Nemesis precedes Justicia: the impunity point in the American 21st century

One of the reasons, I think, that the Epstein affair has sort of haunted the American 21st century is that it is emblematic of the rise of impunity for the rich and the powerful. The rich and the powerful always possess a certain large impunity – this is one of the great incentives to wealth. Popular wisdom has long known this, but it is undiscussed in our schools and colleges and magazines in general. It would stick out, a bit. I got rich so I could do criminal shit -why, say it aint so, great entrepreneur!  

Our legal system, for instance, is built on two conflicting principles, one of which is egality before the law, the other of which is a very strong hierarchy of lawyers, organized by marketplace principles, which makes egality before the law a joke. One man kills his neighbor and cuts off his head and is put in jail and even executed; another man, possessor of a fortune running into the hundreds of millions, kills his neighbor, cuts off his head, is arrested and escapes and flees and is recaptured, and he simply purchases lawpower and gets off scot-free – I’m of course referring to the case of Robert Durst.

The tug between the punishability of all citizens and the impunity of the top few is a theme in all republics. I would venture that there is something like an impunity point beyond which the republic loses its form of stability – its traditional organizations and support structures. That beyond-punishment space opens up real possibilities. We have always, in the American republic, lived with a certain impunity space, but when it broadens, things get very tricky. For the last twenty-five years, I think, elites have enjoyed a very strong moment of impunity, of which we have all seen the evidences. The whole bearing of the court system as well as the executive and legislative branches have been to grant this space to an array of activities (which is given the anodyne name of “de-regulation” in political economics), highlighted by the array of increasingly severe punishment for an array of activities among those who cannot afford great or even moderately good lawyers. I’d say that there is a reason that the macro-effect of this is greatest on the African-American population, which is uniquely rare among the elites – in contrast to women, or gays, etc. In the latter cases, it is all about breaking the glass ceiling – moving up in the elite cohort from a position in that cohort. In the case of those who are in the area outside the elite cohort, it is all a matter of the Great Jailing.

The impunity point was reached well before the Biden presidency, but in many ways it is an exemplar of gateway behavior. The deregulation of the economy achieved, during the Biden presidency, an absurd structure – the wealth of the wealthiest, measured mainly by financial instruments, went well past the level of ancien regime aristocracy. At the same time, the impunity of the political class, in the exemplary instance of Donald Trump, was paraded before us as, absurdly, a sort of pragmatism. The country club penitentiary combined with the Mar a Lago bathroom to show everyone that nothing, in the Republic, was serious anymore. No law was really non-negotiable for the elites, and no law was too onerous for the non-elite citizen – especially in the subset Republic created by private credit agencies and private equity firms.

This all sounds doomscrollingish, but I feel anything but. That the system is bursting in all directions could mean that we are transforming into an authoritarian gumball. But it could mean what it means – that the time is up on this state of impunity. That we’ve come to the point of the ultimate game, in which people will actually sacrifice largely in order to punish those they feel who have acted unfairly. Liberalism was, also, born out of revolt. Nemesis precedes Justicia. Amen.

Secrets - the movie

1.

 

Childhood – middle class childhood – is, among other things, an education in secrets. Secret making and breaking. A paper by Yves de la Taille on the development of  “the right to a secret” among children cites researchers in the Piagetian school claiming that children develop a conception of secrecy around four years of age. I wonder if that has changed as we’ve plugged our kids into youtube and other internety business. I vaguely remember an Oswald the Octopus episode about a secret, which amused Adam in his toddler days.

I don’t think the secret begins as a peer to peer, sibling to sibling or playmate to playmate toy. Parents take great pleasure in making secrets part of kidlife. What would a present be if it isn’t wrapped – if it isn’t the subject of hints – if it isn’t hidden, after it is bought, in the parental closet or workroom? The present needs to be presented in the wrapping because the wrapping is the charisma of the gift. You tear it off, and you guessed right or wrong.

Gifts and guessing, that long bourgeois couple. It will outlast the love marriage.

2.

Secrets and secret societies play an abnormally large role in Georg Simmel’s theory of socialization. Consciousness itself is under the law of the secret. Self-consciousness is not only consciousness that I think, it is consciousness that you don’t know what I think. The cogito comes out as a sly devil, a hider. Epistemology must first deal with secrets and their breaking before we get to the other stuff. I know what I think as I talk to some Other, even while I am talking, and the Other can project this on me since the Other does the same thing. I can, of course, say what I think, but the phrase, “can I be frank,” or “can I tell you what I think” derives its affective sense from the fact that I don’t always, and in fact almost never, tell you what I think entirely. I edit for you. And thank God you edit for me. I’m uniquely equipped to do this, beyond the lie detector’s reach – which of course depends on physiological signs, and doesn’t really measure what’s held back – because I know my secret self. Which is my self, the one I take to the toilet, the shower, the bed. The intimacy here is, formally, a secret, and it is within that secret that all the variables of memory and sense hide. This secret distinguishes me from the Other, and the Other has its secret, and we exist as secret sharers side by side, or in traffic, or as fan to celebrity, lover to love, aging parent to child. We live in secret and we die that way. Here, it really is a matter of until death do you part. Or as Simmel puts it, this is the “deeply grounded circle of mental life.

Yet, such is the power and attraction of exposing oneself that it is a rare individual who goes about making a mystery of himself. The escaped convict, the confidence man, the revolutionary, the knight of faith – all do trail mysteries, but all are out of the mainstream. When Simmel published his Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, the mystery man in literature was in fashion. Hamsun wrote Hunger in 1890 and Mysteries in 1892, which had a tremendous influence on German literature, at least. Dostoevski’s The Possessed, published as Die Dämonen, was published in German translation in 1906. Les Caves du Vatican, Gide’s novel with its scene of the l’acte gratuity – Lafcadio’s murder of his seatmate on the train – was an act that was a mystery even to its perpetrator.

In this atmosphere – the nervous crisis of the European intellectual – putting the secret and the secret sharer as a whole chapter of the large book on sociology made sense. For Simmel, the internal secrecy of the consciousness was anything but a logical choice – it was a choice forced upon the subject by natural history. The secret (which is and is not the unconscious) is distinct as a form from the logic and reason that may advantage a person who wants to keep a secret. Simmel, living before the wireless, compares what happens in the mind of the socialized subject to a treebranch that is entangled in a telegraph wire, causing it to send out messages every time the wind blows. It “leaves signs that give us a reasonable sense” – but that are ultimately caused by something other than the sense. “If one looks at ideas as they continually flow in a time series through our consciousness, this flickering, zigzagging collision of images and ideas … is far distant from reasonable normativity.”

We are idiots babe. It’s a wonder that we still know how to breathe. Which is the expressionist message.

3.

 

In one of his essays, Louis Marin speaks of a certain book of traps, written by a 16th century Venetian. What an evocative title that is! Traps, spies and secrets have always fascinated me.

The secret itself – which tends fatally to the scenario of the trap - has not, for some reason, been a large topic in philosophy since Simmel,  even though it is certainly a conceptually involuted trope. It has been replaced, I think, with the problem of the unconscious.

My approach to the secret takes it that there are two broad secret types. First order secrets are those in which the content of the secret is secret, while the form (that is, that there is a secret there) is not; this is the usual type that is treated in the literature, both fictional and factual. We have, for instance, an intelligence agency and we know that it has put under lock and key documents about X. In this case, we know that X is secret. It is our minimal knowledge, but it is in itself non-secret knowledge. As well, our knowledge that the secret is being kept is public knowledge.

Sometimes, an institution will insert an ambiguity in that knowledge by saying that they can neither confirm or deny X. This is a step towards the second order secret. These are secret in which both the content and the form are secret.

For instance, you have a friend who, it turns out, is a murderer. The secret here is both that he is a murderer and that you never suspected he had a secret. I’ve often thought that if, somewhere, there really was a man who shot at Kennedy from the grassy knoll, and he kept that a secret all his life, it would form an interesting novelistic problem. How would you portray that secret keeping as the interesting novelistic theme without violating the secret – that is, approaching the life with an unsourced knowledge that the man had this secret? This would be possible only if something after the man died indicated that this man was the shooter on the grassy knoll. But if you told the tale from this “leak” of information, you would be starting out from a desublimated place; and the whole sublimity of the story is the fact that such a non-secret murder was effected by a man who kept it secret his entire life.

Secrets have a sublimity. A paranoid sublimity.  To keep it secret that you have a secret is to be an agent within a paranoid narrative.

The rough division of secrets does not really give us the essence of secrets, but it is a start.

I once dreamed of a novel in which this second order of secrecy forms the core. Unfortunately, to tell the tale is to violate the core.

You might think this is a trivial distinction, but actually, it is the distinction that informs the relationship between secrecy and political power. We know, for instance, that the CIA holds back information from American citizens - we know that they have secrets. The peculiar status of the CIA depends on our knowing that they know what we dont know in much the same way that the Minister D., in the Purloined Letter, holds sway over the Queen because she knows that he possesses a letter that she doesn’t  want the king to know about. The queen’s secret, then, is a second order secret, while D’s is a first order secret. Second order secrets are often such as to make their possessor vulnerable, while first order secrets are often of the type to make their possessor powerful. This generalization obviously has some very important exceptions, but when it comes, at least, to Intelligence agencies in the U.S., it holds true.

In fact I once dreamed of writing a little spy novel- the notes for which are in some box or other in somebody’s closet- in which the premise was that the real US Intelligence agency was the asphalt testing division of the US Department of Highways and Transportation, while the CIA and the NSA were shells. That was a sort of joke. It is funny because, of course, we think of the CIA, etc., as powerful, and even romantic, because we know they operate in secret, whereas asphalt testing has no James Bond-ian resonance. The charisma of the wrapper is on one, but not on the other.

Parents little think of what they are teaching their child with that first wrapped present.

"Do your own research"

 I find the meme "do your own research" a stab in the right direction - the direction of a Deweyan utopia. Instead of "don't do your own research", the response should be: there are many methods to researching, and you should know a bit about them before you do this noble thing: researching.

When the anti-vax crowd was "doing their own research", they were not doing it by using some elegant cross-checking, historically founded method. They were googling. A good start! But like stepping inside a library, also a good start, you have to know where you go next.

The right wing influencers were like bad librarians, telling you to search in the section entitled pseudoscience.

Unfortunately, the liberal crowd was too often like: don't research at all. Eat your gruel! Not only a dumb answer, but one that has lead us in the past to disaster after disaster.

There have been times without number over the past 25 years when doing your own research was very important. For instance, when all the Serious people were saying Iraq had WMD and was threatening the U.S. Backed up by many a warhawk outfit, rightwing and centrist, who flooded the zone. And who would dispute the towering expertise of, say, Paul Wolfowitz, whose opinion on the minimal cost, even profit, of invading and occupying Iraq surmounted the mere amateur estimates of those who estimated the war as costing 200 billion dollars. And the latter were wrong too – multiply that by five.

My idea, the one I got hold of in the first grade and have never let go of, is: Go into the library. Then ask to find out where the right section is. Then get some map in your head of the recent history of the research on the issue you are interested in. Don't be afraid of being heterodox. But remember as well that mere contrarianism is more of a tantrum than a method. Do, do your own research, and reflect on how you do it, so you can do it better. Figure out your limits, both of the content and of technique.

And remember: this is what teachers from the 8th grade onward have been trying to get you to do!

This quote from one of Einstein's letters is a good guide: “So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth."

Go forth and seek the truth. That is the point of doing your own research. Whether it is research on how to fix an electric appliance or research on vaccines and the history of quarantine methods, your education should have given you the skills to go to the library and find guides. This is the point of education in a democratic system: to help you your whole life long.

details - from Naomi Schor to Heinrich Heine

 IN Naomi Schor’s great book on details [Reading in Detail], one of the monuments of the deconstructive moment of the 90s, there is an anecdote about Dali meeting Lacan, recounted in Dali’s The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, and thus as unreliable as Mickey Mouse’s broomstick assistants in Phantasmagoria.

“While awaiting Lacan’s arrivcal, Dali is at wok on an etching. In order to see the drawing on the copper plate more clearly, Dali found it helpful to stick a small white square of paper on the tip of his nose. After Lacan’s departure, Dali goes over their discussion, sorting out their agreements and disagreements:

‘But I grew increasingly puzzled over the rather alarming manner in which the young psychiatrist had scrutinized my face from time to time. It was almost as if the germ of a strange, curious smile would then pierce through his expression. Was he intently studying the convulsive effects upon my facial morphology of the ideas that stirred my soul? I found the answer to the enigma when I presently went to wash my hands… I had forgotten to remove the square of white paper from the tip of my nose!

… This very Freudian slip-up, this conspicuous “shine on the nose”, will serve as a parable for paranoia-criticism and its vissicitudes…”

Schor’s book is a combination of a certain feminist reading in aesthetics and an archaeology, or perhaps I should say underwater archaeology, a “diving into the wreck”, of the ways in which the detail has been sublimated and continually rediscovered in the eras of romanticism and modernism, those companions of consumer capitalism. The detail is the threat of a certain plenitude that, as man after man, quoted by Schor, assures us, is both threatening and female. In Baudelaire’s terms, the detail encodes the riot, the uprising: any detail conceals in its being noticed the moment in which order is potentially sprung. And yet it is of course the individual members of the street mass, the workers and plebes, upon which the work that sustains the order is done.

As it is with the vast unpaid mass of female labor.

2.

Heine’s memoirs begin by extensively undercutting the memoir genre as one of liars. He illustrates the inherent lie in self-portraiture by telling a shockingly racist anecdote about a South African King of the Ashantis, who has his portrait painted by a travelling European. After often jumping up from his pose several times, the king has a request:

The King, who admired the striking resemblences [of the painter’s portraits of Ashanti women], demanded to be counterfeited himself; he dedicated some sittings to the painter when the latter thought he observed, from the King‘s springing up to observe the progress of the painting, that there was a disquiet in the expression of his features, the grimacing of a man by which he betrayed that he had a wish on his tongue for which he could hardly find the words… Seeing this, the painter so pressed his majesty to tell him his greatest desire until the poor Negro King finally whispered whether it wouldn’t be better to paint him white.“

This anecdote, which mysteriously twins with Dali’s, very richly invests the detail with just the kind of social psychopathology that Schor is raising up from the wreck.

3.

Which gets me to another anecdote in Heine’s “Confessions”. Heine wrote a number of articles under the title De l’Allemagne, in mocking homage to Madam de Stael’s book of that title. A mockery backgrounded by Heine’s notion of the battle in Europe between Napoleon – the male principle – and Madam de Stael – the female principle, both exponentially raised to represent their sexes. Heine’s account of de Stael is unfair, of course, but it is also funny. And in the midst of his complaint against her account of Germany (which, he insists, she saw from a limited point of view, ignoring the “brothel and the barracks” in favour of the “thinkers and the poets”), he tells an anecdote that displaces Schor’s discourse about the detail and fetishism and moves us to a discourse about the detail and obsessive compulsion: although are these things so far apart, really?

“I will by no means imply that Madame de Stael was ugly; but beauty is something wholly different. She had pleasant particulars, which however formed a very unpleasant whole; particularly unbearable for a nervous person like Schiller, of blessed memory, was her mania for taking a tuft of grass or a small paper sack and rolling it over and over between her fingers. This manoeuvre made poor Schiller dizzy, and in despair he gripped her beautiful hand, in order to stop it. And Madame de Stael thought that the sentimental poet was pulled out of himself by the magic of her personality. She did in fact have beautiful hands, I’ve been told, and the most beautiful arms, which she contrived to show naked – certainly the Venus de Milo never displayed such beautiful arms.”

This is the kind of anecdote, the kind of detail, that gets passed around in the European salon of literature. The balling up the paper sack – the grabbing of her hand – the comparison of naked arms to the goddess with no arms, in her most famous statuary incarnation – these tap out a certain S.O.S., a certain coded distress of Heine, the poet of blessed memory. Against the background of the struggle between the male principle and the female principle, Napoleon and de Stael, de L’allemagne seems to be caught in a vertiginous moment, a complex of misunderstandings observed by Heine, in Paris, himself trying to understand the “female principle” in the person of his last lover, Elise Krinitz.

4.

Details and generals.

In Schor’s chapter on Displacement, she quotes from another “confession” – that which forms Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.

“What happens then in the borderline case of a self-analysis, for after

all no Hippocratic oath governs the relationship of Freud the writeranalyst

and Freud the analysand? The answer is forthcoming: in The

Interpretation of Dreams, Freud blithely breaks what I call the second

law of the detail-every detail must be interpreted-which he enunciates

in a note to his case history of the Wolf Man: "it is always a strict

law of dream interpretation that an explanation must be found for every

detail" (S. E., 17:42). Indeed, beginning with the analysis of the Irma

dream, Freud is careful to stress the limits of his interpretation: "I had

a feeling that the interpretation of this part of the dream was not carried

far enough to make it possible to follow the whole of its concealed

meaning. If I had pursued my comparison between the three women,

it would have taken me far afield.- There is at least one spot in every

dream at which it is unplumbable-a navel, as it were, that is its point of

contact with the unknown"

The navel is, as a point, strictly not the point of contact with the unknown, but the point left by a past contact. The navel was famously a question for the theologians, whose speculations are given a medical-cosmological sense by Thomas Browne in the Pseudodoxia Epidemica:

“For the use of the Navel is to continue the Infant unto the Mother, and by the vessels thereof to convey its aliment and sustentation. … Now upon the birth, when the Infant forsaketh the womb, although it dilacerate, and break the involving membranes, yet do these vessels hold, and by the mediation thereof the Infant is connected unto the womb, not only before, but a while also after the birth. These therefore the midwife cutteth off, contriving them into a knot close unto the body of the Infant; from whence ensueth that tortuosity or complicated nodosity we usually call the Navel; occasioned by the colligation of vessels before mentioned. Now the Navel being a part, not precedent, but subsequent unto generation, nativity or parturition, it cannot be well imagined at the creation or extraordinary formation of Adam, who immediately issued from the Artifice of God; nor also that of Eve, who was not solemnly begotten, but suddenly framed, and anomalously proceeded from Adam.”

Haven’t we seen this knot before, being balled up in the fingers of Madame de Stael? Whose particulars, beautiful in themselves, do not make up, for Heine, a beauty, but instead a constant irritation. And whose arms compete, in their nakedness, with Venus de Milo’s absence of arms? And can we plumb this point?

I’m not going to answer these questions.

The use-value of sanity

 

Often one reads that Foucault romanticized insanity, and this is why he pisses people off. I don't believe that.

I believe he pisses people off because he refuses to romanticize sanity. He refuses the unspoken agreement, among men of good will, that we are all sane here. He refuses to see the dreadful networks of death and destruction, the dreadful vacuous boredom that consists of fear of boredom on the one side and the prisons on the other, as collectively sane, and you just don't make those noises in the club. The biggest and most consistent romanticizers are, after all, those who find the position they live in, all the amenities, the distant violence and the vicarious pleasures, the whole goddamn ball of wax, as something completely normal. What a crock that is. Foucault had an unrelenting grip on that thing.

Madness is, on the one hand, a very plain thing - I go into the library, some poor bugeyed soul approaches me to tell me what he's been hearing, and I say to myself: you are mad.

On the other hand, all of it is also at large, out there among the suits, as the sanest behavior. The Greeks with their slaves and their incredible tortures and deaths. The whole early modern period, where the sane got jobs as, say, slave traders. In Saint Domingue, in the eighteenth century, a slave could be punished for having eaten some sugarcane by being forced to work with a metal cage fastened to his head - an ingenious torture for a hot climate, among bugs. Now, a sane craftsman made the cage, a sane overseer puts it on the man's head, a sane plantation manager made the rules, a sane owner gets the money. I believe they were sane. But what good was all that sanity?

Coincidence: shadow and fact

 

1.

In 1850, Dickens began a novel with an exemplary sentence: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station shall be held by someone else, these pages will tell.”  It was, in fact, obviously the nature of these pages – the novel – to tell this story. It went without saying that for Dickens, as well as for other Victorian novelists, the interest of the novel was tied to interest in the individual. If there was an anxiety here, it was about heroism in Carlyle’s key, a heroism that passes the moral tests of life – but there was no doubt that a life was definitely not a matter determined within a larger social pattern, and only of interest insofar as it could be grouped with a subpopulation in order to display certain tendencies. In this sense, the novel bet everything on the ideology of heroism.

 

Even so, at the same time, in mid nineteenth century, there were indications that a radically different point of view, the statistical mindset, was winning minds outside the circle of literature.  Quetelet, for instance, in 1835 had already tried to show that crime should not be understood through its individual instances, but through statistics demonstrating its likelihood of incidence. From this, Quetelet inferred that it was society, and not the criminal, which produced crime, just as an orange tree produced oranges. We would not hold an orange responsible being an orange, although we might pluck it and squeeze it to death for its juice – just as we might take down a criminal and cut off his head to satisfy the principles of social hygiene.

 

Dicken’s notion of the novel and the individual produced what Robert Musil called a naïve, or old fashioned story form, which was very difficult to break with. In his view –a view, it must be admitted, conditioned by Musil’s envy of the fame of the great modernists – Ulysses and A la recherche are still footed in the archaic world of certainty and heroism, instead of the world in which that ground had disappeared and criminals could be considered the fruit of society, rather than bad actors making bad decisions, while characters could be considered as hybrids of the interior thoughts that, they delusively believe, guide them, and the administrative purposes for which they employed by exterior forces.

 

It is in this context that Musil thought a lot about coincidence – Zufall. Chance, after all, is felt as coincidence in a story, especially when science shatters our confidence that a life and a life story are one and the same thing.  In his diaries,  Musil piled up references to popular work on probability and chance in the field of math and physics. One of his sources was Erwin Schroedinger’s essay on the Gesetz der Zufall – the Law of Chance – in Koralle, a popular science magazine, which appeared in 1928.

 

It is a small, lucid essay, with two themes. One is that our understanding of the physical world is based not on certainty, but on probability. The other theme is that the second law of thermodynamics, which posits that systems advance from order to larger degrees of disorder, doesn’t free us from the link of determinism, if by determinism we mean unpredictability. Rather, entropy is highly predictable.

 

To make this point, Schroedinger uses an example that would have struck a writer like Musil – the example of the library.

 

He asks us to imagine a library that has been organized so that all the books in it are numbered and put in their proper places. And then he imagines a horde coming in on Monday – surely, students right before exam time – and going through the library and taking out books and putting them back with no regard for their proper place:

 Now the astonishing feature is that this process proves to be subject to very definite laws, especially if we suppose that the valumes are taken from the shelves in the same haphazard way as they are put back…. If we suppose that there were eighty volumes of Goethe’s works, for instance, neatly arranged in one section of the library when the casual mob entered, and if we find that only sixty volumes are now in their places while the other twenty are scattered about here and there, then we can expect during the second week about fifteen volumes will disappear from the row, and about eleven volumes will vanish during the third week, etc. For since we have supposed that the books are taken out quite at random, the probability that one of the remaining volumes will meet with this misfortune decreases as their number decreases.”

 

Schroedinger concedes that his example is stylized – really, for the predictions to be more exact, the numbers must be bigger. If the collected works amounted to 80,000 among millions of volumes, the deviations from the predicted number of remaining books would be smaller.

 

Schroedinger’s library example is interesting to follow through. If this were a real library, then some of the Goethe volumes would be checked out, and some of the books that were scattered around would be discovered by library assistants and put back in their place. In terms of the second law, what this would mean is that the system had feedbacks – which means that it is not entirely closed.

“ We do not wish to asseert anything more than that the total balance of disorder in nature is steadily on  the increase. In individual sections of the universe, or in definite material systems, the movement may  cvery well be towards a higher degree of order, which is made possible because an adequate compensation  occurs in some other systems.”

The notion of feedbacks gives us a new way of thinking about the game played between the novel and the author, in as much as the author keeps adding and subtracting from the novel, as well as that played between the reader and the novel, in that the reader keeps decoding the novel. But the question Musil was gnawing on was whether the novel as a system could accommodate the character as a point determined by the irreversible progress from order to disorder inherent in the other administrative systems within the social world that give the character a content. 

2.

E.T. Jaynes was a mathematician and philosopher who, in the twentieth century, did perhaps the most to counter and wrongfoot the frequentist tradition in possibility theory. Jaynes tried to prove that the possibility calculus is rooted in logic – that it is, indeed, as Laplace said, “the calculus of inductive reasoning” – of which random experiments are merely a subset. In other words, Jayne tried to harden the hearts of all who were interested in probability against the idea that probability represented some objective property of objects – or a Popper put it, a propension. To Jayne’s mind, at the same time that the frequentist line attempted to demonstrate that probabilty was something objective, instead of subjective, it also abstracted, absurdly, from the laws of physics. His central case for this was the discourse around coin tossing. Coins, as Jayne points out, are physical objects, and their rise and fall is completely described by the physics of ballistics. (I take this example from Jayne’s book, Probability theory: the logic of the sciences). Thus, to say that a coin with heads and tails has a fairly equal chance of landing on either side, with a lean a bit to heads over a long series of tosses, is to speak nonsense. Rather, everything depends on how a coin is tossed, as a physical object.

 

The laws of mechanics now tell us the following. The ellipsoid of inertia of a thin disc is

an oblate spheroid of eccentricity 1/√2. The displacement x does not affect the symmetry of this ellipsoid, and, so according to the Poinsot construction, as found in textbooks on rigid dynamics (such as Routh, 1905, or Goldstein, 1980, Chap. 5), the polhodes remain circles concentric with the axis of the coin. In consequence, the character of the tumbling motion of the coin while in flight is exactly the same for a biased as an unbiased coin, except

that for the biased one it is the center of gravity, rather than the geometrical center, which describes the parabolic ‘free particle’ trajectory.”

 

Given these physical facts, this is what Jayne suggests:

Therefore, in order to know which face will be uppermost in your hand, you have only

to carry out the following procedure. Denote by k a unit vector passing through the coin

along its axis, with its point on the ‘heads’ side. Now toss the coin with a twist so that k and

n make an acute angle, then catch it with your palm held flat, in a plane normal to n. On

successive tosses, you can let the direction of n, the magnitude of the angular momentum,

and the angle between n and k, vary widely; the tumbling motion will then appear entirely

different to the eye on different tosses, and it would require almost superhuman powers of

observation to discover your strategy.

 

Thus, anyone familiar with the law of conservation of angular momentum can, after some

practice, cheat at the usual coin-toss game and call his shots with 100% accuracy.”

 

Jayne’s point is that probability is not a spooky physical property connected with the two sidedness of the coin, but is a logical abstraction describing the physical event, including in its reference set the manner of the tossing.

 

Jayne goes on to demolish other examples from the frequentist literature. Here’s his conclusion:

 

“… those who assert the existence of physical probabilities do so in the belief that this establishes for their position an ‘objectivity’ that those who speak only of a ‘state of knowledge’ lack. Yet to assert as fact something which cannot be either proved or disproved by observation of facts is the opposite of objectivity; it is to assert something that one could not possibly know to be true. Such an assertion is not even entitled to be called a description of a ‘state of knowledge’.”

 

This conclusion led Jaynes to some radical and unorthodox positions. In particular, it led him to stress lack of knowledge, rather than physicalism, when accounting for quantum mechanics. He is famous for applying this, as well, to thermodyamics:  “entropy is an anthropomorphic concept, not only in the well known statistical sense that it measures the extent of human ignorance as to the microstate. Even at the purely phenomenological level entropy is an anthropomorphic concept. For it is a property not of the physical system but of the particular experiments you or I choose to perform on it.”

Often, while following a philosophical train of thought, one encounters a moment when the values one has been using strangely seem to inverse themselves. It is like the child's game of closing your eyes and spinning around and around: at the moment you stop and open your eyes, it seems that it is the world that is spinning around and around and you are standing still in the eye of it. The argument about probability partakes of that vertigo. The classical school inherits from Laplace the confidence that the world is a totally determined system, in which all phenomena can eventually traced back to material causes. And yet, to get to this argument, the school has to advance the thesis that probability is simply a measure of knowledge - or, to use the modern term, information. This means that, in classical terms, possibility is subjective. On the other side is the world picture that rejects crude determinism and accords chance a very real place. This school, then, takes possibility as as a real property, or in Popper's terminology, propensity, of events. This is, ultimately, an argument that makes possible an ontologically distinct thing called subjectivity. But, in grounding subjectivity in chance, in making possibility objective, this school entangles itself in all the logical problems adduced by Jaynes. And so, as the first group bases its determinism, which ultimately dissolves subjectivity, on the subjectivity of the probability calculus, the other group bases its indeterminism on the reification of a spooky non-cause. As I've pointed out, what goes for chance goes for coincidence. Perhaps here a Kantian probabilist could claim that we have reached the limit of our reason - the antinomies of chance are undecidable. But I'm pretty sure Jaynes would question whether, ultimately, we are not just making undecidable a case of our lack of knowledge, thus forcing us back towards his school.

3.

In Mill’s Logic, that grand old lumber room, in Chapter 18 of Book three,  a principle is spelled out that, in our day, has been shorthanded into the sometimes tendentious phrase,  correlation does not prove causation:

“Although two or more cases in which the phenomenon a has been met with may have no common antecedent except A, this does not prove that there is any connection between a and A, since a may have many causes, and may have been produced, in these different instances, not by any thing which the instances had in common, but by some of those elements in them which were different.”

Mill, in keeping with his practical bent, distills from this a question: “After how many and what sort of instances may it be concluded that an observed coincidence between two phenomena is not the effect of chance?”

Another way of putting this question is: when is a coincidence really a coincidence?

As Francois Mentre has pointed out, the French mathematician and scientist, Cournot, was also intested in this question, or at least in one of its guises: the reality of probability. Cournot worked in the shadow of Laplace; but where Laplace, finally, came down on the side of a universal determinism, Cournot was sure that this move was not justified by Laplace’s mathematics.  “He could not admit that chance was nothing  but a “vain sound, flatus vocis, which we use, as Laplace said, to disguise our ignorance of true causes.” For him [Cournot], chance had an objective reality independent of our knowledge.” (144) Cournot spelled out his ontological conviction by way of a critique of Laplace. Laplace wrote that Nature obeys “a small number of immutable laws.” Cournot’s disprove of Laplace’s determinism moves from this idea: “it suffices, said Cournot, that there be only two, perfectly independent one from the other, in order that we must make a place for the fortuitous in the government of the world. Whether or not  we do or do not know the literal law for each of the independent two series, as soon as they intersect, there is chance. Chance thus does not derive from our ignorance of the laws of the universe, no more than it diminishes as the measure of our knowledge extends. It subsists in the eyes of the expert as well as those of the ignoramus. It is necessary to accept it as an irreducible, sui generis fact that has a notable part in the government of the world.” (209)

This, though, is hard to accept, either for the expert or the ignoramus or that hybrid of the two, the modern mystic..

One can see that Cournot’s observation blocks two popular explanations of coincidence (or chance – in fact, I am using coincidence here as a proxy for a semantic family that includes the French hasard and the German Zufall). True coincidence can neither be purely the effect of human ignorance of the causes in place, nor can itself be characteristic of some autonomous law – a law of synchronicity or seriality. The same reasoning Cournot applies to other laws would apply in this case, so that any law of synchronicity would inevitably generate coincidences that would fall outside its domain as it intersected with other universal laws, creating, if you will, hypercoincidences.

One way of looking at physics in the 20^th century is that the physicists were both moved by the fact that the world given by a structure that was governed by two or more irreducible laws would have to accord a large place to chance – such that probability was no longer a way of mathematically stylizing elements that were, to an all powerful intelligence, always certain – and a movement to unify the laws of physics, to reduce them to some grand single principle, which would drive out coincidence.

However, there was also a tradition, a fringe tradition, that rejected the whole idea that coincidence wasn’t subject to its own proper law. Instead, it sought that law. This was an especially popular theme in Germany in the 20s, coexisting with a faddish interest in psychoanalysis, physiognomics, graphology, paranormal psychology, etc. Psychoanalysis had a tentative relationship with these things, which fascinated Freud, but which, finally, he diagnosed as cultural symptoms of a mass psychopathology.

4.

The ever resourceful, ever peculiar Arthur Koestler devoted two books to a minor figure in the history of science: Paul Kammerer. One book, The case of the Midwife Toad, detailed Kammerer’s search for proof that Lamarkian evolution – the inheritance of acquired traits – actually exists. The other book, The Roots of Coincidence, explored Kammerer’s fascination with what he called seriality, which found its way into Kammerer’s 1919, Das Gesetz der Serie. As I pointed out, if we take Cournot’s reasoning to be correct, there shouldn’t be a “law” of coincidence, since coincidence is, by definition, a byproduct of the fact that the laws of physics are both plural and independent one from the other. Thus, a law of coincidence would simply create another kind of coincidence that it couldn’t encompass, and thus would not be a law of all coincidences at all – eliminating it from consideration as a law of physics.

Nevertheless, while 20^th century physicists did follow, reluctantly, the probabilistic path scouted out by Cournot, there were intellectuals – sometimes including physicists of note, such as Wolfgang Pauli – who couldn’t resist the impulse of trying to discover some law to explain the interstices of chance.

Mostly, these intellectuals were not physicists, however. Rather, they were, many of them, concerned that the geometric spirit was strangling the poetry of the world, and sought places at the spiritual front where they could fight back. Often, however, they ended up fighting back using the methods of their opponents – that is, instead of claiming poetry as a power in its own right, they claimed that they were making scientific discoveries.

Kammerer, according to Koestler, made notebooks in which he recorded coincidences. He was on the lookout for them. A coincidence notebook is something to dream about – what a wonderful form for a novel!  Here’s what it looks like, in an extract from Koestler:

Kammerer's book contains a hundred samples of

coincidences. For instance:

(7) On September 18, 1916, my wife, while waiting for her turn in the consulting rooms of Prof. Dr.j.

v. H., reads the magazine Die Kunst; she is impressed by some reproductions of pictures by a painter named Schwalbach, and makes a mental note to remember his name because she would like to see the originals. At that moment the door opens and the receptionist calls out to the patients: "Is Frau Schwalbach here? She is wanted on the telephone."

(22) On July 28, 1915, I experienced the following progressive series: (a) my wife was reading about

"Mrs. Rohan", a character in the novel Michael by Hermann Bang; in the tramway she saw a man who looked like her friend, Prince Rohan; in the evening Prince Rohan dropped in on us. (b) In the tram she overheard somebody asking the pseudo-Rohan whether he knew the village of Weissenbach on Lake Attersee, and whether it would be a pleasant place for a holiday. When she got out of the tram, she went to a delicatessen shop on the Naschmarkt, where the attendant asked her whether she happened to know Weissenbach on Lake Attersee-he had to make a delivery by mail and did not know the correct postal address.”

Those who have the ear for these things will be impressed by the similarity (the coincidence?) of this kind of prose with Freud’s cases from ordinary life in the Psychopathology, which contains the famous (and much disputed) analysis of a “Freudian slip”. The coincidence, in fact, seems to be a sort of slip by fate itself – as though some secret law governing human events slips quickly into and out of view. Kammerer, like Freud, was concerned with repetition. He defined the series as "a lawful recurrence of the same or similar things and events -a recurrence, or clustering, in time or space whereby the individual members in the sequence-as far as can be ascertained by careful analysis-are not connected by the same active cause".

What they are connected by is the same person, depending on the case.

 

Six years before Kammerer’s book, Freud had published one of his more adventurous works: Totem and Taboo. In this book, he develops the idea of projection as a process by which the ambiguity of feelings one has about a person are relieved – in the case of “primitives”, by imputing hostility to the spirits of the dead, a hostility that has its real origin in the hostility one felt about them living. This idea has had a long career, and merged into the ordinary way of thinking about how we negotiate feeling and interactions with others so that it no longer seems or is even recognized, much of the time, as Freudian. Of course, it is a word that coincided with a technology – the projection of images on a screen – that also characterized one of the long events in the cultural life of the twentieth century. Freud sees, in a sense, the false divide that separates the “primitive” from the modern, even if the only moderns that he compares to primitives are neurotics. As to neurotics – in essence, you have successful ones, who sublimate their neuroses, and unsuccessful ones, who exibit it, and that is the psychopathology of everyday life. Mental illness is  a matter of degree, not a difference in kind.

Which is why projection is fundamentally based, according to Freud, on the human setup:

“But projection exists not only as a defense mechanism, but it also arises where there are no conflicts. The projection of inner perceptions to the outside is a primitive mechanism which underlies, for instance, our sense perceptions, which thus have the greatest share in shaping our outer world. Under not sufficiently fixed conditions, our inner perceptions will also project outward our feeling and thought processes as well as our sense perceptions, applying them to the forming of the outer world while they should remain bound to the inner world. This is connected genetically, perhaps, to the fact that the function of attention is not originally directed to the inner world, but instead to stimuli streaming in from the outer world, receiving from the endopsychic processes only reports of the development of pleasure or pain. Only with the construction of an abstract thought language, through the conjunction of sense-related remnants of verbal representations with inner processes, does this become gradually perceptible. Up to this point the primitive person through projection of inner perceptions on the outside develops a picture of the outer world that we only now, with a heightened sense of consciousness in psychology, are forced to retranslate.”  

6.

Nabokov played around with the coincidence device himself, in his novel, Despair. There, the hero, a prosperous businessman named Hermann, mistakenly supposes that he looks like a certain much poorer man. Hermann befriends this man on behalf of a plot to make make money and get out of a relationship with his cheating wife. The plot involves getting the double to dress as Hermann and then killing him. After this, the life insurance money will come rolling in, and Hermann can collect it. Hermann, then, is very much writing the “plot” for his characters, and banking on a coincidence. But what he doesn’t reckon on is his own blindspot with regard to what he looks like. There’s a character in a Turgenev story who says, somewhere, that he can keep a sharp mental image of strangers, but more familiar faces, including his own, never fix themselves in his imaginagtion. Hermann seems to be in a similar case – in fact, nobody else thinks his double looks like Hermann. Thus, the coincidence by which the murderer hopes to make his escape ends up being no coincidence at all – which is a very funny variation on the coincidence plot.
An Israeli sociologist, Ruma Falk, has made a career long study of coincidence stories. Like a disillusioned Hermann, Falk claims to have shown that our coincidence stories often depend on obtaining a statistically significant result from a deliberately chosen extreme example instead of basing that conclusion on a random sample”. The emphasis here on the random sample indicates the frequentist bias of Falk’s work – but at the same time, what really interests here is a cognitive property – the “surprising” effect of the coincidence. If Hermann had interviewed other candidates for doppelganger, or consulted his friends, he might well have found someone who, according to consensus, looked like him – which would of course be a coincidence, but one founded in the pool of types, cultural and genetic, in which Hermann existed, like some dictator looking for a body double to use as a security measure. But Hermann didn’t, because the coincidence surprised him to the extent that he didn’t question it.
Falk, then, looked at the element of surprise in coincidence stories. They divide stories of coincidence taken from a pool of subjects between self-coincidence and other-coincidence. They asked their subjects to judge the degree of surprise elicited by these stories – that is, stories the subject told about his or her experience, and stories the subject read about others’ experiences. “On the average, authors judged their self-coincidences somewhat more surprising than they judged others’ coincidences. However, the mean rating of the control subjects revealed that the other-stories were objectively more surprising than the self-stories. Taken together, authors found their own coincidences more surprising than others’ coincidences despite the fact that the latter were objectively more surprising.”
This is a complex response, no? One might speculate that the surprisingness of coincidence operates in more important ways in ordinary life than it is given credit for. At least, in listening to people talk about their lives, and about accidents that have befallen them, I get the sense that coincidence operates as a sort of guiding shadow to making sense of the incidents in a life - making the life seem fated, necessary, telic.

 

 

  

 

 

 

Anti-modernity

 1.

Anti-modern. This is the term Jacques Le Rider turns to repeatedly in his biography of Karl Kraus. Which is entitled, somewhat contrarily, Karl Kraus: lighthouse and flame thrower of Viennese Modernity.

The anti-modernity of the modernists has become a common critical theme. The nostalgia of the modernists for the archaic or primitive past – how we see it and feel it!. In Picasso’s paintings, or De Chirico’s (whose father was an archaeologist who helped “discover” Minoan civilization), in Pound’s poetry – “Ecbatan/City of patterned streets”, in Lawrence’s Etruscans, in Stravinsky’s Rite.  Or, on the lefthand side, the “oppositional nostalgia” of Benjamin, the Surrealists, et fucking cetera.

However, Kraus’s anti-modernity employed a special kind of code and entrance to the horror of the present. In 1912, he worked it out in his address, essay, harangue that he chanted at the Musikverein for the Nestroy memorial celebration. Nestroy at 50. He published it as Nestroy and Posterity.

I think of that odd looking figure making those long, entrancing stand-up routines at the center of Kakania – a Kakania that would soon disappear forever. The empire of the Habsburgs: the empire that, in distinction from all those areas ruled by all those crowned heads, had not unifying reason save for the ruling family. No nation, no constitution, to bear it all up.

Kraus saw a bit of the world event that was happening in all the disasters and delights of his time and subsumed it into a phrase, “posterity”, Nachwelt. Kraus was a good ambushers, and his ambush around the word posterity was, in a sense, the summing up of his peculiar art.

Posterity, as Kraus says at the beginning, is a debt, a Schuld, owed to the past, or at least paid to the past. Schuld means, as well, guilt – the debt/guilt binary that we find in the Lord’s prayer is certainly doing overtime here.

A debt however is only as good as the debtor’s consciousness of the debt. It is only owed by a subject who feels it is owed. But what if, Kraus asks, the after-world becomes incapable of feeling it owes a debt? And what if that tidal change in sentiment marks a break in the relationship between the past and the future?  “We inhabitants of a time which has lost the ability to be a posterity.”  Kraus uses the comic, concrete situation of the writer or reader in a room in a house that owes everything, from framework to plumbing, to the engineer. A person who has everything to make the residence comfortable – and unliveable. That is, if we take living to be a matter of feeling a certain debt to the past.

“It would be better for the artist not to be born at all rather than with the comfortable thought that when posterity arrives, they will have it better.”

In a sense, one can put this bitter thought in the balance with any number of progressive maxims: say, Lenin’s phrase, Communism is Soviet Power plus electricity.” Or, pushing back, to Jefferson’s supposed remark, “I am a soldier, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.” This optimistic progress, in Kraus’s view, is mined by its own contradiction. The world that the merchant makes, the world of armed force and trade opportunities, is a world in which poetry becomes impossible.

Kraus, was a genius and a demagogue. He was, as well, from a home that was extremely comfortable, and he liked comfortable people, or at least women bearing aristocratic names, granted. But his own talent for spotting the way the time was going – a demagogue’s talent, as well, impresses me. “ The technologists have demolished the bridges and the future is now what automatically attaches itself.” I feel, here, something moving in the obscurity, something that it is hard to see for those who “owe” the OG 20^th century their transport, meals, illumination and pills.

2.

Paul Warde makes useful distinction (in Subsistence and Sales: the peasant economy of Württemberg in the early seventeenth century, Economic History Review, 2006) between a school of the economic historiography of peasant economies that emphasized Ricardian decreasing returns and Malthusian limits to resources, and a school that emphasized a Smithian growth approach, in which the peasant’s natural inclination to barter and trade and maximize profit is merely hindered by rent seeking and anachronistic guild like institutions. One of the star representatives of the latter approach, Sheilagh Ogilvie, attacks any theory that holds that the peasant economy is somehow special, because, according to her, such a theory is founded on the idea that peasants are irrational. Her reading, then, of Polanyi style analysis is that it is deeply patronizing to peasants and blind to the way peasants were struggling to become capitalists against the dead weight of feudal institutions:

“But whether 'irrational' or 'differently rational', peasants lack the conventional economic concepts of wages, capital, interest, rent, and profit. [Ogilvie here is criticizing non-Smithian approaches] Consequently they can neither minimize costs nor maximize profits; instead, they minimize risks and seek to 'satisfice' culturally defined consumption targets.9 These theories regard peasant minimization of risk as excluding 'capitalist' maximization of profit, a distinction puz-zling to mainstream economics, which regards all economic agents as seeking to obtain the lowest possible risk for the highest possible return.”

If this were an accurate criticism of what is the dominant anthropological paradigm of peasant economies, Ogilvie has chosen the right method to smash it – finding records of peasants minimizing costs, making profits, trading, using money, etc.

But as Ward points out, this pushes the non-Smithian approach into absurdities it never articulates. Far from thinking that peasants have no conception of opportunity costs, as Ogilvie puts it, the school she attacks most harshly bases its whole analysis on the peasant’s awareness of opportunity costs.

Ward is, I think, correct here:

“Historians have not recently argued, at least for central and western Europe, that peasants did not understand profit generally. They have argued that they were not profit maximizers , or primarily motivated by profitability, a rather different position, although it is in truth rather difficult to establish if, or indeed how, peasants might have conceptualized profit or loss across a range of activities over any given period of time.”

Ogilvie, in other words, is using the evidence from the record, which amply demonstrates trading, quantifying, and wage labor, as something that demonstrates a collective social tendency on the part of the peasants to conform their economic activity to these kinds of proto-capitalist features. But she actually shows nothing of the kind, since she thinks it is sufficient to show trading in order to show all the institutionally driven activities that result from the circulation of commodities. In fact, the peasants in her example often show exactly the kind of limited good mentality that would make investment and profit maximization not only institutionally difficult, but culturally suspect.

…
How capitalism arrives is a question that is wrapped up with how the capitalist character is formed. It seems, in a sense, that capitalism, with its double aspect – of a certain form of production and a certain form of circulation – is boobytrapped. One must understand the mentality of the agents of circulation in order to understand the condition of the agents of production, and one must understand the limits imposed on the agents of production in order to understand the possibility of circulation. One must, then, understand not only technology, but ideology.

Mainstream economics is proud of its methodological individualism, but it doesn’t believe it. The individual, as the economists understand, does not spontaneously produce his acts. The man in an office, or behind a plow, or behind a gun, did not find his places by inventing his scene. The idea that the individual invents society is, evidently, an act that has never attributed to any individual. So the mainstream economist has come up with a wonderful concept saver: the individual, in their terms, is essentially a chooser. Goethe’s Faust cried out that in the beginning was the act – but the economist’s homo economicus counters that in the beginning was the choice. The cosmology of the preference wraps the societal world in a mystery – for one never seems to come to acts, only to choices. Every blade of wheat, every board of wood, every drop of ink, is not what it seems to be, but is instead an agglomeration of atomic choices. By some inexplicable accident, these choices also seem to be matter, and have weight and chemistry. The only thing that isn’t chosen is choice itself.

This is a rich cosmology, but not necessarily a believable one. So it is reinforced by the time honored method of scolding. If we don’t hold to individualism, all responsibility is lost, and anarchy and concentration camps are loosed upon the world.

The origin of this cosmology is surely to be found in the period between around 1650 and 1789. And it did not arise among the peasant masses, yearning to profit maximize, but among a varied assortment of clerks and policymakers. Intellectuals in Edinburgh universities and ministers at Louis XVI’s court, as well as slave traders and sugar merchants were all starting to put it together.

By the late twentieth century, the capitalist operation had become so dominant – at least among intellectuals – that historians could not believe the cosmos had ever been different. Thus, in the spirit of conquest, the historians went back to pre-capitalist societies and attempted to rescue them for capitalism. Thus, theorems of market equilibrium, or of public choice, are imposed as the real language of rationality that the peasants were, as it were, articulating in mime.

My own sense is that the peasant economies were not irrational, nor are the rational capitalist economies non-peasant – the rational economic institutions are colonized by non-equilibrium, non-growth, non-maximizing kinds of behavior, and peasant economies surely involved calculations to some end. However, instead of the models that Ward and Ogilvie use to understand rationality of peasant economics, I think one should turn to contemporaries, like Blaise Pascal, for the vocabulary of what was afoot. Pascal’s three forms of the spirit – l’esprit geometrique, l’esprit de finesse, and l’esprit juste give us a much deeper sense of what was in question, in the maintenance of the household, the community, and the person in peasant economies, than we are going to get from Ogilivie’s grid. yet historians in the 21st century, who don't yet face a powerful alternative to capitalism, are unlikely to give up the project of conquering the past with the models of the present, even if the rules they are using predict a much different past than the one that we have. Actually, they also predict a much different present, which must be adjusted, nudged, and jammed to fit into the mainstream economist's rational formats. But the present is malleable, while the past, ah, the past - the problem is that the past can't be fired, or layed off en masse.
More's the pity.