The Cargo Cults of USA – Part I

Posted on 13 July 2014 by Laleh Khalili

John McPhee has taught David Remnick and Richard Stengel and a few other famous journalists to write, and apparently he is a fixture of The New Yorker, but his work is so much more interesting that those of his proteges, and I don’t ever remember having read his pieces in the New Yorker.  I would have remembered any writing of his as his style is so much more readable, so much more enjoyable, than the sterile and staid and worthy pieces published in the dully venerable magazine (that said, their investigative journalism is fantastic).

And John McPhee seems  to have an obsession with cargo.  He has written two books about transportation: the first, Looking for a Ship, published in 1990 is about oceangoing ships, traveling down the Pacific coast of South America.  The second, Uncommon Carriers, published in 2006, is a series of essays about inland US transportation,on rivers, canals, roads and rail, and via UPS.  He is what any ethnographer should aspire to being: attentive, curious about EVERY detail, alive to the affect and labour of infrastructure, empathetic, up for trying what his interlocutors do as a matter of daily labour.  And he has a way with language.  Such beautiful style and more or less devoid of the kind of hyper-masculine tone that has become de rigeur among a certain kind of creative non-fiction writers.

First, Looking for a Ship.

By now, I am more or less familiar with the story of being aboard a ship and the stories seem to more or less indicate the same sense: of hierarchy, boredom, of gradual automation, of jobs lost, of a shipping industry that is shifting to East Asia.  He tells a beautiful story about the gradual changes to and the decline in the US shipping industry.  The book was written just before the end of the Cold War, and it is fascinating to read the account of Soviet ships doing cracking business in US ports and carrying more US goods than do US ships.  He has wonderful accounts of the ocean floor and enters a beautiful conversation with Darwin who sailed the same route more than a hundred years before him.

He is a fabulous raconteur the language of the profession, conveying something of the richness and details of it. His account of the goods transported aboard the ship is like odd and strange and mismatched names strung together like a talisman.  But the cargo he writes about is the invisible stuff of our lives.  At every port he visits he sing-songs the goods shipped in and shipped out:

We brought very little cargo to Buenaventura, but we did bring the crew.  We had eighteen thousand pounds of powdered graphite, twenty tons of used auto parts, ninety-one tons of polypropylene for making plastic furniture, ten tons of tiremaking machinery party, and two Ford trucks, but scarcely was the first of it in the air and dangling from cables over the dock when the gangway rattled  with springy feet and the streets were full of sailors and mates (p 225).

Vitalists and New Materialists, take note of the way the goods, the solid objects, the stuff are so central to the detail and richness of this story.  The same attentiveness also jumps  off the page in his account of a hazmat truck driver in Uncommon Carriers:

Before San Diego, he had hauled a surfactant from Salt Lake to New Mexico. He had washed in Phoenix and deadheaded west.  To Hill Air Force Base, in Ogden, Utah, he once hauled parts degreaser for F-16s. From Philadelphia to Superior, Wisconsin, he hauled a “secret ingredient” to the company that manufactures Spy Grease.  After bouncing to Neenah to wash, he loaded at Appleton a soap used in the making and curing of bricks.  It was bound for Dixon, California.  He has hauled weed killers, paint thinners, defoaming agents that form a broth in the making of explosives, latex for sandwiching plywood, and dust suppressants that are “kind to horses’ hooves.” To Fresno he tool latex for a dye that turns brown cardboard white.  Wood squeezings, or lingin liquor, is used in curing cement.  He has carried it from Bellingham to Rancho Cucamonga -northern Washington to southern California  He turns down a job maybe once a year. “I don’t want to haul any more cashew-nutshell oil -I believe it harms my barrel,” he said.  Cashew-nutshell oil arrives in ships from Brazil.  “You can’t make any fiction devices -clutches, brake shoes, brake pads- without it.  It looks  like creosote or asphalt.  It’s a hard wash. It calls for a stripper [i.e. a corrosive soap]” (pp. 15-16).

I absolutely loved that passage for both its imagined map of the (still-)industrial hinterland of the US, and for its occult recitation of secret ingredients and strange components of the things we don’t see, think about, talk about.  The things that make our lives, move us around, allow us shelter and furniture and god-knows-what.

But, back to Looking for a Ship, which is really -despite its absolutely wonderful account of being on a ship, and its beautiful portrait of the captain- a story about unemployment.  Aboard the undermanned ships, when things are ordinary and the weather and the waves are not playing up, having a massively undermanned ship is an inconvenience.  But the weather and waves don’t always obey:

On the Spray, Andy went through one hurricane three times. A thousand-pound piece of steel pipe broke its lashing and “became a proverbial loose cannon.” Ten crewmen -five on a side- held on to a line and eventually managed to control it, but they had almost no sleep for two days.  The Spray once carried forty men. Reduced manning had cut the number to twenty. “Companies are trying to get it down to eleven or twelve by automating most functions,” he says.  “When everything’s going right, four people can run a ship, but all the automation in the world can’t handle emergencies like that” (p. 139).

McPhee tells us that Columbus sailed on a 117-foot-long ship with 52 sailors.  The Captain he portrays

is sailing with thirty-three on a merchant ship that is six-hundred and sixty-five feet long. [Captain] Washburn call this undermanning. Steaming between the Scylla of automation and Charybdis of bankruptcy, contemporary American shipping companies fund ways to get along without crewmen: they beach the purser, the second cook, the sous-chef, the extra third mate, a wiper or two, and various engineers.  Many ships larger than Stella Lykes have scarcely twenty men aboard. If you are looking for large crews, you would look to a navy.  [Charles] Darwin’s little warship had a crew of sixty-five.  A modern United States Navy frigate, barely half the size of the Stella Lykes, will have two hundred and fifty men aboard, seven of them running shoulders at any one time on the bridge (pp. 108-109).

This undermanning, unemployment and underemployment is the engine to the part of the story that most seduced me (in that way that grim stories seem to seduce me).  The opening of the book is all about how his friend Andy is looking for a ship to board.  It is extraordinary how much suspense, how much heart-breaking competition between the same union comrades, this “looking” entails.   The qualified sailors and officers have to go to union offices in various ports to wait for a ship to come in and to post the positions opening aboard.

We had no idea where we would be going, if anywhere.  We had gear for cool weather and gear for the tropics.  Looking for a ship, Andy had once spent two months fruitlessly hanging around the union hall in Charleston.  He had put in many weeks in New York with the same result.  He once went as far as Puerto Rico. He spent two weeks there going to the hall. He got no ship.  He tried Charleston on his way home and with great luck got a ship in two days.  The ship he got in Charleston was called the Puerto Rican. He was on it for four months, sailing as third mate, coastwise.  A chemical tanker, it blew up, out of San Fransisco , on a later voyage.  It broke in half (pp 4-5).

This desperation for jobs puts the sailors in competition with each other.  “There is so much hunger for work that no one is happy to see anybody else [in the union hall]. We are a brotherhood, so we hate each other,” one sailor says (pp. 5-6).    The first mates sign up as able-bodied seamen.

To provide jobs of any kind for its increasingly distressed mariners, the Masters, Mates, and Pilots union arranged for five oceangoing tankers to be crewed with union members, right down to the last deckie.  Licensed officers accepted jobs as ordinary seamen, able-bodied seamen, and bosuns because they could not get another work (p. 9).

The story of McPhee and Andy waiting for a ship to come in is breathtakingly suspenseful.  You feel the intensity of despair, the pall of unemployment, the slow resentment building in the interstices of ostensibly fraternal relationships.  And the pure luck that could play a role in denying someone a turn on a ship.  The killer cards (union cards that are approaching a year but not just there, which gives you priority, because at a year, the card “rolls over” and you have to start anew).

And what McPhee is brilliant about is the give the human dimensions -the labour- of the businesses he studies (more on this in the next post on McPhee).  His people, their practices, and the way they fit within the machinery of commerce, are acutely drawn. And the potted histories he gives of these commercial ventures are brilliant.

The United States Merchant Marine, the name of which suggests an assault on a valuable foreign beach, is not, as a good many people seem to think, a branch of military service. It is essentially a collective enterprise of competing private companies, flying the American flag on the stems of their ships, employing American-citizen crews, and transporting cargoes around the world.  Sail and steam,  the United States grew in rank among nations on the aggressive reach of its Merchant Marine.  American merchant ships once numbered in the thousands… Diminishing rapidly, the number of American dry-cargo ships was already below two-hundred, and there were about as many tankers. Not one commercial vessel was under construction in an American shipyard (pp 10-11).

Again and again McPhee reminds me of Skula, though there are no explicit traces of the great poet of shipping here in McPhee’s books.  To be fair, McPhee doesn’t quote any other scholar or writer on transport either.  He is singlemindedly interested in the ethnographic details of what he studies rather than connecting the writings of others to his own.  He also has a sense of the way all of this fits within the military landscape:

In time of war, the Merchant Marine is a prominent participant.  This civilian job -risky enough at any time- becomes exceptionally dangerous… American merchant mariners were among those who built the bridge on the River Kwai.  War, with its all-out sealifts -the Korean Sealift, the Vietnam Sealift- expands the merchant fleet. Afterwards, the ships go out of service more rapidly than the sailors, and jobs are hard to come by.  The unions close their membership books until numbers level out. By the late nineteen-seventies, the Second World War crowd was gone, and much of the Vietnam crowd. Books opened….  In the mid-eighties, “everything slammed shut again” as the United States Merchant Marine was competitively outbid by ships under foreign flags and was reduced to carrying less than five percent of all oceangoing American cargo.  One American company after another entered Chapter 11 [bankruptcy] with its keeps up and its screws in the air.  Soon the Soviet merchant fleet was carrying at least ten times as much American cargo as the United States Merchant Marine, in direct trade between the two countries -a multiple that keeps growing through time.

In 1988, the National Maritime Union sold its nine story building at 346 West Seventeenth Street, Manhattan, which had medical facilities, a gymnasium, a sauna, a restaurant, a theater, and a school, and -with its porthole windows- suggested an upended ship. The N.M.U., of course, was a sailors’ union -the once very powerful organization of the unlicensed [i.e.non-officers]- and now it had lost a leveraged sellout, was called M.E.B.A/N.M.U., and had been merged with a branch of the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association, an organization of engine-room officers (pp 11-12).

Of course in a very roundabout way what this reminds me of is this horrible New York Times opinion piece by the shocking Tyler Cowen who argues “the very possibility of war focuses the attention of governments on getting some basic decisions right — whether investing in science or simply liberalizing the economy. Such focus ends up improving a nation’s longer-run prospects.”  Oh yes, “innovation in science” and “liberalizing the economy” (i.e. putting people out of jobs) – the fantasies upon which capitalism floats.  And again and again the unemployment that like cashew-nutshell oil greases the wheels of ever-downward wage pressures.

Posted in capital accumulation, infrastructure, labour, logistics, political economy, readings, shipping conditions, ships, transport | Leave a comment

Innovative use of shipping data

Posted on 2 July 2014 by Laleh Khalili

This fascinating little research report talks about how historical shipping logbooks can be used to keep track of environmental data.  These logbooks include “historical logbooks recorded by explorers, whalers and merchants during epic expeditions between 1750 and 1850, including famous voyages such as Parry’s polar expedition in HMS Hecla and Sir John Franklin’s lost journey to navigate the Northwest Passage.”

Posted in methods, shipping conditions | Leave a comment

imaginary cities

Posted on 21 June 2014 by Laleh Khalili

Hav is like a nested doll.  There is an original fictional travelogue published in 1987 embedded within the arc of a narrative that updates the story originally published in 1987 with “the events”; with the resulting diptych published in 2007.  Then this embedded story is itself embedded within the life of the travel-writer/popular historian/fiction-writer, Jan Morris.  Jan Morris is a travel-writer in the vein of many a British travel-writer.  With one difference: she is trans*. I imagine this shouldn’t matter, but I think it does.  It gives her a sense of the instability of place and personhood that is nicely reflected in her work.  There is also a humility in the ways in which she portrays the places to which she travels.   She says as much in the epilogue of Hav:

After forty years of wandering the world and writing about it, I had come to realize that I really seldom knew what I was writing about.  I did not truly understand the multitudinous forces -political, economic, historical, social, moral, mythical- that worked away beneath all forms of societies.  I blundered around the planet, groping for meaning but not often absolutely understanding them, and working only with an artist’s often misguided intuition (p.299).

and she ends the book with this quotation from Novalis: “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.” And it is perhaps because I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment that I have started this blog.

But Jan Morris’ book is also recognisably a British travelogue -even if it is fictional.  The earlier book describes a city modeled after “places like Trieste, Danzig or Beirut” – or Istanbul or Singapore – or indeed Baghdad.  And the latter part describes a city very like Dubai ruled by a formerly oppressed minority who has now established a theocracy in the shiny, drab, sterile new city.

As a whole the story is disorientingly familiar, and affecting, and there are inspiring little bits in there.  In one spot, Weimar-style debauchery by German residents shocks “even the Egyptians… sometimes.” What is lovely about that sentence is the “even” – which makes of Egyptian residents of Hav a kind of high-living, life-loving group of people. There is a description of the harbour, and of the city being a trade entrepot which are very effective.  The description of a musty shipping firm becoming a massive logistics concern is fantastically interesting (my friend Sonya quoting this passage convinced me to read the book):

Mr. Butterworth stirred his coffee cup for a moment. ‘Shipping agencies,’ he said, ‘have always been complex businesses. We’ve always tried to move with the times, which is why we’ve hung on here all this time, and I think I can say we’ve adapted successfully to the new Hav. Those name-plates outside are all ours really, you know – subsidiary companies of ours, associate agencies, concessionaires, that kind of thing.’ 

‘You mean the whole building is yours?’

‘Well yes, in a manner of speaking. Ownership is a sort of abstraction in Have these days. Let’s say we have an enthusiastic interest in it all – how’s that?’ (pp. 272-3)

The city’s pastiche of Istanbul, Shanghai, Beirut and Baghdad introduces lots of different communities living together and the peculiarities of those communities.  There is a lot of detail that is rich and brilliant and lovely and introduces a kind of sunny Mediterranean warmth into the story. In this earlier part, Morris celebrates a kind of Levantine or coastal cosmopolitanism which the British have written about with such affection (think of the Alexandria quartet), however problematically rooted in colonial sentiment this affection may be.  While I really liked the sense of the place in this earlier part, an imaginary geography of great whimsy and descriptive depth, I was also a bit uneasy with the easy way all communities fit the stereotypes of those communities.

The latter part is more interesting to me.  It happens after events obliquely called “The Intervention” – which having been written in the mid-2000s, must map to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.  And in the aftermath of the devastation (where almost all the landmarks are destroyed in ways that remind one of Baghdad) secretive Cathars come to power over a gleaming metropolis which is staid, hyper-policed, and intent on erasing its rich multiethnic history (replaced with kitsch simulacra of the historical past).  Something about the nostalgia for the everyday conviviality of those cosmopolitan days appeals to me as conflagrations of sectarian sentiments seem to turn swathes of the Middle East to ash.   What also appeals to me is the fact that the fundamentalists risen to power are Cathars (not Muslims) and that they have a kind of politeness, intense decorum, and system of thought that vaguely reminds of The Brave New World. And the Dubai-like description is funny and accurate, with comically obnoxious British tourists named the Ponsonbys declaring they prefer the new Hav to the old one: “one feels so safe here. The security’s really marvelous, it’s all so clean and friendly, and, well, everything we’re used to really.  We’ve met several old friends here, and just feel comfortable in this environment” (p. 196).

Even though I like this latter part a lot, something about it also nags at me.  After finishing the book I went off and tracked down the reviews for it.  And reading them clarified what it is that nags at me. I am pretty sure Morris doesn’t mean it this way, but almost all the reviewers saw the book as an “experience of change and decay” or “a fictionalised account of the ways in which contemporary civilisation has lost its way” or “a lament for a lost world and a stinging critique of what has replaced it.”  The reason I am sure Morris doesn’t mean the book to be a conservative plaint about gradual decay of society is a moving scene in which she describes a prettily painted modern village into which a cave-dwelling people she had visited previously have been moved. She mentions that many of the women do say that yes, they have given up the old ways, but their new flats are very comfortable, thank you.  The reason the book still nags at me is that she says these villages remind her “that huge healthy construction the Nazis built on the island of Rugen in the Baltic, to provide holiday indoctrination to the Hitler Youth” (p. 262).

“Development” can be tricky.   Historical change can be tricky.  And Dubai is certainly not the model city of the future.  But there is something troubling about preserving “old ways of life” that smells of a kind of salvage cultural work, of quaint museumisation of other peoples’ histories.

Ultimately, it is these tensions that make Hav an interesting book to read.  Beautifully written and evocative, and still laying bare the dilemmas of writing about “the other.”

 

Posted in empire, imperialism & colonialism, Middle East, ports, readings | Leave a comment

The Port of Beirut

Posted on 20 June 2014 by Laleh Khalili

This gallery contains 23 photos.

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Izzo, Camillieri, Montalbán

Posted on 17 June 2014 by Laleh Khalili

I have just finished a prize winning Manuel Vázquez Montalbán detective novel with Pepe Carvalho as its central character, The South Seas.  I was also a devotee of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series (who was named in honour of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán).  And of course Jean-Claude Izzo has been a revelation.

What all the novels have in common are middle aged men who love food, live by the sea, and have vaguely (or not so vaguely) left-wing politics.  But there are distinct differences too: you read Montalbán for the intensity of its post-Franco politics.  His Carvalho is pretty unlikeable: he is incorruptible and cynical- which are great, but he also dislikes women even as he fucks them.  Izzo’s Fabio Montale loves women – and not just when he is bedding them.  He loves older women, and younger women, and everything in between, and likes to listen to them and talk poetry and politics to them.  Montale is also incorruptible, but there is hope coursing through his arteries, even as they are hardening with cynicism and despair at the interpenetration of the apparatuses of governance, the racist parties and the Mafiosi.  Camilleri’s Salvo Montalbano is mostly put upon by his distant girlfriend, and he is the least political of the three, though he is also incorruptible. He is also the wiliest of all three where Carvalho is the most violent.  Montale just cleans up after everyone else’s violence.

But of the three, Izzo’s books are most about the place in which they take place.  No doubt Camillieri’s writing about Sicily makes you want to go Porto Empedeocle. It is a beautiful tourist destination and one can feel the sunshine, the warmth of the sea in August.  The best writings of Montalbán gives a flavour of the gritty ghettos of Barcelona (which you wouldn’t want to visit). But the city of Barcelona, the port, even the neighbourhood in which Carvalho lives don’t come alive, don’t have a discernible geography. Or a smell, sound, temperature.  But Izzo’s book creates the most fulsomely imagined city.  His Marseille stinks like rotten fish, its port is being devoured by tourist cruises and its economic base is shifting.  You can feel the heat of the afternoon, the dampness of the air, the din of multiple languages being spoken.  His Marseille has a real geography; his books map the rise and fall of the communities, trace the movement of languages, goods, people, migrants, and criminals.  You can read his books to get a sense of how the city breathes, where it lies on the land, how it moves.

And a last word on food. On this, Camillieri makes your mouth water; but Montalbán gives you the recipes.  Izzo is more spare.  He names his dishes and restaurants and bars but you won’t salivate the way you do thinking of eating the food Camillieri describes.  But that also may be because I am partial to Sicilian food.

 

 

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“A foretaste of annihilation”

Posted on 13 June 2014 by Laleh Khalili

Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line is an odd novella.  A ghost story, a beautifully symmetrical tale, a strange little fable, or a metaphor for the First World War (as Wikipedia seems to say)?

A young man is given command of  his first ship.  He finds that the previous commander of the ship had gone mad and died.  The ghost of the previous commander seems to haunt the ship.  The symmetries are between science (represented by the doctor) and faith (in curses); the young (the narrator) and the old (many figures in the story); the oily steward at shore and the heroic steward at sea; steam vs sail and so on.  The story is beautifully constructed and like all of Conrad’s writing balances extraordinary language with a shapely plot.

I won’t write about it a great deal, but the most striking facet of the story is the focus on command.  Here is where Conrad writes “command is a strong magic” and here is where he points to how dignity is vested in command.  As soon as he is given his ship, here is how he feels: “My new dignity sat yet so lightly on me that I was not aware that it was I, the Captain, the object of this last graciousness.  It seemed as if all of a sudden a pair of wings had grown on my shoulders. I merely skimmed along the polished floors.”

And the affects of command – the emphasis on masculinity:

A sudden passion of anxious impatience rushed through my veins, gave me such a sense of the intensity of existence as I have never felt before or since. I discovered how much of a seaman I was, in heart, in mind, and, as it were, physically—a man exclusively of sea and ships; the sea the only world that counted, and the ships, the test of manliness, of temperament, of courage and fidelity—and of love.

 

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“no sailor’s card”

Posted on 10 June 2014 by Laleh Khalili

Imagine a trans-textual “proletarian” protagonist, one that has travelled the world, gets stuck into adventures aboard ships and on land, and has a laconic easy sarcasm and a way with words.  A kind of working class Marlowe with a better sense of humour and no penchant for imperial condescension.   Imagine, then, that this character lends his name, Gerrard Gales, to his creator.  Imagine, still more, that his creator is himself a creation; his name, B. Traven, possibly a pseudonym for a German (or possibly German-American) writer called Ret Marut, or the real name of a Germanophone Swede called Bendrich Traven.  Or possibly B. Traven is two people, Ret Marut who stole the manuscripts written by a US drifter called Traven Torsvan.  And then imagine that a novel written by this mysterious author -only about whose anarchist politics and sympathies for the Wobblies we are certain- writes a novel that is made by a great director, John Huston, into a classic and innovative film, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, the first Hollywood film to be filmed on site in Mexico.

But the book feeding my current obsession with everything maritime and thalassic is his The Death Ship, a wondrous novel written from the perspective of the lowly on the ship, and thus unlike Conrad and a bit more like the Crab Cannery Ship.  Except much less didactic, far more cinematic, and much more of a romp.  Here is Traven on officers versus sailors:

Ship’s officers are merely bureaucrats with a claim for an old-age pension, and the stewards are just waiters.  The skipper is in command of the ship. All right, but he does not know the ship. No, sir, believe me. … When a commander is loved, or thinks he is, it is only because everybody under his command is clever enough to know that they can get along with the old man best by complying with his whims and caprices. .. The ship loves the crew. The crew are the only true comrades a ship has at sea. They polish the ship, they wash it, they stroke it, they caress it, they kiss it -and they mean it, because they are not hypocrites where their ship is concerned  The skipper has a home, sometimes a country home or an estate, and he has a family, a pretty wife, and lots of worries about his family. Some sailors too have wives and kids. They seldom make good sailors. They look at the ship just as a factory-worker looks at the plant he works in to make a living. The good sailors, the true sailors, the born sailors, have no other home in the world than their ship. It may be this ship or that one, but home is always a ship… The ship speaks to the crew, never to the skipper or to the officers. To the crew the ship tells wonderful stories and spins yarns of all sorts. The ship in turn likes to listen to the tales told by the crew (pp. 109-110).

[Compare this with Conrad for whom “Command is a strong magic.“].  There is also a way that The Death Ship is firmly embedded in the politics of early 20th century and of labour struggle.  Here is Traven on sailors demanding overtime:

No sailor has yet been found who asked to sign off [over unpaid overtime wages] in mid-ocean, without another ship standing by. Being in port, the skipper could not throw the man overboard. The port authorities would not permit such a thing to be done, because it would pollute the harbor, for which crime the skipper would have to pay a heavy fine. The port authorities were not interested a bit in what a skip per might do to his men so long as the port was kept clean. Suppose the skipper had let his man go without paying for overtime; the sailor (sailors are that mean) would have gone straight to the seamen’s union, or, worse, to the Wobbly firemen’s syndicate, or, in a mild case, to the consul. In any case the skipper would have been forced to pay the overtime, or the whole Yorikke would have been put under an embargo. The Wobblies in particular and the communists would have held the ship for half a dollar if the skipper had refused to pay it to a sailor when due (pp. 132-133).

The story Traven tells feels real and wonderful and rich.  A sailor left behind by his ship wanders from country to country in Europe without his papers and has to fight against a tragicomic succession of bureaucracies, consuls, police forces and all else who demand of him a documentary proof of his existence.  Only in Spain does he find solace and sustenance:

Oh, you sunny, wonderful Spain! May you prosper and live long! No one calls you God’s country. It was the first country I met in which I was not asked for a sailor’s card or for a passport. The first country in which people did not care to know my name, my age, my beliefs, my height. For the first time my pockets were not searched. I was not pushed at midnight across the border and kicked out of the country like a leper. Nobody wanted to know how much money I had, or what I had lived on for the last three months (p. 95).

There are wonderful descriptions of the ways in which a person’s personhood is entirely constituted through the paperwork they are supposed to carry:

…don’t be short of papers that make a modern citizen, such as birth-certificate, vaccination-certificate, certificate of baptism, certificate of confirmation, marriage license, income-tax receipts, receipts that you have paid your light-bills and for the telephone, an affidavit that you have no connections with criminal syndicalism or Moscow, and a certificate from police headquarters that there are no charges against you still pending (p. 352).

At sea, Traven’s description of working to stoke the coal-fueled engine of the ship is dark and hot and infernal.  The labour involved is dirty, grueling, monstrous.  In a long and wonderful passage, Traven explains what a “death ship” is:

Death ships belong to the period long before the American Civil War, to the times when slave-trading was a great business, and blockade-breaking could make a ship-owner rich with three successful trips. No, there are no longer any death ships today. They are things of the past. Any consul can tell you that. And a consul is a high personage of diplomatic rank. He won’t tell you anything which is not true. No one knows death ships. No government recognizes them. After all, that which is not admitted does not exist, like the Russian revolution. Don’t look at it, and then it disappears.

The seven seas are so full of death ships that you can have your choice of them! All along the coasts of China, Japan, India, Persia, the Malay Islands, Madagascar, the east and the west coats of Africa, the South Sea, South America, coming up as far as the Pacific coast of Mexico, where they land Chinamen and dreams of artificial paradises by the truckload. Money is always useful, no matter how you make it. The point is to have it. As long as you have it, no minister will ever ask you where and how you got it; just rent, or better buy, a church seat, and pay something for the missions in China.

There is still room enough for a couple of thousand more of these beautiful and useful ships. Making immigration restrictions does not help the shipping trade very much. So the ships must look elsewhere for a sound business. One cannot do away with all the bums of the world, because there might be a few artists among them, and writers, or cranky millionaires. So it is close to impossible to check white slavery, just because there might be among the slaves a few wives of men with influence and some daughters of great kings of finance who wish to adventure on their own account. White slavery makes more money for those fine men who are paid to investigate and prevent it than for those who are actually in the trade. One is just as good a business as the other. Difficult as it is to do away with all the bums, it is just as difficult to do away with all the death ships. There are not a few shipping companies who would go broke overnight if they had no death ships. Other companies could not survive boom or depression if they did not send down to the bottom a ship when it is time to do so for cold cash (p. 288-289).

His wonderful description of the kind of shipboard wage labour which borders on slavery reminds one of Marcus Rediker’s wonderful work on seafaring:

Sailors are certainly not slaves. They are free citizens, and if they have established residences, they are even entitled to vote for the election of a new sheriff; yes, sir. Sailors are free laborers, they are free, starved, jobless, tired, all their limbs broken, their ribs smashed, their feet and arms and backs burned. Since they are not slaves, they are forced to take any job on any ship, even if they know beforehand that the bucket has been ordered down to the bottom to get the insurance money for the owners. There are still ships sailing the seven seas under the flags of civilized nations on which sailors may be whipped and lashed mercilessly if they refuse to ship double watches and half of the third watch thrown in (pp. 134-135).

And this extraordinary section on sailors like gladiators:

We, the gladiators of today, we must perish in dirt and filth. We are too tired even to wash our faces. We starve because we fall asleep at the table with a rotten meal before us. We are always hungry because a shipping company cannot compete with the freight rates of other companies if the sailors get food fit for human beings. The ship must go to the ground port, because the company would be bankrupt if the insurance money would not save her. We do not die in shining armor, we the gladiators of today. We die in rags, without mattresses or blankets. We die worse than hogs in Chic. We die in silence, in the stoke-hold. We see the sea breaking in through the cracked hull. We can no longer go up and out. We are caught. The steam hisses down upon us out of cracked pipes. Furnace doors have opened and the live coal is on us, scorching what is still left of us. We hope and pray that the boiler will explode to make it short and sure. “Oh, down there, those men,” says the stateroom passenger who is allowed a look through a hole, “those filthy sweating devils, oh, never mind, they do not feel it, they are accustomed to the heat and to such thingsas a ship going down; it’s their business. Let’s have another cock well iced.”

Of course, we are used to all that may happen. We are the black gang. If you are hungry and you need a job, take it. It’s yours. Others are waiting to take it for less (pp. 150-151).

The book is full of fabulous polemical passages like this – but the story it tells is also rich and funny and sentimental and brutal and exciting. And the wonderful friendship between Gerrard Gales and Stanislav, a Polish sailor and coal-stoker, is a kind of fraternity of the damned, and has an emotional depth, a roundedness to its sense of solidarity and affection, of shared experience of statelessness, and of being at sea, both literally and metaphorically.  There are other characters, many nameless, but of all of them Stanislav is the only one allowed to tell his story at length, the one whose fate is fused with that of Gales, the narrator.

In this rich story, we hear about shipwrecks and fraudulent sinkings, of gun-running and smuggling (to Syrian and Moroccan rebels no less – it is the 1920s), of ports and cities, and roads.  But Traven also writes about seasickness (I think this is the first time I have read of seasickness in a maritime novel), and the dirty work sailors do in ports, and an extraordinary section on descaling the boiler aboard the ship:

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. Well, you who said so, you have never scaled a boiler of the Yorikke right close to the Equator with the fire out only ten hours and the boiler next to it under full steam! It must be done. Boilers have to be scaled or they go up to heaven, taking along the whole crew and all that is left of the ship.

We were sitting inside that boiler as active members of a nudist camp. The walls of the boiler were so hot that we could not touch them with bare hands, nor could we kneel at the bottom without a thick layer of rags under us.

There wasn’t such a thing as goggles for boiler-scaling on the Yorikke. No goggles were known at Carthage, so why should the Yorikke have them? The dust of the scale sprang into your eyes and almost burned the light out of them. If you tried to rub it out it would only pierce so deeply into your eyelids and under them that you would have to pick the specks out with a pin or with a pocket-knife. You feel that you are going mad. You cannot stand it any more and you call on one of the other guys to get them out. He works with his dusty and clumsy hands about your eyes until he gets them clean, but your eyes swell under this torture and they stay swollen and bloodshot for a week. Even suppose you had goggles, they would not do you any good. The dust darkens them to such an extent that you cannot see where you are.

The boiler inside has to be illuminated for you to see what you are doing, because it is as dark inside as it is in a coalmine. If you had electric light it would be easier. But on the Yorikke we had only the ancient lamps of old Carthage. Five minutes, no more, and the boiler was filled with black smoke so thick that we could cut it like a cake. And the smoke stood as if chained and gummed.

The drumming, hammering, and knocking against the hull inside seemed to crack open your head and mash your brain to powder.

Hardly ten minutes’ work and we had to come up and out to get air, exhausted each time like pearl-divers.

We would crawl out and dart under the air-funnel which reaches into the stoke-hold. The ocean breeze would strike our hot bodies, and then you feel as if a sword were thrust through your lungs. After fifteen seconds you feel like lying naked in a blizzard. To escape this terrific snowstorm, which in fact is only the soft breeze of the tropics, you hurry back into the hot boiler as if hunted, and go to work harder than before with the hope that the harder you work, the quicker you will be out of the inferno.

Before ten minutes have elapsed, however, you have to crawl out again into that blizzard of Saskatchewan, because you feel you are surely going to die if you don’t have fresh air.

There is a moment where the nerves seem to burst. It happens when you feel that you have to go out that very second and you see your fellow-man squeezing slowly through the manhole. The boiler has only one manhole. The narrower it can be made, the better for the boiler. Only one man can crawl through at a time. The others have to wait until he is through and fully out. While he is squeezing himself through, which takes a certain time, the hole is entirely closed, and not one mouthful of air can come in. The two men still inside feel exactly like men in a sunken submarine. No difference (pp. 310-311).

There are a number extraordinary chapters in Moby Dick in which a sperm whale is skinned, beheaded, processed in a cataract of blood, fat and flesh.  It is a documentary record of whaling few nonfiction works can best, and it is operatic (or painterly, if your painter is Hieronymus Bosch) in its composition.  Though the passage on descaling the boiler does not come close to Melville’s great masterpiece, it nevertheless has something of the power of Moby Dick‘s ethnography in conveying the work that is shipboard labour and for that, I am grateful to Traven.

Posted in bureacuracy, labour, literature, ports, readings, seafaring, shipping conditions, ships, the sea | Tagged | Leave a comment

“a city of many rivers”

Posted on 8 June 2014 by Laleh Khalili

It is extraordinarily rare to read someone whose work haunts you and then becomes part of your personal canon.  That you wake in the middle of the night wanting to look at the map of his imaginary geography.  The last time this happened to me was with Roberto Bolaño.  But my new discovery, courtesy of Sinan Antoon, is much closer to home.  The word images he draws remind me of the black-and-white photographs in my parents’ albums, and send me scrambling through my own trunkful of loose photographs looking for pictures of Shatt al-Arab I shot in 1999 – from the other side of the river (unsuccessfully, as it turns out: I was waylaid by youthful pictures of beloved friends in various states of debauchery).

The writer Sinan has gifted me is the Iraqi Muhammad Khuddayir, and the extraordinary book of his that is the spectre roaming behind my eyes is his exquisite Basrayatha, first written in 1996, translated into English by William M. Hutchins, and published by American University of Cairo Press in 2007 (and Verso in 2008).  The book is a kind of memory book.  It affixes in words histories and memories and stories. It has a kind of spiral structure with every story taking you to the next story.  Khuddayir is a reliable guide and story-teller.  His histories (or at least his retelling of how histories are told) ring true and magical.  There is a bit of Calvino here, and a bit of Borges, but there are also visual modes of story-telling which better describe how this book is put together: lots of fragments, pieced together intricately and coherently, sewn together at the jagged edges with threads of word-association, and memory-association, and images, and extraordinary erudition.

First, let me get Khudayyir’s erudition out of the way: he quotes Foucault’s Heterotopia, and a half dozen obscure and famous writers in Arabic and in European languages; the latter range from Balzac to Buzzatti.  Interestingly, the Balzac reference is to a short story about the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt (as Edward Said has written, “nearly everywhere in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and French culture we find allusions to the fact of empire”).  Basrayatha has historic footnotes, and strange little playful ones that remind one of Borges.

My favourite section, predictably enough, is the chapter about the Shatt-al-Arab and its progenitors:

Basra is a city of many rivers. Historians have counted six hundred major rivers and ten thousand side channels.  Al-Baladhuri mentioned the figure of 120,000 rivers.  The exact number of those rivers remains the secret knowledge of nature of the men who dug them (and by whose names they are known) in order to irrigate the fields and orchards granted to them as fiefs by caliphs, princes, and governors. The names of these rivers changed as the names of their proprietors changed and as their huge palaces, which were surrounded by lush gardens, crumbled.  The land-tax ledgers and those of the municipality do not reveal the true location of the Ubulla River (the largest of the ancient rivers connecting to the city of Utba ibn Ghazwan), the Abu al-Asad River, which the Caliph al-Mansur’s general excavated, the Mubarak River going back to Khaled ibn Yazid al-Qasri, or the other rivers of which traces will turn up on topographic maps based on aerial photography as faint, zigzag lines surrounded by salt marshes (p. 50).

The sense of how visual this is – but also how it draws on old histories, old maps, old stories- also comes through here:

The Ashar is one of the principal rivers of Basra and the artery of the Shatt al-Arab.  It relinquished its palms, walls, and trees to make way for the street that the governor Sulayman Nazif built in 1909.  We can reconstruct daily life at the beginning of the century from the notes of a customs official, the ledger of a moneychanger, or the records of foreign consulates.   We can similarly collect odd views of the river from faded photographs recorded by black-box cameras.  We can imagine the flow of traffic at the mule-hire station located next to the customs office as draft animals laden with merchandise set off for the city center.  Opposite the mule station was the cargo dock, noisy with workers unloading the ships anchored there.  They were supervised by customs employees and troops – leaning against the wall- from the Ottoman maritime barracks.  Here in the harbor concluded the sea voyage and days of quarantine, and then the city’s vast cloak would envelop red, yellow, and black visages of people clad in caps, pants, and hats (p. 52).

Historians would recognise the act of imagination in the remaking of disappeared places.  But so do those who have lost their cities – to exile, or to war, or to the storm from heaven the Angel of History cannot contemplate without horror.  In that passage I recognise all the ways in which I try to reconstruct homes and houses and pasts.  It is why I wanted to find the photographs of Shatt al-Arab I took in Khorramshahr.  It is why exiles cherish, depend on, live through their collections of photographs.

Khudayyir describes the making of bridges across Ashar River:

Over the first bridge rose the dome and minaret of the Maqam Ali Mosque.  Over the second bridge was a clock erected by an Armenian citizen named Suriyan. The third bridge separated a hotel with many wooden balconies from the palace of Government… The largest coffeehouses leaned against the entrances of the three bridges, whereas the other ones between the bridges began to go out of business.  Then all of them were removed when new streets were opened on the north bank and the old wooden bridges were replaced with concrete ones.  As the river’s commercial activity decreased, it developed into more of a focal point for the city.  The ports inside the city were deserted and the boats moved to the banks of the Shatt al-Arab (pp. 53-54).

As the book beautifully traces the transformations of port cities – of the shifts of commercial ventures outside cities as cities become places of pleasure (and leisure economies)- it weaves and brings together ancient and modern histories, and its recitation of beautiful historical names, its stories of Basrans, “children of the rivers”, builds a beautiful edifice, a wooden bridge, complex and intricate, between the Basra of imagination and the Basra of history and the present.

There is so much else to love about this book…  He loves not just the river, but also trains:

A passenger on the night train confronts the riddle: did cities and their train stations create trains – or did trains create cities and their stations? … The train created unbreakable fraternal bonds between me and those strangers -brothers of the night and travel, brothers of the unknown life that settles in one place only to depart for somewhere else.  Anyone who  -like me – has felt ties dissolve among the brethren during our long nights when trains thunder forward plucks these ties back from the silent night by force (pp. 111-112).

And bicycles.  The lovely descriptions of cycling, of bike races from villages to Basra, of the delight in owning a bicycle (pp. 71-72) feels rich and gently humorous and full of sodade (I can’t think of an English word that conveys that feeling).

And the “flares of natural gas from the refineries” (p. 113).  And ships arriving in Baghdad in 1831, to a city beset by the plague, boats arriving “by the sea route” gliding towards “the lifeless, walled city by the river fort, and the ships moored before it, while clouds of smoke billowed above them” (p. 23).  And the beautiful description of the river as “a route for comfort and punishment” (of sieges and commercial goods, p. 48).

And the British invasion in 1914, when the “Indian Expeditionary Force “D” left its forts on the island of Bahrain, after a rest break during which they took supplies and an additional number of guides, mercenaries, horses and mules” before “enter[ing] the Shatt al-Arab and proceed[ing] past rows of interlocking palms until they established a base in the Basra basin with all of its facilities for spices, dried fish, apes, whiskey, malaria, grimacing nightmares, and screams of sexual bondage” (p. 49).  How could you not love the pungent smells wafting from this description, with its strange Borgesian categories of objects one finds on military bases?

There is a long chapter on the war between Iran and Iraq.  So much about this chapter feels raw, less meandering, less playful, even a bit more nationalist (but maybe I say that because I am Iranian and remember the war?). There is passage after passage I have marked in my book where the words lacerate.  But the most haunting is the image of driving through a war-mangled landscape at high speed:

We were cruising along at a hundred kilometers and hour, and the car was like a large eraser, rubbing out all the scenery around it. The cleared space pushed other scenes toward us, but the car quickly erased those in turn. We crossed the Ashar River, and signs for places we knew began to whiz past. We did not notice until after our fleeting passage, when we were beyond them, that their large, glass facades were smashed. They were different now. Their forms were new. Signboards were askew and doors were torn away. (I should erase and draw: erase a restaurant and draw a burned-out structure. I should  erase a cinema and draw an abandoned building.  I should erase a coffeehouse and draw a closed business.) (p. 155).

It is the parenthetical litany of “shoulds” that serrates, gashes, burns through the skin.  Read it.  It will haunt you in that way that only great and ambiguous books telling stories in memorable spirals can.  Like smoke, like a river with a hundred thousand canals, like the flames from the gas flares that heat the oily landscape of that corner of the world, Basrayatha coils around itself, unwinds, and rewinds.  And through you.

 

Posted in literature, Middle East, ports, readings, the sublime | Tagged , | 1 Comment

“…for rivers and seas are not to be regarded as disjoining, but as uniting”

Posted on 4 June 2014 by Laleh Khalili

From Hegel through Schmitt to Foucault and onwards, there is a way of thinking about sea and land not as inert backdrop but as factors determining politics, history and the transformation of the world.

Hegel’s The Philosophy of History is geographically deterministic and intensely racialised.  His reading of Africa and Africans doesn’t even bear thinking about.  And his idea of civilization, not just as a process, but as a standard is present there throughout that book, and especially when he writes about “that element of civilization which the sea supplies.”

Here is Hegel on the sea:

The sea gives us the idea of the indefinite, the unlimited, and infinite; and in feeling his own infinite in that Infinite, man is stimulated and emboldened to stretch beyond the limited: the sea invites man to conquest, and to piratical plunder, but also to honest gain and to commerce. The land, the mere Valley-plain attaches him to the soil; it involves him in an infinite multitude of dependencies, but the sea carries him out beyond these limited circles of thought and action. Those who navigate the sea, have indeed gain for their object, but the means are in this respect paradoxical, inasmuch as they hazard both property and life to attain it. The means therefore are the very opposite to that which they aim at. This is what exalts their gain and occupation above itself, and makes it something brave and noble. Courage is necessarily introduced into trade, daring is joined with wisdom.
For the daring which encounters the sea must at the same time embrace wariness — cunning — since it has to do with the treacherous, the most unreliable and deceitful element. This boundless plain is absolutely yielding — withstanding no pressure, not even a breath of wind. It looks boundlessly innocent, submissive, friendly, and insinuating; and it is exactly this submissiveness which changes the sea into the most dangerous and violent element. To this deceitfulness and violence man opposes merely a simple piece of wood; confides entirely in his courage and presence of mind; and thus passes from a firm ground to an unstable support, taking his artificial ground with him. The Ship — that swan of the sea, which cuts the watery plain in agile and arching movements or describes circles upon it — is a machine whose invention does the greatest honor to the boldness of man as well as to his understanding.

This stretching out of the sea beyond the limitations of the land, is wanting to the splendid political edifices of Asiatic States, although they themselves border on the sea — as for example, China. For them the sea is only the limit, the ceasing of the land; they have no positive relation to it. The activity to which the sea invites, is a quite peculiar one: thence arises the fact that the coast-lands almost always separate themselves from the states of the interior although they are connected with these by a river. Thus Holland has severed itself from Germany, Portugal from Spain  (p. 90-91 of the Dover 1956 edition).

Carl Schmitt borrows some of this thinking in his Land and Sea, a supposed children’s story “as told to my daughter Anima” (pity the child!).  Schmitt’s reading of technology, geography and power -always Eurocentric, especially antisemitic [his rendering of Disraeli is rather shocking]- is always provocative and seems to prefigure other forms of theory.  [One example is this passage which reminds me of New Materialist thinking about objects: “The compass lent a ship a spiritual dimension which enabled man to develop a strong attachment to his ship, a sort of affinity or kinship.”]

For Schmitt himself, what mattered was men’s telluric attachments – in fact the beginning of politics for him (as he writes about it in his Theory of Partisan) is a nationalist, land-loving act.  But here, he reflects on the sea:

Is it not remarkable that a human being standing on the shore would direct its eyes quite natu­rally from the land towards the sea and not the other way round, that is, from the sea to the land? In people’s deepest and often unconscious memories, water and the sea are the mysterious and primordial source of all life.

His potted world-history, told from the shore (or from aboard a ship) is actually worth thinking about, perhaps because of its long sweep:

For almost half a millennium, the Vene­tian Republic symbolized the domination of the seas, the wealth derived from maritime trade and that matchless feat which was the conciliation of the requisites of high politics with “the oddest creation in the economic history of all times.” All that the Anglophiles admired in England, between the eighteenth and the twentieth cen­turies, had already made the fame of Venice: the great wealth, the diplomatic superiority by which the maritime power was exploiting the rivalries among the Continental powers and made others fight its wars, the aristocratic system of government which seems to have resolved the problems of internal, political order, the forbearance of philosophical and religious notions, the asylum extended to the political emigration and the ideas of independence. To all these may be added the magic attraction exerted by sumptuous festivals and by artistic beauty.

Schmitt sketches a three stage history – potamian (riverine), thalassic (Mediterranean) and oceanic – which is very obviously influenced by Hegel’s Philosophy of History.  As ever Schmitt’s central concern is the domination of one place over another. And as such, he questions the ability of sea powers to exert their power over hinterlands.  For him, coastal empires only have fleets which can go so far with landlocked powers’ natural bulwark against invasions – at least until British mastery in the 19th century.

In the early history of maritime power Schmitt delineates, the combination of whaling and of the Dutch invention of the technology of sideway sails (which allows multi-directional mobility in ships) resulted in a “revolution” in maritime practice.  It is also at the same time that the sailing ships are equipped with canons and therefore can engage in “long-distance artillery duels undertaken with a highly perfected sail maneuvering.”

But for Schmitt, perhaps what is most important is what he calls the “planetary revolution” that took place with the 1492 Colombian “discovery” of America.  Schmitt recognises that the continent had been “discovered” before and certainly mentions the indigenous inhabitants, but given that his world is firmly Eurocentric, he sees 1492 as the commencement of a transformation in the spatial imagination of Europeans, not just in geography and astronomy and politics, but in the arts and religion  as well.  There are ways in which this reminds me of Foucault’s ideas about the space.  Foucault writes,

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermodynamics. The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.

And like the good historian he is, Foucault also traces the history of space.  For him, like Schmitt, it is the European imagination of a global whole (but via Galileo’s discoveries) that decides this spatial shift.  I have to confess that although it doesn’t surprise me that Foucault doesn’t mention colonisation as the event that kicks off this planetary imagining, the fact that it is Schmitt who does chagrins me.

Schmitt goes on not only to write of the process of colonisation, but also of

the planetary space order… which consists in the separation of land from sea. Henceforth, the dry land would belong to a score of sovereign states. The sea, on the other hand, would belong to nobody, or everybody, but in reality, it would be belong to a single country: England. […]

The primordial fact of the British conquest of the seas, and the separation of land from sea need to be taken into consideration, if one is to grasp the deep-going sense of the famous slogans and maxims often quoted at the time, like for instance, Sir Walter Raleigh saying: “Whoever controls the seas controls the world trade; whoever controls world trade holds all the treasures of the world in his possession, and in fact the whole world’. Or: ‘All trade is world trade; all world trade maritime trade’. Slogans about freedom such as ‘All world trade is free exchange’ express the zenith of England ‘s maritime and global power.

There is something incredibly provocative about this – and it pushes me to go off and read that enormous tome, Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660-1783.  [Though Schmitt pooh-poohs Mahan: “However weight a personality Mahan’s was, and his model of a bigger island, as impressive [sic the odd diction and punctuation], his theory did not reach the elemental essence of a new spatial order.  His theory had not been prompted by the spirit of the old seamen, but rather, by the conservative need of geopolitical security. It had nothing of the energy of elemental irruption, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave birth to the historical alliance between the navigators’ spirit of adventure and the Calvinist predestination.”  Unsurprisingly, all important transformations in the world for Schmitt arise in the northwest corner of Europe.]

But where Schmitt is always best is where he reflects on forms of warfare.

World history is the history of the wars waged by maritime powers against land or continental powers and by land powers against sea or maritime powers […] According to the medieval interpretations put forth by the cabbalists, world history is a combat between the strong whale, leviathan, and the no less strong behemoth, a terrestrial animal, which was represented imaginatively as a bull or an ele­phant. The names leviathan and behemoth had been borrowed from the Book of Job (40 and 41). According to the cabbalists, behemoth tries to tear leviathan to pieces with its horns and teeth, while in turn, leviathan tries hard to stop the land animal’s mouth and nostrils with its flaps and fins in order to deprive it of food and air. This is a graphic illustration, which only the mythological imagery can convey, of the blockade to which a sea power subjects a land power by cutting its supplies in order to starve it to death. In the end, the two opponents kill each other.

And then, he performs this extraordinary comparison between land warfare and naval warfare.  Schmitt writes that land warfare was always about victory against the other side, and primarily about fighting between combatants.  “Maritime war, on the other hand, favoured such characteristic means as bombardment, the blockade of the enemy shores, and the capture of enemy and neutral merchantmen, in virtue of the right to capture. As such, the sea war tactics were directed both against enemy combatants and the non-combatants. Thus, a starvation blockade indiscriminately affected the entire population of the involved territory: soldiers, civilians, women, children, and old people.”

He then has an uncharacteristically semi-phenomenological discussion of how the British viewed the world as from the sea and this allowed them the mastery of the maritime space and therefore becoming the world metropole.  But he also has a familiar discussion of the nomos of the world [in a kids’ book!!!!], or a different order between land and sea:   “Energized by her maritime and global supremacy, England, queen of the seas, built up an empire that spread to the four corners of the planet. The English world began to think ln terms of bases and lines of communication. What to other nations was soil and homeland, appeared to  the English as mere hinterland.”

And towards the end of his discussion of the land and sea, he hints at the rise of the US as a world power: “Whereas the Crimean War was still waged with sailing ships, the American Civil War saw the advent of the armoured steamship. The latter marks the beginning of the modern, industrial and economic wars…   A fish until then, the leviathan was turning into a machine.”  Even as he knocks Mahan, he recognises the changes that this new machinery of warfare has wrought.  But for him, the most important moment was that transformation of the European spatial imaginary in the 16th and 17th centuries and the kind of technological innovations that happened concurrently.

When the book ends with aeroplanes and the conquest of the “third element” -air- it is like an afterthought, anticlimactic and non-heroic.  Almost inevitable. And very little about what it might mean.  In the end, as in the beginning, the Hegelian categories are those that remain central to Schmitt’s analysis.

 

 

Posted in empire, imperialism & colonialism, militaries, ports, readings, seafaring, the sea, war | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The Lottery of the Sea

Posted on 4 June 2014 by Laleh Khalili

With thanks to Michelle Woordward whose 2007 blogpost on Allan Sekula’s Lottery of the Sea brought me here, it seems that Adam Smith has a wonderful passage about the sea which does the familiar two discursive manoeuvres -speaking of the sea as a place of work and as the romantic sublime- really well:

[33] What a common soldier may lose is obvious enough. Without regarding the danger, however, young volunteers never enlist so readily as at the beginning of a new war; and though they have scarce any chance of preferment, they figure to themselves, in their youthful fancies, a thousand occasions of acquiring honour and distinction which never occur. These romantic hopes make the whole price of their blood. Their pay is less than that of common labourers, and in actual service their fatigues are much greater.

[34] The lottery of the sea is not altogether so disadvantageous as that of the army. The son of a creditable labourer or artificer may frequently go to sea with his father’s consent; but if he enlists as a soldier, it is always without it. Other people see some chance of his making something by the one trade: nobody but himself sees any of his making anything by the other. The great admiral is less the object of public admiration than the great general, and the highest success in the sea service promises a less brilliant fortune and reputation than equal success in the land. The same difference runs through all the inferior degrees of preferment in both. By the rules of precedency a captain in the navy ranks with a colonel in the army; but he does not rank with him in the common estimation. As the great prizes in the lottery are less, the smaller ones must be more numerous. Common sailors, therefore, more frequently get some fortune and preferment than common soldiers; and the hope of those prizes is what principally recommends the trade. Though their skill and dexterity are much superior to that of almost any artificers, and though their whole life is one continual scene of hardship and danger, yet for all this dexterity and skill, for all those hardships and dangers, while they remain in the condition of common sailors, they receive scarce any other recompense but the pleasure of exercising the one and of surmounting the other. Their wages are not greater than those of common labourers at the port which regulates the rate of seamen’s wages. As they are continually going from port to port, the monthly pay of those who sail from all the different ports of Great Britain is more nearly upon a level than that of any other workmen in those different places; and the rate of the port to and from which the greatest number sail, that is the port of London, regulates that of all the rest. At London the wages of the greater part of the different classes of workmen are about double those of the same classes at Edinburgh. But the sailors who sail from the port of London seldom earn above three or four shillings a month more than those who sail from the port of Leith, and the difference is frequently not so great. In time of peace, and in the merchant service, the London price is from a guinea to about seven-and-twenty shillings the calendar month. A common labourer in London, at the rate of nine or ten shillings a week, may earn in the calendar month from forty to five-and-forty shillings. The sailor, indeed, over and above his pay, is supplied with provisions. Their value, however, may not perhaps always exceed the difference between his pay and that of the common labourer; and though it sometimes should, the excess will not be clear gain to the sailor, because he cannot share it with his wife and family, whom he must maintain out of his wages at home.

[35] The dangers and hairbreadth escapes of a life of adventures, instead of disheartening young people, seem frequently to recommend a trade to them. A tender mother, among the inferior ranks of people, is of afraid to send her son to school at a seaport town, lest the sight of the ships and the conversation and adventures of the sailors should entice him to go to sea. The distant prospect of hazards, from which we can hope to extricate ourselves by courage and address, is not disagreeable to us, and does not raise the wages of labour in any employment. It is otherwise with those in which courage and address can be of no avail. In trades which are known to be very unwholesome, the wages of labour are always remarkably high. Unwholesomeness is a species of disagreeableness, and its effects upon the wages of labour are to be ranked under that general head.

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