Top 10 ways to get stuff into two piles

The simplest kind of analysis is the one where stuff is all the same, everything is one thing, or it all boils down to that in the end. One pile analysis. It’s all good, it’s all bad, or perhaps it’s all absurd. “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”

One step up the analytical complexity scale is when there are two kinds of stuff. In the classic version of two piles analysis there is no middle ground or mixing; the categories are mutually exclusive and mutually defining. It’s even been argued in structural anthropology that such binaries are the building blocks of all of our thinking. Of course, complexity sneaks in if the two piles can be mixed, or if they sit at the ends of a continuum of possibilities. Still we are not yet close to the analytical scope and flexibility of fields and networks. Pure binaries are not found in the wild, but they can still be helpful as an orienting fiction if we don’t mistake them for real; they can also be fully imposed on occasion if the alignment of conditions and forces is just right.

Here are ten of my favorites, in no particular order, only there are eleven.

1. Lumpers and splitters: This one is fun because it’s an attempt at a meta-binary that calls into view the whole process of categorization. Lumpers do few big piles, splitters do many little piles. Splitters think the lumpers are missing important distinctions, lumpers think the splitters are splitting hairs.

2. Folders and crumplers: Sort of a crude, buttwipey way of getting at the “odd couple” binary between orderly and chaotic personality types; metaphorically covers just about any performance of self. Planners and improvisers are in here. Freud called these types “anal-retentive” and “anal-expulsive.”

3. People with loaded guns and people who dig: Still one of the best meditations on the deficiency of simple categorizations in a complex world, and of the irrationalities produced by trying to get the categories to settle down into simplicity, is Sergio Leone’s great spaghetti western “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” This one is the last and most explicit of a series of contingent “two kinds of people in this world” binaries the movie contemplates, each only as successful as the violence that can be deployed to enforce it.

4. Foxes and hedgehogs: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” A quote from Archilochus, picked up by Sir Isaiah Berlin in a famous essay, adapted for various applications. Again, this binary threatens to split open the whole exercise, because hedgehogs will tend to put everything into one big pile and foxes will tend to make lots of little piles.

5. Positive and negative liberty: Again thanks to Isaiah Berlin. Negative liberty refers to individual freedom from constraint; positive liberty focuses on freedom to act within the context and for the good of community. Accordingly, the emphasis of negative liberty is ‘rights’, that of positive liberty is ‘duties’. These two different and possibly contradictory understandings of what it means to be free underlie a great deal of confusing political discourse.

6. Autonomy and heteronomy: Auto-nomy, self-regulation; hetero-nomy, other-regulation. From the perspective of normative autonomy, any restriction of my sovereign self-rule is a kind of oppression. The ‘other’ in heteronomy may be a person or persons, rules and concepts, environmental conditions, even one’s own habits, passions or desires (like body parts that have ‘minds of their own’).

7. Movement and position: I covered this one here. Some people are comfortable with dynamics and uncertainty; some people want things to sit still and behave.

8. Via positiva and via negativa: My thanks to Marc at In Harmonium for this one, more thoroughly explored there. He’s referring to mindsets according to which the focus is on what we can be (positiva) or can’t be (negativa) certain about. Positiva statements are accordingly about Truth, negativa statements about possibilities. Objectivity and subjectivity is a subset binary here; as Marc and others like Sandra Harding point out, the best solutions are a matter of adaptation and negotiation among perspectives.

9. Men and women: Look, as soon as men can be said to have a ‘feminine side’ or women who like sex and open doors for themselves threaten ‘masculinity’ this whole house of cards collapses into a messy pile of possible human traits. But that doesn’t stop it from being one of the most basic myths we use to organize our sense of who’s who and what’s what.

10. Public and private: In England the schools people call ‘private’ in the U.S. are called ‘public’. Sex is private unless it’s homosex, in which case it’s publicly regulated. Halliburton and Blackwater are part of the ‘private sector’, while the ‘public sector’ includes agencies like the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice that do some of their business in secret. Private names both my genitals and a rank in the army; public names kinds of libraries and enemies. A ball of confusion; see Weintraub.

11. Us and them.

Wordle pedagogy

The commentary on Rough Theory’s wordle post of dissertation chapter 1 stimulated a further thought about Wordle, which its creator describes as “a toy.” I’ll agree with that to start with, because it’s fun to play with.

The “beautiful word clouds” generated from our more ’serious’ work feel like they capture something, however. As Lynda said ironically at RT, “it’s all there, and presented much more eloquently than I could ever do with bothersome things like sentences.” NP wonders if they could be submitted in lieu of an abstract, and Lynda says “*Now* I know what my thesis is about.” I had the same reaction, including that shiver of embarrassment about certain words that should have been inconsequential turning out to be heavy in the distribution (Wordle removes linguistically common ’stopwords’ and weights the rest by frequency).

Still, in principle it should matter what order and relation we put words in; otherwise we could all just stop with the bothersome sentences and write word lists for wordling. For example, frequency is not the only index of importance; sometimes a word that appears only once is the fulcrum of a whole argument. In fact, this transition from lumped word clusters to organized thoughts is pretty much what I’m trying to teach during my day job. I get papers that read like wordles all the time; if the words are well-enough chosen, they sometimes even pass. Now I find myself wondering if I could use Wordle itself to graphically represent to the students the difference between a word dump and a fully-articulated paper.

I’d welcome thoughts on this. Just as a first impression, I imagine requiring students a week before an early-semester paper is due to come to class with a Wordle printout of their introductory paragraph. I would then put them in work groups and have them attempt to interpret each others’ wordles to see how close they could get to the author’s intended meaning. In the process I think they would be clarifying in their own minds what ‘extra’ is needed beyond mere words to communicate a meaning and frame an argument. The additional benefit is that this would move their procrastination window up a week.

If this seems like fun, we could always experiment with my chapter wordles here or NP’s at Rough Theory….

All that’s fit to print

From the ridiculous to the sublime, here’s a wordle of chapter 5:

Here’s chapter 6:

The worldle is now a better place.

The deadest vole

Because it keeps sitting there staring at me, and because it says things at patient length that I occasionally wave my hands at in rushed panic, I have posted the current version of my dissertation/book in Stuffed Voles.

I never did find a title I liked for it – it dissertated as Indeterminacy, Irrationality, and Collective Will: Gramsci’s Marxism, Bourgeois Sociology, and the Problem of Revolution, really little better than a collection of search terms, later replaced with some mishmash about a prehistory of postmodernism that won’t do either. Nor am I sold that there’s an ideal audience of more than about two people for it in its current form. I have conflicting thoughts about different directions to push it. But I don’t work on it a lot. I got tenure without publishing it and happily spend most of my professional time teaching (4/4) and reading. There’s no rocket pushing it toward escape velocity.

Still, my advisor and committee were kind enough to let me write it like a book in the first place, so it hangs together ok and pretty accurately reflects the state of my knowledge and concerns at that time (early/mid ’90s). Although it’s just one of many possible versions of the story of the late-classical period of European social theory, with just one of many possible selections from the available cast of characters, it’s probably good enough to be among someone’s favorites. There are certain kinds of question people regularly get exercised about that it speaks to pretty well: rationality and irrationality, political culture, identity, social construction, contingency, critical standpoint, theory and practice. I’m saying if you’re in exactly the right mood it might be worth a look.

The period is roughly 1890-1930. People I talk about at some length include Kautsky, Bernstein, Sorel, Lenin, Lukács, Tasca, Bordiga, Machiavelli, Mosca, Michels, Pareto, Durkheim, Weber, and of course Gramsci.

Reasonable and smart? Global warming edition

In my real life I’m a son of Chuck and Linda. Linda is an art historian; although she wouldn’t say so, one of the world’s foremost experts on the arts and crafts movement. Chuck started out to be an engineer, took a detour into philosophy which is still where he’s professionally housed, and now spends his time figuring out ways to explain how complex systems like economies and climates work and involve each other. He hangs out a lot with climate scientists and is in on the cutting edge about global warming. He knows what he’s talking about. Here’s a recent attempt to explain where we’re at with all that in a commonly-understandable way, in the form of a review of a book that most people won’t read. This will probably end up published somewhere, so consider it a preview.

My question to all y’all visiting here (about 50 a day so far, thank you and welcome) once you’ve read this is, can you imagine a reasonably smart (therefore, winning) politics for Crazy Barack or Crazy John that would adequately take the situation Dad describes into account? Remember, Crazy Al Gore, who knows these things as well as anyone, couldn’t do it and gave up trying.

CRAZY EDDY

Everyone who’s lived for a while in the Delaware Valley remembers Crazy Eddy. Crazy Eddy was in the going out of business business. He’d open up new CRAZY EDDY’S all over the place, and immediately run going out of business sales. He did this for a number of years, then, to everyone’s surprise, he went out of business. Every region probably has its star of the going out of business business, but Crazy Eddy is our all-time star. (Well, maybe Gene Mauch.)

But now it turns out that with all these climate problems we’re all in the going out of business business. We’ll have to be careful. The going out of business business is a tricky business. The trick is, the less it feels like you’re going out of business the better. The money rolls in; the inventory moves. And that could fool you into thinking you really weren’t going out of business. Crazy Eddy seemed to think that the going out of business business could last forever. And look what happened to him.

Management help may be on the horizon. There’s this guy we’ll call Crazy Vaclav. What’s crazy about him is that he has an uncanny ability to find numbers, get them right, and make them mean something. He’s also a maniac for hard work. Other than that, there’s nothing crazy about him. In fact he may be the sanest person on the planet. He keeps the only sensible books on the going out of business business: numbers we’d better pay attention to.

For instance, suppose we were worried about all the gas, oil, and stuff being used up by farm equipment: tractors, and so on. And you think “Well, maybe it’s time to go back to horses. They did it for us once; they can do it again.” Crazy Vaclav has it all figured out for us. “Matching the power of U.S. tractors in the year 2000 with horses would require building up an equine stock of 250 million head, about ten times the record number of horses in 1918. About 300 million ha [hectares], twice the total of U.S. arable land, would be needed to feed the animals.” Lively times on the stud farm.

Moving from horseshit to moonshine (Well, what did you think ethanol was? Puts NASCAR right back to its roots.), how much would we have to make to replace the petroleum, coal, and natural gas we use? Crazy Vaclav had to work to get this one. There are lots of estimates and conversions to make, based largely on data the petroleum and coal companies have provided. To make moonshine, you take vegetation (the more sugar the better) ferment it, then distill it. Corn squeezins are the most common, but the net production of vegetation on earth (NPP) can be calculated too, and you can figure out how much you’d have to work with per year by adding it all up. Making petroleum, gas, or coal is another matter. You take a lot of vegetation, sink it in swamps, and put a lot of pressure on it for a few hundred million years or so. You find out that “… during the later 1990s, annual consumption of fossil fuels burned organic carbon that required about 400 years of current global NPP.” So it seems that if we converted to biofuel, and used every scrap of vegetation for moonshine, we’d be able to replace one fourhundredth of the energy we’ve typically been using. Unfortunately that’s a big over-estimate given the technologies, and, of course we’d all starve to death before the first year was over anyway.

But the real threat to keeping the going out of business business in business isn’t the supply of stuff to put on sale, it’s the temptation of an old classic, the going out of business fire: the producer of dozens of vacant lots in North Philly. Let the insurance industry pay (as they did in New Orleans, and as they’re doing right now in California). The trouble with fires is that once they get going, they’re hard to stop. This is just as true of the slow slow fire of global warming as it of a wildfire in a dry canyon. Maybe we ought to collect up those greenhouse gases, and store them away. Wouldn’t you know. Crazy Vaclav is worried about finding enough storage space. “Even if the gas were stored in the supercritical form … [squeezed as tight as it’s possible to squeeze it], putting away just 10% of its global flux would require annual handling of a volume equivalent to the worldwide extraction of crude oil.” I guess we’d better not fire the fire department. (Crazy Vaclav is really Vaclav Smil; and the book where you can find all the numbers and calculations is Energy in Nature and Society.)

Meanwhile, on the other side of the street, Crazy Barak and Crazy John are competing for our support. They both tell us that our economy can grow while we stave off the end of the going out of business business. They differ in minor particulars, but they’re both using numbers that aren’t within thousands of miles of making any sense. In a few months one of those distinguished gentlemen is going to be running the going out of business business. Better one of them than me.

Chuck Dyke

cdyke@temple.edu

Bo Diddley, 1928-2008

I must have been under a rock because I missed the recent death of Bo Diddley, one of the greats of the generation that turned blues, r&b, gospel, jazz, country, worksong, hollers, and street music into rock & roll. Thanks to Lumpenprofessoriat here’s a video of Bo and the band at the top of their game:

Rachel and I were just watching a John Lennon documentary, and so one striking thing to me about this vid is all the white girls going all beatlemania for big black Bo. It can be easy to forget that this hysterical and racially goodwilled fanitude was a general cultural style at the time, of course with gendered variants. Even earlier. My dad has reminisced about the virtual mosh pit up at the front of the stage at a Charlie Parker concert (at that point, must have been the early ’50s, Dad was the only white guy there).

In his heyday Bo had a great band, as you can see. It’s all about the rhythm. The girls had moves, and it’s interesting and unique for the time to see one of them, Lady Bo, doubling on guitar and taking a lead turn. In Bo’s music there’s very little of the predatory misogyny that catches at contemporary sensibilities about much of the popular music of that time, and maybe here is more evidence of Bo’s good nature in that respect. He wasn’t a guy who drew the line; everyone was invited.

I saw Bo about 22 years ago at J.C. Dobbs on South Street in Philadelphia. It was one of those cash-maximizing affairs where he was touring without a band and played with whatever locals he could pick up. Like many artists of his era, black and white, he signed bad contracts, managed what money he did make poorly, and had little to show for his glory years. The venue was small and noisy, the band was a bunch of clueless young guys, and Bo was disinterested; but even so, there were flashes of the charisma, wit, and style you can see in the video, and it’s a cherished memory.

Throwing stones

I admire and enjoy the work Max Forte is doing at OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY. His post on shooting kids is typically interesting and provocative. It’s working from this video shot from the cab of a U.S. military vehicle in Iraq, in which a soldier narrates his thoughts about a series of Iraqi children throwing rocks at him and eventually breaking his windshield. Those thoughts are, as Max notes, not pretty (strong language alert):

Like a good anthropologist and especially as the engaged anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist kind, Max’s empathy tends to slosh toward the locals. He’s aware of the soldiers as humans, but because they’re in big trucks, have guns, and are members of an occupying force of dubious legitimacy, their troubles are their own and easily solved by getting the flork out of Iraq. He wonders why we should ’support the troops’ in doing this bad thing that they’re doing. Stop doing it, The End.

I want to fiddle with Max’s take on the video and the situation (comments on the thread itself have also been excellent, go see), but only in a more general context of agreeing with his principles and project. What I say here is meant to balance the analysis from a different perspective, which I believe is what a good anthropological community ought to do. It could be that a more balanced analysis blunts the thrust of Max’s politics, and here we may find our disagreement. I’m not much persuaded by righteous critiques of righteousness, which is why I wrote the post before this one. To me Iraq is a vivid but otherwise ordinary case of a lot of people acting in moral good faith according to different understandings of what the content of morality is, and a lot of other people acting out their habitus, and the rest kind of improvising. Taking a stand here makes sense for many reasons, but for me to join in with all that would just add clutter.

To start by clearing a little clutter, ’supporting the troops’ and ’supporting the mission’ are two different things. Max is able to collapse those together because he assigns full, intentional responsibility to the troops for being there as agents of the mission. I’m actually sympathetic to this kind of strong moral ascription as a regulative ideal, but it is an ascription of an ideal. As such, it’s not very anthropological. Max is appropriately not much interested in the anthropology of the troops, but I am. I teach in Fayetteville and work with these soldiers from Fort Bragg all the time. They matter to me. They’re smart and dumb, moral and expedient, reflective and unreflective, likable and repellent in just the same proportion as most folks. They’re in the army for a range of reasons, not mutually exclusive, including passionate love of their country, a sense of duty and honor, group solidarity, class struggle, anxiety about their masculinity, social betterment, economic expedience, a poor sense of options, and occasionally sadism.

The narrative offered by the soldier on the video is chilling at face value. As far as we know from what he says, the only reason he’s not shooting a bunch of Iraqi kids or giving the wheel a little jog and running them over is that his sergeant told him not to. Who knows what he’d do if he thought he could get away with it, and so on. If we take what he says at face value, this guy is a dangerous sociopath with a barely restrained god complex. Just like the United States?

I know very few people who are so reflective and controlled or unreflective and simple that I can (or in kindness should) take what they say at face value. I watched the vid with my wife Rachel, who isn’t a big fan of militarism but used to be married to a soldier at Bragg and hung out with those guys a lot. We both had the same reaction, which was “poor guy.” That soldier is no psycho. Crude and a knucklehead, yes; not defendable. But he’s scared, tired, frustrated and hurt. Maybe feels like he’s there trying to do a good thing and being dragged down. He’s probably not fully invested in the ideology of liberation from tyranny; few soldiers I know are. But he’s familiar with the chaos of collapsed order and he does know he’s in a no-win situation. He’s blowing off some serious steam here, and probably pumping himself and his buddy with the camera up. But he’d no sooner shoot those kids than he’d shoot his sergeant, who he also no doubt cusses out behind his back on choice occasions. He’s disciplined with a pretty good discipline in comparison to, say, a warrior in Chinggis Khan’s Mongol hordes or a thug in Nasty Somoza’s Nicaraguan National Guard, either of whom would have had a much less restrained idea of how to apply superior power.

And the thing is, the kids know it. They don’t even bother ducking or running away once they’ve hucked their rocks. We may well admire their initiative and pluck in resisting the occupiers (I’d want something a little more structured and thoughtful if they were my kids), and they are certainly earning themselves some bragging rights (the guy who broke the windshield is a folk hero for the next little while), but they’re basically punks getting away with symbolic acts of defiance to authority. Good for them, but not what I’d call Resistance with a capital R. Their impunity is evident in their relaxed posture, their mocking tone, and the fact that this particular corner is known by both ’sides’ as the one where you come to stone the Americans. I can see where that would be fun and affirming, under the circumstances, a thrill of transgression for sure and a ready tie-in to a typically othering notion of group solidarity. Of course, they are also in a larger sense in a no-win situation, which brings us back to Max’s point — yikes. U.S., just get out.

Whether or not that happens any time soon, I think it’s worth going back and cleaning up that standard left-wing critique of the hypocrisy of U.S. democracy for supporting rather than toppling nasty dictators. Saddam was one of those, and according to the Cold War rhetoric of critical opposition to cynical U.S. imperialism the neo-cons actually did the right thing, for once, by taking him out. We could have gotten at the oil and kept Iran in check much easier by making up with Saddam over Kuwait and letting him get on with exterminating the Kurds. Despite all the war’s stupidity and barbarism, and the very real danger of a plunge into civil war and anarchy, Iraq is much closer to popular self-determination now than it was under the Sunni Ba’athists. So it turns out we on the left do not actually want a muscularly unhypocritical U.S. democracy. We should get much clearer on what we do want, and thanks to Max for working toward that.

Reasonable and smart

would be a pretty good sort of President to have, in my view. Just an egghead bias, I guess. My local paper ran a spiffulous editorial from Gail Collins of the New York Times that does a sweet job of identifying Barack Obama’s credentials in this respect. Here’s an approving take on it, with long, relevant excerpts, from the Daily Kos.

Collins’ point is that Obama is entirely consistent in crafting his positions and actions pragmatically on two basic principles: finding rational common ground, and avoiding stupidity. So when he ‘fails’ to go to the wall for some point of moral purity, it’s probably because doing so would be divisive, dumb, or both.

Wow. Awesome.

Priceless

– though your life may be to you, your faith and/or your moral philosophy, the gummint has its value nailed down to a statistical nicety. Just so you know, that’s $6.9 million, which is a sweet discount of $1 million from five years ago.

This figure is used to calculate the costs and benefits of regulations, for example by the Environmental Protection Agency. So for a regulation anticipated to save ten lives to be ‘worth it’, it would have to cost less than $69 million to implement, and so on. Our tax dollars at work.

It’s very upsetting that there’s no apparent calculation for the special value of the lives of children. Won’t somebody think of the children?

Mistakes and confusions

I note with some relief in the paper today that a cliché shift may be occurring. For the last little while when Bush administration officials wanted to sound all tough and serious they would lard their posturing with the phrase “make no mistake.” Make no mistake, no one they were talking about was impressed by this. And make no mistake, I’m a little tired by it.

As Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice has been one of the chief advocates for making no mistakes, so she’s sort of an official barometer of craptastic gummint lingo. Imagine my delight, then, seeing her remarks on Iran’s recent missile tests. Given the opportunity to tell those pesky reprobates yet again to make no mistake about our commitment to ensuring Middle Eastern peace through war, the Sec instead said “I don’t think the Iranians are too confused… about the capability and power of the United States to do exactly that” (capability and power being subtly distinct things in the world of international diplomacy), and “[w]e take very, very strongly our obligation to help our allies defend themselves, and no one should be confused about that.”

Hooray! A new era! Let mistakes be banished, and confusion reign.

Now if we can just get rid of all those references to “blood and treasure….”