Translation revisited

Last week, our friend BDR, in linking to Stephen Mitchelmore's recent meditation on Peter Handke's fiction, reported an opinion of a professor acquaintance who told him "if you can't read Handke in German don't bother since Handke's main interest is the language." With all due respect, I call bullshit on this. I cannot read Handke, or anyone else, in the German, but I would be much the poorer for not having read the English translations of Slow Homecoming, Across, or Repetition, to name only three from the 1980s. They are remarkable works in their own right. I'd go further and say that few works written originally in English from that same decade compare favorably with them. So to say I shouldn't have bothered? Nonsense.

On a related note, back in March, translator Daniel Hahn had a post at Words Without Borders in which he took issue with how translations are reviewed. He rants thus (emphasis his):

what makes me crazy is when the reviewer praises something that I did and gives the impression that I’m not there. By all means compliment the author on the tightness of the plotting, on the deftness of the characterization, and ignore me—they’re supported by my work, of course, but marginally. But a reviewer who thinks he can praise the rhythm, the texture, the beauty of the prose, the warmth and wit of the voice, without acknowledging who’s responsible—as though those things in an author’s original simply reappear automatically after the mechanics of translation have been applied to a text—that’s a reviewer who simply has no understanding of what translation is. There’s a reason the copyright in my translations belongs to me and not the original author. The plot and the ideas and the themes aren’t mine, but the words are, all of them, and the way they all fit together, too. And if that’s what you’re reviewing, I want credit. (Or, for that matter, criticism.)

This strikes me as, frankly, wrong. All three of those Handke titles I mentioned above were translated into English by Ralph Manheim. Another of my Handke favorites is the memoir about his mother, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, which was also translated by Manheim. Perhaps it's simply Manheim I like! I think not.

I began reading Hahn's post expecting it to contain utterly banal points with which I would trivially agree. After all, it is all too believable that reviewers both tend to ignore the work of translators and have little understanding of what it is the translator does. But Hahn takes it further, appearing to claim that the translator is entirely responsible for "the rhythm, the texture, the beauty of the prose, the warmth and wit of the voice". In fact, the translator is responsible for conveying as best as possible the original author's rhythm, texture, beauty, warmth, and wit. The translator makes the best possible decisions within constraints presented by the original work.

Along with those Manheim-translated works mentioned above, I've also read Handke books rendered into English by other translators, such as Scott Abbott and Michael Roloff, and have never gotten the impression I was reading a stylistically different writer. I have just begun reading Charlotte Mandell's translation, from the French, of Mathias Énard's recent novel, Zone. The last novel I read was, coincidentally, Mandell's translation of Jonathan Littell's remarkable novel, The Kindly Ones. Oddly, they have very little in common at the level of the sentence! And neither of them bear any obvious resemblance whatsoever to Mandell's translations of Maurice Blanchot, which themselves are instead stylistically similar to other Blanchot translations, for example, those by Ann Smock or Lydia Davis (meanwhile, Davis' own fiction is nothing like her translations of Blanchot). This point aside, which I am sure I have belabored, Hahn here, in so easily separating plotting and characterization from the language used, demonstrates as little appreciation of fiction as the standard mainstream reviewer.

Daniel Green, highlighting Hahn's post, agrees with him too readily, though he makes this excellent point, which is the point I'd originally thought Hahn was going to make, as I began reading him: "Too many reviewers make too many facile judgments of translations in which the translation itself drops out. . ." Unfortunately, Dan uses this as an opportunity to once again all but throw his hands up when it comes to translations. He writes:

This is the tragedy of translation: Many of us will read some great books only in their translated versions, and thus we won't finally really know fully what makes them great. It's also possible we might read some rather mediocre books that have actually been made better by their translations. Given the cachet translated fiction seems to have acquired among some readers (its very lack of widespread availability, its lack of attention from the major newspaper book reviews perhaps allowing the devotee of translated fiction to feel one of the enlightened few), I think it likely some translated books of this latter kind are getting more attention than they deserve--under the prevailing circumstances, any new translated work deserves notice. Making authors and their work available through translation is an entirely worthy service, but understanding their limits are also important. We shouldn't make claims about the underlying work--on which the translation is a variation and therefore a new work--we can't possibly validate without in fact reading it.

There are some good points mixed with the bad here. I think he's right that there is some excessive valorizing of translated works for their own sake, and it's of course trivially true that translations have their limitations, and that we should be cognizant of them. However, where Daniel Hahn wants to isolate plot and structure from the "rhythm, texture, beauty, warmth, and wit" of the language, Daniel Green insists, as he often does, that because we necessarily read some great books in translation, "we won't finally really know fully what makes them great" because of that distance. The problem with this is that it assumes that "knowing fully" what makes great books great is the ultimate object of reading.

There once was a time when a literate person knew and could read multiple languages as a matter of course. There are no doubt countless reasons why this is no longer the case, at least in the Anglo-American world. And, of course, literacy itself is more widespread. Anyway, regardless of the reasons, many of us rely entirely on translations if we are to read anything originally written in a language other than our own. There is undeniably a distance between the original work and its possibly multiple translations. Some of us, myself included, have looked on this situation with anxiety. How do I know which translation to choose? What am I missing? How will I ever know or understand the work in question? As such, we owe good translators a great debt of gratitude, and we should always remember what it is that they do for literature. And certainly praising any quality of the prose without mentioning its status as translation is opening a reviewer up to easy and deserved criticism. But the history of literature is rife with misreadings and poor interpretations and context-free assessments, not to mention misleading translations; indeed, the history of literature arguably is these misreadings. We do the best we can with what we have. That so many of us require translations in order to read most of the great works of world literature is no reason not to read them, nor is it a reason to refuse to critically engage with such works at whatever level we see fit.

As readers, we can never "know fully" any work, translated or not. We are always at some remove from the work. Treating art as a set of objects to be assessed and judged is finally little different than treating it as a set of commodities to be bought and sold.

"The wish was father to the thought"

At the very end of The Tyranny of Science, a book collecting a series of four lectures Paul Feyerabend gave at Berkeley in the early 1990s, this question is asked of Feyerabend:

In relation to what you said the first day, talking about the Furies, namely that the mother was seen as just a breeding oven, I would like to understand the reasons why in such an evolved society as it was in ancient Greece, women were not considered as such, as women.

Here is Feyerabend's reply:

In the play itself this idea is introduced by Apollo, who represents a new kind of religion. For the Furies the mother is not just a breeding oven, it is a blood relative. So there are two parties and the question is how the new party arose. I do not know that. Athena's solution is that both parties have made contributions to the history of the city and should be remembered by it. Was it implausible to make the assumption that women are a breeding oven? Not on the basis of what was known at the time. Women gave birth. They bore the child for nine months. They became pregnant as a result of intercourse. This was known and that is not being denied. What is being denied is, to use modern terms, is that women make a genetic contribution. That is a very subtle matter which at that time could only be dealt with by ideology.

This response is both interesting and unsatisfactory, in the way that the book as a whole is both interesting and unsatisfactory. The book is unsatisfactory, for me, because, as Feyerabend himself anticipates more than once in these lectures, I would have preferred a more "systematic" account of the "rise of rationalism" and his argument that (quoting the back cover) "some very basic assumptions about science are simply false and that substantial parts of scientific ideology were created on the basis of superficial generalizations that led to absurd misconceptions about the nature of human life". He explains why he does not offer such a systematic argument (e.g., systematization is part of the problem; fair enough), yet I desire one nonetheless. I'll have to look elsewhere (any recommendations?). The book is interesting, in part, because Feyerabend tells stories, including the stories contained in some of the Greek tragedies, to illustrate some of the problems with the stories told by the early philosophers. He is also at pains to remind us of the context of the tragedies, as well as of such artifacts as Plato's dialogues, how what we read is necessarily only an aspect of how they would have been experienced in their own time. All this is very well and good. However, he is often unclear about the significance of some of what he relates, or perhaps he assigns a different significance than they seem to reveal to me.

But back to the question and response. I was amused that, after four days of Feyerabend's lectures, the person asking is able to innocently use the word "evolved", implying a telos of progress at odds with his thesis, or that the "rise of rationalism" is necessarily a good thing. When I first read the question, I admit that I read it as wondering how the "evolved" Greeks did not consider women as people, like men. I quickly read past the "considered as such, as women", which evidently has more to do with their biological function, as women, as those who give birth, etc. My misreading made me laugh (and actually provided the kernel leading to me writing this post), but the implied telos of progress remains and serves as a useful point of departure.

Interestingly, Feyerabend hints that the notion that women are merely "breeding ovens" is, relatively speaking, for Aeschylus, a new one. He notes that, for the more ancient Furies, the mother is a "blood relative", or in our scientific language, a genetic contributor. He notes that Apollo's idea overturns this. What he doesn't say is why that might be. He observes that the idea that women are merely "breeding ovens" is not implausible given the knowledge available to people at the time, but he doesn't say anything about why such a new idea would be appealing. I would like to suggest that the Oresteia is in a sense a dramatization of the domestication of the female, a manifestation of the hiding, the covering up, of the older matriarchal order. By the end, the Furies have been tamed; they have become "the Kindly Ones". (It is, by the way, entirely coincidental that I completed Jonathan Littell's astonishing novel by that name just prior to reading The Tyranny of Science.)

I've made the argument (or, well, assertion) multiple times already that the histories of philosophy and science would look a lot different if the experience of women were considered worthy of attention, or if those disciplines had been practiced by women, rather than by men off doing Important Work. I originally said this based on some reading, but really on little more than a hunch. Lately, however, I have been reading works that have both reinforced this conviction and deepened my understanding and appreciation of the problem. One of these was a book I read last year by the late Marxist historian George Thomson with the very dry academic title, Studies in Ancient Greek Society: The Prehistoric Aegean. To quote from the back cover, Thomson "traces the economic and social development of Greece in the Bronze Age and deals with the evolution of epic poetry" including "detailed discussions of such topics as matriarchy and land tenure." It's a boring, somewhat convoluted story as to how I ended up reading this fairly obscure book, but I'm glad I did: it's a fucking monster, deeply learned, incredibly erudite, often over my head, at times unexpectedly very funny (his occasional rants about bourgeois historians are frankly awesome), and fascinating as hell.

With respect to the topic at hand, one of the interesting things Thomson does is trace the roots of the Greek myths, including, among other things, how they were cobbled together over centuries from disparate stories about various local gods. Another is trace the attitudes the Greeks had towards others and towards their own past. For this, he surveys a variety of reports, from Herodotus, Eusebius, Strabo, Aristotle, Thucydides, with references to confirmations from Plato and Aristophanes: "The Greeks were well acquainted with the realities of primitive society":

Surrounded as they were by more backward peoples at various stages of savagery or barbarism and by the advanced but archaic empires of the Near East, the civilised Greeks did not fail to observe that the status of women in these surrounding countries was very different from what it was in their own.

Without going into great detail (or excerpting several whole pages), the upshot is that these peoples employed a wide range of matriarchal characteristics, from different rules for descent and matrimony to different configurations of property and labor to more egalitarian sexual roles. Thomson says, "There is no reason to discredit this tradition. Athenians would not have fabricated a story which represented their ancestors as savages" and quotes Thucydides thus: "The Greeks lived once as the barbarians live now." But, he writes, already reaction had set in:

The materialist view of social evolution was irreconcilable with the doctrine, fostered by the growth of slavery, that Greek and barbarian were different by nature. If such things as primitive communism, group-marriage, and matriarchy were admitted into the beginnings of Greek civilisation, what would become of the dogma, on which the ruling class leant more and more heavily as the city-state declined, that its economic basis in private property, slave labour, and the subjection of women rested on natural justice? If the writings of the later materialists, Demokritos and Epicurus, had not perished, we might well have possessed a more penetrating analysis of early Greek society than Aristotle's. But they perished partly for that reason. Plato wanted the works of Demokritos to be burnt, and his wish has been fulfilled.

No serious student can read Aristotle's Politics without admiration for the author's erudition and insight. If that book had perished, the world would be the poorer. But this must not prevent us from recognising its limitations. He knew that the Greeks had once lived in tribes, and he must have been familiar with the tradition that they had once been without slaves. He was presumably aware of the part assigned to Kekrops in the history of matrimony, and in any case he had before him the example of contemporary Sparta, where the rule of monogamy was so little binding that half a dozen brothers might share a wife between them and adultery was not punishable or even discreditable. Yet, accepting the city-state as the only possible formation for civilised life, he constructs a theory in which the original nucleus of society is identified as the married couple dominated by the male and supported by slave labour. The principle laid down by Thucydides was precluded from the start.

Where Aristotle failed, we cannot expect much of Herodotus. During all his travels the truth stated so lucidly by Thucydides never dawned on him. All he has to say of the Egyptian matriarchate is that 'sons were not obliged to support their parents, but daughters were'—alluding to the rule of inheritance; and the remark occurs in a passage where he is more concerned to divert his readers than to interpret the facts. Hence it is not surprising that he introduced his account of the Lycian matriarchate with the observation that 'it is unparalleled among the peoples of mankind'. The wish was father to the thought. The significance of this misstatement is that it represents what [...] the Greeks of his day were predisposed to believe.

In case my point in discussing these two books together is unclear, I'll finish up by simply observing that it has always been in the interests of ruling classes to naturalize their power and the social and property relations informing that power. Likewise, it has always therefore been necessary to avoid or obscure any history—specifically, the central role of women—that reminds us how things otherwise have been and still could be.

International Day of the Midwife

It could be said that, though I've been leftwing for more than 20 years, I became truly radicalized, truly feminist, in connection with questions of birth and childcare. I'll say more about that in future posts, but today is International Day of the Midwife, and though I failed to observe International Women's Day here on the blog, and I let another May Day go by without marking the occasion, I'm not going to miss this one.

So this is in honor of all the midwives, all the doulas (especially my dear friend Emily Pelton, who was our excellent doula), all the childcare providers, all the women persecuted as witches throughout history in the transition to capitalism (and also Karen Carr, who today was able to negotiate a plea agreement against ridiculous charges that could have put her in prison for more than 30 years). Thank you. Without you we are nothing.

(Here is the World Health Organization on the day, and the Midwives Alliance of North America with a list of useful links on midwives and ways to mark the occasion.)

Righteous

Our eternal war with Eurasia needs no justification, yet has always been justified.

Update - 9pm: I learned about the death of Osama bin Laden during last night's long baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Mets, first via Phillies blog threads I participate in, then from the ESPN broadcast team. Soon, chants of "U-S-A, U-S-A" could be heard circling the stadium, no doubt to the bemusement of the players on the field. Much was made of the notoriously difficult Philadelphia fans' ability to "get this one right". As if they would be anything other than virulently patriotic. The threads alternated between patriotic, celebratory guff and half-hearted talk about the game at hand, which for once, it was said, was meaningless in the face of Important Good News. A few voices here and there expressed some ambivalence, but for the most part, patriotism brought everyone together, rallying everyone around Obama. Post-game wraps dealt with the game in a perfunctory manner: the Phillies lost, but it's ok, it was a Good Day. I was annoyed (I wanted to talk about the game!), and I felt, renewed, my isolation from the political culture at large. Why do I still allow myself to be surprised that there is still so much distance? The persistence, ten years after the fact, in most Americans' abject ignorance of any sort of coherent explanations for why things happen is, somehow, still, dismaying for me.

"To the extent that people are euphoric over Bin Laden's death, this is a measure of the permanence of his achievement." So says Richard Estes, at American Leftist, in his excellent post on the subject: "[T]here is a perverse, unacknowledged alliance between al-Qaeda, neoliberals and neoconsevatives, as all three groups are in agreement about the urgency associated with the need to marginalize and impoverish workers even if it is in the service of strikingly different visions of the future." He also includes some updates, with useful links on the failure of the option Bin Laden represented, its irrelevance to the changes shaping the Middle East now.

Again

And so we are bombing Libya. Again we are put in the position—or we put ourselves in the position—of having to "have an opinion" on some indefensible action the United States takes overseas (but, oh, yes, I forgot: this time it's a UN-sanctioned affair; Madeline Albright: "If possible we will act in the world multilaterally, but if necessary, we will act unilaterally."). Again we are asked to accept the notion of "humanitarian intervention". Again we are told that, in fact, such "intervention" can only be carried out via a bombing campaign. We are blandly assured that everything is above board. You know, just like the last time, and the time before that. Besides, they say, we were invited; how could we refuse? Indeed how?

We are admonished that it is important to listen to the claims or desires of actual Libyans. No doubt this is true, to the extent that we can know what those are. Nevertheless, it remains up to us to recognize and remember the character of our own putative leaders. We know damn well that they are neither trustworthy nor reliable, though too many of us still seem to need to believe otherwise. As ever, history is collapsed into a moment, context is obliterated, and we are presented with an urgent fait accompli.

Bombs kill people, and are meant to, and they destroy cultures and property. All are necessary, from the perspective of empire. We must not continue to forget this whenever another disaster flits across our television or computer screens. No post-World War II American military action has been either morally defensible or justifiable (and don't pretend that World War II was as simple as all that). No such action is possible, given the current configurations of capital and power. A knee-jerk anti-war response is the only acceptable answer.

When one thinks of death

"There is nothing to praise, nothing to damn, nothing to accuse, but much that is absurd, indeed it is all absurd, when one thinks of death."

These words come from Thomas Bernhard's "Speech on the Occasion of the Awarding of the Austrian State Prize", which appears in full in the recently published My Prizes: An Accounting. Bernhard readers will have already been familiar with the phrase, or at least the second half of it, in some form. It is, after all, the kind of thing he would say, and often did. In his "Speech at the Awarding of the Georg Büchner Prize", for another example, he begins

"What we are speaking of here is unfathomable, we are not properly alive, our existence and suppositions are all hypocritical, we are cut down in our aspirations at the final, fatal conclusion of our lethal misunderstanding with nature, into which science has led us and abandoned us..."

And, for just one of many possible fictional examples, this blog's name, of course, is taken from a passage in The Loser, in which the narrator speaks of "the existence machine", into which we are thrown, without being asked; life is ongoing when we arrive, life chews us up, life continues when we are gone. We have no say in the matter. That is to say, all is absurd, when one thinks of death.

Some readers fixate on Bernhard's litanies of hate and despair, a vein through which one could look on the remarks quoted above and see a morbid, depressing writer. But it misses the fact that Bernhard is very funny. And, in fact, if we re-consider those remarks, they are kind of ridiculous. In the context of the book My Prizes, we get the impression he tossed the lines off in a hurry, as though they were meaningless to him, as he claimed the prizes themselves to be (except for the money, which he was more than happy to take). Words that we formerly encountered, most likely, in the context of a review or a profile of Bernhard, playing the role of characterization (like, dude, he's so hardcore, he scolded silly people about death at a frivolous award ceremony, that kind of color), become something more like a darkly comic practical joke. (Notice, too, how the word death is italicized in the first quote above. One can almost hear the hilarious contempt with which he no doubt spoke the word.) They serve the purpose of gratuitously puncturing the events at which they were delivered. So we must be wary of taking the remarks too seriously as a philosophy. Except insofar as it is absurd that humans toil and sweat and struggle and then just fucking die.

But this post wasn't supposed to be about Thomas Bernhard. Then what?

The fact is, I've been thinking about death. Not constantly; I'm not at all death-obsessed. But I've been thinking about our alienation from it. Mine anyway. An old friend of mine was in town recently. His mother died a year ago, so inevitably we spent some time talking about her and about how the last year had been for him. He'd also had a close friend die about a year previously, so he'd been confronted with death in a new way for him. He felt now that he no longer feared it. Whereas I've never had someone close to me die, other than grandparents, whose deaths made me sad in the abstract but which I was able to keep my distance from, because, I've always rationalized, they were old and had lived long, full lives. Of course, this is a blessing; I've been very fortunate. (It is also, to some extent, a function of privilege.) But I've thought a lot about how I'm not prepared for death, how I was sheltered from experiencing others' sadness and grief. Death is an intellectual thing, for me, distant. It happens to other people, in other places. To expand this "my" back out to a shared "our", it seems to me, though others have not been nearly so fortunate as me in their personal lives, that our culture operates in great denial of death. This is not an original idea, but it strikes me as important.

We've lately been attending a local Quaker Meeting with some regularity, and this past Sunday, some were moved to speak about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Death in this larger sense, then, was on everyone's mind. Unspoken, but on my mind at least, was the unfolding nuclear disaster. The terrible irony of this happening in Japan of all places. I thought about the different kinds of damages inflicted on impoverished countries, such as Haiti, versus the wealthier, more infrastructurally sound Japan, and about the reasons for those differences. Yet it is Japan that has nuclear reactors. Just now, writing this, this phrase from Bernhard, quoted above, appears more serious now, looms ominously: "our lethal misunderstanding with nature, into which science has led us and abandoned us". Science, our faith. Capitalism, our religion. Civilization, endgame.

The first time I read Blanchot I didn't understand. The second and third times, too, of course, but the first was a different sort of not understanding, I think, than the others, or than continues to attend my reading of him. In this case, it was the fiction Death Sentence. There was something about that work that I could not quite get. Perhaps relate to is a better way to put it—I couldn't relate to it—though I'm usually allergic to that kind of formulation. But it was the way death hovered over the text. I couldn't relate to it as an immediate concern. As a concern. It was a new kind of not understanding for me. It somehow made it difficult for me to pin the work down (as though the work needed to be pinned down; I oppose reduction, yet I reduce). Or was one of the difficulties.

I am not making sense. Let me try something else. In the past I have written about a) the decline of a shared symbolic language and b) the kind of writing I have associated with contemporary Anglo-American writing, writing, fictional or not, that I have called utilitarian (also), which others might call journalism. In this kind of writing, much concerned with the facts, and with argument, death is a fact. It happens, we know it happens, we're not fooled (we're nobody's fools). But somehow it's not a part of life. It is controlled. It is offstage. (Or perhaps it is gruesomely violent, clinically so, but distanced, reported, fact-like, uninvolved.) Anyway, I've written of this kind of writing in part to highlight that it has been my own default setting, at least in the sense of my expectations as a reader, expectations which have made reading certain European writers difficult, slippery. I've many times mentioned Blanchot, of course, and I've talked about Barthes and jouissance and so on. What I've left unmentioned so far has been the way that death seems to figure in the work of so many of these writers. I often can't get a handle on it; it helps keep the work at a distance.

I think that I've had trouble with such writing, in part because I have not shared in the literary or cultural concerns shaping the writing. I have no neat and tidy explanation for how and why I've been alternating talking about literature and life in this manner, except to suggest that one shouldn't be necessary. Except also to wonder whether to no longer be able to share in a common language is to be somewhat less than fully alive. We appeal to literature for many reasons, though in our culture we'd more often rather be entertained. We do not learn to understand death as a part of life, even if we "know" it to be the end of life. We deny it. Our scientific enterprise, medical science in particular, seems to be, to a large extent, a mass delusion in denial of death, a shared delusion that it can be resisted, that it ought to be. We are not supposed to die in our own homes anymore. Just as we are not supposed to be born at home either. The whole process must be contained.

I arbitrarily took Illness as Metaphor off the shelf yesterday and read it. In it, Susan Sontag writes, on cue: "For those who live neither with religious consolation about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied." And later: "part of the denial of death in this culture is a vast expansion of the category of illness as such". So that disease can be explained, and death controlled.

But here's the thing. I have gravitated towards the writings of the French and German writers, who make the English and American writers seem so shallow. On the one hand, I am unable to access the language of death, for reasons suggested above. I resist the tendency of my own culture to separate death from life, to attempt to solve the problem. The United States and to a somewhat lesser extent England are merely the apotheosis of this general Western tendency (that is, I am far from excluding Europe from this, even as I oppose the continental writers to the Anglo-American). Those writers I refer to respond in part to this with some dismay; this is one of the problems of modernism. On the other hand, such writers do seem death-soaked. I am referring mainly to that set of writers that David Auerbach of Waggish recently, in his review of Lars Iyers' novel version of Spurious, called "deeply serious", "Creators who are searching, reaching, profound, bombastic". He goes on to quote a passage from Blanchot's essay "Literature and the Right to Death", which he says "could read as either pompous nonsense or the deepest truth, depending on the day." And, indeed, depending on the day, or week, or my level of sleeplessness, or whatever, I can read that passage and either glean something, or the beginning of something, deeply meaningful, or not understand it in the least. At times I have found it wearying having to work so hard against my not eradicated journalistic expectations. Bernhard is a tonic, of course, and perhaps a lesson, a reminder, that the others are not so po-faced as they may at times seem in translation, or at least on the surface. As, indeed, is Spurious itself (it is very funny). But even so, it is there.

And, as Auerbach notes in his review, they are unrelentingly male. This is not an unimportant point, and it brings me, finally, after much dithering, to my own point, or at least the point with which I will conclude these ramblings. I've suggested in the past that the history of philosophy would look a lot different if it hadn't been written almost exclusively by men, about men, for men, away from the concerns of women and children, away from the province of reproduction. I've similarly suggested that science would have come around to certain discoveries about childhood development if scientists had bothered to pay the least attention to children, and to the women who raised them. If such men hadn't been off doing Important Work, while life itself went on around and without them. In both cases we likely could have been spared a lot of nonsense about human nature (and perhaps, instead, have inherited other nonsense, but a healthier, more life-focused nonsense, I assert). But my point is that, though I gravitate towards those writers responding to the modern condition, now stretching back several hundred years (both the condition and the response to it), I resist the strong tendency in this tradition to see life itself as the misery. I wish rather, writing as the father of a beautiful little girl, to celebrate life. It is, at times, easy to do that. All I have to do is be in her company for a few minutes, and life is great. Life is great. But it doesn't take long, when away from her, when commuting, when reading about the problems of the world, to despair about the future world that awaits her. And I thus write with sadness and anger as I consider, as I often must, the death cult that is capitalism, its continued encroachment on and destruction of the natural world, and the immanent disaster "into which science has led us and abandoned us".

"like any addict, it continues to do the same things, while expecting a different result"

Speaking of Stan Goff, today he posted this piece at Feral Scholar, by way of introducing us to this article by Sierra Bellows at the University of Virginia Magazine. Stan says:

Meanwhile, unbeknown to most Americans, there are still 75,000 troops in Iraq – where yet another rebellion threatens to break out; Commander-in-Chief Obama continues to oversee a lost and cruel war in Afghanistan; the CIA continues its covert drone war against rural Pakistan; and Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke has successfully reflated a financial bubble, ensuring that the next crash – coming to a theater near you – is even more traumatic than the last. Then, we’ll see more Yorba Linda-like lunacies, because this is what middle-classes do when they are frightened.

I believe what the Irish bard said was, “the center cannot hold.”

The empire, in a word, has become unmanageable, but like any addict, it continues to do the same things, while expecting a different result. We 12-steppers call that “insanity.”

At last, I’ll get to my point, and link the article that this is leading into. Empires always become unmanageable, because they are inherently “addicted” to the exploitation of peripheries. As those peripheries are exhausted, the core must continually seek further and further afield to satisfy its habit. This core-periphery dynamic is, in fact, not only a feature of empire. Empire is one manifestation of the same process – an ecological one at bottom – that we call “civilization.” Because no core can continually feed on a periphery without materially exhausting it, no core can go on indefinitely. It will eventually overreach, and at that point, it loses the ability to manage its own system – a system that turns out at the end of the day to have created a fatal dependency on that periphery, even as it has pillaged it.