“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads
Saturday, October 08, 2022
The death of the author, the life of the misprint
Friday, October 07, 2022
Voltaire and commercial society
Voltaire’s history of the reign of Louis XV
begins with a study of the system of John Law, seen from the point of view of
the civilizing process – or at least the domesticating process. Voltaire is at
pains to put Law’s bubble in the context of the “habit of obedience” ingrained
in the French under the reign of Louis XIV, comparing the troubles that the
latter Louis faced, in his regency, from an upstart aristocracy, with the
mildness faced by the regent, the Duc D’Orleans, even in the exercise of truly
autocratic power. Out of the disempowerment of the nobility brought about by autocracy
of the Sun King, Voltaire spotted another power on the rise, which would
maintain a social order by the somewhat paradoxical support of those whose
political power was abridged by it. This
passage should be underlined by those looking for the genealogical ancestors of
Marx’s sociology of capitalism:
“Finally, Law’s famous system, which seemed
that it must ruin the regency and the state, actually sustained, in effect,
both one and the other by consequences nobody had foreseen. The cupidity that
it awoke in all conditions of the population, from the basest upt to
magistrates, bishops and princes, turned away the attention of all minds from
the public welfare, and from all political and ambitious views, in filling them
with the fear of losing and the avidity of gaining. It was a new and prodigious
game, where all citizens wagered one against the other. The obsessed players
hardly quit their cards in order to trouble the government. And so it happened,
by a prestige of which the hidden mechanisms could not be seen except by the
finest and most practiced eyes, that a chimerical system gave birth to a real
commerce, and played the midwife to the rebirth of the Indian company,
established in the past by the celebrated Colbert, and ruined by the wars. In
the end, if there were many private fortunes destroyed, at least the nation
become more commercial and richer. This system enlightened minds, as the civil
wars, in the past, had sharpened braveries. It was an epidemic sickness which
spread itself in France, Holland and England. It merits the attention of
posterity, for here it was not a question of the political interest of one or
two princes that sent shockwaves through the nations; rather, the people
themselves hurried into this madness which enriched some families, and reduced
others to beggary.”
Voltaire sees this as a madness, but it is
now a norm. The rise of the financial industry in all its branches is a sort of
surprising result of industrial society. In defiance of the economist’s fetish
of “efficiency”, the very size of finance in contemporary capitalist society is
a marker of vast inefficiencies, of rent-seeking for its own sake.
Because most economists work for the man,
though – the financial man – or hope to, this little insight is lost in the
footnotes. We don’t want to bring to the floor the fact that our form of
capitalism is, by its own standards, a vastly inefficient machine. That would
discourage the poky and the plunky – the little ones who have to be taught to
identify with the plutocrats.
Thursday, October 06, 2022
The Third Wish
I am obsessed. I understand the hurricane and tornado chasers. The longing and fear that come together in some apocalyptic act, which passes – as all apocalypses in America pass – with aftermaths of junk piled by the street. Our enduring symbol of … what? The pioneer spirit? William Carlos Williams missed an important moment in the American poetic when he passed over junk piled by the side of the street. The rent is way passed due, the billcollectors and the sheriff, in that enduring tandem, are wheeling away the moveables and fixing the lock on the door. In this case, the billcollectors and the sheriff are celestial.
It is my nightmare, and I can’t resist watching it play over and over. The water that claims everything you have, the wind that lifts the roof off the building. I’ve built a thin surface of normality over this mad panic expectation. The third wish is, always, secretly, the death wish.
Tuesday, October 04, 2022
And here's our old friend, the reindeer
“Reading it, we were struck like by 100 000
volts that during the Upper Paleolithic – that wonderful time when there were,
max, 150 000 people in Europe, and life was good for around twenty thousand
years - the cave artists generally didn’t draw or paint or engrave people. There
were your stray vulvas, the masked bird man, many hand prints, but generally –
no people. Instead, there were mammoths. There were lions. There were rhinos
and horses. Oddly, much fewer reindeer, even though reindeer meat was the spam
of the Paleolithic – it was always poached reindeer for breakfast, fricasseed
reindeer for lunch, and reindeer pudding for dinner. We are often told how to
evolution stories about this or that human habit, but in reality, the way those
how to stories are formed is that evo psychologists extrapolate back from
‘primitive people’ of today to those wandering around 200,000 years ago.
However, this habit is in serious disconnect from archeologists, who have long
held that ethnography of people today, in no matter what state of society they
live in, is essentially unhelpful when trying to reconstruct the way the
inhabits of the Eurasia 30,000 years ago lived. It is impossible not to imagine
back using our PBS/National Geographic images, but what tribe do we know of
that doesn’t draw people? Deleuze and Guattari talk of the special faciality of
the West – this seems right, on all accounts – but to show so little interest
in people when one has mastered perspective, and the expressive character of
animals? That seems quite significant. But of what? Well, this is where
speculation is dumb, but irresistible.”
I went on to outline my speculative
position: the cave art of 25,000 years
ago, with its relative absence of the
human, marks the time when – just perhaps – humans did not assume they would
prevail. They did not even assume they were superior, since of course they knew
– the horse was superior for speed, the lion and tiger and bear was superior
for strength, the bird for flight, and so on.
There wasn’t - I would speculate, in this
scene still dotted with other hominid candidates for most likely to survive -
the sense that homo sapiens was superior in any department at all.
Calasso’s book is more sophisticated than
my speculation, but it shares the sense that “man” was level with “nature” – in
fact, that split between the humans and nature was inconceivable because
neither category in the modern sense existed. Enemy and friend, transformation
and death, hunting and eating existed. “When it began, the hunt was not a
person who pursued an animal. It was a being who pursued an other being. No one
could say with certainty who was who. The pursued animal could be a transformed
man, or a god, or simply an animal, or a spirit or a something dead.”
And so it was I think through most of the Holocene.
This recent change of earth time – the Anthropocene – was prefigured when a
divide, a borderline was built, in heads and hearts and fields. Did that border
have to thicken into plastic strewn oceans and the kind of yuck that we can see
in pictures of the aftermath of Hurricane Ian? I don’t believe it. What is
strange about the anthopocene story is that we have a story from science that
would make sense to the cavepainters – that we are brothers and sisters of
other animal tribes, that there is nothing called “nature” that causes
anything, that everything has a material unity that we can play with but never
overstep, that metamorphosis is life.
Sunday, October 02, 2022
The fascist franchise
On September 11, 1936,
two bombs exploded in Paris, one in front of the Conferation du patronat
francais, the other in front of the building housing an association for
metallurgy on 45 Rue des Boissieres.
On December 12, 1969,
a bomb exploed in the Banca
dell'Agricultura on Milan's Piazza Fontana that left seventeen dead and
eighty-eight injured.
On January 6, 2021, a
mob stormed the Congress in Washington, trying to annul the results of the 2020
election in the United States.
What unites these
events is that they were all committed by far right groups, and the first two
were committed, we know now, as part of a strategy to create a seemingly “leftwing”
terrorism that would justify a coup d’etat. In the case of the Trumpists, there
was a considerable campaign, after the attack on the capital was made, to blame
the so-called anti-fa.
It is interesting to
consider the success, or at least partial success, of this false flag strategy. In Italy, the
blaming of right wing acts of terror on the left was covered for months by the
police and the prosecutors, until the entire story connecting left wing
anarchists or communists to the bomb broke down. In its place, the police and
prosecutors found a trail that led to the real perpetrators – who were either
not prosecuted or let out of jail on technicalities by the higher courts. In
France, the group of people behind the Cagoule – the people who financed it,
the people who were in the know about it – all found homes in the Petain government
under the occupation. As for the members of the Cagoule, some came back and
fought against the Germans – such was their interpretation of the mix of
anti-semitism and nationalism of their creed – while some collaborated with the
Germans, adopting Hitler as a path to “cleaning” France of Jews and Communists
and degenerates, blah blah.
As for the mob of
patriot boys and blah blah, they can look forward to a court system seeded with
far right figures, including the highest court in the U.S.
History, in as much as
history is biased by the media of the time studied, has been kind to the
neo-fascists. That fascism was the reigning power in 1970 of three of the main Mediterranean
countries – Greece, Spain and Portugal – and that many on the international
anti-communist front, including many Americans, some of them having posts in
the CIA and Army, thought that the danger of the Italian Communist party called
for “extreme measures” – made it geopolitically logical that Italy, too, would
have a coup and a neo-fascist government. As it turned out, fascist doctrine
was not as pervasive in the Italian army
and security branches as it was in Greece, where many of the “colonels” of the
Junta had tasted their first blood under the Nazi occupation, as collaborators
(although changing sides to the British and Americans in 1945, and becoming
vital to the American side in the Greek civil war that pitted the communists
against the forces of “freedom.”
I am a bit startled that
this history has gone into the crapper, and the only reference that is made
when the fascist party wins in Italy is to Mussolini. There is a reason for
this: referring to the Cold War would definitely mess up the Manicheanism between
freedom and communist tyranny, which is the paradigm favored by the older
generation of Cold War scholars.
There’s a sort of
Freudian rule about covering up the fascist part of the anti-communist alliance:
it is the rule of the return of the repressed. The repressed were never, looking
back, very repressed. And they are now at the door.
The philosopher as spy: the case of Alexandre Kojeve
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The most dangerous man the world has ever known was not Attila the Hun or Mao Zedong. He was not Adolf Hitler. In fact, the most dangerous m...
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In messing around in the vaults – the vaults under the surface of history and literature, as per the posts of last week - LI recently came...