A few days back I linked to (and subsequently commented on, in a way I thought was politically neutral) Dr John Barnes’ semiotic analysis of “Scott Thomas,” who has since been revealed as Scott Beauchamp, a one-time MFA student at U of MO, Columbia.
Barnes, as he himself noted in the post, leans politically left — a point lost on some of his critics, who either think he’s lying (because his analysis upset their immaculate partisan applecart), or, more likely, because he can’t by definition come from the left and still have the audacity break with the unified narrative.
A few samples from the comments at Dr Barnes’ site:
I'm really impressed with the way you guys seamlessly moved from "he's a fake" to "he's a poser" when it turned out he wasn't a fake after all. That's some fancy footwork.
****
What a fascinating post by a writer who seems to hate writers and writing. But isn't this so routinely true of literary critics?
The writing by Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who it turns out is really deployed in Iraq, is recognizable for a style routinely used by war correspondents: derivative of Hemingway, sparse and emotionally flat. What was good for Hemingway apparently is evidence of fraud now, at least when the writer says things that offends John Barnes.
Mr. Barnes, given that you've been shown to be a tendentious fool yourself for mischaracertizing Beauchamp's military service, what now? Anything so bold as a retraction and an apology? I won't hold my breath waiting. Being a far right-winger means never having to say you're sorry.
****
JOHN BARNES IS LYING.
If he really "didn't care about this," i.e., didn't care from a political point of view, he wouldn't have written 3,000 words about it.
And, the self-identification of Scott Thomas Beauchamp shoots Barnes in the a-- and out of the water, anyway.
Say good night, you wingnut.
Oh, and your MFA psychoanalysis? Two can play at that. Great job of "projecting."
****
More semiotics are in order. What are we to say about John Barnes, the semiotics of whose writing suggests that he's a disdainful William F. Buckley (or Dorothy Parker) wannbe, even ready to denigrate his adversaries by means of abstruse sophistry? Dr. Barnes, analyze thyself!
****
Oops, turns out The New Republic has reconfirmed Beauchamp's story. Some semiotics! He's a soldier, he was there, and he told the truth. John Barnes, you need to examine the semiotics of a Republican smear. Right up your alley, I'd say.
Leaving aside for the moment whether or not TNR is “reconfirming” the accounts in Beauchamp’s stories as “truth” (which, if they are, they are incorrect, at least according to others in a position to know), in the course of a few short comments, Barnes — a self-identified leftist (and one not of the Clinton “centrist” mold, either) — is described as a “wingnut,” a “far right-winger,” a Republican, a William F. Buckley wannabe, a liar, and a person whose intent it was to “mis-characterize” the military service of an actual person, when what he clearly sets out to do is engage in a speculative endeavor based on his analysis of an authorial construct.
In short, he’s been excommunicated — much like (ironically) Kos once tried to excommunicate TNR itself from the ranks of authentic left-wing policy sheets for outing his Townhouse talking points list (though the reactions to these stories seem to suggest TNR, under Foer, has rehabilitated itself by learning to pander to the Kos Kiddies and those of like mind).
Perhaps Jesus General can arrange a letter-writing campaign to have Dr Barnes canned for breaking ranks. For the greater good.
Since Beauchamp’s self-outing, much cyber ink has been spilled over the significance of both his pieces (“Shock Troops” principle among them) and TNR’s editorial decision to publish them.
TNR, from what I can gather, is standing by the stories — but only insofar as they represent one soldier’s view of war, and not in the way suggested by the hysterical commenters who assailed Dr Barnes’ profession, academic credibility, personal intergrity, and ideological “purity” for having engaged in an academic exercise that didn’t end with Barnes’ concluding that conservatism is a mental disorder, or that Dick Cheney is likely a cyborg created by Dow-Corning and run by Richard Perle from the same secret cave where Zionists control the media and international banking.
The specifics of Beauchamp’s pieces — slow-moving Bradley Fighting Vehicles impossibly swerving off course, in a country lousy with IEDs, to bisect dogs; soldiers wearing the skull plates of war casualties beneath heavy Kevlar helmets; the mocking of a disfigured woman who no one but Beauchamp remembers being at the place he situates her — all rang false to members of the military and those with knowledge of how the military works. Which, in turn, led them to speculate that Beauchamp couldn’t possibly be telling the “truth” in any conventional sense of the term.
This morphed, in some cases (it is alleged; I have yet to see an actual link), into the speculation that Beauchamp can’t possibly be a soldier — and it is to this suggestion that many on the left (and probably John Cole) now cling like Robin Williams to long-unfunny schtick. Suddenly, leftwing apologists are rushing to tell us we’re not entitled to interpret a text based on anything other than what the author says it means, or, at the least, what the author claims was the text’s significance: we’re asked, for instance, to forget that Beauchamp’s pieces contained the kinds of errors in detail that betray him as either someone unfamiliar with combat, or else dishonest about how it is conducted (Beauchamp appears to have written some of his pieces before entering Iraq); we’re asked to forget that the writing of such pieces violates military rules for active duty soldiers (which fact can be used — wrongly, it turns out, but not at all improperly: such extratextual clues are often useful in determining an author’s meaning and intent — to piece together a profile of the implied author, the historical author, and the motives of each); we’re asked to forget that the publication of such stories in a news/policy magazine carries with it the suggestion that it has been vetted for accuracy — which goes beyond simply passing the buck to the writer and noting that the piece was labeled as subjective, essentially freeing the editors from any responsibility for the liberty it takes with facts: subjectivity is one thing; fiction, however, is another thing entirely when placed in certain conventional contexts. And it does no good to conflate or confuse the two, unless your goal is to try to minimize the inherent dishonesty of publishing as “subjective journalism” what is instead propagandistic fiction.
In short, we’re told to forget all the clues presented in the texts that lead us to interpret them in a particular (and quite defensible) way — because the text only means what the author says it means.
Suddenly, the “death of the author” isn’t so comfortable a hermeneutic construct, I suppose — at least, not when it’s being wielded against you.
But let’s be clear about how all this fits into the concept of intentionalism. Authors can lie — which is why, while I’ve argued that meaning is fixed at the time of signification (all that remains after signification — the point where the text becomes a text, and marks are turned to language — is interpretation, or the method by which some agency attribute intents, be it his own, or what he believes to be that of the author, in order to decode and re-encode the speech act) — reconstructing that meaning, though it is the goal of interpretation, is nearly impossible to do with any degree of absolute certainty, particularly when the text is complex, as is often the case with “literary” endeavors.
Similarly, authors can intend to signify something, and a million readers can all decide that what he “meant” was something else entirely.
This does not, however, argue that the author didn’t mean what he meant — just that he failed to signal his intent effectively, which led to a failure in getting his meaning across effectively.
Beauchamp meant what he meant. We are left to determine what that is, and we use both textual and extratextual clues to do so.
That Beauchamp can come along later and argue that he never intended to mislead is something we can chose to believe or not; the meaning is already fixed, and it is the author’s. But not all authors are forthcoming about their intentions, and so it is left us to determine intent by closely examining both the text and the moment in which it was constructed.
We are free to use biographical information about the author, his relationships, his previous writings, etc., to contextualize our interpretation. We are free to use the historical moment to provide context, as well. Just so long as we remember that, in both instances, all we are doing is gathering clues to bolster our interpretation — and that some of those clues could potentially be red herrings.
In this case, knowing now that Beauchamp is a soldier doesn’t necessarily make his accounts any more credible, though for many people it certainly will. But we are free to ask, what kind of soldier is he? How does he feel about soldiering? What does he conceive of as the responsibility of a writer — presenting facts objectively, or working in “significances,” which would involve shaping facts to fit a conclusion or moral.
Similarly, just because Beauchamp has expressed an intent to use his soldiering as a kind of shield of absolute moral authority doesn’t necessarily mean that his accounts can’t be true. Which is why close readings that seized on the details have proven so important to pressuring his account.
In interpretive situations, the appeal is always to the author’s intent, because it is intent that governs meaning. But the intent — and the meaning — is fixed at the moment the signifiers are signified. It is the author at that moment that we are interested in when we are trying to determine what a text means, from the perpective of interpreting it.
That Beauchamp is in fact a soldier, therefore, has only potential bearing on his meaning. He could have been writing from the perspective of his “soldiering,” or he could have been writing from the perspective of his “I’m going to use soldiering as a cover here to assert my bona fides.” To listen to some of his apologists tell it, however, the very fact that he IS a soldier is proof of his authenticity — and so proof, by extension, of the authenticity of his stories about soldiering.
Which, pardon me for noticing, I don’t think is the kind of accomodating thinking they’d apply to, say, a Republican president.
These are, for better or worse, a few disorganized thoughts — and I introduce them here in order to generate a discussion. For my part, I have to workout, then run to the store to pick up DVDs.
I will, however, be happy to hear your thoughts, and will respond to questions and concerns as best as can when I have some time.
For follow-ups from Dr Barnes — now officially part of the vast rightwing conspiracy — see here and here.
He actually writes on that Germany-based old blog of his, that his drivellings will both indemnify him against criticism a la John Genghis Kerry, and that he will prove himself to be America’s pre-eminent post-Iraq war poet, and the insulation from criticism his military service gains him will ensure this–in a sort of snake-swallowing-its-tail eternal circularity–perhaps envisioning himself enshrined in future Norton’s Anthologies, and named Poet Laureate by Hillary! herself.
Or have I forgotten how to read again?
TW: Spenser Cormac. No, not even close to either.
Dude, you totally gave him the wingnut cooties.
Racist.
He may be a member of the armed services, but IMO he does not seem to be much of a soldier.
The Left and TNR could not give a flying fuck whether what he wrote was true or not. They want it to be true, and they believe it to be true, and that is quite sufficient for their purposes.
The simple fact that he had written previously how he planned to use his military service as a shield against criticism, at least to this rube, shows that he entered into his writing with less than pure intentions, and given his subsequent writings that coincidentally confirmed his dreams, suggest that his motives were closed to bad faith than less than pure.
I’d say that’s a fair argument to make with respect to intent, JD — though you’d want to show how the text suggests it.
In the end, the “best” interpretation is the one that most convinces.
Of course, in an era where “convincing” is no longer necessary — will and willful blindness are today’s interpretive moves — the “best” interpretation is the one that most people believe, for whatever reason.
The trick is to make it impossible for them to hold on to beliefs that aren’t grounded in intent, or that rub uncomfortably against the actual text and its context.
“In an era where convincing is no longer necessary …”
For this can be directly attributable to the Left. Truth is subject to their bastardization of the common and traditional usage of words. Meaning is subject to the political affiliation of the target. The media has so thoroughly discredited itself to such a percentage of the population that we no longer trust even the smallest details to be credibly reported on. Truth is now subject to a consensus, rather than the truth actually being the truth. The mere fact that we have to point that out shows how extensive this practice has become.
I do not see this changing in the near or distant future, and as such, places like Jeff’s site shall remain fixtures for those that have an appreciation for objective standards and proper use of the language.
Question,
What if the intent of the author is to have the meaning assigned by the reader? I called Don McLean, but he’s got caller id now and doesn’t pick up any more.
I’m thinking of something like a religious text or Carlos Castaneda (maybe he had a meaning in mind, I never found one)where either the text is written to obfuscate any intended meaning or it is written under the influence of psychedelics or even in an alchoholic blackout (like the poem I wrote to my ex-girlfriend sophmore year on the back of that menu) and probably doesn’t have a meaning.
And if everything has a meaning as soon as it is signified, does that meaning still exist if A) I can’t remember what it was or B) I don’t remember writing it?
And if no one else who was present at the diner remembers me writing it, is the meaning that she interpreted (that I had slept with either her roommate or her Dad) the correct one? I hope not, because her roomate had buck teeth and her Dad was, well, a dude.
Awesome JD!!! Since you’re actually part of the “Right”, why don’t you substitute the word “right” in your first paragraph, so it reads like this
See, in two paragraphs you have artfully interpreted this issue for both sides.
Shorter Goldstein: It’s not true because people I don’t like say it is.
Or, no, wait–is Jeff writing about the intentionality of STB’s readers as assigning the final meaning to the texts (ignoring the obvious–that STB’s “writing” style is probably as deconstructed English as is possible and still able to be read at all)? Can we think of STB as a flesh-covered tabula rasa, one who manifests words and items like words, as sort of a primal response to any stimuli whatsoever, something like a protozoa or amoeba flapping about in a drop of water (as he is an amoeba in the “drop” of water that is part of the pail that is Iraq)? Therefore, any meaning to be taken from his manifestations is in that of the eye of the beholder?
TW: Inverting Longinos. I don’t know what Longinos are, but timb has that inverting thing worked out, I suppose.
Shorter TimB: I have not followed (and am incapable of following) anything of substance regarding the Beauchamp affair.
This seems to me to be a precursor to the potential desperation on the left that could happen if things continue to improve in Iraq. We’ve already had democratic Senator Clyburn basically admit that if the surge works it would be bad for democrats chances in 2008.
I can’t begin to imagine the extreme left implosion of lunacy that would happen if the news continues to improve as well.
BBBBUBBUT- ABUGGHRAIB!!!
I think others have gone along this road:
STB wrote things that, as a soldier, he had to know were false.
He had to know that soldiers would blow the articles to shreds.
He had to know that TNR would bite.
He had to know that once TNR published the articles, they’d look like schmucks because anybody with a clue (which STB correctly presumed did not include TNR) would know better.
Is this guy a right-wing tool using TNR’s faults to ruin them?
He could have made up stuff which could not have been refuted. But he chose to claim things which were obviously–except to TNR–false.
Why?
timb–
You’re being an idiot. What Jeff is saying is that there is only one interpretive practice that operates in good faith, and that is the one that stipulates that it is most important to attempt to attempt to determine what the author means, rather than what you would like the author to mean.
It doesn’t matter much whether Mr. Beauchamp is a soldier if what he peddles as an eyewitness account is riddled with lies. Yes, he’s a “soldier.” Glass was a “journalist.” And you are “reasonable.”
Oh, that John Barnes. (He should have written the book on titmice. It would have been better.)
Which precludes a prediction I was about to make, i.e., that the next thing that happened would be Dr. Barnes producing a long post full of drivel designed to establish that Beauchamp is an Unimpeachable Authority, which would edge him back toward the Left’s good graces. Only “edge”, of course, because as the world knows, it takes ten attaboys to cancel one aw-shit (and, some cynics add, a hundred attaboys to counteract one aw-fuck!)
Possibly not.
Regards,
Ric
For the record, TNR has said it’s “re-reporting” the story, whcih is not really the same as standing by it. But as Jeff’s post makes clear, the nutroots seem to be lacking in reading comprehension.
The trick is to make it impossible for them to hold on to beliefs that aren’t grounded in intent, or that rub uncomfortably against the actual text and its context.
This can’t be done.
An impossible thing is believed for reasons external to and preceding it, and while demonstrations of its impossibility may lead to concession-making noises from supposed ex-believers, the moment of impossible belief is irrevocable, and one’s reasons for it–the identity that can believe such things–are only strengthened.
In the last Beauchamp thread, there was a link to a Crooked Timber post where this story was viewed, at this late date, still, through the lens of the Rathergate memo, still believed–or at least still usable as a premise to doubt doubt. In the thread, the memo was again solidly debunked (via link). Concession-making noises ensued from some, resistant wails from others (and the social effect of the latter was obvious). But for both, that impossible thing is a part of who they are now, however uncomfortably rubbed. “However, my point stands.” The impossible thing has done its work.
In fact, discredited propaganda not only works, it works better.
Spam-block says: Herr companied
The machine understands.
So… do we have an address so we can send him his t-shirt and a cookie bouquet?
What I’m afraid of is that this is a race – to disassemble AQ in Iraq and its fellow anarchists, before they can produce a Tet-like event sometime in summer/fall 2008. You know such a thing is in their playbook. So the U.S. and those Iraqis fed up with the violence have a little less than a year to get things done.
(I don’t see an effective withdrawal movement coming out of Congress while Dubya is in office. Congress couldn’t order pizzas without mistakenly having them delivered to the Smithsonian.)
“Suddenly, the “death of the author†isn’t so comfortable a hermeneutic construct, I suppose  at least, not when it’s being wielded against you.”
Mheh.
Just like when the Independent Prosecutor law was turned on a Democratic President.
THAT died a quick death, didn’t it?
“Why?”
We can’t say yet. This is the entracte and the Army will write the opening to Act III. TNR and STB will then respond in a manner sure to win applause from progs everywhere and the curtain will drop.
I just hope that the scriptwriter for the Army has his wits about him. STB isn’t worth the pixels expended upon him to date and making him a cause celebre through notable disciplinary action won’t be helpful.
While I agree with your comments for the most part Jeff, I don’t think the comments provided really prove anything. They are just another example of what passes for reasoned discourse on the internet. if you disagree with the prevailing wisdom at a particular site, expect to get flamed. Break ranks on a conservative site and you are ‘moonbat’ or ‘progressive.’ Do the same on a progressive site and you are a ‘right wing nut.’ Something seems to break inside most people’s skulls when they argue over the internet instead of face-to-face.
In short, don’t waste your time with people who say ‘You are just a ____ and therefore you are wrong.’ Really that sort of stuff is little different form animal noises.
“The “Right could not give a flying fuck whether what he wrote was true or not. They want it to be “falseâ€Â, and they believe it to be “falseâ€Â, and that is quite sufficient for their purposes.”
timmah – you could not be more wrong. I will speak only for myself, as admittedly there are some on the Right that will use this as a means to advance their positions. I only wish that if TNR is going to publish something, they go through the basic motions of determining the veracity of the piece prior to publishing it. As evidenced by the numerous mistakes pointed out by those in the military currently, TNR did no such thing.
As usual, your projection leads you to attribute motives to me that simply do not exist. I simply want them to be remotely honest. Is that too much to ask for?
New headline “MSM abolishes left wing slant – Women, children, and minorities hardest hit.”
This exercise is endlessly interesting and certainly illuminating.
But on a side note, this sort of discussion (about the meaning of contemporaneous highly-charged political events and texts, which is becoming a monthly or weekly occurrence in the blogosphere) usually gets me to thinking about various political and social histories that we all read in school.
How were these events manipulated, at the time? Think about Vietnam. Korea. World War I. Or civilian political matters, like the so-called “Progressive Era”, the New Deal, Prohibition, etc.
All Leftist/Democrat sacred cows. The people who are smearing Jeff Goldstein and Dr. John Barnes today are the same kind of people who wrote all the histories that we were fed in school.
We can safely conclude that the conventional school-book histories are a pile of outrageous lies. We can only see this particular pile of bullshit regarding Scott “Papa” Beauchamp because it is happening in real time, and being debated via the Internet.
Beyond the fact that neither AQ nor the insurgents nor the militas have the manpower to pull of a Tet (unless Iran and/or Syria is willing to lend them about 10 divisions of infantry with armor and artillery) the key continues to be the Iraqi government. A key which is looking worse and worse each day.
I must say that while I do not despair of the military aspects of this fight, the political ones are not looking promising. If the Iraqi parliament is unable to rise above sectarian bickering and petty theft our country will be forced to make a difficult decision with regards to our continued deployment. It will be a small comfort if on that unhappy day we are able to declare military victory but political failure.
This is the thing that keeps me up at night. Well that and an Edwards/Kucinich presidency. *shudder*
Cap: frag lengthened Plans for STB?
Bumped from a few days ago,
Get that ‘dillo dancin!
BALLAD OF PRIVATE BEAUCHAMP
(Apologies to the Talking Heads)
Heard of a Humvee without enough armor
Got the material I need
Heard of some gravesites, by FOB Falcon
I got enough for my screed
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance
Never been near it myself
But that don’t matter, to that TNR boy
I’ve lied so much about myself
This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco
this ain’t no fooling around
Got to trash this war, and all my comrades
Y’know it got Kerry real far.
Transmit the blog post, I just hit upload
hope no one fact checks my shit
I got three stories, I’ll title ‘Shock Troops’
The lefties really dig it
Inside a warehouse, trucks are loading
I have a menial job
I sleep in the daytime, I work in the nigh time
My sergeant thinks I’m a slob
This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco
this ain’t no fooling around
I’m writing stories, for TNR now
I’m getting my ticket punched
Heard about Kerry? Heard about Harkin?
Heard about Murtha you say?
You know they all faked their wartime exploits
And they got a really long way
I got a wife who, works for a lib rag
And baby that was my in
Y’know they won’t fact check
Y’know they won’t question, I feel just like Joe Wilson
Why stay in college? In the fine arts program?
Gonna be different this time?
I’ll pretend I’m a macho, vetran psycho
Who just saw too much, that’s all
This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco
this ain’t no fooling around
Babe, I’d love to hold you, I’d like to kiss you
But I’m getting my ticket punched
Trouble back home, got my shit published
People are reading it now
Now they’re fact checking, having real vetrans read it
My lies are screaming out loud
They’re trying to find me, trying to ID me
Shit! they got my unit tagged
I’ve changed my story so many times now
Oh damn my shits in the bag!
You make me shiver, I feel so tender
When I have to use my real name
I’m so exhausted, from so much lying
I’d like to sneak out in drag
Get my instructions, follow directions
And call them all chickenhawks
Yeah that’s it chickenhawks, it’s always seemed to work before
But now I’m a liar, or as they say fabulist
What’s worse they think I’m a bore.
I’m feeling alone, my friends all gone now
Hey where did everyone go?
Gotta face the music
All by myself now
You know partisans are that way
They love a winner, but hate a looser
you better watch what you say
I gave them a grapefruit spoon
To see what they would do
They used it to remove their eyes
Passing it on to one, then taking two.
Leftie or no, I like this Barnes guy.
I maintain that questioning the existence of a source reporting things that do not jibe with the personal experiences of people who have been in the same situation is fair. It’s an essential question: what is the source of these statements? Does that source exist? Could that source know the things it claims to know?
To take that line of questioning and attempt to turn it around: “Ah-hah! He does exist! That means everything he says is believable and true!” is quite a piece of dishonesty. That the source exists doesn’t mean it’s in a position to know, nor does it mean it’s telling the truth.
I mean, fer crissake, if the mere existence of the purported source is sufficient to prove the statements attributed to that source, then Atlantis must be real because Plato says Solon told him about it, and Solon was a real person!
Oh screw Scott Thomas.. Anyone heard anything from the Al Qaeda jihadis hiding in their bunkers in Baqubah since Operation Arrowhead Ripper started in June? I always enjoy hearing their take on the effectiveness of the US Operations.
tw: their cassation (my thought exactly…)
STB’s defenders never confront his text. In fact, they deride the nit picking milbloggers for daring to try to figure out if what he wrote was even possible. How declasse.
It’s unlikely that the military investigators will focus much on STB’s intent beyond an intent to deceive. Instead, they’ll focus on his text, and rub it very uncomfortably up against the military reality on the ground at FOB Falcon. STB will be proven to be full of shit by this elementary exercise.
But let’s do the Pomo shuffle and agree that interpretation is rooted in political power. Very good. The vast majority of Americans, especially we paste eaters on the right, still believe in antiquated ideas like physical reality. When someone states that a BFV can do something that it demonstrably can’t, we call bull shit. Said another way, we’ll win the reality contest and the pomo election. It’s only a matter of time.
BARNES LIED, DOGS DIED!!
An author can intend to leave a signifier unsignified or (more often) dually signified. For instance, he can write “cat” and intend for it to play on several meanings of “cat” at once. This is, in short, how intended irony works. Or, he can decide he wants the reader to supply the signified of his or her choosing. This kind of “open” text is often talked about.
But the point is, it is only open because of an authorial move — a refusal to append a specific signified to the signifier. Which, by necessity, becomes the signified. What is intended is [signifier] “cat” + [signified] “however one wishes to understand “cat” in this instance. The meaning, then, is intentionally open — because that’s how the signifier was turned into language.
This misses the argument made in this post by such a wide mark that, were I not familiar with timmy by way of intertext and habit, I’d conclude he was parodying the way we look at him here.
Alas, having read many of his other arguments, I conclude instead that he really is that incapable of understanding what I’ve written — but that he feels so confident in his own abilities as a hermeneut that he is comfortable trying to encapsulate my arguments in a single sentence.
God help those who he represents as a lawyer.
I’m going to cut Franklin Foer a bit of a break here (without knowing whether he’d do the same in return) and guess that the primary reason that he was not as diligent as he should have been with fact-checking Beauchamp’s piece is that Beauchamp is married to a TNR staffer. In the first place, he’d be hard-pressed to call his staff member’s husband a liar (and behave as if he were), and in the second, he’d have his guard down a little, thinking that someone who is KNOWN to them wouldn’t try to pass fiction off as fact.
Would they? If Beauchamp’s stories are in fact untrue, that says more about Beauchamp’s freakish little ego that he’d take advantage of his own wife and her employer to further his Hemmingwayesque literary dreams than it does about Foer’s confirmation biases, whatever they may be.
Foer was a fool to trust Beauchamp (assuming he wrote fiction), but Beauchamp is a jerk to the tenth power for taking advantage of TNR. Fortunately, Beauchamp’s only two options turn out badly for him: he was telling the truth and didn’t report it, or he was lying. Either way, the Army isn’t going to be amused.
Shorter Goldstein: It’s not true because people I don’t like say it is
Actually, there’s a bit of truth there, timmeh, but not how you think. As I wrote over on that Crooked Timber thread, we’d rather hear bad news from someone who’s on “our side” so that we know they are telling the truth against interest. If your worst enemy tells you that you have B.O., you don’t believe them; if your best friend tells you, you hit the showers.
If Michael Yon or Bill Roggio or Iraq the Model give us bad news, we’re more likely to believe it because it’s not in their interest (political? professional?) to give bad news (and they do, which you’d know if you ever read them).
So if a known specimen of Chiroptera lunaris reports troop atrocities, we’re more likely to doubt it and pick it apart to see if it holds up.
Kinda like the way y’all react to White House Press statements. Now if Bush announced that we’d failed in Iraq, would you believe it? If the NY Times said that the surge was working, would that be good enough for you? What’s that you say? They did? The devil you say!
This, more than anything else, is the reason for my deep depression about modern political discourse.
I’d wondered way back in high school English classes whether attribution of meaning to an author’s work was any of my business.
That was not an issue of importance to the nation at large, of course.
But then moral relativism became de rigueur of the hoity-toity. Unmoored from morality, a mind can fashion a reality-anarchy that permits anything to be true, and nothing to be deniable. At that point ends justify any means since all truths are false, and any evil is not much worse than any “good”.
Assignment of meaning has occurred at all levels of perception, in all things except perhaps the hard sciences.
I’d say that makes political discourse impossible. That may be the least of our problems at this point, eh?
Jeff,
You don’t know whether to laugh or cry, do you?
tw: ownerships that
– The Lefts post Nam dilemma: “When life gives you lemons, make kool aid.”
There’s nothing wrong with that.
“An author can intend to leave a signifier unsignified or (more often) dually signified. For instance, he can write “cat†and intend for it to play on several meanings of “cat†at once. This is, in short, how intended irony works. Or, he can decide he wants the reader to supply the signified of his or her choosing. This kind of “open†text is often talked about.”
Dear God. Or Jeff. I was going to say, “The Pukey,” but I cannot find, on the Intertubes, the postmodern short story of that name, which defines “Cat.”
Maybe I never read it at all.
TW: This misgivings. STOP FREAKING ME OUT!
Pablo – The irony in that is rich.
However, the author left us significant clues along the way as to what his intent was. His dreams than magically came true, his statement that he would use his service as a shield from criticism on issues like defense, and his hostility in general towards the conflict. So, in this instance, one does not have to go beyond the author’s text to discern intent, is seems readily apparent.
Either he witnessed these actions, and failed to report them properly, or he simply made shit up. Either way, he is likely to become a martyr for the progressive cause, which appears to have been his goal all along.
But the point is, it is only open because of an authorial move  a refusal to append a specific signified to the signifier. Which, by necessity, becomes the signified. What is intended is [signifier] “cat†+ [signified] “however one wishes to understand “cat†in this instance. The meaning, then, is intentionally open  because that’s how the signifier was turned into language.
I can see where that would cover nonsense. Wasn’t it dada that was created to specifically have no meaning?
But what if it wasn’t intentional, like the poem I don’t remember writing. I think our Tim O’Brien wannabe had a clear intent for writing what he wrote in the way he wrote it when he wrote it. But if none of that’s known, even by the writer for whatever reason, does all of that still apply?
I’m guessing this is covered in like week two, but that was during drop/add and I wasn’t there. Sorry for the retread
“But what if it wasn’t intentional, like the poem I don’t remember writing. I think our Tim O’Brien wannabe had a clear intent for writing what he wrote in the way he wrote it when he wrote it. But if none of that’s known, even by the writer for whatever reason, does all of that still apply?”
Well then we have to appeal to the ‘you’ that you were when you wrote it. That author may be a state of mind that is gone now, but we might still have to sniff out clues as to that intent. If the author left no clues behind, then, we may, at best, be making a ‘best guess’ as to the state of mind of the author.
OT, but, Ouroboros? Haven’t I seen that handle on Bash.org before?
Dammit! I thought the official uniform was brown shirt & jackboots. Now I feel so overdressed.
Unfortunately, should Beauchamp get his just desserts and/or should TNR recant, there will be plenty of Truthers who see the hand of the vast rightwing conspiracy at play. One can only hope that Beauchamp will be kept too busy cleaning latrines to do much writing in the future.
JD, I’d suggest that even before we knew who he was we’d been left significant clues as to whether the work was fact or fiction, regardless of its billing.
tw: These promptly surfaced.
Just to be a punctilious prick, “Mizzou” is located in Columbia, MO. Columbus is home to a rival school. “Mizzou” also has a j-school that is somewhat reknown for turning out this kind of journo. Which, considering that the outlets where these aspirants will ultimately seek employment hold Missouri in considerable distain as backwater farmland, I find quite amusing.
tw: possible omnibuses – uh, okay jeff, what’s the secret here? got to be some algorithm that scrapes the post content and delivers vaguely related terms or something.
“Either way, he is likely to become a martyr for the progressive cause, which appears to have been his goal all along.”
JD,
If we are in the middle of a piece of performance art, (a Foer/Beauchamp co-productin) can our interaction affect the ‘meaning’ of the piece? If we giggle, does it affect the authors intent?
If the Army (a “charactor” in the drama) assigns STB to guard duty in the Aleutians for the balance of his enlistment, without saying another word about him, will SBT’s intent be realized?
“Mizzou†also has a j-school that is somewhat reknown for turning out this kind of journo.
In The Show-Me State, no less. I’m not sure who’d appreciate this more, Orwell or Ionesco.
What’s so lame about Scott is that he presents the degraded sense of humor as having been caused by his experience of war, but at least in this piece, you get absolutely no detail about the experiences Scott has had which were so degradey. He doesn’t refer to his earlier pieces. It’s all effect and no cause. He could just as easily be writing about a change in his coffee drinking habits, his choice of music on his ipod, or his sexual preference. The way this piece is structured, blame or credit for pretty much anything could be imputed to the war. Am I a monster? Am I a caffeine junkie? Am I a country-western fan? Am I a homosexual? This piece works by substituting calculatedly “shocking” detail for an actual narrative. I just don’t agree with Dicentra here – Franklin just flatout effed up and should be completely savaged and left a ruined man.
– See happyfeet. “ruined man” is redundent to me, since he’s already cloned irreversably into the collective.
TW: “deserve letters” ….No turing twit….but maybe a singing marx-o-gram would be in order…
“What if the intent of the author is to have the meaning assigned by the reader? I called Don McLean, but he’s got caller id now and doesn’t pick up any more.”
As I see it the author made a decision, and the author’s decision was to have the reader decide. At the end though, it was still the author’s intent that authorized the reader to assign intent.
This is different from a case where the author communicated poorly so that the reader could not determine what the author’s intent was.
Actually Beauchamp’s whole join the Army and be America’s war poet idea seems to me like it should be in a script for a movie titled Dumb and Dumber Go to War. “In the next scene, Private Beauchamp is escorted to the stockade, with hilarious results.” “But his friend Foer (Dumber) has a plan to get him out!”
Seriously I really should respect Beauchamp for his accomplishments of surviving boot camp and writing poetry, two accomplishments that I will never, um, accomplish. He may end up doing more to foster freedom in Iraq than I will ever do, too. Kind of like things always work out for the best in Hollywood. Hell, I’d probably buy Beauchamp dinner just because now he’s a celebrity. I doubt if I would have the guts to call him a liar to his face.
Hold on a minute. Maybe that’s why Foer believes him. He knows he will see him face to face eventually. Foer works with Beauchamp’s wife. It could just be self preservation.
I don’t think I’d have the guts to call Foer a coward to his face.
Beauchamp would not be worth confronting in person. It would just add to his martyrdom that he craves. I do feel for him once the Army is done with him. I do not know the specifics of their policies, but I suspect that reporting these types of actions via magazine rather than to the chain of command is well outside of the scope allowed. Just guessing. I would only guess that making shit up and sending it to a magazine is a step or two worse.
If a writer’s meaning is allowed (or expected) to be assigned by the reader, then the writer forfeits his expectation of a focused, exact meaning, and his work will necessarily approach fiction (defined for my purposes here, broadly it seems, as written meaning that isn’t exact, an inconstant meaning that can shift based on the observers/readers’s personal perspective, which is itself based on the reader’s entire lifetime of accrued knowledge acting as a filter, in the optical sense of the word, to the author’s words.) So, whatever the author’s intent, his work’s ‘meaning’ is altered, or changed, by the actual reading, based on the reader’s interpretation, examination or criticism.
An analogy from the physical world is the ‘observer effect’…if an investigator looks too closely at the ‘spin’ of a subatomic particle, the very nature of looking to determine the exact measurement of the ‘spin’ changes fundamentally the nature and direction of the spin, and the measurement is meaningless.
So, unless one is reading a proven ‘hard’ text (say, a calculus or physics text, and maybe some of the ‘softer’ sciences, but not, of course, anything environmental or historical) the writing is, and has to be, indeterminant in nature. And the interpretation will be ‘spun’ differently by every single new reader who comes along.
Because, no matter what’s written today or tomorrow, the same words read by scholars or students 50 or 100 years from now will be interpreted differently based on simple progression of the future reader’s (hopefully advanced) knowledge.
(Now, if I could just sling Schrödinger’s cat into this mess, my intent to spin this to a Physics lecture would be solidified…)
life, depicted as a value computed from a square matrix of numbers by a rule of combining products of the matrix entries and that characterizes the solvablitity of simultaneous linear equations…
Shorter Goldstein: It’s not true because people I don’t like say it is.
That’s Godlstein to you, bub.
Shorter Goldstein: It’s not true because people I don’t like say it is timmahb
Timmah applies the leftist standard to Jeffs post; distort what was said.
The fact is, what was written by STB was called into question because it didn’t ring true, which led to speculation, by many other soldiers(to include myself) that the author wasn’t even a soldier, not because we “didn’t want to beleive” but because it doesn’t square with our experiences in similar situations. That it was published in an anti-war periodical and the editors admitted that they couldn’t fact check what STB had written, raised even more red flags as to the credibility of the source as well as what he had written. Futher independent investigation reveals that, by his own admission on his own blog, that STB joined the US Army not to serve his country, but to burnish his resume in order to give credibility to his anti-war fiction and his narcissistic fantasies of being a war-poet or some such bullshit.
So, timmah, if you want to believe stupid shit because it conforms to your preconceived notions born of sheer ignorance and leftwing prejudice, you are welcome to it. But, don’t demand we hit that particular crackpipe with you.
So we have a left wing radical that joined the military to write a book slandering the military. Turns out he’s not much of a soldier (totally expected of a leftie with a personal mission) and an even worse writer. When he can’t find any facts to support his left wing upbringing he did what all good lefties do, lied his a** off. Not even smart enought to cover his tracks for a week, and takes down his ‘anti-american’ publisher. I suggest they get him out of Iraq quickly or he’ll become a victim of friendly fire, well deserved.
Stupid, as usual, Ted. Maybe Jeff feels for my clients, but I feel for your soldiers. You could get them killed (if you ever saw combat). I was originally going to direct JD to run down to the library and pick up Paul Fussell’s Wartime or Heller’s “Catch 22” (if fiction is his bag). Soldiers have been shooting dogs, taking “trophies” and rifling through the pockets of the dead since time immemorial (check out the brave French knights riding down the squires in the aftermath of Agincourt). It rings false to you, because you don’t want it to be true. I never read the guy before you righties made a big deal of him (his writing style is…I believe the technical term is very sucky), but he points to no events (except the commissary one) that are not that different than the videos of the “Haji girl” or this fine video of soldiers tormenting a dog (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-kZW9bhIGE). In the end, the vast majority of American soldiers (especially the Marine and chief I know) are excellent people. They also know some people do dumb things for fun in a combat zone.
But, here at Sanitized War/PW, we know only Al Queda cooks kids and eats them (Mike Yon). Thanks, Ted. You reminded me of the essential silliness of the right’s objection to the story
That guy in the video reminded of someone else in the news lately, can’t quite put my finger on it.
We know people, including soldiers, torture and torment dogs, timmy, that is not the point. The point is, the dude said they were swerving around hitting dogs in a Bradley, which is slightly more maneuverable than a D6 bulldozer as I understand it. That is what makes people disbelieve it. If he had said they were in a small car or even a Humvee it wouldn’t have raised so many eyebrows. Likewise with making fun of a burn victim who was working for the troops in a crowded mess hall. A couple of assholes in an alley or isolated shop, maybe, but not likely in a crowd of sympathetic GIs.
Now ignore what I said and resume ranting.
Comment by timb on 8/1 @ 12:46 pm #
but he points to no events (except the commissary one) that are not that different than the videos of the “Haji girl†or this fine video of soldiers tormenting a dog (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-kZW9bhIGE).
I believe it’s Hajji Girl, by the way. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1ync1wDIec
Dimb’s grasp of history, and scholarship generally, is showing again.
No, I stand corrected, it’s Hadji Girl.