death in the eyes

J. P. Vernant’s essay, Death in the eyes: Gorgo, figure of the other (doesn’t that subtitle sound like it was filmed by Roger Corman?) begins resoundingly, like this:

‘Why study Gorgo? The reason is that for a historian, and a historian of religion in particular, the problem of alterity or ‘otherness’ in ancient Greece cannot be limited to the representation the Greeks made of others, of all those whom, for the purposes of reflection, they ranked under different heading in the category of difference, and whose representations always appear deformed because these figures – barbarian, slave, stranger, youth, and woman – are always constructed with refernce to the same model: the adult male citizen. We must also investigate what could be called extreme alterity and sk about the ways in which the ancients attempted to give a form in their religious universe to this experience of the absolute other. The issue is no longer one of a human being who is different from a Greek, but what, by comparison to a human being, is revealed as radical difference: instead of an other person, the other of the person.

Such, we think, were the sense and function of this strange sacred Power that operates through the mask, that has no other form than the mask, and that is presented entirely as a mask: Gorgo.” – translated by Froma I. Zeitlin.



If Casaubon in Middlemarch, his “small taper of learned theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world”, had begun his “key to the mythologies” on this note, Dorothea’s confidence in him might not have completely collapsed. Or is it just that the Victorians, peering at the Greeks, saw a ruddy imperialist power that surely would have subdued the Hindoo – and we see sex?

Vernant’s essay, having proposed such a bold plan, touches on the elements we have looked at in previous posts. Vernant’s notion is Freudian, but it is difficult to read much about the Greeks without thinking of Freud. The notion is of the genital mask: as in the figurine of Baubo we introduced in the post before last, the face and the genitals are combined to form the visual joke that Demeter found so funny. It is a punchline. But underneath the comedy of the genital mask there is a horror of the inhuman, the other who is not a person. For Vernant, one of the messages in the picture of Athene blowing out her cheeks to blow on the flute is that there passes over the very face of reason the genital mask, the horrible likeness.


“But among all the musical instruments, the flute, because of its sounds, melody, and the manner in which it is played, is the one to which the Gorgon’s mask is most related. The art of the flute – the instrument itself, the way it is used, and the melody one extracts from it – was ‘invented’ by Athena to ‘simulate’ the shrill sounds she had heard escaping from the mouths of the Gorgons and their snakes. In order to imitate them, she made the song of the flute ‘which combines all sounds”… Pindar, Pyth 12.1). But the risk inplaying the role of the shrieking Gorgon is actually to become one – all the more so as this mimesis is not mere imitation but an authentic ‘mime,’ a way of getting inside the skin of the character one imitates, of donning his or her mask. The story is told that Athena, wholly absorbed in blowing into the flute, did not heed the warning of the satyr, Marsyas, who, when he saw her with distended mouth, puffed out cheeks, and a face wholly distorted by the effort of getting a sound from the flute, said to her: The ways do not become you.”

Of course, Vernant’s interpretation, here, references Freud’s interpretation of Medusa. The thing is, Vernant comes to this interpretation not through Freud, but through a track laid down in Greek history and literature itself. If there is one thing all the philosophers seemed to be wary of, it is the flute. It is easy to make the correspondence between the constant denunciation of the excitement caused by the flute and, say, the denunciation of rock n roll as a degenerate music in the fifties. But there is an element left out – the iconography of flute playing. Aristotle’s reading of Athena throwing away the flute too hastily passes over what, exactly, is so ugly about puffing out one’s cheeks. As well as what the mouth to pipe picture is all about.

Perhaps the key to all the mythologies is the conjunction, at the bottom of the world, of misogyny and xenophobia – or the reason that patriarchy is such a good framework within which to grow racism. After all, the conjunction of those two things is structural, not logical. There’s no logical necessity that patriarchy should be especially racist.

Sadly, Blair is not going to jail

“But us, who never profit from anything, we are alone. Alone, like the Bedouin in the desert. We have to cover our faces, pull our sheets about ourselves and plunge, head bowed, into the story – and always, incessantly, up to our last drop of water, up to the last palpitation of our heart. When we croak, we will have had the consolation of having made our way, and navigated in the Grand syle.

I sense against the stupidity of my age such floods of hatred that they choke me. The shit mounts into my mouth, as from a tied off hernia. But I want to keep it, fix it, let it harden… - Flaubert, letter to Bouilhet.

Flaubert has a reputation for denouncing la bêtise. Sartre claimed that for Flaubert, betise was essentially identical with language itself. But if you read the language of the paroxysms of disgust which are provoked in Flaubert by the stupidity of his age, you’ll notice that the metaphors are about reversing speaking or eating. The body wants to come through the mouth. In another letter, speaking of researching one of his novels, Flaubert speaks of ‘swallowing volumes and taking notes” so that he can fulfill his one and only purpose: “to spew on his contemporaries the disgust that they inspire in me” (cracher sur mes contemporains le dégoût qu'ils m'inspirent).

This, of course, is the problem with indignation once it increases to a certain level. It wants to bypass language altogether, to play the tape of culture, and even of organic growth, backwards, to shit out of the mouth, to spew or spit one’s entire being. If the holy speech gone backwards is the royal road to the wolf and the devil, to get to the true underground gods, playing language itself backwards is just the spell. It is not a spell to used casually.

LI understands Flaubert’s problem: after all, we live in the age of Bush and Blair.

Which brings us to a commentary by one of the heroic liberal interventionists in the Independent. A man named John Rentoul, who has already received some notice for this wonderful sentence – a formula guaranteed to bring up the chunks: “ The Iraq war is a tragedy, above all, because of the damage it is inflicting on that cause of liberal interventionism…”

Ah, yes. One hopes that the Iraqis – who were given this wonderful, wonderful chance, as Rentoul points out, and yet somehow it “unleashed a new form of murderousness on the Iraqi people in place of the old" – are aware of this. We know that our President has long been disappointed in their ingratitude. But that a gorgeous war, all shimmery with hope, in which many a liberal interventionist could, vicariously, get their General Patton out – oh, so much better than paintball! – could temporarily dent our hopes for troop movements in Iran, liberated at last, or Sudan, or perhaps freeing the people of Venezuela from dire dictatorship – such things make Rentoul weep. Not that he’s a wet, mind you:

“The Iraq war is not an argument to be won or lost; it’s a tragedy.” In search of what posterity may make of Tony Blair’s record in foreign affairs, I was struck by these words in one of the better first drafts of history, The Assassins’ Gate, by the American journalist George Packer.

Not that the pro-war argument has been lost. As long as the Iraqis continue to say that their appalling suffering is worth it to get rid of Saddam Hussein, it cannot be.”

Well, said the cat, clicking its claws, I don’t think a single Iraqi thinks their appalling sufferings are in some equation with getting rid of Saddam Hussein. He is, after all, well and truly hung. There’s not a babe, old man, young man, young woman or other victim of car bomb, American firefight, mortar fire, militia kidnapping, etc., etc who considered that what was happening to them was dying for freedom. And seemingly those appalling sufferings – perhaps having to do with the wholesale looting of the country by American contractors, the arrogant and unbelievable criminal negligence of the American occupational ‘authority’ in completely denying 25 million people security for a year, the thousands dragged through prisons, the thousands whose homes have been ransacked, the completely demented double speak of democracy and the old imperialist fetch it, boy that discards Prime Ministers and rams oil laws down the Iraqi throat – perhaps all this is, well, deeply to be regretted. But let it not stop another good man, another noble Blair or Bush, from exercising that executive prerogative that will start it all up over again.
And at that thought, the shit does mount in my throat. Unfortunately, the shit mounts in the very throat of the times. The convergence between short term memory loss and warmongering in these here states is enough to top any of the mere bourgeois stupidities, the pablum of progress crowd, that revolted Flaubert. The bland and sleek beasts that have snacked on blood – but all at a safe distance, and through the appropriate proxies – over the last six of seven years have not, unfortunately, been felled by a single rhetorical thunderbolt. And this is where intelligence turns into shit, because intelligence knows this to be true. Intelligence knows that you can quote the Rentouls up and down – the sycophantic stupidity, the blind and beastial repetition of long exploded lies, the production of a Disney War world in which Bush never lied and Blair was motivated by honor.

“As soon as he has gone, a more balanced judgement of British foreign policy over the past decade may be possible. But one historian cannot wait, and has already offered a superb analysis that strips away many of the myths that have attached themselves to Blair’s conduct of Iraq policy. Professor Peter Hennessy may be surprised to find his work cited in defence of Blair, because he is one of the Prime Minister’s fiercest critics in these matters. Yet the chapter on Suez in his sparkling history of Britain in the 1950s, Having It So Good, should be required reading for anyone tempted to draw parallels between Iraq and Suez.

The two are so completely different as to be polar opposites. As Hennessy writes, Anthony Eden pursued his aims of taking back the canal and forcing the fall of President Nasser of Egypt “in the teeth of attempts to divert or warn him off by President Eisenhower, his two law officers, one Chief of Staff ... the Joint Intelligence Committee and the Treasury”. Blair’s Iraq policy, on the other hand, was pursued with the explicit support of all their 2003 equivalents.

The most damning feature of Eden’s conduct was his attempt to deceive his Cabinet and the US, and finally his uttering, twice, an unadorned lie to the House of Commons.
Blair was, of course, guilty of none of these crimes, and was cleared by four inquiries and one general election.”

He was cleared by one general election? General elections clear nobody, although it is interesting that this shoddy metaphor used to be used by Pinochet's supporters to talk about his wonders to behold in Chile. Even in terms of the metaphor, that election was, at best, a hung jury, since I believe he got the equivalent – since we are speaking in term of a trial metaphor - of two and a half votes for innocent, as opposed to the rest of the jury. As for the establishment cover-ups that constituted the four inquiries, well – we already know how inquiries go in the age of Blair that don’t bring in the non-guilty verdict. We saw Blair cut off the inquiry into the bribing of the Saudis by BAE.

Blair is retiring into some no doubt Murdoch contrived haze of comfort, and will do as much as is humanly possible to create the greatest amount of misery he can on his path towards death. He is one of the monsters. One of ours.

What's so funny?

We mortals are forced, though it may hurt us
to bear the gifts of the gods. For the yoke lies on our necks. – Homeric hymn to Demeter

Herodotus recorded the obscure origin of today’s schoolboy insult: “He tells us that Sesostris, king of Egypt, raised columns in some of the countries that he conquered, on which he caused to be figured the female organ of generation as a mark of contempt for those who had submitted easily,” according to Knight’s discourse on the worship of priapus. But as Knight adds: May not these columns have been intended, if we knew the truth, as protections for the peole of the district in which they stood, and placed in the position where they could most conveniently be seen?”



Speaking of the female organ of generation gets us to the second myth that figures in Vernant’s essay: Death in the Eyes: Gorgo, figure of the Other. I want to place this myth next to Athena throwing away the flute – consider them as two paintings. This is the myth of Ceres and Baubo.

Some background: when Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, was ravished by the God of the underworld, Ceres went wandering about the world in mourning. Thus, she came to the small village of Eleusis. And, as we know from Arnobius, one of the Christian father’s who quoted at length from the Orphic hymns in order to discredit them (thus preserving them – such are the unexpected results of hatred), the scene in Eleusis consisted of some peasant swineheards and huts, in one of which Demeter entered to rest. The old woman in the hut, Baubo, sees that the goddess is in pain. She offers her some spiced wine. Here’s the translation from Arnobius, which seems a bit bowdlerized:

“The goddess in her sorrow turns away from the kindly offered services, and rejects them; nor does her misfortune suffer her to remember what the body always requires.16 Baubo, on the other hand, begs and exhorts her—as is usual in such calamities—not to despise her humanity; Ceres remains utterly immoveable, and tenaciously maintains an invincible austerity. But when this was done several times, and her fixed purpose could not be worn out by any attentions, Baubo changes her plans, and determines to make merry by strange jests her whom she could not win by earnestness. That part of the body by which women both bear children and obtain the name of mothers,16 this she frees from longer neglect: she makes it assume a purer appearance, and become smooth like a child, not yet hard and rough with hair. In this wise she returns16 to the sorrowing goddess; and while trying the common expedients by which it is usual to break the force of grief, and moderate it, she uncovers herself, and baring her groins, displays all the parts which decency hides;16 and then the goddess fixes her eyes upon these,16 and is pleased with the strange form of consolation. Then becoming more cheerful after laughing, she takes and drinks off the drought spurned before, and the indecency of a shameless action forced that which Baubo's modest conduct was long unable to win.”

Now, the question for LI is: why did Demeter find Baubo’s flashing her so funny? Part of the joke that doesn’t come through in the Arnobius account is that Baubo painted the face of a man on her belly. That’s sorta funny. But what is the joke about flashing? Apparently, it is an important one. In Laurie O’Higgins Women and Humor in Classical Greece, there is a whole chapter on cultic obscenity emphasizing all women cults and the apparent ritual of obscene jests and sketches that enlivened reverencing the goddess. Of course, according to O’Higgins, the philosophers were intent on curbing this kind of obscenity – just as Athene throws away her flute, because it makes her cheeks bulge out when she blows into it. Actually, Aristotle reads this as a commentary on the wildness associated with the pipes. O’Higgins points to the festival of the Thesmophoria, a celebration of Demeter in which women in Athens temporarily separated from men, built huts and celebrated the Goddess. Obviously, the Baubo story indicates what the jokes were about. But LI doesn’t understand the joke in the first place. So we will come back to this in another post, and use that most inappropriate of all instruments, reason, to try to take apart the meaning of the joke.

Gorgo Head, Gorgo Head, what are you doin' round my bed?

The fragments I wanted to put together this week were all about genitalia and racism. That is, starting off with Aristotle’s reference to the perils of playing the flute in the Politics and going to Vernant’s essay on what made Demeter laugh when an old woman hiked up her skirt and showed her her privates. Vernant has a theory about Gorgo, the genital face, and the Other, and I think this is a good time to go down the trail with him, from whence we will all return refreshed and Freudened. But this week might be pretty tough, in terms of making bucks, so I can’t guarantee that I will give you all a genuine raree show.

Still, to start things off, a quote from Aristotle’s Politics:

“The flute, or any other instrument which requires great skill, as for example the harp, ought not to be admitted into education, but only such as will make intelligent students of music or of the other parts of education. Besides, the flute is not an instrument which is expressive of moral character; it is too exciting. The proper time for using it is when the performance aims not at instruction, but at the relief of the passions. And there is a further objection; the impediment which the flute presents to the use of the voice detracts from its educational value. The ancients therefore were right in forbidding the flute to youths and freemen, although they had once allowed it. For when their wealth gave them a greater inclination to leisure, and they had loftier notions of excellence, being also elated with their success, both before and after the Persian War, with more zeal than discernment they pursued every kind of knowledge, and so they introduced the flute into education. At Lacedaemon there was a choragus who led the chorus with a flute, and at Athens the instrument became so popular that most freemen could play upon it. The popularity is shown by the tablet which Thrasippus dedicated when he furnished the chorus to Ecphantides. Later experience enabled men to judge what was or was not really conducive to virtue, and they rejected both the flute and several other old-fashioned instruments, such as the Lydian harp, the many-stringed lyre, the 'heptagon,' 'triangle,' 'sambuca,' the like- which are intended only to give pleasure to the hearer, and require extraordinary skill of hand. There is a meaning also in the myth of the ancients, which tells how Athene invented the flute and then threw it away. It was not a bad idea of theirs, that the Goddess disliked the instrument because it made the face ugly; but with still more reason may we say that she rejected it because the acquirement of flute-playing contributes nothing to the mind, since to Athene we ascribe both knowledge and art.“

Notes of an editor

Lately,I've been trying to scuff up some decent labor. Times are slow, and the schedule of my bill collectors is starting to outrun my excuses. So, I decided, in desperation, to check out Craig's list - since none of the academics I usually go to knew of anyone, or had anything. Craig's list is crowded, it appears, with editors offering services and minted credentials, yet the adverts have that last chance aura of a used car dealer's smile, that awful sinking feeling one gets around zoo born predators, with the bars in their very eyes. I'm no springing Leopard of the Lord myself, but when I read of someone offering to put "snap and pop" into your next business proposal, I inwardly groan and the spirit do run low. I ruthlessly excise snap and pop whenever I see it. Lucidity, a cool intelligence, a minimum of five dollar words, and the grain of your voice when you have something fucking real to say - that's what I always hope the game is about. If it is about snap and pop, hand me the shovel, because I want to be on that end that clears away shit rather then the end that piles it up.

Such is the sad life of LI at the moment, underemployed and overcaffeinated.

Why the hen won't lay no egg

The beast it cometh, cometh down
The beast it cometh, cometh down
The beast it cometh, cometh down
... It's Tupelo bound


“I have to admit to being increasingly irritated at the tendency of British commentators and politicians to present the election as France's last-chance saloon, for in most things that combine to make up a decent quality of life, from health to literacy, to gentility and solicitude for the vulnerable, France has us beaten.

Mr Sarkozy did not appear too convinced of this when he came to London three months ago to address expatriates who had fled high unemployment in France to find work in the City's booming financial-services sector. Referring to London as possessing a 'vitality' that Paris sorely lacked, Mr Sarkozy exhorted the crowd to return home - after casting their vote for him of course. 'France is still your country, even if you are disappointed by it,' he said, at the same time promising less regulation, more jobs and other free-market reforms.

The BBC's Crossing Continents took up the theme, broadcasting a documentary on how French graduates are flocking to the Square Mile. But the BBC should follow up its investigation with a comparison of how each country treats its citizens once they move from the freedom of youth to buying a house, getting from A to B, educating the children, staying healthy and growing old. For the fact is that British migration to France, at just over 40,000 a year, outstrips French migration to Britain. Most of those who leave cite what they see as a declining British values system, the soaring cost of living and poor public services.”

Of course, the French immigrants to London story has gotten great play in the states, too, especially in the Washington Post. Annie Applebaum, whose articles double dip – once in the post, once on Slate – made a special point of it. And, as is typical of the neo-con shit that sings insanely in one’s ear, a constant drone of lies and nonsense, Applebaum, operating with a complete ignorance of the situation, managed to draw out of her ass the pack of halftruths so dear to the editors of Slate and the Fred Hiatts of top dog punditdom.

Mr. Scruggs, commenting on my last heartfelt cry for a PS victory, poured some skepticism on the mush mouthed Royal – and who can disagree that she has been mush mouthed? However, unlike Jospin, she did actually mention the name of the party she was running on – quite a leap forward. That she has to make a deal with the moderates has everything to do with the failure of the ‘extreme left’ to do anything with the victory that was theirs in voting down the constitution. And the unsightly spectacle that resulted in another dreary star led party by Bové went down in flames even before it went up, which is a new record in crashes. It shouldn’t be that hard to balance a sensible nationalism – the nation defined as that political unit that potentially allows the maximum amount of popular governance, and slice and dice that as you will later – with the defense of well being, but the ‘left’ seems not to understand its own fucking history anymore. As we have often said on this site, left and right are prisms to look at the same treadmill of production – liberal, conservative, nazi, communist, they all centrally share the assumption that there is no alternative to that treadmill. We may be on the edge of a historical moment when that assumption is shaken, but we aren’t there by a long shot yet. Sarko’s edge is given by his racism, pure and simple. Under cover of that racist edge in the U.S., Nixon actually codified and expanded the Great society. Sarko has even taken a page from Nixon in suggesting affirmative action – which, yes Virginia, arose as a conservative solution to the problem of racial justice back there in the early seventies. The racism has been a hard thing for Royal to deal with. She has done the politician’s natural thing, and sometimes tried to gain some of the shit glamour of that for herself – in the same way Clinton had his sister souljah moment. But it was really impossible for Royal to deal in those goods, especially against a man who embodies the flic with the baton mentality.

One of the useful things about the dread twentieth century is that all the programs were tried. So we know how the reactionary program will work in France. The model of disenfranchisement and the takedown of the structure of well being will be experimented with first among blacks: immigrants and the children of immigrants. Destroying the network requires segmenting it first, and if you can unravel it at the bottom it is much easier to unravel it all the way through. LI’s prediction is that this won’t happen. There will be the riots. There will be the intensified surveillance regime. There will be the nutty concessions by the socialists. But the main thing – the cycle of ‘flattening the earth’, to use the metaphor beloved by Thomas Friedman – is even now giving less of a return. The worldwide trend towards privatization has reversed itself, quietly, over the last six years. The juiciest privatizations yet to come are in the Gulf region, and it is becoming painfully obvious to Bush’s base, the investor class, that the fuck up in Iraq, while killing the unimportant up to now, is starting to screw with the money. Of course, the French economy is also targeted, and Sarkozy would love to inflict maximum Tony Blair on the place. But everything depends on how far his racist edge will get him.

ps - clementine autaine is good and succinct about what happened, here. I don't know if she is correct that 60 percent of France's employees voted Sarko, but I can believe it. The question is whether they will cut their throats in the upcoming legislative elections.

encore une fois de plus

On assiste sur les chaînes de Bouygues et de Lagardère à des tracts électoraux !» «Il nous reste deux jours, restez debout, c'est vous, le peuple français, qui allez décider. Dressez-vous contre tous les systèmes, dressez-vous pour une France juste et forte, dressez-vous pour la lumière, refusez l'esprit de revanche, refusez tous les mensonges et toutes les haines. En avant ! – Segolene Royal.

If only she’d been this tough all through. Aye. Go Royal! France is about to elect its Bush, its spirit of revenge, its gleeful little bumpkin, its smug side, its action hero flic. We know this is going to be a fucking bust. Must we watch this cycle all over again? No to thatcher, reagan, bush, aznar, and berlusconi. Don't do it, France.

Western man, don't you... come aroounnd....

“What madness says of itself is, for the thought and the poetry of the beginning of the 19th century, equally what the dream says in the disorder of its images: a truth of man, a very archaic and very near truth, very silent and very menacing: a truth under every truth, the closest to the birth of subjectivity, and the most distributed on the level of things; a truth that is the profound retreat of the individuality of man, and the inchoate from of the cosmos: What dreams, is the Spirit in the instant that it descends into matter, and it is the Matter in the instant that it lifts itself up to the Spirit. The dream is the revelation of the very essence of man, the most characteristic process, the most intimate of life.” - Foucault

There is little mention of the new world in Foucault’s book about madness. But I spy with my little eye a whole world of docking points, places where the savage connects to the madman. These figures operate in tandem, in the mysterious fields of the Western man, bronco buster and pissant – and they also operate, I’d say – taking a bold step – as sosies, parody doubles, of homo oeconomicus, that new species hatched upon the word by what Polanyi calls The Great Transformation. That transformation operated upon the European savage, be he the Galician serf watching Napoleon’s soldiers marching by or the Irish peasant crawling through the fields to find a place to dump his starving body, as it operated upon the New World savage – and sometimes, as in the ‘providential’ emptying out of Ireland and the ‘providential’ ‘vanishing’ of the Indian in the Midwest and South, with surprisingly similar results. The treadmill of production is already switched to the on position.

Memmie le blanc and the other feral children of the 18th century are curiosities of the boundary that also cuts across the treatment and definition of the mad. Which means that the discovery of the European savage, the feral child, changes its meaning and terms during the 18th century.

Jumpcutting, then, to the problem of languages that still brings up all the old circus figures, re that New Yorker article – what Duguld Stewart says about Adam Smith’s essay on the origin of language gives us a nice little peephole into the narrative that was given to Memmie’s life, and would be given to Kaspar Hauser’s – these creatures from the woods in whom conjecture was magically embodied in the village, transported to courts and ending up apprenticed to shoemakers or put in nunneries, to the great delight of the savant:

“When, in such a period of society as that in which we live,
we compare our intellectual acquirements, our opinions, manners,
and institutions, with those which prevail among rude tribes, it
cannot fail to occur to us as an interesting question, by what
gradual steps the transition has been made from the first simple
efforts of uncultivated nature, to a state of things so
wonderfully artificial and complicated. Whence has arisen that
systematical beauty which we admire in the structure of a
cultivated language; that analogy which runs through the mixture
of languages spoken by the most remote and unconnected nations;
and those peculiarities by which they are all distinguished from
each other? Whence the origin of the different sciences and of
the different arts; and by what chain has the mind been led from
their first rudiments to their last and most refined
improvements? Whence the astonishing fabric of the political
union; the fundamental principles which are common to all
governments; and the different forms which civilized society has
assumed in different ages of the world? On most of these subjects
very little information is to be expected from history; for long
before that stage of society when men begin to think of recording
their transactions, many of the most important steps of their
progress have been made. A few insulated facts may perhaps be
collected from the casual observations of travellers, who have
viewed the arrangements of rude nations; but nothing, it is
evident, can be obtained in this way, which approaches to a
regular and connected detail of human improvement.

In this want of direct evidence, we are under a necessity of
supplying the place of fact by conjecture; and when we are unable
to ascertain how men have actually conducted themselves upon
particular occasions, of considering in what manner they are
likely to have proceeded, from the principles of their nature,
and the circumstances of their external situation. In such
inquiries, the detached facts which travels and voyages afford
us, may frequently serve as land-marks to our speculations; and
sometimes our conclusions a priori, may tend to confirm the
credibility of facts, which, on a superficial view, appeared to
be doubtful or incredible.”

This may appear to be a remark relevant only to speculative histories and anthropology. However, what unfolded from the idea of conjectural history, as Stewart saw, was the whole theory of economics, which brought with it the notion that social action can be modeled, and that the models can be like models of other material events. The main thing about these conjectural histories is that the expert, representing us, is at one end. We are the goal.

IT'S HERE!!!!!!

Ladies and Gentlemen... the moment you have all been waiting for! An adventure beyond your wildest dreams! An adrenaline rush from start to finish, says Hustler's Financial Supplement! Revolutionized my view of the world - I'm resigning! says Treasury Secretary Paulsen. Can you just pay me back half of what I loaned you, says the translator's brother, D.!

It came from the depth of misty olde England - a monster beyond reckoning! A disembodied shape! Neo-classical economics - can anyone stop this fearsome beast from destroying the world! Find out the answer - buy the book!

adam smith and the Pirahã

Our last post was an accident. We were looking up a quote in Foucault to use to continue talking about our European savage thread, and found the Kugelmass post about the Scull review and remembered the controversy. We will be using Foucault again, because we are going to talk about – language!

Uh oh. That lost us most of our readership right there. The deal is this, however. Two weeks ago, there was an article, The Interpreter, by John Colapinto, about the language of a “hunter-gatherer tribe called the Pirahã” in the New Yorker. It was fascinating stuff. The tribe is in the news because a Chomskian named Everett, a well respected linguist, has defected. The Chomskian El Dorado is to construct the universal structures of language, and lately the sweet spot has been the notion of recursion:

“… a linguistic operation that consists of inserting one phrase
inside another of the same type, as when a speaker combines discrete
thoughts ("the man is walking down the street," "the man is wearing a
top hat") into a single sentence ("The man who is wearing a top hat is
walking down the street"). Noam Chomsky, the influential linguistic
theorist, has recently revised his theory of universal grammar, arguing
that recursion is the cornerstone of all languages, and is possible
because of a uniquely human cognitive ability.”

Everett claims that the Pirahã defy this universal law. His description – or rather, the description given in the article – is of a beautiful but bizarre tongue:

“Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense
with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle
conversations.”

And this is what he wrote in "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã" that set off a minor uproar:

“The article described the extreme simplicity of the tribe's living conditions and culture. The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for "all," "each," "every," "most," or "few"--terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition. Everett's most
explosive claim, however, was that Pirahã displays no evidence of recursion…”

Because I was following a chain of associations having to do with Memmie – vide my posts – this reminded me strongly of Adam Smith. Smith wrote an essay on the origin of language which has a claim to fame in excess of its content, or so claimed Dugald Stewart in a memoir about Smith in which he said that Smith worked out his method of conjectural history in the essay. Let’s set that aside for another post (Ive just written about this is the preface to Silja Graupe's Basho of Economics, by the way) – what surprised me about the Pirahã is the similarity to Smith’s ideat that language arose from antonomasia – that is, the using of a particular name for a general.

“Two savages,2 who had never been taught to speak, but had been bred up remote from the societies of men, would naturally begin to form that language by which they would endeavour to make their mutual wants intelligible to each other, by uttering certain sounds, whenever they meant to denote certain objects. Those objects only which were most familiar to them, and which they had most frequent occasion to mention, would have particular names assigned to them. The particular cave whose covering sheltered them from the weather, the particular tree whose fruit relieved their hunger, the particular fountain whose water allayed their thirst, would first be denominated by the words cave, tree, fountain, or by whatever other appellations they might think proper, in that primitive jargon, to mark them. Afterwards, when the more enlarged experience of these savages had led them to observe, and their necessary occasions obliged them to make mention of other caves, and other trees, and other fountains, they would naturally bestow, upon each of those new objects, the same name, by which they had been accustomed to express the similar object they were first acquainted with. The new objects had none of them any name of its own, but each of them exactly resembled another object, which had such an appellation. It was impossible that those savages could behold the new objects, without recollecting the old ones; and the name of the old ones, to which the new bore so close a resemblance. When they had occasion, therefore, to mention, or to point out to each other, any of the new objects, they would naturally utter the name of the correspondent old one, of which the idea could not fail, at that instant, to present itself to their memory in the strongest and liveliest manner. And thus, those words, which were originally the proper names of individuals, would each of them insensibly become the common name of a multitude. A child that is just learning to speak, calls every person who comes to the house its papa or its mama; and thus bestows upon the whole species those names which it had been taught to apply to two individuals. I have known a clown, who did not know the proper name of the river which ran by his own door. It was athe river, he said, and he never heard any other name for it. His experience, it seems, had not led him to observe any other river. The general word rivera, therefore, was, it is evident, in his acceptance of it, a proper name, signifying an individual object. If this person had been carried to another river, would he not readily have called it a river?”

...

There are questions that occur to the reader right away. One, of course, is the assumption that the Pirahã are primitive. This is the same assumption that encompasses so much writing about the Amazon Indians, even though we know that many groups actually fled into the jungle with the arrival of the Spanish and adapted their culture to a new kind of living, even as the spaces in the jungle for human population apparently opened up as the first Amazonian civilizations that the Spanish met disappeared – prey, no doubt, to diseases that were sweeping over the continent. And even though we know they adopted new technologies as things changed - as, for instance, bananas, an import from Africa, colonized the jungle. However, the Pirahã, according to Colapinto, have a deeper history with the Amazon, having arrived there between ten thousand and forty thousand years ago.

The isolation, the depth of time, the language - all seem to be parts of a story we might have already heard, once upon a time. Well, we will take this up again in another post

Scull's fun and factoids: or Foucault in round one

A couple of months ago, Andrew Scull published a scathing review of Foucault’s The History of Madness, which is out in a new translation, in the TLS. At the time, this made a stir on some of the theory blogs, but LI didn’t pay much attention to that. Theory blogs love to trample extensively through the mire, but lately LI has wished for a change of mire – it is always zizek zizek zizek badiou French theorist zizek zizek zizek.

However, we did read this post on the valve about the whole thing by Joseph Kugelmass.

Kugelmass had the same reaction as most of the theory web, which was to defend Foucault by retreating to the notion that Foucault, after all, didn’t have to get his footnotes and facts right – that he was working with another set of criteria. The reason for this attitude was that Scull’s piece gave off the shimmer of expertise. Here, at last, Foucault's misstatements and tricks would be unmasked by a man who knows what he is talking about, an expert in the field. The takedown would be cool and professional, building to an earned indignation. LI’s first reading of the review was defensive too: Foucault, I wanted to say, was writing in Uppsala in the late fifties, and so didn’t have the latest resources. So he made do with what he had. Brave fellow.

I'm not an expert in medical health history. But I am something of an expert in reviewing. And from that experience, I knew that some things were a little too easy in the Scull review. And so LI started digging. The more we dug, the more we thought that, far from being the piece of an expert confronting bullshit with the fruit of empirical research, we were looking at something much more familiar, the half assed takedown. Face it, you are not going to take down a book so firmly entrenched in the canon in a four page review - but you can do some damage. Scull seemed to overreach from the beginning of the review, and when he reaches that section which should be razor sharp, a cutting away of all of Foucault's supports, revealing him to be a lilliputian fraud, a strange thing happens...

While the headline writer phrases Scull’s critique in terms of the fictions of Foucault, but a better headline would be the factions of Scull. His facts are, when not quite factual, often astonishingly – squishy.

There’s nothing more boring than fisking an article, so we will simply concentrate on that part of Scull’s review that deals with Bethlem Hospital - Bedlam - which is, after all, within the area of Scull's expertise. Here, at last, the reader should be able to take things on trust. This is the section dealing with Bethlem:

“Foucault alleges, for example, that the 1815–16 House of Commons inquiry into the state of England’s madhouses revealed that Bedlam (Bethlem) placed its inmates on public display every Sunday, and charged a penny a time for the privilege of viewing them to some 96,000 sightseers a year. In reality, the reports of the inquiry contain no such claims. This is not surprising: public visitation (which had not been confined to Sundays in any event) had been banned by Bethlem Royal Hospital’s governors in 1770, and even before then the tales of a fixed admission fee turn out to be apocryphal. Foucault is bedevilled by Bethlem’s history. He makes the remarkable claim that “From the day when Bethlem, the hospital for curative lunatics, was opened to hopeless cases in 1733, there was no longer any notable difference between the London hospital and the French Hôpital Général, or any other house of correction”. And he speaks of Bethlem’s “refurbishment” in 1676. In reality, it had moved in that year from its previous location in an old monastery in Bishopsgate to a grandiose new building in Moorfields designed by Robert Hooke.

Monasteries surface elsewhere in his account. We are told with a straight face that “it was in buildings that had previously been both convents and monasteries that the majority of the great asylums of England . . . were set up”. This is a bizarre notion. First, there were no “great asylums” set up in England in the classical age. Vast museums of madness did not emerge until the nineteenth century (when they were purpose-built using taxpayers’ funds). And second, only Bethlem, of all the asylums and madhouses that existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was ever housed in a former convent or monastery, and when it was, its peak patient population amounted to fewer than fifty inmates, hardly the vast throng conjured up by Foucault’s image of “grands asiles”.”

The first thing that should be said about these paragraphs is that they conceal a point Scull is conceding to Foucault. Almost all of Scull’s objections pinpoint p 191-193 of Histoire de la folie. Here’s the paragraph that is most strongly questioned:

“C'était sans doute une très vieille habitude du Moyen Age de montrer les insensés. Dans certains des Narrtürmer d'Allemagne, on avait établi des fenêtres grillagées qui permettaient d'observer de l'extérieur les fous qu'on y avait attachés. Ils formaient ainsi spectacle aux portes des cités. Le fait étrange, c'est que cette coutume n'ait pas disparu au moment où se refermaient les portes des asiles, mais qu'elle se soit au contraire développée, prenant à Paris et à Londres un caractère quasi institutionnel. En 1815 encore, s'il faut en croire un rapport présenté à la Chambre des Communes, l'hôpital de Bethléem montre les furieux pour un penny, tous les dimanches. Or le revenu annuel de ces visites s'élevait à près de 400 livres: ce qui suppose le chiffre étonnamment élevé de 96000 visites par an.”

The main thing is -- Scull agrees with Foucault. Up until the 1770s – well into the l’age classique – it was customary and quasi institutional to visit Bedlam.

The larger point about which Scull, following Roy Porter, does not agree is that the early modern era saw a great commitment of the mad. This is why the Olympic precision of “and when it was, its peak patient population amounted to fewer than fifty inmates” seems so devastating.

The problem is, of course, that it is also wrong.

Scull doesn’t give his source for that figure. However, we do have some interesting figures cited by Joseph Mortimer Granville in The Care and cure of the insane v. 2 (1877). In one of the reports to the 1815 select committee on madhouses which Scull seems to preen himself on, a Mr. Edward Wakefield, who made a humanitarian investigation, and was met and accompanied by the governor of the hospital, toured the male and female incurable wings and reported, “in the men’s wing were about 74 or 75 patients”. (289) This, of course, doesn’t include the population in the separate female wing, or the other parts of the hospital. The interesting Granville then cites a more in depth account of the hospital, made from the hospitals records in a paper by a Doctor John Webster, given in 1843, who writes that 22,897 insane patients were admitted to Bethlem hospital since 1683. In the twenty years between 1762 and 1782, for instance, 3945 patients were admitted, 1366 were cured, 560 died. Breaking it down, Webster writes that in 1750-51-52 462 were admitted, 145 were cured, 118 died. (304-305). So where does Scull get his 50 patient figure? Is it an average? If so, then it is, to say the least, bad scholarship not to say so. What year is he referring to?

In fact, Thomas Bowen, whose 1783 book is approvingly cited by Scull in his own book on the English Madhouse system, The Most Solitary of Afflictions, talks of a great influx of patients from all over the kingdom into Bedlam in the first years after its re-opening.

Scull knows to press on the Anglosphere fetishism for statistics – it gives a positivistic tang to the review, sets him up as the scientist versus the Gallic charlatan. But in truth, the scientist has no basis for his fifty figure.

Now, let’s deal with a few other Scull specials:

“Foucault alleges, for example, that the 1815–16 House of Commons inquiry into the state of England’s madhouses revealed that Bedlam (Bethlem) placed its inmates on public display every Sunday, and charged a penny a time for the privilege of viewing them to some 96,000 sightseers a year. In reality, the reports of the inquiry contain no such claims.”

This is Scull’s most genuine point. Even here, though, he twists things. Foucault writes of a report to the House of Commons, not a report from the House, and he writes “if we can believe it”. The real point here is that Foucault cites no source for this report. His source, Ned Ward, instead talks about the price paid by visitors to see the patients in Bedlam. Here Scull thinks he can score another hit:
“This is not surprising: public visitation (which had not been confined to Sundays in any event) had been banned by Bethlem Royal Hospital’s governors in 1770, and even before then the tales of a fixed admission fee turn out to be apocryphal.” I’m not sure what turn out to be apocryphal means. Scull’s own citing of Ned Ward’s article in the London Spy, which this seems to refer to, page 51 in his book, Most Solitary of Afflictions, refers to Porter’s book, Mind Forg’d manacles, for “skepticism about the authenticity of Ward’s Report.” Mind Forg’d Manacles was published in 1987 – some twenty six years after Histoire de la Folie was published. And is Scull even right?

This is from an essay in The World, published on June t, 1753, footnoted in an edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, describing a visit to Bedlam:
“It was Easter Week, when, to my great surprise I found a hundred people at least, who, having paid their twopence apiece, were suffered, unattended, to run rioting up and down the wards…” (1889)

Scull’s review, then, is, to say the least, not the most reliable account of Foucault’s “mistakes” even on a topic on which Scull is supposedly an expert. The more interesting question, however, is why Scull was instantly conceded to be right, and Foucault wrong? I think this might be on account of the general beating Continentalist are perceived to have received from Sokal and Bricmont. That perception is wholly based on the idea that Sokal is a hard scientist, a physicist. What Foucault did was make us question experts – and he appeared at a time when the advice of experts, from that given about the Vietnam war to the dangers of radiation, fell into disrepute. Unfortunately, knowledge by authority is a very powerful thing – in Weber’s triad of legitimations, tradition/authority is at the center. It is especially powerful when the authority figure bases his authority on reason – but then uses the authority qua authority to squash opposition. This is just what Scull did. The scurrying for the exits done by Foucaultist is a painful reminder that, on the whole, academics can be defined as those people who have been extraordinarily influenced, in their development, by the classroom. Thus, their rebellions are most easily quenched when a teacher figure comes through the door.

Mission accomplished

Everybody is publishing their memories, sweet memories, of the Mission Accomplished moment – that moment when President Backbone made us smile with our might, the righteousness of our cause, and, let’s face it, the genius and toughness of our leadership, warriors all. Here’s a clip from a CNN interview with Douglas Brinkley, a liberal historian whose talk was pretty much the standard Democratic party line as – to put it bluntly – they stupidly stared at the beginning of an occupation and thought, well, war’s over. These people were utterly vacuous. Utterly lacking in brains. As unable as the most ultra Bushites to put one “then” in front of another. They really believed that their would be no insurgency? They really believed it was all about marching to Baghdad? They really thought the U.S. was that powerful? They really were that unacquainted with the history of the last one hundred years? They really were that afraid to speak out? What a collection of pissants and fuckwads, as we like to say down here on the Farm. Never forget: we are ruled by meritocratic morons. They make up the “national dialogue.” And they don’t know shit from shinola.

In the end, President Backbone did not only represent the brainlessness, the frothiness, the raised on sugarness, of the apocalypse tending peckerwood crowd that yearns to make America a mix of the Taliban and Las Vegas, that wants Jesus to not only redeem and reanimate Anna Nicole Smith but to appear with her on one of their favorite shows and admit that the love child is really his – no, this represents the collective collapse of the whole rotton lobotomized governing class, those people who voice the most deadly stupidities in the smuggest tones as if they received their collective wisdom from Jehovah, instead of taking it out of their ass. Nurtured in the gated community and taking their upward trajectories as instances of natural law rather than the fruits of successful crime, they encase themselves in the iron armor of the platitudes they’ve used to suck up to the leaders they so admire to crawl from one policymaking post to another, and are rewarded for their supererogatory servility with a disproportionate share of the resources of the planet, thus choking the rest of us in their backwash. These people are leading us all into a black cultureless void, animated by orgasmic flashes of purposeless violence, and you can tell the left from the right because the left is ultra concerned about those violent video games.

Here’s the transcript.
“BRINKLEY: Oh, well, it was quite a dramatic day. I mean, from landing in the Viking jet onto the aircraft carrier, walking around with the kind of top gun uniform on, shaking hands with many of the thousands of troops, 5,000 people there, and then with the speech it really took a very campaign like tone. He claimed his credential, I think, last night, that he is a commander-in-chief. He joins the likes of a Lincoln or a Woodrow Wilson or his father as winning a war, albeit this is just one war in the war on terrorism.
And I think the key to the speech last night was his hammering really two times the connection between al Qaeda and September 11, that he hadn't forgotten. And the president clearly seeing the battle of Baghdad as -- linked to the battle of Afghanistan, being linked to 9/11. And I think that was the major point of last evening's speech. HEMMER: You know, it reminds us that this White House continues to see the entire -- well, let's say the entire four year term of this president wrapped up in a 9/11 world.
Do you see it the same way?
BRINKLEY: Absolutely. It's what triggered all of this. It's what's transformed his presidency, the thought that I will not forget. Remember the great moment when he picked up that bullhorn at the rubble of September 11 and you couldn't help but remembering the journey our country has gone through, a year long debate on Iraq, then finally on March 19th the president announcing to our country he committed our troops there. Last night was the bookend to that March 19th speech.
But it did not say fully that the war was over. If we'd completely announced it, then we would have to start dealing with international law on people that we're capturing there in that deck of cards, as it's being played out.
So it was, there was a bit of a hold back there in last night's speech. But it was a lot of patriotic fervor, mission accomplished behind him. He wants the American people and the world to realize that he had an objective, he went about it and he completed it.
HEMMER: Douglas, look ahead for us, if you could. I want you to look at a poll we took last night from a number of people who watched this speech and watched the events on board the Lincoln. This is what they say right now as to what should be given a higher priority now that Iraq is over in terms of combat -- the economy, 46 percent.
How difficult, how easy could this be for the White House to make this pivot?
BRINKLEY: Last night was the pivot. You had to claim that credential. You had to have that evening on the -- the symbolic night on the Lincoln. And now the administration is going to, of course, be continuing rebuilding Iraq, working on the road map to peace, the peace process in the Middle East. So foreign affairs is going to be a big part of what they have to do. But they're going to start putting the compassionate back in conservative.
We've seen that this president can be and is a hawk. The Bush doctrine is considered a very tough, tough doctrine in foreign affairs. The question now is can there be compassion at home? How are we going to work to rebuild our schools? What about Social Security? What about issues of unemployment? How are we going to get the economy going again?
He has to do more than tax cut proposals. He's going to have to show a kind of vigorous, new, really progressive agenda here at home.
HEMMER: Ten seconds left here, Douglas.
Where does this rate last night in terms of presidential moments? BRINKLEY: It's one of the memorable ones of his administration. I think it's a -- because of the first nature of it, the fact that he actually, for a brief moment, flew the plane in the sky when it landed on the aircraft carrier and then the memorable. Americans, anybody likes victory and he was able to declare it last night. It was a lot of good news. You know, we, a big term has been embedded journalists. He was an embedded president last night with our troops.
HEMMER: Wow.
BRINKLEY: And that goes very well with the American people.
HEMMER: Well stated.”

a collector speaks.

Other people collect butterflies. A hobby that gets you outside, and puts you in scenes of great natural beauty, and sharpens your sense of microscopic differences.
LI’s hobby doesn’t come with such healthful after-effects. We like to collect leftists who preach far right policies, in the name of the left. These people can’t ask for the salt without assuring all and sundry that asking for the salt is a leftist value. No, an enlightenment value. No, a universal value, comrades!
Figaro – which, for those not in the know, is a conservative paper – published a simply beautiful specimen Friday. Just as the ardent collector, spotting a patch of vetch, is on the q vive for anthrocera purpuralis, the collector of these apostles of true, of core, of hardcore leftism knows to venture into areas like the Wall Street Journal Editorial page, or transcripts of the Hugh Hewitt program, to scoop up some really great specimens. As they feed in these areas, they become much less shy – even garrulous. One of their traits, then, is known as the Nick Cohen maneuver – as they advocate, say, small scale massacres of dusky mannikens on what C. Hitchens likes to call, with manly insouciance, the killing fields, they throw out truly piteous echoes about the ‘betrayal of the left’ By which they mean that somehow, behind their backs, so dastardly machinatins have merged together the stalinists and the islamofascists in a fight to collective agriculture under Shari'a law. So betrayed are these specimens that inevitably their incomes, and media appearances, go up and up. It is wonderful that unlike other subgroups - Satanists, vampires, Christian strippers, etc. - which are represented in the media (usually on afternoon talk shows, although is Jerry Springer still on?) by real members of the group, the subgroup of the left is never represented except by members who have hurt feelings about it. And who are continually addressing it.

These specimens do take out of that immersion in the left subgroup the idea that everything is about the left. Which adds of course to the comedy. What better place to address the comrades than from the columns of Figaro? With a program we can all get with: deregulating that market, invading this or that barbarous country, spending more money on those missiles. Etc. As anyone can tell, a lefty program par excellence. Those interested in evolutionary issues should notice that there is usually a path of development here, going through the Cuba stage, the Mao stage – essential, the Mao stage, for creating the tendency to grandiose statements about cultures about which the speaker evidently knows nothing – going through a nice bashing liberalism stage, and finally settling on a perpetual urging of free markets, free minds, and neo-imperialism as the true and onlie heritage of Marx’s good gray beard.

Our specimen today is called Alain Boyer. Figaro’s headline writer gave his piece an exquisitely ridiculous title: Si vous êtes vraiment de gauche, votez Sarkozy ! For those who don’t read French, the translation is: If you like escargot, you will just love my recipe for Feces Alexander! Boyer begins with an almost Berman-like seriousness (nobody does this thing better than Paul Berman) with a reference to those two outstanding beacons of the left – Max Weber and – oh, shades of Gluckman! – Raymond Aron. The point of invoking them is to gild, with academic jellies, a dismal cliche about the difficulty, o saints, of bringing about properly lefty ends if you don't compromise a little with the worst reactionary economic policies ever to bankrupt a country.

My beating heart! This is truly the golden age - when in my lifetime has effrontery so easily shaded into imbecility right before my very own peepers? I love it. My butterfly net is all aquiver.

Boyer rings some bells to come, to his own satisfaction and that of all the comrades in the hall, to these paragraphs ringing with that degree of absolute nonsense we've all grown used to in this country:

‘Without incentives, who will take risks? If a measure which “honors” social justice, from the 35 hour law to refusing to lower the percentage of taxes or protectionism is admittedly counter-productive from the point of view of the real promotion of that same value, we must renounce it.

Today, seeing the state of the country, we must have the courage to propose certain “liberal” reforms, incentive producing and negotiated with those who, as the CFDT, have decided to no longer consider politics in a democracy like a war, a zero sum conflict, but like a deliberation followed by compromise.”

Etc, etc. The end of the article paraphrases De Sade: “Français, encore une effort pour promouvoir les valeurs de gauche !” Translated, this reads: “wasn’t that tasty? and I had my maid write this whole fucking thing! I especially imported her from Morocco for that purpose, and presented to her my big bad incentive. Now I’m off to New York to have it translated for the WSJ!”

But let's see. I imagine translation first to the Guardian. We will see. The Blairists will just orgasm over this.

negative inspiration

Spirit enough to be bored — Whoever doesn’t have enough spirit to be able to find himself and his work boring is certainly not a spirit of the first rank, be it in the arts or sciences. A satirist who was, unusually, also a thinker, could add to this, taking a look at the world and history: God must not have had this spirit: he wanted to make and did make things, collectively, too interesting.” – Nietzsche, Human all too H.

LI is unsure about the jab at God at the end of this little saying, but every writer knows the moment that comes upon him like negative inspiration, when he detaches and to find himself and his work boring. That’s the moment that Bely cuts his masterpiece, Petersburg, by a third; that may be the moment when Rimbaud said fuck it, although I am too little devil or angel to venture there into that affair. However, I’ve been pondering the economist’s version of happiness – even Bartolini’s, critical as he is of the treadmill of production that has brought us wheel of fortune lifestyles. Economists are so fucking weird because they combine the most sophisticated mathematical models with psychological insights that would shame a ten year old. It is all about not only licking a lollypop, but doing it forever and ever, and getting everybody’s lollypop to lick. It is a gross and unrealistic view of happiness. I suspect economists are so enthusiastic about growth not so much because growth is a good in itself, but because it perpetually puts off the question: what is the system for? And, of course, even Marxist economists will edge out of the room once you start pondering the many dimensions of alienation. Economics is really not the dismal science, but the clubbish science – and in clubs, it doesn’t do to pose such questions. They are so easily answered by dinner, especially if dinner includes port.

Now, in LI’s youth, boredom was our mark of Cain – it was the boredom generated by capitalism that we were against. We tended to be big supporters of the situationists, without really having a vast or even a tiny little knowledge of them more than they pissed people off, and the autonomen, because we loved the autonomen boldness, the kicking ass, the taking over of buildings people weren't using, the contempt for the Polizei. This sounded like the shit to us, even though we heard overtones of peasant hut nostalgia in some of that wish that enterprise consist of holding hands and weaving or something, which made us wrinkle our nose. The via negativa, through pure abjection, sounded pretty good, too, theoretically. Put Bataille on the internal stereo system and see if “we’re so pretty, oh so pretty” comes out.

However, although it was quite the enemy, boredom was never really an issue. Which is why we were undoubtedly a cause of unmitigated boredom in others. It wasn’t until we began to take writing seriously, and tried to write fiction, that boredom became interesting, and we became aware of our own karmic debt to those we had bored and bored and bored.

A debt that would merely grow heavier (oh, the motherfucking links!) if we went too far into it. More interesting is that, perhaps out there on the edge a bit, our experience with boredom, the way it became a boundary, is pretty much standard, nothing unusual. L'enfant du siecle after all, god damn it. And it is now become that which we all must flee. Any dialectical witch should find that which we all must flee interesting indeed.

Creating unhappiness, creating growth

"Keep your electric eye on me, babe
put your raygun to my head..."

Continuing from our last post re Stefano Bartolini's paper.

Bartolini’s model connects work, happiness and savings by hypothesizing that growth is a matter of exploiting two negative externalities, of which he concentrates on two types: “positional ones, and those which reduce the availability of free goods as final or intermediate goods.” In essence, that the promise of the affluence which is supposed to have been brought about by greater labor productivity and, especially, the increase in human capital, has not been borne out for reasons that are germane to the system itself. The system generates both an image of happiness and a pandemic of unhappiness. Bartolini wants to know why the savings rate does not effect the quantity of labor, why, that is, the amount of time spent working keeps going up, and why the satisfaction with one’s life is unaffected by increases over a certain amount of wealth. The latter begs the question that Geddes asks the John Houston character, the millionaire, in Chinatown: what more can you eat? How much better can you dress?

“The capacity of the hypothesis that relative income matters to explain the empirical
anomalies of growth theory should be intuitive. Individuals are induced to work hard
and to accumulate much by positional competition. The fact that the position of
people with constant incomes worsens if others increase their incomes is a powerful
incentive for the former to be interested in money.6 But, a general increase in income which leaves the relative positions unchanged cannot improve general well-being. In an economy of this kind the well-being of everyone cannot improve by definition.

Hence the hypothesis of negative positional externalities is consistent with
explanation of the happiness paradox. Positional negative externalities may be the
tertium movens which explains the empirical anomalies of growth theory.”

In a footnote, Bartolini explains those positional goods:

“The main precursors of the idea that relative position matters are Veblen 1899/1934 and Hirsh 1976. According to Hirsh, well-being in the rich economies depends increasingly on positional goods. The clearest definition of pure positional good has been provided by Pagano 1999, according to whom consumption by an individual of a positive amount of a positional good involves the consumption of an equal negative amount by someone else. Examples of pure positional goods are power, status, prestige. This definition implies that increased consumption of a positional good by someone produces a negative externality on someone else.”

While the notion of positional competition and measurement of wealth relative to position is not new, Bartolini’s second negative externality is much less explored:

“According to this approach, the theoretical and empirical difficulties of growth theory are due to the fact that it fails to consider that well-being and productive capacity depend largely on goods that are not purchased in the market but are furnished by the social and natural environment. The growth process generates extensive negative externalities which reduce the capacity of the environment to furnish such goods. These negative externalities may be the tertium movens of growth given the capacity of the market to supply costly substitutes for the diminishing free goods. If agents can purchase substitutes for free resources they will react to the decline in their well-being or in their productive capacity by increasing their use of goods purchased in the market. Negative externalities force individuals have increasingly to rely on private goods in order to prevent a decline in their wellbeing or productive capacity. In this way they contribute to an increase in output. This feeds back into the negative externalities, giving rise to a further diminution in free goods to which agents react by increasing output, and so on.”

A simple example of this comes to mind: the cost of a highway. A highway presents an obstacle to travelers without cars of a rare type: it is as if the state had imported high mountains into an area. The traveler, to get around auto-intended roads, is strongly inclined to get an auto.

Now, here is the bit that has so much relevance to the current election in France – but as much relevance to the past seven years of the moronic inferno in the States.

“The idea behind GASP (Growth As Substitution Process) models is that one way to motivate people to accumulate money is to create a society in which increasingly less can be obtained for free; a society in which opportunities to acquire well-being in ways which do not pass through the market become increasingly scarce, and in which well-being can therefore only be purchased.

According to this approach, the theory of growth based on accumulation and
technical progress is unable to explain the paradox of happiness because it tells only part of the story of growth – the story, that is, in which goods are luxury goods for one generation, standard goods for the next, and absolute necessities for the one after that. The history of economic growth is obviously full of examples of this process. But the other side of this story is that of free goods which become scarce and costly ones for the next generation and luxury goods for the one after that. Urbanization is widely associated with phenomena of this kind. A world in which silence, clean air, swimming in clean seas or rivers, or pleasant strolls become the privilege of uncontaminated places and tropical paradises is a world which tends to spend considerable resources to evade the unliveable environments that it has constructed. The periodic mass migrations known as summer holidays that one observes in the rich countries, or the fact that tourism from the rich countries has become an important resource for many poor ones, may not be indicative of higher living standards but rather a response to a deterioration in the quality of life.”

And finally, my last quote from Bartolini – although this rich essay has a lot of things LI will mine later:

“… in GASP models, the inability of growth to improve happiness derives from
an institutional problem, and not a biological or cultural one. The price system does
not receive signals about the importance of fundamental needs which do not pass
through the market. Individuals are unable to control resources crucial for their
happiness. The fact that money does not buy happiness stems neither from biology nor from culture; money is unable to buy happiness amid a pattern of growth with
excessively high social and environmental costs.”

Now, if I were to criticize Bartolini, it would probably be on the happiness decline. I am not sure that he is right that happiness is on the decline, so much as the composition of happiness has changed in way that are disastrous for our human relationships. But that would be another story for another time.

The Rupture will not be Televised

LI has been pondering the slogan of Sarkozy, the Frankenstein candidate for President in France. Sarkozy has been calling for a ‘rupture’. This might sound like an odd thing for a conservative to do, but, since the 80s, there's a ponce conservative fashion for using those leftist terms associated with ‘revolution’ and revamping them in terms of reaction, much like some rich collector buying antique cars and making them road useable.

In reality, at this point in the developed economies, there are no longer a lot of unknown models. The last two hundred years have given us an ensemble of economic policies, and it isn’t too hard to put in one’s parameters and predict results. It is hard, on the other hand, to imagine another all encompassing economic policy. LI thinks that this will be the conceptual roadblock to really dealing with the environmental affects of the treadmill of production over the next thirty to fifty years. Sarkozy’s rupture is simply applying as much Thatcherism as he dares to create a typical neo-liberal boom in France – one that concentrates the benefits of growth in the wealth of the upper income percentiles, and that spreads affluence further down the percentiles by easing credit and by substituting upward job trajectories for wage raises. The advantage of this kind of growth is that the wealth it creates is extensive enough to expand the seeming base of goods shared by all – the image of prosperity, in other words, connects to a certain extent with the reality of prosperity. Credit is not a fiction. It is a real driver. And it fits well into the notion that greater income comes not from increases in wages, but rising through the ranks. A system that is built like this can’t, in the end, afford a large manufacturing sector. One of the prices of Sarkozy’s “rupture” is de-manufacturing. The Anglo-sphere is all about de-manufacturing.

There is an interesting article by Stefano Bartolini that deals with growth using a Polanyi-style scheme of analysis. It bears the rebarbative title (by which I mean a title fit for a cannibal's barbecue) “Beyond Accumulation and Technical Progress: Negative Externalities as an Engine of Economic Growth .” The abstract, however, hearteningly poses questions that economists generally feel are icky, and that LI feels are exactly the point.

“The traditional explanation of growth based on the primum and secundum movens of accumulation and technical progress, faces two major empirical anomalies. Why do people work so much i.e. why do they strive so much for money? The growth literature provides no answer to these question, nor to the further and very important one of why people are so unhappy. Moreover, finding a joint answer to the two questions seems particularly puzzling. Why do people strive so much for money if money cannot buy happiness? I argue that the solution to this 'paradox of happiness' can be provided by including in the theory a tertium movens of growth: negative externalities. These externalities can be of two kinds. The first are positional externalities, i.e. those due the fact that individuals may be interested in relative not absolute position. The second kind of negative externalities are those which reduce free goods. Some recent models, both evolutionary or with optimising agents, show the role of these externalities as an engine of growth. This approach emphasises that the growth process generates extensive negative externalities which reduce the capacity of the social and natural environment to furnish free goods. In these models individuals have increasingly to rely on private goods in order to prevent a reduction in their well-being or in their productive capacity due to decline in social and natural capital. This generates an increase in output which feeds back into the negative externalities, giving rise to a self-reinforcing mechanism whereby growth generates negative externalities and negative externalities generate growth. According to these models, growth appears to be a substitution process whereby free final (or intermediate) goods are progressively replaced with costly goods in the consumption (or production) patterns of individuals. From the point of view of this GASP (Growth As Substitution Process) models the two anomalies of growth theory are two sides of the same coin. People strive so much for money because they have to defend themselves against negative externalities: they work so much in order to substitute free goods with costly ones. But an increase in income does not improve their happiness because it involves a process of substitution of free goods costly ones. Some implications for environmental economics are drawn.”

Tomorrow I am going to comment a little more about this paper, which is very relevant to the issues before the French public in this election. One more quote to shore that up – my French readers will surely appreciate the relevance of this graf in Bartolini’s paper to the headlines in the papers:

“In short, the result of perpetual growth seems rather vulnerable to inclusion of a work/leisure choice in models. The plausible mechanisms emphasised by endogenous growth models which ensure a non-decreasing marginal productivity of capital over the long period are insufficient to generate perpetual growth. In order to generate it, individuals must work and accumulate i. e. must be interested in money, more than endogenous growth models predict. According to these models, in fact, individuals react to a long-period increase in labor productivity by enjoying life more than is necessary to ensure perpetual growth. This is as regards the theoretical problems.”

What they said - the Bush occupation plan, Oct. 10, 2002

Every once in a while, one needs benchmarks. Here's a benchmark. Here is a story from October 11, 2002, about what the Bush administration planned for Iraq. Contrary to the new shiny revisionism of the warmongers (Hitchens, Perle, Ajami, etc.), the Bush administration announced what it was going to do in plenty of time for its war supporters to know what it was going to do.

This is the war they supported.
Their butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth stances are actually cynical we-lied-to-cram-the war-down-your-throat-and-they-lied-to-us laments.

Notice, also, the con job of pretending that this was about WMD. The idea that there would be a major effort to find WMD was intrinsic to how the war was sold. Of course, after the invasion, the idea of spending a year making a major search for WMD was given the same status as the search for the tooth fairy or for Santa's reindeer.

"THREATS AND RESPONSES: A PLAN FOR IRAQ
Foreign Desk; Section A
U.S. Has a Plan To Occupy Iraq, Officials Report
By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT
1380 words

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 -- The White House is developing a detailed plan, modeled on the postwar occupation of Japan, to install an American-led military government in Iraq if the United States topples Saddam Hussein, senior administration officials said today.

The plan also calls for war-crime trials of Iraqi leaders and a transition to an elected civilian government that could take months or years.
In the initial phase, Iraq would be governed by an American military commander -- perhaps Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of United States forces in the Persian Gulf, or one of his subordinates -- who would assume the role that Gen. Douglas MacArthur served in Japan after its surrender in 1945.

One senior official said the administration was ''coalescing around'' the concept after discussions of options with President Bush and his top aides. But this official and others cautioned that there had not yet been any formal approval of the plan and that it was not clear whether allies had been consulted on it.

The detailed thinking about an American occupation emerges as the administration negotiates a compromise at the United Nations that officials say may fall short of an explicit authorization to use force but still allow the United States to claim it has all the authority it needs to force Iraq to disarm.

In contemplating an occupation, the administration is scaling back the initial role for Iraqi opposition forces in a post-Hussein government. Until now it had been assumed that Iraqi dissidents both inside and outside the country would form a government, but it was never clear when they would take full control.
Today marked the first time the administration has discussed what could be a lengthy occupation by coalition forces, led by the United States.

Officials say they want to avoid the chaos and in-fighting that have plagued Afghanistan since the defeat of the Taliban. Mr. Bush's aides say they also want full control over Iraq while American-led forces carry out their principal mission: finding and destroying weapons of mass destruction."

At the time this was published, LI pointed out that the Bush plan was a pipe dream.

one of the great isolatos

She enters history like the protagonist of an 18th century picaresque novel:

‘One evening in the month of September 1731, a girl nine or ten years old, pressed, as it would seem, by thirst, entered about twilight into Songi, a village situated four or five leagues south of Chalons in Champagne. She had nothing on her feet: her body was covered with rags and skins: her hair with a gourd leaf; and her face and hands were black as a Negroe’s. She was armed with a short baton, thicker at one end than the other like a club. Those who first observed her took to their heels, crying out, ‘There is the devil.” And indeed her dress and colour might very well suggest this idea to the country people. Happiest were they who could soonest secure their doors and windows; but one of them, thinking, perhaps, that the devil was afraid of dogs, set loose upon her a bull dog with an iron collar. The little savage seeing him advancing in a fury, kept her ground without flinching, grasping her little club with both hands, and stretching herself to one side, in order to give greater scope to her blow. Perceiving the dog within her reach, she discharged such a terrible blow on his head as laid him dead at her feet. Elated with her victory, she jumped several times over the dead carcase of the dog. Then she tried to open a door, which not being able to effect, she ran back to the country towards the river, and mounting a tree, fell quietly asleep.”

This is from the English translation that was commissioned by James Burnett, Lord Monboddo. Monboddo is one of those bit players – he had a reputation for eccentricity, built upon his massive multi-volume books that extended the Edinburgh enlightenment’s story of progress as the essence of history to natural history. Monbaddo, famously, thought orangutans were another species of human being – which was not really as odd as it seems, given that Linnaeus himself carved out a special category for wild boys and girls, homo sapiens ferus. And Monboddo had a strong suspicion that people might be born with tails. Or at least that is the legend, which makes Monboddo a crazy Scots Rousseau, crawling around, Nebuchadnezzar like, on all fours.

Michael Newton, in Savage Girls and Wild Boys, devotes a chapter to the Burnett-Memmie Le Blanc story. You can also find Julia Duthwaite’s essay, Rewriting the Savage: The Extraordinary Fictions of the "Wild Girl of Champagne” here As Douthwaite points out, the whole story of Memmie is wrapped in mystification, including the supposed memoir, written by her friend, Madame Hecquet. Madame Hecquet could be the daughter of Dr. Hecquet, who was famous earlier in the century, or she could not exist at all. She could be, and was suspected to be, a proxy for Charles de la Condamine. In Newton’s account, the translation of Hecquet’s work was done by William Robertson, James Burnett’s secretary, in 1765. When Burnett met her, through the offices of Condamine, Memmie Le Blanc was making her living as a curiosity – although in some sense she was still a nun. Burnett, curious as always about primitive man, must have been steered to Memmie, since the Hecquet book, according to Newton, was not selling – in fact, it was part of Memmie’s act to sell copies of it.

Monboddo wrote the preface to the translation of the Memoir. He makes a bee line between Memmie as a Man Friday and Memmie as the Lockean specimen, the subject who had, by good fortunate, befallen some subtraction on the path to human development – the metaphysician’s freak, in short. The preface is genial, and even gives Memmie’s Paris address, for those wanting to see her and put a penny in her box. Monboddo concedes that “the vulgar will be entertained with this relation much as they are with the history of Robinson Crusoe; but to the philosopher it will appear matter of curious speculation; and he will draw from it consequences not so obvious to the generality of readers. He will observe with amazement the progression of our species from an animal so wild, to men such as we. He will see, evidently, that though man is by his natural bent and inclination disposed to society, like many other animals, yet he is not be natural necessity social, nor obliged to live upon a joint stock, like ants or bees; but is enabled, by his natural powers, to provide for his own subsistence, as much as any other animal, and more than most, as his means of subsistence are more various.”

This fascinates LI – for isn’t it the devil of the spirit of capitalism that it is a system which forces men out of the autarkic state, in which all is barter for immediate use, or home production, into the world of monetary exchange – while at the same time defining his essence as being able “to provide for his own subsistence, as much as any other animal” by himself? The economic man, who stands, like Robinson Crusoe, at the very beginning of the labour process, contains this primordial twist like the sons of Adam contain original sin. And that twist comes out of the figuration of that inseparable and damned couple, the colonizer and the native, the European and the savage. So to have a savage retrace the original colonization is, to say the least, interesting.

And that is the story of Memmie, at least as Monboddo sees it. Born, he speculates, among the Huron (who he knows from the tales of an erudite traveler – although this account is contradicted, somewhat, by Monboddo’s insistance on the whiteness of Memmie’s skin), she was captured, while in a canoe, by a ship of unnamed Europeans, her face was blacked, and she was sold as a slave somewhere in the Carribbean. A white Indian in blackface, she was re-embarked for unknown reasons in a ship that foundered on the French shore. She escaped, and helped her girlfriend, a Negro girl, escape. Here things get murky. This black girl was seen when Memmie was first spotted, and there are some odd hints that Memmie might have beaten her to death and eaten her – but then again, there is an account that she sheltered her and the girl got sick. She is out of the picture by the time Monboddo meets Memmie, that's for sure. In any case, what we have here is a game of substitutes of an ingenious kind – the white for the Indian, the Indian for the black, Friday for Robinson Crusoe, Europe for the deserted island. For a moment, history goes, if not backwards, at least in a sort of spin.

More in a future post

ps – oddly, Robinson Crusoe never marked me. I assume I read it, or some abridgment, when I was a boy, but I don’t have the memory of it that I have of Gulliver’s travels. So I’ve been reading it this week, and finding it very surprising. The most surprising thing is the echo I catch of Kafka’s The Burrow. I’ve looked about and found some references to Defoe in the Kafka literature, but it is always about the island in the Penal Colony. But more impressive, to me, is Robinson Crusoe’s alternations between spasms of labour and spasms of fear – in particular, after he spots the imprint of a naked foot on the beach – and the same alternation experienced by the creature in the burrow. That creature attributes his ceaseless scrabbling and his moments of collapse to the need to defend himself:

“I have to have the possibility of an immediate exit passage, for in spite of all my watchfulness, can’t I be attacked from some wholly unexpected side? I live in the innermost part of my house in peace, and in the meant time, slowly and quietly, the enemy is boring towards me from somewhere.”

Crusoe has similar feelings.

“But now I come to a new scene of my life. It happened one day,
about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with
the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain
to be seen on the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I
had seen an apparition. …

When I came to my castle (for so I think I called it ever after
this), I fled into it like one pursued. Whether I went over by the
ladder, as first contrived, or went in at the hole in the rock,
which I had called a door, I cannot remember; no, nor could I
remember the next morning, for never frightened hare fled to cover,
or fox to earth, with more terror of mind than I to this retreat.

I slept none that night; the farther I was from the occasion of my
fright, the greater my apprehensions were, which is something
contrary to the nature of such things, and especially to the usual
practice of all creatures in fear; but I was so embarrassed with my
own frightful ideas of the thing, that I formed nothing but dismal
imaginations to myself, even though I was now a great way off.
Sometimes I fancied it must be the devil, and reason joined in with
me in this supposition, for how should any other thing in human
shape come into the place? Where was the vessel that brought them?
What marks were there of any other footstep? And how was it
possible a man should come there?”

These passages precede a long description of Crusoe’s stratagems in creating a wholly disguised place to hide. As in The Burrow, working in panic is expressed by a confused sense of time. Where Crusoe has accounted for his time up until this point with as much exactitude as he has accounted for his tools, his firearms, his goats, his crops, and all the troublesome implements he has to make himself. But after seeing the footprint, it is a little difficult to understand the passage of the years. Similarly, the creature in the burrow, building out its tunnels, sometimes starts up from sleep and begins to work madly:

“… than I hurry, then I fly, than I have no time to calculate; for I just want to carry out a new, wholly exact plan, grasp arbitrarily what I find with my teeth, slink, carry, sigh, moan, stumble and only some irrelevant alterations of the present circumstances, that seem to me so very dangerous, will satisfy me.”

Perhaps the echoes are to be expected – Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is so diffused in our culture that he is pretty much everywhere that you want to find him. Still, the parallels are striking.