There’s more to this little pisser than meets the eye
Sunday, November 29, 2020
May '68: The Pivot of Leftist Politics in France
1968 was turbulent all around the world. For France, it was no different. The conservative president Charles de Gaulle was still in power. The controversial Algerian War had unsettled the populace. France was abandoning its position as colonialist overload of Vietnam as America escalated its own war against communism in that nation. The police had been militarized in anticipation of social upheavals. The young generation of postwar students were getting anxious and the labor unions were looking for new reasons to agitate the national workforce. The fires of political protest were sweeping throughout America, England, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Japan and it was time for France to get caught up in all of that too.
It all started small. A group of students at the Paris University of Nanterre wanted to spend more time with their girlfriends. The female dorms had strict time limitations and curfews for male visitors. The Sexual Revolution was building momentum and there were a lot of boy and girl students who wanted greater access to each other. They held a couple small demonstrations in the Spring of 1968 and, unpredictably, they began to attract a larger and larger number of students.
Earlier that year, France’s Communist and Socialist Parties had agreed to form a coalition to replace Charles de Gaulle as prime minister of France. Activists at Nanterre saw the small demonstrations as a potential flashpoint to start an uprising and began getting more and more disgruntled students involved. So on March 22, 150 student agitators occupied a university administration building and drew up a list of demands. The police surrounded Nanterre and allowed the occupiers to publicly state their grievances. Then they were allowed to leave without being attacked, although the ring leaders were later brought in for disciplinary actions. They were later celebrated as heroes and that day was commemorated by christening it the Movement of 22 March.
Demonstrations at Nanterre continued throughout April, disrupting ordinary affairs until May 2 when the university officials closed the university and threatened to expel the students who were responsible. Across town, at the Sorbonne campus of the University of Paris, students went on strike to protest the closure of Naterre. The police were called in to maintain order; they surrounded the Sorbonne campus and sealed it off to prevent anyone from coming or going. On May 3, students from Nanterre and other universities in Paris marched on the Sorbonne. They were joined by high school students and educators who were organized by the teacher’s union. 20,000 people arrived and began to attack the police. Barriers were built with any materials or debris they could find in the immediate area and the mob began throwing rocks and bricks. The police decided to retreat but soon returned wearing riot gear. The crowds were blasted with tear gas, being trampled and beaten with batons as the cops chased them away.
Later in the week, students began returning to their campuses but when they arrived they found a police occupation. On Friday May 10, crowds began to gather at the Rive Gauche. The police attacked them so they set up barricades and the riots started again. Cars were burned and molotov cocktails were thrown. The disturbances lasted through the night and ended at dawn. The next day, images of the fighting were broadcast on television and the general public were horrified by the police brutality.
The next day, over a million protesters marched through Paris. The Prime Minister Georges Pompidou went into hiding and called for the police to leave Sorbonne and released all the rioters who had been arrested. The students returned to the university but they became more violent, throwing rocks and bricks at the authorities. More barricades were set up and students occupied the campus, declaring it to be an autonomous people’s zone.
All throughout the city, graffiti was written by anonymous protesters. Slogans like “It is forbidden to forbid” and “Be realistic, demand the impossible” could be read on walls and sidewalks. Some of these ideas became conventional wisdom for the upcoming generation of new radicals. Pamphlets, booklets, and chapbooks were also circulated, free of charge, throughout the crowds. They outlined revolutionary schemes and ideologies written by communists, socialists, anarchists, and artists. One pamphlet going around was published without copyright by the Situationist International, an offspring of the Surrealist art movement that morphed into an anarchist urban guerilla outfit. The manifesto, written by a young filmmaker named Guy Debord, was titled Society Of the Spectacle. It would go on to obtain cult status in postmodernist and activists intellectual circles.
Meanwhile, throughout all the neighborhoods of Paris, people began organizing popular action committees. They held meetings to discuss their grievances against the government and laid out plans to petition for change. Over 400 committees were formed. The mainstream of society had joined in with the revolt.
The tides began to turn on Saturday night when the leaders of the student demonstrations were interviewed on television. People watching at home were disappointed by their lack of direction, destructive ambitions, and utopian ideologies. The student leaders wanted to tear down the capitalist system and end the consumerist society but they had no real plans for what to do after that happened. Popular support for the movement began to gradually wane. But the protest movement was far from over.
Not only young people in other parts of France begin to protest; blue collar workers all over the country, but mostly in Paris, declared a general strike. Influenced by student Communist Party activists, the Proletariat laborers, most especially the factory and farm workers, demanded ownership of their workplaces and the resignation of President de Gaulle. To calm the tensions, the labor unions made a deal with the business owners to increase wages by a heft 35%, shorten working hours, and provide more vacation time. The striking workers refused to accept this bargain. Their demands were more radical and more political. Some student demonstrators took note of the general strike and began showing up at the factories to sit with the idle laborers and support their picket lines. Some activists entered the factories and spent time talking to the workers, getting to know them and forming alliances.
Towards the end of the month, while still on strike, the working classes, students, and Communist Party officials held a rally in a football stadium. As the day wore on, speaker after speaker came to the microphone and made speeches about overthrowing the government and radically altering the foundations of French society. But the proletariat and the student would-be revolutionaries had different agendas and by the end of the rally it was obvious they could lend each other little more than verbal support.
On May 24 and 26, the only two deaths of May ‘68 were reported. In Lyon, rioters set a driverless truck into motion. It crashed into a line of police and killed one of them. Two days later in Paris, a 26 year old activist got into a fight with another demonstrator who stabbed him to death. In later years when police were confronted with their brutal and militaristic tactics of crowd control during those times, they responded by saying that they were proud of their actions because they themselves never killed anyone.
While the rally was happening, the Socialist Party’s leader, Francois Mitterand, held meetings with government officials to discuss forming a new government. Surprisingly, the politicians wanted to include the Communist Party in their committees. The demonstrators were largely supporters of communist ideology and their numbers were large enough that it was thought they should be allowed to discuss their demands. The Socialist Party had more support from the general populace but they agreed to allow the Communists to attend planning sessions.
The conferences were scheduled for May 29 but got canceled because on the morning of that same day, Charles de Gaulle, fearing the start of a revolution, fled the country. He handed power over to Prime Minster Georges Pompidou who, for a short time, ran the government by himself. The government collapsed when members of the National Assembly began to flee. Documents were destroyed, money was stolen, and a lot of politicians tried to cross the borders to escape to other countries. Somebody gave Georges Pompidou a gun and told him to keep it close in case he needed it. No one knew where de Gaulle had gone.
Later that night, Pompidou learned that de Gaulle was over the border in Germany, plotting his return with a member of the military, General Jacques Massu. At that point, de Gaulle had grave doubts about his ability to continue leading France. He felt that he had lost the support of his people. Part of their plot for his return included plans for getting his family out of France if he were assassinated or unable to restore order in his country.
On May 30, the Communist Party called for a march. A crowd of 500,000 gathered at the President’s palace on Champs Elysee. Pompidou was expecting a violent revolution to begin so he called out the riot squads and snipers, ordering them to shoot to kill if anything got out of hand. He also ordered tanks onto the streets of the countryside, surrounding Paris in case the demonstrators tried to escape. He mistakenly believed the they would start fighting then leave the city, regroup on the outskirts, and return to make tactical strikes using guerilla warfare techniques. But the Communists were not into violence. Their objective was to call for conferences and negotiations. They wanted their entry into politics to be done legally and peacefully. Some scholars have argued that if the military and police had clamped down with violence, then public opinion would have turned to greater support for the revolutionaries. All sides played their hands wisely that day.
On May 30, Charles de Gaulle, back in France, appeared on television and announced that he would not resign. He also explained that the military had surrounded Paris in case a revolution began. But on the brighter side, he called for elections to be held at the end of June and Communist Party members would be on the ballot. After the broadcast, one million supporters of the government marched on the Champs Elysees, waving French flags. The call for revolution was over. The workers returned to work. The college year ended and the students returned home for the summer.
The election in June resulted in a loss for Charles de Gaulle. The Communist Party gained a small number of seats in the National Assembly and the Socialist Party lost most of theirs. Some small, spontaneous demonstrations happened after that but the uprising of May was over.
Blue collar workers and left wing activists were unable to hold their fragile alliance together and went their separate ways. An experimental commune was set up outside Paris, though. A handful of anarchist squatters, leftist journalists from a newspaper published by Jean-Paul Sartre, and farmers with radical views attempted to form a co-op but the project lasted a very short time. The more educated activists looked on in dismay as the farmers took to fighting and bickering with each other; in the end, they refused to cooperate and the commune dissolved.
In the long run, May ‘68 was increasingly seen as a turning point for the French left wing. It inaugurated the New Left movement in France. But this movement was less involved in demonstrations, strikes, and riots. Instead, a class of French intelligentsia formed and turned to philosophy and intellectualism instead. For better or worse, the arcane, and often confusing, disciplines of postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and critical theory became a mainstay in Western university humanities departments. Many believe these theoretical styles have done more harm than good when furthering the cause of left wing politics.
So what was May ‘68 really all about? There is no general consens. Both left wing and right wing public intellectuals have tried to dominate this narrative to support their own agendas. Many people supported the uprising for many different reasons, bringing their own complaints and ideas into the mix. It came and went like a spontaneous explosion of existential frustrations. In the end, there were no effective leaders with clearly stated goals to seize power and direct the demonstrations towards a higher cause. It all fizzled out quickly, leaving not much but an election and a lot of nostalgia. Strikes and demonstrations are now common in France and the capitalist establishment continues on with relative stability, able to withstand the shocks and upheavals that arise every so often.
Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin Books, New York: 2006.
Ross, Kristin. May ‘68 and Its Afterlives. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London: 2008.
photo credits:
Friday, November 27, 2020
Taiwan officials throw pig guts in parliament in fist fight over pork imports
Taiwan's rambunctious legislature frequently sees chaotic clashes between rival lawmakers but Friday's scuffles were particularly novel
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
Mysterious monolith discovered in remote Utah wilderness
People are freaking out over a monolith discovered in the middle of nowhere in Utah.
Book Review
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Do you think capitalism sucks? Try schizophrenia instead! That is sort of, but not exactly, what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari recommend in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. They lay out a dense but somewhat comprehensible description of human beings and their relationship to the capitalist system. They also explain how Freud’s system of psychoanalysis acts as a method of repression that makes capitalism function more effectively.
Deleuze and Guattari begin by describing the human as an individual. The human mind, particularly the unconscious, is made up of desiring-machines which work together to create flows. The concepts of “desiring-machines” and “flows” are both loosely defined and can be applied in a multitude of contexts thereby resisting the tyranny of the sign/signifier as the deconstructionists would say. The flows they write about are roughly equivalent to Freud’s concept of “libido” or psychic energy that circulates through the mind. The concept of “desire” is also central to their thesis. Traditionally, most philosophers, economists, and psychologists have written about desire as being a lack. A poor person desires money because they lack it or a hungry person desires food because they don’t have any but Deleuze and Guattari turn the concept on its head and analyze “desire” as being a creative force. The desiring-machines create energy that combines with energies created by other desiring machines which strive to reach full realization of their potential for completion. Desiring-machines can also be parts of the body; therefore, eyes, hands, mouths, anuses, and anything else can be a desiring-machine or a partial, detachable machine; for example, a breast-machine seeks to connect with a baby’s mouth machine so that both can fulfill their purposes to completion by creating flow, in this case, milk for nourishment for the baby. Like other psychologists, Deleuze and Guattari have a strange preoccupation with things like anuses, penises, and breasts; sometimes you have to wonder why psychoanalysis never offers any theories on knees, ankles, ribs, elbows or eyebrows.
Desiring-machines create flow that extends beyond the individual into the socius, the societal body in its entirety. Social-machines are individual humans that invest desire in the social praxis. As this desire flows through the socius it gets encoded as things like money, labor, property, or information. Outside the limits of the socius is the body without organs, a wilderness or deterritorialization without form or organization of any kind. The body without organs is the unknown and that is where Deleuze and Guattari want us to go when we become schizophrenized.
In a capitalist society, psychoanalysis has crystallized the ego in the form of Oedipus. The figure from the Greek tragedy who tore out his own eyes becomes a censor and a castrator for the desiring-machines. The ego-Oedipus blocks the flows they produce and turns them into an unconscious theater where the desiring-machines no longer produce desire but instead express themselves through symbols. This Oedipus-ego is kept under control by the authoritarian father-figure, a representative of the psychotherapist who prevents desire from flowing into the empty space represented by the mother. This Oedipus-complex, according to the authors, is implanted in the psyche by the psychotherapist himself. Since this Oedipus is under strain from blocking the flows and desires created by the desiring-machines, it is under constant risk of neurosis, a state where Oedipus is weak and gets submerged in the psychic content while barely blocking it from circulation. Failure to do so leads to psychosis.
Oedipus is like an iron-door, one that is under the control of the father. It is a barrier and an internal instrument of repression. This functions in capitalism because that politcal-economic system also has mechanisms of internal repression and control in the form of non-productive social-machines like the police and bureaucracies that function by limiting the flow of things like labor and money, otherwise defined as chains of desire produced by social-machines, encoded and overcoded by capitalism. These flows of encoded desire are controlled by the axiomaticization of the ruling classes.
Capitalism is like schizophrenia because it strives for fulfillment by breaking through onto the body without organs. It is there where the surplus value of the encoded chains of desire get decoded and deterritorialized as pure capital. The system of capitalism differs from schizophrenia because the schizophrenic seeks to go further over the body without organs, permanently plunging into deterritorialization so that others can follow but capitalism actually reterritorializes its capital by extending its limits and reterritorializing its decoded flows. Capitalism reterritorializes its flows by investing them in things like new technologies or private property, or it can recode capital to create more capital through credit and interest. Capitalism also recodes desire by expanding its internal limitations so that the working classes can never get rich or stop working for long periods of time. They become permanantly contained despite the constant expansion of their territorial limits. Factories are prisons and reterritorializing capital expands the prisons into larger and more complex prisons so that the ruling classes can keep circulating encoded and overcoded desires to continuously overcome the boundaries of the socius and generate more wealth for themselves.
For Deleuze and Guattari, there are two ways out of this dilemma. One is to navigate around Oedipus into a paranoiac molar gregarious-aggregate, a group of social machines that believe themselves to be superior to the rest of the socius. Being molar demands that its social-machines be uniform, conformist, and easy to control. This paranoiac gregarious-aggregate is their definition of fascism but other groups that demand this type of corporatist community can be molar as well. On the same axiom of resistance is the schizophrenic individual, a person whose desiring-machines flow freely without any interference as they break out of the socius into the body without organs. These individuals resist capitalism because their thinking and language are derailed, freed from the logic of repressive categories, and permanently deterritorialized, unable to be recaptured by the socius to have their desires recoded. Thus, the authors advocate a type of psychotherapy called schizoanalysis. They do not literally want to make people schizophrenic but they think an individual can liberate themselves by taking on aspects of the decoded flows that characterize people suffering from that clinical disorder. They wish to dissolve the tyranny that Oedipus has over the desiring-machines of the unconscious so that people can free themselves from the prisons and injustices of capitalism, making it possible to achieve a fuller, richer life.
So that sums up some of the main ideas in Anti-Oedipus. Where does that leave the reader? Probably confused. There are plenty of descriptions to support these ideas but it isn’t really necessary to understand all the minute details to understand the book. At first you might be impressed by the complexity of the authors’ work. It is an intricate and complete system nd you might even feel self-congratulatory for having understood a lot of it. But with a little distance, something seems to be wrong. While their argument can be understood with a good deal of effort, it appears to be disconnected from reality. There is no doubt that there are flows through the socius and capitalism does appear to succeed at expanding both internal and external limits. But are there really desiring-machines in the unconscious? By what mechanism does capitalism encode, overcode, decode, and recode deterritorialized surplus value? Who is responsible for doing this? Is it happening by instinct? Are the captains of industry conspiring with psychotherapists to operate this machinery? That would take us into the domain of conspiracy theories, wouldn’t it? How can we be sure any of this is real? There is certainly no empirical way to justify this work of philosophy. It is like a city made of vapor that blows away in the wind when you finish the book.
If we can choose between capitalism and schizophrenia, is schizophrenia really the better choice? The use of schizoanalysis to guide the patient to the body without organs certainly has its risks and could leave the individual being unable to survive. At best, they would probably be a lone eccentric or possibly even one of those homeless people yelling at ghosts on the street corner. Would this kind of deterritorialization really be a legitimate foundation for a society? One might venture to speculate that capitalism is at least stable and relatively safe despite all its horrible shortcomings. Deleuze and Guattari appear to be advocating a naive form of libertarian individualism that could ultimately lead to nothing more than the social and mental isolation of the individual. There are not many radical anarchists out there who could even entertain the idea of living naked in the woods while scavenging for bugs and wild mushrooms to eat for the sake of spiting capitalists. Deleuze and Guattari simply do not make a strong case for the idea that schizophrenia is a desirable alternative to capitalism. They actually do not even make a strong case that capitalism is inherently undesirable either. They describe capitalism in their own unique way but never say much about why it is wrong.
On top of all that, this book is written using the language of psychoanalysis and the Oedipal complex is the cornerstone of the authors’ thesis. But psychoanalysis is now considered a pseudo-science. Freud has been disproven over and over again. No one believes in Oedipus anymore. Schizoanalysis never made any headway in the psychiatric community either. It could be safe to say that the only people who even know what it is are those who have read this book. And that also revolves around the idea that they were able to comprehend it in the first place.
Gilles Deleuze once said that works of philosophy are more like works of art than arguments. They should be appreciated for their systematic structure and descriptive language. Taken at that level, Anti-Oedipus is an impressive work. But then you have to wonder why they chose to write it in the first place. Critiquing capitalism and advocating for a new form of psychoanalysis that would radically change the political system doesn’t mean much as a work of art for art’s sake. This is a work that demands its readers put its ideas into action. In the end, it is too dated and disconnected from the real world to be of real value. Even so, Anti-Oedipus is still a real accomplishment because of its intellectual rigor and the way ot forces the reader to keep thinking while goes along.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Penguin Books, New York: 1972.
Sunday, November 22, 2020
Fifty Years Ago: Angry Brigade and the Motley Crew of Miss World Judges in 1970
ON 21 November 1970, in his usual smooth and professional manner and while, “the girls are changing into their extremely expensive evening gowns”, Michael Aspel introduced the judges of that year’s Miss World. In the late Sixties and early Seventies Miss World was pretty well the most popular TV show in the world and the show regularly got over 20 million viewers in the UK alone. Considering the huge global audience, Eric Morley – the man in charge of the contest – chose some very odd judges.
Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Asia's forgotten musical gems rediscovered on vinyl
As the vinyl market experiences booming demand, crate diggers are spending time and money to re-release forgotten musical gems around Asia and beyond.
Constantly Wrong: The Case Against Conspiracy Theories
Constantly Wrong: The Case Against Conspiracy Theories
documentary film by Kirby Ferguson (2020)
Monday, November 16, 2020
Book Review
A Planet for Texans
by H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
This book is all hat and no cowboy. A Planet for Texans was written by H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire as a science-fiction book that was probably intended to be some kind of statement about libertarian politics. What we get is a half-baked novelette with too much dialogue and a handful of science-fiction images. The end result is nothing memorable.
Stephen Silk is an ambassador for the Solar League, a United Nations type of organization that manages interplanetary politics at the end of the 22nd century. They send him to New Texas, a planet colonized by Texans after a series of wars that made them want to leave Terra and live according to their own rules on an alternate planet. The Solar League wants New Texas to join them but some of the planet’s inhabitants are against the idea for fear that they will not be allowed to continue with their lifestyle. The previous ambassador, Cumshaw (I couldn’t help thinking of his name being a misspelling of “cumshot” while reading this), was murdered and Silk needs to find out how and why.
The Texans colonized New Texas because it had herds of supercows, basically giant cattle that are no different from ordinary cows except for their enormous size. The ranch owners supply the entire universe and all its planets with supercow meat. There are a few other science-fiction details like space age guns and flying cars. More or less, New Texas does not appear to be a whole lot different from the real Texas and this story could have taken place on Earth without having to change much. There is one other difference though and that is the presence of the z’Srauff, a race of creatures that have achieved the same evolutionary level as homo sapiens only they descended from dogs instead of apes.
The strongest part of this book is its blending of elements from various genres. It has details that are not only from science-fiction but also westerns, detective fiction, mysteries, espionage, political thrillers, utopian literature, political ideology, and courtroom drama. But none of these elements are written out to their full potential. They hang out in the sidelines of the story and are more like window dressing then substantial parts of the book.
The characters are just as irrelevant. There are around ten different people that get introduced and most of them do nothing more than speak a couple of times. Some of them only speak once. Their main function in the story is to provide information about Cumshaw’s murder to Stephen Silk as he tries to solve the crime. The authors could have easily accomplished the same thing with two characters maximum. Why is Hoddy Ringo even in this book? He serves absolutely no purpose at all.
There isn’t much action to speak of. Aside from a flying car chase, a possible assassination plot that never gets full treatment, and a couple brief gun fights, most of the book is dialogue. The New Texans speak in a folksy idiom as they tell Silk about their freedom and love of guns. He questions them about the murder and then acts as a prosecuting attorney as the gang that shot Cumshaw are on trial. You mostly get the same story twice because the New Texans first explain the crime to Silk and then the whole story gets told again during the trial with mostly the same details. This takes up about half the story which is sad considering it is only 100 pages long. Authors that need to repeat themselves to such an extent to fill up pages don’t have much to say.
A Planet for Texans is a lean, skeletal, anemic piece of writing. It has the feel of an outline more than a story. The political ideology of New Texas is little more than shallow thoughts for simpletons but I won’t bother to dwell on that. If the authors filled in more details, added a subplot or two, given the characters more dimension, and thrown in a little more action, this could have been about half as good as Dune. But they didn’t and the result is juvenile, cartoonish, and rudimentary. It isn’t any more sophisticated than an episode of Scooby Doo. The authors put a half-assed effort into this book and could have done a lot better if they had actually made the effort.
Beam, H. Piper and McGuire, John J. A Planet for Texans. Ace Books Inc., New York: 1958.
Friday, November 13, 2020
Yorkshire Ripper: Wearside Jack hoax and police blunders that derailed inquiry
Despite the 2.5-million police man hours expended on catching him, Peter Sutcliffe continued his murderous spree for more than five years
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
Book Review
Violence and the Sacred
by Rene Girard
Imagine a prehistorical time when a band of early homo sapiens committed an act of violence that resonated in such a powerful way that we still feel its effects hundreds of thousands of years later. This act of human sacrifice had a profound impact on the structure of the human psyche and how societies manage conflict. Such a belief is outlined by Rene Girard in his book Violence and the Sacred. His provocative theory is well-developed and, at the very least, plausible. Girard, however, runs into major problems when he tries to explain the disconnection between his theory and the social practices of humanity in the modern world.
Girard develops a hypothesis about the origin of human culture based on an unrecorded event that happened so far back in history that no one actually knows what or how it happened. He claims that an act of transgression, probably a murder, occurred within a community and the members of that community retaliated by committing acts of violence against members of the opposing faction. Think of a blood feud situation in which members of an organized crime family kill off members of an enemy family in retaliation for an act of violence committed against them. The cycle of retaliatory violence spiraled so far out of control that the survival of the band of humans was in jeopardy. Then somebody realized that the key to ending the feud would be to unite the opposing sides by having them team up together to perform a ritual sacrifice, one involving a human scapegoat. The community’s collective consciousness blended and was then directed towards the sacrificial victim, channeling the murderous energy into one common direction so that it no longer dispersed throughout the society.
Rene Girard traces the survival of this behavioral framework from prehistory into the so-called primitive societies of Africa and beyond. Mythologies were invented to explain the ceremonial killing and these myths eventually transformed into religions. As the human diaspora spread all over the globe, the diverse communities continued this ceremonial rite, taking it with them, and changing it according to their own needs and styles. Many tribes began substituting animals for human sacrifices and some abandoned the practice altogether. The ancient Greeks sublimated this ritual slaughter into tragedy and beyond that, traces of the ceremony still remain today in various forms like literature and political theory. This is a structural-functional sociological argument and the implication is that an act of violence is necessary to form tight community bonds and prevent the spread of cyclical violence throughout society.
Girard justifies his hypothesis by comparing the places where this rite of sacrifice has survived. He applies the framework of his description to tribes in Africa like the Dinka of what is now South Sudan and the Incwala of Swaziland. A mythology of the Tsimshian Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest is also analyzed. The idea is that all of these rituals and myths are ancestrally related to the one original human sacrifice and the differences in detail are a result of cultural evolution. Up to this point this is a very tightly wound and well-reasoned theory which gets backed up with fairly legitimate evidence.
Girard builds on his hypothesis by analyzing mimetic desire as a motivational force. The tragedy of Oedipus and Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus complex exemplify what he means. Humans learn by imitating others; first and foremost, men learn by imitating their fathers. A young boy desires to be like his father but he also builds his individuality by desiring to be different from his father. This is a double bind and the resolution of this conflict is necessary for the individual to effectively grow up and adjust to society. One of the ways he wishes to be like his father is in the possession of his mother. Therefore competition for the mother leads to conflict with the father which is the source of violence in the human individual. Sex and violence, being two forms of libidinal energy, need to be suppressed and controlled through social taboos to prevent a person from becoming a danger to himself or others. Incest taboos became a way of controlling human instincts and that is why religious practice is partially characterized by prohibitions. Girard’s contention is that religious myth and ritual are necessary to keep a society from self-destructing.
The breaking of taboos can be dangerous and people who do so can be elevated as kings, sometimes later to be sacrificed, or degraded as marginalized individuals. Since the goal of sacrifice is the preservation of social order, victims are chosen from the periphery of a community. The victim can be a domestic animal, for instance, or sometimes it can be a human, possibly a slave, a prisoner of war, a physically or mentally disabled person, an elderly person, a child, or someone deemed to be a social deviant. In some societies, human sacrifice became too disturbing so animals or effigies were substituted for the same purpose.
Girard’s hypothesis works well when he applies it to pre-modern myth and ritual but when he begins to critique modern society this book goes completely off the rails. From an intellectual point of view, modernism is defined as era of releasing humanity from its bindings. Industrial workers were to be liberated from economic slavery by communism. Psychoanalysis was meant to remove taboos and end the repression of mental energy that had built up over the centuries. Humanity would reach its full potential through technology and the free exchange of ideas. Nietzsche announced the death of God and religion was one of the casualties of modernism since it was seen as being one of the major obstacles to humanity reaching a higher stage of evolution. Girard’s take on all this is that modern society, where the judicial system has replaced religion as the primary regulatory institution, is off-balance and plagued by never-ending problems. He believes we need to return to religion to prevent the modern world from collapsing.
While his analysis of pre-modern societies is provocative and well-thought out, he leads us in the direction of a conservative agenda. He doesn’t explicitly say that we should restart using human sacrifice as a means of regulating society but he sure does hint at it loudly. His hypothesis is fundamentally conservative because the rite of sacrifice is described as a method of maintaining the status quo. It pits a conformist society, massed to participate in the ritual, against a peripheral outsider who is to be sacrificed as a scapegoat. Turned on its head and looked at from the sacrificial victim’s point of view, this is not good. Social order is more important and if you happen to be the scapegoat, that is your tough luck. The victim is someone distinct from society, possibly a non-conformist, an individualist, an artist, a member of a minority group, a person who question the established order or refuses to go along with the herd. The underlying social message is that the individual risks persecution, in the form of marginalization and possibly violence, so conforming to the community reduces the risk of being singled out for an act of persecution. This is the essence of religious communities or political parties that draw a strong line of demarcation between insiders and those outsiders. Reactionary thinking of this type can lead to fascism, genocides, holocausts, pogroms, ethnic cleansings, and other forms of crimes against humanity when taken to logical extremes. Girard does not appear to be advocating for violations of human rights when he defends a rebirth of religion in the modern world but he could easily tread that path if not cautious. In the self-critique of his own theory, he does acknowledge that rites of sacrificial violence do not always result in their intended effects and therein lies a potential for extreme danger. He would probably say that the sacrificial rite is meant to prevent those types of atrocities but still, the idea of murdering a peripheral individual to maintain the status quo of does not resonate well with moral or civilized people.
There are further problems in the examples Girard uses to support his theory. His chapter on Claude Levy-Strauss seems like a pointless sidetrack. The ceremonies and myths he dissects are taken far out of context and appear to even be incomplete. His explanation of the biblical story of Jonah is the most obvious example. The idea of the sailors throwing Jonah off their sinking ship can loosely be interpreted as a form of scapegoating and human sacrifice but it ignores the actual meaning of the story; Girard does not mention how Jonah prays to God after being swallowed by the whale and gets regurgitated as a symbolic form of redemption. The moral of the story has nothing to do with the details given by Girard. This can be said of the Dinka ritual involving the sacrifice of a cow; the full ritual is not explained and the Dinka people’s understanding of its meaning is never examined. Girard, a literary critic, appears to have no understanding of anthropological or sociological methodologies or theories but he employs cherry picked ideas from social science texts. He interprets anthropological data the same way he interprets poetry and literary fiction, without regard to the fact that literary criticism and anthropology do not overlap as disciplines in any convincing way. He also doesn’t provide enough data to support the theory that all ceremonies are variations of the one original human sacrifice. He uses less than ten examples to support a theory that would apply to a vast quantity of data, so vast that collecting all of it is an unrealistic and unrealizable goal. We can take him at his word but only up to a certain point.
He makes the same blunder in his definition of certain Greek words like “kudos”, for example. He makes assertions about the complexity of encoded information in lexical items from Ancient Greek but he is not fluent in Ancient Greek and borrows his material from other scholars who may not be entirely accurate in their explanations to begin with. Girard takes these words out of context to support ideas but he has no concept of how semantic systems operate. Words have fluid, not static, definitions and their meanings are heavily dependent on context. Think of how the word “like” can be used as a noun, a verb, an adverb, or a discourse marker depending on its lexical and syntactic environment, for example. His knowledge of linguistics is laughable. You can’t take the definition of a word in a language you don’t understand and use it to make sweeping generalizations about psychology and religion that pertain to humanity in its entirety. Girard just found some writings by other scholars who said what he wanted to hear so he lifted those ideas out of their theoretical context and used them to support his own theories. This is a matter of adjusting the evidence to fit the claim.
Finally, the idea that there was one human sacrifice that initiated all human culture, social praxis, and even language itself is an unprovable claim, at best, speculation. Girard admits himself that this can not be proven or empirically justified. Some credit can be given because he has identified and analyzed one thread of human behavior and belief that appears to run through many human societies but it doesn’t take into account all the other threads of human behavior that have, do, or will ever exist. It is one thread among many and to ascribe it the importance he does is just a little bombastic.
The idea that culture originated in this event is not convincing either. If the people who performed the first human sacrifice used any kind of tool, even something as simple as a rock or a sharpened animal bone, then culture existed before the sacrifice. Food, clothing, and shelter are the basic human elements of survival. These are biological necessities. Tools are used by humans to make the acquisition of these materials more convenient. Language is used for abstract thoughts and for the coordination of human societies to maximize the potential for survival. Since all of these innovations are rooted in biological need, it would be plausible to consider that human biology is the root of human culture. If a community leader convinced a whole society to sacrifice a human with some sort of tool, that could entail the idea that culture preceded such a happening. Girard claims that this was a religious event that caused human culture and language to develop but it is more likely that religion was a product of abstract and symbolic thought; most likely, language and culture caused religion, not the other way around.
Rene Girard has developed an interesting hypothesis about the origins of sacrificial rites and their relation to human violence. He ends the book by claiming that his theory will revolutionize the way we think about human culture, religion, art, language, and literature. That change has not yet come. It probably never will. Girard did not recognize the limitations of his own ideas or their limited applicability in the real world. He identified and described a pattern of human behavior then made grandiose claims about its importance. He was a narrow but intense thinker and the mechanics of his ideas are plausible up to a point. It’s actually surprising that he maintained his status as a scholar since his laser focus on one idea makes him more likely to have been a fanatic, a radical fundamentalist, or a cult leader. In the end though, he was a one trick pony with an ulterior motive and his overestimation of his own importance ultimately sabotaged his ideological success. People who are predisposed to religious belief will probably swallow Violence and the Sacred as a whole without asking many questions about it; those of a more secular mind probably won’t.
Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1979.
Tuesday, November 10, 2020
Owners' joy as rare £2.5m books stolen in London heist returned
The owners of rare books, including those by Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton, have described their "profound joy" at having them returned
Monday, November 9, 2020
Life Is a Four Letter Word: The Trials of Lenny Bruce
This summary is not available. Please
click here to view the post.
Saturday, November 7, 2020
Tuesday, November 3, 2020
Is the U.S. Already in a New Civil War?
Experts say that a new civil conflict will look nothing like the last American Civil War, but that the country is on the verge of large scale political violence.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)