Daily Kos in the WaPo

Saturday’s Washington Post carried an op-ed from Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas (also co-author of Crashing the Gate) and Susan Gardner. Apart from the oddity in seeing an avowedly new media web 2.0 kind of guy publishing in the sort-of old media, Gardner and Kos laid it down by attacking not the GOP, but the old-skool Dems:

In the House, Democrats chose Nancy Pelosi to lead them over current DLC Chairman Harold Ford, who warned of disaster if Pelosi won. Calling her a “throwback” who practiced a “destructive and obstructive” style of politics, Ford proclaimed, “I don’t think Nancy Pelosi’s kind of politics is what’s needed right now.” Today, Nancy Pelosi is the first female speaker of the House.

Their point was that the old Dem leadership, by tracking to the center, not only wasn’t successful, but wasn’t even attractive politically because it took away our ability to make a true choice:

Convinced that this is fundamentally a conservative nation, Ford demanded that Democrats unceasingly inch toward the right or risk electoral irrelevance. As then-DLC official Ed Kilgore put it in 2005, “If we put a gun to everybody’s head in the country and make them pick sides, we’re not likely to win.” But we who live outside the D.C. bubble — in all 50 states, in counties blue and red — were hearing voices at odds with the Washington consensus. People wanted real choices at the ballot box. And given the disastrous rule of the Bush administration, they wanted a Democratic Party that stood tall and pushed back like a true opposition.

Fords has been proved wrong, and Kos right, for now. Why should we accept that this is fundamentally a conservative nation? Why shouldn’t there be a true choice politically?

Sure, you could say that Kos has nothing to lose. He’s not a consultant and regularly attacks them as deviating politicians from their core beliefs. You could say, as the MSM often does, that he’s pulling the party to the left (as if that’s somehow something inherently scary). Sure, we don’t know if he’ll be proved right, or not, in the next election (though polls certainly indicate another Democratic success).

But so what? His vision is so much more attractive and principled. The netroots movement has built some amazing coalitions and raised real, Washington DC kinds of money from millions of small, individual contributions. It helped Jim Webb get elected, it helped Ned Lamont get nominated. And this push to the left? Oh yes:

In fact, we pushed the party so far left that we positioned it squarely in the American mainstream and last year won a historic, sweeping congressional victory, something the “centrist” groups had been unable to accomplish for decades — not even in the DLC’s glory days of the 1990s.

Politics of maps

I’m thinking of some sessions for next year’s AAG conference in Boston, perhaps on the politics of maps. There are so may ways to go on this topic however: historical, regional or some kind of cross-cutting theme.

A review in the New Yorker highlights this issue. Sixty years ago, India was partitioned:

Cyril Radcliffe, a London barrister, was flown to Delhi and given forty days to define precisely the strange political geography of an India flanked by an eastern and a western wing called Pakistan. He did not visit the villages, communities, rivers, or forests divided by the lines he drew on paper. Ill-informed about the relation between agricultural hinterlands and industrial centers, he made a mistake of enormous economic consequence when, dividing Bengal on religious lines, he deprived the Muslim majority in the eastern region of its major city, Calcutta, condemning East Pakistan—and, later, Bangladesh—to decades of rural backwardness.

It was in Punjab that Radcliffe’s mapmaking sparked the biggest conflagration. As Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs on either side of the new border suddenly found themselves reduced to a religious minority, the tensions of the preceding months exploded into the violence of ethnic cleansing. It seems extraordinary today that so few among the cabal of Indian leaders whom Mountbatten consulted anticipated that the drawing of borders and the crystallizing of national identities along religious lines would plunge millions into bewilderment, panic, and murderous rage. If the British were eager to divide and quit, their successors wanted to savor power. No one had prepared for a massive transfer of population. Even as armed militias roamed the countryside, looking for people to kidnap, rape, and kill, houses to loot, and trains to derail and burn, the only force capable of restoring order, the British Indian Army, was itself being divided along religious lines—Muslim soldiers to Pakistan, Hindus to India. Soon, many of the communalized soldiers would join their co-religionists in killing sprees, giving the violence of partition its genocidal cast. Radcliffe never returned to India. Just before his death, in 1977, he told a journalist, “I suspect they’d shoot me out of hand—both sides.”

This is what I’m talking about. To some extent this cartographic partitioning is both unusual and extremely consequential (similar events occurred after the two World Wars, in Yugoslavia, Palestine and now possibly Iraq). At such, this might be the “height” of the politics of maps. From being a reasonably varied country, people began to partition themselves:

The British policy of defining communities based on religious identity radically altered Indian self-perceptions, as von Tunzelmann points out: “Many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged.”

Maps are a way of operationalizing these boxes or categories of thought. Putting into play the knowledges: this is what you might call the politics of maps.

Expressed on a continuum we will find a range of effects from local town planning to the geographical way we tell stories about ourselves. I don’t know if there’s interest in this from the larger community, I guess I’ll just have to see!

New Foucault videos

The Foucault documentary by ARTE France which I mentioned back in June has been made more accessible. Previously you had to register at the site, and download special software to play it. Also it was rather long, but it has now been cut up into chunks. It’s now very much easier to watch (but still no subtitles in English!).

The site is here and was done by someone calling themselves “Parole des jours.” He also has tons of other videos, including interviews with Badiou, Genet, Stravinsky, Heidegger… and Michael Moore.

What’s wrong with this?

Updated.

I’m sorry, but what’s wrong with this answer?

MS. ETHERIDGE: Thank you.

Do you think homosexuality is a choice, or is it biological?

GOV. RICHARDSON: It’s a choice. It’s –

MS. ETHERIDGE: I don’t know if you understand the question. (Soft laughter.) Do you think I — a homosexual is born that way, or do you think that around seventh grade we go, “Ooh, I want to be gay”?

GOV. RICHARDSON: Well, I — I’m not a scientist. It’s — you know, I don’t see this as an issue of science or definition. I see gays and lesbians as people as a matter of human decency. I see it as a matter of love and companionship and people loving each other. You know I don’t like to categorize people. I don’t like to, like, answer definitions like that that, you know, perhaps are grounded in science or something else that I don’t understand.

AmericaBlog observed:

Bill Richardson self-immolated tonight on live TV. I haven’t seen anyone fumble a question like this so badly…. Karen Ocamb said there were gasps, and hisses in the audience.

Huh?

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most popular Foucault blog?

Alexa is a site that provides information on traffic for websites. A bit of poking around reveals:

foucaultblog is the 5.8 millionth most popular site on the web! Exactly 0.000002% of the world’s internet users visit here.

This prompted me to check other sites:

michel-foucault.com is ranked at 2.5 millioneth most visited, with a staggering 0.00001% of internet users dropping by;

foucault.info rockets past with a ranking of 903,000, and fully0.00007% of the world’s internet users (oh, the fame! this must be why they have stopped linking to me now!);

(Update: sorry, I couldn’t find a record for the still nevertheless wonderful foucauldian reflections).

And the top ten sites by comparison:

Yahoo!
Microsoft
Google
YouTube
Windows Live
MySpace
Baidu
Orkut
Wikipedia
qq.com (eh? who knows!)

The blogosphere and the MSM

One of the stories of the summer, for me anyway, has been the conflict between the blogosphere and the mainstream media (MSM). I wrote about this earlier, if a bit obliquely, with the central question of whether you can be partisan but not polemical.

There are many people around who advocate bi-partisanship, cooperation and lack of polemics. Certainly the preference for what might be called “problematizations not polemics” in the work of Foucault has often intrigued people. But I remain to be convinced that there is no role for hard advocacy that sets itself in opposition to some privileged mode of thought. What, if you need justification from Foucault, he called “counter-conducts.”

The example sine quo non of this is the blogosphere, or people-powered commentary and discussion. This rose to a peak last weekend with the YearlyKos convention in Chicago which was attacked before during and after (eg., by Bill O’Reilly) as being both a kind of dangerous hard-left group and a marginalized, ineffective bunch of nerds. In fact, it is neither, but rather a gathering together of advocates of progressive issues and Democratic party supporters (all the major Dem presidential candidates showed up and were interviewed).

There is a tradition in the blogosphere of opposition to the MSM, and in fact historically, that is one of the reasons for its rise: that the media was conservative, or mainstream at best, and did not properly report or do journalism on Democratic party candidates in the 2004 elections (which was when it really came to prominence, but starting with moveon.org which was founded to counter-act the attacks on Clinton when he was president).

Today some of the most ardent opponents of the MSM are still in the progressive blogosphere: people such as Glenn Greenwald at Salon, and Eric Boehlert (author of Lapdogs, How the Press Rolled over for Bush).

Greenwald is a constitutional lawyer and got his start following the 2005 NYT revelation of the Bush administration warrantless wiretaps, but has been increasingly attacking political reporting in the MSM for being pro-Bush and displaying a lack of investigative initiative. But Greenwald is not above harshly criticizing the Dems, as for instance this weekend when they agreed to pass Bush’s revisions of the wiretapping law, FISA.

Greenwald’s favorite snark is that beltway media pundits think of themselves as Serious and others , such as dirty bloggers, as irrelevant. This is not an arbitrary insult, for it gets at the idea that there is a core of experts who are the only ones Serious and well-connected enough to pronounce on politics. This is where the clash with the bloggers comes in, for they are (in the eyes of the MSM):

1. Unqualified (no j-school)
2. Partisan

It is this second point they often harp on and which interests me here. Is being partisan automatically dismissible from the ranks of Serious political reporting and opinion?

Here’s Jay Carney, a leading writer at Time’s own blog, making that case:

What I meant about having a responsibility not to be labeled left or right is that our responsibility is to the truth — that we should write what we see, not what we want to see or wish to be true, and that, if we do so, attempts to label us as partisan will fail.

So for Carney, by being non-partisan, one can be truthful, and that partisanship excludes you from the truth. You can avoid being called partisan (the latter strategy has not really been borne out however. I would guess that both the left and the right believe large segments of the media are not in sympathy with their beliefs.) He goes on:

If we’re doing our jobs as political reporters, attempts to label us as left or right will fail because our stories will be grounded in solid reporting.

This just strikes me as ridiculous. It means that no story can be left or right or politically tinged, that everything finds its way in the middle. He’s talking about “our stories” plural being neither left nor right, but somehow equally balanced. Isn’t that rather like the “equal time” claim of creationists? Isn’t it rather like saying that all views are equally pertinent? What kind of relativism is that?

Here’s Jay Rosen, the respected journo prof at NYU:

It’s our responsibility not to be labeled left or right is a case of a political journalist blurting out a deep truth about his profession. Carney and Tumulty really do define their responsibility this way: to avoid what would get them labeled, especially by peers but also other onlookers— and of course potential critics. When you actually feel a responsibility like that it not only makes you timid; but you look for opportunities to demonstrate that you are independent, not “in the tank,” non-aligned, the professional skeptic. You are constantly proving your political innocence, which is a rhetorical—not an informational or truthtelling—task.

But in actual fact it’s worse than that, because in general, all voices are not heard equally. Here’s a forceful expression of why bloggers and MS should not play nice:

Because I believe American traditional media to be complicit in an illegal and immoral war and occupation of Iraq. They are unable and unwilling to expose the shredding of our Constitutional rights but quite concerned about Paris Hilton’s incarceration. They are entirely unbothered about their own absurd appearances at Correspondents Dinners rapping with Karl Rove, to my mind the architect of an American Presidency chock full of the worst American war criminals ever.

You can find many similar opinions, fuelled of course by the fact that Serious journalists in DC are all on record as saying let’s go to war with Iraq in videos and in print, to which net-savvy progressive bloggers can gleefully link time and time again (Atrios, to cite just one minor example, even invented a new term, the Friedman Unit or FU, to snark at Friedman in the NYT who is forever saying let’s give it just 6 more months every 6 months).

At YearlyKos, Greenwald and Carney were on a panel together and Greenwald lost no time in attacking the MSM. Mother Jones magazine liveblogged it as:

Take home point from Greenwald: Journalists think bloggers want them to become partisan. Actually, bloggers just want journalists to be adversarial and skeptical.

Thus we move profitably away from partisanship as blind partisanship, to the press having more of a politics of critique. I would say that that is a great summary and insight into precisely the main desire of bloggers regarding the MSM.

I’m not sure if or how this might advance our thinking on this, but I know that a politics of critique sounds better than both a wishy-washy bi-partisanship that is usually a cover for partisanship, and ideologically driven partisanship that is closed to debate.

As Foucault might have said:

[My approach] is “antistratgic”: be respectful when singularity rises up, and intransigent when power infringes on the universal.”

Google Books geographical display

Interesting new capability from Google Books. It can pull out all the places mentioned in a given book, and show them on an interactive Google map.

Here’s what Space, Power and Knowledge looks like:

It’s not always accurate: for example there’s a tab over Lyon because we mention a book by an author with that name. Also it doesn’t pick up some places in India.
But on the whole this is a pretty remarkable feature.

New review of the History of Madness

The California Literary Review today published a new review of the History of Madness.

Excerpt:

Facebook is the new panopticon

Counterpunch argues that the Facebook phenomenon is pretty much Bentham’s panopticon made real:

Facebook has ushered in a revolution, and a failed one at that. It is much like the panopticon – ‘all-seeing’, that surveillance device the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham pioneered in the nineteenth century for penal reform. Zuckerman shares more with Bentham than he realises: a desire to improve the quotient of pleasure in society; a desire to maximise the network for the common good. As Bentham commences his study on penal reform, he calls his device the panopticon ‘or the inspection house’.

The author, Binoy Kampmark, a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge, UK, goes on:

In 1975, Michel Foucault added his gloss to Bentham’s Panopticon Notes. For Foucault, the major effect of the Panopticon is: ‘to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.’ The prison inmate ‘is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.’

There are subtle differences. Members of the networks have become inspectors, just as they have become prisoners. People do ‘communicate’ with each other. It is a brilliant seduction: to give the means of surveillance to everybody in order to legitimise it. We see but we are also seen (at stages). We relinquish ourselves to others, but have the luxury of indulging in everyone else’s surrender of secrecy.

Personally I don’t buy it. Sure there are surveillant qualities but it is largely voluntary. And it is not new. When I was a grad student in the 1980s, I had a little script running on the VM mainframe computer that allowed me to see when any of my friends logged on. then I would send them a little “IM,” often startling and disconcerting them.

Today, we are used to far more. What could Facebook tell you anyway? Facebook is really part of something larger, the surveillant society/mentality which believes in trading surveillance for security. That’s the real issue.

…adding that clearly someone else has thought about this way more deeply than I have:

Square Michel Foucault!

An intrepid professor from Bloomington discovers the Square Michel Foucault in Paris.

This is from Differences and Repetitions, a blog by Prof. Ted Striphas.

I wonder if there is a square Lyotard, Baudrillard or Derrida? de Beauvoir?

Last year, when I traveled to Italy, I made a point of swinging by Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, where the Marxist activist and political theorist Antonio Gramsci is interred. In the same spirit I tried tracking down the burial sites of some of my favorite French philosophers before heading to Paris. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far. Foucault apparently is buried somewhere in northern France, Derrida in a Parisian suburb. Guattari may be interred at La Borde clinic, and who knows where Deleuze is?

Anybody know?