks who are like him into agreeing, and then finally, we can really save the world by getting some academics fired! With the exception of the last, most people I have met in academia certainly qualify. And not just the men, despite my use of the masculine pronoun. And this is why "inter-disciplinary" is only considered if their are strict "disciplines" to begin with. And as long as it mean MORE academic contracts. That goodness disciplines can intermingle within a constitutionally protected marriage of the general education requirements for the classically-republican education!
If you need anymore evidence to Sokal's shittiness, you can take his April-Fools-Day-Senior-Year-Prank-Publicity-Stunt-Entrapment scheme itself. Maybe we should have academia vice squad who prowl the academic docks looking for journals with a loose editorial board! If Sokal had only worn a wire, he could have gotten the editor joking with him on tape, saying how "post-modern" his essay was, with a nod and a wink! Incriminated! It's too bad that the journal takes open submissions and doesn't pay anything to its authors, otherwise maybe Sokal could have traded the editors a golf vacation with hookers for a three-part series, and there could be criminal preceedings! Just like that guy- oh, what was his name? You know, they guy who bribed a bunch of elected officials who run this country, oh whats-his-name? Oh well. I guess I was too busy circling typos in every collegiate academic journal and high school newspaper in the country instead of reading the actual news.
And yeah, it might seem that my ego is invested somewhere in this little rant. Well, it is. This is not what someone who is pretenious sounds like. This is what I sound like when I've invested a year of my life and $35,000 (so far) of my own money in something that I think is more important than any other thing I have going in my life, and therefore am spending all of that and most of my sanity trying to become better trained in it and having to deal with all the other asshole pricks that think just like Sokal and contributing to nothing but a waste of paper because this is the "best place in my shitty TV-watching flag-waving fast-food-eating blood-sucking murderous chauvanistic fatherland" to learn what I want to learn, or so I've been told by many of those same asshole pricks. Then, some jerk who can do math with tenure reads me three sentences of a 300 page text and then tells me that in addition to my job prospects either being non-existent or surrounded by many of the jerks who I loath, my job itself is bullshit. Yeah, you might say that my ego is a little bit invested. You might say that my life and mind is a little invested. And hey, philosophy is a bit of bullshit sometimes. So is everything. That's life. I think if Bill Clinton can cite a little semiotics in his legal testimony on his blowjobs, if physicists can shoot billions of dollars of electronics into space, and if Queer Eye can be a positive step for gay culture than Felix Guattari can coin a few choice phrases.
Does this mean that I, as a philosopher, could not be wrong? No, I could definitely be wrong, and I have been many times. Philosophy is not easy, its hard. I got a grade-inflated equivalent of a C in my Kant class, ok! I admit it! I don't know it all! I don't want to, I don't ever want to take a class on the First Critique again! If I died not knowing Kant's Critique of Pure Reason well enough to get an A from Jay Berstein, I would be perfectly happy. But I tell you what I do know: I do know that if I handed Jay a paper saying that "philosophy is bullshit", he wouldn't have given me a grade at all, because THAT is not any work at all.
PISSED:
[jungesam][campbel2] [although this rant is really not directedly at either of you]: Sokal is alot of bullshit. So he fooled some editors. This doesn't prove anything (although as Charlie mentioned, perhaps the fact that they still have jobs does). The fact is that Sokal is guilty of precisely the same thing that he is accusing philosophers; that is, using elements of others' actual work in paraphrased form merely to further a meaningless discourse AND one's own career.
Let's take a look at some of Sokal's work before he began his much more well-known career as a professional debunker (from which I'm guessing he sold a shit more books). Let's choose, say, his april 2002 piece, entitled "Transfer Matrices and Partition-Function Zeros for Antiferromagnetic Potts Models III. Triangular-Lattice Chromatic Polynomial". I quoth from the "abstract":
"We study the chromatic polynomial P_G(q) for m \times n triangular-lattice strips of widths m <= 12_P, 9_F (with periodic or free transverse boundary conditions, respectively) and arbitrary lengths n (with free longitudinal boundary conditions). The chromatic polynomial gives the zero-temperature limit of the partition function for the q-state Potts antiferromagnet. We compute the transfer matrix for such strips in the Fortuin--Kasteleyn representation and obtain the corresponding accumulation sets of chromatic zeros in the complex q-plane in the limit n\to\infty. We recompute the limiting curve obtained by Baxter in the thermodynamic limit m,n\to\infty and find new interesting features with possible physical consequences. Finally, we analyze the isolated limiting points and their relation with the Beraha numbers."
Whoa! And they get paid for that bullshit?!?!? Tell me THAT isn't the most pretensious thing you've ever read!!! I can't even understand a word! "m,n\to\infty" isn't in any dictionary I've ever seen! Who are Fortuin and Kasteleyn? Some of Sokal's cronies in the "cult of physics" no doubt, who probably have cushy jobs because of their supposed "ability" to write in this "theoretical" (theoretical means "made-up" in case you didn't know!) literary style. Somebody kick these guys out on their asses, and get to work trading bonds or some other job involving REAL things, fer crissakes!!
So I can't understand high-level math that describes physical environments measured on some "invented" scale. I can accept that there is a history of research that people have been working together very hard to build. So then, why should the theorists who trying to describe the workings of your subjectivity on a unconscious and pre-language level have to write for a 5th grade reading level? Because, for the simple fact that these sorts of physicists who would take time off from their VERY important research to critique a field that they know nothing about are pretenious pricks who have to further their ego by "defending" their field against the "threat" of philosophy. Read how happy that Dawkins shithead is about Sokal's book. You'd think someone proved String Theory isn't a gigantic... "theory"! I bet he had alot of sticky late-night pleasure when he got to talk about "erectile organs" and square roots in the same sentence. I for one have never taken any stock in Lacan's logic squares simply because I knew right off the bat that seeing as how I knew nothing about logic, I couldn't decide whether Lacan's lectures were worthwhile or not. But it seems like Dawkins couldn't even have gotten that far, because anyone who has opened the first five pages of "Lacan for Dummies" could have understood that the Phallus as a structure has nothing to do with the penis. If you think you can understand a psychoanalyst (Guattari, Lacan, or the one you might visit four times a week), or even a psychiatrist, conducting a theoretical discussion just because you walked into a room or opened a book to a random page, then you should try landing a plane, because that looks really easy on TV.
This is the trouble with people. They think they understand things. "Sure, I know how a cell phone works. They make it out of plastic, intergrated circuits, and other complicated electronics in Malaysia, I sign up for a bill for which I pay once a month, and then they beam calls to my phone from the national network through those towers I see by the interstate. But my phone is broken for no reason! It just broke! I didn't even drop it!" This is why people kick machines when they are broken, why they talk louder to people who don't speak their language, and why hundreds of people "who know how to drive" are stranded at the side of the road every year because they didn't change their oil or ran out of gas. It is the assholic nature of humanity to assume that if they can't understand something, FATE must be fucking with them, because god knows there SIMPLY COULD NOT be something outside of the understandable-realm of their own little mal-adjusted world. This is also why we have religion, by the way.
And while Sokal's has a prepubescent emerging-stump of a argument going with the whole "science out of context" thing, he totally loses it in his knee-jerk quotations. Sure, Irigaray gets a little happy with her fluids. But THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT!!!! If he had took a look at any serious literature on Irigaray, he would find other key elements about the nature of literature, the necessary departure from form, from substance, from science, from the world, etc etc etc etc. It is not supposed to be about science, as in what you learn in the lab. It is supposed to be about science as naturalism, as in the way that we think. She's not talking about the science you do at a lab bench, she's talking about the science of our thought. If you had done the work, and read Irigaray, Heidegger, and Husserl, or even had some concept of what post-modern means, you would already know this. Otherwise, you just assumed that you knew, even though you didn't. Did you know what I meant when I said "naturalism"? Maybe you thought you did. Maybe you thought you did, and then misinterpreted what I said, or thought my sentence didn't make sense, because you didn't know. Then again, maybe I made it up, or I got it wrong. What do I know anyway, I only have a half a master's degree in this sort of thing. However, that's more than you have, so I'm going to take my word for it. After all, this is not Reading Rainbow.
I don't really need to go back into the whole literary value of printed-word thing again, where I try and simplify really complicated big-kid ideas in to recognizable "small-words" to argue the fairly basic fact that literature and poetry are more important to human life than any hard science since building fires. I really don't care in the end if anyone gets it, least of all some asshole that has already made up his mind, and moreover made money off a book he published demonstrating his own idiocy. Because if he ever faltered in that idiocy, he'd probably have to give that money back, or at least stop getting more of it.
Yeah, I'm pissed off. But I really get tired of this sort of thing. I don't know why it is such a scandal that it might be harder than voting to be political, it might require more work to be right than publishing a book or being on TV, and why it might take language that you wouldn't find in a sportscast vocab to describe the feelings, emotions, and patterns of behavior in something as simply as, oh, say sex. And the other end of things is no better, when some prick with a piece of paper on his wall thinks that because he is good at describing some things, goddammit, he must be good at describing everything! And therefore, he should! Especially when he can influence other pricks who are like him into agreeing, and then finally, we can really save the world by getting some academics fired! With the exception of the last, most people I have met in academia certainly qualify. And not just the men, despite my use of the masculine pronoun. And this is why "inter-disciplinary" is only considered if their are strict "disciplines" to begin with. And as long as it mean MORE academic contracts. That goodness disciplines can intermingle within a constitutionally protected marriage of the general education requirements for the classically-republican education!
If you need anymore evidence to Sokal's shittiness, you can take his April-Fools-Day-Senior-Year-Prank-Publicity-Stunt-Entrapment scheme itself. Maybe we should have academia vice squad who prowl the academic docks looking for journals with a loose editorial board! If Sokal had only worn a wire, he could have gotten the editor joking with him on tape, saying how "post-modern" his essay was, with a nod and a wink! Incriminated! It's too bad that the journal takes open submissions and doesn't pay anything to its authors, otherwise maybe Sokal could have traded the editors a golf vacation with hookers for a three-part series, and there could be criminal preceedings! Just like that guy- oh, what was his name? You know, they guy who bribed a bunch of elected officials who run this country, oh whats-his-name? Oh well. I guess I was too busy circling typos in every collegiate academic journal and high school newspaper in the country instead of reading the actual news.
And yeah, it might seem that my ego is invested somewhere in this little rant. Well, it is. This is not what someone who is pretenious sounds like. This is what I sound like when I've invested a year of my life and $35,000 (so far) of my own money in something that I think is more important than any other thing I have going in my life, and therefore am spending all of that and most of my sanity trying to become better trained in it and having to deal with all the other asshole pricks that think just like Sokal and contributing to nothing but a waste of paper because this is the "best place in my shitty TV-watching flag-waving fast-food-eating blood-sucking murderous chauvanistic fatherland" to learn what I want to learn, or so I've been told by many of those same asshole pricks. Then, some jerk who can do math with tenure reads me three sentences of a 300 page text and then tells me that in addition to my job prospects either being non-existent or surrounded by many of the jerks who I loath, my job itself is bullshit. Yeah, you might say that my ego is a little bit invested. You might say that my life and mind is a little invested. And hey, philosophy is a bit of bullshit sometimes. So is everything. That's life. I think if Bill Clinton can cite a little semiotics in his legal testimony on his blowjobs, if physicists can shoot billions of dollars of electronics into space, and if Queer Eye can be a positive step for gay culture than Felix Guattari can coin a few choice phrases.
Does this mean that I, as a philosopher, could not be wrong? No, I could definitely be wrong, and I have been many times. Philosophy is not easy, its hard. I got a grade-inflated equivalent of a C in my Kant class, ok! I admit it! I don't know it all! I don't want to, I don't ever want to take a class on the First Critique again! If I died not knowing Kant's Critique of Pure Reason well enough to get an A from Jay Berstein, I would be perfectly happy. But I tell you what I do know: I do know that if I handed Jay a paper saying that "philosophy is bullshit", he wouldn't have given me a grade at all, because THAT is not any work at all.
5.06.2006
Immigration vis-a-vis Fascism
Alright. ONE more thing. This is more re: my use of the word "fascism" than anything else, and its just to clear it up "once and for all" because thats what plans are for, right? This is something implicit when ever I use the word that I realized that most people aren't picking up on, and it hurts my ability to communicate.
I admit, using the word "fascist" to describe any sort of politics post-Franco seems to be used out of historical context. It might seem the equivalent of using the Holocaust as an example in debate: rhetorical overkill that limits the ability of good argument by using a galvanizing example that's relevance is metaphorical at best. And, fascist seems to have a common use slur-value that is equated with "Nazi", "Pig", or generally, "asshole". I for one always picture Jeff Bridges yelling it at the chief of police of Malibu after being hit in the head with a coffee mug, somewhere in the back of my head when I say it.
That said, I think the word has significant meaning apart from all this. I am a big fan of doing deep thinking regarding the meanings of words that we choose in the contexts in which we choose to use them, and then revising our usage based on new ideas of meaning. I wouldn't call myself an expert on Fascism, but I have done a good bit of research into the history of the movement called Fascism, and also of the later analyses that tried to figure out exactly what it was all about.
If I went into all of that, it could be really long, and you would get bored, because its not you that is interested in that sort of stuff, its me. Just to sum it up, I'm working with the idea that Fascism is a system of social control, under which individual are social constructed in relation to the system through certain mechanisms, institutions, and discourses in order to maintain that system, and thereby that control. Obviously there are social effects that may be similar (we all know that we are all individually and social constructed in various ways, etc...), but the main difference between and ordinary society and a Fascist society is that Fascism is a system of control, where certain individuals are explicitly controlled by others. (Also, the difference as I see it between totalitarianism and Fascism is that totalitarian systems are maintained by a system of mostly physical control, which while perhaps having correllaries in ones person psychology, does not attempt to construct the "individual" within that system of the "social," the system, of course, being one of control. I would say that while Stalinism is totalitarianism, and there certainly are Fascist elements to the propoganda and ideology of that brand of communism, ther attempts to redefine "man" in a controlled relationship with the "state" are much more archetypical in what are historically known as Fascist regimes.)
You could make the argument that then almost every society falls under my rubric of Fascism. This would be a valid argument which we could discuss, and I would argue against it, using various historical, political, and philosophical ideas.
What is NOT a legitimate argument is Fascism itself. I know this will really piss off the democratists out there, but there is no condition under which the argument in favor of social control should be heard, accepted, or considered legitimate. I do not stand by this proposition dogmatically. I stand by it rationally, because once you allow a discourse of control to be considered equivalent (and thereby arguable as an alternative or opposition) you have allowed your own discourse to be conjoined to a discourse that is controllable, and then your own words are subject to control by that conjunction of "democratic equality". To use a crude example, it would make no sense to "vote" for an all-powerful god creator, because it is not on the basis of democratic legitimation that such a god has the theological power it does. Likewise, a King is chosen by god, not by the people, so voting for King is illogical, and an affront to the concept of representative leadership.
The interesting thing about Fascism, and thus the reason I think the word is so useful, is that one doesn't have to be a Nazi to be Fascist. Certain authors use the concept of "micro-fascisms" which are not regimes, but instances of similarity to the methods of Fascism that exist within ordinary human life. These small instances, if exploited and alligned, create the systems that we could then call Fascism. The point is to always remember the lessons learned from Fascism, not just to bury the term in the past, in history. We can only hope that we are wise enough not to have humans casually sending each other to torturous mass-death again. Current events show us that humans all over the world still have alot to learn, and apparently we aren't thinking hard enough about what sort of society and what sort of individual would be able to do something like that.
This is why I think it is very important to call Fascism out when we see it, or see behavior that is representative of that sort of thinking and systematic behavior. I'm not talking about little "micro-fascisms" here, there is plenty of full Fascism going on every day.
Alot of people reacting to my use of the word (not counting those who like to make full of my polemical style, they are free to keep doing so) seem to think that this is a bad tactic to use to critique immigration policy because it doesn't reach out to those who disagree, or because a full condemnation is too idealistic, or just because they think that immigration feelings as they are are bad, but not that bad. This is mainly what I want to address.
Take a look at this picture. This was taken almost 50 years ago. Look at the woman with her mouth open, shouting slurs at the students that are making history by going to school. 50 years ago she was "one side of the debate". Now, she is a racist. We now recognize her opinion on public school policy as being equivalent to the thinking of these people. That is why troops had to be sent in to keep people like this woman only shouting.
Today, there are people with another "political opinion." Or these people. And those are just the people who "support" killing people who cross the border, not the ones who do it themselves (perhaps). And there are plenty of other people who believe that maybe they shouldn't be murdered outright, but it is "legal" to have to live in fear of being deported at any moment, losing their jobs, homes... and because it is legal, it is ok. And if you think that racist "opinions" are only held by far-right websites and groups like the John Birch Society, why don't you ask one of your minority friends what they think about race in this country?
So maybe it sounds a little funny to call people racist or Fascist now. But imagine what it will be like in 50 years, and what the racial population of this country will look like. Imagine how we will look back on the people who said, "well, you know its against the law for that person to be here". Maybe the same way that we look at people who stood in the path of desegregation?
My point is not that history will prove me right, because I don't know that. What I mean is that there are certain things that we do not realize until way after the fact. It is how historical mistakes like Fascism are made. Its because we don't fully look at what we are doing when we say, "legality equals truth," or "let's not offend the people we disagree with," or "every opinion is valid." Because later on we say, "shit, how did we let ourselves do that?" and "If only we had known the full extent of what was going on, we would have acted differently." It happens every day. Someone is building a wall, someone is murdered, someone is tortured while other idiots take digital pictures, someone is deciding to go to war, someone is making a law that takes away someone's house. Sometimes we just need a "What the fuck?" moment to realize what is actually going on.
So I'll say it again. Any support of laws that prevent people from moving from one place to another, which is a system of social control based upon an individual-in-the-social identification, IS FASCISM. Sorry if that offends you, that isn't the point. It doesn't mean that you aren't a good person, or that I don't like you. It means that you need to take a long hard look at what you think, why you think it, and how what you think is currently affecting other people.
So that's pretty much all I wanted to get across. Sorry if it sounded like a lecture, its really just more of what I was thinking as I thought it. Don't take me too seriously, take yourself seriously instead. Yeah but don't do that either.
I admit, using the word "fascist" to describe any sort of politics post-Franco seems to be used out of historical context. It might seem the equivalent of using the Holocaust as an example in debate: rhetorical overkill that limits the ability of good argument by using a galvanizing example that's relevance is metaphorical at best. And, fascist seems to have a common use slur-value that is equated with "Nazi", "Pig", or generally, "asshole". I for one always picture Jeff Bridges yelling it at the chief of police of Malibu after being hit in the head with a coffee mug, somewhere in the back of my head when I say it.
That said, I think the word has significant meaning apart from all this. I am a big fan of doing deep thinking regarding the meanings of words that we choose in the contexts in which we choose to use them, and then revising our usage based on new ideas of meaning. I wouldn't call myself an expert on Fascism, but I have done a good bit of research into the history of the movement called Fascism, and also of the later analyses that tried to figure out exactly what it was all about.
If I went into all of that, it could be really long, and you would get bored, because its not you that is interested in that sort of stuff, its me. Just to sum it up, I'm working with the idea that Fascism is a system of social control, under which individual are social constructed in relation to the system through certain mechanisms, institutions, and discourses in order to maintain that system, and thereby that control. Obviously there are social effects that may be similar (we all know that we are all individually and social constructed in various ways, etc...), but the main difference between and ordinary society and a Fascist society is that Fascism is a system of control, where certain individuals are explicitly controlled by others. (Also, the difference as I see it between totalitarianism and Fascism is that totalitarian systems are maintained by a system of mostly physical control, which while perhaps having correllaries in ones person psychology, does not attempt to construct the "individual" within that system of the "social," the system, of course, being one of control. I would say that while Stalinism is totalitarianism, and there certainly are Fascist elements to the propoganda and ideology of that brand of communism, ther attempts to redefine "man" in a controlled relationship with the "state" are much more archetypical in what are historically known as Fascist regimes.)
You could make the argument that then almost every society falls under my rubric of Fascism. This would be a valid argument which we could discuss, and I would argue against it, using various historical, political, and philosophical ideas.
What is NOT a legitimate argument is Fascism itself. I know this will really piss off the democratists out there, but there is no condition under which the argument in favor of social control should be heard, accepted, or considered legitimate. I do not stand by this proposition dogmatically. I stand by it rationally, because once you allow a discourse of control to be considered equivalent (and thereby arguable as an alternative or opposition) you have allowed your own discourse to be conjoined to a discourse that is controllable, and then your own words are subject to control by that conjunction of "democratic equality". To use a crude example, it would make no sense to "vote" for an all-powerful god creator, because it is not on the basis of democratic legitimation that such a god has the theological power it does. Likewise, a King is chosen by god, not by the people, so voting for King is illogical, and an affront to the concept of representative leadership.
The interesting thing about Fascism, and thus the reason I think the word is so useful, is that one doesn't have to be a Nazi to be Fascist. Certain authors use the concept of "micro-fascisms" which are not regimes, but instances of similarity to the methods of Fascism that exist within ordinary human life. These small instances, if exploited and alligned, create the systems that we could then call Fascism. The point is to always remember the lessons learned from Fascism, not just to bury the term in the past, in history. We can only hope that we are wise enough not to have humans casually sending each other to torturous mass-death again. Current events show us that humans all over the world still have alot to learn, and apparently we aren't thinking hard enough about what sort of society and what sort of individual would be able to do something like that.
This is why I think it is very important to call Fascism out when we see it, or see behavior that is representative of that sort of thinking and systematic behavior. I'm not talking about little "micro-fascisms" here, there is plenty of full Fascism going on every day.
Alot of people reacting to my use of the word (not counting those who like to make full of my polemical style, they are free to keep doing so) seem to think that this is a bad tactic to use to critique immigration policy because it doesn't reach out to those who disagree, or because a full condemnation is too idealistic, or just because they think that immigration feelings as they are are bad, but not that bad. This is mainly what I want to address.
Take a look at this picture. This was taken almost 50 years ago. Look at the woman with her mouth open, shouting slurs at the students that are making history by going to school. 50 years ago she was "one side of the debate". Now, she is a racist. We now recognize her opinion on public school policy as being equivalent to the thinking of these people. That is why troops had to be sent in to keep people like this woman only shouting.
Today, there are people with another "political opinion." Or these people. And those are just the people who "support" killing people who cross the border, not the ones who do it themselves (perhaps). And there are plenty of other people who believe that maybe they shouldn't be murdered outright, but it is "legal" to have to live in fear of being deported at any moment, losing their jobs, homes... and because it is legal, it is ok. And if you think that racist "opinions" are only held by far-right websites and groups like the John Birch Society, why don't you ask one of your minority friends what they think about race in this country?
So maybe it sounds a little funny to call people racist or Fascist now. But imagine what it will be like in 50 years, and what the racial population of this country will look like. Imagine how we will look back on the people who said, "well, you know its against the law for that person to be here". Maybe the same way that we look at people who stood in the path of desegregation?
My point is not that history will prove me right, because I don't know that. What I mean is that there are certain things that we do not realize until way after the fact. It is how historical mistakes like Fascism are made. Its because we don't fully look at what we are doing when we say, "legality equals truth," or "let's not offend the people we disagree with," or "every opinion is valid." Because later on we say, "shit, how did we let ourselves do that?" and "If only we had known the full extent of what was going on, we would have acted differently." It happens every day. Someone is building a wall, someone is murdered, someone is tortured while other idiots take digital pictures, someone is deciding to go to war, someone is making a law that takes away someone's house. Sometimes we just need a "What the fuck?" moment to realize what is actually going on.
So I'll say it again. Any support of laws that prevent people from moving from one place to another, which is a system of social control based upon an individual-in-the-social identification, IS FASCISM. Sorry if that offends you, that isn't the point. It doesn't mean that you aren't a good person, or that I don't like you. It means that you need to take a long hard look at what you think, why you think it, and how what you think is currently affecting other people.
So that's pretty much all I wanted to get across. Sorry if it sounded like a lecture, its really just more of what I was thinking as I thought it. Don't take me too seriously, take yourself seriously instead. Yeah but don't do that either.
5.03.2006
Immigration 3
I would hope that this excerpt from Cooperative Research (find these entries under their dates in the sections titled, "Saudi Arabia" and "Soviet-Afghan War", respectively) will end all the idiotic coversations of the "status of illegal immigrants" in connection with "terrorism." It was simple for all of the hijackers of the 9/11 attacks to enter this country by fooling the bureaucracy into giving them LEGAL documents, never mind the relative ease of obtaining fake documents. Remember these are people who arrive at airports and must speak face to face with border control agents, not people who risk their lives running through the desert. And, whether or not you are willing to believe that the CIA actually was responsible for getting them into the country, I guess that is taking the discussion in another direction, but you can be sure the relavence of terrorism doesn't have anything to do with whether the guy who delivered your chinese takeout has a green card.
May 2001
The US introduces the “Visa Express” program in Saudi Arabia, which allows any Saudi Arabian to obtain a visa through his or her travel agent instead of appearing at a consulate in person. An official later states, “The issuing officer has no idea whether the person applying for the visa is actually the person in the documents and application.” [US News and World Report, 1/12/2002; US Congress, 10/20/2002] At the time, warnings of an attack against the US led by the Saudi Osama bin Laden are higher than they had ever been before— “off the charts” as one senator later puts it. [US Congress, 10/18/2002; Los Angeles Times, 6/18/2002] A terrorism conference had recently concluded that Saudi Arabia was one of four top nationalities in al-Qaeda. [Star-Tribune (Minneapolis), 6/19/2002] Five hijackers—Khalid Almihdhar, Abdulaziz Alomari, Salem Alhazmi, Saeed Alghamdi, and Fayez Ahmed Banihammad—use Visa Express over the next month to enter the US. [US Congress, 10/20/2002] Even 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will successfully get a US Visa through this program in July (using a false name but real photograph), despite a posted $2 million reward for his capture. [Los Angeles Times, 2/27/2004] Only three percent of Saudi visa applicants are turned down by US consular officers in fiscal 2000 and 2001. In contrast, about 25 percent of US visa seekers worldwide are rejected. Acceptance is even more difficult for applicants from countries alleged to have ties to terrorism such as Iraq or Iran. [Washington Post, 12/1/2001] The widely criticized program is finally canceled in July 2002.
and:
Sept '87-Mar '89
Michael Springmann, head US consular official in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, later claims that during this period he is “repeatedly told to issue visas to unqualified applicants.” He turns them down, but is repeatedly overruled by superiors. Springmann loudly complains to numerous government offices, but no action is taken. He is fired and his files on these applicants are destroyed. He later learns that recruits from many countries fighting for bin Laden against Russia in Afghanistan were funneled through the Jeddah office to get visas to come to the US, where the recruits would travel to train for the Afghan war. According to Springmann, the Jeddah consulate was run by the CIA and staffed almost entirely by intelligence agents. This visa system may have continued at least through 9/11, and 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers received their visas through Jeddah, possibly as part of this program. [Fox News, 8/18/2002; Associated Press, 8/17/2002; BBC, 12/6/2001]
May 2001
The US introduces the “Visa Express” program in Saudi Arabia, which allows any Saudi Arabian to obtain a visa through his or her travel agent instead of appearing at a consulate in person. An official later states, “The issuing officer has no idea whether the person applying for the visa is actually the person in the documents and application.” [US News and World Report, 1/12/2002; US Congress, 10/20/2002] At the time, warnings of an attack against the US led by the Saudi Osama bin Laden are higher than they had ever been before— “off the charts” as one senator later puts it. [US Congress, 10/18/2002; Los Angeles Times, 6/18/2002] A terrorism conference had recently concluded that Saudi Arabia was one of four top nationalities in al-Qaeda. [Star-Tribune (Minneapolis), 6/19/2002] Five hijackers—Khalid Almihdhar, Abdulaziz Alomari, Salem Alhazmi, Saeed Alghamdi, and Fayez Ahmed Banihammad—use Visa Express over the next month to enter the US. [US Congress, 10/20/2002] Even 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will successfully get a US Visa through this program in July (using a false name but real photograph), despite a posted $2 million reward for his capture. [Los Angeles Times, 2/27/2004] Only three percent of Saudi visa applicants are turned down by US consular officers in fiscal 2000 and 2001. In contrast, about 25 percent of US visa seekers worldwide are rejected. Acceptance is even more difficult for applicants from countries alleged to have ties to terrorism such as Iraq or Iran. [Washington Post, 12/1/2001] The widely criticized program is finally canceled in July 2002.
and:
Sept '87-Mar '89
Michael Springmann, head US consular official in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, later claims that during this period he is “repeatedly told to issue visas to unqualified applicants.” He turns them down, but is repeatedly overruled by superiors. Springmann loudly complains to numerous government offices, but no action is taken. He is fired and his files on these applicants are destroyed. He later learns that recruits from many countries fighting for bin Laden against Russia in Afghanistan were funneled through the Jeddah office to get visas to come to the US, where the recruits would travel to train for the Afghan war. According to Springmann, the Jeddah consulate was run by the CIA and staffed almost entirely by intelligence agents. This visa system may have continued at least through 9/11, and 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers received their visas through Jeddah, possibly as part of this program. [Fox News, 8/18/2002; Associated Press, 8/17/2002; BBC, 12/6/2001]
Etymology of Fascism
Fascist- L fasces, a bundle of authoritative rods, pl of fascis, a bundle, has s fasc-, prob akin to MIR basc, a neck-band, a collar, and therefore perh to BASKET.
L fascis has It derivative fascio, a bundle, hence a political group, whence both fascismo, hence Fascism, and Fascisti, hence Fascists.
Fascis has further derivative fascina (fasc- + -ina), a faggot.
Source: Origins, by Eric Partridge, Greenwich, 1983.
Bundle of rods, you know like the Roman symbol. Individuals may break, but the bundle is solid. Kind of like the arrows in the Great Seal of the United States. Gotta love symbols. Anyway, you see the resemblance to faggot, like what the old guy on the cover of Led Zepplin IV is holding.
L fascis has It derivative fascio, a bundle, hence a political group, whence both fascismo, hence Fascism, and Fascisti, hence Fascists.
Fascis has further derivative fascina (fasc- + -ina), a faggot.
Source: Origins, by Eric Partridge, Greenwich, 1983.
Bundle of rods, you know like the Roman symbol. Individuals may break, but the bundle is solid. Kind of like the arrows in the Great Seal of the United States. Gotta love symbols. Anyway, you see the resemblance to faggot, like what the old guy on the cover of Led Zepplin IV is holding.
Immigration 2
Response to question by [youngrox] :
As serious as plans, yo. Laws aren't "real". There is nothing good about law itself. Law only exists to protect people and society. I think is a pretty accurate summation of the general poltical philosophy under which this state was developed. That said, I would ask your question right back at you: "Why do you think that immigration into the US (or any other country) should be controlled by the state?" The typical answer is given in a mode that says that whatever benefit or lack thereof there might be from living on that or the other side of a national boundary should be given/denied/granted-on-limited-basis to people mostly on account of place of birth, and then this is flexible based on other things like race and class. How does this protect people? Given that there IS such a benefit/lack dynamic associated with a border that people are trying to get across, (why no one seems to care about canadians entering the country), it would stand to reason that a law designed to keep some people on one side of the line is not designed to protect all people, rather only SOME people. And that "SOME" is determined by place of birth, then class, then race. So why should a state seek to decide who can come in and who can leave? Because it has racist, classist, and generally elitist ideas about who can and cannot obtain certain protections of "rights granted by god" (a little contradictory, eh?). If the argument was about social welfare, the law would be about fixing our social welfare system, not about figuring out who we can justify ourselves in denying that welfare (notice Clinton didn't do anything different with his welfare reform other than finding ways to take it away from people, either.)
When I say fascism, its not about nazis, or WWII, or the enemy of communism. (the etymology of the word is actually kind of cool, did you know it is related to "faggot"?). Its about certain means of personal ideological control being applied to society to ensure the continuation of certain societal trends of elitism and subsequent oppression.
While I personally tend to be fairly anti-state (which is really anti-bureaucracy) I have no personal problem with people deciding that they want to live in or under a state. But if they use that state to oppress people in a fascist way, then that is bad, and should (and will) be fought. This has nothing to do with who gets to own a car, this is about people getting to live where they want. You can build a wall, you can imprison people, you can make mandatory paperwork for people to own things or earn money, or you can just let a hurricane knock certain people's houses down and then refuse to let them rebuild them, it all ammounts to the say thing, which is using your power to maintain your power at the expense of others.
I'm not being radical, I'm not trying to be extreme, I'm just pointing out how the system works when "what is actually happening" seems to be fairly far out of the scope of most people's interest.
As serious as plans, yo. Laws aren't "real". There is nothing good about law itself. Law only exists to protect people and society. I think is a pretty accurate summation of the general poltical philosophy under which this state was developed. That said, I would ask your question right back at you: "Why do you think that immigration into the US (or any other country) should be controlled by the state?" The typical answer is given in a mode that says that whatever benefit or lack thereof there might be from living on that or the other side of a national boundary should be given/denied/granted-on-limited-basis to people mostly on account of place of birth, and then this is flexible based on other things like race and class. How does this protect people? Given that there IS such a benefit/lack dynamic associated with a border that people are trying to get across, (why no one seems to care about canadians entering the country), it would stand to reason that a law designed to keep some people on one side of the line is not designed to protect all people, rather only SOME people. And that "SOME" is determined by place of birth, then class, then race. So why should a state seek to decide who can come in and who can leave? Because it has racist, classist, and generally elitist ideas about who can and cannot obtain certain protections of "rights granted by god" (a little contradictory, eh?). If the argument was about social welfare, the law would be about fixing our social welfare system, not about figuring out who we can justify ourselves in denying that welfare (notice Clinton didn't do anything different with his welfare reform other than finding ways to take it away from people, either.)
When I say fascism, its not about nazis, or WWII, or the enemy of communism. (the etymology of the word is actually kind of cool, did you know it is related to "faggot"?). Its about certain means of personal ideological control being applied to society to ensure the continuation of certain societal trends of elitism and subsequent oppression.
While I personally tend to be fairly anti-state (which is really anti-bureaucracy) I have no personal problem with people deciding that they want to live in or under a state. But if they use that state to oppress people in a fascist way, then that is bad, and should (and will) be fought. This has nothing to do with who gets to own a car, this is about people getting to live where they want. You can build a wall, you can imprison people, you can make mandatory paperwork for people to own things or earn money, or you can just let a hurricane knock certain people's houses down and then refuse to let them rebuild them, it all ammounts to the say thing, which is using your power to maintain your power at the expense of others.
I'm not being radical, I'm not trying to be extreme, I'm just pointing out how the system works when "what is actually happening" seems to be fairly far out of the scope of most people's interest.
Immigration 1
I agree with [jungesam] about immigration. If you are in any way opposed to the free flow of people from one region to another, you are a fascist. It is not a matter of legality. All laws (or nationality) have done is to provide a juridical transference of racism, classism, and general good-old-fashioned elitism based on just about any category we can write into law and find borders between. If you think it is about legality then you are fucking blind or a fucking fascist. What does where you were born matter to anything about anything? If you want to find some sort of haven and social "rights" underneath the wing of a state, you should be allowed to sign that social contract. If you want to take advantage of some institutional bureaucratic provisions, then you will, whether you are what or the other. If you want to try and take advantage of other people economically by creating and supporting arbitrary social and individual boundaries and distinctions, then you are a fascist, and do not have a point of view, but only an abusive authoritarian psychology which I will personally make my business to subvert, malign, dissuade, or destroy.
4.22.2006
Daicon IV
In 1983 a Japanese Radish spaceship and a bunny girl teamed up to defeat sci-fi once and for all. Thanks to [zurkonic] for the link.
Science-fiction is the new literary fact. Thanks.
4.20.2006
Objectivity and Conspiracy
So far, in my combing the evidence regarding al-Queda and the "events known as 9/11" I have been very hesitant to form and "conclusions" because I think this is precisely where propaganda and parnoid theories start and real evidence ends. However, I think I have seen enough to say that I can think of three possibilities of "causality" that could be associated with our governments actions. I now pose these in order of seriousness of the implications, not of the likeliness that they are "true". I am fairly certain that there will never be a way to conclusively prove any of them beyond doubt (besides the first). And therein is the tragedy of history.
However, because I am currently working with Kant, I have decided to rate these three with his criteria for logical proof: Possible, Plausible, and Necessarily So.
First Possibility- necessarily so (best-case):
The FBI and the CIA ignored evidence and completely missed the opportunity to stop the largest and most ambitious terrorist attack on US soil despite the ease with which they could have done so, for no apparent reason other than bureaucratical idiocy. (This is basically what the 9/11 comission said, in not so strong language.)
Second Possibility- plausible (scary):
Certain high ranking members in the FBI and the CIA knew a large and ambitious terrorist attack was imminent, and although the did not know the details, pulled in the reigns of their organizations to allow the terrorist attack to take place. The motivation could be to create a lasting political image that would change the face of US politics corresponding to the ideology of neo-cons like the PNAC (although it should be noted this process was already in place before the Bush administration took power).
Third Possibility- possible (surreal):
al-queda is a front organization still being controlled by the CIA in order to create an impetus for armed conflict and american military domination post-communism. The attacks were planned and executed by the CIA and their operatives with the complacency of the FBI. The NSA is probably in their somewhere, but they cover their tracks better than the other two.
I only upgraded #2 to plausible today, because I read the text of Operation Northwood. Although that operation was never carried out, it only would have needed the approval of Kennedy and McNamara to go through, and then it would have been history, and we never would have known. Then I stopped to think, if this idea was suggested to Bush and Rumsfeld, would they say yes or no? Would allowing the deaths of a few thousand american civilians (or, only a few hundred, seeing as I don't think they counted on the WTC actually collapsing) be too much of a price for free ideological reign? Hence: plausible.
However, because I am currently working with Kant, I have decided to rate these three with his criteria for logical proof: Possible, Plausible, and Necessarily So.
First Possibility- necessarily so (best-case):
The FBI and the CIA ignored evidence and completely missed the opportunity to stop the largest and most ambitious terrorist attack on US soil despite the ease with which they could have done so, for no apparent reason other than bureaucratical idiocy. (This is basically what the 9/11 comission said, in not so strong language.)
Second Possibility- plausible (scary):
Certain high ranking members in the FBI and the CIA knew a large and ambitious terrorist attack was imminent, and although the did not know the details, pulled in the reigns of their organizations to allow the terrorist attack to take place. The motivation could be to create a lasting political image that would change the face of US politics corresponding to the ideology of neo-cons like the PNAC (although it should be noted this process was already in place before the Bush administration took power).
Third Possibility- possible (surreal):
al-queda is a front organization still being controlled by the CIA in order to create an impetus for armed conflict and american military domination post-communism. The attacks were planned and executed by the CIA and their operatives with the complacency of the FBI. The NSA is probably in their somewhere, but they cover their tracks better than the other two.
I only upgraded #2 to plausible today, because I read the text of Operation Northwood. Although that operation was never carried out, it only would have needed the approval of Kennedy and McNamara to go through, and then it would have been history, and we never would have known. Then I stopped to think, if this idea was suggested to Bush and Rumsfeld, would they say yes or no? Would allowing the deaths of a few thousand american civilians (or, only a few hundred, seeing as I don't think they counted on the WTC actually collapsing) be too much of a price for free ideological reign? Hence: plausible.
4.17.2006
Conspiracy?
[jungesam] Check out this site, it is very detailed. Especially look at the complete timeline of the day of 9/11. I haven't had a chance to read it all yet. The whole Cooperative Research site looks really sweet, it also has timelines of Katrina, Iraq, and other hard-to-track historical themes involving sketchy US business.
Did you know that the president of my school, Bob Kerrey, was on the 9/11 comission?
Since saying I was thinking about the fact that Flight 93 was shot down, I checked up on it, and it seems not only likely, but probably certain that it was shot down. The failure to admit this doesn't seem so much "conspiracy" as it was just stupid run-of-the-mill doublespeak, just like the US denying it is spying on Venezuela (my favorite of example of bullshit as status quo). My wonder is, if Bush did give the order for this plane to be taken down as [tanseybe] says, then what part does this play in the entire conspiracy of the day? Was it done to make it seem that the government was actually trying to thwart the attacks? If so, why wouldn't they have publicized it? Or is it just to convince the people within the government who know that it was shot down that the attacks were legit? Like, the typical terrorist response finally caught up with the last plane, and then they had to take it down or else it would be obvious to all the air traffic controllers and military etc. that the take down was deliberately stopped even though by that time the threat was very clear. Or was Bush not in on the conspiracy? Or was the motivation to show "heroic" Americans who thwarted the attack (the passengers) and the whole thing was orchestrated? That one doesn't seem very likely to me, considering the rescue workers were plenty of lambs to the slaughter already. Or, maybe if the entire day was allowed to happen rather than being deliberately orchestrated, once the towers collapsed then the decision was made to shoot down 93, because the carnage exceeded the expectations.
[jungesam] I've been looking over some 9/11 conspiracy shit on the inter'web. Mostly on this one www.whatreallyhappened.com. It's not a bad site, not great. Anyway, it seems much more plausible to me that if there was a "conspiracy" (not to assume causality or anything) that it would've occurred in the failure to stop the planes flying into the buildings. I've found several interesting ideas, alot of them relating to Israeli spies and Israeli communications companies that are supposed fronts for spy organizations (have you read about the alleged gun on Flight 11?). Which is all slightly suspicious, because it would put Israelis behind everything (and most of the sites seem to lead slightly or more than slightly to right, and not the christian right) but then again if you (whoever in the US was planning the whole thing) were going to have a foreign government help you out, the Israelis would certainly benifit from a war on terror (Islamic terror that is), they would also be very competent and probably already have alot of networks in place, and also it would be really convenient to cry anti-semitism against the largely circumstantial evidence to throw people off. That's who I would pick to help ME plan such a conspiracy, anyway. I certainly wouldn't pick a European country like Germany or something, the small help they do give the CIA ends up all over the front page.
But, I have to say I'm pretty convinced that the planes did bring down the towers, and that a plane hit the pentagon. All in all, I think it would be easier to fly a plane into the Pentagon than to fake it, because there sure were alot of people who claimed to witness it. And while one could go to all that trouble of providing a sample of fake witnesses, why not just actually do it? As for the WTC, I've looked at a shitload of diagrams, schematics, videos, pictures, and even seismic readings. And while I have very little idea what all those mean from a technical point of view, the things I see is that in both collapses, the original "explosion" of debris flying out of the sides of the buildings comes from the upper area of the impact zones. So, if the buildings were rigged with explosives, they would have had to been placed at different floors (because the planes impacted, like 15 floors apart?), and then the pilots would have had to hit directly below the bombs to make sure the explosions would show up in the right place. Also I saw one video where it is very clear that the side of the first tower (on the "inside" of where the top of the tower fell outward) buckles inward before debris shoots out. Very much like a beer can being crushed. That just doesn't seem consistent with an explosion. I read some description that said there were bombs in the basement, but that really doesn't make much sense either, because it is obvious the towers fell from the top.
What makes much more sense to me is that alot of people just can't believe that something so big and symbolic could fall down, and when it did, to fall down in the way it was designed to, and so they believe something "must" have caused it that wasn't two "little" 767s. Which is all kind of awe inspiring in a really brutal way. But, I would be willing to accept the very likely and plausible possibility that the government allowed either by inaction or by planning those planes to hit those buildings.
Oh, and also watching those video clips over and over also reminds me just how fucked up the whole thing is.
Did you know that the president of my school, Bob Kerrey, was on the 9/11 comission?
Since saying I was thinking about the fact that Flight 93 was shot down, I checked up on it, and it seems not only likely, but probably certain that it was shot down. The failure to admit this doesn't seem so much "conspiracy" as it was just stupid run-of-the-mill doublespeak, just like the US denying it is spying on Venezuela (my favorite of example of bullshit as status quo). My wonder is, if Bush did give the order for this plane to be taken down as [tanseybe] says, then what part does this play in the entire conspiracy of the day? Was it done to make it seem that the government was actually trying to thwart the attacks? If so, why wouldn't they have publicized it? Or is it just to convince the people within the government who know that it was shot down that the attacks were legit? Like, the typical terrorist response finally caught up with the last plane, and then they had to take it down or else it would be obvious to all the air traffic controllers and military etc. that the take down was deliberately stopped even though by that time the threat was very clear. Or was Bush not in on the conspiracy? Or was the motivation to show "heroic" Americans who thwarted the attack (the passengers) and the whole thing was orchestrated? That one doesn't seem very likely to me, considering the rescue workers were plenty of lambs to the slaughter already. Or, maybe if the entire day was allowed to happen rather than being deliberately orchestrated, once the towers collapsed then the decision was made to shoot down 93, because the carnage exceeded the expectations.
[jungesam] I've been looking over some 9/11 conspiracy shit on the inter'web. Mostly on this one www.whatreallyhappened.com. It's not a bad site, not great. Anyway, it seems much more plausible to me that if there was a "conspiracy" (not to assume causality or anything) that it would've occurred in the failure to stop the planes flying into the buildings. I've found several interesting ideas, alot of them relating to Israeli spies and Israeli communications companies that are supposed fronts for spy organizations (have you read about the alleged gun on Flight 11?). Which is all slightly suspicious, because it would put Israelis behind everything (and most of the sites seem to lead slightly or more than slightly to right, and not the christian right) but then again if you (whoever in the US was planning the whole thing) were going to have a foreign government help you out, the Israelis would certainly benifit from a war on terror (Islamic terror that is), they would also be very competent and probably already have alot of networks in place, and also it would be really convenient to cry anti-semitism against the largely circumstantial evidence to throw people off. That's who I would pick to help ME plan such a conspiracy, anyway. I certainly wouldn't pick a European country like Germany or something, the small help they do give the CIA ends up all over the front page.
But, I have to say I'm pretty convinced that the planes did bring down the towers, and that a plane hit the pentagon. All in all, I think it would be easier to fly a plane into the Pentagon than to fake it, because there sure were alot of people who claimed to witness it. And while one could go to all that trouble of providing a sample of fake witnesses, why not just actually do it? As for the WTC, I've looked at a shitload of diagrams, schematics, videos, pictures, and even seismic readings. And while I have very little idea what all those mean from a technical point of view, the things I see is that in both collapses, the original "explosion" of debris flying out of the sides of the buildings comes from the upper area of the impact zones. So, if the buildings were rigged with explosives, they would have had to been placed at different floors (because the planes impacted, like 15 floors apart?), and then the pilots would have had to hit directly below the bombs to make sure the explosions would show up in the right place. Also I saw one video where it is very clear that the side of the first tower (on the "inside" of where the top of the tower fell outward) buckles inward before debris shoots out. Very much like a beer can being crushed. That just doesn't seem consistent with an explosion. I read some description that said there were bombs in the basement, but that really doesn't make much sense either, because it is obvious the towers fell from the top.
What makes much more sense to me is that alot of people just can't believe that something so big and symbolic could fall down, and when it did, to fall down in the way it was designed to, and so they believe something "must" have caused it that wasn't two "little" 767s. Which is all kind of awe inspiring in a really brutal way. But, I would be willing to accept the very likely and plausible possibility that the government allowed either by inaction or by planning those planes to hit those buildings.
Oh, and also watching those video clips over and over also reminds me just how fucked up the whole thing is.
Intellectuality
My thoughts to one [jungesam] from my GrinnellPlan about a quote by Chomsky, in reverse chronological order, seperated by my addressing him. Achieved here for my convenience.
[jungesam] I like what you said. I think this conversation, in comparison to the typical plan "political" discussions, is "progressing" very nicely (heh heh).
First, I agree with what you described as the opposition between the object of texts as discursive objects and objects as "ts existence as real set of dynamics and problems operating in the material world". But, I'm not sure that Chomsky is speaking with this distinction in mind. He seems to be more concerned with the form of the theories as understandable, and thereby, useful, which is not totally unrelated, yet not taking up the exact point that you are. Most importantly, (I can't check at the moment because the site is down) I don't think he ever used the word "political", which you have used as the core of your point and that I believe is key to the actual problem (not Chomsky's issue, I'll try and distinguish between the two).
Second, just because this is irking me although it may not be very important, the whole "French School" thing is a little hard to follow. Chomsky (and us by extension) have included Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Lacan, and Sartre in the same "school" although the only thing they all have in common is that they are French, and perhaps that Americans all "look to the east" in the same direction. I think Chomsky is thinking about all of them together, but now that we are talking about "politics" I don't think that we are. This is part of the reason I think you and Chomsky are making different points. I don't think we have to argue that Lacan is a-political, and I think Sartre's political contradictions are pretty obvious. So from now on I'm going to try to use the names of who I am actually referring to, because I'm going to try and think about the actual connections between writing and politics, which we've already said occurs fairly close to the personal level, and not on the level of philosophical nationality.
Now, about politics and academics. Certainly it seems that at face value, the actual realm of politics is divorced from academics. In your example (whether historical or not), the intellectuals bicker about minor points of the theoretical background, while the real politics is going down in the streets. This is certainly a problem, especially once the movement ends, and then workers end up without jobs or dead and the academics get to have nice careers "analyzing" what went wrong. Certainly there is no class consciousness in that relationship, we can see that right off.
The problem, as I see it, is the problem itself. When we start talking about who/what is political and who/what isn't (as anyone who is concerned with actually having political "consequence" will undoubtably start to talk or think about) being "political" has become, in a manner of speaking, academic. This is part of the reason I posted those graffittos from 1968. I personally like the Situationists (and I think you do too) because they understand some of the inherent contradictions in human life, and embrace them. "Culture is the inversion of life," "It is forbidden to forbid," "Read less, live more," (ironically, written) and couldn't we add "I don't respect the idea of respect?" Haha. Part of the "intellectual" struggle of '68 is trying to figure out "what" exactly was the politics behind the movement, but it is near impossible. I don't want to overly romanticize it, but is this real politics then, that which cannot be pinned down as politics? If it is, then real politics failed. If it wasn't, does that mean that real politics won? Or have we yet to see "real politics"? Will we know it when we do? How will we know? Will we read about it in book? on walls?
While trying to figure out exactly how to assert ourselves in this crazy world, and try to make things better for ourselves and for everyone we know and for everyone we don't, I feel like we just have to get along as best as we can. I really liked what [glynnsea] said, and I don't think he is going about it all wrong. I think Sean is going about it as well as anyone can. He's doing something he thinks is important, and something that is challenging, and along the way he gathers inspiration from many things, one among them being books. I'm getting a degree in philosophy, not because I want the degree, but because I hope that it will help me help others in the same way I was helped by others. Hopefully by teaching or by generally working to make philosophy (more) accessible to others, someone can become awakened to the issue of the world in the same way I was.
But the philosophy is the point, not my own personal motivation. So, if we can't figure out what is political without some academic discussion, how could we decide whether or not academic discussion is political without academic discussion From this I would conclude that as contradictory as it sounds sometimes, politics is inherently intellectual. Of course the situationists would disagree, and I love them for it, but even a rejection of academics is academic. The only thing that could be completely unacademic would be alogical. Which is possible, and I think plausible, but I can only imagine that happening during acts of sheer anger, love, violence, sex, or other sorts of "affective" "unconscious" experience like drug use, etc. Again, that situationist sort of theme. But when we are not doing those things, all we have is "acadmeics," or logic and discourse.
All of this, by the way, I am grabbing from post-structural philosophy (especially Deleuze and Foucault) and my own musings thereupon. Hence I think that at least these thoughts that I am thinking now have some sort of relevance towards the "political" at least in the process of definition.
Not that my use of philosophy (specifically these authors) in anyway excuses them outright from their political failings. "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" has not solved the problem of capitalism or of schizophrenia, and many people have written about why. In addition, there may be issues that the text doesn't address fully, like the sexual issues that Braidotti brings up in her work. But does this mean that there is something wrong with academics, or these academics in particular? I don't really think so, other then the fact that they are not as perfect as some other "disciples" of them would like to believe. All it means to me is that we have to continue to use our powers of philosophy (the fundamentals that people like Foucualt and Deleuze teach us) in order to continue to refine our notion of the political and the actual political, "real set of dynamics and problems operating in the material world," so that whatever we are doing, we are doing it as best as we can.
Now, if Chomsky or anyone else thinks that certain authors some how fundamentally fail in this ability, it seems to me that either: 1) the person has read and understood the text and has disagreements with it that can be dealt with in discourse and action the way we deal with any other disagreements in the world 2) the person has not understood the text and is rejecting it superficially on that basis. This is the same sort of logic that sounds to me alot like when someone says, "I don't get ____ culture, it just seems so different from my own, it must be useless" (e.g. "I think rap music is stupid and incomprehensible and violent"), in other words, using a superficial disagreement as grounds for full dismissal and proof of cultural superiority. I think that you, [jungesam], are the first case, and that's why we're having a good conversation about it. On the other hand, I don't think Chomsky is willing or able to have a conversation about it, and that is why he fits into the latter case.
Because I have been discussing politics and academics, and because it is close to May, and mostly because the French youth won on the labor law, I am posting my favorites from an archive of graffitti compiled during May 1968. I stole it from the wikipedia article about May '68.
Lisez moins, vivez plus.
Read less, live more.
L'ennui est contre-r�volutionnaire.
Boredom is counterrevolutionary.
Pas de repl�trage, la structure est pourrie.
No replastering, the structure is rotten.
Nous ne voulons pas d'un monde o� la certitude de ne pas mourir de faim s'�change contre le risque de mourir d'ennui.
We want nothing of a world in which the certainty of not dying from hunger comes in exchange for the risk of dying from boredom.
Ceux qui font les r�volutions � moiti� ne font que se creuser un tombeau.
Those who make revolutions by halves do but dig themselves a grave.
On ne revendiquera rien, on ne demandera rien. On prendra, on occupera.
We will claim nothing, we will ask for nothing. We will take, we will occupy.
Plebiscite : qu'on dise oui qu'on dise non il fait de nous des cons.
Plebiscite: Whether we say yes or no, it makes chumps of us.
Depuis 1936 j'ai lutt� pour les augmentations de salaire. Mon p�re avant moi a lutt� pour les augmentations de salaire. Maintenant j'ai une t�l�, un frigo, une VW. Et cependant j'ai v�cu toujours la vie d'un con. Ne n�gociez pas avec les patrons. Abolissez-les.
Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases. My father before me fought for wage increases. Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen. Yet my whole life I've been a chump. Don't negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them.
Le patron a besoin de toi, tu n'as pas besoin de lui.
The boss needs you, you don't need him.
Travailleur: Tu as 25 ans mais ton syndicat est de l'autre si�cle.
Worker: You are 25, but your union is from the last century.
Veuillez laisser le Parti communiste aussi net en en sortant que vous voudriez le trouver en y entrant.
Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving as you would like to find it on entering.
Je suis marxiste tendance Groucho.
I am a Marxist of the Groucho tendency.
Soyez r�alistes, demandez l'impossible.
Be realistic, ask for the impossible.
On ach�te ton bonheur. Vole-le.
Your happiness is being bought. Steal it.
Sous les pav�s, la plage !
Beneath the cobblestones, the beach!
Ni Dieu ni ma�tre !
Neither God nor master!
Soyons cruels !
Let us be cruel!
� bas la charogne stalinienne ! � bas les groupuscules r�cup�rateurs !
Down with the Stalinist carcass! Down with the recuperator cells!
Vivre sans temps mort - jouir sans entraves
Live without dead time [ie. time of boredom, time at work] - enjoy without chains.
Il est interdit d'interdire.
It is forbidden to forbid.
Et cependant tout le monde veut respirer et personne ne peut respirer et beaucoup disent " nous respirerons plus tard. " Et la plupart ne meurent pas car ils sont d�j� morts.
Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can breathe and many say, "We will breathe later." And most of them don't die because they are already dead.
Dans une soci�t� qui a aboli toute aventure, la seule aventure qui reste est celle d�abolir la soci�t�.
In a society that has abolished all adventures, the only adventure left is to abolish society.
L��mancipation de l�homme sera totale ou ne sera pas.
The liberation of humanity will be total or it will not be.
La r�volution est incroyable parce que vraie.
The revolution is incredible because it�s real.
Je suis venu. J�ai vu. J�ai cru.
I came. I saw. I believed.
Cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derri�re toi !
Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!
Il est douloureux de subir les chefs, il est encore plus b�te de les choisir.
It�s painful to submit to our bosses; it�s even stupider to pick them.
Un seul week-end non r�volutionnaire est infiniment plus sanglant qu�un mois de r�volution permanente.
A single nonrevolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a month of permanent revolution.
Le bonheur est une id�e neuve.
Happiness is a new idea.
La culture est l�inversion de la vie.
Culture is the inversion of life.
La po�sie est dans la rue.
Poetry is in the street.
L�art est mort, ne consommez pas son cadavre.
Art is dead, don�t consume its corpse.
L�alcool tue. Prenez du L.S.D.
Alcohol kills. Take LSD.
Debout les damn�s de l�Universit�.
Arise, wretched of the University.
Je t�aime! Oh! dites-le avec des pav�s!
I love you! Oh, say it with cobblestones!
Camarades, l�amour se fait aussi en Sc. Po, pas seulement aux champs.
Comrades, love is being made in the Sciences Po [a prestigious academic institution] too, not just in the fields.
Travailleurs de tous les pays, amusez-vous!
Workers of the world, have fun!
Pouvoir � l'Imagination
Power to imagination.
[jungesam] In addition to the above and below, I learned today that Foucault joined students in throwing rocks at police during the student occupations in 68.
[jungesam] The full text of it is here. Its not incredibly interesting, the few paragraphs I had posted were pretty representative.
[jungesam] No big diagreement on my part, just a few things to clear up. First, I think the whole issue is overshadowed by the reification in Chomsky's words (and the general academic discourse) of this whole "author", "text", "theory" thing. How can someone say that a "theory" refuses to step into the political realm? A theory is nothing but an abstraction of discourse: an object with an ideal reflection within subjects. Of course discourse is going to consist of people sitting around and talking and writing, that's what discourse is. Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Merleau-Ponty were all fairly political as people in 60s and 70s France (the end result of those politics is debatable, but they were at least doing something. Lacan is obviously another story, and a quite interesting one is his own overtly non-political and reactionary way.) Now their philosophy has been taken as "theory" by other persons who are not in the least interested in doing anything political other than a "political" discourse. So to blame a book or a theory is just reifying the idea that somehow politics can be attributed to an object, which is precisely the opposite of what I take the "real" politics that most people talk about to be. You can blame Brian Massumi for not using Deleuze's books in a political way, or blame Zizek for creating a false politics by way of Lacan, but any such thing as "theory" cannot be "politics" by definiton. Whether or not a writer can be political by writing is another question, both for theory and politics. Do you see what I mean? I think this is a real problem for any sort of "material" politics, because it is so easy slip into idealism while trying to simultaneously keeping track of the material and ideal (in this sense I mean in the realm of ideas) factors of life. Is politics supposed to be of ideas, or objects? It seems like Chomsky wants text to be pieces of writing, or objects, and also be have within them ideals capable of the activities of subjects, without considering the intermediary contexts and discourses of multiple people, texts, etc. that really form the strata between object and subjective action.
Second, which I think follows directly from this, it is some sort of strange magical (a fetish?) process which allows a subject to represent an object (in this case, a text) to his/herself and somehow find a causal chain of "success" that becomes a positive consequence. What I mean is any sort of logic that would let us judge that a "text" has or has not somehow become "successful in the face of real world problems". Like you wisely noted, most actually political movements' "philosophy" comes from "the spontaneous philosophy of the participants". (Which I think Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard discovered in their own experience, and incorporated into their work. Whether this makes their work poltical or not is another story...) So if "grand narratives" are no longer revelant to politics or never were, then why are we castigating books for being books or for being all-too-human? What does Chomsky expect books to be such that certain books are failing his standard? How can he treat a book as both an object which people interact with and as a ideal that should be held against standards of judgment? It seems silly to expect the corpus of "theory" surrounding the name of Derrida, which finds itself largely synonymous with "literary theory" to somehow "get out of the text." So why would we expect any other book to get up and march to the picket line of its own volition, let alone rally together the students or workers or whoever and make them "political". Who can make another human be "political"? Who can tell someone what a book "means"? Isn't that one's own responsibility?
After going through these arugments in my mind, I can only think of two possible conclusions that Chomsky could be accomplishing in this strange circular reasoning. Since a book or theory cannot be political, or have "consequences for the real world problems that occupy my time and energies," his criticism could be that the certain people who tend to be involved with certain areas of study, certain texts, and certain discourses founded in dead authors names are ineffectual and wasting their time and pursuits. The other possible criticism I could read here is that the texts, discourse, and people involved are of such poor quality or substance as to make effectual and good use of intellectual time impossible. While the first is certainly possible, yet sort of progressive empty (he chooses to ignore rather than engage the current intellectuals by critiquing only people who are dead) the second seems to be either unreasonably cruel and heavy-handed for someone who also claims to not understand what he the theory he is dealing with, or simply a judgment call on theory as theory. If he is simply saying that these theories are not good theories because of their poor quality as theory, then he is just saying, "I don't like that author, instead I like these authors." Which, yeah, we all say and is fine (I don't read linguistics) but I hardly think that this is a relevant critique because he is not meeting the theory on its own terms.
I'm going to stop here. I just think he doesn't really bring anything to the table because it begins with a sort of screwy premise (a contradictory theoretical relationship between authors, texts, discourse, and effectiveness), conducts itself through a sketchy argument (something is unsuccessful because it lacks clear standards of success that I have already created, and it has no clear standards because it is unsuccessful) and ends up at a substance-less conclusion (the "theory" is deemed unsuccessful as he is unable to engage it in a clear way, all because he has defined theory in a contradictory way that is unable to be clearly engaged). Furthermore, one could agree with this end conclusion, no matter how specious it is, but what does one do in response? Stop reading French people and read Chomsky or his friends? Stop reading all together? Or just continue trying to read in a critical and thoughtful manner, considering an idea to be only an idea and a book to be only a book, like I was doing before I read that Chomsky statement?
I think what you said about the revolutionary/political content of current French thought is interesting and a good point that people involved with the discourse rarely think about. However, one would have to have read and understood those texts for what they are (only texts) before one could start talking about that issue. I don't think Chomsky even makes it out of the gate.
[jungesam][campbel2] I think what Chomsky said is something that has to be said, but thus being said it is not all that more interesting than anything that has been said to which he is saying it.
Over-complicated? Yeah.
Elitism is certainly an issue. But the counter issue is qualification. This is something I've gone back and forth about during my almost complete first year of graduate education. I still support the idea of higher education and degree status because of people like Gene Ray. There needs to be a way to figure out if people are presenting themselves and their opinions in a helpful manner at all, and to seperate the wheat from the chaff. But this seems to have a unfortunate consequence of becoming a club rather than a specialized discipline.
But I disagree about what Chomsky says about having things explained in an easy way. I think that is pretty much bullshit, and a problem of our consumer culture that wants everything packaged for consumption. If you want ideas that are packaged for mass use, then become an evangelical Christian or a marketing specialist, because that is the current paramount of ideas constructed for easy understanding and "viral" dissemination. The wonders of "language" do not give us the ability to make things equivicably simple and understandable. I don't know if that idea itself could be any simpler and understandable. If Chomsky doesn't expect to understand Neutrino physics, why does he think that the functioning of the unconscious or society or politics could be any simpler?
Of course, if you are going to speak about something obscure, and to do so you find it necessary to speak in an obscure manner, you should be prepared for most people to ignore you or misunderstand you. As well, you should be held to a higher standard, of either research or results of such research and so-called "theories", and not be given a free reign to word-vomit your way to 3 published books a year. This is why I find Zizek obnoxious.
I have found that the understanding of a text is quite a process in itself, fairly divorced from the writing of a text. So if one is going to dive into something quite difficult, say Deleuze, Lacan, or Derrida, the process by which one understands the text and what they end up with it is probably going to be fairly different than what the author intended. It will most likely be a mixture of what the reader wanted to extract from the text and the current discourse surround that "author" (when the author is dead the persona of the author ends up becoming a characterization or a genre rather than an actual person, Lacan is a excellent example, and Deleuze is quickly becoming similar). That being said, when one picks up a text of, say, Derrida for the first time, they are probably going to have to rely on other secondary-work by others to "get into" the flow of the terms, ideas, etc. If the text is somewhat like Derrida, that means that alot of the secondary texts that add to the general philosophical "persona" or characterization of Derrida's thought, forming a general "theory" that one will have to be accustom to. If the secondary work, like that of Derrida, is fairly incomprenhisble in an attempt to be "deep" then the reading that one will take is that this "theory" is stupid, pretensious, and ultimately not worth the trouble. At this point, it might not be worth it.
But one has to remember is that it is just a book, filled with sentences, made up of words. I think this what Chomsky (and alot of other people) miss. There is no "theory" unless one is picking up the book with that in mind. This is why I am glad I first started reading Deleuze with no "formal" introduction to his work, and very few encounters with other texts. This way, I was able to find the great parts that I could interpret myself, and when I finally got around to seeing what the "theory" of Deleuze was known to be, I was disgusted with the ease that people made light of his work.
A "theory" is not complicated, it is bullshit. Much like both the "theory" of evolution and intelligent design. Both are vague abstractions of an entire wealth of wisdom that are not alternatives to each other at all. The are both very diverse and have had much evolution over the course of their history that have actually very little to do with either Darwin or the Bible (the supposed canonical "texts" which provide the "truth" of the theories), and to think of them as alternative "theories" is to fall into a sort of bullshit politics that is substantiated by soundbytes and headlines.
Where I think that this leaves us is that what you get out of any "text", "theory", or "idea" is fairly contingent on what you put into it. I have ranted before about how Lacan is almost incomprehensible. I think what I said was something like "he is so obscure as to make his thought mean just about anything one wants". Which is fairly true, yet no reason to dispose of him. This is precisely the same as "history", language, or anything else. There are rought indicators which you can use to direct your argumentation in a certain direction or form, but in the end one's creativity will largely determine what the "conclusions" are.
So complicated ideas are complicated, unless you drastically simplify them, and then they will be simple ideas. Haven't we all figured this out before? I feel like this is one of the lagging lessons of post-modernism that people just can't seem to except, and thus why we haven't left post-modernism behind. Ideas are just ideas, no more no less. Texts are text, theories are ideas lined upon in points, axes, or fields. A narrative is story with characters and action and a timeline. Truth is what we say it is. Success is dependent upon the conditions of "success". Why does Chomsky have such a hard time with this? Why do any of us? It doesn't stymie thought unless one needs thought to be dependent on texts being "works," theories being "movements," narratives being "history," and truth being True.
The reason that I read the "elite, cult of postmodernism" is because I can get stuff out of it and apply it in ways I find useful. If I didn't, I wouldn't read it. If you want it explained to you I would love to help, but you are going to have to do the comprehension on your own. I can't and won't make difficult things hard for someone's own gradification, just so they can say they "get it". This is why there are different "theories" in philosophy and "disciplines" in academics, because first of all, there are way too many of us doing this for any one of us to read and understand it all, and second because if there was a unified theory, we would all be saying precisely the same thing, and that would be useless, never mind impossible.
[jungesam] I like what you said. I think this conversation, in comparison to the typical plan "political" discussions, is "progressing" very nicely (heh heh).
First, I agree with what you described as the opposition between the object of texts as discursive objects and objects as "ts existence as real set of dynamics and problems operating in the material world". But, I'm not sure that Chomsky is speaking with this distinction in mind. He seems to be more concerned with the form of the theories as understandable, and thereby, useful, which is not totally unrelated, yet not taking up the exact point that you are. Most importantly, (I can't check at the moment because the site is down) I don't think he ever used the word "political", which you have used as the core of your point and that I believe is key to the actual problem (not Chomsky's issue, I'll try and distinguish between the two).
Second, just because this is irking me although it may not be very important, the whole "French School" thing is a little hard to follow. Chomsky (and us by extension) have included Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Lacan, and Sartre in the same "school" although the only thing they all have in common is that they are French, and perhaps that Americans all "look to the east" in the same direction. I think Chomsky is thinking about all of them together, but now that we are talking about "politics" I don't think that we are. This is part of the reason I think you and Chomsky are making different points. I don't think we have to argue that Lacan is a-political, and I think Sartre's political contradictions are pretty obvious. So from now on I'm going to try to use the names of who I am actually referring to, because I'm going to try and think about the actual connections between writing and politics, which we've already said occurs fairly close to the personal level, and not on the level of philosophical nationality.
Now, about politics and academics. Certainly it seems that at face value, the actual realm of politics is divorced from academics. In your example (whether historical or not), the intellectuals bicker about minor points of the theoretical background, while the real politics is going down in the streets. This is certainly a problem, especially once the movement ends, and then workers end up without jobs or dead and the academics get to have nice careers "analyzing" what went wrong. Certainly there is no class consciousness in that relationship, we can see that right off.
The problem, as I see it, is the problem itself. When we start talking about who/what is political and who/what isn't (as anyone who is concerned with actually having political "consequence" will undoubtably start to talk or think about) being "political" has become, in a manner of speaking, academic. This is part of the reason I posted those graffittos from 1968. I personally like the Situationists (and I think you do too) because they understand some of the inherent contradictions in human life, and embrace them. "Culture is the inversion of life," "It is forbidden to forbid," "Read less, live more," (ironically, written) and couldn't we add "I don't respect the idea of respect?" Haha. Part of the "intellectual" struggle of '68 is trying to figure out "what" exactly was the politics behind the movement, but it is near impossible. I don't want to overly romanticize it, but is this real politics then, that which cannot be pinned down as politics? If it is, then real politics failed. If it wasn't, does that mean that real politics won? Or have we yet to see "real politics"? Will we know it when we do? How will we know? Will we read about it in book? on walls?
While trying to figure out exactly how to assert ourselves in this crazy world, and try to make things better for ourselves and for everyone we know and for everyone we don't, I feel like we just have to get along as best as we can. I really liked what [glynnsea] said, and I don't think he is going about it all wrong. I think Sean is going about it as well as anyone can. He's doing something he thinks is important, and something that is challenging, and along the way he gathers inspiration from many things, one among them being books. I'm getting a degree in philosophy, not because I want the degree, but because I hope that it will help me help others in the same way I was helped by others. Hopefully by teaching or by generally working to make philosophy (more) accessible to others, someone can become awakened to the issue of the world in the same way I was.
But the philosophy is the point, not my own personal motivation. So, if we can't figure out what is political without some academic discussion, how could we decide whether or not academic discussion is political without academic discussion From this I would conclude that as contradictory as it sounds sometimes, politics is inherently intellectual. Of course the situationists would disagree, and I love them for it, but even a rejection of academics is academic. The only thing that could be completely unacademic would be alogical. Which is possible, and I think plausible, but I can only imagine that happening during acts of sheer anger, love, violence, sex, or other sorts of "affective" "unconscious" experience like drug use, etc. Again, that situationist sort of theme. But when we are not doing those things, all we have is "acadmeics," or logic and discourse.
All of this, by the way, I am grabbing from post-structural philosophy (especially Deleuze and Foucault) and my own musings thereupon. Hence I think that at least these thoughts that I am thinking now have some sort of relevance towards the "political" at least in the process of definition.
Not that my use of philosophy (specifically these authors) in anyway excuses them outright from their political failings. "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" has not solved the problem of capitalism or of schizophrenia, and many people have written about why. In addition, there may be issues that the text doesn't address fully, like the sexual issues that Braidotti brings up in her work. But does this mean that there is something wrong with academics, or these academics in particular? I don't really think so, other then the fact that they are not as perfect as some other "disciples" of them would like to believe. All it means to me is that we have to continue to use our powers of philosophy (the fundamentals that people like Foucualt and Deleuze teach us) in order to continue to refine our notion of the political and the actual political, "real set of dynamics and problems operating in the material world," so that whatever we are doing, we are doing it as best as we can.
Now, if Chomsky or anyone else thinks that certain authors some how fundamentally fail in this ability, it seems to me that either: 1) the person has read and understood the text and has disagreements with it that can be dealt with in discourse and action the way we deal with any other disagreements in the world 2) the person has not understood the text and is rejecting it superficially on that basis. This is the same sort of logic that sounds to me alot like when someone says, "I don't get ____ culture, it just seems so different from my own, it must be useless" (e.g. "I think rap music is stupid and incomprehensible and violent"), in other words, using a superficial disagreement as grounds for full dismissal and proof of cultural superiority. I think that you, [jungesam], are the first case, and that's why we're having a good conversation about it. On the other hand, I don't think Chomsky is willing or able to have a conversation about it, and that is why he fits into the latter case.
Because I have been discussing politics and academics, and because it is close to May, and mostly because the French youth won on the labor law, I am posting my favorites from an archive of graffitti compiled during May 1968. I stole it from the wikipedia article about May '68.
Lisez moins, vivez plus.
Read less, live more.
L'ennui est contre-r�volutionnaire.
Boredom is counterrevolutionary.
Pas de repl�trage, la structure est pourrie.
No replastering, the structure is rotten.
Nous ne voulons pas d'un monde o� la certitude de ne pas mourir de faim s'�change contre le risque de mourir d'ennui.
We want nothing of a world in which the certainty of not dying from hunger comes in exchange for the risk of dying from boredom.
Ceux qui font les r�volutions � moiti� ne font que se creuser un tombeau.
Those who make revolutions by halves do but dig themselves a grave.
On ne revendiquera rien, on ne demandera rien. On prendra, on occupera.
We will claim nothing, we will ask for nothing. We will take, we will occupy.
Plebiscite : qu'on dise oui qu'on dise non il fait de nous des cons.
Plebiscite: Whether we say yes or no, it makes chumps of us.
Depuis 1936 j'ai lutt� pour les augmentations de salaire. Mon p�re avant moi a lutt� pour les augmentations de salaire. Maintenant j'ai une t�l�, un frigo, une VW. Et cependant j'ai v�cu toujours la vie d'un con. Ne n�gociez pas avec les patrons. Abolissez-les.
Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases. My father before me fought for wage increases. Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen. Yet my whole life I've been a chump. Don't negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them.
Le patron a besoin de toi, tu n'as pas besoin de lui.
The boss needs you, you don't need him.
Travailleur: Tu as 25 ans mais ton syndicat est de l'autre si�cle.
Worker: You are 25, but your union is from the last century.
Veuillez laisser le Parti communiste aussi net en en sortant que vous voudriez le trouver en y entrant.
Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving as you would like to find it on entering.
Je suis marxiste tendance Groucho.
I am a Marxist of the Groucho tendency.
Soyez r�alistes, demandez l'impossible.
Be realistic, ask for the impossible.
On ach�te ton bonheur. Vole-le.
Your happiness is being bought. Steal it.
Sous les pav�s, la plage !
Beneath the cobblestones, the beach!
Ni Dieu ni ma�tre !
Neither God nor master!
Soyons cruels !
Let us be cruel!
� bas la charogne stalinienne ! � bas les groupuscules r�cup�rateurs !
Down with the Stalinist carcass! Down with the recuperator cells!
Vivre sans temps mort - jouir sans entraves
Live without dead time [ie. time of boredom, time at work] - enjoy without chains.
Il est interdit d'interdire.
It is forbidden to forbid.
Et cependant tout le monde veut respirer et personne ne peut respirer et beaucoup disent " nous respirerons plus tard. " Et la plupart ne meurent pas car ils sont d�j� morts.
Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can breathe and many say, "We will breathe later." And most of them don't die because they are already dead.
Dans une soci�t� qui a aboli toute aventure, la seule aventure qui reste est celle d�abolir la soci�t�.
In a society that has abolished all adventures, the only adventure left is to abolish society.
L��mancipation de l�homme sera totale ou ne sera pas.
The liberation of humanity will be total or it will not be.
La r�volution est incroyable parce que vraie.
The revolution is incredible because it�s real.
Je suis venu. J�ai vu. J�ai cru.
I came. I saw. I believed.
Cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derri�re toi !
Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!
Il est douloureux de subir les chefs, il est encore plus b�te de les choisir.
It�s painful to submit to our bosses; it�s even stupider to pick them.
Un seul week-end non r�volutionnaire est infiniment plus sanglant qu�un mois de r�volution permanente.
A single nonrevolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a month of permanent revolution.
Le bonheur est une id�e neuve.
Happiness is a new idea.
La culture est l�inversion de la vie.
Culture is the inversion of life.
La po�sie est dans la rue.
Poetry is in the street.
L�art est mort, ne consommez pas son cadavre.
Art is dead, don�t consume its corpse.
L�alcool tue. Prenez du L.S.D.
Alcohol kills. Take LSD.
Debout les damn�s de l�Universit�.
Arise, wretched of the University.
Je t�aime! Oh! dites-le avec des pav�s!
I love you! Oh, say it with cobblestones!
Camarades, l�amour se fait aussi en Sc. Po, pas seulement aux champs.
Comrades, love is being made in the Sciences Po [a prestigious academic institution] too, not just in the fields.
Travailleurs de tous les pays, amusez-vous!
Workers of the world, have fun!
Pouvoir � l'Imagination
Power to imagination.
[jungesam] In addition to the above and below, I learned today that Foucault joined students in throwing rocks at police during the student occupations in 68.
[jungesam] The full text of it is here. Its not incredibly interesting, the few paragraphs I had posted were pretty representative.
[jungesam] No big diagreement on my part, just a few things to clear up. First, I think the whole issue is overshadowed by the reification in Chomsky's words (and the general academic discourse) of this whole "author", "text", "theory" thing. How can someone say that a "theory" refuses to step into the political realm? A theory is nothing but an abstraction of discourse: an object with an ideal reflection within subjects. Of course discourse is going to consist of people sitting around and talking and writing, that's what discourse is. Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Merleau-Ponty were all fairly political as people in 60s and 70s France (the end result of those politics is debatable, but they were at least doing something. Lacan is obviously another story, and a quite interesting one is his own overtly non-political and reactionary way.) Now their philosophy has been taken as "theory" by other persons who are not in the least interested in doing anything political other than a "political" discourse. So to blame a book or a theory is just reifying the idea that somehow politics can be attributed to an object, which is precisely the opposite of what I take the "real" politics that most people talk about to be. You can blame Brian Massumi for not using Deleuze's books in a political way, or blame Zizek for creating a false politics by way of Lacan, but any such thing as "theory" cannot be "politics" by definiton. Whether or not a writer can be political by writing is another question, both for theory and politics. Do you see what I mean? I think this is a real problem for any sort of "material" politics, because it is so easy slip into idealism while trying to simultaneously keeping track of the material and ideal (in this sense I mean in the realm of ideas) factors of life. Is politics supposed to be of ideas, or objects? It seems like Chomsky wants text to be pieces of writing, or objects, and also be have within them ideals capable of the activities of subjects, without considering the intermediary contexts and discourses of multiple people, texts, etc. that really form the strata between object and subjective action.
Second, which I think follows directly from this, it is some sort of strange magical (a fetish?) process which allows a subject to represent an object (in this case, a text) to his/herself and somehow find a causal chain of "success" that becomes a positive consequence. What I mean is any sort of logic that would let us judge that a "text" has or has not somehow become "successful in the face of real world problems". Like you wisely noted, most actually political movements' "philosophy" comes from "the spontaneous philosophy of the participants". (Which I think Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard discovered in their own experience, and incorporated into their work. Whether this makes their work poltical or not is another story...) So if "grand narratives" are no longer revelant to politics or never were, then why are we castigating books for being books or for being all-too-human? What does Chomsky expect books to be such that certain books are failing his standard? How can he treat a book as both an object which people interact with and as a ideal that should be held against standards of judgment? It seems silly to expect the corpus of "theory" surrounding the name of Derrida, which finds itself largely synonymous with "literary theory" to somehow "get out of the text." So why would we expect any other book to get up and march to the picket line of its own volition, let alone rally together the students or workers or whoever and make them "political". Who can make another human be "political"? Who can tell someone what a book "means"? Isn't that one's own responsibility?
After going through these arugments in my mind, I can only think of two possible conclusions that Chomsky could be accomplishing in this strange circular reasoning. Since a book or theory cannot be political, or have "consequences for the real world problems that occupy my time and energies," his criticism could be that the certain people who tend to be involved with certain areas of study, certain texts, and certain discourses founded in dead authors names are ineffectual and wasting their time and pursuits. The other possible criticism I could read here is that the texts, discourse, and people involved are of such poor quality or substance as to make effectual and good use of intellectual time impossible. While the first is certainly possible, yet sort of progressive empty (he chooses to ignore rather than engage the current intellectuals by critiquing only people who are dead) the second seems to be either unreasonably cruel and heavy-handed for someone who also claims to not understand what he the theory he is dealing with, or simply a judgment call on theory as theory. If he is simply saying that these theories are not good theories because of their poor quality as theory, then he is just saying, "I don't like that author, instead I like these authors." Which, yeah, we all say and is fine (I don't read linguistics) but I hardly think that this is a relevant critique because he is not meeting the theory on its own terms.
I'm going to stop here. I just think he doesn't really bring anything to the table because it begins with a sort of screwy premise (a contradictory theoretical relationship between authors, texts, discourse, and effectiveness), conducts itself through a sketchy argument (something is unsuccessful because it lacks clear standards of success that I have already created, and it has no clear standards because it is unsuccessful) and ends up at a substance-less conclusion (the "theory" is deemed unsuccessful as he is unable to engage it in a clear way, all because he has defined theory in a contradictory way that is unable to be clearly engaged). Furthermore, one could agree with this end conclusion, no matter how specious it is, but what does one do in response? Stop reading French people and read Chomsky or his friends? Stop reading all together? Or just continue trying to read in a critical and thoughtful manner, considering an idea to be only an idea and a book to be only a book, like I was doing before I read that Chomsky statement?
I think what you said about the revolutionary/political content of current French thought is interesting and a good point that people involved with the discourse rarely think about. However, one would have to have read and understood those texts for what they are (only texts) before one could start talking about that issue. I don't think Chomsky even makes it out of the gate.
[jungesam][campbel2] I think what Chomsky said is something that has to be said, but thus being said it is not all that more interesting than anything that has been said to which he is saying it.
Over-complicated? Yeah.
Elitism is certainly an issue. But the counter issue is qualification. This is something I've gone back and forth about during my almost complete first year of graduate education. I still support the idea of higher education and degree status because of people like Gene Ray. There needs to be a way to figure out if people are presenting themselves and their opinions in a helpful manner at all, and to seperate the wheat from the chaff. But this seems to have a unfortunate consequence of becoming a club rather than a specialized discipline.
But I disagree about what Chomsky says about having things explained in an easy way. I think that is pretty much bullshit, and a problem of our consumer culture that wants everything packaged for consumption. If you want ideas that are packaged for mass use, then become an evangelical Christian or a marketing specialist, because that is the current paramount of ideas constructed for easy understanding and "viral" dissemination. The wonders of "language" do not give us the ability to make things equivicably simple and understandable. I don't know if that idea itself could be any simpler and understandable. If Chomsky doesn't expect to understand Neutrino physics, why does he think that the functioning of the unconscious or society or politics could be any simpler?
Of course, if you are going to speak about something obscure, and to do so you find it necessary to speak in an obscure manner, you should be prepared for most people to ignore you or misunderstand you. As well, you should be held to a higher standard, of either research or results of such research and so-called "theories", and not be given a free reign to word-vomit your way to 3 published books a year. This is why I find Zizek obnoxious.
I have found that the understanding of a text is quite a process in itself, fairly divorced from the writing of a text. So if one is going to dive into something quite difficult, say Deleuze, Lacan, or Derrida, the process by which one understands the text and what they end up with it is probably going to be fairly different than what the author intended. It will most likely be a mixture of what the reader wanted to extract from the text and the current discourse surround that "author" (when the author is dead the persona of the author ends up becoming a characterization or a genre rather than an actual person, Lacan is a excellent example, and Deleuze is quickly becoming similar). That being said, when one picks up a text of, say, Derrida for the first time, they are probably going to have to rely on other secondary-work by others to "get into" the flow of the terms, ideas, etc. If the text is somewhat like Derrida, that means that alot of the secondary texts that add to the general philosophical "persona" or characterization of Derrida's thought, forming a general "theory" that one will have to be accustom to. If the secondary work, like that of Derrida, is fairly incomprenhisble in an attempt to be "deep" then the reading that one will take is that this "theory" is stupid, pretensious, and ultimately not worth the trouble. At this point, it might not be worth it.
But one has to remember is that it is just a book, filled with sentences, made up of words. I think this what Chomsky (and alot of other people) miss. There is no "theory" unless one is picking up the book with that in mind. This is why I am glad I first started reading Deleuze with no "formal" introduction to his work, and very few encounters with other texts. This way, I was able to find the great parts that I could interpret myself, and when I finally got around to seeing what the "theory" of Deleuze was known to be, I was disgusted with the ease that people made light of his work.
A "theory" is not complicated, it is bullshit. Much like both the "theory" of evolution and intelligent design. Both are vague abstractions of an entire wealth of wisdom that are not alternatives to each other at all. The are both very diverse and have had much evolution over the course of their history that have actually very little to do with either Darwin or the Bible (the supposed canonical "texts" which provide the "truth" of the theories), and to think of them as alternative "theories" is to fall into a sort of bullshit politics that is substantiated by soundbytes and headlines.
Where I think that this leaves us is that what you get out of any "text", "theory", or "idea" is fairly contingent on what you put into it. I have ranted before about how Lacan is almost incomprehensible. I think what I said was something like "he is so obscure as to make his thought mean just about anything one wants". Which is fairly true, yet no reason to dispose of him. This is precisely the same as "history", language, or anything else. There are rought indicators which you can use to direct your argumentation in a certain direction or form, but in the end one's creativity will largely determine what the "conclusions" are.
So complicated ideas are complicated, unless you drastically simplify them, and then they will be simple ideas. Haven't we all figured this out before? I feel like this is one of the lagging lessons of post-modernism that people just can't seem to except, and thus why we haven't left post-modernism behind. Ideas are just ideas, no more no less. Texts are text, theories are ideas lined upon in points, axes, or fields. A narrative is story with characters and action and a timeline. Truth is what we say it is. Success is dependent upon the conditions of "success". Why does Chomsky have such a hard time with this? Why do any of us? It doesn't stymie thought unless one needs thought to be dependent on texts being "works," theories being "movements," narratives being "history," and truth being True.
The reason that I read the "elite, cult of postmodernism" is because I can get stuff out of it and apply it in ways I find useful. If I didn't, I wouldn't read it. If you want it explained to you I would love to help, but you are going to have to do the comprehension on your own. I can't and won't make difficult things hard for someone's own gradification, just so they can say they "get it". This is why there are different "theories" in philosophy and "disciplines" in academics, because first of all, there are way too many of us doing this for any one of us to read and understand it all, and second because if there was a unified theory, we would all be saying precisely the same thing, and that would be useless, never mind impossible.
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