Adam Burton

Is it worth spending four hours a day reading the news for the Something Else news aggregator blog, or should I do something else (differently)?

That ‘pun’ was not intentional.
I have been thinking, for almost as long as I have been doing, that the process that I go through to keep the Something Else blog updated, is arduous and wasteful of my time.

To explain briefly, I subscribe to a couple of hundred news feeds that I hope might feed me news about British foreign policy. Each day (not always) I read the hundreds of headlines that are fed in and select the ones that, based on some assessment of the article presented by it’s headline, might have something to do with British foreign policy. Then, if I have time, I read through some of those articles that I have selected, skimming the ones that are less interesting and reading in full the others. I take relevant clippings from these articles and post the clippings on the blog, with a link to the original article and tags that categorise the blog post in some way. I then tweet the headline of the article with a link to the blog, or the original article. Sometimes it is enjoyable, but in general I am worrying that I have not spent enough time on it - the back-log of articles that I have to read is beyond a thousand.

The point is that, through this process of research I am expanding my perception of what constitutes actions of the British government in terms of foreign policy, and developing my understanding of those actions and the context for them. With that understanding and using the clippings from the articles I hope to be able to put together (not necessarily write) new articles that answer my own questions about the British governments actions. I also see the blog as a resource for anyone interested in British foreign policy, as it is, hopefully, well indexed by the tags and so provides a, sort of, database of clippings, far from comprehensive, concerning British foreign policy issues. The twitter feed is, potentially, a useful aggregator for whoever might be interested.

The problem is that all of this takes up quite a lot of my time and when I began thinking about making a newspaper about British foreign policy several years ago I did not envision myself sat at a computer reading the news for six hours a day (which is what I need to do, not what I do). I want to do some of that, but, and whilst I am quite happy for the progress made by the work that I do to move slowly, I want something more to come from the work that has an ever so slightly more immediate impact, not immediate, but, tangible, or something, I am not sure.

Recently, thoughts about the aims of the project that I wrote down some time last year have been passing through my mind as I scan the headlines. I wrote:

The newspaper will:
- answer simple questions about world events in relation to Britain’s involvement
- listen to the victims of UK foreign policy
- support the work of non-corporate media and independent journalists
- emphasise historical context

This process, that I have described above, does do these things in a marginal way but certainly not to the degree that I had imagined when I wrote them down. Listening to the victims of UK foreign policy, for one, barely registers, because the sources for articles that I am using, for whatever reason, has not developed in that direction, apart from the few articles that are relevant from Pambazuka News and things from allAfrica. I also end up relying on the Guardian far more than I would like. The Guardian has good reporters who do good work and good investigative journalism but the articles (and journalists) are often marred (Marred?) by their processing through the establishment media and therefore can only, with few exceptions, represent elite interests. Independent media, whilst, of course, potentially suffering from the same effects through aspiration, et cetera, still, I should hope, avoid these problems by way of their nature, as independent, non-corporate, or whatever. I should probably read this through before I post it.

There is in fact little reason to post this at all. It is, really, an excuse for me to type out the thoughts that I have been having this morning about the newspaper and how it ought to work. I HATE the idea of posting this but I have a feeling that this is what ‘blogging’ is and if I continue to write and then delete the things that I have some peculiar urge to tell people on the internet about I will not have much reason to keep a blog anymore.

I think that I need to change direction. Or, at least, see what happens if I start my research from a different place than I have been doing up to this point, because, apart from the fact that I cannot motivate myself to get up early enough in the morning to ‘check the feeds’, something is preventing me from focusing my energies on what I have been doing so far. That is some sort of conclusion.

Use your sense: look at history, think of obvious things, breakthrough the propaganda images, remember that the institutions are trying to indoctrinate you - keep that in mind - compensate for it. And if you do these things I think you can get as good a sense of the world as anybody has.

Noam Chomsky’s response to a question about the social sciences.
From the Q&A of a lecture given on November 30th 1998 at University of Maryland, College Park Graduate School on the New World Order:

http://youtu.be/pcRZQvU1C9Q

Full lecture here:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/116018-1

Boxed Objects to Remain in Boxes

This is being done for the sake of itself.

Fox Art Licks Vulpes Vulpes text

At some time during the winter of last year I wrote some or all of this on my phone when I was walking from Clapton to Kingsland in the evening. It was made for the Vulpes Vulpes contribution to Art Licks printed magazine (issue two).
For the best part of an hour I have been replacing all of the spaces in the text with spaces that are highlit yellow. For that reason only I am putting this here as a PDF file. Perhaps in another time I will put it here with the spaces highlit yellow using HTML.

• Therefore:
• 
• PDF download
• Photograph by Anna Chrystal

Having meetings

In September and October I will be participating in Decalcomania. The article that I am making for that exhibition, which is based on Damming the Flood by Peter Hallward, is going to begin being made this week. I wrote out about what I think is going to be in it for a while today -  at the swimming pool on Columbiadamm - and it led me on to thinking about something important for other work that I do and that is what this post is about.

The article is being made and handed out (5,000 copies, perhaps) for a number of reasons. One is to tell people about Haiti. Another is to advertise some meetings about Haiti at the gallery that the exhibition is in. In my writing out about what I think is going to be in the article I had some, a few, things figured out and I feel like I will be ready, tomorrow, to read Damming the Flood again, or at least to make a list of particular topics and to see if they are indexed. When I had got to that point the impending problem presented itself and that is what this post is about.

In Penzance, the town that the exhibition is in, I will spend three or four days handing out copies of the pamphlet that contains the article that I am making. I will begin on a Monday. The meetings will be held on the following Friday and Saturday. There will be four of them. The purpose of the meetings is to see if some of the people who might read the article will want to have a discussion about how we can support people in Haiti. The article will inform these discussions. Damming the Flood is about (amongst other things) Haiti’s, um, post-colonial servitude - to put it simply - and perhaps wrongly. By explaining the recent history of the Haitian peoples’ struggle towards independence from the former-colonial powers and by showing the role that these powers have played in maintaining that dependence - the article will, hopefully, help us all to understand better what we can do to support Haitians. This informed discussion is what this post is about - is about.

At the swimming pool I was trying to think about how to say what it is that is going to be discussed and it occurred to me that there was no reason to do this because that is what the discussion is for and that is when I realised what this post is about.

In an attempt to write a press release for the launch of Something Else it occurred to me that I do not want to do that and that I do not want to work on it at all for the next 30 days. Part of the problem was that I could not explain part of the purpose of the newspaper, which is to, well. I have been unable to explain what has been slipping around in a, sort of, lubricated blood-bath of words and feelings for several years. To put it crudely: I want the paper to encourage people to do something. But this is difficult for me to say for this reason: I do not think that I ought to be telling anyone what to do. It was a good moment when I was thinking about this in the context of the Haiti article and it moved over in my head and into the context of the newspaper.

I decided today that I ought to have meetings, once a fortnight, or once a month, to discuss what has been published in the newspaper. Each of us has to make our own decisions about how we want to support people whose problems we are concerned by. That is what the newspaper is part of. The meetings are the opportunity to work out collectively what would seem to be most effective. Without the meetings the newspaper is simply a few particles within the infinite vacuum of the internal dialogue that each of us has about how the world works / ought to work.

Some notes from Haitian Inspiration by Peter Hallward towards ‘tpiraiiwatwf’

I read: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/haitian-inspiration

I made notes.

I put them on here:

These notes are notes towards an article about Haiti that I am making.

Haitian Inspiration was published in January 2004, one month before Jean-Bertrand Aristide (democratically elected President of Haiti) was forced by the United States onto a plane and into exile for seven years. The article establishes a line of reasoning that explains much of Haiti’s past and which runs right through Damming the Flood (Peter Hallward’s 2008 book on Haiti). The people of Haiti have a peculiar attitude about who ought to govern their existence and have held this attitude for as long as they have been the people of Haiti. It is this attitude problem, as described by Noam Chomsky, that first encouraged my  interest in Haitian history.
Noam is often asked: “What can we do?” and he sometimes responds by pointing to Haiti and suggesting that we do what Haitians are doing: get together and “take over the political system.“(1)
Peter Hallward explains:

One factor above all, however, accounts for the outcome of what became one of the first modern instances of total war: the people’s determination to resist a return to slavery under any circumstances. This is the great constant of the entire revolutionary sequence, and it is this that lends an overall direction to the otherwise convoluted series of its leaders’ tactical manoeuvrings. As Carolyn Fick has established, when Dessalines, Christophe and the other black generals finally broke with the French in 1802, it was the constancy of their troops that enabled their eventual decision. ‘The masses had resisted the French from the very beginning, in spite of, and not because of, their leadership. They had shouldered the whole burden and paid the price of resistance all along, and it was they who had now made possible the political and military reintegration of the leaders in the collective struggle.’(2)

Peter goes on to make a comparison between the leaders of that revolutionary ‘popular political mobilization’ and the leaders of the current one, making clear, it seems to me, the true nature of the power behind Jean-Bertrande Aristide. I suppose that it seems so to me because I have read Damming the Flood. The situation is severely distorted by less popular forces.

For my article I need to find a limit on how much historical context to provide. The importance of the colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti’s colonial name) to the French economy is explained succinctly:

Recognized as a French territory from the late seventeenth century, by the 1780s Saint-Domingue had become far and away the most profitable colony in the world, the jewel in the French imperial crown and the basis for much of the new prosperity of its growing commercial bourgeoisie. ‘On the eve of the American Revolution’, Paul Farmer notes, ‘Saint-Domingue – roughly the size of the modern state of Maryland – generated more revenue than all thirteen North American colonies combined’; on the eve of the French Revolution it had become the worldʼs single largest producer of coffee and the source for around 75 per cent of its sugar.(3) This exceptional productivity was the result of an exceptionally cruel plantation economy, one built on the labour of slaves who were worked to death so quickly that even rapid expansion of the slave trade over these same years was unable to keep up with demand. Mortality levels were such that during the 1780s the colony absorbed around 40,000 new slaves a year. By 1789, Eric Williams suggests, this ‘pearl of the Caribbean’ had become, for the vast majority of its inhabitants, ‘the worst hell on earth’.(4)

The majority of the article is commentary on the importance of the Haitian revolution in the context of the French and American revolutions and explains the relevance of these issues to readers of Radical Philosophy. This historical context, beyond what I have noted above, is perhaps superfluous to my re-presentation of Peter’s work.

The conclusion seems to foretell the events of a month beyond its publication and the final sentence neatly summarises my intentions for the project:

Aristideʼs greatest crime in the eyes of the ‘international community’ was surely to have continued this struggle. Thermidorians of every age have tried to present an orderly, pacified picture of historical change as the consolidation of property, prosperity and security. Haitiʼs revolution testifies to the power of another conception of history and the possibility of a different political future.

—-

References

1. Looking for the Magic Answer? - Noam Chomsky interviewed by David Barsamian. Excerpted from Class Warfare, 1995. - I should point out that the comeback to Noam’s suggestion is that populations in the North have “more to lose” when they try to organise against un-democratic forces. He responds here in the final paragraph.

2. Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below, University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1990, p. 228.

3. The Uses of Haiti - Paul Farmer, Common Courage Press, Monroe ME, 1994, p. 63.

4. From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492–1969 - Eric Williams, André Deutsch, London, 1970, p. 245.The standard account of the Haitian revolution remains, with good reason, C.L.R. Jamesʼs The Black Jacobins: Toussaint LʼOuverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Penguin, London, 2001; originally published 1938.

“The power is real and it is what animates the way forward.”

For one month I will be preparing an article for the forthcoming Decalcomania exhibition. The article will be based on the book Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment by Peter Hallward. During this month I will be reading two things. One will be Damming the Flood, again. The other will be a selection of articles about Haiti, written by Peter Hallward that have appeared in a variety of journals and which are available on the web. As I make my way through the articles I will be making attempts at writing up my notes for on here.

The purpose of the article that I am preparing will be to encourage those who read it to read Damming the Flood. The purpose of my preparing will be to condense in a, hopefully, not too pathetic way what I take to be two of the main themes of the book: i) correcting misrepresentation of popular democratic governance in Haiti and ii) the use of foreign aid by former colonial powers as a tool to prohibit Haiti’s independence. (I will be trying to explain here, sometime, why I think that reading Damming the Flood constitutes a valid and worthwhile form of support for the people of Haiti.)

During the exhibition I will be handing out copies of the article in PensAnts and holding some meetings to discuss the article and Haiti. The title of the article (and this post) is a quote of Jean-Bertrande Aristide, from an interview with Peter Hallward.

Here is the list of articles:

Haiti: One More Shameful UN Betrayal - The Guardian, 23 November 2010.

Haiti 2010: Exploiting Disaster - October 2010.

The Land that wouldn’t lie: Foreign intervention in Haiti - HaitiAnalysis 29 January 2010. (An abbreviated version of this article first appeared as The Land that Wouldn’t Lie in the New Statesman, 28 January 2010.

Securing Disaster in Haiti - 21 January 2010, Monthly Review Zine.

Our Role in Haiti’s Plight - The Guardian, 13 January 2010.

A Haitian Boat Disaster - Radical Philosophy 145, September 2007, 53-55.

Did He Jump or Was He Pushed? Aristide and the 2004 Coup in Haiti - published in eight instalments in Haïti Liberté, October-November 2007.

Aristide and the Violence of Democracy - [review essay on Alex Dupuy, The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community and Haiti (2007)], Haiti Liberté nos. 1-3, July 2007.

One Step at a Time: An Interview with Jean-Bertrand Aristide - London Review of Books 29:4, 22 February 2007. The complete English transcript is available online at Haiti Analysis and in French here.

Insurgency and Betrayal: An Interview with Guy Philippe - HaitiAnalysis, 23 March 2007.

Option Zero in Haiti - New Left Review 27, 23-47, May 2004.

Haitian Inspiration: Notes on the Bicentenary of Independence - Radical Philosophy 123, 2-7, January 2004.

Thank you to Peter Hallward for these links.

A clear distinction between conjecture and reason.

I am concerned that I should not be publishing my thoughts here. I am concerned that you might think that it is pathetic. I feel compelled to do it. And because I feel compelled to do it I have made an attempt to explain what it is that I think moves the compulsion forward. I would not want you, or anyone, to think that I think that I have something to say that you ought to be interested in. There is something about the act of publishing that makes a person seem that sort of person. It may seem facile to deny that I think that I have something to say that you ought to be interested in. However, I have given it some thought and I do not believe that that is entirely the case. As follows.

If you spend some of your time writing out what it is that you are thinking it might help you to develop your opinions and feelings and it might help you to make reasoned arguments if you try to distinguish between your opinions and those reasoned arguments. If you write them down and put them out here it might seem as though you think that they are of some particular worth. You think that they have worth in having the potential to join discussion of their topic.

There are two reasons to write here, then. One is for your own sake and another is for the sake of discussion. There is a third sake in that, if you can make a reasoned argument, that reasoned argument ought to be based on facts, and that reasoned argument ought to, then, be of some use, if it contains useful, rational, reasoned arguments based on facts.

Is it not the point that you, that you want opinion to be recognised as such, pointless, so that you can be relaxed about expressing your opinions, so that you can show how plastic opinion is and that it should be valued as such, trusted as such? That is what you said: your opinion alongside your reasoning. You am interested in solidity too. You can explain yourself by spending time writing out what you are thinking and what you are arguing to make the clear distinction between conjecture and reason.

I have updated my web site…

… and I have made the second post to this blog.

And I have posted some writing about Something Else on the Something Else web site. I do not like the idea of saying anything specific on the internet.

I will stop now. Here is a link to my web site: http://adamburton.com/
Thank you to Andrew Hilton for taking this photograph: