Business journalism sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks. Oh, and it sucks some more after that

 

In Matthew Josephson’s amusing history, The Robber Barons, there is a nice story about the young J.P. Morgan. After having done what any man on the move would do in 1861 – paying a substitute to fight for him in the Union army – Young Morgan looked about him for opportunities. One of the knocked on his door, in the person of Simon Stevens. Stevens had stumbled onto a deal, by which he could buy 5,000 Hall carbines and sell them to the Union Army of the West, with which he had a contract. The beauty of the deal was that the carbines had been rejected by the government in Washington on account of the fact that they were defective – when used, they tended to explode, taking the thumb of the shooting soldier with them. “The quartermaster at Washington sold them for $3.50 apiece. “The government had sold one day for $17,486 arms which it had agreed the day before to purchase for $109,912,” comments the historian Gustavus Myers. That young Morgan knew of this situation is plain from the fact that after repudiation of the consignment of guns by General Fremont’s division, he bluntly presented his claim not for the money he had advanced, but for all of $58,175, half of the shipment having been already paid for in good faith.”

Thus began the Morgan tradition of advancing money for products that tend to blow up in the users hands. Evolution and human kindness being what it is, the products are now called credit swaps or meme stocks. But the object is always the same: a quick buck, made with the poker face of propriety, and the compliance of a corrupt government.

Matthew Josephson and, for that matter, Gustavus Meyers, are dead. And so is critical business journalism. Journalism is always a limbo thing, half information, half huckstering. Writing is sales: even when God pitched in, writing on those tablets, he was selling his line: You shall have no other Gods before me. But in biz journalism, you reach the lowest of all sales methods, the bucket shop optimism that persuades the easily persuaded that they are geniuses. Thus you get the inevitable Cramer, popping up like a bad penny, extolling tariffs because they will “bring back small town America”, which I guess is his way of saying gee, Jim Crow was the best thing! And the avalanche is reported by a he said she said approach that is laughable, from suits who are all about how there’s a bright line for certain companies. Those companies, those wonderful domestic manufacturies and small town abattoir, have to sell their products. And guess what? In the domestic sphere, which has depended on cheap for the past fifty years, that demand side does not just magically shift to higher priced goods – it shifts, rather, into unemployment and peeps sleeping in their expensive used cars.

I have to laugh about this weeks rise and fall story: Newsmax. Newsmax is an emblem of the American upper crust in full decay mode. A purveyor of far right fairy tales for the geriatric and dyspeptic, it faces a billion dollar lawsuit from Dominion and the fact that it lost money, it lost fucking money last year. So it IPOs at ten, and in a day it is at 200 or something. A three day blast, and now I believe it is down to fifty and will continue to circle the toilet as it goes on losing money.

But business journalists don’t care. They are not trustworthy. They will not give you an analysis worth having – but will continue to spray their readers with Axe and bad breath until they both keel over. Unearned capital is sweet, but when it ceases to be sweet, it becomes a curse on the land.

Hunting scenes

 

1.

In the Carnavalet, the Museum in Paris dedicated to Paris, there is a room full of old enseignes – painted signs of wood or sheet metal which were put outside of wine shops, taverns, bakeries, butchers, etc. These painted signs were not only simply pictures of wine or bread or meat, or simple cutouts of medal, to signify what was being sold, but combined the indexical with the emblematic, or  totemic or whimsical. The Hotel du Grand Cerf shows a metal cutout of a great buck deer, but also a reclining, draped woman at the deer’s feet,  whom the deer looks about to kiss. Or a wooden bas-relief of a cat,  hung over a café named the Black Cat.

In the spirit of the enseigne, I’d like to hang over this little essay (if that is what this melody is) a painting from 1565.  Let’s not name it – you know it, and you know the artist. Alistair Fowlie provides a good description of it: in the foreground, “three hunters and a dozen dogs” trudge through the snow downhill to a village. To the left, there is a junky inn of some sort with a broken sign, and what looks like a fire, over which a pig or a bore is being cooked.

Fowlie names the dogs – using curious hunterly lingo: “three smooth-haired grayhounds (fast gazehounds for hare or deer or fox); one shaggy greyhound or lurcher (for hare or rabbit); four brown limers or bloodhounds with pendulous ears (one of them defecating); and several smaller dogs.”

Fowlie notices that none of the hunters are in livery. They are, in other words, probably not members of some noble’s house, not servants, but villagers.  This is the Low Countries, not France or Spain, and hunting is not a privilege, by law, of the aristocracy. Ortega y Gasset, in his Meditations on Hunting, written in Lisbon in 1942, laments – with his conservative nostalgia, his distaste for the age of the masses – the decline of the privilege of hunting, which is “one of the characteristic privileges of the powerful”.  Ortega imagines that this privilege extends back to the Neolithic era. In modernity, the hunting privilege has aroused powerful envy: “ One of the causes of the French Revolution was the irritation the country people felt because they were not allowed to hunt, and consequently one of the first privileges which the nobles were obliged to abandon was this one. In all revolutions, the first thing that the “people” have done was to jump over the fences of the preserves or to tear them down…” Ortega may be on to something, at least as far as the painting we are looking at is concerned, since the hunters and the dogs only occupy the bottom third of the painting. Over the snowing hill and far away is a landscape with a frozen pond upon which people are skating, and houses with snow laden rooves within which one feels, instinctively, that people are gathered around the hearth. The world belongs to the season, and the season is not one for occupations. As Ortega points out, occupations, jobs, are painful, and the majority of mankind is immersed in them.

“So here is the human being suspended between two conflicting repertories of occupations: the laborious and the pleasing. It is moving and very sad to see how the two struggle in each individual. Work robs us of time to be happy, and pleasure gnaws away as much as possible at the time claimed by work. As soon as man discover a chink or crack in the mesh of his work he escapes through it to the exercise of more enjoyable activities.”

Though our hunters are burdened down with the prey they have caught, though the afternoon is falling and the snow is deep, one feels like they have had a happy expedition in the woods and fields. They have killed animals, and are taking them back to the village, while children play a form of hockey on the pond far below them.

2

A theory of hunting.

In the Celestial Hunter, Roberto Calasso considered hunting myths – starting with a close reading of  Jason and the Argonauts – to pull together the thematic structures in our ever increasing humanization (which, by dialectical cunning, pulls us ever closer to our total de-humanization), with at its center the idea and practice of sacrifice. Hunting is an essential moment in this continuum.

“For a long time, animals, perplexed, observed men. They perceived that something changed. Men were no longer animals among the numerous animals that predators took down and devoured, in the savanna and in the caves. Now, even men took down and devoured. But not with their naked hands. They always used an extra-human object : stones, spears, pikes. And they finished by using something even stranger : they struck at a distance, with obsidian points that penetrated the skin. They were the only animal that struck from afar. When men advanced, in the brush or in the forest, one sense a particular odor, something disagreeable and alarming. These were the hunters.”

For Calasso, this moment – the moment of killing from afar – was the crucial but unspoken event that transformed man the animal into man the human.  This was the pre-sacrificial moment in the background of all sacrificial moments.

“The detachment vis-avis the animal was the major event of history. Every other event refers to this. No story subsists of what took place. But the innumerable stories which have been transmitted presuppose this story which has not be transmitted down to us and which perhaps has never been told. Before even being a ritual, this was what preceded all rituals, and it is what all rituals allude to.”

Another Italian thinker, Carlo Ginzburg, has hypothesized that the hunter’s art preceded and influenced the art of writing. In his long, manifesto like essay, Clues, Ginzburg writes:

“Man has been a hunter for thousands of years. In the course of countless chases he learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of his invisible prey from tracks on the ground, broken branches, excrement, tufts of hair, entangled feathers, stagnating odors. He learned to sniff out, record, interpret, and classify such infinitesimal traces as trails of spittle. He learned how to execute complex mental operations with lightning speed, in the depth of a' forest or in a prairie with its hidden dangers. This rich storehouse of knowledge has been passed down by hunters over the generations. In the absence of verbal documentation to supplement rock paintings and artifacts, we can turn to folklore, which transmits an echo, though dim and distorted, of the knowledge accumulated by those remote hunters.

An oriental fable that circulated among Kirghiz, Tartars, Jews, Turks, and others relates the story of three brothers who meet a man who has lost a camel or, in variant versions, a horse.U They describe it for him without hesitation: it is white, blinded in one eye, and carries two goat-skins on its back, one full of wine, the other of oil. Then they have seen it? No, they have not. So they are accused of stealing and brought to trial. For the brothers, this is a moment of triumph: they demonstrate in a flash how, by means of myriad small clues, they could reconstruct the appearance of an animal on which they have never laid eyes.”

There’s a relationship between Calasso’s notion of the animal that attacks from afar and Ginzburg of the invisible animal that is tracked by its traces – a venatic semiotics.

Perhaps the actual idea of narration (as distinct from charms, exorcisms, or invocation) may have originated in a hunting society, relating the experience of deciphering tracks. This obviously undemonstrable hypothesis nevertheless seems to be reinforced by the fact that the rhetorical figures on which the language of venatic deduction still rests today - the part in relation to the whole, the effect in relation to the cause - are traceable to the narrative axis of metonymy, with the rigorous exclusion of metaphor.”

Ginzburg’s essay is an attempt to account for a change in historical and philosophical biases in modernity – or rather, in the post WWII period, with the decline into which the grand narrative has fallen – by pointing to the emergence of the clue not only in detective fiction and fact, but in the way historians have worked in excavating smaller scenes, micro-histories.

3.

A theory of the person

Sergio Dalla Bernardina, a professor of anthropology in France, has devoted his studies to the interface between the animal and the human. As an anthropologist, of course, he has to operate with angelic quotation marks invisibly dancing above his enabling categories, and I will too, endowing those two terms with a vague generality.

He is particularly interested in hunting, or in the way animals become subject to killing by humans. Mostly, these animals are four footed and give suck to their young – not for Dalla Bernadina the hecatombs of roaches that are the ordinary casualties on an exterminator’s daily work.

To that end, he’s done field work with hunters in Europe: hunters of chamois in the alps of Northern Italy, hunters of bore and foxes in Corsica and Spain. Etc.

There is a story about the interface between humans and animals. In the early modern era, the old kinship that was felt between man and beast gave way to the clockwork beast, the mere carrier of our goods and services. The cows in the factory, slaughtered on the assembly line, are the great image of the modern ethos.

However, dalla Bernardina has come to a curiously paradoxical conclusion about the interface between man and beast even in modern times, and even among modern hunters, which is that hunted animals are endowed by hunters (and some animals, dogs and cats for instance), with personhood by humans.

It would seem that personhood would endow animals with rights. However, that is a very theoretical point of view, a very liberal and cushioned point of view. In history up to this very moment, the personhood of persons has not ever prevented them from being killed by other humans. The wars, murders, execution and general mayhem which weaves a ghastly course through the human to human interface gives us, anthropologically, a different sense of personhood than this ghostly substance with a right to a lawyer and one call. The criminal, the traitor, the soldier enemy, or even the person in the way is violated by a symbolically rich interaction that founds personhood on responsibility and fault. We kill them, and in our eyes, to relieve, perhaps, our own guilt, we make them responsible for their own deaths. They did the wrong things, these killed: were born to the wrong people, fought on the wrong side, were in the wrong place, speeded and didn’t pull over and so on.

Responsibility is hung around your neck like the albatross around the Ancient Mariner’s.

God save thee, ancient Mariner!

From the fiends, that plague thee thus!

 Why look'st thou so?'— 'With my crossbow

 I shot the Albatross.

In dalla Bernardina’s great essay, A person not altogether like the others: the animal and its status, Bernardina’s describes the mise-en-scene of the Ainu bear ceremony, taken from Arlette Leroi-Gourhan’s field work. Every year a small bear cub is captured. The whole village than treats this cub with extraordinary kindness and generosity, feeding it, petting it, pampering it like a child. The village “officially” treats it as a person, and even a privileged person.

Then comes the feast day. The bear is taken on a tour around the village, and everyone gently explains the festival, which is to be transmitted, spiritually, to the whole tribe of bears after his death. This is necessary so that the bears will be happy to come to the persons who have treated them so nicely, and not to be angry and destroy the huts of the village. So much the ethnologist Leroi-Gourhan understood. But then comes the puzzling part: “for a reason that we could not grasp, but which, perhaps, has the purpose, as in the corridas, to fatigue the animal, everyone begins to mistreat it, to anger it, pulling it on all sides, pricking it with branches and striking it with large leafy bamboo shoots. At last it is lead to the square of the village and attached to a stake. Everyone assembles. Then the chief of the ceremony takes his bow and shoots the first arrow. Officially, that is considered to kill it. Then all the men target it with their arrows. Nearby, they lay down two big logs on the ground. Then they lead the dying or dead bear to the logs and break its neck. A piece of wood is introduced into its mouth and the spoils are transported before the village’s palisade. The women clamor their indignation and hit the men for their cruelty, the older ones weep, but, soon, the young people begin to dance.”

Dalla Bernardina relates this ceremony to the testimony of contemporary hunters in Europe, who almost always eventually use “person” type words to describe the animals they hunt. The animals, it turns out, are “clever”, “malign”, “tricky” – they are, in the narratives of the hunters, responsible, in part, for their own killing. It is only when they are dead that they are wholly animal, wholly separate from the realm of beings to which they hunters themselves belong. There is, thus, an identification between the hunter and the prey that seems to be much different from what one would expect in a Cartesian culture, or a culture in which the animal was merely a machine, a clockwork extravagance, a rightless object.

Dalla Bernardina rightly contextualizes his theory with the class notion that the poor, the worker, the peasant are inherently cruel, and thus treat the animal cruelly. This notion traverses the entire Western discourse on cruelty to animals  - a discourse that has increased as the mechanization of slaughter has created a gap between the people who eat the meat of the killed animal and the people who raised the animal, shipped the animal to the abattoir, slaughtered the animal. From the perspective of those who, like me, get their bacon wrapped in plastic in a grocery store, the cruelty practiced on, say, pigs, which I know about from Charlotte’s Web and Wodehouse Blandings novels can be the subject both of my horror and of my indifference at the same time. Killing from afar is not only a structure, but a logic.

4.

The mice.

I was sitting on the sofa four months ago when my eye caught something. A certain shadow, a grayness. I look up and nothing is there, but I sensed something.

I remember years ago, before the apartment was remodeled, having the same feeling. Of something being there.

Of course, in a couple of days I saw it. The mouse. Rushing along the baseboard at a good clip. And always being able to escape almost magically by going through the crack between the floor and a storage drawer mounted just above the floor.

And so it began. The mouse droppings in the bathroom. Under the refrigerator. The sightings. Going to the bathroom at night and thinking, sleepily, of a mouse running over your toes.

At first I tried clove oil. Bought a sprayer with that dispensed a scent that was supposedly repulsive to rodents. And this would work for a day, or two, but then one of use would see it again.

Then the snap traps. Which I put under the sink, under the refrigerator. Which snapped on me as I set them up. Fuck!

And nothing. Never worked. I had the feeling that it wouldn’t work. I knew it wouldn’t work.

So the glue traps. The awful glue trap.

One evening, we were going out. To a dinner with some friends. We were talking, coordinating. I look over and where I set the glue trap, there it was. A mouse. Caught. On its side.

This was the first one. Now the glue traps folded over. When you opened them out, like a book, and spread them on the floor, the mouse would, theoretically, mostly be caught on one leaf or another. The reason for this was not just that you could close and store the traps without getting glue on yourself. The reason was what I now had to do. Because I was not going to leave the mouse, seemingly stunned, in the glue. So I put one leaf over the other and stomped, thus crushing the mouse.

A little mouse blood drop on the floor.

And so it happened. Three more times. I felt absolutely dirty the first time. I felt a little less the second. I still felt dirty, though. Fold over, stomp.

Poor mice. But I felt it was not my fault. I felt it was their fault. I felt that they were invading my space, and that I would have left them alone if we met “in nature”.

We closed up the egress from the outside, we tracked down where they were coming from. I think, at least. Have not seen one in a month. Nor felt one. Cause you begin to feel mice in a relatively small apartment.

It is not my fault.

 

Hunting scenes 2

Following

There’s a relationship between Calasso’s notion of the animal that attacks from afar and Carlo Ginzburg’s of the invisible animal that is tracked by its traces – a venatic semiotics.

So much depends upon that almost invisible concept of “following”. So much: metaphysics, history, writing…

Which  brings me to a familiar story. A man tells this tale in a poem: in a chariot balanced on bronze eight spoked wheels, with an iron axle, pulled by wise horses and led by celestial maidens, he comes to the portal of night and day and is there greeted by a goddess who cries out to him that he has left the beaten track of men.

The goddess then proceeds to tell him a cosmic secret. There are two ‘routes’ of inquiry: that of what is, and that of what is not.

Philosophers, enraptured by what is and what is not, have neglected the question that some more naïve inhabitant of roads, ways, trails, streets, pistes, sentiers, Wege, some vagabond, some pour lost soul, might ask – say a girl wearing a red hood, entering a forest and coming to two trails to her grandmother’s house. That question is – how is being, or non being, like a road? Or, if inquiry and being are so related as the chariot wheel is to the track – how is inquiry a road? Why this image?

Who leads the inquiry? I imagine this question coming from the girl, as she strips off the hood and throws it into the fire, and strips off her socks and throws them into the fire, and strips off her chemise and throws it into the fire, a magic fire that consumes instantly and ashlessly, and all the undergarments, strip he tells her, and her staring at the being on the bed of whom she has always had a presentiment. The being who wants to see all of her and never will, there will never be enough seeing, just as she has remarked on enough of him, seen him – his teeth, his ears, his hairiness. This couple, made of girl and wolf, sex and hunger. Both know trails, tracks, paths. One will return, one will not. Both know the pins and needles. One is the route of what is, one is the route of what is not and cannot be. Beware of the second route.

Not that this couple would have been in any position to read the fragments of Parmenides, which were first gathered together again – all the extant verses - in the West by G.G. Fuelleborn in 1795.

In Calasso’s telling of the event/non-event of the arrow, the thrown spear, the first killing at a distance, he contrasts metonomy – the event described – and metaphor – the event modelled, analogized. For the arrow is the first human transcendent, opening up a world of thrown things, from light to vision itself. The world as projection.

“There are two original sins for Homo : separation and imitation. Separation takes place when Homo decides to oppose itself to the zoological continuum, in taking certain animals into its service and considering others as a material potentially useful for it own ends. Imitation is when Homo approximates, in his behavior, the predators. Once the passage to predation is accomplished, Homo does not know how to treat this new part of its nature. It chooses to circumscribe it in its literal signification and extend it as a metaphor. It invents hunting as a non-indispensable activity, a gratuitous one. It was the first art for the sake of art.”

To follow – this is rooted in the animal world of tracks, flights, lines of attack and retreat. Yet, for something so fundamental, it is also so hidden. It is about hiding and seeking, it is the business of the child, the girl going into the forest and choosing the trail to follow to grandma’s house. Or Hercules at the crossroads, that swollen boy at his twelve appointed tasks.

2.

Rane Willerslev’s did his field work among the Yukaghirs, a small tribe in Siberia whose social system relies upon hunting – hence the name of his book, Soul Hunting. Willerslev was a participant-observer – he joined the hunting parties and, according to his own account, became pretty good at it, good enough to find sedentary life, life in the village, tedious:

“Like most other hunters, I found the monotony of life in the village almost intolerable. In addition, the young village women, with their elegant leather boots and Russian-style clothes, seemed alien to me. When I was not interviewing teachers, administrators, and retired people, I killed time by hitting the bottle with the other hunters. It was only when Akulina and Gregory Shalugin, an elderly Yukaghir couple with whom I had developed a particularly warm friendship, dragged me along to the forest that my condition improved. From that point on, however, I avoided village life as much as I could and spent the rest of my time in the field with Spiridon’s group and other groups of hunters in the forest.”

Willerslev frames his notion of the Yukaghir sense of the world in terms of the mimetic agent: to follow a track is, in some sense, to mimic the being that made the track. Following here is a common but unspoken skill of both the hunter and the prey, for the prey that makes the track is also following some mimetic goal: escape, food, sleep, sex, birth, play.

In this sense, the hunter’s spirit lies over all writing, all incisions or marks on surfaces. To write is to follow. And the time of following is a double time, divided between going forward in the future and knowing that going forward is what constitutes the past – that past inhabited by beings that are going forward on one’s track, that are tracking one.

A sunday meditation on balls

 

There is a tremendous literature about sports in the 20th and 21st century, but really little about the ball. The ball itself. Yet the ball is fascinating. The hardness, the compression of the racket ball balls is satisfying, but I can’t get myself into one of those balls. By contrast, that is what I spent my time trying to do between 11 and 21, playing tennis. I was a steady player, but mediocre. I was paired with another such player on the high school team – not for me the thrill of starting as a single. On the other hand, I was good enough that I could sometimes defeat our single player – not the Swedish ringer, but my buddy, W. – in a match. In tennis, sometimes you have a growth spurt – you play above the level of your play, you get it in a new way, the ball is your second self. But I could never climb to that level and stay there. Not enough dedication. Even so, I knew that when I played well, it was about the ball. The racket, the beautiful racket, followed, obeyed, it was a part of you, but it wasn’t idiosyncratic, it didn’t have a free will, it wasn’t a ball.

It is odd that economists don’t consider the ball. All the activity, the immense labor, that is woven around balls. Because why? Because you want to win, and to win means doing your thing with the ball, which is the thing – the object and the symbol – between you and your opponent.

Balls have evidently been around a long time, but they don’t get the study that, say, coins do. They should, though. Take, for instance, the American football. That ball is grotesque. It is less ball than projectile. If Adorno had had a sportif bone in his flabby kritikdrenched body, he would have recognized the intimacy between the football and Hiroshima. In fact, football is a tremendously interesting game, but it is interesting the way the war in the Pacific, circa 1941-1945, is more interesting than the Thirty years war.

On the other hand, you have the baseball, which is all Renaissance, a thing of beauty that would have been recognized by Alberti or by da Vinci. The stitching and the whiteness and the generally regal bearing of that ball, the great materials it is made of, mystically color the entire game.

When I was a kid, someone – I think Uncle Harry – gave me a baseball on which was inscribed the names of the Baltimore Oriole players from the great 1966 team. Boog Powell, Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson, etc. Looking back, this was probably a manufactured thing, with those signatures. But the thing about the thing is: we move here from pragmatics to memorabilia. From the sphere of use to the sphere of fetishism. And this has downward effects on our way of thinking of Plato’s heaven of ideas. Myself, I think  we cannot get rid of essences in philosophy, but we find them right before our nose rather than beyond the starry sky. When we try to pluck one and only one particular from the crowd of essences, we pluck it out of one field of use. A wonderful thing about the baseball in Don Delillo’s Underground is that it is literally plucked, or caught, by someone seated in the Dodger’s stadium. It is a magic trick – as all catching of a baseball has a certain magic aura about it. From the essence to the particular – this is the route of humanism as well as magic.

Yet even so – there is the ball – not the individual balls. Oddly, all of these balls are inter-substitutable. One doesn’t play a ball game with the individual ball in mind. There are, of course, balls that are fetishistically claimed – bowling balls, for instance. But mostly the balls are disposable in their very essence. You might try to live on the tennis ball during the game, you might try to clear your mind of everything else, but in the end, you have no affection for the ball qua that particular ball.

…

Children’s encyclopedia’s retail glorious myths about the invention of fire, or of the wheel, or the pully, or bronze – but they never both to imagine the invention of the ball. The ball, in fact, seems part of nature. A pebble, a nut. Yet the ball is surely the very symbol of culture – it is the very symbol of the symbol. In itself, it is nothing. But in play, it becomes more than itself. It starts to mean. It is Victor Turner’s symbolic object, and as such, it defines spaces and limits. It creates a passage, traversing a space that is charged with meaning. But unlike those objects – human beings – who also go through passages, the ball can mean but it can’t express. This, of course, brings us back to the afore mentioned fact that balls do not earn our affection, as say a piece of furniture, a house, a car do. A ball is always being subsumed into the great collective of balls.

…

And that’s it for the Sunday meditation on balls. 

Liner notes by Karen Chamisso

 

There was one song he played I could really feel – Joni Mitchell

 

Little Sheba’s in the under-verse spotlight

Lapdancing for sugar and feels

And there’s this one white American heiress

blown westward in platinum and heels

 

This one white American heiress

Leaving selfies in Vegas and Paris

 

Yes, race, the brunt and burden of it

Is the putty and soul of the American song

And some have to make money working

While others in family trees belong 

 

And there’s this one white American heiress

Leaving selfies in Vegas and Paris

 

The angels ride the browning needles

That are shedding from Grandma’s  Christmas tree

Which is where the lynch rioters ended up

With the usual hot tar and bigotry

 

And that was so long ago

That it might be this morning’s penitentiary

In a number of small towns dying

Save for that old-time punitive luxury

 

Which will never reach out for one white American heiress

As she leaves selfies in Vegas and Paris

Causes and resentments

 

 

What difference does cause make?

The Egyptians and Eastern Mediterranean cultures thought that thinking went on in the heart. There was strong evidence for this: the heart for instance spoke – it beat. Whereas for the Egyptians, nothing came out of the brain exactly.

The Greeks strongly believed, for the most part, in the extramission theory of vision – that miniscule rays issue from the eyes, which is how we see. In a sense, vision is touch – the rays touch the things seen. Even Leonardo da Vinci implies an extramissionist belief in his notebooks. In fact, as was shown in a widely circulated 2002 article by Winer, Cottrell, Gregg, et al., a survey of adult Americans finds that large numbers of adults, among whom are college students, still think something shoots out of the eye that “causes” vision.  When shown a three models of vision, one showing “rays” represented as dotted lines going out of the eye, one showing photons “entering the eye” and one mixing the photons entering the eye with the rays coming out of the eye, from 41 to 60 percent of the adults surveyed preferred the last choice. I’m not sure however if the adults really believed this or thought that if given three choices, one of which mixes up the first two choices, the safest bet is the half of one, half of the other choice. The last refuge of the student who didn’t have time to study the subject.

Until the 17^th century, the majority of physicians in the “Western” world believed that the passions were the result of various humors, usually put at four: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. The animal spirits were the middle men, so to speak, of the humors. Very subtle entities, the animal spirits were produced by the blood in the heart.

We – by which I mean myself and Occidental physicians and most of their patients – no longer believe any of these “cause” stories. By believe I mean that it doesn’t cross your doctors mind to check and see if some subtle vapor formed in the heart is picking up too much black bile, thus causing you to be depressed.

However, if the extreme change in the belief in causes – causes on an intimate scale, causes that helped one define one’s very self, down to thinking thoughts about the very self and feeling “feels” about the self – hasn’t caused any meta-change in the self’s concept of itself, hasn’t a place, so to speak, in the intellectual history of our ordinary life – is this proof that, basically, we don’t have any feelings about cause?

I ask this question because it isn’t often asked by historians. That is, not in this way. One traces the “progress” of science, but one doesn’t ask what effect that progress has on the Da-sein in question.

2.

I admire Carlo Ginzburg for being one of the historians who admits the existence of other disciplines into his historical method – but it astonishes me that he is one of the few who does so. In the anthropology of emotions, there has long been a dialogue over the study of how different cultures express emotions. But this dialogue has to do with the Other – with the “non-Western” peoples who, in the colonialist calendar, are primitive, live in another age – say the stone age – from our hip to the plastic Westerners.

I have long thought – it was the thought that drove my interest in the way happiness became a total social fact in modernity – that we should look to these anthropologists in order to understand the development of that modernity in places like France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc.

For instance: Robert I. Levy, in an essay entitled Emotions, Knowing and Culture [1984], proposed two axes for analyzing emotions on the sense making level – that is, not as private experiences, but as experiences that enter into the public domain. On the one hand, he speaks of hyercognition – “Hypercognition involves a kind of shaping, simplifying, selecting, and standardizing, a familiar function of cultural symbols and forms. It involves a kind of making “ordinary” of private understandings.” In contrast to that stands hypocognition – “Hypocognition forces the (first order) understanding into some private mode.” Citing his own work on “sadness” among Tahitians (Levy claims that, while there are words for severe grief and lamentation, there are “no unambiguous terms that represent the concepts of sadness, longing, or loneliness… People would name their condition, where I supposed that [the body signs and] the context called for “sadness” or “depression”, as “feeling troubled” pe’ape’a, the generic term for disturbances, either internal or external;…”) Levy writes that these are some “underschematized emotional domains”, and that these are hypocognized. “One of the consequences of hypocognition is that the felt disturbance, the “troubled feelings,” can be interpreted both by the one who experiences them and by others around him as something other than ‘emotion’. Thus, the troubled feelings that persist too long after the death of a loved one or those that occur after some loss that Tahitian ideology holds to be trivial and easily replaceable are in the village often interpreted as illness or as the harmful effects of a spirit.”

Other anthropologists have named this form of emotional expression “situated”.

Levy’s idea has not, unfortunately, been taken up by intellectual historians. Perhaps this is because one thinks, still, of emotion as being a very intimate and incommunicable state of feeling, which, though perhaps aroused by an external incident, is wholly enveloped within the individual self, much as a tooth ache is felt by the possessor of the tooth and not by the dentist who pulls it. But the affections are not spontaneously invented within us, even if they are, of course, neurologically guided. In fact, one would expect that the kind of epistemic and social ruptures that are thought to constitute the great transformation within the Occident – defined as capitalism, or the industrial or scientific revolution, or the emergence of new encompassing institutions – should present situations that evoke feelings that are ‘underschematized’.

The feeling of cause, for instance, seems underschematized. And yet, much of our schooling is all about schematizing our sense of cause. And in so doing, it alienates us from a sort of idiot sense – a private, but shared, popular sense – of cause.

It is harsh, schooling. The accumulated social feeling about teachers often comes out in reactionary times when the whole process, the learning that one is entirely wrong about almost everything, is revenged.

It is an oddity of the work of Foucault, and of his followers, that though Foucault was very clear about the kind of epistemic rupture that he dates, approximately, to the late 18th and early 19th century, the rupture is not witnessed. On his account, it happens in a sense without any contemporary realizing it. I call this odd in that Foucault thought that he, on the contrary, could very well recognize the ‘end of man’ and the shifts that signaled another epistemic rupture. If we suppose that such things could be witnessed, perhaps the witnesses would struggle with hypo-cognition – perhaps they would not be able to interpret their feelings about what they witnessed, about the new thoughts they thought. Suppose, suppose.

 

 

 

 

 

The sidelined "lefty"

 It is the fate of the people of “lefty” opinions, such as myself, with no particular organizational skills but a buncha thought out and even written down notions, to feel that we generally sit on the sidelines of history. Lefties, during most of the twentieth century, felt like actors, while lefties in the 21st century, even under the best of circumstances, feel like responders. The accidents pile up and the responders can merely sort through the bloody mass of victims – usually at a safe distance. There they are, in the photographs, under this or that bombed building. Here we are. Hi.

As an amateur and mere spectator, I fall under Blake’s dictum, I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s. During the regnum of SuperBush, the Vulcan spector lauded between 2001 and 2007 for having stupidly allowed 19 hijackers to destroy the WTC and using that springboard as an excuse to fight a long bloody losing war in Afghanistan and a long bloody pointless war in Iraq, I occupied myself, between bouts of political hysteria, with trying to piece together a certain systematic view of the happiness ethos in the Occident – or whatever you want to call the hodgepodge of peasantry, factory workers and owners, and investors in the Western part of the Eurasian continent.

I never got my system all together. But occasionally I revisit it. And feeling the strong chill of a sideline period extending who knows how far since the fascisctoid goofies took command of the D.C. jungle gym, I thought I’d revisit it again. Here is a summary I wrote up a coupla years ago;

In 2007, I was suddenly struck with a vision – or a trifecta of visions. The first vision was that happiness, in Western culture, was a total social fact – the name Marcel Mauss gave to concepts that pervade social relations and social representation in a given culture. Happiness, like mana (the primal power spoken of by Polynesian people, which served as the object of Mauss’s study in The Gift) was located in three conceptual places: as an immediate feeling – I am happy about some x; as a judgement about a whole life or collective institution – for example, in survey questions about whether the respondent is “happy”, which elicits a life judgement – and finally as a social goal against which social systems should be judged – the well-being promised, for instance, by market-oriented economists. This threefold set made me wonder how it was all connected – for these were not simply different definitional aspects of happiness, but truly ontic differences that were, at the same time, understandably linked.

Vision number two was that the happiness culture was built in the early modern era. This was accompanied, or quasi caused, by the beginning of the idea of economic growth – in contradistinction from the older, Malthusian restrained, society of the image of the limited good, and by a change in fundamental family patterns in which, increasingly, males and females married and started their own households, instead of remaining in the paternal house. The destruction of the society of the limited good – the idea that your goods, or luck, take from a restricted common pot - was, as well, the destruction of a larger worldview in which nemesis, or God’s judgment, played a predominant part. The old notion of fortune’s wheel was laid aside in the name of a new notion in which economic activity actually intertwined beneficently – the vices of the rich were the profits of the jeweler and hatmaker, etc. and equilibrium was disconnected from non-growth. The second phenomena, which was first postulated by an obscure scholar named John Hajnal, who proposed, in 1965, that that, in essence, starting with the end of the 16th century, you could draw a line from Trieste to St. Petersburgh and allot two different household formations to each side. On the West, you have what Hajnal came to call the simple household formation, in which one and only one married couple were at the center of the household; in the East, you had what he called a joint household formation, in which two or more related married couples formed the household. Hajnal claimed that in the sixteenth century, the Western type of household was new, and characterized by a demographic shift in which marriage occurred significantly later in life. For women, for instance, the average age moves from 20 to 25. Meanwhile, in the East, the marriage age remained very young, and so a married couple of, basically, teenagers remained in a household with an older couple, usually the husband’s family. This, to me, was a fascinating fact – even if later scholars messed about a bit with the neatness of Hajnal’s theory. What this meant was that a window in biographical time opened up between independence and marriage. For both males and females, that window was something new – it was youth. As it shifted down in the twentieth century, it became adolescence and young adulthood. The effects of this were enormous.

Vision number three was of the effect of combining the treadmill of production, accelerated by technology and the revamping of the social structure, and the happiness culture. That effect was, essentially, to remove the limits on the human. The human limit, once rigidly defined by the gods or necessity, and the scarcity of luck, now expanded to include the world. The world became the instrument for making humans happy. It had no more “rights” than any other instrument.

So, that was the sum of it, and then I got bored. I always get bored, out here on the sidelines.

This spring we're on our own: the end of the cult of the savior billionaire and the battle of Columbia

 

As the revolutionary fevers of the sixties were calming in the seventies, the Right Wing was alarmed by what they took to be the sneaky new strategy of subversion by the New Left, the so called “long march through the institutions”.  The Modern Age, a magazine that was proudly to the right of National Review, published an article by a certain Helmut Schelsky (translated by Edward Shils) in 1974 that laid out the program in the most apocalyptic terms possible: “The unity of “left-wing radicalism” which resides in this consensus regarding strategy embraces the German Communist Party and its university affiliate “Spartakus”, as well as the most diverse anarchist grups, the leadersip of the Young Socialists, as well as important sections of the Young Democrats.” Schelsky’s message was not just for Germans (West Germans, who lived in a country, incidentally, where the Communist party was as illegal as it had been in the 1930s, under the Nazis), but for all defenders of the West. Schelsky puts upfront the fact that the systematic strategy of subverting the system is about “the conquest of the universities and of teacher training colleges…”

Schelsky’s sense of the Long March through the institutions was not exactly an illusion. Indeed, in the seventies, the return of student radicals to graduate programs was a long event. In many ways, the second wave of feminism was nurtured in English departments – to my mind, one of the great triumphs of liberal civilization. Similarly, gay civil rights was an exercise in both the streets and the classrooms.

Although I am quoting an article from 1974, I could be quoting Chris Rulfo in 2023. He even uses the verb conquest in his articles and podcast about how the “radical left conquered everything.” It is a curious thesis – in the year 2023, without a peep from the Democrats or the “radical left”, billionaire wealth surged by 2 trillion dollars. Not, from this “radical leftist”, a banner year in our conquest. But if one keeps in mind that the conquest has a nub of truth – the oppression of women, of gays, of blacks, Hispanics, etc in America was, at the very least, discredited, even if out there in the fields it was still doing its work – and one looks at that surge of wealth for those at the top, it was obvious that the so called “cultural war” – which is really a civil rights struggle, disguised as a struggle against “woke censorship” – was about to take a new turn. The universities and schools simply cannot hold out in their aging liberal sensibility against the massive changes in the composition of wealth not only in America but throughout the “West”. The American liberal cult of the savior “billionaire” – the ex of Bezos, or Bezos himself, or Soros, or some other moneybags – signals that everything has gone wrong. The long march had become a wholly owned subsidiary, in the standard centrist Democratic party narrative, of the “good rich people”.

Thus, the Potemkin villages were easy targets of destruction. Much easier than anybody thought. The news channels, newspapers and universities have been rolling over at speed in a mere three months due to the efforts of the truly stupidest collection of bozos ever to have used the Oval office to sell baseball caps.

When a collective collectively loses its backbone like this, one must look at more than individual vice. The long march of plutocracy through the parties, starting with the Dem surrender to Reaganism, has borne its poisoned fruit.

There is some relief, I suppose, in knowing who you can’t rely on. In this acid test of American democracy, we can see the savior billionaire groupies looking for some win-win figleaf, some way of making retreat and surrender look like the most reasonable thing ever done by a Democratic politico in the gym basement of the Senate building. In other words, we see the sheer comedy and parody on display of the woke-lite brigade. They will, when the cards are down, join the Trumpies.

Tin soldiers and Columbia folding/this spring we’re on our own, to parody an old song.

We are on our own.