Neo-Weberian Foundations

Case Review Chapter, Update 1

2010-08-05T21:29:00.000-07:00

The ethnic cleansing class at Antioch has but me in high gear. We start the first of the historical case studies, the Armenian genocide, this week. I still have to type up the blurbs for the Adalian piece and impose an outline on them. I forgot to handle that this week and must do this very soon.

I’ve started in on the Yugoslavia pieces. I’ve marked up the two Mann pieces and I’ve finished off the chapter from Stoessinger all the way through outline stage. We cover those readings in roughly twelve days. I gotta bust my ass. I may strategically not cover Bell-Fialkoff if I run short.

I need to devise a review table for the kids. The rows should be specific time periods in each case. The columns should be how the different theories do at dealing with each period. I’m probably just going to have them deal with “types of variable” rather than specific theorists, so maybe I should drop the theorist names altogether. The four variable types are: politician agency, psychological interpretive bias, larger socio-structural conditions and culturo-structural conditions. I think that’s how I ought to review the cases in the chapters as well, except I have integrate different theorists back in.

Theory Chapter Reading Update 3

2010-07-24T08:55:00.001-07:00

I haven’t been keeping up on graphing, even though I’ve been working. First, I need a new kind of graph for rewriting theory. I’m still working on the proposal and yesterday I got a lot of progress. I’m hoping to have the document done sometime next week.

At the start of class, I assigned two chapters of Grossman, so those were blocked and outlined a while back.

I’ve blocked all the Armenian case reading that I’ve assigned for the case study. I may look at more material when it comes to the four genocide comparison in the dissertation, but I won’t touch anymore for a while. I have to type in the blurbs for Adalian and type in the outline and they grunt work will be done. I think I need to make a table with all the narrative’s details and compare each of the texts for coverage as my next step.

I’ll work on the proposal until it exhausts me. Then I’ll work on Adalian. Actual writing is by far the greatest burden. I need high quality focus for that, my most precious resource.

I also need to get more photocopying done. I need to find a way of coordinating the big picture using this blog. The more I can keep looking at the these tables, the better I coordinate the larger tasks of writing. I have to avoid falling off the wagon.

Theory Chapter Reading Update 2

2010-06-27T09:08:00.000-07:00

Moving right along...

Theory Chapter Reading

2010-06-26T16:35:00.000-07:00

I’m going to need some of the reading that I’m doing for the theory chapter blocked before teaching the Antioch class. Most of the book is already marked up, as you can see. I thought I would get a category going for that.

If I make tables for everything, maybe I can come up with a coordinating system that gives me the big picture. I feel that’s what I lack the most in life.

Text Acquisition Update 1

2010-06-22T16:17:00.000-07:00

New idea. I need to make a table for everything that goes into the research process. I’m constantly becoming decontextualized and it causes me to lose time. Right now, I want to lower the number of library books I have taken out. Most of the pieces below are for the theory chapter and don’t have to be read immediately. That said, having the books out is a serious recall-war liability, an invitation to expensive fines.

Moreover, the more information I represent about the writing process visually, the less I have to hold it in my brain, the less likely I’ll forget and the less likely I am to fall off the damned horse every time I get distracted.

We’ll see if it works.

Proposal Update 8

2010-06-20T16:37:00.000-07:00

Okay. I’ve gotten comments and I’m on to the second draft. I realized that I’d fallen off of the wagon in documenting progress. That’s always bad because I lose track of time between completed phases of what I’m doing. I lose time and focus. It’s already halfway through June. It is pivotal that I have the next draft by next week. I need to start making appointments with faculty to get reviews of the document. I need the second draft to be done prior to making those moves. I’m not confident enough to make the appointments and write against that deadline. But it is pivotal to have the document done this week. The Antioch course is from scratch this term. Of course, the Antioch class is two chapters from my dissertation, so it’s in no way in conflict with what Susan Whiting once called (and very optimistically, I might add) my research agenda. But I have to have a proposal document and must rewrite it to other specifications for other grantors. I need the next working document.

The current work chart is below.

The rest of this table is a little harder than the finished portions. I realized that I didn’t have enough about the concept of “framing” itself. I was wondering if I needed to add another section, but I’ve realized that I need to add a little to each of the section I haven’t finished. This complicates matters. I need to integrate key information into each part. 33I just finished reading a 2000 review article from the Annual Review of Sociology by Robert Benford et alia. It had useful goodies, but I have to do triage reading on the material to get the proposal done and then really read it in depth for my theory chapter. Moreover, the review article is old (so depressing to think that the year 2000 was a decade ago!). I don’t know what’s been happening with the idea of framing lately.

This table is the rewrite for the theory section. I need to do more to retrench the cases, too. That table can follow this one. Right now, let’s get the last theoretical considerations out of the way.

Wish me luck. I’ve got miles to go before I sleep.

Proposal Update 7

2010-05-10T21:30:00.001-07:00

Well, my efforts today didn’t totally suck. The table is somewhat misleading. Nelly prudently suggested to me that I seemed to be getting repeated coverage in separating the lit review from causal model. Moreover, she pointed out that the SSRC would only give me one big “Relevance of the Research to Disciplinary Concerns and Other Fields” section to cover it in. So I rewrote the whole thing. I now have five, 1.5-spaced pages in Times New Roman 11-point font. The citations need work, but I’m saying that they’re edited anyway. Here’s the table for the rest of the proposal:

Proposal Update 6

2010-05-10T14:40:00.000-07:00

This is a rough outline of the causal sequence. Writing it up took much of the morning and was exhausting. I hate how pathetic I am at sequencing.

* * *

While the present literature does not offer us definitive answers about the causes of ethnic cleansing, it provides myriad clues from which to synthesize a more coherent answer. The proposed model draws on several literatures from political science, sociology, psychology and history.

All Too Human: The Resistance to Killing as an Obstacle

1. There exists a reflex to abstain from killing within our own species

2. The reflex is tied to self-identity

3. The result of this violation of self-identity is trauma

Finding Your Inner Fascist: The Frame of Enemy Recognition

1. Our reflex of infrahumanization can allow for the objectification needed to kill

2. To facilitate planned killing, requires the imposition of a frame that allows for consistent objectification.

3. Definition derived from Schmitt

4. The enemy frame allows consistent objectification of the other, allowing for sustained violence.

If You Want to Make an Omelet—Politicians as Agents

1. Agents are important because ethnic cleansing is disciplined action undertaken by someone with the power to impose the discipline. This is the level of conscious choice.

2. Structural approaches tend to de-emphasize the importance of agency, but reveal clues about the difficulties agents face.

3. Current agent-based literature is wrongly focused on question of why—pointless question

Natural Born Killers? Hardly!—Training the Cleansers

1. Boot camp inculcates the identity of a killer and marries it to pro-social causes

2. Boot camp simulates actual killing rather than simple target practice

Manufacturing Consent: A Tipping Game

1. The Law of Few: The Importance of Opinion Leaders

2. Stickiness Factor: The experience of threat

3. Context: The Focus of Most Existing Structural Theory

Proposal Update 5

2010-04-26T09:51:00.001-07:00

Okay. The section on manufacturing consent is done. I’m realizing that a key motivational technique is not to lose heart when solution to the organizational challenge of a given paragraph isn’t immediately forthcoming. It’s okay to have a few days where you have no visible forward progress. But I should journal and think about the problem actively for a little while each day and not feel like a failure because the paragraph didn’t emerge on demand. Organized complex paragraphs requiring large amounts of synthesis are simply not available on demand anymore. While this is an annoying and offensive problem, it is important to bear in mind that it is not an insuperable problem.

Time to stick the new section into the paragraph rewrite worksheet. Once that’s cleaned up, we’re in the first draft’s endgame. I have to organize the cases and the logistics. Wheeee!

UPDATE: I've just gotten through the fifth paragraph of the sequence using the paragraph rewrite worksheet. I'm already exhausted. I get it now. MS gives me lesions. The brain needs to shunt ideas the long way around. Re-routing is exhausting. I get tired, so I stop. Then I forget to go back. I get nowhere, then I get depressed. The trick is to learn (1) to do this in small bits and pieces (2) while remembering to keep going back and working on it consistently, (3) despite the fact that there's very little that's rewarding about each piece and (4) not to get depressed that what I used to do quickly in my head, I now have to do piecemeal over weeks. Yeah it sucks, but this is doable! I can't forget that.

Proposal Update 4

2010-04-24T17:15:00.001-07:00

I’ve come to the most difficult section of the causal sequence. I clearly can’t exceed two paragraphs, given that we still haven’t talked about cases and methods yet. I'm having problems with synthesis. Perhaps I need a new arrow diagram.

Proposal Update 3

2010-04-13T17:49:00.000-07:00

I think I may lay off Bourke and dig into Grossman. She’s a brutally disorganized writer. Blocking and outlining the first chapter was painful. If her first combined with Grossman provide enough fodder for the proposal, I’ll leave the rest for later.

Proposal Update 2

2010-04-13T09:56:00.001-07:00

The first draft of the lit review is done. The intro to the essay comes in at about a page and a quarter and the lit review is coming in at just under three pages. The proposed model begins near the top of page 5. I’m using the length requirement for the SSRC as a guideline. Currently, the font is Times New Roman 11-point, but the spacing is still double-spaced instead of space-and-a-half. I feel that I’m on track for length. Now for the model.

I have two sections done and ready for editing. I got stuck a while back while free-writing when I realized that I needed more data. I spent all of January and a good part of February reading. I wanted to just “skim and get what I need quickly” for these sections—anything to avoid plodding and losing “writing momentum.” I’m coming to realize that for someone with lesions in his frontal lobes, there is no such thing! There is only “charting momentum” of the type you see on this blog. Writing cannot be experienced as a flow. I need to work section by section, toward a single draft. I can't just bash out a rough draft at a single shot. Baseball. Writing is baseball—162 games. It’s all about consistency. Instrumentally rational production. No charisma.

Here’s the reading that needs to be finished for the model:

Part of the trick is to stop being perfectionistic about efficiency. I need to focus on comparatively efficient but still withing the realm of the possible. It was always my goal to see it in my head and then make it happen. That led to fast, good drafts when I had working frontal lobes. Now I must embrace what under the old system was gross inefficiency. When reading, I must take in a gross oversample of information, rather than triage reading and distilling what I need from the text “on demand.” Next, I must write a rough paragraph that is likely to also be disorganized and contain to much information. This is simple “journaling.” Then I distill and reorganize by hand, using the paragraph rewrite exercise. No skipping steps and trying to do it in my head. It’s plodding, pure and simple. I do not fly. I plod. I’m the fucking turtle. I need to embrace it.

Proposal Update 1

2010-04-11T19:18:00.000-07:00

Okay. I’ve been writing. I’m in the middle of the proposal’s rough draft. Here’s the progress chart for the intro and lit review:

And here’s the progress chart for the model:

I need to make a progress chart for the portion on testing the theory. I also need to get back to the lit review. There are several more pieces I need to read for this proposal.

I’m beginning to understand why I’ve choked on this for so long. I used to do incredible amounts of organization and distillation in my head. Making all these tables makes be very aware of just how daunting writing is for me now. I could never organize because my unconscious mind knew that if I saw how fucking hard everything was for me now, I’d fall apart. The planning needed to stay on focus is simply enormous.

The Violent Politics of the Lit Review

2010-02-21T10:49:00.000-08:00

It's slowly dawning on me that the lit review of a grant proposal is counter-intuitive to a graduate student (or to this one, anyway) because it must maim and wound each item to make it fit into its appropriate bullet point. This violates every single principle we've learned about honest critical reading. A lit review is an act of intellectual violence—it is a putsch, a coup. Like all violence, its success is measured not by its erudition, but by whether or not you get away with it. It is utterly political.

Thank you, Nelly, for having me read Latour.

Lit Review Update 22

2010-01-25T10:05:00.000-08:00

I need to develop a better “triage” reading system. I need to know how much of which book to read when. I’m focused on a new proposal. I think I have enough of Chirot & McCauley and of Bell-Fialkoff. I’ll pick up more prior to writing the review article. I need to get Rae and Bulutgil. Then I need to read Schmitt and start the proposal.

I need to erase the pencil marks the last reader made in Rae so I can photocopy her Turkish genocide of the Armenians chapter. My photocopying for the coming weeks should include creating a file on each genocide.

Lit Review Update 21

2010-01-24T12:14:00.001-08:00

I had to add Chapter 3 of the Chirot & McCauley to the list. I strongly suspect a large chunk of their causal argument is there. Well, I knew the book would require considerable digestion. At least it's stylisitcally easy. I seem to manage a good ten pages an hour.

NOTE: Actually, leafing through Chapter 3, it doesn't look useful at all. That's quite a relief. Let's skip to Chapter 4.

NOTE: I may punt the rest of Chirot. The book is just an analysis of existing literature with very little that's original added. the "Solutions" chapter comes across as fairly insipid. I may go back, but I feel this book is slotted enough for this part of the project.

Lit Review Update 20

2010-01-23T13:53:00.001-08:00

Wednesday and Thursday were occupied by class preparation. I was exhausted on Friday and had an afternoon nap. I hope to type up the blurbs and impose the outline this evening. We’ll see how it goes. I've mislabeled Chapter 4 in the chart above as Chapter 3. Worse, the way they write this, it suggests I need to add Chapter 3, as it may actually be critical to causality. I need to control my frustration with the slow pace of this project. There are days that I tend to despair, especially when I have to spend so much time on being a teaching assistant. I almost never get repeat jobs and that mean class preparation takes up a great deal of time.

Lit Review Update 19

2010-01-19T20:39:00.001-08:00

I decided that I didn’t want to type up the blurbs from The Concept of the Political yet. Leafing through, I decided I wanted to give it another reading. It’s certainly short enough. So I stuck with the lit to be reviewed.

It’s a very short intro, but so far the Chirot and McCauley is, well, breezy. This is a wonderful trait in a novel, but I find it rarely works out in technical writing. It’s not that I object to good writing in the social sciences—perish the thought! It’s just that a good theory tends to tax the style of even the best writers. At any rate, I’m only ten pages in. We’ll see how the rest unfolds.

Lit Review Update 18

2010-01-18T17:50:00.000-08:00

I’m getting a better estimate of my feelings about the future tasks associated with this literature review. What I’ve decided:

I Will Finish Bell-Fialkoff

The more I read the book, the more I understand why I hate it. Basically, a Myers-Briggs sort of framework, Bell-Fialkoff has very little intuitive capacity. He’s all sensing, all the way. Now, don’t get me wrong. Someone with a high proclivity for sensing can be an excellent researcher. But such a researcher must at least be able to draw on their intuition enough to determine the relative importance of each fact so as to guide his or her reporting. Bell-Fialkoff, poor man, doesn’t even have this to help him. As a result, the whole book reads like the research paper written by that undergrad with no experience who is simply guided by what he finds interesting. Fact follows fact, and most are non sequitur to his alleged topic. He creates mammoth typologies that may or may not have some later use. He is interested in using his imagination to a limited extent—he will, for example, share his feelings about the different types of identity he discusses and how they interact. That said, he never attempts to prove any of these impressions.

His theory chapter is the best example of this approach. It is called “Cleansing as a Metonym of Collective Identity.” Well, OED gives this definition for the term metonym:

a. Rhetoric. (A figure of speech characterized by) the action of substituting for a word or phrase denoting an object, action, institution, etc., a word or phrase denoting a property or something associated with it; an instance of this.

b. In extended use: a thing used or regarded as a substitute for or symbol of something else. Also (esp. in Linguistics and Literary Theory): the process of semantic association involved in producing and understanding a metonymy.
Because the association involved in metonymy is typically by contiguity rather than similarity, metonymy is often contrasted with metaphor.

Wikepedia’s definition is a little clearer, although I’m not sure that it’s better, which is worrisome:

Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept. For instance, "London," as the capital of the United Kingdom, could be used as a metonym for its government.

So cleansing is supposed to be a shorthand method of referring to collective identity. But that, of course, makes no sense. So perhaps, annoying git that he is, Bell-Fialkoff is using the term “metonym” as a sort of metaphor. Perhaps his meaning is something along the lines of “We like to make references to groups as if they were monolithic blocks. We use the term ‘Arab’ for example, with reference to a place like Syria, Jordan or Egypt. But the truth is that all these societies contain far more than just Arabs. But we like the shorthand, so collective identity is, in a sense, a metonym for whole societies. Now, ethnic cleansing is supposed to end that state of the collective identity being a metonym. That is, if one weeds out all the individuals who do not meet the identity, then the collective identity is an objective reality and not a metonym anymore. That would at least be comprehensible. Of course, that doesn’t explain why ethnic cleansing is a metonym for collective identity. If you can think of a more literal explanation please do let me know. As is, this is the best I can do.

Titles aside, however, there is barely a reference to ethnic cleansing in the whole chapter, which appears to be nothing other than a typological survey of the different possible forms of identity ranging from ethnicity and religion to gender and sexuality. Occasionally he does discuss how politicized a form of identity can become. For example, he does not believe that feminism will become a basis for an independent state, where ethnicity can. But cleansing doesn’t seem to be in the chapter. This frustrates me greatly, because I feel that reading it is a waste of my time.

That said, he keeps getting cited. So I am going to assume that I need to know the book. Frustration has to be part of the process. So I need to avoid sitting down and doing the book at one time. That will drive me batty. If I spread it out and keep coming back to it as I do other tasks, I will be better able to digest the damn thing.

I’ll then ask Steve how to politely review the book. Yeah, I really hate the book, but I have no reason to hate this man. Sadly, the two are associated willy nilly. The problem is that I’ve found very little that is positive so far, and typically, one has to find something to praise in order to be civil in a book review. I can perhaps gesticulate at a few of the interesting thoughts he rambles about but never develops.

I’m Going to Draft a New Proposal after I’ve Read All the Theory Sections

I had initially thought I would do a complete lit review of both theories and cases and turn it into a 10,000 word review article and then distill that down as a smaller part of a theory chapter. Then I realized that I need a grant. So after I read the theory sections of all the books, I’m going to put a hold on the cleansing-by-cleansing overview of the cases. Instead, I’ll start the grant proposal.

I now despise grant writing because, of all documents, a grant proposal requires the most distillation of the most possible texts and must, ironically, be complete before the product that achieves that distillation. As “distilling in my head” is my greatest challenge as writer now, the genre of the grant proposal is my Achilles’ heel. I despise it above all others.

There is hazard here. I need a new causal model. That model requires a good distillation before I can spell it out. I had hoped to write a theory chapter before I wrote the grant proposal. I have to do the proposal first. This is genuinely frightening to me, as I have failed at this task so many times. But I need money. There’s no way around it.

My current model requires me to know at least two books by Carl Schmitt’s work inside and out. I read and marked up the text of The Concept of the Political several years ago. I still need to convert it into an outline. I need to read and mark-up Political Theology, which is at least already photocopied.

Reading Plan

So my planned reading for the term looks something like this:

Bell-Fialkoff

With all the whining about Bell-Fialkoff both here and on Facebook, you’d think I’d have gotten further. In a sense, I have. I’ve marked up Chapter 3 through p. 85, which means I’ve marked up about 29 pages out of 59. This puts me at roughly the halfway point for the chapter. But even worse than reading abstruse German theory like Hegel is reading someone who has no real idea behind his or her writing. If you suffer with Hegel, you will get something at the end of the day for having mastered the text. All I’ll get from mastering Bell-Fialkoff is the ability to say that I gave him a completely fair shake. That’s really awful motivation. I’d honestly prefer punting the book to being fair to him. That said, I will force myself to read it.

Kaufman

What irritates me about Kaufman is that I distilled him before, but probably didn’t keep the mark-up. So I know how the theory is supposed to “work” (whether it can be said to work is another matter entirely), but I don‘t have the notes for easy citation. Moreover, I distilled him down to what I judged to be the most generous possible reading—a reading that made his theory look as if it were a theory. At the time, I judged that to be rhetorically expedient. It probably still will be, but I don’t have the notes to be able to reconstruct the range of possible readings. Might as well get the homework nailed so I never have to hunt through the text again.

Rae

I discovered Rae at the library the other day. She calls ethnic cleansing “pathological homogenization,” which is why she didn’t show up on my first pass through the databases. I can’t recall how I stumbled across the book. It may have been while looking for reviews for Bell-Fialkoff to see if everyone else hates the book as much as I do. I haven’t read her argument yet, but the book looks interesting. Moreover, she provides case studies, so she gives me more historical fodder for the review of cleansings that will follow the writing of the proposal.

Bulutgil

Sadly, since she doesn’t employ case studies, I may have to read her whole dissertation at a shot, which will make this part of the theory review a bit of work. She’s a fairly clear writer, however, so at least it won’t be a great deal of suffering. I figure at this point, I’ll start with her introduction, her theory chapter and her conclusion and then make a judgment about whether I know enough to give her a place in the quick lit review that is needed for the proposal, the way I would with the case theory books, or whether I must read the whole thing at a single sitting. My guess is it’s going to look and feel a great deal like the famous Fearon and Laitin piece on civil war. It will have the same strengths and the same weaknesses.

Chirot and McCauley

This is the most difficult of the books to survey quickly. It looks as if Chirot and McCauley have engaged the literature thematically, but are not necessarily presenting any new evidence. This means that there is no “evidence” section to survey separately. If I’m to read it, I have to do the whole thing. This makes me wonder if I shouldn’t just start marking this one up now. As this piece seems to be much more of a large-scale critical survey of the literature, reading it in detail might do a great deal to contextualize me into this literature quickly. Still, it’s a whole book at a shot. Looking at it again, I see that there is a chapter that is about pre-modern mass murder. I could always slot that with the chapters from Mann, Bell-Fialkoff and Rae that are pre-modern. So maybe I don’t have to have the whole book at once. Just most of it.

Schmitt

For a German, Carl Schmitt is a very light read. He has a rare gift for being both direct and succinct. The marking up is already done for The Concept of The Political. That first box should already be gold, but I'm too lazy to fix it now. At any rate, The Concept of the Political is remarkably short and should only require a few days to convert into an outline. I’ve never read Political Theology. But there are several external clues in the critical literature that suggest that I’d find it useful.

Reading Sequence from Here

I might start with typing up the outline for The Concept of the Political, just to give myself a feeling of momentum again. Then I could do ten more pages of Bell-Fialkoff. Then do a chapter of Chirot, followed by ten more pages of Bell-Fialkoff, and work my way alternating chapters of Chirot with wretched snippers of Bell-Fialkoff. Hopefully I can then go and clean up through the smaller authors at the end and finally digest Political Theology. We’ll see how it goes.

Out of the Pocket

2010-01-09T18:31:00.000-08:00

After having really taken apart the theory sections of Staub and Mann, I have an emotional barrier to overcome. My initial plan was to plod along methodically and review four more theory sections: (1) Bell-Fialkoff, (2) Kaufman, (3) Chirot and Macauley and (4) Bulutgil. My pace has been slower than I wanted. Yesterday, Ellis suggested that I should move beyond preparing and start writing. Staub and Mann are the two beefiest texts. I’ve done a précis of Kaufman before. This provides three representative samples of three different types of theoretical approach. Moreover, I feel as if my own model is crystallizing in my head after having gone through Staub and Mann, by far the most substantive books in the set.

This makes me wonder if it might not be prudent to consider diverting my attention to writing a new grant proposal. In favor of changing are the following:

I have three rival approaches and I know their theories well. A model is unfolding in my mind. I have the bare requisites.
My problem has been that I have started too late. January is an ideal time to start for the fall.
I seem to be doing better at step by step.
It’s hard to write and teach when you suffer from MS-induced chronic fatigue. With a grant, I could work full time in 2012-2012.
I want to show my committee a tangible item this term.

Drawbacks are:

I’ve been trying to avoid changing patterns when the going gets hard. Remember the whole “‘Institutionalization’ of the Lebanese Republic” paper. As I would encounter failure, I’d change courses, then get discouraged, then punt the project. I’m scared that I’m doing the same thing here.
Of all the actual cases, I’ve only read the Armenian case material. I really want to know a lot more history. On the other hand, at the rate I’m going, I will still blocking and outlining next June.

In the end, this is about trust. I’ve had to try to adapt and have subsequently failed so many times that I want to dig in and just follow the detailed plan as a perfectionist to the bitter end. I want to focus all my efforts on building my offensive line because I want to be safe. I don’t feel like someone who could be an Aaron Rodgers or a Steve Young anymore. Since MS, when that line goes down, I’ve gotten sacked. I don’t trust myself to dance. I like that pocket. I want to know the enemy completely before going in. I don’t trust myself. I used to believe that I could handle anything that got thrown at me. I don’t anymore.

But being a good quarterback requires a certain amount of scrambling. I think the reason I’ve decided to write the proposal is because I need to prove that I can adapt. There are two reasons why my last proposal failed. The first was being too weakly organized. But I’ve been working my ass off in learning how not to choke and to work slowly but steadily. The second is that I was attempting to determine the impact of an independent variable on a dependent variable (consociationalism), instead of trying to theorize the cause of the dependent variable (ethnic cleansing). No, I didn’t write the proposal to look that way, but clearly I wanted to show what consociationalism really did to a state in civil war. As long as I was obsessed with the independent variable, the project had no end of troubles. When I let go and just did a theory of ethnic cleansing, suddenly the project began to shape properly.

I guess what I am trying to tell myself is this time it will be different. Trust yourself. No, I’m not Aaron Rodgers anymore. I can’t be fast and supple. But that old man in Minnesota is still alive and at his age. I want into this game and that means I need a fucking grant. I’m going to do this. Reviewing the rest of the literature will wait.

Review of Mann

2010-01-09T13:47:00.000-08:00

Mann’s overwhelming analytical strength is in his command of his historical cases and his ability to correlate the various types of violence he studies with the social conditions under which they are produced. The book, in my opinion, is likely to be the finest in the set that I’m reading. His cases are what as a debater I was trained to call prima facie cases—cases that from the standpoint of rhetoric are well constructed, cases that at “face value” must stand. If you are to debate Mann’s argument, your major recourse is to return and review the secondary historical texts on which he draws and criticize his cases and argument on the basis of flaws in evidence that you may uncover. If you accept his internal evidence, and at face value, I see no reason to doubt his honesty and thoroughness, the construction of each case is sound, logical, balanced and thorough. He is also a clear writer and, alone among the writers on violence, offers sober and realistic assessments of what interested agents might do to stop ethnic cleansing. I wouldn’t hesitate to assign any part of this book for student reading. Certainly the other authors in the set will have to go to great lengths in order to beat Mann. I admire the book a great deal.

The only weakness I can find is that, by and large, he omits coverage of the psychological literature on violence. I see his argument is more concerned with correlating social structures with violence, rather than understanding why those structures are able to cause the corresponding violence. In all fairness, I believe he would debate this criticism. Without a doubt, I believe he is correct that ethnic cleansing is a modern phenomenon and that the social conditions he describes are strongly correlated with ethnic cleansing. That said, I hold that without understanding the psychology of the rhetoric needed to create and coordinate mass violence, the actual causes of the violence will elude us. Moreover, Mann’s central thesis that ethnic cleansing is the “dark side of democracy” cannot be developed as a critique of liberalism without analyzing the integrating the genuine impact of the ingroup-outgroup distinction on democratic practice.

Mann’s Theses

Mann’s theory takes the form of general predictive hypotheses about ethnic cleansing when it occurs. These are reproduced below:

Thesis 1: Murderous cleansing is the dark side of democracy

This first thesis contains several sub-theses:

Thesis 1a: Murderous ethnic cleansing is a hazard of the age of democracy since amid multiethnicity the ideal of rule by the people began to entwine the demos with the dominant ethnos, generating organic conceptions of the state that encouraged the cleansing of minorities.

Thesis 1b: In modern colonies, settler democracies in certain contexts have been truly murderous, more so than authoritarian colonial governments. The more settlers controlled colonial institutions, the more murderous the cleansing.

Thesis 1c: Regimes newly embarked upon democratization are more likely to commit murderous ethnic cleansing than are stable authoritarian regimes.

Thesis 1d: Stably institutionalized democracies are less likely than either democratizing or authoritarian regimes to commit murderous cleansing.

Thesis 1e: Regimes that are actually perpetrating murderous cleansing are never democratic. Apply these theses beforehand to monitor the state as it becomes less democratic.

The other theses are more simple:

Thesis 2: Ethnic hostility rises where ethnicity trumps class as the main form of social stratification, in the process capturing and channeling classlike sentiments toward ethnonationalism.

Thesis 3: The danger zone of murderous cleansing is reached when (1) movements claiming to represent two fairly old ethnic groups both lay claim to their own state over all or part of the same territory and (2) this claim seems to have substantial legitimacy and some plausible chance of being implemented.

Thesis 4: The brink of murderous cleansing is reached when one of the two alternative scenarios play out: (1) The less powerful side is bolstered to fight rather than to submit (for submission reduces the deadliness of the conflict) by believing that aid will be forthcoming from the outside or (2) the stronger side believes that it has such overwhelming military power and ideological legitimacy that it can force through it own cleansed state at little physical or moral risk to itself.

Thesis 5: Going over the brink into the perpetration of murderous cleansing occurs where the state exercising sovereignty over the contested territory has been factionalized and radicalized amid an unstable geopolitical environment that usually leads to war (political instability is required).

Thesis 6: Murderous cleansing is rarely the original intent of perpetrators.

Thesis 7: There are three main levels of perpetrator. These are: (a) radical elites running party states, (b) bands of militants forming violent paramilitaries, (c) core constituencies providing mass though not majority popular support.

Thesis 8: Ordinary people are brought by normal social structures into committing murderous ethnic cleansing and their motives are much more mundane.

Mann is not pursuing a generalized theory. He argues, “Given the messiness and uniqueness of societies, my theses cannot be scientific laws. They do not even fit perfectly to my case studies.” He sums up his position as follows:

Murderous cleansing is most likely to result where powerful groups within two ethnic groups aim at legitimate and rival states “in the name of the people” over the same territory, and the weaker is aided from the outside. It worsens in the presence of unstable, factionalized party-states. That is the main argument of this book, and it indicates that in explaining this particularly vicious area of human behavior, political power relations are ultimately decisive.

His claim that, “All my cases have peculiarities that I must respect,” is the mark of a good historian, a claim for which, in turn, I have a good measure of respect. Certainly the book is a testament to Mann’s scholarly thoroughness. That said, I am not convinced that a theory of ethnic cleansing cannot be causal, rather than descriptive.

Critique of the Causal Model

While Mann openly stresses that leader decisions are critical causes of ethnic cleansing, he does very little actual theorization the role of agents in his book. His method consists of reviewing the historical narrative of several ethnic cleansings to determine common social conditions that precede ethnic cleansing. This analysis is valuable, but not complete. I believe that psychological insight, specifically a deeper knowledge of how the ingroup-outgroup distinction is activated at times of threat would help make his collection of theses into a more parsimonious and compact theory.

Let’s spend a moment on thesis one. Mann believes that, ironically, given the literature on the democratic peace in international relations and a general belief that liberalism is the panacea for all intolerance, it seems that democracy, particularly weak, unconsolidated democracy, actually seems to be a critical component in the causality of many cleansings. I am more than delighted to grant this. That said, the reasons why this is so are unclear and the effect appears highly inconsistent.

For example, thesis 1a tells us that people have a tendency to confuse the ethnos (an ethnic, organic notion of the people that indicates that the community shares “a common culture and sense of heritage, distinct from other peoples,” (Mann, p. 3) with the demos, a view of the population that sees the community as “the ordinary people” (Mann, p. 3), by which, as far as I can tell, means that it is a collection or more or less atomized individuals who live in a given space. An important characteristic of the common identity of the demos is a capacity to be stratified into interests that are not linked to an idea of separate community. The most important of these is class, but age and gender are important as well. The core idea, however, when contemplating itself, the demos is never divided into communities that can be seen as an ethnos. Ethnic cleansing is always a clash of more than one ethnos (ethnoi?—sorry, my Greek is non-existent). To arrive at ethnic cleansing, people must be in an ethnos “state of mind.”

Mann does not sufficiently explain how one travels between these two interpretive frameworks. To be fair, he does tell us quite a bit. For example, he explains that slower emergence of the nation as a result of slower integration into the world capitalist system leads to a demos self-concept, because ethnic elites can be assimilated into the ethnicity of the dominant ethnic group and slowly integrate lower classes as they become politicized (Mann, pp. 57-60). In contrast, quick integration into the world capitalist system means that ethnic elites will be “captured” by their ethnic subordinates who become politicized too quickly to permit for this slow, top-down integration into a single demos. Conservatives within the various ethnoi will stir up the mobilizing masses and create conflict (Mann, pp. 61-63). Of course, Mann is not the first to tell us this story. We can look at least as far back as Anthony Smith’s Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986) and Leah Greenfeld’s Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (1992) for different parts of this story. And Mann does not explain why individuals who are often confronted with the option of seeing group identity as ethnos or demos will pick one over the other.

The only clue we have is Thesis 2: Ethnic hostility rises where ethnicity trumps class as the main form of social stratification, in the process capturing and channeling classlike sentiments toward ethnonationalism. We know that subsuming class grievance under ethnos, makes ethnic cleansing more likely. We do not know why.

He admits that Thesis 3 does not apply to Holocaust (Mann, p. 503). He simply replies that the Holocaust is the most atypical of the cases and despite its pre-eminent coverage in the literature, should not be viewed as paradigmatic. I think a more logical approach would be to admit that in many cases, leaders must rely on forces other than coercion to gain obedience of the population and staff that are to carry out the cleansing. In the case of Nazi Germany, Hitler had created an ultra-authoritarian state that was responsive to his directives. He did not need to sell a threat anymore. It was sufficient that he believed that “subhumans” were a threat. In short, no ultra-authoritarian state is likely to fit into a paradigm, because any theoretical explanation must look at the structural constraints facing a ruler’s freedom of action. Largely unconstrained rulers, a rare phenomenon to be sure, do what they wish. If you wish to predict what the dictator of an ultra-authoritarian state will do next, you have no recourse but to study the leader.

Mann’s Policy Prescriptions

Mann is alone among those prescribing for policy with respect to preventing cleansing in combining moral sensitivity with pragmatism. His lists a number of suggestions toward the reform of the international system of collective security, the international system of justice and U.S. foreign policy priorities that he immediately admits are “pie in the sky,” (Mann, p. 526). Far more interesting is his constructive suggestion for helping reconstruct post-conflict states. He suggests combining federalism or consociationalism with features that ultimately undermine those provisos in favor of cultivating a demos. Mann argues that acquiring peace very often requires stop-gap measures that end up reinforcing ethnic identity. That said, if electoral incentives are created to undermine guarantees to varying ethnoi by making it possible for politicians to develop cross-ethnos parties that reinforce the demos, then a long-term future may be possible. Finally, Mann is frank that this problem may not survive the 21st century simply because if ethnic cleansing is simply a response to creating “nations” that “fit the states,” we may well arrive at an ethnically cleansed state system by the end of the century. His view is depressing, but realistic.

That said, his causal argument does not explain the inexorability he sees. I see the inexorability, too. I’m rather hoping that I can draw on (1) a psychological knowledge of the political deployment of rhetoric and (2) a better theory of elite action to help explain why.

Lit Review Update 17

2010-01-02T23:36:00.000-08:00

Yeah, buddy! The theory chapters from Mann are done! It took two and a half more hours to type in the blurbs and covert them into an outline. I'll do the math tomorrow for per page production time. Tonight, my brain is tofu!

!I'll do a write-up of the theory portions of Mann tomorrow, too. I probably will hold the colonial chapter and perhaps do them together with the pre-modern cleansings, not because they truly belong together. Rather, I'll throw them together because only Mann and Bell-Fialkoff do a chapter on pre-modern cleansing and I don't think anyone else deals with colonial murder. I should find something on the Belgian slaughter in the Congo under King Leopold. I don't know if I have anything for that under the cases.

Lit Review Update 16

2010-01-02T15:59:00.001-08:00

Plugging away. The mark-up took about five hours, four of which was work and one of which was getting up to make coffee for me and Craig, going to the bathroom and other breaktime. The piece was 28 pages long. So in actual work, I'm marking up at a rate of seven pages an hour. In elapsed time, I'm getting about five and a half. So let's be conservative and estimate five pages an hour. That means 34 hours for Fialkoff, 7 hours for Naimark, 43 hours for Chirot. I'm not sure how to gauge Bulutgil, as she is in double-spaced, twelve-point text (it's her unpublished dissertation). Sweet Lord, I hope my pace picks up! I have 84 hours of mark-up to do and that hasn't calculated in time for typing in the blurbs and outlining.

Those two processes require more thought that you might imagine, even though they are faster. Typing up the margin blurbs usually requires more elaboration on the comments to make certain that they are quickly and easily comprehensible later on. The goal of this exercise is to avoid the need for recontextualization time at all costs! Imposing the outline structure also requires some analytical ability, but it's only here that I often arrive at a clear picture of what the writer was trying to argue, especially when the writer has poor organizational skills. Years ago, Susan Whiting told me, "You have to give each book a fair reading as well as a fair trashing. But the fair reading has to come first." I do hope she will be proud of me. These writers have my undivided attention and pure focus.

I feel that I have some small hope of picking up speed, however. Mann was definitely the most dense of the writers so far. In all fairness, he was also the most rewarding read of the bunch, so far. I'm not looking forward to Bell-Failkoff at all. He seemed to read fairly densely, but I have to say I was underwhelmed by what I read.

I wonder if I can devise a framework for judging textual density and then gauging mark-up time that way? I should keep more data. Neil asked me to make a realistic assessment of my ability to do this job, given my constraints. He didn't say it in a nasty way at all and I seriously appreciate him saying it. I don't know if I'm too slow to make it. But I'm pretty sure that most of my attempts to sample lightly here and there have been partly responsible for why I've been stalled for so long. I can't do the distillation in my head anymore. It all has to show up on paper. That's slow. But what I can do is keep good notes on the process and go back to Steve and Ellis for advice. The more they see, the more realistic their advice can be.

I definitely feel that after this lit review, I'll be able to run a seminar of ethnic cleansing with ease. In a way, that's what keeps me going. This sounds totally geeky, but I want to run a seminar. Most of my comparative seminars were not able to integrate theory and cases. I want to design seminars that do.

Lit Review Update 15

2010-01-02T01:48:00.001-08:00

Amazing how long some of these chapters take. I spent about two hours typing in blurbs and another two hours imposing the outline structure on the typed-up blurbs. This is a particularly dense chapter, but still, my method is clearly time-intensive.

I'm trying hard to make sure I do dissertation work every day. I had to get together a syllabus for the Antioch class and that took some time today as well. I have a huge challenge ahead of me this term. I have a good deal of class prep and need to keep chugging on the dissertation. I'd hoped to have the lit review done by the time school starts. It's clear that was too ambitious. I'm now hoping to have all the material converted to outlines and the lit review written by the end of term. So much for my theory chapter. I'm hoping that my attempt to document all of this will allow me, for the first time since I arrived in Seattle, to start making realistic estimates of production time. If I can develop predictable work estimates, I will have done a great deal to restore some sense of self-esteem and self-confidence to the process of writing.

I'm facing an enormous challenge this term, due to my exceptionally heavy teaching load. I'm a TA for three sections of Ellis' POL S 331 and I'm teaching a course at Antioch. The UW and Antioch are on the same week schedule for their quarter systems this term. I'm giving the Antioch class a single writing assignment that has two drafts. This means grading for Antioch starts early in Week 10. When I see Ellis' syllabus, I'll have a clearer idea of my grading load. I've done Ellis' 331 before and I've done my Antioch class in another form at Green River. Still, both were a long while ago and I have incomplete notes. I will need prep time.

If I can write the lit review this term and pull my family out of our financial hole, I really can be proud of how far I've come over the past few years. If...

Lit Review Update 14

2009-12-29T19:23:00.001-08:00

Christmas was really bad for productivity. I'd hoped to have more done by now. Still, I haven't given up the ship. I just need to keep plugging away. I have done other work in the meanwhile, mostly for the Antioch class, but I hate falling behind on this. My dissertation has to be priority.

Mann's Chapter 4 really is more case than it is theory. I just don't have any more colonial cases in the remainder of the books. I may throw it in with the "Early Ethnic Cleansing" chapters in Mann and in the Bell-Fialkoff book. It probably won't go in the theory section of the lit review. This chapter was pretty heavy. The mark-up took me about five hours. So I'm moving at nine pages an hour or so. I think that's right. I need to time myself next time. And that wasn't without interruption. But my focus wouldn't be that much better if I weren't interrupted. I'm not the worker I used to be.

Plug and chug. Gotta plug and chug.

Lit Review Update 13

2009-12-24T01:52:00.001-08:00

Slowly but surely.

Lit Review Update 12

2009-12-23T17:04:00.000-08:00

In a sense, it's harder to argue with a text that you actually like. Certainly, I find Mann much more engaging than Staub, especially when it comes to empirical analysis. His weakness so far is that he's not as good a theorist as he is an empiricist. While he's boundlessly more organized than Staub (not necessarily an achievement, but let's give credit where credit is due--he's about as together as we might expect from a solid academic writer), his theory is not as well-distilled as it might be. I'm about three pages into his second chapter. It looks like a normative theory developed from and given in conjunction with an empirical account of the development of democracy in Western Europe. The writing is very breezy and, naturally, as the subject is quite thorny, the text has already raised a few red flags. I don't think he sees concepts as clearly as he should if he is to understand the full consequences of his argument. It's still early, however. He may yet bowl me over. Mann definitely keeps me quite interested. He's a good deal more fun than Staub.

Quick Notes on Staub

2009-12-19T21:36:00.000-08:00

First, it’s always important to judge a book by its cover, so let’s consider what really counts—the title. The Roots of Evil is fairly quotidian in comparison with Chirot and McCauley’s delightfully effusive choice of Why Not Kill Them All?, but certainly it’s far catchier than anything I’ve dreamed up. Hemmingway used to leaf through the Bible to find titles when he was drawing blanks. Perhaps I’ll do the same. I wonder if I might find something creative in military memoirs? Something with blood and passion, and yet a sense of humor. Perhaps I can find something with a Desperate Housewives feel to it? Something akin to Gretchen’s splendid Better Homelands and Watchtowers.Obviously I’m not going to leave the reader uplifted; it’s just not that kind of book. That said, Shakespeare always had some comic relief in his darker tragedies, and I feel the right title might serve to punch up this otherwise morbid subject.

What would Marc Cherry do? Better, what would Bree Hodges do? That woman can slap an upbeat façade on any situation. This is exactly the sort of sensibility I need.

At any rate, we can’t dwell on aesthetics forever. Staub does have a theoretical approach that we ought to consider. He’s a psychologist. And indeed, the theory portion of the book is a fantastic review of a great deal of psych literature. I’ve pulled up a few items to read later in the day. His basic argument is that ethnic cleansing is caused when (1) the psychology of living through hard times meets (2) a culture conducive to outgroup derogation that serves to target frustration, (3) leaders willing to command the use the technique with followers sufficiently disciplined to use it and (4) a lack of external intervention.

The Psychology of Living Through Difficult Times

While Staub does mention that people must feel threatened for this technique to be used, he seems very committed to a real experience of widespread suffering for the technique to make sense. I tend to think that phrase “threat perception” works better, as I believe that clever leaders can manufacture the perception of threat where actual threat may not exist and that plain bad luck can also lead to this perception in the absence of any real threat. To Staub’s credit, he does mention threat several times. Yet, the text makes clear that is looking for “hard times” akin to his master case of Nazi Germany. Certainly, the Weimar Republic is rather well-known for its hard times. Few could imagine it an upbeat and secure environment in which to have lived. There are least, we must give him his hard times.

The idea is that people experience threat due to hard times and instinctively seek self-protection, both of the body and of the constructed self (of identity). Indeed, trauma theory gives us good reason to argue that individuals may often not only mistake the constructed self for the physical self, but actually will, on occasion, place the survival of the constructed self above the physical self (i.e. martyr themselves rather than give up their self-concept).

The types of threat that Staub is concerned with are collective threats, and it turns out that experiencing threat collectively has a dynamic that differs from experiencing threat alone. First, when one experiences threat, one becomes more pro-ingroup and have a greater need for ingroup connection. When the source of threat can be targeted to an outgroup, members of the ingroup become hostile to the outgroup. A combination of two phenomena make groups likely to support genocide. The first is “scapegoating”—a strategy of reassuring oneself of one’s own agency by blaming a convenient other for whatever bad times one is experiencing. The other is “just world thinking” in which individuals believe that the suffering of others exists because, by and large, it is deserved.

By far, his comprehensive review of elements in the psychology literature on bias and how these elements come into play during political conflict is by far the most useful contribution Staub makes. He is unique among the other authors in this literature review in his attention to the micro and macro psychological issues involved in genocide.

Culture Conducive to Outgroup Derrogation

I’m less impressed by his analysis of cultural causes of genocide. I have always disliked “cultural” analysis because many analysts who use the concept revel in its vagueness. They believe strongly that one must immerse oneself in the given culture and, once one has a feel for the culture, one can speak about it with some authority. I cannot trust this approach. I tend to prefer a clear indication of a specific norm that is causal. I want to know the genealogy of that norm and see some sort of measure of how widespread that norm might be in a given time and place. Moreover, I would like a clear indication that the norm is causal. Staub does mention that “Unproductive research approaches and excessive initial expectations have reduced interest in the notion of national character,” (p. 51) but then goes on to mention that many psychologists (Milgram, Maslow, Beatrice and John Whiting, etc.) have nonetheless found uses for culture. That said, he makes no discussion of the proper method by which norms or symbols can be isolated as a variable.

I’m afraid that this lack of sophistication shows. He likes to talk about “monolithic” as opposed to “pluralist” cultures. He conflates cultural diversity with political freedom and cultural uniformity with authoritarianism. He believes that pluralist societies are more likely to act to prevent ethnic cleansing, offering no evidence to support his claim. In his study of the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, he calls the Ottoman Empire a monolithic culture, a claim that, to be frank, is ludicrous. I am not particularly convinced that any culture is intrinsically authoritarian or, for that matter, democractic. My instinct is that his cases will find authoritarian, monolithic culture wherever he needs to find it.

Leaders Willing to Use the Technique

Staub does admit that understanding leaders is important for understanding genocide. That said, he laments that the Nuremburg trials were a missed opportunity to advance the study of the genocidal leader’s mind. His preference is to look at followers and make inferences about leaders from studying the followers. While I don’t doubt looking at antisocial behavior and “fanaticism” might help us understand leaders, he doesn’t seem concerned with looking at anything as mundane as biography. Again, here we mostly see psychological analysis of what helps individuals kill other people. I found the lit survey useful. But he never goes beyond surveying the psych literature. I anticipate that the cases are going to show a lack of historiographical sophistication.

A Lack of External Intervention

I do think that external pressure might help stop nefarious plans for genocide. That said, Staub really doesn’t offer any evidence to support this claim. He simply asserts it. He is also actively interested in creating a more caring, pluralistic world rich in “transcendence opportunities” and run by “compassionate institutions” as the solution to avoiding further genocide. Further, people should become less materialistic. The notion that even the wealthiest democracies in the world seem to have fallen short of these goals and that most of the world is not likely to witness anything like the idealized society that he describes does not seem to dawn on Staub. His grasp of the political is weak at best.

Scientific Ethical Neutrality and Moral Argument

Topics like genocide and ethnic cleansing are especially thorny ones for a social scientist to tackle. Social science as a technique rests on ethically neutral interpretation of social action. Genocide, however, is viewed ethically as a crime of the most grievous order. Presenting an ethically neutral argument about this sort of topic requires great consideration of matters of tone. Moreover, simply dropping ethical considerations is not an option. All knowledge is intended for a knower who may likely be called to act upon the knowledge the scientist provides. It seems to me unconscionable to create knowledge and not address the moral implications of that knowledge, especially on an issue of the highest moral gravity.

Yet, it seems to me equally unconscionable not to separate the tasks of the scientist and the citizen and make clear to the reader when one is engaged in the tasks appropriate to the former and when to the latter. Staub, however, does not “change hats” if you will, when speaking as scientist and citizen. This is quite clear at the beginning of the book, when he describes evil not as a question of moral intention, but rather as an empirical category, comprising “the destruction of life, dignity, happiness and the capacity to meet basic needs” (p. 25). Genocide is studied as a crime with the full presumption of the moral meaning of the act. Staub also designs his theory to maintain accountability. Evil can be found in leaders, peoples and cultures and must be found accountable in all three. He is particularly concerned with he seems to believe is the nascent desire for people in hard times to throw themselves into a totalizing identity, abdicating their individual moral accountability. I must admit, I find his moral views naïve.

On the whole then, the book is good for its psychological lit review. He makes a poor historian and a poor political scientist.

Lit Review Update 11

2009-12-18T20:24:00.000-08:00

I’m delighted to say that I have finished reviewing the theoretical portions of Staub’s The Roots of Evil. I’ll pick him up again as I wind my way through the cases.

Next on the menu, Mann.

Lit Review Update 10

2009-12-15T15:08:00.000-08:00

I realized that when I made the table originally, I have accidentally skipped to the end of Chapter 6 and thought that it was the end of Chapter 5. I've separated the two chapters. I knocked out Chapters 6 and 15 today. Two more to go.

I'm half tempted to punt the last two chapters and move on to the next author. I photocopied the theory chapters from Mann already. I could easily move on. Chapter 16 in Staub looks like it will be a totally gratuitous chapter that reads something like, "See, now that I've read all this psych, I can not only explain genocide, but knock out the cause of war in a single chapter." [Flex intellectual muscles here]. The last chapter looks more useful. I'll probably try slogging through them both tomorrow. I have real life crap to do this afternoon.

So much of coping with my version of MS is, like the recalcitrant algebra student, learning not to skip steps. I used to be good at distilling knowledge accurately and quickly in my mind. Take out that RAM chip though, and all you can do is chip away at it.

Writing is now baseball. It's stats and averages and chipping away at it quietly. I've got to learn to see the joy in it.

NOTE: I think I may just punt the last two theory chapters from Staub. Skimming through, there doesn't seem to be much there. I'll check again in the morning when my head is clearer.

Lit Review Update 9

2009-12-12T19:05:00.000-08:00

Three more theory chapters from Staub to go. Then we move on to the theory of the next book, which is Naimark. He's an historian and doesn't really have a theory. But to the extent that each author has a generalizable view, I want to know it. Then I figure we make a list of ethnic cleansings that each writer brings up and pull in all source material about that incident from the other books and few others besides.

I figure that the lit review should have a section going over their overviews. Then, I should go cleansing by cleansing. The finished product should give the reader both a clear idea of the state of the social sciences on ethnic cleansing and a quick comparative look at some of the most important cleansings of the past century. All of this, naturally, should pave the way for my book. After all, that's what a lit review is almost always about.

It's a rather vain business I find myself in. The things we do to stay a teacher...

Lit Review Update 8

2009-12-11T22:27:00.000-08:00

UGH. Too tired to keep plugging away tonight. More forthcoming.

Lit Review Update 7

2009-12-10T19:08:00.001-08:00

Since I don't really need my laptop to teach when I'm a TA (no lecture = no powerpoint), I often just bring material to mark-up during the gap between my sections. It's easier than hauling and setting up my laptop to work. So today, I finished marking up Chapter 4 of Staub.

Staub is one of those "throw the kitchen sink at 'em" kinds of writers. He spits out endless detail with lackluster organization. Why pick a causal factor? Throw in anything at all that might be causal. He assumes that if he pumps out enough information, like a machine gunner, he'll eventually hit the target. Who cares which bullet was the right one, so long as the target is dead? I feel riddled with bullets.

Tonight, I'll see if I can finish off the outline for at least one of these chapters.

Lit Review Update 6

2009-12-09T21:15:00.000-08:00

Lit Review Update 5

2009-12-09T17:30:00.000-08:00

Pluggin' away.

Lit Review Update 4

2009-12-02T19:36:00.000-08:00

I’ve realized that I’m going about this all wrong. I’m going to hold off on generating that blog entry for the Armenian Genocide. It doesn’t make sense to start there, just because I’m done with note-taking for it. That’s the old Talal, trying to go for a quick kill, trying to create the all-important feeling of momentum. This is baseball, not football. There is no momentum. It’s antithetical to the game. It’s about stringing together small actions into a larger sequencing structure. It’s about statistical consistency, not momentum and passion.

I need to look at the bigger project. The truth is that I don’t have a mechanism for evaluating the three accounts of the Armenian Genocide that I’ve read, because I really haven’t done much with the theories in defense of which the original texts were written (when there was a theory—Naimark is a descriptive historian). I need to have each theorist very clearly spelled out in my mind. Then, I can evaluate how each theorist does with respect to each case.

Second, I’m starting a literature review that I will use in the theory chapter. This isn’t the theory chapter. I can’t keep thinking I can just distill as much as I need out of the source material and create a complex but compact document. That would require a great deal of short-term recall. I’ll get lost and the whole thing will fall apart. I need to write a lit review, then distill that written review to create part of the theory chapter. No skipping steps. In the process, I’ll read a lot about several ethnic cleansings.

So theorists we’re looking at will be: Ervin Staub, Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, Stuart Kaufman, Michael Mann and Zeynep Bulutgil. Two historical tours of ethnic cleansings, by Norman Naimark and Benjamin Lieberman will help provide case material. We’ll read through the theory chapters for each, and then go through the case chapters cleansing by cleansing. If I find shorter historical chapters that aren’t in these sources, I’ll include them in the case analysis, but I’m not going to run out and get books. This lit review has to be written by January.

Tomorrow evening, we start with the theory chapters from Staub.

Grading!

2009-12-02T17:16:00.001-08:00

Grading was actually done in the wee hours of the morning on December 1. After pushing so hard, I naturally crashed afterward and only posted it now. Now back to the write-up for the Armenian genocide.

Grading!

2009-11-30T19:57:00.001-08:00

Damn, this is dragging on. I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Grading!

2009-11-29T20:07:00.001-08:00

Ugh. I hate being behind. The essays are always a bitch.

Grading!

2009-11-27T09:46:00.000-08:00

I'm not even going to feel slightly glum over needing to crash for the next four days on grading. I was very productive dissertation-wise last week. So I'm going to make breakfast, hit the gym, shower and then do the short answers today. Essays always take more time, so they get Saturday and Sunday. I'll plug, chug and print on Monday, return the papers on Tuesday. So let it be written; so let it be done!

Lit Review Update 3

2009-11-25T18:13:00.000-08:00

The Naimark chapter went by fairly quickly. I need to start grading now. Then I'll do a quick write-up on the Armenian genocide. Look for that early next week. Then, on to Nazi Germany.

Lit Review Update 2

2009-11-23T17:11:00.000-08:00

I'm starting the Naimark tonight. I got all the Nazi case material copied this morning at school.

Lit Review Update 1

2009-11-22T19:19:00.000-08:00

Both of the Armenia chapters in Mann are done. In the next few days I need to finish the Naimark and the Staub chapters (both much shorter and less detailed than even a single Mann chapter). Then I’ll do an intermediate write-up for the blog and move on to the Nazis.

Starting a Lit Review

2009-11-16T19:02:00.000-08:00

My time in Tel Aviv has dealt me a significant reversal. I’ve had to punt on my old thesis. I initially thought that Lebanon’s consociational constitution served to accentuate confessional identity in Lebanon, making it easier to objectify people. As objectifying people is a requisite for killing them, I postulated that in a civil war, Lebanon was more likely to have ethnic cleansing than Jordan. Jordan, after all, has spent most of its history denying any identity differences between its citizens. Sadly, the samples I was able to photograph from an-Nahar don’t back me up. In the few years prior to the outbreak of the Lebanon 1975-1990 Civil War, I found only one headline that dealt with confessional identity. This was a purely administrative article announcing that the Druze personal court would open two weeks later than the other person courts that legal season. The predominant local identities were all economic: workers, teachers, unionists, etc. In contrast, a few days after the `Ayn Rumaniyyeh Massacre, the papers began talking about Christian parties. As far as I can see, ethnicity is salient only after the war begins.

My goal is to have a new theory chapter by New Year’s Day. Ideally, I can convert that into a proposal, but I want the theory chapter first. Proposals have proven more difficult for me until I have a clear picture of the project. So let’s build the theory chapter. The goal is to map it thoroughly. I need to acknowledge that I can’t allow my brain to organize spontaneously behind my imagination. I am no longer capable of thinking at several levels simultaneously. I can get all the divine influence the muses want to send me and the truth is that I can’t channel it all. I simply cannot organize it quickly enough for it "flow" from me. I can only manage the flow of imagination in dribs and drabs. Writing cannot be ecstatic or charismatic anymore. I have to force myself to plod without getting depressed and without losing focus. Writing isn’t ecstasy anymore. I have to find some reason to like it again.

The most difficult part of every theory chapter is damned lit review. So let’s make a laundry list of what we need:

I’m hoping the strength of my interpretive approach will be clear when I go over the largely contradictory literature on ethnic cleansing. Most of these models are attempts at being necessary and sufficient models. I need to review these works and show their shortcomings.
A review of the psychological problems, particularly the ingroup/outgroup dynamics, associated with killing as a task.
Material to draw on that demonstrates the normative problems of dealing with ethnic cleansing as a topic. I need to find pieces that I don’t like because they are so focused on morally condemning the act of ethnic cleansing that they can’t be troubled to understand it.
Part of my argument suggests that ethnic cleansing is rare enough an activity that making a statistical model would be difficult Some people have taken this tack, but I’m not sure that it’s true. I need to know this literature.

So I'll go in order, find pieces for each part and report back here. Let's see how it goes. I warned anyone who might be reading that this is the most boring blog ever.

A Note to My Committee

2009-09-05T08:02:00.000-07:00

Esteemed Committee Members,

Shabat Shalom from Tel Aviv! My partner Craig suggested that I actually write and tell you that I’m here, trying to gather a newspaper sample for my dissertation. This seemed wise, as I only had a chance to talk to Ellis about it before I left. Craig and I arrived about a week ago. I have spent my weekdays at the Arab Press Archive at Tel Aviv University.

The plan, you may recall, was to collect a sample of 2400 articles, 300 for before both civil wars, 300 for during and 300 for after. Each packet of 300 was to he half domestic policy articles and half were to be domestic policy editorials. I rigged a fun method that did not use a flash that I hoped would allow me to get a massive article dump while I was here. That mechanism, if you’re curious, is depicted at this link.

The Problem of Acquiring the Sample

Sadly, they are as intolerant of non-flash lighting as they are of flash lighting (although, curiously they allow photocopying and scanning, which also uses light) and have express rules against copying a whole page at a time. After a (nonetheless very pleasant) week here, it is apparent that my dream of doing a massive sample absorption that I can sort out once I get home is simply not going to happen. I have to select the articles and copy them while here. I’ll get the build-up to each civil war before I return to Seattle if I’m lucky. I’m going to have come back. This means that I still need to learn how to write an effective grant application before I graduate.

The Problem of Editorials

But other difficulties arisen. Empirical reality is regrettably messy. My initial plan was to look at domestic policy pieces and (1) tally how often pieces discuss community identity as opposed to sub-group identity and (2) look for objectifying language, outgroup derogation, etc. The problem is that I was very naïve in assuming that there would actually be domestic news and domestic policy editorials. This is not really the case in Jordan. I’ve read through several issues of ad-Difa`, a privately held Jordanian daily. Ad-Difa` doesn’t really cover much local news. Most news articles and virtually all editorials are foreign policy pieces.

What domestic pieces exist fall into three clear genres: (1) The Royal Watch Piece (i.e. the King or Prince Hassan Went Here and Did This Today—Isn’t That Exciting?), (2) The Development Narrative Piece (i.e., the government has built new roads and/or is trying to improve public education) or (3) General Announcements (people’s marriages, deaths, the names of all the students in the country who passed their tawjihi, etc.). There are occasional pieces associated with local government. What seems conspicuously lacking is really, any reference to conflict at the domestic level. Society, to the extent that society is depicted at all, it is, by and large, depicted as unified and unproblematic. Now, it’s not Syria. No one here is being made the mouth ridiculous truisms, i.e. “Hafiz al-Asad is nation’s best pharmacist” or show up in mass demonstrations chanting what they do not believe. Nonetheless, the country will have a civil war in 1970 and there is no trace of dissent in the news of 1967 and 1968.

Now, while ad-Difa` is a privately owned paper, it is one of the few privately owned papers that survived the 1967 War and did this mostly by toeing the government line. I imagine that, when I get to it, ad-Dastur, the state organ, is going to look a lot like ad-Difa`. Ad-Difa` certainly looks like recent copies of the English-language daily The Jordan Times. You can check them out at this link. It's depressing how little has changed.

I think the media in Jordan reflects a government line. It’s not Syria, don’t get me wrong. They don’t simply fabricate news. A limited civil society exists in Jordan. Public opinion is a limit of sorts on the monarchy. But clearly public discourse is limited and, ideally, the state shapes the discourse and not vice versa. It is clearly the intent of the state that most citizens be depoliticized. Pan-Arab issues such as the Arab-Israeli conflict probably distract from domestic policy and serve to unify the citizens the way local sports coverage unifies the fans.

While I haven’t started sampling it yet, I’ve looked through an-Nahar, one of Lebanon’s most famous newspapers. The editorials do occasionally talk about something other than foreign policy, although foreign policy is a great cause célèbre in Beirut, too. Nonetheless, domestic policy news pieces show up by page 2. Moreover, there is conflict. Lebanese politicians do have at one another. For what it’s worth, politicians are making consistent appeals for public support. An-Nahar does contain occasional domestic editorials, but these are more sparse. I don’t think I can get one from every issue I randomly sample.

I had initially wanted to include editorials because I thought that the language might get more objectifying there. But that will never happen in Jordan, which never disembarks from the unity bandwagon. Given these difficulties, unless any of you can suggest why I should keep them, I think I want to punt on editorials and focus on news coverage. I think my best shot at p<0.05 is in having a 300 article sample for each period. I think the genres are different enough that I'll skew the outcome if I make a single, split sample. Doing a sample of 300 each for each period is unrealistic, given my working constraints. Please tell me what you think.

The Structure of Civil Society and Its Impact on the Model

One of the elements that I find more difficult to deal with in this project is the conception of civil society. I talk about two methods of recognition. The first is consociational, where sub-groups are formally recognized as equal but separate communities. The second is universal, in which all individuals within the state are recognized as equal individuals without reference to other forms of identity. But both the United States and Jordan use the universal recognition. Their civil societies, however, are very different.

During my prospectus defense, Steve asked me if my theory could explain ethnic cleansing in Stalinist Russia. After a few months of reflection, I realized that my theory wasn’t particularly helpful for understanding ethnic cleansing in ultra-authoritarian states, because in those states a single leader had so much power that the decision to perform ethnic cleansing is essentially the personal decision of a largely unconstrained leader. That said, the more the political sphere was open to the participation of multiple persons, the more useful my theory would be. Simply put, my theory rests on the assumption that leaders have to “sell” something like ethnic cleansing to their followers. While civil war is indeed a time of crisis in which the usual rules do not apply, I’ve held that the “normal” condition is sort of an anchor for behavior. Yes, you exceed the normal during a civil war, but those actions are constantly judged against the normal. So the more power in the ruler’s hands, the more ethic cleansing is a personal preference and the less the recognition narrative matters. The more power is enmeshed in a civil society that requires consent, the more the recognition narrative matters, as the leader must be seen to live out the narrative.

After seeing the newspapers, I’ve wondered if Jordan is too authoritarian to be a viable model. Jordan does formally recognize citizens as equal individuals. But Jordan’s civil society is not exactly free or open, either. It may well be that Jordan doesn’t participate in ethnic cleansing because the king is very powerful and he personally isn’t into ethnic cleansing. That said, he won the civil war, but barely. He isn't powerful enough to be an al-Asad or a Saddam. Moreover, there have been other crises such as the 1989 fuel riots that forced a short-run pluralization in the state. While Jordan doesn’t have many policy debates, it does have a civil society that is occupied by more than just the king. I still balk at classifying it with Syria or Ba`thist Iraq. I feel that I can still sell this.

Any feedback? I could really use some.

Cheers!

Talal

The Problem of Jordanian Editorials

2009-09-02T09:55:00.000-07:00

Ugh. More sampling issues. I just finished polling editorials from ad-Difa` in post-war 1967. Virtually none of them deal with domestic issues. And ad-Difa` is the privately owned newspaper. Of course, it is a privately owned newspaper that survived the post-’67 War establishment of martial law by toeing the government line. I did not anticipate this in my research design. Reality is fuckin’ messy.

This makes me wonder if I should tally editorials together with articles at all. Right now, I am sampling the top domestic policy article (usually short and buried somewhere after p. 3 of a six-page newspaper). If there are no domestic policy editorials to sample, should I allow them to be tallied together? My target was a combined 300 pieces per survey, as that is the most likely minimum number to give me p ≤ 0.05. If I can't combine them as a single survey, then I'd need to do a separate 400-piece survey for each. I really can’t envision doing 300 articles and 300 editorials for each period, with six total periods. I need to graduate. Should I just dump the editorials?

I guess I need to start looking at Lebanon. I need to know the look and feel of a Lebanese paper before I can make a decision.

Sampling Issues

2009-09-01T06:17:00.000-07:00

Kirk sent me an e-mail asking about my sampling issues. I thought I might start writing about them here. To see the problem, you’ll need to know a bit about my argument.

What The Hell Are You Trying to Prove?

Er, test. We never prove. We only test hypotheses. My dissertation is a theory about ethnic cleansing during civil war. I argue that places that recognize sub-group identity and lend it legitimacy by granting it representation are more likely to wind up with ethnic cleansing during a civil war than are places where sub-group identity is officially ignored and the state pretends that society is composed of atomized individuals. The logic behind my thinking is that human moral sensibilities are inherently context-driven. Very few people believe that any specific act is universally wrong or right across time and space. We look to context to determine what actions are appropriate in given circumstances.

Killing someone is always a difficult act for individuals who are not psychopaths. To kill someone requires objectification. For a normal person to kill someone, you can’t stop and think, “This guy is just some other guy like me. He’s a human being who had a mother, too.” You can’t pull the trigger. You have to objectify them. You can’t view them as the same as you.

In countries where sub-group identities are a daily part of the deal, individuals spend most of their day “slotting” people. They are always conscious of out-group identity. When you spend all day slotting people as a matter of business, then you get used to it. This makes objectification easier. Moreover, your moral obligations within civil society are constructed as being different toward different people based on group identity. In countries where the government doesn’t operate under the assumption that everyone belongs to a group and that is the natural way to do business, there exists a polite public fiction that everyone is the same and differentiating between groups is rude. That fiction serves as a barrier of sorts for ethnic cleansing. If you’re already divvying everyone up into in-group and out-group all day long, you’re a step closer to the sort of objectification needed to kill. It’s an easier sell for politicians who need your support.

The Jordanian Civil War didn’t have ethnic cleansing. The Lebanese Civil War did. Both civil wars had similar causes—the destabilizing presence of armed Palestinian guerrillas. Levantine Arabs are very culturally similar. Jordanians and Palestinians are for all intents and purposes the same people. Same dialect, same food, there was no distinction between them at all prior to the British drawing a line between then in 1921. There’s a little more cultural distinction between Lebanese and Palestinians/Jordanians. But not much. So virtually everything is the same except the state and its system for recognition. Lebanon distinguishes between groups. The whole system is built on it. Jordan doesn’t formally distinguish between groups. The whole system is built on pretending there's no difference. So we have a natural experiment of sorts.

How Are You Going to Prove (er,Test) It?

Well, the lack of ethnic cleansing in the Jordanian civil war is a matter of record. Yes, civilians got killed, no one claims it wasn’t bloody, but these were mostly collateral damage in an attempt to root out the guerrillas. Jordan did not become Rwanda. Ethnic cleansing begins in Lebanon almost immediately after Ayn Rumaniyya. We can draw on secondary historical sources for evidence.

The question is finding a way to trace the causality. There’s a lot of psych stuff I can draw on. Moreover, there’s media stuff I can use to show how the press shapes public discourse and how the state creates the framework of basic assumptions the media run with. But what I need to prove is that public discourse in Jordan and Lebanon are shaped the way that I say that they are. So for this, I am gathering a sample for what is called a content analysis, a statistical study of the properties of given texts.

On the basis of my argument, I make the following predictions about Jordan and Lebanon newspapers from the period:

At all times discourse about domestic politics in Lebanon will make more references to sub-groups and fewer references to Lebanese as a whole than in Jordan.
In both countries, we should see a rise on objectifying language used to describe sub-groups the closer we get to civil war, sustained objectifying language during the civil war and a slow decline in objectifying language after civil war.
Nonetheless, the extent of objectifying language will remain lower in Jordan during all three periods

The Sampling Problem

I have selected two major newspapers for each country that were in publication prior to, during and after the civil war. For Jordan, I selected ad-Difa` (The Defense) and ad-Dastur (The Constitution). For Lebanon, I selected an-Nahar (The Day), al-Hayat (Life) and as-Safir (The Ambassador). I spent some time with an online calculator that suggested to me that with a sample of 300 articles, I could probably get the coveted p=<0.05. So for each period (before, during and after the civil war), I will sample 300 articles, for a total of 2400 coded articles for the damned project. Half of each sample will be domestic politics news articles (150) and half will be domestic politics editorials (150). This way, there is a chance that I can differentiate between the two genres, as I imagine the more objectifying language will crop up in the editorials.

I’ve just surveyed the Arab Press Archive’s holdings for ad-Difa` and ad-Dastur from the dates June 21, 1967 (the day after the loss of the 1967 War) to August 31, 1970 (the day before the start of the Jordanian Civil War). This period contains a total of 1,168 days. Both dailies publish every day of the week including Friday, so we should expect both papers to have that many issues. The Arab Press Archvie has 804 issues of ad-Difa` from this period, 68.84 percent of the estimated population, and 722 issues of ad-Dastur, 61.82 percent of the estimated population.

My first problem is whether I should take 150 articles and 150 editorials from a combined pool of 1,526 issues of both papers combined, or if I should sample 75 articles and 75 editorials from ad-Difa` and 75 articles and 75 editorials from ad-Dastur. Ad-Difa` is a privately held paper that had its origins in the Palestine Mandate, but was published from Amman after 1948. Ad-Dastur is a government-run Jordanian newspaper. These two papers had the highest circulation in Jordan at the time. As ad-Dastur is a state newspaper and the Hashemites were avid state builders, you would expect it to virtually never distinguish between Transjordanians and Palestinians. Ad-Difa` would be more likely to not toe the line, but it’s important to note that the papers survival in the period we are studying rests on it not rocking the boat too much.

So should I split the sample, or take from a pool? Right now, I’m splitting the sample. Kirk said he’d look at what I’m doing and give advice, as his work often rests on getting random samples. Anyone who wants to pipe in is more than welcome.

Reading through al-Difa`

One of the things I’ve noticed as I read through al-Difa` is it’s genuine lack of domestic political coverage. Granted, I’m reading September 1967 right now, so you would expect foreign policy to predominate. Jordan has just lost a war and the whole West Bank in the process. Domestically, you would expect little participation. Jordan is under martial law. But still, I’m floored by just how few articles deal with domestic issues. I expected sub-group references to be muted. But to be honest, reference to even a general public is muted. The press in Jordan so far seems to represent to the public what the state is doing. The public itself isn’t really covered. It reminds me of Habermas' description of the Château de Versailles, with the whole point of the edifice being to represent the king's power to the people, not the people's opinion to the king. I think of Gretchen working at King Abdullah II’s press office and rather wonder about her take on this. It also makes me think of Ellis' fun class studying Arab monarchy by reading Shakespeare, as those plays are a good English source for understanding monarchy. I wonder if Jordan being a monarchy might undermine the comparison I'm drawing. Still, Jordan isn't Syria.

Lebanese politicians, spewers of endless bullshit that they are, nonetheless address constituencies. I’m not seeing much of this in the Jordanian press as I read.

2009-06-20T10:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, I've been feeling better physically. Let's see if that can translate into real work.

I did a lot of brainstorming on "Faith, Epistemology and the Ideal-Type of the Sacred" last term. I realized I had two problems. The first was that, prior to MS, I had gotten used to being good enough that I could skip steps, like a smart algebra student. It had been so long since I'd done the steps, I'd forgotten there were steps. I kept trying to solve problems in my head. What I realized was that I did know the steps. I basically ask myself the same questions I ask students to help them flush an idea out of their minds.

The second problem is the cause of the first. The reason I could do it all in my mind is because I had more working memory. I could ask a question, remember it while I answered it, keep the answer in my mind, criticize it by asking a new question, rinse, lather repeat. That required me to hold a question in my mind and then answer it. Writing the question down allowed me to look at the question, so I didn't have to keep it in my recall. Rather, it was in my recall, but seeing it was a constant reminder that refreshed my recall whenever it started to sputter. Sadly, that happens all the time. I could focus most of my working memory on answering the question. Writing the answer allowed me to criticize it without holding it in working memory the same way. Basically, the trick is to do your dialectical thinking on paper or the screen. SHOW YOUR WORK. DON'T SKIP STEPS. Welcome back to fuckin' algebra.

So I think I solved the problems of the paper last term. When I was timelining last year, a progress chart helped keep me on track. Let's see what it does this year.

Facing Down My Demons

2009-04-20T21:42:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, Mary Pepping, a neural psychologist, told me that I was choking. That while the brain damage to my frontal lobes had seriously compromised some of my executive abilities, it was not possible that they had compromised them as badly as they had on the battery of tests she had given me. Simply put, if I was as bad at sorting as the test made me look, there would be no way I could do as well as I did on the parts of the test that I aced. Instead, she suggested that I had "an unwitting tendency to channel somatically my distress at not being able to perform the tasks" at which I am impaired. This is a clinical, perhaps more gentle way of saying that I was choking.

And I have been choking. I have not written a successful paper since the spring of 2005. That paper, while it achieved its goals, at 45 pages at space-and-a-half was far too long. I have been trying to gain control of my writing since, and have failed repeatedly. This has taken a terrible toll on my self respect.

Well, I've learned a lot over the past four years. I've learned about the normal problems of scale that any imaginative graduate student has to conquer. I've learned about my very sad organizational abilities and how to work ways around them. I've learned about my difficulties managing my emotions. So I'm facing down one of my incomplete papers. It's called "Faith, Epistemology and The Ideal-Type of the Sacred," also known as "the Plato-Weber paper." I'm going to try to face this one down. Maybe I'll make it, maybe I won't. But I'm going to try again.

The Newspapers are Still Stored on Paper!

2009-04-17T16:39:00.000-07:00

I finally sent off an e-mail to Haim Gal at the Moshe Dayan Center and just heard back from him. Most of the newspapers in the Arab Press Archive are recorded on paper! I'm really and truly floored. Well, the good news is that I won't have to buy the damned microfilm reader. I think I may have to buy a really good digital camera or two. If I can figure out how these sorts of things might work, Craig and I can photograph the articles.

Trying to Get to the Arab Press Archive

2009-02-16T21:35:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to get back on top of my research efforts again. I really want to graduate. This is a current draft of my proposal. Craig and I are going to try to go to Tel Aviv in September. I'm wondering if it can work that quickly.

Buy a microfilm scanner. These fuckers are expensive (like, $6000 expensive! Plus I need a new laptop to use the damned thing). There are cheaper ones, but they're bulkier and slower. This model I could keep with me on plane. Here's the sales pitch:

Ellis has suggested that I ask Joel Migdal to write a letter of introduction for me to the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. Hopefully, they would issue me a research invitation and this would help me get through my interview with the Shin Bet at Ben Gurion Airport. Craig and I need ticket money (I'm guessing this will cost the two of us about $4000) and then room and board. I'm going to e-mail the Binational Fulbright Commission in Tel Aviv and see if they can recommend something. Alain McNamara, who runs the Binational Fulbright Commission back in Amman used to provide information to other researchers even if they weren't Fulbright Fellows. Perhaps they will be as kind.

I have to keep myself focused and together. That's so damned hard for me. We'll see what can be done.

The New Draft Proposal Is Done

2008-10-27T00:31:00.000-07:00

See? You thought I wasn't working. Well, I was! HA!

A Problem of Inspiration

2008-07-28T00:05:00.000-07:00

This passage in Talal Amin’s essay “What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?” triggered a visceral emotional response in me:

Johann Sulzer, a theorist of the fine arts, wrote in more general terms: “All artists of any genius claim that from time to time they experience a state of extraordinary psychic intensity which makes work unusually easy, images arising without great effort and the best ideas flowing in such profusion as if they were the gift of some higher power. This is without doubt what is called inspiration. If an artist experiences this condition, his object appears to him in an unusual light; his genius, as if guided by a divine power, invents without effort, shaping his invention in the most suitable form without strain; the finest ideas and images occur unbidden in floods to the inspired poet; the orator judges with the greatest acumen, feels with the greatest intensity, and the strongest and most vividly expressive words rise to his tongue.” Such statements, Flaherty argues, are strongly reminiscent of accounts of shamanism—in this case of a shaman described not skeptically but in wonderment. They employ the idea of inspiration metaphorically—as control of an “instrument” from outside the person, or as a “gift” from a “higher power.” But these remain metaphors, covering an inability to explain a this-worldly phenomenon in natural terms.

My problem after multiple sclerosis is that I cannot have this experience as a writer. The experience of exaltation when one is flooded by imagination and converts that imagination into a structured, final product was my primary motivation to work. Charisma is the experience of exercising transformative, creative power. You have to see transformation and creativity in real time for it to be charisma.

The difficulty is not that I cannot be flooded with imagination anymore. That will still happen all the time if I don’t work to control it. The problem is that my organizational skills have been so badly compromised by the brain damage that I can’t keep up with an intense flow of imagination. I can’t organize the flood of images quickly enough to experience imagination as a high, because the high is the product not only of pseudo-religious awe at the flow of images flooding one’s consciousness, but also of mental power in processing it all. Instead, the result is distress. I’m still flooded with sight, but I can’t shape it effectively. Trying to do it in real time, I write disasters like the damned Lebanon paper.

The obvious solution is to let in less at a time and developing means of putting the pieces together slowly. The problem isn’t that the processor is bad (low intelligence) or the hard drive is bad (compromised long term memory problems, like Alzheimers), but that I’m running on too little memory (short-term recall problems) and simply can’t keep and manage all the images flooding into my conscious mind all at once.

The problem is that working on turning imagination into theory bit by bit just isn’t a high. Remember, I have to see the creative transformation in real time, i.e. “right before my eyes,” to experience that exalted high. If creative transformation happens incrementally, there’s no euphoria at all.

Is it any wonder I’m not getting anywhere?

	Teaching	Writing
Financial incentives	Regular if scanty pay at regular intervals when I teach.	The vague possibility of gainful employment without regular pay interruptions that seems to recede into an impossible to attain future.
Time constraints	Structured allotments (the course meets at regular times) with immediate selective incentives that force efficient use of off-schedule time (if I walk in unprepared I die of embarrassment). Top prioritization because I must teach to receive an income.	Chronic fatigue greatly reduces my “off schedule” time outside teaching and real life (funerals, doctor’s appointments, family crises, etc.) eats away at this time. Writing is consistently interrupted.
Pleasure in the work	Immediate high of watching the students experience new ideas they’ve never experienced before.	Slow boring of hard boards. Perspective erodes passion. Lack of self-confidence, as I can’t see the results happen in “real time.”

Scaling Back

2008-07-20T22:10:00.001-07:00

The proposal writing is coming along. As with so much else in my life, survival requires scaling back. Although, for once, scaling back in this instance has nothing to do with multiple sclerosis. My imagination has always been too grandiose. Both in writing exam and essay questions for students and in framing my own research, I have tended to forget how quickly simple things placed in matrices become insanely complex. I’m not a very mathematical person. Naturally, I would need reminders that multiplication is not addition.

The old table was this—

—and the new table will be this:

This will reduce the case load from this—

—to this.

Needless to say, I’m not thrilled. I felt I had a whole theory before. But the fact that the new version feels “merely adequate” to me is probably a good sign. The case load looks far more manageable and far more likely to fit under 250 pages, which is the goal size for publication. The new proposal does not require Hebrew, which is definitely my weaker language. There’s no reason I can’t scan the sample needed for the cases I’m cutting. I may be able to incorporate them in the dissertation, or may be able to keep the material for later. This smaller version looks more fundable to me. And the bottom line is if I can’t haul my ass to Tel Aviv to get the sample and don’t get some time off from teaching, this dissertation isn’t happening.

I really want to graduate. I want a real job, one that pays all year long and with a decent salary.

Update

2008-07-20T00:51:00.000-07:00

Grading was okay last week. I whipped through. I’m starting to re-write my proposal this weekend. Wish me luck.

Reconstructing/Lessons Learned

2008-06-30T13:19:00.000-07:00

I learned a lot last term. Anyone who’s been reading can see that my life fell apart in Week 7 of the term. Craig and I went to Vegas for Nelly and Simon’s wedding (she was radiant, he was dashing and the ceremony was beautiful, I’ll write some about it on the other blog when I get a breather). I turned my grading back a weekend late (June 3, Week 10, not May 29, Week 9). Thursday I gave the kids a three-hour review. The Red Wings won the Stanley Cup that night. Saturday of Week 10 we had a lovely brunch at Jamie Mayerfeld, the course’s prof. I was so tired by that point, I didn’t even try to pick up any research that weekend. I slept most of it and helped Craig clean for the rest. The final exam was on Monday, June 9 and grades were due on Monday, June 16. “Ah!” you’re saying. Finally, the galaxy cuts Talal a scheduling break. No comments are needed for final exams and you have a whole week. Even with 68 of them, you ought to be fine.

Well, Monday June 9 was also the arrival date of my mother, my niece and my aunt (the reason we cleaned). I wasn’t done grading until about Thursday. The visit was absolutely wonderful, but a fortnight long. My aunt stayed only ten days, leaving Seattle on Thursday, June 19. Much to our shock, my beloved Auntie Char died in her home that night. There was a fire in her bedroom and she died of asphyxiation. Her body was cremated last week and I am flying to New York on Friday, July 4, to attend the memorial service on Saturday.

Real life, folks. As a multiple sclerotic in graduate school, it’s my biggest allergy. In terms of research progress, I’ve been out of commission for nearly a month. Real life events happen. The universe won’t go on hold just because my life is on hold writing my dissertation. I won’t get any work done over the weekend in Connecticut and New York and the next weekend, I’m grading again (wheee!) for the 26 students in Arab-Israeli. I get one weekend to do real work and then the next weekend, I grade for my other course (Global Ideologies at Antioch). That’s only eight or nine students, but they get rough drafts, so each assignment has full comments, then a grade sheet for the final draft. Certainly this is much less demanding than the 68 student load I had last term. We’ll see if I have learned to be more efficient over the past two terms and can crank these out quickly. Maybe I can squeeze research work in.

Although I’m thinking that I should postpone actual research (again) and work on grant proposals over the summer. I didn’t get that job at the McNair program I applied for, so grading will be a big part of my life next year. If I actually get a grant, I’ll have time to write. And I’ll have money to go to Tel Aviv and get my newspaper sample.

I dunno. Anyway, here’s what the month ahead looks like:

I'm beginning to realize that my previous value set has to be further revised beyond my initial expectations. In my previous life, I organized to achieve efficiency. I now have to accept that efficient work is patently impossible. I now have to organize to improve recovery after regular disruption. My previous standard was not getting derailed. Regular derailment is the new story of my life. I can, perhaps, ameliorate this problem, but I cannot solve it. I must accept that. The most I can achieve now is organizing to recover from regular derailment. Simply put, ordinary life is not going to go away. I'm going to go off track regularly. I need to become good at getting back on the track, with minimum time lost and reduced emotional cost in terms of frustration.

The difficult part is managing the process of acceptance. Working the way I work will simply never be inspiring or exciting. I do enjoy the work itself, but working this way does not offer much motivation and offers ample frustration. I need to figure out the motivation.

Fallen off the Wagon

2008-06-01T00:32:00.000-07:00

Wow! The past two weeks have been a bad time for this blog as an ordering device. First week of grading, I was feeling under the weather. Aches, pains, slight fever here and there. Sinus headaches, no phlegm or post-nasal drip though. The next weekend Craig and I had to fly to Vegas for Nelly and Simon’s wedding. This weekend, I’ve been grading. Being a low-energy person with weak attention span means that it doesn’t take much to throw me off.

I’m already late returning my grading. I’ve made good progress this weekend, however, and hook or by crook, the papers go back on Tuesday. Then I can start thinking about Lebanon for a little while. My mom is visiting at the end of term, however, then I start Arab-Israeli again.

I’m getting a really clear picture about why my dissertation is going nowhere fast. I need to find a way out of teaching for a while. That’s easier said than done and I miss it when I’m not doing it, though.

Once More unto the Breach

2008-05-16T01:09:00.000-07:00

In the morning, it all starts again. Gotta get some shut-eye.

Post-Grading Strategy

2008-05-14T21:29:00.000-07:00

Student papers are turned in once again on Thursday. This weekend will be hellish. Simon and Nelly’s wedding is the weekend after, so I must do everything I can to have the papers done within a single week. I need to be hyper-productive Friday-Monday. I think I’m going to cancel my office hours on Wednesday and stay home to grade. I’m hoping I don’t have to turn back any papers late. Taking papers with me to the wedding is ridiculous.

Anyway, after Craig and I get back from the wedding, that gives me two weekends of work before I grade finals. Our final exam is on the first day of exam week. The final exams require no comments, so I’m hoping I can crank those out in a few days.

I’ve decided that the next book on the timeline list is Raghid El-Solh’s Lebanon and Arabism: National Identity and State Formation. I’ll put off the Great Arab Revolt for a while. I’ve also picked up a few books on French colonialism. I need to photocopy these excerpts:

Persell, Stuart Michael. The French Colonial Lobby: 1889-1938. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. 1983. pp. 97-114, pp. 140-158.

Thomas, Martin. The French Empire at War: 1940-1945. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1998. pp. 62-63, pp. 100-129,

Martin, Thomas. The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society. New York: Manchester University Press. 2005. pp. 40-45, p. 115, pp. 162-163, pp. 185-208, pp. 218-226, p. 295, pp. 323-326.

Those will provide snippets for the timeline, but they can wait, too.

I’m embarrassed to say that the Solh is the only thing on my list by an Arab. But Arab writers are not publishing on the subject in English and I’ll be damned if I slug through books in Arabic for what we’ve determined is already an unpublishable conference paper. Truth be told, I think that this paper is a lot like my lone grant application this year. It’s not so important that it get me very far. It’s just important that I write it to prove that I still can still produce a paper. Baby steps.

Fromkin's Been Nailed

2008-05-11T02:55:00.000-07:00

I finished extracting what I needed from Fromkin. I’m not sure he was a good choice now. The problem is that he loves long, dateless descriptions that skip back and forth across time. Usually descriptive texts that are useful, I scan into the timeline. But that can realistically be one or two paragraphs, maximum. Fromkin will give interesting descriptions with nothing at all to date and the descriptions go on for several pages. I simply can’t scan in whole pages, especially when it’s clear that he’s skipping back and forth over time, even while not dating a damned thing. What I need to read is a book that’s more like Zamir about the Great Arab Revolt (which looks really not so great after reading Fromkin!). I think my future timelining has to rest on ferreting out which book is date-rich. That one always has to come first. If nothing else, having the chronology already done for me would have allowed me cut and paste more out of Fromkin.

I’m thinking of adding another book on the Great Arab Revolt, Eliezar Tauber’s The Arab Movements in World War I. The book was reviewed by Philip S. Khoury, Jeffrey A. Rudd and Charles D. Smith and sounds a great deal like the Zamir—a book short on interpretation and long on mind-numbing detail. Smith, the author of what has become the standard textbook for courses on the Arab-Israeli Conflict, points out his errors, but on the other hand praises the book as the state of the art. The weaknesses tend surround issues of ignoring Rashid Khalidi’s work on Palestinian identity and Arabism, especially when he is so anxious to stress local nationalisms prominence at the expense of pan-Arabism. Khuri was the most lukewarm reviewer. Rudd was much more positive. Smith, interestingly, while the most critical, was also the most enthusiastic as well. All three reviewers stated that they would have liked to see Tauber both develop his own argument and engage the arguments of other scholars.

Do I need another book on this list? It’s a good one to read. I dunno. I probably should send the last blog to Ellis and ask him if he thinks this is a viable conference paper. Maybe I should just punt the idea. It’s late. I need to crash.

The Plan So Far

2008-05-05T16:24:00.000-07:00

I don’t want to lose more time, especially since I don’t get much down time before the next onslaught of grading. I basically get this weekend and next weekend to work on the timeline. The weekend of the 16^th, I have to grade like the wind. Normally, I’d be able to plug and chug over the weekend of the 23^rd as well, but Nelly and Simon are getting married and Craig and I will be in Vegas for the wedding.

I had a chat with Nelly just before I went on my little grading hiatus. I think it helped me clarify the issues I’m having with the paper. And the comment that Gretchen made was quite to the point—I need a clear explanation of how hierarchy plays into creating an institution. We can play checks and balance games forever. I’ve said that the hierarchy don’t need to all be true believers. How is the discipline maintained? Let’s see if I can spell this out clearly.

A state becomes institutionalized when:

(1) A hierarchy exists to impose order under among the depoliticized under pain of violence. This hierarchy is the minimal organizational requirement the state.

(2) The capacity to impose violence is effectively monopolized by the state so that all other hierarchies with a capacity to impose violence, whether internal or external believe that it is unrealistic to attempt to do so in the given space. This is often called sovereignty, but due the juridical meanings that have cropped up around this word, making it some sort of “right,” instead of an empirical phenomenon, I’d rather not use it.

(3) Existing politicians have selective incentives to enforce the rules upon one another, typically because individual politicians perceive that forcing other politicians to obey the rules enhances their own individual capacity for increasing or maintaining power and opens avenues for imposing policy preferences.

(4) There is no realistic means for a politician to practice within the space except by playing by the established rules. This may, in essence, be covered by condition 2.

Now the important questions that follow are

(1) How do these conditions emerge?

(2) Where do the rules come from?

My answer to this question is that due to the importance of human agency in the creation of institutions, the origin of an institution can only be understood genealogically; they cannot be understood theoretically. The idea is that you and I and everyone else are all different people. All things being equal, we will all behave to identical stimuli in different ways. If we respond in uniform ways, it is only because the situation is structured. That is, it has a set of practical limitations that privilege certain responses over others. The more structured the situation, the more uniform the response.

There can be no theory that explains where an institution comes from, because structure is created, however unintentionally. We can only understand how a state comes into being by means of genealogy. That is, all we can do is trace the relevant sequence of events. We may know that human beings tend to impose political order on other human beings, but beyond the knowledge that we tend toward order, we can only trace how any specific order came into being with the understanding that the content of the specific order, its rules, was entirely unpredictable. If one could “run time five times over” as if our study were an experiment in which every random variable might conceivably work out differently, each time we would probably have different results.

So institutionalization, the means by which a set of rules seem to take on a life of their own, can be understood theoretically. Simply put, for as long as the four rules above hold true, then the institution will be institutionalized. When they do not hold true, one should expect continuous change in political context. The four conditions may become true in any number of ways. That road is probably different for every institution in every time and place.

I’m still saying all of that badly. But it’s a little better now than it has been. I apparently am having trouble with inferences as a result of the brain damage, so I stumble around what I mean to say for a while before the right words come out of my mouth. It’s quite irritating.

Testing the Theory (in Thirty Pages)

Now of course, we come to the writing challenge. My theory suggests that prior to the establishment of order in a given time and space, things should be fairly chaotic. We can, however, trace the genealogy of events to show how exogenous and unpredictable factors transformed political context. In short, we argue convincingly that neither the emergence of the four conditions of institutionalization nor the set of rules that make the institution were predictable. The strategy

(1) Provide a genealogical narrative tracing the emergence of the rules of the institution and the four conditions above, which led to the rules’ institutionalization

(2) Counterfactual analysis of the genealogy. I have to draw on the reader’s imagination to show exactly how things might have worked out utterly differently at several different points in the narrative. Otherwise the claim that we can understand the events only by means of genealogy isn’t credible. Obviously, one can’t prove a negative, but one must at least put forward credible reasons to believe that the negative is true.

This seems to be daunting, but it turns out to be nothing compared with subsequent tasks. To show that at a given point the institution becomes institutionalized, one has to go over the subsequent history and show that:

(3) All four of the rules are in force for the period in question. Obviously if all three rules are in place and the institution’s rules are in flux, the argument is not causal.

(4) The rules of the institution are taken for granted in the rhetoric of the period. This is the process tracing for the project. The way we know that there is a psychological change in the way individuals treat the institution is seeing if their rhetoric changes. Before “institutionalization” other ways of organizing the space should very commonly be part of discussion. Afterward, whie such discourse probably won’t disappear, it ought to drop markedly.

This is, of course, not a project that can be churned out in thirty pages if I intend to prove all of this. The genealogy alone would (and, in the first iteration of the paper, did) go on forever. Then I would have to skim through the rest of Lebanese history to show that the dynamics of political action were institutional and were shaped thereafter by the emergence of the institution that we traced in the genealogy.

Nelly suggested that I might just present the paper as a “think” piece—a direction for future research that I’d like to get feedback on. I can’t publish it, but I could at least present it at a conference or two. So that’s the plan so far.

Ding Dong, the Wicked Witch is Dead!

2008-05-01T02:58:00.000-07:00

Rejoice in Munchkinland! Grading is over. Fuck, I’m so tired. I gotta be up at the crack of dawn to print their comment sheets out, too.

Setback (Again)

2008-04-28T21:05:00.000-07:00

I’m a little behind. I had a setback. One of the annoying things about having little ability to suppress my emotions is that when irksome things happen, I need to take time to get over it. Even when I know what the correct emotional response to the situation is and I have developed the proper strategy with dealing with it, I’m pretty helpless to “just get over it.” That is the reason we suppress emotion. Well, not being able to suppress emotion, I have to be “good” with things before I could move on.

I’ve come to realize that before I was 26, I rarely was ever “good” with any of the shit that life threw at me. I just stated, “There’s nothing I can do. I won’t let this slow me down,” and then suppress the hell out of any negative emotions. Yeah, I’d whine and bitch to my friends, but I’d always get the job done. I’d adapt. My rule was I felt what I wanted to and suppressed the rest of my feelings. And negative feelings had their uses. I could channel them into other tasks. Emotional conflicts were rarely resolved. “Emotional resolution” was for the weak. Victory justified any annoyances along the way.

All of that is now completely beyond me. I have to be “good” with anything I have to deal with or I’ll fall apart dealing with it. This means when the emotional shit storms come, I have to clear the shit before I go on. So I lose a day or two. As my focus is shit, it may be a while longer before I regroup, if something else hasn’t turned up in the meanwhile. Well, at least my desire to post progress here helps me refocus on the task faster. Plus, if this were a normal class, my current progress would have been sufficient for finishing on time. As it is, I’m turning back papers on Thursday instead of Tuesday. And I am ready to teach Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality tomorrow. So things aren’t so bad. Plus, the Wings beat the Avs 5-1. Life is good.

Comments!

2008-04-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

Oh! I just discovered that my dear friends Gretchen North and Nelly Samoukova have left comments on the blog! Twit that I am, I didn’t set the comment feature to require me to approve the comments before they post, which is the only way I can find to get to notification that there is a comment waiting. I have fixed this and will undoubtedly reply more quickly. Expect me to post replies before the weekend is out!

Going into Halftime

2008-04-25T10:56:00.000-07:00

Week 4 is done. Goodbye Locke; Hello Rousseau! Although I am a liberal, I’ve just never cared for Locke much. He’s just so clumsy.

This blog seems to be working. I lose focus when I’m grading. I did timeline a little on Wednesday during my office hours. I miss it. I’m doing fairly well this term. Jamie Mayerfeld, my prof, doesn’t make us come to lectures if we’ve already done the course with him once before. So I skip Mondays and Fridays so I can work. I teach three sections on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I attend the Wednesday lecture and have my office hours on Wednesdays. I have done pretty well for timelining when I’m not grading. If I had previously been as disciplined about grading as I had been in the past week, I think I’d have performed far better. I’ve gotten roughly 30 done in a week’s time. The difficulty is that I need the “at-home” days if I’m to actually get anything done. The three days I’m on campus are very unproductive. My focus is shot by the time I get home. I also see that without the blogs to force me to see the pattern of my progress is that when the grading is done, my mind will wander to something else before I return to timelining. I need to make sure I hit timelining immediately after grading is over.

Grading is my biggest distraction. I really understand why we’re seeing such a rush to the bottom in terms of education quality. Without good grading, the students can’t improve. But the students themselves don’t really care if they improve. They just want to be entertained. So the dominant, if utterly unethical strategy, is simply to be an entertainer. Make the grading easy, be entertaining, and you’ll get good evals with minimal work. You’ll have plenty of time for research. Well, I don’t have the heart for that. I just don’t.

On the other hand, there’s quality teaching time and shit teaching time. Being a TA is shit teaching time. I’m willing to teach any of the courses I’ve already designed. I’m willing to teach Arab-Israeli or Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict. Unlike being a TA, I don’t have to absorb any new material—the courses are designed. I get a grader and only have to grade 30 papers at a shot. I do a commitment matching thing with the grading. Students who participate in class get put in my stack the first time around. Then students who participate and students who made above a B+ get put in my stack the second time around. Then students who participate, students who improved from the first paper to the second and then students who made above a B+ get graded by me for the final. For the most part, those who care get a lot of attention. Those who don’t, don’t. The grader gets paid a completely ludicrous wage of $600/term. So I try to give them as low a comment burden as possible. First cut, everyone gets comments. As students fail to meet teacher commitment in terms of comment output, they get downgraded. It’s a time-efficient deal for me. I get maximum satisfaction for my efforts.

I’m thinking I need a respite from being a teaching assistant. There’s a job that’s come up with the graduate school, being a graduate student advisor for a program to advise minority undergrads to help them get into PhD programs. It’s twenty hours a week and the shifts are eight hours, so I could pretty much guarantee a three-day week. If I got the job, if the department wants me to teach independently, I’ll take it during the unpredictable, off-term when they offer it. Otherwise, I’ll be out of the TA loop.

I don’t know if I have a shot at the job. But I think I’ll shoot them an application and see what happens.

Setback

2008-04-22T00:37:00.000-07:00

The rest of the weekend didn’t work out as well as I’d have liked. Craig needed to move offices at work and, with the commute, that took about six hours. We were moving file cabinets, desks, etc. I’m a pretty low-stamina guy and I was feeling low energy anyway, so it wiped me out for Sunday. I had to go into campus today (Monday, I just posted after midnight) to deliver two graded papers to Jamie and I stayed for the lecture since I had to go in. I crashed and had a three and a half hour nap. With making dinner, I only got five papers done on Monday.

So I’m fifteen behind. Let’s see if I can handle five a night over the next three nights. That will give me the weekend again for the last 29 papers.

I miss timelining. It’s been too many days since I thought about Lebanon. Grading is such a bitch. But, damn, the extra pay is handy.

Another Ten Bite the Dust

2008-04-19T23:52:00.000-07:00

Wow. I seem to be doing this faster. I’ve noticed a few changes in grading over the past two years. While I’m as concerned with helping to write comments that can lead students to actually improve, I’ve gotten better at standardizing comments. At first I was just standardizing comments like “Excessively colloquial language” or “Writer does not present prima facie case—essay does not draw on reason to advance its thesis.” I realized though, that in writing individual comments, I would often repeat myself as well. So I made a rule this year that any good individual comment I wrote, I would keep and integrate into the comment sheet. If you want to see what the whole thing looks like, follow this link.

I notice that my feelings are changing as well. I used to suffer quite a bit when they wouldn’t get it. Now it doesn’t bother me quite as much. I still work like the dickens to get them to get it; it’s not that I don’t care. But I guess I don’t look at it like it’s my personal failing, especially when I have given them a lot of support and structure. I’m really a lot better at matching the student’s level of commitment. Moreover, the tension of dealing with the same set of problems with a new group after having struggled so hard to get the old group past it used to depress me. It doesn’t anymore.

Posting the meter to this blog seems to help. I know nobody reads this silly dull blog, but it at least makes me accountable to myself. I realize a great deal of my problem has been that I get lost in the fog of my mind. Having a graph seems to keep me focused and in context. It ties me to time usage.

Anyway, more papers tomorrow, Insha’ Allah!

Ha! I Did It!

2008-04-18T23:07:00.001-07:00

Ten down. Fifty-nine more to go!

Grading!

2008-04-18T12:20:00.000-07:00

Okay, I have 69 papers to grade. The gradesheet was all ready to go last week, so I can start plugging and chugging this afternoon. The goal: ten per day on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday for a total of forty this weekend. I don’t know if I can be this consistent, but I’m hoping this “post the chart so the world can see your progress or lack thereof” approach can keep me focused. If nothing else the method is providing documentation for exactly when and in what kinds of circumstances I fall off the wagon with the timelining. I hope this will help me improve. I really want to graduate and I need progress.

If this method (ten at a shot on weekend days) works, I should be done grading by Sunday of next week and be back to timelining again. I have to go to campus on Monday and that may throw me off. I have to give Jamie Mayerfeld, the prof running the lecture, two graded papers and if I go to school, I might as well stay for the lecture. But, we’ll see what can be done.

Nelly and I had a productive talk about the “Institutionalization” paper. More on that soon.

A Peace to End All Peace

2008-04-14T13:17:00.000-07:00

Okay, I’ve decided which parts of Fromkin to timeline. I’m going to do chapters 23-28, chapters 35-37, chapters 41-44, chapters 46-48 and chapter 57. Basically this surgical reading emphasizes the diplomacy that lead to the Great Arab Revolt, the revolt itself, and the peace settlement in the Middle East focusing on Syria and Lebanon and a little side voyage into the Turks’ s slaughters of the Armenians and the rise of Mustafa Kamal’s Turkey.

The last two parts are important because the Maronites are quite mindful of the slaughter of the Armenians and see this as a primary motivation behind the expansion of the borders of the autonomous sanjak of Mount Lebanon into the Greater Lebanon of today. Given that this choice was a demographic disaster that has guaranteed that Lebanon will never be the Christian state the Maronite Church had hoped for, the paranoia that led to it needs some explanation. Moreover, France’s need to re-fight its war with Turkey and to eventually abandon the Treaty of Sèvres is important for our story. Re-fighting the Turks made the French vulnerable to insurrection in Syria as they had to deploy their men northward. Moreover, losing this small war meant that the French had to cede to Port of Alexandretta to the Turks. As Alexandretta was the only decent port in the Syria mandate that had not found its way into the borders of Greater Lebanon, the outcome of this war was one of the stressors that plagued the French Mandate in Syria.

Fromkin isn’t too dense, so let’s hope I can do this quickly. I have grading to do next week. Yippee.

Where Have You Been, Talal?

2008-04-13T12:11:00.000-07:00

I know. No progress posted for over a week. We had a birthday party on the weekend of April 5-6 for my mother-in-law and brother-in-law. That kept me busy. Tuesdays and Thursdays are my teaching days. I find I have shit for focus after commuting, teaching three sections, attending a teaching meeting (Tuesdays only) and commuting back. I tried to timeline on Thursday, but my concentration was shot and it went nowhere. Wednesday, a friend had some personal career stuff to discuss, so I was busy with her that afternoon. I only left the U District at 4:30, so I was pretty tired that day, too. Sometimes I can timeline if I’m tired, but Zamir loves to shift back and forth across time and can be awfully vague with dates (despite being the most detailed historian in the group). When he’s in his back and forth mood, I can’t follow him if I’m tired.

But enough bitching! Zamir is finally done. What’s the strategy from here? Well, I was hoping to fill in the chronology from 1910-1926. That way I could start posting some interesting blogs about the creation of the mandate. I hate to keep this so boring.

That strategy, however, is riddled with problems. I was thinking of reading the first few chapters of the Ziadeh. I was hoping he’d be my complement for Zamir. While I have other sources in the timeline for 1910-1926 that aren’t in the chart, they’re mostly books about French imperialism and the Treaty of Versailles. Zamir is basically my detailed source for Lebanon itself during that period. The Ziadeh piece, being a book of Lebanese constitutional history from the 19^th century until the roughly 2005, likes to skip. He really doesn’t cover the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the war. Moreover, only one chapter of his book (chapter 4 covers 1920-1943) really covers the meat of my paper. He really has a gap between 1915 and 1920. While without a doubt, I’ll read his chapter 4 for the paper, I’m wondering if I need to add a book that can give me at least 1910-1920 coverage.

It seems almost like cheating, but I was thinking of selections from David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. It was published back in 1989 and is a bit dated now, but it has several elements that make it appealing. It has chapters on the Ottoman Empire during the war, on the Great Arab Revolt (yes, I know it wasn’t really all that great a revolt and mostly involved British troops. But I’m a Jordanian-American. I’m trained to call it the Great Arab Revolt), and The French war with Turkey and the Turks genocide of the Armenians. I could use a little more of all those elements to contextualize the situation in Lebanon just before the start of the mandate. It would be nice to have another source for the period that is focused on Lebanon, however. I hoped that Ziadeh would do the trick, but I don’t think he can do much for me in that period.

After that, I think I want to deal with the Gaunson. It’s a full book of facts about five years I can only rely upon Zisser for. I wrote in an earlier blog, Firro covers the period, but you never want Firro to be your fact book. Zisser is not as bad as Firro, but he isn’t as fact-rich as Zamir. Gaunson looks like he might do the trick. After Gaunson, then finally to the Solh. He looks Firro-esque in terms of his style. I figure waiting until later is the best I can do with him.

I need to timeline this week. I’m grading for three sections after Thursday. It’ll be a nightmare.

The Mission: To Debunk the Theory of the Velveteen Rabbit

2008-04-05T23:40:00.000-07:00

If you are not to die of boredom reading about my adventures in timelining, it would probably help to tell you what the paper is about. The question I’m trying to answer is “What makes a state real and not just a bunch of people you could ignore?” Steve Hanson, one of my teachers, defines an institution as a standardized pattern of behavior. Well, how does the pattern of the state become standardized, so much so that institutional practices can appear to be as inevitable a fact of life as gravity? Clearly, people don’t always go along with all attempts to create institutions. I tell my students, “I proclaim the Hattarian Empire! Join me and together we shall rule the world!” and yet no one bats an eyelash. Much to my disappointment, they don’t cry out, “No! I’ll never join you!” They just give me that impossibly jaded and bored look, waiting for my lame attempt at a joke to end so that they can jot the next real point down in their notebooks. Clearly, they have no difficulty separating the real from the imaginary.

We all know institutions are imagined in the sense suggested by Benedict Anderson when defining nationalism. A nation he says, is an imagined community, “an image of communion.” We don’t know most of the people in our community. Yet, the group has a distinct sense of entity. Because this “image of communion” is shared by many individuals and had rules that serve as a reference point for their political discourse, it is real. The same is true for the state.

We know there is no superentity, no artificial deity in the sky. Rather, as Timothy Mitchell suggests, this image is anthropomorphization of the coordinated, disciplined practices of many discrete individuals. The effect of the disciplined coordination of individuals across time and space evokes this sense of an entity. This is especially true as the coordinated pattern of behavior, when successful, can subsist years after all those who originated the pattern have perished. The pattern seems, like Frankenstein’s monster, to be alive. The state, then, is imagined, but it is no means imaginary. This is Hobbes’ description of the state in Leviathan:

For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to perform his duty) are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth and riches of all the particular members are the strength; salus populi (the people's safety) its business; counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death. Lastly, the pacts and covenants, by which the parts of this body politic were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation.

Here is Hobbes’ original conceptual sketch:

This is always a fun passage to teach in intro political theory classes, because while Hobbes claims that by art he hopes to create an artificial man, Hobbes later admits what I believe any honest reading of the description makes clear—what he really hopes to create is an artificial god—one that comes with no annoying problem of theodicy. Hobbes’ artificial god exists to enjoin good and prevent evil. While Hobbes does not delve into theology, one imagines he sees such a deity as an improvement on the original, from a purely pragmatic and political standpoint.

So the state is imagined as an artificial god. We know the state is real when the impact of the coordinated, disciplined actions of the discrete individuals involved in this pattern of behavior leaves us with this sort of powerful image of god-like action. Yet all imagined but real institutions were once purely imaginary. How is it then that the United States, once imaginary, became a real, imagined entity, with power over millions, whereas my Hattarian Empire is doomed for all eternity to be a comical figment of my imagination? How do states become real?

Huntington’s Definition of Institutionalization

Well, naturally, before I take a shot at answering the question, you will want to know what’s in the existing literature. The last answer is relatively old. A guy named Samuel P. Huntington calls the process of “the state becoming real” by the name institutionalization. Here’s his definition:

Institutionalization is the process by which organizations and procedures acquire value and stability. The level of institutionalization of any political system can be defined by the adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence of its organizations and procedures. So also, the level of institutionalization of any particular organizations or procedure can be measured by its adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence. If these criteria can be identified and measured, political systems can be compared in terms of their levels of institutionalization. And it will be possible to measure increases and decreases in the institutionalization of the particular organizations and procedures within a political system (Political Order in Changing Societies, p. 12).

Note that there’s not much “there” there. Institutionalization is a process, however the process is not defined. To the extent it offers any substance, the definition is practically circular. An institutionalized state is valued and stable. Is it stable because it’s valued? Is it valued because it’s stable? Is there a causal relationship between value and stability, or indeed are both caused by one or more other variables? All we know is that we can measure institutionalization by the institution’s adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence. Clearly Huntington knows the effect when we he sees it. And the effect is the state is like a living, breathing person, and a fairly dynamic one at that. Adaptable, complex, autonomous, coherent—would I did so well for myself! He doesn’t quite know how the set of rules crosses the boundary between “imaginary,” on the one hand, and “imagined, but real,” on the other. But he’s sure he knows what the institutionalized state looks like. Huntington definitely sees Hobbes’ Leviathan.

The only thing that Huntington keeps coming back to in the text is legitimacy. The state is institutionalized because it is valued. My advisor, Ellis Goldberg, once wittily called this the theory of the velveteen rabbit. You might recall the touching exchange from your own reading:

“Wasn’t I Real before?” asked the little Rabbit.

“You were Real to the Boy,” the Fairy said, “because he loved you. Now you shall be Real to every one.”

—Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

So Huntington’s basic dictum, to the extent we can ferret it out, is, “If you love it enough, it will become real.” Well, my basic response echoes the words of a woman with eminently more life’s experience than me:

“What’s love got to do with it?”

—Tina Turner

My basic theory is that the reason the state appears as a god-like autonomous entity in our imaginations is due to the discipline imposed by a hierarchically organized staff of individuals. I can hear your now. “Ah,” you say. “That’s very clever. But haven’t you really just removed the problem to a different level? It’s all well and good to say that we obey because there is a special staff of organized individuals who apply both rewards and sanctions to us. But what about the staff? Why do they maintain the pattern, especially when they have the opportunity of doing things like siphoning off all the state revenues to Swiss bank accounts and leaving their piss-ant country to live in the French Riviera?”—don’t laugh, this happens quite frequently in the states at the bottom of the global per capita GDP pecking order—“Could it be that the state is real because the staff loves the state and work hard to make it real for the rest of us by bribery and whip-cracking?”

Well, my response runs something like this: It undoubtedly helps if the staff love and believe in the state, especially when you are first trying to get the state “off the ground.” But, in any society, politics is deeply attractive to those individuals who seek pre-eminent status. Owing to this less than congenial company, the desire to practice politics very rarely afflicts those individuals who are deeply principled and selfless. If the pattern is to be maintained consistently, it seems quite unlikely to me that it can always be the result of a deeply ethical staff. Even the most committed of us are only human. Corruption is a constant temptation, which is one of the central reasons we need the state in the first place. Self-discipline undoubtedly helps, but I doubt it is the answer.

Our dilemma at theorists, then, is (1) we know the staff isn’t a group of incorruptible true believers and (2) the staff sticks with the narrative as if it were what they really and truly believed it most of the time and (3) we really can’t take recourse to another hierarchy watching our first hierarchy, as this would simply defer the question another level. We know the state works in practice. How do we make it work in theory?

I’m still trying to hammer it out. This is the fuckin' messy part.

Timelining Problems

2008-04-04T16:24:00.000-07:00

It’s been a rough slog. Chapter Three of Zamir’s Formation of Modern Lebanon is a messy, descriptive text that zips back and forth across 1920-1925. Sorting it out has not been easy.

You see, I love timelining when it yields organized data. It’s a useful way of understanding a history, as historians are often quite giftless in their organizational ability. Without imposing my own order on the facts, I often won’t get at the meat of their argument. It’s also a useful way of preparing to synthesize several secondary sources. I get a high off of seeing the product grow and develop. It can be amazing.

Nonetheless, the method has some limits against which I’m struggling. Timelines are event driven. There are two types of narrative that can easily accommodate:

1. Event-oriented narrative: This type of narrative deals with temporal sequencing and causality of events. These are ideal for timelining because you can locate events relatively precisely. Even when precise dates aren’t given, one can often contextualize. The results look like this excerpt from the year 1921

March 4: De Caix and Catroux conclude an agreement granting the Druze of Jabal Druze local autonomy with minimal French intervention in their affairs (Zamir, Formation, p. 168, 134 in passing).

March: The High Commissioner issues an arrêté to unify all taxes and duties throughout the Greater Lebanon on the basis of the Ottoman legislation that had been in force in Beirut. The affect of this decision is most keenly felt in southern Lebanon’s tobacco-growing regions, as a monopoly tax existed on tobacco dating back to 1876. (Firro, pp. 79-80)

Sometime before April: Kamal al-As`ad tries to instigate a Shi`i rebellion in Jabal `Amil (Zamir, Formation, p. 135).

April 21: Gouraud pardons Kamal al-As`ad and gives him the Légion d’Honneur. This crude buy-off is apparently enough to win over the support of Jabal `Amil for the mandate. The Shi`a of the Biqa` Valley remain unenthused, as they had closer relations with Faisal (Zamir, Formation, pp. 135-136).

April: The High Commission holds a trade fair to encourage French trade and investment (Zamir, Formation, p. 104—Location of trade fair in unclear).

April: Gouraud holds a reception for Greek Orthodox leaders and notables (Zamir, Formation, p. 133).

2. Descriptive narrative to contextualize an event: These also are easy, as you can simply enter an excerpt of the original text beneath the event with its date. This is greatly simplified with a text scanner.

April: Albert Sarraut’s colonial program becomes French government policy, (Andrew, p. 226). Andrew and Kanya-Forstner on the Sarraut program (pp. 226-227):

In April 1921, the enormously ambitious colonialist vision of the Empire’s economic development also became government policy. Amidst exuberant colonialist fanfares Sarraut presented to the chamber a huge programme of infrastructural development covering every part of the Empire. The programme was intended to end the uncertainty and lack of continuity which had hitherto characterized attempts at colonial development and to provide the ‘clear, stable and precise plan’ which had been lacking in the past. From ‘museums of samples’ the colonies would be transformed into ‘centres of production’. ‘The progressive execution of a large and creative programme of action, carefully and conscientiously elaborated’, Sarraut declared, ‘will ensure, through the increased strength and prosperity of the whole of France d’Outre-Mer, the future strength and prosperity of the Mère-Patrie’.

The Sarraut programme, however, was not so much a development plan as an imperial fantasy. Ever since the war years, the popularity of mise en valeur had been based on the illusion that it would provide instant, or almost instant, solutions to the economic problems of the metropolis. But colonial government could never be other than very long-term and tremendously expensive. The very economic crisis which the Sarraut plan was intended to solve made its implementation impossible. The deficit on external trade in 1920 was 20.4 milliard francs, even higher than in 1919. During the year, the value of the franc fell by almost half against the pound and the dollar. The even more precipitate fall of the German mark made the prospect of reparations on the scale originally envisaged increasingly remote. Unable to balance the metropolitan budget, France was in no position to spend several milliard francs on the Empire. The most fantastic part of the Sarraut plan was its funding. Both Simon and Klotz had vaguely envisaged a state-financed Crédit National d’Outre Mer to provide an annual credit of 450 million francs over a ten-year period for colonial development. By 1920, however, it was unthinkable for parliament to approve colonial expenditures on this scale, and Sarraut abandoned the idea in favour of issuing bonds on the open market. By 1921, this idea too had been abandoned. Sarraut later admitted that he had counted on German reparations to balance the metropolitan budget and free private capital for colonial investment. Without reparations, he could think of no other solution. Incredibly, his Bill contained no financial provisions at all; these, he promised, would be submitted later. It did not even include an estimate of the total cost.

Harder than these first two, but still manageable is:

3. Narrative relating a compressed series of events: This is often used to summarize demographic and economic changes. Typically this narrative method describing a series of events as a general trend, locating endpoints of the process. One solves the problem by marking the endpoints in the timeline, each with a note dating the complementing endpoint.

Where I am having genuine trouble is dealing with a fourth type of narrative:

4. Descriptive narratives not tied to an event: Here’s an example:

Zamir on the malaise that begins to grip French imperial policy at this point (Zamir, Formation, pp. 103-104):

For the French, the disappointment was particularly acute. They had hoped that with the removal of Faisal and their occupation of all Syria their troubles would be over, but the following years found them faced with an exhausting war against Turkish nationalists in the north and continual unrest in Syria which culminated in the Druze revolt. The majority of the Muslims resented the French mandate, and Arab nationalist leaders in exile in the neighbouring countries and in Europe waged a bitter anti-French campaign in which they demanded the complete independence and unification of Syria. Furthermore, the French were soon disabused of their hopes for economic advantages stemming from their control over Syria. Having poured millions of francs into Syria and Lebanon, they had expected to reap the benefits of their investment, but it soon became apparent that Syria's economic potential and importance for France had been greatly exaggerated. Without the oil of Mosul and the rich agricultural region of Cilicia, and with the port of Alexandretta under continual threat from the Turkish nationalists, Syria could fulfil very few of their expectations. The French government and public then realised that Syria was not a second Algeria, but an economic burden that would have to be continually financed from Paris.

France was then undergoing a serious post-war economic crisis and lacked the resources necessary to establish control over Syria and Lebanon. The French public began to resent the large government expenditures in areas where they felt France had no vital interests. As the difficulties confronting France in Syria became more apparent, nearly every aspect of the government's Syrian policy came under attack in the National Assembly and in the press. Moreover, after the enormous loss of life during the War the French were reluctant to send soldiers abroad to fight Turkish nationalists or Arabs for objectives that remained obscure. During the first few years of the mandate the formerly strong emotional drive for French control over Syria rapidly gave way to increasing opposition to French involvement there, particularly in the National Assembly. The Syrian mandate became a much-debated issue in French politics, and proposals for a reduction in the Syrian budget an annual phenomenon. There were still many deputies and senators who felt the need for a French presence in Syria and Lebanon, but increasing numbers of them, particularly those of the Left, who from the start had opposed France's involvement in the Levant, criticised the government's policy and the large expenditure it entailed. The opposition was centred in the Finance and Foreign Affairs Committees of both chambers; it eventually succeeded in exerting a strong influence on the government's Syrian policy.

Zamir gives no dates in this passage. Clearly the context makes clear that he is talking about attitudes that are forming over the early twenties. But it looks like the optimism of the Sarraut program gives way to this program of “empire on the cheap” fairly quickly. I stuck Zamir’s passage in 1921 in my timeline because it seems that the volte face was fairly quick. They’re making drastic cuts as early as 1921, and General Gouraud resigns as High Commissioner over these cuts by November 1922. But the Sarraut program becomes policy in April 1921! This is a very rapid turnaround. My problem is that Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, the authors of the source that tell us about the Sarraut program, don’t really cover how the volte face occurred. Zamir doesn’t give us nearly as much as Andrew and Kanya-Forstner on just how grand French ambition was (although to his credit, he does discuss this—you can rely on Zamir for detail, if not always for good contextualization).

What I imagine happened empirically is this: Sarraut and the many French interest groups that favored the colonial program had a very “neo-con” bent, where they imagined France as far more powerful than it actually was. Sarraut, the other French diplomats who favored the Syria policy and the interest groups who clamored for it simply assumed it would be easy to make Syria into an Algeria. I don’t know much about how Algeria became such a profitable colony for France, so I can’t compare and contrast. However, it’s pretty clear that Sarraut and company didn’t compare and contrast, either, and it was their empire!

The grand program has many interest groups backing it, but the appropriations committees in France take one look at the funding and say, “Mais non.” But the program is popular, so they give it some funding. It never dawns on our luminaries down at the Quai d’Orsay that they’re going to get back so little, so two or three years into the occupation, they suddenly have to retool and scale way back.

It’s my guess that all this goes down in 1921. But there’s no historical backing in my secondary sources.

Needless to say, Syria never became an Algeria for France.

In the third chapter of Formation, Zamir is in what I like to think of as his “high descriptive mode.” He does this a lot in his next book, Quest. He describes trend, giving dates only for examples or quick reference points. So instead of a chronology, he’ll talk about things thematically, going back and forth across the history taking examples from 1925, then back to 1918, etc. I try to order everything chronologically. It’s a pain in the ass. But when I’ve done the timeline a clear narrative emerges that makes his thematic discussion make sense. But it’s difficult to contextualize the thematic discussion without the chronology. This leads me to believe that al, good history must be based first and foremost on strict chronology. One builds the analysis over the chronology as you relate events in order. Zamir does this sometimes, but other times, he doesn’t. Those times are a huge pain in the ass.

Slogging through Zamir

2008-03-29T14:41:00.000-07:00

Progress isn’t bad, actually, considering that I really didn’t work on the timeline on Thursday. I spent some time writing about the model. I have two-thirds of a blog entry written about how the revision should look and what my problems were the first time through. I wrote until I got stuck and mulled it over the rest of the day. That’s really the hard part about the theoretical part in a comparative politics paper. You’ve got to mull things over until you solve your problems. It’s work, but it doesn’t look like work. It looks like loafing and, until you solve the problem, you have nothing to show for the time, so you feel like you’re loafing. In a sense, mulling can be depressing, because you don’t see incremental progress. I like to see reward for my labor. It encourages me. Hence, the timelining chart. See? Two squares of grey turned yellow. Talal did good.

As you can see, after I’m done with Zamir, I’ll only have the shorter excerpt left from Hanna Ziadeh before I’ll have finished reading all the early stuff. I may try writing some postings on World War I, the end of the Ottomans, early Lebanese history, French imperialism, Versailles and that epic dipshit Woodrow Wilson at that point. It’s rich stuff.

Today, I needed to feel more progress going on, so I spent time with Meir Zamir. I like Zamir. He’s a good chronologist and it’s always good to start with a good chronologist. There’s no getting around the need for mastering a slew of facts to get at the heart of what’s really going on. Plus, it’s a messy, messy time. Messy times are filled with all sorts of idle dreams. Going in to World War I, the world looked like this:

What emerges, in retrospect, to us, can only look like this, which is pretty much, but not quite, our reality:

But what’s glaringly obvious leafing through Zamir is that the only way we can trace the development of the second map from the first is by genealogy. What? You didn’t take MAAS 501 at Georgetown and get forced to read Foucault’s neigh near incomprehensible essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History?” Here’s my crash course in the concept. It’s loaded with what I hope are witty graphics and little jokes. I’m told it’s generates a few chuckles. The students in POLS 436 seemed to like it, anyway. But to get on with it:

GENEALOGY: An historical technique that tracks a concept or type of action as it changes from moment to moment, revealing discontinuity over time.

The idea is that certain events don’t really have one cause. Indeed, certain events are the cause of random confluences of other events that are really in no way predictable. You can’t understand the event using theory, only by tracing its genealogy in its specificity. People try things and fail. Roads that you’d never imagine working wind up paying off. In retrospect, we assume that the attempts that failed were doomed to fail and the attempts that worked were the only thing that could have worked. Foucault dislikes that bias.

What I like about the Zamir text is that he tends to track all of the lines that went nowhere. Now, tracking all those lines doesn’t necessarily prove that they could have gone somewhere. But it is stunning to see how many different trajectories were out there and amazing to see them all die off as the field of possibilities closes in response to the increasingly structured situation.

Side Note: Author Identity

I find it quite deliciously odd that the history of Mandatory Lebanon is being written by Israeli scholars. Both Zamir and Zisser are Israeli professors. Kais Firro’s first name is Arabic. His last name seems like anyone’s guess, but he teaches at the University of Haifa. So he works in Israel, even if he’s an Arab. Oh, wait! You know what? I bet he’s Druze. I can’t find an on-line bio, but he writes on the Druze extensively. That could be it.

This reminds me of a story. Back in the fall of ’97, I was chatting with Elyse Semerdjian, who now teaches at Whitman College (in Walla Walla, Washington, of all places), and Kevin Martin, who I think now teaches at the University of Memphis, were chatting in the gilded lobby of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. I had just met Elyse, who shares an important link with me in our scholarly isnad (genealogy)—we’re both students of Denise Spellberg, who teaches Medieval Islamic History at UT Austin. Anyway, Elyse, as you might guess from her name, is Armenian, so I asked her if she were Catholic or Orthodox. Kevin did a double-take at this attempt to slot her and said, “Because her religion matters so much!”

Elyse laughed and said, “No, I don’t mind. It’s a question an Arab would ask.”

Kevin, an ardent secular liberal from Texas, is fairly unique among secular liberals in not being fundamentally hostile to religion. He came from Texas, so it’s a world he knows well. That said, he hates its intolerance. Back then, I had no clue that I was queer—dumb as a rock, I was. I lived near Dupont Circle and things like the Drag Queen parade there would make me quite uncomfortable. When Kevin discovered this he would do things like try to hold my hand in public just to watch me freak out (Kevin really loves women, by the way, not a queer bone in his body as far as I know). But he was (and I imagine still is) mischievous as hell, especially when he thinks you’re being an ass, which, admittedly, I was.

Russell Hardin relates an experience where he was sitting at a conference on political identity and one of the participants started the introductions by requesting each participant give their ethnic identity and say how it related to the discussion, because “no one is just an American.” Hardin thought he was. I no longer feel that I can give a safe answer to that kind of question

So does the slotting matter? Does the slotting not matter? Should the slotting stop? Can the slotting stop? The longer I’m at this, the more divided I am. Anyway, contemporary Lebanon’s early history is being written in Israel, but in English. And it’s all being published by I.B. Tauris in London. I have no idea what that means, if anything at all.

Firro is Done! Hallelujah!

2008-03-26T19:21:00.000-07:00

The event is not as exciting as if it were, say, raining men, but with due apologies to the Weather Girls, hallelujah, nonetheless!

That last chapter was brutal. Firro’s fatal weakness is that he really isn’t capable of writing the thesis statements and plans of attack that good writing needs to have if a reader is to keep up with a complex argument. Coupled with his assumption that his reader basically knows the history and he can spend most of his time interpreting it, the text is very difficult to follow. As Zamir’s Quest book runs out just before the fall of France, 1940-1946 on my existing timeline pretty much relied solely on Zisser. Zisser, while fairly comprehensible, is not a detailed chronologist. So unlike the other chapters I’ve timelined out of Firro, I didn’t really have a good chronology onto which I could graft Firro’s material in this last chapter. It was quite painful. I may have to go back to Firro after reading the Gaunson book, just to see if I missed anything useful.

But first, I need to read the first Zamir book. I have large parts of it already in the timeline, but because I wanted to “just bang the paper out” back in 2004, I did triage reading and timelining to fill in the blanks. But Zamir shows himself to be the most reliable chronologist in the bunch. I figure I should use him as a foundation. So to Zamir I go. I’d show you the picture of the cover, but the library copy doesn’t come with the cover and I can’t find a picture on the internet. It is mercifully slimmer than the second Zamir book. Sadly, though, as I explained earlier, it has Firro’s irritating habit of not translating French quotations. Yippee.

Timelining

2008-03-25T19:12:00.000-07:00

A critical part of any project that uses narrative history is timelining. Presently, my timeline for Lebanon 1914-1946 is roughly 70 pages long. Yes, I know. I can hear you now. “Talal! You are writing a seventy-page timeline for a thirty-page paper! No wonder you aren’t getting anywhere!”

Well, hold on. Any research project takes in far more old data than it puts out in new interpretation. The digestion, after all, is what the reader wishes to be spared in favor of the slim, simplified, effortless answer it is the researcher’s job to provide. We must always know much more than we write. Sorry. My students hate this, but it’s how scholarship works.

That said, the timeline itself is priceless to the researcher, because it can grow. It is, if you will, a capital investment. A well-designed timeline is an integrated, pre-digested reading of many different historical sources that can be used for large numbers of projects. The timeline I am creating is not only fodder for one paper on Lebanon, 1920-1946. It is the foundations of future lectures and chapters, etc. I’ll be dealing with Lebanon for the rest of my career. This is an investment. Here’s a link to an older draft to give an idea of what’s involved.

Moreover, the problem isn’t so much that timelining takes so long. The problem is that I haven’t been timelining. Between 2005 and now, I’ve been dealing with exams, my prospectus and trying to relearn organizing myself out of a wet paper bag. I really haven’t been working on this since 2004. That’s a long time.

The table below summarizes the books that have to be included in the timeline. The shading shows what years the books cover, with gray showing the bits that haven’t been timelined yet and yellow showing the bits that have. The years delineate the line on the right, so the far right border of the chart represents 1950.

As you can see, I’ve got a bit of a slog to get through. Historians each have their own irritating foibles that must be accommodated. Zamir, for example, is quite fortunately rich in dates and data. But his writing style is not particularly chronologically disciplined. He’ll talk a little, rewind, tell you something else, fast-forward and jump to another city, etc. I found that I needed the timeline in order to make sense of the messy, if rich text. The dates, thanks be to God and Zamir, are mostly all there.

Judith Tucker, one of my profs back at Georgetown, was always much fonder of historiography than she was of history and Firro writes in a similar bent. He always wants to assume that you know the chronology and instead, if not focus on what other historians are saying, at least focus on broader, grander interpretations. He rather assumes that you have your facts down. Having timelined Zamir first, I could follow him, but I’m not all that sure that it would be the best book to pick up to get acquainted with Lebanon under the Mandate.

Major fun challenges. It’s irritating that in his first book (the one I’ve not really worked on yet) Zamir likes to make direct quotations of French text without translations. Firro does the same. I spend lots of time at the dictionary.com French-English translator plugging in text. I haven’t taken French in years. And let’s face it—je m’appelle Vincent. Je joue au tennis. Est-ce que vous jouez au tennis? doesn’t constitute a political vocabulary. It’s lots of fun.

Sadly, one gets this sort of treatment from francophile orientalists all the time. Back at UT, I had an adjunct Islamic political theory prof from the University of Chicago poly sci department who studied Morocco. It was the first political theory class I ever took. I didn’t get it and wouldn’t for more than a decade, but I knew the Middle East better than most of the people in the room. She was going to give me a B, then relented and gave me an A. I was grateful, even though I really didn’t know why I was getting the B or why it changed to an A. Anyway, she always lapsed into French, leaving me to try to translate the “smooth-drop-every-other-syllable” elision that is spoken French into my guess at what the written French, which had the missing syllables, must have looked like. I did this in the desperate hope of recognizing enough cognates to conjure what she must have been saying.

It especially irritated me that she never lapsed into Arabic, a language I actually understood. But, she studied Morocco, so I’d probably never have been able to figure out what she was saying anyway, even had she been comfortable enough with the Maghribi dialect to lapse into it, which obviously she wasn’t. But she gave me an A, so I should stop bitching.

Anyway, back to the grind.

Current Project: The "Institutionalization" of the Lebanese Republic, 1920-1946

2008-03-25T02:20:00.000-07:00

The original draft of this 75-page monstrosity was completed in November 2004. It is the biggest disaster of my career as a writer. The difficulties were:

(1) Any imaginative person has myriad theoretical ideas about a subject which he or she is passionate. A good theorist must approach this myriad mess and distill a portion of it into a theory. My MS short-term recall problem made it difficult to see the whole picture at once (more on that type of problem here), so I wound up writing the whole mess. It’s time to slay the dragon.

(2) I was trying to show the reader where the idea for the theory came from and which texts had influenced it, as a sort of a literature review. This was a disaster. The journey a thinker takes to develop an idea is not the same journey the reader needs to take to learn the idea quickly. In fact, as the journey the thinker took is often a series of very idiosyncratic imaginative responses to many different texts, that journey, without extraordinary narration, must be by and large meaningless to the reader, whose imagination must perforce work differently that the writer’s. The intellectual journey is deeply meaningful to the thinker, but the thinker is unlikely to be able to contextualize the journey for the reader unless he or she happens also to be a novelist. The point is to bring the reader to the new theory as quickly and painlessly as possible. The intellectual journey is not a literature review. This was not multiple sclerosis. It was simply self-indulgence.

(3) Foucault is right about story telling. We don’t recreate the seamless story from the shambles that are the documents. Rather, we impose order on the documents, excluding some details and inferring others. Our story is always more incomplete than the documents. Now, if done properly, this is hardly a tragedy. Every series of events can be narrated at a more concrete or a more abstract level. I was having trouble moving up and down the ladder of abstraction in order to pitch the story properly for my page limit and theoretical needs. This is a normal graduate student problem. It is not embarrassing that I suffered from it, but it is annoying.

(4) I don’t draw on enough secondary sources for the history. I knew that going in. I was desperate at the time to simply give birth to the idea. The paper was desperately out of control. Getting it into publishable shape was the least of my worries.

The new goal is 12,000 words.