Consider Phlebas

Interdisciplinarity

2012-01-22T11:48:00.001Z

David Graeber's Debt is a work in a kind of history of ideas; an attempt to draw out, through its involvement in and reshaping of various human practices, the part that debt and the network of ideas it sits at the centre of have played in constructing contemporary society. In order to do this well, as well as Graeber's undoubtedly extensive and often highly illuminating knowledge of the practices of debt, you would need to be a competent reader of the texts used and to have some skill in conceptual analysis. Otherwise, you will make mistakes about the content of changes in practices and when and where they occurred. Graeber illustrates this perfectly.

For example, in Graeber's discussion of how, through slavery, debt shaped ideas of freedom, he relies on a contrast he deploys elsewhere between possessing an object and being embedded in a network of human relations. Of course, though, possessing an object is being embedded in a network of human relations, relations of permissions and prohibitions of the various uses of the object by all the people who might use it, permissions and prohibitions which can be more and less rich. Equally, we can understand being embedded in a network of human relations as structuring and so specifying the set of powers you possess in much the same way as Graeber sees a focus on the things you own and so hold powers over does. Graeber is in effect contrasting something with itself. Given the way the contrast structures much of what he says - the switch from what he calls "human" to "market" economies is discussed in these terms, for example - his failure to see this is pretty damaging to his project as a whole.

Relatedly, he is pretty lazy about interpreting various figures in the history of political thought. In the course of his discussion of freedom, he refers to the "strange fantasies" of "Hobbes, Locke and Smith, about the origins of society in some collection of thirty- or forty-year old males who seem to have sprung from the earth fully formed [and] then have to decide whether to kill each other or begin to swap beaver pelts". While I've not read any Smith, I find it hard to understand how someone who had read Hobbes and Locke could think they shared a philosophical anthropology, and particularly how they shared this kind of highly individualized one. Locke's explanation and justification of the the formation of the state in The Second Treatise (pdf) focuses on the need for adjudication of disputes between families (see Chapter 7, particularly sections 87 and 88). What Locke says may or may not be right, but given its focus on families, which for Locke included not just blood relations but servants and slaves, and on the adjudication of disputes, which could of course only occur in the context of sustained relations that it is worth trying to preserve, it could hardly be sensibly characterised as about 'some collection of thirty- or forty-year old males sprung from the earth fully formed'.

This really is a pity, since what Graeber says about, for example, the myth of the origin of money in barter is excellent, both in itself and as a critique of economics as it is practised. If that expertise could have been married to a decent background in the history of political and presumably economic thought as well as a coherent conceptual framework, the book perhaps would have been really good. It's not as if Graeber is alone in thinking that the problem with market relations being that they're conducted altogether outside of morality, in a realm of power. It's more that it's strange that an anthropologist, supposedly trained to tease out the content and rationale of the various structuring links which inevitably make up any set of human relations, would fall victim to that error.

(Not) Ruled By Effete Arseholes

2012-01-21T19:24:00.005Z

Whatever else you might think about this song, and I think it's great, you have to wonder if it displays the sort of attitude towards one's homeland likely to be the basis of a successful nation-state.

Lest We Forget

2012-01-04T16:48:00.002Z

I'm glad that two of Stephen Lawrence's killers have been brought to justice. I'm uneasy both about the removal of the double jeopardy rule and about the length of time that's passed since their crime, but criminal justice is centrally about public reassurance and condemnation, and those both speak strongly in favour of their punishment. However, the reason Stephen Lawrence's murder became a public and political event, the reason it wasn't only a private wrong, was the way it, particularly once The Daily Mail got involved, and then the Macpherson report into it exposed the racist incompetence of British police forces. So in many ways, this fact (from here) is the most important thing I've seen about the coverage of their conviction today:

...those disappointed by the decade since Macpherson point at the stop and search figures. According to official statistics, in 1999-2000, a black person was five times more likely than a white person to be stopped by police. A decade later, they were seven times more likely.

The Ethics Of Creation

2011-12-13T16:25:00.000Z

One of the wonderful things about reading Rawls' A Theory of Justice is the breadth and so the richness of his writing. For example, in the context of explaining why the parties in the original position would choose principles which maximize the position of the worst-off, he discusses the role of facts in theorizing about justice, saying that "fundamental principles of justice quite properly depend on natural facts about men in society" and then going on to claim that thinking otherwise "makes moral philosophy the study of the ethics of creation: an examination of the reflections an omnipotent deity might entertain in determining which is the best of all possible worlds". This is a lovely, pregnant phrase, one which he goes on to develop and refine by contrasting the differences between the role of facts in utilitarianism and his own theory through the remainder of that section. One of the many complaints about the REF, the mechanism by which the British government distributes funding for research in higher education, is that it institutionalizes a 'publish or perish' requirement (see for example here). If you haven't got enough good pieces of work published in the census period, at the minimum you're screwing your institution and your colleagues over and perhaps making yourself unemployed or more likely unemployable. Rawls finished his PhD 21 years before he wrote Theory. He published articles here and there in the interim, but not many, not by today's standards. He didn't have to. Presumably, one of the consequences of that is the scope, the genuinely magisterial scope, and so the care and wisdom of Theory. He had the time to think these things through, to pursue resolutions to problems through all their complexities. In comparison with much of the work done in his field now, then, ironically, it is his considered reflections on how we might live together justly in spite of our differences that seem like an ethic of creation. There is so much that they explore, so much that, partly because of his influence, which perhaps has not always been good, but not just because of that, is now skated over, assumed and not thought through.

Actually The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

2011-11-17T11:05:00.001Z

Anyone teaching moral or political philosophy inevitably comes across some surly know-it-all student who's convinced that the entire enterprise is an obvious mistake. Typically they have incredibly bad reasons for thinking that we should just stop investigating whether it's acceptable for people to treat in each other certain kinds of ways; certainly, you can be sure they'd feel they had some kind of complaint if you told them that everytime they made some stupid remark about it 'all being relative', you'd thrash them to within an inch of their life. Unfortunately, pointing out the performative contradictions in their attitudes like this is morally unacceptable, a point you can be sure they'll make - and fail to realise the relevance of to their earlier insistence that the whole practice of making moral claims is, like, so bourgeois. On the other hand, actually engaging with them, given how deep-seated a patently contradictory form of ill-considered relativism or scepticism often seems to be, can be very frustrating, for them as well - and it's not always their fault they hold ridiculous attitudes - as well as preventing you from teaching what you're supposed to be teaching. This, designed by the wonderful Tom Porter at Manchester, then is an excellent tool: a careful and patient online guide through why most of the common and most obvious forms of scepticism about moral and political philosophy are quite straightforwardly wrong - although I should say that I don't think framing the question in terms of the ontological status of moral claims, rather than in the terms of the less contentious question of whether there are standards of correctness for them, is a good idea.

For Gerhard Richter

2011-10-26T16:44:00.000+01:00

Barbeques And Ballgames

2011-08-31T17:08:00.001+01:00

I'm moving house today, typing this while waiting for the removal van to arrive. I was away till late yesterday and had done at most a couple of hours packing before going, but I was still able to take a very leisurely pace getting everything into boxes and suitcases today. This somehow seems wrong. In Michael Mann's great film Heat, Robert De Niro's character, a resourceful, charming and incredibly self-contained career criminal, has a maxim about having nothing you can't leave in 30 seconds flat. I'm not quite there, but still. I never wanted to be a career criminal though. I'd have liked to have had the self-possession, the confidence of being in command, but I'm not really equipped that way; I don't have the nerves, let alone the stamina or the stomach, for it. And of course Heat is the story of a man increasingly unable to walk away from the loyalties that despite himself he can't help but accumulate, in the end forced to choose between them and survival. So you wonder. I turned 30 while I was away. How is it I've got to 30 with a life that can be packed up in a few hours and could probably be walked out of considerably quicker than that? Where are my traces?

On Lacking Balls

2011-08-14T17:49:00.001+01:00

Twice in the last week I have listened to people provide straightforwardly racist analyses of the riots and looting in the earlier part of the week. One began with a critique of the looters' unwillingness to put in the hard graft necessary to get what you want which quickly became a critique of black peoples' unwillingness to put in the hard graft necessary to get what you want. Obviously, there are a number of problems with this, but it was quite striking how quickly the looters became black people in general. The second was more hyperbolic, less a piece of standard Tory excuse-making for being a prejudiced prick and more a kind of hysteria . The person in question complained that since the looting they saw was committed only by black people, a claim I am sceptical about, they felt that they were the object of race hate because of it. This was though they had no actual interactions with the looters and certainly had nothing stolen. It was also after they'd said that the looters' targets seemed to be chosen without any interest in race and mainly focused on getting desirable consumption goods rather than violence, which they admitted had been more or less totally absent. One of the cheering things about it all has been the relative absence of this sort of thing from the coverage I've seen by professional news organisations, but you wonder how many conversations around the country have been marked by it, how acceptable it is or is becoming to characterise looting as a problem of a racial enemy within. You also wonder how many people hearing it were, like me, prepared to let it pass, to at least avoid contradicting them.

The Fruit Of An Excess Of Corruption

2011-08-10T11:39:00.000+01:00

One thing that I've noticed about the looting over the last couple of days is how stratified it shows consumption patterns in the UK are. I think I've once been into a Footlocker - to buy a pair of football boots - yet the theft and destruction seems to have always picked out sportswear shops. On the other hand, bookshops, where I spend considerably more of my time, seem to have been left untouched. I'd imagine that's not an unusual difference between someone of my class and someone of the class typical of the looters. It'd be strange if it was only consumption patterns and not, say, attitudes towards the legitimacy of other's property rights, which differed like that. Thomas Jones points out here that the borough of London which is all started in, Haringey, is the most unequal, and it's worth noting that Clapham Junction sits between a series of large highrise housing estates off Falcon Road and up St Johns Hill and the Victorian and extremely expensive terraces between Clapham and Wandsworth Commons. As Rousseau put it when pouring vituperation on the hierarchies of eighteenth century Europe and the conspicuous consumption that fuelled them, "subjects having no law but the will of their master, and their master no restraint but his passions, all notions of good and all principles of equity... vanish".

Not The Colour Of Television, Tuned To A Dead Channel

2011-08-02T21:31:00.003+01:00

Although I didn't quite get the madeleine rush I'd expected from listening to the original Dr Who theme music, the British Library's science fiction exhibition, Out of this World, was otherwise excellent - particularly as respite from my landlord's insistence that I have quite unreasonably inconvenienced him by refusing to voluntarily make myself homeless for a fortnight and demanding instead to continue to pay rent to live in his flat. It's hardly revolutionary in that it thematically connects various movements in and around sci-fi to various perennial human concerns, only made more vivid by the expanded scope of technology, both real and imagined. It doesn't need to be though, since it has such a wonderful range of material to play with: Cthulthu toys in the same display as novels by a Booker winner; artists' imaginings of H. G. Wells' Martians along with the 18th century's visions of the 20th; musings about the origins of steampunk across the aisle from a copy of short story in which the term cyberspace was first used; a typed and annotated draft of The Day of the Triffids and Gallileo's speculations about the possibility of life on the moon. Quite enough madeleine rushes even without the Dr Who theme music, I suppose.

Wapping Year Zero

2011-07-08T09:23:00.000+01:00

Bent coppers, bent journalists, unsolved murders, the manufacture of evidence, the well-connected raising walls of silence that can't be breached: it's like we're all living in a David Peace novel. So far at least we retain the hope that some of the right people will get their comeuppance, though we all know what happens to those hopes in Peace's novels. You do have to wonder though what the hell News International thinks all the journalists who were until yesterday working on the News of the Screws are going to do now.

I Told You To Bury It At The Crossroads

2011-06-15T13:17:00.005+01:00

So, apparently Blue Labour is not, despite my efforts, dead (pdf). The question is whether that means it's alive. Since its critique of the allegedly left-liberal mainstream in the Labour Party seems to consist of a rather poorly warmed-over version of the communitarianism that had finally collapsed under the problem of not actually having read the people it was trying to criticize some time in the mid-nineties, I think not. They're even invoking Alisdair MacIntyre now, who may be a very good moral philosopher but whose discussion towards the end of After Virtue of how what he says relates to contemporary political theory is rather marred by the fact he is quite obviously uninterested in how any of the actual details of what it says might interfere with his moral grandstanding in favour of whatever it is he thinks he can coherently get out marrying the traditions of Thomist Catholicism with those of Red Clydeside.

Let's just remind ourselves briefly what was wrong with communitarianism the last time round so as to be able to deal with its shambling zombie cousin. Communitarians say that communities, traditions and relationships give our lives purpose and meaning, enable us to act together to achieve common goods and the like. So far, so motherhood and apple pie. The worrying move is when they start describe liberals as unable to understand the unavoidably social nature of our lives because of the way their stance depends on abstract values which cannot but fail to capture the distinctive character of the groups we actually live our lives out in. What's worrying about this is that the abstract values they have in mind are things like whether you are able to leave these groups, whether you have an equal share of power within them, and whether they treat you with basic human dignity.

None of these are abstract values. It's pretty concretely awful when you are trapped within a group which systematically deprives you of a right to a say in what it does and predictably denies you a fair share of what it cooperatively produces. Concretely awful in the way that the lives of people who weren't straight white men were in the period that Maurice Glasman evokes as exemplifying the ideal he wants to return to - along of course with the lives of many straight white men who had limited access to healthcare and education and depended on often dangerous work in order to be able to live. Jon Wilson even goes so far as to slag off Tom Paine's demand for equal rights as demonstrating the pitiful way he'd become alienated from the communities he should have been making his home in. Why not call him a rootless cosmopolitan and be done with it? Glasman after all has already said that EDL supporters are "falsely stereotyped as racist, sexist, nationalist", so slurring other members of your political community as insufficiently enculturated into its exclusive and oppressive norms of conduct is surely only a small step away.

What Blue Labour and other communitarians fail to understand is that what liberals are interested in is ensuring that communities and traditions treat their members decently and that relationships are not abusive or exploitative. This is why we care about rights to exit, for example, since the right to leave means that people do not have to be trapped in relationships they hate. Either Blue Labour don't care about people being trapped in abusive, exploitative and oppressive relationships, communities and traditions, or it is entirely unclear what their complaint about liberalism is, since, other than saying things in favour of class, gender and racial hierarchies, that complaint seems to be more or less entirely constituted by some hand-waving in the general direction of some obscure complaints about abstraction. It is notable, for example, that Jon Wilson's discussion of the value of groups before slagging off Tom Paine says nothing about the importance of rights of exit or other rights to control the terms on which you interact with others.

Given that, more or less everyone I am aware of has been far too conciliatory to an intellectual movement whose sole distinctive contribution seems to be the valorization of various kinds of racism, sexism and ideologies of self-help entirely inadequate for ensuring that people can live their lives out without being at the mercy of others and impersonal forces beyond their control. Rather than trying to carefully explain why we disagree with their oh-so-careful, thoughtful analysis, as Stuart White does her e for example, the appropriate stance is, I'd presumably rather predictably argue, one of outright and uncompromising hostility - which is of course only a difference of strategy with Stuart. When they start talking about working class traditions of self-help, our response should be, so you want to abolish the NHS? When they start talking about the importance of community, we should say, communities like the ones where marital rape was legal whereas sex between consenting adults of the same gender wasn't? This is zombie communitarianism, and rather than treating it like a respectable intellectual interlocutor with whom we can have a reasonable conversation, we have to just go straight and hard at the head before it cracks open ours and begins feasting on brains.

Laying Traps For Troubadors

2011-05-24T09:00:00.002+01:00

(NSFW)

On Beating And Ill-Using

2011-05-05T11:42:00.000+01:00

Last May, before the formation of the current government, one of the reasons I hopefully gave for thinking that a Labour and Lib Dem dominated coalition was possible was that the Lib Dems could not get voting reform without the support of the Labour party. I suppose that only matters if you think they could have got the support of the Labour party, and of course the parliamentary mathematics made such a coalition so unwieldy and beholden to nationalists as to be extremely unlikely even if the subsequently increasingly obvious personal distaste could be set aside. Still, a coalition with the Tories was not the only other option open to the Lib Dems, nor was the wholehearted public embrace of an ideologically driven cuts agenda by the party leadership once in coalition necessary. For a group of people able to lead a political party to 22.1% of the vote in a general election, they show a striking inability to work out the basic conditions for the achievement of what must be their single most important political goal. Without a reform to the voting system, this is as good as it is ever going to get for the Lib Dems, and this is already destroying them. Yet they have taken a series of decisions which have made it more or less impossible for them to get the one thing that would turn them from a party condemned to carping from the sidelines or the junior and abused coalition partner into a potential party of government. The Alliance had thought about it in 1982; why hadn't Nick Clegg?

On Knowing Your Enemies

2011-04-28T18:57:00.005+01:00

In a complicated world, it can often be difficult to know where to stand on a given issue. There are many competing considerations to evaluate, and their weights and precise directions can be hard to assess. You may need answers to empirical questions that you may not be very qualified to resolve, and working out who you can trust to provide you with accurate information can often be nearly impossible. Given that, it's useful to have a bellwether of sorts, a guide whose views you can use as a basis for deciding what position to take. For example, you might take the leader of the Conservative Party. You might decide that thinking and doing exactly the opposite of what David Cameron thinks and does is, in any area where you are unsure, probably never going to take you too far wrong. If the Eton-educated leader of Britain's premier defenders of class and other unjustified hierarchies approves of it, then it is probably evil, particularly if he has to lie to make a case for it.

I would suggest this might be a helpful decision procedure for working out how to vote in any forthcoming national referendums on Britain's electoral system. This is notwithstanding both the various frankly ridiculous claims about difference a only marginally more proportional system will make that the yes campaign have peddled, and any desire you might have to shaft Nick Clegg and various other senior Lib Dems. In the latter case, I'd suggest that the best way of shafting the Lib Dem leadership is to shaft the Tory leadership. The Lib Dem leadership is going to cling to the Coalition for dear life, since they will be obliterated at any election unless they have substantial Tory support. Tory support on the other hand is holding fairly steady, presumably because all their voters are actually evil rather than merely misguided and so not so disturbed by plans to gut welfare provision and the Health Service in the middle of a recession. They don't necessarily lose by going to the country, and so are always asking themselves, what are we doing letting this load of bloodless, electorally crippled chancers make us change the voting system? There's always a chance the red meat Cameron'll have to give to the backbenches if they lose the referendum will end up being Nick Clegg's battered political corpse.

Remembrance Of Things Past

2011-04-18T09:17:00.002+01:00

There are various reasons why, in professional contexts, I rarely call myself a philosopher any more. One reason is that I hope I have mostly trained myself out of the weirdly autistic behaviour fondly mocked here.

I Said I Reach For My Revolver

2011-03-29T15:42:00.002+01:00

Apparently, the AHRC, to whom I have obediently genuflected as funders of my doctorate in various publications, has taken it upon itself to lead a programme across the research councils to fund academic research on the basis of its contribution to "Connected Communities". This became clear to me because the Observer claimed that they'd been forced to incorporate the Big Society into their funding priorities at the weekend, an allegation they strongly deny, although not, as they claim, refute. What they deny, though, is that they have coerced into including empty government buzzwords in their funding priorities, not that empty government buzzwords are included in their funding priorities. This is craven toadying, and made worse by the fact that it is craven toadying on the back of what was already craven toadying; the Connected Communities programme, which depoliticises struggles within them through a meaningless rhetoric of wellbeing in exactly the way you'd imagine something that could contribute to Big Society would, predates the current government. I would not, however, sign the petition urging the AHRC to remove the Big Society from its six strategic funding areas, as so far as I can see the AHRC does not have six strategic funding areas and so the request is ill-formed.

It's Hard To Explain To A Crying Child

2011-03-22T16:59:00.003Z

In keeping with being on strike, I've been reading bits of G. A. Cohen's posthumously published corpus today - and also bits of Mike Davis' Buda's Wagon, although the methods of applying political pressure it provides a history of are obviously rather further than I am prepared to go. As well as the text of the talk How To Do Political Philosophy he gave at the beginning of my MPhil class in Contemporary Political Philosophy, collected in On The Currency of Egalitarian Justice, I looked through Why Not Socialism? I don't think I'd realised the extent to which taking that class had shaped not just my research interests, including interests in what we should expect from political philosophy, but also how I do, in the most basic sense possible, political philosophy. For example, one of the major points Cohen's instructions on how to do political philosophy make is that disagreement over political principles is endemic, at least amongst political philosophers, not because of bad faith but because there are typically conflicts between various desiderata all of which cannot be satisfied at once. He lists 8 such sets of desiderata as examples, pointing out how different theorists have rejected different desiderata. One of the points I try, doubtlessly imperfectly, to impress on students is to see that there is almost always something to said for an opponent's position and in rejecting it, you are rejecting something it would be attractive to believe. That, I think, is substantially a legacy of Cohen, as is the fetish for trying to be clear about how what you're saying relates to things any opponents you might have believe.

Cohen's focus on cutting through obscurity and exposing the deep conflicts underlying disputes between political philosophers I think sometimes had its costs though. I remain unconvinced that he ever really understood what was going on in Rawls, and particularly in the appeal to the basic structure as the subject of justice, although he's hardly alone in that. His work on Nozick and libertarianism generally is I think considerably more penetrating precisely because he encountered someone there who, although less disciplined, thought in a similar way. One way that this comes out is in the way he uses the value of community in Why Not Socialism. Community here is contrasted to the instrumentalising way which the twin motives of greed and fear structure market relations. It involves serving others and being served alike instead of only providing others with goods when and because it is to your benefit and is undoubtedly a considerably more moral attractive ideal of how to interact with one's fellows. The immediately obvious problem is the contrast with market relations. Even excluding the kinds of care and assistance that Cohen readily admits are not provided on the basis of greed and fear despite being provided through the labour market, it seems that many more market relations have basic features quite absent from this understanding. For one thing, the property rights around which markets are structured are very rarely maintained directly by greed or fear. I do not abstaining from robbing my fellow citizens from greed or fear; I do it for a whole host of more or less explicitly moralised reasons, some of which seem rather close to the sort of reciprocity Cohen invokes. The clarity he sought could, I think, too often encourage the drawing of too sharp distinctions and so obscure insights which required a more subtle appreciation. None of that, of course, diminishes my debt or my gratitude to him, both personally and in terms of the corpus of work he produced.

Which Side Are You On?

2011-03-21T21:51:00.003Z

I'll be going on strike tomorrow for the first time in my admittedly relatively short professional life. UCU has called for a series of strikes in defence of pensions and pay first in the four nations of the UK, starting in Scotland last Thursday and moving across Wales and Northern Ireland before ending in England tomorrow, and then across the country as a whole on Thursday. I have my reservations about the structure of university education in the UK, and particularly the roles that graduate students and more junior members of staff play within it, but employers are seeking to both impose substantial salary cuts in real terms (pdf) and undermine pension rights (pdf). This is exactly the sort of situation in which collective action is appropriate, and I am glad to see that UCLU supports the strike action.

Gratuities

2011-03-19T19:57:00.003Z

Two quotes, the first from J. D. Mackie's A History of Scotland's description of the Reformation in Scotland and the second a self-description reported in a forthcoming biographical memior of Brian Barry published by the British Academy. Make of them, their possible implications in terms of contemporary political events, and my opinions on those events, what you will.

Practical politicians and calculating economists do not identify themselves with causes of uncertain value.

Barry once wrote that he could not remember a time when he was 'anything other than an atheist with a soft spot for the Church of England, a socialist exasperated by all sections of the Labour Party, and a sympathizer with the tribal vision of England a la Orwell ("a family with the wrong members in control") slightly suffocated by the reality of it'.

Not Crying But Laughing

2011-03-19T19:53:00.002Z

Someone, somewhere, is always taking the piss. Apologies both to Italians and the Japanese.

Roll, Dream, Roll, Dream

2011-02-13T13:51:00.002Z

Although I'm enjoying it, I'm also finding Patti Smith's Just Kids slightly saddening. Although part of it is that I once saw her play live with someone I regret not knowing as well as I did then, it's more than that. What was so wonderful about seeing her play live is the enthusiasm she is able to pass undiluted and to the crowd as a whole for the possibilities of what is basically fairly uncomplicated rock music. You hear Because The Night, and not just that, and you're fiercely certain and celebratory of your joys and your entitlements to them, all of you all together all at once. I saw Rage Against The Machine at the height of their powers and my vulnerability to that kind of thing, I saw The Pixies play when I thought my chance had been and gone nearly a decade before I knew I was missing it, but Patti Smith on the site of a derelict steelworks by the shores of the Mediterreanan is I think easily the best gig I've ever been to.

What's clear from the book is that the sense of the world's openness to youth and energy and a commitment to them she manages to invoke in and with her audiences has structured her whole life. She went to New York and slept rough because that's where she wanted to be and was sure it'd work out in the end; she worked shit jobs in shit places and didn't eat to buy art supplies; she upped sticks and moved into the Chelsea Hotel with Robert Mapplethorpe when he was sick having no idea how they'd pay the rent. It's not that she's sure that the world'll accommodate itself to her - far from it - but rather that she's sure that she can bear the costs of whatever battles she has to fight and that they'll be worth bearing. In the end, the capacity of a kind of democratic, egalitarian wonder at the world to make something beautiful of the sacrifices it has to make in order to win out give it a real courage and resilience. Its openness makes it almost unbreakable. The sad thing about that, of course, is how difficult it is to replicate.

Religion As A Lifestyle Choice

2011-02-09T10:55:00.002Z

Despite being well aware that Italy is Italy and that not all observant Catholics observe all the parts of Catholic doctrine, this is still pretty shocking. Not that the case against Berlusconi for paying an underage prostitute and then abusing his authority to cover it up is being fast-tracked: crusading magistrates are a familiar part of the Italian political scene, though you might worry about the sustainability of their attempts to constrain the efficacy of popular decisions about who rules. Rather, and related to the concern about the clash between legal and more directly democratic procedures, it's that a

survey by the weekly Famiglia Cristiana showed only half of observant Roman Catholics were critical of his behaviour.

This isn't a little bit of marital breakdown where sympathy for those who've at least tried to make a go of it might soften judgments, nor is it all Italians, many of whom might describe themselves as Catholic without really ever attending mass. This is observant Catholics making judgments on - and this is only the sexual behaviour - orgies with hookers. Is there some part of orgies with hookers they didn't understand?

Pretty Straight Guys

2011-02-02T11:25:00.001Z

Apparently, the head of an authoritarian, corrupt, torturing regime which happens to be useful to us is no longer a sonofabitch, but our sonofabitch. Instead, they are "immensely courageous and a force for good". I suppose it's typical of Blair's massive solipsism that he cannot differentiate between what is on the most charitable reading, the very unfortunately necessary evil of Hosni Mubarak, and the individuals willing to sacrifice everything in order to bring an injustice to light you would typically describe as 'immensely courageous'. It's not as if ordering your security services to shoot unarmed protestors against your autocratic rule displays the same sort of deep commitment to human dignity that, say, protesting against that regime, knowing the risks you're running, does. Everyone has a tendency to claim that what they want is in fact what's morally required, but in Blair it seems to have been elevated to a principle of statecraft.

Every Time I Hear The Word 'Community', I Reach For My Revolver

2011-01-17T23:22:00.002Z

Anyone reading this presumably knows me and so knows that I am not always given to sweetness and light about the rest of the human race. I suppose I'd miss them if they were gone, but that is only a supposition. So even if Maurice Glasman weren't pitching himself as "more conservative than the Conservatives", even if he weren't in effect calling for the abolition of most of the welfare state along with the reinstatement of officially-sanctioned gender and racial discrimination along with the criminalization of gay sex, even if the specific political vision he's offering weren't one of "faith, family and the flag", I'd not be entirely happy about Ed Milliband having decided to ennoble him. Early on in his Culture and Equality, Brian Barry defines a 'gut liberal' as "somebody who feels an inclination to throw up when confronted" with either right- or leftwing invocations of the idea of the moral perfection of a world beyond the atomizing and alienating entitlements of rights-talk. Community looms large in these discourses, whether it's one built around hierarchies of status associated with the right or around the obliteration of difference implied by the universal brotherhood of man - and let's not forget that it often was a universal brotherhood of man. Barry's gut liberals should then presumably feel distinctly queasy at the increasing resort to an appeal to community in British political rhetoric. I don't have to like or want to spend time with my neighbours, I, along with everyone else, have to treat them justly - which isn't the same thing at all.

Officer/Overseer

2010-12-12T20:14:00.002Z

On page 202 of China Miéville's newest book, Kraken, there is an almost too perfect reference to KRS-One's Sound of da Police, so good you feel it can't be serendipitous, must be orchestrated. A character familiar with slavery is being pursued by the police, and mishears their reference to themselves as officers as overseer. This seems like an apposite Easter Egg for the week just gone. Somewhere, a police officer is probably not worrying very much about the consequences of having nearly killed a student protester, who given that the baton strike which left him needing breain surgey was recieved on the back of the head, was presumably facing the other way and so not attacking police officer at the time he was hit.

When people make claims about violent extremists, remember how many students were hospitalised and how many police officers were. Remember then how likely it is that someone who's been attacked by the police is to go to hospital to recieve treatment for their injuries and how likely it is that a police officer attacked by someone else will. Remember that the police are all trained, armed and armoured and that students typically aren't. Remember that the police have horses and ride them into crowds of people they've packed together and refused to allow to leave, swinging batons, whereas the protesters confront a row of shields and visors with weapons improvised from placards and the barriers being used to contain them.

Not only do I tend to think that people have of self-defence, I also tend to think that they have rights to free movement and rights to use force to enforce those rights. More, I think it is particularly important that the state refrain from violating citizens' rights since it, unlike actual persons, has no life of its own that might make doing so at least forgivable. Indeed, the legitimacy of its exercise of authority seems to depend on at least it not systematically violating its citizens rights. Therefore, I tend to think that as such, the protesters' violence against police officers earlier this week could only be made illegitimate by the likelihood of resulting in further use of illegitimate state violence against others. Partisans shouldn't fight against an occupier who'll carry out punishment killings, but it should be a matter of regret, for they have been prevented from legitimately exercising their rights to defend themselves and their institutions by their enemy's willingness to violate the rights of others.

On Not Bleating

2010-12-04T17:21:00.001Z

I'd not noticed this till someone pointed it out to me in conversation yesterday, but apparently the Government's proposals for changes to the funding of higher education are now substantially worse than those made by Browne. Rather than make apocalyptic claims about the effects of a system of university funding where which courses students pick to pay for decides how much money universities get for teaching them, apparently in ignorance of the fact that we currently have such a system, opponents of the Government's propsoals might like to point out that fewer students are going to eligible for grants, fewer students are going to be eligible for subsidised loans, and that those loans are going to be less subsidised and take longer to pay back (BBC News; HEFCE presentation (pdf)). Basically, the financial burden students are going to take up by going to university is going to increase for all but the very poorest. That is an affront to equality of opportunity. Students should not have to live like paupers in order to be able to go to university, which is the fate which will await all but the wealthy. There's also good evidence it'll put people off, which is of course also a failure in terms of equality of opportunity.

According to my informant, although I can't find direct evidence of it anywhere, part of the government proposal includes re-rating the level at which loans start to be repaid only every five years and on the basis of 2% fall in the real value of money. Both RPI and CPI are currently above 3%. This means that the headline rise in the threshold at which graduates start repaying their loan is illusory, since it'll be eroded over time and anyway fail to keep piece with growth in incomes for four years out of five. For example, at 3% inflation, £21,000 in today's money will have lost nearly 15% of its value in five years and be worth a little over £18,000. Even when re-rated, over five years a difference of 1% between the actual inflation rate and that assumed produces a real fall in the threshold of over a thousand pounds. Add to this that people will be paying for longer at real rates of interest, and you wouldn't want to be poor or to have taken up much of the government's offer of means-tested, subsidized support.

The Pope Wears A Funny Hat

2010-11-30T13:32:00.000Z

Apparently Noam Chomsky has endorsed the various student occupations around the UK. Clearly the levers of power are almost within their grasp.

On Bleating

2010-11-14T23:13:00.000Z

I'm not going to trawl through the entire Browne report, or even the Coalition's proposals for funding higher education. Apart from anything else, given the state of the higher education sector as it is and the increasingly causalized part of its labour force I am in, I haven't got time. What I will say is that Stefan Collini appears to be talking shit in the LRB of the 4th of November. Collini attacks the Browne proposals as a marketization of higher education which, by encouraging students to pick degrees on economic grounds, will destroy higher education as a public good. Public goods are goods whose benefits are non-excludable and non-rivalrous, that is, goods where if one person has them, everyone has them, and where there is no dimunition in benefit from extra people possessing them. Such goods are notoriously under-provided by the market.

One of the reasons this happens is because people are unwilling to pay the cost of something they know other people are also going to benefit from - or at least they are when they think about it in homo economicus terms. Public subsidy avoids this problem by spreading the cost more evenly across the population who benefit rather than expecting some sucker to pay for everyone. So Collini would then be on strong grounds if he could show that the Browne report proposed reducing public subsidy to higher education to the extent that students started making choices about whether to go to university and what to study that where not conducive towards the production of a population with optimally high levels of higher education. This would at a minimum, presumably require investigation into current patterns of students' choices about higher education so as to form hypotheses about what differences the different structure of public subsidy that Browne proposes will result in. Collini says nothing about what motivates students and how sensitive that is to the subsequent costs of their degree. Unless Collini can show that the Browne proposals would substantially change the behaviour of students, then his argument is basically empty bleating - especially since students already bear substantial economic costs of their studies and this doen't seem to have made any difference to their participation rates or choices about what to do.

None of that is to say that the Browne proposals aren't terrible, indeed, aren't terrible in exactly the way that Collini claims they'll be. It's to say that if you're going to make that claim, you could at least adduce some relevant evidence. A lot of the commentary on the Browne report and the government's proposals has been of this kind of standard so far as I can see. What exactly the effects on student participation is an empirical question. If you want to argue that students are in general going to behave differently if they have to pay back another £18,000 over the course of their working lives on top of the £9,000 or so they now have to pay back, then you need to show that there's reason to think that they will. Making them pay £9,000, initially up front, doesn't seem to have made much difference. Is £18,000 going to push them over a threshold? I don't know, but neither, so far as I can see, does Stefan Collini.

Newspeak

2010-10-26T22:52:00.000+01:00

Freedom is chauvinist dress codes.

All The Perfumes Of Arabia

2010-10-17T23:58:00.000+01:00

Earlier this week I was involved in a conversation with a colleague about Ed Milliband's election as Labour leader. They were a MilliD partisan, whilst primarily on the principle you can learn a lot about people on the basis of their supporters, I wasn't - not that I'm a Labour Party member anyway. One argument they invoked in favour of David over Ed was that David had integrity, whereas Ed didn't, apparently because David wasn't prepared to say that the Iraq war was a mistake and Ed was, even though he'd have supported it if he'd been an MP at the time. Now, I think that's a pretty terrible argument for the conclusion that David has integrity and Ed doesn't anyway, and that it's pretty rich for a self-confessed Blairite to be appealing to the value of integrity; integrity after all is about the way in which you relate to your past commitments as your commitments rather than on their intrinsic virtues, and it seems unlikely that the Blair of 1997 retained any of the commitments of the Blair of 1984, for example.

More important than that, though, is the wrongheadedness of thinking that integrity is an important political virtue. It is a virtue of Ed Milliband that he saw the chance he had when his brother refuse to shaft his former bosses the way he should have done, and shafted his brother. Politics is about holding and wielding power, and having integrity gets in the way of seizing it, keeping it, and using it appropriately. It may be politically useful to be thought to have integrity, but that's quite different from having it. In other pieces of foolishness, I had a conversation with someone who thought that facts about the proportion of GDP of a country spent in the public sector were politically explanatory: as if we could learn about a container and its contents by specifying how full it was; "should I drink this?" - "well, it's a quarter full" and not "no, it's a nuclear reactor".

On Testimony

2010-10-06T22:26:00.002+01:00

What is it Like to be a Woman in Philosophy? (hat-tip to Dave Holly).

Bastards, Fellow Travellers And Holy Fools

2010-09-25T18:54:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, I heard back about an article I'd submitted to a journal. For the second time, despite both referees recommending revise and resubmit, it was rejected. This'd be less frustrating if the reviewing was better. For example, one of the two referees was unsure the argument of the article was. Presumably then they didn't read the two sentences, one of which began with "[f]irst" and the other with "[s]econd", which followed me saying "Thus, in this paper I try and do two things" towards the end of first paragraph on the second page. Sometimes one wonders exactly whose peers it is that are doing the reviewing, and whether it's a group you'd want to spend your professional life working with.

On The Long And Glorious History Of Aggressive Atheism

2010-09-19T12:00:00.001+01:00

The devil has always had all the best tunes.

The Second Time As Farce, Or, And A Pony Please

2010-09-08T10:01:00.000+01:00

I'm reading The Hugo Young Papers, whose main feature thus far has been to make you realise how far the terms of political discourse have been shifted to the libertarian right since Young started his journalistic career: the idea of the Tories fighting an election over their right to impose a national incomes policy, as Heath did in '74, is unimaginable now. However, I've now just reached the early eighties and the formation of the SDP and then the Alliance. This is from the interview with Richard Holme in January 1982, who was later to be Lib Dem spokesman in the House of Lords but had then just finished a stint as President of the Liberals. Young asks about the prospect of the Alliance going into coalition with the Tories after the next election and, crucially, how to extract proportional representation from such an arrangement; "how to prevent getting a pledge to PR out of the Tory leader, and then this being ditched by Tory MPs - meanwhile the Alliance being locked into the government and looking stupid":

[G]ive support on the back benches for, say, eighteen months: which would mean that the Alliance would bring down the government, not itself be brought down by Tory backbenchers. This would put the government's survival on their commitment to PR being pushed through the HC - hence a much better tactic than joining the government on a condition not fulfilled.

I Don't Need Hear The Words

2010-08-26T19:34:00.000+01:00

The branch of the Gagosian in London, near King's Cross, currently has an exhibition of lateish Picasso, of works from 1945-62. It is, so far as I could see, almost unbelievably bad, not in the sense that it's poorly hung or curated, but in the sense that the vast majority of the work in it lacks any obvious redeeming quality. There are some nicely bold posters, a couple of the characteristic sketches of bulls pared down to essential, pure lines, and a few entertaining ceramics, but the majority of the work is paintings, and terrible paintings. They're muddy, lazily uncomposed, faux naive, as if experiments in how far a reputation'll take you, without purpose even in their purposelessness. There's nothing disconcerting or arresting about them, they're just ugly and placid, the colours mutedly uncomplementary, without either coherence or contradiction, the lines slapdash, unalive, just left lying there. It's been reviewed as showing an intimate, domestic side to Picasso: if that grey formlessness was his domestic life, God help him.

Quality Journalism

2010-08-12T14:35:00.001+01:00

Charmingly exposed here.

On Speaking Plainly

2010-07-05T13:03:00.004+01:00

I like a bit of over-complication as much as the next man, but certain styles of writing I find very difficult to get on with. To wit, from the introduction to Ashenden and Owen's 'Foucault Contra Habermas':

The first aspect of this criticism is based on an elementary confusion in that, although Foucault's analyses typically operate by focusing on the practices through which relations of knowledge, power and ethics are articulated and focusing on the effects of these practices, that is, the ways in which they structure forms of subjectivity, this does not entail the rejection of hermeneutics per se, since it is through the self-understandings and actions of human agents that these practices have been produced and are maintained or transformed (as Foucault's essay 'The subject and power (1982) as well as the preceding scetion of this introduction makes clear).

Whatever else it may have done, as part of a text whose authors think sentences that long and with that many subclauses are appropriate, it seems unlikely that the preceding section of the introduction will have made much clear1.

1. I am of course aware that the first sentence of the post immediately below is at least as long.

On The Unidentifiability of Priests

2010-06-14T15:05:00.001+01:00

Just to put Dworkin finally to bed - I really do find it quite baffling that anyone with any philosophical training at all can take any of his arguments for his theory remotely seriously: confusing, for example, a dispute about canons of interpretation of some text with a dispute about what the text is, as he does when he says in a 2004 article that disputes over the meaning of the clause in the US constitution forbidding cruel and unusual punishment show that legal positivism is false, is just stupid - let's observe what his general account of how to define social practices would involve. Dworkin's interpretative and so normatively guided theory of law depends on the view that since law is a normative practice, it cannot be defined or picked out except by interpreting it so as to put it in its best possible light. Science is also a normative practice - it seeks truth - so does that mean that we cannot define or pick out instances of science without making them seem as close to truth as possible? Is it true that unless I assume that Newton was as right as he could be, I would somehow fail to satisfactorily identify him as a scientist and the Principia as a work of science? Of course not. It's crazy to think that as soon as some practice is normative in any way, any definition of it must be structured around an assumed success in its attempt to guide itself by some value or other. If adopted as a general canon of attempts to say what some x is, this would totally undermine our use of all kinds of perfectly sensible descriptive terms. Either we would have to claim that people were guiding their participation in practices by some value which they did not recognise or had misconstrued, or we would have to claim that despite appearances, the practice in question did not exist there and then. We might imagine a Dworkinian theory of government denying that any had ever taken place anywhere before the Warren-era Supreme Court decisions, as governing just is a highly particular kind of equality - or, in a way even worse, claiming that every tinpot despot, bloody tyrant, racist, and genocidal maniac was in fact aiming at the distinctive goods of the practice of governing. How on earth anyone could think that this stood as a way of respecting the internal character of a practice, I do not know; it is subversive of the very idea of a practice by turning that into a claim about pursuit of goals when of course participation in any given practice is differently motivated for different people in different times and different places. Idiocy.

On The Arrogance Of Priests

2010-06-11T19:32:00.000+01:00

In preparation for teaching next year, I've been reading some fairly basic jurisprudence, mainly around a debate between H. L. A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin. The debate focuses on the question of the role of moral resources in filling out what a given system of law says, and so what law actually is. Roughly, Dworkin thinks that because accurately any given legal statute will require casting it in the best light possible, an accurate interpretation of any given statute and so what the law is involves using whatever appropriate set of true moral principles there are. Hart, on the other hand, thinks that the law may be indeterminate and that, in effect, the law is more or less whatever whomever the system designates as the relevant authority says it is, whether or not it has been interpreted in line with whatever appropriate set of true moral principles there are. Now, whatever else may be said in favour of either view, Dworkin's reasoning in favour of his claim involves a piece of rather interesting systematic blindness. Part of his argument depends on the thought that since law is a normative practice, it needs to be understood from the inside, from the point of view of its participants. For him, the relevant participants are lawyers, other lawyers in fact, since Dworkin himself is trained as a lawyer. So, on Dworkin's view, the people whose view of the law dictates what it is really like are those who make its decisions. The people who are actually subject to those decisions, wise or capricious, subtly reasoned or pieces of intellectualised brutality, apparently have no relevant understandings of the practice at all, nothing to bring to the project of understanding their fundamental character. Law is what lawyers do - or rather, wasn't that the other view?

A Certain Class Of Person

2010-06-05T19:01:00.000+01:00

Walking back from Hampstead Heath this afternoon, I saw Stephen Byers in the street. As is presumably often the case, he looked shorter and fatter in real life than on the telly, and had a slightly shifty, dispirited look. This is something that wouldn't happen in South London I feel: no failed technocratic New Labour ex-ministers on the streets of Clapham; apparently Will Self, but not Stephen Byers.

In Which I Wonder When Someone's Going To Ask Me To Stop Sleeping With Waitresses

2010-05-29T16:59:00.001+01:00

One of the persistent themes of The Wire is Jimmy McNulty's conviction that he is not just the smartest guy in the room - and it is always a guy - but that, combined with his unfailing sense of what has to be done, entitles him to decide what is done. The chain of command is an obstacle to be overcome rather than an institution that, however grudgingly, has to be respected. It's not enough, notice, to think you're the smartest guy in the room. Freamon, at least as good a detective as McNulty, nails him in one episode in the third season. McNulty comes in on his day off to find Freamon and Prez working, prepping something, and starts rhapsodising their collective capabilities, bigging himself, but not just himself, up. Freamon, having asked him what he's doing in on his day off and been told since his ex-wife has the kids, he's nothing else to do, gives McNulty a lecture which ends with the warning that 'the job will not save you'. And indeed it's one of the lessons of that season that policework, or at least the kind of policework involved in highly targeted investigations into the leadership of drug gangs, is not going to stop Jimmy McNulty's life from being deeply unsatisfying to him.

One of the roots of McNulty's attempt to find satisfaction through bringing down Stringer Bell and his ilk is surely the frustration at the failure of his superiors to do about these figures beyond ensuring that no-one really has time to do much more than clear up the messes their underlings leave behind. In a way, what Freamon is urging him to do is see past that: it's by using the opportunity it gives him to save it that McNulty is trying to get the job to save him; redemption through self-sacrifice for the greater good. The experience of institutional imperatives distant from a moral life as it is lived isn't the only thing that can give you the sense not only that you know best but ought to go round telling people so, however common it is as a source of that feeling of entitlement. Another of generating it, I think, is through sympathetic relationships of apparent equality between people who at least ought, as far as knowledge goes, to be unequal.

Oxbridge tutorials, at least in the arts and humanities, seem to follow this model. By encouraging students to understand their work as attempts at answers to questions present in serious academic scholarship, and then responding to it and them Socratically, accepting them as having equal standing in the argument, when in fact of course almost any undergraduate is going to be less capable than most of those who might teach them, Oxbridge tutorials are almost structured to make them over-confident in their own abilities. If it only takes three days reading and two and half thousand words to master the mind-body problem, then what else is not within your grasp? I remember reading somewhere, perhaps in the comments here, that PPE, which as the degree I took and the degree I taught on is upmost in my mind, was designed to enable civil servants to provide ministers with a briefing overnight. At least there the costs of overconfidence, if not immediately obvious, will quickly become clear, whereas the tutorial is almost designed to avoid that; the relationship between tutor and student, whilst not always friendly, has to at least be civil and is very unlikely to result in anyone getting sacked.

There are of course other pathologies of Oxbridge undergraduates. As well as being over-confident, they tend I think to be unnecessarily adversarial. I do this as much as anyone else (he says, generalising from a sample size of one). One thing that is almost certain to annoy about other people's work, for example, is the absence of a sense of conflict from it: not in the sense of an abstraction away from the conditions of politics in general, although that can annoy me, but in the sense of an abstraction away from the conditions of politics in the discipline. Writing that smoothes over disputes, buries profound disagreements under mealy-mouthed attempts at consensus as if those meant to read it were children unable play together nicely, rather than adults with carefully formed and articulated positions on the matter in hand: this, more than almost anything else my colleagues do, annoys the shit out of me. It would be a mistake though, to build your life around that or any other set of annoyances, around an attempt to extirpate their sources. Like Freamon says, the job will not save you.

On Being Pure Of Heart

2010-05-11T21:45:00.000+01:00

About a week and a half before the election, I said I'd vote Lib Dem if I were voting where I grew up, in Battersea, and not where I live now. Martin Linton, the Labour incumbent, had been deeply unsatisfactory as an MP: a pretty craven piece of 1997 New Labour lobby fodder who'd not even had the decency to buy any real influence in exchange for more or less absolute loyalty. He was also 9th on the Tory hitlist, having scraped through two recounts last time, and was presumably looking enviously at a snowball's chances in hell. I know people who did vote Lib Dem in Battersea, although I'm fairly sure that had it come to it, I wouldn't have done. Although obviously I don't know all of them, I wonder how the 7,000-odd of them now feel about having unseated a Labour MP. Not only have they effectively put a Tory in, but they did so by voting in favour of a candidate who would have ended up being Tory lobby fodder anyway. Having voted in favour of more or less everything Blair and Brown have done is not great; voting in favour of everything David Cameron will do is going to be worse. Of course our voting system's not fair. Behaving as if it were will not make it so. Lib Dems may resist being described as yellow Tories, but if it walks the walk... I suspect that they are now about to be royally screwed by everyone, and I can't say that I'm particularly distressed by this.

On Fetishes

2010-03-31T16:30:00.003+01:00

I think it is safe to say that I am generally of a fairly Kantian bent; I'm all for all that secularized puritanism - what's so bloody great about happiness anyway? So you'd have thought that I'd quite like Arthur Ripstein's Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy. I don't, and I think Ripstein may be a bit mad. Ripstein's reconstruction of Kant's view starts with an exploration of Kant's idea of innate right. I don't know whether Ripstein is right about the interpretation of the relevant bits of Kant, since I don't know the relevant bits of Kant, but what he says seems to me wrong, at least as claims about the coercively enforceable rights we have over our bodies. Ripstein's claim I think is that because we are entitled not to be subject to anyone else, we are entitled to set our own purposes, and that because we are entitled to set our own purposes, we are entitled to exclude others from any control over our own bodies. If others controlled our bodies at all, they would be setting our purposes by eliminating certain ways in which we could act and so making us unable to pursue certain ends.

Now, this, independently of anything else Ripstein says seems to me implausible. I do not lose my ability to act if you can choose whether to make my left ear twitch at five minutes intervals. I simply do not need full control rights over my body in order to be able to act as I please; some instances of control by others over my body are simply irrelevant to my ability to act, because there are many things my body does or can do which have no impact on my use of it to pursue any given project. If my left ear involuntarily twitches at five minutes intervals, this does not impact on my ability to act as I please and so it can hardly impact on it if you can choose whether it twitches or not. You may be using me as a means, but I can still set my own ends.

When added to other things that Ripstein says, it seems even more crazy. Ripstein apparently thinks that no-one else having control over your body is not only necessary but sufficient for you to be setting your own ends. If he did not, then he would not be able to restrict innate rights to rights against having your body controlled by others; indeed, he would have to admit some rights of others to control your body by requiring you to do provide others with control over objects other than their bodies necessary for them to act. Not only does Ripstein want to say that if I can make you twitch one ear, you are under my control, but also that I can set my own ends even if I am so crippingly hungry all I can think of is food. The distinction Ripstein draws between our capacity to act and the world in which we act in order to sustain this sort of claim clearly does exist - that I cannot achieve an end I set myself does not mean that I cannot set it - but it is either it is not as sharp as he imagines or not in the place he imagines. He says, for example, that although "[p]urposive beings that were unable to manipulate or modify physical objects could not have property in them, because those objects would not be available to them as means", such beings "would still have a right to their own person". What kind of right could this be? How could I have a right to a physical body that could not manipulate or modify physical objects? What could possibly explain or justify such a right?

Anthropologically Unjust

2010-03-21T00:21:00.002Z

This is just wonderful (via Carl).

Grindingly Awful Up Close

2010-03-20T15:22:00.000Z

In his foreword to a recent translation of parts of Garibaldi's memoirs, Tim Parks says of Garibaldi that he appreciated that "only complete singleness of mind could make anything happen... he sacrificed every other consideration for Italian unity". Parks clearly thinks this is a virtue in Garibaldi. I'm pretty sure it's not: as Parks acknowledges, what sacrificing every other consideration for Italian unity meant was not just sacrificing himself - and let's not forget that Garibaldi lived to see Italian unification - but "the lives of thousands upon thousands of others". Garibaldi's own view seems to have been that anyone who wasn't prepared to take ill-equipped and untrained young men off to fight guerilla campaigns in the firm belief that, despite the hostile attitude of the two nearest Great Powers, the sheer glory of being prepared to kill and be killed to be united under a tinpot monarchy would be enough to ensure victory. For example, when criticizing the behaviour of Cavour in allowing French interference during his attack on Naples in 1860, he says of some of his own followers who assisted Cavour that they were

swayed by the hypocritical, terrible pretext of necessity. The necessity of being cowards! The necessity of abasing oneself in the mud before some ephemeral image of power instead of heeding and understanding the vigorous, forceful, virile will of the people who wish to exist at any cost and are prepared to destroy these insect-eating icons and bury them back in the dung from which they sprang.

This is just batshit crazy. This is not, it's a gamble and maybe it won't come off, but that doesn't make it not worth trying; this is, because we want it enough, it will happen. Never mind the fact that the book is full of the refusal of peasants in what was still a predominantly rural society to assist Garibaldi's troops; never mind that if it was true that merely wanting it was enough to make it so, it'd be hard to explain how it hadn't happened yet, or indeed why it would be wrong to try and stop it happening; never mind the price that both sides pay for showing that you want it enough; Garibaldi has seen the virile will of the people, appointed himself its tribune, and thereby licensed himself to demand that all others yoke their will to his, to throw away their plans and commitments in the service of some greater glory. Parks ends his encomium to Garibaldi's ability to drive the campaign for Italian unification out of the murky shadows of high politics and out into bloody fields and mountainsides up and down the country with a discussion of Garibaldi's instructions for his funeral:

He wanted his body to be cremated in a red shirt. 'Plenty of wood for the pyre', is his last exhortation. The remark is emblematic of his personality. He consumed his whole life and the lives of thousands upon thousands of others in a conflagration that is still the most illuminating moment in modern Italian history. Very few of those warming their hands at the bonfire look well in the weird light it casts.

Perhaps those who outlived Garibaldi, who embody the tendencies that he struggled against - for the backroom deal rather than the barriacdes in the street, for compromise and often deceit and even betrayal rather than plain-speaking - are emblematic of the forces of reaction in Italian politics, as Parks clearly thinks. But they are not the forces of reaction because of their methods; they are the forces of reaction because of the use they put them to. This is what politics is like, and without it, as the corpses strewn over the Italian penisula in Garibaldi's crimson wake show, whatever glories we may be fortunate enough to find, they will be cold comfort when we're lying in the mud trying to hold our guts in.

Cybermen On Heat

2010-03-02T19:00:00.000Z

It turns out that discovering that Will Self regularly walks around the area you grew up in and know like the back of your hand is much more disturbing than his encounter with a dildo in a public place. Indeed, the fact that Will Self encountering a dildo in a public place is more or less exactly what you expect probably explains why the idea of him on buying paint the Northcote Road is quite so disturbing. It's a whole new level of uncanny for me: being disconcerted not by normality being not quite able to cover up the deep levels of weird that sustain it, but the reverse - the insertion of the normal into the typically weird. I'm sure some unfortunately-named French person has been talking about it for years; probably they'll be the subject of In Our Time next week.

Victor's Justice

2010-02-11T22:43:00.001Z

One of features of recent discussions of when military force can justly be used is a suspicion about the traditional distinction between questions about the justice of the resort to force and the justice of individual uses of force. This distinction between the jus in bello and the jus ad bellum is at the heart of the doctrine, apparently central to the law of war, of the moral equality of combatants. This holds that the justice of cause that combatants fight is irrelevant for assessments of the justice of their actions. One work which has argued that combatants are not morally equal is David Rodin's War and Self-Defense. Rodin, however, uses rather a suspect argument to cast doubt on the distinction. He insists that it is paradoxical if

the war taken as a whole is a crime, yet that each of the individual acts which together constitute the aggressive war are entirely lawful

Perhaps Rodin thinks that every part of a car must have the same properties as the car itself. If nothing else, seeing him trying to drive a door handle home should be amusing. Nor is this a point which political and moral philosophy is unaware of. The dangers of fallacies of composition are an important part of Jerry Cohen's arguments against libertarianism in his Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality, for example, quite apart from their role in the arguments of the later Rawls for the special significance of basic political, social and economic institutions over and above the acts that make them up. Nor is this the only lacuna in Rodin's book: for example, it seems to be a premise in his account of why legitimacy cannot ground state's rights to defend themselves that if a state has the right to rule over its own population, it must have the right to rule over everyone else as well. I recently read an interview with Michael Walzer (here) in which he was quite bitter about the reception the profession gave to his two major works, and in particular to his work in just war theory, Just and Unjust Wars, which is explicitly one of Rodin's targets. It's not always easy to be sympathetic to Walzer, but Rodin manages to make it seem so.
In terms of the discipline, one of the interesting things about the pattern of Rodin's mistakes is that although I disagree with his account of individual rights of self-defence, it is powerful in a way that his account of the rights of collectives is not. Applied moral philosophy, anyone?

On Doing And Allowing

2010-02-04T22:41:00.004Z

I've twice had conversations about work it was probably not best for me to have in the past week. Both concerned job prospects. Neither made me feel any better about them; not, in either case, because they were critical of me as such - although Lord knows there are enough things to be said in that regard - but because they reminded me of how unforgiving and fickle the academic job market can be. One involved someone first urging me to cultivate a colleague I have less than nothing to do with so as to exploit them for favours while the other dealt with exactly why one should not complain about people getting academic jobs on the basis of being able to exploit people for favours (because how on earth else are you supposed to get one, roughly). Being able to do the academic job market in a certain sense relies on being able to ignore the things that these conversations brought up, at least if you're not in receipt of said favours; if you thought of the numbers of people, well-qualified people, you were competing against for each job, you'd not apply for anything. I have four papers under review: one needs to go from being under review to being forthcoming soon, or this year may be done for me and, after all, there's only so many years of this you can do. It's hard for this sort of thing not to turn into a bittnerness about not only the discipline but academia as a whole; it's not just the bastards, holy fools, and assorted fellow-travellers in your own field, and there are always enough of them, but everyone who has a disciplinary axe to grind that is against you - or something like that anyway. Doubtless I'm having another one of my self-exculpation through persecution complex moments. Either way, this is not exactly cheering; sign, and save people who'd probably think of my work as a total waste of time from being unjustifiably sacked.

Newness Getting Old

2010-01-21T14:51:00.000Z

Nature, after all, does abhor a vacuum. See how a certain airbrushed one has been filled here.

Sometimes Only For Certain People

2009-12-24T17:52:00.000Z

Tony Judt has a piece in a recent New York Review of Books called 'What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy', in which, along with ascribing neo-liberal dominance in part to the influence of lessons taken from the collapse of inter-war Austrian democracy, he asserts that the best way for social democrats to market themselves is in terms of a social democracy of fear. The idea is supposed to be analogous to Judith Shklar's liberalism of fear, the idea of which was to argue for various foundational liberal rights as protections as things everyone has reason to fear; centrally, political oppression. Likewise, Judt wants to say that everyone has reason to endorse government-run schemes of protection against sickness, unemployment and the like. This seems to me a mistake much like that which David Runciman points to in his review of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's Spirit Level for the LRB, in that it elides the difference between some property being held the average member of some group and it being held by all members of that group. It is almost certainly true that most Americans would be better off in a more equal society; it must be as true that some Americans would be worse off. A liberalism of fear works because anyone can be picked up by the secret police and tortured, because we all have our little pecadilloes, because we could all end up on the wrong end of some political decision. However, not everyone is plausibly going to run out of money to pay their medical bills, notwithstanding the fact that even if you might, you nonetheless might be better off pooling that risk on terms of your own choice than being required to do so with everyone. There's that old line about a liberal being the guy who won't take his own side in a knife-fight: arguing for a social democracy of fear seems to try to make it true, and in particular forgets that if in the end someone gets stabbed, usually at some point someone else was holding a knife.

Go Home Boys Or You're Going To Jail

2009-12-10T21:47:00.000Z

As I am sure many of the readers of this blog are aware, reforms which HEFCE is currently proposing to its formula for distributing funds to British universities involve making 25% of the relevant funding depend on the demonstrable contribution of research produced by the relevant department to the general economic and social well-being of the country in the last five years. For various, quite obvious, reasons, not least of which is that it is an open invitation to bullshiting, I have signed petitions urging HEFCE not to do this. I suspect this is why I got an unsolicited email from a strange body called 'Educators for Reform' today, asking me to sign their petition opposing it. Initially, I thought this was just one of those things that happens when you sign petitions, but then I saw who it was from - Luke Tryl. That would be the same Luke Tryl who invited David "not saluting but drowning" Irving and Nick "let's deport Londoners too" Griffin to the Oxford Union as a piece of self-congratulatory, self-publicising, and frankly downright vile contrarianism, presumably. It turns out now he's working for Reform, a Tory think-tank, who are apparently trying to astro-turf support of the back of trade union sponsored petitions. The reference to crowding out private research should have given it away, I suppose, just as it shouldn't be a surprise that that's where you end up if you're a prick with the right connections. Well, they and he can both piss right off.

On Public Reason

2009-11-26T21:11:00.000Z

Let's just say, not of the Rawlsian kind.

With God On Our Side

2009-11-15T18:50:00.000Z

In 1997, in the aftermath of that year's Education White Paper, an Advisory Group on citizenship education was set up. In its report, published the next year, it approvingly quotes from a submission by the Hansard Society.

Programmes should be established to promote political discourse and understanding, as well as encouraging young people to engage in the political process. Further, they should encourage tolerance and respect for individuals and their property, irrespective of a person’s gender, race, culture or religion. They must also encourage young people to behave honourably and with integrity, as well as promote respect for the rule of law. Young people must be encouraged to develop leadership and team skills in order to promote self-discipline and self-motivation. They should be encouraged to take pride in themselves and the communities to which they belong, as well as to see themselves as citizens of the world.

Other than the last clause of the last sentence, which invokes a non-existent polity to imagine oneself a member of, after the first sentence I fail to see what any of this has to do with citizenship in particular at all. Citizenship is presumably to do with it is to be a citizen. What it is to be a citizen is presumably something to do with your relationship to political authority; in particular, to be a citizen is to have certain political foundational rights, including the right to have rights. Whether political power can rightly be exercised over me without any formal mechanism for me to hold it to account seems to me to have pretty much f*ck-all to do with whether I am capable of motivating myself or not. You don't get to be a citizen because you're a paragon of moral virtue; you get to be a citizen because your life is profoundly shaped by the political institutions you live under and so you have a right to hold it to account in certain ways.

Using the idea of citizenship as a convenient banner under which to gather everything that you might think would be desirable isn't just evidence of an inability to make fairly elementary distinctions, but also I think rather politically dangerous. For one thing, it disguises trade-offs. In a community which isn't tolerant of people irrespective of their gender, race, culture or religion, presumably it's quite difficult to be both tolerant in that way and proud of one's community. Which of the two goes? What if political participation requires me to make compromises damaging to my sense of self? Where's my integrity then? A policy programme which has ruled out, a priori as it were, the possibility of conflicts amongst its various ends by seeing them all as part of the same idea is going to fail because it cannot understand that sometimes it has to make choices between them. Either no choice gets taken at all and so resources are wasted pursuing competing ends, or, rather than publicly laying out their grounds for choosing some ends over others, officials choose on their own private and probably confused grounds, and political power is made a little less accountable - which is rather ironic in a programme designed to promote citizenship.

That's not all either. There are at least two other things wrong with this kind of project, centred around a notion of citizenship which fails to see that it is but one, rather specific, political relationship. First, it puts the onus for dealing with any structural political failings a system has on the average citizen, rather than on the political actors who are both familiar with and presumably benefitting from the failing system. If politicians are worried about the way in which the population at large seems ill-informed about and contemptuous of them, they might think about what they've done wrong rather than what the population at large has. Second, hand-waving in the general direction of citizenship seems to encourage all kinds of disturbingly illiberal communitarian claims about what's best for us. For example, quite apart from thinking that we should generally be proud of our communities, apparently without any consideration of what they or we are actually like, the report ends by endorsing remarks made by the then Lord Chancellor, in which he said that "[o]ur goal is to create a nation of able, informed and empowered citizens who... recognise that the path to greatest personal fulfilment lies through active involvement in strengthening their society". What if I don't like my society? What if what society wants to do to strengthen itself is something I find vile? What if I'd rather stay at home and read a book, or indeed, sit on the sofa, drink beer and watch football? Can I not achieve personal fulfilment like that? Will Kymlicka said of citizenship theory that it is mostly 'old wine in new bottles'; it seems more like vinegar to me.

141/117

2009-11-05T23:08:00.003Z

I'm reading Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah. I'd seen the film first, which I think is actually fairly faithful - at least to the sense of the book, if not quite the sequence or precise arrangement of the episodes it catalogues: the dilapidation of Scampia's concrete monstrosities; the inventive yet nonetheless cheap horror of the violence; the way in which a consciously fatalistic lust for power ends up seeming the only comprehensible reaction; and above all, the total integration into and indeed perfect service of the global economy. But one thing above any other struck me. Although it's quite shocking to think that Pelle Italiane and the other faux designer shops on the Seven Sisters Road are probably run by Camorristi, or to read reports of the blankness of adolescents in Naples' hinterland, the death toll really stops the breath. The Troubles, assuming Saviano and Wikipedia are to be trusted, did not manage to kill more people than intra-Camorra feuds from the mid-seventies onwards. Admittedly, Northern Ireland has a smaller population than the Province of Naples, but presumably a greater proportion of the killings took place in the Province of Naples. The average rate of Camorra killings alone is higher than the present homicide rate for any Western European state. In comparison, the total number of murders in London in the year to September was 128; that's 13 less than the average of organised crime killings over the twenty seven years to 2005 for an area with less than half population. If people must make comparisons to The Wire, then rundown areas of the UK seem not to be the place to start.

Like A Dog Not Walking On Its Hind Legs

2009-09-27T22:54:00.000+01:00

I suspect that I tend towards the more formal end of views about the appropriate standards of staff-student interactions at universities. This is probably partly because of the structure of teaching that I'm most used to; tutorials, sometimes with only one student, make particularly obvious how seedy Terence Kealey, vice chancellor of the University of Buckingham, is when he tries to claim that external regulation of exam grades has eliminated power differentials that would corrupt relationships between students and staff at universities here. Still, one would have to have a remarkably laissez-faire attitude to causal misogyny and leching to think that his attempt to legitimate patriarchal sleaziness through clever-clever irony and literary allusion was not rather exploitative, notwithstanding his willingness to blame if not the victim, at least the more vulnerable of the two parties. For one thing, if this is merely about the tributes that age pays to youth and vice versa, why is the relationship in question explicitly defined as one of male professors and female students? I'm not sure whether academia is any better or worse than society at large, but it certainly suffers from various gendered norms and on occasion outright sexism. No male graduate student of my acquaintance would dress more formally to teach, whereas I know women who do, just as no man I know has been harrassed by one of their colleagues. I suppose, though, if you're the kind of person who thinks that the relevant relationship in The History Man is one of acolyte and academic hero, rather than a gradual bullying into submission, and more, in a position to benefit from doing just that, then you would think that any unwillingness to accept that that sort of thing is really not OK was a bit humourless.

I Can Do No Other

2009-09-22T16:35:00.002+01:00

I was reading - in bed: devotion to the cause I tell you - one of the early, pre-A Theory of Justice Rawls papers last night, entitled 'The Sense of Justice', and was struck by its explanation of a sense of justice in terms of guilt. The idea is, perhaps more commonly than I'm aware, that it is our capacity to form relationship both with others and to principles where failures to live up to the terms of those relationships generates guilt that accounts for and makes sense of our idea of justice and so our inclusion in the scope of principles of justice. In the absence of a sense of justice, we wouldn't be able to have those relationships; we might be able to have relationships of a similar sort, but since those relationships are marked by the way in which we conceptualise our failures to live up to their terms, we wouldn't be able to have them. Now, what's interesting about this is its foundation in guilt. People have been criticizing Kantianism for secularising - more and less successfully - the fiercely self-directed and often self-critical religious sentiments of mid-to-late eighteenth century Prussia for some time; it's been a persistent theme of Alasdair MacIntyre's writings, for example. For a Kantianly-minded philosopher to begin from guilt though, is perhaps rare. It's also revealing, because it makes it clear how central an ethic of responsibility is to Kantians, or at least Rawls. Unlike shame, guilt is only an appropriate response to something you're responsible for, so to make the capacity for guilt central to being a subject of justice is to make one's sense of responsibility, of having to bear the costs of your actions, central to being a subject of justice.

On Blond Beasts

2009-09-14T17:02:00.003+01:00

Richard Layard apparently thinks that there is "no nobler ideal" than crude utilitarianism. Let us do him the charity of assuming that he actually means what he says. Presumably then he thinks it noble to discount the suffering caused by injustices, like say rape, against any pleasures that those who inflict them gain, or that if I could make myself happier by stupifying myself, doing so would be noble. Whatever one might say in favour of crude utilitarianism, the thought that treating all pleasures, regardless of what they are pleasures in, as equally significant would be noble is not usually one of them. Assuming that Richard Layard doesn't actually think that it's better if child molesters enjoy themselves whilst molesting children, perhaps he should leave doing philosophy to philosophers, rather than economists who are apparently neither familiar with the rather long history of philosophical critiques of crude utilitarianism nor capable of understanding the basic implications of positions they advocate.

I Know You Can't Know That

2009-08-24T23:27:00.000+01:00

A little puzzle I was offered today, which might perhaps be interesting. I will give what I think is the solution at the end of the week. A teacher says to their pupils, at some point this week I will give you a test, which you will not know is a test until I tell you afterwards. Given that if the test hasn't taken place in the last couple of minutes of Friday, the students will seemingly rightly think that it will take place then, and likewise for the couple of minutes before then, and so on, until the teacher is apparently compelled to say that the test has already been taken, can what the teacher says be true?

Outgrown Those Basic Feelings Anyway

2009-07-28T23:59:00.000+01:00

For the first time in 9 years - the first time since I moved here as an undergraduate - I'm leaving Oxford tomorrow without knowing if I'll be back for longer than a night or two here and there. Admittedly, I'll probably be back to teach - and hopefully play football - pretty regularily next academic year, but it's not really the same; even if I do find a spare bed or sofa, it'll only be for a night - I won't be settled here. I describe myself as a Londoner and, more, am quite prepared to attempt to police who gets to make that claim - the postcode plays a generally under-appreciated role: Richmond is, for example, not in the relevant sense in London - but in lots of important ways I was formed here and not there. That's not just because I first lived away from my parents here, and not so much because of the place in a general sense - this is a university town, and for 8 of the 9 years, I've been a student, so I've never really felt like I knew the town separately from being a student in it - but more because of people whom I've been close to: friends I made when I was an undergraduate and lived with when I was a masters student, various people in what I feel really is a community of political theorists, some others I've accumulated, more and less purposefully, along the way.

There was a time when I really wanted to leave, felt like I couldn't bear to be here any more, but even then, that was a fairly explicit piece of self-repudiation: what I thought I couldn't stand was the life I had made for myself here. Like it or not, here is a central piece of who I am: although surely other things underlie them, so much of what has shaped me into the person I am now happened here and in ways that I suspect are often would really only have happened in as a student - and perhaps particularly a postgraduate student - at an elite university in an otherwise rather nondescript provincial town. There are habits, even a habitus, that I've acquired here that it is difficult to imagine having acquired elsewhere; ways of thinking but also habits of mind in a broader sense, learned psycho-social behaviours. This isn't meant as a communitarian paean to the form of life I suppose I now know best - I hope I have the sense to be far more ambiguous about the value of that set of more and less conscious institutions and my way of negotiating them: after all, I did once want little more than to abandon them - but rather an acknowledgement that if I am to maintain a well-founded sense of integrity, of who and what I am and its significance, then I need to see Oxford's role in making me and how suited to it I am. I've not been away for more than 3 weeks for 6 years; it'll be odd to leave.

By The Japanese War Memorial

2009-07-14T17:55:00.001+01:00

From Geuss's 'Liberalism and its Discontents', Political Theory, 2002.

[I]f some of the deficiencies inherent in adopting a pure normative standpoint are visible even in a philosopher who has moved as far beyond Kant as Rawls has, this seems to me to give further weight to suspicions about the normative standpoint as a whole.

Setting aside the 'pure' for the time being, I think it's worth marvelling at just how perfect a piece of self-disembowelling this is. Our suspicions about the very idea of a normative standpoint and its deficiencies can have more and less weight; by what measures are we to establish this weight, and by what standards are we to judge these failings? Presumably not normative ones, since they ground suspicions about the very possibility of normativity, and so presumably not ones which are supposed to compel or even count in favour of agreement on them. I suppose anyone who disagrees with Geuss then has no reason to carry on reading him then.

Feel The Heat Around The Corner

2009-07-13T21:27:00.000+01:00

Both Heat and Public Enemies open with crimes that go wrong, in both cases because one of the criminals loses their rag and is more violent than they have to be; in the first, the inexorable unravelling of the lives the rest of the film seems to document rather than force is begun by that loss of control, whereas in the second, so far as the film is concerned, that act is basically consequenceless, forgotten after the first five minutes or so. This is the problem with most of Public Enemies: not quite, I think, as Peter Bradshaw claims, that Johnny Depp is too taciturn, insufficiently flamboyant; it's hardly like De Niro or even Pacino, admittedly better and crucially older actors than Depp, chew up the scenery in Heat; they instead exude calm, world-bitten menace. It's that it's mostly very easy for Depp: he breaks out of a prison with a bit of metal shaped into a vaguely gun-like form before driving away past tens of soldiers without a shot being fired, bribes the police and buys souped-cars seemingly at whim, even goes out on the town, casually revealing what he does to strangers. There's no tension: if anything goes wrong, it doesn't seem to matter - there's not even a sense of the scale on which things can go wrong: it's just Depp, being weirdly unemotional in a world he seems to move through without any real effort at all - and so no sense of inexorable failure of everything really begins to build until the last half hour or so. Compare and contrast the romance in Heat with that in Public Enemies: admittedly Eady's as much of a cipher as Flechette is, but at least living in a world in which things do not just fall into his lap, De Niro has had the space to seem justly self-confident, competent, charismatic; you can see what's attractive about him, whereas Depp, notwithstanding being rather handsome, is at best a little boorish. Alternatively, think of the slow-burning disaster in The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford: desperate hero worship gone sour and bitter in the face of what violence and mistrust will do to you in the end, and a much better film for it. There is one wonderful scene, where Depp is sitting in the cinema, watching Manhattan Melodrama, seemingly like he knows what he can't, that he'll die on the street outside when he leaves. And tension does build towards the end, as the mob refuses to provide support and he's left without a bolthole. Nonetheless, overall, flat and, from Mann, disappointing.

No Reason Not To Try

2009-07-09T10:59:00.002+01:00

Trying to do a careful analytical unpicking and undermining of Glen Newey's recent LRB piece on Raymond Geuss' new book would be mostly pretty tedious and anyway miss the point, which is its polemical character; I'm assuming, for example, that Newey doesn't really think that taking moralised stances about political arrangements makes one a supporter of the present Iranian state. More briefly, I note that even Bernard Williams, hardly friendly to Kantian-inspired liberalism, understood that the point of that liberalism is that it is about the conditions of the legitimate exercise of political power, so it can hardly be that it ignores the fact of the exercise of political power, since it is premised on it; that the presence of disagreement does not mean there is no right answer, and certainly not that there are not better and worse answers; and that if the problem is that ignoring the fact of political power generates undesirable results, then we better have something to say about the terms on which those results are undesirable. When one wants to say what political philosophy properly is, standards by which that properly can be assessed are necessary, and that pitches us right back into making evaluations of some sort or other; maybe not moral(ised) ones, but evaluations of some sort, and so the possibility of disagreement.

You Can't Whistle It Either

2009-07-07T22:26:00.000+01:00

From Ray Monk's 'How To Read Wittgenstein' - no, I haven't - discussing the later Wittgenstein's abandonment of the idea of "a single 'logical form' shared by thought, language and the world, which a philosopher might uncover and reveal":

During his first six months back in Cambridge in 1929... [Wittgenstein] fairly quickly came to the conclusion that the very notion of logical form had to be abandoned. In this, he was helped by conversations with Ramsey and, still more, by conversations with the Italian economist Piero Sraffa. In the preface to Philosophical Investigations that he wrote in 1945, Wittgenstein says that he is indebted to Sraffa for 'the most consequential ideas of this book'... Wittgenstein, soon after his return to Cambridge, was explaining his ideas to Sraffa and insisting - as he had insisted in Tractatus - that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same 'logical form'. To this, Sraffa made a Neapolitan gesture of brushing his chin with his fingertips, asking: 'What is the logical form of that?'

I'd describe the relevant gesture as more of a flick than a brush, but still; attention to life as it is lived, and in a wholly appropriate medium. In other news, I handed in two copies of my D.Phil to be sent off to examiners this afternoon; let us not ask about its logical form.

My Leg Measurements And The Size Of My Cock

2009-06-27T17:46:00.000+01:00

I know celebrity is odd, and I also know that lots of other people know that. Still, I hope it isn't only me that thinks that it's pretty bizarre if there's a real need for an eight-page supplement on the life of an only just cold musician who had made no new music of any note for well over a decade or that satisfying that alleged need is anything but a bafflingly vicarious exercise in sanctimonious intrusion. I suppose I can make sense of a regret that there'll be no more music, but the thought that there's anything more than a passive consumption of product, however wonderful that product was, to the relationship is quite alien to me. What otherwise unsatisfied need is being met by projecting the features of a real, mutual, in some way intimate, relationship on to the surely long-mad one-time purveyor of pop music whose genius after all lay in the way it was polished out of all reality? And if anyone mentions Diana, Obergruppenfurher of our hearts, I'll claw my own eyes out, or at least theirs.

Not Here And Not Now

2009-06-15T23:43:00.005+01:00

There was a time when I would have found this little local dispute a cue for immediate, confident, intervention. Partly I don't - except when applying for jobs - think of myself as a philosopher any more really: sometimes I think of myself as a political theorist, but more often as a Rawlsian, and more often even than that as a graduate student who's grant has run out and is about to submit and, in all probability, be more or less unemployed. Some hard-nosed and pithy, ideally Marxian, aphorism along the lines of not being able to live on bread alone telling you something important about bread, and its sources, would presumably be appropriate here. That's not all of it: political theorists are not wholly a subset of philosophers; our canon is different, which means we ask slightly different questions and expect answers to begin from slightly different places.

For what it's worth, I can find philosophers and the more philosophically inclined amongst political theorists quite annoying, but not because they present themselves in ways which I find rude, although some of them do tend towards distinctly socially awkward - which I'm hardly one to be casting aspersions on the basis of, I suppose - and like any discipline, philosophy has its share of shits. I find them annoying because - which may not be unconnected to the social awkwardness and the share of shits - I don't think asking highly abstracted questions about increasingly denatured cases is actually a particularly sensible way of going about answering questions, at least in moral and political philosophy. Who are those questions for? Perhaps philosophers qua philosophers, but less often, it seems to me, philosophers qua human beings with lives that go on in a world characterised not by questions about the precise character of the betterness of this state of affairs from some universal perspective but ones about considerably more situated and uncomfortable difficulties. Certainly not for ordinary people whom one would hope do not spend their time being crippled by agonising over the infinite varieties of trolley problem.

I went to a presentation a while ago by a friend who is - to my mind at least - a little too interested in right-libertarianism; here, one wants to paraphrase Linda Smith and say if not the oxygen of oxygen, at least the oxygen of academic respectability; a fellow attendee described right-libertarians as the gift that just keeps giving, which I think expresses just the right amount of scorn. Anyway, the friend argues - fairly convincingly to my mind, but that's not really the point - that right-libertarians need the first property-owners to have been individuals for their claims about individual rights to follow, and that all the evidence from anthropology indicates that that's not the case: actually, the first property-owners were almost certainly collectives of various sorts, who then passed over their property to individuals later on.

What's interesting about this is that this was well-known to, say, the Scottish Enlightenment, as was pointed out during the presentation, begging the question of how that richer, more humane, understanding of how we go about political philosophy in particular has disappeared. What presumably structural forces have caused us to forget that sort of knowledge? Bernard Williams had a view about this, contrasting the "intense moralism of much American political and indeed legal theory" with what he thought was its predictable counterpart, a concentration in American political science on "the coordination of private or group interests": "a Manichean dualism of soul and body, high-mindedness and the pork barrel... [where]... the existence of each explains how anyone could have accepted the other". He goes on to contrast that combination of piety and sordidness with a view in which conflict is central but contained; where what a political decision announces is not that someone is wrong, but "that they have lost", where of course that implies acceptance of some rules under which they lose.

Predictably, I find that view congenial, if wrong in its reading of Rawls. Whether it's generalizable I'm not sure. I tend to think so, although I've no real evidence to base that claim on. It seems to me that just as idealism lives under the shadow of Tamanay Hall and vice versa, the colonization of the social sciences in general by various forms of physics envy, with economics typically in the vanguard of this assault, will similarly generate attempts in philosophy to both distance oneself from and approximate those degrees of precision through abstraction. If that's true though, then it could well be the driving force explaining philosophers' apparent comparative failure at the grant stage and the general hostility of both humanists and social scientists to philosophers: social scientists because after all, philosophers end up behaving like their poor cousins, faffing about ineffectually with third-hand pieces of maths and no real sense of life as lived, and humanists because, really, they'd like them to be talking about actual people. Rudeness doesn't come into it: it's that they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing; illuminating, through careful conceptual analysis, the conditions of life as we have to live it without in doing so destroying the possibility of it. Eh; of course, that's over-general and, more, unkind, bitter. There'll always be exceptions; what's important though, is whether they are exceptions.

Their Predominant Colourings Would Be Melancholy And Gloom

2009-06-08T22:36:00.000+01:00

I would write about the European elections, and the fact that the good people of Lancashire and Cumbria and Yorkshire and Humberside have elected fascists, but what would I say? That when James Purnell is a major figure in the Labour Party this is hardly surprising? That if no major political party is prepared to say that "reasonable concerns of the (white) working class" are that they don't see their real incomes stagnate and even drop during a period of economic growth and not a euphemism for badly concealed racism, this is what you get? None of that is really very illuminating: it's a grindingly familiar story. I'm reminded of James Fenton's crepuscular journalism. It seems appropriate: formulated in response to the despondency and incompetence of South Vietnamese troops just before the fall of Saigon, it deals in the little defeats of the half-light, in shrugs, in guard posts no-one bothers to man and truths no-one tries to conceal any more. Its defining feature is its lack of bravado; appropriate for a government whose ministers can't even conduct a decent assassination on a leader so cripplingly useless that you wince each time he comes on television.

I Have Filled My Heart With Hate

2009-05-16T00:08:00.000+01:00

I have had a vague desire to see 300 since I saw trailers for it a couple of years ago; the photoshopped, crazed hyper-realism of it, a fetishism of gloriously bloody violence, all impossible slow motion decapitations and exquisite showers of carefully rendered drops of blood, seemed like it would be ridiculously entertaining. And indeed it was ridiculously entertaining: the sudden pull back to a carefully framed landscape view of the Spartan king, having just gravely intoned that this is not madness, but Sparta, planting his foot on the Persian emissary's chest and flicking him backwards into a perfectly circular large black hole, which lurks in the middle of a courtyard for no obvious reason, is quite beyond the idiotic in a really rather wonderful way.

Of course its politics are barely disguised fascism: anything that enjoyed violence quite that much could only avoid being hateful by placing itself in a world in which only relentless brutality could avoid abject subjection. The problem with Sin City, after all, was that it tried to locate itself in a world not totally distant from ours: where violence's victims are not just effectively nameless soldiers or evil beyond imagining, there is a way of getting along that means perfecting the art of killing is not the only way to live. If there was any other way of living a life, then a life which took all its meaning from the total destruction, the utter crushing, of other lives, would seem, as it is in reality, at best quite hopelessly gratuitous. When we cannot live together, then someone has to die, and their death may as well be glorious, whether that triumph is found in the killing or in the act of dying.

This is a vision of politics as a kind of impossibility, a negative-sum game where compromise means humiliation and if not enslavement, then a kind of betrayal. If political action is always and everywhere either submission or triumph, then that is what we are left with; a politics of rousing speeches and good deaths, of killings stylised out of reality and of honour become vengeance stretched into infinity. Its aesthetics may be wonderful - the glowing embers of the Spartans' cloaks, the sodium lamp sunrises, the snarling monochrome of the Immortals' masks, the sudden stop-motion of bodies flying away from and into sword and shield blows: it's all quite beautiful - but tragedy has always been heartarchingly beautiful from a distance and grindingly awful up close.

Putting Your Hand In The Next Man's Pocket

2009-05-11T23:24:00.002+01:00

Fiddling, whilst Rome burns. Which of these is supposed to be more scandalous, that some members of a fairly small group of people took a rather venal attitude to their expenses, or that in a period of economic growth, the real incomes of the poorest 10% of the population fell and those of the wealthiest 10% rose? What do we care more about, t he fact that MPs don't fully understand the ins and outs of virtue ethics, or that the 6 million poorest people in the UK on average lost 6% of their real income over the past three years whilst the 6 million richest gained on average 4% more? For all that some philosophers might like to make it so, politics is not a morality play, full of allegory and the opportunity to strike pious poses: it's what we do when we see that sainthood doesn't and couldn't, except at prohibitive cost to those who have to live under it, divide the spoils of not killing each other. So MPs skim a bit off the top; it's not very nice, but it's hardly the failure to arrest the enormous rise in inequality that occurred under Thatcher, or even to reverse the effects of the institutional changes which generated that rise and allow those who benefitted from them to continue to capture the lion's share of the benefits generated by economic growth. But no; we need to make sure, not that we redress the balance of power in the institutions we all live within and support which allows those with the most to systematically accrue more and more at greater and greater cost to those with least, but that everyone understands that what really matters is whether some MPs think they can get away with charging a couple of hundred quid to the taxpayer for broken toilet seats.

Update, 12/05/09: that some MPs were designating the same property as having different purposes under different sets of rules is now equivalent to a system of endemic patronage which had governed everything from the distribution of public works contracts to the formation of governments and whose end required a campaign in which, despite being guarded continually by members of the security forces, several members of the judiciary were assassinated.

A Tally

2009-04-26T11:33:00.002+01:00

Saves I'm proud of: 3
Saves I'm pleased by: 6
Balls I didn't get and probably should have: 1
Balls I didn't get and perhaps could have: 1
Opposition players satisfyingly and perfectly legally clattered: 2
Final score: 6-0 to them.

Sempre la solitaire.

Serendipity

2009-04-09T20:05:00.000+01:00

In my head, Charlie Mingus' programme for training cats to use the toilet rather than a litter tray (via Popbitch) and this article about the way in which the Telegraph legitimates and then re-markets American wingnut gossip too toxic to be touched in its original form (via the ever excellent Yorkshire Ranter;) should be linked. Unfortunately, I lack the native wit to do so; a straightforward analogy tricking your cat into shitting in the loo and tricking the American public into batshit lunacy seems to reflect badly on both cats, cat-owners, and the American public, and not be anything like hostile enough to the right-wing noise machine. Other attempts welcomed in comments.

Their Law

2009-04-07T23:14:00.001+01:00

So what initially was presented as a kind of tragic coincidence - with a little black propaganda thrown in: although presumably that's more or less automatic, like a Catholic crossing themselves as they walk into church - seems simply tragic now. Unfortunately, tragedies aren't always acts of blind fate. Med Hughes of ACPO was on the Today programme on Saturday claiming that “we’ve moved away from a historical period where simply the police service was, if you like, the arm of the executive and would prevent protest” (around 3.30 here; via Alex). As Stuart White points out here, kettling hardly seems like the considered democratic response by the agents of law and order to the threat of peaceful protest: it is suspicious of citizens attempting to do what democratic citizens ought to and civilly but firmly questionning the acts of their governors, and disrupts, seriously, their attempts to do so and to do so under conditions and at risks roughly of their own choosing. Disruption and suspicion are not prevention, so I suppose Hughes didn't tell an outright lie; on the other hand, if everytime a police officer tried to arrest anyone, groups of people surrounded them and wouldn't let them move from a restricted area, I imagine you'd hear from ACPO pretty quickly. Assaulting passers-by isn't prevention either, of course, just as describing it as disruption'd be fairly euphemistic. One wonders though, how far apart imprisoning, possibly illegally, large numbers of peacefully protesters, and getting a few kicks in when you have the chance are.

Update, 09/04/09: Sometimes tiny differences can make all the difference.

On Not Helping

2009-03-24T23:58:00.001Z

I've recently been reading this collection of Michael Walzer's essays. I'd not really read anything by him other than Just and Unjust Wars before, and it's quite fun: it's not as pithy or as astute when interested in something - there's nothing as good as Williams' reading of the torture scene in in 1984 in Truth and Truthfulness, for example - but it tends towards a Bernard Williams-esque valorization of the political, except with a kind of quite intriguing and probably distinctly American civic republican spin; if Williams had wanted to defend a principle of non-intervention, then one feels it would have been on the negative grounds of the tendency towards of disaster of interventions, rather than on the positive grounds of self-determination Walzer appeals to (in this paper).

Walzer appeals to an example where we could, by putting some chemical in the water supply, costlessly and permanently turn the post-independence Algerian government into Swedish-style social democrats. Presumably we feel there's something undesirable about this; at least I share Walzer's thought that something's gone wrong here, and plausibly something about self-determination. Williams, I think though - and this is probably a pure rhetorical device here: who really knows what Williams would have thought - would just ask what the moral evaluation of the acts of gods are supposed to tell us about what we, who are not gods, should do here and now. We can't costlessly lift a whole nation from the place history has brought it to so as to carefully put it down somewhere else instead; the point of politics is that we can't go round doing things like that. There are costs, and we have to work out whether they're ones we can bear, and ones we can impose. What should be done when there are no costs at all is a question for someone else entirely. It may be worth noting here that Walzer talked about a ticking bomb case in a paper in the early seventies.

Anyway, so Walzer wants non-intervention, including neutrality in civil wars, on grounds of self-determination. Even if we can partly set aside cases involving the total change of political, economic and cultural institutions and attitudes simply through an act of will, we cannot totally set them aside: even if we think that part of what has gone wrong in the case he uses is that gods shouldn't treat mere mortals like that, or that our moral reactions aren't supposed to be callibrated for those kinds of cases, it's still seems like a wrong against self-determination. So it looks like the pro-interventionist still has a case to answer: alright, this society is by any plausible standard less than fully just, but you can't make it fully just; properly, it is for its own people to do that. Walzer doesn't want to push that as far as it might go: he allows that in cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing, or mass enslavement, intervention is allowed. Other than those, though, he is prepared to require the citizens - better the inhabitants perhaps - of an unjust state to suck it up: it would be wrong for outsiders to help them make their state more just.

I think this is probably wrong, but I don't have to think it's wrong because self-determination doesn't matter: ecumenically, I might think it's wrong - and this is probably something that's been said before, but because of my unfamiliarity with the literature, I just don't know it's been said or by whom - because self-determination is not a zero-sum game. For Walzer to be right that self-determination rules out active interference, it has to be the case that active interference would always in some way infringe on self-determination: maybe not self-determination across all time, but at least self-determination in the roughly here and now. That, though, doesn't look plausible about other cases of self-determination, and is likely to be even less plausible about self-determination for groups.

Consider an individual who is in a domineering relationship. Although there might be a dispute about what counts as active interference, it seems to me we could fairly actively interfere with them and yet increase their self-determination, under certain conditions at least: encourage them and provide them with resources to leave or otherwise restructure that relationship, for example; if not that, at least give them the option of doing so. That looks like active interference, and certainly like the sorts of things Walzer wants to analogously rule out for societies: helping one side in a civil war by providing it with certain resources unavailable to the other; here, not encouraging the individual to stay in the domineering relationship. Yet that could certainly increase their self-determination in the roughly here and now: an abusive partner doesn't have to be beating you to within an inch of your life - presumably the analogue of Walzer's 'no intervention without genocide, ethnic cleansing, or mass enslavement' condition - for you to become more autonomous by leaving them.

More, note that individuals are singular, whereas societies are plural, and so the dispute about what counts as self-determination for a particular individual within that individual is unlikely to be as radical as the dispute about what counts as self-determination for a particular society within that society. Nor are parts of individuals able to silence other parts of individuals in ways that parts of societies are able to silence other parts of societies. A society where everyone is involved in the self-determination is more self-determining than a society in which only some are so involved. Then, though, there are trade-offs to be made: we might be able to raise the voices of some without lowering the voices of others quite as much, or even really at all. If self-determination's not a zero-sum game, then interference doesn't have to limit it, and Walzer's argument against interference fails, but it doesn't seem that self-determination is a zero-sum game, even for individuals and surely not for societies.

Not Chained To A Lamp-post

2009-03-24T14:11:00.002Z

Via William Gibson.

How Are You Never Going To Be Late?

2009-03-22T23:46:00.000Z

Early on in the first season of The Wire, Avon takes D'Angelo to see an older relative in hospital, a man who must have lived in the same violent world as the pair of cousins, the younger a lieutenant in the older's drug empire. We come to know that he must have lived in this world because just before the camera draws in to reveal a healed bullet wound on his forehead, Avon says that the comatose man frightens him because his fate shows that the world they inhabit cannot be lived in forever: you only need to be "a little slow, a little late" once. That's by way of explaining the post title; not much more.

On The Counterfactual

Deadening metaphysics are,
simply, and so no beginning.
Let them mock us then, and start there.

How little subtlety there is
in observing that time passes.
A brute fact, with a distinct lack
of alchemy, of a soft touch,
poppy-petal light, skin on skin.

It has instead a discipline
A brutal self-reliance, hard
like blows to the back of the skull.

Consider reaching beyond it;
Stepping in the same river twice
And the strange tyranny
Of its impossibility.
Yet how the prospect beguiles.

To bathe in last year’s ancient rains,
To have them drawn back from the sea
And so pass out of things’ passing.

Outside endurance, enchantment,
And inside enchantment, nowhere
Endlessly left to twist tighter,
Doubling back, and again,
Ever watching each thing's leaving.

Putting Away Childish Things

2009-03-09T22:42:00.003Z

One of the most annoying things about Bernard Williams was his deep suspicion of assertions of normativity which separate themselves from practice. For example, in the posthumously published In The Beginning Was The Deed, along with asking what the point of being Kant at the court of King Arthur might be, he quotes Habermas demanding that participants in the political process

drop the role of the private subject... The combination [of facticity and validity] requires a process of law-making in which the participatory citizens are not allowed to take part simply in the role of actors oriented to success

and himself goes on to say

But what is this "are not allowed to"? It cannot be blankly normative. Suppose, one is bound to say, that they do? It may be replied: it will defeat the point. But what if it does? And how can we be sure, in the light of the possibility, what the point really is?

Since this is in the course of making an argument about how political philosophers ought to theorize, this is in a certain sense a little bit rich. If we ignore that what political decisions do is not "announce that the other party was morally wrong or, indeed, wrong at all [but that] they have lost", then he had better think that there is a sense in which we have gone wrong, or else it is unclear what point he thinks he is making. In the sense that it is an interpretative point in favour of a refusal to admit certain kinds of normativity to politics, it is fairly elliptical, and in the sense that it is just a blunt refusal to admit that we might reasonably want things to go other than they do, it not only undermines his own position but is deeply unphilosophical.

On the other hand, one of the most wonderful things about Bernard Williams was his deep suspicion of assertions of normativity which separate themselves from practice. There's an early passage either in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy or Morality: An Introduction to Ethics where Williams pours utter scorn on the idea that what people are really like is the way that they would behave in a lifeboat which is sinking because it is overfull. The idea is that just as we would not expect to see what a tropical plant is like by placing it in the Antarctic, we hardly find out what humans are like by imagining them under conditions where cooperation and compromise are pretty likely to result in them dying. Similarly, the integrity objection to utilitarianism importantly relies on the thought that it matters to use what we as individuals do, rather than how the world ends up being once are acts and omissions are endlessly mediated through the agency of others. The thought seems to have been that philosophy is an account of what we do as humans, and if it stops being intelligible as such an account, then it has failed. Philosophy is a humanistic discipline, and the ones we really ought to hate are the reductionists, just as relativism - and I think this is probably my favourite of Williams' aphorisms - is either too early or too late; because either it answers the question, should we tolerate those people we have no straightforward way of persecuting, or because it does not answer the question, given that you and I have some practical disagreement about the moral status of some act, how do we and ought we to resolve that disagreement without bloodshed.

All this is by way of objecting to another way of understanding philosophy. One of my colleagues was talking a couple of weeks ago about some research which claims that children are much more philosophical than adults. Unlike adults, apparently children go round constantly questioning things; they're forever asking about the sources of authorities they encounter, demanding causal histories of events or explanations that they're given, and so on. They always want to know why, are resolutely independent, critical inquirers, whereas adults are in contrast dupes, with both the ability and the will to tear back the veil and see what lies beneath atrophied, beaten down by time and the need to get by in a world which has limited patience for a refusal to acquiesce in the way things are. Time and the need to get by in world which had limited patience for a refusal to acquiesce in the way things are, at least for some values of 'the way things are', though, are central features of human existence. The reason children don't (always: children don't go round asking why their parents love and care for them, or not usually at least, or, minimally, don't usually behave like they've been asking that question, for example; one should always ask which questions aren't being asked, what forms of life are being privileged) behave like beings which have got used to them is because they aren't beings which have got used to them. That, though, doesn't mean that no-one should have got used to them, that the presumption should be against having got used to them, that philosophy is constituted by not having got used to central features of (adult) human life. Who would this philosophy be for, which goes round always demanding why? What would it not demand why of? Would it demand why it wants to know why, and what answer would it accept to that question? Where would it begin from, and who would recognise the world the answers to its questions left?

Another way of expressing this worry is to wonder about the conditions which might fulfil what Williams called the Basic Legitimation Demand, which requires that political orders are intelligible to those who live under them as solutions to the problem of providing order - without themselves becoming a problem in precisely those terms. I spoke to another colleague about this some time last week, who was fairly insistent that the work that intelligibility was doing there was not just a black box in the general sense which Williams obviously intended it to be - so that we could be Lancelot at Camelot and John Rawls at Harvard - but similarly indeterminate in any concrete situation - who could tell whether we ought not to be Lancelot at Harvard and Rawls at Camelot? In particular, they wanted to insist that Robert Nozick's right-libertarianism was a viable answer to Williams' question; that if the sorts of political orders we have round here now could tell all those they exercise their coercion over that in some imagined state of nature, they would not be worse off, that in the midst of riches being in the same state as a hunter-gatherer is sufficient to legitimate (being coopted into ensuring) coercive denial of access to those riches. I saw the tail end of a BBC4 documentary on the Miner's Strike this evening: I would have liked to see someone walk up to a striking miner in 1984, and tell them that since they weren't yet starving to death, the political order they lived under was legitimate. It's hard to explain to a crying child, after all, and we shouldn't make people do it unless we have to.

On Not Speaking Italian

2009-02-22T18:39:00.000Z

After reading Peter Bradshaw's review, I decided against going to see The Reader: he articulates, how accurately I don't know, a worry that the film is unacceptably exculpatory of one of its main characters, a Nazi extermination camp guard; if not no poetry after Auschwitz, at least no poetry about Auschwitz. Having not seen the film, I suppose I'm in no position to judge whether that's fair or not; Bradshaw makes it sound fair, at least, and for all his predictable foibles, I think he's usually pretty good. Apparently a complaint in the same kind of area has been made about Waltz With Bashir, the thought being that the more or less total absence of the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacres or of the context in which those massacres took place makes the film's attempt at reconstructing the details of the narrator's (limited) participation in those massacres a denial of the wrongs done either in the massacres or in Israel's 1982 invasion more broadly. For example here, the film is described as first "an act not of limited self-reflection but self-justification" and then "striving towards working through qualms to restabilize the self as it is currently constituted... [and not] asking challenging questions that would destabilize that self".

I'm not quite sure about this kind of claim: although it's right that the film is not primarily about the suffering of the victims of the Israeli invasion, it seems to rely on that suffering and, more, the wrong of that suffering to generate its narrative force. If it couldn't have been wrong to do what the narrator did, then his attempts to understand and come to terms with it would be adolescent pieces of self-obsessed introspection, tedious and whiny. The absence of the Palestinian victims at Sabra and Shatila, although perhaps not always of the victims of the conflict more broadly, is then a presence looming over much of the film. The figure of the psychiatrist, for example, seems much more ambiguous than the piece linked to above suggests. As well as saying that memory takes us where we want to go, and hence positing a kind of therapeutic effect for the narrator's nightmares reliving his experiences in Beirut, he tells an ancedote about how easy it is to plant false memories: apparently, doctored photos of themselves as children are almost inevitably assimilated into their recollections of their childhood by adults. Memory then might be hiding something much worse than the mere lighting of flares. Similarly, the apparent self-absorption of the reference to 'the other camps' is hardly exculpatory: presumably the last thing an Israeli of all people wants to justly compared to is a Nazi.

That may not get the film off the hook as far as ignoring the rest of the conflict goes, although it's worth noting that the songs about bombing Beirut are accompanied by scenes of Israeli soldiers being bored and boorish; it's not like the film endorses that act. But then, films may choose their own subjects, and one can easily imagine that Israeli attempts to conceptualise what has been done in their name would be seen as patronising and self-serving. What absence, then, is doing in the film could even be seen as a kind of respect: a refusal to try to capture what something must have been like for someone else can be a tribute to their subjectivity, rather than a denial of it. The use of the real footage at the end of the film, rather than Othering the Palestinian victims, seems to me to bring the question at the heart of the film back into sharp focus: what the hell did we do to do this to someone? Everything else becomes a shadow-play, a kind of paper screen which is eventually ripped aside to reveal what was really going on, which was the creation of figures of almost pure grief. Arabic is notoriously difficult to learn, while most of us can become fluent in violence in just under a semester indeed.

Weaving A Jumper From Your Own Hair

2009-02-09T23:07:00.002Z

Lampooned, here.

Or, more seriously, if we're thinking about rules which apply to large groups of people across long periods of time, shall we perhaps think about some cases of rules which apply to large groups of people across long periods of time? To put it another way, stealing from Jo Wolff, why is that in the luck-egalitarian universe, everyone is self-employed?

Bloody Memes

2009-02-08T22:48:00.001Z

This one, via Facebook, requires 25 random facts about yourself. I felt that 17 showed sufficient willing.

1. I once deliberately destroyed a £10 note.

2. Despite having mocked various female friends for possessing more shoes than was entirely necessary, I now possess more shoes than I can count on the fingers of one hand.

3. In my defence, at least half of these pairs of shoes have at least one hole in their soles.

4. I hoard things. I still have an IPod and its power dock, despite the fact it's not worked for at least four months and is apparently beyond repair.

5. I used to be able to do a passable impersonation of someone who could speak French.

6. I can now do a passable impersonation of someone who can speak Italian instead.

7. I have shaved my legs more recently than my chin.

8. I have never broken a bone.

9. I have never had stitches.

10. I have been non-ironically clapped off stage, once.

11. I have never been to a country that is not now a member of NATO.

12. I don't think of Switzerland as a country.

13. I know at least one cake recipe by heart.

14. I am not currently a member of a political party.

15. Despite myself, I am not sure that I would right now rather be having a cigarette outside in the cold than trying to come up with another ten facts about myself which avoid actually revealing anything important whilst creating at least a sense of engagement with the reader.

16. I do many things I am not sure about.

17. I have never liked trying to describe myself, and more, lack patience with those who try to get me to.

Simple Pleasures

2009-01-30T14:59:00.002Z

Truly, the internet is a wonderful thing. In this post (via), this comment:

Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Pride and Prejudice (or Pride and Practical Reason). It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good will must be in possession of the only thing that is good without qualification.

Ben Wolfson, whoever you are, you're a kind of God.

But So They Were

2009-01-10T19:20:00.001Z

On weird ways that institutions leave their mark, this, appropriately enough from here, I liked.

On Being Hard

2009-01-10T19:16:00.001Z

J. G. Ballard, in the more recent novels, I think made a living out of a kind of rather virulent reactionary politics: the recurrent thought seems to be that there is no political solution to the problem of violence, that any attempt to solve that problem simply displaces and even excerbates it. The plots take place against a backdrop of vaguely leftist concerns, it's true - the gated communities of a moneyed leisure class - but what is crucial is not that that shapes the members of that class: it rather liberates them, allows them to do what they've always (really: it's the really that gives it away) wanted to, which is experience the visceral thrill of exercising brutal, sadistic power. The insistence that humans are fallen, cannot but revert to bloody type is doubly obssessed with violence; both in that it insists that violence is inevitable, as if peaceful societies have never existed, and in its own self-image, as able to bear truths others dare not face, engaged in a kind of masochistic proof of its strength. As with Houellebecq, there must be a suspicion that there's an explanation in Ballard's personal history: a childhood in the cantonment in Shanghai and an internment camp must mark you in certain ways. What they don't do, as Ballard seems to think judging by his autobiography, is function as adequate models for what societies are generally like: contrary to what all kinds of saloon bar philosophers may think, people aren't really like what they're like under great stress; the whole point of being under great stress is that it's not how you normally are.

Not everyone is a psychopath, whatever Ballard may say: that's how we're able, in the end, to distinguish psychopaths from everyone else. Saying so might even border on the psychopathic itself: if the total failure of empathy is definitional of psychopathy, then an inability to see the motivations of others as other than brute data, as having a lived history which give them content and meaning, could be a kind of psychopathy. There's a kind of liberal piety which plays into this, though, where everything good is morally costless, where political conflict gets erased, and so generates the temptation to bring it back, bubbling up through the gaps all orders must leave somewhere. Regretting, as Obama's appointment to head to C.I.A. does here (via), that a majority of a given public do not believe in a absolutely exceptionless prohibition on torture, totally setting aside any questions about what tradeoffs you are prepared to make, does that. It invites the machismo of ticking bomb cases, when what you want is this (via), notes on the economy of torture, of its politics: thinking that the prohibition exists in a vacuum allows that exceptions to it might to, when our reasons for the prohibition are importantly to do with the fact that torture does not happen in a vacuum; it needs torturers, equipment, places and times for the equipment to be used, information that it confirms and that verifies it, and so on. I suppose then it is that kind of pious liberal that Ballard thought of himself educating in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, who thinks of goodness without a (real) history, as just how people are. Notice, though, that his posturing suffers from exactly the same flaw: it is stripped of its institutional context. People aren't usually evil because that's the way they're doomed to be; they're terrible because they ended up that way. Even Hobbes saw that; Ballard can't.

Like A Daydream, Or A Fever

2009-01-02T22:25:00.000Z

Apparently the little author biographies of Justin Cartwright's novels used to contain a not-so subtle dig at his ex-wife: he lives in London, sometimes with his children. In The Song Before It Is Sung, he only lives in London, which is perhaps for the best. You can well imagine why his wife might have left him; the book concerns Conrad Senior, a somewhat self-absorbed man in early middle age who is using the bequest of an old professor's letters to a German friend executed by the Nazis as an excuse for doing not very much other than think rather vague thoughts about the grand sweep of history, swan about in London, and have pretty women - including his wife when she comes to divide up the marital goods having had quite enough of this extended adolescence - f*ck him at the drop of a hat. The women are ciphers, nagging shrews melting into his arms as he passive-aggressively refuses to engage with them or empty-headed wantons whose short skirts and drug use are indicative of their sexual licence. Even Senior himself is something of an empty vessel, not much more than a vehicle for the author's persistent equation of objectivity in morality with teleology in history: as if because we must give up on the idea of ineluctable progress we must give up on the idea of must.

Although the book has its moments - the scene where Senior meets the cameraman who filmed the execution of the German in Berlin is really rather well done, and there are some nicely catty asides - there are some passages which practically beg to be taken out and shot. There's a meditation on Grosz's remark that his work was a reaction to commanders in the field painting in blood that works itself up to the full height of imagining Hitler, the former art student, as the modern master of the genre. Or the observation, after a rather self-satisfied, condescending little list of the relevant features - illegal immigrant cabbies, hookers, greasy fast-food joints, and any number of stereotypes out of central casting - that metropolitan railway stations are a bit seedy; no shit, Sherlock. The prose is often just lazy: I suppose it thinks of itself as having the wonderful economy of someone like William Gibson, but it hasn't got anything like the self-control, the precision of Gibson's careful accumulation of exact detail; it just doesn't think carefully enough. This isn't just evidenced in the banal vignettes collapsing under the weight of meaning they're supposed to be bearing but in the theme: using a heroic good German to try and make a barely even sophomoric point about how Hegel said some crazy shit once and then, like magic, there were Nazis and everything else terrible in the world and so we should all be relativists, since what was so terrible about the Nazis was that they believed in objective morality and not that they started the bloodiest war the world has ever seen and murdered millions. Or something.

Anyway, don't bother. Or with Howard Jacobson: a less funny Philip Roth, with much more portension. What you should bother with is I Am Cuba, a hallucinatory, black and white propaganda film made by a Soviet director about the run-up to Castro's revolution in the mid-sixties. The white looks burned on to the camera, like anything not actually black the director pointed it at was sodium blazing away under an inevitably cloudless sky, so that sugar cane fields look like they're full of brilliant incandescent triffids and a crowd marching down monumental steps into water-cannon like innocents claiming their birthright and walking into heaven. That doesn't do it justice: it's full of mad, looping takes, framing characters from above and below, against hillsides, brightly-light shop windows, collonades, burning over-turned cars. It's so alive, so eager. I liked it much more than a kind of companion piece at least in subject matter, The Battle Of Algiers, which I saw a while ago but seemed to me to have no heart at all and to be very pleased with its achievement of that pitilessness, as if that was precisely the attitude one ought to adopt to violent rebellion. I Am Cuba was so much more human, was not just attempting to be a document of retrospective historical inevitability, if it was even attempting that, but to give life to those living through that inevitability.

For Now's The Time For Your Tears

2008-12-07T19:43:00.002Z

Just in case you didn't think Diaz Pertini was bad enough, just in case you didn't think all the police officers involved in Diaz Pertini getting off was bad enough, a former Italian President and Home Secretary advocates not only the systematic use of violence and infilitration as tactics against peaceful protesters but apparently reveals that that was his method when in office (via this generally good post). Apparently for the Casa Della Liberta, freedom means the suppression of any protest against the government of the day through the institutionalisation of systematic police brutality. Also, three rather good pieces on the Shannon Matthews case and the moral panic surrounding it.

On Empty Formalism

2008-12-05T21:13:00.004Z

Libertarians claim to be interested in making people as free as possible. Motherhood and apple pie, you'd've thought; who has anything to say against people being free, after all? On the other hand, there's something pretty suspicious about appeals to values which no-one disagrees with. Why not just offer the moon on a stick along with that magic pony? It's not really 'all moral worlds contain loss', is it? donpaskini doesn't get it quite right here, when he says that "[i]t's not the arguments against libertarianism that are most devastating for its adherents, it's their own attempts to apply their beliefs to the real world", since running around waving your arms and shouting 'freedom! freedom!' is hardly really an argument. What really matters is what the libertarians mean when they run around waving their arms and shouting 'freedom! freedom!', and in the absence of anything else, it seems like the policies probably are what they mean. Freedom is having to apply to an unaccountable charity to get a licence to procreate, or being mugged because the police are busy raiding your house to check whether you're beating your kids. Your take-home lesson today: the plausibility of a general claim is the plausibility of its instances.

Timeserving

2008-11-18T00:19:00.001Z

This and this, amongst other things, I like. That's yer lot.

The Lowest Whore In Creation

2008-11-12T10:39:00.000Z

From the discussion in Dominic Sandbrook's Never Had It So Good of the British secret service and novels about it in the late fifties and early sixties:

In Casino Royale, Bond notes approvingly that Vesper Lynd's enigmatic, unfathomable personality means that 'the conquest of her body... would each time have the sweet tang of rape'. And in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Tracy tells him: 'Make love to me... Do anything you like [...] Be rough with me. Treat me like the lowest whore in creation. Forget everything else. No questions. Take me.'

There is, then, a startingly aggressive side to Bond's treatment of women [...] reminiscent of the violent hostility to women often present in the New Wave novels of the late 1950s. Just like Room at the Top or Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Bond novels such as Casino Royale or On Her Majesty's Secret Service present their readers with a hero who treats women as disposable commodities and barely distinguishes between physical love and sadistic violence. It was surely no coincidence that all these books... were eagerly snapped up by male readers at a time when women were financially, socially and sexually more independent and assertive than ever.

Sandbrook also quotes a reviewer for the New Statesman as describing the Bond novels as worse than straight pornography. Although I understand that there is good evidence to link the consumption of pornography with the holding of various beliefs about the occurrence of the sexual practices depicted in it and women's willingness to engage in them, evidence I've not heard of being produced for the readers of Bond or New Wave novels, you have to have a degree of sympathy for the reviewer's claim. Bond novels are better written than most pornography, and call upon a potential rather toxic combination of exotica, class superiority, and nationalistic chauvinism to objectify women, whereas pornography usually lacks pretensions to any artistic merit. The attitudes they display towards gays and lesbians are unsurprisingly vile: Sandbrook notes that many of the women Bond seduces are, when he meets them, lesbians, although of course brought back to the rightful place as sexual helpmeets by the end of their involvement with this epitome of masculinity. The best of British, eh?

Today On This Programme You Will Hear Gospel And Rhythm And Blues And Jazz

2008-11-05T17:21:00.002Z

Of course you have power.

I Will Rescue America And Take Her For My Demon Bride

2008-11-04T13:39:00.002Z

All the news that's fit to print.

Me And God In Co-Production

2008-11-02T19:16:00.001Z

Last night, with my mother, I saw Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes The Barley (spoilers), which is of course quite as didactic as one would expect. With Land And Freedom, I think I minded this less: I knew it was quite unsubtly manipulating me, but I didn't particularly care since it's so easy to summon a relatively uncomplicated attitude to the Spanish Civil War; for the Republicans and against everyone else, including the Soviets. Partly because I have a not-quite-fully examined hostility to Irish nationalism and particularly what seems to me the centrality of an idea of victimhood, I was much more hostile to Loach's attempts to garner sympathetic identification for rebels fighting for what they'd have probably been given anyway. Starting a civil war in which thousands died over whether or not you had to swear an oath of allegiance to a foreign head of state - which, accurate or otherwise, seemed to be the sum of the actual, practical difference between the Free Staters and the Republicans according to Loach - is, so far as I'm concerned at least, pretty reprehensible: you don't kill people just so that you can avoid breaking your word. That is a moral vanity of a pretty monstrous kind. Nor is one extra-judicial execution or reprisal much better than another. Yet Loach wants people who hold their honour so high they'll kill their comrades so they don't have to lie or to send a message to others to be the focus of our sympathetic identification in the film. It is hard to identify with someone who kills in the service of some cause they consider just, particularly some left-wing cause they consider just I think, and does not wonder whether what they are doing is just, whether what they're sacrificing is worth what they're getting, whether anything could be worth what they're sacrificing.

The best moments, then, of the film are when people do start to ask whether what they're doing is just, as when the film's hero Damien tells the story of taking a mother of an informer he executed whilst fighting the British to her son's grave to his brother, now on the other side of the civil war. Or when the brother stoically delivers the perhaps implausibly forgiving letter Damien wrote to his sweetheart, as deeply implicated as either of the brothers in the independence struggle herself, before being executed for refusing to give up his comrades. That's where the tragedy and so the drama lies, at points where one's public and private commitments start to unavoidably conflict, where forces beyond your control make sure you have to lose something that you cannot afford or fairly be asked to give up. That's when politics becomes personal, when commitments of one sort or the other have to be sacrificed, when you have to tell your brother's lover or your friend's mother that you've shot them. Part of the point of what we might call normal politics, then, seems to be to eliminate or at least mitigate the ways in which people are pushed into making those kinds of choices: a world in which we constantly find ourselves wondering how exactly it is that ought is supposed to imply can is not a very hospitable one, and only political institutions, by controlling forces beyond the power of individuals acting alone, can deliver us from such an outcome. So then, we end up returning, almost ineluctably, to an argument against G. A. Cohen. It's almost ironic.

Really, Burn After Reading

2008-10-25T17:10:00.002+01:00

Since there hasn't been any fiddly and probably totally inconsequential political philosophy here for a while, I present to you, some fiddly and probably totally inconsequential political philosophy! As regular readers may remember, my doctorate is perhaps frighteningly obsessed - notice how I put distance between the mental states of what is after all a piece of writing, and those of its creator - with G. A. Cohen's attacks on Rawls. Those attacks began by observing that Rawls' difference principle, which legitimates inequalities in income and wealth (roughly) that maximize the income and wealth of those who have the least income and wealth, seems to treat the intentions of those who would recieve the proposed inequalities as fixed. They blossom into a whole host of variously methodological and conceptual attacks, but it all starts with that observation, and the claim that that shows that at least the levels of inequality Rawls thought were justified by it are not, that in fact it legitimates very little inequality.

The idea is that like a kidnapper who demands that you pay up, or the kid gets it, ignoring the fact that it's them that makes it true that the kid gets it, Rawls' economically productive, instead of just producing as much as they could, ask for incentives to do so even though they could make more without the incentives. Like the kidnapper, that paying them will produce a good outcome is dependent on their will. Someone asking for medical treatment is usually going to be ill whether or not they decide to be ill, but how much they work is something people have control over. Cohen then says that a productive egalitarian ethos is a demand of justice, since it will increase the take of the well-off, roughly (more technically, for any given level of output that could be achieved by providing financial incentives to the productive, there is a more egalitarian distribution in which the productive are not so incentivised, and the least well-off have larger holdings, a distribution achievable if the productive have a productive egalitarian ethos).

Now, I think this kind of thing is totally crazy, mostly because I think that there are good reasons for thinking that the justice of distributions of property rights ought to be sorted out by features of systems of property rights, rather than people's motivations, and particularly their motivations about how much and at what to work. Leaving people space to live their lives is, on reflection, a more or less foundational requirement of just political systems, and if you have to take decisions about which job to do at what rate of pay on the basis of how it'll effect the distribution of property throughout your society, that requirement is not met.

But that's by the by here. The fiddly, inconsequential bit of political philosophy concerns Cohen's claim that a productive egalitarian ethos would not limit people's freedom. Cohen argues this on the grounds that moral demands in general are limits on freedom or are in general not, and so it can't be an argument against any particular moral demand that it limits freedom. It could be an argument against a law that it limits freedom, since laws coerce people, but it's not an argument against a moral demand, and the ethos is a moral demand, which he doesn't call for the legal enforcement of. This may or may not be true in general, and it doesn't matter for my argument against Cohen's position, which is that the demand is too demanding and so different from a claim about freedom. However, I think I can show that Cohen is wrong about whether or not the ethos limits a potentially significant freedom.

More or less ex hypothesi for Cohen, a society's coercive legal structures cannot distribute stuff justly: people's behaviour within those structures matters, which is why he thinks that an ethos is a requirement of justice. That means that whether or not one is complicit in injustice is going to be dependent on people's choices within coercive structures: so far as Cohen's concerned, it is only if other people chose to follow the demands of the productive egalitarian ethos, for example, that I can avoid living under a set of institutions which end up distributing stuff in a way which treats people unjustly. Obviously, in order to make his argument that the ethos does not limit freedom, Cohen has to insist that the ethos cannot be a legal requirement: indeed, otherwise it wouldn't be choice within a society's coercive legal structures. That means, though, that I have a positive right to not meet the demands of the ethos, that no-one can force me to meet the demands of the ethos. Unless everyone does meet the demands of the ethos though, for Cohen our society will be unjust: when the law prevents people from forcing each other to meet the demands of the ethos, it prevents them from making their society just. Cohen's ethos then does conflict with a certain freedom, the freedom to live in a just society. If Cohen's right, then even the best possible legal system may coercively prevent me from having to live in a society which distributes goods unjustly.

Tonight We Sleep In Trieste Or In Heaven

2008-10-22T23:41:00.002+01:00

About the best bit in the three hour long but nonetheless rather fun repetition of what Wilfred Owen called the Old Lie - itself now something of an old lie too, I suspect: nothing that prompts schools to show you episodes of Blackadder could not have ascended to the status of myth, I think - that is A Bridge Too Far is a kind of self-overcoming of that understanding of the point of martial virtue. Good old Dickie Attenborough is commanding troops holding one end of the titular bridge, totally out-numbered and out-gunned by the implacable Hun, who, coldly rational as ever, sends over a messenger to ask if the plucky Brits feel like they've been slaughtered for long enough now and might consider a surrender. Attenborough turns to one of his officers, telling him to tell the Germans to go f*ck themselves, more or less. The officer, utterly deadpan, shouts across the no-mans-land at the end of the bridge that they'd like to discuss terms, "but unfortunately we haven't the proper facilities to take you all prisoner". Consequently, more or less all the British get killed, including Attenborough's rather eccentric junior, and Attenborough, along with the remainder, gets taken prisoner. In real terms, a total bloody - literally - disaster, but as a cinematic moment, absolutely brilliant.

Until the last month or so, for the last six months that was kind of how I felt about domestic politics: whatever one was doing, it was at best gestural in that kind of way; at its heart was an acknowledgment that it couldn't possibly be doing any real good, since the forces aligned against it were so strong, but out of sheer bloodymindedness you ought to do it anyway. The Tories might be miles ahead in the polls and making all the kinds of subtle nasty party noises you'd expect, Labour's programme might consist of mostly making the benefits system increasingly punitive for anyone it thought The Daily Mail disapproved of while lacking the balls to even appear to actually do much else at all but flounder, but at least I was still pure of heart. However, now, although the Tories are still miles ahead in the polls, everything else seems to be running the right way: clearly global capitalism hasn't collapsed and we're not about to enter the proverbial socialist utopia of milk and honey, but some serious readjustments in the distribution of threat advantage have occurred. Not only do free-market ideologues seem to have lost their balls, the centre-left(ish) in power looks like it might have got them back and decided to make use of its ability to, you know, actually do stuff. Even the Fed has had to not only buy out banks but accept some political consequences for doing so, and still Americans are probably going to elect a black man as their President. I mean, a global recession is of course pretty awful and all that, and doubtless we're not going to see the complete end of attempts by finance capital to dominate political proceedings, but it warms the cockles of your heart.

So, from a much more politically dubious source, a new motto. In Como, on the lakefront, there's a really rather hideous fascist-era war memorial, cod-futurist and vulgar. Its inscription provides the title of this post. Of course, it's Owen's Old Lie without even the veneer that comes from obscuring one's meaning in a dead language: it's brash and unbelievably stupid, a moral horror really. No coughing like hags and cursing through the sludge whilst drunk with fatigue there, but instead the brazen promise of not only glory beyond imagining but also a warm bed. Like I say, a moral horror. It has a kind of fit to my mood though. One doesn't have to be resigned to the fact that politics is the art of the possible anymore; one can be hopeful that it is now, because the boundaries of the possible seem wider than they did even a couple of months ago. A stupid hoping beyond hope seems appropriate. It's maybe just as irresponsible as it is on the war memorial - a global recession is after all a definite price to pay, and it's not as if secret cadres of Rawlsians have now overtaken the commanding heights of both the state and the economy - but I suppose hopes is always in a certain sense irresponsible.

Postscript: For example, take this (via). Waiting for the great leap forwards!

Copy-Editing For The Morally Perplexed

2008-10-07T18:01:00.000+01:00

Over the past two days, I have found three examples where I used 'but' to begin a sentence in exactly the sort of context in which I condemned its use here. Not only do I still know the difference between a foolish hope and a hope of foolishness, though, but I also eliminated all these erroneous uses of 'but' so my claim to the moral high ground is, I think, entirely safe. Entirely safe, I tell you.

Giles Coren Is Still A Prick

2008-10-05T21:37:00.001+01:00

Although it wasn't one of my favourite moments of the just recently finished series of The Wire, I enjoyed the two scenes in which examples of the proper use of the verb 'to evacuate' were provided; first, to a reporter who had wrongly written that some number of people were evacuated, rather than the building they were occupying, and second, to a policeman who didn't understand that McNulty meant the homeless murder victim he was standing over had shat himself after being killed. This, I think, should be borne in mind when considering the complaint I am about to make. I recently recieved copy-edited proofs of a piece of writing I did. Now, I know that my writing can be rather convoluted, my meaning somewhat opaque, and so some manglings I am prepared to forgive: they were probably there in the first place, and in attempting to untangle them they only get wound more tightly. Nonetheless, some things aren't matters of style, but of basic grammar. Not understanding the difference between a foolish hope and a hope of foolishness is one, and thinking that it is acceptable to begin sentences of written English with 'but' is another. Grumpy old man interlude now over.

On Tolkein and On Being Abroad

2008-09-20T15:08:00.000+01:00

Both from Michael Dobson's LRB piece on a history of literature in English in the long(ish) 17th Century, which apparently tries to play up the contributions of the Celtic fringe. The first, a marvellously scathing judgment on one of the most turgid, reactionary, quasi-autistic adolescent reads of all time, beginning with the book's interest in James Macpherson's Ossian, and offering the Lord of the Rings as a reason to be glad the interest is not more widely spread:

Among the archipelago's tales of legendary warrior heroes, [the book's author] is more interested in James Macpherson's Ossian [than Malory's Morte d'Arthur] which he laments, 'has yet to be assimilated to Eng. Lit.' Long may it remain unassimilated. The last time anyone tried to incorporate Macpherson's all-too-imitable cod-Gaelic woodnotes wild, they produced The Lord of the Rings. Complete with twee Saxon hobbits, suspiciously Welsh-looking dwarves and intolerably fey Celtic elves, Tolkein's kitsch epic may well be the most archipelagic work of modern times, comparably only to the one about the Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman who go into a pub.

Second, in the course of making the point that the relevant Other for many writers of English in the period was not a Celt whom they were anxious about the integration of into a civilized metropolitan kingdom, but rather various potential Continental aggressors, already civilized and perhaps capable of not just subverting the established order, but obliterating it, an observation about taking his children abroad, who have been

subjected in their turn to holidays in Scotland, and Wales, and Cornwall, and Ireland: after all, the experience of being English in the other parts of the United Kingdom and Ireland is a vital part of their rich native birthright of discomfort and alienation. But they have also been conscientiously transported to the Continent. As I myself noticed after I finally got a passport and went on a school exchange visit to France in 1975, the enigma, the significance and the embarrassment of being English within Britain are nothing compared to those of being British within Europe.

It helps if you speak the language, at least a little, although that then leaves you in the position of perpetually being at risk of mortification by co-nationals who loudly advertise their inability to do likewise. Oh the perils of being middle-class.

Tasted Like Meths And Probably Was

2008-08-21T21:37:00.001+01:00

In his 'All The Wrong Places', James Fenton, in reaction to the nocturnal loosening of tongues amongst the increasingly despondent South Vietnamese soldiery, considers setting up a new school of journalism, crepuscular journalism. Whilst it might not end the sorts of complaints found here, it would at least make a change, and would not quite deprive Chris of his enjoyment of calumny. The simple rule of the school would be to "[b]elieve nothing you are told before dusk". Fenton goes on:

Instead of diplomatic sources, or high-ranking sources, or "usually reliable sources", the crepuscular journalists would refer to "sources interviewed last night," "sources at midnight," or best of all, "sources contacted a few hours before dawn." It would be considered unprofessional to interview the general on the morning of the battle. You would wait till the evening, when he was reviewing the cost. Crepuscular stories would cut out the bravado. Their predominant colourings would be melancholy and gloom. In this they would reflect more accurately the mood of the times.

Indeed.

A Man's Gotta Have A Code

2008-08-21T13:57:00.000+01:00

Miller's Crossing, possibly one of my favourite films, begins with a prohibition-era Italian gangster coming to see the head of the Irish mob, who runs the town, to ask whether or not the Irish will lift their protection of a bookie, whom the Italian believes is leaking information about fixed fights. As he explains the situation, Jonny Caspar, the Italian, in a piece of what we are never quite sure is transparent self-justification, describes the problem as a matter of ethics and the bookie's lack of them: fixed fights may be fine, but selling which fight is fixed - that places you beyond the pale, endangers the smooth running of the town by endangering what was previously a sure source of income. The reason we are never quite sure if the description of the issue as an ethical one is totally self-serving is that it looks like Caspar believes it: if you can fake sincerity, then you've got it made, but Caspar, forever looking for an opportunity to be slighted, clearly sincerely thinks the world owes him rather a lot. It is that that he has to think though: the reason that casting rules which benefit you as absolute moral precepts is always suspicious is precisely that they benefit you, and no more; you have to be entitled to the benefits.

That the justification is forever teetering on the edge of becoming an insult to everyone else's intelligence may be why Caspar also casts it in terms of a more general pursuit of rational self-interest, that if fixed fights get sold, then nothing is sacred anymore and everyone loses in the resulting chaos. That doesn't really work either, because although it's not a piece of such naked self-interest, its distance from Caspar himself seems to deprive it of that fierce sense of constantly being wronged, and so the combination of the instrumental with the moral becomes much more difficult to sustain. Regardless, Leo, the Irish boss, refuses to sell out the bookie, and Caspar huffily blusters that he was only doing Leo the courtesy of informing him in advance of the killing, thereby setting the stage for the gang warfare which the rest of the film is punctuated by.

Despite a couple of scenes where the police, under orders from one or other of the mobs, raid speakeasys, and a piece of gloriously self-possessed violence by Albert Finney as Leo in which he is indeed an artist with a Thompson, the film's real interest is in Gabriel Byrne's Tom, a lieutenant to Leo, who half-stumbles, half-glides through the mess of the gang war, all bone-dry, jaded wit and variously conflicted loyalties. Except that loyalties isn't quite the right word for it: they're more fickle than that. For example, he explains his temporary switch over to the other side to Leo as an elaborate double-cross, but his reasons for breaking with Leo were genuine and he only attempts to give this explanation once it is clear that he has broken with Leo forever. Likewise, he is once offered the opportunity to do something when it would be very risky for him not to, and then, later, when doing it is really quite gratuitous and destructive, he carefully engineers the chance to complete a now pointless task. About the only constants are a kind of (an enormously appealing, at least in a character in a film) bitter self-satisfaction, drink, and gambling (debts). As he says, wonderfully, to a lover, getting the response that she'd never met anyone who made being a son of a bitch such a point of pride, "if I'd known we were going to cast our feelings into words, I'd've memorised the Song of Solomon".

Tom is effectively a kind of cipher, a hyper-stylised version of a noir staple. When the lover tells him he's come to see her for the oldest reason there is, he replies that there are friendlier places to drink, and then does more than that anyway, just like he's supposed to. He doesn't really have any hinterland of commitment, just a smart word, a proud manner, various addictions and a handsomely lived-in face, and for the purposes of the film, itself a gloriously hyper-stylised tribute, that works. And it's for that reason that he's able to somehow extricate himself from the betraying his boss, in several different ways, and risking his life for nothing he hasn't already sold: the politics of the gang war eddy around him, and he swims through them, without ever quite being dragged under, because he has no reason to favour one current over another, knows how to let them carry him without taking him down with them. As someone says to him at one point, he sees all the angles: it's just that that's all he does, a kind of cold assessment without any real involvement. In that sense, the anarchy of the gang war does him no harm: although he loses things, we never quite sure why or how much he cared about them, and he just keeps doing what he always was, seeing the angles and world-wearily playing them, forever at a kind of distance.

Of course, if he wasn't outside politics, above commitment, with no vested interests, then he wouldn't be able to see all the angles. The fact that he is all surface means that being "back in the jungle", as Caspar puts it, is just another version of the game, another, although in general less productive, set of rules to work out and manipulate. Other people still have their commitments, and you just have to play them right. In this, and in his lack of a hinterland, he is like Heath Ledger's Joker: both exploit the way the predictability of other people by having no interests in particular to bind them to anything in particular. Neither, for example, really have a fixed past: just as the Joker re-tells, differently each time, the story of his grotesquely extended smile, Tom Regan is constantly correcting people, showing them that they've not got him quite right.

Where they differ, contra what Michael Wood said about The Dark Knight in the most recent LRB, is that Tom is not political at all, whereas the Joker's distinctly political aim is the end of politics, to make any rules at all an impossibility. Anton Chigurh, of No Country For Old Men, whom Wood compares with the Joker, is much more like Tom Regan than the crazed maniac who burns a pile of money: Chigurh, like Regan, is unreadable, a kind of force of nature, although of course a quite different sort of force of nature, but similarly quite uninterested in anyone else other than for his own quite private, in both sense, ends. The Joker would never flip a coin to decide whether he kills you or not: he would have you flip it to see who else he kills. Chaos is not a self-regarding aim; other people need to be involved. That's why Wood is also wrong about the film's labelling of the Joker as a terrorist: the Joker is in fact the archetypal terrorist, since he seeks the destruction of the basic, ordering, elements, of a social order. Or at least, that's what I argue in my article on the topic (I'm allowed to be pleased with myself, alright). In that sense, then, we should not be so cruel to the second of Johnny Caspar's attempts to give his self-interested requests a moral appeal: the problem with it is not the good it appeals to, since we do have a deep interest in the maintenance of social order, but rather the causal connection between the good and what Caspar wants to do; one bookie selling out your fix does not unleash a Hobbesian Sate of Nature, although a gang war may well do.

Carrying On Regardless

2008-08-05T15:43:00.001+01:00

No-one has tagged me with this, but I'm going to do it anyway.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or for whatever reason loathe (like Phil, I see no reason to confine my self to books my education's left me hating, not least because there aren't any on this list: the only thing I read at school on this list is To Kill a Mockingbird, which I liked; I stopped doing Eng. Lit. at 16).
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
~~4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling~~
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
~~6 The Bible~~
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
~~14 Complete Works of Shakespeare~~
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
~~17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks~~
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
~~21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell~~
~~22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald~~
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
~~26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh~~
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
~~42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown~~
~~43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez~~
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
~~60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez~~
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
~~86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry~~
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
~~90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton~~
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
~~94 Watership Down - Richard Adams~~
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

33, by my count, but about half of that I read when I was a kid. I've only actually crossed out things I am pretty certain I am never going to voluntarily read, if I haven't already read them. The Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare go on grounds of length, for example. My underlinings are also a bit haphazard: I'm not really sure that I definitely like A Handmaid's Tale more than Cloud Atlas for example (and I'm not sure that I like Cloud Atlas more than Number9dream or A Handmaid's Tale more than Cat's Eyes, either). More interestingly, perhaps, allthough there are plenty of things on the list I think people should read, just because they're parts of the cultural furniture, I wouldn't press anything I've read on this list into people's hands, even the things I've underlined. That's partly a function of having read most of the stuff I have read on it a fair while ago, and so their charms having faded, but partly because even the stuff I read relatively recently - Cloud Atlas, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Atonement, A Confederacy of Dunces, A Fine Balance, His Dark Materials - I feel is either over-rated, enormously so in the case of Mistry, or doing quite well by itself, thank you very much.

The two things I really noticed when doing this, though, are how heavily biased in favour of the classics of 19th century literature the whole thing is - Dickens and Austen are the two most popular authors, even though almost two-thirds of the list was written after WWI - and how few of these apparently central parts of the canon I have read. I did once start a Dickens novel - I think it may have been 'Our Mutual Friend' - but found it very hard going. On the other hand, I have enjoyed Austen adaptations on television. I realise this doesn't count. Other things: only a quarter of the writers are women, with that proportion dropping after World War I; excluding Victorian classics, there's almost nothing in translation; Douglas Adams, (f*cking) Tolkein, and Frank Herbert seem to be your lot as far as sci-fi or fantasy goes, so no Pratchett - whom I'm a bit meh about, but is very popular - Dick, or Asimov; none of that leftist-ish world-weariness typical of Cold War thriller - no Greene or Le Carre, for example; Kerouac and Heller is as far as any beat-ish post-war stylistic experimentation goes, so no Pynchon, (early) Roth, or Vonnegut; only one non-fiction work.

I'm not really sure whether it's an odd list, or whether it's entirely unsurprising. Enid Blyton, for example, is surely really weird, but you'd have bet your life on a grindingly middlebrow author like Mistry being in there (I'd put money on the two authors I didn't know, Zafon and Albom, being of that sort too, for example). It's not an accident that there's nothing on there italicized: I'm genuinely not that bothered about reading any of it, although of course I'm open to persuasion. What I feel like reading is maybe a little more Le Carre, certainly Michael Chabon's Kavalier and Clay, another Pamuk perhaps, David Peace's Red Riding forerunners to GB84, even Raphael Samuel maybe, whose essays on Britishness I really enjoyed. Big nineteenth century realist novels you can beat a man to death with and oh-so-heavily-freighted with significance beach reads; thank you, but no.

The Man Who Is Sleeping, That's Your Murderer

2008-08-03T17:55:00.000+01:00

A lot of play has been made of The Dark Knight being some kind of political morality tale, supposed to offer us thoughts on the limits of publicly accountable institutions, on how much we might need men - and they are always men, at least in drama - prepared to do awful things to keep us safe in our beds at night. A lot of the film's narrative tension depends on what sorts of answers to those questions the main characters will decide upon, how far Batman and Harvey Dent are prepared to bend the rules in order to save the meaningful existence of those self-same rules. The problem, apart from the length and the failure to give anyone the kind of backstory against which their character can develop and their dilemmas acquire significance, is that those questions are kind of unintelligible in a world in which a single criminal, apparently without organisation or much money, can poison officials, kidnap policemen, rig boats and hospitals to blow, infilitrate various mafias, and the like at will, more or less by sheer force of personality. The rules the precise structure of whose value we're supposed to be wondering about are obviously inappropriate when you're confronted with an apparently omnipotent madman. Aristotle observed that gods and monsters live outside the polis: monstrous gods make a mockery of the idea of it.

The Light Before We Land

2008-08-03T00:37:00.001+01:00

In my first year as an undergraduate, I lent a friend Iain M. Banks' The Use Of Weapons, which is I think my favourite of his novels, science fiction or otherwise. I suppose in lots of ways, it's just a well-written space-opera, despite all its quite carefully imagined worlds its pleasures unashamedly adolescent: there's a gag, the details of which I can't quite remember and have no copy to hand to find, about the technical-sounding acronym of a spacesuit turning out to stand for a joyfully expletive-ridden two fingers to those on the receiving end of its capabilities. For all that though, for all the men with big guns and a problem with authority figures and the svelte, available women, the fantasies of a world of limitless technological potential, the vast expanses of space conquered by macho buddy-buddy partnerships of men and calculating yet insouciant machine - which is not to do that down: it's done well; it's just to observe that's what it is - the book really is a narrative of redemption.

It's about what someone will do to live down, to make good, what they have already done, about how we are to understand what they are doing now in light of what they have done. It's a novel about how the past bears down on you, about how time's arrow runs only one way, and how we can neither avoid nor be too careful about interpreting the present in the light of the past. Given the dual narratives, of operative trying too hard to do good, and a family bitterly divided by civil war, it could hardly avoid telling a story about how the terrible things you've seen and done mark you. It makes its point about being careful interpreting how those things mark you, though, through a twist, which, as it's intended to, alters the structure of the narrative quite completely: the sacrifices which are supposed to be redeeemed by the acts of the main character are cast in suddenly quite a different light. Clearly, that changes the nature of the redemption that is being aimed at: having been drawn into one understanding of what rectification was being aimed for, we are instead jerked sharply to some radically different alternative. The friend I lent it to couldn't cope with that: the space opera stuff he lapped up - I think I may remember the spacesuit gag because he mentioned it when I asked him whether he liked it - but the grating shift of sympathy, of what we might try and redeem, of what can be redeemed, he couldn't stand.

I've always been a sucker for the horror of things that can't be undone, are as they are, beyond our powers any more. To find that the world is intransigent, uncooperative in our attempts to remake it, is, I feel at least, to locate the core of our moral predicament. There's a scene in Hotel Rwanda, perhaps particularly poignant for me because of whom I watched it with, where European nuns are flown out, saved, by the UN peacekeepers, and the orphans they were looking after left behind to the tender care of the Interhamwe, despite Don Cheadle's desperate pleas. That, more than the massacres themselves, the scene where they drive over bodies of people who've been hacked to death, cut me up: the impossibility of doing anything about it, the tragedy, in the proper fatalistic sense of the term, of it, is nigh-on unbearable. I watched the repeat of Boy A tonight on More4. That carried that terrible charge too. I wonder what the man I lent The Use Of Weapons to would have thought of it.