A Modest Proposal: Let AI replace CEOs!

 The Dumb New Yorker post - Will AI Replace College or some dumbfuck thing, I'm refusing to check - is another in the media corps cult of AI. Lets face it, AI is a minor tool for lab work and heavy industry, and it isn't going to "replace College."

The bosses are heavy invested in tech, and if the stock crumbles, they crack and crumble next.

So...

Funny how the headline is never: Will AI replace the CEO. Cause there you have a case. What does AI do best? Make up factoids and use them to support other factoids. It "hallucinates." It comes up with the dumbest advice possible. Etc. And what do CEO's do? They rarely known the industry or enterprise they head. Mostly, they make up factoids to support other factoids to massage stock valuations. BINGO! I don't think Grok could replace a single Teaching Assistant, but Tesla would save about 40 billion dollars if it replaced Musk with Grok. Same stupidity - the self-driving yellow cab market is worth a trillion! We are going to mars! Etc. But with less compensation. Grok ought to cost a coupla million to run, maybe in the tens of millions, but it is much cheapter than Musk.

However, not once in the AI goldrush, not once in the infinite amount of AI stories suggesting all middle management and creative jobs are kaput with AI on the watch, has there been any suggestion that top management could be replaced. Gee, I wonder why? I wonder why there is no audience for that in the business pages?

The media can suck my dick.

A translation of Pierre Herbart's story Miraflores

 

“Herbart has made his life into a blank sheet, but it has taken everything he had. He will die seated in front of his blank sheet.” Indeed, according to Jean-Luc Moreau, from which I take this quote about Pierre Herbart, he did die a pauper, and a sick man as well. So poor he was buried in a common grave. Not the ending one would have predicted for a man who was Gide’s secretary in the 1930s, an editor of a famous communist magazine in Moscow for a time, an agitator in the colony of Vietnam, a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, and a resistor in occupied France.

He’s not well known. I came across this story from the late twenties, when Marxism was becoming Sur-marxism, and I thought that it was a rather wonderful enigma. A tale torn from a dream. So I translated it.

 

Miriflores

One evening in a little village in Hungary I witness a strange show put on by a showman with a donkey in the village square. He beat a drum. I easily recognized in this scene one of the images in Madame de Segur’s “Memoires of a donkey”, which showed Miriflore, the intelligent ass, his master and the latter’s family. I couldn’t be mistaken. The son had exactly the stupid air that Madame de Segur lent to our village obscurities. The little slattern girls were clothed in hoop skirts and the boys wore baggy pants and close fitting shirts The papas and mamas were walking up and down, ignoring the donkey man, and Cadichan – Segur’s donkey – absorbed the whole thing through its evil eyes. I wasn’t too surprised, as I expected some show of this kind this evening.. I following the doing with a certain curiosity, then retired back to my room in the inn, although not without a certain trepidation brought on by my reading the news of an innkeeper who had recently been arrested for killing foreign tourists in order to make a paté much appreciated by his customers. Nevertheless, I fell asleep, only to wake myself up in the middle of the night murmuring: “I’m in Hungary.” Upon which I became sad. What to do? I decided that the next day I would find the donkey man and attach myself to his destiny. “He would certainly let me if I gave him a little money”, I thought. “And besides, I can do a few card tricks to follow the end of his routine.” This project returned to my mind when the servant brought me my cup of coffee in the morning. I decided not to argue with it. In the dining room I asked for the innkeeper and then asked him how I could find the place where I could meet up with the donkey man.

- What donkey man? The man asked.

- The one who was there yesterday. In the square.

The innkeeper took a long look at me and , without replying, went across the room to consult with his wife. Sometimes he glanced over at me and I understood that he had decided I was crazy. That could be dangerous. Thus I decided to get out of there with a feigned indifference. I haled a passing carriage.

- I will give you a one hundred franc tip if you get me to Cassal in half an hour.

The horses raced like the wind. We passed the last house in the village when a man came out of the stable and took off in pursuit of us. I recognized the donkey man. He ran as fast as he could, signalling to us. I watched him from a little porthole cut into the roof of the cart. He was manifestly losing ground. At a road crossing he went down the wrong path and continued running in the opposite direction. I was saved.

The coachman turned to me.  “We never show that we see him”, he said.

The door of the past

 In an essay on Henry James’s autobiographies, Richard Poirier claimed that the first volume – A small boy and others – which is ostensibly a memoir of William James, who had recently died – deserves a place among the two other great books about the boyhood of artists that appeared in the 1910s: Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann and Joyce’s A portrait of an artist as a young man. Perhaps we should include Freud’s Aus Der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose from 1918 in this company.

As it happens: I’ve never read James’s autobiographies. But Poirier’s enthusiasm for A small boy – which was not so much about the picture of William James that it intends, in a cultic gesture, to offer, but about Henry James’s own impression of a bringing up that followed the rather inimitable lines of his father’s whims and his sensibility’s grasp, even then, of the opportunity afforded.

Late James is my favorite James, in spite of the verbosity and the his use of catchphrase and cliché – much as Charlie Chaplin or Gene Kelly would use some ordinary commodity as a partner in some gorgeous cinematic dance sequence. I like that. I live for that.

This is H.J. dancing:

“To knock at the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide – to see the world within begin to “compose” with a grace of its own round the primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently. Such then is the circle of my commemoration and so much these free and copious notes a labour of love and loyalty. We were, to my sense, the blest group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture of differences, and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that each of us, to that fond fancy, pleads for preservation, and that in respect to what I speak of myself as possessing I think I shall be ashamed, as of a cold impiety, to find any element altogether negligible.”

The door of memory is thus the door to a wake, and this act of loyalty one long toast; while somehow the copious notes work towards that preservative end. H.J.’s music does not exclude the occasional wheezing, or the tuning of the instrument when it is out of tune, and it is in these moments especially that the fans get their ticket’s worth: the odd combo of raggedness and dignity – O O O that Jamesian rag - elevates the mundane tune.

It is, at least formally, the only James tale of a philosopher – for that is what William James turned out to be. I imagine, though, that to Henry, the mere disciplinary difference was all epiphenomenon, for underneath it all was the solid substratum of the writer.

On Movies

 When Edison, among others, invented the apparatus for making film, everybody – in the West - had a pretty good idea of what an actor did and what theatre was. These ideas were passed onto film, as if film were merely the extension of theatre. It did not occur to Edison, or to others in the first period of moviemaking, to do more than let the camera record a basically theatrical experience. It was as if one were just taking a big extended photograph of a play.

Now, the play is certainly not a spontaneous experience, but it soon became evident that the theatre and the movie operate in different dimensions. The actor in a play may rehearse the part, certainly has to memorize the lines, appears in a stage setting, interacts with others who have also memorized lines, etc. – but all within the defining and unitary experience of the performance. The actor’s experience of the play and the audiences is equivalent, by which I mean that the actor’s part in the play, in real time, concords with the audience’s real-time observation of the play.

This radically changed with film. It was blown to hell. The idea that the film would mimic the play – photograph it - could not long ignore the technical nature of film making, which allows one to create a performance out of an ensemble of many cuts. And that is key – at that moment, the experience of the audience is fatally and finally cut adrift from the experience of the actor. It is, of course, still possible to film a play, but movies generally are built on the ruin of the old regime, in which the actor experiences the unity of his part in something that occurs from beginning to end at one time. This rarely if ever happens in movies.

Of course, this became, very early, a trope in film. Since the silent films, movies have loved to show – to gleefully demystify – their making. They love to focus the camera on the camera focusing on the actor, they love to show the fakery of it all, they love to show the director, sitting in a director’s chair, saying cut. The cliché quickly and thoroughly penetrated the culture.

However, even as the difference made by the movie was exposed again and again, we retained old, theatrical ways of looking at what was happening. We still called the figures mouthing the lines and pretending to be detectives or kings ‘actors’. And though auteur theory wasn’t really codified until the fifties, the characteristics of it in movie appreciation appeared early on – as though the director was an author.

And so, newpaper and magazine movie critics will write about the performance of the ‘actor’ in the film as something that occurs like the performance of an actor in a play – they will ignore what they know, and what every movie abundantly references – that this is very much a synthesis, rather than a spontaneous unity. The movie references this in its camera work, its transitions, its ‘special effects’, etc., and we know after we have finished it that our experience of it as a performance was an illusion. Even the dimmest movie goer sees through the illusion. The ironic entailment of the reality affect offered by movies is that they become less ‘real’ – they reveal themselves as process the realer they are.

So what are these figures? Are they actors?

There’s a story told on the DVD of Ni Toit ni Loi (Vagabond). In one of the last scenes in the film, Sandrine Bonnaire, the actress who plays Mona – the film’s central figure – wanders into a small French village where the grapes have just been harvested. The village celebrates by allowing a sort of carnival – men dressed up like wine demons capture whoever wanders by – civilians – and dunks them in a vat of wine, or throws grapes at them. According to the interview, when Bonnaire played in this scene, she was not expecting these grape demons – and she was really terrified by them as they chased her around, and eventually into a phone booth. It is an excellent scene – but it would never work in theatre. In the unity of the experience of audience and actors that makes up theatrical performance, and actor who doesn’t know what is happening destroys the code of the performance. He or she isn’t better or worse at that point, but becomes a non-actor. However, this rule simply doesn’t apply in film. This is why film actors often speak of acting a role in terms of the way they physically throw themselves into it – rather than, as theatre actors do, the way they throw themselves into it psychologically. Bonnaire lets her hair go, doesn’t wash it, or herself – DeNiro pumps himself up to 250 pounds for Raging Bull – etc. Now, it isn’t the case that the film actor doesn’t try to assume psychological characteristics, or the theatre actor is not concerned with the body as an instrument – it is a matter of what is subordinate to what. In a sense, the actor in movies, cut off from the entirety of the film by the process of making the film, is doing something very different than what we call acting. A movie is a riposte to methodological individualism – the fundamental level at which the movie works is not reduceable to the separate and individual contributions of the people involved in it. We understand it that way for giving prizes, and because the myth of the individual is something that, at least in America, we pay lip service to. In making movies, the West invented an art form that it did not have the conceptual structure to understand.

This is why I am uncomfortable with saying things about movies in the same way I can say things about novels or poems. Of course, the latter two, as well, propose experiences that require a certain cut in the time of their consumption – the praise of a book that “you can’t put down” is foregrounded in the fact that you do, as a reader, put down books, you don’t read continuously from cover to cover. Yet this editorial and utilitarian fact has long been built into our reading experience, whereas the movie experience still carries with it the overtones of the aesthetic experience it overthrew. Perhaps the real end of the 19th century, the century before movies, was signified in Mallarme’s notion of the Book, the one true book, and Wagner’s notion of the Gesammtekunstwerk, impossible products of a saintly devotion to the one good and real thing. Funny how movies, which have gone from products of ultra-modernity to museum goods, have begun to imitate the Wagnerian gesture of being too long, too aggressively long, entirely

The Rise and Fall of Baby in Popular music: some notes

 

1.  “Baby baby where did our love go…?”

“I’ve got you babe…”

“It’s not me babe…|

2. The ductus of baby. Discuss.

3. Someday somebody will write a rich philological-historical study of the rise and fall of babe and baby in popular song in the sixties and seventies. 

Not me, but somebody. Here’s a few notes.

4. It should be said at the outset that I use “honey”  and “darling” a lot, both as endearments and as terms of address – but I have never called anybody babe or baby who was not, in fact, below 16 months of age.

It should also be said that, on another personal note, baby ended for me with Soft Cell, at some point in New Orleans on the dance floor in the Hotel Pontchatrain. It dies while I was dancing with M.P. on the stroke of midnight, although the date and time could be the effect of a blur in my memory.

5. Mostly babe and baby fell into that group of affectionate names for woman (as distinct from the denigrating terms, like bitch or whore – although as we all know, these are mix and match sets and everything depends on the conformation of the tongue and the lips). As well, though, looking over the set of popular songs in my data base (i.e. Youtube and Spotify), baby was also a female term for addressing a male. And applied to the heteronormative male, it has an interestingly dissolving libidinous effect. Who is baby?

7. In 1932, a James Hart wrote an article on Jazz Jargon for American Speech, from which I cull this:

“A new connotation for the once highly respectable nomenclature of the family, ‘mama’, ‘papa’ and ‘baby’ was introduced into the American language by Tin Pan Ally. … Along with the new connotations came along the new signification of the world ‘baby’.” Hunt cites such titles as “I wonder where my baby is tonight” and “yes sir, she’s my baby.”

8. An interesting experiment was conducted on the Ed Sullivan show, once. The Supremes sang a medley of the songs of the Temptations, and the Temptations sang a medley of the songs of the Supremes. Thus we heard David Ruffin sing “Stop In the Name of Love” and could register a certain transformation in the sound of baby: “Baby baby I’m aware of where you go”….

There is, I think, in the very ductus of the words of a song an indication of the fragile autonomy of song against poem. The ductus of the word is why performance is all too quicksilver to be one of those kinds of things that one can hypostatize, rank, and generally treat to the domestic gaze of established literary aesthetics. What we have going on here is a pathic understanding. The seven types of ambiguity are as nothing to the types of ambiguity summoned and released in the word “babe”.

9. Pathic understandings, however, are not a private language. Instead, they emerge in communities and disappear as well. I can’t really say that “baby” disappeared from popular song in the eighties. Anybody can come up with exceptions. Simple minds had a hit, Don’t you (forget about me) where the baby note – the baby as the addressee – was definitely in the mix. However, by then there was something out of date about the word – as out of date as Greenwich Village or the Beats or Motown Detroit.

10. “Baby Baby Baby you’re out of time.”

“Nowhere to run to baby/nowhere to hide.”

Down in the basement at McDonalds, or why equality of opportunity is a bogus goal

 

I've never understood the popularity of the American belief that the intervention of the state in the political economy should be limited to the goal of “levelling the field” to provide opportunity for all at the start, while ignoring the inequality of outcome.  It seems a contradiction in terms. How can you "level" the playing field, and at the same time allow any unequal outcome? These are in direct contradiction with one another. Any 'playing field' in which one of the players gains a significant advantage will be vulnerable to that player using some part of his power or wealth to 'unlevel' the playing field to his advantage. There is no rule of any type, there is no power that will prevent this. The problem is thinking of the playing field as a sort of board game. You play monopoly and you accept the outcome as 'fair'. The problem of course is that in life, unlike monopoly, you don't fold up the board after the game is over and begin it all again - in other words, the economy isn't a series of discrete games that are iterated at zero.

This is the fatal flaw in the liberal détente with the social democratic ideal:  "equality of opportunity", which presents itself as pragmatism, is actually wildly utopian. The idea that comforts the liberal thinker is that when it succeeds, it will dissolve itself. This is the story behind the goofy, Larry Summers-esque gesture of pretending that those who make it into the Forbes 400 list will fall in the next generation as other movers and shakers from the bottom battle their way forward. This is, in itself, nonsense – the Duponts, the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Goulds are still up there in the multimillionaire/billionaire class.  Behind every member of the Forbes list of billionaires you will find plenty of investment from older wealth. But  the larger point is that those who succeed most do so in a system that allows them ample leaway to make sure that we as a collective never go back to zero, where there is equality of opportunity for everyone. Our idolized 'competition' is limited to those in the lower ranks - for among the wealthiest or the most powerful, the competition is, precisely, to stifle and obstruct competition in as much as it injures wealth or power. D’Angelo has it right in The Wire, a famous scene in which he and his crew are eating McNuggets as they sell their drugs:

“Wallace: Man, whoever invented these, yo, he off the hook.

Poot: You think the man got paid?

- Who?

- Man who invented these.

-Shit, he richer than a muthafucka.

D’Angelo: Why? You think he get a percentage?

Wallace: Why not?

D’angelo: N…, please. The man who invented them things? Just some sad-ass down at the basement at McDonald's, thinkin' up some shit to make some money for the real players.

Poot: Naw, man, that ain't right.

D’Angelo: Fuck "right." It ain't about right, it's about money.”

This groundlevel view understands money is not right.

My objection here should spell out the structural dilemma here. In trying to build an economy with a non-interfering state that only guarantees that the ‘playing field’ is leveled, you are building, in reality, a massively interfering state. There is no point at which equality of opportunity will, as it were, work by itself. This is because the economy does not exist as a chain of discrete states – rather, what happens in time t influences what happens in time t1. The board game metaphor, however, exerts an uncanny influence over liberal thinking. From Rousseau to Rawls, the idea of an original position has, unconsciously, created the idea that society is very much like a board game. That is, it has beginnings and ends; a whole and continuous game came be played on it; that game will reward people according to their contributions. And so on. Here, classical liberalism still has a grasp on the liberalism that broke with it to develop the social welfare state. Both liberalisms, for instance, can accept that the price of an apple is not ‘earned’ by the apple, but both bridle at thinking the price of a man – his compensation – is not ‘earned’ by the man. It must have some deeper moral implication.

As we have all abundantly discovered, the liberal hope, in the sixties, that the social welfare system would so arrange the board game of society that equal opportunity is extended to all, and in so doing  dissolve itself – was based on the false premise that the players all recognize a sort of rule in which they would not use their success in making moves to change the rules of the game. The reactionary economists, that is, the vast majority of the tribe, attribute this to an inertia in the machine, i.e. the laziness of the worker.  But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the incentive in this ‘board game’ – success consists precisely in changing the rules in your favour. It does not consist in getting rewarded for one’s contribution to the aggregate welfare of the players of the game. The billionaire is of a different kind than the saint.  He is of the same kind as the drug dealer. And each, to use Spinoza’s phrase, must continue in their being in order to be at all.

On Boyle

 

Among the scholars who are doing the history of science outside of the Whiggish framework - the latter referring, of course, to Herbert Butterworth’s famous phase about the framework that sees the history of science as essentially a progress - Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s The Leviathan and the Air Pump is one of the most cited texts. It focuses on the New Learning in 17th century England, which was in many ways an extension of the Baconian experimental impulse. Robert Boyle was not only the premier experimenter, but, more than Bacon, the natural philosopher who set the rules for experimentation.

One of Shapin and Schaffer’s ideas is that the experimental method, depending on witnesses for its veracity, evolves a prose style of witness. Shapin and Schaffer point to Thomas Sprat’s injunctions about the proper mode of representation in his history of the Royal Society – which was, in effect, also a polemic on behalf of the society. Sprat enumerates the inveterate injury done by rhetorical ornament, which was at first the “admirable instruments in the hands of Wise Men” but now have turned disgusting – “They make the Fancy disgust the best things, if they come sound and unadorn’d; they are in open defiance against Reason, professing not to hold much correspondence with that, but with its Slaves, the Passions; they give the mind a motion too changeable and bewitching to consist with right practice.” In fact, as Sprat enumerates the faults of the ornate style, he himself falls into a Passion – “For now I am warmed with this just Anger” – but, apparently, this Slave is true to reason, rather than its betrayer. And although Sprat sees the ornaments of rhetoric as being almost beyond reform, he does make a very Protestant recommendation: “They have therefore been most rigorous in putting in execution the only Remedy that can be found for this extravagance, and that has been a constant Resolution to reject all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants before that of Wits or Scholars.” [Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, II,117-118]

Shapin has written a biographical sketch of Boyle that picks at what he was like as a person – and how one would, at this distance, ever find out the facts of what William James might call acquaintance.

Acquaintance is, of course, the very nub of witness.

Born of a rich, rapacious pioneer of the land grab game in Ireland, an ennobled Elizabethan nabob who at one point might have been the richest man in the Kingdom, Boyle’s father despised Ireland – which was the source of his wealth – yet had his children taught Gaelic. Boyle himself certainly retained in his own voice the Irish English intonation, one that his tutors at Eton never could extinguish. More than that, Boyle he was a stutterer. According to his own account, Boyle picked up the stuttering habit when he was a boy from mocking the speech of others. Shapin imagines this might be Boyle mocking the Irish English of others.

While his elder brother was one of the great rakes at Charles II’s court, Boyle was an Anglican of a species now long extinct – an enthusiastic Anglican. Recent work on Boyle has emphasized this aspect of his intellectual character. While maintaining a corpuscular philosophy and advocating for the experimental method, Boyle wrapped these concerns in a general world view that allowed him to attack both Catholics and atheists for a wrongheaded view of God – both, in his opinion, being all too eager to pull God into his creation, and thus fumbling the very root of divinity: God’s exteriority to the world. It is that exteriority that allows God to be a supreme chooser – he can chose the way the world will be because he is not caught within it.

Boyle was an Anglican and directed his Free Enquiry, as well as his other philosophical and theological treatises, against both the Catholics and the ‘atheists” – the latter comprehending all who would make God immanent in nature, instead of standing outside it. But his brothers, as Shapin points out, were notorious Restoration rakes – the very type to be attracted to the libertine philosophy.

While the language of natural philosophy, for Sprat, is going to cast off the Wit’s devious metaphors and the disgusting fancies of the scholar in order to embrace the language of the artisan, Boyle, who was more noble than Merchant, had his own problems with taking the language of the vulgar for the instrument of the wisdom. For where, after all, are the vulgar getting their notions? Are they educated witnesses? Is there any way to escape ambiguity – which is, in its way, as disgusting as metaphor, insofar as it is not the plain way to truth:

“I have often look’d upon it as an unhappy thing, and prejudicial both to philosophy and physic, that the word nature hath been so frequently, and yet so unskillfully employ’d, by all sorts of men. For the very great ambiguity of this term, and the promiscuous use made of it, without sufficiently attending to its different significations, render many of the expressions wherein ‘tis employed, either unintelligible, improper or false. I, therefore, heartily wish, that philosophers,m and other leading me, would, by common consent, introduce some more significant, and less ambiguous terms and expressions, in the room of the licentious word nature; and the forms of speech that depend on it: or at least decline the use of it, as much as conveniently they can…”

Boyle’s observations are of course still current. The weight of the false opposition between the “organic” and the “chemical” moves both the vulgar and the high income crunchy folks. Whenever I encounter this weird notion, I like to point out that the organic is as chemical as the synthetic. I win so many friends this way!

Boyle does a rather wonderful thing about the word “nature”, which makes him the founder, as it were, of the linguistic turn in philosophy – for he gives 8 rules for avoiding the word: 1. Use the word God for natura naturans; 2. use the word essence, or quiddity (tho a barbarous term); 3 “If what is meant by the word nature” is what ‘belongs to a living creature at its nativity” – say, “the animal is born so” – or say that a thing has been generated such. 4. for internal motion – say that the body moves spontaneously; 5. use – “the settled course of things”; 6 for the “aggregate of powers belonging to a body” use constitution, temper, mechanism or complex of the essential properties or qualities; 7. when used for universe, use the word world, or universe; and 8. “If, instead of using the word nature, taken for either a goddess, or a kind of semi-deity; we wholly reject, or very seldom employ it.”

This is a text worth going back to.