As It Were a Monogram

"The image is a product of the empirical faculty of productive imagination, the schema of sensible concepts (such as figures in space) is a product and as it were a monogram of pure a priori imagination through which and in accordance with which the images first become possible, but which must connected with the concept, to which they are in themselves never fully congruent, always only by means of the schema that they designate." (Kant, KRV A 141-2/B 181, 1781/1787)

"One is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective." (Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 1916)

One or Two Images

This week's New Yorker has a perfectly good piece on Ezra Pound. Louis Menand obviously knows the subject. He also provides (given the space) a good, standard account of "In a Station of the Metro". But then he tells us that "the form 'made new' here is, of course, the haiku: two images juxtapositioned to evoke a sensation" (126).

Though Menard gets most of it right, Pound's account is not quite the same. He quotes the following example of haiku:

The footsteps of the cat upon the snow:

plum-blossoms.

He calls this a one-image poem: "a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another." While it may not make much of a difference in the context of an article in the New Yorker, whether it is one image fashioned by a super-position of two ideas, or simply two "images" juxtaposed, it gives me pause.

Are we talking about the image of faces (or footsteps) alongside the image of petals (or plum-blossoms), or are talking about the image of a faces as petals (footsteps as plum-blossoms)?

Imagination

The image is that which can be seen without strain and done without effort.

Imagination turns what you see into something you can think about. It turns your feelings into something to do.

Poem Conceived on Bornholm Many Years Ago

In the summer studio
above the rock garden,
I took the eyes
of the painter.
What is it, I asked,
They cannot see?
Cannot? he balked.
They won't. Be kind,
I said. They don't.

Long before I knew anything about poetry, but thought I might become a poet, I spent a few days on the Danish island of Bornholm. Naturally, we went to the Oluf Høst Museum, which is a beautiful place—one of those places you immediately wish hadn't been converted into a museum, but could remain a place for an artist to work. So you begin to plan its conversion into a retreat for artists, a school, your own home.

Like the poem says, I tried to put myself in the mind of the painter while I stood in Høst's summer studio. At the time I was also, of course, generally despairing of the human species, which I suppose I still am, but less hopefully, more completely desperately, I guess, which means I don't imagine anything can change, or really needs to. (This post emerges vaguely from my response to Kirby in my last post. I felt the urgency of art, but not its futility.)

Back then, I worked on a poem about it, which must have run about thirty lines that are now lost. When it came back to me now, suddenly, thinking about the particular necessity and contingent universality of imagery, I was also reminded of Ezra Pound's reflections on "In a Station of the Metro".

Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation ...

I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity." Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough.

I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.

Okay, I'm no Ezra Pound. But my first effort was undoubtably not of the first intensity. What I just came up with (recalling the "equation" that was the core of the experience in that studio) is much more satisfying. It is still very much "just a poem" (maybe its emotion is just as must just a sentiment). But maybe it just needs that final bit of focusing.

If I am right about "the image" then we can almost describe in advance—a priori, if you will—what I will have to do to intensify it. I must situate the poem more resolutely between a natural regularity and a cultural regulation. I must activate both its urgency and its futility.

More later (I hope).

[One more thing: shortly before writing the above I had just read this post over at Jonathan's blog.]

An Imagism

Some loose jottings.

I generally look for imagery. If appearances are the undetermined objects of empirical intuitions (Kant) and surfaces are the undetermined subjects of normative institutions (me), then the image is more radically undetermined. It indicates neither the subject nor the object of an experience.

Perceptions are grounded in the immediacy of empirical intuitions. I want to say that there are regularities (which are basically natural) that govern perception. Action is likewise governed by (cultural) regulations.

Now regulated subjects have "representation" in the political sense, while regular objects have "representation" in the scientific sense. Images have only their "presentation", "pure" presentation, we might say. Well, we just took the "re-" off the "representation" to get that.

So what's the root of "regular"? It turns out the "re-" isn't a prefix. (Would have been neat.) But I did find this in the OED: "L. regula straight stick, bar, ruler, pattern, etc." Images are governed by "rules" in the sense of lines or bars on a ruler, i.e., "patterns".

Now, a pattern has "resolution", we might say (in the digitial sense). Better: regulations (subjects), resolutions (images), and regularities (objects). And to "re-solve" is to "loosen back" (needs more work). Imagery is the locus of grammatical "tightness". Subjective and objective representation (regulations and regularities) are about grammatical "rightness".

Like I say, just jotting things down.

[I should acknowledge that this post at In the Ordinary Sense got me thinking about this again.]

Deformulation

The Pangrammaticon is the blogosphere's leader in the deformulation of prose and poetry. Also known as reverse engineering, deformulation is the separation, identification and qualification of images in a literary formula. Our experienced poets have performed deformulations on hundreds of texts and have the skills and the tools to successfully deformulate the most difficult material.

Deformulation analysis uses interpretative techniques and conventional exegetical methods to identify and qualify (at least somewhat) the components of complex literary expressions. The components may include polysemes, plaster cramps, idle chatter, discourse, luxuriants, anecdotes, flame wars, etc. Although we do not guarantee a "cookbook recipe", our analysis, in most instances, identifies the literary hype of major and minor components. An Internet search is also performed when needed to locate the source of similar, commercially-available materials.

We have successfully deformulated a variety of texts...

Our clients often come to us with knowledge of the imagery in their target formula, such as wetness, dissolution or suffering. Using our client's information along with our literary expertise we can create a working "recipe" that meets a variety of needs, including:

Competitive existential characterization
Identification of botch to botch variations
Comparative analysis of "good" and "bad" examples
Copyright infringement or plagiarism

Our experienced poets are kept up-to-date with the latest web content and have developed techniques for unraveling complicated formulations.

Roundness

My hope for philosophy has always been that it could provide an elucidation of some ordinary experience. In Kant, the need for such an elucidation can be seen at least here: "The empirical concept of a plate is homogeneous with the pure geometrical concept of a circle. The roundness which is thought in the former can be intuited in the latter" (KRV A137/B176). When we think a thing is round, we subsume an object under the concept of a circle.

But there is a hitch. What is the concept of a circle? Well, it is line whose every point is the same distance from another point. The length of that line is famously incommensurable with the distance from its center. The ratio of the radius to the circumference, which Kant in his own notes estimated to be 6, is actually the irrational number 2pi. So what does it mean to think something is round?

A real plate, a thing in the world, cannot be "perfectly round" (truly circular). We do not think its likeness with a geometrical figure. Rather, we imagine it spinning on the potter's wheel. (More generally, we imagine a wheel.) Such a wheel will always have a slight wobble. It will have an axel with a determinate width and there will be a small space between the axel and the hub. It is for that reason that the circumference and the radius can rationally coexist.

Conceptual Notation

"You can write history by tracing ideas, exposing the growth of a concept," said Ezra Pound (GK, p. 60). It's not a terribly original idea. But you have to grasp a concept as such (and not another thing) in order to do this well. To this end, I propose "conceptual notation", borrowing the phrase from Frege, but reading it very much through the later Wittgenstein.

And developing along lines suggested by Albers. I'm trying to get a hold of a book about his work called simply, To Open Eyes. Well, my aim is just as simply to open minds. Albers was able to show us how colours work. Eyes give us access to colour. Minds give us access to concepts. Eyes see colours; minds grasp concepts. They are the means by which we notice them. We then write down what we notice.

Conceptual notation is a technique of kulchural studies.

Monetary Kulchur

"and the light became so bright and so blindin' in this layer of paradise that the mind of man was bewildered."

Ezra Pound, Canto XXXVIII

"Since the 1980s," Richard Cook tells us, "every U.S. economic expansion has been nothing more than a Federal Reserve-created asset inflation." Eric Janszen reaches a similar conclusion about so-called "financial bubbles", which he prefers to describe as periods of "asset-price hyperinflation". The basic idea is that government and business get together to create financial instruments to artificially inflate the price of assets in a particular industry (information technology and housing being the most recent, energy is next, it seems). It's all very Poundian. Janszen seems a bit accepting of the whole affair and doesn't make much of the extraction of profit; Cook, however, cites Major C.H. Douglas and everything. Here at the Kulchural Studies Revival Center we follow such ideas with interest.

Style and Symbol

Recent developments in Denmark suggest another thesis of kulchural studies. The Social Democrats now propose to outlaw "religious dress" in the public sector. Their argument is that a clear indication of one's religious beliefs will undermine the public's faith in the "professional" commitment of the civil servant.

In an interview in the major left-leaning daily, a midwife (who would be affected by the proposed law ... not yet even a bill, it should be noted) asks, "What's next? We'll have to go topless at the pool?" Perhaps she reads the Pangrammaticon? While the interviewer refuses to grant that it's a similar situation, she really hits the nail on the head here.

Here's the promised thesis of kulchural studies:

The fall of Western Civilization is the history of style supplanted by symbolism or (for those who think that is too stylish a way of putting it and need a symbol to hold on to) the subjugation of practice to theory.

Those who would outlaw the hijab insist that it is a mere symbol. This is probably because, raised as a faithful Lutherans, they understand God merely as a metaphysical assertion (a "faith alone"), not a set of practical constraints, i.e., a guide to living. A religious artifact, to them, is always, and only, a symbol. They simply cannot get their mind around a religiously motivated practice. They have no sense of the problem of winning and losing one's soul.

They have, in short, no sense of style. They are not interested in how an experience feels; instead, they immediately reduce it to the simpler question of what it might mean.

In this case, the relevant practice and feeling, most notably the wearing of a headscarf, can be translated by the simple English word "modesty". My wife and I have been struggling to find a good Danish equivalent. It's actually not easy; to avoid a directly moral notion like "decency" (anstændighed) one reaches for the somewhat old-fashioned "seemly" (sømmelig). The language may already be incapable of expressing the terms of this problem.

Hijab, as I understand it, can refer both to the headscarf itself and the modesty it achieves. I intentionally say "achieves", not "implies", because there is no doubt that, while they can certainly be beautiful, women who wear this garment are less likely to be directly attractive. Maybe it's different for you, but I generally feel less ashamed of my own impulses in their company than in the company of typical "Western" woman.

("American woman ... get away from meee heee ..." etc.)

Critics of hijab focus on what they think is the purely symbolic effect of the scarf. But the scarf actually covers something. In so doing it also emphasizes (or demands) a particular sincerity of facial expression. It is a fashion statement: a style. And it has obvious moral effects. What should the State's position be on the strength of a woman's desire to exhibit her hair in public? Kulchural studies of course articulates that question as a straightforward absurdity.

Capital

Like most people, I was more revolutionary when I was young. Today, I have centred my indignation on a simple proposition: some people make way too much money compared to others.

I do think a system of incentives is necessary. People who do their jobs well should be rewarded with a few luxuries. What one must object to, however, is a society that rewards even dubious hacks for choosing particular professions while letting recognized masters of other arts scrape by.

"Should the richest man in a town amass ten times more, even fifty times more, [than the poorest man,] it is not hard to conceive of a decent society," said Norman Mailer. "When you get to the point where you're speaking of thousands to one, something outrageous is taking place." What that something outrageous is might be gleaned from the title of the book that this idea appears in: Why Are We at War? The answer, of course, is: in order to keep it well over a thousand to one.

Something outrageous is taking place. But there is something a bit quaint about Mailer's suggestion that America (this fictional little town) "got to the point" where it was a thousand to one. It's been a thousand to one for 10,000 years. It was a thousand to one in ancient Egypt and in Imperial Rome and in the British Empire.

'The world would be a better place...' pretty straighforwardly if it were impossible to be rewarded 50 times more than anybody else for one's efforts. It would be more than enough to ensure that people made an effort. In fact, it might ensure that only one's real efforts were rewarded. So say I on this first of May.

Topless

No matter how broad and changeable the relative morals of styles may be, there is always an absolute norm to be kept after having heard the admonition of conscience warning against approaching danger; style must never be a proximate occasion of sin.

Pope Pius XII, 1957

It looks as though the City of Copenhagen will adopt a new policy for public swimming pools of allowing women to swim bare-breasted, just like the men. Women have been allowed to go topless on public beaches and in public parks for as long as I can remember. Nudity on television and in newspapers is common. This includes full frontal nudity and, yes, penises.

The Danish People's Party, while steadfast in its opposition to hijab (Muslim headscarves in particular), is nonetheless concerned about the new pool rules. What about the children, they ask? They have, of course, chosen to ignore the basic argument for the new policy, namely, that seeing a naked breast does not harm anyone, not even very young children. The activists who demanded the new freedom (they demonstrated in the obvious way) were objecting to the sexualization of the breast. They simply did not see it as "adult content".

I recently read Philip Roth's The Breast, the first and best of the David Kepesh novels. Roth, I think, is absolutely adamant about the sexuality of the female breast. But his sexual fantasies are not wholly convincing. (The character of David Kepesh will have to be dealt with in another post.)

I think this sort of issue is very much a part of the grammar of kulchur. At the extreme ends (public copulation and the burka) it seems pretty clear that there have to be limits, both to individual freedom and collective morality. But what about a moderate bikini and hijab? It seems to me to be an interesting discussion that is too often allowed to bog down in one or another perceived "fundamentalism". There are arguments for "modesty in dress". There are hairstyles that are so absolutely "fetching" that they undermine civil discourse. There must be limits. Etc.

I don't claim to know where all the lines should be drawn. But drawing them is worth taking seriously. I think hijab is perfectly good suggestion, worth considering in its details and comparing, point by point, with a tight pair of faded bluejeans. The blanket refusal to talk about modesty on the grounds that modesty oppresses is, to my mind, not constructive.

Stray Thought

Possible essay project. Revisit Perloff's "Whose Era?" (Pound/Stevens) question politically. Working title: How to Do Things with Money.

The Audacity of Unsentimentality

Still, Lyndon Johnson must be given a vote. Because My Hope for America contains one good sentence, one more than Barry Goldwater could claim. This sentence reads: "...the wall between the rich and poor is a wall of glass through which all can see." It inspires a corollary whch is almost as good—the space between hypocrisy and honest manner may not forever insulate the powerful from the poor.

Norman Mailer

Kirby's keeping me abreast of developments on the campaign trail. It seems Barack Obama has said something that could be taken out of context. And taken out of context it was. And off we go.

Let's begin with the spin. "I’m a southern boy myself,” Dave ‘Mudcat’ Saunders tells CNN. “I don’t have a gun because I’m bitter, it’s because I’ve always had one. I don’t pray to God because I’m bitter. I pray to God because it makes my life better.” The implication is pretty straightforward: Obama has said that rural southerners pray to God and own guns because they're bitter. But is that actually what he said? Of course not. He said:

...the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

I said in my last post that Obama's strength is not to deny facts; in this case he does not even deny interpretations. His damage control on this includes an insistence that he meant the first three words of what I just quoted. According to Obama, this is the truth. And it remains the truth even as the affair hits the news.

Obama's crime here is to be unsentimental about poverty. Poverty sucks. It humiliates people and makes them less human. It is not saying it that is humiliating (especially not within the four walls that Obama was saying it); it is the actual 25 years without real opportunity. It makes people bitter. It brings them low. Makes them mean. Turns them into brutes. For a left-leaning liberal (i.e., a democrat), that's the goddam reason to get rid of poverty! Obama is saying that you're not going to get rid of poverty in America unless you do something about the forces that create poverty.

He was explaining to his supporters what he also talks about in his book (page 249-259). He was trying to get them to understand the complexity of the situation. Consider this similar passage in The Audacity of Hope. He is has just described what the hard work and determination of one man, Mac Alexander, has done for Chicago's West Side.

But travel a few blocks further in any direction and you will also experience a different side of Mac's world: the throngs of young men on corners castings furtive glances up and down the street; the sound of sirens blending with the periodic thump of car stereos turned up full blast; the dark, boarded-up buildings and hastily scrawled gang signs; the rubbish everywhere, swirling in winter winds. Recently, the Chicago Police Department installed permanent cameras and flashing lights atop the lampposts of Madison [Street], bathing each block in a perpetual blue glow. The folks who live along Madison didn't complain; flashing blue lights are a familiar enough sight. They're just one more reminder of what everybody knows—that the community's immune system has broken down almost entirely, weakened by drugs and gunfire and despair; that despite the best efforts of folks like Mac, a virus has taken hold, and a people is wasting away.

Okay, the "rubbish swirling in winter winds" is not a great image, and not a little sentimental, but here's my point: Is there anything offensive about this description of urban poverty? Would an urban version of 'Mudcat' Saunders say, "Hey, I'm from the West Side! I'm not wasting away in despair!"? Would that be anything like a critique of what Obama is saying? Of course not.

Obama is not saying that people who believe in guns or always keep God at their side are forced to do so by poverty, despair, and bitterness. What he is saying is that if one approaches poverty without a good sense of its social, structural causes (perhaps because one has given up all hope that social structures will change after 25 years of joblessness), then one may become bitter, and in that bitterness one's faith in God, one's insistence on holding a gun, one's conviction that another faith or another race is to blame, is a mere sentiment. It will not change things.

"Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment," said Mailer in his review of LBJ's My Hope for America. I don't want to say that The Audacity of Hope doesn't have a single a sentimental page. A book written by a man who wants to be president must cover so much ground that he is bound to express an emotion every now and then that he does not really feel. But I am generally impressed with his honest manner, with his lack of hypocrisy. And he is not, in particular, sentimental about the poor. He is outraged.

The Audacity of My Hope for America (part 1)

"Human Greatness" is an unusual energy coupled with straightness, the direct shooting mind, it is incompatible with a man's lying to himself, it does not indulge in petty pretences.

Ezra Pound (GK, p. 106)

Pound had Mussolini. Norman Mailer had JFK. We, I, have Barack Obama.

I first began to like Obama when watching him handle himself in confrontations with Hillary Clinton, whether in real-time debates or in his responses to journalists about her most recent attack. He has a way of accepting the facts (where they are not obviously skewed) and taking a position on the real point of contention. Also, like Pound's Mussolini (which is to say, a larger than life statue of the man), Obama seems to display a "swiftness of mind ... in the speed with which his real emotion is shown on his face" (GK, p. 105).

So I was eagerly looking forward to reading his book, The Audacity of Hope. Now, my eagerness here was obviously tempered with the certainty that I would be largely disappointed. Mailer, let us remember, would be "forced" to admit that, by ordinary standards, Kennedy did not write well (imagine Pound having to comment on Mussolini's poetry!). But there is still better and worse writing, and I think Mailer offers us a good model for an analysis of The Audacity of Hope in his review of Lyndon Johnson's My Hope for America.

Of course, a book written by a high official must not be judged by average standards, or one would be forced to say, for example, that Jack Kennedy was not a very good writer and that Bobby Kennedy, at last reading, wrote a dead stick's prose—his style almost as bad as J. Edgar Hoover's. But even at its worst, the prose style of Jack Kennedy (and his ghost writers) is to the prose of L.B.J. (and his ghost writers) as de Tocqueville is to Ayn Rand. It is even not impossible that My Hope for America is the worst book ever written by any political leader anywhere. (Cannibals and Christians, p. 48)

Now, even Obama's title is better than Johnson's. And its source, the Rev. Wright, is of course much more interesting. It should remind us that part of Mailer's hope for Kennedy was that he could "play fair" with Castro. In his open letter to JFK, Mailer articulated the theme of the "imperfect union", let's say, that is the United States. This was in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs.

You are in trouble. Your best troops now fear that you are not deep enough to direct the destinies of our lives. And if you are not, the country will deaden a little more, even as it increases in its fevers, and the imagination of the best will will begin to harden into the separate undergrounds of a New left and a new Right, ready to war against the oppressive, flatulent, and totalitarian center of our beleaguered land.

Do not hold to that center, Jack, it is the pusillanimous sludge of liberal and conservative bankruptcies, a pus of old jargons which will whip into no militant history, but may be analyzed eventually by the chemists as the ingredient which smudges the ink on such mothers of the center as the N.Y. Post. (The Presidential Papers, p. 78)

Of course, Obama has not yet been in a position to screw up the invasion of a country whose music he did not understand (Mailer's analysis of the Bay of Pigs). So we can use this warning as an audacious expression of our hope for Obama, namely, that he is deep enough to direct the destinies of our lives. The next president of the United States will, arguably, either be that deep or destroy us (at least the vital parts of us). If Obama succeeds, he will have to defeat the "totalitarian center" of US politics. (Interestingly, McCain offers more hope in this regard than Clinton.)

I generally like Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech. I think he manages to avoid the worst pitfalls in his "condemnation" of the Rev. Wright's opinion of America, which, like many European, left-leaning, intellectual types, I find much less objectionable than his American critics. I was disappointed, around eight minutes into the speech, to hear Obama say that "the problems of the Middle East ... emanate from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam." That's a pretty simpleminded thing to say. It's the sort of thing a presidential candidate arguably "has to say", so we can forgive it in its way. But Obama's appeal to me has so far been his ability to avoid saying what a candidate has to say. And even this he seems to acknowledge when he talks about "a candidacy as imperfect as mine".

After 9/11, Le Monde famously declared that "We are all Americans". Indeed, in the years that followed we all got our versions of the Patriot Act and of "home grown terror cells". Even before 9/11, I was arguing among my friends that we should give up the European Union and subscribe directly to the US Constitution, that Denmark should become just another state in the union. That would, for example, allow us to vote on who should become the Leader of the Free World. That is the audacity of my hope for America.

If Obama is not elected, my hopes will be diminished. I am going to spend a few posts on this topic.

An Irrefutable Analysis of Total Domination

The publisher of Noam Chomsky's Hegemony and Survival calls it "an irrefutable analysis of America's pursuit of total domination and the catastrophic consequences that could follow". It's the typical hyperbole of a publisher's blurb, of course, but also a disturbing notion.

Kirby's comment about the possible relations between Islam and "respect for life and freedom" (see previous post), got me thinking. I come back to this nugget of wisdom from Ezra Pound quite often these days:

In August 1942, the following elucidatory statement was heard on the Berlin radio: the power of the state, whether it be Nazi, Fascist, or Democratic, is always the same, that is—absolute; the different forms of administration are merely a matter of the different activities which one agrees not to allow. ("A Visiting Card", 1942, SP, p. 276)

Here's what I'm thinking: A democracy is committed to allowing the free expression of ideas, even the idea that democracy is a bad idea. A fascist state is committed to controlling the expression of ideas; it is committed to "the free expression of opinion by those qualified to hold it" as Italian radio stated the "Fascist policy" in its introduction to Pound's broadcasts. It is therefore in the difficult position of implicitly endorsing views it does not explicitly suppress.

This was once a paradox. But I don't think it should stop us from thinking. The genius of democracy is that the state can maintain its absolute power over allowable activities without having to suppress opinions to the contrary. But these days, for some reason, Western intellectuals (i.e., liberal-democratic thinkers) are in a tizzy about people who express the view that we should do away with democratic rights like freedom of speech.

In my opinion, we should talk as much as we are able. If the state begins to restrict our freedom of expression, well, then, we'll have to continue covertly. Obviously. Pound's insight is dead on: whatever we do, we are living under the "total domination" of the state. Once again we see the relevance of Lewis's "art of being ruled."

Anti-Islamism

The words "anti-fascism" and "anti-semitism" are subtly different in their grammar. An anti-fascist is against an ideology while an anti-semite is against a group of people. That is, the suffix "ism" in the two cases has a different significance. In the case of anti-fascism it is attached before the prefix "anti", so that it is part of what is being countered. In the case of anti-semitism the suffix is attached after the prefix. It is anti-(fascism) but (anti-semite)ism. Anti-semitism is itself an ideology, while anti-fascism is the stance against a particular ideology.

The grammar of "anti-Islamism", as far as I can tell, is more like that of "anti-fascism" than "anti-semitism". At least when used by anti-Islamists, themselves. Last week, I encountered two very different examples, which got me thinking about this political stance. (I think anti-Islamism will, for obvious reasons, be as characteristic of the twenty-first century as anti-semitism and/or anti-fascism are of the twentieth.)

I found the first example in Granta 100. It includes a fragment of an "abandoned" story by Martin Amis called "The Unknown Known". In his note to this story, Amis says that "Islamism is a total system, and like all such it is eerily amenable to satire" (163). The fragment is a first-person account of an outrageous terror plot intended to out-9/11 9/11. Here's an example of its satire (the protagonist is describing how he felt when he lived in Greely, Colorado):

A thousand times a day I would whisper it ('But her father...her brothers...'), every time I saw a luminously bronzed poitrine, the outline of underwear on a tightly packaged rump, a thin skirt rendered transparent by a low sun, a pair of nipples starkly staring through a pullover, a white bra strap contending with a murky armpit, a stocking top arresting the architecture of an upper thigh, or the very crux of a woman sliced in two by a wedge of denim or dungaree. They strolled in swirly print dresses across the Walkway, indifferent to the fact that anyone standing below, in the thicket of nettles and poision ivy, could see the full scissoring of their legs and their shamelessly brief underpants. And when, in all weathers, I took a late walk along the back gardens, the casual use of a buttress or a drainpipe would soon confront me with the sight of a woman quite openly undressing for bed. (160-1)

The satirical element here lies not just in the style of the description but the way it becomes obvious that the narrator's offence at the "shamelessness" of American women is connected to his own lack of respect for their privacy. Thus, the serious cultural difference between Muslim modesty and American promiscuity is not analyzed but simply played out from the perspective of the latter, and obviously at the expense of the former. Modesty in dress (at least when founded in the Muslim experience) is presented as silly (and ultimately perverse), while suggestiveness in dress is presented as wholly innocent (and innocently wholesome).

The second example can be found in Ursula K. Le Guin's recent piece in Harper's (Feb 2008). Le Guin uses "Muslim" attitudes to women in passing (her essay is about something completely different), characterizing it in the arguably standard manner, namely, as medieval:

In the Dark Ages, a Christian priest could read at least a little, but most laymen didn't, and many women couldn't—not only didn't but couldn't: reading was considered an inappropriate activity for women, as in some Muslim societies today.

Islamism (the "total system" that Amis is against) is related to, but not identical with, Muslim beliefs about the proper relations between men and women. Amis also satirizes polygamy, it should be noted. But who's the prude now? we might ask. The point here is that there are a number of perfectly serious discussions about the role of women in society that are pre-empted by this anti-Islamist rhetoric, a rhetoric that is always in danger of becoming anti-Islamic. It simply depends on where your satire or, as in the case of Le Guin, your standard illustrative example, suggests that Islamism originally goes off the rails.

Too often, it turns out, the anti-Islamist thinks that the problem originates in (emanates from?) the Koran. So we have Geert Wilders denouncing it as "fascist" (Economist, March 22-28, p. 38), for example. When pressed, he would no doubt argue that its role in Islamism (not Islam) illustrates what he means. But his critique, like Amis's satire, and Kurt Westergaard's cartoon, is offensive to a much broader audience. We have to watch developments very carefully if we want to see when this opposition to a total system itself becomes a total system.

More Friendly Fascism

In late 1970, Bertram Gross published a paper with the ominous title “Friendly Fascism: Model for America”, which he later expanded into a book called Friendly Fascism: The new face of power in America (Evans, 1980). In 1975, in an (as far as I can tell) independent analysis, Joseph Holland also predicted that the US would see the rise of a new and “friendly” form of fascism. Nancy Bancroft took up the idea again in 1982, calling for Marxist scholars to keep an eye on things.

Holland's forecast specified downward social mobility for most Americans; high unemployment; decreased purchasing power; economic scarcity; bitter geographic and racial tensions; social unrest leading to repression of labor and leftist movements; limited, if any, electoral choice; and the orientation of the economy toward global management and defense production. In the seven years since Holland described American fascism, part of his prediction has become reality. The rest does not look out of the question. (Bancroft 1982, p. 155)

That’s more or less Gross’s point as well. While he is by no means a Marxist himself, he would agree with Bancroft’s way of putting it:

Marxist interpretations of fascism differ from non-Marxist ones chiefly by suggesting that fascism is a form of capitalist class rule. In the Marxist view, fascists do not take over or subvert a democratic government. Rather, the existing democratic government itself becomes fascist, to meet new needs of the dominant class. Prior to fascism, democratic forms and ideology partially hide capitalist rule. With fascism, democratic restraints disappear and the class rule of a small elite becomes vastly more exploitative. (Bancroft 1982, p. 155, my emphasis)

The essence of fascism, as Gross puts it, is close ties between big government and big business, through which all real decision-making takes place, under the cover of the meaningless spectacle of popular politics.

The prospect of fascism is actually a perennial theme among commentators on American democracy. Tocqueville intuited the threat of “a new physiognomy of servitude” in the power of the majority. Much of Norman Mailer’s work, starting with The Naked and the Dead in 1948 and intensifying in the 1960s railed against what Simone de Beauvoir (in The Mandarins) had called the “nascent fascism” of American politics, foreign and domestic. Indeed, in his commentary on 9/11 and the War in Iraq, Mailer suggested that fascism is “the natural government for most people” and that the “spreading democracy” might easily “encourage more fascism at home and abroad”. Noam Chomsky, speaking before 9/11, said that “the United States has been in a sort of pre-fascist mood for years … Now, we haven’t had the right person yet … but sooner or later somebody’s going to fill that position.” Bancroft, similarly, talked of “proto-fascism”. All of these people are careful to point out that an “American version of fascism” will differ from the despotism of a Hitler or a Mussolini.

Sources (very rough)

Bancroft, Nancy. "American Fascism: Analysis and Call for Research". Phylon (1960-), Vol. 43, No. 2. (2nd Qtr., 1982), pp. 155-166.

Chomsky, Noam. Understanding Power.

Holland, Joseph. "Marxist Class Analysis in American Society Today" in Sergio Torres and John Eagleson, eds., Theology in the Americas. Maryknoll, N.Y.: brbis Books, 1976)

Mailer, Norm. Why Are We at War.

Friendly Fascism

While Bertram Gross's Friendly Fascism: The new face of power in America (M. Evans, 1980) leaves a lot to be desired as piece of writing, its vaguely flarfy title concept is worth thinking about. Here's my version of it.

Fascism (on this view) has four essential components: it encourages violent action, it glorifies personal leadership, it dissolves the difference between business and government, and it denigrates the distinction between private and public affairs. The first two, the cult of violence and the cult of personality, may be considered, precisely, the "cultural" aspect of fascism or simply "cultural fascism". The third and fourth constitute its "organizational" aspect, which, in turn, have a social mode (business = government) and a subjective mode (private = public).

Friendly fascism is organizational fascism, i.e., fascism without the cultural characteristics it is commonly associated with. Now, a friendly fascist society will, of course, have to retain some of the cultish elements; it will still cultivate violence and leadership throughout the social order. But it will not do so "officially", as it were.

In fact, the most workable way of doing it is probably to cultivate these things as entertainment rather than policy. Thus, the friendly fascist state produces imagery that activates our desire for violence and greatness, but it does not openly propose itself as the model of such images.

A rigorously non-fascist society would tolerate no collusion among business people and government officials; it would maintain a clear distinction between private and public concerns; it would acknowledge the strength of the people over that of the leader; and it would pursue peaceful solutions over the use of force. We don't, obviously, live in such a society.

If kulchural studies is a science to support what Wyndham Lewis called "the art of being ruled" then it must take seriously "the spectre of friendly fascism".

Advertisement for my Birthday

Like many another vain, empty, bullying body of our time, I have been running for president these last ten years in the privacy of my mind, and it occurs to me that I am less close now than when I began. Defeat has left my nature divided, my sense of timing is eccentric, and I contain within myself the bitter exhaustions of an old man, and the cocky arguments of a bright boy. So I am everything but my proper age of thirty-six, and anger has brought me to the edge of the brutal.

Norman Mailer
Advertisements for Myself

It's my birthday today. I am now thirty-seven. Things are looking up.