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.

Battle of the sexes

I was already thinking a thought about sexes when I happened upon some help from the most excellent Hoyden About Town, writing about a newish dating service that thinks sex is more complicated than one from column A and one from column B. Well hallelujah, brothers, sisters and friends, let’s run with that for a moment.

Much of third-wave feminism has been about troubling the categories of the body, by taking seriously the huge variety of human experiences of embodiment and in particular, of gender/sex/sexuality. Morals and practices are often quite narrow and rigid about these things, but vary dramatically from place to place and from time to time. Grappling with these differences in what parochially seem to be fundamental categories of our existence is now one of the ordinary requirements of a liberal education, which is my biz.

A favorite resource for me as a teacher lodged in history is Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Laqueur shows that in Europe well into the early modern period, and supported by close anatomical study, the dominant understanding of sex was that there was only one. Basically, they thought that everyone was a male but either an innie or an outie; depending on the body’s heat the goodies either got pushed out or retained inside. Ovaries are retained testicles, vaginas are inverted penises, and so on. (I’m simplifying Laqueur’s rich discussion quite a bit and he simplifies a rich history filled with a variety of understandings to make his point. See Joan Cadden, The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture for a far more nuanced and comprehensive analysis.)

There were some interesting corollaries to this view, including the ones where both partners (obviously) had to orgasm for conception to take place, and women were (obviously) the natural sexual aggressors because they wanted to incorporate men’s heat, aka precious bodily fluids:

Laqueur shows that in this as in so many other ways the modern advances of knowledge and civilization of the 19th century were a load of crap for women, who went from being second-class but sexually empowered to being second-class and sexually repressed. More than this, he shows how our ‘readings’ of the body are always mixed up in our cultural preconceptions and political agendas. (A neat parallel discussion about weight and dieting is at Savage Minds.)

So, to boil this down even further, it used to seem obvious to educated European persons that there is one sex. Now it seems obvious to educated Euro-American persons that there are two. History and anthropology show that a three-sex model is not at all uncommon. This is all by people living within, looking at and thinking about ‘the same’ physical bodies.

It’s all very well to play with the wrong wacko theories of other deluded folks, but fortunately we now have things properly sorted out and there are two sexes, no more no less, right?… except I can’t see any final reason to believe this, even if we take a very strict scientific view. Science went from one to two before, and science does not deal in settled truths, it deals in robust theories (e.g. two sexes, evolution, laws of thermodynamics) subject to new findings. It may well turn out that there are biologically three sexes, or six, or forty-two, with all sorts of surprising consequences for getting the pairings wrong.

Let’s say there are six. There are various ways this could work. The above-mentioned dating service points to one. Protein, hormone or immune-system variances may turn out to sort into sexualizing packages one through six, such that ones and fours are well-mated but ones and fives are not. It could be that twos and sixes can only work with help from a three or four. Could something like this explain reproductive difficulties? Was Henry VIII a three looking for his six but foolishly marrying one five after another? Maybe he ought to have smelt their pee more carefully….

How about if it turns out that the gender continuum — ultra-masculine to ultra-feminine — actually contains sexualizing thresholds, creating natural sex/gender composites? So the six sexes might be: masculine male, neutral male, feminine male; masculine female, neutral female, feminine female. Who knows how this is written into the genes, I’m speculating here. Sexuality might still have little to do with any of this, as is the case with the current two-sex theory. Or it might turn out to run most smoothly through the ‘gender’ component of the sex composite (masculine to feminine, with neutrals most open to anything), with conflict inherent at the extremes. Or it might turn out that same-to-same works best. Although this version of the hypothesis obviously feeds off of a lot of old stereotypical gender garbage, it would certainly naturalize, explain and demarginalize a lot of things about transgendering and transsexuality, as well as a variety of familiar failures in normative hetero/homo relationships.

One thing’s for sure. We don’t know the full truth of these matters yet; or rather, we know a variety of mutually-inconsistent truths about them. And maybe, given how people abuse the truths they have, it’s better that we don’t. My vote is for Burkean existentialism.

Move your feet.

Something my Dad told me many years ago when I was just a tyke Carl Dyke has always stuck with me. It’s a good example of how I do much of my thinking analogically, as for example in the last post on “getting clear.”

He was talking about how he played offensive guard on the football team in high school. He was a tall, skinny kid and guards are supposed to be the massive road graders of the offensive line so this was really an unlikely thing. What he told me was that the key is to move your feet. If you can keep your feet moving, he said (and of course I don’t remember his exact words), you keep your balance and leverage so you can maintain your position while never giving the other guy a clean shot to knock you over.

This is just beautifully (although of course imperfectly, as are all analogies) an image of metastability. There’s lots of shifting, preferably unpredictable in specific moves without being indeterminate in a larger sense, within a bounded range. No trouble keeping track of him continuing to be the same player playing the same position, but he’s otherwise not staying still or letting himself get pinned down.

As is so often the case during this, my blogging apprenticeship (N. Pepperell is my Yoda :-) ), a thread on Rough Theory prompted this thought. The thread points to recent ‘theory wars’, which is a sort of thing I’m familiar to ennui with as an intellectual historian, although not the current instance. We all have to figure stuff out sometime, somehow.

The discussion on NP’s thread is worth perusing. In a very general sense it’s about how to ‘ground’ theories in real, sensuous histories without merely turning them into curios or losing an aspiration to broader engagement and relevance.

So it’s about our relationship to the ground. And it all made me think – move your feet. The problems come when we try to plant in one position. Too easy to hit from a blind side and get knocked over that way. Go ahead and stay where you are, but keep your feet moving. Keep turning, shifting, engaging.

Move your feet.

Position and movement

There’s a thread over on Rough Theory that got me thinking a stray thought I didn’t want to clutter up that excellent site with, but did want to write down so I could see if I agreed with it. Without going into too much detail, the thread concerns what to make of Marx’s way of doing theory in general, and whether there’s something useful in the idea of ‘emergence’ in particular.

The conversation between N. Pepperell and Daniel strikes me as a classic sort of contrast between two very different ways of thinking about things, which I’ve tried to capture in my title for this post by hijacking Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as a rough analogy. Daniel is an excellent philosopher, and he is oriented toward position. N. Pepperell is also a outstanding philosopher, oriented toward movement. The uncertainty principle tells us that we can know either position or movement, but not both. Since this has to do with quantum physics (which I understand only vaguely) the analogy is a real stretch; let’s see if I can pull it off.

One way to do philosophy, speaking very roughly indeed, is to attempt to gain certainty – or at least clarity – by defining entities very precisely. The entities may be words, concepts, percepts, ideals, things (-in-themselves), or whatnot. Socrates’ dialogues are a famous example of this sort of philosophy. Through a process of logical questioning, Socrates attempts to determine the exact nature of a series of important concepts. In principle, it is possible to pin down exactly what ‘justice’ is, for example, or ‘the good’, and what the relations are between them.

To do great violence to a complex history, this kind of philosophical thinking passes up through Descartes and Kant (a mixed case) to analytic philosophy. The common project is to get the world and our thinking about it to sit still so that we can say clear and definite things about clear and definite things. The “sitting still” part is the “position” part I’m getting at.

The philosophy of position has often contrasted itself polemically against “sophism”, the kind of slick and slippery wordplay of which all philosophers are accused by their detractors. This is a defensive red herring. Meanwhile, playing in the branches of the family tree of positional philosophy are monkeys for whom things and thoughts cannot be pulled out of context and nailed down schematically without killing them, or at least denaturing them. These are the philosophers of movement, for whom it is often precisely the messy (from a positional perspective) relationality and changeability of things and concepts as they arise and bounce around in the world that characterizes them. Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Dewey, Beauvoir, and late (but not early) Wittgenstein are this sort of philosopher. Nietzsche charmingly called his monkeying the “philosophy of the dangerous maybe.”

Marx was not a maybe kind of guy, but he did monkey around with concepts. Over on Rough Theory N. Pepperell is doing something very interesting at the moment: dissecting an instance of what happens when a philosopher of position (Georg Lukacs) attempts to explicate a philosopher of movement (Marx). Lukacs takes single instances of what Marx says and pins them down to static meanings in a static relationship to each other, then derives conclusions from this alignment, just as positional philosophy says one oughta. Meanwhile, Marx has taken what he said, realigned it with other concepts, added ‘context’, worked it all through a dynamical process in which each element is transformed in specific relations and interactions with the others, and come to quite different conclusions.

This process is ‘emergence’, but to a philosopher of position it just looks ‘confused’ because as Heisenberg told us, you can’t see motion if you’re trying to determine location. It just looks like a blur that needs to be resolved – by taking a snapshot!

The question of ‘intentionality’ is mixed up in all this, but I’ve muddied the waters enough for one post.

UPDATE: I am now satisfied that the “Daniel” simulacrum I used as the ‘philosopher of position’ has little relationship to the Daniel with whom I have been sharing pleasant and edifying chat in the comments to this post. I will leave faux “Daniel” there as an imaginary philosopher and, perhaps, a cautionary tale.

UPDATE: Ah. Thanks to the keen eyes at Perverse Egalitarianism, here is a better examplar of the type.