Month: May 2004

Sympathy for Lynndie England

You were never prepared for this. You never expected it. You grew up poor, in one of the poorest parts of the United States. You were something of a tomboy, but a good sort of person — you got along with folks, and they tended to like you. You were impulsive, sometimes — marrying on a whim at age 18, only to divorce the guy a year or so later — but never nasty or vicious. You joined the Army Reserve, mostly, because it seemed to offer money and opportunities you couldn’t get any other way. You hoped it would allow you to save up for college, and give you some of the skills you’d need in order to get in.
But you never expected you’d be called up to active duty, and sent to Iraq: a country far away, hotter than Hell, and filled with people who we were supposed to have freed from tyranny: you were told that these people would love you, but it seemed that they mostly resented you, in a sullen sort of way; aside, that is, from the ones who actively hated you and tried to kill you.
You were trained as much to be a bureaucrat as a soldier: your job was to sit behind a desk and process the papers of Iraqi detainees. But once you were actually working at the Abu Ghraib prison, you found that a lot more was expected of you.
The higher-ups (both military officers whom you were supposed to obey, and private “contractors” who you were told you should also obey) wanted “information” from the detainees, and they wanted you to help them get it. There were various interrogation techniques they taught you: depriving the prisoners of sleep, stripping them naked and humiliating them sexually, putting hoods over their heads and subjecting them to mild electric shocks; and of course, threatening them with physical violence, and sometimes carrying through on the threats, for the sake of credibility.
It was weird at first; you had never, in your wildest dreams, imagined doing these sorts of things to anyone. But these prisoners really hated and resented you; you knew they’d kill you if they could, if the positions were reversed. So it wasn’t that hard to think of them as less than human; especially since your superiors encouraged you to think this way, encouraged you to be relentless, not to let the fuckers get away with anything, pry their secrets loose from them before more Americans, more of your buddies, were killed. And when you did your part in the interrogations, when you finally got one of the prisoners to break, to lose his defiance, to tell the “contractors” everything he knew, your superiors praised you for a job well done.
And after a while, you even started to enjoy it; it wasn’t the power, exactly, so much as a kind of recognition from your peers: an esprit de corps that kept you going, when you were cut off from home and family; and an acceptance as one of the guys, which was something you had always wanted, proving yourself as their equal even though they originally looked down on you because you were a girl. In a funny way, it was also something that brought you and your boyfriend together more: not that you got off on what you were doing, exactly, but it was a kind of complicity, and a way in which the two of you could feel that you were triumphant, standing together against — and in spite of — everything else, and everyone else in the world.
And it must have been in one of those moments that your boyfriend took those photos: of you grinning and giving thumbs up, and pointing at the genitalia of a naked, abject prisoner; or of you grinning and holding one of those poor fuckers by a leash, as if he were a disobedient dog.
And now those pictures have been published, and you are the most infamous woman in the world; and they’re going to throw the book at you, and basically you have no future and no hope. But of course somebody has to take the fall; and of course it will never be the people who imagined it, who organized it, who trained you in it, who told you to do it, and whose dreams of conquering and looting the world you were never really privy to. They can’t be blamed, so it has to be somebody like you, who was poor and without prospects to begin with. No matter how deeply you felt that esprit de corps, you never were a member of that elite, and you never would be; you were expendable from the beginning, and your life is the price our rulers are happily willing to pay, as they pursue their program of conquest and domination.

You were never prepared for this. You never expected it. You grew up poor, in one of the poorest parts of the United States. You were something of a tomboy, but a good sort of person — you got along with folks, and they tended to like you. You were impulsive, sometimes — marrying on a whim at age 18, only to divorce the guy a year or so later — but never nasty or vicious. You joined the Army Reserve, mostly, because it seemed to offer money and opportunities you couldn’t get any other way. You hoped it would allow you to save up for college, and give you some of the skills you’d need in order to get in.
But you never expected you’d be called up to active duty, and sent to Iraq: a country far away, hotter than Hell, and filled with people who we were supposed to have freed from tyranny: you were told that these people would love you, but it seemed that they mostly resented you, in a sullen sort of way; aside, that is, from the ones who actively hated you and tried to kill you.
You were trained as much to be a bureaucrat as a soldier: your job was to sit behind a desk and process the papers of Iraqi detainees. But once you were actually working at the Abu Ghraib prison, you found that a lot more was expected of you.
The higher-ups (both military officers whom you were supposed to obey, and private “contractors” who you were told you should also obey) wanted “information” from the detainees, and they wanted you to help them get it. There were various interrogation techniques they taught you: depriving the prisoners of sleep, stripping them naked and humiliating them sexually, putting hoods over their heads and subjecting them to mild electric shocks; and of course, threatening them with physical violence, and sometimes carrying through on the threats, for the sake of credibility.
It was weird at first; you had never, in your wildest dreams, imagined doing these sorts of things to anyone. But these prisoners really hated and resented you; you knew they’d kill you if they could, if the positions were reversed. So it wasn’t that hard to think of them as less than human; especially since your superiors encouraged you to think this way, encouraged you to be relentless, not to let the fuckers get away with anything, pry their secrets loose from them before more Americans, more of your buddies, were killed. And when you did your part in the interrogations, when you finally got one of the prisoners to break, to lose his defiance, to tell the “contractors” everything he knew, your superiors praised you for a job well done.
And after a while, you even started to enjoy it; it wasn’t the power, exactly, so much as a kind of recognition from your peers: an esprit de corps that kept you going, when you were cut off from home and family; and an acceptance as one of the guys, which was something you had always wanted, proving yourself as their equal even though they originally looked down on you because you were a girl. In a funny way, it was also something that brought you and your boyfriend together more: not that you got off on what you were doing, exactly, but it was a kind of complicity, and a way in which the two of you could feel that you were triumphant, standing together against — and in spite of — everything else, and everyone else in the world.
And it must have been in one of those moments that your boyfriend took those photos: of you grinning and giving thumbs up, and pointing at the genitalia of a naked, abject prisoner; or of you grinning and holding one of those poor fuckers by a leash, as if he were a disobedient dog.
And now those pictures have been published, and you are the most infamous woman in the world; and they’re going to throw the book at you, and basically you have no future and no hope. But of course somebody has to take the fall; and of course it will never be the people who imagined it, who organized it, who trained you in it, who told you to do it, and whose dreams of conquering and looting the world you were never really privy to. They can’t be blamed, so it has to be somebody like you, who was poor and without prospects to begin with. No matter how deeply you felt that esprit de corps, you never were a member of that elite, and you never would be; you were expendable from the beginning, and your life is the price our rulers are happily willing to pay, as they pursue their program of conquest and domination.

Altieri on affect

Last night I had the pleasure of doing a reading together with my old friend Charles Altieri, at Richard Hugo House. This was the first in what is planned as an ongoing series of readings called “Critics as Performers,” sponsored by Subtext, which is a major resource for experimental writers in Seattle.
I’ve also been reading Altieri’s new book, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. It’s a smart and very useful and important book, which does the crucial work of taking on the cognitivists and analytic philosophers who misconstrue affect by subordinating it to moralizing concerns, and ultimately to the imperialism of Reason. That’s my language, not Altieri’s; part of what makes the book powerful and effective is that Altieri takes on the cognitivists on their own terms, and shows cogently how their subordination of imagination to reason and of aesthetics to ethics, together with their general hierarchizing of the mental faculties due to their privileging of cognition, and of normative ethical goals, utterly fails to account for the complexities and richness of affective experience.
Reading the cognitivists always infuriates me: but for reasons that I am unable to articulate, since my language and starting assumptions are so different from theirs. (All I can really say is that my 20-month-old daughter’s temper tantrums are at least as important an aspect of what makes her human as is her learning to speak and to grasp abstract concepts).
What Altieri does for me is to articulate those reasons, refuting the cognitivists at their own game and on their own grounds.
It’s all the more effective in that Altieri sidesteps carefully around Deleuze; though he shares with Deleuze a love for Spinoza. Deleuze does provide a clear alternative to normative, cognitivist accounts of things like affect and emotion; but I often fear that my own (and others’) recourse to Deleuze provides too easy a shortcut. Altieri doesn’t take this shortcut; it makes his book difficult going for me in places, but I am learning far more from it as a result.
The centerpiece of the book is Altieri’s critique of Martha Nussbaum’s recent book on the emotions. I will not even try to summarize Altieri’s argument; but only note that it comes down to Nussbaum’s inability to adequately understand and appreciate Proust (page 173). Altieri writes: “For Proust the role of imagination is not to establish norms [such as Nussbaum tries to do] but to develop passions and compassions that make predicates like ‘saner’ and ‘more responsive’ [much valued by Nussbaum] seem painfully inadequate.” The Proustian lesson — if we can even call it a lesson — is that affective intensities involve us in singular experiences that we cannot but value, but whose valuation cannot be reduced to any sort of ethical (generalizable) norms, even humane and humanistic ones. To say this is not to invoke some sort of pseudo-Nietzscheanism cruelty or inhumanism, but rather to respect and honor singularity, against all attempts to call it to “reason.” (I am selectively following Kant here; if the ethical is the universal, then the aesthetic is the absolutely singular that cannot be brought under any universal rule, and that we “judge” therefore entirely without grounds).
(I fear I’m losing coherence here; so I’d better stop, and instead go back and parse Altieri more carefully).

Last night I had the pleasure of doing a reading together with my old friend Charles Altieri, at Richard Hugo House. This was the first in what is planned as an ongoing series of readings called “Critics as Performers,” sponsored by Subtext, which is a major resource for experimental writers in Seattle.
I’ve also been reading Altieri’s new book, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. It’s a smart and very useful and important book, which does the crucial work of taking on the cognitivists and analytic philosophers who misconstrue affect by subordinating it to moralizing concerns, and ultimately to the imperialism of Reason. That’s my language, not Altieri’s; part of what makes the book powerful and effective is that Altieri takes on the cognitivists on their own terms, and shows cogently how their subordination of imagination to reason and of aesthetics to ethics, together with their general hierarchizing of the mental faculties due to their privileging of cognition, and of normative ethical goals, utterly fails to account for the complexities and richness of affective experience.
Reading the cognitivists always infuriates me: but for reasons that I am unable to articulate, since my language and starting assumptions are so different from theirs. (All I can really say is that my 20-month-old daughter’s temper tantrums are at least as important an aspect of what makes her human as is her learning to speak and to grasp abstract concepts).
What Altieri does for me is to articulate those reasons, refuting the cognitivists at their own game and on their own grounds.
It’s all the more effective in that Altieri sidesteps carefully around Deleuze; though he shares with Deleuze a love for Spinoza. Deleuze does provide a clear alternative to normative, cognitivist accounts of things like affect and emotion; but I often fear that my own (and others’) recourse to Deleuze provides too easy a shortcut. Altieri doesn’t take this shortcut; it makes his book difficult going for me in places, but I am learning far more from it as a result.
The centerpiece of the book is Altieri’s critique of Martha Nussbaum’s recent book on the emotions. I will not even try to summarize Altieri’s argument; but only note that it comes down to Nussbaum’s inability to adequately understand and appreciate Proust (page 173). Altieri writes: “For Proust the role of imagination is not to establish norms [such as Nussbaum tries to do] but to develop passions and compassions that make predicates like ‘saner’ and ‘more responsive’ [much valued by Nussbaum] seem painfully inadequate.” The Proustian lesson — if we can even call it a lesson — is that affective intensities involve us in singular experiences that we cannot but value, but whose valuation cannot be reduced to any sort of ethical (generalizable) norms, even humane and humanistic ones. To say this is not to invoke some sort of pseudo-Nietzscheanism cruelty or inhumanism, but rather to respect and honor singularity, against all attempts to call it to “reason.” (I am selectively following Kant here; if the ethical is the universal, then the aesthetic is the absolutely singular that cannot be brought under any universal rule, and that we “judge” therefore entirely without grounds).
(I fear I’m losing coherence here; so I’d better stop, and instead go back and parse Altieri more carefully).

Generation S.L.U.T.

Marty Beckerman‘s Generation S.L.U.T.: A Brutal Feel-Up Session With Today’s Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace is actually not bad. Its naturalistic (apparently — no way I could really know) story of teen promiscuity, alienation, and suicide is fairly convincing and moving, its over-the-top satire is funny and pretty much on target, and its interpolated statistics, headlines, interviews, and autobiographical essays definitely intensify the effect, more because of the way they multiply and collage the text in McLuhanesque fashion, than because of their particular content.
All in all, as a satirist’s moralistic warning about the dangers of a generation growing up without love or passion, the novel is a bit compromised by its own enjoyment of all the scenes it describes (which range from drunken sex between 16-year-olds who don’t even know each others’ names to knockout drugs, gang bangs and date rape) — but if this is a failure in terms of the book’s moral intent, it is only to the good in terms of its artistic success. Beckerman clearly despises jocks, cheerleaders, and proto-frat boys, which is a good thing; but his own smartassitude isn’t as far from frat boy self-congratulatory humor as he might wish. Once again, something which compromises his message, and his clear intent, makes this a better book than it would be if he had carried through that intent unambiguously.
As for Marty Beckerman’s either being a genius or a fraud — he clearly wants us to think he’s one or the other — don’t believe the hype. I don’t buy it, or rather, I don’t think he is a skillful enough media manipulator to carry it off. On Beckerman’s own website, he links to this site, which denounces him as “The Jewish Antichrist”; of course this site is itself actually registered to Marty Beckerman. But the novel works precisely because it is quotidian rather than scandalous, and Beckerman’s attempt to gain some sort of extra cultural cachet by pretending to be scandalous is a dud.

Marty Beckerman‘s Generation S.L.U.T.: A Brutal Feel-Up Session With Today’s Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace is actually not bad. Its naturalistic (apparently — no way I could really know) story of teen promiscuity, alienation, and suicide is fairly convincing and moving, its over-the-top satire is funny and pretty much on target, and its interpolated statistics, headlines, interviews, and autobiographical essays definitely intensify the effect, more because of the way they multiply and collage the text in McLuhanesque fashion, than because of their particular content.
All in all, as a satirist’s moralistic warning about the dangers of a generation growing up without love or passion, the novel is a bit compromised by its own enjoyment of all the scenes it describes (which range from drunken sex between 16-year-olds who don’t even know each others’ names to knockout drugs, gang bangs and date rape) — but if this is a failure in terms of the book’s moral intent, it is only to the good in terms of its artistic success. Beckerman clearly despises jocks, cheerleaders, and proto-frat boys, which is a good thing; but his own smartassitude isn’t as far from frat boy self-congratulatory humor as he might wish. Once again, something which compromises his message, and his clear intent, makes this a better book than it would be if he had carried through that intent unambiguously.
As for Marty Beckerman’s either being a genius or a fraud — he clearly wants us to think he’s one or the other — don’t believe the hype. I don’t buy it, or rather, I don’t think he is a skillful enough media manipulator to carry it off. On Beckerman’s own website, he links to this site, which denounces him as “The Jewish Antichrist”; of course this site is itself actually registered to Marty Beckerman. But the novel works precisely because it is quotidian rather than scandalous, and Beckerman’s attempt to gain some sort of extra cultural cachet by pretending to be scandalous is a dud.

Tattooed Life

Tattooed Life isn’t Seijun Suzuki’s best film, and it’s far from his most delirious; but still it’s filled with astonishing visual inventions, in fight sequences and elsewhere, that Quentin Tarantino would die for, and surprising emotional depths that Tarantino would never be able to comprehend. I saw this film originally when Scarecrow Video brought Suzuki to Seattle for a retrospective of his films; and now that it has finally come out on American DVD, I’ve been able to see it again.
In the Q&As after nearly all the screenings at that retrospective, Suzuki evaded nearly all the questions he was asked, disclaiming any artistic intent whatsoever, and saying only that he violated continuity rules and skewed camera angles, turned fight scenes into abstract tableaux, mixed genre signals, presented convoluted plot turns as elliptical asides, created absurdly heightened symbolic color schemes, and so on, because he was trying to keep the audience entertained.
In a way, I suppose, he was telling the truth; for the extravagances of Suzuki’s directorial style — at least in his earlier, pre-1967 films; I’m less sure about his hyperstylized recent efforts like Pistol Opera — seem to be refreshingly free of auteurist pretensions. Suzuki doesn’t take his own dedication to pulp with the self-conscious, self-congratulatory seriousness of (yes, again) Quentin Tarantino; rather, Suzuki’s films are themselves so self-conscious and expressionist and daringly extreme that Suzuki himself doesn’t (or didn’t) need to be.

Tattooed Life isn’t Seijun Suzuki’s best film, and it’s far from his most delirious; but still it’s filled with astonishing visual inventions, in fight sequences and elsewhere, that Quentin Tarantino would die for, and surprising emotional depths that Tarantino would never be able to comprehend. I saw this film originally when Scarecrow Video brought Suzuki to Seattle for a retrospective of his films; and now that it has finally come out on American DVD, I’ve been able to see it again.
In the Q&As after nearly all the screenings at that retrospective, Suzuki evaded nearly all the questions he was asked, disclaiming any artistic intent whatsoever, and saying only that he violated continuity rules and skewed camera angles, turned fight scenes into abstract tableaux, mixed genre signals, presented convoluted plot turns as elliptical asides, created absurdly heightened symbolic color schemes, and so on, because he was trying to keep the audience entertained.
In a way, I suppose, he was telling the truth; for the extravagances of Suzuki’s directorial style — at least in his earlier, pre-1967 films; I’m less sure about his hyperstylized recent efforts like Pistol Opera — seem to be refreshingly free of auteurist pretensions. Suzuki doesn’t take his own dedication to pulp with the self-conscious, self-congratulatory seriousness of (yes, again) Quentin Tarantino; rather, Suzuki’s films are themselves so self-conscious and expressionist and daringly extreme that Suzuki himself doesn’t (or didn’t) need to be.