Coworkers today, knowing of my deep interest in football supporter culture, asked me what I thought of what happened in Egypt yesterday, where 70+ people were killed in violence in Port Said after a match in which al-Masri defeated visitors al-Ahly 3–1. I meekly responded that the football pitch is often a proxy for the society around it, since nothing I had read so far about the violence sounded right. Violence on that scale at a football match—I’m thinking of Heysel and Hillsborough—features vital extenuating circumstances that move the catastrophe beyond a question of “hooliganism” or something similar that is as easy to excuse as it is to pathologize (and, in fact, the former relies on the latter).

I’m not even a semi-pro on Egypt or Egyptian football. But I do remember reading about how ultras groups had participated in the street protests (and been crucial to the organization of said) against the Mubarak regime. This makes perfect sense. Ultras can boast of two main characteristics that help in these endeavors, despite their often apolitical official positions: top-notch organization and deep knowledge of police tactics. It’s not surprising that the Cairo ultras groups—those supporting al-Ahly and those supporting their bitter rivals Zamalek—have long-standing beef with the Egyptian police, and that as recently as last week the al-Ahly ultras were using the space of the stadium to air their grievances against the post-revolutionary Egyptian state, which remains a far cry from the democratic fantasies of Tahrir only a year removed.

Perfectionatic gives details on the problems with the account of yesterday’s violence as an act of hooliganism. This blog post has already featured on Soccer Politics and deserves a wide audience.

So as a non-expert, what more can I add? As anyone who has talked to me at length about my ideas regarding supporter culture (or has read what I have written about it) may recall, the willing participation in the collective mass object of the ultras group of a (democracy?) of (liberal) political atoms—individual agents—suggests a means of thinking political action differently in our current moment. Ultras are often criticized with vocabulary identical to that used to criticize other, more obviously political contemporary actors, like Anonymous and #Occupy: “inarticulate,” “inconsistent,” “uncertain.” But these collective objects are also, to some extent, effective.

The Zamalek and al-Ahly ultras may not have caused or led the protests in Tahrir, but their role was important, as was their continued support of their democracy-minded neighbors, as one can see in this video of Zamalek’s Ultras White Knights:

Look at the signage. Even with no Arabic, one can notice the old Libyan flags, at least one Tunisian flag, V’s logo from V for Vendetta. “We rule Egypt,” “No way back,” “25 January,” and so on.

An object (the ultras) is made up of (and yet independent of) constitutive objects (the supporters) held together at the moment by the internal relations of the larger object, which include the larger object’s history as an object, and its intelligence regarding other objects (the state, Cairo, the abilities of its member objects). That fact is undeniable, and it’s a source of political hope. The ultras object’s organization and its knowledge of police tactics make it a powerful opponent against the arm of governmental violence.¹

Ultras definitionally don’t have politics with which I agree—to presuppose that all ultras objects have monolithic (or consistent, or articulate, etc.!) political leanings would be foolish, as the ontology on which their existence depends does not have a preexisting politics. But ultras groups (and Anonymous, and #Occupy) show that it is conceivable for objects as political actors that are more than the (silenced, discouraged) “voters” that we have come to associate with contemporary (neoliberal) democracy.

As I finish this up, it seems that ultras (and their supporters) are marching (and being injured by Egyptian police) in Cairo. This story, and its consequences, are not yet finished.

1. I appreciate the irony here that Graham Harman, on whose philosophy much of this depends, teaches in Cairo. In his initial comments on his blog about the violence, he writes “Please do not be lured into thinking that this was just a hooliganism incident gone terribly awry. 79 are dead, virtually all of them from among the al-Ahly fans, who as a group happen to be ardent revolutionaries. In my email conversations with people back in Cairo, I haven’t heard from one person who thinks this was anything but organized.”

I will, however, remind readers that it doesn’t matter what you think of Paleckis as a person or of his ideas. He was tried under a terrible law and deserved our support.

News has broken over the past week about the uncertain fate of Algirdas Paleckis, the head of the Socialist People’s Front, a party in Lithuania. Speaking on the radio in November of last year, he talked about what are known as the “January Events,” which include the shooting of protestors by the TV Tower in Vilnius. Paleckis asked about who was actually at the tower and then said, “saviškiai šaudė į savus”—“our own were shooting at our own” or “like was shooting at like.”

For this comment, he has been charged under 170-2 of the Lithuanian Penal Code—a clause enacted in 2010 which makes it a crime to “publicly endorse,” “deny,” or “coarsely belittle” both Soviet and Nazi German crimes as well as the the aggressions of 1990–1991.

Last week, however, the government put off their decision on the matter, allegedly because of documents that were not translated from Russian in time. These documents, pertaining to the January Events, may vindicate what Paleckis said. His party, however, suggests that the government is eager to bury their decision—due 30 December—under news regarding the holidays, especially now that it has gotten a bit of international play.

Even if you use the same words to describe Paleckis as you did his grandfather—”Moscow’s ass-licker,” Russian agent, buffoon whose vanity is flattered by the KGB to provoke the Lithuanian state—his fate is a troubling one for three reasons.

1. The law sucks

I’m still enough into the Enlightenment to be in favor of free speech laws, but even past that, the law Paleckis is accused of breaking is a complete disaster of jurisprudence. First, it codifies explicitly the legal equivalence of Soviet and Nazi German crimes. I’ve written enough about that in the past. Second, the language describing the events of 1990–1991 is completely mealymouthed. I’m scared to even attempt a translation.

Finally, this fancy law obfuscates the existence of the Holocaust. It only alludes to it first as a “genocide” that has been recognized as such by the EU and then again as a “genocide” against “inhabitants of the Lithuanian Republic.” This isn’t euphemism; this is an offensive game of playing equivalences, the far right fantasy of “Dual Genocide”: the Holocaust, the argument is read by me, doesn’t need to be mentioned since it wasn’t the only genocide in Lithuania. The Lithuanians also suffered!

If you aren’t convinced by my arguments, Dovid Katz makes a more liberal (even invoking Voltaire) case for defending Paleckis’s right to free speech, regardless of its contents. Katz also links to Leonidas Donskis, who writes about “concept inflation” in terms of “genocide” and Lithuania’s eagerness to “criminalise discussion,” which is wholly anti-democratic. Donskis even calls out Western European  democracies who have similar speech laws regarding denying the Holocaust, so this isn’t a case of simply piling on poor, little Lithuania.

Simply put, if you believe in free speech, you believe that Paleckis should have his charges dropped—not potentially spend a year in prison (after having his sentence suspended for two years, effectively silencing him).

2. Paleckis did not “deny” the shootings

This is more of a delicate matter, and for it, I rely on the phrase that has rung out and is repeated in the press: “like was shooting at like.”¹ This statement is empirically correct even if we accept the official version of the events. For example, the case could be made that everyone present was still a Soviet citizen—this is surely the position Moscow took, in warning Lithuanians of the “bourgeois dictatorship” that would follow independence.² Soviet citizens (soldiers of the Red Army / KGB forces) fired upon Soviet citizens of the Lithuanian SSR.

Even more foolishly: human beings shot at human beings.

This isn’t lawerly slipperiness. This is a point about ontology. The only way “like was shooting at like” can be considered a “denial” is if we consider that the difference between the shooters and the victims is so stark that they are different ontological entities, sharing nearly no commonality between them. Opfer vs. Täter, in the most childish manichean game of cops and robbers (or partisans and communists, as we used to play as kids) imaginable.

Paleckis had language specialists come in to prove that he was merely expressing his opinion, and not denying anything. In my opinion, it does not even come down to that. The parts quoted in the press are philosophically not a denial, and it would require the mentality of a playground bully to see it otherwise.³

3. Can there be a non-nationalist history of Lithuania?

What Paleckis is after, per his provocation, is a reckoning and inquiry into the January Events. It is absolutely the case that at the time, Moscow denied opening fire on the protestors. It is also absolutely the case that eyewitness reports and testimony gathered at the time—which is, I imagine, what these documents requiring translation are—conflict with the state’s version of events. As Balsas printed, in discussing the Paleckis case, some Sąjūdis members felt that bloodshed was needed to unify the movement. Others present at the tower or watching from nearby testified at having seen gun flashes from rooftops, where there were no Soviet soldiers. And apparently the ballistics findings of the bodies suggest that it was not (entirely) Soviets shooting, as they include weapons from the start of the 20th Century.

So it’s unclear. Even as the 20th anniversary of the events creeps up, the state has shown a lack of interest in pursuing these uncertainties. Paleckis’s father, an MEP, in scolding his son for saying what he did, says that discussion of the events should be left to witnesses to discuss “openly, in detail, and objectively, and not the new generation, supported by the tales of others.” That’s exactly the kind of discussion that the current law has made impossible. Who will stand up and say “I saw Lithuanians open fire,” if they know they could be hauled off to jail just for saying it? Paleckis’s brother, a journalist, brags about his own closeness to the action, as he was “already working as a journalist.” The “insanities” Paleckis is repeating, he continues, already bubbled up during the bloody night itself, told by “overthrowers” like Soviet soldiers. In other words, even by his own admission, the events on the ground were immediately uncertain, but, in his opinion, no inquiry is required because those providing uncertainty are, conveniently, all unreliable.

And this is the problem here. Revising the state history requires taking seriously people the state has already deemed unfit to bear witness, holders of unreliable testimony. The fact that the state (and especially the long shadow of Sąjūdis which is cast over the entire political apparatus) benefits from the state’s version of events is never—and now can never—be questioned.

I have no idea what happened that night 20 years ago. I was at home, probably doing homework or whatever it is that studious freshmen in high school do on Saturday evenings. Shortly after the events—maybe even the next day—I recall participating in a protest, probably at the USSR consulate in New York City, where each of the 14 people who was killed that night was memorialized. The sign youthful, nationalist me carried, ironically, read “Литовская Свиня,” as a sort of resistance and recuperation of the belittling of Lithuanians at the hands of the Soviet state.

And yet now, the Lithuanian government is acting like the swine from the sign I carried, greedily gobbling up all claims on historical legitimacy and silencing dissent.

Lithuania is afraid of looking back at its history. That’s shameful, but expected. No state likes to roll out its darkest moments and parade them about. But Lithuania does a state like the US one better; it criminalizes the efforts of others to see what hides in those darkest moments.

1. Though the law does not cover simply denials, in the media he is accused of “denial,” so I’ll focus on that.
2. Moscow’s prescience is for a different post.
3. It may, of course, be the case that he said more on the radio, and I’ll get to that, but so perhaps newspapers were disinclined to reprint it, fearing their own scalps. See how stupid this is?

At yesterday’s orientation for the new year-long students from Chicago, the warnings about the strike were repeated. “La grève,” students were told, is a part of French culture, and now that you’re in France, you should get used to it.

The idea of a general strike in the US strikes me as completely outrageous, and not just because only about 12% of the workforce is organized.² After all, only 8% of the French labor force is organized (yes, you read that correctly), but here the unions are “bien implantées.” Instead, the general strike makes no sense because there’s an American fetish for grassroots activism. I want to expand on this idea a bit here, so that, at least for me, I can try to figure out why political action feels so suffocating in the US. Suffocating and useless.

But before I continue, I want to throw this out: the closest thing we’ve had to a general strike in my political lifetime is the threat among huffy, self-interested libertarians to “go Galt.” The continued activity of the allegedly anti-free market US economy more or less proves that either the goGalters haven’t gone Galt of that none of them is, actually, or as a collective, as crucial to the US economy as John Galt is/was.³

The Tea Party and the Galteteers, though, will have to wait a bit, since, first, I want to talk about 2008. Barack Obama’s election, as Jay Smooth points out, was both a “huge, transcendent, symbolic moment” as well as “a good, but mundane, political moment that could turn out well only if we put four years of work into it.” Jay managed to capture my own ambivalence over the election, and, as I wrote about the 3CT confab “The Event of Obama,” one of the main take home messages of the election of Obama was the idea that we may have a President who, if not politically in line with the grassroots, at least might respect the efforts of the grassroots.⁴ Obama’s election seemed, as far as tactics were concerned, to be proof that if enough small-timers get together, massive change can occur. But although there are obvious mistakes with this belief—namely in the way that, once Obama had the nomination, he was able to mobilize the non-trivial organizational power of both labor unions and the DNC—the fantasy remains. Hillary Rodham Clinton was the establishment candidate, but the grassroots stepped in and said that, instead, they wanted Obama. Furthermore, Obama himself had worked as a community organizer, suggesting that he had a certain respect and appreciation of the work grassroots organizers do.

And we’ve seen how that has worked out. At least from the view I get over here of the US, the grassroots that worked so hard for Obama has more or less abandoned him (not that I can blame them) to the degree that we’re hearing about potential bloodbaths at the ballot box come November. But, if we take the charitable view, there is a segment of the American population that has taken Jay’s advice and continued the grassroots pressure on “our employee,” the President. And that’s the Tea Party.

I find this (and, again, I’m trying to be charitable for the moment) fascinating. One grassroots gets Obama elected and then recedes in frustration over his administration, despite understanding that it was only with their continued effort that Obama would pursue policies that the grassroots supports. Instead, a completely new grassroots organization emerges to put pressure on the administration, but it’s a pressure from a completely different political position.⁵ My suspicion is in two parts here: first, that the grassroots supporting Obama was possibly over-romanticized (remember: labor, DNC, Obama’s own operations); and second, that the Tea Party depends, as I suggested in the last post, on being grassroots in order to derive its legitimacy, despite being dubiously grassroots.

So why is the grassroots so important? I don’t know. I won’t perform a history of grassroots activism, but I will note that the OED traces the word to a distinct American heritage, finding the first example in a description of Roosevelt:

1912 McClure’s Mag. July 324/1 From the Roosevelt standpoint, especially, it was a campaign from the ‘grass roots up’. The voter was the thing.

That line about “the voter was the thing” aligns grassroots activism with a very specific sense of anti-collective action. Power (sovereignty) is located in the specific voter and in the specific desires of the specific voter. And without dusting off Tocqueville, I suspect that there’s a whole lot of (American) value placed in approaching politics in this fashion.

Perhaps the importance of grassroots activism in the US is indicated by the pejorative term “astroturfing,” that is, creating a “fake” grassroots movement (you know, like the Tea Party) by funneling centralized cash into various ephemeral organizations that are provided with seemingly sui generis letters to the editor ready for submission to local newspapers and the like. Astroturfing proves that there’s a certain legitimacy attached to grassroots, if organizations are willing to hide their involvement to give cover to a sort of organic movement. Note that I’m not talking about companies or advertising campaigns, which, for obvious reasons, want to hide their corporate/marketing sources, although one could (should) argue that the Tea Party is viral marketing for both Fox News and Koch Industries.

But this all comes at what cost, leading to the question in the post’s title. Obama’s election was partly the result of grassroots work, but it still was obviously not just that. The transcendent aspect of the election had to do with raw numbers of voters turning out and so on, whether they were so inspired by their own dissatisfaction with the previous administration, or encouraged by their union, their family, on DNC canvassers hitting the streets. Eventually the tree took over, precinct captains were assigned, and so on. And in the aftermath, as I said, it was the “Yes we did!” sensibility that conquered the narrative, this idea of an amorphous “we” that spontaneously rallied around a certain candidate and, totally organically, voted for change.

I’m not sure anyone believes the strong version of this narrative, or if anyone did, they have certainly abandoned it by now. But this strong version is crucial to the continued Tea Party success.⁶ Read any mainstream article about the Tea Party, and it’ll have narratives similar to the kinds of narratives we heard in 2008. “I’ve never been political before,” one person might say. Another might say, “I finally decided I had had enough.” A third, “So I decided to have a little get together at my overleveraged house.” And then on their list of demands is merely “wanting American back,” with some muddled talking points affixed that reference communism or something… not much different from “I want change I can believe in.”

Ultimately, though, these reasons are selfish. Egotistical. Individualism is always the realm of the narcissist, and that may be most obvious when it comes to political expression, which is the main issue I have with not only the popularity of grassroots activism, but also with the (Tea Party’s) need to maintain the fiction of the grassroots. The individual stirs to action only when the individual has personally had enough, the story goes, when the America that individual imagined is now no longer available.

Compare this with the rally in France on Saturday or the general strike today. Sure, the Roma marched for their own rights, but they were joined by tens of thousands of non-Roma who don’t like what the Republic is doing–not to themselves, but to others (Roma). And today’s general strike, though called by seven unions, is being supported by other organizations–organizations that are potentially totally uninvolved with the specific issues on the table. The constituent, centralized organizations are able to call upon their members to sublimate their individual concerns for the greater good of what the organization (the community, even) wants to do, a good determined at least indirectly democratically.

The Tea Party demands no sublimation.⁷ Can you imagine these people rallying in support of the mistreatment of others? (Undocumented workers, victims of institutional racism, etc.) It’s absolutely incomprehensible, since the crux of the organization is self-interest.⁸ Look at the rhetoric: “America back.” “Restoring.”⁹ There’s nothing altruistic or communitarian here. It’s petulance in tricorners and court shoes.¹⁰ And it’s not even forward-thinking petulance. It’s womb-seeking regression.¹¹

When a movement has clarified structure, has an organization helping design and refine the collective desires of the membership, the movement makes sense. Saturday’s rally was to protest the government’s recent actions regarding Roma and other Travellers. But the specific issue also resonated with larger issues: the racism and xenophobia of the state and its Sarkozyite slope toward police power. It all fits within a family of political concerns. But the American fixation on the grassroots, now most visible with the Tea Party, disallows that kind of clarity. One price of organic structure is that you get blobs, fuzzy entities that are largely illegible. So while I understand why the Tea Party has to keep up that fiction (who would turn out and march “Hey Hey! Ho Ho! Lets give Rupert much more dough!”?), I don’t understand why the American fantasy relies on it so much.

I mean, didn’t this financial crisis teach us why overvaluing individualism might be, you know, a bad thing?

1. In fact, it felt like there were more bikes around than normal.
2. I don’t recall from where I got Sunday’s “7%.” I thought it was from this David Harvey paper, but that does not seem to be right.
3. What the fuck do I know. It’s not like I’ve actually read this book.
4. Later, I draw a strong connection between grassroots with self-interest. I maintain that there’s always an element of that that is then sublimated, as the self gives its interest over to the collective organization that often emerges out of grassroots activism. I doubt many non-profit organizations were founded by fiat from above; concerned people got together and realized the value of collective action. It’s that second step, so feared by the “definitionally” decentralized Tea Party that condemns it to being a collection of confused, selfish gnats.
5. Someone needs to do an anthropological study on the “Change We Can Believe In”ers-cum-Tea Partiers.
6. I’m aware that larger Tea Party organizations have emerged, but my sense of them–in other words, how they exist in the media narrative–is of them as sort of tenuous alliances. This of course helps the larger Idea of the Tea Party to avoid damage when someone acts the racist, but it also helps continue the fiction of the founding of the Tea Party(s).
7. I’m not sure “sublimation” is the right word here, but I think the point is clear.
8. There’s a Niemöllerin aspect to the French model that can’t be discounted, of course, where self-interest supports some sense of community involvement, because one hopes that the community will have your back when the state turns against your particular group. But we have majority actors (middle-class, white French) involved in the community–hypothetically the safest demographic in the Republic. At the same time, I’m not sure how far you can go calling “a rising tide raises all ships” self-interested.
9. Yes, this rhetoric existed–and I probably used it–during the Bush administration and Obama campaigns. But it took the absurdity of these whiny wannabe tax cheats for me to see the problem with this approach.
10. Making the Tea Party the aesthetic and philosophical equivalent of, um, Marie Antoinette?
11. Wombs left crowded by unwanted pregnancies, but, still…

“Sarkozy: ça pue Vichy” (click to enlarge)

When the Awl complains that this has been a miserable American summer, they’re mostly right, but it hasn’t been exactly a great summer in France, either. Sarkozy has decided to kick off the 2012 presidential campaign extra early by re-burnishing his xenophobic credentials, angling to get the support of the far-right Front National types–the very people who abandoned him during the regional elections earlier this year. Most notably, Sarkozy has called for the deportation of Roma and other Travellers from France, even though, as EU citizens, the Roma have every right to be in France. Stoking xenophobic fears is a classic pétainiste move, as we saw in last year’s L’Armée du crime, which showed how the Résistance was demonized in Vichy France as being overrun with foreigners and communists (which it, of course, was, to its credit). I suppose the Sarkozy government was more willing to stir up a human rights fight than continue hearing the endless stream of bad news regarding the Woerth/Bettencourt affair, but the mistreatment of the Roma and the “Gens du voyage” prompted a massive protest on Saturday that led tens of thousands of protesters from the Place de la République to the Bastille and back to the infamous Hôtel de Ville, and it’s the ideas that the manif prompted that I want to address below.

I attended a few anti-Soviet (well, pro-Lithuanian independence) rallies in the late 1980s, including riding in a bus with a bunch of activists from Boston to Washington DC to protest the visit of Eduard Shevardnadze at the USSR embassy.¹ Part of the appeal of the protest was the night before, when the activists would all congregate somewhere and prepare their signs. We were an unfunded outfit, so our own manual labor had to produce the signs we would wave.²

On one trip to DC, however, I was there coinciding with a Teamsters rally against NAFTA, I think.³ The Mall was littered with discarded signs, almost all printed at some cost to someone! in two colors on white. I brought one back with me (to put up on my wall in my dorm, thereby enhancing my lefty cred at prep school), but seeing the mass produced signs really bothered me. There was something fake, I felt, about participating in a rally featuring such mechanical reproduction. I went to rallies, I felt, because I cared about the issues, and I cared about the issues enough to spend the time to invent a funny slogan / sign, draw it in (again, illegibly mannered) typography, and carry it with pride. A printed sign, even a union-printed sign, seemed like the refuge of a poseur, a readymade protest for the kind of person who just showed up at a rally without any serious commitment to the issues involved.

We are all Roma. (click to enlarge)

Fairly or not, this perspective reached for me its most absurd levels in 2000, when Hadassah Lieberman would appear somewhere and the crowd would wave all these identical blue signs reading “Hadassah!” I mean, no disrespect to the potential future Second Lady, but the signs showed a kind of enthusiasm over her that felt completely fake to me.⁴ Then, during Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver in 2008, if I recall correctly, the entire crowd on cue began waving “Help Is On the Way” signs as he began to use it as a theme in his speech. This is one example of many, but this sort of reproduction of the audience as a photoshopped mass waving the same signs over and over has become a kind of staple of US political expression at the national party level (I don’t know about other levels).

At the rally to support the rights of Roma and Travellers on Saturday, however, the mechanical reproduction of protest imagery was part of the point. First, the Fédération anarchiste scored a major coup with their black inverted triangle stickers that had the word “ROM” printed on them in a font that looked like Hebrew.⁵ In a Spartacus move, the stickers asserted the power of collective action over individual particularity. If the government plans on separating the Roma from the rest of the French population, then the rest of the French population will assert themselves as Roma, ruining the efforts of isolating a community. Considering the principle of égalité, if we can’t all be equal in being ethnically neutral, then we’ll all be equal by being marked as Roma. As one (hand-made) sign pithily put it, “NOUS SOMMES TOUS LES R HOMMES.”

Simply put, the stickers offered both an easy means of integrating oneself into the rally, but also a means of showing the quantitative support of the rights of the Roma. Showing up at République is already a certain political gesture after all, and the sticker is a marker that makes you stay. I mean, I doubt people were just walking around the Third yesterday, saw a bunch of activists, and decided to get involved.

“Non à la république du fric, des flics et des patrons !” (click to enlarge)

Furthermore, as is I imagine the norm for French manifestations, the quantitative strength (total numbers) is only part of the story. There’s probably some element of pee contesting between the various heavy hitters as far as making the biggest show. The Confédération Générale du Travail, for example, had (at least) two trucks, two balloons, lots of music, and tons and tons of stickers to give out. The newbie Nouveau parti anticapitaliste also had lots of stickers, a truck blasting anti-Sarkozy hip-hop, and widely reproduced posters calling for an end to the “République du fric, des flics et des patrons.” The larger parties, including the consolidated Front de gauche, made up of the PCF and other center-left parties, and the Parti socialiste made up the rearguard of the march, and they had what seemed to be the clearest image of reproduced signage. And they also seemed the least enthusiastic of any of the organizations marching. The representatives of the PS looked downright bored.

That boredom suggested a kind of tension in the rally, a tension between individual interest and collective interest. That is, I suspect a lot of people turned out largely because the group called on them to do so. I’m certain that everyone present honestly believes that Sarkozy is being a complete asshole with his actions toward the Roma, but that if the PS/PCF/whoever had not called on its members to come out to protest the position, they might not have. I saw this all over the place–the rally felt more like a big social occasion, a chance to catch up with friends after a long summer apart on vacation (C’est la rentrée, after all!). Sure, there was chanting, the CGT blasted the “Internationale” on its stereo system, and many sang along, but I do not suspect that anyone shouted themselves hoarse like I did at the May Day rally in Chicago in 2006. What I mean to suggest here is that the very act of rallying as a group means something more than just “caring about the issues.” The social, community element is extremely important too, which is why it’s no surprise that the friend I went with is an anthropologist who is studying precisely one of the groups that showed up. The rally is a chance to meet up with your fellow commies, say, and chit chat, and feel like part of a group that has both social and political value to you.

In this case, where the rally is made up of specific groups/parties made up of people who know each other, the mechanical reproducibility provides not just pissing contest “look at the show we put on” bragging rights, but also extends a kind of belonging. The “ROM” sticker was an outward political gesture of ironic protest to a republic that is not terribly interested in making certain people feel like they belong. The “la CGT” or “NPA” stickers, on the other hand, were precisely the opposite–they were ways of expressing specific membership in a group as a way of belonging to that group.⁶ If everyone showed up with their own hand-made signs, no one could be critiqued for not putting in the advance effort, but the rally would not be able to take advantage of feelings of belonging that predate the rally, that predate the issue, even.

This point is important when I try to bring what I pieced together about this rally with what I know about anti-war rallies in the US in the early part of this century and with what I read about Tea Party rallies, including the “Restore honorable gold trading” rally this past weekend in DC.

[This part of the post is not terribly well researched. Sorry.]

A complaint I often heard about those anti-war rallies hinged on the fact that they were organized by A.N.S.W.E.R. Critics of the rallies pointed out that A.N.S.W.E.R. was a radical fringe group and that there is no way on earth those tens upon tens of thousands of people would actually agree to most of A.N.S.W.E.R.’s actual political positions. As a result, the rallies were somehow… illegitimate. In response, I recall hearing people say that they did not care who it was who did the logistics.⁷ They, themselves, as individuals, felt the need to express their dissatisfaction with the Bush administration. I imagine they, too, felt like they needed to be around other people who felt like they did, regardless of other political or social connections, just to feel like they weren’t alone with their anti-war sentiments.⁸ But it kind of defuses the community, turning an anti-war march into some kind of shameful gathering of transgressors. Everyone arrives via a different route, stays a while to indulge in their transgressions, and then floats back off in separate directions. It’s the nonce community of something like a tearoom, maybe?

But this individualist/organic spirit that was used to discredit the anti-war movement is now, perversely, the seeming source of the Tea Party’s power. The Tea Party is To Be Reckoned With precisely because it is, despite what the lamestream media might say about either Sarah Palin or the Koch brothers, decentralized, individual, emergent like a rhizome, full of nodes firing along unpredictable channels. If the Tea Party were seen to be yet another in a long line of arboreal forms of protest, then it would be dismissable as just politics as usual. But no, its faux organicism is exactly what makes it stylish. They are the pre-destroyed jeans of our political wardrobe.⁹

What I mean here is that as long as the Tea Party can convince the media and the politicians and the public that they represent a sort of disorganized, uncertain, but palatable discontent within the US, those groups can ignore the Tea Party only at their risk. The American fetish of grassroots activism, which is why Obama was considered to be so transcendent, helps the public to dismiss forms of protest that are markedly coming “from above,” say, from a union, “demanding” that its members turn out to protest something or help someone get elected.¹⁰

So it’s funny to me to see the lengths to which the Palin machine goes to hide its continuity, acting instead as a reactive bouncy ball that rolls over to whichever “organization” wants to shell out the six figures to hear Sarah Palin speak. There should be no shame in declaring organizational affiliation even on the national level. It might just help those Tea Partiers feel like they belong to something, instead of just whining about how they want “America back.”

1. This was the high point of my ’60s glorification. I was interviewed by a newspaper and said I had wished I lived in that time period, so that I could be part of a protest movement. In retrospect, I find that sentiment absurd in the extreme, but the person having it was, like, 13, so chillax.
2. Mine were invariably too wordy and my typography was outrageously mannered, making my posters gibberish as far as political call to action is concerned. Others were content with just scrawling “Nyet, Nyet, Soviet!” on their signs. I had to be fancy.
3. This is probably the late-August trip I took to DC to see Georgetown in 1993, then.
4. This is most certainly a feeling related to my general sense of disappointment with Gore’s choice of a running mate.
5. The Roma actually wore brown triangles in German concentration camps.
6. After the “ROM” sticker, which I did not get, an “NPA” sticker was my second most coveted, since I’ve felt a bit of kinship with them based on my following their work over the past year. It also looks awesome.
7. I recall this being an often repeated response to the Nation of Islam and the Million Man March. The issues that the march brought up were more important than the positives or negatives of the organization setting up the march.
8. I wrote an article for the Maroon around that time about how I felt like I had become incomprehensible when it came to discussing the war. The anti-war position was so silent in the mass media, yet seemed so obviously the right course of action, that I felt like the only reason we were going to war was because the anti-war people were, simply, incoherent. We were incapable of making sense. Man, what an awful time that was. Is.
9. In Vilnius this summer I saw two young women walking together in identical destroyed jeans. It was jarring, to say the least.
10. This coercive power of unions, of course, is why they are the devil and why even 7% of a workforce’s being organized is 7% too much.

I think it’s funny that JFK could have merged the idea of the “Global South” with the literal southern hemisphere. Randall Munroe’s snarky joke doesn’t change the metaphorical power of the expression.

But what a glance at Munroe’s own map shows is that the bulk of the land on Earth is located north of the Equator, so if we picked a speck of terrain at random, it’ll more often fall north of the Equator. What if, I then wondered, I got rid of the Equator and split the Earth in half by area, in effect making an “Area Equator,” so that a randomly selected point on land would have a 50% chance of landing in the “South” as opposed to the “North.” What might that world look like?

Enter Quantum GIS. I downloaded a shapefile of the world, and it had area already keyed in as an attribute for each country.¹ I was ready to calculate the areas of each polygon, but I’m glad I didn’t have to. Then I added polygons until the sum of the areas of the selected polygons was about half of the total sum of the area. Next, I chose an outrageous color scheme. The results:²

The world, split by area. (click to enlarge)

What’s interesting is that this map is not so terribly different than the map of the North-South Divide provided by Wikipedia. The main difference is that I include Australia, while they include much more of Asia. China by itself has a larger area than Australia, so subtracting the Aussies from my area list and adding China would already knock the swing out. But my point is, at this stage, strictly cartographical.³ One can now sort of see where the “Area Equator” of the Earth is.

So this doesn’t let JFK off the hook, but it might nuance the point a bit.

1. There were some errors. A handful of small countries and Eritrea reported 0 for their area.
2. I ran the test twice, with and without Antarctica. Mostly adding in that frozen landmass means that I have to deselect much of the Middle East, Pakistan, and, I think, Algeria. So it’s not terribly different. Remember: Antarctica is never as big as it seems on unprojected maps.
3. Another caveat: I have no idea where the “area” calculation came from, so who knows how reliable my results are.

Twitter has been full of people complaining about the vuvuzelas, arguing even that soccer will never succeed in the US (as though it needs to succeed in the US in order to mean something) if there is a threat of having to endure this constant buzzing.

Banning the vuvuzelas was even half of the pre-game show yesterday afternoon on France2 (the rest was about a visit to a “bidonville” by the French team), and reports are surfacing that indicate that the organizers, in the voice of World Cup organising chief Danny Jordaan, are considering putting a halt to the horns.²

To everyone who is complaining about the vuvuzelas, I offer you one of two bullets by which to shoot yourself: either you are completely new to the sport, or you are an imperialist.

Consider this: horns are played, without pause, around the world. The constant noise predates the South Africa World Cup. Making noise constantly is precisely the Ultras credo. Don’t believe me? Watch some footage of the US playing Mexico in Mexico City last year. Forward about 2:10 into the video below and listen to the din. The main difference, in terms of noise, is that there is cheering mixed in with the constant horns, which we heard last night in the Australia match, where Australian fans managed to drown out the vuvuzelas.

Again, there’s nothing new to constant din in the stadium. It’s the point, as any English fan will tell you, as he or she boasts about the sheds over the supporters that let the supporters’ racket echo out over the pitch. It’s part of caring for your team. Soccer, no matter what those who say it’s boring believe, is an intensely passionate sport, and passion is displayed by lots. of. noise.³

So if it strikes you as annoying, and you want it gone, take the easy way out and admit to barely ever watching soccer; admit that seeing a match where crowd response isn’t conducted by hopping frogs on a jumbotron is a completely brand new experience.

I recommend that as a way out, since the other variant is basically this: you have certain expectations about what is “appropriate” fan behavior, and they are probably rather puritan and emblematic of your western European cultural upbringing. Blowing horns without pause for two hours isn’t what’s done at Harvard-Yale football games, so it must be the wrong kind of exuberant gesture from a fan base. Tut-tut the shit out of that vuvuzela feeling.

A World Cup already heavily biased towards Europe (playing in Euro-friendly temperature) also now needs to regulate fan behavior to coddle European sensibilities? Really?

Keep the vuvuzelas around. If you don’t like the buzz, sing over them (as the Australians managed to). Imagine yourself in a round of “We’ve got spirit, how about you?” with the vuvuzelas until you’re showing so much spirit that you’re winning.

And now, ultras courtesy YouTube:

1. Les Bleus are turning into advanced level catfighting egomaniacs, by the way, as Four Four Two shows us.
2. Now Libération is getting into the mix, asking readers which is more annoying, the horns or the cheesy pop songs that support Les Bleus?
3. And they do this in the US, too, thank heavens. Go to a Chicago Fire game. Sit by Section 8.

ArcGIS in action. (click to enlarge)

[A lot of the below is meandering toward what I suspect is a rather obvious conclusion to hardened veterans of the digital humanities. Since I'm not one of those, my own shoes needed to walk the mile. Of what transpires below, what might be new is, quickly, how while there is a call for digital humanists to move past prose to include other forms of analysis (maps, in this specific example), geographers have a different approach to the post-prose moment, one steeped in skepticism over the value of visual representations of data. Are geographers scaredy cats? Or might digital humanists be overexuberant? Or some combination of neither?]

Aside from the “reflexive vs. positivist” opposition in Martyn Jessop‘s talk at the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Research and his similar article in Literary and Linguistic Computing (discussed briefly here), the opposition that caught me most off-guard in Jessop’s article was one that was reasserted a few times at Geoinst:

there are fundamental issues concerning the status and function of images in humanities scholarship, this includes the images produced by digital visualization tools. Humanists are used to expressing themselves, and assessing the work of others, through the medium of prose. There is a belief that the visual cannot be as rigorous as the written. It is seen, as, at best, a supplement to the written word and stands in a subordinate position.

Jessop continues to explain how images in “modern educational texts” tend to be merely distractions to break up the flow of the text as opposed to being an integral part of the argument. There are “very few instances where the visual is treated on an equal pedagogical footing with the written.”

This line of reasoning from Jessop’s article continued in his talk, and Anne Kelly Knowles referred to it as well, explaining that history tends to be verbal, whereas geography tends to be visual, setting up the situation in history where the text is privileged over the map, which requires more critical response.

Now it is certainly not the case that the humanities value the textual over the visual as objects of study. I know a few art historians, musicologists, and students of film who would spit milk over their keyboards upon reading an assertion like that online. But it feels true to say that, as a mode of scholarship, the prose work lays claim to the most prestigious form of knowledge creation in academe.

From my reading of the dizzying Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 at UCLA, I get the sense that this tension is a relatively well-investigated and argued one within the digital humanities.¹ Part of the appeal of DH, it seems, is precisely attacking the primacy of prose as the form good scholarship should take, which is reflected in the value given the curatorial (as opposed to the straight analytical). As the UCLA manifesto asserts,

[W]e are advocating for a neo- or post-print model where print becomes embedded within a multiplicity of media practices and forms of knowledge production… Digital Humanists recognize curation as a central feature of the future of the Humanities disciplines… Curation means making arguments through objects as well as words, images, and sounds… All of which is to say that we consider curation on a par with traditional narrative scholarship.²

What’s interesting here, to me, is the interest of the digital humanities to move toward the visual precisely when geography is having its own crises, especially among critical geographers, regarding the visual. The visual is attached to the “scopic regime,” an “ocularcentrism” derived from Descartes, who posited “an epistemological standpoint of early modernity that subscribed to the notion of a detached, objective observer capable of a ‘god’s eye‘ view of the world.” Barney Warf here is drawing a history of geography’s relationship with “capital accumulation [and] the rise of the nation-state,” a relationship helped by the illusion of the “certainty of visual knowledge.”

As the visual arts came to be dominated by linear perspective, so, too, did geography come to be dominated by the idea of homogenous, infinite, Newtonian space containing interlocked nation-states or other rigidly bounded entities, within the metaphor of the surface. “The rise of logical positivism in the late nineteenth century,” Warf continues, “added a aura of scientism to this view, mathematicizing it with the disciplines concerned with space such as geography and urban planning in the forms of isotropic planes, surface in which the distribution of social features is evenly distributed.” This scopic regime continued in geography, more or less, until the critical geographers began to break away from it and the quantitative revolution in the 1970s.³

But it is not the case that the critical geographers are asserting for “more prose” in their work. Instead, they were looking for ways to get out from the empirical burden, which, as Soja remarks, though producing “significant and useful factual knowledge about the objective, real world,” had a “tendency to fixate on materialized surface appearances and directly measurable patterning, creating an illusion of opaqueness that could block deeper understanding of the causal forces underpinning these surface expressions.” These “idealized visions of the world” led to a “luminous search for deep structures of causality as the imagined took precedence over the real.”

Soja himself, one of the fiercest proponents of a larger role of spatial thinking in attempts to understand the world, does not argue for “more maps / less prose” but for merely an approach that treats the spatial as an equal party in the trialectic of spatiality-historicality-sociality. In fact, it seems that it is the reliance on the visual that gives geography its static and synchronic sense, a rigidity (in comparison to history’s richness and dialecticity) that Michel Foucault suspects is the result of Henri Bergson.⁴

I bring up this brief history of geography since it shows how the emergence of GIS can be seen (and is often seen) as a reaction to the work of the critical geographers. Soja calls it a “defensive disciplinary response.” “Over the past ten years,” he continues, “the positivist and descriptive core of geographical analysis has refortified its centrality, sustained in part by large flows of financial support for the advancement of Geographical Information Systems (GIS).” The apparent intellectual offspring of the quantitative revolution in geography, “today GIS,” as Marianna Pavlovskaya explains in a 2006 article in Environment and Planning A, “sustains an industry worth $6 billion a year… and remains a corporate and state-sponsored technology widely used for profit making and control.” If GIS was not so appealing as a means of state and capital control, it wouldn’t be getting the funding it is today, especially in contrast with critical geography.⁵

GeoDa, now available for Mac and Linux! (click to enlarge)

But Pavlovskaya’s article does not to simply criticize GIS: she explains that the reception of GIS as the latest guise of state-control/positivism is misguided, and that, in fact, GIS is beginning to be used as a qualitative method, that is, one of the methods that has “become an accepted strategy for those advocating nonpositivist knowledge production and aspiring for emancipatory change.” GIS, Pavlovskaya argues, gives the illusion of precision and exactness, which subsequently gives the illusion of quantitative analysis. But putting something in a database doesn’t guarantee accuracy, just like relying on fieldnotes doesn’t guarantee sloppiness. Furthermore, computers don’t guarantee logic: one can behave illogically with them and logically without them. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches involve interpretive efforts at pattern detecting, at reading textual fields.

Next, and on this point I’m not sure I stand with Pavlovskaya, it’s not the case that the math used in GIS analysis is actually complex enough to qualify as “quantitative” or even “statistical.” A lot of it is, at its root, just counting or not notably different from regular human interaction with space. She writes,

In truth, most spatial techniques available in GIS are only marginally ‘quantitative’ despite being very illuminating. Using simple math (such as distance measurements or calculations between raster layers), they require spatial imagination skills (such as buffering or overlay) and logical thinking (such as combining layers in site selection of multicriteria evaluation). As such, these core functions replicate human spatial thinking about places and phenomena that is common to all geographic research. Overall, spatial analysis in GIS today is largely qualitative, visual, and intuitive despite its insistent labeling as a quantitative method.

She further offers that even cutting edge “quantitative” work in GIS using AI or Bayesian probability is just an “attempt to replicate human reasoning.” In my mere year’s worth of GIS training, we definitely started feeding legitimate statistical beasts, doing spatial regressions and clustering calculations. These don’t replicate human reasoning–in fact, they exist precisely to slow down human reasoning, which is often terrible at detecting randomness, or the lack thereof. Pavlovskaya certainly isn’t asserting that all GIS is qualitative, of course, but I know that, in my work, I felt like I was eating at the kid’s table until I started being able to attach p-values.⁶ This is my own bias, though, that I’ll unpack another day.

Pavlovskaya does approach the leading question of this post head on, however, in terms of visualization–the image over/with the text. Data visualization is what GIS’s core strength seems to be, as GIS can output maps quickly and efficiently, with both quantitative or qualitative data. She points to Mei-Po Kwan’s work on irrational responses to data visualization to argue that it’s “the most telling example of nonquantitative functionality in GIS.” The visualization is, in fact, quite the alluring song that attracts people–myself included–to GIS. If part of our charge, as digital humanists, is to move past prose, to visualize our data, the satisfaction of GIS is really right up our alley. And it’s easy to get striking results: “Visualization is so powerful a technique that often the manipulation of data within GIS does not go beyond querying the data and displaying the results.” Feed in a spreadsheet of census data, dial up a chloropleth, export to .jpg, and move on.

This is a bit flip, but I think it’s important to assert it. Visualization shouldn’t be an end in itself, and engagement with and understanding the tool of visualization deserves the highest priority. Pavlovskaya warns about how maps are tools of control. Maps over-assert their reliability by relying on a metaphor in the mind of the viewer in which space is scientific and exact, so, as a result, maps are true. Here I cue, again, of course, Mark Monmonier, who warns in his epilogue about using a map with the “dual role of both informing and impressing its audience.” After all, “a flashy map… touts its author’s sense of innovation, and cartographic window dressing in a doctoral dissertation… suggests that the work is scholarly or scientific.” With GIS, we have the added authority of having a computer that’s making the map, so the stink of truthiness clings even more formidably to the embedded .jpg.

Warf closes his own article on networks with a bomb detonated in the ocularcentrist modernist’s favorite street-corner café. Vision’s attachment to truth “is essentially a positivist assumption that denies the possibility of other ways of understanding the world.” Mobilizing Richard Rorty, he finishes by declaring that “once we abandon the positivist metaphor of the mirror as the basis of objective knowledge, we are led to the metaphor of the conversation, in which language, positionally, and dialogue are central.” Strangely, to me, this sounds like, in part, a call for less image-based analysis and more dialogue-based thinking, which gets recreated in prose.

I plan on not introducing any more new sources from here on in, so a recap is in order: there is a move to advance past prose-based scholarship in the digital humanities. This means curating various kinds of objects, this means incorporating non-prose forms of analysis (like maps) and data visualizations in general.

Visualization, however, is an approach to data that, along with its current big-budget exponent, GIS, is attached to quantitative analysis, and, hence, to forms of state and corporate control, power relations that move in direct opposition to projects in the digital humanities that are interested in the empowering capability of digital humanistic scholarship. Furthermore, visualization as an end to itself is still wrapped up in questions of power and control that, in my reading of the UCLA Manifesto, remain unaddressed, pushed aside to make room for unrelated emancipatory rhetoric.

On the other hand, GIS itself has not managed to live up to the hype surrounding it as a quantitative tool. In fact, the revolutionaries in the qualitative world can exploit its power for their own purposes.

But is quantitative work necessarily bad? Can’t there be a quant/qual matrix that people like? This is probably a terribly boring discussion that’s been had at every social sciences get together where there are as many bottles of wine as graduate students, but it’s still new to me.

I find it interesting, for example, that the UCLA manifesto separates quantitative and qualitative into historical moments–a sort of political/developmental timeline that Marx might be proud of:

The first wave of digital humanities work was quantitative, mobilizing the search and retrieval powers of the database, automating corpus linguistics, stacking hypercards into critical arrays. The second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, generative in character. It harnesses digital toolkits in the service of the Humanities’ core methodological strengths: attention to complexity, medium specificity, historical context, analytical depth, critique and interpretation.

Now there’s a lot in this snippet that I think is very, very wrong (or, at least, getting carried away in the rhetoric of the manifesto).⁷ But it does pitch the digital humanities in a similar historical narrative as that of critical geography. Quantitative geography, however, has not disappeared, so we can’t talk of geography in waves as much as in branches. And considering the fantasy of the quantitative promise of GIS (which, pace Pavlovskaya, I still have), being encouraged to incorporate it into my digital humanities work certainly doesn’t seem like a full on, earnest effort to be, also, “qualitative” and “emotive.”

So I end with two messes on the table for starters: the political/control nature of visualization is unaddressed in relation to the pressure/encouragement to visualize and the role of quantitative work in digital humanities seems to earn the feeling of being old-fashioned or compartmentalized within a larger qualitative framework, at least within the framework of the UCLA manifesto.

Conveniently, I’m walking away from these messes, citing a lack of space on this page to continue. But I do have a feeling I’ll be returning to the UCLA manifesto soon enough. The tension over visualization, though, seems like it might be too complex for me right now.

1. I’m new around here, remember.
2. “Narrative scholarship” here, I think, means “prose scholarship,” not scholarship of narratives. But I’m not positive.
3. Soja on the quantitative revolution: “This increasingly technical and mathematized version of geographical description, however, differed only superficially from the neo-Kantian tradition that helped to justify the isolation of geography from history, the social sciences, and Western Marxism.”
4. “Est-ce que ça a commencé avec Bergson ou avant ? L’espace, c’est ce qui était mort, figé, non dialectique. En revanche, le temps, c’était riche, fécond, vivant, dialectique.”
5. For a tour de force of geography in the service of state control, I encourage one to read the opening pages of Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics. The short version is that Ireland did not exist until the English crown needed to control it, so they sent in their surveyors to create an Ireland by mapping and dividing up the land.
6. On the other hand, Pavlovskaya mentions that even with the hard core quantitative work, “GIS technology has fulfilled its promise for quantitative analysis only marginally.”
7. These concerns are not appropriately addressed by the backtracking in the sentences that follow the quoted material.

Cover of tomorrow's Libération. (twitpic.com)

[UPDATE: Added video links]

As the iPhone app beside this paragraph indicates, it was kind of a big day for the Parti socialiste in France, who managed to win control of 21 of 22 regional councils in metropolitan France. Only Alsace squeaked by with a UMP majority, and overseas, the UMP won control of the council in La Réunion and possibly in Guyane as well. No “grand chelem” this time around, alas.

I’m less inclined to provide the same kind of analysis as I did for the first round, largely since I’m leaving France in less than two days, but also since not much actually changed. The abstention rate fell a bit, but it was still historically high. The UMP representatives on television still acted largely clueless, and even their candidates looked lost on the television. Valérie Pécresse, in fact, looked so lost, that the French Twitterverse erupted in speculation over how in the cups she may have been. (video) Frédéric Lefebvre kept up the same level of stupefying idiocy he showed last weekend, arguing that without the Front National, the PS would not be celebrating. But the UMP also fell back on the argument that it’s not their policies that are to blame here, but, rather, la crise, man.

It is interesting that even Corsica was captured by the PS this time around (while the news explained this, they cut to footage of Corsican nationalists shooting flares at a government building while brandishing the intimidating Corsican flag, particularly given that the leftists were not able to build a similarly strong coalition in Alsace. But Alsace will probably require some greater analysis. All I can provide here are the numbers. In the first round, the UMP won with 35% of the vote, followed by a split left (19% PS, 16% E-E). But the FN got 13% of the vote, and the extreme right 5%, and MoDem 4%. In the second round, UMP support soared to 46%, the PS support climbed to 39% (PS + E-E + 4 more points), and the FN picked up not even two points. The question then is whether those nine extra points came from MoDem. Furthermore, turnout improved in Alsace in the second round, showing that UMP did have some reserves, after all.

In any case, the funeral for the UMP has possibly begun, signaled by François Fillon’s wearing a black tie when addressing the nation on the embarrassing results shown by his party. (video) “Fillon en noir : c’est un deuil?” asked one person on Twitter. That seems to be the case.

As a final thought: in France, a campaigner or supporter–that is, anyone who is at an election night party–is called a “militant.” Hearing that word over and over without the radical connotation it has in the US was kind of jarring.

Priorities. (click to see original tweet)

Everyone in the US knows that the more removed an election is from a presidential election, with emergency special elections inhabiting the limit point away, the more turnout will be depressed. Furthermore, everyone in the US knows, since the Christian Coalition rode this pony into power, that the lower turnout is, the fewer votes you need to win. So if you excite your base and get them to vote in a number not representative of the population, with just a small number of votes, you can look very important.

This fact of democracy is among the themes emerging out of Sunday’s elections, suggesting that, nationwide, the Front National’s performance (about 12%) was the result of a base more motivated to vote than the average French population, so that when you have global abstention at greater than 50%, the FN’s performance can look out of whack. But does it stand up? Libération began to address this question in their article “FN et abstention : le cocktail que dit non,” which provided two maps showing region-by-region rates of both votes for far right parties (usually the FN) and for abstention. I took crummy photos of the maps and reproduce them here.

Abstention rate. (click to enlarge)

A glance at the abstention rate suggests, and this is helped by how Libé chose to color it, that France seems split in two, with the western half more inclined to vote than the eastern half. Yet Franche-Comté, the sole region in the east with a below 50% abstention rate bucks this trend. Similarly, it’s unclear whether the 51.2% rate in Brittany is that much different from, say, the 53.7% rate in Bourgone. Furthermore, given the national rate of 53.64%, having two colors above and three below the rate further confuses things. It’s useful to have this information, but it needs a bit more context.

Regarding the right-wing vote, Libé was content to lump it in correspondence with the rate of abstention. “A l’est d”une ligne Marseille-Rouen, soit on boude les urnes, soit on vote Le Pen,” they write. Yet in this image, the coloration is even more severe. Not counting Corsica (which is, interestingly, off the pace of both abstention and extreme right voting), there is only one color category for the entire swath of France that voted below the national average. Furthermore, the coloring suggests a stronghold in PACA, where Le Pen père was at the top of the list, and in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, where Le Pen fille was the top of the list. Yet Marine Le Pen’s performance was bested in Alsace, and Picardie brought in a huge result–a result so surprising, that one of my coworkers gasped upon looking at the map.

Extreme Right vote. (click to enlarge)

Libé, or, at least, the article’s author, Eric Aeschimann, commits a grave sin in pushing home his point, however. He provides two examples of the correspondence between the two variables, explaining how in Vitrolles, near Marseille, the abstention rate hit 62%, yet the FN collected 21.5% of the vote. The numbers were similar in Lens: 60.5% and 21.4%. Yet this is (all together now) cherry picking.

The two questions, then, that this post hopes to answer are: is there a demonstrable correlation between the abstention rate and the vote total received by the far right? Might there be a correlation with the other parties, as well? That is, could Libération be picking on the FN out of general, national shame over the 12% result?

Time to make a dataset! I put the abstention rates for each region into a table along with the performances as given in today’s Libé. This conflated the FN and other “far Right” parties, thereby raising their values a bit, but not, I hope, by too much. I then added the results for the PS, UMP, and Europe-Écologie, which Libé reprinted in their own maps. The far Left fall beneath the scope of even this leftwing newspaper, so I relied on online results to tabulate a combined total for the Front de Gauche and the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste.

The vote totals, among the 22 regions, distributed into boxplots, show the variance between vote totals in the various regions. Some element of explanation is necessary for some of the outliers. First, the outlier for the PS, its 7% showing in Languedoc-Rossillon, is the result of the explusion from the PS of Georges Frêche, who, still very popular in his region, fronted his own leftist list, which carried the plurality in the region (34%), leaving the official PS list in the dust. The green coalition did not field a list in Corsica (which is itself an outlier in terms of abstention rate), which explains their 0 there. Nevertheless, the squat box for E-É shows that they enoyed very little variance in the nation as a whole. The two outliers are Rhône-Alpes (17.8%) and Île-de-France (16.6%). Just behind them, interesting, is Alsace at 15.6%. Alsace, of course, was one of the only two regions carried by the UMP in 2004, suggesting the possibility of a combined green-pink front to knock over UMP this upcoming Sunday. Finally, the far-left outlier is from Auvergne, where the separate FG and NPA lists combined to net 18% of the vote. Lest one consider this an NPA stronghold, 14 points of that total come from the FG list.

But now that the reader is familiar with my color scheme, I can add the second chart, which plots the performances of the five groups per region against the abstention rate in the region. To show where this argument is going to go, I’ve also included color-coded regression lines for each party that show the correlation between the group/party’s performance and the region’s rate of abstention. The regression lines help one guess other, theoretical values.

So here are the numbers to go with the chart. For the far-Right parties, the adjusted R^2 was .44. R gave a statistically significant level of correlation (p < .01). For the UMP, the adjusted R^2 was .05 with a p of .17. For the PS, -.04, with a p of .72. For the ecologists: .35 and p < .01. And, finally, the for the far Leftists: an adjusted R^2 of .05 and a p-value of .15.

What do these numbers tell us? First, they give credit to Libé‘s suspicion. There is a positive, strong correlation between abstention and the amount of votes the far Right received at the ballot box. The dark blue line racing up the chart suggests that the worse the turnout, the better the result for the FN. For the far Left, PS, and UMP, the correlation is not strong at all, yet the model does suggest that apologists for the far Left are not entirely without reason in complaining that they were particularly harmed by the bad turnout, especially considering their astoundingly negative regression line. Of course, it seems entirely unlikely that if the turnout rose to 60%, the FG/NPA would get 40% of the vote, but that’s the problem with R^2 that close to zero: awful predictive value.

But Libé is not entirely off the hook here, since note that Europe-Écologie also showed a statistically significant relationship between low turnout and high vote totals. This suggests that Green voters are as passionate as far right voters about showing up at the polls, as they do better the fewer people vote. On the other hand, when I remove the big 0 in Corsica from the E-É total, the statistical significance collapses. In fact, only the far right maintains its level of strong correlation with Corsica taken out of the picture, though also further shrinking the sample size, which is its own risk.

Of course, these models are rather simplistic and make outrageous assumptions, like that the distribution of Greens, xenophobes, and commies is more or less evenly distributed in France. Furthermore, it would be helpful to compare these totals with other totals with other rates of abstention over time, and so on and so on. But it’s better when the model confirms your suspicion (“only crazy people vote”) than when it doesn’t.

• I wondered about the 53% rate of abstention (47% turnout) in comparison to previous elections. Turns out it’s pretty bad. The rate has been climbing over the past 25 years, though, 1998 saw a 42% rate slightly worse than the 39% rate in 2004. In 1992, 31% of the voters stayed home, and in 1986, it was 22%. Libération compares the turnouts of non regional elections, too. Though the abstention rate in the European elections edged toward 60%, no other election since 2004 (municipal, presidential, or legislative) has topped 40%.
• Rue89 interviewed three political experts on the successes of the FN and E-É as well as the failure of the NPA. The two success stories were not terribly interesting, but the taking to task of the NPA was. On the one hand, Olivier Besancenot no longer seems like a radical, which suppresses the interest of potential voters. On the other hand, the anti-pragmatism marginalizes the party, when actual votes do matter. They performed worse than in both the European elections last year and the last regional elections, leaving themselves, in the words of the commenter, a fringe party not unlike the Lutte Ouvrière.
• Le Figaro referred to the NPA campaign as a bet for autonomy (from the Front de Gauche) that they lost badly. Libération called the result a nice slap. “We maintain our independence from traditional parties,” Libé quotes Besancenot as saying, “and we pay a huge price for that.” (Le Monde didn’t seem to consider the NPA worth writing about.)
• MoDem’s failure is captured in a little graph in Libé that compares their withering support since the 2007 presidential elections with the surge in Verts/E-É support, which has its local high point in last year’s European elections. I wonder if it’s the case that E-É has been picking off votes from MoDem. From my understanding of political alignments, however, it seems that in the US, if a green party were to jump from ~7% to ~16%, a bulk of that new support would indeed come from straight up centrists.

Anarchists tease Leftists. (click to enlarge)

Tonight the polls closed on the first round of the sexennial elections for the 22 regional councils in France.¹ In comparison to the US, the regional councils are sort of like state governments, and their primary dossiers involve education, transportation, and land use. Rue89 has conveniently put together a “Regional Elections for Dummies” page, but, as it’s actually called, “Les régionales pour les nuls,” you can guess that it’s in French, and, hence, not very useful. But it lays down the groundwork.

The way the elections themselves run is a bit peculiar as well: various parties present lists to the voters in the first round, and they vote. If a party (/list) wins an outright majority, there is no second round in that region (from my understanding), and 75% of the seats in the council are distributed via the proportional representation of the rest of the various parties, provided they scored 5%.² Should a party fail to win 50% (as is nearly guaranteed) in the first round, a second round follows.

It’s important to keep in mind this second round while trying to make sense of the performances of the various parties, as well as trying to understand how this first round is being read as a tremendous rebuke to Sarkozy and his policies. But more on that below.

In the second round, only the parties that got at least 10% in the first round can run again. Parties that had at least 5% of the vote, however, are allowed to merge with other parties, to form a united front. Then the winner of a simple plurality gets the bonus seats, and the other 75% are distributed based on performances of the remaining parties.

The temporary winners in Île-de-France. (click to enlarge)

Now some historical background: in 2004, the first time these elections had this 25% bonus seat rule, put in place to defang the ability of the Front National to mess up majorities, The Parti socialiste went to town. They had majorities in 20 of 22 regions in Metroplitan France. But much has happened since. Sarkozy was elected, which helped unify the center-Right under the UMP banner. Furthermore, the center-Left was humiliated at the European Parliament elections, winning only 14 seats (as many as the unified Greens won) to UMP’s 29 seats.

So coming into these elections, the broad, national questions were clear: was the center-Left finished in France? How would the Front National do with a center-Right party at the Élysée? Would the FN’s support be boosted by Éric Besson’s debate on national identity? How would the centrist/liberal faction, represented by the terribly named MoDem, fare between the UMP and PS juggernauts? And, for my own interest, how would the far Left parties, split into basically two factions, the Front de Gauche, made up of the PCF and other parties, which was willing to join executives headed by the PS, and the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste, which was nationally mute on the topic, but argued locally against collaborating with the center-Leftists.

So, first, the Sarkozyan failure and the explosion of the PS. Libération put together a slightly buggy little web application that shows a map of France and shows the various results. If one looks at it right now, one sees:

First round results. (click to enlarge)

As one can see from the Île-de-France (greater Paris) results, the color scheme is not what Americans might expect. Pink is the socialists, and blue is the UMP. In any case, for a party that got just 16% of the vote last year during the EU elections, it certainly has its distinctive pink color splashed around a whole bunch of this map. But considering how little of the map was blue in 2004, how can this be considered a huge night for the Left and a slam of Sarkozy?

Pierre Haski at Rue89 spells out three specific FAILs of the Sarkozyan régime:

1. The UMP rallied the “Presidential majority” in round 1, and failed to win 50% anywhere. Where, exactly, their extra votes are coming from is totally unclear. Look at a case like Île-de-France in the picture above. Infamous Valérie Précresse won almost 28% of the vote, but who will jump aboard to push her list over 50%? The E-É Green faction will almost certainly fuse with the PS (their national numbers are down a bit from last year’s triumph, which saw them match the PS’s performance). The FN will likely not crossover. And MoDem is effectively finished as a political movement, possibly to be embraced by the Ségolène Royal wing of the PS.³
2. The UMP’s transparent play for far-right votes by launching the debate on national identity failed to neutralize the FN, which only had its numbers suppressed a bit. By clearing 10% in 12 regions, the FN will find itself with seats in 12 regional councils.
3. Sarkozy’s brash egomania has been soundly rejected by a PS in ascendence.

Parisians are not fans of the FN. (click to enlarge)

The FN’s performance I find rather fascinating. Many people tweeting about the elections continually expressed their shame at the performance of the party (see here, here, and here), but it remains a force: Jean-Marie Le Pen, running in PACA (far southeastern France), cleared over 20% of the vote. His daughter Marine, running in the traditional left-wing stronghold of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, cleared 18%. It’s only in western France and Île-de-France where the FN failed to reach 10%.

All the same, the FN’s 11.7% performance at the national level suggests a possible new third party in France, and it’s Europe-Écologie. Their leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (an MEP) was all over the television this evening, sticking it to the UMP representatives–some of whom went so far as to point out that the UMP might be able to fuse with the E-É list in order to bring a coalition over 50%. Île-de-France’s E-É candidate, Cécile Duflot, however, explained that it’ll be green-pink coalitions that are made, not green-blue. And though the E-É performance of 12.5% off their pace from last year, by topping the FN, the Green faction has established itself as the main third force in French politics.

The less said about MoDem, the better. It seems fitting that the best MoDem story of the night I’ve relegated to a footnote.

Olivier Besancenot and the NPA. (click to enlarge)

But now we get to the juicy, stuff, the tussle of the far Left parties. I don’t fully appreciate the distinctions, nor do I know all the back stories, of the myriad far Left parties. I know that with them I share a skeptical view of the PS (exemplified by Besson, a PS defector who worked overtime to burnish his new right-wing credentials, and by Royal, always willing, like a New Democrat, to look for allies on the Right instead of on the Left). But I also, like them, hate the Sarkozyist France more than the PS vision.

Simply put, while the Front de Gauche did well enough to merge with the PS lists in some regions, including Île-de-France, the NPA was humiliated. I have no idea what Olivier Besancenot, the head of the Île-de-France list, expected from the party (he is not their head, as the NPA has no head), but a 2.5% national performance is not a good sign for the future. Emerging out of the far Left success in the presidential elections, the NPA surely had higher hopes, but now they will seat not a single person in any region, except in places like Limousin, where they united with the FG. In fact, in Limousin, the 13% performance means that they stand a chance to seat a person without having to (further) compromise with the PS.

Additionally, Besancenot was totally absent from the television today (at least while I was watching, but I remembered rather late that I could watch TV on my telephone), and, if anything, hurt his image when he did show, allegedly wearing a pair of Nikes. That is probably not the best fashion sense for an anti-capitalist allegedly concerned about globalization. All the same, the NPA came out with a call for a strike on March 23 (just after the second round), calling it a third round of action. The document put out by the NPA after the election, however, further fascinated me.

In this document, the NPA complained that the resounding anti-UMP sentiment of the electorate allowed the PS to escape culpability for its own failures over the past six years of regional control. Furthermore, the executive council asserts, the racist politics of the UMP have only served to keep the FN on the playing field. All the same, the party exhorts its members to make certain that the door is closed to Sarkozyism in the second round. “We’ll deal with the weak Left later,” they seem to say.

Non-voters win! (liberation.fr) (click to enlarge)

But there is one more point made by the NPA that was variously remarked upon by many tonight: the outrageous level of abstention (as they say in France) of 53%. Or, as we’d say in the US, the awful turnout of 47%. The NPA sees in that mass of silence much of its future support (and I’m inclined to agree), but that tremendous number has been finessed in many different ways beyond as a mark of shame. For the Left in general, it was seen as an explanation for the strength of the FN. As in the US, it’s the extremely motivated (read: fringe) who tend to vote in smaller elections. So turnout is higher among the FN than among, say, the PS. For the Right, including Frédéric Lefebvre, the low turnout was proof of dissatisfaction with the PS. This point, which Lefebvre repeatedly made on television, was then twisted as showing how a rejection of the UMP in the polls was actually to their benefit.

I don’t know what the standard turnout for this sort of election is, but talking about the rate was the big topic all night, as mentioned. It’s a shame for parties like the NPA and FG (I do believe that their support comes from people most likely not to vote, even if they are fringe actors), but that’s how things are.

So what will come next Sunday? It’s hard to see how the PS doesn’t, again, practically run the table. Alsace and Corsica will probably stay UMP, as they have substantial majorities over the PS, although the strong performance of the E-É in Alsace might even make that region turn pink-green. Wherever else the UMP has chiseled out a lead after the first round, the PS is nipping at its heels. The opposite is, of course, often true, but the UMP has more or less maxed out its appeal, as noted above.

What, then, that all means is totally unclear, since it’s not like France is a Leftist paradise at this current time. Alas.

1. There are 25 total, including the départements d’outre-mer. Those three also had elections today.
2. Incidentally, the candidate party lists must have a 50/50 gender split. Also interesting is how this system, unlike anything in the US, that I know of, relies on a tiered list. So if the party in question wins just one seat, it’s the top person who gets the seat. If they win two, they include the next person down, and so on. It’s an amazing hierarchy built into the system.
3. One of tonight’s touching bits of television theater was during the loser speech of MoDem head François Bayrou. A microphone began to feedback, and he sarcastically thanked it, suggesting that dude just couldn’t get a break tonight.

What Eric Cantona is doing aboard a plane in this ad is a mystery, and the ad is full of other ironies, like the prominent role played by Denílson, despite being a bench player in France, and the hilariously prophetic failure to finish on Ronaldo’s part. The dejection shown by the three young fans as Ronaldo’s shot clangs off the bar of the makeshift goal was an expression fans of the Seleção, myself included, got very used to making during that World Cup. Nike has since provided a whole stream of excellent ads, usually featuring Cantona, often the Seleção, and other stars. I’ll just embed as many as I can find at the end of this post, since holy smoke are they fun to watch over and over and over and over.

So I was a bit worried, however, about how the run up to the 2010 World Cup would go, especially since I suspected that as light a touch might not be as evident, since ad agencies have no clue what to do with “Africa,” still considered a massive unity in the Western consideration. So today, while watching Spurs beat up on Blackburn, I saw the first big-time ad using the World Cup as hype to push product, Pepsi’s “Oh Africa!” campaign, featuring an Auto-Tuned Akon:

But while trying to find the above embed, disturbed as I was by how the percussionists make up, literally, the background of the shot, I found the long-form, star-heavy version of the ad, which includes, from what I can tell, Kaká, Lionel Messi, Thierry Henry, Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba, and Andrej Arshavin. It begins rather innocuously, with a group of players walking around an open-air market, admiring the bootleg football shirts (something I’ve done countless times at the Maxwell St. Market). Kaká amusingly finds a Messi shirt, the men giggle, and then Thierry Henry decides he wants a Pepsi, and everything falls to pieces:

Drogba asks where the pitch is, a whistle sounds, and out of thin air, an autochthonous pitch made up of humans (including Akon) appears.¹ Nature conspires against the professional footballers, throwing trees, meerkats, and tall grass in their way. But the people themselves who make up the boundaries of the pitch also conspire, constantly moving the goal farther and farther away from the pros. Finally, Ivorian Drogba, who between this ad and the previous one seems to be Pepsi’s idea of the spokesman of the South African World Cup, lines up a shot and lobs it. The pitch spins around, yielding an own goal.

Despite losing, the footballers get their Pepsis, and Henry gives up his shirt (which he of course just bought), to then to have his body painted (so that, perhaps, he can literally blend in with the background like the percussionists in the Akon video above). I was flooded with a bunch of different readings of the ad, and none of them was particularly good. Above, I already hinted ad my discomfort over the continental-scale theme of the song “Oh Africa” itself, but I won’t push on that too hard. However, it bothers me greatly that suddenly out of thin air a thousand (or so) CGIed “Africans” emerged to play the role of a painted line. It further bothered me that they had to rely on trickery in order to win, showing themselves as seemingly incapable of competing by the rules set by the foreigners. And, finally, it bothered me that, despite winning, they still gave up their natural resources (Pepsi) willingly to the people who marched in, demanded it, and failed to pay the price set for it.²

The ad does have one moment I liked, at the end, when Messi, lost in the tall grass (he’s short, get it?) calls out for his Barça teammate, Henry. Messi may be the only Argentinian player I have ever liked.

I haven’t seen any other ads yet for the World Cup (which strikes me as strange), even on company websites (much less on YouTube). The Adidas France page, for example, still has Vancouver images on the font. Yet in hunting around, I found this sort of feel-good PSA about the World Cup, in which an Australian chastises a whining South African about infrastructural problems (at an airport):

Hopefully once Nike and Adidas début their ads, they will be more like this and less like the “Lion King with humans” ad that Pepsi has tossed out.

So here’s the huge postscript, provided by YouTube:

First, Nike returned in 2002 with the Terry Gilliam–directed “Secret Tournament” run, which featured the most famous song in the world of 2002:

Ah, Edgar Davids. Your team did not even qualify for the World Cup. Cantona is so charming throughout. There was a coda to this ad:

Around 2004 (judging from personnel and shirts), Nike put out this ad featuring a match between Portugal and Brazil. Cantona cameos again:

In 2006, Nike returned to the Brazil focus and added a new version of “Mas que nada,” this time performed by Black Eyed Peas. This ad… wow. First, it’s tender as the “Robinho hazing” ad. Adriano‘s gentle kiss of the ball kills me each time:

Cantona is in full beach football mode here. Also notable: the shirts in the dressing room are different from the shirts in the game footage, and the final shot of the goal celebration includes Kaká, who, as an Adidas spokesman, I imagine was not allowed to goof off in the locker room with the others in filming a Nike ad.

Adidas responded with their own all-star ad, which makes me choke up. The two kids are adorable in their precocity (“¡Soy el capitán!”), and the idea of calling forward Franz Beckenbauer (with Zizou‘s touching call for Michel Platini) was a fantastic touch. It’s a shame Adidas’s stable of players, which includes two teams I hate (France and Argentina) is not as dynamic, though I like the idea of Jermain Defoe playing in goal (oh, he scored today!):

Ah! I’d forgotten the funny homage to 1966 with Lampard “scoring” on Oliver Kahn off the crossbar. Good stuff, Adidas.

1. I was at first reminded of how boundaries are determined in women’s lacrosse, but whatever.
2. I was surprised, in fact, that there was no reference to The Gods Must Be Crazy, at least from my dim, dim, dim recollection of that movie.

The first post merely introduces the song with a few video clips thrown in.

The second post is a 3000-word monster that looks at the fate of songs with political messages in recent Eurovision contests, Eurovision as a whole, InCulto’s song in comparison to the Lithuanian entry in 2006 (which coincidentally beat out InCulto’s offering that year), and the song’s relationship to funk and punk. Then I shift into high gear and talk about miscegenation, economic inequality and the egalitarian fantasy of democratic equality. Then I close with some complaints on the ghetto, particularized punk of Gogol Bordello. Oh, and there’s like four embedded videos and links to who knows how many other songs on YouTube.

The third post is a quick roundup of recent press on the song, which includes news that the European Broadcasting Union, the people behind Eurovision, is investigating InCulto’s song for the possible political content of the lyrics.

A way to spend the day.

I finally saw The Hurt Locker, after wanting to see it forever. I don’t remember what about the original reviews or trailers made me think I’d like it, but the absolute orgy of praise it has received in the months since release only built up the interest.

And now, I don’t get it. I think the movie did a good job of showing how being in EOD is viewed as being a job, though a job that could either kill you every day or a job that can drive you bats. The movie handled the mundane and quotidian reasonably well (and then shat on it by having Beckham become a body bomb), much like Generation Kill did. The end, then, silliness with the son notwithstanding, showed the possibility of different kinds of mundanity, not necessarily hierarchically organized. James’s everyday life doesn’t involve choosing from hundreds of types of cereal, it involves bomb disposal.

Still, as the movie dragged along, it got more and more unbelievable, from the totally incomprehensible scene with the professor to the insanely unlikely 3-man chase after the insurgents (which is when the movie lost me). I’ve read that this is the “most real” depiction of the war in Iraq (whatever that means), and it’s not like I have my own anecdotal evidence to go on, but it seems that a “more real” depiction would be even more mundane.

Which leads me to my primary issue with the movie, which seems to be a result of narrative strategies of realism. Nancy Armstrong opens her essay on the fiction of bourgeois morality in the second volume of Moretti’s The Novel by asserting that

Literary history has indeed smiled on fiction that sets a protagonist in opposition to the prevailing field of social possibilities in a relationship that achieves synthesis when two conditions are met: (1) the protagonist acquires a position commensurate with his or her worth, and (2) the entire field of possible human identities changes to provide such a place for that individual.

The payoff Armstrong insists on is missing in the movie (to its benefit), but the setup was all too familiar. The protagonist is bigger than the space he (or she) inhabits. As soon as I saw that Guy Pearce was dead, I knew that his replacement would be a cowboy. Sure enough, James doesn’t follow the rules; he’s idiosyncratic. Sanborn reads this as a testament to James’s being a hillbilly redneck. I saw it as a sign that we’re dealing with a serious protagonist. And then, somehow, I got bored. Something about the police officer/soldier who doesn’t follow the rules but gets results is starting to bore me as a narrative device (and if we believe Armstrong, we believe that there’s no other way to make a lasting narrative about war or the police). We saw this in the fifth season of The Wire: we had loved what a loose cannon McNulty was in the first four seasons, but his antics in season five started to seriously alienate his coworkers and, if I recall correctly, many viewers.

Can you, then, think of examples of narratives of war or police where the main character does always follow protocol? Would that even be watchable? Would it, on the other hand, be/feel more real?

As a side note, how can a movie be considered pro-Army propaganda (as this one is) if the entire fuel of the plot is based on the assumption that Army protocol–in fact, the very idea of protocol–is wrong?