David Hawkes in the TLS and Chomsky (eclectics and science)

On FaceBook a mate of mine linked to an article by David Hawkes in the TLS about Noam Chomsky: How Noam Chomsky's world works

I made the following comment:

This is a weasel article full of half-truths and very slippery deductions. Chomsky himself is to blame (as always  ) for not going the whole hog and following reason along the path it beat after Kant and the French revolution using Hegel and especially Marx. But Hawkes is either disingenuous or blind to his own analytical shortcomings here (pot kettle black as Chomsky might be tempted to say). 

In the first place, rooting language in a biological capability doesn't turn people into objects or language into a non-social phenomenon. We use our brains to orient ourselves in the world as subject (or let's say a self-orienting object among non-self-orienting objects) and language is one of our special human faculties for doing this. Science and logic and so on have nothing to do with capitalism as such, they are formalized and institutionalized human capacities and activities that have developed in various kinds of societies to improve our self-orientation. Capitalism as a form of society drove this development much further than any previous society. Now capitalism is incapable of taking things any further and socialism will either take over the baton or humanity will collapse into an unimaginable state of barbarism.

Hawkes gestures abstractly at Marxism in what he writes, but makes damn sure not to give chapter or verse or make any concrete observations.

Chomsky is empirical and rational, and driven by scientific curiosity. Once something appears to him to be empirically and rationally validated he takes it as a basis for a next step. In this he is ruthlessly logical. The US government lies and goes to war using violence and atrocities for the benefit of big capital. The US media establishment supports it to the hilt. So get used to it. Structuralist and behaviourist linguistics only scratched the surface of human language and drew all kinds of misguided conclusions about it. Chomsky blew them out of the water by taking structuralist method as far as it would go and transcending it, as any good philosopher and/or scientist would. As Syntactic Structures brilliantly demonstrated in 1957, and I was privileged to discover in 1965.

Anyhow, more of a conundrum in Chomsky is the modesty of his approach. What is revolutionary is the ruthlessness with which he holds to scientific principles and the insistence with which he asserts his findings and pursues their logic, not the content of his findings as such. The problem for reactionaries and trimmers and eclectics (like Hawkes) is that they don't understand the depth of his certainty and conviction once his principled conditions for reasonable proof are met. The trimmers are swept around like dust by winds and tides (Dante has them blowing about helplessly on the banks of the Styx, despised even by Charon and refused even the basic courtesy of admission to Hell - they have done nothing worthy of eternal residence anywhere  ). Like all good scientists, Chomsky gives us an Archimedian "pou sto" (somewhere to stand) - a stable fulcrum that we can use our levers with to move the earth. One that winds and tides swirl around, not one swirled around by winds and tides.

Higher education as public relations

Mary Beard blogged about the Open University's absurd ads for spin doctors.
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2012/08/university-publicity.html

I commented:


I think they're just seeing how far they can push us without getting their shins hacked. Or their spins reversed.
There's a more general aspect to this zeitgeist stuff. It ties in with the Romantic dissolution of genre boundaries (exploding in the novel form in the Enlightenment, and culminating in things like Brecht's "epic drama" and Joyce's "poetic novel" last century). For some decades now it's been eroding the boundaries between fiction and documentary (ficumentaries and reality shows etc).
The historical ground for it of course is the dissolution of class (ie rigidly, materially hierarchical) society. The philosophical ground is the transition from analytical to dialectical reason/logic (A equals A, you say? Hmmmm). Living, moving and becoming more than dead, static and either/or.
Which affects us in our everyday lives by making us conscious that we are not just living but being seen to live. And exist in a permanent state of metamorphosis through our interactions. We make ourselves (poesis) not just invent, but make, shape.
Except that society (still rigidly class-determined) is struggling to the death against this change. It might as well struggle against the tide of course, but as a result of its resistance all this is happening but no one is aware of it. ("They do not know it, but they do it", as Marx comments in Capital.)
And examples of it happening are all around us, particularly in the US, the most dialectically contradictory country on earth. Like the focus in schools on shaping yourself in relation to your classwork - oral presentation. You are your image. A company or institution is its perception. Careers and billions in profit depend on this.
And people being what we are, we examine it and make a science out of it, excising all the critical bits on the way.
It's international and damn near universal now, because the social transformation is so delayed. The zeitgeist juice impregnates the whole body of the world system deeper and deeper because of the immense material pressures involved.
So humans are the deliberate synthesis of their social conventions and their innate selves. However, the refusal to grasp what's going on means that the innate self bit - the "poor, bare, forked animal" - is obliterated. What's left is the social self that flatters the system. The "furred robes". But since the times are in a state of chassis the unconscious forces itself on us in the form of nightmare and dystopian imaginings. The emperor's new clothes are both furred robes and dissolved in air, flickering before our eyes like strobe lights.
Which means we get spin doctors and social masseurs and Big Media pushing the Big Lie with the straightest of faces and immense self-importance, while a few brave souls (Chomsky, Wikileaks) are busy trying to slow down the strobe and reveal the emptiness at the heart of the Emerald City, so to speak.
Mary is on the side of the angels here, asking who is managing the light show, and why. So our small, voluntary, blog community is standing up to the huge, professionally funded educational institution, and can point to the rising tide, or at least the rising pressure it is exerting.
The nice thing is that keeping the zeitgeist locked up demands a huge amount of effort and resources. And although it takes resources and effort to liberate it, they are infinitesimal in proportion. This will be evident in some decades when capitalism has disappeared down the plughole and sucked bourgeois society down the drain with it.
In the meantime, the truth is a mighty warrior, and a warm and sexy companion to boot. Blake wrote: "Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed." Which is basically what we're doing as we make and shape ourselves in our opposition to the absurdity and inhumanity of the prophet Gobbledegook and incomprehensible Profit.

Women against rape who don't want Assange extradited

Interesting article in the Guardian entitled “We are Women Against Rape but we do not want Julian Assange extradited”:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/23/women-against-rape-julian-assange

I commented:

Proportionality is the key to a rational understanding of this affair. And the disproportionate and unusual aspects of the prosecution of this case are made very clear by Naomi Wolf in this article: http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/something-rotten-in-the-state-of-sweden-8-big-problems-with-the-case-against-assange-by-naomi-wolf/
A rational understanding of the affair is of course not the key to its resolution. That lies in a powerful political confrontation of the reactionary and inhuman forces hounding Assange by those fighting for justice and humanity. It is good to see that imperialist states (Sweden, Britain and the US) by no means have things all their own way in this conflict. Their material interests (extracting profit from us at all costs at the expense of our lives and dignity, and violently and deceitfully defending this robbery) confront ours head-on (the Marikana massacre is a recent blatant example of this - the Sharpeville of the Black Bourgeoisie). But although they have the upper hand as yet with their jealously guarded monopoly of violence and propaganda, they are constrained by self-interest to observe certain rights and freedoms allowing us to organize and agitate against them (it's called bourgeois democracy and it's necessary for capitalism to work optimally, and it enrages them as much as competition does, and is just as frequently disregarded by them if they can get away with it).
In this case the material interests ranged against the imperialists include those of exploited minor capitalist states (neo- and semi-colonies like Ecuador), and even the strategic interests of more powerful uppity competitor states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, for instance), so Assange is not solely dependent on public opinion or rags like the Guardian for his safety and defence.
The shocking thing here is really the imperialists' complete lack of concern for women subjected to rape and violence. There has been no massive, long-term campaign in any of the media attacking Assange (and going on about the sanctity of arrest warrants and legal procedure) to highlight and combat the scourge of oppressive everyday sexual practices. Date rape, marriage rape, repressive laws (Oil ally Saudi criminalizing women drivers, say, or the US witch-hunting of professionals providing abortion and sex advice), sneering and smearing attitudes demeaning and humiliating women at work, etc. If what Assange is accused of were taken seriously by the propagandists using it to attack freedom of speech and of information, then they would be permanently apoplectic at the behaviour of the thousands of men in our laddish, macho cultural world who refuse to wear condoms, force themselves on drunk or sleepy or unwilling partners, and never ever ask for explicit permission to get their leg over.

Assange, material interests and rational discourse

There's a good article by Seamus Milne in the Guardian today. “Don't lose sight of why the US is out to get Julian Assange”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/21/why-us-is-out-to-get-assange?

I commented:

This article is simple and straightforward. Its foundation is the potential consequences for Assange of the material threat posed by his Wikileaks activity to the material interests of the US and its allies, including Britain and Sweden. These consequences are manifestly terrifying. The most evidence for this is the treatment being handed out to Bradley Manning and the whole procedure of extraordinary rendition. In the name of proportion it considers this aspect of the affair to outweigh the elements touted as central by the anti-Assange lobby - law, the legal system, and the rights of women. And the need for justice to be enforced to the letter. Proportionality reveals that this mountain of abstractions is wobbling atop a speck of fly shit in terms of substantial violation of law, legality and the rights of women - the shit is there, but if we compare every component of the accusations being made with similar or worse misdemeanours we know to be committed all day every day but which are never brought to court or given the same headline treatment, then we can see it is a speck of fly shit. No serious drive to discourage rape or other violence against women would use the methods or tone of the anti-Assange campaign or spray ideological filth all over the arena. 

In this affair substantial material interests are at stake, and it's worth noting that in such conflicts rational discourse is not the way things are done. People fight for their interests (or what they think are their interests) using any means they can. The British state spends thousands of pounds on an unprecedented show of police force around the Ecuadorian embassy, for instance. No rational discourse there. 

What we can do, in the interests of rationality, is to analyse the degree of reason in the arguments put forward by the conflicting sides. Where substantial state interests are concerned there is no such thing as an impartial judge, history is clear on that, so our analysis won't decide any conflict, but it will show us which side is closer to reality and the truth, and so which side is most likely to emerge victorious in the long run.

The US, Britain and Sweden will claim they are closest to truth and justice even while they are tumbling into the dustbin of history, and will heckle and bully the world to believe them.

But they look more and more like incompetent enemy agent Chico Marx in Duck Soup when he says: "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"

On Julian Assange seeking asylum in Ecuador

There's a trite little article in the Guardian purporting to give a Swedish view of the Assange case.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/16/julian-assange-few-friends-left-sweden
I commented:

Karin Olsson ignores the most important factors in this case.

The first and most obvious - the elephant in the room, the big picture - is the proportionality. 

Assange is NOT under official suspicion of any crime in Sweden. He is NOT charged with any crime, let alone absconding from a trial or a sentence. The offences in relation to which he is wanted for questioning BEAR NO RELATION to the issues relating to his fear of a miscarriage of justice leading to his rendition to the USA, neither in substance nor proportionality. Potential exemplary punishment of bad sexual behaviour during an otherwise consensual encounter would be better exacted in a case WITHOUT THE POLITICAL AND STRATEGIC ASPECTS of this one. 

In this case the severity and seriousness of the political and strategic tensions involved are beyond dispute, which can't be said for the severity and seriousness of the alleged sexual crimes involved. 

Sweden has a concrete record of handing people over to the USA in collaboration with the CIA in breach of international law - the case of the extraordinary rendition of two Egyptians in 2001 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#Sweden) is the most flagrant.

The USA has demonstrated very clearly the kind of treatment Assange can expect if it gets hold of him by its treatment of Bradley Manning. Manning is alleged to have supplied Wikileaks with a great number of secret US documents. Assange is the head of Wikileaks and therefore responsible for annulling the secrecy not just of these documents but all the documents published on Wikileaks, most (but not all) of which are diplomatically and politically embarrassing to the USA. So Assange can reasonably expect even harsher treatment. 

And since threats should taken into account where a reasonable assessment of fear is concerned, the threats of execution and assassination made by senior public officials in the US are highly relevant.

There's a good article in the Guardian by Mark Weisbrot about the situation now:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/16/julian-assange-asylum-ecuador

What to do when they smack us down

The following was posted on Facebook:

S M

aren't these companies supposed to obtain permits before they can proceed to fracking? shouldn't those permits detail the hazards the local population will be exposed to? when are we going to consider the precautionary principle?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-09/fracking-moratorium-urged-by-u-s-doctors-until-health-studies-conducted.html

Fracking Moratorium Urged as Doctors Call for Health Study

www.bloomberg.com

The U.S. should declare a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in populated areas until the health effects are better understood, doctors said at a conference on the drilling process.

I commented:

S - just asking questions like this isn't enough. The answer is "of course", followed by "so???". They've got to have their power to disregard humanity (and the world) removed, by force if necessary. They *never* hesitate to use force to further their ends. One example should be enough to demonstrate this: the US-engineered Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973 - copper. They use force (preferably the threat of force, but that's just icing on the cake) to keep us and our interests out of power. When did you ever see an election where power over the economic structure of society was an issue? Or if there was, where it was allowed to take place, or if it still did, where the result was allowed to stand? Or, if the result stood, where the issue wasn't finally decided by force? Again Latin America provides a myriad examples. "If voting could change the system, it would be illegal." When they butcher and torture our families and friends and destroy our communities, it doesn't help to stand by and weep. Libya. Syria.




S M responded:

i hear you. is there a peaceful way, though?

I replied:

Nope. Never has been. No system has changed without the violent ejection of those profiting from it. Today we have a big problem. Previous system revolutions have started piecemeal - you could see a tide rising around the rocks - like the welling capitalist enclaves under slavery (in Rome say) and in the bourgeois city-states of Italy after the fall of the Roman Empire. Today the bourgeois capitalist system is entrenched worldwide and has to be overcome on a world scale - this is a much greater challenge. This doesn't mean every country all at once - the October Revolution and the post-ww2 revolutions showed us that. But capitalism will keep savaging humanity until the non-capitalist socialist system dominates the world economy. If previous oppressive systems were rocks swallowed up by a tide, capitalism is a pressure cooker (goatskin bottle) that will explode from the pressure building up inside it. The better the precision we use in cutting our way out, the less destructive the explosion will be. Which means that the more we know about this process, the better our chances - both of getting out and in fact of surviving at all as a civilized species.

So *why* do men hate women?

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | A slur and an outrage

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2070272,...

A slur and an outrage

The reporter who blew open Watergate is part of a misogynist conspiracy against Hillary Clinton

Zoe Williams Wednesday May 2, 2007 The Guardian

All you ever read about Hillary Clinton is how the American electorate hates her, and yet the only reason you're reading about her in the first place is that she is, in effect, 50% of the candidacy for leadership of the Democratic party. Somebody, surely, must like her. It can't just be the internet. Is the net even allowed to vote?

Carl Bernstein is dishing the dirt in his forthcoming unauthorised biography, entitled A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Bernstein is now known as "the one played by Dustin Hoffman" in the Watergate film. He is a seminal investigative journalist, and claims to have the unexpurgated truth, culled from 200 sources - one of which, wince-inducingly, is Clinton's closest confidante, Diane Blair. Or rather not the woman herself; she (and now you can wince) died of lung cancer seven years ago. Bernstein has filleted her papers and personal effects, which are being sorted for the University of Arkansas library. He stops short of calling Clinton a liar, apparently, but suggests that she played fast and loose with the truth. Well come on then, how would the truth look if she'd played slower and tighter?

The gobbet that's meant to stir us up and keep us going until publication next month is this: contrary to what she's said, she did know about Bill and his affair with Gennifer Flowers. Or at least, she probably knew. This is according to an uncredited writer who has followed her career closely. "She always knew about her. Anyone who has approached the subject of Hillary Clinton with a clear eye will run across many examples of stories that are not true."

It's a tricky one, isn't it? Maybe she did know, but there might be a question mark over how she knew - was it actual information, or a hunch? When exactly should she have announced that she knew, in order to keep her veracity slate clean in the eyes of the voting public? When she'd got hold of some DNA evidence, or just when he came home with a naughty look on his face? Never mind that this is his transgression, not hers. Never mind that he paid his debt for his lively undercrackers some time ago, as I think even the most stalwart conservative would agree. How can this possibly be a relevant test of her, as a person or as a politician?

This is so far beyond the old "does it matter what they do in the bedroom?" debate. It's outrageous even to suggest that her husband's sex life is salient to her career in the first place, let alone that she should be held accountable for it. The whole book, ranging across "everything" from Clinton's "complex relationship with her disciplinarian father" to "her courtship with Bill Clinton and the amazing dynamic of their marriage, during the most trying of circumstances", is a slur on Hillary Clinton, refracting her through the prism of the men around her to a nexus of feminine roles: daughter, wife, blah.

The greatest outrage is that the next accusation will be that she isn't a "heavyweight". Misogynist opinion sees no contradiction in reducing any given woman to a series of soap opera and/or biological roles - and then, using this as "evidence", levelling at her the charge that she isn't serious-minded!

The same has happened to Ségolène Royal, the socialist contender for the French presidency, who has found even members of her own party incapable of comprehending how someone can both be a mother and understand foreign policy. Oh, that we had time to caper through the various German responses to Angela Merkel's childlessness.

In the UK, our tabloids are still capable of this sort of thing, but in Westminster, in soi-disant quality journalism and publishing, it would be laughed off the page. At the risk of unseemly nationalism, it's worth remembering how far we've come.

mszoewilliams@yahoo.co.uk

********************************

Choppa's response:

So, *why* do so many men fear women?

For the same reason many US-icans fear socialists and communists.

US citizens are so afraid of their peers - of each other -- and you can see this in any piece of US mass culture, which is full of organized bullying and brutality (Them) against weak and trembling individuals with a desirable goody to be stolen (Me) -- that they can hardly conceive of the Evil that must be inherent in Double Thems (Emperor Ming, Lex Luthor, the Joker, Saddam Hussein, Huns, Nips, Bogey de Jour).

Men likewise are so afraid of each other, so terrified, so browbeaten, so cowardly, so corrupt, so squishily yellowy-brown, that the Alien Other, the Double Them confronting ManHood, Woman, must be of an Evil so inconceivable that their balls clench and they shrivel up in the face of it (la Fica Dentata).

And the culture of fear is nurtured by a society of alienation and terror. Change society from Dog eats Dog to woMan helps woMan, live and let live instead of kill or be killed, and you drain the cesspit of fear we all splash around in.

Voilà.

Chomsky interview on C-Punch about war and empire

There's a good interview by Sameer Dossani with Noam Chomsky on CounterPunch about war, neo-liberalism and empire now:

http://www.counterpunch.org/dossani03092007.html

It makes good points about the differences between Asia, Latin America and Africa.

I felt a couple of things could have been brought out more clearly, though.

What Chomsky doesn't mention is the political power reason WHY the Asian countries could ignore IMF and US pressures and industrialize. Particularly Japan (the big one), Korea, and the other "tigers". It was a clear policy choice by the States to give them their head after the war, and let the local capitalists thrive. It was the only way to avoid a devastating series of social struggles encouraged by the defiant existence and growth of China and Vietnam that could have thrown imperialism out of the region. Not the same history of imperialist/colonialist domination as in Latin America and Africa (which Chomsky does point out, to great effect).

He also remains silent on the strategic revolutionary/socialist aspects of Cuba's international intervention(s). Its subordination to Moscow's Socialism in One Country nationalism etc.

He doesn't mention the changing class structure in India, with the wholesale extinction of the old mainly rural caste system and the creation of a modern urban working class. He describes impoverishment, but not proletarianization as a process. He describes the flight of millions whose land has been stolen from them into the cities to unemployment, but doesn't mention the class dynamic involved in this.

And he doesn't go into where Lula comes from and why he might be a good leftie (class betrayal running the errands of foreign capital and big local capital, instead of the working class that nurtured him), or where Chavez comes from and why he's a leftie at all (same kind of petty-bourgeois military base as Castro in the 50s, and same reliance as Castro on the support of the poor masses to withstand the attacks of imperialism). Of course, Castro had Moscow, but on the other hand, Chavez is deeply rooted in Venezuela itself, and in the military, and he now has control of oil rather than sugar. Serious democratic nationalism today is forced to head for socialism and internationalism if it wants to survive, it has no other choice except capitulation to imperialism. So in a way, Chavez is a throwback to the anti-colonial struggle in the age of imperialism :-) Not much of a model for other countries to follow in other words - but quite possibly an enabler of more working-class and contemporary socialist movements in other countries (maybe Bolivia, Ecuador, even Argentina) to seize the reins of power and move forward.

Interesting that he mentions Clinton but doesn't generalize on the strategic importance of his Latin American initiatives more. Clinton's policies re Mexico, re Colombia, and re Iraq all contributed more than anything the more aggressive Bush has done to undermine those countries and weaken them strategically. And we can expect a repeat performance if another soft-cop Clinton gets into the White House.