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?

on the party

1. In James C. Scott’s Seeing Like the State, there is an appreciation of Lenin as a modernist figure, in particular like Le Corbusier. Scott takes Lenin’s text, What is to be Done, as his starting point for discussing the organization of the Communist party as a classic modernist project: the use of military metaphors, a planning structure based on an elite command center, the distrust of spontaneity, the whole nine yards. But more than that, Scott compares Lenin’s notion, in 1903, that a party such as he envisions it, and only a party such as he envisions it, can really bring about a revolution, with what happened in 1917, when the spontaneity that Lenin believed to be doomed by its lack of goals and viable mechanisms actually did the task that the Bolsheviks couldn’t do in fifteen years – overthrew the Czar. Revolution, it turned out, was very different from Lenin had envisioned it.

I think Scott is a little to narrow in his tying Lenin’s theory of the party simply to the Communist party. What Lenin saw was how the party would function in a nation-state. Any party. Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Fascist, Menshevik, Bolshevik – and this is a curiously underemphasized thing.

To get to this, turn to an associate of Weber’s, Robert Michels, who wrote the text book on the nature of the party in 1910, eight years after Lenin’s book, formulating the ‘iron law of oligarchy.’

Michels is an interesting figure. He was a political activist in the Social Democratic party – near the anarchic edge – as well as a sociologist. Later, after WWI, he moved towards fascism, teaching in Italy. But we are concerned with just a few of his notions.

Robert Michels contrasted two ways of comparing democracies and monarchies/aristocracies. One was to compare the frequency of elections as the index of popular participation – and by this criteria, democracies were clearly more ‘democratic’. But the other way – comparing length of tenure of the officials – gave a more paradoxical result. In Germany, an official – in the legislature, in the party, as a minister – had much greater chance of having a longer tenure, or at least a more frequent one, then they did during the aristocratic/monarchical time.

Michels came up with certain psychological reasons for this unexpected datum. For instance, the democratic representative often is the recipient of gratitude for what he has done. An appointed official or an aristocrat, on the other hand, does what he does evidently for – his king or his family, thus arresting the impulse of gratitude. I’d say gratitude is a word whose correlate is very material favors, a whole exchange system full of them. In general, the frequency of election actually puts a greater stress on those factors that are ignored in the notion that leadership would change significantly with each election. Instead, it leads again and again to the successful longevity of the representative. The reason is that the cost of entry goes up, the longer the representative endures in office, and the more the gratitude/favors logic works to ensure the closeness of supporters and the officeholder.

There are also, according to Michels, external reasons that help ensure length of tenure. For instance, “…the party that changes its leaders too often runs the risk of finding itself unable to contract useful alliances at an opportune moment. The two gravest defects of genuine democracy, its lack of stability (perpetuum mobile democraticum) and its difficulty of mobilization, are dependent on the recognized right of the sovereign masses to take part in the management of their own affairs.”

The idea of an alliance is very important. Because the party is so often considered as an instrument, as something that is designed completely to accomplish a purpose, it is hard to see it standing for itself. It must stand for an idea, represent a class, an ethnic group, etc.

2. Imagine, then, Lenin.

In 1900, when Lenin began his second tour of exile in Europe, he was in his thirties, and had been active in clandestine revolutionary activity in Russia for the last decade. He came out of that experience of organizing, writing and prison with two ideas. One was a newspaper – which became the Iskra – and one was a party.

Lenin’s second objective is the whole point of 1902’s What Is to be done? I am not interested so much in the infinite ins and outs of the history of Bolshevism, proper, but rather in trying to understand the idea of a highly intelligent man from a state in which there was little to no experience of parties, as they developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, re-inventing the whole concept. Lenin, then, is dreaming. Not that the dream is uninformed by the historical experience of parties in Europe – most notably, the Social Democrats in Germany. But he is dreaming of a party that will play a different role than any party has played before. In Lenin’s dream, the party will found the revolution – and, beyond the ultimate question of the state’s always to be put off dissolution , that means it will found the state.

Of course, as James Scott points out, Lenin is wrong in the case of Russia – the revolutions came about spontaneously, just as the people he denounced said they would. And in 1905 and 1917, Lenin quickly accommodated to that fact – but the party he founded acted as though they had created the revolution. The thing that is important is that this conception of the function of the party is something new, something that theorizes the way parties will be throughout the twentieth century.

This role is new. No revolution in the past came about through the organization of a party. Parties formed as secondary political characteristics of the state. The change, perhaps, comes first in the U.S. –one could argue that the Republican party, under Lincoln, is the first party to expand its role to something more than a loose confederation of likeminded people seeking the power of office, becoming a nation-builder.

But Lenin was the one who saw the party most clearly as a new dispositif, to use Foucault’s term: there was a new dialectic of agent and percipient set up by Lenin’s notion of the party. It is as if the ventriloquest’s dummy took on life, became a Frankenstein’s monster.

The Lockean-Rousseau-ian state had been founded on a semi-magic relationship between the people and the state. The people were the Agent, sending their thoughts to the great state, the Percipient. The thoughts are, of course, not natural phenomena, but the phenomena of a will – and just as the agent is controlling, in some small way, the percipient, so, too, the Agent people is controlling the state Percipient, which represents the people’s will.

Into this duality, Lenin introduces the party, which is again shaped around an agent/percipient relationship. But by this time the constants had been loosened – the agent’s will might well actually reflect the work of the percipient, who is not simply the naïve, the mind-controlled subject, but a subject who has woken up and reversed the flow of suggestion. The party becomes both instrument and theorizer, dropping its own suggestions into the mind of the agent, or rather making the agent, the people, choose not the desires of its heart, but the desire for one or the other party.

3. Each election, under this interpretation, is a magic show gone wildly wrong.

This is not to say that refusing to vote is not wildly wrong too. The parties may be part of a circus, but it is the only one in town - in fact, it is the town. You can't get away from it, in this scenario, by an act of quietism.

Revolution and its ghosts

I wrote this a coupla years ago. Today, as the Republic, aka the lyceens, gather in the streets to face down repression, I'm thinking about revolution and haunting.  

"In the world of epiphenomena, the haunt is king.

This sentence, believe it or not, forced itself upon me at 6:45 a.m this morning, as I was arising from bed to go empty my bladder. An old man in a dull month, or a dull man with an old prostate – one of those moments.

Well, yesterday I had to finish up some editing work, and in the evening we were scheduled to go to La Rotunde and chow down, but in between times I was thinking about haunting. In particular, haunted houses. Houses in which what happened in the house forms the nucleus of the story.

Haunted houses have been mocked in the cultures that claim to be children of the Roman Empire since Lucian of Samosata was a pup. In fact, Lucian’s dialogue, Philopseudès, or The lover of lies, is one of the great documents of the Hellenic enlightenment, written maybe a decade before Tertullian, in another part of the Empire, began vigorously damning peeps like Lucian. Renan compared Lucian to Voltaire – and Voltaire also compared Lucian to Voltaire. The lover of lies is a dialogue that contains a dialogue, a conversation between philosophers, so called, at gathered around the sick bed of an evidently wealthy man named Eucratès. They commence to talking about miracle cures, phantoms, and other such business, to the disgust of Tykhiadès, who takes the view, sometimes taken by Voltaire and lesser philosophes as well, that superstition is just stupidity. How can anybody be so dumb as to believe in ghosts haunting houses?

This kind of one dimensional positivism is still around. And it has its fragment of veracity: if we believe in something we call “cause”, much of these superstition visions seem to call for explanations rooted in local causes – like fear of the dark – rather than in cosmological causes – like an afterlife from which these phantoms come.

Our anthropological liberalism, too, searches for causes, but not in the stupidity of the credulous, but in cultural practices that we study while withholding our own cultural biases – an epoche that is either tolerant or patronizing.

Haunting, of course, as hauntology and all the rest of it, became a modish object of reflection after the fall of the wall. Helped along by Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, the idea of something haunting something else - the way Communism haunted Europe, or the way Hamlet’s dad haunted Hamlet – became a model for thinking about our own neo-liberal ghostliness.

Myself, as a citizen of Paris, think about haunting as a matter of urban history. And certainly Paris is a haunted and hunted city – we walk past old torture chambers and the ghosts of faits divers, here, as we go to Carrefour and get the meat and veggies and wine.

Paris has always been a central place for occultists, sex magic theorists, Gurdjeffians, far right white magic dudes, clairvoyants, and situationists. Yet, in the Paris media, the ghosts and haunted houses are usually somewhere else. There’s a whole mythology of Britain as a ghost-haunted place, and Brittany too. Whereas if such beliefs creep into Saint-Germain, they are intellectualized – its all surrealists and serious searchers in the Kabbalah.

In Southern France, “folk beliefs” are everywhere. Recently there’s been an excellent scandal in a village near Montpellier. The mayor of Agde, Gille D’ettore, felt that he needed a connection on high. He needed God. Or some spirit. So he searched around to contact the big OTHER, and had the misfortune to contact a corrupt clairevoyant, Sophia Martinez. Here’s the story in brief from the Midi Libre:

“Medium and healer, she is alleged to have used a stratagem with the Mayor of Agde and numerous other interlocutors: in using a masculine and raw voice on the telephone, she made them think she was in contact with a supernatural being from the Beyond. This voice incited them to take good care of the voyante, including materially.

Suddenly, she was able to pay, by means of Gilles D’ettore, for a veranda, a jacuzzi, a sumptuous wedding, airplane tickets for herself and her friends, etc.”

Such little things the beyond wants from us! D’ettore was not the only seeker after advise – some real estate broker is suing Martinez because he gave her ten thousand euros to speak to his late mother, which he did on the telephone – although the voice at the other end might, just might have been Martinez’s own.

If corruption there must be, I’m rather happy that it went into making sure a clairevoyante from Agde could soak in a jacuzzi after expending enormous spiritual energy connecting with the beyond. I get it."

Pour des lyceens!

 I haven't tuned into the NYT gurgling their macronist responses to the police violence against the Lyceens yet. But I have seen a lot of the videos - including a video of an insane police charge at our school, Voltaire - and I've seen the vids of heartening demonstrations of support by parents and workers that are now all around - except of course on French fox tv, which is a phantasmagoria of redfaced racists yelling shit.

Tuesday is the day when the unions and the parents and the high school kids - the lyceens - are taking to the streets. I've been officially informed that we are going out in the streets too.

We are obviously at a dead level in this weird century - the American president, convincted of rape, sending his love out to the Cornell rapists, and the French president, who never met a cop thug that he didn't love, cheering on the flying squads as they take down protesting 16 year olds. At least in the latter case, however, I'm pretty sure that things are going to wind up like they did for the Gilets Jaunes - that is, Macron will try to bribe his way out of this situation while guarding the only thing he really cares about, i.e., making sure the superwealthy are not ever really taxed.

Dead levels everywhere. But we are not dead yet. Meanwhile I'm going to listen to the Who's Baba O'reilly (teenage wasteland) this fine morning.