questions about happiness

I thought my friend Alan at Milanda’s questions was going to continue biting holes into my social psychological arguments about happiness, but since he has stopped – he has other fish to fry – and because he raises some interesting questions, I think I’d like to take up a particular theme in his objections, which is that I am using a non-standard, or at least a non-Aristolean, notion of happiness.

As I wrote in the last post about the imago of the dominatrix, switch in hand, who cut such a path through 19th century porn, written so often by men who, as little boys, suffered blissful spankings at public schools and felt bereft thereafter – the certain energy goes out of the theme of volupté as the early modern period comes to an end, and happiness, or the pursuit of happiness, triumphs in the official world – the world to which all justifications must refer. To remind y’all – and hey, I’m sorry about being so repetitive, but I can’t really expect my readers to remember all this shit – I am interesting in the way volupté emerged on the margins, in natural philosophy, under the aegis of Epicurus, in the 17th century, and quickly became a slogan for the libertines and for a certain protest against, on the one hand, Christian doctrine, and on the other, the unofficial religion of the intellectuals, which since the Renaissance had been a sort of stoicism derived from Cicero and Seneca. There are a lot of questions both about the emergence and the way it so quickly made its way into a major vector, that group of “idle’ nobles in England and France whose political energies were, essentially, put into the libertine lifestyle – a lifestyle characterized by its distance both from the bourgeois and the monarch. Of course, I’m giving you a pretty rough map, here, of social tendencies into which are folded philosophical themes – but it is a good enough map to predict the kind of conflicts that will occur in the confrontation of theses and little groups. One can talk about salonwork here.

But let’s not be distracted by the formal characteristics of philosophical history as I am presenting it, like Hegel, Jr. What happened in the Anglosphere was that the dialectic of volupté was aborted – in contrast to what happened in France. In its place, the Scottish Enlightenment expressed the mores of proto-liberal culture in a systematized ethics of sympathy and a theory of the market – the former justifying the raw terror visited upon various global populations by the embodiment of the latter.

So, to return to Alan’s question, or to derive a historical question from one of his questions: how does Aristotle’s idea of happiness, which has become central in contemporary philosophical ethics, fit into this story?

a letter does not always arrive at its destination...

The NYT has a long overdue article about the Saudi support for the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Of course, it softpeddles the extent of Saudi activity, and relies exclusively on U.S. government officials as sources instead of, oh, you know, investigating the pretty easy to investigate money trail. But one expects no less.

The thing that caught LI’s eye was not so much the content of this story as an oddly boastful passage making it clear that the reporters see themselves as a sort of signaling instrument for the Bush administration:

“The accounts of American concerns came from interviews with several senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they believed that openly criticizing Saudi Arabia would further alienate the Saudi royal family at a time when the United States is still trying to enlist Saudi support for Mr. Maliki and the Iraqi government, and for other American foreign policy goals in the Middle East, including an Arab-Israeli peace plan.
In agreeing to interviews in advance of the joint trip to Saudi Arabia, the officials were nevertheless clearly intent on sending a pointed signal to a top American ally. They expressed deep frustration that more private American appeals to the Saudis had failed to produce a change in course.”

This is the establishment talking – and it ain’t talking to you, reader. Clearly, the incentive and value of the article isn’t news - isn’t the independent and, as Joe Klein would put it, ‘serious’ investigation of a fact by this time known and well established in the Middle East. No, it is to operate as a middle man between the Bushies and the Saudis.

What an astonishing admission to make. More astonishing is, LI believes that nobody on the NYT sees it as an admission. They have been sunk up to their eyeballs so long in the petrified turds of the governing class, in the morass of talking points and tv talk fests, that they have lost the capacity to understand what “reporting” is. The NYT and the WAPO have taken their self-applied limits – to report or mention a very small bit of reality, and to censure any realities beyond that – and narrowed them in the past twenty years to the point where the caricature they serve up doesn’t even serve the governing class any more.

The double audience of the media – on the one side, the rubes, and on the other side, the ‘serious’ – functions on the level of the selection of what goes into the papers, or goes on tv. This is why the first question one has to ask about any article in a paper is: who is this for? Every letter is addressed in this world - although, as Derrida pointed out in another context:

"The divisibility of the letter... is what chances and sets off course, without guarantee of return, the remaining [restance ] of anything whatsoever: a letter does not always arrive at its destination, and from the moment that this possibility belongs to its structure one can say that it never truly arrives, that when it does arrive its capacity not to arrive torments it with an internal drifting."

In media terms - there are always unserious people out there.

So, when WAPO, week after week, throws one neo-con after another into their editorial mix, the rubes – the usual, slightly liberal audience of the WAPO – are puzzled and even outraged, especially as it just keeps coming in spite of its evidence lack of fit with the audience that the Washington Post has developed over the years. I’ve never read a comments thread on these columns that wasn’t almost completely appalled by the neo-con drivel, and puzzled by the reason it was appearing. So why would a business so callously keep slapping its customers in the face? These pieces appear because these columns have a second audience, that loose association of high government officials, upper management types, think tankers, and lobbyists, the people who count. These people are meme hungry, and the feeding of them is the main concern of the media decision makers. And of course the memes, regurgitated, then get to reappear in the articles - hence the proliferation, over the last year, of straight news reports from the Iraqi front that include, ritualistically, some accusation of Iranian training, weapons, interference, what have you.

Pleased as I am to see even the smallest hole in the dike that the Americans have thrown up against reality in the Middle East, I’m pretty sure that real reporting about the Saudis – and thus a real picture of what is going on in the Middle East – isn’t going to be breaking out in any major American paper any time soon. Such a picture would tell us things like, oh, who financed the Pakistani nuclear program and why – hint, the initials are S.A., as in Societe Anonyme – and how that has operated as a big time incentive to the Iranians. It would erase the favorite picture that the media likes to convey to the rubes – that the Iranian government is a bunch of mad mullahs. It would show that the Iraqi government as it is now constituted and for which the U.S. is fighting is an Iranian ally – which reality is one of the major reasons the U.S. hasn’t attacked Iran, the other being, of course, that the governing class has already decided that spending 12 billion a month to give George Bush a perpetual testosterone party in Mesopotamia is a bit rich, but spending 24 billion per month to pursue two losing wars is more than even the U.S. can afford – I mean, we are all for CEOs having a good time, and who could deny George that prerogative of masculinity which consists in amassing simply oodles of dead brown bodies, hundreds of thousands to mount on the wall, but face it: ROI time is ROI time.

another fine detour on the path to volupté

LI’s search for the embourgeoisification of volupté – its routinization and removal from the line of radical materialist thinking associated with Epicurus in the seventeenth and eighteenth century – has turned into a continual stumbling upon fortuitous themes in the history of pornography. Such is the life of bloggery.

In trying to find some interesting 18th century erotica that we could use here – and also, we always like interesting 18th century erotica – we stumbled on the Eros-Thanatos site,which has a few rare texts, including a whole book by Hughes Rebell, that weirdo among weirdos in the porno universe, as well as the dada writer Renee Dunan, a woman of who operated between naturism and surrealism and apparently produced a ton of pamphlets of the kind just adored by the police – there is nothing like seizing artistic studies of nudes. In fact, police and criminologists get so carried away by the idea that one of them, the eminent early 20th century professor, Ludwig Kemmer, accidentally produced an under the cover seller entitled “Die graphische Reklame der Prostitution” and in the process made himself a type – the pedagogue fascinated by the vices leading his students astray – that went into Professor Unrat, and hence into The Blue Angel of Marlene fame.

In Professor Rath, the Weimar crackup becomes fate. In the world turned upside down, the disciplinarian is disciplined, the first shall be last and the nationalists aren't going to like watching Prussia lie at the feet of that French sounding wench, Lola, and turn a blind eye to her infidelities. A quick perusal of the Eros-Thanatos site shows that such abjection is a very popular subject – in fact, the books and stories collected on the site are weighted towards the flagellation narrative in a rather dreary way. It isn't, I should confess, my particular yen. In the nineteenth century, after the pleasure-pain calculus of the utilitarians became a sort of official ideology of the modern capitalistic nations, flagellation seems to have taken over from the formerly popular anti-clerical topos in porn.

Jeremy Baron’s article, Spare the Rod, in the Spring 06 issue of Sexuality and Culture, traces that phrase, which is not in the bible, back to its real origin, along the way exploring the figure of the female dominatrix. The word dominatrix itself, according to Baron, is first recorded in the 10th century, used by Canoness Hroswitha to show “a fragile woman who is victorious and a strong man who is routed with confusion.” The phrase spare the rod and spoil the child, deriving from a set of admonitions in Proverbs, first occurs in Hudibrus, the 1662 Samuel Butler poem. But as Baron points out, the lines are entirely about sexual courtship, not about educating children:

Love is a boy by poets stil'd;
Then spare the rod and spoil the child.
A Persian emp'ror whipp'd his grannam
The sea, his mother VENUS came on;
And hence some rev'rend men approve
Of rosemary in making love.
As skilful coopers hoop their tubs
With Lydian and with Phrygian dubs,
Why may not whipping have as good
A grace, perform'd in time and mood,
With comely movement, and by art,
Raise passion in a lady's heart?
It is an easier way to make
Love by, than that which many take.

It is odd to think of the millions of pious folk who quote the phrase with an entire innocence of its context.

According to Baron:

“In the seventeenth century physicians became interested in the association between beating and sexual pleasure. Distinguished Renaissance anatomists made the first medical explanations for this phenomenon. In 1629 Johann Heinrich Meibom (1594–1655) [the oil-secreting gland of the eyelid is called Meibomian] suggested that potency was stimulated by pathways from the warmed buttocks that increased blood flow to the organs of generation(Meibomius, 1643; Meibom, 1718). We do not know whether Butler read this 1629 edition or perhaps the fourth edition of 1643. In 1669 Dr Thomas Bartholin (1616–89) [who had described the human lymphatic system: it was his father Caspar after whom was named the small lubricating gland near the vaginal opening
in mammals] wrote to J.H. Meibom’s son Heinrich (1638–1700). This letter established, perhaps for the first time, that women too were sexually excited by buttock-beating, ‘Women too are raised and inflam’d by Strokes to a more easy concepcion’ (Bartholin et
al., 1669).”

As Baron points out, the law in the seventeenth century was clear: men could lawfully beat their wives. There is a long and depressing chapter on the history and prevalence of wifebeating in Edward Shorter’s History of Women’s Bodies, which I’d recommend for the strong stomached. Shorter’s larger case – that men were generally indifferent to their wives in rural European society, even to the point of finding their injuries or deaths less traumatic than the deaths of cows or horses – seems exaggerated, but he does collect a good deal of ethnographic evidence of extraordinary domestic brutality.

What is interesting is that it is within these cultural parameters that two behaviors arose: one was punishing children with spanking or whipping on the buttocks, and the other was the lubricious dominatrix, the whipper of men. Sex is the ultimate bricoleur, of course, the goddess who sees in the human body a thousand and one affordances never before discovered. Martin Amis, who has not always been a rotten egg opining about issues he knows little about, like the Middle East, but was street knowledgeable about the human middle, genitals with all the trimmings, once wrote:

"Gore Vidal once said that the only danger in watching pornography is that it might make you want to watch more pornography; it might make you want to do nothing else but watch pornography. There is, I contend, another danger. As I sampled some extreme productions on the VCR in my hotel room, I kept worrying about something. I kept worrying that I'd like it. Porno services the "polymorphous perverse": the near-infinite chaos of human desire. If you harbour a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it. You'd better hope that this doesn't happen while you're watching a film about a coprophagic pigfarmer - or an undertaker."

I’ll continue this in another post.

big and small

Our Mercury, therefore, is the same which contains in itself all the perfections, force and virtues of the Sun, which also runs though all the streets and houses of all the planets, and in its own rebirth has acquired the force of things above and things below; to the marriage of which it is to be compared, as is clear from the whiteness and the redness combined in it. – Paracelsus

And the world being spontaneously produced and being also self-adherent, is allied to matter; which, according to a secret signification, is denominated a stone and a rock, on account of its sluggish and repercussive nature with respect to form: the ancients, at the same time, asserting that matter is infinite through its privation of form. Since, however, it is continually flowing, and is of itself destitute of the supervening investments of form, through which it participates of morphe, and becomes visible, the flowing waters, darkness, or, as the poet says, obscurity of the cavern, were considered by the ancients as apt symbols of what the world contains, on account of the matter w9ith which it is connected. – Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs, translated by the ever strange Thomas Taylor.

There is an old hermetic slogan, one that is referenced by every alchemist: as above, so below. LI’s notion of politics begins with the opposite view: as above is not as below. Instead of drawing a heavy dividing line between the public and private, we draw it between the big and the small, viewing those two sphere not as degrees on one continuum, but as opposing and asymmetrical spheres. Yet, there is a power – or a power relationship – that ‘runs though all the streets and houses of all the planets.’

Mr. Death, please don't take Bat Boy!

Fuck! There goes my last hope for American journalism

It came out of nowhere. People worry about Murdoch taking over the WSJ when a much more prestigous paper was, unbeknownst to us all, threatened by catastrophe. Only the true insiders could draw on stories like this one, by top flight journalist Chuck Lee:


"After opening a popular Chinese restaurant in Manhattan, Chuck Lee discovered that eating large amounts of hot mustard enabled him to foretell the future. Chuck has consented to share his remarkable predictions in a weekly column.

2008 BUCHAREST, Romania — Vampires realize that the blood of tuna fish suits their macabre nutritional requirements as effectively as human blood. The undead begin lurking near the shores of the Black Sea, sucking fish dry and discreetly throwing their bodies into the water.

2009 BUCHAREST, Romania — An unexpected side effect of the new vampiric diet occurs when the discarded fish themselves return to life as vampires. The fishing industry comes to an abrupt halt while authorities try to capture and kill the thousands of bloodthirsty ‘nosferatuna.’"

Other papers are afraid to tell the truth. WWN did it every week. No favoritism. I can only think that aliens have penetrated this society and succeeded in shutting down the one paper that was warning us of their menacing approach.

islamo-penguinism

Johann Hari, having retracted his old support for invading Iraq, gained some absolution from LI. But his recent review of Nick Cohen’s lachrymose new book, I was a Red Diaper Baby and I poop in Your Face… uh, oh, wait a minute, that’s not the title, let me google it, it is "On the Pleasure of Sticking My Thumb Up My Ass", sorry about the mixup – he gives a fourfold analysis of the pro-war Left view, circa 2002-2003 that makes the old anti-warrior in LI want to cry. The very first pillar, which Hari still evidently believes, is the idea that Islamism is fascist. Fuck. Again, the only proof presented for this is a slender book by Paul Berman. Here’s Hari’s account:

“Islamism. The pro-war left argued that Islamism (as opposed to Islam) is a variant on an old enemy of the left - fascism. Paul Berman, in his book 'Terror and Liberalism', carefully teased out the intellectual origins of Islamic fundamentalism, looking primarily as Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual godfather of al Qaeda. It was not hard to find the links: Qutb was explicitly and openly influenced by European fascism. Not was this a merely intellectual influence: when his ideas eventually became a state-ideology - in Taliban Afghanistan - it looked hideously familiar to historians of fascism, with its fanatical Jew-hatred, homophobia, misogyny, the banning of all dissent (and even of music), and the supression of all liberal freedoms. Jihadists even inherited the most eccentric lacunae of fascist conspiracy-thought: on 9th March 2004, a meeting of Freemasons in an Istanbul restaurant was blown up by Islamist suicide-murderers.

Ah, the minimisers of Islamism said, but these are the poor, the wretched of the earth! In fact, the pro-war left pointed out, Islamists activists are overwhelimgly wealthy - Bin Laden is the son of a billionaire - and they are oppressing the real wretched of the earth, not least women. Besides, to refuse to see that people living in poor or oppressive countries can become fascists is to fall for what Bertrand Russell called "The Fallacy of the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed."”

Actually, this is such entire rubbish that one is hesitant to ever read Hari about the Middle East ever again, no matter what his repentance. The opponents of the fascist paradigm did not say that Islamism arose from the cries of the oppressed, but, quite differently, that Islamism arose as a confluence of interests between the ruling ideology of Saudi Arabia, one that existed in the Arabian peninsula a hundred years before Sayyid Qutb, and American anti-communism. It is a simple story, one that was rehearsed time and time around the globe. Searching for anti-communists meant, to the U.S., destroying ‘neutralists’ – or at least leaning against them heavily – which thus made the U.S. a natural ally of Pakistan against India – and maintaining the flow of oil that underwrote the thirty glorious years from 1945-1975. The idea that fascism had a salience here, or that it was the state formation into which Islamism fell, badly distorts history and fascism. The one salient characteristic of fascism is the cult of the leader. The one salient characteristic of Islamism is not the cult of the leader – it is the re-unification of theological and state power, on the Wahabi model. If one wanted to crusade against this, there is one place and one place only where it has emanated from: Saudi Arabia. Not Iraq. Not even al qaeda. However, Saudi Arabia just happens to be a keystone state, without which the West would be plunged into an economic downturn that no leader in the West wants to contemplate. End of story.

That Hari thinks banning music is echt fascist shows that he has little or no idea of fascism.

On the other hand, there are proto-fascistic states in the Middle East, set up to maximize the state’s hold over businesses, legitimated by a cult of the leader. One is Iraq. One is Syria. One is Egypt. Even here, however, fascism is a pretty poor model – except in the case of Iraq. In Syria, for instance, the leadership, belonging to a minority sect, can’t really play the ethnic cleansing card that is one of the pillars of fascism. In Egypt, the leadership model after Nassar was badly dented, and one could as well talk of a kind of monarchy. In Iraq, on the other hand, there was a cult of a leader, the persecution of ethnic groups, a reliance on the military and an aggressiveness that does approach fascism. Unfortunately, this is the reverse of Islamism. The evidences that are given for some symbiosis are pitiful – Saddam’s concessions to and play upon the newfound fervor for Islam was a way of navigating the dictator’s dilemma, and was certainly not generated from above. While there is every evidence Osama bin Laden is a genuine believer in a Wahabist state, there’s no evidence whatsoever that Saddam is, and the Baathists left in Iraq form the strongest opposition to the idea of Iraq becoming an Islamic republic – it is, rather, America’s ally there that has pulled that one off.

It is sad that four years into the war, Hari still has not learned basic, basic facts about Middle Eastern history, and shows an astonishing inability to grasp what fascism means besides that it means the rule of meanies and evildoers. Why not have done with it and say that Osama is really the Penguin in Batman and call Islamism Penguinism?

girls who want boys who dig girls like they're boys...

In his book “Sex collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers and Compilers of Erotica”, Geoff Nicholson makes a very sensible remark about that monument to Victorian encyclopedism, My Secret Life: that in some ways, the most entertaining part of that eleven volume chronicle of fucking is the index:

You might, for instance, look up Spending and find the following citations:

my first
in voluntary
on writing paper
on a silk dress
on silk stockings
against a looking glass
against a door
in a woman’s hand
copiously
baudy ejaculations when
is the most ecstatic moment of life
happiness of dying whilst

And so on.…

LI, last week, proposed that the pre-history of the money shot in visual and written pornography hasn’t, really, been written, even as IT has been busy finding traces of its invisible ink in pornography of the twenties and thirties, the evanescent signature of the ill paid Stakhanovite dick, moonlighting the extra night, the bleary dawn, scurrying home to catch a little rest. Our perhaps crooked opinion is that it is the sheer accident of filmic form, the imposition of a narrative structure on a sequence of images to give them some kind of spurious spectatorial order, which elevated spending into its present uneasy prominence. It was not in response to some voyeuristic mandate, but – like so many narrative solutions to technical problems – was actually a double solution in the double register of pornographer and viewer, with a different sense and context in each register This, of course, begs many questions about narratives themselves. Most notably, are we going to just give it up and allow that tiresome notion of a narrative imposing itself on some wild tabula rasa of images to subtend an argument without taking a proper Derridean potshot at it?

Our readers, we hope, don’t think LI is capable of that level of stupidity. However, we simply want to leave a mark here, a sort of editorial mark, against simple dualism and move on to …

Art history!

Last week we mentioned the dilettanti club, which was ostensibly founded to foster a feeling for antiquity – or at least that antiquity that the proper English gentleman would come upon in the Grand Tour of Italy. The interest in antiquity, however, was not, at this point, a mild and scholarly pursuit. It was the meeting place for a number of radical currents in English – and in European – life: the idea of non-European civilizations as actual civilizations, for instance, which comes out in William Jones’ work; the idea that Christianity suppressed the ‘healthy life’ of paganism, which has alchemical and deist roots; the development of the modern Epicurean ideal of volupte, which gradually embougeoised into the pain-pleasure calculus (with the dire consequence, from LI’s point of view, of giving rise to Happiness Triumphant, which currently bestrides the world like the Goddess Dullness in the Dunciad:

Whate’er the talents or howe’er designed
We hang one jingling padlock on the mind.

ah, private enterprise, how sweet the sound

And the state… was on the other side
We can beat them… for ever and ever – David Bowie
Not – LI

As we have tried to make abundantly abundantly clear on this blog, we consider the terms in which politics is ‘seriously’ discussed in the U.S. to be laughable. We especially find laughable that there is some primal difference between public entities like the South Dakota Department of Education and private entities like Exxon. There is not now, there has not been, and there never will be a primal difference of that kind. To consider how that clown show called libertarianism bases itself on this fallacious fault line makes the observer of the American scene almost despair. Just as cultures have their special cuisines, they have their special stupidities. This is the Ur American one. You can talk until you are blue in the face, but the next thing you know, someone will be dreaming of how we can all set up a magic kingdom in which the state is shrunk like a pair of panties gone through the hot cycle while the private domain blossoms and grows and is full of hippety hop nursery animals.

Well, in this kingdom of the blind, you don’t even have to be one eyed to be king – you simply have to blink every once in a while.

The press, gaudily touting itself as the fourth arm of the government, at least presents an accidental truth. Indeed, the press operates, mostly, as a lubricating agent to ensure the smooth expropriation of a nation’s wealth into the pockets of those who deserve it least and who, entrenched behind that vast architecture of legalized crime called the financial market, gain the most. I suppose in this system, the surprise is that one gets any honest reporting, rather than the opposite. Still, we were amused that the NYT, fresh from its awestruck coverage of the scholarly depths and breadth of the CEO set, had the audacity to publish a sort of crib sheet from the Exxon PR department by Jad Mouawad entitled,

“Gas Prices Rise on Refineries’ Record Failures.”

Whenever the oil companies are ringing up record profits while prices soar, the newspapers are put in a bind: how can one create an explanation to disguise the simple and truthful one that oil companies enjoy excess wealth, have spent tons bribing generations of congressmen to ensure that they will enjoy excess wealth, and have no scruple about picking the average autodriver’s pocket to put that money in the hands of Exxonish upper management types? Newspapers can be awfully creative, but Jad Mouawad makes an unprecedented move in this article by in effect, simply saying na na na na na.

Some critics of the industry have theorized on Internet blogs that the squeeze on gasoline and other refined products points to a deliberate effort among oil companies to bolster profits by keeping supplies tight. But experts point out that the companies have little incentive right now to hold back on fuel supplies.

“Every refinery would like to run as much crude as possible but they simply can’t,” said David Greely, senior energy economist at Goldman Sachs, who in a recent report compared the drop in domestic refining with an “invisible hurricane.” “These are more complex systems. There are more chances for things to go wrong. And when things go wrong, they tend to back up the system.”

Notice, of course, that Mouawad not only quotes a Goldman Sachs guy against those unnamed internet bloggers (as opposed to the bongo drumming bloggers), but that he is so certain that the incentives that the internet bloggers don’t understand exist that, uh, he doesn’t tell us what they are. They just are. I mean can't you trust a guy who says that the refiners want to produce more gasoline? If you can't take him at his word, well, feelings get hurt. This is what those barbaric internet bloggers don't understand, but Jad understands so well. Surely, during the interview, David Greely started crying big buttery tears, just like the Walrus, and our friend Jad, just like the carpenter, lent him his big checked handkerchief. Salt tears mingled, no doubt, with a lunchy Terrine De Foies De Volaille appetizer. I hope those internet bloggers are truly ashamed of themselves. Really! Ruining an appetizer like that. The internet blogger argument is so mean, and cruel, that Jad and his buddy aren't even going to honor it by giving a counter argument. In this way, those internet bloggers are proven decisively wrong.

The article is so riven with baloney, lies, half truths and half wittedness that we just get tired thinking about it. Still, for some facts about the oil industry go to this blog, (an Internet blog! my god!) which takes out a pocket knife and picks the article to pieces pretty quickly.

Jack Kupransky makes a pretty obvious point. First, he quotes the NYT:
As a whole, refining disruptions have been considerably higher than in previous years: they averaged 1.5 million barrels a day in the first quarter, compared with 700,000 to 900,000 barrels a day from 2001 to 2005. In the days after the hurricanes, refiners were forced to briefly halt as many as five million barrels of production.
Then, unlike the gods and heros that inhabit Goldman Sacks, he actually does some simple arithmetic:
To anybody who knows nothing about the business, a shortfall of "1.5 million barrels a day" in refining capacity might sound like a really big deal, except for the fact that available inventory levels of retail gasoline (as reported weekly by the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA) having been running consistently above 200 million barrels for this entire period, way more than enough to cover even a 1.5 million barrel a day shortfall. If inventories weren't able to cover the shortfall, we would see inventories declining dramatically over time. Yes, inventories are 4.5% below a year ago (but only by a mere 9.5 million barrels), but that further proves that refinery shortfalls are not causing inventories to be drawn down in a dramatic way. Multiply 1.5 million per day by 90 days and you get 135 million barrels. The EIA data proves that gasoline inventories have not been depleted by 135 million barrels. In other words, the loss of production due to outages did not result in a shortfall of available gasoline. In other words, there was no supply shortage.”

So, why did the NYT chose to publish this laughable piece of pro oil company propaganda? The shoe drops at the end of the article, with a nice instance of quote marks to make us realize that only internet bloggers and real yahoos would ever question OIL:

“But with a third summer of high gasoline prices, lawmakers are debating legislation they claim would punish oil companies for exploiting the tight supply situation and engaging in “price gouging.” At the same time, they are pressing refiners to produce more fuel.”

Price gouging. My god, how twentieth century, along with usury laws and the like. Those fucking legislators should know better, and – in fact – they do. They will make noise. They will do nothing. The machine, the public/private machine, will work smoothly. Ain’t that sweet – sweet as sweet crude!

the hearsties

The prizes for journalism are not, perhaps, as well known outside of journalism circles as within. There is, for instance, the Pulitzer “cockroach” award, given for the columnist who has done the most to promote exterminationism and war crimes – and though most people thought Christopher Hitchens had the lock on it again this year, that award went to the ever egregious Fred Hiatt. And there is the Hearst award for Bootlicking, which goes to the journalist who has displayed the most valiant brownnosing in the areas of celebrity interview, sports, business, and political reporting. The Hearstie is prized by the writers of Teen People and the business journalists from Forbes, two pools that have traditionally dominated, but this year, I see a strong showing by the New York Times. Harriet Rubin, for instance, turned in a stunning performance yesterday in the business section.

An article entitled “C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success” had a certain magnificent abasement, a certain saucy extra lick to the ever delicious brown pucker of many of our wisest titans of industry, that it sent a responsive shudder through through the media world. It was said that Louis XIV’s tutor would agree with the prince’s anwswers even before Louis spoke them – prudent man. Today’s journalist takes the same route, which is the safest with the obviously great, world class figures they have the honor and the privilege to actually address. Wasn't it the NYT's political correspondent who spoke, in 2003, of how scary it was to ask the President - a man, and yet really, so much more than a mere man! - questions in press conferences. One had to come up with questions in a trembling voice, like, do you rate yourself, as a leader, as slightly better or much better than FDR and Churchill? Could you give us the secret of your brilliant decision-making? etc. Things like that. Things that our fourth branch can be proud of.

The subject of Rubin’s piece is of that our CEOs are not only Einsteins, are not only the genetically perfected group of mortals that sit atop the most perfect meritocracy in this most perfect of meritocratic worlds, but that they are also readers. Reading has apparently just been discovered – the woman who writes the Harry Potter books invented it – and it has been discovered, moreover, to be good. It is good to read! And so we get stories like this:

Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete. Ken Lopez, a bookseller in Hadley, Mass., says it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars.

Perhaps that is why — more than their sex lives or bank accounts — chief executives keep their libraries private. Few Nike colleagues, for example, ever saw the personal library of the founder, Phil Knight, a room behind his formal office. To enter, one had to remove one’s shoes and bow: the ceilings were low, the space intimate, the degree of reverence demanded for these volumes on Asian history, art and poetry greater than any the self-effacing Mr. Knight, who is no longer chief executive, demanded for himself.

The Knight collection remains in the Nike headquarters. “Of course the library still exists,” Mr. Knight said in an interview. “I’m always learning.”

Or like this:

“If there is a C.E.O. canon, its rule is this: “Don’t follow your mentors, follow your mentors’ mentors,” suggests David Leach, chief executive of the American Medical Association’s accreditation division. Mr. Leach has stocked his cabin in the woods of North Carolina with the collected works of Aristotle.”

And then, of course, that vignette that helps us, outside the golden circle, sympathize with these titans, these brains, these possessors of the biggest cocks ever to rape the planet Earth. This one is touching on every dimension:

Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power. The empire-loving Elizabeth I surrounded herself with the Roman historians, many of whom she translated, and kept one book under lock and key in her bedroom, in a French translation she alone of her court could read: Machiavelli’s treatise on how to overthrow republics, “The Prince.” Churchill retreated to his library to heal his wounds after being voted out of power in 1945 — and after reading for six years came back to power.
“Over the years, the philanthropist and junk-bond king Michael R. Milken has collected biographies, plays, novels and papers on Galileo, the renegade who was jailed in his time but redeemed by history.”

Ruben might have bowed to that silly journalistic rule about including all the highlights of a career in her description of the philanthropist and junk-bond king by adding ‘jailbird’ to that list of glittering titles – but the comparison of Milken and Galileo is, well, almost a masterpiece. The probing tongue has discovered, here, a piece of hardened excrement beyond price, and swallows it down with an insouciance that would make Louis XIV’s tutor shiver all over. One is reminded of that great scene in Gravity’s Rainbow of the encounter between Brigadier Pudding and Katje:

‘Now her intestines whine softly, and she fells shit begin to slide down and out. He kneels with his arms up holding the rich cape. A dark turd appears out of the crevice, out of the absolute darkness between her white buttocks. He spreads his knees, awkwardly, until he can feel the leather of her boots. He leans forward to surround the hot turd with his lips, sucking on it tenderly, licking along its lower side..”

One does hope that Ms. Rubin got the proper antibiotic shots after her own performance with Milkin, et al. This is truly an article to cherish.

search me with this salt

- Lot's wife, Anselm Kiefer


But the storehouse, and the very life of memory, is the history of time; and a special charge have we, all along the Scriptures, to call upon men to look to that. For all our wisdom consisteing either in experience or memory – experience of our own, or memory of others, our days are so short that our experience can be but slender… - Lancelot Andrewes

In his great, skewed sermon on Lot’s Wife, preached before Queen Elizabeth, Lancelot Andrewes remarks there are only seven instances, in the Vulgate, when we are called upon to remember something – a memento is laid down, as he puts it:


“Seven several times we are called upon to do it: a. Memento dierum antiquorum, saith Moses. 2. Recordamini prioris Seculi – Esay. 3. State super vias antiques-Jermy. Investiga patrum memoriam-Job. 5. Exemplum sumite Prophetas-James. 6. Rememoramini dies priscos-Paul. 7. Remember Lot’s wife- Christ here; that is, to lay our actions to those we find there, and of like doings to look for like ends. So read stories past, as we make not ourselves matter for story to come.”

Of course, it isn’t hard to pick out an odd discrepancy here in the chain of taboos – for if Lot’s wife was cursed for looking back, what is Christ doing but asking us to look back to that act? In a sense, the reason to remember the story within the memento seems to contradict the command of the memento. Except: what is that command?

Which brings us closer to the fate of Lot’s wife and her pitiful story. LI is a great fan of this story.

It is the more pitiful in that the story ends with Lot’s wife appearing as a sort of footnote to the whole adventure. One is reminded of that great Brueghel painting - the subject of Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" - of the fall of Icarus – the boy’s legs waving just above the encroaching waves, and the placid and roundabout ignorance of the event as life goes on: the herdsmen, the sailors, the laborers.

Briefly, this is what Genesis has to say:

Lot dwells in Sodom, with his wife, two daughters, and his sons in law. The Lord sends angels into the city to check it out – he is doing a survey, and if the angels can find a just man in the place, the Lord will spare it. But the Sodomites throng before Lot’s door, demanding to have sex with those angels. Lot offers his daughters in their place, but the Sodomites won’t have it. The angels then tell Lot to go, but:

“019:016 And while he lingered, the men laid hold upon his hand, and
upon the hand of his wife, and upon the hand of his two
daughters; the LORD being merciful unto him: and they brought
him forth, and set him without the city.

And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad,
that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee,
neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain,
lest thou be consumed.

019:018 And Lot said
unto them, Oh, not so, my LORD:

019:019 Behold now, thy servant hath found grace in thy sight, and
thou hast magnified thy mercy, which thou hast shewed unto me
in saving my life; and I cannot escape to the mountain, lest
some evil take me, and I die:
019:020 Behold now, this city is near to flee unto, and it is a little
one: Oh, let me escape thither, (is it not a little one?) and
my soul shall live.

019:021 And he said unto him, See, I have accepted thee concerning
this thing also,
that I will not overthrow this city, for the
which thou hast spoken.

019:022 Haste thee, escape thither; for I cannot do anything till thou
be come thither. Therefore the name of the city was called
Zoar.

019:023 The sun was risen
upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar.

019:024 Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone
and fire from the LORD out of heaven;

019:025 And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the
inhabitants of the
cities, and that which grew upon the
ground.

019:026 But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a
pillar of salt.”

When Christ lays his memento on Lot’s wife, commanding us to remember her, he doesn't give her a name. Unlike Abram’s wife or Joseph's, we aren't given her first name in the story. As she figures, a diminuendo, at the end of the great destruction of the city, that diminuendo is made tinier still by the absence of a name, as though by degrees we were getting down to granules of her, flakes, a mere seasoning. By looking back and becoming a pillar of salt, she became one of the two great Western myths about looking back – the other being Orpheus’ backward glance at Eurydice as the two were coming out of the underworld. In Orpheus’ case, too, the taboo was that he could not look back. And in Orpheus’ case – just as in the case of the memento laid on Lot’s wife – the original taboo did not effect the chain of glances backwards to the moment of violation. The poem - the story - escapes the rule. Such a limit to the taboo implies that memory and the gaze backward are on two different planes…

But LI is not as concerned with this as with the career of Lot’s wife. Lancelot Andrewes’ sermon is constructed around the orthodox version of the story – Lot’s wife is an instance of faintheartedness. In one sense, of course, she links up with Eve, another woman who disobeys the Lord’s word. But in another sense, Lot’s wife has put up with everything. She left Ur, the wicked city, with Lot. She wandered with Lot for years. She put up with Lot offering to protect the angels of the Lord at the price of giving the men of Sodom her daughters. So her great sin was quailing at the last moment. It was frailty of the will.

“Looking back might proceed of divers causes, so might this of hers, but that Christ's application directs us. The verse before saith, 'Somewhat in the house;' something left behind affected her, of which He giveth us warning. She grew weary of trouble, and of shifting so often. From Ur to Haran; thence to Canaan; thence to Egypt; thence to Canaan again; then to Sodom, and now to Zoar; and that, in her old days, when she would fainest have been at rest. Therefore, in this wearisome conceit of new trouble now to begin, and withal remembering the convenient seat she had in Sodom, she even desired to die by her flesh-pots, and to be buried in 'the graves of lusts;' wished them at Zoar that would, and herself at Sodom again, desiring rather to end her life [67/68] with ease in that stately city, than to remove, and be safe perhaps, and perhaps not in the desolate mountains. And this was the sin of restlessness of soul, which affected her eyes and knees, and was the cause of all the former. When men weary of a good cause which long they have holden, for a little ease or wealth, or I wot not what other secular respect fall away in the end; so losing the praise and fruit of their former perseverance, and relapsing into the danger and destruction from which they had so near escaped.
Behold, these were the sins of Lot's wife, a wavering of mind, slow steps, the convulsion of her neck: all these caused her weariness and fear of new trouble--she preferred Sodom's ease before Zoar's safety, 'Remember Lot's wife.”

In a great phrase, Andrewes later says that we are searched with her salt. This vivid picture of Lot’s wife is, in fact, why I am in absolute agreement with Kurt Vonnegut, who dedicated Slaughterhouse Five to her:

“Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them.

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because
it was so human.

So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.”

Oddly enough, Vonnegut’s interpretation imputes to Lot’s wife feelings that are not often interpreted to her in the afterlife of her story. A more common interpretation is that Lot’s wife was drawn by the sensation of the destruction. That the taboo was a taboo on enjoying violence. Just as in the story in Plato, where Leontius was so drawn and at the same time repulsed by the bodies that lay on the execution field outside of Athens that he rushed to one and addressed his eyes, saying, there, ye wretches, take your fill of the fine spectacle. Myself, though, my instinct is that Andrewes notion of a certain sloth, a certain nostalgia, a certain weariness, a desire to, at last, to “die by her flesh-pots, and to be buried in 'the graves of lusts’” rather than continue on this unending quest with her husband, in the service of a dangerous god, in the hands of an inhuman justice, can be combined with Vonnegut’s notion of a certain instinctive human compassion to give us a sense of the meaning of remembering Lot’s wife. To LI’s mind, Lot’s wife is the genius of our reactionary instincts. It is where we are reactionary – politically, socially, emotionally.

Although Lot’s wife is a strong figure, the only figure in the New Testament, as Andrewes points out, who has a memento laid on her by Christ, she is not the subject of a lot of poetry. But Anna Akhmatova wrote one poem for her. Here it is:

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,

over a black mountain, in his giant track,

while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:

"It's not too late, you can still look back



at the red towers of your native Sodom,

the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,

at the empty windows set in the tall house

where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."



A single glance: a sudden dart of pain

stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .

Her body flaked into transparent salt,

and her swift legs rooted to the ground.



Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem

too insignificant for our concern?

Yet in my heart I never will deny her,

who suffered death because she chose to turn.

All of which brings us back to that death sentence. If one reading of the punishment - that Lot's wife is punished for feasting her eyes on a scene of destruction - is wrong, what, then, are we to make of this taboo? In LI's opinion, we here strike upon an odd topic: the embarrassment of power. Yes, the catastrophic crimes committed by the powerful need some cover, some secrecy, so that they do not arouse such indignation in subject populations that Jehovah will be strung from a lamppost. But it isn't the case that power is simply and completely structured by rationality. Perhaps - LI hypothesizes, don't hold me to this in court! - perhaps Jehovah is embarrassed. Perhaps the reactive feelings that turn Lot's wife's head - reactive feelings that, remember, have caused Lot himself to linger and complain - are not unknown to the Lord of Hosts, or the Fuhrer, or the POTUS, or the infinite bureaucratic systems with their infinite lists that make possible the slaughter of cattle and people in equal measure, with more wastage per pound on the homo sapiens. Joseph K., you will remember, is hidden in the tavern to spy upon one of the Castle's minor officials, but a great demonic power in the village itself. There is a shame in power, in its exercise, its structure, that must be revenged upon its victims. An embarrassment even where power is most rampant and insolent.

and what are you doing? Oh, first let me tell you what I'm doing...

I was talking on the phone last night with a friend who is thinking of going to the Frankfurt Book Fair this November to peddle her translating talent. She lives in Barcelona and has translated two novels from Spanish, one for FSG. So we talked a little bit about plans and projects, and I admitted that I am in a trough vis a vis fiction. But, I said, I’ve been doing this thing on my blog that I’d love to, to do something with. Then I started spieling to her about how for the last year I’ve been developing these different themes that have a certain coherence: the career of the sage in the West, and the expulsion of the sage as one of the founding gestures of modernity; the construction of Happiness Triumphant, as happiness became not merely a mood or a feeling, but the keystone of all moods and feeling; the dialectical career of volupte, originally a liberating opening to pleasure, under the sign of Epicurus, rediscovered by the libertines, but soon adopted by the bourgeoisie as part of the pleasure-pain calculus legitimating capitalism; and these numerous capillary connections to two events of the longue duree, the treadmill of production (underneath capitalism and socialism) and the war culture. Such was my spiel. Well, believe it or not, I’m a spieler. It is unbelievable, sometimes, the bullshit that falls from my lips, as though the devil rode my tongue. I’ve exerted, to the right audience, a sinister and bizarre influence.

However, even to myself I could tell that these themes form something more like a cloud, a diffuse atmosphere, a certain temperature, rather than anything solid enough to climb upon. Imagine the Decline of the West as composed within the brain of an amorous cricket and you get some idea of the essay I’d like to gestate. But there it is…

My pre-occupation with these things has brought me back to certain philosophical concerns of my LI's wild years. Yet, as I look around at philosophy blogs, I don’t see a lot I feel akin to. Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, to me, were all about tracing paths. Their successors are more like Calasso, or Ginzberg, or Hadot, or Veyne, rather than those who are currently popular with the theory crowd. Who are pretty indifferent to genealogies, traces, histories, all the old fuddery. That makes LI a bit of an outlier, eh? Still, I can see this … project, in the distance – a glorious outline in a pea soup mist, getting underway as crowds wave handkerchiefs and the crew blows kisses, goodbye!

ps - I can't wholly lament my inability to get ahead with this blog. I went to a google search reference that brought someone to limited inc and I'm proud to say that we are SECOND if you are searching for Suck My Big Cock. My parents will be so proud!

our blue planet - one of the galaxy's premier outhouses!

I am reviewing the book, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. The book is about the world as it would be if humans disappeared about now – perhaps prey to some human created virus, or swept up in the Rapture.

It is an impressive reminder that when the U.S. sent up that satellite in the seventies, the one with the famous drawing of a heroic human figure by Leonardo Da Vinci and various emblematic signs indicative of our human kind, we forgot the sign for endless shit. What is that sign, anyway? It should be in the zodiac. Some star cluster spelling out turd. Humans are characterized, more than anything else, by their tremendous ability to create garbage. No other creature has ever created garbage on the human scale. We each use more energy than a blue whale, and we each turn it into more waste than a blue whale weighs.

Take plastic. Since its invention, about fifty years ago, it is all still here.

“EXCEPT FOR A SMALL AMOUNT that’s been incinerated,” says Tony Andrady the oracle, “every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last fifty years or so still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment.”

That half century’s total production now surpasses 1 billion tons. It includes hundreds of different plastics, with untold permutations involving added plasticizers, opacifiers, colors, fillers, strengtheners, and light stabilizers. The longevity of each can vary enormously. Thus far, none has disappeared. Researchers have attempted to find out how long it will take polyethylene to biodegrade by incubating a sample in a live bacteria culture. A year later, less than 1 percent was gone.

“And that’s under the best controlled laboratory conditions. That’s not what you will find in real life,” says Tony Andrady. “Plastics haven’t been around long enough for microbes to develop the enzymes to handle it, so they can only biodegrade the very-low-molecular-weight part of the plastic”—meaning, the smallest, already broken polymer chains. Although truly biodegradable plastics derived from natural plant sugars have appeared, as well as biodegradable polyester made from bacteria, the chances of them replacing the petroleum-based originals aren’t great.”

I’m quoting from the Orion magazine excerpt. Reader, do read this article. Orion is one of the smartest magazines going at the present time, and their environmental reporting and essays are so much better than the gasbaggery of most magazines that it is depressing.

Weisman’s chapter is about where that plastic is mostly going. It is mostly going into that part of this beautiful planet that God looked down upon, and said – to his angels – this shall be man’s toilet bowl, where he can dump all the shit and crap he needs, after filling his guts with twinkies and potato chips. You guessed it: the oceans! yes indeed, this little hominid critter is doing a bang up job on the oceans. There is a part of the Pacific ocean in the horse latitudes between California and Hawaii known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. It is mostly avoided by ships, since the water in it is warm and slowly rotates in a vast vortex. It is the size of Texas. The plastic bag I took my groceries home in two years ago this day is probably there; as is the potato chip bag I crumpled up, the Styrofoam that my computer was packed in, and a bike tire or two. The plastic in the upper waters has been measured. It now outnumbers the plankton. Plastic is made in little pellets called nurdles, and those little pellets find their way, by wind and water, to the ocean two. It is estimated that two hundred fifty million pounds is manufactured each year. And the pellets then go through guts. Just as sea birds and turtles consume empty balloons and rubber bands, these miniscule nurdles are eaten by tinier creatures. A biologist named Richard Thompson has been studying this:

“Thompson’s team realized that slow mechanical action—waves and tides that grind against shorelines, turning rocks into beaches—were now doing the same to plastics. The largest, most conspicuous items bobbing in the surf were slowly getting smaller. At the same time, there was no sign that any of the plastic was biodegrading, even when reduced to tiny fragments.

“We imagined it was being ground down smaller and smaller, into a kind of powder. And we realized that smaller and smaller could lead to bigger and bigger problems.”
He knew the terrible tales of sea otters choking on poly-ethylene rings from beer six-packs; of swans and gulls strangled by nylon nets and fishing lines; of a green sea turtle in Hawai’i dead with a pocket comb, a foot of nylon rope, and a toy truck wheel lodged in its gut. His personal worst was a study on fulmar carcasses washed ashore on North Sea coastlines. Ninety-five percent had plastic in their stomachs—an average of forty-four pieces per bird. A proportional amount in a human being would weigh nearly five pounds.

There was no way of knowing if the plastic had killed them, although it was a safe bet that, in many, chunks of indigestible plastic had blocked their intestines. Thompson reasoned that if larger plastic pieces were breaking down into smaller particles, smaller organisms would likely be consuming them. He devised an aquarium experiment, using bottom-feeding lugworms that live on organic sediments, barnacles that filter organic matter suspended in water, and sand fleas that eat beach detritus. In the experiment, plastic particles and fibers were provided in proportionately bite-sized quantities. Each creature promptly ingested them.
When the particles lodged in their intestines, the resulting constipation was terminal. But if the pieces were small enough, they passed through the invertebrates’ digestive tracts and emerged, seemingly harmlessly, out the other end. Did that mean that plastics were so stable that they weren’t toxic? At what point would they start to naturally break down—and when they did, would they release some fearful chemicals that would endanger organisms some time far in the future?

Richard Thompson didn’t know. Nobody did, because plastics haven’t been around long enough for us to know how long they’ll last or what will happen to them. His team had identified nine different kinds in the sea so far, varieties of acrylic, nylon, polyester, polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyvinyl chloride. All he knew was that soon everything alive would be eating them.”

Now, some would call this a shame and maybe even get all environmentally sappy. But luckily, in the country that counts, the U.S. of A., we have a hard core of people who have it on the authority of Jehovah himself that we can fuck with the planet any old way we want to. It is called the gang bang theory of human domination – oh, I’m sorry, that’s wrong. It is called Christianity. Not all Christianity, let’s not be unfair. The Catholic church, for instance, is so concerned about the plastic that goes into making condoms that they are doing the Lord’s work in trying to get condoms out of, like, Africa. I’m thinking more of the punkass peckerwood right. And they have an organization! Is that cool or what? it is called the interfaith punkass peckerwood movement. Just joking! It is called the Interfaith council for Environmental Stewardship. By Environmental Stewardship the IES means the same thing RJ Reynolds means by Public health – don’t believe the hype! cigarettes are good for you, Al Gore made up that thing about global warming, and God doesn’t want you to do anything romantic – pagan even – and against free enterprise (his other commandment) by making the ocean into something other than what God wanted it to be: a vast toilet.

And to think: some say this isn’t the greatest country in the world.

Intrepid pedicons unite!

“Who does not know', Forberg exclaimed at one point, 'that the Greeks and Romans were intrepid pedicons and determined cinaedes?” – Whitney Davis, “Homoerotic Art Collection from 1750 to 1920”, Art History 2001.

Who indeed? Davis’ interesting article outlines the gay millionaire boho culture of the late nineteenth century and the early 20th, which was centered at Capri in particular, where Jacques d'Adelswaerd Fersen, the son of a Swedish, I believe, millionaire established a famous pleasure palace and enlivened its grounds with faux classical sculptures of his boyfriends, dancing and generally rippling muscularity for all to see. This was the world of Gide, Symonds, Wilde, and Norman Douglas. This culture looked back on a surreptitious tradition going back to LI’s man, d’Hancarville:

“The classical philologist Paul Brandt (1875-1929) was the 'Hans Licht' of a widely read three-volume social history of Greece, emphasizing her sexual practices and erotic art. In its depth and range the book and art collection of Brandt and his partner Werner von Bleichroeder was probably the most important of the period.[ 6] It included refined contemporary homoeroticist visual fantasy and pornography -- some of it by top semi-clandestine artists, like Otto Schoff, connected with Jugendstil and Art Nouveau -- intercut with stylistically more classicizing or mock-classical materials. The latter included the prints for a 1907 luxury edition of the frank and learned commentary (an Apophoreta, or 'second course') by Friedrich Karl Forberg (1770-1848), first published in 1824, on the Hermaphroditus of Antonio Beccadelli (1394-1471) of about 1460, which was itself a collation of Latin erotic epigrams and quotations culled from ancient Roman sources (such as Martial) and edited by Beccadelli. For nineteenth-century readers, Forberg's Apophoreta was perhaps the single most detailed source for unorthodox sexual practices, and certainly for the sexual vocabularies, of the ancients.[ 7] Forberg corrected the text of a sixteenth-century manuscript of Beccadelli published in Paris in 1791. Most such copies had been suppressed in the Renaissance; as Symonds observed, the 'open animalism' of the text did not sit well with moralists.[ 8] Several attempts were made to suppress Forberg's edition. But it was assiduously preserved in nineteenth-century erotic book and art collections and rescued by publishers of erotica. Isidore Liseux issued a poor French translation of the Apophoreta in 1882. And at the end of the century Charles Carrington published a good English translation, accompanied by further notes; in a nod to the now-notorious circles of Symonds, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, it was supposedly produced by 'Viscount Julian Smithson, M.A.' for his friends.[ 9]

Some copies of Forberg's edition of 1824 had been illustrated with a number of engravings taken over from P.F. Hugues d'Hancarville's pornographic publications of mock-ancient gems, produced in the 1770s and 1780s, to be considered in more detail below.[ 10] These were reproduced yet again in a special album of prints published to accompany a 1907 French translation of the entire edition of 1824 --Hermaphroditus and Apophoreta.[ 11] Throughout his Apophoreta Forberg continuously cited d'Hancarville's engravings as pictorial illustrations of the sexual possibilities mentioned in Beccadelli's or the collated Roman texts -- the postures of pedicatio (anal intercourse), irrumatio (oral intercourse) and so on, whether heterosexual or male and female homosexual.[ 12] Brandt and Bleichroeder owned a luxury new edition of the English translation; published by Charles Hirsch in Paris and dated 1907, it contained twenty new obscene plates, three of them explicitly homosexual.[ 13] That Beccadelli-Forberg highlighted homosexual practices is clear from the text -- 'who does not know', Forberg exclaimed at one point, 'that the Greeks and Romans were intrepid pedicons and determined cinaedes?'[ 14] -- and had been noted by Symonds. Brandt knew the work well; for his own use he prepared an index to the first German translation (printed after his death), which had been produced in Leipzig in 1908 by the homosexualist publisher Max Spohr accompanied by a new, modernized sexological commentary on Forberg's original Apophoreta by Alfred Kind.”

The Hermaphroditus has a special place in LI’s heart – long ago, in the 80s, we wrote a forty page essay about it as an example of my work for the U.T. philosophy department. Those forty pages have long ago departed this world, but we vaguely remember that this paper was about the enlightenment system of the senses, with its emphasis on touch and its problem with that emphasis when it came to admiring the luscious buttocks of the Hermphroditus, a sculpture that was particularly appreciated by Winckelmann (DC) and Herder (AC). The problem of arousal and the problem of the sense that art appeals to – that sweaty palmed urge of these German travelers to the museums of Italy – found an echo in the emphasis on distance and disinterestedness in Kant. All of which is so much gone pedantry. Still, the notion that the world is made up of atoms of feeling has had a long and honorable career in many cultures, and still has an underground career in erotica – the sexualized universe turns the hierarchy of the senses upside down, with dumb touch being crowned phallic king.

…

While the history of art, dirty art with an emphasis on big dicks, might seem like an aleatory tradition at best, it is LI’s belief that the enlightenment interest in the cult of the phallus was connected with many of those things that made up the radical enlightenment. The Dilettanti club that sponsored Richard “Phallus” Payne also sponsored Sir William Jones, whose favorable opinion of the Persians and the Arabs and the Hindoos would be treated to immense scorn by John Stuart Mill’s father, James, in his influential History of India – a document that marks one of the turning points in the Imperial mindset. While the idea that non-European people were savages, being visibly unchristian, had long been part of the stock of European prejudices, the idea that Europe was far ahead of them, - an idea that took root, at first, in the notion of the European superiority in culture, and quickly became mixed with the idea of some superiority in stock, or race – was not part of the orthodoxy of the Enlightenment, but was, nevertheless, created within the Enlightenment. There’s an unfortunate notion that the issue about which the Enlightenment struggled was universalism. It is true that universal claims were made in the Declaration of Independence, by Kant, and by other paragons of Enlightenment thought – and of course Tom Paine was unable to get any mention of the equality of Africans in the Declaration. But LI would maintain that it was still around the issue of religion that various and opposing themes about race, sex, and progress were shaped, with a sort of second wave of relativism hitting the enlightenment intelligentsia. The first wave, of course, had hit with the discovery of the New World. The second wave hit with the discovery of the connection between non-Europe and the European past. And it played a nicely dialectical role – it both confirmed a European myth – that Europe’s past was the savage present, and that Europe was, consequently, more mature, more grown than the non-European world – and it put into question the foundation of European legitimacy, the classical heritage.

So there is a lot that comes together in the galantes archaeology and anthropology of the late eighteenth century. As we shall see in another post.

in the era of the crab louse

At one point in the 90s, I was working in a closet in a building on the Yale campus that looked, for all the world, like a pile of giant dog turds ascending fourteen stories. A Philip Johnson special. I have always despised Philip Johnson’s work, and sitting in that awful structure confirmed my view of the man. Anyway, I was working for a construction company that was doing interior reconstruction work on some of the laboratories. I was depressed, because it is hard to sit in a closet all day. Plus, it used to contain chemicals, this closet, so there were taped messages everywhere proclaiming sterile area. This struck me as a downer to my natural optimism. Besides, I wasn’t used to the North’s winters, which, to my horror, swoop down upon you and enclose you in a cloak of gloom starting in October and muffle you fucking up until March. To cheer myself up, I played my little tapes on a boom box. One in particular would drive my boss crazy. He was rarely in, but when he was in, he would nest in the outer office. It was my Lords of Acid tape. Somewhere around then Lords of Acid did a sex tour with My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult and were arrested in Hartford or something. Anyway, exciting times, except for me in the closet. I thought they were sufficient unto the day thereof.

I hadn’t thought about that for a long time. Today, I went on a nostalgic little trip on YouTube, looking at a buncha Lords of Acid vids of yore. And it struck me that the lyrics to Crablouse almost exactly describe my feeling about how the body politic has been penetrated by war criminals of the Bush-Cheney-HillaryClinton type. For those who haven’t heard this rousing anthem, here’s the chorus and the second verse:

“It's there to stay, it sucks all day
It's there to bite, my parasite

The little vampire, horny and so greedy
It doesn't care about a penis and it's envy
It's intelligent, nasty and it's sick
A party animal, a pervert and a pig
If a crablouse gets mixed in your saliva
Stumbles through your body right into your vulva
Then waits patiently until a penetration
Gets it out of there and right into salvation.”

That pretty much summarizes the last six years, don’t you think? Since the coup, that thing has sucked all day, and it has sucked the political life out of many, while with others it has contented itself with their blood and ouns. Every day, another mass murder in Iraq hosted and enjoyed by the American taxpayer, another innocent frying in some Southern death and jim crow juke joint, another fake terrorist scare. This is the era of the Crab Louse. The hatchlings of its eggs inside us will be here for as long as I’m alive.

not the phallus again!

In a couple of earlier posts, LI was pursuing the track of Epicurus – not the real Epicurus but his double, his eidolon, who appeared in Europe in the 17th century in Gassendi’s work and soon became a background daemon in the libertine and materialist tradition. LI’s idea is that the intellectual history of happiness in the Early modern period has been traced too grossly, with too little attention paid to nuances having to do with, for instance, the career of volupte as a go between concept that mediated the pleasures of the flesh and the science of the flesh.

Well, we merely danced this maze lightly, and we broke off abruptly with La Mettrie’s anti-stoicism (and his paen to the orgasm). But we never actually give up a theme around here. Although it might seem to be farted around, ha! ha! unbeknownst to the innocent reader, we are making progress.

As we said in our post on IT’s various posts on porno, theorizing pornography has often led to ignoring the history of pornography. That history is connected with a lot of the broader features of modernity. Thus, for instance, the link, the indissoluble link, between porno, paganism and classical learning in Britain.

About which we will be make a couple of posts, starting with the Dilettanti club, an eighteenth century London institution that promoted archaeology. It had many famous members. Joshua Reynolds painted their portraits. Horace Walpole waspishly said that the Dilettanti club was formed with the “nominal qualification [of] having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk.” The eighteenth century was one of the drunkest of all centuries, at least for the British. In fact, one could well wonder whether English culture ever flourishes in dry times.

The Dilettanti were connected to a whole libertine whig culture, which is suggested by names like the Hellfire club. As we pointed out in our earlier posts, the Epicurean tradition via Gassendi certainly flowed into the libertine moment in France, and was multitudinously imported into England by way of exiles and Hobbesians and deists. Of course, one imagines that all of these people were aristocrats – yet that is not totally accurate. The spread of this culture among radicals who were connected to the artisan/mechanical class, the budding Priestleys and Paines, gave British radicalism its divided heritage: on the one side, the goody goody temperance and vegetarian types, and on the other, the experimenters in new sexual and cultural relations, who by degrees become the seedy barflies and soakers who flit through the diaries of all the famous twentieth century writers – the Café Royal types.

The Dilettanti published Richard Payne Knight’s book, A discourse on the worship of the priapus and its connection with the mystic theology of the ancients. Then the book was suppressed by Knight, who couldn’t abide the scandal. Knight is an interesting figure, another devotee of Lucretius, and I want to get back to him, but I want to first take up the supposed Baron Pierre d’Hancarville, who set up an artist’s workshop to copy the collection of antiquities collected by a British grandee, William Hamilton, in Naples. It was Hancarville’s idea that material culture – images on pots, graffiti, and all the detritus of the antique world – could lead us into what that world was about. This was an incredibly influential idea. It wasn’t solely Hancarville’s. Yet he might have influenced Winckelmann, and through Winckelmann we can island hop up through the art historical tradition. d’Hancarville’s business – the sales of little ancient phallic charms to connoisseurs – also had an under the table effect. Freud had a collection of those phallic charms himself, and some of them might be traced back to d’Hancarville.

More on this when I have time.

another fine and supreme moment

A long time ago LI made a mistake. We had this brain flash: since the monks of old slept in their coffins, why not trade in our old bed, which trailed more bad luck than Jacob Marley trailed chains, for a small little like couch bed? We miscalculated. It turns out that LI is not a jelly fish. We have a distinct spine. Plus, we have about six feet of body, and the bed only had about 5’11” feet of space. This was hard on the foots.

Well, so it went. Live and learn. Learn, for instance, the most intimate secrets of your vertrebrae.

Well, a couple of weeks ago a woman we know decided that she was returning back to sunny California, and gave us her bed. We only had to pick it up today. Of course, the day turned out to be rainy, U-haul decided to play us in that way they have of promising a truck and not delivering, and the bed turned out to be humongous. But who the fuck cares? We finally assembled it in our little apartment, put on the new sheets, and lay down on something that offered… resistance! Incredible as that might seem. Yes, it is big enough to fuck an elephant on. And I’m talking with all the foreplay. But it comes with no bad luck, and a certain air of nobility. O, to work, again, on a bed, writing away! Perhaps this will light a fire under all our dead fictions and LI will dwindle into mere rumbles of impotent thunder about the scoundrel era of American history.

I wonder what the first dream will be like? I find that, at important turning points in my life, all my friends come and visit me in my dreams. Like they want to say hi. Even the ones who now loathe me. Plus old lovers and my Mom, dead these thirteen years. However, possibly the spirits will not find me getting a normal bed an important turning point in my life. Well, fuck the spirits! The last time I had a good bed, a really sweet bed, was 1998. I remember that bed with longing to this day.

meditation on Infinite Thought's modernist porn

IT continues her interesting series on porno today. I’m not sure where she is going with this. She has consistently interrogated the money shot as the truth of cinematic porn, finding it even back in the days of vintage porn (filmed). One aspect that she has not explored, however, is one that seems obvious to me from a narrative level. To film a man and a woman or a man and several women or several men and a woman or several of either sex fucking is to have a narrative problem. How do you keep this interesting. Now, there is an interest we all feel in fucking (wasn’t it Jane Austin who said that it is a truth universally acknowledged that we all like to watch some dick and pussy action on whatever screen is handiest, given favoring circumstances?), but the interest in art divides neatly into two registers. There is the interest of the artist in the art, and the interest of the spectator or audience. And while it is hard to imagine an artist working without any sense of what interests an audience – what conventions, what tropes, what narrative arcs - the artist has to also look to the limitations and possibilities of his materials. Thus, for instance, mystery writers can mix up their mystery, they can vary the crime involved, they can make the narrator the ultimate perpetrator, they can be as careless of clues as, say, Raymond Chandler is, but one of the things one knows about mysteries is that they generally tend to murder and some solution because those have become convenient templates for the writer.

In cinematic porno, the question is: is the money shot that has become the solution to the fucking sequence a template that makes it easier to organize the film, or are we talking about a convention that the audience imposes on the film? How could we tell? My own instinct would be that the money shot, like the murder in a mystery, solves several interest problems with the least cost to the creator. So, in essence, I'm saying the presence of the money shot derives from the direction of the creator, not the audience. I'd say that, on the audience side, we have evidence that there is less interest in the money shot. That evidence has to do with the state of porno itself, a medium in which fast forward has become the constitutive principle that has, essentially, destroyed the old movie pornos – a technological effect that is even more dramatic than the effect of the sound track on film in the late twenties. What has been left gives the creator an orientation problem. To a certain extent, you could play your average vid porno backwards and it wouldn’t make any dramatic difference. While the rite of cock sucking and pussy licking, etc., is as predictable as the liturgy in the Roman Catholic Church, it exists to cover all the bases and to extend the time. Fucking, in other words, which used to be the endpoint of a fantasy, has now dispensed with the fantasy to the greatest extent possible. This means that, in a sense, pornos have accidentally converged on the minimalist mindset of one subgroup in modernism – which at various times threw off Victorian rhetoric, dispensed with figuration in painting, and dispensed with enduring materials in conceptual art. Although there are those who are sexually attached to the money shot, to my mind, the money shot is already archaic in the fast forward universe. It is a last desperate stab at giving fucking an orientation and drama. If it were simply cut out, would it be missed by the audience? I don’t know if anybody has made the experiment. I do think that it would be missed by the filmmaker and the players. Removing cum removes a dramatic anchor. Would that removal also destroy the premium experience of porn – the audience’s own money shot, the spurting end of viewer response?

My sense that the audience could get along without it has to do with the history of still image pornography. Which actually brings me back to the question of volupté and the epicurean tradition and the pictures of Pompeii. About which I will have more to say in another post.

PS - check out Alan's post on happiness, in reply to my attack on happiness triumphant, at his blog, Milinda's Questions.

Come on, just, tie me to the wall! – Hanin Elias

LI streamed the press conference via the Washington Post site this morning. My reaction to it comes in words can’t really be released from my tongue, because they are long words, in Hittite or something, leaden, chthonic, expressing a hatred and loathing that is older than I am for the creature whose oozing and gurgling at the podium embodied the wadded up effluvium of a million chamber of commerce assholes all shoved up and out one crusted old seamy lead pipe at the Veterans Disease and Fetch Fuck Festival in Tinytown, Applachia; it reminded me of nothing so much as the tune piped by ET spermatozoa colonizing a brain that had caught a fatal dose of athlete’s foot and was eating its syphilitic spinal chord for dinner.

This is my gift to my presidroid: a killer, a moron, a pool of drool.

FREE THE BULGARIAN NURSES

One of the funnier delusions that the D.C. elite like to perpetrate on the American people is that the Bush administration is genuinely fighting for democracy. To perpetrate this, the media has to segregate what the Bushies actually do in the world from what they do in David Broder’s head – and then, of course, report on what they do in David Broder’s head. So – the same administration that is putting money in the pockets of Pahlavi-connected Iranian dissenters, all in the name of democracy, hails as one of its great breakthroughs the new relationship with Libya, a dictatorship for thirty years that isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Libya has held in its jails, on the flimsiest of pretexts, a number of Bulgarian nurses that are under death penalty for spreading AIDS, which is Qaddafi’s way of pretending that AIDS doesn’t spread in Libya as it does in the rest of the world, via sex. That would be an admission too far – so why not line up some innocent Bulgarian women against a wall and shoot them?

Again, Libya has re-affirmed its commitment to murder these women. Tony Blair, that heartless bastard, made several journeys to Libya when he was P.M. – or was he P.M.S.? – and, in the light of his selfannointed position as the Lancelot of Democracy, Inc., talked seriously to Qadaffi – about selling him jet fighters. As we know, Blair’s commitment to the most democratic regimes in the region, like Libya, like Saudi Arabia, and his firm commitment to spread the Weapons of Mass Destruction that are approved by the West in order to line the pockets of his cronies is sterling, a characteristic that gets him raves in the American press, especially among the liberal hawk crowd – oh, if only Bush was as eloquent as Blair! Well, at least they share a mutual loathing for honesty, integrity and the sanctity of human life.

We are led, as always, by the lowest scum.

the omissions are part of the text

Li is such the summer sluggard that we didn’t bother to connect our previous post to the posts on war. My point in claiming that routinization is a great and central historical fact, extremely difficult to understand – the object par excellence of historical fantasia – was to return to the logic of the state, war and debt in the emergence of the liberal state. If we ask ourselves what it means that 50% of Britain’s taxes were going into paying long term loans that financed past wars, we have to imagine that half of Britain’s taxes had no visible public effect at all. For the taxpayer, those taxes as good as disappeared. And when you get used to the state taking your money and providing zip in return, you begin to think that the state is basically a robber. In the case of Britain, work that could have been done by public investment – in land improvement, schooling, transportation – was either done poorly, then, by the state or by private forces.

This isn’t, of course, just true of early 19th century Britain. In the U.S., the incredible amount eaten up by the military from the Korean war on similarly “vanished”. At first, however, the way in which the military took from public investment in needed areas was not such a big hole, given the willingness of the government to consolidate New Deal programs and, in the sixties, complete the preliminaries of social democracy. But after the sixties, the taxes increasingly vanished. And of course, under Reagan, while the tax burden shifted decisively to the individual from the corporation and from the wealthy to the upper middle and middle, the money that was dispensed to the military increasingly lost its multiplier effect. The sedimentation of the expectations entailed by this massive and continuous robbery to pay for past wars and military outlays that were essentially useless – and of course there has been no use for almost all military technology developed after 1970, which is always developed to fight an imaginary menace with imaginary scenarios that, at most, move the gamer boys to creaming in their pants – has been to create a general collapse in confidence in public outlays – in the government – even as it postpones needed public investment. So the public sphere gets crappier, is run on a budget or used as an excuse for the legalized corruption of contracting, and the infra-structural and environmental needs – needs that can’t be met piecemeal, can’t be resolved by individual acts of good living – just go on being unmet.

James Galbraith has noticed this hole in the liberal brain – the brain that seems to have been put in formaldehyde under Clinton – in his review of two recent books: Consumed by Benjamin Barber and Deep Economy by Bill McKibbon. Galbraith aims a lot of nice, steel toed kicks at the first book. After quoting one of Barber’s over-ripe passages about the New England Puritans, to whom Barber attributes so many capitalist virtues it would make Schumpeter scoff, Galbraith writes:

“Nothing wrong with it, of course, apart from some things it leaves out, like witch hunts and King Philip’s War and the price controls that were a ubiquitous feature of economic regulation in Massachusetts Bay. … Also, I doubt Barber can document an economics of investment, as distinct from thrift, in colonial North America. Thrift is simply a matter of pinching pennies, but you don’t get investment before you have industry, which the colonists did not. Proto-Reaganauts, in short, they weren’t.

But Barber is determined that Paradise has been Lost, and on occasion he states this view without guile: “Once upon a time, in capitalism’s more creative and successful period, a productivist capitalism prospered by meeting the real needs of real people.” The problem is that this is not history. It is, rather, like all sentences that begin “Once upon a time,” the stage setting for a fairy tale, a rendition of truths for children. And this is curious, in a book that is, from soup to nuts, a critique of infantilization. Consumed is self-referential. It is, to some degree, an instance of the problem it describes. Barber serves up some of the longest sentences since Proust, yet underneath is largely a simple moral tale, an allegory not more complicated than, say, social Darwinism or Horatio Alger.”

I don’t totally agree with Galbraith about the total lack of investment – surely it was in ships, and spread into slavetrading and sugar hauling – but it certainly wasn’t in New England itself.

Galbraith’s main point is here, however:

“The question is, what are we going to do about it? Are we going to do anything about it? Almost fifty years ago, in The Affluent Society, my father wrote about this problem, which he defined as “private affluence and public squalor.” His solution was “social balance”: public goods, including schools and parks and libraries and higher culture. Liberalism stood for its own values. It stood against corporate dominance, business thinking, and commercial culture. And it was backed by the power of trade unions, of churches, and of the educational and scientific estate.
Barber offers no similar recourse. Everything he would do, he would do through markets, not against them or by bringing them under control. He speaks mainly of the “slow food” movement, of Hernando de Soto’s property-rights-for-the-poor and of the Grameen Bank’s micro-lending programs, each of these the projects of enlightened voluntarism, presupposing that markets can be as much a force for good in principle as they are presently a force for ill in practice. The democracy he would like to build lacks social or political organization; it isn’t about parties and agendas and laws and new government agencies tasked with meeting national needs. The New Deal and the Great Society are not Barber’s antecedents. He seeks merely the willed capacity to conduct one’s own life beyond the reach of mass culture, and offers the wishful thought that sensible people, each acting alone, will somehow manage to do just that. Good luck. Barber speaks of “capitalism triumphant,” and he proposes to leave it that way.”

Galbraith is reiterating the creed of all us misfit liberals. This is what liberalism finally figured out in the Keynesian decades. Unfortunately, liberals took a corrective episode – the great inflation of the seventies – as a conclusive finishing off of the mixed economy. The era of big government is dead and all that. The mystery of why people believe this is, I think, in part explained by the part war and its financing played even during the height of the Keynesian era. Of course, there are other factors.

Galbraith offers the same charge against McKibbon, even though he concedes that McKibbon’s is a much better book. And he concludes on a down note:

“This brings us back to the sphere that both McKibben and Barber largely ignore: public policy. The function of the government, in principle, is to foresee these dangers, and avert them. The powers of the government exist to permit the mobilization of resources required. And only government can hope to do the job.
This is bleak news not only in the present climate of thought, but also given the decay of the public sphere since at least 1981. Whatever government might have been (or seemed) capable of in the 1940s or the 1960s, it plainly is not capable of today. A government that cannot establish a functioning Homeland Security Department in half a decade, a government that is capable of creating the Coalition Provisional Authority or Bush’s FEMA, is no one’s idea of an effective instrument for climate planning. Plainly the destruction of government—the turning over of regulation to predators, military functions to mercenaries, the Justice Department to a vote-suppression racket, and the Supreme Court to fanatics—has been the price of tolerating the Bush coup of November 2000. Soon we will face the aftermath of all this, with the fate of the earth in the balance.”

the motor of history goes into the shop

The hardest thing to recover from the wrecks of history is the horizon of expectation that the actors presupposed. Those expectations, that imagined future, all black on black, was intrinsic to the routines and habits that made it the case that people accepted x and came to reject y. The historian can make it easier on him or herself by simply borrowing the economist’s toolkit. It doesn’t really explain expectation, but it gives you a nice labels that you can paste over the gaps – for instance, you can talk about marginal disutility and make a graph.

A more sophisticated stab at the mystery was made by Marx, who assumed class conflict. By assuming an intrinsic violence that exceeded exchange, he opened up history to ethnography. His followers often have a hard time with this – they have a tendency to revert to the economic models of the neo-classicals, with the difference that, for the Marxists, profit is a dirty word, and for the neo-classicals it isn’t. This kind of Marxist will tell you, with a knowing smirk, that everything that has happened in Iraq was planned, usually by some bigwigs, who are motivated purely by profit. Secret plans and the holy elevation of profit are the marks of this line of thought. Marx himself, thank God, was not given to such bogus analysis, since of course he realized that profit and loss has to be reconciled, in the end, with the realities of class conflict. Thus, in his analysis of how Louis Bonaparte became the emperor in France, he is very careful to underline the fact that the working class, which fought for the Republic, was fighting against its own interests, so to speak, insofar as the Republic was dominated by conservative business men, while the bourgeoisie, which did have an interest in preserving the Republic, went, to a man, to Louis Bonaparte’s side. Marx’s analysis – his journalism in general – confronted a fact that he tended to erase in the economic works – the lack of a truly homogeneous class. Actually, he thought that one could be created – that a working class consciousness could be forged that would draw together the entire working class. Briefly, such homogeneity has occurred, but never, it seems to me, because of class identification – instead, it is always about some collective threat. It is war, not the consciousness of one’s place in the system of production, that produces solidarity.

Whenever I read about art and commodification – quite a common topic around the theory blogosphere, hotly and obscurely debated – I always think no, no. As a subcategory of routine, art can say something about commodification as one economic and symbolic routine, but art is never going to be just about commodification, nor is its value about commodification. On the other hand, art is where expectation is most exposed, most vulnerable – although, given the gamelike limits of art, that exposure happens in “free time”. Which is why historians should pay attention to art. Art is about routines. Burroughs is right.

America: still number one!

"He is now so enthusiastic about the assignment of resurrecting NBC’s fortunes that he brings a small set of chimes along with him to meetings so he can play the three-note N-B-C jingle whenever a happy moment occurs." – NYT story about Ben Silverman, the newly appointed co-chairman of NBC’s entertainment operations.

Let it never be said that America lacks business self-helpiness. We fucking rule the world in business self-helpiness. And how do we do it? Oh, they’d like to answer that question in the capitals of the Axis of Evil. In Pyongyang, in Teheran, in Beijing, you can fucking bet your bongos, where they ponder: how is it that America became the biggest and the best? Yes, we know they buy the books: Tom Peters for Dummies in Farsi, Who Moved My Cheese in Korean – they import them, the intelligence services pore over them, they try to come up with that winning formula, that American flow. What they don’t understand, what they will never understand, is that a thing like carrying around a set of chimes to jingle out the NBC jingle when you’ve made a thrilling killa point as you talk with your team, and it is a team looking beyond petty compensations differentials – say when you’ve made the point that you have to walk to the edge of the box that you are thinking out of to gain points with that crushin’, cruising 20 something demo with sexier teh dumb comedy plus competing on the we want torture front with savvy stuff the bill of rights up your asshole, terrorist kind of rockemsockem coporama – that a thing like that comes bubbling all on its ownsome out of the homegrown American amygdala and you can’t counterfeit it, grow it in a tube, or steal the plans for it. Go ahead and try, fuckers! Meanwhile, we will just set here and listen to the heady music of the LI jingle, which gets us all inspired and shit to innovate, innovate and innovate.