Well, I should not have been quite as skeptical, as on Thursday, while I was distracted by a weekend holiday, Mélenchon expressed no interest in being in Hollande’s government.

Last week, the NPA asked Mélenchon to join them in resisting Hollande’s government (assuming the PS candidate is swept into power). While the two strains of the far-left may not unite in opposition, this makes me take Mélenchon more seriously than I did a mere week ago.

But I’ll wait for May 7 for further thinking about this. Let’s let Hollande win, first.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon Discours de Villeurbanne Eng… par kominaaa

Jean-Luc Mélenchon Discours de Villeurbanne Eng… par kominaaa

If you only have time for one part of the speech, I recommend the 35 minutes of the second part.

Mélenchon has been getting a bit of attention in the English-language press of late, largely because of his amazingly successful march on the Bastille on the anniversary of the founding of the Paris Commune. This was then buoyed by his overtaking Marine Le Pen in the polls, to now be the infamous “third man” in the election.

The first round of elections is on April 22, and, should no one top 50% (very likely), then the top two performers will square off for the second round, whose polls are on May 6. It’s interesting to read the Guardian coverage, especially since it focusses so much on, for example, his anti-1%er rhetoric, like charging 100% tax on all income over 360,000€.

But the speech presents a far different man. Choosing not to rail on the rich, Mélenchon doesn’t seem like a rabble-rouser, but, rather, as a pedagogue. In comparison to, say, the State of the Union Address, which is nothing but a series of lines with the life polished out of them to cue standing ovations, Mélenchon early on tells the crowd not to cheer too much or make too much noise. There’s not enough time, he explains, to get through what he needs to do.

What he needs to do is not make promises (though he does that, too, in spectacular fashion in the second part). As he says, he has to teach his supporters, make sure they understand why they’re fighting the way they are, so that they can, subsequently, take his message to others and convince them.

It sounds a bit vanguardist, but that does not mean it’s a bad approach. Throughout, he jokes that he is criticized for being too intellectual in speeches. That’s not the case, he responds. Everyone in the audience understands perfectly well what he is saying. It’s only complicated to those, like the mainstream media that he claims ignore him, who can’t manage to listen and learn.

To my ear, at least, this pedagogical position works. It doesn’t sound patronizing. And even when, in a bravura performance of “they want intellectual? I’ll give them intellectual!”, he reads from Les Misérables on the differences between the barbarians of civilization and the civilized barbarians, the words hit home, clear as day.

The approach also suggests a mode of politics based on persuasion—moral and intellectual. He’s not whipping a bunch of stormtroopers overflowing with resentment into a hate-filled tempest. Nor are his words the tepid promises of continued stewardship, drawing support by promising the status quo. He doesn’t say, “Isn’t it crazy that they are doing this?” Instead, he teaches, “They are doing this. Here are the reasons why it is crazy.” He knows that, as a non-mainstream party politician (though not far from it), he needs to persuade. He can’t, like a (US) Republican whispering “Dred Scott” and having his audience understand “abortion,” assume too much about those listening to him. After all, they’ve not heard all this before… that’s why it is exciting!

And what is he teaching? An interesting theory merging social struggle (la lutte) with the rule of law (la loi). The low union membership in France, he explains, is not a problem, since workers do not negotiate their rights on a contractual, but rather on a legislative basis. It’s not the case, then, that one needs a strong union to negotiate with management. Better to have the state intervene and tell management that they can only have, for example, 5% of their staff on temporary contracts. That way, everyone in the working class benefits, not just the union members. The law is stronger than the contract—a profoundly anti-neoliberal formulation, where the law serves to ensure contract.

The state needs to remember its obligations to the class that makes up its largest number and are its fiercest republicans, the workers. This is not very far removed from 99% rhetoric, but it’s a different approach than the tubthumping on marginal tax rates above.

For those who have been confused in the past by why Mélenchon saves particular venom for Marine Le Pen (and it’s a rich, rewarding venom), here he explains it clearly. Le Pen and he, he believes, are fighting for the same votes—those who have been brought to ruin by politics as usual and want the little guy to have a voice for a change, not the boring suits represented by Sarkozy and the socialist candidate, François Hollande. He does not need to convince the apparatchiks of the PS to break ranks and vote for him. Similarly, the UMP voters are also out of his reach. But Le Pen’s voters… the gambit is that, if they see past the flattering sublimated racism of her political program, they’ll see that she will not actually help the working class. Mélenchon makes this point clearly by pointing out Le Pen’s plans regarding curbing abortion and getting women out of the workforce. How will these things help the working class? Mélenchon’s then adds that Le Pen, upon seeing the workers in the streets demanding no change in the retirement age, called them “rioters.” Rioters whom she now needs for electoral viability.

And so he marches on in the speech. To Le Pen’s taunts that he is a “communist,” he responds that if believing what he does makes him a communist, then, so be it, he’s a communist. He’s not afraid of the term or of what people did in another part of the world half a century ago under the name of “communism.”

But is that actually the case? Lutte ouvrière’s presidential candidate, Nathalie Arthaud, stares ahead in her campaign posters, with the text underneath that announces that she’s a communist candidate for president, implying that Mélenchon is hardly that, despite his backing by the PCF. And it would be a mistake to assume that his pedagogical tone merely masks a revolutionary spirit. His proposals sound like aggressive social democracy. His first step to help end the crisis of precarity in France, for example, would be to transform 850,000 temporary government workers into permanent employees. Not quite workers taking over the means of production, is it? (Though he does also argue that if firms are going out of business, the workers should have a right to buy it and become the owners, themselves.) On the other hand, Mélenchon’s coalition, as well as the Lutte ouvrière as well as the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste, as this article from the ICFI-backed World Socialist Web Site points out, will back Hollande in the case of his (likely) plurality in the first round, which would then earn, at least someone like Mélenchon, a nice post is Hollande’s government. No more Thalys to Brussels; Mélenchon will be able to live and work in Paris.

Not that the rallying around Hollande will be a shock. It’s nailed on. But it does force Mélenchon’s rhetoric into a sort of uncomfortable zone bordered by skepticism. He’ll never convince the neoliberal Hollande administration (even with him in it) to pursue his stated legislative agenda, much less start a Sixth Republic. But this is the problem with abandoning the revolution. You get mired in legislative coalition-building and the like.

During the regional elections two years ago, I paid little attention to Mélenchon’s coalition. The Front de gauche seemed like a desperate move by leftist parties left in the lurch with the neoliberal socialists on one side and the revolutionaries on the other side to consolidate and rally around Mélenchon, who founded his own party, the Parti de gauche, after turning his back on 30 years of loyal service as a high-level functionary in the PS, and continues to live a comfortable life on 6,000€ a month as an MEP. Mélenchon’s comments at the start of his speech about being vehemently against a cult of personality seem like a direct response to my skepticism two years ago.

Instead, I paid attention to the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste. The NPA, judging from their posters in my neighborhood, seemed like an energetic and young party, riding the coattails of their own charismatic presidential candidate, the boyish part-time mailman and media darling who gives speeches in a hoodie and sneakers, Olivier Besancenot. Besancenot refused to be his party’s candidate this time around, despite good showings in the previous two elections. Over and over he has repeated that the NPA is not “Besancenot’s party,” but that, rather, it is the “Party of Besancenot, and Poutou (the current candidate), and others.” Yet he remains a huge spokesman. Here, he took to the airwaves today to repeat his party’s current approach to the election: ensure that Sarkozy is tossed aside, but also not support the government of Hollande.

Besancenot fait un appel du pied à Mélenchon par Europe1fr

Besancenot, at the end of the chat, is teased for how Mélenchon has taken the trappings of revolution away from the NPA, and now the NPA is taking them back, and Besancenot’s points are good: Mélenchon’s popularity are raising awareness for the left in general, but it’s unclear if a career politician is the person needed to push it further, especially since the Front de gauche is nowhere near as skeptical of the PS as the NPA is. Hence the NPA’s call for Mélenchon to join them in opposition after the election, rather than sit snugly at Hollande’s side.

In short, it’s hard to describe how I feel about the “phénomène Mélenchon.” The speech above is a good one, and it affected me, but after some time away from it, again the skepticism grew. But wouldn’t a (hypothetical) vote for him be more useful, in terms of moving the proverbial ball forward, than a vote for Poutou? For Artaud? Either way, these questions are probably best saved for May 7. Today, the point was to focus on Mélenchon’s pedagogy, not drift into leftist brawling, like in this mean-spirited tear down of Besancenot provided by the Trotskyists at WSWS (no, Mélenchon was also not spared). I’m not sure I succeeded.

Even if Mélanchon won’t bring the worker’s revolution, he’ll at least bring the Danse ! Danse ! Révolution !

It’s easy to say about an article on the internet I read on the phone in bed for free in a few minutes that, “well, it’s a bit more complicated than that.” But Goldfarb sets a lofty goal. Despite the specificity of the subhead, the article aims to tackle something general about Eastern European “ultra-nationalism.” And to provide a syncretic account of that, definitionally, one must make a muddle of a lot of things.

So we’re treated to a myriad of examples of “Hitler nostalgia” that initially make sense—the infamous “SS veteran marches,” the hounding of Fania Branstovsky and Rachel Margolis for fighting with Soviet partisans—and then we’re talking about institutionalized Polish anti-Semitism at soccer matches. Then we’re talking about the Latvian vote to only have one official language. And what, exactly is the discussion of the Lithuanian policies regarding the use of Polish orthography on official Lithuanian state documents doing for the argument about being  nostalgic about Hitler?

Goldfarb ties the points together in a way I have not before seen by arguing that these “bloodlands,” to use Timothy Snyder’s useful term from his frequently unreadable book, are simply developmentally backward; these “newly liberated nations are only just being allowed to go through historical processes America and western Europe went through in the 18th and 19th century,” namely the “kind of nationalism that underpinned Hitler’s theory of ‘One People and One Reich.’”

I’d believe this astonishingly patronizing excuse more if, first, a ‘One people’ mentality did not seem to be the foundation of all of Western Europe and the US regarding its ‘One [liberal, (ex-)Judeo-Christian] People’ in response to the variously understood Islamic threat. I’d also believe it if it were the case that these Eastern European states did not, actually, enjoy varying levels of independence during the past century—time during which they could do some of the national developing Goldfarb suggests has been denied them.²

Most importantly, I would believe Goldfarb’s excuse if he considered more carefully the provocative opening to the second part of his article:

Historians and sociologists around Europe’s eastern edge all agree: the basic questions of politics in the area have been settled.

All the countries are ruled by right-of-center governments who buy into free-market economics.

Therein lies the answer, though not quite as Goldfarb imagines it. Hitler nostalgia (and ultra-nationalism) are results of (the fantasy of) the permanence of (neo-liberal) capitalism. Consider what a ridiculous statement that first sentence is. Universal agreement on the reached telos of politics. That reads like something out of Jameson or Žižek. And in an era of #Occupy, or of Jean-Luc Mélenchon polling at 15%, it sounds ostentatious in its triumphalism.

It is a serious problem that there is no high-functioning left in Lithuania, at least not one that I can recognize from half a continent away. There is an academic left, Naujoji kairė 95, which, as far as I can tell, has no active political presence. Then there is a political party, Socialistinis liaudės frontas, which seems perpetually in the shadow of its provocative leader, Algirdas Paleckis.³

Yet when the SLF has rallies, they are met by jeering youths who have decided it would be a gas to troll the “halfwits of little Paleckis.” Somehow the kind of behavior that seems appropriate in the US when the Westboro Babtist Church is involved, falls flat and feels astonishingly poundfoolish when transported to a state ravaged by a cratering economy and a political élite running out of ways to implement harsher austerity measures.

I lean on this anecdotal bit a lot, but it’s the first time I’m mentioning it here: over the summer, while in Vilnius, I was talking to a French businessman about my life here in Paris. When I said my apartment was “paid for,” he assumed I was getting state aid. He launched into a whole speech—and this is, mind, from a bourgeois businessman—about how Lithuanians are mortally afraid of the state. They fear that any action of state power is the beginning of communist recidivism, and so the state is abandoned. Mocked. Politicians are all clowns or corrupt or both. This level of antagonism toward the state, of fear, he continued, makes no sense to a French citizen. The French republican understands that the state exists to serve its citizenry, but to also protect it. Etc., etc.

Despite trafficking in extremes, I think my interlocutor has a point. The goal of the ethnic nation of Lithuanians was an independent state. Under such circumstances, the ethnic nation would have the space to “kvetch” (as one of Goldfarb’s Polish academics says), to have a moment of catharsis, to have the pie it had always seen in the sky. But it simply does not work that way. Ethnic self-determination, a relic of the early twentieth century as much as of nineteenth—and certainly far more than of the eighteenth, despite Goldfarb’s claims, was always much messier in practice than in theory, but that obvious fact seems to have been ignored in the excitement over reaching for that pie.

Now the Lithuanians have a state that is constitutionally separate from the ethnic nation.⁴ Efforts to reforge the ties look appropriately out of place, but anachronistic only in their boldness.⁵ In this way, Lithuania is like a little France. Nominally a republic with no official ethnic basis of membership, it still, just like France, has difficulty living up to that standard.⁶ But, unlike France, the state is hobbled by pervasively anti-communist electorate. And so the state moves to burnish its anti-communist bonafides by retreating to classic tropes of anti-communism: anti-Semitism, nationalism, anti-Statism, militarization.⁷

Would a strong state make the “Hitler nostalgia” go away? I doubt it. But reckoning with the political left and considering that it provides more than a boogeyman one must perpetually run from (or puff breasts against) would probably do the trick of bringing both history and politics back to the table, letting us bin the hackneyed Santayana quote.

1. If you’re writing an article that presumes to be at least partly about Lithuania, and the only expert on Lithuania you seem to have contacted is Dovid Katz, then your article is going to have problems. I fully agree with Katz’s goals at Defending History, and I’m proud that he has linked to my writing on occasion. But talking only to him stacks the deck. For me, as we’ll see below, what is missing from Goldfarb’s account is an appraisal of the immanent anti-communism in the region (though I can only speak about Lithuania). This line of reasoning is not one I’ve yet sussed out of Katz’s work. It may be as simple as this: for me, contemporary ultra-nationalism and institutional anti-Semitism are functions of anti-communism. For Katz, I think, it’s reversed. It’s not a big difference, in the grand scheme of things, since, after all, our interests are aligned. Basically, I’m perhaps most miffed by the fact that the subhead, again, promises “Lithuania and Latvia,” yet Goldfarb seems to have spoken to mostly Polish academics.
2. It is also certainly the case that national culture did not suffer within the USSR. Snyder makes a compelling case, for example, regarding how the USSR actually allowed a specifically Lithuanian culture to flourish in ways it had never done before in history, even during Lithuanian independence during the interwar period and during the medieval-era Grand Duchy.
3. If I’m more diffident than usual here, it’s since I feel a bit out of my depth, as someone who isn’t politically engaged in Lithuania. But I’ll say just this: I learned about Naujoji kairė 95 not from anything they did, but, rather, from dismissive remarks made about them by columnist Andrius Užkalnis, whose bombastic Reaganophilia is well-documented. Paleckis and his party I learned about clicking about on the internet, but, again, I never read anything good about them. Something like the Guardian article above about Mélenchon, recast in a Lithuanian sphere, is so incomprehensible to me to be basically laughable.
4. The Constitution says that the sovereign in the Lithuanian Republic is the “nation.” The Constitutional Court has decided that, in that line, “nation” means “citizenry,” not ethnic group. And since citizenship cannot be denied based on ethnic grounds, it means that there is a possible future where the “Lithuanian nation,” as far as the sovereign of the Republic, will have no ethnic Lithuanians. I’m fine with that.
5. Consider the Polish orthography issue whenever getting one’s liberal dander up about “English only!” movements in the US. Unlike the US, Lithuania has an official language, and that language is Lithuanian, which does not have, officially, letters like “w” in it. The government, hence, has no obligation to provide the letter “w” on passports, etc. I think the issue is stupid, and I also think the government should let Poles spell their names however they want, but I understand the government’s position.
6. See, for example, France’s own problems with dealing with linguistic minorities despite having an official language.
7. We can add, of course, other tropes, like a reflexive pro-Americanism that lets the CIA use your territory to torture suspects.

Needless to say, it was not empty. There was a group of people drilling police confrontation tactics like making sturdy walls against the police. There were scattered protestors with small signs and tables set up, and there were cameras everywhere.

The ubiquity of the recording eye was probably what was most remarkable. At least three teams of camerapeople were filming the drills, and then seeming security guards were also filming them. Then pro-Occupyers were filming the security guards, who were also being harassed by other pro-Occupyers. (Very DeLillo-esque.)

NYPD were, simply put, everywhere. Wall St. was completely blocked, Thames St. was closed to house a bunch of NYPD scooters, and Liberty Place was a parking lot for prowlers. Broadway featured police in three different types of shirts, and there was even a man who certainly looked like a police who was in a suit (that would be a fourth shirt, I suppose).

Even during our hour-long stay, there was excitement. Two men came bearing a 20-foot banner reading “OCCUPY WALL STREET.” I imagine they had been warned already by the police about it, since as they tried to plant it near a sculpture, the police immediately batted it out of their hands, and the two young men were cuffed and led away before the livestreamers had a chance to run half the length of the park to capture the skirmish (they had been covering the drills). The efficiency of both sides of the operation was surreal. A theater that has been well rehearsed.

Then I shot a minute’s worth of video of the drummers and police.

I do not have much more to say about #Occupy. There are many who are much smarter than I on this. But I do know that I was not the only person there in a tourist capacity. Tourists photographing Wall Street and the rest of Broadway were encouraged by the protestors to also take a picture of Zuccotti. One man shouted, “no tour of New York is complete without Occupy Wall Street!” and I, obviously, agreed with him. Going to the park was the only real (specific) goal I had of my trip. So this is my little spiel about #Occupy.

But how do you talk about entities that benefit from the publicity. In France, a soccer team won promotion to the top league this year whose full name is “Évian Thonon-Gaillard Football Club.” Now, teams in France frequently have complicatedly long names that indicate historical mergers and the like, but here the name is pretty clear: “Thonon” is short for “Thonon-les-Bains,” and it and Gaillard are two towns in the Alps, both along the Swiss border. “Évian,” however, does not refer to “Évian-les-Bains,” a town right next to Thonon-les-Bains. Instead, it refers to the Dannon mineral water that we know in the US as “evian.” Évian-les-Bains have their own team, after all, Évian-Lugrin.

Now that Évian Thonon-Gaillard FC are in the top flight and getting lots of press, the question becomes how to refer to the club. The local Grenoble newspaper offered a few variants to its readers in a poll: “ETG,” “Évian Savoie,” “Croix de Savoie,” or something else. “Savoie” is the name of the region, and the club was known as “Olympique Croix de Savoie 74″ when it was founded (via merger), and the logo retains the white cross on a red field that is the symbol of Savoy. Sports daily L’Équipe refers to the club as “Évian TG.” However, the stadium attendance site Stades et Spectateurs uses the name “CROIX-SAVOIE.” Calling them some form of “Évian” is free advertising. Calling them “Croix de Savoie” is anachronistic and inexact. Personally, I call the team the band of jerks who beat ASSE last weekend.

The example of ETG came up in a discussion on twitter about how soccer teams usually have many different names that are often rather confusing, especially from country to country. In the US, this doesn’t tend to happen. The Boston Red Sox are either “Boston” or the “Red Sox” (or both). Anything else is being literary (“Carmines”) or overly colloquial (“Bosox”). Sure, a term like “Sox” causes confusion when Boston is playing Chicago, but that’s the exception that proves the rule. So I was asked what the convention is in Lithuania, where, among other things, “Žalgiris” can refer to either a basketball team in Kaunas or a soccer team in Vilnius.

One thing even a casual glance at Lithuanian soccer reporting indicates is that there are quotes all over the place when it comes to team names. A team like Ekranas is never called “Ekranas.” It’s always either “„Ekranas“” or “‘Ekranas.’” To know why, we return to the question of how Lithuanian handles a “simbolinis pavadinimas,” or a company’s name that uses (non-standard) words in a non-standard context. For example, “ekranas” means “screen.” When it is in quotes and capitalized, the reader is alerted that the word is being used in a non-standard and proper manner. And these names are always in quotes.

As peculiar as this sounds, we do this regarding works of art in English. We talk about “the novel ‘Ulysses’” (using New Yorker style!) or about “the song ‘Happy Birthday to You.’” In Lithuanian, you’d write things like, “the hotel ‘Hilton.’” Yet if the name itself indicates that it is a company (and what kind of company it is), then quotes are not necessary. So we’d write “American Airlines,” not “airline ‘American’” or “airline ‘American Airlines.’” The examples the Supreme Lithuanian Language Commission gives are instructive, if kind of funny, in my opinion. It’s “UAB Užupio kavinė,” because from the name it’s clear that it is a café. But it’s “akcinė bendrovė „Lietuvos draudimas,“” because the name (which translates to “Lithuania’s insurance”) doesn’t make it clear that it is a company. Either way, the commission agrees with my journalist friend from the top of this post: a writer is not forced by Lithuanian language rules to respect airBaltic’s marketing strategy. In proper Lithuanian, they would be called “UAB oro linija „Airbaltic.“”

Things get even more complicated when trying to figure out how to decline names of companies, but I’ll save those five rules for another post. And then there are the rules for naming companies, which, if I read them correctly, suggest that airBaltic could never have registered that as a company name, had they been founded in Lithuania.

As far as I can tell, there are three men named Corentin (it’s a Breton name) who are memorialized in some way in (slightly greater) Paris: Corentin Cariou, Corentin Celton, and Corentin Cloarec. Cariou has a métro station and street named after him. Celton, a métro station and hospital. And Cloarec, a street.

Corentin Cariou was a communist councilman to the council of the 19th Arrondissement. Appropriate for his name, he was born on the edge of the earth, in the coastal village of Loctudy in Brittany. In his early 20s, speaking barely any French and being illiterate, he leaves the life of the sea to go to Paris, where he gets involved as a syndicalist. Long story (on Wikipedia) short, once the Communist party is made illegal during the Daladier government, Cariou is arrested. He escapes in early 1940 to Brittany, regroups with his wife and child, and returns to Paris to undertake clandestine operations. In late 1940, he’s arrested again by the Vichy government. Once the Soviet Union declares war against Nazi Germany, communists are freed to participate in a war previously considered “imperialist.” But repressions against communists in France continue, and now Cariou is under the watch of the Germans. In response to an attack on a German sentinel in the 19th Arrondissement, the Nazis decide to kill 20 “communists and Jews” in their custody. Cariou is among them, and he is shot in a forest on 7 March 1942.

Corentin Celton was, like Cariou, also born on the edge of the earth, this time in the village of Ploaré, which no longer exists. He also left behind the life of a fisherman to move to Paris, where he also got involved with the SFIC, the French faction of the Communist International. After working in the hospital that now carries his name, he began a bunch of union-related administrative posts. In 1939, he returns to work as a nurse in the army. After being demobilized in 1940, he continues working as a nurse, but increasing legal anti-communism forces him underground. In 1942, he is caught using a false identity, and after initially being sentenced to three years, a second hearing changes the sentence to death. The Nazis execute him outside of Paris on the antepenultimate day of 1943.

Corentin Cloarec is the occasion of this post, since the street bearing his name is only two blocks away from me. A Franciscan monk at the Couvent de Saint-François in the 14th Arrondissement (and right beside the street now named after Cloarec), Père Corentin is charged with providing support for the Résistance in the Denfert-Rochereau area. After being named in a list of Résistance members given under torture, the monk is visited by two young French members of the Abwehr, who shoot him. He dies before he is able to get medical attention. Thousands attend his funeral. A Franciscan who was working as an interpreter for the Germans had advance knowledge of the execution and tried to warn his fellow brothers, but it was, obviously, in vain.

Saturday, walking down rue du Père Corentin, I saw that a sign for the supermarket G20 had had some editorial content added. The G20 has two entrances, from both sides: one on rue du Père Corentin (which takes one straight to the organic section) and the “main” entrance on avénue du Général Leclerc (another man with a history relating Paris and World War II). The sign that was augmented announces that there are two entrances, one from each street, and it points to the entrance on rue du Père Corentin. In a bit of coincidence, the sign sits right beside a memorial to Gustave Pommier, a 26 year old man from the countryside, who, as a lieutenant in the FFI, was killed in a raid on a Nazi garage. That area near the plaque features, these days, both a large Citroën garage and an RATP garage for buses.

The editorial content is what’s interesting here, though. First, “Pére [sic] Corentin” is circled, and someone has added “FUSILLÉ pendant que PAPON BOUSQUET etc. FAISAIENT CARRIERE eux.” Father Corentin was shot while Papon, Bousquet, and others were making their own careers, then. So the first comment serves is a pedagogical moment reminding the reader of the situation of Père Corentin’s martyrdom while collaborators like Papon and Bousquet (and do read their Wikipedia entries!) were just cutting their teeth on selling out their countrymen. It’s a little historical gift, I suppose, to people walking down the street.

The second remark, however, I suppose is written by a different hand, and its target and means are much more acute. “FUSillE SANS ROLEX lui,” it reads, pointing to the plaque for Pommier, suggesting that, as for him (Pommier), he was shot without his Rolex on. Its mode is both historical and especially critical, considering the geography (and toponymic issues) at hand.

Not all those shot by the Nazis should be considered equally.

I may also mention that the book was written… where the libraries are not well equipped for European studies… Hence it is possible and even probable that I overlooked things which I ought to have considered and that I occasionally assert something which modern research has disproved or modified… On the other hand it is quite possible that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library. If it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects, I might never have reached the point of writing.

(from Mimesis)

Some silver lining?

More on the closure of Library.nu:

• Association of American Publishers press release
• Library Closure of Type .nu (by Alan Toner)
• Library.nu a fermé et c’est une catastrophe (by Yann Leroux)
• Library.nu R.I.P (mourned via Borges by Lawrence Liang)
• Library.nu: Modern era’s “Destruction of the Library of Alexandria” (“My first difficulty was finding anything about it in English” by Sean Johnson Andrews)

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.