THE IVORY CHOP SHOP!!!!!!!!!!

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:12:04 GMT

Original Platters accuse fake Platters of 'name piracy'

Trade Skirmish: First Salvo In A Trade War?

A Work of Passion: New triumph for old ghazal masters

Lloyd Price 'Clean' In Wax Bootleg Case

Claim new threats to Lubavitch rabbi

Bitter Battle Brewing Over Bootleg Britannica Books

print piracy is rampant in the rural areas of Maharashtra, Gujarat, West Bengal, Delhi-U.P. and C.P.C.I. and has spread to the South

Boot legging poses problem: Video cassette market explodes

under the names of Gault Industries, Datax Enterprises, Soundco Corporation, Sound 8, Standard Tapes, Motor Tapes and Sound Sales

From Fruitwalla to Cassette King

rough draft of last requests

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 19:57:53 GMT

Here is a quick rundown of what I am trying to do:

The state has increasingly intervened to regulate property since World War II, and not just in terms of space - e.g. guiding the course of suburbanization, abolishing racial covenants, building prisons everywhere, waging the War on Drugs, or permitting free confiscation of property for commercial development (as in the recent Supreme Court case). Government has also gotten fervently active in protecting immaterial property, and this agenda takes many forms. Corporations have been granted extraordinary new privileges in owning information, such as the genetic code of an animal or plant. The entertainment industry has enlisted the support of the government in suppressing the circulation of unauthorized recordings. Calls from the pharmaceutical, computer and cultural sectors have led the US government to pressure people throughout the world to comply with property law. The government has even prohibited the creation of software that circumvents the restrictions that companies build into their products - for example, a program that disables antipiracy mechanisms on a CD or computer program. Imagine if the government had forbidden people from popping the hood and tinkering with a car. (We might not have NASCAR!) It is absurd in the context of a traditional manufacturing economy, but this scenario has become reality as far as computer programs go. These policies represent a profound extension of the government's ability to regulate behavior, based on the sanctity of property.

I would tie all this to the emergence of the post-industrial economy. These changes accompanied a transformation in the way people in the developed world lived and worked. The writers of the Port Huron Statement saw this coming as early as 1962, when they spoke of the dimunition of the labor movement, the increase of automation, the rising importance of immaterial labor (education, healthcare, research, management) and the freeing of the corporation from national strictures. Nations like Japan and the United States soon came to focus ever more on the production of services and information, all mediated by communication technology. Saskia Sassen, for instance, has written about how, during deindustrialization, centers like New York and London reinvented themselves as high-tech coordinating centers for production, which has been dispersed all over the globe. Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Paolo Virno have examined how this structural change of the global economy has gradually changed the nature of all work, from agricultural fields to the McDonald's counter, from the shop floor to the sales floor and beyond. I'm looking at media piracy as one instance of the new game: a crucial commodity (entertainment), toward which so many resources are directed, is up for grabs due to the availability of technology that produces (and reproduces) information. It starts with the audiotape recorder and copy machines, and continues through the VCR, personal computer, and Internet. A society that engages so many of its members in producing information carries the vulnerability of its products being misappropriated, or freely distributed.

In the first part of my prospectus, I discuss the many new technologies that became widely used in the 1960s and 1970s. The ones mentioned above hardly make for an exhaustive list. The answering machine, cable television, closed circuit television, surveillance cameras, lie detector tests, databases and many others came on to the scene as well. Although most had been developed much earlier, these devices were increasingly integrated into the workplace, marketplace and government, just as the manufacturing sector began to contract. In short, I argue that the period saw an explosion of new communication technologies, and that these assisted in the shift to a post-industrial or service economy in the most developed nations. I separate these uses into two categories: technologies of control and expression. Certainly, surveillance served to tighten the regime of management in the workplace, and computer technology allowed corporations to monitor consumers' habits and government to track its citizens better. On the other hand, tape recorders, PCs and copy machines afforded new ways for people to produce and transmit information, fostering the independent music scene, the black market for bootlegs, and the proliferation of cheap, self-produced magazines ("zines"). These examples suggest countervailing trends to the larger consolidation of control of the media during the late twentieth century, of which Ben Bagdikian and many others have written. While a boom in new media did occur, one cannot generalize that what resulted was a more democratic, participatory culture or a hyperregulated dystopia. The trends in communication cut both ways, toward both greater opportunities for expression and the intensification of discipline and supervision.

Next, I try to uncover what models of communication might account for these varying uses of media. Thinkers like Jacques Attali, Jurgen Habermas, George Myerson and Gilles Deleuze have criticized a certain tendency to use technology to justify a mechanistic or authoritarian conception of human interaction. Paul Edwards, for instance, has shown how, starting in World War II, psychologists developed the notion of the human brain as an information processing machine or computer. Thinking consisted of the transmission of signals through a chain of command, and noise had to be eliminated in order for commands to be sent and received efficiently. Such a model has obvious appeal for managers who increasingly use computers and cameras to regulate their employees’ behavior, ensuring that orders are carried out promptly and talk takes the most stereotyped, efficient form possible.

I see the problems of the contemporary culture industries as analogous to the worldviews of cognitive psychology, computer science, and Taylorism. When unauthorized reproduction became widely possible, music companies moved to quash piracy on a variety of grounds: the copies made for inferior product; the copies were identical in style and quality to the originals; piracy would cripple investment in new music; pirates wrongly reaped the benefits of promotion, which was necessary to the creation of “hits”; and artists had a right to remuneration for their work and control over it, i.e. they deserved to determine whether a studio demo or a live performance would be sold as a public commodity or not. The alternative was not only injustice but anarchy. Copies of varying quality would proliferate in the market, and consumers could not what they were getting from and who made it. Great numbers of people would get their hands in the music business, recording concerts, repackaging and remixing hits, and compromising the integrity of the individual product as a singular work. These results did, in fact, occur in the 1960s and 1970s, as corporations and the government scrambled to suppress such activities.

It was a messy situation. Contrary to the record labels’ ideal of producing a clean, professional product, the pirated versions included the noise of an amateur concert recording, or the sonic slippage in a copy of a copy of a copy. This literal noise the music companies saw as a defrauding of the consumer. But I suggest that, figuratively, the growth of the musical black market was also a form of noise, viewed in light of the orderly, effective system of distributing information the music business desired. If a corporation, a computer, or a human brain could be conceived of as systems for sending signals through hierarchical branches, then multiplying activity along the lines of distribution would distract, divert, and sap energy from the whole. An industry, even a whole culture, could fit into this model of communication. Songwriters wrote songs, lawyers registered them, performers recorded them, producers prepared them, corporations promoted and distributed them, and consumers bought and listened to them. A discrete, inviolable piece of culture should move efficiently down the supply line. Piracy is an unnecessary and unwholesome form of noise in this system, to be trimmed like stray leaves and twigs that distort the form of a topiary dinosaur. Music executives and their lawyers argued that “it takes a great deal of hard work and promotion to make a hit,” and the unauthorized copiers disrupted that system so much as to threaten its existence. The corporation was sending out many signals – musical recordings, advertisements in sound and print, arranging performances to boost artists’ profiles – and they had a right to see that these efforts reached their targets. Moreover, songs did not just find favor with audiences on their own merits. A successful recording was a social creation of the most delicate kind, and the state had to step in and protect this marvel from the corrosive effect of diversions from the system that created it.

In short, I suggest that the chieftains of the culture industries saw their relationship to the public in much the same way as a cognitive scientist understood a computer, or as the modern manager viewed a productive workforce. None of these systems could function successfully with unregulated noise pervading its structure. As Gilles Deleuze observed, “The societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is noise and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses.” Post-industrial society came to enforce new restrictions on behavior because the technologies that enabled social change also facilitated activities that threatened the new systems of production. I know this is quite a conceptual leap I am trying to make here, and my research may yet show that it cannot be sustained. Still, I would like to find some larger principle underlying the way that people talked about piracy and tried to handle it as a social problem. I would also like to examine the fruits of the booming black market of the 1960s and 1970s, analyzing the pirate or bootleg recording as a cultural artifact like any other. Are there any features that distinguish these goods as a style or form of culture? In my prospectus, I spend some time considering the significance of the literal noise that characterizes unauthorized recordings. I also relate the practice of manipulating sound through tape recorders, computers and other means to genres that emerged in the 1970s, like hip-hop and electronic music, which “sampled” sound to create collages, and new traditions like punk rock that incorporated noise as a key motif. If there is a connection between all these cultural developments and the economic and political conflict over piracy, I would like to find it.

Tue, 09 May 2006 15:51:41 GMT

I am doing a bit of an experiment here. Since I'm writing about media and piracy, the idea of "networks" comes up a lot - both the infrastructure of information technology and the system of connections through which people make and distribute goods of dubious legality. So I might end up using the term in this project, partly to analyze how the underground economy functioned geographically. However, "network" is such a trite old cliché in the new age, bandied about left and right by corporate propagandists and academic theorists and your cousin Shelly. I don't want to be buying into the same goofy language that Cingular's PR department uses, especially if the term is so fuzzily defined that it conceals a lot of other ideas with their own implications. Indeed, the word has been prominent in a lot of political thinking in recent years. The idea of a "network society" has informed the projects of the center-left (like the UK Labour Party) to propose a more social-democracy-flavored response to the post-industrial society, which otherwise seems to be dominated by right-wing parties who find that faith in technology can easily support a belief in unfettered free markets. Some of the more traditional left get really annoyed when people go on and on about networks, rhizomes, affect, identity and so on. They think that this way of thinking obscures the basic conflict between capital and workers, and elevates the consumption enjoyed by upper classes everywhere (such as First World academics) to the ultimate focus of all political thinking. I can definitely see how a discussion of media piracy could end up dwelling only on the goods people consume, turning a blind eye to the productive process and the larger matrix (there we go again) of power relations throughout our society and beyond. My own instinct is to say that entertainment is just another form of production, the same in all the important ways to other kinds of work. I don't really understand those who say that the theory of surplus-value no longer applies in the service economy or to immaterial labor. As long as there is property, and work being done, both of which are under the control of someone other than the person doing the work and using the property, value is still being appropriated. It's still capitalism.

So, given all that, here is the dense undergrowth of the word "network." More to come...

TYPES OF NETWORKS (according to Wikipedia)

* Business network
* Entrepreneurial network
* Social network
* Old boy network
* Sexual network

* Radio network, create and distribute radio programming
* Television network, create and distribute television programming
* Network (film)
* Network Records, a record label
* The Network, a band

* Digital network, a coupled network of digital components
* Electrical network, a network of electrical components
* Computer networking, communication between computer systems
* Telecommunications network, a network of telecommunications links

* Network theory, the applied mathematics counterpart of graph theory
* Network (mathematics), a type of digraph in graph theory
* Neural network, an interconnected group of biological neurons

* Transport network, facilities on which people and goods move
* Spatial network, urban networks or networks of rooms within buildings

* Network effect, a characteristic that causes a good or service to have a value to a potential customer dependent on the number of customers already owning that good or using that service

MEANINGS OF NETWORK

channels
Synonyms: arrangement, artery, chain, checkerboard*, circuitry, complex, connections, convolution, crisscross*, fabric, fiber, grid, grill*, grillwork, hookup, interconnections, jungle, labyrinth, maze, mesh, net, netting, nexus, organization, patchwork*, plexus, reticulation, reticule, screening, structure, system, tessellation, tracks, wattle, weave, web, wiring

local area network
communications network, computer network, LAN, workgroup computing

neural network
interconnected system, neural net, semantic net, semantic network

old-boy network
exclusive informal network, age group, Freemasonry, networking, old-girl network, peer group

amalgamate
blend, admix, alloy, ally, coalesce, combine, come together, compound, consolidate, fuse, incorporate, integrate, interface, intermix, join together, meld, merge, mingle, network, pool, team up*, tie in, tie up*, unite

apparatus
system, bureaucracy, hierarchy, network, organization, setup, structure

bond
fastener, band, binding, chain, connection, cord, fastening, fetter, gunk, hookup, irons, ligature, link, linkage, manacle, network, nexus, rope, shackle, stickum*, tie, tie-in, wire

bond (2)
relation, affiliation, affinity, association, attachment, connection, connective, friendship, hookup, interrelationship, liaison, link, marriage, network, obligation, relationship, restraint, tie, tie-in, union

cobweb
entanglement
fiber, filament, gossamer, labyrinth, mesh, net, network, snare, tissue, toil, web, webbing

combine
connectamalgamate, associate, band, bind, blend, bond, bracket, bunch up, coadjute, coalesce, commingle, compound, conjoin, cooperate, couple, dub, fuse, get together, hitch on*, hook on*, incorporate, interface, join, league, link, marry, merge, mingle, mix, network, plug into, pool, put together, relate, slap on*, synthesize, tack on*, tag on*, unify, unite, wed

just what i've been trying to get at

Mon, 17 Apr 2006 21:00:50 GMT

We're told businesses have souls, which is surely the most terrifying news in the world...

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is noise and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses...

Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America

147

the cyborg discourse generated by these theories was from the outset both profoundly practical and deeply linked to closed-world discourse. It described the relation of individuals, as system components and as subjects, to the political structures of the closed world.

154

A unique feature of their theory is that it does not picture conceptual structure as a reflective representation of external reality. Instead, it views concepts as essentially structured by human life and action, and especially by the human body in its interaction with the world.

155

while metaphors reveal hidden aspects of reality (by providing a frame that highlights them), they also always hide other features. Perhaps the best example comes from the CONDUIT metaphor, in which people discuss the nature and functioning of language using the complex metaphor

IDEAS (OR MEANINGS) ARE OBJECTS.
LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE CONTAINERS.
COMMUNICATION IS SENDING.

Language is thus conceived as a conduit through which objects (ideas), packaged in containers (words and phrases), are transferred from a sender to a receiver.

156

It was the dominance of exactly this CONDUIT metaphor that prompted Ludwig Wittgenstein's repudiation of the logical-atomist view of language as a picture of reality and forced him to the conclusion that meaning must be understood as embodied in the use of language—in a context, for a purpose.

161

As Lakoff and Johnson have shown, one way to evoke the full range of a metaphor's cultural potentialities is to explore its entailments. What are the entailments of the Turing-test metaphor THE MIND (OR BRAIN) IS A COMPUTER? The most obvious ones are these:

The brain is hardware.

The brain is a rapid, complex calculating machine.

The brain is made up of digital switches.

The mind is software.

The mind is a program or set of programs.

The mind manipulates symbolic representations.

The mind is an information machine.

Thinking is computation.

Perception is computation.

Memory is looking up stored data.

The function of the mind and brain is information processing.

All these claims have in fact been made, in more or less these terms, by cognitivists over the last four decades. They have achieved such currency that some of these ideas, such as the notion that the brain processes information, no longer seem metaphorical at all.

The entailments of the COMPUTER metaphor lead off in a range of directions, some obvious and some less so. For example, the metaphor of the mind as a set of programs, or symbolic instructions that process inputs and control outputs, provides a rich set of analogies that allow us to portray the complex, hidden, abstract processes of thinking and the production of behavior in terms of the relatively simpler and more concrete ones involved in computer programming.

162

The computer is most familiar as a calculating machine and a symbol processor. It manifestly does not betray any capacity for emotion or sensitivity to the emotions of human beings. The COMPUTER metaphor also implies, then, that emotion is either irrelevant to the understanding of human thought, or that emotion might somehow be represented as a symbolic process. The computer is a logic machine.

167

Hard mastery is the imposition of will over the machine through the implementation of a plan. A program is the instrument for premeditated control. Getting the program to work is more like getting to say one's piece than allowing ideas to emerge in the give-and-take of conversation.

168

Computers symbolize unblinking precision, calculative power, and the ability to synthesize massive quantities of data.

169

At the same time they stand for the rigidities of pure logic and the impersonality of centralized corporations and governments. This reputation was one source of their authority in the construction of closed-world discourse.

210

The airplane, the tank, and the submarine were primitive examples of what would eventually be labeled "cyborgs": biomechanical organisms made up of humans and machinery. 1 Their internal and external linkages took the form of electronic feedback circuits. These included not only interphones and radiophones for communicating with other humans but the dials, controls, and bombsights through which humans communicated with the machines. Should any of these information linkages fail, a cybernetic weapon could be totally disabled. The limits of communication under noisy conditions formed, therefore, ultimate limits to their effectiveness. The noise the machines made and endured had to be checked, or else, somehow, their communications systems had to be made to function despite the noise. The second new problem came from the radical increases in the speed of motorized military units and air warfare, which necessitated matching increases in the rapidity of communication.

211

Psychophysicist said: "The waist-gunner with a new "bandit" looming in his gunsight has no time to code his message to the rest of the crew in dots and dashes. "Tally-ho, three o'clock," fills his quota of seconds. … Even speech was often too slow when the kamikaze came boring in and the radar lookout had to relay his data on the "contact" through the ship's information center to the gun directors."

These two design problems—the "human engineering" of cyborgs to counter the problem of noise, and the engineering of communications for maximum speed and efficiency—involved academic and industrial psychologists in the problems of war. Interpreting military requirements in light of their existing research programs and theoretical commitments—largely psychometric, psychophysical, and behaviorist in character—experimental psychologists directed their efforts toward specifying the design parameters of the human organism, in order to insert that organism into electromechanical military systems.

In communication between aircraft carriers and their fighter planes, and between ships, "fifty percent of the words transmitted … must be repeated," according to shipboard communications officers

212

Ultimately, the two labs employed over seventy-five scientists. Roughly half of these were psychologists.

The PAL played a crucial role in the genesis of postwar information processing psychologies. A large number of those who worked at the lab either during or after the war—when it continued its work under military, NSF, and NIMH contracts—helped to develop computer models and metaphors and to introduce information theory into human experimental psychology.

the view of the human as an information processing system, in a precise, quantifiable sense

213

The Flint, Michigan, Journal reported under the headline "Navy Ear Plugs Cut Noise, Yet Let Sailors Hear Commands" that "with the ear warden … loudness of both battle noises and the voice is brought down within the limits of hearing. … The command can be heard." 12 Noise caused chaos by breaking the links of the chain of command. Ear Wardens restored order.

(see Flint, Michigan, Journal, September 17, 1944. Harvard University Archives. )

The PAL's task could not be to eliminate the sources of noise, but only to reduce noise locally, to ensure the functioning of the human components of cybernetic weapons

214

to analyze and optimize the physical and psychophysical basis of the chain of command. The lab—mirroring Shannon's conception of the communications chain—studied the technologies that passed orders from commanders to soldiers and returned information in the opposite direction. It made no distinction between the technology of hardware and the technology of language and listening.

War noise thus helped to constitute communication as a psychological and psychophysical problem.

217

Wide variation was found in the ability of individuals to understand and to make themselves understood through communications systems under noisy conditions. The PAL also discovered that brief training in articulation and listening improved performance measurably.

(See George Miller's textbook 'Language and Communication,' based largely on results of the military research on communication and written because Miller could find no basic text on psychology of language, 1951)

218

As an early PAL report put it, anticipating systems theory: "ultimate perfection of communication demands that each link in the total system be designed to complement and work effectively with every other link." 19

Essentially, "systems research" meant "human engineering." As the postwar proposal to continue SRL research put it,

the primary concept of basic Systems Research on Informational Devices and Centers is the scientific study of personnel and equipment as they must operate together under conditions of actual use. Systems Research utilizes the techniques of many fields of which engineering, physics and psychology are, perhaps, the most important. Systems Research is not primarily concerned with the development of individual equipments for specific applications, but...

222

The war effort helped show psychologists how measurements at the outer limits of human and electronic capacities could reveal truths about ordinary situations. It emphasized to them the importance of such concepts as noise and information (even before formal information theory had spread); psychoacoustics helped join information theory and information technology to psychophysics. Finally, the research context of transmissions through a command chain became a paradigm for future work on communication. These factors help to explain why ex-PAL scientists like Miller, Pribram, and Neisser would later become primary exponents of the view of the mind as a hierarchically structured information processor incorporating multiply redundant systems as hedges against stressed, noisy communications channels.

223

He experimented with many different kinds of sound, such as static, bad music, and obnoxious voices, trying to determine which would produce the greatest interference with a listener's understanding of the primary signal in radio voice communications

224

a few paragraphs later we find him discussing what looks like a quasi-Chomskyan picture of language as rule-governed: "Our choice of symbol sequences for the purposes of communication is restricted by rules. The job is to discover what the rules are and what advantages or disadvantages they create." 37 Immediately below, Miller gives a detailed description of communications systems in Shannon's formal-mechanical terms—source, destination, channel, and code—and compares the "human speech machinery" to a transmitter and the ear to a receiver, establishing the "vocal communication system"

(see Noam Chomsky, "Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior," Language, Vol. 35 (1959), 26–58.)

230

His Hixon paper argued that complexly patterned, rapidly executed behaviors such as the playing of arpeggios proceeded far too quickly for neurological execution of the chains of conditioned reflex arcs postulated by behaviorists

231

Behavior in searching for one page after another is under the control of successive index entries. "Here we are not concerned with a flow of energy or transmission of information from one page number to the next but merely with the order in which the 'instructions' are executed." 61 Just as a computer uses the same system to control its own programs as it does to process information, so a person can use the same number either as a "control" instruction ( e.g., as a page number in an index) or as an item of information (e.g., as a price).The remainder of PSB was devoted to the analysis of various forms of behavior, including "cognitive behavior," as the execution of instruction sets in the form of TOTE units. The key notions were organization, hierarchy, and feedback in the passage of control from one instruction to the next. This is the same structure I have been calling the "chain of command," relocated within the individual.

the notorious shitstain test

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 14:40:21 GMT

Ok, here's what I'm thinking:

I read the lit review, and, though I can't say I understood all the material, I can say this: the "territory" idea continues to be interesting but mysterious to me, and I think I get the Kafka thing. I can understand why the idea of a "minority language" could be used to examine independent music, punk, whatever the case may be. It reminds me a bit of these feminist ideas, which have been applied in a lot of other areas, about how the oppressed person or group has a better (closer to accurate) understanding of how the system works, and what the society is actually like, because they have to survive under its more adverse conditions; in other words, they are forced to see a lot of things that the oppressor doesn't really need to in his/her daily business (except of course when there are rebellions and he needs to finetune the craft of oppression, using whatever fuzzy resolution she has available). Doesn't the minority language have an innate value because of what it records about, what it furnishes the means to articulate about the dominant system? (To which it is always in a tense and precarious relationship.) You can see that in Kafka's writing, and you could possibly see it in independent music.

To me, it always comes to this question: what is significant about 40 or 50 people, standing more or less still, in a room in front of some musicians? Or, even better, 15 or 20 standing around at a show in somebody's living room, listening to serious amateurs from their own community? What really is the point of "Q and Not U, Karate, Cave In, Piebald, The Rapture, Further Seems Forever, Between the Buried and Me, Underoath, Velvet Teen, Ted Leo & The Pharmacists..."? Obviously, I love a lot of this music, so I do think it must have value or significance. Here are a couple guesses as to what the music might mean.

Independent music is:

1. a very specific niche market for a cultural product that is loaded with very fine distinctions, allusions, motifs, etc. in a refined tradition

2. the mirror for a highly educated mini-class of white-collar workers with a certain self-image (one that, in varying degrees, is at least a little contrary to the "system")

3. the lowest level of the music industry selection process, as a proving ground for artists or sounds/styles that will later be recruited for higher earning potential

4. a counterpoint to the prevailing capitalist cultural market, containing a necessary critique of the majority experience (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit)

5. another genre or a group of subgenres

6. the bailiwick of a small group of professionals who make music their lives by writing, playing, recording, producing, booking, distributing music

7. a means for providing a sense of history, continuity and connection to free-floating atomistic atheistic consumers

8. a subculture that progressively innovates over time, unlike much market-researched mainstream music

I'm sure there are many other ways of describing what indie-rock/punk/hip-hop/etc is, but these are the views that first come to mind for me. Are these legitimate ways of conceptualizing music? And do they have any relevance to Deleuze (like, maybe, #7)?

for a mild distraction...

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 12:10:05 GMT

Adorno meets Girls Aloud...a porn fantasy. By my fellow Nottingham critical theorist thapunkprincess.

http://thapunkprincess.livejournal.com/14713.html

i'm here!

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 12:15:28 GMT

Ann Lee
Critical Theory and Cultural Studies
March 1, 2006

Literature Review

As Theodor Adorno reminds us, music is characterized by its “non-conceptual” nature, its content is not deduced in the same way as say, literature or painting, and therefore requires a different kind of aesthetic approach. Perhaps this is what has led some, like Andrew Bowie, to pose music as the primary field for raising ontological/epistemological concerns ; undoubtedly, music has been long associated with philosophical mediations on identity, the subject, and their relationship to society. My thesis similarly attempts a philosophical investigation of music, drawing primarily on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to probe ways of doing music. In my view, it is both the creative and practical nature of their philosophy that provides us with such enabling concepts to theorize a critical or “minor” language of music today. Rather than simply pinning theory to a new historical moment however, in reference to Paul Klee, D&G argue that the goal of music is to render audible, not render “the audible”—similarly, my thesis proposes not to simply create new forms of musical expression or analysis, but to also render audible those non-sonorous forces at work.
This literature review serves to contextualize the main questions of my study, organized around several key themes. First, I address more general debates regarding the nature of a “Deleuzean cultural studies” to situate my thesis in a broader sense, through the use of a unique methodology attuned to the local and singular. Next, I address specific expositions of, and debates surrounding the musical terms raised by D&G in A Thousand Plateaus—primarily, the concepts “refrain”, “minor/ity”, “pop” and varying expressions of music’s relationship to territory. There are also moments when reading alongside D&G the work Theodor Adorno, a prominent cultural critic and sociologist of modern music, appears pertinent—not merely for a comparative entry point—but for the useful ways he discusses limits on music’s relationship to capital. Obviously, as the two often stand in irreconcilable difference, my task is to utilize differences for productive, practical purposes. A key difference between Deleuze and Adorno for example, is in their respective interpretation of dialectics, so in addition to exploring these ideas, I would like to examine the articles that discuss the consequences of difference on music, especially in conceptualizing time. While my thesis avowedly privileges the Deleuzean concept of the refrain as a guiding model for reading music, i.e. the movement within territory or society—I think one way of linking the two may be through a major musical advisor to Deleuze as well as Adorno’s contemporary, Pierre Boulez. Not only am I seeking to “revive” traditional readings of Adorno, but I would like to show how his formal theory enhances forms of musical production today. Finally, I would like to discuss the works of several authors who explore the numerous concepts employed by D&G such as Charles Stivale, who takes the theorization of “minor” with concrete practices of identity and authenticity in the Cajun music repertoire. These, and other contemporary examples can legitimize the utility and uniqueness of a “Deleuzean musicology”.

To be clear, this literature review focuses on the ways cultural theorists have attempted to respond to at least one of these four questions: 1) Why should we use D&G in analyzing music, or musical subcultures?; 2) What concepts do they provide us to theorize music with?; 3) How can their concepts be productively employed in relation to Adorno?; and 4) How can we employ these concepts to build a “minor” language, or way of doing music today? While the review itself seeks to foreground existing debates within the field of D&G and music, the thesis itself whilst informed by these debates, strives to open up discussion on relatively unexplored musical terrain.

_Deleuze & Guattari and Cultural Studies_
The following two articles discussed relate philosophy to the more general issue of reading music as a cultural phenomenon, and also begin to introduce various D&G-influenced methods of analysis. Gregory J. Seigworth and J. Macgregor Wise, in their “Introduction to Deleuze and Guattari in Cultural Studies”, remark on the blurred distinctions between cultural studies and philosophy, when new theoretical “dressings”—a “dash of color to the average cultural studies’ essay”—‘let’s see, hmmm, a Nietzschean floor covering, an Althusser-inspired armchair…’" takes precedence, also, causing problematic designations as to what the role of philosophy in cultural studies might be. For example, “philosophy thinks acting while cultural studies puts thought into action” --or vice versa. They argue that a distinct quality in D&G’s philosophy however, is in this proposed alternative to the old theory/praxis debate. For D&G, philosophy is not simply (a la Douglas Kellner) for retrieving a lexical “toolbox”; rather, it is in the creation of new concepts:

When it [philosophy] creates concepts, entities, it is always to extract an event from things and beings, to set up the new event from things and being, always to give them a new event: space, time, matter, thought, the possible as events

Seigworth and Wise reiterate throughout the article, that when applying Deleuze to cultural studies, concept-creation is not achieved through leaving or transcending one’s own immanent space, to create a more “situated” event but, as D&G radically suggest, these theories/concepts are already “in the context or situation/event… ‘the concept speaks the event’” . They also point out ways D&G provides a sort of grounding, a way of warding off the dangers of falling into “theoretical glibness” when dealing with grand, abstract discourses (as some have attributed to D&G’s work). D&G emphasize the utility of the concept sustained with other concepts, by struggling, and putting these concepts in motion. Like Benjamin's argument in “The Author as Producer”, the theorist is not an interpreter or reflector of culture, but crucially transmits the cultural itself by mustering specific tools to create these discourses: “Practice […] should not be understood then as the direct application of theory onto a particular set of circumstances […] they maintain a certain degree of coexistence: always present—one within the other—at the same moment”. Seigworth and Wise also make this connection between cultural studies and what has often been designated as “post-structuralist” tendencies to escape signification and deconstruct transcendent power relations. Though their introduction arguably fails to elaborate on the specific nature of the movement of these concepts and at times, loses itself in the seemingly abstract (“philosophy’s usefulness for cultural studies is to be found in its infinite patience […] the infinite patience […] that must always transpire alongside and in the midst of those more giddy moments of running and jumping and knocking things over” ), it provides nonetheless a useful starting point to understanding a Deleuzean way of speaking and of, potentially doing music. A merging of cultural studies and philosophy becomes both apparent and possible.

Ian Buchanan, however, takes a slightly different approach to this question, and in his article, “Deleuze and Cultural Studies” focuses on the question of the subject. He argues to not begin by asking what he claims is the reductive question, “What is subject”—but rather, “How does one become a subject?”-- for “it is only by asking ‘how does one become a subject?’ that cultural studies can avoid objectifying subjects” . Similar to Seigworth and Wise, he argues for a repositioning of the subject to direct attention to the subject surrounding milieu, the forces which constitute them as subject (rather than the social given from which a subject emerges). He agrees that a Deleuzean cultural study is not a simple application of theoretical tools to various social situations, but reconceives cultural studies by first addressing notions of the subject. His argument then entails a rigorous philosophical meditation starting from the problematic Deleuze finds in Hume, then moving to considering Deleuze’s coloring of a “transcendental empiricism”. Buchanan states:

The problem is this: If a subject is wholly transcendent, then it cannot effect or be affected by the society it inhabits… Only a subject that is given can be shaped by the social, that is, constituted by forces external to itself. But a subject that is completely given and not at least partially transcendent cannot have any effect on the social order. The aim of cultural studies should be to provide a theory of culture that can accommodate both of these considerations. By constructing the subject dually, transcendental empiricism does in fact furnish the grounds for just such a theory, showing that the subject is the product of social mechanisms and that the subject is capable of manipulating those mechanisms.

Buchanan criticizes the subjective mapping of musical movement in purely qualitative terms, ie., how a piece of music a differs from music b in x, y, ways. A critique that perhaps echoes the same objections both Adorno and Deleuze had to positivistic or empirical methods. In a Deleuzean fashion, Buchanan states cultural studies must concern itself with the creation of new concepts, of determining the “conditions of existence”—which he then argues, is found in the conditions of the subject. If we relate Buchanan’s definitions of a transcendental empiricism to this larger question of Deleuze and music, he would say the listening/composing subject, whilst born from social structures, is still a “product of self-invention”, a subject that must transcend “the given” in order to attain agency. The question then, becomes how the subject attains agency or, enables the “passively synthesized subject to become active”—which recognizably, borrows the Nietzschean emphasis on the creative power of the subject, a will to power. To reiterate, Buchanan claims the subject is not imposed by the social but from the given, and emerges by a particularization, ie. a becoming. “To the extent that a subject is a subject, he or she is free… Since the subject is always already free, any variation in freedom is also a variation in subjectivity… This variability I will call modality.” These various modes of agency within subjectivity might be usefully incorporated into a comparison of D&G’s notions of “revolutionary” or “critical”, and Adorno's different use of the same terms. But Buchanan extends these ideas to music in another article, "Deleuze and Pop Music". He states that like Adorno, Deleuze considered the popular as undesirable and a machine for massification and devaluation, but that certain Deleuzean concepts are more applicable to popular culture:

The new is not 'merely different' but the differentiating. It is what makes the difference characterized as diversity possible... What is especially significant about this concept for my purposes is the importance it places on repetition, for popular music--and its associated nostalgia--is constituted by repetition.

What seems most important for Buchanan is in this repetition, the ritornellos-- a key concept in D&G's A Thousand Plateaus. Buchanan defines it as a portable territory one carries in order to transform on'es surrounding milieu, a "block of sound that is at once a way home, the very source of home, and home in our hearts." For example, listeners of popular music can appropriate "the voice" it gives them to express themselves differently and in doing so, "make habitable the objective conditions of their existence; in other words, what popular music does is set in motion a becoming-minor or, what amounts to the same thing, a becoming- public of the otherwise private individual." Perhaps Buchanan's ultimate direction comes clear when he invokes the notion of nostalgia, claiming it to be the key idea built into the refrain of popular music, a strategy of capitalism insofar as it operates on repetition in order to enhance an effect. At the same time, Buchanan argues that it is a mastery of this repetition that leads to truly creative expression, or, a form of expressing the "inexpressible" of popular music.

In a short response to this article, Andrew Murphie challenges the view that Deleuze rejected popular music, calling it quite "untenable" (as Deleuze frequently drew examples from popular music such as Edith Piaf, Bob Dylan, Claude Francois). Murphie points out the dangers of bracketing Deleuze and Guattari, and citing Les Trois Ecologies: 20 , states Guattari often openly admired popular music. But it is in Charles Stivale's review of Buchanan's notion of "Deleuzism" in Deleuzism: A Metacommentary that Buchanan's assimilation of Deleuze into cultural studies finds points worth critiquing, or theoretical differences become apparent. For example, Stivale claims Buchanan's relegation of Deleuze to dialectics of, what he calls a "Jamesonian critical apparatus" within academia is highly problematic. Thought Buchanan's insistence that we see Deleuze as "a dialectician" has not yet been adequately addressed here, perhaps Stivale's objection to Buchanan's "Deleuzism" raises important discussions surrounding Deleuze and cultural studies. Buchanan states:

By valorizing experimentation and rhizomatic structures, Deleuze's work apparently lends itself to all manner of wild appropriations, by any sector of the discipline... Yet if Deleuze's work actually licenses these readings of him, then however eccentric they may be, they are somehow affiliated to it, but to ignore it seems equally problematic since it strips the Deleuzean of its specific, or better, singular force, as a politically charged mode of creativity, leaving it only the weak generality of anything goes. For this reason, the central problem in reading Deleuze and reading with Deleuze is: what can be done with Deleuze? The answer, I have argued, is to produce Deleuzism.

Buchanan argues that the way to do justice to Deleuze is a disciplined, "hermeneutic" judging of all readings of Deleuze--but of course, as Stivale remarks, is quite an un-Deleuzean move after Deleuze had written in Dialogues on the disciplinary tactics of the tribunal, "better to be a street sweeper than a judge." Clearly, the way to function with Deleuze, in affirming Stivale's case, is not imposing programmatic stances. Undoubtedly, Buchanan's notion that a reconceptualization of subject can in turn, radically impact the possibilities for musical analysis--however, Stivale's critique reminds us of the dangers to creative exchange or expression when placing our study in a potentially prescriptive, overarching "Deleuzism".

_Concepts_
D&G's philosophy is built on connecting up concept-to-concept so that, when defining the key terms they use, it is difficult to speak about one without implicating another. Like listening to a record, one song often contains the clues for understanding or feeling out the next, and when placed out of order, may detract from the artistic consistency of the piece as a whole. But it seems that no other philosophy has so extensively ascribed to its music concepts, qualities arising out of a cosmology. Music, that is, for D&G relates to the corporeal experience as well as the natural creative processes, making them at once cosmic and affective modes of thought. It is important then, to understand this impact of territoriality on music and the central concepts linked: the refrain (ritournelle), becoming (devenir), minor and pop.

In A Thousand Plateaus, D&G first describe the refrain by giving the example of the child who sings in the dark to get rid of their fear , as a means of warding off the threat of "chaos". It is precisely through this music-making that a new territory is staked out. Fear itself does not necessarily dissipate but channeled into other form. The example of the child also illustrates how the refrain creates both content and a form of expression. It can then be defined as, "any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes." The refrain is no longer the mere content of the song, but a constitution of milieu components that mark a series of territories collectively moving towards the world, a history of becomings. Instead of describing music in sociological or scientific terms, such "territorial analyses" supplies an explanation of how the refrain can be used as a way of organizing the history of western classical music. As Ronald Bogue describes, "The cosmos with which music is intertwined is not a circumscribed totality but an open whole whose dimensions can never be given as such. The essence of music is to be found not in the macroscopic order of celestial cycles, but in the molecular domain of transverse becomings." Previously, Buchanan had defined the refrain as, a block of sound that "is at once a way home, the very source of home, and the home in our hearts" --but Bogue rephrases it say, it is "a point of stability, a circle of property, and an opening to the outside." --to pose the three-fold character of the refrain: a means of reconfiguring one's immediate territory, but also marking one's territory, then as a way of furthering creative lines of escape. The elements formed out of the territories D&G call milieu and rhythms, which themselves emerge out of a backdrop of chaos. Differing elements will cause the milieu to then fluctuate or move accordingly. The usefulness of these distinctions between milieu and rhythms are in their creative functions-- the milieu components emerge in territories as qualities, while "rhythms become expressive" . Territorialization transforms these various milieus and rhythms by creating expressive qualities and autonomous rhythms that induce a reorganization of functions. Thus, following D&G's further explanation of the refrain, we gather that the refrain "may (1) mark or assemble a territory; (2) connect a territory with internal impulses and or/ external circumstances; (3) identify specialized functions; (4) or collect forces in order to centralize the territory or go outside it." It is the movement of the refrain that forms the "content proper to music". While music is subject to systematic processes, D&G note that the great composers master the dominant language of their day and reinvent "a sort of diagonal between the harmonic vertical and the melodic horizon."

In a discussion with the musician Richard Pinhaus, Deleuze talks more specifically of the refrain in relation to time, by posing the question,"What is pulsation?" Borrowing from the Stoics, he makes the distinction between Aion and Chronos-- Aion being a "time of the incorporeal" and Chronos, a "time of bodies", calculated as a number of movement, a pulsed time. Pinhaus states that while pulsed time is a kind of territorialized time in that it marks a territory, pulse or beat on a territory, he's trying to find possibilities of talking about time that also includes "force, rhythmic complexity, systems of accentuations, harmonic resonance..." - --a "non-pulsed" time. Opposing serial techniques which proceed by "transition", and he is instead, seeking one operating by "translations" (citing musicians who build songs on "totally inclusive synthesis" like Hendrix, Glass, Ravel, Reich, Fripp and Eno). Both Deleuze and Pinhaus begin discussing the possibilities for a "non-pulsed" time, or rather, a musical form which is not subjected to the metronome, chrometry, but rather, the refrain. As stated earlier, Deleuze believes music is the content proper to the refrain, though the refrain is not yet musical. He argues that in non-pulsed time, you no longer have a development of form but relations of speeds and slowness, additionally, "you no longer have subject formation but you have hecceities." It is the movement of deterritorialization that releases non-pulsed time, creating a sort of collage. Through use of the refrain one can talk about these varying degrees of music material. No longer are the conditions for analysis marking a pulsed, temporality of a form in development, but rather, since all sonorous forms are made of these little refrains, the result is that refrains can also be traversed by a movement of deterritorialization "in a time which is no longer precisely the pulsed time of territory".

Ronald Bogue also explicates the role of the refrain in Deleuze's musical thought in Deleuze on Music, Paining and the Arts., describing it as "developing a theory of animal behavior as forms of thematic rhythmic patterning, and ultimately extending the musical model to describe the interactions of the natural world as an extended symphony of contrapuntal refrains." Bogue deals with music in three chapters of this book; in the first, he discusses the "deterritorialization of the refrain", the refrain being, as a preliminary definition, any sonorous block used to transform one's milieu, territory, or social field. Bogue also traces composer Messiaen's influence on Deleuze, and how his experiments in rhythm helped him develop this theory of unorthodox time, associated with becoming and the event. In the second, he discusses other composers of considerable influence on Deleuze's conception of music as "the history of becomings", like Varese, Bartok and Berio, to thinkers like Jakob von Uexkull and Raymon Ruyer. Bogue also discusses the idea of "becoming-other", the process all musicians enter when they create something genuinely new, also taking form of "becoming-animal", "becoming-woman", "becoming-child" or "becoming-molecular". It is a "transverse" connection between the dominant musical components, and such processes of becoming that characterize history. Bogue further develops how D&G transcend the progressive linearity of musical history by integrating the periods of Classicism, Romanticism and Modernism with the concepts of milieu, territory and cosmos, as well as their relation to Klee, "making the invisible visible" and the Dividual, and how it relates to music. The third chapter discusses how the creation of a new musical ethnology, or "ecology", influences our understanding of content and expression if indeed, music is immanent to the natural world: "The birth, growth, maturation, and eventual death of each organism is a continuous process, and that ongoing process of self-formation is best conceived of as the expression in time of a kind of developmental melody."

Minor_
The concept minor, can be found first used in D&G's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), and refers to ways in which Kafka utilized the dominant language (German) to subvert, or modify for other linguistic purposes, for a minor purpose. This linguistic use, according to D&G's theory of language, is not merely to communicate information, but to express power or a practice imbued with power relations--"To make the sequences vibrate, to open the word onto unexpected internal intensities-- in short, an asignifying intensive utilization of language." In the first chapter, minor is given the following three characteristics: 1) the intensive utilization of language or "deterritorialized sound" ; 2) is an inherently political movement; 3) takes on a collective value (as enunciation comes into figure). From this, we can begin to see how the use of "minor" to describe music is unique; it suggests its contents, the revolutionary potential, resides in the materiality itself. Bogue also describes how the concepts of minority and territoriality are intimately related, in a chapter entitled, "Minority, Territory, Music" in An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Bogue states, "In a major literature, the personal, familial and conjugal can remain detached from the sociopolitical sphere, where it tends to function as a mere background or environment"-- and quoting Kafka, minor literature's "cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics" Bogue also points out that "minor" is less a commitment to specific cultural communities than a matter of general usage in language. In the same way, it would be interesting to pose 'minor' ways of doing music-- music which makes possible a collective enunciation of group solidarity (and as Dick Hebdige's classic subcultural text Resistance: The Meaning of Style articulates). D&G insist, "the condition of possibility of any language is the complex network of practices and material elements that shape a given world." These practices are then shaped by "assemblages" which Bogue takes to defines as "heterogeneous collections of actions and entities that somehow function together", and follows a complex process of patterning and transformation. D&G favor the writers who, like authors Kafka, Joyce and Beckett, make "language itself stammer"; who place "all linguistic, and even nonlinguistic, elements in variation, both variables of expression and variables of content".

Michael Hardt's notes on A Thousand Plateaus is also useful here, in discussing Kafka's use of "minor" on the broader level of political resistance. As D&G note, "major" and "minor" do not qualify two different languages, rather, two usages or functions of language. Since D&G favor the rhizome over the arborescent, we can see the obvious objections to the use of a language insisting on unity and uniformity whereas the "minor" usage operates on a proliferation of the multiple uses of language. Hardt claims however, that we can extend this analysis not to just two usages of language, but of usages within society, "two ways of living".

The difference between majority and minority has nothing to do with numbers, because in fact the minorities are most often larger in number. It is probably not wrong to say that the difference is not one of a number but of power... but D&G rather refer directly to the social standard or constant as the mark of the majority. The minority way of living, then, would refer to a subordinate system, or a subsystem--one, however that still maintains a standard.

Hardt also reiterates the quality of a minor "line of flight". Construed as a political alternative, flight must be creative, not a mere escape from death. This occurs by "transforming the 'compositions of order into components of passage'" , what Hardt designates as a "constituent flight". What it implies is not the mere constitution of a new order, norms or majority, but something closer to Paul la Cour's famous statement--"being a poet is not writing a poem, but finding a new way to live." Similarly, Hardt reads into D&G a new mode for resistance one that encompasses a complete, new minoritarian usage (versus just being a minority).

To connect with this notion of minor is then, pop. Mentioned also in their book, they say:
What we call pop--pop music, pop philosophy, pop writing-- Worterfucht. To make use of the polylingualism of one's own language, to make a minor or intensive use of it, to oppose the oppressed quality of this language to its oppressive quality, to find points of nonculture or under-development, linguistic Third World zones by which a language can escape...

Take for example, Kafka's Metamorphoses--why, D&G ask, are Gregor Samsa's warbling so important? They explain, noises are created which take language from sense, "conquering sense" from signification. It also shows the word itself as a piece or note built on a "ladder of intensities" (intensities being defined as "any linguistic tool that allows a move toward the limit of a notion or a surpassing of it" ). The metamorphosis is opposed to the metaphor so that music, rather than being cordoned off to representation, encounters a new ways of being expressed. Timothy S. Murphy and Daniel W. Smith, in "What I hear is Thinking Too: Deleuze and Guattari Go Pop", unpack this notion of pop in relation to contemporary forms of music. They argue that gathering from D&G's concept of pop, the explosive potential of various musical forms has been made even more available today.

The regime of music production that is tied neither to the European composer/concert tradition and its strict division of labor, nor to any of the various historical traditions of indigenous music making around the world, but rather to the bricolage of modern recording technology (electric/electronic instruments, studios, overdubbing, mixing, etc.) and its media of distribution.

Murphy and Smith are interested in the production of recordings in a qualitative sense, coinciding with earlier discussions to the composition of forces or, the polemic against quantifying analyses. In true Deleuzean fashion, they state that their descriptive elements of their general theory of music acts as a double, as a way to describe and provide examples from popular/unpopular music. Pop, for them, is a form of multiplicity, a rhizome that "develops by fits and starts, in a messy, practical improvisational way rather than in a refined, programmatic, theoretical way." This, of course opposes the linerarity of formal composition in obvious ways, or the dialectical development of harmony as conceived by preceding composes. Their example of how music reterritorializes on the refrain, by moving in what D&G call a "punctual system", each note becomes a point within a system of two basic aces, the horizontal axis of melody, and then the vertical lines which move in relation. "Between these two axes, diagonals of modulation or transposition can be drawn that establish localizable connections between points of different levels or moments, thereby instituting various frequencies and resonance." Pop then, becomes for Murphy and Smith, something that not only opposes the high, standard "serious" music, but can encapsulate through its modes of production and distribution, all forms of music. Of course, my primary objection to Murphy and Smith's article is the way they vigorously oppose these two traditions:

Clearly, their [D&G's] claims for pop as an inventive and intensive usage of the heterogeneous elements of different sonorous territories are a far cry from the pessimistic account of popular or mass culture articulated by T.W. Adorno in his writing on popular music... Popular music in particular, Adorno claims, enacts through its repetitive verse/refrain form and superficial fashion shifts the debasement and conformity that capital imposes on its subjects.

They argue that Adorno's views on popular music reveal a lack of sympathy for these forms of expression, that they could no possible truly "deterritorialize" the determinations of capital--however, this would seems reliant on a commonplace approach of confining Adorno fairly exclusively to high culture, without referring to his extensive philosophical writings on music and autonomy. Although there are significant differences between the two corpuses, such as notions of subject I address later, Adorno's reflections of critical music, as stated in "Some Ideas of the Sociology of Music" in Sound Figures, often resonates with the Deleuzean notion of pop or minor-- rather than opposing them, as Murphy and Smith suggest. Adorno's view on the ideological function of these cultural industry products involved not only the famous degradation of art, but also their function of "naturalizing" and "concealing" its critical potential--and makes a turn similar D&G as to the ways music's deterritorialized components can be reterritotrialized, inserted into assemblages of desire which then act within the market. Additionally, D&G conceive music as deterritorializing when it recuperates musical materials and no longer concerns itself with the transcendent, musical structure. Giving primacy instead to the sonorous material itself, as Murphy and Smith state, "the musician no longer demands that the note function in relation to the harmonic or melodic axis, but rather considers the sound in its singularity, as a pure force" Adorno too, places an emphasis on the music materials as constructed in an on-going process of mediation: "In reality, [music] reflects the objective stage reached by the language and forms of music. Both are socially mediated." Rather than provide expressive "meaning", music is interpreted by its becoming object-with-materiality, a social imprinting that requires philosophical/aesthetic interpretation. Read in Deleuze's terms, music is perceived as a series of interrelationship that, albeit socially mediated, resembles language itself.

Greg Hainge in a chapter entitled "Is Pop Music?" from Deleuze and Music gives a more diverse account of understanding "pop" as well as criticisms of the approaches to "pop" as theorized by Buchanan, as well as Murphy and Smith. He first investigates "what music is", the event music, music as haecceity. Further elucidating Klee's idea of "rendering audible" or perceptible, the forms of Western music, he explains the process by which music is imbued with a movement across two planes. For Deleuze, this constitutes the essence of musical movement whose content is "the refrain". Hainge states, "whilst music makes use of the refrain... it is not the objective of music to stake out territory, to create an enclave shut off from the outside but, on the contrary, to affect as do the colors of a coral fish and birdsong, to deploy attributes intended to attract no repel" . In other words, the refrain allows us to describe how Western music produces fixed forms through certain types of movements, and not becomings, but "its power of affects, its musicality it might be said, comes from a properly musical process that consists in dismantling those very forms, pushing them to their limit, submitting them to the diagonal or transversal as music reterritorialises upon itself qua music." Later Hainge renders this distinction between content and expression clear: "Wester music, whilst dependent on the creation of forms, only becomes music through the undoing of those forms and this double movement is music's very ground of possibility and its salvation, it is what enables it to form a block of expression and yet remain musical."

This distinction between what music is and the movement music can make allows Hainge a further exegesis of "pop" as well as critiques Buchanan's notion of nostalgia-- of music as the refrain which only allows us to return "home". In Buchanan's sense, pop is music insofar as it includes and depends on the territoriality of the refrain. Hainge argues that though the refrain is essential to music, because it forms a block with it in order to take it somewhere else--"the refrain is ultimately 'a means of preventing music, warding it off, or forgoing it'". Additionally, "whilst an analysis of pop's relationship to the refrain wold appear to suggest that pop is not music, then this analysis does not in the end allow us to differentiate pop from other musical forms and cannot then serve to define what pop is." In response to Murphy and Smith's article, which bases the definitions of pop on production and distribution, Hainge writes that this approach "might be said to overcome the very binary opposition that they establish, since many of the traditional modes they oppose to pop have altered their modus oprandi to utilize the bricolage of modern technology and distribution so as to ensure their very survival" (a point Adorno incidentally also makes). Hainge's critique continues: "Smith and Murphy's definition of pop then ends up turning this term into little more than a portmanteau word which can contain any kind of music, a phenomenon that does not appear to worry John Corbett who suggest that 'all music is no popular'" Concisely put, Hainge discusses the problematic of using pop as an umbrella term, sweeping under it all forms of music with no distinction, or rather, applying the same criterion to analyze the expression of these varying degrees of "popular". He suggests then, in order to fully understand "pop" is to understand its relationship to the market, to its territory or milieu. Drawing from Buchanan, that popular culture is "more complexly bound to its milieu than other modes of art perhaps are' Hainge argues for an "intensification" of this relationship, and that it "no longer qualifies as music in a Deleuzean sense since the mode according to which it operates is not one in which it is desirable to perform the deterritorialization of the refrain intrinsic to a properly musical expression. What will here be called pop is pop at its most extreme level of intensity, pop as an idea and not a content of expression" Hainge then, recognizes a fundamental distinction between pop as music and the process of music itself. While older forms of music, classical or pre-industrial, conformed to a transcendent or otherwise musical "outside", pop appeals to an outside governed by the market, by capitalism. Of course this distinction becomes slippery when on recognizes the axiomatic nature of capital to consume all forms of music; however, pop specifically comes into expression when it relies on this outside rather than an "artistic or musical becoming" in which D&G state, "expressive qualities or matters of expression enter shifting relations with on another that 'express' the relation of the territory they draw to the interior milieu of impulses and exterior milieu of circumstances."

It may be beneficial then, to further discuss D&G's writings on capitalism in A Thousand Plateaus, when they describe it as a schizophrenic and highly repressive system. Because capitalism is only interested in the individual and profit, it must deterritorialize all territorial groups such as the church, family, etc., yet at the same time, since it requires social groups in order to function, it must create retrerritorializations, further spaces for these new formations to emerge. For D&G, history is characterized by these new formations, these processes of deterritorialization. They describe at first a "primitive territorial machines" where all practices are coded, marked out and governed by rules. Yet eventually, the "tribal" gives way to the barbaric territorial machine that in turn, deterritorializes the tribe whilst maintaining a social order through highly coded production. Desire is then inscribed on the "body of the despot". Finally, capitalism arrives in the form of the civilized capitalist machine, radically decoding and deterritorializing social life; yet, it creates new formations to then be recuperated by further reterritorialization. To make an analogy in music, these "subversive" forms of music such as punk can be read as being snatched up, deterritorialized and recycled by the capitalist machine--and simultaneously, a possibility for reterritorialization emerges. D&G pose ways to read into capital's appropriation of popular music, the becoming-music, that creates an immanent plane of relations whilst resisting an "outside". This ultimately for D&G as well as Adorno, seems to occur in music's language, the concepts or figures it may project onto their surrounding milieu (in this case, capital).

Mon, 27 Feb 2006 20:01:20 GMT

Ways to Narrow Down a Study of Piracy

Social uses/practices -- research on consumption patterns, bootleg communities, mixtape; private noncommercial world, separate from black market economy; also, nonpirate uses of tape in independent music (rock, hip-hop, folk, etc.)

Spatial patterns of piracy -- production and distribution -- geographical spin

Discourse -- in law, commercial media; the language used to describe "counterfeiting," "piracy," etc.; what about counter-discourse, any pro-piracy or anti-regulation opinions in Congress, state legislature, media?

Relation to international developments and law -- Interpol, Zulfiqar Bhutto, East Asia, lex mercatoria

Site-based case study -- ex: Long Island or Charlotte as coordinator of production

Cultural formations after the cassette; minority expressions and genres; sites of consumption (gas station, truck stop, churches); based on Peter Manuel's analysis of India market

As problem for post-industrial society; relation to development of security state, and simultaneous media developments: Muzak, cable, satellite

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 17:49:31 GMT

"...the observation is correct that the technically integral, completely made artwork converges with the absolutely accidental work; the work that is ostensibly not the result of making is of course all the more fabricated. The truth of the new, as the truth of what is not already used up, is situated in the intentionless."

- adorno

WELCOME TO THE IVORY CHOP SHOP, everyone's favorite dissertorial site for sartorial assassins

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 20:56:22 GMT

Ms. Matissered and I are going to try using this livejournal to sort ideas for our dissertations, which are both supposed to be getting out of the embryonic stage with a quickness right about now. We will be putting up bits and scraps of outlines and recipes for consumption and comment in the next couple of months; to share research, strain out the promising leads, and figure out what the heck we're doing. I've posted some of my notes from Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977), Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media (2001), and David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity (1989).

NOISE

Attali

“Already, material production has been supplanted by the exchange of signs. Show business, the star system, and the hit parade signal a profound institutional and cultural colonization. Music makes mutations audible.”

“Any theory of power today must include a theory of the localization of noise and its endowment with form. Among birds a tool for marking territorial boundaries, noise is inscribed from the start within the panoply of power. Equivalent to the articulation of a space, it indicates the limits of a territory and the way to make oneself heard within it, how to survive by drawing one’s sustenance from it.”

“Eavesdropping, censorship, recording, and surveillance are weapons of power.”

“Information theory uses the concept of noise (or rather, metonymy) in a more general way: noise is the term for a signal that interferes with the reception of a message by a receiver, even if the interfering signal itself has a meaning for that receiver. Long before it was given this theoretical expression, noise had always been experienced as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages. In all cultures, it is associated with the idea of the weapon, blasphemy, plague.”

“In the network of representation, it is in general a flow of information, but it can create the conditions of a new order for the listener. The repetition of music always creates disorder since it does nothing but replicate a recorded presentation, imperfectly and without creating anything new: it is thus necessary in repetition to spend increasing amounts of value to maintain order.”

“Noise is the source of these mutations in the structuring codes. For despite the death it contains, noise carries order within itself; it carries new information. This may seem strange. But noise does in fact create a meaning: first, because the interruption of a message signifies the interdiction of the transmitted meaning, signifies censorship and rarity; and second, because the very absence of meaning in pure noise or in the meaningless repetition of a message, by unchanneling auditory sensations, frees the listener’s imagination.”

Marx: “In history as in nature, decomposition is the laboratory of life.”

“Today it has become possible for each listener to record a radio-broadcast representation on his own, and to manufacture in this way, using his own labor, a repeatable recording, the use-value of which is a priori equivalent to that of the commodity-object, without, however, having its exchange-value. This is an extremely dangerus process for the music industry and the authors, since it provides free access to the recording and its repetition. Therefore it is fundamental for them to prevent this diversion of usage, to reinsert this consumer labor into the laws of commercial exchange, to suppress information in order to create an artificial scarcity of music. The simplest solution would be to make such production impossible by scrambling the quality of the broadcast representation, or by truncating it, or again by taxing this independent production, financing royalty payments on these unknown recordings through a tax on tape recorders – this is done in Germany. The price of music usage is then based on entirely on the price of the recorder. But the number of recordings could increase without a change in the number of tape recorders. We could then conceive of a tax on recording tape, which woud mean paying music royalties in proportion to the exchange-value of nonmusic.”

“Usage becomes transformed, accessibility replaces the festival… it ceases to be a unique, exceptional event, heard once by a minority.”

“It [music] remains at bottom the only element of sociality, that is to say of ritual order, in a world in which exteriority, anonymity, and solitude have taken hold, music, regardless of type, is a sign of power, social status, and order, a sign of one’s relation to others… Music has thus become a strategic consumption, an essential mode of sociality for all those who feel themselves powerless before the monologue of the great institutions.”

“[The price of a record] depends very heavily on the process of the production of the demand for music and on its fiscal status, in other words, on the role assigned to it by the State.”

Manovich

“So rather than being an aberration, a flaw in the otherwise pure and perfect world of the digital, where not even a single bit of information is lost, lossy compression is the very foundation of computer culture, at least for now. Therefore, while in theory, computer technology entails the flawless replication of data, its actual use in contemporary society is characterized by loss of data, degradation, and noise.”

Blade-Runner v. Macintosh GUI : two visions (1982 and 1984) of what the future would be like. One was the cyberpunk noir of high futurism + grimy reality, and the other was a crisp, modernist array of minimalist lines and clarity.

“The non-transparency of the code” - see McLuhan on media, Whorf-Sapir hypothesis on code, Lakoff on cognitive linguistics, and Derrida on logocentrism.

“from the ‘abstraction’ of the 1910s to the ‘process’ of the 1960s, artists have continued to invent concepts and procedures to assure the impossibility of painting some preexistent content.”

“to think of an interface as a separate level, as something that can be arbitrarily varied, is to eliminate the status of a new media artwork as art.”

What about taking a digital picture of a digital photo? These are pixels of pixels – but would they actually portray the original pixels If the resolution was high enough, the original pixels would be present but would be subdivided into smaller pieces – if the resolution were lower, the larger relationships of the pixels would be reconstituted along new lines (i.e. noise, generative distortion).

POLITICS OF THE MEDIUM

Attali

“Musical distribution techniques are today contributing to the establishment of eavesdropping and surveillance. Muzak, the American corporation that sells standardized music, presents itself as the ‘security system of the 1970s’ because it permits use of musical distribution channels for the circulation of orders. The monologue of standardized, stereotyped music accompanies and hems in a daily life in which in reality no one has the right to speak anymore.”

David Harvey

Flexible accumulation results from 1. diversification of production geographically, which 2. automatically means access to cheap labor and 3. intensified competition between nations and localities (if not between corporations, which A. get more consolidated or B. are illusorily fragmented into many subcontracted producers), all of which results from advances in communication (satellite, internet, cable, tapes/CDs/DVDs) and transportation (air travel, containerization). All of these trends unfolded after World War II -- new technology driven by military investment, the rebuilding of Japanese and European economies, the subsequent emergence of Asian and Latin American competition via excess investment from the highly advanced countries, the entrance of new labor onto the market (women, immigrants), and so on. If it's all the same, and goods can be produced rapidly with cheap labor and high technology almost anywhere, then signs, images, fashions, ads -- making full use of the communication system -- can make all the difference where a margin of competitive advantage is concerned.

"Benetton, for example, engages in no production directly, but simply operates as a powerful marketing machine, which transmits commands to a wide array of independent producers." (158-9)

"Access to, and control over, information, coupled with a strong capacity for instant data analysis, have become essential to the centralized coordination of far-flung corporate interests. The capacity for instantaneous response to changes in exchange rates, fashions and tastes, and moves by competitors is more essential to corporate survival than it ever was under Fordism." (159)

"Control over information flow and over the vehicles for propagation of popular taste and culture have likewise become vital weapons in competitive struggle." (160)

"Computerization and electronic communications have pressed home the significance of instantaneous international co-ordination of financial flows." (161)

"New technologies have empowered certain privileged layers, at the same time as alternative production and labour control sytsems open up the way to high remuneration of technical, managerial, and entrepreneurial skills. The trend, further exaggerated by the shift to services and the enlargement of 'the cultural mass,' has been to increasing inequalities of income, perhaps presaging the rise of a new aristocracy of labour as well as the emergence of an ill-remunerated and broadly disempowered under-class." (192)

Heidegger: "At a time when the furthermost corner of the globe has been conquered by technology and opened to economic exploitation; when any incident whatsoever, regardless of where and when it occurs, can be communicated to the rest of the world at any desired speed; when the assassination of a King in France and a Symphony in Tokyo can be 'experienced' simultaneously; when time ceased to be anything other than velocity, instantaneousness and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from the lives of all peoples... then, yes, then, through all this turmoil a question still haunts us like a spectre: What for? Whither? What then?"

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 23:49:02 GMT

In June 2005 the very aged justices of the United States Supreme Court will grapple with the legal status of a technology that allows computer users all over the world to obtain movies, music, software and other documents free of charge. The case will not be an easy one. Most of the justices were born in the formative years of radio as a communication medium. In recent years the world has watched as all the heavyweights of our politics – senators, lobbyists, Metallica – have argued over what Americans ought to do with technologies that undermine “intellectual property” by making precious cultural commodities cheap to reproduce and distribute. These debates have a history that goes much deeper than the mischief wrought by computer programming college students in the late 1990s. The story, in fact, begins with the introduction of audiotape in the broadcasting industry in the 1950s, but the crucial moment came twenty years later with the popular dissemination of devices like the VCR that brought home recording to the masses.

To explain how political disputes over cultural reproduction have since played out on the shifting terrain of a global economy, we must consult several distinct bodies of literature, including works on the history of copyright, the technical development of different media, and international relations in the late twentieth century. Some scholars illustrate how new media entered society, while others analyze the “post-industrial,” information-based nature of the modern American economy or address the significance of intellectual property to highly developed nations. No one has yet traced the medium of tape from its popular introduction through American efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to control the flow of information into developing nations. A few thinkers have considered whether these new technologies can truly disrupt established relationships, concluding that the new toys become acceptably assimilated or provide temporary headaches for authoritarian regimes. The existing story lacks an in-depth analysis of the international skirmishes that have pitted information producers against the combined forces of world poverty, cultural appetite, industrializing ambition, and mercurial technology time and time again. What might emerge from such a study is a better understanding of how new cultural practices can alter old structures of power and property.

The actual invention of the toys under question is a fine place to start. Brian Winston’s Media Technology and Society provides both a rich explanation of technical development and an astute analysis of how capitalist societies handle new communication tools. Winston proposes a “‘law’ of the suppression of radical potential,” signalling his own skepticism by placing the word “law” in quotation marks. From the telegraph forward, he argues against the hype of technological “revolutions” by revealing how devices emerge from gradual processes of scientific development and greet the population at large through entrenched institutions. Winston insists that technologies do not simply erupt onto the scene and destabilize the power structure of society; rather, they approach the public only when powerhouses like the music or electronics industries can absorb the threats a new technique offers and can turn them to the advantage of government or business. For example, the basic science behind home recording of video and audio cassettes has been available since the early 1950s, when singer Bing Crosby pushed for the creation of a tool that would allow a performance to be broadcast on the east and west coasts of the United States without having to give it twice. However, cassettes did not enjoy broad, personal use by the public until the 1970s and 1980s, once television and movie companies failed to suppress VCRs through the courts and Sony had secured a market for mobile, manufactured music through its Walkman player. Moreover, Winston notes, the new devices did not undermine the established powers as expected, since culture industries succeeded in getting most consumers to use their VCRs and audiotapes for prepackaged content.

Arguments against the disruptive power of technology refer back to a great expectation of what could have occurred. Since most of the same power relationships remain in place, in some form or another, following the introduction of a new device, observers conclude that the event had little significant impact. “Rather than the technology revolutions,” Peter Stevens argued, “most of the new media and communication forms have clearly not transformed the key social and economic relations firmly entrenched since the 19th century.” Such statements reheat the old “Why is there no socialism?” question, suggesting that since classes and capitalism persist the radio or the Internet must have fallen far short of some acceptable standard. Harder to see are the deep changes, good or bad, that actually did result from a new technology – those that we may have bemoaned lacking had they too not happened.

In fact, “radical potential” has been realized at a variety of places and times, often beyond the purview of business enterprises that can control popular usage elsewhere through sophisticated marketing and their power over production. Winston is correct to highlight the ability of corporations to direct the course of technological habits, as when a handful of record companies forced their self-serving preference for compact discs on the public simply by withholding vinyl records from the market. Institutions like the music business can protect vital interests most easily in their own backyard, where a legal ruling they have sought applies or an established market is accustomed to taking what they give it. Outside of such bounds, however, the “law” of suppression carries less weight. In their book Global Political Fallout: The VCR’s First Decade, Gladys and Oswald Ganley offer a compendium of the unexpected receptions home recording devices received throughout the world in the 1970s and 1980s. The Ganleys show how the hardware (VCRs) and software (tapes) spread into the unlikeliest of markets, like Islamic fundamentalist states and the Soviet bloc. The Pakistani film Dubai Chalo (“Let’s Go to Dubai”), for instance, captured the zeitgeist of the moment by celebrating migrant workers who brought VCRs home from the wealthy states of the Persian Gulf. The book records some comical moments in the worldwide diffusion of tape, such as the Soviet Union’s attempt to dupe users of underground networks by circulating a fake conversation between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher threatening a nuclear attack on the Communist countries. The resulting work is a whirlwind tour of a world in change, and the Ganleys offer tentative conclusions a shade more optimistic than Winston’s. “VCRs and videocassettes are not necessarily more destabilizing than older technologies, but neither need they be less so,” the authors write, emphasizing the democratic relevance of extending information access to illiterate people. They concede that the technology’s cost could be prohibitive, but their entire work attests to the surprising penetration of VCRs into even the poorest societies.

Has tape had an impact beyond enabling authoritarian antics or helping Asian villagers watch Dallas? Siva Vaidhyanathan suggests that the new communication tools have benefited the cultural life of the United States but also triggered a destructive legal and political climate. In Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, Vaidhyanathan analyzes the history of copyright law, particularly in America, from Mark Twain’s crusade for extending copyright to the more recent furor over file-sharing networks like Napster.com. Although Twain insisted on “thick” protection for authors under American law, Vaidhyanathan observes that the young Samuel Clemens had been nourished on a steady diet of cheap British classics, since American publishers freely ignored foreign copyright protections throughout the nineteenth century. Copyrights and Copywrongs shows how audiotape and subsequent inventions allowed musicians to create whole new genres, most notably hip-hop, by sampling and reconfiguring other people’s music. However, Vaidhyanathan argues that the copyright industries feared the new practices of appropriaton and have stifled creative expression through court rulings and new legislation since the late 1980s.

Similarly, a number of scholars have observed the advantages of piracy for developing nations. Much like Vaidhyanathan, anthropologist Brian Larkin has focused on the creativity that illicit reproduction can foster. His work addresses the hybrid culture of film in Nigeria, where the audience’s long exposure to pirated American and Indian movies has provided the basis for a unique domestic medium called “videofilm.” Nigerian auteurs have emerged in recent years with bizarre feature films designed for home video distribution. “This industry has pioneered a new film form and generated an entirely novel form of reproduction and distribution and to do this has relied on the capital, equipment, personnel, and distribution networks created to facilitate pirate media,” Larkin writes. In other words, both the physical form of the film industry and the phenomenon of Nigerian cinema itself owe their existence to the structure of illicit reproduction. More practically, Susan K. Sell has observed that some developing nations see a local factory cranking out pirate CDs as a source of employment and manufacturing capital. For example, Thailand’s prime minister lost his job in 1987 for trying to pass tougher copyright laws. According to Sell, the nation’s government had “a strong interest in protecting the piracy industry that provides jobs in manufacturing as well as in over 12,500 retail shops.”

Of course, Prem Tinsulanond had only tried to make Thailand’s intellectual property laws conform to the demands of the United States. Sell and other scholars have demonstrated that the American government became much more active in pushing for greater copyright, trademark and patent protection in the 1980s. In contrast to its blithe disregard for ownership of information in the nineteenth century, the United States led the way in persuading other nations to end the rampant piracy of software, music and movies on the streets of cities like Singapore and Bangkok. “The United States has aggressively linked higher levels of protection to trade issues through Section 301 of the U.S. Trade Act,” Sell writes. “The United States has applied significant direct pressure on targeted states. These states are highly dependent on access to the U.S. market and are, therefore, vulnerable to U.S. threats of trade sanctions.” She sees the American government as forcing free-trade liberalism on nations that “changed their policies but not their minds,” often leading to lax enforcement even when laws are changed at America’s behest. However, Sell does suggest that some nations with substantial computer or entertainment industries, such as India or Brazil, will become increasingly amenable to intellectual property protection as strict standards benefit them more.

These political maneuvers by the American government and its corporate allies come under close scrutiny in Michael P. Ryan’s Knowledge Diplomacy: Global Competition and the Politics of Intellectual Property. This account highlights the pivotal role of industry groups like the International Intellectual Property Alliance in getting copyright and patent issues on the government’s diplomatic agenda in the early 1980s. Ryan observes that the United States favored bilateral confrontations with offending countries rather than working through the World Intellectual Property Organization or other United Nations agencies based on a one-nation, one-vote model of decisionmaking. In the late 1970s, he writes, the chief executive officers of IBM and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer began laying plans to strengthen international laws. The movie, book, music and business software industries joined their fight in 1984 with the creation of the highly effective IIPA, which assesses each nation’s compliance with American laws and makes recommendations for recourse against offenders. According to Ryan, the office of the United States Trade Representative more or less directly translates these suggestions into trade policy.

Knowledge Diplomacy touches on a basic fact of the world economy about which historians, sociologists and lobbyists can all agree: the United States has metamorphosed into a society geared largely to the production and export of information and services. Protection of intellectual property and the technologies that threaten it rank as major priorities for elites in business and government because of the central place entertainment, medicine and computers occupy in America’s relationship with other countries. According to Ryan, “The copyright industries grew at an average annual rate almost double that of the economy as a whole from 1977 to 1994,” and virtually every work echoes this statistical insight on economic structure, with all its implications for law and trade policy. Ryan has some sage insights about why the VCR and its descendants might be more destabilizing than other technologies, contrary to the assertions of Winston and the Ganleys. Easy reproduction of information is especially threatening to America’s “post-industrial” state because products like movies are so costly to produce but can be replicated at the push of a button. Moreover, music and film companies cover the cost of numerous loss-making products with the occasional Jurassic Park that brings back big money. A pirate entrepreneur who sells CDs out of a Karachi pushcart for less than a buck has no such concern.

Nonetheless, scholars have failed to connect the dots about how reproducible culture has rewritten the rules for the globalization of an information society. Ryan concludes that, with the Cold War over, “the North-South relationship is no longer basically conflictual.” Countries appear year after year on the IIPA’s watch lists, and some nations ignore American threats only to undermine their own policies when they do eventually comply. In such a world, as politicians and lobbyists link piracy to the fearful specter of terrorism from the impoverished, Susan K. Sell’s portrait of coerced nations with unchanged minds rings truer than Ryan’s open horizon of consensual liberalism.

The world has changed. The old game was made of steel and oil. The Chinese learned in the Great Leap Forward that poor people could not achieve the progress of the industrialized world by making steel in a backyard furnace. Even if someone stole the schematic for a tractor, building one required physical infrastructure and each additional tractor cost a good deal to make, even with economies of scale. For the past thirty years the United States has faced a situation in which the most valuable products it offers the world actually can be replicated at little cost. (This observation applies especially to entertainment and software but also includes patents. As Ryan observed, “A pharmaceutical product faces human and financial barriers to market entry that are higher but not different in kind.”) The advent of the Internet modifies this situation primarily by reducing the marginal cost of reproducing culture to almost zero, i.e. each additional copy of an image or text on the World Wide Web costs virtually nothing to make, quite unlike the tractor or even the videotape. What wars are now fought over CD-burning or online file-sharing occur on the terrain marked out by video and audio cassettes in the 1970s. The essential change occurred when, for the first time, consumers of culture could easily copy and manipulate the signals they were receiving.

Scholars need to understand the politics of a system in which the means of production – e.g., two VCRs churning out videotapes – have increasingly entered people’s homes. Access to decentralized communication media has directly accompanied the shift to an economy based on the production and distribution of information. Thus, the advantage and privilege of property are distinctly harder to maintain now than they were a hundred years ago. A study that follows the political battles over cultural reproduction from America to Singapore, Thailand, China, Pakistan and points between could shed light on the character of globalization. It remains to be seen whether the owners of information can successfully rein in its free roaming in a society that, by its very nature, depends upon networks for the distribution of knowledge.

Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2001

Wed, 26 Jan 2005 17:56:26 GMT

Sassen argues that, while industrial production has become more dispersed around the globe, command of the world economy has become increasingly concentrated in a few key urban centers, whose function has been transformed since World War II. Especially since the US-centered, Bretton Woods system ended in the 1970s, industry has shifted out of places like New York or Tokyo into certain Third World locales, turning the old metropolises into bases for information control (finance, services, education, culture). She looks particularly at NY, Tokyo and London, although she also mentions Frankfurt and Paris as models. The three cities have undergone the same parallel process of change in economic base, spatial organization and social structure. "The territorial dispersal of current economic activity creates a need for expanded central control and management," she writes, pointing out that the control of the economy has not become more decentralized along with production. A certain kind of production does occur in the command center, she insists, that of innovating in finance, building networks and literally making markets. Sassen sees these functions as not purely managerial.

As the producers of intellectual goods have risen to the apex of power, the victims of decentralization in the developed world (e.g. Detroit, Nagoya, Manchester) have become disempowered; Sassen links the shift of jobs out of Nagoya and into Thailand or the US to the creation of the first ever Toyota headquarters in Tokyo. These changes alter social relations both between the hollowed-out regions and the intellectual command center and within the new global city itself. Sassen juxtaposes Daniel Bell's 1973 thesis that post-industrial societies would be marked by a highly educated working class in a more rational relation to management with the developing reality. "Major growth industries show a greater incidence of jobs at the high- and low-paying ends of the scale than do the older industries now in decline. Almost half the jobs in the producer services are lower-income jobs, and half are in the two highest earning classes." In other words, the growing class cleavages in the new city parallel the stark stratification between cities in the global economy. Sassen says the proliferation of low level service is essential to satisfy the desires of educated (technocratic?) elite in the landscape of gentrification - laundries, maids, gourmet shops, boutiques, hotels, food service, etc - while manufacturing has moved from a First World union model to a dependence of sweatshops and homework. She warns against notions of progress that imagine menial work diminishing in society. "Backward sectors, such as downgraded manufacturing or low-wage service occupations, can be part of major growth trends in a highly developed economy. It is often assumed that backward sectors express decline trends. Similarly, there is a tendency to assume that advanced sectors, such as finance, have mostly good, white-collar jobs. In fact, they contain a good number of low-paying jobs, from cleaner to stock clerk."

"The cross-border delivery of services is the only mode of delivery that has the characteristics of trade in goods, with the difference that only services embodied in goods (software or tapes, etc.) or those value-added can be put on paper (evaluations, drawings) can actually cross borders independently of producers. Telecommunications technologies make possible and can be expected to contribute to the growth of transborder flows, especially for information-intensive services. This technology has raised the tradability of many of the professional services. But, surprisingly, this type of transborder flow accounts for a small share of international transactions in services. Telecommunications technology has raised intrafirm flows of services in transnational corporations and other corporate organizations." 47

"In the United States, major cities such as New York and Chicago have large centers that have been rebuilt many times, given the brutal neglect suffered by much urban infrastructure and the imposed obsolescence so characteristic of U.S. cities. This neglect and accelerated obsolescence produce vast spaces for rebuilding the center according to the requirements of whatever regime of urban accumulation or pattern of spatial organization of the urban economy prevails at the time. In Europe, urban centers are far more protected and they rarely contain significant stretches of abandoned space; the expansion of workplaces and the need for intelligent buildings necessarily will have to take place outside the old centers." 124

"Up till now the major outcome of the development of telecommunications capability has been to expand the spatial dispersion of the economy. But this dispersion has required the expansion of central functions. At what point will telecommunications be applied to centralizing functions and the complex of professional, managerial, and executive functions at the top? The urban form that had developed in the last two decades associated with this spatial reorganization of economic activity has clearly been one of growing densities and extreme locational concentration of central functions and of the production of innovations. In 1990 I asked whether we were reaching the limit of this urban form, notwithstanding the massive high-rise office complexes under construction in London and Tokyo, with a few more planned for New York. New York suggested to me that we had partly because of an increasingly disadvantageous trade-off between the benefits and costs of this agglomeration. Yet the late 1990s launched a whole new building phase in London and New York (and other emergent global cities) which is further expanding the space of the high-priced center.

"An important factor that needs to be consideed is the massive infrastructural investments required by telecommunications systems and the organizational complexity that allows firms to maximize benefits they can derive from such systems. This effectively creates barriers to entry. While in principle any city could consider developing telecommunications capability of the first order and hence compete for a number of functions now concentrated in leading cities, in practice entry costs are so high, in addition to the costs of continuous incorporation of the newest technology, that for the foreseeable future, major cities, have an almost absolute advantage." 336

Is the new telecommunications infrastructure really that costly? If the more basic industrial base is in place - an electric grid, for instance - then certain new devices and systems can be grafted onto it easily. The VCR was embraced more rapidly in some less developed countries than in the United States, though partly because there was a dearth of entertainment and communication alternatives in these places as compared to the options American consumers faced. Still, the hardware dropped in cost rapidly and became affordable for many throughout the world, whether purchased firsthand or obtained by way of guest workers and other migrants. The software was even cheaper, such that a new basis for local production and distribution of culture became possible in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. A telephone system of the traditional landline fashion required great investments in infrastructure, as did cable television; broadcast TV and radio involved somewhat lower costs but still demanded a significant amount of hardware scattered over the landscape in a hierarchical, defined and centralized network. The newer technologies, such as videotape, CDs and the internet, have proven more flexible, rhizomic, and multilateral, and built upon existing networks (electricity, telephony). Cellular phones and wireless internet could combine these decentralized characteristics with the low-cost of infrastructure (immaterial transmission) for a recipe even more conducive to moving control out of the information command centers that Sassen describes.

"We know that manufacturing, as epitomized by the two decades after World War II in the United States, had a strong multiplier effect and contributed to the expansion of a strong middle class. In the period when manufacturing based on mass consumption and large scales of production was the leading economic sector, there was a pronounced orientation in the general economy toward the production of housing, roads, shopping centers, new schools, and all other components of the suburbanization process that dominated economy and society. The decline of Fordism entailed a change in the economic and political place of unions and mass production as well as the demise of a broader institutional framework sustained by that model of production, one with significant shadow effects for larger sectors of the economy. The historical forms assumed by economic growth in the post-World War II era - notably capital intensity, standardization of production, and suburbanization-led growth - contributed to the vast expansion of a middle class. And so did the cultural forms accompanying these processes, particularly as they shaped the structures of everyday life insofar as a large middle class contributes to mass consumption and thus to standardization." 337

Operation Rewind, meet Operation Firestorm

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 01:56:38 GMT

Apparently, file-sharing kills, and Osama Bin Laden is hawking mixtapes on Canal Street. Jack Valenti is a sick old fart, and I can't believe Gurinder Chadha allowed him to take her for "Show & Tell."

INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT PIRACY: A GROWING PROBLEM WITH LINKS TO ORGANIZED CRIME AND TERRORISM

HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON COURTS, THE INTERNET, AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS. FIRST SESSION. MARCH 13, 2003

Mr. Smith:

In 2000, the annual seizure of pirated discs for the Motion Picture Association was 1.9 billion units. By the close of 2002, it was up to 6.1 billion units. In just 2 years, the annual piracy rate had increased five times.

In some places, such as Asia and parts of the former Soviet Union, pirated software accounts for nearly 90 percent of the software used. At the close of 2002, for example, seizures of pirated Microsoft products alone exceeded $1.7 billion.

The copyright industries drive the engine of the American economy. Exports and foreign sales of U.S. copyrighted products total $100 billion, which helps the national balance of trade. Copyrighted works are a result of American creativity. When properly commercialized, these works lead to jobs, profits, and a more enjoyable quality of life for us all.

There is good reason why the Founders embraced the concept of intellectual property protection. They realized that if creators cannot gain from their creations, they will not bother to create. And actors and writers and composers and singers cannot gain if their work is stolen. Would any other American industry be able to sustain its operations for long if a third of its sales were lost to theft?

A recent article in Time Europe noted that an average drug dealer pays $47,000 for a kilo of cocaine with an estimated street value of $94,000, which yields 100 percent profit. For the same $47,000 investment, a pirate could buy or produce 1,500 pirated copies of Microsoft's Office 2000 professional software and resell it for a profit of 900 percent.

Mr. Berman:

While Internet—international hard goods piracy may seem a dull subject to some, it is a critical issue to U.S. copyright holders. The aggregate hard good piracy losses suffered by U.S. copyright industries in foreign nations are pretty astounding. You've mentioned some of the figures. You talked about 56 countries. I have an estimate that it probably equals $20–$22 billion annually worldwide, not including Internet piracy.

Individual foreign countries—China, $1.85 billion; $770 million in Brazil; $800 million in Italy; $757 million in Taiwan; and $756 million in the Russian Federation. Another interesting statistic—93 percent of business software sold in China, 47 percent of music sold in Taiwan, 80 percent of movies sold in the Russian Federation were pirated.

In 2001, 99 percent of entertainment software sold in Brazil was pirated, while, in 2002, 55 percent of entertainment software sold in Italy was pirated.

As piracy percentages climb in a particular nation, it becomes increasingly difficult for U.S. copyright owners to establish a legitimate market. In some cases, as with entertainment software in Brazil, U.S. copyright owners have had to abandon the market entirely. They simply can't justify the expense of maintaining a presence in a nation where the demand for their copyrighted works is almost entirely met by vastly cheaper pirated versions.

The piracy-related inability of U.S. copyright owners to access a legitimate market in many foreign countries results in real harm to the U.S. economy. The core copyright industries make a tremendous contribution to the U.S. economy, accounting for more than 5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. That's more than the deficit will be in about 5 or 6 years. [Laughter.]...

I don't want to steal her thunder, but I want to highlight a couple of the issues that I think her particular situation represents. In Joan's case, the theft of her intellectual property rights is not some private syndicate operating in distant shadows within a foreign government, but it is the foreign government itself—the Russian Federation government.

Mr. Malcolm:

Highly organized criminal syndicates pose special challenges for law enforcement because they have significant resources to devote to their illegal operations, thereby increasing the scope and sophistication of their activity. They control international distribution channels, which allow them to move massive quantities of pirated goods, as well as any other illicit goods, throughout the world.

These groups will not hesitate to threaten or injure those who attempt to interfere with their operations. Throughout Asia, organized crime groups operate assembly lines and factories that generate literally millions of pirated optical discs. These groups pirate a full range of products, ranging from music to software to movies to video games. Anything that can be reproduced onto an optical disk and sold around the globe is available...

Of course, this problem is not limited to Malaysia, but occurs in other parts of the world such as in parts of the former Soviet Union. Additionally, many organized piracy groups from Asia use South America, most notably Paraguay, as a transshipment point for pirated products. Industry groups have reported that organized crime from Taiwan and other parts of the world control much of the distribution of optical disks into Latin America through Ciudad del Este...

Mr. VALENTI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Berman, and Members of the Committee.

Before I begin, I want to introduce a gifted young independent filmmaker from Britain, whose blockbuster film, ''Bend It Like Beckham,'' is proving very popular in Europe. But, alas, it's been hijacked all over the world, and here it is avalanching this country. And guess what? Her film doesn't come out yet in the United States for another week.

Ms. Gurinder Chadha. Stand up. I want them to see you.

Because in the words of Peter Finch in the movie ''Network,'' she's mad as hell, and she's not going to take it anymore. [Laughter.]...

PREPARED STATEMENT OF JACK VALENTI

America's crown jewels—its intellectual property—are being looted. Organized, violent, international criminal groups are getting rich from the high gain/low risk business of stealing America's copyrighted works. We don't know to what end the profits from these criminal enterprises are put. US industry alone will never have the tools to penetrate these groups or to trace the nefarious paths to which those profits are put. For these reasons it is entirely suitable and necessary that the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property of the House of Representative's Committee on the Judiciary hold this hearing and illuminate the nature of the problems and the effect on the copyright industries (consisting of movies, TV programs, home videos, books, music, computer games and software).

Page 48

THE ECONOMIC WORTH OF THE COPYRIGHT INDUSTRIES

The copyright industries were responsible in 2001 for some five percent of the GDP of the nation. Over the past quarter century, these industries' share of GDP grew more than twice as fast as the remainder of the economy. They earn more international revenues than automobiles and auto parts, more than aircraft, more than agriculture. The copyright industries are creating new jobs at three times the rate of the rest of the economy. The movie industry alone has a surplus balance of trade with every single country in the world. No other American industry can make that statement. And all this comes at a time when the U.S. is suffering from some $400 billion in trade deficits.

DIGITAL PIRACY: THE DELIVERY DREAM, THE PIRACY NIGHTMARE

It would be a serious mistake to take our past successes for granted. While piracy has been a sad fact illuminating our lives since the blossoming of the home video entertainment business a quarter century ago, the forms of digital piracy we now face raise serious, new challenges that we need your help in addressing.

I must admit, with all appropriate modesty, that we had become fairly good at combating the old forms of analog video tape piracy. With the help of our government and international trade agreements, such as the World Trade Organization's Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property, most countries have adopted modern copyright laws. We had been seeing declining loss rates in many of the traditional centers of piracy. Despite our successes, we were losing close to $3 billion dollars a year.

Page 49

And then the world changed. Digital technologies, which offer so much in terms of enhanced clarity of image and sound, and exciting new ways to deliver high quality entertainment directly to people's homes, also gave birth to serious new forms of piracy.

By now, I presume that all of you have heard of our concerns about Internet piracy—and I assure you, that dialogue will continue. The mysterious magic of being able, with a simple click of a mouse, to send a full-length movie hurtling with the speed of light to any part of the planet, is a marketing dream and an anti-piracy nightmare. Ask the music industry how Internet piracy can devastate an industry's bottom line. As computer modem speeds accelerate and broadband access spreads across the United States and around the world, more people are gaining the ability to download full length motion pictures quickly. The threat to the motion picture industry from Internet piracy is growing.

Internet piracy is not the only digital threat we face. Today, I'd like to focus on another form of digital piracy—widespread piracy of optical discs—CDs, Video CDs, DVDs, and recordable versions like CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. The piracy of DVDs and other optical media products is dominated by organized crime and increasingly threatens our international markets, which account for 40 percent of revenues earned by the filmed entertainment industry. Indeed, all industries that rely on intellectual property protection, including the music and video game industries, are facing huge losses from optical disc piracy, especially in international markets. Microsoft products are another favorite target for the pirates.

The motion picture industry seized over 7 million pirate DVDs worldwide last year. DVD piracy didn't exist for our industry as recently as 1999.

Page 50

''DIE ANOTHER DAY:'' AN EXAMPLE OF PIRATES IN ACTION

The damage from pirated DVDs is enormous. DVD piracy erodes our home video revenues, but also corrodes revenues from our international theatrical business. Pirate DVDs often enter the market months before the release of legitimate DVDs—often before a movie is released into the theaters. Let me give you just one example. MGM's latest James Bond film, Die Another Day, was released theatrically in major cinemas in the United States on November 22. The first pirate copy, camcorded from a press screening in the United States, showed up in pirated DVD format in Malaysia on November 21. By the 28th, only six days after its US theatrical release, every major market in Asia was already infected with pirate copies of Die Another Day. In Taiwan, theatrical release wasn't scheduled until February 1 to coincide with Chinese New Years holidays—normally a big period for cinema sales in that part of the world. The pirates had nine full weeks to sell our products in pirated form before the film was legitimately released in theaters.

A SNAPSHOT OF OPTICAL DISC PIRACY AROUND THE WORLD

The problem of large-scale pirate optical disc production began in China in the mid-90s. When China cut off the export of piratical discs in the late 1990s, the pirates packed up their equipment and relocated to more hospitable areas where enforcement was lax or absent. Now we are seeing major problems with DVD production in Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Philippines, and Indonesia. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ukraine, and elsewhere in Central Europe are host to factories replicating pirate copies of music CDs. The music industry's problems today are always a danger sign for us, since pirates often start with music and then move on to movies, video games and other products.

Page 51

In the past year, we have also witnessed a major surge of large-scale factory production of DVDs in Russia. Today there are at least 26 optical plants in Russia, including at least five that specialize in the production of DVDs. The number and overall capacity of these plants has more than doubled in the past two years. Nine of these plants are located on property owned by the Russian Government.

Pirate DVDs have devastated the local market in Russia. Pirate DVDs have so saturated the Russian market that the pirates have resorted to selling them on the streets by the kilo. Pirate DVDs are sold everywhere—at street markets, in kiosks, in retail stores and over the Internet.

Those 26 plants in Russia currently have capacity to replicate about 300 million DVDs and CDs a year; legitimate demand in Russia is approximately 18 million units. This excess capacity points to the fact that the Russian pirates are targeting export markets—OUR export markets. Piracy in Russia poses a major threat to revenues across Europe. In 2002 MPA's anti-piracy operations seized pirate Russian DVDs in markets across Central and Eastern Europe. In July a raid at a retail market in Poland turned up over 4000 copies of pirate discs from Russia. Those discs contained 15 different language tracks—from Finnish and Swedish to Greek and Turkish, Dutch, Danish, to Indian and Arabic. If bold actions aren't taken quickly to shut down this piracy, American sales of copyrighted works to Western Europe—our most lucrative market in the world—will be demolished by these pirated imports from Russia. The time to act is now before these criminals further build out their distribution networks and alliances throughout Central and Western Europe.

Page 52

Even before large-scale factory production has been brought under control, we are now seeing the rapid growth of local burning of movies and other forms of copyrighted content onto blank recordable media—CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. This kind of piracy is more dispersed geographically, since the piracy takes place in medium to small ''labs'' with banks of CD burners, but is often still highly organized. The retail markets in Taiwan are filled with this kind of pirate product; not coincidentally, Taiwan is one of the world's largest producers and exporters of blank optical discs, fueling this problem around the world.

Joan P. Borsten Vidov:

We are proud to have contributed to the safeguarding and promotion of Russia's rich artistic heritage. We accomplished this by investing millions of dollars to acquire, repair, restore, and distribute these films, making them accessible for the first time to the general public outside the former USSR. The Soviets had freely ''borrowed'' Western literature and music to make some of the best animated films—a bad habit that did not end after the USSR signed its first intellectual property convention in 1973. So we also had to plead and cajole representatives of these writers and musicians to license us the rights necessary to keep these films alive...

The most significant advance in the protection of foreign copyright proprietors' rights in the USSR occurred in 1973 when the Soviet Union acceded to the Universal Copyright Convention and for the first time in history granted broad legal protection in USSR to the works of foreign authors. This step forward was the direct byproduct of the intensive trade negotiations between the United States and the USSR that began in 1972. One of the special concerns of the Soviets in these negotiations was the legal protection abroad of Soviet technology. The Soviet government was desirous of expanding the sales and licenses of Soviet technology in the United States, but the Soviets believed that this would not be possible unless the U.S. eliminated the 30 percent withholding tax on royalties earned by Soviet organizations. In the commercial negotiations that followed in 1972 and 1973, the U.S. government negotiators offered to rescind the withholding tax if the Soviets would recognize the rights of U.S. copyright proprietors and compensate them for the use of their works. The culmination of this negotiation was Soviet accession to the Universal copyright convention...

PREPARED STATEMENT OF TIMOTHY P. TRAINER

The International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC) would like to thank the distinguished members of the Subcommittee for the opportunity to offer its views with respect to the links between intellectual property theft and organized crime and terrorism.

The IACC is a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization devoted solely to combating product counterfeiting and piracy. Formed in 1978, today it is comprised of a cross section of business and industry—from autos, apparel, luxury goods, and pharmaceuticals, to food, software and entertainment—the IACC's members' combined annual revenues exceed $650 billion. The touchstone of the IACC's mission is to combat counterfeiting and piracy by promoting laws, regulations and directives designed to render the theft of intellectual property undesirable and unprofitable. The IACC serves as an umbrella organization, offering anticounterfeiting programs designed to increase protection for patents, trademarks, copyrights, service marks, trade dress and trade secrets.

Critical to the IACC's purpose is its belief that acts of counterfeiting create severe public health and safety hazards, as well as economic harm. The IACC supports government actions that will ultimately result in increased enforcement, lead to the prosecution of intellectual property infringers, and create a strong deterrent to counterfeiters and pirates. In pursuing its mission, the IACC provides law enforcement officials with information and training to identify counterfeit and pirate products and in the methods of product security to prevent the infringement of its members' intellectual property rights.

Page 150

In an effort to create conditions under which its members' intellectual property rights are safe from illegal copying, infringement and other forms of theft, the IACC engages in substantive dialogue with governments and intergovernmental organizations worldwide. In pursuing its mission, the IACC provides law enforcement officials with information and training to identify counterfeit and pirate products and in the methods of product security to prevent the infringement of its members' valuable intellectual property rights.

SCOPE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY THEFT

There are no product lines, corporations, or consumers that escape the counterfeiters' and/or pirates' reach. Dangerous counterfeit products have appeared in retail stores across the United States. Organized crime is increasingly attracted by counterfeiting's high profits and relatively low criminal penalties. In addition, the manufacture, distribution and sale of counterfeit goods rob local economies of precious tax revenues, and costs Americans jobs.

Many pirate and counterfeit goods are not as visible as you might think. Many people think of the counterfeits and pirated products purely in terms of street vendors' products—music CDs, sunglasses, t-shirts, hats, cosmetics, cell phone covers, handbags and watches—bearing easily recognizable and known names and logos. But, on a different level, product counterfeiters and pirates are trading on names and logos often associated with things such as razor blades, shampoos, pharmaceuticals, foods, hand tools, auto parts, light bulbs, film, skin lotions, laundry detergent, band-aids, insecticides, batteries, cigarettes and practically anything else that bears a name that consumers are familiar with in the market place. Very few products, if any, are beyond the reach of skilled counterfeiters.

Page 151

PUBLIC HEALTH AND SAFETY DANGERS

Of particular concern to IACC members and consumers is the increasing availability of fakes that present severe health and safety risks. For example, the World Health Organization estimates that counterfeit drugs account for ten percent of all pharmaceuticals. That number can rise to as high as sixty percent (60%) in developing countries.(see footnote 14) In another case, and according to a federal indictment made public in May 2002, U.S. Customs officials seized 59,000 bottles of counterfeit vodka in a Massachusetts warehouse. The fake vodka had been imported from a former Soviet republic.(see footnote 15) In Estonia in 2001, illicit vodka containing methyl alcohol killed 60 people.(see footnote 16) The problems, however, do not end with pharmaceuticals and alcohol.

In the 1990's, a major shampoo manufacturer was forced to place half-page advertisements in at least 27 national newspapers informing the general public that counterfeit versions of its shampoo were available in retail stores. Of particular concern to the manufacturer was the fact that the fake shampoo may have contained bacteria, risking infection in users with weakened immune systems.(see footnote 17) Even more disturbing was the case where the operational life of counterfeit bearing seal spacers removed from a United Airlines plane were found to be only 600 hours—the genuine parts had an operational life of 20,000 hours. The fake parts came complete with fake boxes, labels and paperwork and were only discovered because of a very alert maintenance technician.(see footnote 18) Finally, counterfeit-labeled infant formula found its way onto shelves in grocery stores in 16 states.(see footnote 19)...

These are just a few examples. For more stories about the well documented links between intellectual property theft and organized crime and terrorism, please refer to the attached document containing a list of relevant public source news articles and government reports compiled by the IACC.

The IACC believes that the best deterrent to counterfeiting and piracy is criminal penalties that result in actual imprisonment. Based on this policy, the IACC has led efforts that resulted in the passage of the 1984 Trademark Act that established federal criminal sanctions for trademark counterfeiting,(see footnote 28) the Anticounterfeiting Consumer Protection Act of 1996 that increased civil penalties and provided U.S. Customs with the authority to assess administrative fines against those that import counterfeit products,(see footnote 29) and the establishment of specific criminal provisions for trademark counterfeiting in 31 states and the District of Columbia. By providing federal and state law enforcement officials with the jurisdiction to prosecute counterfeiters, and U.S. Customs with the discretion to penalize known importers of counterfeit merchandise, the IACC has sought to promote a comprehensive enforcement system to stop illegal goods at the borders, punish manufacturers and distributors of counterfeit products in interstate commerce, and address counterfeiting at the retail level within the states, counties and cities where it is most prevalent.

Recent world events have caused federal and state government officials to correctly reevaluate the mission priorities of law enforcement personnel to address national security issues. As pointed out above, the IACC is concerned that the low risk, high-profit nature of counterfeiting and piracy has and will continue to attract the attention of organized crime and terrorist groups looking to fund their operations. The IACC and its members look forward to working with Congress, law enforcement and the new Department of Homeland Security to identify and eliminate links between counterfeiting and the funding of terrorist groups that may arise in the course of protecting U.S. economic interests and intellectual property rights.

http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/judiciary/hju85643.000/hju85643_0.htm

International Association for
the Study of Organized Crime
http://www.iasoc.net/news.htm

TURNING A CONVICTION INTO PUBLIC EDUCATION: In December 2002, David Rocci pled guilty to conspiracy to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Rocci was the owner and operator of an Internet site dedicated to providing information about copyright infringement (www.iSONEWS.com). Rocci used this web site sell circumvention devices known as Amod chips, which defeat security protections in the Microsoft Xbox---allowing unlimited play of pirated games on the Xbox gaming console. As a condition of his guilty plea, Rocci transferred his domain name and website to the U.S. government. In an imaginative move, the government replaced iSONEWS.com with a new web page providing information about the case U.S. v. Rocci, as well as a general anti-piracy message outlining the potential criminal consequences for engaging in illegal piracy. This case was the first time that the United States assumed control of an active domain name in an intellectual property case. After 2 weeks, the site received over 550,000 hits.

SOFTWARE PIRACY: Don Clark, “Microsoft reports big loss in sales from piracy ring,” The Wall Street Journal, (April 22, 2002). Microsoft lost between $200-$300 million from an international piracy ring that operated for at least 2 years involving 50 suspects with links to organized crime. The FBI's Operation Firestorm resulted in 27 arrests for copyright infringement, fraud and money laundering. Mirza and Sameena Ali were charged in a scheme involving Microsoft's educational discount program. Some of the defendants stole access codes to unlock Windows XP. Adobe Systems and Symantec products also were counterfeited. Most of the arrests were in Silicon Valley with ties to Pakistan and Taiwan.

Volkov, Vadim. Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Capitalism (Cornell University Press, 2002).

Felia Allum and Renate Siebert. Organized Crime and the Challenge to Democracy (Routledge, 2003).

Chin, Kolin. Chinatown Gangs: Extortion, Enterprise, and Ethnicity (Oxford University Press, 2000).

"Is It Safe?"
http://www.emedialive.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?CategoryID=27&ArticleID=4884

Copy protection has taken on many forms since Hollywood studios began fighting the villainous VCR back in the 1970s.... Whatever their (mis)fortunes on the Web, technology companies have enjoyed some success in fighting disc copy protection in the streets: March 2002 saw the first-ever publicized bust of DVD-R pirates in the Bronx, New York, and the LAPD nabbed a similar piracy ring in Long Beach in July. While these busts brought down relatively small operations, they appear for now to be proportional to the problem in the U.S. Piracy overseas, however, particularly in Asia, continues to run rampant. While there is a thirst for American culture, there is also a distaste for perceived American greed, so until these attitudes change, would-be protectors of copyrighted content will continue to wage an uphill battle.

Statistics

Software piracy grew from 37 percent in 2000 to 40 percent in 2001 around the world, according to the Business Software Alliance's (BSA) seventh annual survey on global software piracy. "In the seven years that we have conducted this study, this is the first time piracy has increased two years in a row. This is particularly disturbing in light of the fact that more and more software companies are moving their distribution systems to the Internet," says BSA president and CEO Robert Holleyman. Vietnam, China, and Indonesia topped the piracy charts although in the last year we've seen minor percentage declines there. North America continued to be the region with the lowest piracy rate at 26 percent, up one percentage point from 25 percent in 2000. However, North America accounted for the third-highest piracy dollar losses, totaling $1.9 billion, down from $2.9 billion in 2000. That decline can be deceiving. BSA attributes it to the strong U.S. dollar relative to local currencies and to lower software prices.

The Recording Industry Association (RIAA) says they were more successful in busting up illegal operations in 2001 than they were in 2000. Raids on more than 230 distribution operations and more than 145 manufacturing operations led to the seizure of 2.8 million unauthorized CD-Rs. Raids aside, the RIAA says the music industry loses more than $1 billion per year from the illegal activities conducted in the world's four leading pirate marketplaces: Brazil, China, Russia, and Mexico. Not including losses resulting from Internet piracy, the sale of pirate recordings exceeds $4.2 billion worldwide.

Dave Gussow, "For entertainment industry, resistance is usually futile"
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/09/15/Technology/For_entertainment_ind.shtml

It has balked before, at the player piano and the VCR. Now its target is file sharing. Will the entertainment industry again fail at its efforts to thwart a new technology it feels threatened by? ...

Looking back, some of the lawsuits involving the entertainment industry and new technology may seem quaint. In 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Apollo Co., which made player pianos, did not violate the copyright of the songs Little Cotton Dolly and Kentucky Babe, held by the White-Smith Music Publishing Co., by putting the music on piano rolls.

In 1976, Universal Studios and Walt Disney Productions sued to block Sony's Betamax video cassette recorder, saying they wanted surcharges added to the cost of the machines and blank tapes to make up for the loss of copyright royalties.

It took eight years, but the Supreme Court ultimately decided in Sony's favor, with the majority finding that people taping TV programs "is legitimate fair use." The Betamax eventually died, with the VHS format becoming dominant, but the precedent stood.

One of the first real tests of the digital age came in 1998. The Recording Industry Association of America sued to stop the sale of the Diamond Rio, the first MP3 digital music player, saying it would encourage piracy. The association lost.

Last year, 5.5-million portable music players were sold in the United States, according to market research company IDC, a number predicted to grow to 19.3-million units by 2007...

Music has drawn most of the attention so far because the technology has not evolved to make movie downloads fast and easy - yet.

Even on a fast digital subscriber line connection, downloading a 136-minute movie can take 75 minutes. (A faster connection can accomplish the task in about 15 minutes.) In fact, the movie industry's main nemesis at the moment is illegal copying of DVDs, mostly in Asia.

But the industry expects file sharing to become an issue as technology advances and more people use high-speed Internet connections, said Fritz Attaway, executive vice president of the movie group. "We don't have a clear idea of how to solve the problem. It is probably a combination of technology, education and legislation."

Martin Ryder, "The Global Digital Divide: Technical Responses and Social Implications"
http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/dig_div_2003.html

And herein lies the central problem posed in this volume: the Digital Divide - the cultural disparity that results between those who are highly connected into this global information interchange and the rest of the world. There are more Internet Service Providers in New York City than in the whole of Africa (Adam, 2002). In today's world where 80% of the population lack access to basic telecommunications facilities and where nearly half the people have never made a telephone call, there is a small, highly connected segment of us who are creating rapid changes that impact the lives and habitat of all the rest. The industrialized countries with only 15% of the world's population represent 88% of the Internet user population. South Asia, home for 20% of humanity, makes up less than 1% of Internet users. At the present time, a greater plurality of the world's population remains isolated, disconnected, and uninvolved with regard to the multiple changes that affect them, their habitat, and those who will follow after them (UNESCO, 1998)...

The philosophical stance of constructivism is offered in contrast to determinism. A constructivist view of technology in society stresses free agency, individual will, conscious deliberation and choice among human agents. Constructivists insist that people are active agents and not helpless automatons or passive victims; they are always able to make deliberate choices and to exercise control over change. Constructivism argues that human feasibility is not tightly defined by external objective forces alone. There is generally a surplus of workable solutions to any given problem. Technology, including the technology of language, is just another dependent social variable and not the key to the riddle of history.

From a constructivist point of view, social actors make the final choice among several technically viable options. If one option is closed, an agentive actor selects another route to accomplish a critical task. In the real world, the problem-definition often changes in the course of solution (Feenberg, 1992).

A good example of agentive activity by marginalized people is the so-called Radio Defiance Campaign that emerged in South Africa in the late 1980s (see Michaud, 2003). It was a time when the radio airwaves were strictly controlled by the white ruling class. What black South Africans heard on the radio was white-owned and white-controlled programming. In the black townships the programming promoted the notion that apartheid was good, that it was natural and inevitable, and that any expression of resistance amounted to nothing less than terrorism. Attempts toward community controlled programming in broadcasting were strictly out of the question, and black South Africans had become generally alienated from the medium of radio.

During this period, tape cassette players were becoming popular in black townships. Under the leadership of the African National Congress, people began to produce their own programming, mostly music with news and community interest productions, using the medium of magnetic cassette tape! These produced 'radio' broadcasts were passed from hand to hand in small communities. In time, a sofisticated distribution network emerged, where tapes and copies of tapes found circulation into the tens of thousands. In townships where official radio programming was completely ignored, the cassette distribution system developed into a vibrant phenomenon. A complex actor network had been created, connecting human and non-human agents into a viable, coherent, collective organism that was capable of translating the absence of community radio into a force of social change. The Radio Defiance Campaign was a small but significant factor in community organizing that eventually toppled the apartheid regime.

It has been argued that communication technology is a critical factor for influencing social organization and change. But technology is simply one factor among many. Social change is too complex and too subtle to be explained in reductionist terms of media and message. Grand theories tend to ignore the socio-historical contexts. Social change involves an interaction of social, cultural and economic forces as well as scientific and technological influences.

One grand theory about the digital divide suggests that the marginalized will remain silent until they have direct access to the Internet and they have mastered the skills necessary to use the technology effectively. But the example of the Zapatista Movement in Chiapas Mexico suggests otherwise. The manner in which the Zapatista rebellion was covered on the Internet has become one of the most successful examples of the use of computer communications by grassroots social movements. Local Zapatista support was well established in Chiapas. And the human connections with multiple communities outside Southern Mexico was a growing phenomenon. There was no sophisticated ICT network in Chiapas. There were no skilled technicians to wire these connections. There was no government grant or NGO benefactor to underwrite this project.

Gustav Guldberg and Johannes Sundén, "Pirates and Merchants - An Ongoing Struggle on the Hightech Seas"
http://www.msi.vxu.se/forskn/exarb/2004/04106.pdf.

"A BRIEF BUT INCOMPLETE HISTORY OF BOOTLEGS"
http://log.on.ca/hotwacks/zhist.html

Geoff Boucher, "Mix tapes: Piracy or talent mother lode?"
www.chicagotribune.com/technology/ chi-030430epmixtapes,1,5446515.story

"Screen Digest - Global Media Intelligence"

intellectual property and digital technology in the world economy

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 20:20:27 GMT

Digital bridges : developing countries in the knowledge economy / John Senyo C. Afele. (Business HD30.2 .A35 2003)

Cultural rights in a global world / [editors], Anura Goonasekera, Cees Hamelink, Venkat Iyer. (Lehman JC571 .C745 2003g)

Civilizing the Internet : global concerns and efforts toward regulation / Joseph Migga Kizza. (Science HM221 .K588 1998)

Borders in cyberspace : information policy and the global information infrastructure / edited by Brian Kahin and Charles Nesson. (Lehman K4305.4 .B67 1997)

Globalization of services : some implications for theory and practice / by Y. Aharoni and L. Nachum (eds.). (Business HD9980.5 .G58 2000)

Valuation of intangible assets in global operations / edited by Farok J. Contractor. (Business HF5681.I55 V36 2001)

"Authors' Rights in Light of New Technologies," Howard B. Abrams. American Journal of Comparative Law Vol 38 1990 p. 283

Sony v. Universal: US Supreme Court Betamax Decision January 1984
http://www.virtualrecordings.com/betamax.htm

The Piracy "Industry"
http://world-information.org/wio/infostructure/100437611725/100438659531/?ic=100446326327

World Intellectual Property Organization
http://www.wipo.int/

The Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre was founded in 1990 at St. Peter’s College through a generous gift from the Hitachi Corporation. The Centre's mission is to facilitate and conduct advanced research into all aspects of Intellectual Property, particularly the proper role of intellectual property in the light of the new technologies. The Centre's present and future projects include the conduct of long-term interdisciplinary research aimed at involving researchers drawn from not only the law faculty but also those of economics and management.

http://www.oiprc.ox.ac.uk/Aim.html

"INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: WHERE’S THE WORLD GOING?" David Vaver. A seminar paper presented on January 19 1999, in St. Peter’s College, Oxford

From today’s perspective, it is easy to think that the Internet must have caused the internationalization of IP law, but the proposition has only euphony on its side. The growth of world trade and of digital communication networks has created a corresponding demand for IP to become more internationalized more quickly, but internationalization as a project was firmly in place by the beginning of the 20th century...

Copyright goes back to early 18th century. It first protected books, then expanded to cover various forms of art, drama & music. In the 20th century, copyright has expanded to cover almost anything written, drawn, or expressed in any way. The doodling of toddlers and business letters written in commercialese are all protected alongside the works of Francis Bacon and Joanna Trollope. The protection covers copying in any dimension, public performance, broadcast, sometimes even renting. The protection lasts a long time, some say too long. From a maximum of 28 years in the 18th century, copyrights today can easily last well over a century - the life of the author plus 70 years is now the European norm and since 1998, also that of the US...

Thirty years ago, Benjamin Kaplan concluded his examination of plagiarism and copyright law with the observation that

"when copyright has gone wrong in recent times, it has been by taking itself too seriously, by foolish assumptions about the amount of originality open to man as an artificer, by sanctimonious pretensions about the iniquities of imitation. I confess myself to be more worried about excessive than insufficient protection, and follow Voltaire in thinking that plagiarism, even at its worst, 'est assurément de tous les larcins le moins dangereux pour la société.'"

Anthony Murphy, "Queen Anne and Anarchhists: Can Copyright Survive in the Digital Age?" Tuesday 26 February 2002

"Nor should we think that the idealised view that Cyberspace is - and should remain - a lawless, unfettered environment is confined to students surfing the 'Net for free music in a frenzy of Angst, Alco-pops, and acne. Because that view is as old as the 'Net itself, part of its underlying philosophy and motivation. People like Ian Clarke and Justin Frankel and Linus Torvalds, and indeed Shawn Fanning, should be seen not as looking forward but rather harking back to a Golden Age. John Clare [the 'Peasant Poet' who railed against the enclosures] would have clasped them to his bosom." 3

"Amid the fuss and frenzy surrounding the Internet and the e-commerce explosion we tend to forget that in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the electric telegraphy - basis of what has been the 'Victorian Internet' - and the triple expansion steam engine were creating what today we would with all the smugness of the living call an Information Society or a Knowledge Economy - new international markets for literature and music which necessitated a new international framework of copyright law. The Berne Convention in 1886, the foundation-stone of today's international copyright system, was the result." 5

Eugene Volokh, "Cheap Speech and What It Will Do," Yale Law Journal Vol. 104 No. 7

"1. Democratization and Diversification: Many more speakers will be able to make their speech widely available, including many who can't afford to do so today; and listeners will have much more choice than they have now. 2. The Shift of Power Away from Intermediaries: Control over what is said and heard will shift from intermediaries - publishers, bookstore and music store owners, and so on - to speakers and listeners themselves. Private parties will thus find it harder to use their market power to stifle speech. Listeners will find it easier to become well informed about the issues in which they're interested. On the other hand, it will be easier for people to choose only the information they know they want, and to ignore other topics and other views. And the extra diversity of speech may reduce social and cultural tension." 1807

"Ease of Being Closed-Minded: On the other hand, part of the value of the mass media is that they expose readers to topics and viewpoints the readers didn't select. A reader who thinks he doesn't care about science might come across a science story on the front page and find it interesting. A liberal reader may stumble across a conservative column in his daily paper and be persuaded by it. Yet the reader might not have subscribed to either story if he'd had the choice." 1834

Peter Manuel, "The Cassette Industry and Popular Music in North India," Popular Music Vol 10 No. 2 p. 189

"Since the early 1970s the advent of cassette technology has had a profound effect on music industries worldwide. This influence has been particularly marked in the developing world, where cassettes have largely replaced vinyl records and have extended their impact into regions, classes and genres previously uninfluenced by the mass media. Cassettes have served to decentralise and democratise both production and consumption, thereby counterbalancing the previous tendency toward oligopolisation of international commercial recording industries." 189

Wed, 29 Dec 2004 18:02:17 GMT

Here is an oral history of Mischa Schwartz, a Columbia prof in Electrical Engineering. I want to take his class "History of Telecommunications" next semester, but it looks like he might be the history he's teaching. This guy was there with his nodes in all the right places, after the war, gyroscopes, ARPAnet -- working on the earliest dispersed networks through the Dept of Defense and the university system. Yo, check it:

http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/oral_histories/transcripts/mschwartz.html

Tue, 21 Dec 2004 15:35:03 GMT

Taking over the means of production is different when the most significant systems are:

A. communications - the traffic is in information - words, images, signals vs tractors, guns, natural resources
B. digital - low barriers to entry, almost zero marginal cost of production/replication
C. distributed - a dispersed network allows greater access

The system itself, as a whole, is much less vulnerable than traditional broadcasting, so its momentum might be unaffected by actions that target any piece of it. Anyway, we don't want to destroy the communication system so long as it is not an authoritarian one-way transmission (like 1984's telescreens, or the old days of the Big Three networks). Its freedom and its sensitivity lay it open to massive manipulation.

Audre Lorde says, "You can't dismantle the master's house using the master's tools." This is what Marxists have been recommending for a long time. So far it has not amounted to much**, but the tools change over time. Some means have different qualities from others. "The medium is the message," as they like to say.

**To see the difficulties that arise when such a thing does happen, check out this article on Argentine workers who took over abandoned factories after their nation's economy collapsed. "Occupying, Resisting, Producing," by Andres Gaudin

"Using the Master's Tools," by Sanya Sarnavka. www.awid.org/publications/gen_dev/sarnavka.pdf

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 18:34:14 GMT

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 00:16:20 GMT

Neocons take Bush to task for being a limp wristed idealist. Yeah.

Why Is Our Military Not Being Rebuilt?
The case for a total war.

By Adam G. Mersereau

Kind-hearted people might, of course, think there were some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine that this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed.
— Clausewitz

o attack or not to attack? That is the question with respect to Iraq. The Bush administration makes no secret of its desire to topple Saddam Hussein before he develops nuclear weapons with which to destroy Israel and possibly strike America. Given the chaotic nature of war, if we deploy troops onto Iraqi soil for the purposes of destroying its military, ousting its government, and installing a new one, almost anything can happen. The Arab and/or Muslim worlds could unite against us. Saudi Arabia and Egypt could express their indignation by blocking the Suez Canal or other vital shipping lanes. Iran, Syria, and others could take to the battlefield in support of their Muslim brethren. The Palestinians could ignite another hot war with Israel. Arafat could be martyred. China might avail itself of America's distraction by invading Taiwan, and North Korea could make a similar move on South Korea.

Wouldn't now be a good time to begin restoring the American military to its former glory after the crippling cutbacks that occurred under President Clinton?

Of course we are no longer under pressure to match the Soviet Union grunt for grunt and tank for tank, but even before September 11, our military was struggling to maintain its peacetime operations tempo. Many people are getting impatient for the Bush administration to rebuild the military as President Bush vowed he would. Where is the build-up? Where is the recruiting drive? Where is the request for meaningful budget increases? Why are we not replacing at least some of the countless troops, ships, tanks, and aircraft that were so unceremoniously downsized by the Clinton administration? The military was denuded in the 1990's as a result of a multicultural, anti-war philosophy that prevailed within the Clinton administration and the Democratic party. The Bush administration and many other pro-military Republicans hold another worldview that is equally opposed to a large military.

I fear that President Bush and his military advisers are opposed to expending resources to rebuild the military because they have been seduced by a notion that has tempted, to some degree, the leaders of every powerful tribe or nation since the beginning of time: They believe that America's military technology and know-how have somehow transcended the very nature of warfare, and that we can win any war (Read: We can coerce any foreign culture to conform to our national will) using only limited military action. In other words, they do not believe there is a need to prepare for the possibility of a total war in the Middle East, Taiwan, Korea, or anywhere else because they believe that the idea of total war is passé.

That is why Secretary Rumsfeld's "top-down review" did not result in a rebuilding of the armed forces — because the Bush administration believes that American-style warfare no longer requires large occupation forces. That is why administration officials can so openly and casually discuss the pros and cons of attacking Iraq — because they believe that, if they should decide to attack, they can do so almost on a whim, without having to set aside a year or two to rebuild the military. And that is why President Bush can speak so confidently of total victory in the war on terrorism while the military continues to shrink — he believes that well-planned, well-fought, limited engagements can somehow achieve a total victory.

But are President Bush and his advisers correct? Have our wits and technology rendered total war a thing of the past? Can we simultaneously win the war on terrorism and protect our other global interests by talking tough and carrying a small stick? I don't think so. In the long run, to fight and possibly win the war on terrorism while deterring wars in Taiwan, Korea, and elsewhere will require a massive military machine capable of forcing our will upon our enemies and potential enemies. A small force specializing in limited warfare simply cannot achieve that end. Fighting limited wars against populous, culturally driven enemies is like trying to hold back the tide. It is Sisyphean. By definition, limited war can achieve only limited results. If we are going to win a total victory in the war on terrorism while deterring other major wars around the globe, we will first have to rid ourselves of our aversion to total war.

By "total" war, I mean the kind of warfare that not only destroys the enemy's military forces, but also brings the enemy society to an extremely personal point of decision, so that they are willing to accept a reversal of the cultural trends that spawned the war in the first place. A total-war strategy does not have to include the intentional targeting of civilians, but the sparing of civilian lives cannot be its first priority. By contrast, "limited" war is the use of surgical military force to accomplish discreet foreign-policy goals without mobilizing the entire nation, and while minimizing casualties. The purpose of "total" war is to permanently force your will onto another people group, while the purpose of "limited" war is to temporarily deter or discourage an enemy, or to impede the policy of another country long enough to accomplish particular goals. Limited war pits combatants against combatants, while total war pits nation against nation, even culture against culture.

Over-confidence in one's military technology and ability to manipulate other cultures can lead otherwise good leaders to apply limited-war tactics even when the situation calls for total war. This should have been America's primary lesson from Vietnam, where it became patently obvious that you cannot win a total victory by fighting a limited war. In Vietnam, America wanted a total victory — we wanted to impose our will onto the North Vietnamese and alter the course of their very culture — but we were unwilling to fight a total war. We were unwilling to invade, occupy and rebuild North Vietnamese society, and so we fought a war that was designed not to defeat the North, but to keep them at bay. The result of that effort speaks for itself.

As we have seen in Afghanistan, limited warfare, which is always marked by an over-reliance on technology and air power, does not destroy the enemy as much as it disperses him. This was a second important lesson from Vietnam that we really didn't learn. According to historian John G. Stoessinger, the United States dropped the equivalent of 300 Hiroshima-sized bombs on Indochina, leaving 20 million craters that changed the Vietnamese landscape forever. Yet we failed to overcome the will of the North Vietnamese. Why? Because bombs do not change cultures. The primary effects of bombs are to destroy critical infrastructure, and to encourage enemy forces to take cover. If troops do not advance to kill the enemy face to face and occupy his terrain, then the enemy will simply resurface, more determined than ever, and regroup to fight and kill another day. Smart bombs make bombing more efficient, but they don't change the overall equation. Hence, the al Qaeda and Taliban forces that have fled our precision bombing raids in Afghanistan will likely return to reestablish their training camps when the dust settles, and many Americans who are now serving there with such distinction will have to return to disperse them again and again.

Americans may well decide that we are unwilling to wage total war against the nations that harbor and enable terrorists, and that we must settle for less than total victory in this "asymmetrical" struggle. That is our prerogative. But by not rebuilding our military, our government is taking total war, or even the threat of total war, almost completely off the table. This will not go unnoticed by our enemies. The superior tactics and technology of our small force will no doubt yield impressive battlefield results in the current war and in future conflicts, but in the long run our small-force philosophy will create the vacuum that several freedom-hating cultures have been waiting for. And our children or our grandchildren will have to face the reality of total war because we were too arrogant to face it.

— Adam Mersereau left the Marine Corps as a First Lieutenant in 1995 and is now an attorney in Atlanta, Georgia.

Government and Opposition
Volume 39 Issue 4 Page 638 - Autumn 2004
doi:10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00139_3.x

The Return to Limited War
Ian Hall
Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman, , , Cambridge University Press, 2002, 298pp., hardback ISBN 0-5218-0991-6, £45; paperback ISBN 0-5210-0780-1£ 15.95

From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the best and brightest American civilian strategists - from Herman Kahn and Thomas Schelling at the RAND Corporation in California to Henry Kissinger at Harvard 3 - became preoccupied by two related problems: how to fight 'limited' conventional wars and wield nuclear threats without unleashing an uncontrolled nuclear war. The United States and Soviet Union, they had concluded, had reached a nuclear stalemate -'the delicate balance of terror', as Albert Wohlstetter called it 4 - in which both sides could inflict massive casualties upon the other with near impunity. In such circumstances the strategy of 'massive retaliation' to which the Eisenhower administration was committed looked increasingly immoral and implausible. Kahn, Schelling and others therefore set themselves the task of developing alternative strategies that reduced the possibility of conflict between the superpowers resulting in an indiscriminate and unlimited nuclear exchange. 5 Their aim was the restoration to American strategy of the principle of proportionality. To them, this had two great advantages. First, the limited and proportional use of nuclear weapons would mean that more civilians might survive a nuclear war. Second, such a policy would imbue present and future American threats with greater credibility. An adversary would find it difficult to believe, the strategists argued, that the United States would initiate 'massive retaliation' if faced with a minor skirmish or local insurgency; a carefully measured military response that could be calibrated to the seriousness of the action was much more plausible. Better, the logic went, to have a series of credible conventional and nuclear options rather than just one that would entail an act of collective suicide.

For a brief period in 1960 and 1961, the strategists' preferred alternative to 'massive retaliation', the 'counterforce' or 'no-cities' strategy, held sway at the highest levels of American government. Rather than making civilians and industry the targets of nuclear strikes, the objective of 'counterforce' was the destruction of the adversary's own nuclear arsenal. 6 Enthusiasts believed that, if followed in time of war, the costs - in terms of lives and money - would be limited and that an element of control over its conduct might be maintained. Some saw a further advantage: there was a chance that 'counterforce' would allow the United States to 'win' a nuclear war. If war came and the strategy worked, the bulk of Soviet bombers and missiles would be destroyed in the initial nuclear exchange. Civilian lives would be saved - a victory in itself - but if some American weapons could be kept in reserve as a bargaining counter, an even better outcome could be secured. Threatening the Soviets with further (less discriminate) destruction would, it was argued, compel them to accept a dictated and a disadvantageous peace. This was coercive strategy on an unimaginable scale: whole cities, indeed, the entire civilian population of a state, held hostage. 'Counterforce', however, relied on the highly unlikely condition of mutual trust: both sides had to be convinced that the other was playing by the rules for it to work. Worse, it would be impossible to tell if this was the case until it was too late, until the missiles had hit the cities and not the military targets that the rules dictated they were supposed to strike.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 cast all of these problems into sharp relief. 7 Political realities - misperception, misunderstanding and imperfect information - made nuclear war seem much less controllable than the theorists had claimed. 'Counterforce' lost ground, edged out by 'assured destruction' and 'flexible response'- at least until the early 1980s, when it was revived by, amongst others, Richard Perle. In conventional strategy, however, the spirit and logic of 'counterforce' lived on throughout the 1960s. As Fred Kaplan has observed, the Vietnam strategy constructed by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara 'was essentially a conventional-war version of the counterforce/no-cities theory - using force as an instrument of coercion, withholding a larger force that could kill the hostage of the enemy's cities if he didn't back down'. 8 The 'Rolling Thunder' campaign of 1965-68 was the most concerted coercive operation: a massive strategic bombing effort that was designed to demonstrate American firepower and resolve and illustrate to North Vietnam the costs of continued support for the Vietcong. The idea was to gradually increase the pressure, but never to commit the full force of American power - to coerce leaders rather than defeat the army on the battlefield. The campaign failed. The carefully calibrated (if not carefully executed) attacks on civilian and economic targets around Hanoi came to be perceived as 'immoral as well as ineffective', stimulating the anti-war movement and tainting the reputations of those scholars who had devised the strategy. 9 Richard Perle's attempt to resurrect 'counterforce' some fifteen years later did little to help -'coercion', as Robert Pape has observed, had 'come to be viewed as the "dark side" of international relations theory'. 10

Despite this inauspicious history, in The Dynamics of Coercion Daniel Byman and Matthew Byman aim to revive the 'once-active discussion about limited war'. In the preface they note - without explanation - that 'analysis has not kept pace with developments' in the field. Their avowed aim is to remedy that fault and to adapt for the post-Cold War era the theories that came from that 'burst of creative thinking' about limited war in the late 1950s and 1960s (p. xiii). This book is, in many ways, a minor act of homage to the Cold War civilian strategists, especially the great analysts of the early years of the RAND Corporation, Kahn and Schelling. In terms of its method, however, the book is far removed from the game theory and mathematical modelling commonly associated with those men. Indeed, its 'modest' historical approach is more akin to that other major, but no less controversial, figure of RAND's past: Bernard Brodie. 11

Byman and Waxman have split their book into two parts. The first, rather shorter, section examines 'coercive strategy making'. It opens with a chapter on the 'theory of coercion' in which they outline the state of the art and the approach they take in the remainder of the book. The two chapters that follow examine five 'coercive mechanisms' (power base erosion, the promotion of unrest, decapitation, regime-weakening and denial) and five 'coercive instruments' (air strikes, invasions and land grabs, the threat of nuclear retaliation, economic sanctions and political isolation, and the support of insurgencies). In each case, the authors review pertinent historical examples and summarize contemporary thinking on the efficacy of each mechanism and instrument. In the latter half of the book, Byman and Waxman turn to the constraints on the United States in its exercise of coercion. Four sets of constraints are identified - domestic politics, coalitions, humanitarian concerns and non-state actors, and adversary possession of weapons of mass destruction - and a chapter is devoted to each. The book ends with a measured assessment of the 'future of U. S. coercion'.

IN DEFENCE OF COERCION

At the outset, Byman and Waxman follow Schelling 12 in insisting upon two fundamental distinctions. The first is between coercion and 'brute force'. 'Coercion', they write, is 'most successful when threats need not even be carried out', for coercion 'is not destruction' (p. 3). Coercion, they add, can take two different forms: compellence and deterrence. Neither distinction, Byman and Waxman maintain, is always obvious in practice: 'most crises involving coercion fall along the continuum between pure brute force and coercion' (p. 5) and a strategy of deterrence can, by its very nature, shade into one of compellence. Deterrence, they observe, dominated Cold War strategy, but in the period since the Soviet Union's collapse, compellence has come to the fore. It is with this form of coercion that the book is primarily concerned.

In Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States - with the backing of the United Nations or of allies - has threatened and used military force to try to persuade adversaries to fulfil its demands. By no means all of these attempts at coercion have been successful; indeed, both scholarly and political opinion remains divided as to the utility of the coercive strategies employed. Some have gone so far as to argue that compellence almost never works, especially when airpower is used as the primary coercive instrument. Robert Pape, in his controversial study of the use of strategic airpower, Bombing to Win (1996), came to the conclusion that 'coercion is no easier, only sometimes cheaper, and never much cheaper, than imposing demands by military victory'. 13 The Dynamics of Coercion attempts to answer some of these critics and a few more besides, reasserting some of the insights of the civilian strategists, defending (to an extent) their methods, and arguing that coercion can work.

The book's introduction gives a brief snapshot of the most important - and damaging - assaults that have been launched against post-war American security studies during the past decade. Conscious of the need to address these challenges, Byman and Waxman address each in turn. They agree that the 'unitary actor' model of states is problematic and acknowledge that attention must be paid to the bureaucratic politics and organizational processes that Graham Allison famously demonstrated, in Essence of Decision, have such influence over decision-making. 14 'Certainly', they state, 'regimes are not individuals' and should not be treated as such (p. 13). They acknowledge too the weaknesses of the 'cost-benefit model' that is employed in the book and they note - but do not rebut - the criticisms of the notion of 'abstract rationality' that underpinned so much American writing on strategy during the Cold War (p. 14). Their response to all of these challenges is chastened rather than repentant. Byman and Waxman espouse the 'cautious belief' that 'history [is] a promising tool for understanding coercion in the future' (p. 18) and aim at 'modesty' in assembling their theoretical models (p. 23).

In dealing with the contemporary critics of coercion, rather than of method, Byman and Waxman are less restrained. Pape's robust dissection of coercion by strategic airpower is itself given rigorous analysis. They criticize his treatment of airpower in isolation. Coercive instruments, they argue, are seldom used alone; rather, they are employed in combination, their effects often being 'additive or synergistic' (p. 121). Attention is focused too upon the manner in which 'success' and 'failure' in coercion are defined in Pape's work and that of other sceptics. Byman and Waxman suggest that the 'binary metric' they employ - an approach that classifies all outcomes short of the absolute fulfilment of the avowed objectives of the coercer as 'failures'- misrepresents the character of coercive contests, for 'states seldom respond to coercive threats with a straight yes or no'. 'Most states', they go on, 'when faced by a coercive threat modify their behaviour, trying to placate the coercer with small changes while pursuing their own policy objectives' (p. 35). A coercive threat, it is argued, can be met with a range of responses, each of which may fit to a lesser or greater extent with the wishes of the coercer. Rarely, for a range of possible reasons, does the 'coercee' oblige fully. For these reasons, 'coercive contests are better viewed as series of moves and countermoves' (p. 37). Such contests, they argue, are dynamic processes rather than individual events, and the criteria used to ascertain success or failure must be adapted accordingly.

What follows from this dynamic concept of coercion is a renewed appreciation for a venerable idea beloved of the civilian strategists of the 1960s: 'escalation dominance'. This notion, suitably modified, is considered by Byman and Waxman to be 'critical' to the contemporary analysis of coercion. But whereas Kahn had understood 'escalation dominance' to mean staying one step ahead of an adversary on his 'ladder of escalation', they define it slightly differently, as 'the ability to increase the threatened costs to the adversary while denying the adversary the opportunity to negate those costs or to counterescalate' (p. 38). Those in a dominant position, therefore, must be able not only to deter an adversary's attempt to move up the ladder of escalation by threatening further punishment: they must also be able to block a range of lateral 'countermoves' which might circumvent the coercer's assured 'military dominance'. Here the difference in concerns and circumstance between past theorists of coercion and these contemporary authors is stark. For the former, working in the midst of the Cold War, a coercive strategy that threatened mass civilian casualties was - though perhaps morally unthinkable - an instrument of great utility. The 'power to hurt', Schelling argued, was what captured an adversary's attention, focused his or her mind and ensured compliance. 15 As Byman and Waxman observe, this power may now be America's Achilles' heel, for its unrivalled ability to inflict 'adversary civilian suffering creates opportunities for exploiting collateral damage' by those being coerced (p. 45). If domestic opinion reacts negatively to such scenes, the 'power to hurt' undermines the ability to act.

THE CONTEXTS OF COERCION

In the work of the Cold War strategists, coercion is usually portrayed as taking place in a political vacuum - the actors moved according to their rational appraisals of their predicament and their assessments of the risk of future suffering. While Schelling acknowledged that, as he put it, 'collective decision depends on the internal politics and bureaucracy of government . . . on party structures and pressure groups, as well as on individual values and careers', he devoted little attention to their analysis. 16 Byman and Waxman, by contrast, find the examination of these supposedly extraneous influences on decision-making unavoidable. Indeed, they argue that the 'nature of post Cold War world' (p. 127) necessitates an approach that takes the political process and public opinion seriously. The loss of the 'domestic consensus' that underpinned American foreign policy during the Cold War, for instance, means acts of coercion require more fulsome justification to the American people. Their sensitivity to casualties and to 'adversary civilian suffering' (p. 137) place limits upon the means that can be employed, while a 'public preference to multilateralism' commits the United States to seek to build coalitions rather than acting alone.

Through no fault of the authors, who wrote the book before 11 September, this part of their argument has a rather antediluvian feel. A statement like 'the unity of purpose that shaped the U. S. public and elite's perspectives on intervention during the Cold War is largely absent today' (p. 127) sums up a very different American political mood to that which has prevailed since the terrorist attacks. Public support for the 'war on terror' in the United States has been high and remains so; 'sensitivity' to American military casualties and to 'collateral damage' has been much reduced. It has become possible to imagine a scenario - which the authors clearly considered unlikely two years ago - in which the United States does indeed 'coerce alone' (p. 152) without a supporting coalition. The theory that Byman and Waxman put forward does seem to account for these developments: the 'war on terror', they would most probably argue, is a 'high stakes' contest markedly different from the majority of those post-Cold War conflicts discussed in the book. Whether these different circumstances change the rules of coercion remains to be seen.

The two chapters that deal with the constraints imposed by states and non-state actors in humanitarian crises and by adversary possession of weapons of mass destruction are much less contentious. Coercion, Byman and Waxman observe, is commonly necessary in humanitarian operations, but is fraught with difficulty. Mandates may require impartiality on the part of those intervening or place restrictions on the use of force, allowing belligerents 'a zone of safety in which to operate, to arm and train with impunity, and to otherwise disrupt operations' (p. 186). Often it is difficult to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, between the subjects of coercion and those due protection. Non-state adversaries, moreover, can have far greater flexibility, exploiting rules of engagement, provoking disproportionately violent responses, and playing on the worst fears of domestic public opinion. They can, Byman and Waxman write with some prescience, escalate in 'unpredictable and unconventional ways' that are hard to counter (p. 197).

Their account of the challenges raised by weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is necessarily more speculative and less grounded in experience. The first half of the chapter surveys the reasons why states might seek to acquire WMD and the nature of the weapons themselves. The latter half examines the problems the United States is likely to have to deal if confronted with a WMD-armed adversary. Byman and Waxman suggest that even if the US were to be attacked with a chemical or biological weapon, a response that exploited the full range of American capabilities would be difficult. Public opinion, the 'perception of proportionality' (p. 215) and the opposition of coalition partners perhaps more directly endangered, would weigh against retaliation with nuclear arms. The alternatives, they assess, are not much better: 'in-kind options for responding to WMD attacks' (p. 218) are impossible in the absence of American chemical and biological arsenals; a 'counterforce' option would have to be pre-emptive and would clearly be highly provocative (p. 220). A system of missile defence, it is argued, would be similarly counter-productive: though it might enhance the credibility of American deterrence, adversaries would seek alternative means of delivery (p. 221).

COERCION, WAR AND THE LAWS OF WAR

The conclusions Byman and Waxman reach are eminently sensible but not especially specific. Successful coercion, they maintain, 'depends on cultivating favourable political conditions' and 'building robust public and international backing for coercive operations' (p. 239). More intriguing is what their study leaves out. Byman and Waxman are coy about one set of constraints that directly pertain to states' use of force: the laws of war. They observe that the US generally adheres to these rules and that its adversaries often do not (pp. 148-9), but devote very little attention as to what this implies for their theory. Yet it could be argued, with some justification, that in offering protection to civilians and requiring discrimination on the part of the military, these laws set strict limits to any coercive strategy, blocking off escalatory options and preventing dominance from being attained. Recent experience has shown that these problems are taken very seriously indeed by western states - during the Kosovo campaign, for instance, teams of lawyers vetted NATO target lists, removing those that might contravene the Geneva Conventions and Protocols, to the great frustration of those conducting the operations. 17

The wider issue that Byman and Waxman neglect is the relationship between coercion and war. Back in 1966, Thomas Schelling suggested that 'nuclear weapons threaten to make war less military'. 18 War, he argued, would no longer concern the conquest of territory after the defeat of an army, but the outcome of this transformation was not peace. Rather, international relations would oscillate between 'pure violence' and 'bargaining'. 19 With the end of the Cold War, however, the threat of pure violence - nuclear Armageddon - has receded; and the nuclear 'taboo' appears to have been strengthened. An older form of war has made something of a comeback, partly, if one takes Schelling's theory seriously, because, in the absence of the threat of 'pure violence', bargaining is no longer the only option open to adversaries. The question that remains is whether coercion is appropriate in such a world, or whether, as recent events appear to have demonstrated, 'shock-and-awe' is actually a poor substitute for 'brute force' and military victory.

“War is simply power unrestrained by constitution or compact.” With words like these, General William Tecumseh Sherman assured himself a place in the discourse of war, of both his own and many afterward. No person has become more closely associated with the notion of “total war,” and thanks to the horrors of twentieth century conflict he has become an icon of modernity. The history of war pivots on the character who made no apologies for the horrors of war and, it is thought, did not hesitate to drag the whole of society into it – much like the later military planners who leveled whole cities of civilians with atomic weapons and napalm. As such, many have called the American Civil War the first modern war. The term “modern” stands in for a variety of changes – organizational, technological, political, philosophical and humanitarian – that have characterized fighting by industrial societies. Often enough, scholars have collapsed modern war and total war into one phenomenon, but disagreement has persisted as to whether the Civil was either modern or total. As comparison of five works – Charles Royster’s The Destructive War, Archer Jones’s Civil War Command and Strategy, Russel Weigley’s The American War of War, Richard Hartigan’s The Forgotten Victim, and T. Harry Williams’s Lincoln and His Generals – will show, scholars have concurred that the Civil War was a transitional stage on the way to technologically and tactically modern war. Some, however, have gone further to describe its ideological character as “total,” a conflict that envelops all of society in a conflict of visions rather than a garden-variety turf war.
People have turned to consider these questions of modernity and totality after wars have further demonstrated the destructive capabilities of humankind. For example, a wave of books on total war rolled out during and after World War II: Fletcher Pratt’s America and Total War (1941), T. Harry Williams’s Lincoln and His Generals (1952), and Raymond Aron’s The Century of Total War (1955), all of them informed by images of Dresden, Hiroshima and Roosevelt. Likewise, a new fascination with the Civil War gripped historians in the early 1970s, as the Vietnam War prompted scholars to trace the trail of napalm backwards through history. Many, it seems, found its root in the person of Sherman, who coined “War is hell” and so many other aphorisms on absolute destruction. These years gave us James M. Merrill’s William Tecumseh Sherman (1971), John Bennett Walters’s highly objective Merchant of Terror: General Sherman and Total War (1973), and James Reston’s Vietnam and the Civil War, a weepy travelogue that drew a straight line from Sherman’s March to the depredations of the United States in Southeast Asia. A series of works on total war also appeared in the 1990s as America’s adventure in the Persian Gulf came and went.
In one such recent study, The Destructive War, Charles Royster touched on the sense of regret and anticipation that pervades these works with a 1934 quotation by James Truslow Adams: “What the horrors of the next war are to be, no one dares envisage.” Royster, himself publishing just as another American war awaited, commented, “It went without saying that the next war would be more modern than its predecessor.” The

If, in fact, the American Civil War was a total war, where did the impulses for a greater destruction come from? Historians have ventured a few guesses as to how Americans came to kill their enemies more indiscriminately, and a few have suggested that total war was nothing new.

In the search for precedent, Archer Jones has been the most dismissive of the notion that the Civil War’s destructive novelty. His Civil War Command and Strategy sets Union and Confederate tactics alongside earlier instances of rampant and thorough destruction, insisting that warmakers targeted civilians and economic infrastructure long before the 1860s. How, he asked, was Sherman’s March more malevolent than Irish tactics of barn burning and stealing livestock, England’s use of starvation against Ireland, or Oliver Cromwell’s murder of the entire town of Drogheda? Nor did Jones accept that the Civil War more fully engaged the people through mass conscription, pitting whole populations against each other. "Some commentators have characterized the Civil War as total and modern because of the use of conscription to sustain the armies,” Jones wrote, “but this did not result in having much more than 3 percent of the population under arms, about the same proportion as in eighteenth-century Europe, which also used various forms of compulsory service." The destructiveness of the Civil War, then, shared more with conflicts of preceding centuries than with twentieth century wars. "In spite of the malevolence and viciousness of some of its guerilla warfare,” Jones argued, “the Civil War was hardly more total than many others in the past in which invaders encountered or provoked popular resistance."
For Jones, what does distinguish the Civil War is the application of old tactics to new circumstances. Both Confederate guerilla fighting and Sherman’s scorched earth approach may have their historical antecedents, but an assault on infrastructure took on new meaning when the targets were new. In other words, raids may have been used for ages, but raiding railroads and other networks for communication and transportation represented a striking departure. "Displaying an ability to apply elements of older strategy,” Jones wrote, “they gave an innovative primacy to the logistical raid so as to take advantage of the vulnerability of the new base-dependent, railroad supply system."

Russel F. Weigley and Richard Shelly Hartigan have traced an American penchant for annihilation both backward and forward from the Civil War, with Native American policy providing a model for total destruction.

According to Weigely, Lincoln at first
Weigley pointed out the Union's essential difficulty – fighting an invasive war on somebody else's turf, whose main hope was to wear the interlopers out. A restrained strategy could not accomplish this. The invaded country had to be properly invaded, crushed, and conquered, or else the Confederacy’s waiting game would win out in the end.

- Technology
- Administration
- Public relations

Others have suggested the government’s use of public relations as a warmaking tool presaged the highly propagandized conflicts of the twentieth century. Historians have highlighted Abraham Lincoln and William Tecumseh Sherman for their sensitivity to public opinion, especially where the mass perception of military strategy and battlefield outcomes were concerned.

American governments have regularly employed propaganda to mobilize support for military action, as the demonization of foreign foes in the Spanish-American War or World War I demonstrates. However, treatments of the Civil War indicate a special need not only to use propaganda to support action but also to use action itself to prop up public opinion – unsurprising, perhaps, in a war that was longer, bloodier and far more difficult to manage politically than any other in the experience of nineteenth century Americans.

“The Union raids, particularly Sherman's, contributed to victory primarily by their political rather than their military impact,” Jones argued. However, he might distinguish between political and military aspects of war too easily. To recognize this goes beyond Carl Von Clausewitz’s dictum, “War is politics by other means,” ubiquitous in military history texts and especially those involving the American Civil War. Wars fought by democracies with industrial economies are especially sensitive to the political dynamics of military strategy.

- Ideology

How, then, is technology the defining characteristic of modern war if it can be used both for indiscriminate destruction and targeted bombing?

Both approaches assault the infrastructure of a society, but attacking the economic basis of a primarily agricultural society in a prolonged war of attrition may seem more inhumane than aiming for communications and military targets in Kosovo. The strategies used in recent conflicts can appear more limited, or less total, than Sherman’s march.

We might make a useful distinction among premodern, modern and postmodern wars, with the American Civil War straddling the line between the first two and recent conflicts using technology to minimize casualties.

Since “modern” conflicts such as the World Wars or the Vietnam War have been bleak and nihilistic, sacrificing humanity and humaneness to the full extent of technology, many have assumed modern war and total war are the same thing.

Military operations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan represent cases in which entire societies must be reformed, in which the occupying force seeks to remake the local landscape in its own image. The history of modern warfare, in the American Civil War as elsewhere, suggests that such circumstances may tilt action toward total war.

As suggested at the outset, writers have turned to interrogate American military thought and strategy during or after major conflicts. Often they have weighed the question of total war, wondering whether destruction must be absolute in order for victory to be so, and recent conflicts repeat the pattern of the past. Neoconservative thinkers, for instance, have criticized the

Earlier scholars wrote not far from the mushroom cloud, the firebomb and napalm, tools that closely associated technology with indiscriminate destruction in the minds of many, leveling rice paddies and major cities alike.

If modernity is taken to mean more than just material change, but also includes the political and social revolutions that preceded industrialization, then a definition of modern war must include those philosophical views that allow towns to be incinerated at the push of a button. This kind of war permits the pursuit not just of territorial gain or temporary victory but also the absolute replacement of one society with another – it not only permits but is that pursuit. Even if politicians and planners continue to use advanced technologies to try limiting the mess of war, the ideological component of modern warmaking may persist, as wars represent conflicts of vision as much as materials.

Historians have found the soundest agreement in the notion that the Civil War was technically a modern war, with the Union Army in particular embracing new forms of administration and military technology that heralded things to come. Beyond this, most have noted a greater ideological character to the Civil War than most earlier conflicts. The war fit into a larger pattern of struggles that pitted different visions of society against each other, ranging from the French Revolution to the Vietnam War. As nations, especially democracies, have sought to remake others in their own images, a far vaster portion of the population has become culpable, as the legimitate scope of battle expanded dramatically. That being said, nearly all scholars refuse to call the Civil War an all-out assault on civilians, of the sort seen in twentieth century conflicts that supposedly had their roots in Sherman’s march.

Bibliography

*Forster, Stig and Jorg Nagler, eds. On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars for Unification, 1861-1871. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

*Hagerman, Edward. The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare: Ideas, Organization, and Field Command. Bloomington, IN: 1988.

*Hartigan, Richard Shelly. The Forgotten Victim: A History of the Civilian. Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1982.

Janda, Lance. “Shutting the Gates of Mercy: The American Origins of Total War, 1860-1880,” Journal of Military History 59: 7-26. 1995

Jones, Archer. Civil War Command and Strategy: The Process of Victory and Defeat. New York: Free Press, 1992.

*Royster, Charles. The Destructive War. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

Sutherland, Daniel E. “Abraham Lincoln, John Pope and the Origins of Total War,” Journal of Military History 56: 567-586. 1992

*Weigley, Russell F. The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy. New York: Macmillian Publishing Co., 1973.

Williams, T. Harry. Lincoln and His Generals. 1952.

“War is the health of the state.”

"Others have viewed the war as total because of the involvement of civilians, comparing the Civil War in this respect with the Second World War, with its systematic bombing of civilians. Though, by early inaugurating guerilla warfare, the South first involved civilians, the exponents of this interpretation find a more contemporary parallel with the political intimidation objective of strategic bombing and the comparable effect of losses of civilian property, an objective which Sherman included for his raids." 241-2

He goes on to cite Irish tactics of barn burning and stealing livestock, English use of starvation against Ireland, Cromwell's murder of the entire town of Drogheda, and William the Conqueror's destruction of English opposition. "In spite of the malevolence and viciousness of some of its guerilla warfare, the Civil War was hardly more a total than many others in the past in which invaders encountered or provoked popular resistance." 242-3

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:34:44 GMT

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6204

Conversations: Pakistan Government Looks to the Linux Users Group
Posted on Saturday, July 13, 2002 by Frederick Noronha

Linux Market Technology Resource Mobilization Unit pursues GNU/Linux as a means of reducing software piracy.

It must be quite flattering when a government sits up, takes note of the potential of a Linux-users group, and prominently features it in advertisements noticed nationwide.

This happened recently in Pakistan, where a small but growing band of GNU/Linux enthusiasts--and some senior policy planners working at another level--have understood the impact that this alternative computing operating system could have on their plans.

Sometime in June, the English-language newspaper The Dawn published from the port city of Karachi, announced: "The Government of Pakistan is committing itself to the reduction of piracy and the protection of intellectual property. Linux and open source technologies are the corner stone of this initiative."

Deploying GNU/Linux to avoid piracy might be unexpected logic. But in the subcontinent of South Asia--covering the populous regions of India, Pakistan and smaller neighbours--per capita income hovers around $300 US a year.

Affordability of software prices is a key issue, and faced by repeated charges of "piracy" of costly proprietary software, some are beginning to see GNU/Linux as an option.

(This is perhaps one reason why the many forms of "freedom" offered by GNU/Linux are also sometimes interpreted in terms of the "price freedom" and affordability it offers users here, though this may not be seen as too important an issue in the more-affluent world.)

Pakistan's Technology Resource Mobilization Unit has been established by the Government of Pakistan to enable groups of professionals to exchange views and coordinate activities in their sectors. One is to focus on GNU/Linux.

"These physical and virtual groups involve volunteers in Pakistan and abroad, who contribute to policy making by the Government of Pakistan. Each group has national and regional coordinators. Meetings, seminars and conferences are held to debate, crystallize and propagate relevant ideas, concepts and policy directions," the Pakistani government announced recently.

On the GNU/Linux front the Pakistani press announced, "the task force is expected to include committed professionals (e.g. PLUC), academics and practicing software developers to set the future direction for Pakistan". PLUC is the Pakistan Linux Users' Club.

Plans are to have "Linux force"--as it has been described--to hold meetings, seminars and conferences to educate the user community.

"They will also come with proposals to the government [for] funding such as the creation of user-friendly client/server software, training strategies, local language software development, the induction of LINUX into [the] basic syllabi, etc." says the government in an advert published in The Dawn.

TReMU, Pakistan's Technology Resource Mobilization Unit, has plans to set up secure network and e-commerce task forces too, in addition to the GNU/Linux task force.

"The main qualifications to participate are a commitment to volunteer your time and intellectual inputs, to work in a team, and to have a desire for the betterment of the country", says TReMU, making an appeal to the patriotism of the GNU/Linux techies.

It anticipates that these groups will "enable a sharing of resources and ideas". Besides, TReMU hopes that several of the ideas could germinate into development projects and thus "translate the brainstorming, discussion and planning sessions into practical realities".

Those interested in participating have been asked to fill out the relevant forms on the TReMU web site.

It's clear that some influential decision-makers and policy advisors are keen to push toward a GNU/Linux direction.

At worst, this would help third world countries like Pakistan to battle frequent charges of having "pirated" proprietary software--most of which is atrociously priced from a developing-country perspective.

At best, this could help Pakistan, which like neighbouring India has a long reputation for its software skills, to encourage young programmers to understand better and go further, given the transparent and collaborative nature of the GNU/Linux software.

Ovais Khan wrote in to PLUC recently: "There was an ad on page 21 of The Dawn about the creation of a task force for Linux, secure networks and e-commerce. The interesting thing is that the name of PLUC is in the ad. Congrats [PLUC's key driving force Abdul] Basit and all the others."

But some felt differently.

Fawad Halim commented, "I'm very skeptical about anything (good) coming from the Government, but let's see what comes out of this."

Bilal Muddassir shot back, "I think the only organization that can mobilize immense amounts of resources (of course if it wants to) for a particular purpose currently in Pakistan is a government organization. Being skeptical is okay..."

Pakistan Ministry of Science and Technology advisor Salman Ansari recently told this correspondent that he sees other uses for GNU/Linux deployment.

For instance, some 50,000 low-cost computers are to be installed in schools and colleges all over Pakistan. These will be PII computers, each being sourced for less than $100 a piece, he says.

Proprietary software for these PCs would cost a small fortune. Surely more than what the computers cost! But, using GNU/Linux as the OS would ensure that the overall price is kept low. Pakistan is seriously considering the use of StarOffice, an open-source productivity tool that does the same work as proprietary software that costs thousands of rupees.

"Don't be surprised if we become the first country in the world to say that all [government-run] services are going to be GNU/Linux-based", says an enthusiastic Ansari. It's to be seen if these dreams can be accomplished.

"I've set up several networks. When I started setting them up six years ago, the only thing I could run them with, without breaking the law, was Linux. At that time, Windows NT was very flaky. So I've developed a very healthy respect for Linux and open source", says Ansari.

Half-sarcastically, he adds with a smile, "Though I'm a typical Pakistani, I still feel a bit uncomfortable in buying pirated software and paying 90 cents for a software priced $500 US."

Ansari says Pakistan has been speaking to some big vendors about proprietary prices. "We told them we would like to do business with them, but that the pricing would have to be realistic first", he says.

If current software prices are taken into account, to go "legal" Pakistan would have to pay something like $400 US for converting each of its PCs to proprietary software.

"The Business Software Alliance [the network promoting and protecting the interests of proprietary software] has been going all out for it. But they have to come in at a price that equates to the economics of the country", argues Ansari.

Ansari points to the belief that if professionals want to enter the software development field, they need to get into open source. "You will be then able to create products, and not just projects", he says.

It makes sense in terms of regional language solutions front too. "Urdu [the national language of Pakistan] language software is easier [to use] if it resides at the OS level", he adds.

Ansari says that as chairman of the peer review committee of all IT projects, he has been keen to turn down any project that uses pirated software. "But what this (asking for non-pirated software) ends up doing is bloating the cost of the software", he complains, suggesting that open source could be a way out.

He says:

There are two interesting initiatives now. We're launching a major e-governance programme, and the government must have legal software. We're also planning to put in computers in rural schools. Both are going to be high-profile projects. We want to make sure they don't use pirated software, even while we work on cleaning out other PCs.

Ansari says this has "thrown open the debate" in Pakistan. One instance is that the Technology Resource Mobilization Unit has a task force on Linux. The government has also agreed to put in Rs 200 million to fund R&D and software product development, which the government would then own and distribute for free--cutting into the logic of proprietary software.

On the client-side, efforts are on to build a GUI interface for Linux, by working at the OS level for projects that relate to text-to-speech, language translation and language-related software.

"But at the same time, we're not stopping anyone [in government] from buying branded products. So long as they can justify it and negotiate a good price [the justification for which has to be very valid]", says the US-returned engineer.

"In a government contract, if you're going to bid for computers that have a legal OS and office suite, guess who's going to win", he says.

Three aspects take priority on this front, says Ansari: first, encouraging legal software; second, enabling a "complete industry growth" for product development based on Linux; and third, making people "very, very aware" of this powerful tool.

GNU/Linux is something that "almost everybody has adopted, whether it's Sun, Oracle or IBM". This would reduce the cost of computing for the people, even while we would like to use non-pirated software, says Ansari.

He finds it ludicrous to believe BSA's estimation that India uses 63% pirated software, while Pakistan's figure is something like 83%. "Their current paradigm is simply to count the number of computers shipped, and multiply this by five, on the assumption that each computer needs five pieces of software. This is a ludicrous way of estimating things", he says.

He says: "Sure, piracy is far high. If everybody somehow started using Linux, we'd fall below the US piracy levels and maybe have 2% piracy. We want to be ahead of these guys before they start their next 'war on terrorism' (using the issue of 'intellectual property')."

Ansari also argues that Pakistan wants the likes of Microsoft to come out with prices that are reasonable. "We want companies like those to also come and invest in the country, where software or drivers could be written here," he argues.

Youngsters, smitten by the power of GNU/Linux, sing its praises too.

Zuhair Ali, who works in networking and has done his Masters in Physics and Systems Engineering, says:

I'm interested in Linux because in Linux you know what's going on. Nothing is hidden from you behind nice dialog boxes as in Windows. It's a very good toy for me as I can play and tweak as much as I want, and I have all the necessary help and information from the Net.

Ali informs that earlier this year, he and his friends started a chapter of the PLUC in the national capital of Islamabad. It started small, with just four members.

Twenty-two year old Zeeshan Ashraf of Karachi, CTO at the Pakistan-based Specific Research Laboratories, says that PLUC colleague Basit has developed a distro called "PK-Linux". Ashraf himself is working on developing a distro for the embedded and industrial market "much like what IBM and Cisco did for their forthcoming hardware".

Ashraf is also designing an "industrial PC" and is "in the process of making a distro for real-time Linux that would go with this PC and and would have all the drivers to support the custom hardware that we ship with this PC".

Other Linux enthusiasts, however, drop hints that it won't be easy convincing all the many decision-makers and government officials to go along with a pro-Linux policy.

"The LINUX community is very large, but it needs to be assembled together. PLUC is doing this effort toward bringing all the LINUX user base into a group, so all and everybody can benefit from the experiences of the others, and get their queries answered," says Ashraf.

Meetings are held regularly every month, and now PLUC has now undertaken the initiative of spreading the community further by approaching Universities and delivering seminars or conducting workshops, and educating the students of the endless possibilities of GNU/Linux.

But much needs to be done. For one, the potential of GNU/Linux in countries like Pakistan is not fully appreciated globally. Partly, it's a problem with poor communication.

Ashraf argues, "There's mostly no development being done in Pakistan on the OS level. And, even if there are a few people who are doing this, they [don't publicize it]. So, since the national community does not know of this endeavour, how can we expect the international market to appreciate this?"

He himself has been working to develop a hardware card that will provide the most common network buses for the Industrial developer. Ashraf plans to incorporate all the drivers and APIs for this in the Linux kernel, most probably in the PK-Linux distro too. Zeeshan "Shan" Ashraf is the IT manager of a pharmaceutical company. He says:

Linux has a lot of potential, and features that can be excellent for Third World (developing) countries like Pakistan. It's free (affordable) and has almost the same software and hardware-base as does Windows or any other OS for that matter. Pakistan, especially the government-maintained organisations, schools, colleges, hospitals and other institutions can benefit from deploying Linux (as it would provide affordable solutions) and also make it possible to utilise old legacy systems. This would cut costs.

Frederick Noronha is a freelance journalist living in Goa, India.

Iain Borden

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 01:30:06 GMT

"Zero degree architecture is a field of the meaningless, a series of signals, a code reductive in individual signs and complex in its multitudinous instructions. Yet the architecture and spaces of the modern city are not wholly constraining, for there is a contradiction between the homogenizing reduction of space by business, and the open differentiation of urban space in the city as a whole -- and it is this contradiction that skateboaring works within. While advertisements and controlled spaces contribute to the 'terrorism' of everyday life, part of the intensification of the everyday as a mode of production and of administering society, skateboarding offers both an apparently non-commercial realm of compensation and a confrontation of the instructive mechanics of signals.

'There are no more white lines to stay within, sidewalks to conform to or bases to tag. It's all an open highway with hydrants, curbs, bumpers, shopping carts, door handles and pedestrians.'

Skateboaring counters signal architecture with a body-centric and multi-sensory performative activity, and with an indifference to function, price and regulation, creating new patterns of space and time, and turning the signals of the city into ephemeral symbols of everyday meaning and duration." 229

"More conceptually, the main ground that this theoretized history of skateboaring opens up seems to me to be the question of how to construct a materialist history of the experience of architecture. In particular, how can one relate the specific phenomenal procedures by which people engage with the built world to the ideological and material processes which condition them? In particular, is there a correlation between walking, talking, breathing, listening and so forth in the same way that has begun to be understood for vision and the gaze? It may well be, then, that further theoretical study of the encounter and debate between existentialism, phenomenology and Marxism in the 1950s would be a fruitful arena of further theoretical study. How might, for example, we relate Merleau-Ponty's assertions that the body 'contributes more than it receives,' and that 'movement, touch, vision' are all part of the paradox of expression,' to the strictures and demands of the modern capitalist city?" 266

Sun, 10 Oct 2004 22:20:24 GMT

SECTION: PORTLAND ZONER; Pg. B03

GROWING COMMUNITY IN A GARDEN
WADE NKRUMAH - The Oregonian

The trash and weeds that crowded the corner plot are gone.

So are the cars, parked there by people using the sports field at Rigler Elementary School in Northeast Portland.

Now, corn, squash and tomatoes are flourishing in the community garden that's sprouted at Northeast 52nd Avenue and Prescott Street in the Cully neighborhood.

The transformation -- from neglected to respected -- pleases Jane Ganser, who owns a duplex across the street from Rigler Cully Peace Garden.

"I know some of the neighbors are glad it's not a weed corner," she said. "There used to be a lot of weeds and trash. I think it's only going to get better. Of course, I'm a gardener, so I would like it."

The garden, more than four years in the making, is a neighborhood effort built by volunteers, more than $45,000 in grant money and contributions of materials and volunteers' time, estimated by organizers to be worth tens of thousands of dollars.

From the ground up

Will Levenson, as much as anyone, knows what it took to get there.

"It's the kind of thing that, it's good you didn't know what you're getting yourself into, or you might not have done it," he said.

Levenson, who lives in the Rose City neighborhood, said he and Starr Hogeboom, a Cully resident for 13 years, launched the effort to create something in Cully that would benefit and attract a wide range of residents.

"There's not a hub in Cully neighborhood," Levenson said. "There's no gathering place."

A cistern for rain The garden sits in a former grassy area about the size of half a house lot. Compared with many community gardens, it's well-equipped. For instance, it has a gazebo with a roof that collects rain in a 3,000-gallon cistern used to irrigate the plants. A concrete path runs through the center of the garden, providing access for people in wheelchairs, with other disabilities or pushing strollers. Construction of an entryway is planned to start sometime this summer.

These amenities are among the reasons the garden has taken four years to build.

A challenging experience

Levenson said keeping the project going while working around the schedules of a loose collection of volunteers was challenging. When they started, the compacted soil was far from garden-ready. It took time to raise money. The city's community-garden program, which operates on an annual budget of about $100,000, has no funds to develop gardens.

Leslie Pohl-Kosbau, a plant specialist for Portland Parks & Recreation and director of the community-garden program , said it costs at least $40,000 to build a basic community garden.

Many lending hands

It also takes time and energy. Levenson credits many volunteers -- including Tony Guardino, Bruce Nelson, Mike Paperini -- for helping to make the Rigler garden happen.

The garden was helped by a $12,000 grant at the start from the city's Bureau of Housing and Community Development, one of eight funding sources.

It also benefited from contributions of equipment, materials and time from the city, Portland Public Schools and more than two dozen businesses and unions.

Bob Shiprack, executive secretary of Oregon Building Trades Council, arranged help from local building trade unions, which provided muscle and materials.

"It's hard to put a value on all the pro-bono help," Levenson said.

Levenson said the next step is to get the garden incorporated into the city's community-garden system. The nearly 30-year-old program includes 28 organic gardens in Portland.

"The main key is sustainability of the garden," Levenson said. "We were able to come together with the community to build it. But we really need help from the city to ensure that this is going to be sustainable for the future."

Community-garden specialist Pohl-Kosbau said the Rigler garden is a good candidate for the program, but two other gardens already are waiting and the City Council has to approve funding.

Meanwhile, the work continues. Levenson has a plot in the garden, and so does Ganser, who lives in Southwest Portland.

"I love the idea of it as a teaching garden and bringing the community together," she said. "I'm enjoying getting to meet some of the people I garden with." For information about the garden, call 503-916-6152. Wade Nkrumah: 503-294-7627; wadenkrumah@news.oregonian.com

SECTION: WEST POST; Pg. 1

GARDENS' SUCCESS SOWS SEED OF THEIR DEMISE
Theresa Tighe

Across St. Louis, residents are beautifying neighborhoods by growing community gardens on space provided by the city for $1 a year.

The gardens are credited with making the neighborhoods more attractive for new development, but at times those developments need the space used by the gardens.

For some of the gardens, the future is now in the balance. In a couple of cases, gardeners have won the right to buy the plots. Other garden land is in dispute, and some gardeners are willing to move to another garden, if it means making a neighborhood nicer.

In all, the city has more than 8,000 vacant lots and 217 community gardens. The gardeners say the community gardens attract residents and businesses, turn people who happen to live near one another into friends and help increase property values. They cite a three-year survey by the University of Missouri at St. Louis; it shows property values increasing around the gardens.

City officials say the gardens have served their original purposes, preserving neighborhoods and providing residents with nutrition - vegetables grow in many of the gardens.

/ "These gardens are the heart and soul of many neighborhoods," said Gwenne Hayes-Stewart, executive director of Gateway Greening, a nonprofit group that promotes the gardens. "They represent hope. If you take away a community garden, you have taken a magnet out of the neighborhood that is attracting development."

Barbara Geisman, director of development for St. Louis, said the city would have to review each garden on a case-by-case basis before agreeing to sell the land to those who maintain it.

"We would certainly entertain the idea of selling some of them," she said. "If it's in the middle of a development area, then it's a different matter. Our overall goal is to get new housing developed all over the city and put these lots back into a productive, permanent use. This also means that the property would generate tax revenues."

Hayes-Stewart is seeking assurances from the city that future developments will provide adequate green space.

Her group is working to put gardens into land trusts: nonprofit groups that serve as trustees for land for public use. She said that was the model in New York, Chicago and Minneapolis, where community-garden organizations work with the cities to preserve community gardens as a permanent neighborhood asset.

Geisman said St. Louis was developing a city park plan. One of the things planners are looking at is where to put community gardens permanently.

In the first two neighborhoods to come to a city hearing, the gardeners got the gardens. In another neighborhood, the garden was set aside as a green space in the community redevelopment plan.

In one case, the beauty and utility of the Mayberry Community Garden in the 5800 block of Enright Avenue in the Central West End won the garden for the gardeners. Leevora May and her daughter, Valerie P. Granberry, started the garden five years ago. Six of the 12 gardeners are 65 or older.

When they put the garden in, their block of Enright Avenue was dotted with empty lots and abandoned houses and apartments. Now the block has sprouted houses selling for $200,000. The developers, West End Community Conference and the Bank of America, had an option on the garden property.

But when Alderman Frank Williamson, 26th Ward, saw the garden, he began to lobby for it. Then Marie W. Fowler, executive director of the West End Community Conference, saw the garden and began working for a compromise.

In the end, May bought the plot for $200, even though the land was worth much more. But it's not really a windfall; if the land ever is used for anything but a garden, the developers have the first option of buying it.

In another case, gardeners in the Soulard Community Garden in the 2300 block of South Ninth Street have won city approval to buy their plot. They are setting up a nonprofit corporation and raising the money to buy their lot; the price has yet to be set. The process probably will take two years.

Another approach was taken in the Old North St. Louis neighborhood. There, the gardeners at the Hebert Community Garden in the 1500 block of Hebert Street worked with Alderman April Ford, 5th Ward, as a plan was drawn up to govern the neighborhood's redevelopment. In the plan, the ga rden is set aside as green space. So this spring, the gardeners are confident that generations to come will see the flowers grow, harvest vegetables and play in the grass in the large, four-lot garden.

"We have faith in our neighborhood," said Johnnie Owens, the leader of the gardeners. "It is happening. The garden is one of the signs."

In Lafayette Square, the residents are in a fight as tough as pulling out Johnson grass. The Lafayette Square Community Garden is in the 1700 block of Park Avenue. Its creators want to keep the garden right there. It has a wall covered with a mural of St. Louis scenes and an arbor that offers support for grapevines and shade for neighbors.

But city officials consider the location ripe for development and want the garden moved. The gardeners are raising money to pay for the site. Linda Weiner, one of the garden's organizers, said a price had not yet been set.

Gardeners at the Tower Grove Community Garden are willing to move. Six years ago, the city tore down an abandoned apartment building in the 3300 block of Sidney Street. Drug users and the homeless frequented the apartment building, and that scared away some potential rehabbers. Now the garden grows on the site.

Melisa McLean, one of the organizers, says the garden has helped draw rehabbers and made the area a community. Adults come to work and play in the garden. Children also come to lay steppingstones and pull weeds, but their favorite activity is water fights.

McLean says that if a developer wanted the land, it would be a sign of the neighborhood's success. She says the neighborhood group never could afford to buy the land and would just move to another site that needed help.

Said McLean: "I hope that the fact that some community gardens are being bought for development doesn't deter anyone from putting in a community garden."

* * * * *
Gardening groups

Two groups in the area help gardeners create a community garden. Both provide plant material and expertise.

* Operation Brightside - This nonprofit group provides flowers, shrubs, trees and information to neighborhood groups improving public property. Call 314-772-4646.

* Gateway Greening - This nonprofit group helped to start and continues to support 160 community gardens in the city. Call 314-577-9484.

NOTES:
Reporter Theresa Tighe/ E-mail: ttighe@post-dispatch.com/ Phone: 314-340-8129

SECTION: NEW YORK; Pg. 5
Possible Loss of a Garden Has East Village Residents Plotting
By JULIE SATOW, Staff Reporter of the Sun

The city is gearing up to auction off a community garden on First Street in the East Village next month, much to the chagrin of most area residents.

The garden, a tangle of flowers and benches where residents gather at dusk for wine and snacks, and even the occasional evening party, has been there since 1984. On the weekends, children run along the narrow pathways and students read quietly under the trees.

This is not a "green thumb" garden regulated by the Parks Department and protected from a city auction. Instead, the community planted its own renegade garden on the empty lot during the early 1980s, when the neighborhood was infested with drug dealers and crime. Beginning in 1984, the adjacent apartment building leased the space from the city for $402 a month, renewing this monthly agreement for the past 20 years.

Now the city has decided to auction off the plot, which it hopes will generate more money than the lease.

"By auctioning off vacant city property, the city is able to generate money for its general fund," said the spokesman for the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, Warner Johnston. The department is responsible for the annual auctioning of city owned properties, which is scheduled for August 4.

In addition to the auction price, which is set to start at $85,500, the property also will return to the tax rolls, Mr. Johnston said.

The city used to foreclose on properties, but has been using tax liens and auctions since 1996. In the past eight years, it has auctioned 8,000 properties and has 3,000 properties left in its portfolio.

This is the second go-round for the garden, which was on the auction block in 1999. Community outrage and lawsuits forced the city to withdraw 100 gardens from the auction that year, and community gardens that were green thumb gardens were protected permanently from being sold. But this garden is not under the Parks Department's jurisdiction, and is not safe from sale.

Council Member Margarita Lopez, who represents the district, is advocating the removal of the garden from the auction.

"You cannot come back to the community and say, 'Remember when we abandoned you and you had to build your own green spaces because we were not there for you? Well, now we are taking it back.'"

Across from the garden on Houston Street, a large development is coming online that will further crowd the neighborhood, Ms. Lopez added. "This area is under a lot of development and you must have sufficient open space for everyone."

Ms. Lopez has asked the Department of Citywide Administrative Services to withdraw the garden from the auction this month, and is waiting for a response. "We believe that this garden is more important than ever for the community," she said.

Council Member Alan Gerson, who represents the neighboring district, also supports keeping the garden.

The land-use committee of Community Board 3 voted unanimously to support withdrawing the garden from the auction block, and the recommendation is going to the full community board for a vote on Wednesday.

"It used to be our neighborhood was overlooked, but now developers want to develop every space," said the board's district manager, Susan Stetzer. "We do need housing, but we also need to green space."

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 17:47:44 GMT

Software Piracy in Pakistan
http://ko.offroadpakistan.com/computing/2004_02/software_piracy_in_pakistan.html

Towards a political economy of the “real”: music piracy and the Philippine cultural imaginary
http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/mpi/conference/Baes.htm

Looking at Piracy (bollywood in nigeria)
www.ssrc.org/programs/ ccit/publications/brian.larkin.rtf

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 14:06:39 GMT

Generalizations
- Nearly all (e.g. Williams, Weigley) note a change in tactics from the first half of the war to the period after 1863. McClellan restraint vs. greater destructiveness (of army) in Grant and (of infrastructure) in Sherman.
- Was the strategy Napoleonic? Victorian? "Modern"?
- Most treatments of this subject seem to come around the times of wars. (early 1940s, same 70s and 90s).
- has the attitude toward the civilian come full-circle now in Wesley Clark style war? Then there's shock and awe.
- How did the Civil War compare to wars A. elsewhere, B. before and C. since?

Jones, Civil War Command and Strategy

"Sherman also contributed to victory by the political attrition of his capture of Atlanta and the power of his raid through Georgia to serve as a symbol of Confederate defeat. A formidable Confederate war machine still existed at that point, but it was quickly melting away. During the fall and early winter of 1864-1865, 40 percent of the armies east of the Mississippi deserted. The rebel soldiers, finding the cost of victory more than they wished to bear, were voting for peace with their feet. Their sentiments did not differ from those at home. Political attrition had won the war before the military attrition of Grant's logistic strategy could bring military victory." 218

"Rather, increasingly he [Davis] guided his military strategy so as to influence the 1864 Union elections. He did this by demonstrating the ability of the Confederacy to resist invasion, but not by dispersing his effort." 221

"The political objectives of the raid had existed since primitive war, but in its military objectives, the railroads, Grant aimed at what made the Civil War distinctive, the dominance of base-dependent logistics for field as well as siege operations, the joint contribution of a sparse population to supply the need and the railroad to provide the means. Thus Grant used armies to execute a military raiding strategy when the industrial revolution had given it immense new effect.

Although Grant's logistic raiding strategy has never received much recognition because it failed to win the war, it would have, had the war lasted long enough. And its political by-product, the intimidation engendered by his raids and their psychological effect as symbols of defeat, made a powerful contribution to inducing the South to give up its quest for independence before Grant's strategy could have its decisive military effect.

Because the Union raids, particularly Sherman's, contributed to victory primarily by their political rather than their military impact and because Sherman was the exponent of potential political power..." 230

"The war's logistics marked the real debut of motorized logistics over land and of base-dependent armies, both of which have distinguished so much twentieth-century warfare. The railroad provided the means to begin this change, while the low intensity of agricultural production created the need... In operational strategy the war was modern in that it was thoroughly Napoleonic, a trait of most large-scale wars ever since." 240

Jones directly references the Gulf War on p. 240, comparing the tactics to both Napo and the CW.

"Some commentators have characterized the CW as total and modern because of the use of conscription to sustain the armies, but this did not result in having much more than 3 percent of the population under arms, about the same proportion as in eighteenth-century Europe, which also used various forms of compulsory service." 241

"Others have viewed the war as total because of the involvement of civilians, comparing the Civil War in this respect with the Second World War, with its systematic bombing of civilians. Though, by early inaugurating guerilla warfare, the South first involved civilians, the exponents of this interpretation find a more contemporary parallel with the political intimidation objective of strategic bombing and the comparable effect of losses of civilian property, an objective which Sherman included for his raids." 241-2

He goes on to cite Irish tactics of barn burning and stealing livestock, English use of starvation against Ireland, Cromwell's murder of the entire town of Drogheda, and William the Conqueror's destruction of English opposition. "In spite of the malevolence and viciousness of some of its guerilla warfare, the Civil War was hardly more a total than many others in the past in which invaders encountered or provoked popular resistance." 242-3

"Displaying an ability to apply elements of older strategy, they gave an innovative primacy to the logistical raid so as to take advantage of the vulnerability of the new base-dependent, railroad supply system." 245

"The North's unlimited objective, the extinction of the Confederate States of America, eliminated that route to a short war... The Confederacy, a huge country, largely united against its adversary, and using an identical military system, should expect to make a long and determined resistance against the Union, which pursued the ambitious political objective of destroying it." 261

"Scott and the Mexican War taught tactiics directly, operational strategy indirectly, and exemplified the interdependence of military action and political factors and objectives." 272

"Perhaps the best indication is not the scanty evidence but the obvious harmony between their practice and those of the Napoleonic and Mexican wars. But Civil War strategy included important elements not found in these wars. Doubtless the participants improvised these as a response to their opportunity and need rather than adapted them from their use in wars more remote in time. So some Civil War strategy had no ancestry, representing, instead, a recreation of past practice in response to comparable circumstances." 277

John Bennett Walters, Merchant of Terror

"In a measure, of course, all wars have involved more than the clash between armed forces, but with the development of the modern state, war became an instrument of national policy waged by specially organized units, either recruits or mercenaries, according to more or less generally recognized rules. By the nineteenth century the laws of land warfare, established by long usage, had begun to take form as a definite body of international jurisprudence... Although effective sanction was not always present, it was generally understood that the noncombatant or civilian population should be free from all violence or constraint other than that requires by military necessity." xi

Walters points out that the federal government did forbid attacks on civilians. "In modern civilized warfare 'protection of the inoffensive citizen of the hostile country is the rule; privation and disturbance of private relations are the exceptions." xii However, he argues that Sherman had his own ideas about noncombatants and struck out from the federal norm. "Paradoxically, it was in that same conflict that a Union general, William Tecumseh Sherman, gradually evolved his own personal philosophy of war along lines which were clearly at variance with the official pronouncements, and in his practical application of that philosophy became one of the first modern generals to revert to the idea of the use of military force against the civilian population of the enemy." xii

"Sherman's conduct, reflected in the actions of his men, demonstrated a strange hatred -- one without parallel even in World War II. Even as brutal as the Japanese were to prisoners and to civilians who came under their bayonets, there was no demand in United States newspapers for the burning, sacking and pillaging of towns." xiii

Walters misconceived his analogy with World War II, suggesting that especially destructive tactics emerged from some special hatred felt by Sherman for men of his own race and culture. American historians have documented much popular revulsion with the Japanese people during the war, and one wonders if the US military's treatment of Hiroshima might qualify as the burning of a town. In either case, wholesale destruction grew out of a cold calculus of time and death at least as much as political or racial hate.

"No efforts are made here to show that Sherman's program of terror was original with him. It is evident that he was willing to proceed in the face of official pronouncements to the contrary to apply the terrifying force of an uncontrolled soldiery against noncombatants. It is likewise evident that he would not have dared do so without the tacit approval of Abraham Lincoln and General Grant." xiii He goes on to suggest that Sherman's justifications resembled those of Japanese and German generals who committed atrocities against civilians.

Walters traced Sherman's committment to the Union to his upbringing as a Westerner, relying on the federal government for protection from marauding Native Americans and lacking a strong connection with a particular state. The author implicitly ties his unionist sentiments with his willingness to obliterate an entire other society for its sake later in light, using the tactics of total war. 5

Walters argues that, for Sherman, thorough destruction of southern society would hasten the wars end and, in the end, save lives; if war were necessarily brutal, as he suggested, then a more expedient kind of brutality was the best one could hope for. Sherman, Walters says, hoped for "vindication" at the war's end. 69 The historiographical debate around total war tactics in the American Civil War mirrors World War II era disputes about the use of atomic weapons against Japan, as chronicled in works like Ronald Takaki's Hiroshima or Prompt and Utter Destruction.

Forster and Nagler, On the Road to Total War

The authors suggest that the two conflicts can be discussed together because both were struggles of nation-building (America with a half-complete sense of itself as a nation, Germany without formal unity). They also imply that the conflicts originated in earlier ideological battles for a state, such as the French and American revolutions.

"The introduction of conscription, the need to influence public opinion by keeping the antiwar opposition under control, and in general the necessity to coerce the more and more disillusiond population into participating in an evermore strenuous ware effort in order to rally the human resources of the nation, all led to first steps toward transforming the state into the modern 'leviathan.'" 4

The whole thing began in late 18th. "The 'Atlantic Revolution' not only brought about the more or less successful quest for participation of the citizens in the political process within their state. It also led to tremendous wars in which those citizens took immediate part in order to defend their political aspirations." 4-5

- The American Civil War and German Uni Wars represented the convergence of ideological warfare with technological means, weaponry and communications alike. What had sprung out of the late 18th century - wars that engaged vast swaths of society behind particular visions or ideas - was finally martialed by an enormous state with the means to control such participation. 7

"It is certainly no accident that some American historians shortly after the end of World War II began to regard the Civil War as the first in a series of total wars." 7 John B. Walters and Williams followed soon after.

Degler "argues that the existence of a Confederate proto-nationalism demonstrated the relative weakness of American nationalism before 1860, also detected by contemporary Europeans. In other words, was the United States in 1861 an unfinished nation in much the same way that Germany was? The Civil War then was not a war for preserving the Union but rather for creating a new nation with all the forces of economic, technical, and organizational modernity." 16

Neely's article in 1991 appeared while they were putting the conference together. "Evidently, something in the zeitgeist was ripe for the question we asked - and obviously for some other colleagues." 16

- Was it the Gulf War? Or was it perhaps the withdrawal of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, which many had long feared would break out into a total war of the starkest kind - a death-struggle between ideologically polarized enemies using the utmost in destructive technology to wipe each other out.

Sutherland, "Lincoln, Pope, & Origins"

"Most military historians acknowledge that the modern concept of 'total war' had its dress rehearsal in the American Civil War. Although that concept has come to mean many things, its principal themes have always been the disruption of the enemy's logistical base and the destruction of civilian morale... To credit Granty and Sherman with originating this doctrine may be an instance of nothing succeeding like success. In point of fact, the North had sought to wage total war nearly two years earlier. It failed miserably, largely because Abraham Lincoln selected the wrong general, John Pope, to engineer the plan. Yet the summer of 1862 did mark a dramatically new, and eventually fateful, departure in the United States government's military policy." 567

"Order No. 11 announced that all Southern civilians who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the United States would be turned out of their homes and sent within rebel lines. Exiles caught returning to their homes, or anyone caught communicating with people within rebel lines, would be shot. Order No. 13 prohibited the common military practice of protecting the homes of citizens who requested such protection." 578

- Pope didn't feel like wasting resources protecting Confederate ones.

"The impetus behind these orders, as with Pope's address, is clear. Pope had been hearing since late June about the menace of rebel spies, guerilla bands, and bushwhackers within his theatre. He was determined to halt this harrassment." 578

- Sutherland's definition does not include the murder of noncombatants. There Pope "had suppressed unlawful assemblies, arrested men bearing arms against the United States, confiscated property, and required citizens to pay for damage done to railroads and bridges in their neighborhoods; but he had not threatened to raze houses, send people into exile, or execute civilians on whim." 579 In VA it was different because of unified public opinion behind guerilla action. Lincoln wouldn't approve destructive tactics in MO because he did not want to alienate a wavering union state.

"McPherson, for example, stresses the adoption [in 1862] of confiscation and emancipation as the fulcrums of change. These elements did, indeed, form important new parts of the new policy, but equally significant changes may be seen in actual military operations." 568

- In Missouri local population was split between unionists and secessionists.

"T. Harry Williams believed Pope wrote the orders but saw him as the dupe of radical politicians who were seeking to push Lincoln toward a more aggressive war policy." 580 In Lincoln and the Radicals 1941.

"The reign of terror did not stop at material destruction... If white women were not safe, then woe betide the region's unprotected black women, against whom acts of the 'most beastly and infamous character' were perpretrated. No home was spared intrusion. The poorest families were deprived of food. White or black, rich or poor, no one was immune from Pope's concept of total war. A British observer confirmed that the new Northern war policy had 'cast mankind two centuries back toward barbarism.'" 582

- Sutherland suggests that the assault was not limited to economic infrastructure and that the effects of the new concept went beyond the indirect effects of material deprivation. Contrast with Neely.

"So powerful was the impact of the Lincoln-Pope policy, that long before Grant and Sherman unleashed their more sophisticated and successful version of total war, the United States government felt compelled to establish guidelines to contain and control possible excesses." 584

- Following McClellan's protest of the policy, and an ultimatum from Lee and Davis, Halleck got Francis W. Lieber to draw up the same policy that Hartigan discussed. Limits for guerilla war.

"But the Lincoln-Pope policy never had a chance in 1862. Stonewall Jackson checked Pope's advance into Virginia at Cedar Mountain on 9 August." 585 They didn't get a chance to further apply the new policy until autumn 1863 when military fortunes took a turn for the better. "By then Grant reigned as general-in-chief, able to launch a multipronged offensive against all remaining areas of Conferderate strength. Total war had been declared once again, and this time, developed more fully and applied more widely than Pope had ever envisioned, it would prove deadly for..."

"...the Confederacy. Yet Grant benefited enormously from the fact that a precedent for waging total war had already been set, the legal machinery erected, and the philosophy accepted. Lincoln knew what had to be done, and ultimately, in the persons of Grant and Sherman, he had the right men to do the job." 586

Hartigan, The Forgotten Victim

Following the Peace of Westphalia, "Europe was to enjoy for more than two centuries a period that, if not entirely peaceful, was at least marked by a sophistication of treatment toward the noncombatant that had rarely if ever been evidenced. Even the dynastic upheaval of the Napoleonic Era could not disrupt the steady progress made in shielding the civilian from the worst ravages of warfare. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witness the high-water mark of noncombatant immunity. It seems fitting that the developments during these centuries should be ratified precisely at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth with the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. For the civilian there was never a better time." 103

With some exceptions:
The French Revolution's idea of democracy "became a slogan tolling the destruction of the ancien regime, of the entire European political system that had for a century effectively made war relatively safe for the civilian. With the French Revolution came conscription, a return to the armed horde, the levee en masse, in the eyes of more than one commentator, a return to the total warfare of primitive times." 111

Does revolution lead to total war? Was the US CW a "revolutionary experience"? Hartigan links the resurgence of all-consuming conflict to the ideologizing of war. Gone were jockeying moments like America's war with Mexico or the tit-for-tat of European power struggles, and in their place appeared war-with-an-idea, in which one worldview seeks to exterminate and replace another. France's democratic revolution pitted against the ancien regime, Northern industrialism versus Southern slave society, and eventually American capitalism attacking world communism. "The self-confidence of ideology has remained constant since man became ideologic," Hartigan wrote. 112

"One conflict during this period stands out as a predictable exception to this pattern: the American Civil War, predictably different precisely because it was that most uncontrollable of human conflicts, a war within the polity. Conscription, ideology, and technology conjoined to kill more Americans than have died in all of America's foreign wars combined." 113

If total war is defined strictly as warfare that indiscriminately kills both civilian and soldier alike, then few historians would use this word for the Civil War. Neely took this position and refused to apply the label, reserving it for horrors that directly targeted noncombatants, like the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II. As the list of titles with the phrase attests, however, many historians have seen fit to apply the word to the American Civil War, for a more expansive definition does exist. Total war may be construed as a military effort that engages much more a society than a professional army and a munitions industry alone, legally obligating men to fight, pressing citizens into vast war activities on the homefront, and deliberately molding public opinion. For the enemy in a "total war" of this kind, both the economic infrastructure and, more importantly, the ideological basis of the society became legitimate and necessary targets. While Neely may rightly insist that this falls short of the definition, such a war is undoubtedly "fuller" or nearer to "total" than mere squabbles over territory or trade relations that preceded it.

This, in a chapter called "The Maturity of an Illusion." Hartigan regards it as illusive because war inevitably hurts civilians? Or because the twentieth century was to overturn the notion with a vengeance?

A choice between carpetbombing and starvation leads to death in either case.

Weigley, American Way of War

Chapter 7: "A Strategy of Annihilation"

"The most important specific meaning which the phrase 'remorseless revolutionary struggle' could imply in the Civil War was the possible elimination of slavery, with all the immense corollaries that such a step might entail... In the proclamation of April 15, 1861, in which he called for troops to suppress rebellion, he promised to wage a limited war, engaging in no unnecessary punishment and destruction..." 133

- Lincoln wanted the war over fast, to minimize bitterness and the chance of indefinite guerilla warfare. He tried to keep control of things, assure N and S were friends and brothers, and limit destruction. McClellan embraced L's idea that r.r.s. must be prevented. The idea is to exercise restraint in order to persuade the S reincorporation would be a good idea.

"'I have not come here to wage war upon the defenseless, upon non-combatants, upon private property, nor upon the domestic institutions of the land,' McClellan told a Virginia gentleman in apologizing for the loss occasioned by the presence of the Union army upon the gentleman's plantation." 134

"The more is the pity that he was not [an abler commander], however, because once Lincoln removed him from command, the experiment in a war of restrained rationality was dying." 135 But his immediate successors stuck to much the same tack.

"The Napoleonic mania for the climactic battle... The mystique of the battle -- the idea that the battle was the natural object and climax of any military world of the post-Napoleonic era that all the Federal commanders in the East between McClellan and Meade -- Pope, Burnside, Hooker -- were incapable of perceiving any strategic design beyond either the capture of Richmond or the grand battle in which they hoped to win their Austerlitz victory over Lee." 135

- A lack of big picture strategic thinking also cited by Williams

- Weigley points out the Union's essential difficulty - fighting an invasive war on somebody else's turf, whose main hope was to wear the Union out. A restrained strategy, he implies, could not accomplish this - the invaded country had to be properly invaded, crushed, conquered.

By 1862 Lincoln was beginning to worry and suggest that the worst might be in store. "'I never had a wish to touch the foundations of their society, or any right of theirs... If they can conceive of anything worse than General Phelps, within my power, would they not better be looking out for it?'" 137

"Certainly the Emancipation Proclamation issued on September 22 involved strategy as well as national policy. It was, among its other purposes, an instrument designed to deprive the South of the black labor supply which enabled the Confederacy to maintain the industry and agriculture of war and to build fortifications while still retaining an extraordinary proportion of its white population in the front lines." 138

-This is in itself is an assault on the economic infrastructure of the South, as part of a larger ideological recasting of the war. Preserving the union is an ideology of its own, but declaring more specific demands for changing Southern society - apart from its reunion with the North - represented a

"If the total submission of the enemy had to become an object of war, Sherman's design for pursuing the object by attacking the enemy's resources and will could well appear preferable to Grant's method of destroying the enemy armies by direct means, a process almost certain to cost heavy casualties among one's own soldiers. When a new technology of war, offered by the internal combustion engine in the airplane and the tank, seemed to promise new ways of invoking Sherman's strategy, then its appeal rose especially high." 152

"If the conduct of the Civil War had prepared the United States Army to employ a strategy of annihilation, sometimes with frightful literalness, in its wars against the Indians, the strategy was much in harmony with post-Civil War national policy. Hitherto, in the dealings of the United States with the Indian nations a considerable amount of temporizing had always been possible. Until the time of the Civil War, the conscious purpose of the United States government in its relations with the Indian nations was not to eliminate them but to move them, out of territory desirable to the white man and into lands where the white man was not yet ready to venture, or where it was assumed he would never settle." 153

- Is the planned destruction of the buffalo the equivalent of the annihilation of southern economic infrastructure during the Civil War?

- The argument that the Civil War's destructiveness prefigured the Indian wars is more plausible, since they followed sooner after, involved some of the same leaders (e.g. Sherman) and shared an immediate root with the CW in antebellum Indian conflicts.(Weigley's history puts this evolution in its proper sequence by looking at episodes in the long-term development of American military practices.)

- Many of the military leaders in the CW had experience in Indian fighting more than other types of combat. Does Weigley identify this activity as a precedent for CW tactics, or is the CW total war just a harbinger of later Indian strategy?

Weigley and Hartigan cast the total war philosophy of the CW as an antedecent of things to come - late nineteenth century Indian wars on one hand, and the world wars of the twentieth century on the other.

Sun, 03 Oct 2004 17:07:23 GMT

Is the military industrial complex the only workable response to the abundance of a massively productive capitalist-consumer society? Is defense spending (waste) the only way to preserve power and privilege in a society of overabundance?

Military spending is the ultimate form of waste. It has a built-in rationale that most find undeniable (defense); it keeps people employed (manufacturing, military service, private and public bureaucrats); and it allows the transfer of enormous public funds to the private sector and wealthy controllers. The militarized state saved Germany in the 1930s, not to mention the United States under FDR and again under Reagan. "Saved" is not such a good word, but it gave the state and the market economy a certain raison d'etre that got things going again. It's always the same solution - Keynesianism for guns.

Tools vs. Weapons

"In a radicalization of the work of Martin Heidegger, who used productivity and physical work as paradigms for understanding human beings and human culture, Bataille makes central to his philosophy the opposition between waste and use, emblematized in the opposition between the weapon and the tool. Dismantling and finally inventing the categories of output and utility, he figures useful exchange as a servile contraction of experience, and waste as a mechanism of transcendence and sovereignty." James Dawes, The Language of War, p. 150-1

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 22:00:37 GMT

Was the Civil War unique in its time, and was it different from conflicts of other periods?
Why did war grow to include an assault on economic infrastructure? Was this new?
Did the techniques of the Civil War represent a step forward or backward?
Did both sides engage in "total war"?
What does the word "modern" mean? Is it limited to modern warfare, or does it encompass modern government (see T. Harry Williams) and possibly modern society as a whole?

Following the Peace of Westphalia, "Europe was to enjoy for more than two centuries a period that, if not entirely peaceful, was at least marked by a sophistication of treatment toward the noncombatant that had rarely if ever been evidenced. Even the dynastic upheaval of the Napoleonic Era could not disrupt the steady progress made in shielding the civilian from the worst ravages of warfare. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witness the high-water mark of noncombatant immunity. It seems fitting that the developments during these centuries should be ratified precisely at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth with the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. For the civilian there was never a better time." 103

With some exceptions:
The French Revolution's idea of democracy "became a slogan tolling the destruction of the ancien regime, of the entire European political system that had for a century effectively made war relatively safe for the civilian. With the French Revolution came conscription, a return to the armed horde, the levee en masse, in the eyes of more than one commentator, a return to the total warfare of primitive times." 111

Does revolution lead to total war? Was the US CW a "revolutionary experience"? Hartigan links the resurgence of all-consuming conflict to the ideologizing of war. Gone were jockeying moments like America's war with Mexico or the tit-for-tat of European power struggles, and in their place appeared war-with-an-idea, in which one worldview seeks to exterminate and replace another. France's democratic revolution pitted against the ancien regime, Northern industrialism versus Southern slave society, and eventually American capitalism attacking world communism. "The self-confidence of ideology has remained constant since man became ideologic," Hartigan wrote. 112

"One conflict during this period stands out as a predictable exception to this pattern: the American Civil War, predictably different precisely because it was that most uncontrollable of human conflicts, a war within the polity. Conscription, ideology, and technology conjoined to kill more Americans than have died in all of America's foreign wars combined." 113

If total war is defined strictly as warfare that indiscriminately kills both civilian and soldier alike, then few historians would use this word for the Civil War. Neely took this position and refused to apply the label, reserving it for horrors that directly targeted noncombatants, like the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II. As the list of titles with the phrase attests, however, many historians have seen fit to apply the word to the American Civil War, for a more expansive definition does exist. Total war may be construed as a military effort that engages much more a society than a professional army and a munitions industry alone, legally obligating men to fight, pressing citizens into vast war activities on the homefront, and deliberately molding public opinion. For the enemy in a "total war" of this kind, both the economic infrastructure and, more importantly, the ideological basis of the society became legitimate and necessary targets. While Neely may rightly insist that this falls short of the definition, such a war is undoubtedly "fuller" or nearer to "total" than mere squabbles over territory or trade relations that preceded it.

This, in a chapter called "The Maturity of an Illusion." Hartigan regards it as illusive because war inevitably hurts civilians? Or because the twentieth century was to overturn the notion with a vengeance?

A choice between carpetbombing and starvation leads to death in either case.

Chapter 7: "A Strategy of Annihilation"

"The most important specific meaning which the phrase 'remorseless revolutionary struggle' could imply in the Civil War was the possible elimination of slavery, with all the immense corollaries that such a step might entail... In the proclamation of April 15, 1861, in which he called for troops to suppress rebellion, he promised to wage a limited war, engaging in no unnecessary punishment and destruction..." 133

- Lincoln wanted the war over fast, to minimize bitterness and the chance of indefinite guerilla warfare. He tried to keep control of things, assure N and S were friends and brothers, and limit destruction. McClellan embraced L's idea that r.r.s. must be prevented. The idea is to exercise restraint in order to persuade the S reincorporation would be a good idea.

"The Napoleonic mania for the climactic battle" 135

"If the total submission of the enemy had to become an object of war, Sherman's design for pursuing the object by attacking the enemy's resources and will could well appear preferable to Grant's method of destroying the enemy armies by direct means, a process almost certain to cost heavy casualties among one's own soldiers. When a new technology of war, offered by the internal combustion engine in the airplane and the tank, seemed to promise new ways of invoking Sherman's strategy, then its appeal rose especially high." 152

"If the conduct of the Civil War had prepared the United States Army to employ a strategy of annihilation, sometimes with frightful literalness, in its wars against the Indians, the strategy was much in harmony with post-Civil War national policy. Hitherto, in the dealings of the United States with the Indian nations a considerable amount of temporizing had always been possible. Until the time of the Civil War, the conscious purpose of the United States government in its relations with the Indian nations was not to eliminate them but to move them, out of territory desirable to the white man and into lands where the white man was not yet ready to venture, or where it was assumed he would never settle." 153

- Is the planned destruction of the buffalo the equivalent of the annihilation of southern economic infrastructure during the Civil War?

- Many of the military leaders in the CW had experience in Indian fighting more than other types of combat. Does Weigley identify this activity as a precedent for CW tactics, or is the CW total war just a harbinger of later Indian strategy?

Weigley and Hartigan cast the total war philosophy of the CW as an antedecent of things to come - late nineteenth century Indian wars on one hand, and the world wars of the twentieth century on the other.

total war and more: bibliography

Raymond Aron, The Century of Total War, 1955

Christopher Brassford, Clausewitz in English: The Reception of
Clausewitz in Britain and America, 1815-1945

James Dawes, Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S.
from the Civil War Through World War II, 2002.

The militant South, 1800-1861. John Hope Franklin 1956.

Daniel L. Lykins, From Total War to Total Diplomacy: The Advertising
Council and the Construction of the Cold War Consensus, 2003.

James M. McPherson, Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the
American Civil War, 1996.

Fletcher Pratt, America and Total War, 1941

John Bennett Walters, Merchant of Terror: General Sherman and Total
War, 1973.

Stig Forster and Jorg Nagler, On the Road to Total War: The American
Civil War and the German Wars for Unification, 1861-1871, 1997.

Yasushi Yamanouchi et al, eds. Total War and 'Modernization', 1998.

Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War Drew Gilpin Faust

The Journal of American History, Vol. 76, No. 4. (Mar., 1990),
pp. 1200-1228.

Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8723%28199003%2976%3A4%3C1200%3AAOSCWA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L

Battlesword and Rapier: Clausewitz, Jomini, and the American
Civil War Joseph L. Harsh

Military Affairs, Vol. 38, No. 4. (Dec., 1974), pp. 133-138.

Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-3931%28197412%2938%3A4%3C133%3ABARCJA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23

Preserving the "Habits and Usages of War": William Tecumseh
Sherman, Professional Reform, and the U.S. Army Officer Corps,
1865-1881, Revisited Mark R. Grandstaff

The Journal of Military History, Vol. 62, No. 3. (Jul., 1998),
pp. 521-545.

Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0899-3718%28199807%2962%3A3%3C521%3APT%22AUO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q

Shutting the Gates of Mercy: The American Origins of Total War,
1860-1880 Lance Janda

The Journal of Military History, Vol. 59, No. 1. (Jan., 1995),
pp. 7-26.

Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0899-3718%28199501%2959%3A1%3C7%3ASTGOMT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O

Abraham Lincoln, John Pope, and the Origins of Total War Daniel E. Sutherland

The Journal of Military History, Vol. 56, No. 4. (Oct., 1992),
pp. 567-586.

Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0899-3718%28199210%2956%3A4%3C567%3AALJPAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N

John W. Brinsfield, "The Military Ethics of General William T. Sherman," in The Parameters of Military Ethics, ed. Lloyd J. Matthews and Dale E. Brown, with an introduction by Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. 1989

Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War, 1973

Attack and die [electronic resource] : Civil War military tactics and the Southern heritage / Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson.

The Forgotten Victim: A History of the Civilian (short book)

Civil War command and strategy : the process of victory and defeat / Archer Jones.
- some comparisons with middle ages, 17th century