Oily Fingers Playing the Piano

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1837): “It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity, convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.”

Booker T. Washington (1895): “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

Mao Tse-tung (1946) “Members of Party committees must learn to “play the piano” well…In playing the piano all ten fingers are in motion; it won’t do to move some fingers only and not others. But if all ten fingers press down at once, there is no melody. To produce good music, the ten fingers should move rhythmically and in co-ordination.”

Chinua Achebe (1960):  “If one finger brings oil, it soils all the others.”

Stuffing Soyinka and Dubois with Bad Straw

Way back in ‘92, when I was a lad of thirteen, Kwame Anthony Appiah forcefully argued that:

“Race” disables us because it proposes as a basis for common action the illusion that black (and white and yellow) people are fundamentally allied by nature and, thus, without effort; it leaves us unprepared, therefore, to handle the “intraracial” conflicts that arise from the very different situations of black (and white and yellow) people in different parts of the economy and of the world.

The African metaphysics of Soyinka disables because it founds our unity in gods who have not served us well in our dealings with the world—Soyinka never defends the “African World” against Wiredu’s charge that since people die daily in Ghana because they prefer traditional herbal remedies to Western medicines, “any inclination to glorify the unanalytical [i.e. the traditional] cast of mind is not just retrograde; it is tragic.” Soyinka has proved the Yoruba pantheon a powerful literary resource, but he cannot explain why Christianity and Islam have so widely displaced the old gods, or why an image of the West has so powerful a hold on the contemporary Yoruba imagination; nor can his mythmaking offer us the resources for creating economies and polities adequate to our various places in the world. (p.176)

I want to say, to start off with, that I learned a lot when I first read this book. But as I re-read it now, I find myself getting more and more agitated, which is perhaps a nice illustration that scholarship does actually progress with time. The first paragraph, for example, is a strong claim, to the extent that you derive “racial” arguments through strict biological lineage, but I can think of almost no one who actually does this anymore. Who claims that “that black people are fundamentally allied by nature”? Certainly not anyone that gets taken very seriously within AF-Am studies in the academy. To plug my advisor’s book, for example, the starting point for what turns into a really strong argument for how to think about the coherence of “the” black tradition (a claim I’m still evaluating what I think of) is precisely not what Anthony Appiah positions himself as arguing against. As he writes (and you can read the whole excerpt, and should):

“Perhaps the most important thing we have to remember about the black tradition is that Africa and its diaspora are older than blackness. Blackness does not come from Africa. Rather, Africa and its diaspora become black during a particular stage in their history. It sounds a little strange to put it this way, but the truth of this description is widely acknowledged. Blackness is an adjunct to racial slavery.”

Now, I know that contrasting a just published academic book with something published seventeen years ago is somewhat unfair, but this part of Bryan’s argument isn’t even the fresh part; his assertion of the non-biological basis of race is the starting point, a presumption that race has to be understood as historical experience and social privilege which, by the way, Dubois was arguing years before Appiah himself was even born. Biology is part of race, as it is part of gender, but only because of the way that it has been socialized and politicized. And just as Judith Butler (though not without precedent) argued that “gender” as a biological category was not a sufficient horizon of possibility for feminist politics (without giving up “feminism” as a name for the problem), you have people within the black political tradition arguing, from way back, that biology was not a sufficient horizon of progress for an anti-racist project that nevertheless was enunciated in terms of “Race.” There are, I think, some straw men being disposed of here.

By the same token, I’m struck, in the second paragraph, by what a poor reading of Soyinka Appiah seems to be doing, how a disinclination to take any of Soyinka’s arguments seriously enough on their own terms as to actually understand them gets followed up by a series of completely unsupported or undefended assertions about what Soyinka’s system of thinking can or cannot do. The idea that Soyinka would be struck dumb at the problem of Christianity or Islam in Africa, for example, is just silly. But the problems are deeper than that. Appiah is focusing on Soyinka’s Myth, Literature, and the African World, and while I think there are some critiques to be made of it, you have to spend almost no time at all with your nose in that book to see what a disservice it is to compare him with the cliché of the African who fears “modern” medicine and dies because of a superstitious attachment to “Tradition.”

On page 54, for example, Soyinka argues that the Yoruba Gods’ “accommodative nature, which does not, however, contradict or pollute their true essences, is what makes Sango capable of extending his territory of lightning to embrace electricity in the affective consciousness of his followers.” The idea that there’s anything in Soyinka’s sense of tradition that precludes the adaptation and absorption of technology isn’t just a misreading, it’s a basic failure to read at all; this isn’t a side-point in Soyinka’s text, it’s one of the main points, one that gets repeatedly reiterated, again and again.

In any case, I referred to the “cliché” of the technology fearing African because that’s what it is, and a sloppy and stupid one, then or now. When Africans are disinclined to go to a hospital for treatment, one should try to understand why they make that choice, rationally, and how they do it with a great breadth of historical knowledge and range of social desires. One can disagree with their choices, of course, but the fact that some Africans die of malaria because they choose not to use readily available bed-nets is (as Tim Burke pointed out the other day) precisely as rational and as human as the fact that Americans catch potentially deadly flu viruses by not scrupulously washing their hands as often as the CDC recommends. In any case, you have to see the inside of the hospital they are giving up – to the extent they are – and think about why sometimes Western medicine (however magnificent in theory) is, in practice, sometimes not the best choice for people located in the communities in which they’re located, with the circumstances in which they are circumstanced.

Instead, Appiah’s assertion and critique of Soyinka programmatically disallow that sort of rationality, as does Wiredu’s book from which he cribs a bizarre distinction between traditional and modern based on the difference between analytic reason and authoritarian superstition. But my point is that his isn’t so much an argument with Soyinka as with a straw man he’s fashioned for the purpose; nothing in the “African traditionalism” which he and Wiredu attack really resembles Soyinka’s own position, which (I would venture to claim) is written with precisely the considerations Appiah raises in mind.

And the same is true for Appiah’s readings of DuBois, which explicitly start from the assumption that the man’s thought crystallized somewhere around 1897 (“there is an astonishing consistency in his position throughout the years,” p28), something which is, simply and manifestly, not true. DuBois’ 1935 Black Reconstruction and his 1897 “The Conservation of Races” could have been written by different people, and his 1940 autobiography explicitly lays out the ways his early thinking was radically transformed by the challenge that experience posed to his earliest acceptance of imperialist historiography; as he put it, “my intent in this book is to set forth the interaction of this stream and change of my thought, on my work and in relation to what has been going on in the world since my birth.” I therefore look with bemused dismay on the fact that Appiah has cited all three texts, yet seems to have actually read only the one that matched the straw man with which he wanted to do battle.

 

Policing the Wire

I love The Wire, good lord I love The Wire. But I continue to be struck by how often the conversation about the show insists on rehearsing a narrative of TV transcending TV, one of David Simon’s favorite hobbyhorses. Here he is, for instance, in the introduction to the new edition of the a book first published in 2004 (h/t), darkly castigating television’s slavishness to the commercial break:

“As a medium for serious storytelling, television has precious little to recommend it – or at least that has been the case for most of its history. What else can we expect from a framework in which the most pregnant moment in the story has for decades been the commercial break, that five-times-an-hour pause when writers, actors and directors are required to juke the story enough so that a trip to the refrigerator or bathroom does not mean a walk away from the television set, or, worse yet, a click on the remote to another channel.”

And of course he’s not wrong; The Wire could only be the show that it is by getting past the very constraints of the medium which he is here identifying. The Wire’s narration is novelistic in a specifically Benedict Andersonian sense: it interpellates “us” in the same way “the wire” connects the criminals to the police who are watching them, producing defining categories by the very process of surveillance and communication. Anderson argued that the “rise of the novel” coincided with the imagination of national communities, because people had to learn to think of themselves as occupying the same national space as their compatriots, the same way a student has to learn to think of all the characters and events inside a book as occupying a single “novel.” The novel and the nation, in a crude sense, are both pedogogies that teach people new ways to apprehend themselves and their place in space and history. It’s interesting, then, that Simon sees the work of the show as teaching us:

“The first thing we had to do was teach folks to watch television in a different way, to slow themselves down and pay attention, to immerse themselves in a way that the medium had long ago ceased to demand.”

Again, I don’t think he’s wrong when he asks “how can a television network serve the needs of advertisers while the hollowness at the core of American politics, education and newspapering is laid bare, and it is made entirely clear to viewers that they are a disenfranchised people, that the processes of redress have been rusted shut, and that no one – certainly not our mass media – is going to sound any alarm?” The kind of cognitive dissonance that a commercial break in The Wire would produce is truly difficult to imagine, and I really think he is right: the show simply could not work without the sense that everything was happening at once, the extent to which it causes you to forget the texture of its medium. This is why, I think, The Wire could never be self-reflexive about that medium (in the way The Conversation is, for example): it imagines place and collective political possibility through the very simultaneity which it artificially produces.

At the same time, to argue, as Simon does, that “The decoupling of the advertising construct from a broadcast entity was the key predicate for the political maturation of televised drama” is to make the particularities of The Wire’s ideological and aesthetic choices into a narration of maturation in a way that could benefit from being considered more critically. Simon writes, for example, that this “calculating restraint offered viewers a chance to do something that television rarely, if ever, allows its audience: They were free to think hard about the story, the different worlds that the story presented, and ultimately, the ideas that underlie the drama.” But any time the creator of a text talks about how his or her readers/viewers are “free” to interpret, well, I get nervous; if you think you are both teaching and liberating your readers/viewers, well…

Bonus The Wire Content! #1 — Apparently Harvard is teaching a class on The Wire! (h/t) But instead of being taught by some dumb flack in an English department, it is being taught by William Julius Wilson, who is pretty much the shit.

Bonus The Wire Content #2 — Have you guys read Policing the Crisis? What a book, man, what a book. It’s sort of an advanced critique of The Wire’s anti-capitalism, and reading it is at the root of all my “The Wire is nostalgic for a liberalism that never existed” ethos lately. I may stage a debate between The Wire and the CCCS, when I get around to finishing Policing.

 

 

A long deferred post on Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which I deferred posting because I was going to watch the movie again, but then didn’t

First, I propose to you the difference between fantasy and counterfactual. A counterfactual is interested in historical causation, both the question of what could have happened (but didn’t) and what, as a result of that change, might have happened next. A fantasy, on the other hand, is not interested in any of that. Counterfactuals usually introduce (and isolate) the intervening change that causes history to play out differently, but a fantasy simply revels in the thing which is different itself. So a counterfactual might ask “Would killing Hitler, Borman, Goebbels, and Goering in a movie theater in 1945 end the war and save lives, etc?” But Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds doesn’t just beg that question, it completely ignores it: the point isn’t what causes Hitler’s death (or what is caused by it) but rather the spectacle of his body writhing as bullets rip it apart. It is a pornography of history.

Most of the movie’s reviewers have expected nothing more than that from him, and they’re not wrong. Tarantino clearly has created a particular kind of “fucking Jewish wet dream,” as his producer was quoted as calling it (in Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in The Atlantic). But most reviewers, I think, give Tarantino’s movie too little credit and stop there. Those words do get to the heart of the fantasy Tarantino has made for us: a revenge fantasy which makes Hitler into the fetish object from which all anti-semitism emanates, thereby transforming all remembered grievances (Tarantino’s producer’s “I was taunted and thrown into lockers, and I’ve never forgotten it”) into the childish fantasy of killing Hitler. But as it becomes a movie about movies, it also becomes a fantasy about fantasies.

After all, it seems worth stressing that when Inglourious Basterds kills Hitler, this accomplishes very little; he dies not in 1941, but in 1945. Not only was the war practically over at that point, but in the little time remaining before they would be liberated, the death camps could and would have operated just as efficiently without Hitler’s personal direction as with it. The movie kills Hitler, that is to say, at the point when he himself might be an embodiment of evil, but he is no longer really the proximate cause of the machine he’s created. The significance of this shift can be seen in the difference between the first and last chapters; while Landa is proud of being the “Jew Hunter” in chapter one, he has radically changed his goals by the fifth chapter, precisely because – I think – he now recognizes that the war has been lost. He therefore allows both the Basterds and Shoshanna to carry out their plots not in order to end the war, as he tells Pitt, but because it already is over and he wants to end up on the winning side.*

In other words, the movie is programmatically – even symptomatically – uninterested in any practical good or averted evil that killing the figurehead for the Nazi machine could actually cause. And so the movie changes history and saves the Jews not by eliminating the actual cause of suffering, but by replacing the historical reality of Jewish suffering with a fantasy of righteous Jewish-American violence. In other words, it does what a dream does: instead of thinking about the why’s and wherefore’s of reality, it simply fulfills the wishes which life has denied us. (As Tarantino puts it to Goldberg, in fact: “It’s what I want to see, and when I don’t see it, I become frustrated”). We, too, get what we want to see, a WWII in which there are no victims – since the only European Jews we “see” get killed by the Nazis are completely hidden by the floorboards – and in which the American victors get to clothe themselves in a moral righteousness derived from that injustice.

But there is also something deeply interesting about the notion that killing Hitler would somehow address, say, Jeffrey Goldberg’s traumatic childhood experience of anti-semitism. Hitler didn’t invent anti-semitism; the zest with which the victorious Allies retroactively piled the entirety of Western evil onto the Nazi party only concealed their own deeply bad conscience in this regard. It was, in fact, precisely the omnipresent normality of Western anti-semitism that made the Allied nations so flagrantly indifferent to the fate of European Jews at the point in time when it mattered, and only once WWII was well under way did the Allies suddenly realized they’d been fighting the Nazis to end racism. The now-common phrase “Judeo-Christian” civilization, after all, is of post-WWII coinage (replacing the previously mainstream equation of Jews with Christ-killers).

In a perverse way, in fact, you could argue that it was precisely the fact that Hitler clothed his imperial ambitions in anti-semitic terms that has since made anti-semitism as politically unspeakable as it has since become. Obviously the Nazis were evil, if the word is to have meaning, but (like Tarantino, I think) I’m talking much less about the historical reality of the Nazis than about the way that historical reality has been strategically used. After all, when an imperial power which had conquered and still ruled half the world through explicitly articulated notions of its own racial superiority suddenly begins indignantly decrying another nation’s racist imperial ambitions, something peculiar is going on: the fact that Winston Churchill, one-time Undersecretary for the Colonies, could suddenly become a figurehead for the virtuous struggle against imperialism and racism is deeply bizarre. Yet as the Nazi party came to assume official responsibility for that long history of Western anti-semitism, anti-semitism has come to be precisely as unspeakable as Nazi-ism.**

The point, then, is that we have learned to forget that anti-semitic racism was once as American as apple pie precisely by mis-imagining that Hitler was the personal source and origin of all racism in the world, the same way that we have learned to forget that Britain and France pretty much did conquer the entire world (often, explicitly in order to create “living room” for its excess population) by, again, retroactively making Hitler himself into the very alpha and omega of racist imperial ambition. We have, in other words, fetishized Hitler and the swastika so as to forget how widely shared the ideologies they represented were (and are) in the West. Making the symbol evil instead of the ideology therefore has the effect of vindicating those who only shared the ideology, the racism, and the imperial ambition. Europe and America might have conquered the world to acquire living space for the white race, you see, but at least they weren’t Nazis.

What makes Inglorious Basterds an interesting movie, then, is that it understands this, at least a structural level. To echo Traxus4420 – whose post at American Stranger you should read – the Nazis in this movie aren’t Nazis because they’re evil, but rather they’re evil because they’re Nazis, and because of how an allied victory causes “Nazi” to signify (as someone smart observed, this is a movie filled with swastikas seemingly stripped of their ideology). Just as it was by marking Nazi Germany that the West was able to take off its own Nazi uniform in a metaphorical sense, the final scene of Tarantino’s movie is literally about how marking Landa un-marks Raine: by refusing to allow Landa to repent (however self serving it may have been), the Nazi becomes the scapegoat for the entirety of Western evil. And I think the fact that Pitt plays an improbably hillbilly anti-racist vigilante is, then, precisely the point: the endemic racism of the American rural South gets displaced it onto the figure of the Nazi, with whom he has everything in common but the uniform.***

After all, the first two chapters of the movie have encouraged us to see the two figures as structurally similar: both are hunting human beings, explicitly employing terror tactics in a genocidal quest which they never even attempt to justify. My point, however, is precisely not that their actions are morally analogous, but that morality is both irrelevant and absent. We never know what Raine’s motivations are, any more than we know what Landa’s are. Both are perfectly capable of employing ideology, but it is their very cynical detachment from it that allows them do so. To them, on the other hand, the only question is how.

In this sense, the movie is about the mechanics of rendering a certain story about the war as the truth, the way one particular fiction became enshrined as official reality. After all, the movie makes it clear that the choice of which uniforms get to be shed (and which ones cannot be) ultimately gets adjudicated not by reference to any real conception of justice or truth but simply by the vaguaries of fate: it is only because Brad Pitt’s side has won that he gets to indelibly mark his defeated enemy. To put the mark of Cain on a Nazi (but not, say, the allied bombers who firebombed civilians in Dresden or Tokyo) might be a defensible argument, if we argued it, but in practice we (like the movie) don’t: justice is a function of victory. In this sense, while carving a swastika into a surrendering Nazi’s forehead is, ostensibly, an effort to render the truth about that soldier irrevocably visible for all to see, that doesn’t mean there weren’t plenty of soldiers in the German army who fought for their country rather than for Hitler (nor should we be so naïve as to think the Allied ranks were free of racism). Because the reason the current Pope is allowed to take off the swastika he wore as a child (but the surrendering soldiers which Raine marks do not) has little or nothing to do with justice and everything to do with politics.

Which is why, to wax subjective for a moment, I find it rhetorically useful to disagree with Anthony Paul Smith in the absolute strongest possible terms when he wrote that “there is something deeply satisfying about watching someone refusing to allow a soldier to take off their uniform.” Though he’s right in a descriptive sense, it is exactly this sense of satisfaction – the righteous exhilarating rush of victory – which we need to be questioning, and which Tarantino’s movie gives us the tools to question. After all, why are is that so satisfying? Why does depriving someone the possibility of expiation give us a rush? The point of the carved swastika, after all, is to deny them the ability to repent (only surrendering soldiers get marked, after all). Yet I would say, in contrast, that the notion of forgiveness is premised on the realization that – precisely because we are all imperfect – no one can be held to a standard of perfection, and there is consequently something basically un-ethical about denying someone the right to repent. Which is to say, in a world where all of us are stained with sins (by whatever standard one favors), pretending that carving swastikas on enemy soldiers or whatever is anything but an assertion of one’s own (false) moral virtue is simply a way of enabling that fiction, of enshrining it.

Yet fighting a war with an evil enemy does not make you good. That is – and here’s the crux of what Tarantino has done — unless you’ve got a propaganda machine. If you’ve got a film industry that can transform the meaningless crazy horror of violence into a political meaningful spectacle, then, in practice, it does mean that. Which is more or less what happened in the aftermath of WWII: thanks to our own propaganda machine, we’ve managed to forget all the ways the United States might have fought an evil government without becoming good in the process. Again, I’m precisely not equating the firebombing of Berlin and Tokyo with the gas chambers at Dachau, or making any kind of positive claim; I’m arguing that the movie both disputes the historical counterintuitivity of that analogy and shows us the mechanics of the process by which it becomes unspeakable.

After all, in the movie’s almost climax, we see a movie audience chortling with obscene glee at the spectacle of a movie character raining death from above down onto faceless, nameless bare life, and then, moments later, as the audience around us chortles with obscene glee, we see this very movie audience get death rained down from above them. As we chortle with glee, in other words, we find ourselves structurally in the position of the Nazi’s. This is the experience we’re supposed to have; this is how American audiences react to violent spectacles onscreen, and Tarantino knows it better than anyone else. For while this reversion is virtually inevitable, it is the very arbitrariness of that horrifies (and for once, Tarantino gives a position from which to be horrified at violence), for if we accede to the movie’s argument and enjoy the violence as morally praiseworthy, then we make ourselves into Landa/Raine himself, revelling in killing people exactly not because of what they do but because of what they are. The last shot of the movie, after all, literally puts us in the perspective of the nazi being marked, and Raine’s words, clearly, have to be from Tarantino:

There would be much more to say about the movie’s final section, the point when it becomes a movie about movies, had I the inclination or had I not forgotten most of what I originally wanted to say. But I think what makes this Tarantino’s best film, actually, is not just that he’s finally found an argument to put his obsessive film-nerd intertextuality in service of, but because it’s a good argument: by making his movie a deconstruction of the WWII-movie genre,**** he makes it about the ways that cinematic project retroactively placed coherent meaning (“the good war”) on a thing which was actually unthinkable and nonsensically violent and destructive. And because they did it by transforming history into myth, by reveling in fantasies of the past as meaningful and coherant, he can avoid getting bogged down in the nitty gritty of actual causes and causation, making a virtue of his total inability to bother with any of that stuff. Tarantino’s movie, in other words, has much more in common with Slaughterhouse Five than the movies it was actually responding to, but while Vonnegut insisted on the horrible subjective experience of violence’s senselessness, I think Tarantino’s movie is (on some level) about how an objective truth can be imposed on our subjectivities, how we come to believe that the war was, in fact, a good one.

* I really enjoy the inversion of the “impossible mission” scenario there; our “heroes” are so unbelieveably unequal to the task of posing as European (in contrast to the ridiculous facility special force types pose as German in movies like Where Eagles Dare). But the point is then simply that Landa sees through the Basterds instantly and yet still allows them to carry out their mission (sort of) while taking only an incidental sadistic interest in Shoshanna. I find that all the more villainous of him, actually; there’s something almost more terrible about receiving mercy from a nazi.

** I use the term “unspeakable” to reflect the way anti-semites generally know better than to speak their beliefs openly, a sign of that class of racism’s private nature, rather than its disappearance. There are certainly venues where anti-semitic fantasies can safely be uttered, but the establishment media has programmatically not been one of those places since the aftermath of WWII.

*** Don’t even get me started on the whole scalping thing.

**** As Brad Pitt, his own self, put it: “The Second World War could still deliver more stories and films, but I believe that Quentin put a cover on that pot. With ‘Basterds,’ everything that can be said to this genre has been said. The film destroys every symbol. The work is done, end of story.”

Writing a Novel in November

I am doing some variation on this, a project with whose acronym I will not soil your delicate sensibilities, but which will result in my writing some kind of massively flawed but satisfying variation on the theme of the “novel” (for which, see Watt, Lukacs, Moretti, Bakhtin, and novelists). I’ve written a bunch of words and have no idea where they’re going. But since the people providing much of the ethos behind this project are reminding us that no words are bad words, in that spirit, I offer you three of my first paragraphs, whose words are — by that standard, at least and and at most — not bad ones:

No one knew that he started each day with a drink, or that he never stopped until falling asleep in front of the TV; he monitored his blood alcohol like a diabetic watched their insulin. Which is to say, even he no longer thought much about it. It was no longer interesting to him. It was just what he did. After years, he understood the range of breath and the danger of close conversation so well that no one ever smelled a thing on him, so well that he even forgot that he was lonely. He never stumbled, never slurred. And that particular openness of expression had become the face his co-workers knew, the person they identified him as when they greeted him in the morning or said good night to. Had they met him sober — not an impossibility, but it never happened — they would have known him, but would also have been bothered by some creeping subconscious fear, a sense that there was something just a little off. And while they would have gone home without being able to articulate what exactly it had been, what precisely had bothered them, they would have dreamed about it that night. But they would have forgotten it in the morning.

He was such a high functioning alcoholic, in fact, that when he was killed in a car crash, driving drunk, the accident wasn’t even his fault; the other car had swerved across the median when the driver bent over to change cds. And since no one checks the breath of a dead man, the eulogist stressed what a senseless  tragedy it had been, the hand of fate reaching down to pluck one of us, any of us, for reasons that would known to none of us. Which, of course, was more or less what had happened. But the easy answer, the wrong one, was denied.

The groceries he had left on the little stone wall outside of his complex stayed there all that night, and into the morning. By dawn they were wet with dew. The ice cream had melted swiftly and then slowly refrozen under the cold light of the morning stars; the package of cookies he had already opened had allowed in enough moisture to become soggy, and the avocadoes had not even begun to ripen when the garbage man, wreathed in cigar smoke, walked all the way across the sidewalk, picked them up, and tossed them into his cart. He didn’t have to do it; he wouldn’t usually have done it. He didn’t even know that no one was coming for these groceries. But he’s the one who threw them away.

No one knew that he started each day with a drink, or that he never stopped until falling asleep in front of the TV; he monitored his blood alcohol like a diabetic watched their insulin. Which is to say, even he no longer thought much about it. It was no longer interesting to him. It was just what he did. After years, he understood the range of breath and the danger of close conversation so well that no one ever smelled a thing on him, so well that he even forgot that he was lonely. He never stumbled, never slurred. And that particular openness of expression had become the face his co-workers knew, the person they identified him as when they greeted him in the morning or said good night to. Had they met him sober — an impossibility, which never happened — they would have known him, but would also have been bothered by some creeping subconscious fear, a sense that there was something just a little off. And while they would have gone home without being able to articulate what exactly it had been, what precisely had bothered them, they would have dreamed about it that night. But they would have forgotten it in the morning.

He was such a high functioning alcoholic, in fact, that when he was killed in a car crash, driving drunk, the accident wasn’t even his fault; the other car had swerved across the median when the driver bent over to change cds. And since no one checks the breath of a dead man, the eulogist stressed what a senseless  tragedy it had been, the hand of fate reaching down to pluck one of us, any of us, for reasons that would known to none of us. Which, of course, was more or less what had happened. But the easy answer, the wrong one, was denied.

The groceries he had left on the little stone wall outside of his complex stayed there all that night, and into the morning. By dawn they were wet with dew. The ice cream had melted swiftly and then slowly refrozen under the cold light of the morning stars; the package of cookies he had already opened had allowed in enough moisture to become soggy, and the avocadoes had not even begun to ripen when the garbage man, wreathed in cigar smoke, walked all the way across the sidewalk, picked them up, and tossed them into his cart. He didn’t have to do it; he wouldn’t usually have done it. He didn’t even know that no one was coming for these groceries. But he’s the one who threw them away.

Red October: the hunt for a way to win the cold war without negotiating with terrorists

I enjoyed The Hunt for Red October, but it’s also a really interestingly stupid ideological fiction, structured by the need to believe a contradiction about geopolitics: peace can only be achieved by a balance of powers (mutually assured destruction), it acknowledges, but also peace can only be achieved by American supremacy and domination. The movie, quite characteristically, I think, needs to have it both ways, needs both to imagine the cold war as a thing America wins and yet understands, somewhat more rationally, that winning the cold war would actually mean the end of the world (and therefore has to forget it).

It does this by displacing the threat posed by “victory” onto the Russians: their technological superiority would be, as such, an existential threat to humanity, yet the Americans can safely crush them without fear; we, it is understood, would never start a nuclear war, so we can be trusted with a first strike technology. Why, after all, do Sean Connery and his entire officer corps decide to defect? The movie wants very much to establish that it isn’t selfish; their defection comes not when the cold war is lost for Russia, but when it was about to be won, when the Russian’s invent a super sub capable of launching a first strike attack on the US without being detected. It is (Connery’s character) Vilnius’ Ramius’ fear, then, that Russia will use it to win the cold war and end the world that makes him decide to defect. He and his officers choose to defect to the US, in other words, because they are citizens of the world, because they fear for humanity if the USSR has the means to win the cold war.

But why would giving this device to the US solve the problem? The fact that both sides would have the means to start a nuclear war actually accomplishes nothing, because both sides already had the means to start a nuclear war at any time. But this frame of reference diverts our attention from the fact that, in practice, the US goal was always as much to acquire nuclear superiority for itself as it was to establish a peaceful balance of powers. The movie’s reference to the Cuban missile crisis, for example (“some mad man decided to put nuclear missiles off the coast of Florida and nearly ended the world“) is consistent with a historical narrative that has decided to forget the US had also precipitated the whole thing by placing missiles that could destroy Russia in Turkey (while Russia could only hit Europe) and that the negotiated peace was less an American demonstration of will than a pragmatic willingness to de-escalate in response to Russia’s (riskier because prior) dismantling of their missiles in Cuba. And when we removed our Jupiter missiles from Turkey, for example, six months later and (only on the condition that we could do so secretly, so as not to look weak), a generation of American politicians learned the lesson that we could win by standing tall against the Russian. And Khrushchev lost power two years later, in large part for doing what Kennedy (apparently fearing the loss of conservative votes more than the end of the world) wouldn’t do: look weak by averting the crisis through negotiated de-escalation.

It must always be them, in short, who take the first risk, because we aren’t weak. In this sense, the moment when Alec Baldwin and company first board the Russian sub and discuss whether to bring a side-arm is quite telling: Baldwin has been, throughout, the voice of reason, the CIA operative who believes Vilnius Ramius to be trustworthy and that its worth taking a chance on peace. But when push comes to shove, the American sub captain asks him whether he would “bet his life” on Vilnius’ good will, and Baldwin accedes; better to bring the gun so you can shoot your way out of a jam, or something. But this is ridiculous: if Vilnius Ramius is not trustworthy, they’re all dead anyway. Bringing a pistol onto a Russian sub is not safety; it’s dangerous cowboyism, much more likely to precipitate a crisis than avert it. Which is, of course, the thing with missiles in Turkey: it was the desire not to have to “bet one’s life” on Russian trustworthiness (necessitating American nuclear supremacy) that made it almost inevitable that the Russians would put missiles in Cuba in response.  

The Hunt for Red October can’t think its way out of this problem. Which, for one thing, leads it to quite stupidly overlook the glaring hole in its entire premise: while the drama of the movie hinges on the idea that the Red October represents a new technology that can upset the balance of powers, the plucky American sub technicians figure out how to detect the undetectable sub literally the moment it is first used. And while the narrative of the movie from that point forward is the hunting of an un-huntable sub, the Americans track the thing just fine, as do the Russians. But without that kind of stupidity, we wouldn’t be able to stage the final climactic battle between submarines, would have no way to satisfy our bloodlust by blowing up a Russian sub and safely returning home to pat ourselves on the head for winning a war for peace.   

This all makes the business about American cowboyism (“buckaroos”) the movie’s nicest ironic touch, albeit one that Clancy himself is, I‘m sure, totally unaware. Because while Vilnius Ramius is quite right to fear that the Americans might turn out to be hot-headed and stupid (without exception, they pretty much are), the movie both shows that this fear is valid and then, magically, resolves itself without their stupid hot-headedness having any consequences. The best example of this is when Sean Connery suggests to Alec Baldwin that, just maybe, a cowboy gunfight inside the missile chamber of a nuclear sub might, perhaps, be a dangerous thing. This seems to me to be an eminently reasonable notion. But Alec Baldwin both makes fun of this caution and then (as before) chooses self-preservation through pre-emption rather than take any actual risk for peace: when we see the cold war standoff crystallized in the figure of the Russian cook holding the wires of the nuclear missile and Alec Baldwin holding a gun on him, this standoff is not resolved by both sides lowering their weapons and agreeing not to blow each other up. Instead, the mad Russian is pictured by the movie as a suicide bomber, whose only desire is to destroy both sides, and the only way to stop him is to shoot him first. Which Alec Baldwin does, again, without consequence (and the dozens of shots fired in the gunfight in the missile chamber of a nuclear sub ends without mishap).

I suspect, then, that this is the purpose of The Hunt for Red October. Since the actual cold war ended not with American victory but with cooler heads prevailing in the USSR, Clancy’s neo-con wet dream has to re-tell the story of the end of the cold war as a victory for technological superiority. Note, for example, how the movie goes out of its way to humiliate the Russian ambassador in the final scene: a negotiated victory is unthinkable, so the movie can only end with the representative of Moscow crawling to Washing literally with hat in hand. Instead of a troubling narrative in which Gorbachev’s willingness to take a risk and de-escalate first might be seen as having saved the lives of American cowboys (who were heedlessly blundering towards nuclear confrontation because the only outcome they could accept was unconditional surrender), the movie needs to re-imagine the cold war as a history in which we not only could have blown them all up and survived, but in which we won because we did. They are the maniacs who might end the world by trying to win the war by shooting first, it tells us, and then without a trace of self-awareness or cognitive dissonance, happily goes on to tell a story of disaster averted by cowboys who win the war by shooting first.

The Aeneid on Facebook

It’s unclear who transformed Virgil’s Aeneid into a facebook narrative, but to that anonymous soul toiling in, um, anonymity, I say kudos. The thing is incredibly funny, and even though it’s been a few years since I’ve read the epic in question, gags like “Aeneas changed his relationship status to It’s Complicated” after hooking up with Dido are, as far as I’m concerned, the cat’s meow in pajamas, LOLZ.

Anyway, I trust humor more than I trust anything else; where there’s smoke there’s fire, and laughter always indicates that some itch was there to have made it worth scratching. So let me scratch this a little deeper. Why pick the Aeneid for this gag? There are more obvious choices. The Odyssey would work as well, I bet, and is more widely known, while Brad Pitt’s turn in Troy might have made people more aware of the Illiad. In any cases, when a modern looks for a “dusty old epic” to spoof, it’s almost always not Virgil.

But here’s a guess as to why the Aeneid might have been the appropriate choice for this treatment, intentionally or no. Unlike Homer’s epics, The Aeneid is about foundation myths as myths, both the story of the mythical founding of Rome and, in a more general sense, about the ways that the acts of human beings here and now can actually be determinative of the course taken by their predecessors (by, say, creating a mythological story). There’s a nice fantasy of empire, right at the beating heart of the thing, that gets revealed as fantasy, the question of whether one can ever “found” anything and whether permanance can ever be created. It is, in other words, about the ways words become flesh, and about how flesh undoes words: Aeneis’ rage (in a revision of Homer’s Achilles) is the thing that founds Rome, but it’s also a peculiar kind of undoing of it, a vengeful act of founding that simultaneously sows the seeds of its own destruction.

But don’t take my word for it. As Sharon James tells us, “It is, in Jane Austen’s words, a truth universally acknowledged that the Aeneid is concerned with the founding of Rome, an event commonly described by the verb condere. This word is so crucial to the poem that it appears conspicuously at both beginning and end: dum conderet urbem (1.5) and ferrum adverso sub pectore condit (12.950). But these two acts are so different — the one a slow, constructive struggle to settle down and build a civilization, the other a swift, destructive act of enraged killing — that by placing them in such prominent symmetry and using the same word of them, Vergil calls attention to the relationship between them…In linking the slow founding of Rome to the swift stabbing of Turnus, Vergil suggests that the former rests on the latter. Thus he shows the violence and fury beneath the founding of Rome.”

As James notes, this is a linguistic innovation of Virgil’s; while the idiom “to bury a weapon in an opponent” is common both in English and in Latin after the Aeneid, it was Virgil’s use of the two terms in deadly symmetry in the Aeneid, linking the foundation of Rome with the murderous passion that undoes it, that gives it this connotation. All of which is, I suppose, just to make a fairly simple point: what better way to mock the pretensions of the imperial epic than this most transient of texts, the facebook page? What less imperial form of discourse could there possibly be?

 

Shell Games: Keziah Jones, and Things Fall Apart

Keziah Jones’ song “1973 (Joker’s Reparations)” begins with a weird left-turn from the recording of Major Nzeogwu announcing Nigeria’s first military coup in ‘66, he suddenly shifts to singing about global currency politics, how (in 1973), the Naira was introduced (“to help the economy”) and noted that, because it was pegged to the dollar at the rate of six per (“the value’s kinda weak”), this “official calculation” would eventually lead to Nigeria’s impoverishment. Such globalization makes democracy a punchline, he sings, and now Nigerians must go begging to those who, with no apologies, devalue currencies and sends all the money to banks in Switzerland.

Right on; Fela for the 21^st. But I was struck by these lines:

“Before inflation, we used cowries; we all knew what things were worth; But for mirrors and beads, they sold us a whole nation”

Ah, the cowrie shell! Global capitalism has never seemed more like a shell game than right now, of course, but it can be a dangerous fantasy to imagine a pre-capitalist time (or place) when stuff was actually worth exactly what it was worth, however common the Marxists (and others) have done so, using the figure of the primitive as the figure for pure use value economies. But it’s particularly dangerous to use cowrie shells as your example, should you elect to focus in on West Africa, as Keziah has.

Here’s why. If you’ve read Things Fall Apart – and if you haven’t, for shame! – you’ll recall that before the missionaries show up, Umuofia has a thriving economy based on the cowrie shell, an economy which gets radically shifted around after the white folks start dropping benjamins and palm oil kernal becomes a thing of great price, with tragic consequence. It’s a narrative about falling apart, as the title proclaims, so there’s an easy reading in which the difference between a local economy based on local indigenous production gets crushed and supplanted by outside economic forces. It’s this narrative, roughly, which Keziah Jones is appealing to.

The thing about cowrie shells, though, is that they are about as non-indigenous as they could possibly be: the shells used for money by isolated villages in the backcountry Niger delta, as it happens, came from the Maldives, twelve-hundred islands in the middle of the Indian ocean.

How, you ask, did they get there? Well, I’ll tell you. They were used as ballast by slave ships. If you care to know all about it, you can read Johnson and Hogendorn’s The Shell Money of the Slave Trade, or you can be satisfied with my brief sketch: since the cowrie shell happens to have all the qualities one needs of currency (accurately countable, incredibly durable, and with just the right balance between being cheap but not being of unlimited supply) it went from being a East Indian trade object in the pre-European hegemony era to being (around the turn of the 18^th century) the primary merchandise used to trade for African slaves.

A “Dutch Gentleman,” for example, lamented that “Formerly twelve thousand weight of these cowries would purchase a cargo of five or six hundred negroes, but those lucrative times are now no more; and the negroes now set such a value on their countrymen that there is no such thing as having a cargo under twelve or fourteen tons of cowries.” As far back as the 14^th century, Ibn Battuta visited the Maldives and described how: “They gather this animal in the sea and then put them in holes in the ground until the flesh rots, leaving the white shell…. They exchange [the shells] for rice with the people of Bengal, who also use them as currency. They also sell them to the people of Yemen, who ballast their ships with them instead of with sand. These cowries are also used in the lands of the blacks. I saw them being sold in Mali and Gawgaw at a rate of 1150 per dinar.”

Paul Lunde tells us that the exchange rate at that time was 400,000 cowries to the dinar (or more), which was 1/350 of the rate those currencies traded for in Mali, “a proportion that gives an idea of the profits possible in the cowry trade if the shells could be transported far enough from their place of origin. And they were transported great distances: After Yemeni ships, Portuguese, Dutch and English ships also carried them as ballast, and huge quantities were auctioned to slavers in Amsterdam and London in the 18th century.” And then, presumably, shipped onward to West Africa.

This is one of those facts that its good to have on hand when teaching Things Fall Apart; after all, treating the novel like a “first contact” story gets a little strained when you reflect that the “pre-colonial” money used by these isolated natives actually connects them to a global trading network that spans centuries. And I’m pretty sure that Chinua Achebe knew this – or if he didn’t I’m going to pretend – because it makes the story of Things Fall Apart a lot more intersting when you recognize Umuafia’s isolation as more apparent than real, a globalizing exclusion rather than a primitive insularity.

 

The Conversation about the Wire

The Conversation is a remarkable film in all sorts of ways, but it’s as a striking contrast with The Wire that I found myself responding to it. Despite a few nods in the direction of self-awareness, The Wire is, I think, mostly oblivious to its own medium; especially compared to a movie like The Conversation, which is absolutely obsessed with the idea of surveillance and what doing it does to us, The Wire is curiously uncurious about what it does to people to watch other people, what effect the technology itself has on them, and on what kinds of subjectivities get formed by that process.

Think of Gene Hackman going to confession, for example; in The Conversation it’s more than merely a wink at another mode of surveillance: by making his own surveillance activities into the object of surveillance, he is spurred towards the crisis of consciousness that drives the narrative from that point forward, not only the notion that looking is itself a form of involvement (a responsibility he has previously repressed) but the realization that who he is has been shaped and warped by his professional as a private eavesdropper. We see this from the start, in fact; his personal life is not only in shambles because of his obsession with knowing and his defensive paranoia (as the birthday wine and the failed love affair show) but also because he himself is not in control of the surveillance machine. The twist at the end, and what happens to his apartment, make clear that putting your faith in surveillance is a trap: Hackman is misled both because he seeks to know and because this quest is turned against him (and, in fact, the manner in which the movie manipulates us to fall into the same trap is sort of sublime. We jump to the same wrong conclusions as he does).

The Wire does none of this. While there’s a certain kind of brilliance in how it makes a gripping narrative about the economies of information flow that structure social institutions, there’s also a failure to recognize that those institutions tell their own useful fictions, that being a good cop, or a good teacher, or a good reporter can mean both mastering a certain kind of data flow only by also being subject to it. The problem, instead, is that good reporters get fired, good cops ride the boat, and good teachers get chewed up: the institutions of the liberal state have been betrayed from above. But from where comes the presumption that if they had been allowed to do their job, things would have gotten better? Newspapers have always been political tools of the ruling class, the police have been an instrument of social repression for like always, and while I believe in education as a positive social force, you don’t have to work very hard to make an argument for the ways educational institutions can and do get used for social control.

These are complex issues, of course, but while The Wire drips with rage that well-meaning liberals lack real power in today’s society, The Conversation is based on the notion that the road to hell is paved with good intentions: it tells the story of socially sanctioned modes of information gathering and dissemination being not only manipulated for murderous and anti-democratic purposes, but it illustrates the way a basically good hearted person becomes the instrument of that murderous engine. And the more he tries to insert himself into the process, the more he tries to control the instruments of the liberal surveillance state, the more he is himself warped and crushed by it.

In other words, what’s curious about The Wire is not only its failure to think about the repressive use to which liberal social modes of surveillance have always been put, but the extent to which it fails to think about what mastering these modes of power does to the good intentioned people that do it. There are a lot of reasons for that, I think; it’s a cop show created by a former cop, so the extent to which it takes police subjectivity for granted is no surprise. As a muckraking naturalist narration, it takes the conventions of expository naturalism for granted. As a show about teachers and newspapers written by a former teacher and reporter, the kinds of surveillance that drive those institutions are presumed, rather than rendered themselves the object of analysis. And so forth. But I think a certain kind of techno-philia also enables it to make this mistake: while Gene Hackman makes all his own tools and machines — emphasizing his organic imbrication into the process (and the process in him) — “the wire” is always a tool in The Wire, an alienated object that because it exists only to be used, can only be used, and otherwise sits there passively.

Good Greif: On “On Repressive Sentimentalism”

That Mark Greif has a very skeptical view of “marriage” is clear. And in his “On Repressive Sentimentalism,” he positions what he takes to be homosexuality’s implicit antipathy to “marriage” as something refreshingly and hopefully utopian. Here’s how he opens the essay:

“Gays are our utopian heroes. Many things changed in the twentieth century. No change was more momentous and utopian than that men could choose men for love objects, and women choose women, to remake the sexual household. If the household organization of three thousand years of recorded history could be altered simply in the interest of what people wanted, in the interest of desire, then anything could be changed.”

That his claim for the preeminence of this change is not merely arguable but goes un-argued is as strange to me as is the “our” with which he frames his argument. But I’ll get to that in a moment; first, since marriage is the box in which he places all manner of social injustice for the last three millenia, it is deeply important for him to maintain the utopianism of gay politics by distinguishing it from the merely pro-marriage accommodationism of those bourgeois liberals fighting the various variations on Prop 8. As he will argue, a bit further down, “The goal of gay marriage, in the pro-marriage position, has to include indifference to marriage as an institution.  Marriage must remain abstract—it hardly matters if anyone does it once the original blush is off and the initial rush abates.”

To the extent that this “include” is all he is really saying, I agree: allowing gay marriage only to the extent that it can be exactly like straight marriage is possibly as pernicious as forbidding it altogether, and less than nothing has been accomplished. But his is not an inclusive argument, but a polemic, even a jeremiad; the essay, after all, is titled after the “repressive”-ness of sentimentalism.

The first thing, then, is that any time someone tries to talk about the repressiveness of sentimentality, I think about how basically the entire freaking American literary tradition for the last century has used “sentiment” as a short-hand for what Nina Baym calls “the encroaching, constricting, destroying society” against which an American writer has to struggle manfully in order to be considered literary, and which, as she goes on to point out, “is represented with particular urgency in the figure of one or more women.” And Greif is so far from being the first writer to call sentimentality repressive that his failure to address the well-worn path he’s walking becomes interesting in its own right. As I.A. Richards recently wrote in 1929, for example, “sentimental is one of the most over-worked words in the whole vocabulary of literary criticism” and though he noted “its twofold use, as an insult and as a description” more or less so that he could categorize and systematize what exactly is derogatory about being sentimental, his distinction of “its fogginess in the second capacity” from “its social significance” is precisely where we need to start: sentimental is a useful insult because it is both intuitively a bad thing and hard to define why. But as Baym nicely argues, the intuitivity of sentimentality’s badness is so often a simple function of a gut-level antipathy for a domesticity understood as feminized that the fact that Greif can take a statement like “[b]ecause the family…seems to be the origin of violence, hierarchy, and tyranny” as actually saying anything is, at the very least, something to think very carefully about.