Congratulations to Olivia Hallisey

The high school junior won the grand prize at this year’s Google Science Fair for her quick Ebola test. If only every student could have the resources available to kids in Greenwich, Connecticut…

(I also like this robot gardener.)

Mr. Robot

Good show.



Good soundtrack.

MyTransHealth

Via Our Hen House, I discovered Chickpeas and Change (now added to my blog list on the left). Via Chickpeas and Change, I learned about MyTransHealth, which is dedicated to “Connecting the Trans Community with Doctors Who Care.”



They’ve already exceeded their initial $20,000 fundraising goal on Kickstarter



and will evidently launch in the fall. They’ve been featured in Business Insider and The Daily Dot, so it doesn’t appear to be a scam (I’m always suspicious everything is a scam). Sounds like a useful service.

The Saudi Cables and the TPP Healthcare Annex

Two new troves of documents published by Wikileaks: the Saudi Cables, of which a portion were released yesterday (evidently the most damning are to appear any moment now...), and the TPP Healthcare Annex (to the “transparency” chapter), which was released last week.

The Saudi Cables:

Today, Friday 19th June at 1pm GMT, WikiLeaks began publishing The Saudi Cables: more than half a million cables and other documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry that contain secret communications from various Saudi Embassies around the world. The publication includes “Top Secret” reports from other Saudi State institutions, including the Ministry of Interior and the Kingdom’s General Intelligence Services. The massive cache of data also contains a large number of email communications between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and foreign entities. The Saudi Cables are being published in tranches of tens of thousands of documents at a time over the coming weeks. Today WikiLeaks is releasing around 70,000 documents from the trove as the first tranche.

…

The Saudi Cables provide key insights into the Kingdom’s operations and how it has managed its alliances and consolidated its position as a regional Middle East superpower, including through bribing and co-opting key individuals and institutions. The cables also illustrate the highly centralised bureaucratic structure of the Kingdom, where even the most minute issues are addressed by the most senior officials.

[Source]

As’ad AbuKhalil has a post today about the Saudi regime’s comical – well, they would be comical were the regime not in the habit of imprisoning, torturing, and beheading noncompliant “citizens” – warnings:

This is hilarious. The Saudi foreign ministry issued this directive to its citizens: It reads: ‘Dear Aware Citizen: Avoid entering any site for the purpose of obtaining leaked documents or information that may be untrue, for harming the security of the homeland’. Kid you not. The second one reads: ‘Dear Aware Citizen: Don’t publish any documents that may be untrue which could aid the enemies of the homeland in attaining their goals’. Kid you not.

The TPP Healthcare Annex:

Today, Wednesday 10 June 2015, WikiLeaks publishes the Healthcare Annex to the secret draft “Transparency” Chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), along with each country's negotiating position. The Healthcare Annex seeks to regulate state schemes for medicines and medical devices. It forces healthcare authorities to give big pharmaceutical companies more information about national decisions on public access to medicine, and grants corporations greater powers to challenge decisions they perceive as harmful to their interests.

Expert policy analysis, published by WikiLeaks today, shows that the Annex appears to be designed to cripple New Zealand's strong public healthcare programme and to inhibit the adoption of similar programmes in developing countries. The Annex will also tie the hands of the US Congress in its ability to pursue reforms of the Medicare programme.

The draft is restricted from release for four years after the passage of the TPP into law.

…

Few people, even within the negotiating countries' governments, have access to the full text of the draft agreement and the public, who it will affect most, have none at all. Hundreds of large corporations, however, have been given access to portions of the text, generating a powerful lobby to effect changes on behalf of these groups.

[Source]

Review of Timothy Melley, The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (2012)

Generally speaking, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the relations among the covert state, democracy, and culture. I’ll summarize its main points, talk about the best aspects, and then move on to a couple of criticisms.

Melley’s argument is that the institutionalization and expansion of the covert state since the Second World War¹ has profoundly altered US democracy, and, most relevantly, the conditions of knowledge about government activities. This has made for a substantial transformation of the democratic public sphere, leading to a predominance of fiction in how people understand foreign and domestic policy and themselves as individual citizens or a democratic public.

In the early years of the Cold War, Melley recounts, government began to shift in the direction of institutional covert action and public deception and manipulation. The National Security Act established the CIA in 1947, followed the next year by NSC-10/2, authorizing

propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world

all undertaken such that “if uncovered the U.S. government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.” “When President Truman signed this directive on June 18, 1948,” Melley suggests, “he institutionalized not simply secret warfare but also public deception as a fundamental element,” indeed “a structural requirement,” of government policy. Furthermore, the US – like so many other countries - has lived under an almost constant state of exception throughout this period.

These changes have had far-reaching consequences, the significance of which is not often adequately appreciated. “While there was nothing new about espionage,” Melley argues, “the degree to which foreign policy matters were sequestered from the public sphere during the Cold War fundamentally – and perhaps permanently – transformed U.S. democracy.” During the Cold War, the government “made a considerable investment in transforming the conditions of public knowledge at home and abroad.” However, the state always needs public acceptance of, or at least acquiescence to, its actions, and so it “has an interest in generating a public that thinks it has a general knowledge of such work but does not and cannot know in detail.” A key aspect of these transformations is that the public lives in a state of half-knowledge and open secrets - we don’t know what the secret government is doing, but we know that it exists:

In an era of covert action, citizens are offered a modified social contract in which they are asked to trade democratic oversight for enhanced security. In so doing, they tacitly acknowledge that their elected leaders will deceive them about some actions taken on their behalf.

In this situation, as I’ll discuss in more detail below, the public sphere gives way to the covert sphere – “a cultural imaginary shaped by both institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state.” The covert sphere is fiction-based, according to Melley, in three significant ways. First, covert agencies themselves continuously produce fictions in the service of their perceived aims: “The projection of strategic ‘fictions’, in fact, is a primary goal of clandestine agencies.”²

Second, instead of publicity and rational debate concerning government policy, the covert sphere “is dominated by narrative fictions, such as novels, films, television series, and electronic games, for fiction” - considered comparatively “nonserious” - “is one of the few discourses in which the secret work of the state can be disclosed to the citizens.” While some of these fictions are critical, most serve the covert state’s purposes:

The fictions of the covert sphere simultaneously make visible the secret work of the state and consign this work to the realm of fantasy. They confer a half-knowledge that makes government secrecy tolerable because it offers the public the opportunity to proclaim its official ignorance – and then to be shocked when the details of secret programs leak, via nonfiction discourse, into the ‘sheltered’ public sphere.³

Through a combination of state secrecy and public representation, the covert sphere not only smooths over the central contradiction of the Cold War state – that Western democracy can preserve itself only through the suspension of democracy – but it turns this troubling proposition into a source of public reassurance and even pleasure.

This is particularly the case with what Melley calls the “geopolitical melodrama.”

Third, the rise of the covert state “had a powerful role in fostering the forms of suspicion, skepticism, and uncertainty that would eventually find their fullest expression in postmodernism.”

As noted above, Melley develops the concept of the fiction-dominated covert sphere by contrasting it with the principles and practice of the Enlightenment public sphere, whose “dominant discourse” is “journalism, history, jurisprudence, and other approaches grounded in an ethical insistence on ‘truth as correspondence to fact’.” He explains:

[T]he astonishing growth of clandestine institutions since World War II has produced a qualitative change in the structure of public knowledge about U.S. foreign affairs. The institutional infrastructure of the covert state – particularly its commitments to ‘plausible deniability’, hypercompartmentalization, psychological warfare, and covert action – is a significant barrier to certain forms of public knowledge. As the ideal of rational democracy came into increasing tension with what can be called psychological operations, the result was not simply a reduction of public knowledge but a transformation of the discursive means through which the public ‘knows’, or imagines, the work of the state.

If the watchwords of the Enlightenment public sphere were rationality and publicity, then the watchwords of the Cold War covert sphere would be irrationalism, secrecy, uncertainty, and suspicion.

Unlike the ‘rational-critical’ public sphere, then, the covert sphere is marked by a structural irrationality, for the democratic state prohibits citizens from engaging in public oversight of its covert activities.

The Covert Sphere is quite good at analyzing how the rise of said sphere has been seen in gendered terms. The Enlightenment public sphere conceives of citizens as autonomous, informed (male) agents actively participating in the formulation of public policy, which takes place outside the sheltered, “feminine” domestic sphere. But

[a]s the Cold War covert sector became the arena in which foreign policy was made, U.S. citizens were shuttled into a more passive civic role. By offering security in exchange for submission to the inscrutable will of a state protector, this new social compact placed the public in an increasingly feminized relation to a paternalistic state.⁴

The “exclusion of the Cold War public from the male realm of state policymaking” meant that “the public sphere was tacitly reconceived along the lines of the feminized domestic sphere,” which raised the masculine anxiety level. Melley offers a fascinating discussion of how these fears about the institutional decline of liberal individualism were expressed in the discourse surrounding “brainwashing” - the “nightmare of masculinity undone.”

In response, “the fictions of the covert sphere compensate for this structural ‘feminization’ with fantasies of masculinist bravado and heroic agency.” In these fantasies, “feminized civilians…project themselves into the hypermasculine bodies of professional warriors.” Further, these popular fictions “also critique the public sphere as a domestic fantasy.” In other words, what people have been deprived of in terms of real democratic knowledge and participation is returned to them as fantasy through popular entertainments, and “an entire cultural machinery is now in place to cultivate such fantasies” in the form of fiction for adults and children, television shows, movies, video games, and so forth.

Melley argues that the most important of these today is what he calls the “geopolitical melodrama,” whose “ideological function… is to defend the operation of a Cold War security state in a post-Cold War climate.” The geopolitical melodrama

is defined by the yoking of two distinct but related nightmares. First, an external enemy of state – usually a cell of terrorists – takes aim at the U.S. population and security apparatus, which is depicted as a technologically miraculous apparatus that is nonetheless vulnerable to external attacks. Second, this massive system itself goes awry, threatening the democracy it was designed to prevent.

The masculine hero - generally a Western covert agent - who saves his family and the population from both the state’s enemies and the overweening security state itself is in the mold of “the classic ‘rugged’ male individualist of the western or the noir detective tale: a clearheaded maverick with a penchant for breaking social rules and an abiding disgust for the political infighting, inertia, and rule-bound strictures of bureaucracy.” Projecting themselves into this figure “compensates” the audience “for the dread terror of becoming a feminized ward of the security state.” Additionally, the genre serves the needs of the covert state to secure acquiescence by “articulat[ing] a defense of pragmatic illegal action”: “If the hero must do ‘whatever it takes’ to protect his family, then by extension the government should do the same to protect its citizens.” And “whatever it takes” often includes torture.

This has become a significant film and TV genre, and it’s worthwhile to examine its (anti-)democratic and compensatory functions. Melley’s discussion of several of these works is among the best parts of the book.

The general argument of The Covert Sphere is solid and innovative, and the sections on the responses to the growth of the covert state in a context of anxious masculinity and the geopolitical melodrama are particularly insightful. But I’m now going to discuss some of the book’s weaker points. These are related and really overlapping, but involve two basic issues: first, the lack of clarity and consistency in Melley’s view of the public sphere and thus in his critical evaluation of the covert sphere; and second, his often-unconvincing argument that postmodern fiction offers not just a reflection but a meaningful critique of the covert state and sphere.

Judging from what I’ve presented so far, it would be reasonable to assume that Melley’s critique of the covert sphere comes from a standpoint of support for the democratic public sphere. And that implicitly seems to be the case, but Melley seems inexplicably resistant to declaring such a stance. “My goal,” he insists,

is neither to suggest a means of ‘healing’ the wounded public sphere – as if the revelation of secrets would suddenly restore ‘real’ democracy…nor to depict the public sphere as a transparent, democratic ideal that has been sullied primarily by the rise of Cold War secrecy. Government has always had secret components, and as so many of Habermas’s interlocutors have shown, the democratic public sphere has long seemed ‘secret’ or off-limits to large segments of the public, particularly women, minorities, and the lower classes.

First, sure, but that has nothing to do with the principles of transparency and democracy, of information and participation. Habermas’ original depiction of the “bourgeois public sphere” has indeed been criticized, but at the same time over the years people have developed analyses of democratic public spheres that are far less exclusionary and even subversive. The masculinist aspects of the public sphere aren’t necessary to or even compatible with real democracy; in contrast, its basic values certainly are opposed to those of the covert state.

Second, defending the values of the democratic public sphere and “restor[ing] ‘real’ democracy” (the scare quotes are oddly telling) doesn’t involve simply the “revelation of secrets” but a radical challenge to existing institutions in the name of democratic values. Melley is right to question the effects of “heroic public sphere” narratives, like the films with a fantasy ending of public exposure that’s somehow expected to bring about real change. But the exposure of any particular truth or set of truths of course doesn’t exhaust the possibilities for democratic action.

At some moments, Melley seems to suggest that democratic activists’ only hope is the captive media of the covert sphere, as there’s nowhere else to turn. “[T]he deeper one digs in the clandestine archive,” he argues, “the more one doubts that public reason can be guaranteed by the institutions of the public sphere. One of the most important functions of the intelligence services is to manipulate public opinion through propaganda and disinformation, which is most effective when circulated by unwitting civilian journalists and presses.” Indeed, “some journalistic representations of the covert state turn out to be in fact strategic fictions produced by state agencies for instrumental purposes. Such influences create confusion and, when discovered, foster public skepticism, distrust, and uncertainty – a sense that the business of covert warfare can never be publicly known.”

Again, very true, but there’s a whole world of media critics and alternative-media practitioners who see both exposing manipulation and disinformation and continuing to do investigative journalism as fundamental to the democratic project. Melley remarks, strangely, that his argument “is not that the covert sphere represses discourse while the public sphere circulates it. It is rather that institutional constraints on public knowledge shift discourse in the direction of fiction.” This is dangerous in that it elides any differences between the sham public-sphere operations of the covert sphere on the one hand and the basic values of the public sphere and actual efforts in service of those values on the other.

This dismissive attitude toward the (possibilities for a) public sphere is all the stranger in light of the fact that he suggests in several cases – Jane Mayer’s articles in the New Yorker, the book Invitation to an Inquest - that journalism and historiography have provided important counternarratives to the strategic fictions of the covert sphere. Melley’s point is well made that

[a]s state security increases, it hinders the privileged forms of modern narrative knowledge – history and journalism - that insist on the correspondence of narrative to events. Such correspondences are difficult to trace when it is hard (or illegal) to obtain documents, official confirmation, and other traditional forms of evidence.

This is a major public issue. The questions, then, are: Is this a problem, and if so why? Does the rise of the covert sphere reveal basic problems with these privileged forms of knowledge themselves, or should they be defended and reclaimed, and if so how? For some reason, Melley seems to wish not to take a clear position on these questions, at times appearing to lament the decline of the public sphere and side with its defenders and at others to appear more neutral (or at least to suggest that its return, even if potentially desirable, is all but impossible).

With regard to the “public” of the public sphere, there are some issues here, too. There’s certainly a critical tone to Melley’s (correct) depiction of the narcissism of the geopolitical melodrama – its “almost total erasure of the history and claims of those who are the real targets of the state’s clandestine apparatus.” Unlike many Cold War fictions, the geopolitical melodrama “does invite U.S. citizens to imagine themselves targets of the security state - not in an expression of solidarity with minoritized targets, but rather in a narcissistic fantasy that ‘disappears’ populations with grievances about U.S. policy.”

Melley notes the “striking differences between U.S. and postcolonial narratives of U.S. foreign engagement” in this context of US narcissism and exceptionalism. But after pointing this out, he presents his analysis from an almost entirely US-centric perspective (with a few references to French philosophers and social critics). The book is clearly “about” the US public, but even the US public doesn’t appear to be its audience. In fact, Melley writes about the US public almost as though they/we have no political agency – to some extent adopting the disdainful perspective of the covert state itself. The US public is presented as eminently manipulable and irresponsible, and often as eagerly participating in our own deception. The various ways the public and the media acquiesce to and even cheer government secrecy and violent covert action appear as inevitable and not as failings which can be addressed or choices for which people can be held accountable. (The flip side of this is that Melley pays little attention to domestic covert action that works tirelessly to suppress dissent.) All of this contrasts starkly with, for example, the existentialists’ writings about colonialism, which were addressed to a French (and often a global) public, presumed to be real political agents who could choose to change course.

All of these issues come into play in Melley’s presentation of the relationship between postmodern fiction and the covert state. I’ll first say that this is an original and fascinating discussion, and Melley makes a strong case for the existence of a correspondence between the two. I can’t begin to do justice here to the detailed and nuanced analyses of the various works Melley considers. I’m going to focus on the aspect of the argument that I find most problematic.

Melley argues, I think correctly, that postmodernism (and pomo fiction specifically) is in some part a child of the rise of the covert state and its epistemological effects:

My claim…is not that postmodernism is a simple product of the Cold War, but rather that national security institutions were among several crucial factors – including the postwar triumph of new mass media, strategic communications, and multinational capitalism – that altered the conditions of public knowledge in postwar Western societies, generating a pervasive skepticism about the public’s ability to know what is real and true. A good deal of U.S postmodernism expresses this epistemological skepticism.

Postmodernism’s

central quality is skepticism about how to know and represent the world, particularly as history. Postmodernism emphasizes the constructed nature of narratives, philosophical and social structures, and even persons. It reflects the institutions of mass culture, and it thematizes the artifice of nearly everything, especially nature (or ‘nature’) itself. Its distinctive effect on readers and observers is disorientation or confusion about the nature of the real.

Melley does an excellent job in showing how many of postmodernism’s central tenets and themes seem to have grown in the context created by the construction and expansion of the covert state. Pomo themes closely reflect the epistemic conditions of the covert sphere. Indeed, “for a number of influential literary figures, the covert state” itself “has become a central object of reflection and…a major stimulus of postmodern epistemological skepticism.”⁵

It’s the second part of Melley’s argument that I find far less convincing, however: his contention that many pomo writers successfully “critique the epistemological conditions of the Cold War by reproducing them in fictional form.” Of course, determining the effectiveness of any attempt at critique is always a complicated matter, involving knowledge of audiences and their understanding of artistic traditions and intent, the larger political context, and so on. And naturally each work and author has to be examined individually.⁶

In a general sense, though, given the evidence as Melley presents it, I don’t think he supports his repeated claims that pomo fiction not only reflects the conditions of the covert sphere but challenges them. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that much of it goes a long way toward normalizing them. This is primarily for three reasons. First, what postmodernism fundamentally set itself up in opposition to, as he notes, was not the covert state but modernism, characterized as a regime of facts. Postmodernism is “at bottom an expression of skepticism about the project of modernity, particularly its commitments to scientific rationality, individualism, and universalism.” Postmodernism as a project challenges an image of modernism that includes the very public-sphere means of knowledge – science, journalism, historiography – that are undermined by the covert state. In this sense, postmodernism, the covert state, and corporations have had the same target and mission. As Melley notes,

In a quite literal way, the National Security State institutionalized a critique of modern rational knowing…by engaging in what George Kennan called ‘irrationalism’, ‘unreality’, and ‘the necessary lie’….

Within the rhetoric of the public sphere, this transformation produced a contest between rational democracy and psychological operations….

If intelligence collection is the analogue of empiricism or realism, then covert operations, and Psy Ops in particular, abandon faithful representation for something akin to the postmodernist’s deliberate conflation of reality, simulation, and myth.

It’s difficult to see how pomo critiques of the modern “regime of facts” in this context are supposed to threaten the covert state; quite the contrary.

Second, postmodernism tends to present the very political and institutional conditions which Melley recognizes as the result of political choices as an ontological condition in which real knowledge and truth are impossible chimeras. Again, this naturalizes and universalizes the political conditions created by the covert state. Even if individual pomo works recognize the rise of the covert state as an important political cause of contemporary epistemic difficulties, they enter a river of pomo naturalization that undercuts that recognition.

Third, while Melley argues that postmodernism adopts the forms of the covert sphere in order to challenge them, the whole idea of critique through serious imitation is questionable. To argue that postmodern “texts that emphasize epistemological or ontological confusion” effectively work to challenge the covert state requires that a very strong case be made to support it, especially in light of the context described in the first two points – a postmodern tradition that questions the existence of realities that can be legitimately known and recognized, that challenges “the modern ideal of truth as a correspondence between statements and evidence.”

Over and over, Melley describes the points at which the covert state and postmodernism converge. His argument “is not that the clandestine world is ‘postmodern’ but that it produces the sort of extreme epistemological uncertainty that postmodernism would later convert into an aesthetic.” Feature after feature of the covert world is shown also to characterize postmodernism: an emphasis on suspicion and the difficulty or impossibility of knowing what’s real or true; the blurring of fact and fiction; the “confusing of the real with its representations”; the deployment of instrumental or strategic fictions;… The similarities are everywhere:

[T]he conditions of public knowledge under a regime of state secrecy generate forms of suspicion and unknowing uncannily similar to those typically associated with postmodern representation.

[The covert state’s] operational goal…was often to blur the authentic and the fabricated, reality and representation – precisely the sort of ontological confabulation that has come to define postmodernism.

Melley explicitly acknowledges this strong resemblance, and how it complicates some postmodern claims to effective political opposition, as in his discussion of Doctorow’s arguments in “False Documents.” He also recognizes, to some extent, that others have seen in postmodern fiction anything but a genuine subversion of political power. Oddly, it’s in the discussion of the most clearly critical work of those he analyzes - Robert Coover’s 1977 The Public Burning, which “brilliantly critiques the state’s ‘spectacle of secrecy’ through a revolutionary postmodernism that stresses the fictional quality of the Rosenberg affair” – that he raises this issue. The novel, which “parodies the irrationality of the Cold War covert sphere” and is “specifically designed to mock [the] undoing of Habermasian public reason,” “powerfully illustrates,” Melley argues, his “claim that postmodern narrative is both a reflection of, and a response to, Cold War epistemology.”

What’s strange is that Melley presents Coover’s parodical challenge as both postmodern and ironic:

Ironically, Coover’s postmodernism critiques problems themselves associated with postmodernism – a confusion of the real and the fictional, the hindrance of critical reason, and the conflation of distinct ‘realities’ or ontological zones. This irony is what Linda Hutcheon means when she speaks of postmodernism’s ‘complicitous critique’….

My point, however, is not that Coover has reinforced the very logic he wishes to critique. On the contrary, his brilliant critique of Cold War hysteria reflects back the epistemological constraints of the covert sphere, in which state secrecy impedes the public’s attempts to disentangle fact from fiction. If…there is a sort of ‘postmodern’ quality to the Cold War security state, then Coover’s work rearticulates the quality in order to expose and critique it.

The problem here is that Coover’s work as presented by Melley isn’t postmodern in the sense of accepting or even reproducing in form the covert sphere’s confusion, hindrance, and conflation; it explicitly criticizes them. While it uses some pomo forms, it does so in a context of overtly parodying the covert state and the epistemic problems to which it gives rise. So it isn’t complicit in Hutcheons’ sense. In contrast, though, the other works Melley discusses, and postmodernism in general, are more suspect in this regard.

Some examples: First, the image of the CIA. Melley suggests that “[t]he CIA has cultivated its own secular mythology in which it is a vast organism unknowable through the protocols of the rational public sphere.” The “critical” pomo response to this, as described by Melley, is to reproduce the myth:

Popular narrative frequently represents the CIA as a quasi-divine being with extraordinary powers of surveillance. No one has captured this sense better than Don DeLillo, whose characters consistently view the agency as vast, omnipresent, and supernatural.

How is this critical?

Second, the possibilities of accurate narratives. Melley notes that the writer Charles Baxter “views narrative dysfunction as a symptom, and not a critique, of official obfuscation.” But Melley disagrees, insisting that it’s paradoxical:

Narrative dysfunction is a central paradox of covert-sphere postmodernism. On the one hand, narratives in which ‘events never gel into “facts”’ seem to reproduce the effects of deniability and ahistoricism that Baxter and others find so problematic. On the other hand, deliberately ‘weak’ or dysfunctional narrativity is a powerful way to reveal the conditions of knowledge in a regime of state secrecy.

“Many postmodern novels develop intentionally incomplete or ‘dysfunctional’ narratives to critique the conditions of knowledge in a regime of state secrecy,” Melley argues. DeLillo’s novel Libra, for example, uses confused narrative “to critique the conditions of knowledge produced by the Cold War security apparatus. Its historiographic skepticism is both a symptom of state secrecy and a powerful commentary on it.” Joan Didion similarly “is…a master of ‘narrative dysfunction’ as a vehicle for understanding the feminization of the Cold War public sphere.” Works like Democracy are “preoccupied with the difficulty of telling a story. From the beginning, the narrator expresses hesitation and doubt. She compulsively emphasizes her own authorial perspective and suggests alternative ways in which the story could be told.” The book’s “halting, elliptical, ironic style clearly reflects Didion’s vision of dysfunctional Cold War democracy”; her style “imitates the logic of Cold War democracy in order to critique it. It is the narrative embodiment of the dysfunctional covert sphere.”

But the issue with regard to these works (again, as Melley presents them) is different from a work like Coover’s, which is so plain in its parodic purpose. Where does the postmodern critique of modernity leave off and the contrary critique of the covert sphere begin? How simple is it to see the critique in the narrative embodiment? The “complicitous” aspect is clear – not so much the critique.

Third, the ontological status of the spaces of violent covert or military operations. Melley argues correctly that “[t]he colonial imagination…projects a demonological and racialized anxiety about unknowing onto the distant sites of Cold War battle.” The covert sphere “converts the frontiers of U.S. empire into a site of epistemological confusion.” Denis Johnson’s 2007 Tree of Smoke, which “rewrites the Vietnam War as a story of psychological operations in order to critique the Bush War on Terror,” critically reproduces this projection. The colonial “vision of covert warfare as a step beyond reason informs Johnson’s entire portrait of Vietnam as a place that seems wholly other to its U.S. invaders.” Johnson’s portrayal of Vietnam is characterized by “a wonderland quality,” a “radical otherness,” an “atmosphere of hallucinatory horror and insanity.” In this, the work connects to “an entire tradition of Vietnam narratives.”

As he notes, this perfectly “reflects the discourse on postmodernism. Whether there is a single totalizing order…or multiple realities…is among the central questions of postmodernism.” Further, “postmodernism renders the Third World, from a Western perspective, an incomprehensible parallel universe.” So for the USians depicted by Johnson,

the incomprehensibility of Vietnam makes it seem a place outside laws and reason altogether. The postmodern sense of different ‘realities’ thus becomes a vehicle for managing racial and cultural difference. It permits Americans to recast Vietnam as a literal ‘state of exception’, a place outside the law, a zone of supernatural horror in which every form of normality has been upended.

Tree of Smoke is thus filled with American sociopaths who cannot understand or explain their world. …This is the portrait of a nation that has lost its way.

So the novel, as described by Melley, presents the sites of US military action as – to its characters, at least – alternate realities beyond morality, law, reason, and comprehension, places of inherent horror and violence. Once again, I’m not sure how powerfully this reproduction can convey the sociopathy of this view, particularly when the idea of such “multiple realities” is so much a part of postmodern thought. By way of contrast, Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Henri Alleg’s The Question (for all its speciesism, masculinism, and other assorted problems) openly challenges the French public’s similar attempts at escapism surrounding their government’s use of torture in the Algerian War. The torture cells of Algeria aren’t an alternate reality but the real sites of political crimes, he insists:

We were fascinated by the abyss of the inhuman; but one hard and stubborn man, obstinately carrying out his role as a man, is sufficient to rescue us from our giddiness. The ‘question’ is not inhuman; it is quite simply a vile, revolting crime, committed by men against men, and to which other men can and must put an end. The inhuman does not exist anywhere, except in the nightmares engendered by fear. And it is precisely the calm courage of a victim, his modesty and his lucidity, which awaken and demystify us: Alleg has just seized torture from the darkness that covers it; let us now have a closer look at it in broad daylight. [emphasis added]

It’s not that reproducing a character’s colonialist vision can never be used to challenge it (as I’ve suggested, Ursula Le Guin brilliantly does so in The Word for World is Forest). But it’s a tricky thing to do, especially when your audience is prone to accept the projections and when allegedly critical traditions are in many ways complicit with them.

Fourth and finally, collective amnesia and the “problem of cultural memory,” especially concerning violent military/covert operations. Melley suggests that amnesia is a major theme in postmodern fiction, which has underlined how “the difficulty of grounding historical narratives has led to dangerous forms of collective forgetting.” Again we see the connection to the security state: amnesia is both “a pervasive trope for the historiographical dilemma of postmodernism, a way of articulating the conditions of knowledge in postwar society through the psychoanalytical framework of repression, disavowal, and forgetting” and “a prominent trope of the covert sphere, a way of addressing the problem of democracy in an era of covert foreign policy.” And “[t]he coincidence…is no accident, for…U.S. postmodernism was substantially shaped by the institutions of the Cold War.”

The work on which Melley focuses here is Tim O’Brien’s 1994 In the Lake of the Woods, which “recounts the My Lai massacre through a disturbing tale of posttraumatic amnesia.” The story presents the main character’s amnesia as “inseparable from more serious collective-memory failures,” and Melley contends that its “radical ambiguity indicts the amnesia of the public and the dysfunction of the public sphere.” The protagonist’s amnesia is plainly the result of traumatic violence, both inflicted on and perpetrated by him.⁷ It’s less clear from Melley’s description, though, how well it works as an “indictment” of collective amnesia in the US surrounding the Vietnam War. With regard to the shattered public sphere and its forms of knowledge, it does seem to provide a critical commentary:

The novel’s historical narrative…expresses a realist desire to terminate the experience of trauma by putting it into perspective…. But in the precincts of the covert sphere, this proves impossible. No matter how much the narrator wants to critique the society that has forgotten these events, he must admit that he, too, has no purchase on them. …He, too, has learned to forget.

The “realist impulse” is thwarted by the dysfunctional public sphere. But is it an indictment of the covert state or a picture of the tragic fate of the modern condition?

I believe that many of these authors do intend to challenge the covert state, in addition to their other artistic goals. But in several cases I don’t think that Melley has convincingly supported his argument that the specific use of postmodern forms and tropes has done more to challenge than to reflect or even support it. As I said (far) above, I share Melley’s concerns about “heroic public sphere narratives.” And I’m not suggesting that all critical approaches to the covert state have to take the most traditional journalistic and historiographical forms, which would be boring. But reproducing the forms of the covert state to challenge the covert state always risks leaving the reader confused, or, worse, can in effect be complicit with anti-democratic state and corporate agendas.

¹ Today, “forty-five agencies, 1,271 government organizations, and 1,391 private corporations...do intelligence and counterterrorism work.”

² This includes the leaking of truths or half-truths; as Melley points out, even true information comes to take on a fictional cast in the covert sphere in that it’s provided in a limited, strategic, manipulative manner.

³ Melley notes that “The surprises of the covert sphere often lie less in the revelation of secrets than in the public’s astonishment at ‘discovering’ what is already public.” It’s especially interesting in this context to note that in this 2012 book he discusses James Mitchell and the reverse-SERE torture program, which the public was again astonished to “discover” last year with the publication of the Senate report.

⁴ And not just a paternalistic state, but one that institutionally and necessarily treats the public with contempt and disdain through its lies and manipulations.

⁵ These include, as Melley lists, Kathy Acker, Margaret Atwood, William S. Burroughs, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Joan Didion, E.L. Doctorow, William Gibson, Graham Greene, Michael Herr, Denis Johnson, Tony Kushner, John Le Carré, Norman Mailer, Joseph McElroy, Tim O’Brien, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Robert Stone, Jess Walter, and John A. Williams. He discusses several of these authors’ works in depth.

⁶ I’ve read few of the works in question and so can’t offer an analysis independent of Melley’s of their success as critiques of the covert sphere. Nor can I comment on the writers’ motives for the most part, and generally accept their intent as critical. And this shouldn’t be read as an evaluation of the books as works of art. What’s important here is how they’re portrayed by Melley as critical of the “covert condition” specifically in their postmodern aspects.

⁷ Almost all of the novels discussed by Melley are about USians; virtually none about the victims of US state violence in other countries.

Citizenfour and Online Covert Action

Of course, everyone should see Citizenfour:



Looking at the summary of disclosures since 2013, I was reminded (?) about the revelations at the Intercept a year ago about the GCHQ unit JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group) and its program of “Online Covert Action.”

Glenn Greenwald wrote at the time:

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.

…The broader point is that, far beyond hacktivists, these surveillance agencies have vested themselves with the power to deliberately ruin people’s reputations and disrupt their online political activity even though they’ve been charged with no crimes, and even though their actions have no conceivable connection to terrorism or even national security threats.

…Whatever else is true, no government should be able to engage in these tactics: what justification is there for having government agencies target people – who have been charged with no crime – for reputation-destruction, infiltrate online political communities, and develop techniques for manipulating online discourse? But to allow those actions with no public knowledge or accountability is particularly unjustifiable.

It seems that for some reason this information didn’t fully register with me at the time. Naturally, it’s of great interest to me. Two observations:

First, corporations do this, too.

Second, seeing the documents (like the set of slides Greenwald links to – “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations”) evokes a mixture of rage and…sadness. Someone put this presentation together, and this is actual work people do. Like the employees of the repressive secret services of East Germany or Iran, they have, for whatever reason, chosen to devote years if not their lives to this. In some cases, people have dedicated their professional knowledge and understanding of psychology and sociology not to serving real needs, but to manipulating, deceiving, and destroying people in the service of the state. This is their legacy. It’s pathetic.

The best television I watched in 2014

This will be a short one.

For news and commentary, I preferred some shows in the MSNBC line-up: All In with Chris Hayes, The Rachel Maddow Show, and Melissa Harris-Perry (the most diverse of the Sunday shows in 2014 for the second year in a row). On PBS, Bill Moyers remained consistently good. (They’re liberals, but I’m not expecting anarchist television any time soon...) And for comedic political commentary, John Oliver’s weekly show has been a superb addition.



(That clip is actually from this week, but it’s important enough to mention here – I discussed this very issue here last year.)

I continue to enjoy Scandal, Revenge, and Castle on ABC, but there are two other lesser-known shows that captured my interest last year. First, Manhattan on WGN America:



I love the music and look forward to the second season. I can’t do that with the other interesting drama series on a small channel, We TV’s The Divide,



because they cancelled it. Very unhappy about that.

The necrophilous Ayn Rand, Part 2

In my previous post, I described Erich Fromm’s notion of the necrophilous character, as both an individual and a cultural pathology. I noted that, reading Adam Lee’s series about Atlas Shrugged, I started to see Ayn Rand as a clear embodiment – a word she would likely cringe to hear applied to herself - of this character. This surprised me because Lee’s posts, for the most part, didn’t primarily concern this aspect of Rand’s psychology. Nor did I have the book available to search for more examples, which undoubtedly exist. I didn’t need it, since even the small sample of quotations presented by Lee in these assorted contexts just scream “Necrophile!”*

Rand’s necrophilous tendencies are apparent from her physical descriptions of her characters, particularly in comparison to her paeans to nonliving substances and technical processes. They can also be seen in her disregard for the natural world and celebration of ecological destruction. At times, Rand’s descriptions of nonliving objects even reveal a fascination with violence toward living beings.

In showing that “in Randworld, moral worth is linked to physical attractiveness, and heroes and villains can be recognized and distinguished from each other by sight,” Lee offers Rand’s physical descriptions of her protagonists, Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart:

The glare cut a moment’s wedge across his eyes, which had the color and quality of pale blue ice – then across the black web of the metal column and the ash-blond strands of his hair – then across the belt of his trenchcoat and the pockets where he held his hands. His body was tall and gaunt; he had always been too tall for those around him. His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines; they were not the lines of age, he had always had them; this had made him look old at twenty, and young now, at forty-five. [p.34]

A sweep of brown hair fell back, almost touching the line of her shoulders. Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility, and unfeminine, as if she were unconscious of her own body and that it was a woman’s body. [p.20]

Most significant for my purposes is that what makes these characters attractive in Rand’s view is the extent to which they resemble nonliving things: icy eyes, sharp and angular features that know no age, precise and inflexible movements.** Taggart’s posture is explicitly contrasted with “womanly” or “feminine” embodiedness.

Even more telling, Lee provides, “[i]n the name of being fair to Rand” as a writer since he judges it “pretty good,” her vivid, breathless description of the pouring of molten steel at one of Rearden’s mills:

The narrow streak pouring through space had the pure white color of sunlight. Black coils of steam were boiling upward, streaked with violet red. Fountains of sparks shot in beating spasms, as from broken arteries. The air seemed torn to rags, reflecting a raging flame… But the liquid metal had no aspect of violence. It was a long white curve with the texture of satin and the friendly radiance of a smile. It flowed obediently through a spout of clay, with two brittle borders to restrain it, it fell through twenty feet of space, down into a ladle that held two hundred tons. [p.34]

While the human characters are praised for their resemblance to nonliving things, steel is imbued with the qualities of a living being, even the “friendly radiance of a smile”!

Rand’s disdain for the living world encompasses natural landscapes as well. Lee provides a quotation in which she describes a road trip taken by her heroes:

The earth went flowing under the hood of the car. Uncoiling from among the curves of Wisconsin’s hills, the highway was the only evidence of human labor, a precarious bridge stretched across a sea of brush, weeds and trees. The sea rolled softly, in sprays of yellow and orange, with a few red jets shooting up on the hillsides, with pools of remnant green in the hollows, under a pure blue sky.

…”What I’d like to see,” said Rearden, “is a billboard.” [p.262]

The presence of the natural world in human affairs is portrayed as illegitimate: “It was preposterous, he thought, this growing intrusion of the accidents of nature into the affairs of men…” In fact, the most tenderly described element of a vista turns out to be…a mass of coal smoke:

Mr. Mowen looked at the skyline, at the belts, the wheels, the smoke – the smoke that settled heavily, peacefully across the evening air, stretching in a long haze all the way to the city of New York somewhere beyond the sunset – and he felt reassured by the thought of New York in its ring of sacred fires, the ring of smokestacks, gas tanks, cranes and high tension lines. [p.255]

The passion “to destroy for the sake of destruction” and utter disregard for the natural consequences of destructive acts are evident in Rand’s apparent approval of a character’s setting fire to the oil wells he’s abandoning: “Later, when they told her that Ellis Wyatt had vanished, leaving nothing behind but a board he had nailed to a post at the foot of the hill, when she looked at his handwriting on the board, she felt as if she had almost known that these would be the words: ‘I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It’s yours’.” Lee points out that it’s doubtful Wyatt had found the wells on fire when he arrived, but the point is that “Rand sees this as a grand gesture of defiance, a metaphorical middle finger extended to the looters.”

One of Lee’s recent posts is maybe the most interesting. The quotations he provides describe scenes in which Rearden has given Taggart various gifts. Lee uses these scenes to illustrate Rand’s attitude toward selfishness and giving, even in romantic relationships. She can’t allow Rearden to give a gift without driving home that no acts should ever be performed for the purpose of making another person happy. But the descriptions of the gifts are themselves interesting:

On the evening of a blizzard, she came home to find an enormous spread of tropical flowers standing in her living room against the dark glass of windows battered by snowflakes. They were stems of Hawaiian Torch Ginger, three feet tall; their large heads were cones of petals that had the sensual texture of soft leather and the color of blood.

She opened it and stared in incredulous bewilderment at a pendant made of a single pear-shaped ruby that spurted a violent fire on the white satin of the jeweler’s box….

She stood naked, the stone between her breasts, like a sparkling drop of blood.

Here, as in the description of molten steel above, a gem – a hard, nonliving substance - is granted life-like qualities. Even more suggestive of the linkage Fromm suggests between the two forms of necrophilism, living flowers call pleasingly to Rand’s mind injury (“the color of blood”) and eroticized death (“the sensual texture of leather”).

Described in Gary Weiss’s 2012 Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul, Rand’s personality was atrocious in many ways. In her life as in her art, she would probably provide an excellent case study for a Frommian (or Horneyan, for that matter) analysis, not just of Rand as an individual but of the culture that creates and sustains these pathological tendencies. As Fromm suggests, understanding the necrophilous character, especially in relation to capitalism, has important implications for psychological and ecological health.

* I believe Fromm was correct in his contention that such tendencies could be revealed in “marginal, unintended ‘insignificant’ actions, the ‘psychopathology of everyday life’” (Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 374). While he at times took this observation to silly hyper-Freudian extremes – a person’s necrophilousness could be detected in “a particular kind of lifelessness in his conversation” (377), “a predilection for dark, light-absorbing colors” (377), an “incapacity to laugh” (378), and “a special affinity for bad odors” which can give necrophiles “the appearance of being ‘sniffers’” (378) – I do think it’s fair to look for evidence in a person’s literary or artistic works.

** I’m not suggesting that people with similar physical features to Rand’s heroes look less “human” or natural in my view. My argument concerns Rand’s attribution of nonliving/nonhuman qualities to these features and her disgust at what she considered fleshy, human bodies, which reveals an open contempt for the living human form. More generally, as I discussed in the previous post, an interest in the nonliving and mechanical is not in itself indicative of necrophilous tendencies; it has to be analyzed in terms of a person’s (or a culture’s) attitude toward living beings and the connotations living beings and nonliving artifacts have for them.

The necrophilous Ayn Rand, Part 1

I’ve recently started following along with Adam Lee’s insightful and entertaining journey through Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. Reading several of the older posts in his series as I’ve caught up, I’ve been struck by how well Rand seems to personify Erich Fromm’s conception of the necrophilous character. In this post I’ll describe what Fromm meant by the necrophilous character, and in the next I’ll draw on several quotations from Rand featured in Lee’s series as evidence of her necrophilous tendencies.

While Fromm saw the necrophilous* character as loosely related to sexual necrophilia, it was primarily drawn from a critical analysis of Freud’s idea of the “death instinct” and his own understanding of the human tendency and potential for biophilia. Here’s how Fromm defined biophilia and the basic biophilic ethic:

Biophilia is the passionate love of life and of all that is alive. It is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group.** The biophilous person prefers to construct rather than to retain. He wants to be more rather than to have more. He is capable of wondering, and he prefers to see something new rather than to find confirmation of the old. He loves the adventure of living more than he does certainty. He sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations. He wants to mold and to influence by love, reason, and example; not by force, by cutting things apart, by the bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things….

Biophilic ethics have their own principle of good and evil. Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence for life, all that enhances life, growth, unfolding. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, cuts it into pieces. (Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 406; all further Fromm quotations are from the same volume)

Necrophilous tendencies, as this suggests, were the antithesis of biophilic ones:

Necrophilia in the characterological sense can be described as the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures. (369; emphasis in original)

Fromm didn’t believe that we have a death instinct or that the necrophilous character was innate and unavoidable. Instead, he thought people naturally had a more biophilic orientation which served human health and growth, but that its development could be blocked or subverted by childhood experience or culture. “Destructiveness,” he argued,

is not parallel to, but the alternative to biophilia. Love of life or love of the dead is the fundamental alternative that confronts every human being. Necrophilia grows as the development of biophilia is stunted. Man is biologically endowed with the capacity for biophilia, but psychologically he has the potential for necrophilia as an alternative solution. (406-7; emphasis in original)

So necrophilous tendencies are likely to develop in certain cultural atmospheres that interfere with biophilic growth.

While the definition of the necrophilous character above might seem to have a fairly narrow range, Fromm saw necrophilous tendencies as encompassing much of modern Western culture. The love of the “nonliving” could be seen not only in the direct attraction to the “dead, decayed, putrid, sickly” but also in an undue affection for the technological and mechanical, one of “the simplest and most obvious characteristics of contemporary industrial man: the stifling of his focal interest in people, nature, and living structures, together with the increasing attraction of mechanical, nonalive artifacts” (381).

While one recent biographer has suggested that Fromm was anti-technology, and some of his statements superficially suggest a hostility to science, what he in fact seemed to oppose was a particular orientation toward and conception of science and technology: one that wasn’t centered on life and growth or based in love of humanity and the world, that was alienated and alienating. After describing some examples of technological necrophilousness involving cars, cameras, and – a great word – “gadgeteers,” for example, he clarifies:

…I do not imply that using an automobile, or taking pictures, or using gadgets is in itself a manifestation of necrophilous tendencies. But it assumes this quality when it becomes a substitute for interest in life and for exercising the rich functions with which the human being is endowed. I also do not imply that the engineer who is passionately interested in the construction of machines of all kinds shows, for this reason, a necrophilous tendency. He may be a very productive person with great love of life that he expresses in his attitude toward people, toward nature, toward art, and in his constructive technical ideas. I am referring, rather, to those individuals whose interest in artifacts has replaced their interest in what is alive and who deal with technical matters in a pedantic and unalive way. (382; emphasis in original)

Fromm’s go-to example of a techno-necrophilous culture (in contrast to the more traditionalist necrophilousness of the Spanish fascists) was F. T. Marinetti and the other Italian Futurists. Quoting from Marinetti’s 1909 “Futurist Manifesto”, he writes: “Here we see the essential elements of necrophilia: worship of speed and the machine; poetry as a means of attack; glorification of war; destruction of culture; hate against women; locomotives and airplanes as living forces” (383).

So as Fromm saw it necrophilous tendencies could be expressed through both the hatred of living things and the attraction to death, destruction, and decay and the rejection of the living world in favor of the mechanical, nonliving realm of techno-driven society. Importantly, though, in this age of ecological destruction, he recognized the latter as in some sense also an expression of the former:

The world of life has become a world of ‘no-life’; persons have become ‘nonpersons’, a world of death. Death is no longer symbolically expressed by unpleasant-smelling feces or corpses. Its symbols are now clean, shining machines; men are not attracted to smelly toilets, but to structures of aluminum and glass. But the reality behind this antiseptic façade becomes increasingly visible. Man, in the name of progress, is transforming the world into a stinking and poisonous place (and this is not symbolic).*** He pollutes the air, the water, the soil, the animals – and himself. He is doing this to a degree that has made it doubtful whether the earth will still be livable within a hundred years from now. He knows the facts, but in spite of many protesters, those in charge go on in the pursuit of technical ‘progress’ and are willing to sacrifice all life in the worship of their idol. (389; my emphasis)

…It makes little difference whether he does it intentionally or not. If he had no knowledge of the possible danger, he might be acquitted from responsibility. But it is the necrophilous element in his character that prevents him from making use of the knowledge he has.

…We must conclude that the lifeless world of total technicalization is only another form of the world of death and decay. This fact is not conscious to most, but to use an expression of Freud’s, the repressed often returns, and the fascination with death and decay becomes as visible as in the malignant anal character. (390; my emphasis)

Though Fromm wrote in individual terms, he saw the necrophilous tendency as a cultural product (driven by capitalism and Cold War politics; he paid less attention to patriarchy). He didn’t claim that people could be neatly sorted into “necrophilous” and “biophilous” boxes, but that most people exhibited both tendencies to some degree and that their relative strength was influenced by experience within a given culture and age. Very few people, he argued, could be described as fully one or the other. But he did mention, notably, several individual scientists (391) whom he considered representative of biophilia, and contended that there existed “a small minority…in whom there is no trace of necrophilia, who are pure biophiles motivated by the most intense and pure love for all that is alive. Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, and Pope John XXIII are among the well-known recent examples of this minority” (408).

I imagine many would question at least one person on this particular list - Fromm had an annoying tendency to idolize certain living or historical men (always men, as far as I can recall) as representatives of biophilia and as borderline messianic figures. In my next post, I’ll suggest some ways in which Ayn Rand fascinatingly illustrates the necrophilous character – in a manner that illuminates particular features of capitalism, patriarchy, and contemporary attitudes toward science, technology, and ecology.

* Fromm took the term from an angry response from Spanish writer-philosopher Miguel de Unamuno to a speech by the Francoist general José Millán Astray in 1936 which he quoted frequently (368).

** Although today the term “biophilia” connotes a relationship with the whole of the living world, Fromm’s formulation was often very human-centered. As his ideas developed, they did become more ecological (as can be seen in Anatomy and also in To Have or To Be?), but they never really came to include nonhuman animals in any meaningful way; in fact, nonhuman animals were often presented as objects or oppositional forces in Fromm’s work. This is somewhat surprising since Fromm repeatedly lists Albert Schweitzer as among those most representative of biophilia – “one of the great representatives of the love of life – both in his writings and in his person” (406). (I suppose this shouldn’t be so surprising: Jean-Paul Sartre was Schweitzer’s second cousin and he still managed to become one of the most speciesist of humanistic thinkers.)

*** The best example of the overlap between these two forms of necrophilousness, in which the attraction to the “antiseptic façade” barely conceals the desire for the “stinking and poisonous place” is in contemporary factory farming. As it grows bigger and more wrapped in mechanical rhetoric and “clean,” scientific practice, the ecological destruction becomes more and more visible – the toxic lagoons that surround CAFOs, the pollution of the surrounding water, the emissions of methane, the stench,…

A great new app for finding vegan meals and a dairy-free guide

Introducing the new PlantEaters app, Mariann Sullivan of Our Hen House says: “The most brilliant ideas are the ones that when you hear about them, you immediately think, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?!?’” I did, as it happens, think of it, a couple of months ago, as my family and friends can attest (my name was the Vegan Menu Project, but PlantEaters is nice, too. :)) So obviously I agree that it’s a brilliant idea.

Here’s their press release from earlier this week:

PlantEaters Makes Finding Vegetarian Meals at Any Restaurant Easy

PlantEaters, a new iPhone app, opens up a world of dining opportunities for vegetarians by helping them find meatless meals at any restaurant, regardless of whether or not the restaurant itself is vegetarian or vegan. Users can rate and share meals that they’ve had when dining out.

New York, NY (PRWEB) October 22, 2013 – PlantEaters is a new iPhone app that helps you find vegetarian meals at restaurants all around you, regardless of whether or not the restaurant itself is vegetarian or vegan. This focus on meals, instead of restaurants, opens up a new world of dining opportunities for vegetarians, vegans, or those just looking to enjoy a meatless meal.

Finding a vegetarian meal at a nearby restaurant can often be a challenge. By leveraging the collective dining experiences of the PlantEaters community, vegetarians can dine out without having to settle for the house salad. Whether it’s a night out in a new city, or dinner with some meat-eating friends, PlantEaters can help make sure that vegetarians and vegans have a great dining experience.

Over time, the majority of meals in PlantEaters will come from the community itself adding and rating meals (including photos). To help get the ball rolling, the database has been pre-populated with thousands of meals covering a number of major metropolitan areas, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Founded by the husband and wife team of David and Tracy Hersh, PlantEaters represents a passion project for the couple, who have been vegan for four years. David is a serial entrepreneur with deep experience in product design, having been a founder at pioneering efforts in the social networking, e-commerce and fantasy sports industries.

“In our hometown of New York City, we are fortunate to have a great selection of vegetarian and vegan restaurants. Even here though, the number of those restaurants pales in comparison to the thousands of other restaurants the city has to offer,” says David. “Increasingly, these restaurants are offering more meatless dining options and Tracy and I were struck by the fact that there was no easy way to find those meals. PlantEaters was created to fill that need.”

“Most of our friends aren’t vegetarians and until PlantEaters it has always been a challenge finding a place everyone would enjoy,” says Tracy. “We used to always sacrifice our dining experience because we didn’t want to inconvenience others, but now we can easily find a place that makes everyone happy.”*

One of the criticisms Sullivan had was that since the app also includes vegetarian meals, vegans would have to sort through them to find the vegan options. But David Hersh explained in a response that it’s easy to limit your search to vegan meals only, and they also posted about this on the PlantEaters blog.

Another useful resource comes from Ashley Capps at the Free from Harm blog. She’s put together a useful guide to dairy-free milks, cheeses, and more. For the products I’ve tried, I agree with her assessments and recommendations. I also can’t wait to get the Non-Dairy Formulary and try out the recipes.

* This framing bothers me, I have to admit.

WikiLeaks, Stratfor, and the Assange distraction

While many are focused on the vicissitudes of the Julian Assange case, I should post briefly about WikiLeaks and the Global Intelligence Files. The site went back up a couple of days ago after being inaccessible for a while to a DDoS attack. This followed upon WikiLeaks’ publication over the past two weeks of documents related to Stratfor and TrapWire. There are disagreements over how concerned people should be about TrapWire specifically (here’s what seems a more balanced piece), while others contend that the issue is "not the surveillance, it’s the sleaze."

It’s also that this whole corporate-political business is shadowy as all hell. I’ve read through several of the recently released emails, and they’re…interesting. But even they shouldn’t necessarily divert attention from earlier Stratfor revelations or WikiLeaks documents generally.

I linked to a description of Stratfor’s efforts with regard to Bhopal and the Yes Men in a footnote to a recent post, but they deserve another mention. Back in February, the Yes Men reported:

WikiLeaks begins to publish today over five million e-mails obtained by Anonymous from "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The emails, which reveal everything from sinister spy tactics to an insider trading scheme with Goldman Sachs..., also include several discussions of the Yes Men and Bhopal activists. (Bhopal activists seek redress for the 1984 Dow Chemical/Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India, that led to thousands of deaths, injuries in more than half a million people, and lasting environmental damage.)

After detailing some of this activity, they note:

Perhaps most entertainingly of all, the email trove reveals that Stratfor's "Confederation Partners"—an unethical alliance between Stratfor and a number of mainstream journalists—are referred to informally within Stratfor as its "Confed Fuck House." (Another discovery: Coca Cola was spying on PETA. More such gems are sure to surface as operatives sift through the 5.5 million emails.)…

Many of the documents released in recent months also relate to Latin America (including the Honduran coup), and people there have analyzed the information and some of the implications of their release for Latin American politics.

It’s tempting to take the media’s lead and narrowly follow the legal travails of Assange and associated diplomatic maneuverings, but this is to some extent an unfortunate distraction from the content of the WikiLeaks materials.

"Call me Rock God"

Stupid, creepy ad.

Go, Electronic Frontier Foundation!

A few days ago, they posted the audio of their arguments in two warrantless wiretapping cases (that post also contains useful background and links). Then they put up links to the videos themselves:





(I've watched the Jewel arguments, but not yet the Hepting. Good stuff.)

NLG offers Nerd Scare resources

(I had to use "Nerd Scare" - yesterday was the first time I heard it and it made me laugh.)

The National Lawyers Guild last month put up a page, AnoNLG, for cyberactivists* with "Know Your Rights" resources and contact information for those targeted by the government. It's a strange looking site - so much so that I had to confirm that it is indeed a product of the NLG - and I hope it'll be improved over time, but the links to pamphlets and other information on the right look useful and their twitter feed on the left from what I've seen has some interesting notices.

*(of which, needless to say, I am not one :))

Against the Tide

An interview with Ben Kalina yesterday on Democracy Now! reminded me of a book I've recommended several times since I read it several years ago, Cornelia Dean's Against the Tide:



It's that rare find: a suberb science book with significant implications for public policy.

Quote of the weekend: We're the thing that's being sold

I doubt this is shocking to anyone reading this blog, but we're not always as aware of it as maybe we should be. I'm watching Douglas Rushkoff and Micah Sifry on BookTV* (haven't finished, but it's not bad so far), and some remarks from Rushkoff stood out in light of my last post and my next one. He's talking about developing and using communications technologies for democracy and social change...:

That’s where I get excited is people understanding the value they’re creating through these technologies, rather than just surrendering all the value they create to YouTube to get some hits or to Facebook so they can get more friends and be part of that very internal economy where, really, the people, the users, are the product. Alright, there are so many environments in which we think we’re the users, but when someone else is paying, usually they’re the customer, not you, right? We’re not the customers of Facebook. We're the thing that’s being sold on Facebook. And a lot of these environments that seem so free, are free ‘cause we’re not paying with our money, but someone else is paying for us, right?

*It actually says "Program not Embeddable." I like "embeddable," and hope to find new uses for it in the future.

Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark

I truly hate to say it, but _{I was disappointed with Carl Zimmer’s latest book, Brain Cuttings}. I couldn’t get the sample chapter to download,* so I went ahead and downloaded the whole thing



The problem wasn’t the content, which is illuminating and written in the pleasant, lucid manner of his blog posts. ...Well, actually, therein does lie the problem: it appears it essentially is a collection of his blog posts (and an article from Playboy), lacking a real introduction, conclusion, or material in the individual chapters tying them together. This is disappointing as Microcosm



was one of the best books I read last year. Anyway, the very bright spot is that it introduced me to the work of Andy Clark, whose Supersizing the Mind



I’m now reading. (This introduction, of course, could have come earlier had I read *ahem* the original blog post.) I’m about a quarter of the way through Supersizing, and it's captivating. Undoubtedly not for everyone – for those unsure, the sample gives a good sense of the book as a whole – but I’m quite taken with it.

* (Now I’m further annoyed because Kindle is telling me it can’t be opened and that I have to redownload it; does this mean my highlighting and notes are lost?)

You can turn your cell phone into a microscope?

That's just very cool.

Freedom in the Cloud

It was a decade ago, searching for the latest articles on anarchism, that I first came across Eben Moglen. It was this piece - "Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright" - and, while he didn't have anything particularly intelligent to say about anarchism as a political-economic movement, I found the article interesting and shared it with people at the time.

Over the years, others have linked to various talks Moglen has given. Recently someone in a comment thread at Narco News linked to this one from earlier this year. Here he is on "Freedom in the Cloud":



As usual, xkcd gets it.

The trouble for some of us is that while we share the concern of the character in this strip we lack the technical knowledge to contribute significantly to change in this way (or at least I believe I do). But I can do my small part connecting people to those working on it.

UPDATE:

Here's Part 2 - the Q&A: