I’ve always found Foucault pretty hard going, as I intimated in yesterday’s post, though I think he’s a more interesting figure than his epigones. As it happens, he is the subject of not one but two biographies. The first is David Macey’s “The Lives of Michel Foucault”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679757929/junius-20 which is scholarly and fact-filled. The other is James Miller’s “The Passion of Michel Foucault”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674001575/junius-20 , and is a tremendous piece of writing which presents itself as a “narrative account of one man’s lifelong struggle to honor Nietzsche’s gnomic injunction, ‘to become what one is’.” I really can’t recommend Miller’s various books highly enough. As well as the Foucault volume he wrote a very readable study of Rousseau — “Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0872203379/junius-20 — and a highly entertaining history of rock music: “Flowers in the Dustbin”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684808730/junius-20 (also published as “Almost Grown”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099409925/junius-21 in the UK). Miller is currently editor of “Daedalus”:http://mitpress.mit.edu/daedalus .
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Chris Bertram
I spent a very pleasant evening with other bloggers who live somewhere close to Britain’s M4 corridor at Bristol’s Severnshed last night. Pictured from left to right are myself, Dave Weeden (“Backword”:http://backword.me.uk/ ), Josephine Crawley Quinn (“The Virtual Tophet”:http://tophet.blogspot.com/ ) and Chris Brooke (“The Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html ). Topics discussed included Equatorial Guinea, leading Welsh politicians, the excavations at Herculaneum, and, naturally, other bloggers. It was great to meet Dave and Josephine for the first time and Chris once again. A fine time was had by all.
Surfing round the blogosphere, I find “Oliver Kamm banging on”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2004/08/fascism_and_the_2.html about alliances between “the Left” and theocratic fascism. Kamm’s correspondent, the philosopher Jeff Ketland of the University of Edinburgh, offers the following as an example:
bq. One can find examples in the postmodernist literature, and the most obvious example is Michel Foucault, once a member of the French communist party and main source of much recent postmodernist and social constructivist philosophy. Foucault visited Iran around the time of the revolution. He enthusiastically described the revolution as a new kind of “political spirituality”, and was very impressed with its characteristically anti-Enlightenment aspects.
This just doesn’t stack up, though as an instance of left-theocratic alliance. …
According to “Scott Martens at A Fistful of Euros”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000782.php , Tariq Ramadan (recently “interviewed”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-5-57-2006.jsp by OpenDemocracy) who had been appointed to a visiting position at Notre Dame, has been denied a US visa under sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act that were amended by the Patriot Act. Scott comments:
bq. Whether one agrees with Ramadan or not, it is difficult to image an Islamic intellectual figure who is likely to be more acceptable as the other side in an American dialogue with Islam. Thus, the refusal to allow him to enter the US suggests that someone in Homeland Security agrees with the Daniel Pipes standard: Any Muslim who fails to condemn Islam, from its founding to the present and in all its manifestations, must be a fanatic and a threat to the West. …. This is an opportunity for Europeans and Americans to show that at the very least they are capable of exercising better judgement than the Bush administration.
This is a _colour_ photograph of Lake Windermere last Thursday afternoon! Fortunately there were other things to do and among them was a visit to “Blackwell”:http://www.blackwell.org.uk/index.shtml , the masterpiece of Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott. It is a wonderful example of the Arts and Crafts Style, brilliantly conceived and stunningly decorated. It also incorporates work by other leading designers of the period, most notably William de Morgan. It is, I think, worth a very long drive to visit. We also caught the “Sickert and Freud exhibitions”:http://www.abbothall.org.uk/exhibitions/exhibitions.shtml at Abbot House in Kendal before a much sunnier trip up to Scotland. Normal blogging will resume shortly.
“James Boyle in the Financial Times”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/2c04d39e-ec5a-11d8-b35c-00000e2511c8.html on Apple’s claim that Real “broke into” the iPod:
bq. How exactly had Real “broken into” the iPod? It hadn’t broken into my iPod, which is after all my iPod. If I want to use Real’s service to download music to my own device, where’s the breaking and entering? What Real had done was make the iPod “interoperable” with another format. If Boyle’s word processing program can convert Microsoft Word files into Boyle’s format, allowing Word users to switch programs, am I “breaking into Word”? Well, Microsoft might think so, but most of us do not. So leaving aside the legal claim for a moment, where is the ethical foul? Apple was saying (and apparently believed) that Real had broken into something different from my iPod or your iPod. They had broken into the idea of an iPod. (I imagine a small, Platonic white rectangle, presumably imbued with the spirit of Steve Jobs.)
He also ponders whether what Real have done is any different from blade manufacturers making blades that fit branded razors.
As some of you may have noticed the new English football season is upon us. The BBC is running its “fantasy football game”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/fantasy_football/default.stm for the last time this season, and I’ll be entering as I usually do. There’s a facility to run a “mini-league”:http://bbcfootball.fantasyleague.co.uk/info/friends.asp consisting of friends, relations, enemies, critics, critical critics etc. So if any contributor, regular commenter or reader wants to join our league — the “Crooked Timberites”:http://bbcfootball.fantasyleague.co.uk/friends/friends.asp?pin=700279 — they are very welcome to do so. You have to “register”:http://bbcfootball.fantasyleague.co.uk/signup/signup.asp with the BBC and choose your team first, and then email your PIN to me, the Chairman of the League, at crookedfootball-at-yahoo.co.uk . Those who know nothing whatsoever about football can always use the “lucky dip” facility to have the BBC computer pick a team for them. Try to register before 1230 BST on Saturday, 28 August 2004
My post the other day about the Allawi government’s attack on press freedom attracted criticism from some pro-war bloggers. “From Stephen Farrell’s report in today’s London Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1217933,00.html :
bq. “YOU’VE got two hours to leave or we are going to open fire at you. It’s just our orders,” said a policeman guarding the headquarters of the Najaf Governor, Adnan al-Zurfi, when myself and other journalists arrived at his office yesterday.
bq. (…)
bq. Police threatened to arrest or shoot journalists if they did not leave the city and shots were fired into the hotel housing Western and Arab reporters, which lies within a government-controlled area. The threat came even as Mr Allawi spoke at the country’s long-awaited National Conference in Baghdad, calling it “the first step on the way to democracy”.
Nick Cohen, “writing in the New Statesman”:http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newTop=Section%3A+Front+Page&newDisplayURN=200408160014 cites “my post on John Laughland”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002269.html and his views from the other week. (Thanks to “Chris Brooke”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html for letting me know.)
“Will Wilkinson”:http://willwilkinson.net/flybottle/ has a “column up at TechCentralStation on desert”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/081104F.html . This very fact is regrettable, since Wilkinson is smarter, saner, and more interesting that the average TCS columnist and hence will serve to cover-up — somewhat — the nakedness of this “astroturf”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.confessore.html operation. Anyway, the real issue is what he says, which is aimed at “Matthew Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/07/selfmade_men.html , “Max Sawicky”:http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/000663.html and others who attack the concepts of meritocracy. Wilkinson credits their argument — that we don’t really deserve anything — to John Rawls. The argument Wilkinson (mis)attributes to Rawls is, in a nutshell, that although, superficially, it may seem that we deserve praise or reward for our efforts, in some deeper sense we don’t, because the attributes that enabled us to strive (such as our genetic makeup and our upbringing) were not themselves deserved. Given the moral arbitrariness of of our natural endowments — including the capacity for hard work — those with more talent can be legitimately taxed, as necessary, to support those unfortunate enough to have less.
[I’m putting the rest of this below the fold as it gets into technical Rawlsiana]
Whilst English speakers doughtily plough on with our archaic and tough spellings, and have to acquire a tolerance for the inconsistencies between British English and American English (to name but two), the German authorities have fought to implement a thorough spelling reform. But it seems that implementation faces a major hiccough as some of the major German newspapers have had second thoughts. Scott Martens gives “a rough but excellent account of developments”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000759.php and rationales over at Fistful of Euros. (In other news, I shall be travelling to Loughborough this weekend.)
“A very odd column by Christopher Hitchens”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2105032/fr/rss/ about Ahmed Chalabi, the CIA, and so forth. It finishes by hinting at a more critical position toward the Allawi government than some of Hitchens’s admirers have hitherto managed:
bq. As I write, the Allawi government in Baghdad is trying, with American support, a version of an “iron fist” policy in the Shiite cities of the south. (“Like all weak governments,” as Disraeli once said in another connection, “it resorts to strong measures.”) Chalabi, who has spent much of this year in Najaf, thinks that this is extremely unwise. We shall be testing all these propositions, and more, as the months go by.
From Mark Lynas’s “new blog on climate change”:http://www.marklynas.org/blog/ (hat-tip “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/08/11/important_new_blog_about_climate_change.php ) comes “this story”:http://www.iht.com/articles/531250.htm of the medieval village of “Heuersdorf”:http://www.heuersdorf.de/English1.html , in eastern Germany, which is threatened by strip-mining for lignite. God knows why anyone should mine dirty, horrible, acid-rain producing brown coal anyway, let alone demolish medieval churches to do so. This story needs wider circulation.
The Onion “TechCentralStation”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/080904D.html on unleashing the power of the free market to capture Osama Bin Laden. Priceless!
Further to “my last post on idling”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002293.html , I see “via Limited, Inc.”:http://limitedinc.blogspot.com/2004_08_08_limitedinc_archive.html#109202801859090687 that the French electricity company EDF are disciplining an employee (an economist who also happens to be a Lacanian psychoanalyst … only in France!) who has written a book — “Bonjour Paresse”:http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/2841862313/qid%3D1092057870/171-4684613-8604262 — on how to skive at work. The Belfast Telegraph “offers some top tips”:http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/features/story.jsp?story=548650 :
bq. Skiving off is such an ugly expression. Much more preferable are terms such as ‘zero-tasking’ or ‘enabling real-time back-end utilisation’. For those interested in how to zero-task successfully, here are five hot tips:
bq. 1. Never walk down a corridor without a a document in your hands. People with documents in their hands look like hard-working employees heading for an important meeting.
bq. 2. Make sure you carry home lots of documents at night. This gives the impression you work much harder than you do.
bq. 3. Use your computer to look busy. Try “www.IShouldBeWorking.com”:http://www.ishouldbeworking.com/ or “www.BoredAtWork.com”:http://www.boredatwork.com/ for entertainment. The I Should Be Working site has a neat panic button that instantly transfers you to a more business-like page with one click.
bq. 4. Build huge piles of documents around your workspace as only top management can get away with a clean desk. Last year’s work looks just like this year’s – volume counts.
bq. 5. If you have voicemail on your phone, don’t answer it. Let the callers leave a message. Try to return the calls when you know the callers aren’t there. In the end they’ll try to find a solution that doesn’t involve you.