Healing is the disease: America in the 21st century

 Right after January 6, 2021, the United States government, in its entirety, faced a question of legitimacy. That was flubbed completely by the incoming Biden Administration.

We are now at another possible inflexion point. I have no idea if the Dems are going to sweep the midterms. I am always disturbed at the narrowing of the issues when major elections come up: a gross proportion of the attention is devoted to guessing whether the polls are right, which one of the parties will win,, etc., while the very reason that the candidates are running gets short shrift.

I have read enough to know that many major Dem "marketmakers" have spoken up against impeaching Trump, thus preempting, once again, the course of justice. They have not spoken up against impreaching his cabinet picks, but the sotto voce message is clear: the business of America is supposed to proceed with a crew of pirates and cretins at the helm, while the Dems deal with "bread and butter" issues, under the assumption that Americans generally could give a fuck about justice.

I think there is a part of the American electorate - the comfortable, those households making above say 250 thou - that has a structurally lessened sense of fairness. The vast majority, however, do not want the taste of gross injustice to accompany every bite of their bread and butter. It turns to ashes in their mouths.

When a bipartisan concensus is reached that there is no consequence for the wrongdoing of powerful people, the party system essentially becomes gangster-like. Usually the gangster form is disguised by some appeal to unity - and especially an appeal to "healing".

This is why I wrote a bit that I am entitling: Against healing. From January 9, 2021.

Against Healing

Susan Sontag, I think of you!

In Illness as Metaphor, when she went after the “anti-intellectual pieties and a facile compassion all too triumphant in contemporary medicine and psychiatry”, she was well aware of the insertion of a illness metaphoric in politics too. In fact, one of the prized sentences in American political rhetoric is Abraham Lincoln’s use of a battlefield injury metaphor, “binding our wounds” – subtexting the Jesus story – to describe the national process of unification. Lincoln, like Bismark, helped forge a new, modern state. It was noticed early on that Bismark’s German was, like Lincoln’s English, a thing of folk poetry. But instead of using the metaphor of injuries (which presupposes the more extensive field of the “body politic”), Bismark was more inclined to peasant metaphors and similes, where the state is pictured as a plough horse, or “putting Germany in the saddle”.

Lincoln’s metaphors are often celebrated, seldom subject to the critical examination we should give to classic texts. What, after all, did “binding up the wounds” of the Civil War mean?

That meaning, in terms of Lincoln’s life, was of course fated not to be. Lincoln swerved a lot. It is hard to know whether he would have swerved towards the Sumner side of radical Reconstruction, which would have built a different America, or the course taken by the Northern bourgeoisie, who threw African-Americans on the pile – there’s a metaphor for ya! – and healed right whitely. But the healing metaphor was on its legs and since then has done a lot of work. Much of it in support of anti-intellectual pieties and compromises with oppression that normalized and spread oppression.

Lindsey Graham, a straw stuffed non-entity who, as Senator of South Carolina, has succeeded in impressing other non-entities, political reporters mainly for center-lib publications, just used the healing metaphor in the way it is always used – to creep around a gross act of oppression and violence.

“As President DonaldTrump stated last night, it is time to heal and move on. If Speaker Pelosi pushes impeachm ent in the last days of the Trump presidency it will do more harm than good.I’m hopeful President-elect Biden sees the damage that would be done from such action.”

Time to heal. We’ve had so many healing moments! Sparing Jeff Davis and General Lee hanging. Sparing the Confederate leaders. Sparing the Jim Crow enforcers. Sparing every eminence, every rich man or woman who ever violated a federal law or salted away criminal proceeds in an offshore account. We’ve healed ourselves into a jolly little corner, where Aryan Nation Cosplayers accompanied by thugs looking to kill a couple of hate figures or two, Pelosi, a coupla Dems, those bitches, mainly, and peeing on the carpet as they went, and killing a cop – all of this is just healable fun and games. The price of healing is put off, and put off. That is, the price paid by comfortable white folks. The price is quite evident on the streets of Columbus Ohio, Ferguson Missouri, in the cancer gulch in Louisiana, in Kenosha, in Louisville, in every metro in this great healed Republic of ours.

But there comes a time to ask a question: what is the difference between healing and the disease?

McKinseyism in France - now with more cokeheads!

 We are stuck in Montpellier this weekend. The buses trams and trains are not running - ostensibly because of a weather alert, and - I think - because the government is very afraid of demonstrations this weekend.

In the interval, I have thought what book I would advise someone to read about what is happening in France. The book I'd choose is Ryszard Kapuściński's Shah of Shahs. Written in 1979, it is a portrait of a society - that of Iran under the Shah - in the last stages of rot. Pourrisement. Melenchon's term for the regime of Macron is exactly right. In the end, one is left with a ambiance of low level gangsterism. Except of course that under the plutocracy, the laws are changed to reflect the absorbtion of gangsterism in good business practice. Surely there is a McKinsey white paper recommending this floating out there somewhere.

McKinsey-ism is my term for what France has undergone. It is especially interesting that education is the hot spot that is causing all the ruckus. From the beginning,, there has been a pipeline from McKinsey to Institut Montaigne to whatever suit is running the Ministry of Education and Secondary Education. There was a scandal about this long long ago - from 2023, in fact. That is when Laurent Bigorgne, the head of the Institut, was accused of drugging his sister in law in order to rape her. In his defense, he claimed that for the last couple of heady years at the IM, he'd kept himself prepped by extensive use of cocaine.

Here's their nifty program to get education out of the old rut of being run by the state - heavens! - and into the new world of the networks! Here's the story of Laurent Bigorgne, close associate of Macron, whose star was leading him to the appointment as minister of education when, alas, that oopsy moment of date rape drugging and cocaine put a temporary end to his ambitions. Education - especially dismantling public education - is very dear to the heart of Macron. And really, how appropriate that a date rape drug user/cokehead should have headed up the initiative to propel France's education system into the 21st century of AI and the need to create good servants for rich people! Macron, Macron, whose heart was always in, well, taking away a public service for stinky workign folk who don't deserve it! Macron, whose government promises to rebuild the Hotel de Ville in Limoges and has never made a move to rebuild the lycee Paul Eluard in Seine-St. Denis!

Macron's heart...

May he suffer the heartburn he has earned!

Macron checks out

 Macron is going down in the disgrace and ignominy that has characterized his entire reign. The address last night that he deigned to give had zero pertinence to the causes of the protest, but he did his best to put on his indignation act and is going to go all out, deerstalker cap on his head, to track down the perpetrators of this terrible violence! Melanchon, much as I think he should have handed over the keys to the LFI to younger people long ago, was born for this moment. His counter is to pour scorn over the pauvre type which supposedly leads this "government", Lecornu, or as I think of him, Macron's barrista. The secretary of the interior "took responsibility" for the sad and ridiculous policing of Saturday's vandal's special, and offered his resignatiion, which Macron refused. As Melanchon pointed out, , Laurent Nuñez (the interior minister) found 17000 police to guard the pope on his visit to Paris two weeks ago, but somehow couldn't find 10,000 on Saturday as the destruction all too predictably commenced. The 10,000 were of course busy harrassing the legal demonstration and showing it with tear gas - so much fun!

I read some American commentary that okay, the burning of the Limoge will break this protest down and we will go back to handing France over to Le Pen. I sympathize - it is much harder to envision the causes of the protests than to marvel at the flames of a torched building. How do you film the anger that the average French consumer feels everytime she goes to the Intermarche and sees the price of hamburger meat has risen, during the week, one or two more Euros? Or that the packages are more expensive and the weight of them is less? How do you film the parents - such as me myself - as they hear about the college in which repairs are noisily being made while teachers try to teach, or the class - in Victor Hugo it was English - that has lost its prof and has replaced said prof with a circus troupe of substitutes, which are intermittent at best? And this is a very very bourgeois middle school. I doubt the instagram videos of the rats that roam the hallways of the lycee in Seine St. Denis have made it to CBS news.

The rats are still there, the prices are still rising, the governmentt is still lead by an amateur, the budget has not been vetted and voted on for a year and a half, the debt is now larger than Germany's, the taxes on businesses and rich people are still some of the lowest in French history. And the beat goes on.

That figure mimicking a president on TV last night has already checked out. He could give a fuck. Like his model, Giscard D'estaing, the best he can hope for is to be forgotten

ACAB and AFTER

Mucho ink has been spilled – or whatever we want to call the spillage of pixels across a screen – about legitimation. Generally under the heading of the State’s legitimacy. The State is a great thing to talk about because it is one of those hulking abstract categories that make intellectual history such a fun game. But like many fun games, one has to ask if it is being played wrong. Is this a chess game or monopoly or hide and seek?

Still, legitimacy is one of the great legacies of the era of restauration. In Calasso’s The Ruins of Kasch, Tallyrand is the odd hero, the architect and demon of legitimacy. Legitimacy is sorta the tooth implant after the old “organic” ruling class, the family derived royal and aristocratic families, no longer obtain automatic respect for being born.

And so the term is generally used for the rulers. But how about the rulers’ instruments?

For the last decade, at least, we have experienced throughout the world a crisis in the legitimacy of the police.

The reference point is usually the American experience, starting with the riots that spread in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. But it is not merely an American story.

The story in France goes way back in time, but I think the operant reference point is really the now forgotten scandal of Macron’s body guard and weird buddy, Alexandre Benalla, who beat up some protestors in 2018. Benalla was a member of the ambiguous new set of policing instruments that were not fully public functionaries nor private cops. The borderline position was symptomatic of that symptomatic president, Emmanuel Macron, whose reign is coming to an inglorious end after years of using inglorious means to attack France’s public sector. He’s succeeded in indebting the country to an unprecedented extent periodically bribing a restive population, as after the Gilets Jaunes, while at the same time roasting wienies at the cannibal’s feast of the very richest. The fly in the ointment is that the police are, technically, public functionaries, and thus have to be treated like the rest – underpaid, under-equipped, and in general treated with contempt. But at the same time, they are the only functionaries that the government ever praises. It has been coplove for the last ten years, officially.

This has made the police both the authors of oppression, the tampon between the government and the people, and the target of a rage that really is oriented towards the diffuse governing elite. As in so many countries, the upper 20 percent of the wealth percentile has done well while the rest have stagnated. The legitimacy of the police – something that is assumed to be one with the legitimacy of the State – has been put into question among the populace in a way that no government official has even noticed. Yesterday evening, walking in the streets of the pretty rich quarter we live in, the Marais, I saw that the battle initiated with a barrage of tear gas by the cops before the demonstration even started was going to go badly for those cops. This morning the papers and social media are full of pictures of what happens when a state tries to rule with an iron fist without having the resources to really suppress its own people. The message has still not been received in that pinbrain that is the French government. But I think the upper 20 percent are waking up and realizing: France is fucked. Something any lyceen from Seine Saint-Denis could have told them years ago.

Now, onto unfucking the country. I’m no doomscroller. I think the resources are there, have long been there, to make France, as well as any country in France’s league, a happy and more just place.

The clerks of literature

 The literature of the moralistes, a literature which is, at the center, a reflection on character, is the great ancestor of the literature of the clerks, the marginal Daoist tradition that runs from the clerk Charles Lamb to the clerk Franz Kafka. Clerk - from, according to Larousse, the greek klêrikos,  klêros, "fonction de prêtre". The priest's secular descendents, that intermediary class, all the secretaries, accountants, salesmen, bureaucrats which filled in the function of relating the manufactorer to the laborer, the store to the consumer, the bureaucrat to the citizen. In the broad sense, the sense still used by Julian Benda in his famous 1920s screed, La Trahison des clercs, the intellectual class that secularized the priesthood. Benda's book was translated into English as |The treason of the intellectuals - so much had English lost the the larger sense of the clerk which was once familiar to Chaucer. 

Benda did not, I think, have a very firm grasp of Marx's Capital - it was not in his canon, it was repulsive to his thinking. But I find the larger notion of the clerk in the age of capitalism - and bureaucratic socialism - benefits from Marx's work on the system of circulation. It is in that perpetual transfer, a transfer without miracles, eucharistic or otherwise, that we can spy on the clerk's ambiance. 

Character, for the clerks, is a ruin, a roofless and desecrated temple, an archaeological site – the clerks all respond, in one way or another, to the Bartleby principle: I would prefer not to. The world of the clerks reflects fully the two removes that characterize the modern – the remove from nature and from production – both removes, of course, managed by Capital. The clerks inherit the moralists lack of systematicity (the idea of the essai, of experience as a trial, an experiment), but among the clerks that lack has turned to hatred. And this hatred, what is it? It is hatred of the dominance of substitution, a fear of losing their interiority, their difference, completely to substitution. It is a fear that arises from their place as agents of circulation, in Marx’s terms.

Without the clerk, it is impossible to imagine literature in the modern era – defined as that era in which the patronage system of the court and the noble collapsed, and that new thing, the philosophe or intellectual, was surrendered to the market and to the various bureaucracies of governance. The clerk becomes, in the Great Transformation (to an industrial and market economy as named by Karl Polanyi), a more or less self-conscious agent of circulation. In the twentieth century, the middle manager, the director of paper flows and corporate directives, of sales forces and business self help initiatives, is the male hero of Joseph Heller’s Something happens and – in the great novel of this moment in the decline of the middle manager – William Gaddis’s JR. Ben Kafka looks back on this phenomenon in The Demon of Writing: the powers and failures of paperwork. In a pretty masterful piece of interpretation, Kafka shows how the role of paperwork in Tocquevillle’s life and works – how his meditation on the increase and burgeoning typology of the documents of the bureaucracy was traced, by him, to the French revolution as a decisive break from the Ancien Regime. And how the relative elbow room in American bureaucracies was something Tocqueville also noted. In reviewing a book about administration work written by one Louis-Antoine Macarel, an official in the postal department, Tocqueville even provided a metaphor that resonates in his time and in ours – and that functions in the background of many modernist texts:

““[he] takes us step by step down the immense ladder on which are placed one on lop of another, without confusion but almost without end, the multitude of functionaries who compose among us the administrative hierarchy, from the king to the least agent of authority.”

One can even hypothesize that the emergence of the crime novel, with its central figure, the detective, is a kind of libidinal dream of escaping from hierarchy to some direct moment – the solution of the crime being, above all, a solution, a thing of numerous ambiguities and dubious success in the real structure of business and state bureaucracies.

I should say more about this topic, which I have thought about, partly because of my own experience as a part time secretary in various companies, for years. The clerk is dialectically riven – both the promoter of those routines that, in the countryside, the factory, and the store, generated a capitalist mentality, and the first responders to the elevation of the level of alienation this entailed. The clerks are the poets of the routinized world.

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Macron and the paleocapitalist dream

 

One of the great centrist hat tricks is to divert the discussion of government programs from asking whether they successfully meet their goals to the question of its correspondence with some Chicago school notion of how governments just need to get out of the way for capitalism. Here's how France's retirement system meets its goal, for instance: "... just 3.6% of French retirees live in poverty, compared to the OECD average of 12.5%".

Huh. Funny, that stat just gets lost in the squid ink shot around these kind of issues, issues that the richest people - who are the most influential on the media mindset - have decided. One of the conclusions young people are reaching is that the neo-classical defense of Capitalism is a defense of a system that can’t afford retirement for old people or education for young people. Yet the very folks who write this kind of nonsense about “reforming” the system – that is, 99 percent of mainstream media – can’t draw the simple conclusion that what they are suggesting is that there’s a high acceptable level of illiteracy among the young and death and poverty among the old so that ‘free enterprise” can award the top 1 percent trillions of dollars. In other words, they are toting up the cost of social democracy as though it were a matter of cuts in programs, rather then taxing at the rate that preserves social democracy – taxing, for instance, capital gains both every year – not at the point of sale – and at a high enough rate to successfully achieve social democratic goals.

Which is why I’d recommend, for a horselaugh,  the NYT's elegy today of  one of its favorites, Emmaneul Macron, whose unfullfilled promise makes all the upper 20 percent so sad! It is full of these paleo-capitalist sugarplums. I choose, at random, this absurdist description oF Macron's "reform" of the social security system: "Mr. Macron accomplished the first two goals but not the third. He set off angry protests after pushing through an unpopular rise in France’s retirement age to 64 from 62, a move that economists say was critical to stemming the tide of red ink. " Yeah, everybody in France - the France dancing in the head of Bret Stephen's - retires at 62. Or even 64. Those are cases that are at the lower boundary of the retirement range. Macron's "reform" didn't stem any rising tide of red ink, partly because they were purposefully designed not to hurt any of those middle class people who were 62 when the 'reforms" were put in place. And the airy reference to economists is so NYT-y and unspecific that you would never know the journalist is writing as a citizen of a country that owes 40 trillion bucks on its own debts. Which, actually, is the cause of the crisis worldwide. The U.S. bond market drives the interest on other smaller bond markets throughout the world, and in combo with the massive debts accumulated by AI building companies is actually going to sink a lot of people in the next decade.

Anyway, upshot is: the one thing the NYT can never, due to its structure, report on is: foreign affairs. It is always and forever clueless. And it is an essential tool for mapping out the cluelessness of the American elite’s view of the world, provincial, self-serving, and perpetually in shock because it is rejected not only by the dark masses of the benighted, non-U.S. nations, but by the U.S.’s own population.

Kurosawa's brother, Wittgenstein's world

 From Gerald Macé’s Carte de l’empire, I extract the following anecdote.

“Kurosawa’s brother committed suicide when movies became talkies, in a heroic reargard action to defend reciters, who were doomed to disappear. He himself belong to the guild of the benshi, actors who commented on the silent images.

One could well think that the ghost of his brother floated over Kurosawa’s films. Leader of a strike that failed, condemned by the birth of a new technology, the brother, laid off like one of those ronin of the past, having lost their vocation at the same time as their master, incarnated in himself that traditional Japan which put up its fists before allying with Germany before the Second World War, throwing itself into the mouth of the wolf.”

Somehow, this note reminds me that the passing of silent films was an event also witnessed, in a way, by others of that time, like Wittgenstein. I could imagine Kurosowa’s brother intoning the last numbers of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

“My propositions are explicatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. He must so to speak throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

The benti explaining to the movie goer - and the titles in the film are, likewise, dispensable aids. The world of the film, the purely visible world of faces, bodies, gestures, scenery, the picture itself – is the world rightly seen.

Wittgenstein, as is well known, began his long trek towards his second philosophy about the time that the talkies replaced the silent films.

Norman Malcolm has introduced an anecdote that has immediately achieved a place among the great anecdotes, like Samuel Johnson kicking a stone to refute Berkeley. Wittgenstein liked talking to Sraffa, the great Italian economist. At one point, after listening to Wittgenstein on propositional form and language, Sraffa made a Neapolitan gesture – putting his fingers under his chin and making a brushing motion – and asked what the propositional form of that was.

One of Wittgenstein’s commentors interpreted this anecdote to mean that Sraffa was telling Wittgenstein that the sense and the meaning of linguistic expressions are use-dependent. Use, or as Wittgenstein put it, Sraffa’s “anthropological perspective”, freed him to the Audio-visual tracks of ordinary life. Or, to put this in cinematic form, the purity of silent film was not sullied by sound – it was rather a way of joining life itself. For better or worse. The silence of the world is not the case. The silent world, perfectly universal, must be put behind us – even though strong traces remain in the way the builders, for instance, in The Philosophical Investigations seem much closer to the comedians of the silent film era, such as Buster Keaton in Cops – with the central actor at a seriously askew relationship in the world that does not prevent him from living in it with a stoic hilarity.

The purity of the world as representation comes crashing down – but it is a world now sadly tainted, as from Kurosawa’s brother’s point of view, or is it one that we wonder, in retrospect, if it ever existed at all?