Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Counterparts

Some readers will recall the exposé I wrote a few months ago on the life and work of the American poet Jason Boone. What might not have been obvious in that piece, as I would urgently like to clear up now, is that it was all entirely made up: every last word of it, from the meetings I had with Boone at Nirvana concerts in Sacramento in the late 1980s, to the documentary about Boone's life supposedly made by an MA student in the Media Arts Program a the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. There is no Media Arts Program in Fairbanks! In fact, the interviewees in the segment of the film I included in the exposé, one supposedly named 'Michel Pupici' and the other 'Dylan Cooney', are both plainly the same person filmed from different angles. What is more, anyone who has ever met me will be able to confirm that it is I myself, the author, Justin Smith, in both of those roles. I am looking unusually fat, true, and I do not appear entirely sober, but personal identity persisting as it does through such superficial changes, I feel I must come clean and acknowledge my role in the ruse. It was me. All of it. The entire operation behind the Jason Boone story was a one-man job, and that man was not Jason Boone.

You can thus imagine my surprise when, not long ago, on the morning of this year's Canadian Thanksgiving, I received a telephone call from a certain Augusta Aardappel. Readers will recall that Aardappel was supposedly the South African academic who had written a dissertation, in a Deleuzean vein, on the poetry of Jason Boone ('The Boone Rhizome'), and who apparently had dated Boone for a while in the early 1990s. But again, I made her up along with Pupici, Cooney, Coombs, and the rest. Anyone who has the faintest familiarity with the sonorities of Dutch should have been able to detect that she was a fabrication: 'Aardappel' literally means, 'earth-apple', and, on the model of the French 'pomme de terre', serves in Dutch as the word for 'potato' (in Afrikaans it is 'aartappel'). Have you ever met anyone named 'Mr. Potato'? Of course not. It is a name for fictional characters, not for real people.

Yet here was this woman on the telephone, on the morning of Canadian Thanksgiving, with a fully convincing Afrikaner accent, claiming to be none other than Augusta Aardappel. Of course at first I did not believe her, but I was also very intrigued, since my fiction had not previously inspired a great number of copycat hoaxes (I write in a non-existent genre --hyperlinked, multimedia, serial metafiction-- and my readership, if I may be honest, is fairly limited). Curious to figure out why anyone would bother to perpetrate such a pointless fraud, I determined to keep this 'Augusta' on the phone for as long as I could.

I asked her how the weather was in Pretoria, what was her opinion of vuvuzelas, Julius Malema, and Die Antwoord. She complimented me on my familiarity with today's South Africa, and I told her it was really nothing, I just get it from my friends' Facebook status updates. I could conjure an equal semblance of knowledge, I told her, about Vietnam, Tonga, or Sakhalin Island (with the last of these I could even add some Chekhovian flourishes).

When I felt I had gained her confidence I put to Ms. Aardappel the inevitable question. Why, I asked, would she claim to be someone I had made up?

"There's something important I need to tell you," she replied evasively. "Jason didn't die."

"Of course he didn't die," I answered. "He never existed in the first place. I made him up too. Now tell me where you're calling from and what it is you want."

"I'm calling from across possible worlds," was Augusta Aardappel's answer. "I'm calling because I need your help."

I knew immediately she was telling the truth.

*

Philosophers have taken up widely divergent positions on the metaphysics of possible worlds. While the philosopher who coined the phrase --G. W. Leibniz, in his Theodicy of 1709-- was never entirely clear as to just how real the other possible worlds besides this one were supposed to be, over time most converged on the view that these worlds are figments of the human mind, 'state descriptions', as Rudolf Carnap called them in the early 20th century, accounts that people give of some other way this world might have turned out, but in the end did not. Still later others, and most notably the great metaphysician David Lewis, would defend the radical thesis that other possible worlds are only possible relative to us, while they are perfectly actual relative to all the beings inhabiting them.

Lewis's possible-worlds realism would send shockwaves through Anglo-American philosophical circles, though many believed the whole theory was put forth with tongue firmly lodged in cheek. Meanwhile the French, if they heard about him at all, would mostly just stew about his lifting of the title of his major book outlining the theory from Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes of 1686 would serve as inspiration for 1986's On the Plurality of Worlds). And the common people, for their part, on hearing of the notion of possible worlds, as is their custom would giddily declare that this theory is, variously, either corroborated or refuted by quantum mechanics.

I knew about David Lewis because I spent a number of years studying philosophy, and had even considered going into an academic career before shifting gears entirely, surprising everyone who knew me in my earlier life and taking up a career in law enforcement (I am now running for sheriff of Larimer County, Colorado; my slogan is 'Prepared to Lead'). So when Augusta used that phrase, 'across possible worlds', it immediately brought forth a flood of memories from my more studious days. I understood right away, I mean, that she was using a technical term, that she meant something very concrete when she spoke of crossing from one world to another. She, it dawned on me, could very well be the only person who had ever experienced such a thing. No one, not Lewis, and not even Leibniz (who seemed ready to believe just about anything) ever so much as toyed with the possibility of inter-world causation.

"So how does this work," I asked when we spoke again the following night. "Do you need to download the most recent version of Skype to do it? Is that it?" Augusta laughed. "Are you still in the other possible world right now? Is there an inter-world switchboard operator?"

"Those questions can wait," she replied. "For now I need to come see you."

Some Modest Suggestions for the Improvement of Canadian Bilingualism

I think it's splendid to live in a country with two official languages. At risk of having my citizenship application rejected, however, it seems to me there are a number of ways in which the enforcement of bilingualism in everyday life both wastes our time and, more importantly, forces us to witness abuses (of both languages, but most often of French) that ought to make any lover of language moan. 

It is taken for granted in Canada that everything 'important' ought to be said twice, in order to accommodate the two official ethnolinguistic constituencies. Many of us understand both versions, and are made to sit through two different rounds of exactly the same speech, exactly the same set of instructions given over an automated hotline, exactly the same --to speak with Francis Bacon-- Idiotismes. This policy fails to accommodate those of us, however, who tend not to think that what is being said is important to begin with, and have enough trouble sitting through the first iteration of some unctuous speech at some meaningless awards ceremony, or listening to the first run-through of the inherently regrettable reminder before a classical concert that all electronic devices should be switched off. I find myself wishing I didn't understand either language, and wondering how anyone could possibly feel publicly gratified or validated by hearing the platitudes of modern life spoken in the language he or she associates with home and hearth.

Far better would it be to agree that only one language be spoken --pick a language, I don't care which-- and then expect that everyone rise to the task of understanding it. For the most part, even if they are unable to rise to the task, they will not be missing much. I have sat through awards ceremonies conducted entirely in Turkish, I note, and do not feel that I was terribly disadvantaged, notwithstanding my general cluelessness at the time as to the rules for the generation of syntactic compounds through agglutination. Language, I never tire of saying, is a paper-thin wrapping around a much vaster and more complex (and evolutionally more deeply engrained) social reality made up primarily of gestures, expressions, and other bodily motions that do not centrally involve the tongue and the larynx.

But this indictment is a small one in relation to the scandal of product packaging in Canada. Not so long ago I saw, in the window of a Dollarama (which deserves a separate indictment, by the way), something that was labelled as a Halloween Big Daddy Kit, containing a fake gold chain with a dollar-sign pendant, a few fake gold caps for the teeth, and various other signifiers of membership in African-American urban culture. Offensive as the thought of a latter-day blackface routine is, even more offensive to my mind is the supposedly French translation that the Chinese company that manufactured this junk for some reason bothered to slap onto the packaging: Kit de 'Big Daddy' de Halloween.

This, I think, is something that never should have been written by anyone, something simply too stupid to be seen as speaking to the laudable demand for recognition of any ethnolinguistic community. It's not just that every word but the two prepositions is Anglo-Saxon in origin (one a recent borrowing; two others part of a presumedly untranslatable phrase that gets placed in scare quotes; and, finally, one left in English even though a perfectly adequate French equivalent, trousse, is readily available). It is rather that the pseudo-French rendering of the phrase reveals how completely unworthy of being said the original English was. If the French were permitted to play precisely this role and no other, that is, the role of destroying the pretensions of the English, then it would be welcome. But we are expected to take both seriously, and both as perfectly equivalent mirror images of one another, conveying a perfectly legitimate idea. 

But junk capitalism is in general so stupid, and what it asks us to believe so utterly devoid of real meaning, that it's simply misguided to suppose that we are being spoken to at all by the words on the products that it asks us to buy. The supposition that obligatory bilingual packaging could satisfy a community's demand for recognition could only be maintained by someone who does not really cherish language to begin with, but simply sees it as a blunt tool of political maneuvering. Let the Chinese spew out their junk in English (for now; eventually it will all be in Chinese alone, and all of these debates about the recognition of communities will seem thoroughly quaint), and let what's worth being said be said in French. This would be a just division of linguistic tasks, and one that would not at all compromise Canada's status as a bilingual country. Many countries and regions, in fact, from Luxembourg to Kazakhstan, permit just this sort of distinction of roles for different social purposes, and they do not seem to be handicapped by this.

In fact they seem, if I may be frank, rather more elegant. I'm tired of seeing signs that tell me I'm on the 'Campus Sir George Williams Campus', or at the 'Centre Eaton Centre', or that I'm eating 'Tomato Ketchup aux Tomates' (every time I see this last redudancy I think: Well of course I am. You just said that!). These are phrases in no known language. They speak to no community at all.

--

For more great photos of packaging Perronisms, go here.

The Raw and the Cooked: An Interview with Cătălin Avramescu

The beginning of the modern age is heralded by the discovery of the New World, whose human inhabitants were principally noteworthy for their custom, real or imagined, of eating other humans. Scarcely had Columbus returned from his first encounter with the Arawaks of Hispaniola when this point of apparent cultural difference became for European moralists the centerpiece of their search for the ultimate grounds of morality and for the causes of the diversity of moral systems. The figure of the cannibal, in this sense, plays a leading role in the emergence of early modern moral and political philosophy.

The Romanian philosopher and political scientist Cătălin Avramescu is the first scholar to notice the importance of the cannibal in modern European thought, and to attempt to write a comprehensive intellectual history of anthropophagy. His book first appeared in Romanian in 2003 under the title Filozoful crud (“the cruel philosopher” or “the raw philosopher,” depending on context), and in 2009 was published by Princeton University Press as An Intellectual History of Cannibalism. In June 2010, Justin E. H. Smith spoke with Avramescu in Bucharest about, among other things, the difficulty of intellectualizing such a bloody topic as this. This interview was subsequently fleshed out in a series of e-mail exchanges.

Click here to read the interview in Cabinet Magazine.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

For the most part I no longer follow world cinema. I assume that it is a moribund art, both because of the rise of new technologies, and in consequence of the highly globalized system of financing, which ensures that any film that comes out of an under-heard-from part of the world will invariably have the imprimatur of the film boards of two or three developed nations, each of which have long since adopted the film stocks and the conventions of what we still call 'Hollywood'. If I have any gaps in my knowledge of world cinema, and any time at all to fill them in, I always prioritize films made prior to 1980, and whose canonical or at least novelty status is more or less solidified.

One of the few exceptions to this general rule is the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who made his first full-length film in 1995, and who conceives of his own film-making, against the spirit of the age, as an attempt to transmit a distinct aesthetic vision (another is the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose 2004 Tropical Malady I hope I'll have a chance to discuss here soon). I first saw Ceylan's Uzak [Distant] in Istanbul in 2003. It concerns an urban, educated man, divorced and lonely, whose peasant cousin comes to stay with him in the city in order to look for work. That is pretty much the entire story, though it says next to nothing about the film. Uzak, like its successor, the 2006 Iklimler [Climates], is primarily about the weather, or rather about the indifference of the cycles of nature to the futile efforts human beings make to claw their way out of misery and loneliness.

Art and religion figure in Ceylan's world, but only in the background. For me the most striking scene in any of his films occurs in Uzak, when the cousin of refined tastes forces his relative to sit with him in the living room and to watch Tarkovsky's Stalker. When the yokel finally gives up and goes off to bed, the aesthete immediately gets up and switches from cinéma d'auteur to porn. Occasionally people go to mosques and ruins, but only to take pictures, that is, to make art they no longer believe in, or simply to wait outside while someone else goes in to do his business.

Last night I finally saw Ceylan's Üç maymun [Three Monkeys] of 2008. I could not find any excerpts from the film itself online. The trailer does not really represent it all that faithfully, as it comes across looking rather more like one of those Japanese horror films I've never seen, and less like a faithful psychological portrait of desperate people (with only the slightest, and ever-so-interpetrable trace of supernatural intervention). The film is visually the most striking of the three I've seen, though perhaps occasionally Gökhan Tiryaki's cinematography crosses over into an unsatisfying hyperrealism in its compositions of landscape, the sky, and the Bosphorus.

 

Unlike the other films, Üç maymun seems preoccupied with the question of Turkishness, and the passions that are inflamed and that lead to domestic violence and to murder, one senses, could all have been easily avoided if the culture were just a little less possessive of its women. The husband has a moustache and a barrel-build that radiate patriarchal dominion, and the teenage son's feeble attempt, over the course of the film, to emulate his father's facial hair signals, to me anyway, the inescapable, eternal return of the patterns of traditional culture across generations.

One thing that is remarkable is how much the violent sex between upper-class lovers in Iklimler (I have in mind the scene with the chick pea) appears, now, as a sort of study for the violent non-sex between working-class husband and wife in Üç maymun. However context-specific Ceylan's focus is in the latest film, I mean, he seems to see the suffering in it mostly as one instance of a generally desperate human predicament. Chekhov comes to mind (I'm sure he does for Ceylan, too), but in Ceylan there does not seem to be much interest in tracing back the blame for human misery to various social and political injustices. Members of the upper class are empty shells of human beings, but nature wouldn't care if they weren't. Üç maymun ends with a thunderstorm, just like Uzak ended with waves hitting the coast: not as a mirror or an echo of human events, but as a reminder of their littleness. 

[Sunday Cinema, #14]

Girl Talk Is Not Plunderphonic

Last night I downloaded the new Girl Talk album, All Day. Once it was in my iTunes library, I started to search for it by entering the word 'girl'. This pulled up Gershwin's suite to the 1930 film Girl Crazy first, and so for a while I listened to that, until at length I remembered that there was something waiting for me, something new, a product of youth culture, something vital, important, and (I already sensed) very much in need of comment from me.

Gregg Gillis has produced an enjoyable DJ mix of familar pop hits from the past thirty years. Chapeau, I suppose. Yet to listen to the buzz surrounding it, one would think it constituted an important aesthetic moment. I am still trying to figure out why.

It seems to me that there are two quite distinct lineages that have been confused in the reception of Gillis's work. These lineages could not be more distinct, in fact, with respect to aesthetic intent, even if they often employ some of the same techniques and even on occasion are capable of bringing about the same effects in their respective audiences. I have in mind plunderphonics and mash-up.

The one was christened by the Canadian experimental recording artist John Oswald in 1985, and has its roots in late-1960s underground experimentalism and ultimately in the post-war musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry and others. It bears obvious affinities to deconstructive methods in other artistic media, in particular to William S. Burroughs's cut-ups. It is often informed by a political opposition to copyright law, and to commercial music in general. It is a movement that has motivated the production of manifestos.

At bottom, plunderphonics is an investigation of the nature of recorded sound, and an attempt to break down the 'fence' of ownership that copyright law aims to keep in place around the field of sound (to adopt Oswald's own metaphor). Sometimes it involves simply appropriating recordings that were not intended for use by others (as in, e.g., Negativland's surreptitious use in their own albums of Jim Bakker, Casey Kasem, Bono, and other men in need of deflation). In this function, it almost resembles journalism, or at least the sort of opinionated and clever commentary on public figures that passes for journalism in recent years.

Sometimes it turns on the aesthetics of incongruity (which I've discussed at length elsewhere), putting together sonic elements that are generally stored very far apart in our musical imaginations.  Even where there is only one recognizable borrowed element, in what would otherwise be considered a 'cover' song, the aesthetic end remains incongruity. In the Residents' rendition of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction", for example, even covering is plundering. The same band's version of "Kaw-Liga", in turn, is among other things surely the most successful fusion of a Michael Jackson bass line with text made famous by Hank Williams Sr. and with a beat lifted from the Balearic house junk that was floating around in the late 1980s. In spite of all of these apparent affinities, though, the song is not a house track, and it is not, unless you take the Residents' deadpan at face value, an hommage to anyone. It is a product of the early-1970s San Francisco counterculture, and its relationship to what someone like Michael Jackson represented is in the end not so different from Negativland's evisceration of U2. It is, namely, hatred, a will to destroy. That's plunderphonics in nuce.  

The other lineage extends back to the Caribbean by way of the Bronx, and is rooted not in hate but in celebration. To this day, on the Haitian programs on Sunday morning community radio in Montreal, hosts will habitually talk right over the music, extending greetings to their aunties coming home from church, talking up some nail salon or other. The music itself is a jumble of air-horns, baby samples, beats clumsily overlapping with other beats. It is no secret that this routine has a common ancestor with what is called hip-hop; this and its various musical cousins in the African diaspora (dancehall, dub, etc.), have in essence to do with the animation of parties, and if copyrights are violated it is not at all because anyone involved has any ideological reason to violate them, but only because party hosts could not care less about whose intellectual property they are sharing with their friends.

Over the past decade, largely thanks to technologies provided by Apple Inc. and by YouTube, the line between plundering and partying has been blurred to no small extent. Recently, in fact, it is becoming clear that the so-called 'mash-up' will stand out as the definitive pop-musical form of our era. Just as the Internet has sparked the hope that we are moving from a world that aspires to universal readership to one that aspires to universal authorship, the easy manipulation of recorded sound has, it now seems, turned everyone into a sort of derivative musician. This new possibility is nicely synchronized with (and indeed probably the root cause of) the prevailing aesthetic imperative of much youth culture, to appropriate and process cultural artifacts from the past several decades, and to mix them into a strange congeries of decontextualized ingredients, each of which individually requires, to be suitable for inclusion, no particular loyalty on the part of the chef. There is talk of a 'new sincerity' on the horizon, but for now the predominant aesthetic mode remains irony.

Ironists who produce mash-ups are not entirely sure, it seems, whether they mean to be plundering or partying. This is particularly true of Gillis, who seems to wish to inspire some proper revelry, but of a sort that is tinged with just the right amount of plunderphonic transgression. Hence the pseudocontroversy of the free download, where the only thing that distinguishes this from any number of easily available 'hot mixes' that pass without any notice is that it is being presented as a signed work of art, as part of the oeuvre of Girl Talk.

Gillis's formula is simple and cynical, and it does not take any particular pop-musical connoisseurship to figure it out. It involves the incongruous layering of vocal tracks from hip-hop music, mostly from the 1990s, over melodies taken from white pop music of the 1970s and 1980s. Madness, the Ramones, New Order, underlying Jay-Z, Missy Elliot, Usher, and so on. The implicit assumption, of course, is that black and white don't mix, and thus that there is something inherently funny about creating a single, seamlessly fused musical work out of these two timeless opposites. Beyond serving as an occasion to hear racial others use obscenities, the words are meaningless (very much unlike "Kaw-Liga" and "Satisfaction," where the appropriation only adds, by distortion and alienation, to the original meaning of the lyrics), but the beats and melodies are so good that one cannot help enjoying oneself even as one relishes the incongruity.

And thus we have a perfect soundtrack to a party for ironists, one that enables them to throw themselves into it without bracketing their principled commitment to detachment from it, and that allows them to flirt with a violation of the American racial contract without having to question its fundamental presuppositions.

The possibilities for creating art from found sound extend somewhat further than this.

--

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Anarchism (a Concluding Postscript)

This will be the final installment in the recent cascade of reflections on anarchism. I had not expected to have so much to say on this topic, and in many ways am looking forward to getting back to other things that matter, such as verbal prefixes, and the aesthetic difference between plunderphonics and mash-up (coming soon).

I carried Fields, Factories, and Workshops of Tomorrow around with me for a while as a teenager, but later in life for the most part I held to the familiar line, according to which anarchism is just too tall an order, no one who claims to be committed to it can actually believe what she says, and so on. Quite unexpectedly, then, a number of rivulets came together of late to swell into a full-fledged and --I hope I can say-- mature interest in anarchism. One rivulet that is particularly worthy of mention is the seemingly unrelated reading I had undertaken in the past year or so on the history of the scientific study of animal ethology. Any comprehensive survey of this field will extend back further than Konrad Lorenz and Jakob von Uexküll in the early- to mid-20th century to acknowledge the contribution to the incipient field made by Petr Kropotkin. The Russian anarchist had no systematic interest in the quantitative study of animal behavior, but he did believe that cooperation in gregarious species provided a model, one that could be confirmed by closer scientific study, of society without government. This conception of animal cooperation went very much against the prevailing vulgarized version of Darwinism ('red in tooth and claw', 'survival of the fittest', etc.), which has been under attack in the past few decades, by Frans de Waal and other scientists who have insisted on the important role of cooperation alongside competition in all primate societies.

Now I take it as a starting point of any reflection about the viability of anarchism that, if it is viable, it is so in view of human ethology, in view of the innate behavioral range of the particular species of primate we happen to be.  But there is another factor to consider as well, beyond our species-specific behavior, and that is the circumstances in which we find ourselves, which trigger certain behaviors that might have continued to lie dormant in a different sort of landscape. Chimpanzees, as Sarah Hrdy reminds us, are particularly uncooperative with one another when they are made to fly in airplanes (if left unrestrained, they will bite each other's fingers off). My sense is that much state-backed violence (as well as derivative or state-like violence perpetuated by over-armed clans) results from the fact that, in states, and a fortiori in densely populated industrial and post-industrial states, homo sapiens are in a situation not so different from a plane full of chimps.

One of the most common objections to anarchism is that it would require the abandonment of too many of the things that all but the most rugged and survivalist of anarchists hold dear. It is of course absurd to speak of a world that is more or less like ours --airport gift shops, Diet Dr. Pepper, health insurance, cricket leagues, and so on-- but that does not include governments. If there is going to be a world without governments, it is going to look very different from this one. To be a bit more explicit --as explicit as I am able to be, I fear--, it is going to look very much more like the world of chimpanzees (the ones in rain forests, that is, not the ones in airplanes). But is it a precondition of coming forth as an anarchist that one must wish to trade this world for that world without further delay? I don't see why it has to be.

Developing a point I've made in earlier posts, it seems to me we might distinguish at least three varieties of anarchism, which we may as well call the 'hormonal', the 'spiritual', and 'political'. The hormonal anarchist is the adolescent who antagonizes mall cops and draws that 'A' symbol on every surface he can find. He need not detain us, except as long as to note that spiritual anarchism might grow out of hormonal anarchism (perhaps somewhat as love of the forms grows out of sexual lust in Plato's Symposium), but need not. (Spiritual anarchism, I'm tempted to say, ought to be seen as a precondition of the philosophical life: it's cosmopolitanism in the ancient sense, in which one acknowledges citizenship only in the cosmos, rather than in whatever obscure province or empire one happens to inhabit. Any other stance towards the world makes one a mere party philosopher, a courtier, a hack. How, really, can you claim to be à la recherche de la vérité, même amoureux de la vérité, and simultaneously come to feel invested in the mundane jockeying of political parties?)

I said before that if political anarchism doesn't work, I'm happy to simply linger in the anarchy of the spirit. (It would be difficult to imagine a comparable equanimity in partisans of other political ideologies facing up to the unrealizability of their vision of society; you'll never meet a 'spiritual socialist', for example.) But the dichotomy between spiritual and political anarchism is starting to ring false to me. I think rather that it is more fitting to characterize the anarchist stance in terms of narrow- vs. broad-focused perspectives. The anarchist prefers to think about the human species as having got by for the vastly greater part of its existence without states and armies (and airports, etc.), and insists on asking, based on the perspective of the longue durée, whether so many things that are taken as inevitable in our age are in fact so. I grew up assuming cars were inevitable; now they strike me as relics from a swiftly waning era. I don't see why at least some of us should not be trying to imagine how we might go about securing a similar fate for armies, police, and prisons. It bears pointing out that whether you believe these institutions are inevitable or not, it is undeniable that they are capable of radical transformation. So if you tell me that it is impossible to imagine a world without prisons, it seems to me a reasonable challenge to your claim to note that the very denotation of the term you are using has shifted drastically, not just over the centuries, but even over the past few decades. The fact that this has been a shift for the worse, from the perspective of any lover of peace and freedom, does not diminish the strength of the challenge.

Whether one is naturally more inclined to take the broad or the narrow focus is probably just a matter of personality, which is in turn just a matter of genes and environment. Some people will do better monitoring which district fell to the Tea Party in the midterms, coming up with ways to fix shortfalls in the federal budget, and so on. Best of luck to them. I'm even willing to join them at the polling station (with a non-stop stream of cynical commentary, of course). But meanwhile it would be nice if there were a recognized space for people who are by nature more concerned with the full dossier of the human species, and who are trying to imagine its long-range possibilities for the future based on the very good scientific data we have about what it looked like for most of the past, without being marginalized as idle utopians.

Anarchism, then, as I see it, is a certain perspective on the affairs of men. It is realistic and naturalistic, in that it takes human beings as first and foremost a kind of primate, which only in certain circumstances comes to saddle itself with police and armies and so on. It asks whether and how human beings might thrive in the absence of these, and perhaps also hopes that they might someday (again) thrive without them, even if much of what we now value would have to be relinquished, and even as we soberly acknowledge that human pre-history was no idyll either.

Slavoj Žižek Wants to See a Bloodbath

It is said to be a token of the immense respect for the Slovenian philosopher in Western upper-middle-brow media that that pair of distinctive carats in his surname are consistently retained in printed versions of it, no matter what the language of the revue, and no matter what its editorial policy concerning the more obscure diacritical marks that adapt the Latin script to languages for which it was never intended. I note, to begin, that I accord exactly the same respect, and no more, to Radovan Karadžić. In an era when we are all free to pilfer even the obscurest diacritics from Wikipedia profiles of Balkan villains, getting their names right should hardly be taken as a sign of any subtextual esteem.

A parallel that goes far beyond accent marks was brought home to me, again, when I was reading the latest iteration of Žižek's new vision for the future in this month's Le monde diplomatique (which for its part has the absurdly hypercorrect editorial policy of referring to 'William Clinton' and 'James Carter'), in which he expresses more unambiguously than ever, to my knowledge, his belief in the neeed for a Robespierrean redux in order to set history on the right course. Žižek believes that the economic crisis that began in 2008 has brought bourgeois institutions to a critical juncture, and has precipitated a now-or-never moment that will separate the true radicals --the agents of revolutionary change-- from the pseudo-radicals who stand by and call impotently for reform. The intellectual radicals "wanted a real change," he writes, "now they can have it." This change will happen, he goes on to say, when the oppressed classes (among whom he seems to include 'radical intellectuals') take recourse to 'legitimate violence', "legitimate because their very status results from violence."

I've been trying --mostly in posts in this space, as I find these days I'm not even sure I've had a coherent thought at all until I've attempted to write it out and dared to parade it around in public-- to think through a different way of conceptualizing the 'revolutionary potential' of disadvantaged groups (which I do not want to call 'oppressed', for reasons I'll get to). I've been confessing recently that I am drawn to a variety of anarchist pacifism, rather than to the sort of old-fashioned class struggle that Žižek has been campaigning to revive. To be a pacifist, I take it, means above all that we should stop looking for vanguards, and start looking for exemplars. To this end, there is no particular reason to stop at the working class, when in fact there are layers much more disadvantaged still, whose members do not even participate in the system of labor. They cannot be said to be oppressed, because would-be oppressors haven't figured out a way to get anything out of them at all.

Indigenous people might be a minority in today's world, population-wise, but they represent one possible form of human life, and as long as it survives we will have a living model of society that has not been subsumed into any of the available world systems, neither the monotonous transnational capitalist order of airport gift shops and so on, nor the order that Žižek imagines is about to rise up and seize control. As exemplars rather than vanguards, they won't have to seize anything or kill anyone in order for the lesson to get across; what matters is that this truly different way of being be there, and visible, that 'radical intellectuals' be prepared to notice it and to seize on its tremendous power to shame those who are pursuing their narrow class (or national) interests. Exemplarity of this sort is, I take it, very much what Gandhi had in mind in his elaboration of the doctrine of ahimsa or nonviolence, in which aggressors are shamed rather than fought against with their own weapons, and goodness is preserved in the world by those who refuse to adopt the methods of the exploiters. More and more, I believe that there is no greater weapon than shame. It is a weapon, moreover, to which oppressors can have no recourse.  

Can indigenous exemplars really bring the oppressive order down? Probably not, but neither will Žižek's proletarian vanguard, and if we follow the first at least when it's all over we won't have blood on our hands. (I'll try to explain what it might mean for pacifism to 'work', given that we are in the end a bunch of bloodthirsty apes, in another post.)

Žižek's shtick works for a number of reasons among readers who are not ordinarily receptive to calls to the barricades. One is that he is a clown, that he cuts his Leninism with enough sweet stuff about Jennifer Lopez and whatever other trash passes across his hotel TV screens that readers can easily assume to be a put-on every bit that they are not inclined to accept. Another reason, obviously, is the way he plays on his foreignness. He's been through it, Western readers will tell themselves, and has surely earned the right to hold forth on these matters. But anyone who would joke that the only position he would accept in the Slovenian government is that of chief of secret police evidently has not been through it quite enough. Slovenia was the freest republic of the freest federal state in the socialist bloc: the Switzerland of Yugoslavia, as Slobodan Milošević once scoffed. This does not mean it was always easy to be a Lacanian intellectual in Ljubljana during the Tito era, but the sort of inconvenience Žižek faced is categorically different than, say, the Stalinist show trials in the Soviet Union of the 1930s (made possible, of course, by the secret police).

Žižek, I mean, is not speaking from any particular position of experience when he suggests that there is something to be salvaged from the legacy of the Bolshevik revolution. When he suggests that what is to be salvaged is the very most brutal part of that legacy, moreover, he is just being flippant, and Western readers should not let him get away with it simply on the grounds that he has funny accent marks in his last name. 

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The Dregs of States

Unlike most of my contemporaries, I simply hate the mafia. I hate everything that has to do with the mafia, including fictional representations of it in cinema, television, and video games. I am regularly forced to report ads for Mafia Wars on a certain social-networking site as 'offensive' (ads for KY Jelly, in turn, are dutifully denounced as 'irrelevant'). I hate so much as thinking about casinos, Teamsters, cocaine, construction firms, since these all invariably carry with them a further thought of the mafioso who makes them his business. I hate hearing imitations of Sicilian bosses doing their schtick (threatening to kill people in a funny accent), which are almost always imitations of Christopher Walken doing imitations of Sicilian bosses.

Most of all I hate it when earnest students of mine invoke omertà as an example of a moral code, as having a laudable principle at its core even if in its application it leads to regrettable consequences. Each time this comes up I think to myself: don't students read The Stranger anymore? Or do the 'classics' that inform their moral reasoning extend back only as far as The Godfather and Scarface (I admit I made it through the first of these, but only as a Coppola completist; I have never seen a single episode of the Sopranos, and the earliest memory I have of being repulsed by the whimsical representation of organized crime was Wise Guys, the horrid Brian de Palma film of 1986 starring Billy Crystal and Danny De Vito). I would greatly prefer to engage in a discussion about morality with a student contemplating the possibility of random, lone, unprovoked murder, than with one who thinks unquestioning group loyalty represents any sort of moral accomplishment at all. Omertà is for stunted cretins, I want to say, now get that Godfather poster off your dorm-room wall and start reading some Camus or some Nietzsche.

There was another big mafia hit in Montreal this week, as a major parrain montréalais was gunned down in his own home. Predictably the female enablers of the clan showed up in the newspapers looking indignant, flashing gold crosses around their necks, talking on cellphones in front of their bloated pre-fab mansions. Why anyone would find this culture worthy of glorification in TV and movies is truly beyond my comprehension (the TV romances portray these women as victims of fate, as born into it and thus unable to do anything about it; but they damn well can do something about it: they can run away, they can choose to construct their lives autonomously). I am unable to understand, but not at all because I have no appreciation for the power of violence in art and myth. I am right there with Ernst Jünger when he describes the sublimity of trench warfare, and I am no stranger to Gothic tales of torture and bloodsucking either. But these have to do with transgression against ordinary morality, whereas organized crime is about the redoubling of the very most ordinary morality: it's patriotism for people too small-minded and provincial to think about loyalty to the nation.

And this brings me to my real point. I mentioned recently that one of the concerns that often holds me back from publicly identifying myself as an anarchist is this: although I would very much like to see nation-states wither away, I am generally concerned that bands of thugs would move right into the vacuum of state power. But recently I've been wondering whether such bands are not rather the product --or, better, a by-product-- of the existence of more legitimate systems of rule with relatively more legitimate claims to a right to exercise coercive violence. We tend to think of organizations like the mafia as operating against the state, but what if they are in fact operating in imitation of the state, as a sort of trickle-down, derivative reflection in folk culture of a modus operandi that is exemplified par excellence by the state?

It's true that mobsters and warlords tend to thrive most where states function least. But this fact does not necessarily mean that human beings only ever have a choice between states and thugs. It seems to me that it's at least possible --and I'm sure there is plenty of scholarship both empirical and theoretical pertaining to this suggestion, about which less dilletantish students of politics might be able to inform me-- that the thriving of state-like violence cartels within certain states is a sort of jockeying for power in which the under-performing state is one of the players, not the eternal enemy and opposite of the sub-state players.

Would sub-state violence continue in a vacuum of state power? One thing we know is that there is a fairly tight connection between modes of production on the one hand, forms of social organization on the other, and, finally, characteristic expressions of communal violence on the third hand. Hunter-gatherer societies had no standing armies, and engaged in no wars of expansion; their 'wars' were limited to cyclical revenge-based raids on neighboring groups. Wars of expansion began with pastoralism; as many scholars have noted, the current ethnic make-up of Eurasia was determined by nothing more heroic than the cattle-rustling campaigns of steppe dwellers. Standing, professional armies only came with the rise of states, and the idea that a soldier should be a 'citizen' of the state for which he fights, rather than a mercenary, is a very recent development, and likely not a permanent one. 

State violence develops in a continuous line out of clan-based violence as sociocultural complexity increases. The state does better and at a larger scale what tribal raiders and mafiosi seek to do at a smaller scale. Such groups would indeed probably keep doing this in the absence of state power, but I see no obvious reason why the absence of state power should be a particular boon for mobsters and warlords who are currently limited in their exercise of violence by pesky law-enforcement efforts. At present, we have mafia violence and state violence. Whatever we may learn from science and history about human nature, and about the sinister designs that groups of humans spontaneously come up with, it remains a fact that states are vastly more violent than sub-state actors like the mafia that they are officially charged with keeping in check. It is unlikely that thuggish violence would disappear in the absence of states (just as early cattle rustlers did not need state support in order to settle a continent), but in the present situation states do set a fairly high standard of coerciveness for mobsters and thugs to emulate.

Anyone who has seen the special paramilitary stations in Rome dedicated to 'antimafia' operations, with the word 'antimafia' carved into thick stone columns outside their gates, cannot help but notice that there is a certain structural pas de deux going on here, that the two sides need each other and legitimate each other. One also cannot help but think that any state that would think to immortalize its antimafia activity in marble columns is a pretty crappy excuse for a state: a state that permanently acknowledges the reality of sub-state violence cartels in its midst, and in this way sets itself up as merely one center of coercion among others. How much healthier is the state that has no need for such institutions! And how much healthier, to push this thought to the limit, is the 'state' that has no need for coercion of any sort.

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Shimkus's Shibboleth

A minor storm of outrage has been set off by Representative John Shimkus's (R-IL) 2009 testimony before the US House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, in which he assured the chairman that there will be no further climate change since "the earth will end only when God declares it's time to be over." You can see it all here:

 

A first thought on seeing this might very well be: "Who let this yokel into the meeting?" And then the sinking realization: "Oh yes, of course, this is the US House of Representatives, who are all elected by their constituents." Congressmen always come across as a cut below senators. They can often be spotted wearing bolo ties and cowboy boots, small mementos of the places they come from, almost always discarded for anonymous blacks, greys, and reds if and when they ever reach the upper house. So it's not at all unusual to spot a congressmen who retains a bit of local flavor. In fact, his principal job is to spice things up at the federal level by bringing a recognizably local manner to the house chamber, and all the better if the small people back home are watching.

This testimony, I mean to say, is a performance, and more specifically it is a hand signal, a shout-out, a shibboleth for the people Shimkus has figured out he needs to gratify in order to be reelected. Congressmen can do their gratifying openly, in the language of the regular folk who elect them, while senators and presidents can only do it in code. Congressmen generally really are of the people, rather than just being representatives of the people. Being of the people, they are free to express the anti-Enlightenment sentiment that has been simmering in pockets of the West since the 18th century, and that is now at full boil in that pocket of the West we call the 'Midwest'. One may honestly doubt that Shimkus or his constituents themselves believe what they claim to believe; the insistence that they believe this is really just defiance, or negation, of what they are being told to believe by people they resent.

In this respect Shimkus's crude display of illiteracy ought to appear more as a public declaration of a certain sort of affiliation, rather than as having to do with some sort of clash of ideas. The compatibility of God's infallible word with empirical science, and with an allegorical understanding of the factual content of scripture, is something that was already worked out not hundreds of years ago, but thousands of years ago, within the first century of the spread of Christianity, in the subtle philosophical doctrines of Christian Platonists such as St. Clement of Alexandria. We've been over this stuff already, and countless Christians have worked out to their own satisfaction a way of interpreting the world based on tools more handy than a simple, blunt, literal reading of the holy book. Were they condemned as heretics when they made use of these tools? Generally, no, and as often as not they were made into saints. So whenever an American neo-Protestant politician says that he is constrained to believe x because he is a Christian and the Bible says he must, then quite apart from any concerns about the separation of church and state one may still wonder why his freedom to come to conclusions based on his own faculties of reason, judgment, and inquiry is even more circumscribed than that of the first-century Church Fathers.

I try to keep out of this sort of stuff because I think that in general to comment upon it is to become complicit in the cycle of predictable stupidity followed by impotent shock. On the rare occasions I cross over into what is called the 'liberal blogosphere' I am alarmed at the inability of its players to grasp that they are not, or not only, speaking truth against lies, etc., but are also occupying a certain role in a certain unsavory game that requires and craves constant refueling from performing monkeys like Shimkus. I believe that it is better to step back a bit, to remove oneself from this obscene cycle.

The reaction to Shimkus that follows the usual rules of the game, the one that I know without looking has already popped up at the Huffington Post and elsewhere, says: Shimkus is in error here. Global warming is a phenomenon that is unconnected to anything we might uncover through our amateur interest in Semitic philology. To which I want to say in reply: No shit, but who cares about the content of his claims?

We need to be analyzing the claim that the truth about climate change lies in scripture not as a context-free proposition, but as a speech act and as a performance. It's a delirious performance, one that blends wildly different registers of speech by combining phrases like 'parts per million' and 'cap and trade' with words like 'infallible', 'theological', and 'discourse', sometimes in the very same sentence. We should study the conditions that make this sort of confusion possible, and seek to eliminate them. Little or no progress will be made in this task by acting as though Shimkus is an equal communication partner who may properly be held up to our own standards of reason and judgment, and who may properly trigger our disappointment when he says something stupid.

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I Could Have Joined the Tea Party

Among the many distortions arising from the conceptualization of the human social world in terms of 'race' is the false belief this instills among lower status, historically disadvantaged 'white' people that they have something innate in common with all other 'white' people, and thus that their current disadvantage is the result of some exceptional injustice. This in contrast with the disadvantage of their non-white neighbors, which is, the reasoning goes, just in the nature of things. In the United States, ethnic difference among whites has been bleached out in the name of egalitarianism, and the only differences that are allowed to remain are the ones that are thought to be so pronounced in the phenotypes of 'non-white' groups that assimilation is ruled out on supposedly biological grounds. This seems a natural way of doing things for most Americans, while in fact it is anything but.

I think, in fact, that American whiteness is one symptom --if a milder one than ethnic cleansing and genocide-- of the process that Michael Mann has identified as 'the dark side of democracy', where cultures within modern nation-states are forcibly homogenized, and informed by central planning that their identity is now simply the identity of a citizen of that state. The US has conducted itself in this regard very much like Turkey with its Kurdish minority, whose very existence the modern secular republic has practically denied. The one difference however is that it has been assumed in the United States that this homogenizing force can extend only up to the boundaries of 'race', and that whoever lies beyond those boundaries must remain eternally other (even if 'blacks' are deemed American, this is always a special variety of American, a marked category). The parameters of the social world in the American attempt at egalitarianism are set by some supposedly inflexible biological reality about human subtypes. In this respect the US has been, for better or worse, less audacious than Turkey in the democratic project of constructing citizens.

One problem with this sort of racially defined assimilationism is, obviously, that it groundlessly biologizes and essentializes the boundaries of social identity, and so guarantees that American society can never attain to real equality to the extent that the pseudoscientific myth of race continues to have a foothold. But another problem is that it constrains 'white' people to cognize their own social world in terms of a category that is not in fact rich enough to permit them to make sense of their own experiences.

What, after all, is a white person? Curiously, it would be difficult to imagine anyone less 'Caucasian' than a Caucasian. That is, few people conform less to the American stereotypes about white people than do the natives of the Caucasus. Compare, for example, a Chechen Muslim goatherd with, say, a third-generation Japanese American physician. The one has blue eyes and blond hair, but it would be extremely implausible to say that these phenotypic traits confer any advantage at all. Which of the two can move across borders without scrutiny? Which of the two can order things online with a credit card? But what, moreover, could white privilege be if not the sum of such small perks?

My take on the Tea Party movement is this: Tea Partiers are Americans who have been made to believe that they are 'white'; have been made to believe, furthermore, that this status carries with it some natural privilege; and who therefore wonder why, in spite of the fact that they are white, they have nonetheless been given the shaft.

I am a 'white' Californian whose ancestors migrated to the Golden State from elsewhere in the US in consequence of the Depression. On neither side are my ancestors 'Okies' in the strict sense, but rather Arkies and Minnesota Scandinavians. Still, odd-jobs and agriculture were what kept things going for them, and in this respect on both sides I trace my own heritage back to the people immortalized in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. I spent my childhood in the shadow of a now-closed Air Force Base outside Sacramento, surrounded by children of dustbowl migrants who, I've since learned, belonged to that special sub-type of the species I am attempting to describe known as 'Defense Okies'. Throughout the Central Valley of California --where, as I constantly have to explain to Europeans, no one surfs or sees movie stars-- one can still spot restaurants with names like 'Po' Folks' that specialize in cornbread and okra (sometimes associated by false etymology with Oklahoma). In my childhood I ate countless meals, amidst obese couples dressed in matching overalls, at a buffet restaurant called 'Okie Frijole' which, perhaps showing a glimmer of hope for overcoming the 'racial' divide I've been describing as foundational, specialized in the fusion of Mexican and Okie fare. 

Steinbeck thought the dustbowl migrants --to whom he also referred as 'harvest gypsies'-- brought with them a distinctly American character that would justify their displacement of the peon laborers from the Philipines, China, Japan, and Mexico who had first worked the fields of the Central Valley, and that would bring about the absorption of the Far West into the sphere of social values first realized in the Jeffersonian yeomanry of the East Coast. Though Steinbeck was a defender of social justice and egalitarianism, his vision of the future of California was in effect that of a completion of manifest destiny.

 Some radical historians have offered a very different account. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz notes, the Okies making up the majority of California dustbowl migrants can ultimately trace their origins back to the Ulster Scots who served as the shock troops for the 17th-century colonization of Ireland. They were promised two things by the king: a plot of land, and guaranteed superiority to the permanent underclass of natives they would be displacing. Their eventual expansion into the Appalachians, the Ozarks, and the Great Plains was very much a continuation of this promise, which could only occasionally be kept.

By election I have gravitated towards a part of 'white' North America that is historically and spiritually (if I dare use that loaded term) far removed from the Okie experience. My new North America is mostly an extension of Central Europe; it is Jewish and to a lesser extent Catholic, urban, transnational, and perhaps with the exception of Chicago and Toronto it has barely crossed over the western boundaries of the original American colonies. It regularly commutes across the North Atlantic. It has deep and enduring ties to Old World culture; the Ulster Scots by contrast had a vital folk culture, but one that could easily be transformed into American folk culture, without any enduring awareness of its European roots. I am only gradually coming to realize the significance of these differences, and I attribute the long delay largely to the grip upon me in my earlier life of the myth that I was, generically and in a way that is not subject to further analysis, white. The only word left over for more fine-grained distinction is an insult, 'white trash', which in marking the category of 'trash' both implies that it is black by default, and implies that something has gone exceptionally wrong when white people end up trashy. (I note that if I myself have ever been heard using this term, it was as an appropriation, on the model of 'queer', rather than as an insult.)

Anyway with respect to self-understanding, stopping at 'white' failed, for me, to account for the lingering feeling of difference from other members of this umbrella category, not just from Chechen goatherds (who generally are not on the American radar), but also from the other 'white' people of North America with whom I would end up mingling. Racial self-understanding, in other words, suppresses the historical legacies that forge our orientations in the world. Until the 1960s (just before my era) one could still see 'No Okies' signs in stores and restaurants in the Central Valley. Okies had a way of speaking and a way of dressing that would pick them out as ethnic others just as surely as one might pick out a blond Chechen Muslim going through airport security. The Okies were an ethnic group, or an ethno-historical community with shared experiences and shared sources of meaning (embodied in material culture in the form of canned foods, orange cheese, Coors beer; in artistic culture as Bakersfield country; in spirituality as televangelism; in values as a love of independence and a suspicion of the federal government), and to deprive them of the ability to conceptualize themselves as such could not but deprive them of the ability to think about their plight in a lucid way.

It was bound, I mean, to lead them to stupid and reactionary political views, rooted most fundamentally in nativist resentment of non-'white' people both American and foreign, and in the valuing of self-sufficient plot-ownership (or, later, tract-house ownership) above community-based social welfare. The shift from ethno-historical community to 'race' occludes from view the various commonalities the dustbowl migrants might have with other ethno-historical communities, particularly African-American and Mexican agricultural laborers. An ethno-historical community can grasp that it has been shaped by the same forces that forged a neighboring community, whereas someone who thinks of himself in terms of 'race' could never grasp this, since races are conceived as essential and unchanging, and so as never having been historically forged at all. According to a very plausible strain of radical history, racial thinking in the United States has been aggressively imposed upon the self-understanding of disadvantaged communities precisely as a way of forestalling any possible recognition of common cause between these communities. In this respect, it seems reasonable to me to suggest that the Tea Party is a sort of revolutionary force manquée.

When I say I could have joined the Tea Party, I mean not just that had the circumstances of my life been somewhat different, and had I not been exposed by chance to enticing fragments of a culture beyond the Central Valley, I might have found the nativism, populism and libertarianism of the Tea Party demagogues attractive. I mean that there is an ethno-historical legacy, one that is no longer allowed to have a name, that continues to have a certain salience in the way I see the world. For the most part it's been trained out, and I give thanks every day for the later additions I've been able to make of elements from other cultures. But it's still there, and it would be nice if it could be spoken of, and not simply diverted into the myth of whiteness.

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I'm With the Hunter-Gatherers

(From CounterPunch)

A while back I was told that the workers in some slaughterhouse in Kansas were all laid off when management decided to close up shop and decamp to other parts. My reaction was: Well, finally some good news! Only after a few seconds of awkwardness did I realize that the proper reaction was one of somber bemoaning of the state of the economy, the absence of job security in our precarious age, etc. But honestly, if it comes down to minimizing the disgrace of the factory-farming industry versus preserving the jobs of slaughterers, I know where I stand, and it is not with the working class. From my point of view, the dignity of animal lives trumps the need for human jobs as an absolute good to be fought for, and to be preferred wherever the two are in conflict with one another. The same goes, and even more so, for any conflict between the interests of indigenous peoples and the interests of any other constituency, of any class, that encroaches upon them.

It often seems as if the Left is still stuck in a moment of the not too distant past in which it made sense to glorify a certain kind of labor (of a certain species)-- namely, industrial labor. This is a kind of labor that was new in the 19th century, and that inspired many statues and public murals in the early-to-mid-20th century. It is the kind of labor that gave rise to the labor movement, and to all of that movement's laudable gains. For a while, it seemed like such a world-changing form of life that many people took it to be one of only two social classes that mattered, and a good portion of the world was consequently transformed on the presumption that it was the historical destiny of this class to govern the affairs of all men.

But rather than simply assuming that all varieties of industrial --or, somewhat more broadly, of blue-collar-- labor are worthy of equal valorization simply in view of the class membership of the laborer, I would much prefer a perspective on labor that takes into consideration what is being labored towards. And where the telos is indefensible, I would rather not feel obligated to defend labor simply because it is labor. After all, is it not a gross perversion of the laudable aims that brought labor unions into existence to see employees of the American prison industry gaining job security for themselves through collective bargaining? Can anyone honestly say that a victory for prison guards in a state like California --where 27 times more money is spent on juvenile detainees in the criminal justice system than on students in the public school system-- is a victory for oppressed peoples?

The industrial proletariat and other blue-collar laborers, I mean to say, have no particular grip on my sense of justice, when right alongside them --frequently as a condition of their thriving-- we find millions of disenfranchised prisoners, and billions of domesticated animals, all of whose lives consist in unmitigated suffering from beginning to end. Moving from the American to the global context, we find labor --the labor of blue-collar oil industry workers, logging-industry workers, miners, ranch-hands, and so on-- coming up against the interests of people who have never yet had so much as the opportunity to enter the working class. They've never worked at all! They are the people Marx thought were beyond the pale of history, the people who can't even be cast as extras in the grand play of class conflict. Again, here, I know which side I'm on.

There is nothing worse for members of pre-labor communities, particularly indigenous and nomadic peoples, than to be forced by dint of circumstance into a social world that recognizes only the working class and the various gradations of the upper class: management, ownership, and so on. Forced to enter a social world that recognizes only these distinctions, they of course come in at the sub-basement level, and they are despised for being so unable to get their acts together that they can't even make it as common laborers.

They are the drunk Inuit on the streets of Montreal, the Roma in France, the Indian slum-dwellers in urban Mexico. With their hand-me-down Salvation Army clothing, their knock-off sports garb and vestimentary advertisements for products and wrestlers they likely know nothing about, these people can easily appear as very poor representatives of the working class, as low-end proletariat.

But this is an illusion: in fact, where they come from a class designation like this means nothing, and they only get assimilated to the lowest of the lower class of the class-stratified society because they have to be placed somewhere or other, and clearly are not going to be permitted to be absorbed directly into, say, the middle-management class. A homeless, alcoholic, urban Inuit sports some of the symbols beloved of members of the working class, but these symbols are no more accurate a measure of his class background than a knock-off Versailles fountain in a Jersey Shore suburb is a reliable indicator of aristocracy. They are not Lumpenproletariat, or sorry excuses for workers, but something entirely different. In fact, they are frequently the first to be harmed by the promotion of the interests of those with gainful employment. It is my belief that these are the people most in need of protection and of defense, and indeed glorification in the old sense that once caused statues to be commissioned, both because they are themselves the most exposed and defenseless, and also because they offer a valuable model for the construction of a society beyond the boring and plainly inadequate choice between the glorification of factory workers and the glorification of bankers.

When revolutionary ideology was extended to parts of the world, such as Southeast Asia, that lacked an industrial proletariat, the role of the peasantry in revolutionary change was correspondingly elevated in order to compensate for the absence of one of the members of the desired 'worker-peasant alliance'. But from Romania to Cambodia the fundamental precondition of transforming the peasantry into a usefully revolutionary class was that they be fully sedentarized, counted, registered, and in various other ways made 'legible', to use James C. Scott's felicitous term, by the state. Revolutionary ideology has, then, generally held up the industrial worker as the key player in social transformation, but has dipped down where necessary to have the peasantry play the transformative role, while stipulating conditions on how the peasants must first themselves be transformed in order to be ready to do this. No revolutionary thinker has ever contended that there is a transformative force to be harnessed in the form of social life of entirely nomadic and document-less pastoralists, let alone the social life of forest-dwelling hunter-gatherers. Curiously, while Marx thought the final stage of history would amount to a sort of return to humanity's initial state ('primitive communism'), Marx and his successors never supposed that our own era's 'primitive communists' had any place in the transformations about to take place. You can't be an agent of history, the presumption went, if your form of life places you outside of history altogether.

I believe that much of the ongoing neglect of indigenous rights throughout the world has to do with a widespread perception among people at all points on the political spectrum, inherited from the Enlightenment view of history accepted by Marx and many others, that people who are not (at least) workers cannot be significant actors in the making of history and in the modeling of society. But there are many things we now know, in the age of ecological crisis, that remained occluded from the view of high Enlightenment thinkers. For one thing, we know that there is far too much work being done in the world. There is in fact very little labor that does not chip away at the delicate balance of the ecosystem, as anyone who has tried to secure an environmentally friendly mutual fund can affirm.

It seems odd, given this brute fact, to continue supposing that labor can show the way forward for world history. Under the circumstances, it seems that it is precisely the people who have managed to stay outside of history, in a certain admirable sense, who should be held up, if not as a vanguard of active transformation of the world, at least as an exemplar of how others might transform themselves. Indigenous peoples then --the ones without papers, without fixed addresses, and most importantly without jobs-- need to be defended not only because they are the most vulnerable members of our global society, and not only because we owe it to them, but also because they provide a possible model for how to get out of the dismal situation we've created for ourselves with all this hard work and history-making.

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For further reading:

Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, London, 1974.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, 2009.

Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, University of California Press, 1982.