FUCK THEORY

Checks and Balances

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I guess you must have been absent that day in 8th grade history, Governor, but when the Founding Fathers designed the government of the United States they came up with something they called “separation of powers.”  The big round room where all those stupid Democrats sit is the “legislative” branch of government.  The office where you eat your hoagie every day is the “executive” branch of government.  Their job is to make the laws, your job is to enforce them.  The reason there are more Democrats than Republicans in the New Jersey state legislature - the reason there are enough floor votes to pass a gay marriage bill - is that during the competition to see who would get to sit in the big round room (“elections”), more of New Jersey’s voters wanted to be represented by Democrats than by bigoted assholes Republicans. 

The natural question, which I would no doubt find in my ask box if I wasn’t about to preempt it (ha-hah!) is, “Are you suggesting we eliminate executive veto?” or perhaps “Why is the executive veto built into the Constitution if the executive isn’t supposed to use it?”

There are two answers to this question. 
First and most simply, the executive veto, like the filibuster, was designed as an emergency measure, a back-up plan meant to enforce the separation of powers in case of a governmental crisis; it wasn’t meant to become an everyday feature of political life. 
More importantly, though, there are vetos, and there are vetos.  I have much less concern with an executive veto on, say, the state budget.  Why?  Because the state budget directly affects the executive’s ability to do its job.  Like every binary opposition, the line between the executive and the legislature is not a clear-cut one; it’s ridiculous to suppose a unilateral divide between those who create the law and those who execute the law, since the relationship between the two is obviously dialectical.  What I’m saying, in other words, is that the blurrier the line between the domain of the executive and the domain of the legislative, the more reasonable it is to activate a backup measure like an executive veto, which is designed to short-circuit precisely that blurring of boundaries. 

In this case, though, there’s nothing blurry about it.  The voters who put these legislators in office knew what they were doing and made a deliberate decision to be represented by a party that (officially, at least) supports gay rights.  A piece of legislation which protects the rights and freedoms of a minority population from discrimination by the majority isn’t in any way a blurring of the boundary between executive and legislature - it’s the epitome of how legislation is supposed to work in a pluralist democracy.  I’m not suggesting that executive veto should be eliminated in general - I’m just suggesting that in this particular instance, where there is no justification whatsoever for it, a veto would represent not democracy in action but an authoritarian intervention into democratic process, and any attempt to dress up systemic bigotry and discrimination with a freedom-colored ribbon is a disgusting and cowardly action on the part of a slimy and hypocritical kombinator.

Dictionary of Philosophy - “Philology”

Temporality & Metaphor:  Notes on the Representation of Time

(click - thanks for the link, Lauren!)

“Further, from the fact that we are able to delimit Duration and Quantity as we please, conceiving Quantity in abstraction from Substance and separating the efflux of Duration from things eternal, there arise Time and Measure:  Time to delimit Duration and Measure to delimit Quantity in such wise as enables us to imagine them easily, as far as possible…Hence it can clearly be seen that Measure, Time, and Number are nothing other than modes of thinking, or rather, modes of imagining.  It is therefore not surprising that all who have attempted to understand the workings of Nature by such concepts, and furthermore without really understanding these concepts, have tied themselves into such extraordinary knots that int he end they have been unable to extricate themselves except by breaking through everything and perpetrating the grossest absurdities.”

- Spinoza, Letter 12 to Meyer, April 1663 (trans. Samuel Shirley)

Adventures in Pedagogy - Slashes Are For Lawyers

It’s the Information Economy, Stupid

I’m not a fan of abstractions.  Nominalisms like “free speech” and “human rights” don’t usually get much more than a yawn from me.  So this isn’t a post about principles - it’s a post about activity and privation.  It’s also not a post about abstractions - it’s a post about a very real, crucially important battle that is being waged right now, at this very moment, a battle that is part of a very real, crucially important war, a war that stands to define the shape of capitalism for the foreseeable future. 

Let’s not mince words: information is the most important currency of the 21st century.  Maybe in 100 years, when we’ve used most of it up, oil will return to the top of the pyramid, but at the moment there is no commodity worth more than the endless strings of 1s and 0s that make up your digital life.  The war over the future of the Internet can potentially affect every facet of your daily existence from your ability to send e-mail to your ability to vote. 

Please don’t make the error of thinking that this war is about copyright enforcement.  That may be the form that the current skirmish has taken on, but the stakes of this war are considerably higher than whether or not you should be allowed to download the latest season of Project Runway on BitTorrent.  This is a war about fundamental questions of democratic society, about the ownership and restriction of public utilities, about whether multinational conglomorates will succeed in smashing the rhizomatic, decentralized models of commerce and communication that the Internet has provided for the last 20 years, and about control of what is, for better and for worse, the most powerful tool for revolution that exists in the world today (well, OK, second most powerful after Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus).

The basic problem looks like this.
An increasingly large part of our daily lives takes place on-line; this will not be news to anyone.  Communication, shopping, entertainment, travel arrangements - these were just the tip of the iceberg.  US citizens can now pay taxes on-line.  In some places you can vote on-line.  Within a very short time, college admissions will be entirely digital; even today, I’m not sure it’s still possible to apply to a top-tier university without Internet access.  In other words, in the next few years, the Internet will no longer be an option; it will become a requisite tool to which one must have access if one is to enjoy the full range of rights and responsibilities available to you as a citizen. 

The question at the heart of the war is this:  given that access to the Internet will soon be crucial to the basic operations of daily life, do we want that access to be mediated by corporations whose only concern is maximizing profit?  Do you want your ability to vote, to receive tax refunds, and to apply to college to lie in the hands of a private company that has the ability to arbitrarily block your access to any website it chooses? What happens when Time Warner Cable decides they won’t let you stream trailers for movies produced by Sony or Universal?  More importantly, what if ten years from now Presidential elections are entirely on-line, and by unfortunate coincidence a massive technical outage strikes certain neighborhoods, say, those neighborhoods primarily inhabited by people of color?   

At the moment, you still have the option of logging out of Gmail or not having a Facebook account.  But the days in which the Internet is an option are rapidly disappearing.  The on-line/IRL divide is dwindling to nothing, and very soon connectivity will be not a possibility but a fact of life.  If we don’t fight tooth and nail to build an open and public Internet now, we will be living with the consequences of that failure for many, many decades. 

The privatization of governmental responsibilities has become so ubiquitous in the United States that we tend to lose sight of the fact that communication infrastructure is a public utility.  YOU OWN THE AIRWAVES.  Not in a bullshit, ideological, “Take back what’s rightfully ours!” kind of way.  Literally.  Time Warner may own the cables, and they may provide service and maintenance for them, but those cables are hanging off of poles sticking out of public sidewalks paid for by taxpayers and running underneath the pavement of public streets paid for by taxpayers.  Let me say it again:  communication infrastructure is a public utility.  It belongs to taxpayers.  Your democratically elected representatives, who are supposed to be protecting your best interests but whose tongues are lodged so far up the corporate lobby’s asshole their epiglottis has turned brown, are giving away your property to companies that want to use the communication infrastructure not only to make money at your expense but also limit personal freedom and potentially severely impact your ability to participate in your own society. 

How many people are even aware of the fact that in the middle of the 20th century the United States government gave the television networks the airwaves in exchange for an ephemeral promise that their programming would serve the best interests of the viewers?  A quick glance at FOX’s show roster will prove how well that worked out.  The most pernicious brilliance of capitalism is its ability to bottle something that already belonged to you and not only sell it back to you for a profit but actually make you gratefully that you’re being provided with the service. But it is not a given that access to the Internet must be mediated by private companies that sell you the right to use a public resource. 

The Internet, let’s remember, was developed by the US government with taxpayer money.  The Internet belongs to you.  And your elected representatives are doing their best to give it away to the highest bidder.  Not only will you not see a dime from the billions of dollars in profit this will generate, you will actually be charged for using a resource that was yours in the first place. 

The only way to resist this encroachment is to take action.  First, inform yourself.  Then, decide what you can do to help.  The most important war of the 21st century is being fought above our heads at this very moment, and the consequences of losing it are too grim to enumerate. Don’t just call your Congressman and ask that they vote against PIPA and SOPA.  Call your Congressman and make it clear that the Internet belong to you, that you intend to retain ownership, and that your district might be sending someone else to Congress next term if your Congressman thinks otherwise. 

Click here for more information.

Pro et Contra - Philosophy & Allegory

(I/II)
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This is the contra one, obviously.

Here’s the problem with allegory.
Imagine that in the distant future the entire world is in the grip of a giant totalitarian state.  Now imagine that this totalitarian state executed an absolute eugenics program, strictly controlling all reproduction.  Now imagine that the way this program was executed was through the surgical removal of every person’s reproductive glands, so that not only was all reproduction conducted in a laboratory under strict government control, but also no adult in the world had functioning gonads - women had no ovaries and men had no testes.  Now imagine that you’re an ordinary man from our present moment who travels to this future and has an argument with one of these gonad-free future-humans.  In this scenario, wouldn’t one of these gonad-free future-humans be confused if you told them to lick your balls?  Clearly they would, because in the hypothetical world under consideration, the set of “men who have testicles” is an empty set.  Isn’t that a good allegory for how set theory works?

If you answered “not really, no,” then gold star for you. 

Let me start bluntly:  allegories can be rhetorical, but they cannot be truly philosophical, insofar as philosophy is an activity consisting of the creation, modification, and organization of concepts.  (In this definition I follow, as always, Deleuze & Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?).  Prof. O’Connor gives the unfortunate example here of “Nietzsche’s myth of eternal recurrence,” a rather poor choice considering that Nietzsche certainly didn’t think of the Eternal Return as a “myth.”  A better example would have been the parables and fables of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  But parables and fables are not allegories.

The difference is that an allegory represents, while parables and fables illustrate.  The reading of the former is a hermeneutic process, the reading of the latter an analytic process.  The practical implication of this is that while a behavioral or moral principle is given in the parable or the fable, the underlying principle of the allegory must be interpreted, extracted or translated out of the symbolic content; it is generated anew with each reading.  But as the sages made clear in the Talmud, to say nothing of Freud and Derrida, interpretation, hermeneutics, is always an overdetermined process.  Some symbols mean multiple things; sometimes several symbols together mean a single thing.  Sometimes both of those things are true at once.  What this means is that the allegory, unlike the parable and fable, has a much looser relationship between form and content, insofar as its “meaning” can be distributed through any number of symbolic elements without, in theory, fundamentally changing (this is what Lacan implies when he insists in the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” that “the letter” is infinitely divisible).

In practice, this means that the allegory is, potentially, infinitely extensive.  An epic novel can serve as an allegory, and a sonnet can serve as an allegory, and in principle, they could be interpreted as having the same “moral,” which might consist of a single sentence.  Aesop’s fables and Zarathustra’s animal companions offer us a diagrammatic relation between the elements of the story and the elements of the conceptual principle: there’s a crow, there’s a fox, and there’s a piece of cheese.  You can change the symbolic register and make it a fable about a woman, a drag queen, and a Chanel clutch, but no retelling that claims to retain the same moral principle can fundamentally alter the triangular constellation of the key elements.  This remains remains true even if the story is the length of a novel: consider Ibn Tufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, one of the greatest “philosophical novels,” a book-length parable (and well worth reading). 

In an allegory, on the other hand, the principle is not given; it must be generated interpretively.  But because the principle is not given, the distribution of symbolic elements is hermeneutic rather than diagrammatic, and there is no clear conceptual correspondence.  This makes the allegory, as I’ve suggested, extensive: there’s no diagrammatic reason not to add or remove symbolic elements or to reorganize the symbolic distribution.  That’s why allegory, unlike fable and parable, is never properly philosophical, but only aesthetic or rhetorical:  because the distribution of symbolic elements becomes a matter of taste, rather than a matter of conceptual correspondence. The allegory violates William of Ockham’s basic metaphysical principle: Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate (“plurality [of entities] should not be posited unless necessary”; this is the basic principle of conceptual organization - see Ockham’s Quaestiones on Peter Lombard’s Sentences). 

In fact, Plato’s allegory of the cave (in The Republic, Book VII, 514a–520a) does precisely this.  The allegory represents, according to the standard interpretation, Plato’s theory of Forms or Ideas or however you want to translate εἶδος (eidos) and ἰδέα (idea).  The idea here is apparently that the world we live in and perceive is a pale imitation of a pure world of Ideal Forms, where every entity exists in its pure essence.  For Plato, the table in front of you is just a particular incarnation of the universal form “table.”  OK.  So in the allegory of the cave, the shadows on the wall are the material incarnations of forms, the world of our perception, and the real world out in the sunlight is the world of pure forms.  There are really only three conceptual elements here:  the material world, the world of forms, and the limited human consciousness.  But…if the shadows on the wall are made by puppeteers who hold puppets up to the light of the fire, and the shadows represent our material perceptions, wouldn’t perceiving the world of forms just involve…turning our heads to see the puppets?  Why does the allegory continue beyond that point?  Why then is this freakish puppet show just an intermediary between the cave and the outside?  Why is there an outside at all?  For that matter, why don’t the people who leave the cave end up on a mysterious island that moves around and is protected by a giant smoke monster?  Also, who the hell are these puppet show people and don’t they have anything better to do?  Plato is definitely ponenda-ing pluralitas sine necessitate. 

The idea here, as Prof. O’Connor suggests, is that the philosopher’s inquiry helps lift humanity out of the cave and into the light.  The philosopher does this by inquiring after the essence of things, their form, that ancient Socratic question:  “What is it?” (a question, one notes, endemic to 4-year-old children and 70-year-old men).  The profound irony here is that Plato’s allegory fails in exactly the same way that Socrates’ inquiry fails.  In distributing the elements of the allegory figuratively rather than conceptually, Plato fails to answer the fundamental question, “What is it? [What does the allegory represent?].”  This is left to the reader to determine, in an act of interpretation.  The essence is not given, only the distribution of symbols, a particular distribution, arranged formally in accordance with a rule of taste.  From this particular example, the reader is left to extract a general principle, a truth or ἰδέα, the essence of the allegory which would remain the same even if the allegory itself was changed (this is the supposed letter that supposedly always arrives at its destination, chez Lacan). 

This is the basic failure of Platonic-Socratic inquiry:  Not that it attempts to extract a general principle from particular examples, which would simply be inductive reasoning, but that it does so dialectically, by rejecting symbolic elements, in an endless loop whose dynamo is precisely the absence of essence.  Socrates putters around the agora accosting random people.  “What is it that you’re doing?” he asks on young man.  “I’m on my way to an audition, I’m a musician.”  “How do you know that what you’re doing is truly ‘music’?” Socrates asks.  20 minutes later this poor flute player is stumbling to his audition sweating because he has no idea who he is anymore.  But while this young man’s audition is blown, Socrates is no closer to answering the question “What is it?” because he’s simply rejected every example as inadequate, a process of negation the Upanishads refer to as नेति नेति (“neti, neti”; neither this nor this).  Socrates continually tries to generate something from nothing.  And fails.

Ironically, considering Plato’s continual insistence on the clear light of reason, both allegory and Socratic method represent what Hume called “theism”:  acts of the imagination that extend the given indefinitely without a corrective principle.  The principle is not given; there is no conceptual correspondence or schema; and thus while Platonic allegory, like Christian allegory, can produce belief, it cannot produce philosophy in any proper sense of the word. 

Pro et Contra - Clinique & Critique 

(I/II)
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We must distinguish first of all between a syndrome and an illness.
A syndrome is a cluster of phenomena which together present us with a particular assemblage of symptoms or “clinical picture” (Krankheitsbild); an illness is the effect of a particular cause.  One expresses a conjunctive relation, the other a causal relation.  An illness answers to the question “What is it?”  A syndrome answers to the twin questions “What does it do and how does it work?” 

Ordinary language use makes it difficult to see this distinction.  “What’s wrong with him?” we ask; “He’s got the flu” and “He’s an alcoholic” are both conversationally adequate responses to this question.  But addiction is not a cause, it is a syndrome.  The answer to the question “What’s wrong with him?” can be equally well answered with “He’s got the flu” and “His body is infected with a particular strain of influenza virus.”   On the other hand, in causal terms the answer to the question “Why is he staggering around like that?” is never originally “He’s an alcoholic”; the first few times it happens, the answer is “He’s had too much to drink.”  The answer does not become “He’s an alcoholic” until the effect in question has presented itself a good number of times.  In other words, even if the sole, exclusive symptom of alcoholism was excessive drinking, “alcoholism” is not a single thing but rather a cluster of phenomena or events that can be much less clearly expressed as “every time he’s had too much too drink and every problem and complication those times have caused him and every problem and complication those times have caused everyone else around him.”

To begin with, then, an addiction is always a multiplicity.  It is a collective designation for a cluster of phenomena.  And like every conceptual multiplicity, understanding addiction requires two separate cognitive movements:  What are its elements? and What kind of effect do these elements produce in constellation?  In other words, analysis of a syndrome, unlike causal identification of an illness, has two necessary stages: descriptive and evaluative. 

In the case of addiction, the descriptive and the evaluative correspond to the quantitative and the qualitative.  In the example of alcoholism, the first question is, “Does he drink significantly more than an average person?”  (The term “average” here is always a relatively arbitrary mean).  This is the quantitative description (“a lot or a little?”).  The second question is, “Does this quantity of drinking produce a detrimental effect given this particular person’s circumstantial conditions?”  This is the qualitative evaluation (“good or bad?”). 

The reason this double question is necessary is, quite simply, that evaluation is always circumstantial or contingent (we recall Nietzsche’s aphorism:  “There are no moral phenomena, only moral evaluations of phenomena”).  Another way to put this is that “a lot” and “a little” describe an abstract relation, while “healthy” and “unhealthy” evaluate a specific relation.  More bluntly - different people can handle different quantities of drugs, not only physically but also contextually.

Let me give an example from my errant youth.  When I was young, I was famous in my circle of friends for being able to chug vodka.  I was stick-thin, had a lightning-fast metabolism and genetically high alcohol tolerance that runs in my father’s family, and I could drink a bottle of Absolut in about 45 minutes without passing out, throwing up, falling over, or otherwise making an ass of myself.  Over the years, though, I’ve started going out much less frequently, drinking less and less frequently, and my metabolism has slowed down.  If I tried to drink a bottle of Absolut by myself in 45 minutes, the results would be sad at best and disastrous at worst.  Descriptively, drinking a bottle of Absolut in 45 minutes represents a greater-than-average consumption of alcohol by any measure.  But evaluatively, we see that the “goodness” or “badness” of the phenomenon is contextual, not absolute:  the same person performs the same action in two moments or contexts, and their value is drastically different. 

In other words, one again we come back to the basic link between ethical evaluation and utility.  As was the case with exercise in this earlier post, we cannot ask “Is it healthy?” without implicitly asking “Is it healthy for…?”  Marijuana use is another example.  You don’t necessarily want your cardio surgeon taking a bong hit before performing heart surgery on you.  But it’s much less disturbing to think of your favorite musician taking a bong hit before laying down some tracks.  So that even one of the broadest criteria that experts use to evaluate whether substance consumption constitutes addiction - the extent to which it interferes with your job and your everyday life - is entirely contextual, that is, particular.  This becomes most clear if we evaluate addiction based on “quality of life.”  For a broke graduate student, spending $150 a month on marijuana might represent a significant decline on their quality of life, due to financial constraints, while a millionaire my be able to spend $10,000 a month on cocaine without their quality of life being significantly impacted.  The quantitative relation (a lot or a little) doesn’t acquire a qualitative meaning (good or bad) except in and through its immanent context.

Another way to say all this is to say that the difference between description and evaluation is the difference between “a lot” and “too much.”  As Deleuze writes in “Two Questions on Drugs”:  “The second question would be:  How do we account for a ‘turning point’ in drugs, how do we determine at what moment this turning point occurs?…Why and how is this experience, even when self-destructive, but still vital, transformed into a deadly enterprise of generalized, unilinear dependence?…If there is a precise point, that is where therapy should intervene.” 

Time, Duration, Movement - Notes on Zeno’s Paradoxes

Dictionary of Philosophy - “Free Market”

לאמיר הערן גיטא בשורות

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Particularly noteworthy is the anxiety expressed by “a local activist, rabbi and self-defined modern ultra-Orthodox.”  This is in no way a struggle between religiosity-as-principle and secularity-as-principle, but is rather in every sense a battle over ethology, the distribution and encoding of intensities in a particular milieu. 

Based On Some Films I’ve Seen Recently, the Czech Army Has A Similar Problem

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The article linked to above is:
a). homophobic
b). racist
c). Orientalist
d). incredibly offensive
e). fucking hilarious
f). all of the above. 

Obviously, the answer is “f.” 

There are a whole bunch of things going on here. 

First, it is indeed the case that those little army short shorts do a really nice job of displaying and emphasizing a man’s ass.  We’ll get back to that in a minute.

Second, it’s fully possible for something to be hysterically funny and “offensive” or “inappropriate” at the same time.  In this recent post I alluded to the importance of distinguishing the affective value of a text or speech act from the conceptual value of a text or speech act; in other words, the importance of distinguishing the immediate effect something has on you personally, whether positive or negative, from its broader situation in the discursive and material network of relations that produces meaning and value.  This is not an ontological distinction, since there’s no clear line between the two, it’s just a distinction of convenience, a way of dealing in situ with the problematic overlap between structural violence and personal indignation.  So first things first - yes, something can be hilarious and homophobic at the same time.  (If you’ve never seen Eddie Murphy’s Raw, you’re seriously missing out). 

Incidentally, the distinction between the conceptual and affective value of a text or speech act also circumvents another problem that tends to twist queer theorists up in knots, namely, the tension between the quality of representation and the quantity of representation (the question of what’s worse:  no cultural representation, or negative cultural representation).  In other words, as a politically conscious homosexual, should I be more happy that alternative, queer sexual practices are being exposed to the world, or should I be more indignant that this exposition is so homophobic and racist?  Both, and neither.  My personal indignation or outrage is related to but not the same as the discursive structures that attempt to hide non-normative sexual practices from the world.   

Next, a few predictable, cliched binarisms that I will dismiss rather than take seriously.  Nothing about the treatment of Afghans and Islam in this article is original, interesting, or surprising:

- Cultural ignorance: Why, yes.  Other countries than America do have different sexual and relational habits and practices, and there are places where things considered highly inappropriate in American culture are not considered highly inappropriate.  Surprise!
- Racism, homophobia, and chauvinism are overlapping and interrelated forms of oppression: “ANA soldiers are also fond of dressing up like pretty little ladies”; “Afghan men will fuck anything”; they have “bizarre gay encounters.” (Apparently what makes them ‘bizarre’ is the fact that the men in question have a different skin tone, because in gay terms a blowjob is, let’s face it, not very exceptional). In the introduction to Between Men, Sedgwick discusses this overlap with typically sharp lucidity.  Basically it boils down to this:  sexual practices are used as a “measure” of masculine normativity, and racial, ethnic, and cultural prejudice is necessarily situated within the logic of phallocentrism (“My country is more butch than your country” has no meaning unless “butch” has a meaning before “country”). 
- The historical relation between Islam and homosexuality is considerably more complex than a simple opposition between unrestrained buttsex and “a strict Islamic code forbidding a limp-wristed lifestyle”:  The Muslim world is a big place, composed of many different cultures.  The history of homosexuality in Afghanistan and Persia is not the same as the history of homosexuality in Morocco and Sudan.  More importantly, just as in the “West,” homosexuality and Islam have had a complicated relationship that shifted and changed at various historical moments.  Duh. 

All these points are just preliminaries.  What I really want to focus on is my favorite part of the article, the Canadian artillery gunner with the great ass who’s apparently wearing nothing but short-shorts.

Aside from the sexual appeal of the imagery, what I love about this article is the indignation expressed by the soldiers interviewed for this article.  Sex in the military!  Sex between men!  Attention drawn to the fact that military outfits highlight the male physique!  Outrageous! 

This is where the Sedgwick quote on the card comes in.  There’s nothing surprising about homophobia in the military.  There’s nothing surprising that foreign cultures are compared to American prowess through emasculating and phallocentric tropes.  There’s nothing surprising about ignorance and racism in discussion of foreign cultures and ethnicities.  So what’s interesting about this article?  Just what Sedgwick says:  “Even when the project of that diachronic rescasting is to conceal those very contradictions, [it] can have just the opposite effect of making them newly visible.” 

At the very same time that this article situates the terms of the debate through the grindingly familiar language of homophobia, racism, and chauvinism, it also opens up, almost despite itself, a window for thinking through the cultural and material relations that make these bigotries possible. 

A few questions, if you will.

- Why does the Army make its standard-issue short-shorts so form-fitting and sexy?  I mean, really.  Not only can loose, baggy fabric achieve the same range of motion and comfort, it also allows air to circulate, which I can assure you makes a big difference when your balls are dripping sweat in the Middle-Eastern sun.  Maybe instead of blaming the Afghan soldiers for admiring your ass, you should ask your commanders why they want you to walk around showing your ass off in the first place?  Phrased more abstractly, what history of material and cultural relations has produced this particular object as the locus for sexual tension?

- What does it mean that a military base is constructed as a space where men can (or should be able to) stroll around nearly naked as a matter of course?  The problem here, obviously, isn’t nudity or homosociality; the problem is that the openly homosexual activity of the Afghan soldiers draws attention to and forces into the open what is intended to be a tacit, unspoken feature of military life, namely, the tension between homosocial interaction and homosexual activity.  As long as this tension remains beneath the surface, the system works fine; things only plunge into crisis mode when the tension is made explicit:  this is exactly what Sedgwick means when she talks about the “opening-out of contradictions within the status quo.”  

- What is the relationship between desire, activity, and cultural origin?  To put it more bluntly, why are Afghan soldiers fucking each other on their home turf where, presumably, Afghan women are equally available?  A tantalizing hint appears towards the end:  “This is a land where vaginas can kill you. ‘Sleeping with a woman can end up with a very costly honor killing,’ Luongo says.”  In other words, the opposition between the homosocial tension of the American military and the homosexual practice of the Afghan military can serve to “make newly visible,” as Sedgwick says, the ways in which cultural difference and social formation produce the distinction between homosexual activity on the one hand and homosexual identification on the other.  Is there any clearer evidence that being “gay” and being “homosexual” are not the same thing? 

For identity politics, as for thetic or dialectical philosophy, both of which assume a “correct” or “true” form of representation, the bigotry evident in both the form and the content of the article decrease from its truth-value, make it less “correct,” less valuable.  Practical or rhizomatic philosophy doesn’t have that problem, because its measure of conceptual validity is not truth but utility (1 2 3 4).  The point is not to judge the article and accept or dismiss its claim; the point is to look at the unfolding of the concepts and to ask, as Sedgwick teaches us to, “What becomes visible?”  What relations do these concepts open up onto?  How does it work and what does it do?