Historicize That Artifact!
I was going to scribble something about the Oriana Fallaci matter, but I think I need to do something else first. (Now that The Book is finished and thrown out of the house to make its own way, I’ll have more time to chatter here again. Writing books terrible interference with pressing need to chatter and babble and rant. Must never write book again, because of deep need to babble. Make note to self.) There’s this fairly hilarious review in the TLS of a fanciful history of barbed wire.
For Netz, the raising of cattle is not about producing meat and hides from lands usually too marginal to yield arable crops, but rather an expression of the urge to exercise power…While that is the acquisitive purpose of barbed wire, for Professor Netz it is equally – and perhaps even more – a perversely disinterested expression of the urge to inflict pain…I had always thought that we brand our cattle because they cannot carry notarized title deeds anymore than they can read off-limits signs…By this point in the text some trivial errors occur, readily explained by a brilliantly distinguished academic career that has understandably precluded much personal experience in handling cattle.
And so on. And it’s obvious what the next move is, and the reviewer does not fail to make it. It’s another ‘Hey kids!’ move – Hey kids! let’s all do that!
Enough of the text has been quoted to identify the highly successful procedures employed by Reviel Netz, which can easily be imitated – and perhaps should be by as many authors as possible, to finally explode the entire genre. First, take an artefact, anything at all…Take something seemingly innocuous, say shoelaces. Explore the inherent if studiously unacknowledged ulterior purposes of that “grim” artefact within “the structures of power and violence”. Shoelaces after all perfectly express the Euro-American urge to bind, control, constrain and yes, painfully constrict…That finally unmasks shoelaces for what they really are – not primarily a way of keeping shoes from falling off one’s feet, but instruments of pain…the British could hardly have rounded up Boer wives and children without shoelaces to keep their boots on…
I’ll bite. Let’s see… how about drinking vessels. Cups, glasses, mugs. They’re about power, because they control and repress and constrain the liquid, they confine it within boundaries and borders, they fence it in, they prevent its free creative wandering, they harness its energies to the service of (white, Western, male, Orientalist) human wishes. They are commodified and reified, alienated and consumerist. And cruel. They torture the liquid, you see, by penning it in and channeling its libido, by disciplining and punishing it; by taking it away from its parents or children, and by boiling it or chilling it or freezing it. They are an obvious symptom and outgrowth of rationalism and the Enlightenment project, of science and totalizing narratives, of positivism and phallocentrism. They are phallic symbols themselves, though they are also female genital symbols, which is highly tricky and deceptive. And they’re insidiously Eurocentric and hegemonic because they forbid the delightful free Arcadian way of drinking everything from a curved hand, symbol of community and love, replacing it with the rigid geometrical calculus-riddled shape of the dreaded Cup.
Your turn. Another B&W game or contest. Let’s play Deconstruct/Demystify/Problematize the Artifact.
Don’t forget to quote Irigaray on how hegemonistic Western physics has Othered turbulence and liquids…
Drat! I did forget to quote or even mention Irigaray! What a chump. And there is even an item in the Dictionary about that there turbulence stuff. I’m not the one wot wrote it though, so naturally it slipped my mind. No, that’s not right, I don’t remember what I wrote either. When doing revisions I look at my own work with complete lack of recognition. ‘I wrote this? Was I there at the time?’
And then when the wolf _does_ come along, everyone says “Power is everywhere, isn’t it, so it can’t be anywhere in particular, can it? So there is no wolf.”
PS Thank you for linking to my web site. The cheque’s in the post. I can recommend the free leaflet, too.
Yeah. That wolf will have to wait its turn to be problematized along with everyone else.
Hey, I had no idea that web site existed, Chris! Would have linked to it long ago if I had. Saw the ref in books thread at CT and shot off to find it and link to it.
Edward Luttwak, trained economist, professional strategic analyst, current fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was a Reagan era hawk, though he’s since become a slight bit of a maverick. It’s nice to know he can jet down to his ranch in Bolivia for some R&R, hobnobbing with the hands and the local gentry, and his admiration for African pastoralists is most refreshing. But to speak of “marginal lands”, while in some part no doubt true, already presupposes the operations of a large-scale economic system, and the cattle business has been known to involve a fair measure of violence, while barbed wire has been put to other uses. It’s hard to know just how bad the book under review is, since, from the potion available, Luttwak doesn’t review it, but just talks about himself. Source criticism should go both ways.
It’s only existed for two weeks . . . With luck I’ll get a pdf of the free leaflet to proof real soon now.
It’s a ‘just in time’ thing.
“Your turn. Another B&W game or contest. Let’s play Deconstruct/Demystify/Problematize the Artifact.”
Er… how about this from a week or two ago:
http://nonstuff.blogspot.com/2005/05/gravity.html
Ah, good, Chris; I feel less repentent for not linking before.
Fair point, JH. (Oh, that Edward Luttwak! I knew the name rang a bell. I read an interesting book of his several years ago, and was, indeed, puzzled about who [what] exactly he was, given the Reagan affiliation on the dust jacket [or wherever it was] – he seemed awfully skeptical for that.) Sure, one could write a critical history or account of cattle ranching (and people have). But unless Luttwak is quoting terribly unfairly, the book in question seems pretty…fanciful. Not to say strained.
Hey, David, that gravity item is very amusing. Shall I post is as a guest N&C and your entry for the contest or game?
That cattle ranch in Bolivia, by the way, is 110 sq. miles. (I’d googled the name to check if it was the same guy I thought it was.) He was born in Transylvannia; going by his surname, I’d guess he’s a Transylvannian German, (a patrician, merchant-elite upper-crust type). I’m guessing OB read “Turbocapitalism”. He’s not a dumb guy, but I get irritated when a book reviewer reviews himself rather than the book. I’ve read Rorty doing it several times.
OT, I did come across a 1995 Paul Krugman review of Luttwak’s previous book on globalization, together with similar books by 3 other authors, which Krugman panned. Not Luttwak, but one of the others claimed that current trends would lead to “developing”, cheap labor countries accumulating simultaneous trade/current account and capital account surpluses, which Krugman held up as sheer ignorance, since the current account and the capital account are just opposite sides of the accounting ledger, which sum to zero. So Krugman was logically right. However, last year PRC ran a sizable current account surplus, (compared to a very modest deficit with RoW in previous years), while continuing to absorb a fairly large chunk of FDI, as well as, illicit, (because of capital controls), speculative financial flows, which, of course, the CB had to simply recycle into U.S. bonds to support its U.S. dollar peg, (since it’s very hard to invest all of a country’s available capital, when its net savings rate is 45%.) I just thought that was a nice exemplification of the relation between logic and reality.
Good stuff, JH; thanks. Yeah, I could have done with less self-reviewing too – but he made some amusing points along the way, so I used ’em.