It's a (epistemological) jungle out there

 Distance is measured in spatial, temporal, cultural and even personal modes. The anthropologist Edward Hall, working in the vein of ecological epistemology that had its origin in studies done for the air force on air fighter and bomber crew reactions to the adventure of bombing the great cities of Japan and Germany even suggested a science of the near and far: proxemics. Newspapers and tv deal in various degrees of false proximity, which in itself is not a bad thing: after all, illusion surrounds even our most personal acquaintanceship with people and events Like the lovers in Max Ernst’s version of the kiss who wear bags over their heads, even at our closest we never quite know how far away we are.

This is of some relevance to discussions of the “epistemology” of journalism, the topic of a recent discussion between Chris Hayes and David Roberts. They debate, between the two of them, models of knowing – with Roberts claiming that most people don’t think like scientists, but like lawyers. Like the latter, they think of proving cases, unlike the former who, ideally, think in terms of where observation and experiment lead them..

Admittedly, Roberts concedes, this is a very positive picture of how scientists think. But he continues with his “most people” theme: “Well this is my point, it's difficult even for scientists, but of course normal people don't think like that. Even in specifically designed institutional contexts meant to encourage that kind of thinking, even there it's difficult. Most people, most of the time, think like lawyers, i.e., they have a case, they have their conclusion in hand, and they're going out, gathering information, trying to build a case for it. Most people, most of the time, think like lawyers and reason like lawyers, not like scientists.”

I read this discussion and wondered about the sacrifice that pulled out of the jungle of epistemological stances the scientist/lawyer divide. Although I know that those two epistemic models are often the only ones discussed in journalism by journalists.

Why chose these professional types? Especially as we know that “most people” are thinking in various modes of practice. They are lovers or children or parents, they work as nurses or plumbers, they go on vacations or are kicked to the curb, literally, for debt.

When I buy groceries, for instance, I don't think about a case like a lawyer. I think more like an 18th century natural philosopher, reviewing the experiments and having a very vague idea of the variables – but knowing that I must have some picture of the dependent variables in order to get the right groceries. That must be affordable and not wasted.

The experiments are composed of meals cooked and either enjoyed or rejected. Other determinants are price, variety, and time spent cooking. I repeat, these variables are not independent of each other. There’s another variable – who I am cooking for. Each person eating has a history of what they like and how they like it cooked. Plus my own history. And, as a parent, I am continually engaged in trying to get my child to eat healthily – even as I have to admit my own numerous failures to eat healthily.

This adds up to a certain impressive complexity wh/ becomes evident if, say, a stranger joins our meal. Say a foreign student. And wonders why we are eating this one thing and not this other thing, etc.

Now, consider the way “most people” in America work. And notice that most people are neither policy wonks, scientists or lawyers. I think one of the ways to think about people's epistemic lives, a way of seeing the ecology of the epistemic stances, is to look at what they do. There are comparitively few scientists and lawyers in, say, the U.S. Here's the chart of job types from 2024 in the U.S:

Largest occupations in the United States, May 2024

Occupation	Employment
Home Health and Personal Care Aides	3,988,140
Retail Salespersons	3,800,250
Fast Food and Counter Workers	3,780,930
General and Operations Managers	3,584,420
Registered Nurses	3,282,010
Cashiers	3,148,030
Laborers and Freight, Stock, and Material Movers, Hand	2,982,530
Stockers and Order Fillers	2,779,530
Customer Service Representatives	2,725,930
Office Clerks, General	2,510,550

One notices the vast number of home health and personal care workers, of nurses, of fast food and counter workers, of retail salesmen, etc. Now, everybody has a situation, everybody makes epistemological adjustments to it, but I very much doubt the lawyer/scientist model can help us understand the knowledge of the cashier at the Mcdonalds in Tucker Georgia who has been there for five years, has a child who is being raised by her mother, has a boyfriend who is employed as a temp, and has a steady stream of office workers coming in for lunch. The epistemological situation here is a bit like that studied by Hall with his bomber aircraft personnel, who are under tight time constraints, and who engage in intense activity at certain times and at others don't, as this is spaced out over the entire practice segment of their time.

It is into the epistemological jungle we have to plunge, in my opinion, to understand the way “social media” has changed us. The us being a pretty charged pronoun.

Revolution and legitimacy

 1. The active and passive revolution

"The ideological hypothesis could be presented in the following terms: that there is a passive revolution involved in the fact that -- through legislative intervention by the State and by means of the corporative organization -- relatively far-reaching modifications are being introduced into the country's economic structure in order to accentuate the 'plan of production' element; in other words, that socialisation and co-operation in the sphere of production are being increased, without however touching (or at least not going beyond the regulation and control of) individual and group appropriation of profit." –Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

There are few references or essays about Neapolitan historian Vincenzo Cuoco in English. He is known, by a small minority, for having originated the distinction between passive and active revolution that Gramsci took up in the twentieth century and used in a sense that, to an extent, seems to call out to Karl Polanyi’s hypothesis of the double movement – first the movement towards the free market, then the movement towards state intervention to preserve the private sphere from the stresses the profit taking activity had caused - within the Great Transformation to capitalism.

Cuoco (1770-1823) was the sort of figure who could easily have been cast by Stendhal in La Chartreuse de Parme. He was also the sort of figure that was easy to lose sight of, since the nuances he stood for were, in a sense, drowned in the blood of his epoch. In this sense, there is something of Benjamin Constant’s sense of the need to reintroduce Nemesis into politics, in the form of limits that would work against ‘usurpation’ and conquest. Constant’s pamphlets didn’t stop Napoleon, and Cuoco ended up, by all accounts, on the side of legitimacy after the great fading of collective energy in 1815.

He was not from Naples, but from the Molise region. By training he was another lawyer – or rather, his training as a lawyer was just part of a vaster training in the vaguer career of a philosophe, that career that is not, like that of law, institutionally recognized, and seems like no career at all to people who have short views of the amplitudes of the human soul.

He was, like all Italian philosophes, keenly aware of what was going on in Paris in the 1790s, and had, to frame his observations of these distant events, a fund of sources that included Vico. When the revolution came to Naples, his friends, like Pagano, participated in it and even tried to lead it. Cuoco took a discreter role, but even so fled the collapse and subsequent repression that put Pagano’s neck in a rope. In Milan, he published his essay on the rise and fall of the brief Parthenopeen Republic, under the guise of a philosophical history:

2. Legitimate and illegitimate fools

“In history, the custom of reporting names does more to flatter the vanity of those so named than it serves to instruct the reader. Few men know how to master events; the greatest number is its slave; he is what the time, the ideas, the moeurs and the events want him to be; when one has painted the first, what is the point of naming the others? I am firmly persuaded that if in the greatest part of history, one substituted for the proper names the letters of the alphabet, the instruction one would draw from it would be the same.”

In the event, the philosophic dislike for the personal was quickly disgarded in a history that was filled with personalities. And yet, in a sense, those personalities are as unreal in their reality as the characters of La Bruyere. Or they are real, rather, as calculators the combinations they are made of – which is to say, of that time, those moeurs, those events to which they reacted as though they had the choice to be outside of them.

2. “But to imagine a plan for a republican constitution and to found a republic are two very different things. In a government where the public will, or the law, has not and ought not to have any other support, other guarantee, other ministry than the particular will, one cannot establish liberty but in making free men. Before elevating the edifice of liberty in Naples, there was in the ancient constitutions, in the customs, in the inveterate prejudices of the people, and in the interests of the moment, a thousand obstacles that it was urgent to know and indispensable to remove.”

Thus Cuoco, pointing to the republican dilemma when a foreign army, the French, took the city and most of the kingdom.

A story.

Four Corsicans are caught in Apulia when the French army took Naples. One is a former servant, Cesare, and one is a former artillery officer and deserter, Boccheciampe. Their other two companions are, by all accounts, unemployed vagabonds. According to Cuoco, the four were fleeing to Brindisi when the came to Monteasi, a small village, and took lodgings with an old woman, to whom they told the story that they were actually fleeing nobles – Boccheciampe was the brother of the king, and Cesare (this is not in the Cuoco account, but in Pietro Colleta’s History) for the duke of Saxony. Actually, the old woman was related to the royal intendant in the village, one Girunda. According to Colleta, Girunda was taken into the secret – according to Cuoco, Girunda went to the old woman’s house, knelt before Boccheciampe, and swore his allegiance. When the four got to Brindisi, they began to issue orders and raised an army of insurgents – Boccheciampe invested the province of Leuca, and Cesare marched on Barri. The men under their command, according to Cuoco, were ‘baron’s men’, criminals, and miscreants who had escaped from one prison or another. According to Colletta, the four Corsicans were soon busy firing and hiring magistrates and emptying the treasuries of various towns and villages, while imposing fines on the “rebels” to the King.

Not only did the people rejoice in this pillage of the “patriots” – they were encouraged by the clergy, who, knowing the men were imposters, nevertheless seized the chance to proclaim them legitimate in order to set going a countryside insurgency. Even the Bourbon nobility, well aware that the King’s brother was not a rude artilleryman with a Corse accent, played along with the imposters.

And so the revolt in the countryside begins not in support of the patriots who have overthrown the barbaric remnants of feudalism in Naples, when the Republic was proclaimed, but is conducted by the people for the feudal regime, under the banner of four imposters, against Republicanism, as it is understood, itself.

…

Since Naples was the home of Vico and Bruno, there is much here for the Gnostic historian, avid for intersignes, to contemplate, especially as the glosses are supplied by an intelligence like Cuoco’s, whose form of enlightenment materialism (for instance, he attributes the heterogeneity of customs and tempers in the Kingdom of Naples to the heterogeneity of the property arrangements instituted by feodalism: “… and the feudal system, which, in the centuries which followed barbarism and preceded civilization, always varied according to places and circumstances, rendering property diverse throughout; and that diversity necessarily passed into the moeurs, which are always analogous to the nature of property and the means of subsistence”) is lit up, as well, by the darker torches held aloft by Machiavelli and Vico.

The problem of “removing” these impediments to create a new connection between the state and the people – that organic connection of happiness – seems, in the chaos of 1799, to have reached a moment of dream tension in which parts of the fabric of legitimacy – as if will later be called – peel off to reveal the form of the variable that takes the sovereign position. Here I see a place for one of my favorite motifs (motifs for the essayist being what circus animals were for Yeats’ poet): that of the odd, recurring pairing of the sage and the fool.

For underneath Cuoco’s distinction between a revolution from above – a revolution for abstractions, imposed upon the public, which receives it passively – and a revolution from below – a revolution of the people, struggling to achieve their interests, actively – is something like the trace of the odd necessity that yoked the fool and the sage together.

Oh that counter-enlightenment crewe! From Vico onward – and actually, from the witch onward, from the tales in the forest onward – there is a program, or at least a programmatic stance, even if there is no system, or even if the systems are crackpot, deviant, ad hoc – which consists in the rejection of the power of the will to truth. One finds (inevitably?) that the opposition between sage and philosopher that structures Francois Jullien’s argument in A Sage is Without Ideas eventually crystalizes about this matter, our matter, the will to truth. The sage, in Jullien’s account, does not develop a neurosis about the truth – and thus a whole intellectual culture slips the bonds and knots of a certain mastering cognitive passion, orienting itself instead with relation to the road, or way.

Jullien does not ask if the Dao is the path of pins or the path of needles – little red riding hood does not figure in his story. More curiously, neither does the fool. Unless – and here one feels Jullien’s grasp of the theme loosen a bit – that role is taken by the Daoist.

There’s something odd in the story that Cuoco tells: for the great keepers of legitimacy, the monarchists and counter-revolutionaries, are quite happy to use frauds and criminals as their instruments in the war against “illegitimate’ revolutionaries. O, this modern turn – which I doubt even its inventors understood. We have lived to see innumerable frauds and criminals lay claim to the most righteous “conservative” tradition, even as their very presence de-legitimates it.

Cuoco’s story adds a chapter to the role of the adventurer in the Great Transformation – and surely it is in the wake of the adventurer that the fool and the sage come apart as a couple. The philosophe cannot, in the end, take the fool-adventurer as a comrade. Don Quixote can no longer rely on Sancho Panza, and the narrator of Le Neveau de Rameau can only understand the tricks of the salon con man through a story he has yet to invent. Later, of course, he will. And he will call it the Phenomenology of Spirit.

The man in the crowd, circa 2025

 “With a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap, I had been amusing myself for the greater part of the afternoon, now in poring over advertisements, now in observing the promiscuous company in the room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the street. This latter is one of the principal thoroughfares of the city, and had been verý much crowded during the whole day.”

Poe’s man of the crowd would never be found in suburban Atlanta. Not in Lawrenceville, not in Suwanee, not in Duluth.

I know this. I know in particular Gwinnett county, where one of my brothers lives.

And I think it makes a difference.

Last night, like the convalescent narrator of Poe’s story, I was in the fluxes and refluxes of a major city. That is, I was walking from the Republique metro stop down Rue de Temple. It was around 5 in the afternoon, when the winter evening is coming in. The advent of evening so early, so Decemberishly, causes seasonal disorder in some people I know – a sense of melancholy and futility. I am more resistant to the preliminaries of night coming so soon in what I consider to be, still, technically, the day. Autumn melancholy is something I enjoy, the way I enjoy tragedy – I have a gaudy sense of it. Here I am, another deathbound being, alas alack. When I was a kid, I used to enjoy throwing myself around, pretending I was shot, pretending I was dying, like a gangster at the end of a movie: “Is this the end of Rico?” Which is the Jimmy Cagney line – I think it is Jimmy Cagney.

So there I was in the hustle, planning on getting a few things from Monoprix, passing the beggar in front of the Monoprix door, refusing to give him anything and then feeling guilty about not giving anything and giving him a Euro and then finding my items in that giant gut. Along with so many others.

When I am in the crowd, I often think of how, during the day, in the Marais where I live, I must see at least a thousand people that I don’t know. My thoughts often move from the extent of this hustle to the facts as I know them of the billions, literally billions, of people in the world. The people I pass all have clothes, have shoes, have evidently eaten in the past day, smoke cigs or carry umbrellas, shine with finery or, like the beggar, have not washed their clothes in days. And I get a feeling, multiplying the numbers, that this can’t last. How can it last? It is so enormous, eight billion mouths, forever needing eight billion meals at least. The cars, the lights, the bikes, the “made”-ness, the waste, it hits you in the face. I am part of it, a meal-eater, a clothed man, with a backpack no less and a card to ride the metro.

One absorbs this, as a city dweller, without thinking too much. On an average day on Rue des Quatre-Fils, I see a pod of elementary school students being marched somewhere on the sidewalks, I see tottering old people, older even than me, waiting for the bus, I see policemen and the gendarmes, armed with machine guns, I see selfie taking tourists and, so often it is surprising, people setting up cameras to photograph models, I see people sitting in the chairs outside our neighborhood café, La Perle, or across the street in a space La Perle has more or less claimed, I see twenty-somethings from the U.S. talking excitedly to each other or French service workers booking it to work, and it builds inside of me.

When I was a child growing up on Nielsen court, in contrast, it was rare, very rare, that I saw someone on the street that I didn’t know. That person, I could guess, was either related to the families living in the ten houses whose yards abutted the street, or were friends. The dogs on the street had, of course, this same knowledge. The numerous cohort for me was the school, where, indeed, there were hundreds. My high school might have had as many as seven hundred pupils. But the world was, evidently, much less populated around me. This changed my perception of my own importance, for one thing – it is much easier to feel important in a small group than in a vast throng. And for another thing, the world looked imminently carry-able. Surely we can all eat, work, shit, make love, and sleep within the materials at hand.

When I go to visit my brother in Lawrenceville, this sense of a portable world comes back. His street would erupt with astonishment if someone set up a camera on it and filmed a model posing sexily or in impossible togs or whatever. Nobody is making selfies, here. The work done by Amazon delivery or UPS does introduce the stranger, but the stranger is suitably uniformed. The world comes in through cable, through the internet, but it doesn’t press fleshily against one.

“It was now fully night-fall, and a thick humid fog hung over the city, soon ending in a settled and heavy rain. This change of weather had an odd effect upon the crowd, the whole of which was at once put into new commotion, and overshadowed by a world of umbrellas. The waver, the jostle, and the hum increased in a tenfold degree.”

imperial dialectics

 When I was a twenty five year old sprout in NOLA, I read a book by a popular Scottish historian, Angus Calder, about the foundation of the British Empire : Revolutionary Empire. It rocked my world.

What made this book different from the usual procession of imperial icons that storyboard the history of the empire, breaking it down to a series of adventures, was Calder's total grasp of the ebbs and flows of the imperial world. For Calder, the colonial models have to be seen in terms of their first instantiation in the British isles themselves –in Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Raleigh, for instance, not only founded the first, shortlived colony on the Eastern seaboard, but he was also planning on colonizing Ireland. He drew up a frankly genocidal plan for getting rid of the Irish, which, while not unleashed (at least in that form) upon the Irish, certainly was unleashed, later, on the Iroquois, the Cherokee, the Algonquin, etc. Calder's point is that imperialism and the history of England, and by extension the Western countries, is not such that one can segregate the forces at work in the colony from those at work in the mother country. Instead, there was a constant exchange of models between the periphery and the center – the periphery being forged in the center, and vice versa. The experience of the "factory" in Jamaica -- the way in which sugar cane was cultivated, harvested and milled by slaves -- was imported to the factory models in England. The clearing of the Highlands, that fight against a tenacious, clan based mountain people, preludes struggles in India.
It was once said that the British acquired their empire in a “fit of absent-mindedness”. The absent-mindedness is really about the historiography, not the empire-building.
This same logic applies to the American empire. Foreign policy is not one of those forgiveables, which we give to the “progressive” presidents so that we can have our sub-standard social insurance. Foreign policy is a pretty accurate way of understanding the thinking of those in power when they do not have a strong democratic curb.
This is why Biden’s supplying Israel with the means to commit genocide casts such a light on the way the establishment Democrats think. This is why Hilary Clinton’s bizarrely conspiratorial remarks at the Israel Hayom summit (aka the Likud is great! Festival) which blamed the “perception” of genocide on Tik Tok are not the mere ravings of a has been, but are the very rhetoric of insider Dem politicos who are even now wondering how to pull off a victory while maintaining the Biden-Trump world order – and will likely succeed, if the past is any prologue.

Hondurus in the news

 1. It would be interesting and very depressing to trace the road to the pardon of Honduran ex-president Hernández back and back into the wilds of American foreign policy vis-a-vis Hondurus. Back to that time the Obama administration, with Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State, decided that the democratically elected president, Mel Zelaya., was way too lefty and dangerous. The U.S. did not plot the coup in which Zelaya was kidnapped by the military and put on a plane out of the country (unless secret docs emerge confirming the negative), but by Clinton's own account, she worked in the post coup situation to render the "question of Zelaya" moot.
When you help render a country helpless before its most ruthless and vile people - as the U.S. has done time after time in the Caribbean and Central America and Latin America - people will flee.
And where do they flee? Well, in the American sphere, they flee North.

After the coup, with the Military in charge and the Honduran murder rate doubling - from the highest in the world already - thousands of Honduran children came illegally to the U.S.

"In 2014 Clinton told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, “It may be safer [for the children to remain in the U.S.],” but “they should be sent back.”

"During the Feb. 11 Democratic debate in Milwaukee, Clinton said that sending the children back would “send a message.” In answer to a question by debate moderator Judy Woodruff of PBS, she said, “Those children needed to be processed appropriately, but we also had to send a message to families and communities in Central America not to send their children on this dangerous journey in the hands of smugglers.”

Sanders retorted, “Who are you sending a message to? These are children who are leaving countries and neighborhoods where their lives are at stake. That was the fact. I don’t think we use them to send a message. I think we welcome them into this country and do the best we can to help them get their lives together.”

Well, we know who lost that debate - Sanders. And a decade later, Trump pardoning one of the products of the rightwing coup, the drug dealing ex-Honduran president, helps locate precisely the problem - created by American foreign policy under a far right dictate since 1959, when Castro overthrew Batista.

2. The real story behind Hernandez's pardon, as social media tells us all, is that Hernandez was the president who approved the dream community, Epsteinville - or whatever - that was put in place by some libertarian corp merging the money and brilliance, what there is of it, of Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel. The project bought an island off the Honduran coast and land on the coast and set itself up as Prospera Honduras, a ZEDE - that is a Zone for Emplooyment and Economic Development. It was a ripoffy venture to escape taxes, laws allowing unions, the lot.

This happened under Trump. In Hondurus, a lefty president named Xiomara Castro was elected on the promise to abolish the ZEDE law. She did. And then Prospera sued. It sued for 10 billion dollars. It wanted the case to go before the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. The what? That's a court set up to make sure lefty govs don't nationalize any shit. Its a court enforced by trade treaty.

In the United States, Biden was elected. He appointed a new ambassador to Honduras, Laura Dugu. And she urged Honduras to remain "open for business". Biden stocked the state department with his people.The Honduran embassy under Biden was suddenly expanded. Here's a summary of the state of play by Foreign Affairs magazine:

"The U.S. ambassador to Honduras, Laura Dogu, who has made a habit of publicly criticizing the Honduran government on domestic policy, has also rushed to the rescue of the Próspera ZEDE. A few weeks after the U.S. Embassy tweeted about Dogu’s deputy meeting with Próspera investors in September 2022, the U.S. ambassador slammed the Castro government for wanting to “reduce or eliminate investment incentives.” “Without a doubt,” the ambassador said, the Castro government’s “actions are sending a clear message to companies that they should invest elsewhere, not in Honduras.” The U.S. State Department, in apparent disregard for Biden’s opposition to ISDS, has also voiced similar concerns, alleging that the Honduran government’s decision to repeal the ZEDE law “further contributed to uncertainty over the government’s commitment to investment protections required by international treaties."

3. The lesson here is not that all is awful and we should go back to watching TV - it is that the imperial policy of the United States is organized so that it runs through Democratic and Republican administrations to create the same result: profit for American corporations. The immigration "crisis" in the U.S. is one of the side-effects of a system that sucks the wealth out of a nation, produces huge social costs, and gains support from the U.S. government, military and all, to do these things. The people can, actually, stop this. 

But one has to know it is going on, first. 

the mafia bourgeoisie

 In the late 19th century, the nascent science of criminology had settled on two principles. One was that criminals, by definition, were degenerates – people from the margins with inherited vices. The other principle was that civil society was upheld by the bourgeois virtues. If you have degenerates, you must have a norm. The bourgeoisie was it. What Max Weber would later call the protestant ethic was theorized, by the classic liberal, as the material product of capitalism. Honesty, hard work, savings, were not simply norms, but functioned as the basis for a market-based economy.

This set of ideas were in the minds of the two young Italian sociologists who went out from Northern Italy, in 1876, to visit Southern Italy. Specifically Sicily, Italy’s “orient”. There was already a genre of stories about Sicily’s crimeridden society. The word mafia began to be used. And surely this was a form of banditism that had escaped from a neo-feudal society – a revolt by those below. The peasants.

The sociologists – Leopardo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino – have been aptly compared to Tocqueville and Beaumont by the French writer Jacques de Saint Victor in his study of “mafias” and democratic society. Sonnino is the lesser known of the duo – although he did go on to become president of Italy. Franchetti’s career, for a long time, was associated with his attempts to organize the colonization of Eritrea. But his part of the book they wrote - Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia – came into notice in the late 1980s, when Falcone, the judge who was at the center of the maxi-trials of the Mafia in 1986 and 1987, told people that Franchetti understood the mafia much better than anyone else since.

Franchetti came to a realization in Sicily that inverted the assumptions of classical liberalism. The role of the bourgeoisie in civil society, it turned out, was not integral to the formation of the bourgeoisie. In Sicily, the mafia, far from being a symptom of the revolt of the peasantry, was a tool of the Sicilian bourgeoisie. The had a thoroughly utilitarian attitude towards violence. The “industrialization of violence” and the systematic violation of civil society norms was upheld not by the degenerates and the marginals, but by those at the center, the richest and most powerful. And those richest and most powerful were not isolated – instead, they were plugged in to the system of worldwide trade in the most advanced and exemplary fashion.

In an article in Droit (2019), Saint Victor condensed his conclusions, a la Franchetti, about the “dark face” of globalization.

Since the end of the 1990s, and especially since the crisis of 2008, laws have followed laws that attempt to trace dirty money from all the trafficing (drugs, arms, human beings, etc.) and the most powerful mafias have seemed to prefer « licit affairs » (BTP, the health system, the ecological sector etc.) at least on paper (mafia pulita)… The historian of the Camorra, Francesco Barbagallo, has stated that the mafia question is passing into the stage where it becomes « an essential part of the history of power» ; and it is under this title that it should retain the attention of legal historians. In a recent essay, the general commissioner Jean-François Gayraud, a specialist of financial crime, confirmed that evolution, noting that organized crime can no longer be analyzed in terms of social marginality, but as a central element of the black facet of globalisation, with the sociology of contemporary elites being found to be amply transformed. We see, in France as elsewhere, the establishment of real bourgeois criminality. Thus, from this meeting of scrupulous elites and mafias becoming normalized, there appears, little by little, the new figure of the ambiguous actor of globalization, which Italian criminologist call the « mafia-esque bourgeoisie ».

Myself, I think one of the side effects – of, from a sociological perspective, the main effect – of the release of Epstein materials is to clarify the extent and temper of the mafia-esque bourgeoisie. We’ve all been spectators of the open corruption of the Trump regime. We were all spectators, under Biden, of the open corruption of the system of justice, which held back from what would formerly be judicially organized investigations and prosecutions, notably of Trump and of the Supreme Court Justices found taking bribes. Biden’s clan-like pardons that ended his regime were of a piece with what went before. And of course this built on the refusal, under Obama, to prosecute torturers, banksters, and in the massive system of mortgage fraud. It is not surprising that the same engineers of impunity under Obama were very much friends of Jeffrey Epstein. That friendliness and its tone, in email after email, shows how the culture of the criminal bourgeoisie regards itself. Gone, gone is the Protestant ethic – except for the hard work part. That hard work, however, is in service to the dark side of Globalisation. Work and perks – a recipe that is far from the formulas of Horatio Alger or the various business self help books that still find a massive readership.

The seven habits of highly corrupt people. This is where we are.

all that is old is new again: on Guy Davenport's The symbol of the archaic

 

One of the great essays in my life is Guy Davenport’s The Symbol of the Archaic, which appeared in the Georgia Review in 1974. I’m not sure when I read it – perhaps back in my high school days.

Essays are not given enough credit. We think of them as lesser creatures, where the great beasts are poems and novels. Myself, I grant the utility of these categories without taking them too seriously. Although The Symbol of the Archaic is not one of Pound’s Cantos, it definitely takes from the Cantos the traveling technique, that of a movie camera thrust among personal and cultural bric-a-brac, whose speed – the movie camera’s – is adjusted to a personal sensibility recognizing in the very instant of demonstration the connections that may or may not be in operation in some real history, some real slice of multitudinous life. And isn’t this what we all dream of?

The content of Davenport’s essay, a theme to which he returns again and again, is the overlap of the modern (which encompasses a certain 18^th century and goes right up to the non-sequitorial magisterial which came out of Olson’s typewriter at the end of his life) and the archaic, that which is lost in deep time. The inscrutable rubbish and signs left by paleolithic hominids.

This is how Davenport begins:

"Four years ago there was discovered near Sarlat in the Dordogne the rib of an ox on which some hunter had engraved with a flint burin seventy lines depicting we know not what: some god, some animal schematically drawn, a map, the turning of the seasons, the mensurations of the moon."

The ox rib and its inscrutable scribble helps Davenport move on to the whole ephemeral nature of civilization (and, indeed, the ephemeral nature of its discontents), and the way the poets have taken it up, and the impossible nostalgia for what was lost. Davenport was, politically, a standard American liberal, but culturally, he was a conservative of the Hugh Kenner variety.  Thus, the wrecks of what was lost imply the wreckers, and we among them. It is a strain of political impossibilism hymned by John Ruskin in the great proto-Canto, Fors Clavigera, and it leads to a certain melancholy which is ultimately foreign to the American writer, who are the spawn of discovery – that adventurer’s justification, eventually, for every bushwacking and seizure.

Modernism, when Davenport wrote this essay, was still exciting. For me, an awkward sixteen year old in Clarkston, Georgia, modernism looked like a way out of suburban flatheadedness. I little knew that it had given up the ghost to – whatever eclectic thing we have had since. I am rather happy that, at the moment in all the arts, there is a return to modernism – from the margins, from the black dada of Adam Pendleton.

I think Davenport captures something that was silently programmatic in modernism, which was its invention of the pre-historic, the archaic:

“If we say, as we can, that the archaic is one of the great inventions of the twentieth century, we mean that as the first European renaissance  looked back to Hellenistic Rome for a range of models and symbols, the twentieth century has looked back to a deeper past in which it has imagined it sees the very beginnings of tion. The Laocoon was Michaelangelo's touchstone; the red-stone kourus from Sounion was Picasso’s.”

Here – as I was dreaming up this little essayistic ditty – I want to jump to a little remarked, but remarkable, piece of reportage by the Communist Egon Erwin Kisch that is included in his Gesammelte Werke 5: Das Kriminalkabinett von Lyon (The criminological cabinet of curiosities in Lyon). Which contains, surprisingly enough, a superposition of the archaic (stones with markings, rather like those of the ox-bone) and the most modern (fingerprints). And which I think is just a beautiful essay. Yesterday I put up an image from that piece. It shows a burglar with a jimmy in one hand and a revolver in the other. The burglar, through some complicated heist slapstick, fell into a pile of sand, leaving this impression, which was latter captured by pouring plaster of paris in the indentation in the sand, which was later used in the court case against the burglar.

But I think I’ll do  this later.