Spanish Conquest of Cuba

The Spanish acquisition of Cuba as a colonial possession is generally dated to that seminal year in the Age of Exploration, 1492, when Christopher Columbus2 himself is credited with landing on the island in fulfillment of his commitments to the centralized Spanish monarchy under King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castille. Having brutally ended nearly 800 years of Muslim governance in Spain in the consolidation of their own political power on the Iberian Peninsula, Ferdinand and Isabella famously dispatched Columbus as the commander of three vessels intending to gain land, gold, and converts to the Spanish kingdom. No less bloodthirsty than his employers, Columbus and his men (mariners, seamen, and soldiers reputedly much more able and seaworthy than Columbus himself) landed in the fabled New World and quickly began torturing and murdering its indigenous inhabitants in pursuit of wealth, fame, and Christian glory for their own sake, and on behalf of the Spanish royals.

Cuba managed to escape permanent Spanish settlement until the year 1511 when Diego Velazquez de Cuellar landed on the island not as an explorer but as a conqueror with an army and new orders from Ferdinand and Isabella to take the island for Spain. The Taino, Ciboney, and Guanajatabey people resisted de Cuellar's army and engaged in a three-year guerilla campaign against the conquering Spaniards that exacted a hefty toll upon the militant conquistadors, very nearly undoing Spanish designs there before they had begun.

Over time, though, new diseases and new technologies4 began to overwhelm indigenous resistance, and with the capture, torture, and murder of Taino leadership in 1514, de Cuellar took complete control of the island, laid the foundations for the port city of Havana, and instituted the nearly four-century Spanish rule over Cuba and its indigenous populations that lasted into the twentieth century.

The Media and the Military: Sustaining American Empire

Each of the preceding case study chapters has sought to produce two distinct but complementary and mutually reinforcing intellectual outcomes. In the first place, each of the preceding chapters suggested a historical narrative of an American war conducted over the course of the last 125 years that is definitively outside the mode of the mainstream, broadly accepted, conspicuous public histories that are produced within standard institutions of the American state, society, and culture today. These histories proffered alternative views of the American state and the American military in either their ideological positioning, conduct, motives, and/or affected outcomes in the context of the political world in which a given war—of which there have, of course, been many—was conducted. The second element of these case study chapters contained an analysis of print news language as it was constructed and disseminated to American audiences in order to convey information about the military and the wars that were conducted in a given social context during the time period of the war itself. This investigative element, as it was framed and predicated by the theoretical discussion in the introductory chapter to this work, situates itself firmly in the academic history of CDA, which begins with the premise that language encodes meaning both beyond and within the superficial or the semiotic. CDA also asserts that large, public, or state-sustaining institutions like the authoritative print news media wield power in the construction of language and assert substantial influence in their ability to access huge audiences in order to disseminate that language and power. As indicated, then, and as has been referenced frequently throughout this work thus far, this study engages language and discourse, which are in turn crucial intellectual components in the construction of knowledge and information about the observable world. Also, and perhaps in a more immediate sense, this study argues that language, discourse, and the associated knowledge that comes with these intellectual components are disseminated in a given culture and inform considerably about the political and social worlds beyond the immediately accessible or verifiable.

In the previous lecture, I surveyed the question that Wittgenstein posed concerning the possibility of a logically private language – that is, a language that no one but the speaker can, logically, understand. I tried to make clear that, although the question seems, at first glance, to be bizarre and of no obvious interest at all, it is in fact exceedingly important. For a large part of the philosophical thinking of the past three and a half centuries, unwittingly presupposed that the languages we all speak are private languages. The words of our language, it was thought, refer to our own immediate private experiences – which are something that only we can have and that only we can know. And I pointed out that mainstream ideas of contemporary cognitive neuroscience, psychology and theoretical linguistics are likewise tacitly committed to this conception of language and experience. The idea of a logically private language can be represented as a three-legged stool. The three legs are:

First, the experience is logically privately owned: Only I can have my experience. I cannot have your experience and you cannot have mine. Experiences are logically inalienable possessions.

Second, the experiences are privately known. Only I really know of my experiences. For only I have access to them by means of introspection. I have privileged access to my own experiences. But others can judge of my experience only on the basis of my behaviour.

Third, the mental mechanism whereby words are linked to the experiences which they name is private ostensive definition.

This is the three-legged stool of a private language. If the legs are sound, the stool will stand. If so, then it follows that the language each of us speaks is a logically private one. That will face us with the intolerable paradox that no one else can possibly understand us. For the words of the language are defined by reference to samples that no one else can apprehend.

Finally, I drew attention to the characteristic attempt to find a way out of this paradox by invoking the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity. You will remember that this distinction between two uses of the expression ‘the same’ or ‘the identical’ applies clearly to things, such as chairs or cars.

Description and Necessary Truth

It is a part of what Wittgenstein called ‘Augustine's picture of language’ that sentences are ordered combinations of names. A corollary of that idea is the thought that it is by the combination of names in accordance with the rules of syntax that sentences can represent how things are. It is but one step more, in the developed forms of this conception of language, to suggest that just as it is of the essence of words to stand for things, so too it is of the essence of sentences to describe how things stand. And one may well go on to argue, as Wittgenstein did when he wrote the Tractatus, that the general form of a proposition – a sentence in use – is: such-and-such is thus-and-so. And that is clearly the general form of a description.

If we think thus, then we may be inclined to go on to say that different kinds of proposition describe different kinds of subject matter. We distinguish the subject matter of physics from that of chemistry, for example, and we distinguish the domains of physics and chemistry from that of biology. Propositions of physics describe how things are in the domain of physics. Propositions of chemistry describe how things stand in the domain of chemistry. And propositions of biology describe how things are in the realm of the biological. But if we go down this road, what are we going to say about propositions of mathematics?

The Third Leg of the Three-Legged Stool

The idea that our language is private inasmuch as its words refer to what only the speaker can have and to what only he can know is, as we have already noted, akin to a three-legged stool. Two of these legs – namely the idea of private and inalienable ownership of subjective experience and the idea of private and privileged knowledge of subjective experience – have been shown to be rotten. Today we shall deal with the third leg – private ostensive definition.

We shall focus on the manner in which words signifying subjective experiences, such as ‘pain’, are supposedly given a meaning by the private linguist. Our critical task is to examine the cogency of the accounts of language and linguistic meaning given by philosophers who assume that words have a meaning by virtue of standing for ideas in the mind or ‘internal representations’. Our constructive task is to remind ourselves how words signifying subjective experiences are actually used and explained and to give a surveyable representation of this domain of the grammar of our language. We shall touch on this today and discuss it at greater length in the next lecture.

Saddam Hussein: American Client

By the 1950s, the masters of the American regime and its exploding military-industrial complex were growing in their interest in Southwest Asia alongside their increasing interventionist stance in the Southeastern corridor of that continent. In Iraq, the U.S. intelligence community bullied its way into a direct role in the internal politics of the state. There, in the summer of 1958, a military dictatorship arose under the leadership of ‘Abd al-Kareem Qassim, an army general who assumed power by overthrowing the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, one of the few remaining regional governments established by British colonial policies during the interwar years. Assuming control in what came to be called the July Revolution, in one grisly stroke at the Royal Palace in Baghdad on July 14, 1958, Qassim loyalist Abdul Sattar Sabaa Al-Ibousi murdered King Faisal II, Crown Price ‘Abd al-Ilah (the king's first cousin once removed), several members of the Crown Prince's family, and the king's prime minister, Nuri as-Said. A number of valets and servants attendant to the royal family were killed too, serving notice to those in the country who still maintained loyalty to the Hashemite monarchy or to the old order of the Iraqi state. By the end of the month, Qassim assumed the position of prime minister, claiming publicly that he had been elected to the post. In order to maintain strict control over the military, the very institution that promoted him to political power, he also assumed the post of Iraqi defense minister. Promised constitutional and social welfare reforms were few and far between, though, as Qassim's government quickly descended into autocracy.

In fulfillment of his nationalist promises, Qassim quickly moved to seize control over Iraqi oil revenues, which had been consigned primarily to American and British interests vis-à-vis the foreign-owned Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC). Qassim's Public Law 80 immediately limited the operational purview of the IPC while at the same time restoring a number of previously shared oil fields to exclusive state control.

Note to the Reader

As with previous case study chapters in this work, the news articles cited in this Appendix constitute a small sample set of roughly a thousand news articles examined in this work's Chapter 5 entitled “America in Vietnam.” Given the longevity of the American political and military commitment in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 1970s, it is understood that the sample provided here, like the articles examined in Chapter 5 in this work themselves, represents only a small fraction of print news coverage of the American war in Vietnam. As such, the citations provided below are intended to point the reader in the direction of the authoritative news articles analyzed for discursive constructions in Chapter 5 of this work, but they are not meant to represent an overall sample of printed news during the Vietnam era. Given the media attention and length of time of this particular American war, it is this author's contention that such a sampling would be unwieldy in the extreme should its collection be undertaken. Instead, what is provided below is a list of news items whose texts were investigated for discursive frames, narrative tropes, or frames of representation, which then, within themselves, helped to construct particular forms of public knowledge and distribute information about the role of the U.S. military in Vietnam. As with previous case study chapters and as with those to come, the overall assessment in this chapter is a focused effort at discerning the presence of a given discourse formed about the U.S. military by the authoritative print and news media and distributed to attendant readership across America. Conclusions about the form and structure of that discourse, or at least an intellectually significant part of it as the Vietnam War was waged in Southeast Asia, are to be found in Chapter 5 of this book.

Print News Articles

Aarons, Leroy. (1969, April 17). “Protesters in Army Are Increasing: Servicemen's Rebellion: Sharp Divisions, but One Goal Eight Demands Primarily Antiwar Drummed Out of Army Expansion Is Aim.” Washington Post, F1.

Alsop, Joseph. (1968, May 12). “Press Can't Win in Vietnam War: Dismissed Westmoreland.” The Washington Post, B1.

Prolegomenon

‘I destroy! I destroy! I destroy!’, Wittgenstein wrote in one of his pocket notebooks in the early 1930s.

His destructive side is manifest in his criticisms of a wide range of philo-sophical conceptions of language and linguistic meaning. It is seen in his critique of metaphysics, and it is evident in his demolition of dualism, behaviourism and mentalism in the philosophy of mind. The upshot of these critical investigations is the destruction of what he called ‘houses of cards’. His aim was to expose philosophical illusions, to undermine grand theories modelled on theories in the natural sciences and to reveal the chimerical character of metaphysical systems. He did not show these theories and systems to be false but to be nonsense. By ‘nonsense’ I don't mean stupid rubbish. It is very important to be clear about this. I mean that such philosophical theories and systems subtly transgress the limits of language and bounds of sense. The task of philosophy, Wittgenstein held, is to transform latent nonsense into patent nonsense – to make it clear exactly where and why the bounds of sense are transgressed.

Nevertheless, there is also a constructive side to Wittgenstein's later phi-losophy. Side by side with the exposure of nonsense, Wittgenstein gives us, from one domain to another, an overview of the network of concepts that make up the ways in which we think. We have seen this first, in the domain of language, meaning and linguistic understanding. There he displayed for us the warp and the weft of the concepts of word and name, sentence and description, the meaning of words and the meaning of sentences, use and practice, explanation of meaning and definition, meaning of something by words and understanding the meanings of words and so on and so forth. We have also examined aspects of his philosophy of psychology in which he gives us an overview of psychological concepts, their first-person present-tense use and their third-person ascription, their asymmetries regarding knowledge, doubt and belief, their link with behavioural criteria, the concepts of mind and of body, the misleading pictures of outer and inner and so on through a broad and ramifying weave of interlocking concepts.

Late in the documentary film Courage directed by Aliaksei Paluyan, actor Pavel Haradnizky, who has been cleaning his apartment and contemplating emigration, thinks about the role of theatre in the midst of the political protests that erupted in Belarus following the 2020 Presidential elections. He considers the state of Belarus, saying it is no longer just a dictatorship, but a “complete tyranny.”

Filmed amidst the turmoil surrounding the elections, the documentary captures the shifting emotional states and trauma of alienation through the eyes of three actors of the Belarus Free Theatre. Despite Haradnizky's skepticism about the usefulness of performance and art in such a crisis, the film itself makes the case for the power and value of such work. Throughout the unnarrated film, built on a series of fragmented scenes of daily life and footage from scenes of mass protest, Paluyan also depicts segments from Belarus Free Theatre performances. Glimpses of these plays, themselves built on documentary events of the Belarusian past, reveal the ways in which these performances invited audiences to commune, remain engaged, remember, mourn, and heal. While the performances help mobilize communities, they also make lives grievable that the State otherwise designates as disposable. The film and the performances it features strip away romantic notions of revolution while portraying the ongoing struggle for human rights, dignity, and democracy in Belarus. This chapter analyzes both the film and the theatre performances it captures as part of documenting the resistance. Looking both at the documentary material depicted along with the aesthetic choices of presentation in their historical contexts, the chapter reinforces the particular value of theatre in a time of crisis.

In the previous four lectures, we introduced the idea of a private language, the words of which purport to refer to subjective experiences, which only the speaker can have and only the speaker can really know about. We showed that the two notions of privacy: private ownership of experience and private knowl-edge of experience are both incoherent. We also showed that the idea that names of experiences are given their meaning by association with the experiences which they name and that the form of association is a private analogue of a public ostensive definition is likewise incoherent. So much for demolishing houses of cards.

Our present task is to complement the destructive analysis with a constructive account of the logical character of words signifying subjective experiences. This is an important task. For clarifying their logical character is simultaneously to clarify the nature of subjective experiences. Our account must highlight the logical differences between first-person avowals and reports of experience, such as ‘I have a pain’, on the one hand, and third-person ascriptions of experience, such as ‘He has a pain’, on the other. Moreover, it has to weld these two aspects of use together into a single unified concept of experience and experiential attributes. For we must, at all costs, avoid finding ourselves in the position of arguing that the word ‘pain’ or ‘joy’ means something different when it is applied to oneself from what it means when it is applied to others.

Other Minds

We feel sensations and emotions, perceive things and have desires and appetites. Being mature language users, we can give expression to our subjective experiences in linguistic form. We can also express our purposes and intentions, our thoughts and beliefs, which, of course, are not experiences. Being self-conscious creatures sometimes given to introspection, we can reflect on our experiences, as well as on our intentions, dispositions and tendencies, and express our reflections in words.

On traditional philosophical views, each of us has special privileged knowledge about his or her subjective experiences. We have seen that Wittgenstein disputed the claim that when one is in pain one knows that one is, and the further claims that such knowledge is unique, certain and indubitable.

Representation by Means of Language

When Wittgenstein turned to writing what became the Philosophical Investigations, he thought hard about how to begin the book. His primary theme was to be the nature of language and linguistic representation. In 1931, he wrote that he should begin his book with an analysis of an ordinary sentence such as ‘A lamp is standing on my table’ since everything should be derivable from this. What did he have in mind?

His concern was with how sentences manage to represent. Such a humdrum sentence as ‘A lamp is standing on my table’ is meaningful – it has a meaning. By using such a meaningful sentence, one describes a certain state of affairs. One says that there is a lamp on one's table, and what one says may be either true or false. How does a sentence in use, a sequence of sounds one utters, manage to do all this – to represent a situation, to describe how things are, to be true or false? – The question is odd, and it may well engender a feeling of bafflement. You may well feel that you can't really see a problem. You may be inclined to say that this is just what sentences in use do! — Let me try to show you that there is more that is puzzling about linguistic representation that comes immediately to the eye. I shall do so by means of a little dialogue between myself and an interlocutor, who I imagine as a thoughtful member of my audience given to asking good questions. I’ll set the ball rolling:

Unfinished Business: What Use Is Not and When Meaning Isn't Use

In the last lecture, the logical geography of the concept of the meaning of a word was sketched. Wittgenstein linked the concept of word meaning to the concept of the use of a word and to the concept of a rule for the use of a word. The concept of a rule for the use of a word is in turn linked to the concept of an explanation of the meaning of a word – since an explanation of meaning is, in effect, a rule – a standard of correct use. Moreover, the notions of meaning, use, rule and explanation are all connected with the concept of a practice of regular use of a word – and that is linked with the idea of a recognized uniformity that is viewed as standard setting. This network of interwoven concepts ramifies further. The concept of word meaning was also connected with the concept of meaning something by a word, and with the concepts of understanding what a word means and understanding what someone meant in saying what he said. The concept of understanding is in turn linked with using a word correctly, explaining what it means and responding appropriately to its use by others – which are severally criteria for understanding what a word or expression means. We determine whether someone under-stands an expression by reference to whether he uses it correctly, explains correctly what it means in a given context and responds appropriately to its use by others. One might think of this large array of interwoven concepts as a network or web of ideas, each of which is directly or indirectly connected to all the others and all of which conjunctively determine the concept of meaning.

Int. Yes, I have grasped at least part of this network, and I can see that many difficulties can be resolved by attending to the place of the various concepts within this web. Nevertheless, I still have qualms about Wittgenstein's identifying the meaning of a word with its use. I mean, he did say that for a large class of cases the meaning of a word is its use in the language. What worries me is that there are far too many kinds of cases in which the meaning of a word is not its use. And if I’m right, then we can't accept Wittgenstein's claim.

Augustine's Picture Again

You will recollect that an integral element of the conception of meaning that Wittgenstein associated with Augustine's pre-reflective picture of language is the idea that language is connected to reality. Augustine remarked that

So Augustine conceived of words being connected with things by means of ostension. We have already examined Wittgenstein's criticisms of that idea. Let me briefly remind you of some of his points and take the matter forward a little.

First of all, we must distinguish ostensive training from ostensive teaching. All initial language learning is a matter of training. Parents and siblings endlessly repeat words, encourage correct reactions and reinforce correct repetition. This is not explaining what words mean, but inculcating verbal responses and reactions. Ostensive teaching can play a role in language learning only once the child has already acquired substantial linguistic skills and is in the position to start asking ‘What is a so-and-so?’ and ‘What does such-and-such a word mean?’

∙ Second, we must note that the form of words ‘This is so-and-so?’ has two quite different uses. It may be used to make a true or false statement about the object that is pointed at – as when we are asked whether there is anything octagonal around, and in reply we point at a small side table and say ‘This ☞ is octagonal’. Alternatively, we might be asked what the word ‘octagonal’ means, and in reply we might point at the table and say ‘This ☞ is octago-nal’. In the first case, our description could be paraphrased ‘This ☞ table is octagonal’, but in the second case our ostensive utterance is not a description but a definition.