GABlog

If we accept the originary hypothesis we accept that, at the most basic level of analysis, there are nothing but events.  Speaking of broader social processes, like the extension of the market system, is a necessary shorthand, but ultimately that “process” is nothing but a series of events that reference each other as signs.  The market system hasn’t just flowed naturally from more rudimentary forms of reciprocity and sociability; we would have to be able to break it down into a series confrontations, experiments, serendipitous discoveries, seized opportunities, etc.–i.e., events, none of which were inevitable, even if the constitution of one event through its referencing of previous, “precursor” events gives that sense of inevitability. This doesn’t deny that the market system is the best mode of interaction yet discovered for recycling resentments; it just insists that it had to be discovered, and this could have only happened through a series of events which could just as easily have not taken place.

This methodological claim has a claim upon our attention now in particular because we are living in a period of intensified or compressed history, in which the “event-fulness” of reality is especially evident and the attempt to reduce reality to hypostasized abstractions especially useless.  Nothing is happening now because it has to happen, because the next stage of history demands it; everything is happening because of those who are very determined to make it happen, against others determined to make something else happen; in a sense this is always the case, of course, but in compressed history the difference is that none of the agents have a clear or obvious advantage because the institutions established to meet the needs of an earlier crisis, due to the very effectiveness with which they deferred that crisis, no longer channel events in reasonably predictable directions.  So, if GA is to contribute to the disclosure of the kinds of signs that will transcend the crisis which we could name the white guilt/victimary axis, this basic methodological principle must be highlighted.

So, what is an event?  A minimal, formal definition:  an event is an occurence which cannot be sufficiently accounted for by what has preceded it, and after which nothing can be sufficiently accounted for other than by reference to it.  A break, then, which cannot be defined by what came before, while defining what comes after.  And the originary scene provides us with a more “internal” or substantive definition:  an event generates a sign.  An event is over, is “closed,” once it issues a sign which is then iterated within other events, which either remain within the dispensation provided by that sign, or produce a new sign and therefore transcend that previous, epoch-making, event.

We have adequately analyzed an event, then, when we have located the constitutive mimetic rivalries which led to the crisis, and located them as they have been disclosed by the sign closing the event.  What was held sacred by the previous prevailing sign has been disclosed as a source of murderous rivalries, leading to the discovery/invention of a new mode of sacrality, a new center, not to be touched or even approached.  Of course, this analytical approach can become enormously complex.  For now, it is enough to mention that the meaning of the sign issued by the event can only be gleaned or known within another event, an iterative event, in which the sign emitted in the foundational event is shown, simply, to work, to defer some crisis.  We knew that the Holocaust was the foundational event of the post-War era not on April 9, 1945, but when (to take one possibility, or one of many iterative events), American students insisted they would not be “good Germans” and fail to heed the testimony of the victims of their own system–and where, at least plausibly, were thereby instrumental in stopping a war, a war which, in turn, could have led to nuclear conflagration.  (Is this a plausible account?  One could only argue it one way or another within another iterative scene)

I would suggest that in the case of the Holocaust the sign that “closed” the event and made it available for iteration was the emergence, first in a tiny and largely ignored trickle, and finally in the form of best sellers and Oscar winning movies, of victims’ testimony.  The testinomy is what revealed something genuinely new–not the content or information it provided, but in the fact that post-War testimony maintained its continuity with attempts to “tell the world” during the War itself; as any reader of these testimonies know, part of the horror was the sense of certainty that no one knew or would ever know what was happening, that the Nazis would succeed in keeping their monstrous crimes secret, as they constantly taunted their victims would, in fact, be the case.  So, what these testimonies really said to each and every reader, over and above the usually meticulous presentation of the detailed account itself is, “where were YOU”?  If the victims didn’t succeed in getting the word out, one must consider that it was also because no one out there was listening very carefully.  All this could happen without ruffling the surface of our everyday existence (even, granted, a wartime, crisis existence)–our existing institutions, and our consciences, or moral antennae, must be radically deficient in some way, some way in which we can never allow them to be deficient again, because next time we ourselves might not survive (whether physically or morally can be left open).

There is, of course, another iterative event consolidating the hold of “Auschwitz” upon the postmodern world, one which complicates it considerably:  the foundation of Israel and, perhaps even more importantly, the massive mobilization of world-wide Jewish solidarity in response to the threat posed by the Six Day War in 1967 (and the perceived abandonment of the Jews, once again, to their fate at that critical moment).  If it weren’t for that, it would be possible to almost forget the actual identity of the Nazis’ victims–once Auschwitz becomes a frame in which all “othering” can be placed, the specific content of Nazi ideology can become interchangeable with any racializing or “denigrating” ideology–just another “Orientalism,” with the slot of victim filled in accord with the convenience and needs of the dominant groups.  With the Nazis it was the Jews, with defenders of “compulsory heterosexuality” it’s gays–what’s the difference?  The constant reminder Israel represents of the age old desire to exterminate the Jews, to both usurp and erase the specific mode of deferral pioneered by the Jewish understanding of God, makes it impossible to completely de-Judaicize the Holocaust.  It might not be too far to say that our present global struggles, between the White Guilt/victimary axis and what I’ll simply call, rather polemically, those of us determined to renew their stake in the West, breaks down into a struggle over the appropriation of the meaning or sign of Auschwitz.  (There is, briefly, yet another series of iterative events organized around the notion of “totalitarianism,” which would articulate Auschwitz with the Gulag; I would simply suggest, though, that with the demise of Communism, the adherents of this version of the event have assimilated to one of the other positions ).

Part of the project of a “public” GA should be to reconcile such equally legitimate positions:  there is no reason why the insistence that “civil disobedience” be a permanent part of our democratic lexicon, signalling the ultimate responsibility each of us has for whatever passes through our “link” in the “chain of command” need contradict the centrality of the Jews to the event/sign “Auschwitz”–quite to the contrary, since the conjunction can even deepen our sense of the distinctiveness of the Judaic concept of God “as the declarative sentence.”  And a heightened sense of political responsibility only becomes white guilt when the guilty and innocent parties are known a priori, which only results from a kind of mimetic contagion aimed at blurring over the distinctive features of Auschwitz by applying its terms to any asymmetry. 

I am now going to suggest that the event of 9/11 supersedes Auschwitz as the foundational event of the period now beginning.  This, of course, requires some explanation.  First, of course, I don’t mean to suggest any similarity in scale–the al-Qaeda terrorists might have wished they could kill millions of Americans, they might have reasonably hoped to have killed in the tens of thousands (which were, in fact, the initial estimates that morning); but, in fact, there is no comparison.  Nor need there be–the question of a “foundational” or “dispensational” event involves an anthropological revelation of historic proportion, nothing more.  No one, for that matter, actually has to die for this to take place.  Second, I don’t mean that “Auschwitz” now becomes irrelevant–we are obliged to remember and extend the ethical gains consequent upon any epochal event; even more, a new foundational event is such insofar as it includes and redirects the previous one.  Just like God told the Jews to reject any prophet who tells them to change the law, we should reject any event that claims to invalidate any mode of deferral that in some way represented an ethical advance.  We might, in fact, be in a position to discuss more lucidly the lessons of Auschwitz.  Or, more precisely, the deferral of the deadly conflict over the sign “Auschwitz” should provide us with a more minimal version of that event in terms of the new foundation. 

If the sign of Auschwitz emerges through victims’ testimonies, then the sign of 9/11 must emerge from within (or, perhaps, be telescoped by) the destiny of United Airlines Flight 93.  In the plane that was downed by a passenger revolt we see the ultimate limitations of victimary discourse; we are presented with a situation in which White Guilt is utterly inapplicable.  The surprise attack worked because of our lazy, white guilty accommodation to terrorism–the rules were, accede to terrorist blackmail in such situations because, first, that is the best way of keeping everyone safe (implicitly, then, hijackings are less acts of war than safety hazards); and, more profoundly and insidiously, this is simply the tax we must be ready to pay in a world where our comforts have generated so many resentments that we can’t conciliate them all.  Once word came to Flight 93 that this “compact” had been broken, a new reality was revealed:  terrorism had become a conduit for a kind of resentment-for-itself, thereby removing the luxury of rewriting the past so as to speculate about a present in which one wouldn’t have to deal with such things.  (If only we hadn’t overthrown that president, or given so much money to Israel, or become so dependent on oil…if only we hadn’t invaded Iraq)  Civil society might be transformed into a front line at any time, and at least some of us must be ready to cofnront the terrorists’ love of death with a willingness to face death.

More simply, the revelation here is that recognizing the legitimacy of the victimary ends up feeding, rather than dissolving, it.  This has nothing to do with whether or not we are to support victims–supporting victims, though, does not involve a running physical and ideological assault on the center which presumably produces them; rather, it involves calling upon representatives of the center to devise the means needed to protect victims, whether it be of crime, terrorism or tyranny, and even more, being prepared to represent that center when necessary.  The question raised by “Auschwitz” was:  are you, in your ethical “equipment,” someone who would relentlessly get the word out of the death camps; even more, someone who would have been attentive to signs that something unprecedented was underway; even more, someone who, if so positioned, would stop the machinery of death in its tracks, regardless of the consequences to yourself?  The question raised by “9/11″ is:  does your ethical composition prepare you to refuse to be a hostage by whatever means are possible; even more, to refuse to pay blackmail more generally, which is to say to refuse ”standing” to any expression of a grievance which comes attached to the slightest hint that legitimate violence might come in the wake of a failure to address it to the complainant’s satisfaction? This is an extraordinarily difficult pledge to make, as we are discovering, particularly when the terrorist modus operandi is to make us liable for the fate of those they take hostage.  But 9/11 teaches us that paying ransom is the beginning of an process, increasingly irreversible as it proceeds, in which our powers become weapons against us; “ransom,” of course, understood in the broadest sense of allowing our responsibility for the fate of innocents to be used to persuade us to cede control over our actions to to those who thus implicate us.  If we are strong enough to be blackmailed, we are strong enough to reject it.

Here is where the real relevance of our analysis comes into play.  The ability and intention of terrorists to place civilians in the path of our superior means of destruction aims at intensifying the victimary “reception” of Auschwitz–it’s no coincidence that, of all people, Iranian President Ahmadinejad is now accusing the Israelis of being Nazis.  “Auschwitz,” we must now first of all say, is about conscience and liberty, which require the defense of the center that the Nazis themselves tried to destroy.  The Nazis wished not only to exterminate the Jews and erase the Judaic mode of deferral (conscience); they wanted to implicate the free world in these crimes by presenting them as revenge for the Anglo-American capitulation to Jewish interests, for their willingness to wage a war on behalf of world Jewish domination.  (And if we answer, “but we weren’t fighting for the Jews,” does that not implicate us in another way?–we are either dupes of the Jews or cynically self-interested, in which case we would ultimately do exactly what the Nazis have done if we had to)  In the same way, totalitarian Islam wants to commit its murderous crimes and displace responsibility onto us; if we had steadfastly said to the Nazis that a defense of the Jews is a defense of civilization, we would have removed the double bind–rejecting any moral causality between Israel’s existence and self-defense, or even any crimes Israel may have committed in the course of its history, and the resentments being played out today against the very standards of civilization that would make it possible to hold Israel responsible in the first place would have the same effect.  We should assiduously expose the choreographed responses to and even manufacture of Israeli “atrocities,” and we should be repeatedly insisting that each and every civilian death is the fault of Hamas and Hizbollah and no one else; we should be composing and sending teams of human rights inspectors to Hizbollah and Hamas occupied territory to see if the war crime of holding civilians hostage is being committed; we should set up war crimes tribunals for each and every member of these terrorist organizations who commits these crimes; and all the while we should repeat the answer given to those afraid that the rescue of Jews was neglected by those waging the war, which is that the best way to save the most innocents is to win the war as soon as possible–even while we are now able to add that exposing the moral depravity of totalitarian Islam is the best way to both save civilians right now and win the war quickly. 

The point here is not to make moral declarations that improve our image, for ourselves and others; rather, it is to devise strategies that can unite us (to the extent that we can be united) while dividing our enemies.  We must first of all create as many difficulties as possible for the de facto alliance between the “transnational progressive” left (the media, much of the judiciary, the NGOs and human rights groups, the academy), the embodiment of white guilt, and the victimary Islamic totalitarians.  What has gone unrecognized is that the vocabulary selected by the Bush Administration has already gone some ways toward undermining the transnational progressives–the human rights groups have all, as the saying goes, “jumped the shark” in their eagerness to condemn the US, leaving themselves vulnerable to fraud and manipulation, causing them to lose credibility among those helped by America and the American people, reducing, them, in short, to fringe groups.  The liberals have been pushed into the arms of the foreign policy “realists” and the repulsive likes of Brent Scowcroft, whom none of them would have touched with a 10 foot pole before the onset of Bush Derangement Syndrome.  The surest way of losing all touch with reality, except the virtual one constructed in the never ending dialogues of the international “diplomatic community,” is to become a Realist.  While the media is digging itself deeper into border line treasonous activities in the pursuit of stories of interest only to Pulitzer Prize committees.  There is a very outside chance that the Democrats will gain power in the House and/or Senate this November–can anyone doubt that if they do they will govern so disastrously as to lose it again, probably once and for all?  I am not among those who mourn the decline of the media, the Democrats, the human rights groups, etc.–they are all, more and more looking like institutions and organizations created under very specific conditions and limited to those conditions–the post WWII world in which the sign “Auschwitz” called for new modes of scrutiny upon governmental activity  and attentiveness to victims’ claims in particular.  Their rapid descent into senility can be tracked precisely, I believe, with the degeneration of the “Auschwitz” sign into unmitigated White Guilt. 

With regard to totalitarian Islam, I would hypothesize that hostage taking groups are especially vulnerable to infiltration, defection and disinformation.  I suspect–we can’t know of course, because one can still  hope that much is going on in secret (but is anything going on that some self-appointed ”whistle blower” won’t leak to the NY Times?)–that we are engaging these activities very ineffectively, even though they will all serve as “focre multipliers”:  they will not only sow discord and confusion among our enemies but such activites will set up a realm of activity in which intelligence and military professionals can work beyond the reach of the transnational progressives.  The ideal would be to have the major media outlets reporting on the most superficial and irrelevant things, which they will be fed by the elements of the government (the CIA, the State Department) and the human rights groups that are be rendered obsolete by the turn to smaller, more rigorous and smarter groupings who work below the radar.  This won’t create an unaccountable secret government because insofar as these groups work effectively, the effects of their work will show up, indirectly, for those with adequately attuned radar–reporters who are willing to follow subtle trendlines, take risks, find ways of getting inside and gaining the trust of the new type of operative, those who can do serious analytical and interpretive work, will be able to piece things together and present them in ways that don’t endanger those operations.  And we can leave the writers and readers of the NY Times to sleep in peace, cuddling their Pulitzers.

Which means that that other despised element of the “Bush Doctrine,” “pre-emption,” is, in fact, an authentic and central category of the 9/11 dispensation.  Refusing to pay ransom means treating blackmail as the crime that it is.  It means treating anyone who claims to be our enemy as our enemy (who are we to deny anyone the right to be our enemy?).  This would include the not-so-subtle “I denounce violence but if people’s frustrations are not addressed, I can’t be held responsible for the results…”  Let every assassination of a Saudi cleric calling for “martyrs” to go into Iraq be accompanied by a packet of sermons he gave, perhaps emailed directly to American citizens, bypassing the media.  Let’s see who denounces this violation of the rights of those who incite to the murder of our soldiers.  Let’s experiment–the columnist Diane West recently called for declaring war on specific organizations (like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah) so that, among other things, we could take action against their domestic supporters.  Pehaps it’s a gamble–we might make small groups more important than we would like; unlike countries, such groups can always change their names, break off into allied groups, and find other ways to turn themselves into harder targets.  If we stay on the offesnvie, perhaps we’ll find ways of turning that to our advantage as well. In addition to military tribunals for trying those who deliberately use human shields, why not offer a release to all of our prisoners, under one simple condition–that they offer a full, verifiable, confession detailing all their activities and confederates, signed, and for public distribution?  And then they can go where they please!  The fact that we are tinkering around the edges of what’s allowed under the Geneva Convention, that we are held hostage by over-reactions to what were ultimately rather minor abuses of government power 30-40 years ago, rather than improvising energetically, even a bit wildly, shows that we have not yet entered the 9/11 dispensation.  But we will, or the ransom will keep getting higher, until our blackmailers just come and take it already. 

Does all this sound utterly unrealistic and unreasonable (and perhaps “unconscionable”?) to you?  If so, to that extent you haven’t seriously entered the new dispensation either.

Scenic Politics

A couple of pieces from today’s LA Times:

1. Rosa Brooks’ column is a good place to find an unsubtle expression of what passes for a “progressive” perspective. A few days ago, she suggested that Islamic terrorists in the US were as rare as elephants. No doubt the way the Times reports the news, that might well be true: you had to turn to page 16 to learn that the fellow who shot six people in a Seattle Jewish center was a Muslim. Today’s column, titled “Four Lessons to Make Us Safer,” deserves more than simple mockery: it expresses the same view that Kerry embodied in 2004 and that I think is representative of the foreign-policy views of the Democratic party (with the hopeful exception of Hillary C?)

To sum up: Lesson 1 is that “The weak will always seek — and find — asymmetrical methods of warfare against the strong.” She gives the example of how we defeated the Redcoats back in 177something. Thus “asymmetric” warfare is unwinnable.

Lesson 2, therefore, is the following:

If you can’t defeat your enemy militarily, you need to take away his motivation to fight. Overly aggressive military approaches only increase the bitterness that caused the conflict in the first place. Unless we want to become the permanent global cop in a permanent global police state, we need to change our approach.

We want peace in the Middle East? Stability in Iraq? An end to terrorist attacks? We may not achieve any of those things even in the best of circumstances. But we certainly won’t achieve them if we refuse to take seriously the idea that our enemies — like us — consider themselves good people, with legitimate grievances. Eliminate the grievances and you’re on the way to eliminating the conflict.

When progressives say things like this, right-wing pundits immediately sneer: “What do you want us to do, sing ‘Kumbaya’ with the bad guys?” No. But you don’t have to love your enemy — or trust him further than you could throw him — to recognize the benefits of talking to him and taking his concerns seriously.

That’s not being “soft.” It’s being realistic.

Yes, this does sound eminently reasonable. Everyone thinks himself a “good person,” and when Jesus sat down with publicans and sinners (serial killers? death camp directors? people who saw off infidels’ heads with rusty knives?) he forbore to judge them. But what if the “sinner” knows in advance that no act of his can be held to prove he is not a “good person”? And what if his “legitimate grievance” consists of … your existence?

There were some people like that back in 1940-something, as I recall. Brooks herself seems to be something of a fan of the Dems of those days; I quote:

Even as World War II raged, an engaged and visionary U.S. president took the lead in planning the dense web of international institutions and laws that would help tamp down conflicts, spread global well-being and buttress American prosperity throughout the postwar period. Institutions such as the United Nations were never perfect, but for more than half a century they have kept our world reasonably stable.

But, as Ms. B doesn’t appear to remember, the United Nations, as conceived by FDR, didn’t sit down with the Nazis and the Japanese to discuss their “grievances.” (How much Lebensraum do you really need? How about that Asian co-prosperity sphere? And all those Jews, they are a problem, aren’t they? Come to think of it, they’re still the problem!) The UN was our side, and we demanded unconditional surrender, with no discussion of terms of any kind, let alone “grievances.” The evolution of the Democratic party is summed up rather well in the contrast between the UN as “the free world” and the UN as the whole world, which is to say, its lowest common denominator.

The conundrum Brooks poses is not, however, solvable by sarcastic references to her lack of historical perspective. What it really depends on is Lesson 1. If asymmetric war truly is unwinnable, if Hezbollah can never be disarmed by any means and will always keep firing those rockets, and bigger and bigger ones, then indeed we have to negotiate with them.

But what Ms. B seems not to have noticed is that this is tantamount to saying that we have already lost. Or does she think that it’s just Israel that has lost, and that we can talk with Hezbollah, and Ahmadinejad, and Osama b. L., and come up with a friendly solution to their “grievances”? It’s a shame Mohammed Atta and his friends blew themselves up, because they would have been just the right people to help out; English speakers, familiar with American mores, surely able to persuade us to “take their concerns seriously.”

2. Just in case you thought I forgot, here is the second article. Read the link if you like; the headline says it all:

Israel Ends Gaza Raid, Leaving a Trail of Death and Destruction

This is a representative example of “news” reporting from the Middle East. The journalists who agonized over the media’s treating the Israelis as the “good guys” instead of reporting the conflict in a “nuanced” fashion should take heart from this piece. The Times is certainly making sure that Hamas’ “legitimate grievances” are getting a fair hearing.

-eric gans

The MacNeil-Lehrer newshour, which I’ve watched over the years as a reasonably fair-minded program, has an interesting way of covering the recent Israel-Hezbollah conflict. They begin with one of those British reporters who must learn their craft in a mortuary–every sentence ends with a fall–showing us the latest results of Israeli destruction; bombed-out buildings, piles of rubble (today one was topped with a dusty child’s toy), interviews with homeless victims… The strongly conveyed implication is that Israel is indiscriminately bombing “innocent people” for no reason except revenge or general frustration. Then we have our Israel segment, much shorter, with perhaps a bit of destruction, but more likely some footage of soldiers preparing for battle, sitting on a tank, maybe evacuating their wounded. In short, the tough military against the helpless civilians.

Well, journalism today is victimary to the core; if it bleeds (and there’s a reporter around to blame it on the US, Israel, or Mother Nature), it leads. But I was a bit taken aback by the following segment, which involved a group of specialists in the Arab media, but no one remotely connected to Israel, discussing the grave problem that, in contrast with the enlightened Middle East, the USA is getting a one-sided account of the fighting–the Israeli side. It appears that “the media” have bettter contacts in Israel than with Hezbollah and are misleading their viewers into thinking that this is just a John Wayner between the good guys and the bad guys; “nuance” is being lost. Ah, those Israeli lobbyists… And it’s nice to know that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is helping to restore the balance by its “nuanced” reporting of Israeli devastation.

On reflection, I found this little cloud was not without backlighting. If the media elite are suddenly so concerned about nuance, could it be for fear that segments of the population may be slipping away from the victimary perspective? That maybe even Democratic politicians are recalling that FDR, HST, and JFK were not pacifiists?

Let’s not speak of antisemitism. The point of this reporting is to show us that all “war is hell,” but that if one comes down to cases, the winning side is perforce more warlike and therefore more hellish than the losers. This way of thinking has been instilled in the European psyche since the early postwar era; Marguerite Duras/Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour is a beautiful demonstration that the Japanese and the Germans were the real victims of WWII–because they lost. Thinking like this bears no costs when one is protected by “deterrence” that makes the hellishness of war logically inconceivable. But it wouldn’t have worked with Hitler and it’s not going to work with Ahmadinejad. Sometimes you just have to want to win, to be “more hellish” than the other guy because you’re the one with the white hat. Let’s hope that the Hamas-Hezbollah wakeup call is enough to remind us of this.

-eric gans

[Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison] Kevin Barrett told a Milwaukee talk show host in June that he believed that the U.S. government used “controlled demolitions with explosives” on Sept. 11 to bring down the World Trade Center buildings and later said that the idea of a hijacked plane hitting the Pentagon was “preposterous.” He plans to discuss these beliefs over one week of the 15-week course for undergraduate students. …

School officials say they have no reason to oust Barrett because free speech protects academic freedom.

“We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas,” said Patrick Farrell, the school’s provost.  (complete article)

Thus the most preposterous idiocy is considered an “unpopular idea” if it comports with victimary thought. Once again, postmodern skepticism about truth is not across the board. 9/11 denial and Holocaust denial belong to the “free exchange of ideas” because they reinforce antisemitism and anti-Americanism. An absurdity becomes an “idea” only under such conditions; we cannot trust our “objective” judgment in such cases because we might tend to favor ourselves.

Perhaps the sheer mind-boggling stupidity of Mr. Farrell’s remarks will help persuade a few more people that White Guilt is not a coherent philosophy.

-eric gans

We’ve all heard people debate the question of whether Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” applies to the current “war on terror.” As in most dialogues de sourds there is a better answer than either yes or no. This is a conflict between one side that believes there is a “clash of civilizations” and one that does not. To wit, the Islamists believe that modern civilization is evil and that its members should be either annihilated or converted. “We,” to the contrary, don’t believe there is any fundamental reason why even the most extreme forms of Islam are incompatible with the West’s multicultural tolerance. In a word, we want to include them, and they want to kill us. This is not the kind of dispute that can be resolved through academic discussion.

There is a great deal of poverty in the world, and nature inflicts on humanity much disease and other suffering. But humanity has survived poverty and disease and natural disasters with little difficulty. It has survived “acid rain” and can probably even survive “global warming.” The real danger to our species is the same danger that it came into being to defer: intraspecific violence and the form it assumes in deferral, resentment.

No religion is entitled to toleration as a vehicle of resentment. The desire, nay, the intention to destroy Western civilization does not become more legitimate when it is expressed in “religious” terms. The Christian dialectic of love has no effect against those whose very culture is a counter-attack on Christian hegemony. Resentment can be recuperated within the social order only if its energy can be harnessed to productive activity. Once the resentful subject devotes himself to destruction, his resentment will end only with his life. That is why wars are sometimes necessary.

The growth of Iranian power, whose noxious influence in the Middle East is only beginning to bear fruit, is a clear enough indication that Islamic resentment has passed the point where it can be contained by “inclusion.” Kim Jong-il wants to survive; Ahmadinejad wants to kill. It is easy in hindsight to castigate the “cowards” who gathered at Munich in 1938; why should things be different this time? In the contest between those who believe in a clash of civilizations and those who do not, it is the first group that decides for what stakes the game is to be played.

The West has little stomach for destruction. Even 9/11 has failed to remind it that the refinement of individual justice cannot replace in every circumstance the crude efficacy of collective retribution. Thus we agonize over lapses in fairness to people whose sole aim is to kill as many of us as possible. That World War II was the last “conceivable” total war affords no protection against those whose highest dream is self-annihilation.

The market and its political support system is humanity’s best hope for survival. But it has no magic formula for the indefinite deferral of violence. It is increasingly hard to see how the non-metaphorical “clash of civilizations” that is war can be avoided. In its absence, one side grows ever more confident in its hatred and the other, ever more craven in its tolerance of this hatred. A Jewish columnist in the Washington Post the other day echoed Ahmadinejad in calling Israel a “mistake”–ah, but an “honest mistake.” Perhaps the lesson of the 21st century will be that the human species too was an “honest mistake.”

-eric gans

This is a query directed at any interested GA people. We have had a small but civil controversy at the GIRARD list at Ecunet. In a nutshell, Girardians (including myself) sometimes use a scenario from Gil Bailie as a didactic aid in presenting mimetic theory: A child is in a room full of toys, playing half-heartedly with a single toy. A second child enters, and of all the toys available, fixes on the toy in the first child’s hands as the one he/she wants. Child 2 attempts to take the toy from child 1. A full fledged conflict develops as each child models (in the manner proposed by mimetic theory) the other’s desire for the toy–a sort of feedback loop (”positive feedback”) like the screech of a microphone being brought too close to the amplifier. Here (it seems) we have a great deal of mimetic theory in a nutshell (adult desire being of course a much more tricky and underhanded affair).

However, Dan Liechty, a social scientist within the group (with interest in but no commitment to mimetic theory), has continually objected to this scenario as lacking experimental validity (this scenario has not been tested, or the results duplicated in any study that he’s aware of). During one such interposition on Dan’s part, an interesting discussion ensued about experimental models, which I will pass over. What interests me here is that Dan’s comments led to a discussion of taboo and boundaries. I am excerpting (with permission) part of a comment of Dan’s here:

[snip]

“There is no dispute that imitation is a main learning process in childhood and throughout life. That is not what Girard’s theory claims. Girard’s theory claims (at least as far as I understand it) that our DESIRE is imitative, not just a little bit, but like 99-100%. The claim, put bluntly, is that without a model to imitate, we would have no desire per se, but just (at most) some sort of undifferentiated eros (maybe not even that.) This is a quite different claim than simply that imitation is one of, or even the central, mode of human social learning.

“Without this assumption, your interpretation of what is going on with the children in your story is, at best, one interpretation among many possible, and not at all necessarily the most convincing, ESPECIALLY . . . to parents of two year olds. I can think right off hand of a quite different interpretation, equally able to deal with the observed behaviors of your story, and even more deeply rooted in common sense folk psychology that your interpretation apparently appeals to. That would be, simply, that human desire is polymorphous, but that we are especially drawn to ‘forbidden fruit’ - “people always want what they cannot have” as Robbie Robertson wrote it into a song once. So in this interpretation, when child 1 grabs a toy, child 2 senses the implicit “… and you can’t have it!” implied in the grab, thus focusing that child’s attention on the now-forbidden fruit. Child 1 is not mediating the desire for child 2, but rather creating boundaries beyond which lay the forbidden fruit. Child 2 goes into a fit of rage, not because the object itself is so desirable, but because the child protests the imposition of arbitrary boundaries and the creation of something it can’t have.

“That interpretation is every bit as plausible as the Girardian interpretation, but would build toward a much different pattern of psychological development.”

[snip]

In the discussion of taboo which followed, we seemed to be moving toward a view that the taboo springs out of this appropriative situation itself.
To me, that is similar (though perhaps not identical) to the view of GA and the originary scene. So, finally, my two questions:

1) How would GA look at the scenario with the two children?

2) What would be a GA assessment of the taboo element discussed above?

-matt taylor

Michael Haneke’s Caché is one of the more interesting recent French films, even more interesting if you also watch the 20-minute interview with the German filmmaker. If I had more time I’d write a Chronicle on this subject.

Media intellectual Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) finds a series of mysterious VCR tapes of his house and personal activities along with semi-childish drawings of a man with blood on his throat. (The metaphor of life as a video was a striking if easily missed feature of Haneke’s first and nastiest film, Funny Games, in which a couple of satanic young men torture and kill a family for their own amusement; at one point, the woman grabs a gun and points it at the evildoers, whereupon the film “rewinds” and rectifies the situation to the liking of its subject-author). The trail of the videos leads to Majid, an Algerian man whose farmworker parents had been killed in the bloody suppression of an FLN demonstration in Paris in 1961; Auteuil’s own parents, their employers, intended to adopt the young orphan, but Georges (if I understood the film correctly) cut the head off a chicken and blamed it on Majid, who was sent to an orphanage. Georges visits the now grown Algerian in his HLM and accuses him of sending the harassing tapes, of which the latter claims to be totally unaware. But the next tape shows Majid weeping with frustration after Georges’ departure. We meet Majid’s son, who also denies knowledge of the tapes. Finally Majid urgently invites Georges back to his apartment and on his arrival, after swearing he had no knowledge of the tapes, cuts his own throat in front of Georges and dies. Georges steadfastly refuses to feel guilty about any of this; even if he framed the Arab boy, he was a mere six years old at the time and should not be held responsible for the other’s unhappiness.

After the suicide, Majid’s son comes to see Georges in his office and insists on speaking with him, but we learn that his only purpose was to discover how Georges was bearing his guilt–which he continues to deny. The final scene takes place in near-darkness; Georges finally levels with his wife (played by Juliette Binoche, who with dark hair looks oddly like Catherine Zeta-Jones), then takes a couple of sleeping pills and retires to his room, shutting out all the light. This leads him to dream of the day at the family farm when Majid was taken off to the orphanage; we then cut to a long take of students exiting a lycee, in which Haneke pointed out that both Georges’ bratty son and Majid’s son were in conversation, although I could not identify them on my TV screen.

We never learn who sent the tapes. Haneke suggested it might have been one or both of the sons. But clearly that is not compatible with the content of the film; the only possible explanation is that the filmmaker “sent” them; they are a projection of Georges’ guilt. And indeed, Haneke made clear at the outset of the interview that his film was about bearing and denying guilt. In the rest of the interview, he insistently suggested that it was up to the spectator to figure out what was going on; in the final scene, were the two boys conspiring? was the Beur leading the other astray? Was Binoche having an affair with her friend Pierre? It’s all so postmodern.

Yet there is one thing that is not “multicultural” or “undecidable” or “aleatory,” that is not in the film to teach us the “Nietzschean” lesson that truth is whatever we want it to be: white guilt. We don’t know where the tapes are coming from, or even why Majid commits suicide, but we know that Georges is guilty. The Algerian context is projected on the present in a news program that refers to the Iraq war; but even forgetting this overt political analogy, Georges is guilty toward the Arab world, as presumably we all are toward some group of Others. As a German, Haneke has impeccable guilt credentials of his own; the pot that calls the kettle black is well aware of its own blackness. The German filmmaker acts as the Frenchman’s conscience. “We” are all guilty, but “we” is not everyone; guilt is not original sin, but sociopolitical domination, what I have called firstness in other contexts. The son’s utter contempt for his parents, which is very nearly par for the course in the French films I have seen recently, is a visceral moral revulsion. The hope for Europe, if there is any, is that its native sons will repudiate their guilty parents and join forces with the sons of immigrants–not exactly what happened recently in France over the CPE proposal. But purgation is a secondary matter; it’s the guilt that counts. Whence the unexpected absence of violence inflicted on Georges; even Najib’s son, a strapping fellow who could probably whip Auteuil with one hand, suggests that Georges could beat him up because he is the stronger–echoing a similar remark from his father. No burning cars here.

The intimate connection between postmodernity’s denial of “truth” and its fundamental post-Holocaust affirmation of guilt has rarely been made more explicit. As in a novel by Robbe-Grillet, we don’t know if it’s on tape or real or dreamt, but the fact that it is “there” at all is a reminder of an unambiguous event–the killing of 200 Arabs on October 17, 1961 that gives proof of Our guilt, like the bomb in Hiroshima mon amour. This sounds unhappy, and Haneke acknowleged that this is a “sad” film. But it’s really not so terrible. Georges, the allegorical representative of old Europe, winds up in a dark room, peacefully sleeping while the world goes on. When he finally wakes up, there will probably be a lot more Nabils than Georges coming out of that lycee, and they will be unlikely to express their resentment by weeping. Georges might do better to take a few more pills and not wake up at all.

-eric gans

A columnist’s commemoration of the first anniversary of the London subway bombing:

I know, I know. Some of you will be shaking your heads now, saying, “Hey, give the Republican anti-terror strategy a little credit here. After all, we haven’t had another 9/11-style attack, have we?” True. But if you think the lack of another major terrorist attack means the GOP approach to fighting terror is working, remember the old joke:

A guy is throwing sawdust out the window. Another guy comes along and says, “Why are you throwing sawdust out your window?”

“To keep the elephants away,” says the first guy.

“But there are no elephants around here!”

“See? It works!”

Rosa Brooks, The Los Angeles Times, July 7, 2006

-eric gans

This will be an experiment in applying originary analysis to an ongoing historical event–that is, the kind where facts undermining the very premise of your analysis might emerge before you’ve completed it; or, to put it another way, before the event is over or “sealed.”

How should we make sense of Israel’s current campaign to free Gilad Shalit, the soldier taken captive by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza? I ask because there seems to me something that doesn’t “fit” here, because I haven’t seen anyone take note of it, and because it seems to me that this event might illuminate some contemporary trends that Eric Gans has discussed in various Chronicles of Love & Resentment regarding contemporary terrorism, white guilt and the problem of asymmetry.

What I find puzzling, at least according to reports I’ve seen so far, is that Israel’s operation seems to be neither a rescue operation nor the initiating of a full scale war on the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority. A rescue operation, I assume, would be targeted and secret–it would, for example, perhaps be carried out under the guise of “negotiating,” and would therefore not be aided by this full scale assault (or the threat of one–it’s not that clear). At the same time, it doesn’t seem to be an invasion, because the assumption seems to be that if Shalit is returned unharmed, we would return to the status quo ante–that is, Israel doesn’t seem to be taking the kidnapping of one of its soldiers as a causus belli that could no longer be satisfied by anything Hamas does regarding Shalit (just as a Japanese offer to pay reparations for the attack on Pearl Harbor wouldn’t have undone that act or seriously deflected its consequences). I haven’t seen, for example, the Israelis explicitly bringing the continual rocket assaults on Southern Israel since the withdrawal from Gaza into their justifications for entering Gaza. What it looks like to me is that Israel is using its vastly superior military might to intimidate the Hamas government into forcing the kidnappers to return Shalit unconditionally. So, the means of warfare are used to solve a hostage problem, which is hard to see as anything other than a serious mismatching of means to ends: as if the Israelis had bombarded and invaded Uganda in July 1976 to force them to release the hostages held at Entebbe, or the Americans had done the same in Iran in 1979–and then, say, after having secured the release of the hostages in the Embassy (or having failed to), had simply returned home after destroying a good portion of the country (a lot more of it if they failed to secure the release).

One could understand this approach if it were still advisable to simply, as some, like John Derbyshire of National Review like to see, bounce enough rubble to shut down whatever threat a particular weak country poses. This is the unapologetic 19th century imperialist approach: we value the life of one Westerner over your entire country; if you want to play in the big leagues by picking a fight with us, expect it to be no holds barred; and, of course, we have no expectation that you will change your morals or mode of government in the slightest, we just expect you to keep your pathologies to yourself.

I’m presupposing Gans’ analysis of White Guilt in this discussion: the event of Auschwitz (revealing the ultimate consequence of violations of the basic egalitarian premises of modernity), multiplied by the event of Hiroshima (intensifying beyond the possibility of human survival the implications of “Auschwitz”) and, finally, rounded off by an admittedly tendentious reading of Vietnam (even the the self-declared democratic countries are not immune to such extremes–even more, their self-understanding as the “Free World” locked in epic battle with “totalitarianism” might very well license such extremes) has become an unescapable political paradigm. The left has redefined itself, following the fall of Communism, around the propagation of White Guilt, sustaining and seeking to extend the elaborate system of taboos it requires. And the Israeli invasion and then occupation of Lebanon in the early 80s provided the perfect opportunity to apply the template to Israel tout court, with Israeli intellectuals, always imitative epigones of their American and European colleagues, eager to advance the project.

The problem is that no diagnosis of White Guilt, however sharp and comprehensive, can exclude the diagnostician for the simple reason that all out war on the part of the West, and certainly the U.S., is, indeed, impossible. As long as we don’t obliterate our enemies with nuclear weaponry we are “holding back,” which is to say tacitly admitting the asymmetry constitutive of any contest. The incentive to present a particular kind of defiance is thereby inherent in any Western war making: the Third World “resistant” can always say, “go ahead, kill me,” knowing that any such killing is selective (we kill a very small number out of all those we could kill) and therefore tainted (since the choice of who to kill is always to some extent arbitrary, it is always possible to frame such killings as a sign of both weakness and brutality).

An instance of this paradox is in Israel’s decision to arrest the Hamas leadership itself–there was previously the policy (or, perhaps, practice) of targeted assassinations back when Hamas was merely an underground terrorist group (embodied in all kinds of above ground activities as well, of course); Israel seems to be threatening to resume that policy today, but so far they are just detaining Hamas leaders. On the one hand this may seem especially humiliating for members of what is now a “government”; on the other hand, it’s hard to see what deterrence power this entails, since once detained the leaders know they will not be mistreated, much less killed. And if they can be captured and detained, what justification remains for killing them? How long before calls to release them or put them on trial become an international cause celebre? And who else, aside from perhaps Israelis themselves (and not all of them by any means) would be convinced by a trial, no matter how scrupulous? They would still be widely viewed as prisoners of war, leading to more kidnappings of Israeli civilians and soldiers.

There might be one way out of this stalemate that Israel seems to be unintentionally generating, and that is indicated by the occasional hints that Syria may be held responsible for the activities of Hamas. In other words, even when dealing with suicidal terrorists, those terrorists, at some point along the way, are dependent upon the support of someone who doesn’t want to die–find that weak link and attack it relentlessly. Here, the asymmetry shows up as an advantage, but the risks involved dramatically increase. Without a sustained unity of purpose between, at least, the U.S. and Israel–a unity of purpose which has not yet taken shape and will not as long the U.S. government is still thinking of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a “peace process” which is crucial to the War on Terror rather than simply another front in that war–such an approach is most likely to get caught in the same tangle of cross purposes: Israel will threaten Syria, giving Syria the opportunity for some credibility enhancing “defiance,” knowing that Israel will not be able to carry through on its threats because as soon as one starts modeling possible consequences the advantages of doing so start to look vaguer and vaguer.

This seems to be a kind of degree zero of the victimary, leaving the stronger party with the equally untenable alternatives of investing unsustainable resources and moral capital in rescuing single individuals (which might not even be possible–what’s to stop his captors from simply killing him once the rescuers get close?) or initiating full scale warfare without any definition of “victory” that doesn’t simply lead you back to a status quo ante that has already been tried and rejected. (And, of course, the Palestinians are equally trapped, since a condition of this condition is that they can’t accomplish anything either, even on their own terms)

And yet this intense focus on the fate of a single individual, so much a part of Israeli morale and morality, must nevetheless be a basis for constructing some kind of new and more adequate approach. We can assume that one consequence of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza has been the loss of strenuously (and, no doubt, often, in moral terms, dubiously) constructed intelligence networks which otherwise might have facilitated the rescue of Gilad Shalit. Why not compensate for that loss by announcing that all Palestinian individuals who offer intelligence helpful to the recovery of Shalit will be granted asylum in Israel, with a chance of gaining Israeli citizenship at some point down the road–including, let’s say, immediate family members and anyone else associated with that individual who might be in danger of being murdered as a “collaborator”? Let’s see how solidly Palestinians are united behind their new, “resistant,” uncorrupt leadership. Let’s find out how much, as individuals, they genuinely hate Israel. On the Israeli side, genuine solidarity with those Arabs who have taken the side of Israel’s right to exist, and, more generally, the side of peace and democracy, would have to now be demonstrated (as, we must acknowledge, has by no means always been the case). Attention would be redirected towards the maintenance of “consensus” among the Palestinians, to the treatment of “collaborators,” and divisions within Palestinian society might open up–not towards civil war, but towards new ways of being responsible for one’s community. For example, Palestinians with the courage to provide intelligence, or just speak openly in ways that subvert terrorist plots, might decide to reject the offer of Israeli citizenship as a way of demonstrating solidarity with a community which they would now be daring to protect them. New icons of political courage would emerge.

This approach would not exclude waging war against the Palestinians as they are currently constituted; however, it would certainly enter into strategic and tactical calculations–but perhaps in positive ways. Rather than calibrating attacks and withdrawals according to the false logic of encouraging and strengthening “moderate” negotiating partners, the calibrations would now be aimed at giving Palestinian citizens the space in which to step forward, and form relationships with Israelis that would match the various theaters of protest in which Israeli leftists and Palestinians periodically participate. And I haven’t touched on how even a trickle of such Palestinian dissidents into Israeli society might lead Israelis to think about citizenship in new ways.

Perhaps not a single Palestinian will step forward. We would be back in a bad situation, back trying to figure out what form of pain could, at this point, have significant influence on either the Palestinian government or people. But we would be no worse off than we are now, and perhaps a little better, morally speaking.

Scenic Politics