Corey McCall in Other Voices:

Readers of Foucault’s texts have long been perplexed by the apparent shift his writings underwent in the late 1970s. Following the appearance of the first volume of The History of Sexuality (Le volunté de savoir, translated as The History of Sexuality: An Introduction) in 1976, Foucault’s investigations inexplicably change focus: from an investigation of the prison and the mechanisms of power that produce the modern individual in Discipline and Punish, the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality focus on practices of the self in ancient Greece and Rome. Indeed, at the time of his death, Foucault was at work on a fourth volume examining the practices of the self in the Christian era.1 How does one account for the fact that the thinker who had written in 1966 that the one could “certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand and at the edge of the sea” was suddenly writing about the various practices of the self prevalent in the ancient world, practices that were meant to ensure individual freedom and autonomy?2 This, after all, was the thinker that had famously feuded with Jean-Paul Sartre and labeled him an outmoded thinker of systems, better suited for the nineteenth century than the twentieth, who was now writing about themes seemingly much more at home in Existentialist writings than his own anti-humanist ones.

Eric Paras’ book represents the latest attempt to come to terms with this perplexity. What sets Paras’ work apart from previous attempts is the archival work that he marshals in support of his bold claim. Paras has done extensive research in the Foucault Archives, and he uses this research to claim that Foucault basically renounces his former, anti-humanist self in order to begin a project that resonates with certain core humanist values such as freedom and universal human rights. Foucault’s work after 1976 until his premature death in 1984 represents not an attempt to reassess his former positions and provide them with more depth, as some have argued.3 Instead, Foucault’s later writings enact a radical break from the doctrines he previously held. According to Paras, Foucault sought a position “beyond power and knowledge” and found it by delving into various ancient practices of self-cultivation. I am sympathetic to the more moderate claim that Foucault’s later writings represent an attempt to make good on the genealogical claims of his earlier texts and thus are continuous with his previous work rather than an outright renunciation. In the review that follows, I will attempt to outline this case as an alternative to Paras’ more radical claim. Despite the fact that I take issue with the author’s central thesis in the review that follows, Paras’ book stands as a worthy attempt to make sense of Foucault’s sometimes maddening intellectual odyssey.

Michael D. Jackson in The Harvard Divinity Bulletin:

That any philosophy mirrors the life of the philosopher is an assertion from which many thinkers would recoil, since it seems to reduce thought to the prejudices, preoccupations, and persuasions that supposedly characterize the musings of mere mortals. If every great philosophy is, as Nietzsche avows, “an involuntary and unconscious memoir” reflecting who the philosopher is before he or she takes up philosophy, then thought is but an adventitious byproduct of one's life rather than the disciplined, disinterested work of reason. I thought of Nietzsche when I first met Richard Rorty. There was something disarmingly vulnerable about him. Though renowned for his groundbreaking Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and his MacArthur “genius award,” he seemed socially unsure of himself, and nonplussed whenever the talk turned from academic to mundane matters like Australian wines, the films of Werner Herzog, or the best Vietnamese restaurant in Canberra.

It was 1982. The Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. We were there on visiting fellowships—myself, Dick Rorty, Don Hirsch, Zygmunt Bauman, Paul Connerton, Russell Keat, Patrick McCarthy, and others I got to know less well. I was writing essays on embodiment, profiting from long conversations with Paul, who was writing his book on bodily social memory, and Russell, who was preparing his critique of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. It was my hatha yoga practice that had inspired my explorations of body consciousness; unfortunately, it had also turned me into an obnoxious fundamentalist who believed that the respiratory and psychophysical disciplines of yoga enabled one to achieve a truer and more realistic relationship with the world, and that discursive thought was largely illusory. Rorty objected to the essentialist overtones of my view, arguing that efforts to ground knowledge in the body or the mind, in reasoned discourse or strong intuition, were equally misguided. And he cautioned me against explaining any human experience in terms of some prior cause or first principle. In my defense, I pointed out that a philosophical argument against foundationalism could not be transferred to the real world, since all human beings have recourse to notions of firstness, foundations, and fundamentals in their everyday lives. If it is existentially the case that life is insupportable without such notions, what is the point of making philosophical arguments to the contrary? Moreover, I felt that the Deweyan argument, to which Rorty subscribed, against Platonic dualisms like body-mind, true-false, and subject-object left unconsidered the way we deploy these antinomies to capture different modes of experience. Making epistemological claims for such distinctions is absurd, but recognizing the phenomenological differences they communicated was, I thought, vital to understanding human experience.

I suppose I was ineptly asking whether philosophy has anything to say that might make a real difference to our lives, and whether its insights had value only within the academic circles where they served as currency. I quickly learned that these were also burning questions for Rorty, for beyond the philosophical issue of whether we can ever truly represent what lies outside our minds—whether human thought can mirror nature—lies the much more pragmatic issue of whether the insights of thinkers can change the world.

Achin Vanaik in For Liberation:

The mass of recent literature on the ‘rise of Asia’ largely focuses on the implications of this development for the West. [1] It rarely stops to consider the impact on inter-relations between the Asian states themselves. In Rivals, ex-Economist editor Bill Emmott attempts to correct this by examining the cases of China, India and Japan, and argues that the interaction between the three will decisively influence the shape of the coming world order. As he points out, their triple coexistence as major powers represents a historical novelty. In 1820, when China and India between them accounted for almost half of world output, Japan remained a relative backwater, its modernizing drive of the Meiji period lying decades in the future; by the 1930s, when Japan had become a full-fledged industrial and military power, China was impoverished and riven by warlordism, while India groaned under the British yoke. The headlong economic development of the prc and steady growth in India over the past decades suggest that the two Asian giants will join Japan among the top five national economies in the world.

Yet this very process is creating ‘disruptive transformations’ that will profoundly alter the economies, societies and polities of the states in question, Emmott argues, potentially raising new tensions between the three. Rising prosperity has brought commensurate expansion of Chinese and Indian global ambitions. The coming years will see intensifying competition over resources and markets, not least in the battle for Burmese oil and gas fields. In addition, Emmott sees an incipient arms race developing, in a region littered with potential flashpoints. As well as territorial disputes—over Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh in the case of China and India, and over the Senkaku and other islands in the case of China and Japan—there are further sources of tension in Tibet, Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, Pakistan and Kashmir, which the deteriorating world economic outlook will likely only heighten. Emmott proposes a ‘plausible pessimistic’ scenario: China’s bubble-prone economy enters a deep recession, accompanied by rising social protests; the ccp tightens its grip with increased recourse to nationalism, amplifying regional tensions through displays of truculence. With Japan too bolstering its military, Taiwan might become the cause of a ‘short, exploratory exchange of fire’ that could also draw in the us.

Patricia Lee Sharpe in Whirled View:

Ali bin Abi Talib, the fourth Caliph and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, wrote a long letter of guidance after appointing Maalik al-Ashtar to be Governor of Egypt. He advises the new governor that his administration will succeed only if he governs with concern for justice, equity, probity and the prosperity of all.

The passages excerpted below illustrate the timeless applicability of Hazrat Ali’s admonitions. The letter itself is contained in the Nahjal Balaagha, which is a collection of the letters and speeches of the fourth Caliph.

Manifest religious tolerance: Amongst your subjects there are two kinds of people: those who have the same religion as you [and] are brothers to you, and those who have religions other than yours, [who] are human beings like you. Men of either category suffer from the same weaknesses and disabilities that human beings are inclined to; they commit sins, indulge in vices either intentionally or foolishly and unintentionally without realizing the enormity of their deeds. Let your mercy and compassion come to their rescue and help in the same way and to the same extent that you expect Allah to show mercy and forgiveness to you.

Equity is best: A policy which is based on equity will be largely appreciated. Remember that the displeasure of common men, the have-nots and the depressed persons overbalances the approval of important persons, while the displeasure of a few big people will be excused…if the general public and the masses of your subjects are happy with you.

The rich always want more: They are the people who will be the worst drag upon you during your moments of peace and happiness, and the least useful to you during your hours of need and adversity. They hate justice the most. They will keep demanding more and more out of State resources and will seldom be satisfied with what they receive and will never be obliged for the favor shown to them if their demands are justifiably refused.

More here. [The photo is of a painting of my father showing him holding a copy of his own much-reprinted translation of the Nahjal Balaagha from Arabic into English.]

Sameer Rahim in The Telegraph:

V S Naipaul’s father was once forced to sacrifice a goat to the Hindu goddess Kali. In June 1933, when Vidia was still a baby, Seepersad Naipaul had written an article in the Trinidad Guardian criticising Hindu farmers who ignored government regulations and inoculated their cattle with religious rites. His angry opponents threatened him with a poisoning curse unless he appeased the goddess. He refused at first but soon relented: wearing trousers rather than the traditional loincloth (his small rebellion), he offered up a severed goat’s head on a brass plate. In that Sunday’s paper he was all bluster: “Mr Naipaul greets you! No Poison last night”. But this “great humiliation”, as his son wrote in Finding the Centre (1984), destroyed his life. He lost his job and sunk into depression. According to Naipaul’s mother, “He looked in the mirror one day and couldn’t see himself. And he began to scream.”

Over the course of his long writing career, V S Naipaul’s view of religion has moved – much like this story – from the potentially comic to the outright sinister. His first published novel, The Mystic Masseur (1957), was a satire on a fake pundit. In his masterpiece A House for Mr Biswas (1961) the title character (based on Seepersad) is expelled from his training as a Hindu priest when he pollutes some sacred flowers with his excrement. His travel book on India, An Area of Darkness (1964), took a harsher view of Hinduism and the caste system and after 1970, when he first learnt about his father’s ritual humiliation (the family had kept it an absolute secret), his work took on an unforgiving tone.

More here.

Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest:

Beset by so many problems from so many different sources, Pakistanis struggle to make sense of their country and the world. Conspiracy theories are rife; the raucous and rambunctious media (especially the Urdu media) is better at expressing anger than analysis. A strong civil society is struggling to emerge, but the enormous internal disparities in wealth and education make it hard for strong and effective groups to emerge. Like idealistic 19th century Russian aristocrats and students, the educated idealists who direct many Pakistani social movements are so distant from the world of the poor that their efforts, commendable and well intentioned as they may be, are often irrelevant to the problems of the masses.

A recent example shows how this works. While I was in Pakistan, there was massive press coverage of “Diplomagate.” Pakistani law requires that members of parliament must have college degrees. It turns out that dozens of legislators had fake degrees, and the Good Government crowd raised holy hands in horror. It wasn’t just that the fake graduates were what in the American South we used to call ‘pig-ignorant,’ though some of them were. It was that they had perjured themselves to take their seats. There was a mass hue and cry to detect the fakers, expel them from parliament, and even to recover the salaries and expenses they were paid under false pretenses.

OK and fair enough, but a law that requires MPs to have university degrees doesn’t make much sense in a country where half the population can’t read at all and most adults have less than four years of school. And Americans can’t help but reflect that neither George Washington, Benjamin Franklin nor Abraham Lincoln could have taken a seat in the Pakistani legislature.

More here.

From The Economist:

Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate and physicist extraordinaire, called it a “magic number” and its value “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics”. The number he was referring to, which goes by the symbol alpha and the rather more long-winded name of the fine-structure constant, is magic indeed. If it were a mere 4% bigger or smaller than it is, stars would not be able to sustain the nuclear reactions that synthesise carbon and oxygen. One consequence would be that squishy, carbon-based life would not exist.

Why alpha takes on the precise value it has, so delicately fine-tuned for life, is a deep scientific mystery. A new piece of astrophysical research may, however, have uncovered a crucial piece of the puzzle. In a paper just submitted to Physical Review Letters, a team led by John Webb and Julian King from the University of New South Wales in Australia present evidence that the fine-structure constant may not actually be constant after all. Rather, it seems to vary from place to place within the universe. If their results hold up to the scrutiny, and can be replicated, they will have profound implications—for they suggest that the universe stretches far beyond what telescopes can observe, and that the laws of physics vary within it. Instead of the whole universe being fine-tuned for life, then, humanity finds itself in a corner of space where, Goldilocks-like, the values of the fundamental constants happen to be just right for it.

More here.

Good Girls/Bad Girls

The good girls are the ones who are interviewed by the BBC
50 years after they didn’t sleep with their boyfriends,
who themselves, shortly after the non-act, either (1)
plummeted into the sea and were or were not rescued or
(2) didn’t; possibly returning to father four or five tow-haired children,
all of whom grew up and appalled mum and da with their wild wild ways.

I bet there were also bad girls, seams geometrically straight,
hair bobbed just so, white-gloved, heeled,
ready to walk out into the barley, eager even.
Bad girls and bad boys, who woke on a warm afternoon,
itchy with stubble, to find an inscrutable Shropshire ewe watching them,
calm as though the city behind her were not on fire.

by Judy Smith McDonough
Boston Review, May/June 2010

Peter Struck in Lapham's Quarterly:

Last fall, Forbes magazine was all atwitter as Tiger Woods closed in on becoming “the first athlete to earn over $1 billion” in the course of his career. Presumably his fortunes will now start to droop, but Forbes missed the mark—taking the long view, Tiger was never all that well paid to begin with when compared with the charioteers of ancient Rome.

The modern sporting spectacles we manage to stage—and on occasion be appalled by—pale by comparison to the common entertainments of Rome. The Circus Maximus, the beating heart at the center of the empire, accommodated a quarter million people for weekly chariot races. These outdrew stage plays (to the deep chagrin of the playwrights), the disemboweling of slaves and exotic carnivores in the gladiatorial combats of the Coliseum, and even the naval battles emperors staged within the city limits—real war ships with casts of thousands—on acres of man-made lakes they had dug out and drained the Tiber to fill.

For the races, spectators arrived the evening before to stake out good seats. They ate and drank to excess, and fights were common under the influence of furor circensis, the Romans’ name for the mass hysteria the spectacles induced. Ovid recommended the reserve seating as a good place to pick up aristocratic women, and he advised letting your hand linger as you fluff her seat cushion.

More here.

Faisal Devji in Current Intelligence:

The fear that marked public reaction to the 9/11 attacks has vanished, together with the remarkable tolerance then displayed towards American Muslims, who might have been profiled and more readily picked up by agencies of the state, but didn’t suffer large scale violence against their persons or property. Indeed if anything the Bush administration was far more outspoken about the evils of “Islamophobia” and encouraging of “moderate” Muslims including Rauf than its Democratic successor, something that indicates more than disingenuous politicking either then or now. For the popular outcry against American Muslims cannot be attributed to the calculations of party politics without falling into the realm of conspiracy theory. Instead it might be more productive to recognize that Muslims can be reviled today precisely because they are no longer feared as a global threat, having become domesticated into a minority like many others who faced discrimination in the past: ethnic Germans, Italians and Japanese during one or both World Wars, Catholics and Jews among religious communities, and today the Latin populations targeted as “illegal immigrants” alongside those old favourites for criminal profiling, African-Americans.

However novel the circumstances, anti-Muslim feeling in the US, whether justified or not, falls into a received pattern of domestic prejudice against minorities. This marks Islam’s baptism by fire as an American religion, which is exactly what Rauf and his backers say they want, after all. Ten years from now there are likely to be books written and television programs made about the shameful history of anti-Muslim sentiment in the US, by which time Islam will have become naturalised within it precisely because of today’s debate. The truly interesting thing about the controversy, in other words, is neither Islam nor even “Islamophobia” but the transformation of right wing politics in the United States.

More here. [Thanks to William Dalrymple.]

Since 2006, Robin Nagle has been the anthropologist-in-residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY). She is the first to hold this title (though DSNY has had an artist-in-residence since 1977), which, the department claims, makes it the city’s “sole uniformed force… with its own social scientist.” As an anthropologist, she trained in fieldwork and the tools of social science; as a sanitation worker, she had a route in the Bronx.

Alex Carp in The Believer:

THE BELIEVER: You’ve said that “garbage is very scary to us culturally, and it is also… one of the single most fascinating things you could ever study.” And, at least back when you started, garbage was a “cognitive problem” that you didn’t fully understand. Why do you think most people, at least overtly, don’t react to garbage with such a complicated fascination?

ROBIN NAGLE: It’s a complicated answer because it points in so many directions at one time. Garbage is generally overlooked because we create so much of it so casually and so constantly that it’s a little bit like paying attention to, I don’t know, to your spit, or something else you just don’t think about. You—we—get to take it for granted that, yeah, we’re going to create it, and, yeah, somebody’s going to take care of it, take it away. It’s also very intimate. There’s very little we do in twenty-four hours except sleeping, and not always even sleeping, when we don’t create some form of trash. Even just now, waiting for you, I pulled out a Kleenex and I blew my nose and I threw it out, in not even fifteen seconds. There’s a little intimate gesture that I don’t think about, you don’t think about, and yet there’s a remnant, there’s a piece of debris, there’s a trace.

There’s a scholar at Stanford, his name is Bill Rathje. He wrote a book called Rubbish! and he’s an archaeologist of contemporary household waste. He trained classically at Harvard as a traditional archaeologist and did work among the ancient Mayan ruins. He says garbage is a highly visible problem that we choose to make invisible.

More here. [Thanks to Cyrus Hall.]

Manan Ahmed discusses Amitava Kumar's new book, among other things, in The National:

It is among the accomplishments of Amitava Kumar’s new book, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb (Duke University Press, Dh80), that it refuses to separate the cultural and the political means by which the War on Terror has been waged. Kumar’s slim volume begins in India, with the wrongful arrest of terror suspects – and with the observation, by a poultry farmer in Walavati, that “What the Americans were doing in Abu Ghraib, they learned from our policemen here”. As he traces the ordeals of the “ordinary men and women whose lives are entangled in the War on Terror”, Kumar endeavours to connect not only the tortuous practices common to states fighting terrorists, but also the ways this “war” has been imagined. He covers the cases of three convicted terrorists, in their own words, and in the words of their loved ones. The three men were all caught in sting operations and accused of planning crimes, or expressing the desire to commit crimes, against the United States; one convicted of purchasing a rocket launcher, another of wanting to detonate bombs in the New York City subway, and the last of funding Sikh terrorists in India.

Alongside his personal encounters with these terrorists, Kumar shows the haphazardly constructed legal cases, the government witnesses, and the clash of half-digested cultural understandings. He peels back the stories that we only know by headlines – the Lackawanna Six, the American Taliban – with a novelist’s eye and a reporter’s doggedness. Kumar is not out to rehabilitate these characters nor to act as their apologist. He keeps a studied distance, a knowing diffidence – but not just to the terrorists: to the prosecution, to their evidence, to the informants used by the US government to provoke the defendants into convictable speech and acts.

It is when he widens his gaze from the terrorists to the arts, to public speech and to advocacy, in order to highlight the efforts of artists to observe, catalogue and explain – and the efforts of the state to control, coerce and regulate – that his book becomes a truly horrific indictment of post-September 11 “failure of imagination”. He correctly identifies “all of us” as participants in the state’s war on terror – sanctioning the drone attacks, extra-judicial assassinations and extraordinary renditions. By focusing on the banality of the state’s cases against the old, the infirm, the misfits, the ill-suited, Kumar reminds us that the war raging far from our doorsteps is also all around us. He wants to bring that war closer, and to make its consequences visible, by exposing the inequities of domestic counter-terrorism prosecutions.

More here.

Ray Kurzweil in his blog:

While most of PZ Myers’ comments (in his blog post entitled “Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain” posted on Pharyngula on August 17, 2010) do not deserve a response, I do want to set the record straight, as he completely mischaracterizes my thesis.

For starters, I said that we would be able to reverse-engineer the brain sufficiently to understand its basic principles of operation within two decades, not one decade, as Myers reports.

Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn’t at my talk), goes on to claim that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain.

I mentioned the genome in a completely different context. I presented a number of arguments as to why the design of the brain is not as complex as some theorists have advocated. This is to respond to the notion that it would require trillions of lines of code to create a comparable system. The argument from the amount of information in the genome is one of several such arguments.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Gary Shteyngart's previous novel, the witty Absurdistan, had at its core a romance, and the same is true of Super Sad True Love Story. In pitching parlance, this new work is Nineteen-Eighty-four or Brave New World reworked by a tag team of Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth. Absurdistan was divided into two main sections: a hilarious but not too exaggerated depiction of post-Soviet St Petersburg, and a more Swiftian coda in a fictitious post-Soviet state. The satire is off the leash in the US-set Super Sad True Love Story, which takes place in that very perilous territory for a novelist, the near future (the danger being that in 10 years' time no one will bother to read your novel because events will have rendered it redundant or ridiculous).

Shteyngart's forecast for the United States of America is bleak (another drawback to the dystopian novel is that once you've read one you don't need to read another; ditto the post-apocalyptic novel). In the world of the novel, the gap between rich and poor is even more pronounced and publicised than today (we're only a step away from Soylent Green, a film which Shteyngart cites), and wealth doesn't just afford you luxury and pleasure, it gives you a shot at immortality. Of Soviet Jewish background, Shteyngart emigrated to the US as a child, and perhaps this has given him a greater awareness of how easy it is to slip down the ladder, or at least fail to climb up the rungs.

More here.