LI loves Roland Barthes. But we don’t share all of Barthes’ tastes. For instance, Barthes said, in an interview, that he could never feel “close” to Molière. In Molière, he saw foreshadowed the bourgeois theater for which Barthes, famously, had extreme distaste. No Artaud or Brecht came out of Sganarelle’s pocket.
What came out of Molière’s pocket – Labiche, Nestroy, Offenbach – is oriented to a certain kind of laughter. For Barthes, this laughter came out of the smiling, healthy lips of the bourgeois as a sort of baying of the hounds. It was unlocked by simple contradiction: those contradictions which unfolded, tactically, as characters scheme to realize desires which are, on the surface, prohibited by the bourgeois order, but which turn out to be eminently subsumable under that order. That is, in fact, the function of the laugh – it is an acknowledgement of weakness and an acceptance of the underground order, that social supplement which drains off certain irrepressible desires. It is the humor of the wink, the humor of dinner theater, the humor of the suburban ethos depicted on the tv sitcom, in which hypocrisy is exposed not as a way of critiquing the system, but as a weapon to make the system seem total. Whatever doesn’t destroy you makes you weaker. And: everything you want is here, anyway.
So we understand Barthes dislike - and surely his view of Moliere as the ultimate bourgeois writer is influenced by Sainte-Beuve - but we don’t share it. We believe there is a certain aesthetic glory to the humor of the wink. But more than that, the great bourgeois farceurs throw a demonic light on the strategies of their characters, by which they turn the closed system into a Piranesian series of echo chambers. Barthes, we believe, never read Kraus – which is a shame. Kraus would have, perhaps, unlocked for him the dimension in Nestroy and Offenbach, and by inference, Molière, which Barthes seems to miss (besides which, we think the avant garde gesture of separating Brecht from Molière is foolish – Brecht is tied to cabaret, to the humor of Karl Valentin, for instance, by so many lilliputian threads that you can’t yank them out - and that humor in turn leads us inevitably back to Moliere).
In the essay, Nestroy and Posterity (der Nachwelt), Kraus writes:
“If art is not what they [the patrons of good taste] believe and allow, but is the distance between a spectacle and a thought, is the shortest connection between a gutter and the Milky Way, then there has never been a messenger under the German heavens quite like Nestroy. Evidently I mean, never among those that have reported, with a laughing face, that life is an ugly business. We will not disbelieve his message just because it arrives in a couplet. Nor because, in his hurry, he gave the hearer something catchy to sing, because he satisfied with contempt the needs of the public, in order to be able to think a little higher without being interfered with. Or because he wrapped his dynamite in cotton wool and only blew up his world after he had led it to firmly believe that it was the best of worlds; and because he had the spirit to lay on the shaving cream, when it was time for cutting necks ... although otherwise he didn’t wish to give anybody any trouble.”
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Monday, July 07, 2008
Happy Tanabata!
Our far flung correspondent, Mr. T in NYC, reminded us yesterday that today is Tanabata day – at least it might be. I am hoping he will send some pics of how he celebrated it. This day should be dear to those who love the stars – North, I’m lookin’ at you! – and for those living in smoggy regions where the stars barely peep through – I will shed tears for you.
As for LI, we are going to pray for our wishes to come true. And then we will watch this nice little video from Oomph, the German metal goth band that has its own ideas about wishes.
Happy festival, you all!
As for LI, we are going to pray for our wishes to come true. And then we will watch this nice little video from Oomph, the German metal goth band that has its own ideas about wishes.
Happy festival, you all!
Some jottings
Notes:
- Some dates. In 1695, Perrault’s Contes de la mere Oye is published. Mlle L’Heritier’s La Tour Ténébreuse ou les jours lumineux, which contains Ricdin-Ricdon, was published in 1705, though it was in circulation, I believe, earlier. Antoine Galland published Le Mille et une Nuits between 1704 and 1717. And, finally, Augustin Calmet’s Dissertations sur les apparitions, des anges, des démons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Boheme, de Moravie et de Silésie was published in 1746. We will return to all of this later.
...
- In the introduction to Calmet’s dissertation, he writes that the supernatural has changed even in his native Lorraine in the last fifty years. Each century, each country has its fashions, its diseases, its particular visitations. Once, people made pilgrimages to Rome. Once, the countryside would be flooded, in times of crisis, with flagellants. “At the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, everybody in Lorraine only talked about witches and warlocks. That has no longer been the question for a long time. When Descartes’ philosophy appeared, what a vogue did it have? One despised ancient philosophy; one only spoke now of physical experiments, of new systems, of the new discoveries of M. Newton which had just appeared; all the intelligences were turned to his side. The system of M. Law, the banknotes, the fureurs of the rue Quinquampoix, what movements haven’t they caused in the kingdom?”
- Calmet’s notion of modes, his mixture of convulsionaires, witches and banknotes, is just in the line of our own thoughts. Of course, Calmet’s dissertation is to inform France of a new mode, a new fashion in the supernatural world, coming in from the East: the vampire. A whole new kind of revenant.
- In our last post regarding fairy tales, we pointed to a similarity between the world of the fairy tale, in which, in a given, unplanned moment, the social totality was subject to the wish – and the presiding spirit of the modern, ilex, the world turned upside down.
- Rightside up society produces within itself the story of how it came, which is inseparable from how its rules and conventions function. Oftentimes, in folk etymologies, a previous word is hypothesized as being the predecessor of some current word. This is, properly, not back formation, but it is often so called. Rightside up societies use a form of back formation to explain themselves to themselves.
- But the modern, as we have noted, is obsessively drawn to the moment of ilex. There are two steps in the modern game. One is to boldly project a vision of rightside up society which shows that, actually, it is upside down. Or, rather, what is makes the society rightside up is just what the society denies. The second move comes later – that is the move that explains how it is that the collective social consciousness could believe about itself theories and facts that are in error. In the Enlightenment, the explanation refers to superstition. For the Marxists, the explanation is the false consciousness. For the Freudians, it is the complex relationship of the superego to the unconscious.
- In Cornelius Agrippa’s work on the incertitude of science, according to his biographer, Prost, Agrippa made a violent attack on the nobility. In fact, he produced a myth, a geneology of society that went like this:
“The separation of the human family into two branches began with the very children of Adam. From the victim, Abel, came the plebians; from Cain, the murderer, came the nobles, whose work will be to hold in contempt the laws of God and those of nature, confidence in their own force, the usurpation of authority, the foundation of cities and empires, the domination over the creature that God had set at liberty, and who sees himself submitted to servitude and iniquity. For such is, from the beginning, the office of the nobility.”
Agrippa was a favorite author of Foucault’s during the time of the writing of the Words and Things. In Agrippa, one gets a strong sense of the Renaissance episteme Foucault hypothesized, one based on similitudes, the infinite search for the signatures in things. It isn’t surprising that Agrippa’s notion of the horror of the nobility extends, then, to noble creatures.
“All nobility, in a word, is in its essence evil [mauvaise]. Among the animals, those that one values as more noble than the others are everywhere the most nuisance causing: these are the eagles, the vultures, the lions, the tigers. Among the trees, those which are reputed noble and consecrated to the gods are those which are sterile, and of which the fruits are of no use, like the oak and the laurel. Among the stones, it is not the millstone with which we grind the wheat, but the gem without utility that is honored.” (Prost 2, 84).
Perhaps Nietzsche read Prost on Agrippa – this passage is almost too perfectly opposed to Nietzsche, down to Zarathustra’s animals.
Prost notes that Agrippa published this diatribe against the nobility in a book which he was careful to adorn with his emblems of nobility. LI is not very impressed with the irony here. Much more interesting is the millenarian energy.
- Some dates. In 1695, Perrault’s Contes de la mere Oye is published. Mlle L’Heritier’s La Tour Ténébreuse ou les jours lumineux, which contains Ricdin-Ricdon, was published in 1705, though it was in circulation, I believe, earlier. Antoine Galland published Le Mille et une Nuits between 1704 and 1717. And, finally, Augustin Calmet’s Dissertations sur les apparitions, des anges, des démons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Boheme, de Moravie et de Silésie was published in 1746. We will return to all of this later.
...
- In the introduction to Calmet’s dissertation, he writes that the supernatural has changed even in his native Lorraine in the last fifty years. Each century, each country has its fashions, its diseases, its particular visitations. Once, people made pilgrimages to Rome. Once, the countryside would be flooded, in times of crisis, with flagellants. “At the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, everybody in Lorraine only talked about witches and warlocks. That has no longer been the question for a long time. When Descartes’ philosophy appeared, what a vogue did it have? One despised ancient philosophy; one only spoke now of physical experiments, of new systems, of the new discoveries of M. Newton which had just appeared; all the intelligences were turned to his side. The system of M. Law, the banknotes, the fureurs of the rue Quinquampoix, what movements haven’t they caused in the kingdom?”
- Calmet’s notion of modes, his mixture of convulsionaires, witches and banknotes, is just in the line of our own thoughts. Of course, Calmet’s dissertation is to inform France of a new mode, a new fashion in the supernatural world, coming in from the East: the vampire. A whole new kind of revenant.
- In our last post regarding fairy tales, we pointed to a similarity between the world of the fairy tale, in which, in a given, unplanned moment, the social totality was subject to the wish – and the presiding spirit of the modern, ilex, the world turned upside down.
- Rightside up society produces within itself the story of how it came, which is inseparable from how its rules and conventions function. Oftentimes, in folk etymologies, a previous word is hypothesized as being the predecessor of some current word. This is, properly, not back formation, but it is often so called. Rightside up societies use a form of back formation to explain themselves to themselves.
- But the modern, as we have noted, is obsessively drawn to the moment of ilex. There are two steps in the modern game. One is to boldly project a vision of rightside up society which shows that, actually, it is upside down. Or, rather, what is makes the society rightside up is just what the society denies. The second move comes later – that is the move that explains how it is that the collective social consciousness could believe about itself theories and facts that are in error. In the Enlightenment, the explanation refers to superstition. For the Marxists, the explanation is the false consciousness. For the Freudians, it is the complex relationship of the superego to the unconscious.
- In Cornelius Agrippa’s work on the incertitude of science, according to his biographer, Prost, Agrippa made a violent attack on the nobility. In fact, he produced a myth, a geneology of society that went like this:
“The separation of the human family into two branches began with the very children of Adam. From the victim, Abel, came the plebians; from Cain, the murderer, came the nobles, whose work will be to hold in contempt the laws of God and those of nature, confidence in their own force, the usurpation of authority, the foundation of cities and empires, the domination over the creature that God had set at liberty, and who sees himself submitted to servitude and iniquity. For such is, from the beginning, the office of the nobility.”
Agrippa was a favorite author of Foucault’s during the time of the writing of the Words and Things. In Agrippa, one gets a strong sense of the Renaissance episteme Foucault hypothesized, one based on similitudes, the infinite search for the signatures in things. It isn’t surprising that Agrippa’s notion of the horror of the nobility extends, then, to noble creatures.
“All nobility, in a word, is in its essence evil [mauvaise]. Among the animals, those that one values as more noble than the others are everywhere the most nuisance causing: these are the eagles, the vultures, the lions, the tigers. Among the trees, those which are reputed noble and consecrated to the gods are those which are sterile, and of which the fruits are of no use, like the oak and the laurel. Among the stones, it is not the millstone with which we grind the wheat, but the gem without utility that is honored.” (Prost 2, 84).
Perhaps Nietzsche read Prost on Agrippa – this passage is almost too perfectly opposed to Nietzsche, down to Zarathustra’s animals.
Prost notes that Agrippa published this diatribe against the nobility in a book which he was careful to adorn with his emblems of nobility. LI is not very impressed with the irony here. Much more interesting is the millenarian energy.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Trading away the residual
In development economics, the “residual” refers to the factor in the growth of the economy first identified by Robert Solow in 1956. It had been thought that physical capital accumulation, plus land, explained the growth of national economies. After Solow, whose model indicated that these could account, at most, for 50 percent of economic growth, economists started exploring just what the residual was. This was the beginning of the new growth school, with its emphasis on knowledge, technological change, education.
Alas, this changed emphasis rather neglected the relationship between physical capital accumulation and ‘human capital”. For economists, humans are blanks. The man who works as a welder can be retrained to work in a grocery store, or to make chips for a computer, etc., etc. His work preferences, his experience, counts for zip. It is only – ah, the sweetness of it all! – when you get to highly skilled labor like, say, being an economist that you have to be careful to preserve the full majesty of the skill. Economists never consider that they should be retrained to teach, say, literary criticism. That is because they recognize, in themselves, what it means to be human, and in others, what it means to be a zero in a column. We are talking about a severe professional autism.
The impact of this autism is evident in the way the New Growth school attached itself to the old orthodoxy of free trade. One would think that there would be sense, a glimmering sense, that technostructures, then, must involve knowledge – must involve a whole dimension of tacit knowledge – necessary for their growth and change. For instance, when the auto first arrived on the scene in these here states, it naturally attracted the repair services of blacksmiths. Blacksmiths were those people who, at the grassroots, had the most experience with metal – and the auto was the most metal the average person had ever had to deal with. If one traces auto repair back far enough in this country, you always run into blacksmithing.
This makes sense. There are constraints on substitution of skills. And there are paths that skills take in an economy. Imagine, however, that somehow, the U.S. had outsourced all blacksmiths, or most, before the auto appeared. The experience of this vast metal object and needing to repair it would have had to involve creating a service from scratch. This would have impeded, in a major way, the sales and distribution of autos.
Well, this is what the kind of free trade regime which is the essence of Reaganism has helped bring about. We have offshored our residual. Or much of it. Economists are stubbornly blind to that fact, because this offshoring has been massively beneficial to the only class they serve, the wealthiest 1 percent. That class, of course, makes money everywhere. Of course, when it gets into trouble, it gets its money from the taxpayers of one country or anoterh in the grand old tradition of ancien regime nobility – otherwise, however, it is as multi-culty as dick.
The refusal to even consider an industrial policy, about which American economists take a peculiar pride (I did mention the massive professional autism problem, didn’t I?) is resulting in the peculiar shape of downturns and booms in the contemporary U.S. of A. At the moment, economists are puzzling over the odd belief of the public that there is this inflation thing going on. Impossible! inflation, as we all know, being a symptom of class warfare, or, since we don’t want to scare the children, of greedy workers demanding outrageous pay through corrupt unions, which luckily have been smashed. So wages are flat and declining – and isn’t that great! Alas, having pissed on the residual, what is happening at the moment in the U.S. is a phenomenon very familiar from Latin America: a primary products led inflationary spiral. In the seventies and eighties, Latin American countries were hit by savage inflation, kickstarted by increases in petroleum prices, that occurred at the same time the Washington Consensus was being put in place from the barrel of a gun. The inflation eventually went down, and W.C. shills patted themselves on the back – but of course the reason it went down is that the primary product price structure collapsed. Hey, it is back!
Don’t worry though. Nobody will discuss this at all. No economist will recognize it. And, collectively, our lives will get crappier and crappier as we timorously forget that once, there actually was such a thing as resistance. Now, let’s watch some teevee!
Who's that young girl laughing at me
Like I was the butt of some hilarity
Alas, this changed emphasis rather neglected the relationship between physical capital accumulation and ‘human capital”. For economists, humans are blanks. The man who works as a welder can be retrained to work in a grocery store, or to make chips for a computer, etc., etc. His work preferences, his experience, counts for zip. It is only – ah, the sweetness of it all! – when you get to highly skilled labor like, say, being an economist that you have to be careful to preserve the full majesty of the skill. Economists never consider that they should be retrained to teach, say, literary criticism. That is because they recognize, in themselves, what it means to be human, and in others, what it means to be a zero in a column. We are talking about a severe professional autism.
The impact of this autism is evident in the way the New Growth school attached itself to the old orthodoxy of free trade. One would think that there would be sense, a glimmering sense, that technostructures, then, must involve knowledge – must involve a whole dimension of tacit knowledge – necessary for their growth and change. For instance, when the auto first arrived on the scene in these here states, it naturally attracted the repair services of blacksmiths. Blacksmiths were those people who, at the grassroots, had the most experience with metal – and the auto was the most metal the average person had ever had to deal with. If one traces auto repair back far enough in this country, you always run into blacksmithing.
This makes sense. There are constraints on substitution of skills. And there are paths that skills take in an economy. Imagine, however, that somehow, the U.S. had outsourced all blacksmiths, or most, before the auto appeared. The experience of this vast metal object and needing to repair it would have had to involve creating a service from scratch. This would have impeded, in a major way, the sales and distribution of autos.
Well, this is what the kind of free trade regime which is the essence of Reaganism has helped bring about. We have offshored our residual. Or much of it. Economists are stubbornly blind to that fact, because this offshoring has been massively beneficial to the only class they serve, the wealthiest 1 percent. That class, of course, makes money everywhere. Of course, when it gets into trouble, it gets its money from the taxpayers of one country or anoterh in the grand old tradition of ancien regime nobility – otherwise, however, it is as multi-culty as dick.
The refusal to even consider an industrial policy, about which American economists take a peculiar pride (I did mention the massive professional autism problem, didn’t I?) is resulting in the peculiar shape of downturns and booms in the contemporary U.S. of A. At the moment, economists are puzzling over the odd belief of the public that there is this inflation thing going on. Impossible! inflation, as we all know, being a symptom of class warfare, or, since we don’t want to scare the children, of greedy workers demanding outrageous pay through corrupt unions, which luckily have been smashed. So wages are flat and declining – and isn’t that great! Alas, having pissed on the residual, what is happening at the moment in the U.S. is a phenomenon very familiar from Latin America: a primary products led inflationary spiral. In the seventies and eighties, Latin American countries were hit by savage inflation, kickstarted by increases in petroleum prices, that occurred at the same time the Washington Consensus was being put in place from the barrel of a gun. The inflation eventually went down, and W.C. shills patted themselves on the back – but of course the reason it went down is that the primary product price structure collapsed. Hey, it is back!
Don’t worry though. Nobody will discuss this at all. No economist will recognize it. And, collectively, our lives will get crappier and crappier as we timorously forget that once, there actually was such a thing as resistance. Now, let’s watch some teevee!
Who's that young girl laughing at me
Like I was the butt of some hilarity
and idiot begat moron, who begat imbecile...
Well, finally an article about a presidential candidate who gets Iran right. A candidate who demands peace with Iran. A candidate who sees through the bullshit...
Alas, it is not MY candidate, Barack Obama, who has somehow floated into the hands of the D.C. consultant class over the last couple of weeks. I don’t see in Obama an ultra-liberal, but I did see in him a man who had figured out that our foreign policy was as dysfunctional as the Manson family, with much more bloody consequences. Alas, he seems to be trying to placate an establishment that has been seriously weakened by its contradictions, failures, and pathology. The current meme: things are goin’ right in Iraq, because the surge was so awesome, is the latest bs being tossed out by that establishment. To which Obama’s reply should be, the surge was not awesome at all, but was simply a compound of misbegotten policies sinking us ever deeper into a country from which justice and self interest both demand we withdraw. The Obama that exploited Hilary Clinton’s weakness for U.S. directed blood baths was the Obama who won. Unfortunately, that guy is absent at the moment. Where is he? Obama, come back.
In the meantime, put a knife in my heart and turn it – the person who does get it is Bob Barr. Bob Barr! The libertarian idiot from Cobb County, Georgia. He gets it so much that he joined the It’s Time to Talk to Iran conference sponsored by a grassroots group, along with Barbara Lee, the sensible Dem representative from California.
The Diplomatic Courier’s reporter clutters up the story a bit – I don’t think the Barr part makes sense as it is reported – but these two grafs tell the story:
“As part of a larger grassroots diplomatic initiative entitled “It’s Time to Talk to Iran,” the discussions were preceded by a press conference whereby politicians and activists advocated “a diplomatic surge for peace and reconciliation.” Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA), her usually calm features tensed with determination, thundered, “It is time to put an end to [an American-Iranian policy marked by threats and fear-mongering]… The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said that ‘we must learn to live together as brothers or we will surely perish together as fools.’ It is time to talk to Iran. All it takes to begin is one ‘Hello.’” Others seconded Rep. Lee’s sentiments, alternately describing diplomatic engagement with Iran as a “mission of mercy” to unfortunate Iranian citizens.
Underlying these passionate statements was the premise that engaging Iran militarily would represent a devastating political, economic, and humanitarian loss for the United States preceded by a “tragic series of lost opportunities.” According to former Georgia representative and current Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr, American “strategic and tactical interests” in the Middle East could not bear the loss of benefits from a better relationship with Iran. However, two questions lingered: what kind of “strategic and tactical” significance did Iran actually have and what could grassroots diplomacy do in an escalating conflict of hard rhetoric?”
Perhaps what Barr said is that the beneficiaries of the current policy would suffer a serious blow if detente with Iran were put in place. Which, of course, is true.
What puzzles, though, is why this truth isn’t discussed at all in a period when, it would seem, its time has come. The GOP has come up with an answer – a spurious, fraudulent answer – to the cost of gasoline. The answer is to destroy our coastlines. The Dems could easily, very easily, countercharge by a proposal that would lower the cost of gas immediately: lets have detente with Iran. Let’s have a peacetalker in the White House. Let’s give up publicly, once and for all, the American government’s often hinted at desire to overthrow the regime in Teheran. The Dems should be publicizing the effect of Bush’s increased sanctions on taking oil off the market right now. They should be burning into the American mind the fact that we are now paying about a dollar more per gallon for the Middle East policy of colonialism and aggression.
They aren’t. It is a no go zone. Silence. There are many reasons. One of them is the tie between rightwing Americans and rightwing Israelis. The Courier article floats the completely bogus story that Iran micromanaged the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. That of course is simply and completely a lie, from beginning to end. However, it is a comforting lie from the point of view of Israel’s leadership, since it blames another power for what was evident in that war: Israeli overstretch. The Israeli ambition to be the Middle Eastern superpower which deals with the U.S in the Middle East, sort of lead dog as the U.S. colonizes the area, met an obstacle: reality.
But the tie between rightwing parties is a result of the military industrial/petro complex, not, of course, the cause of it. Israel no more pulls the strings in our foreign policy than Saudi Arabia does. Stringpulling is the wrong metaphor. There are no puppets here. There is collusion between interested parties, quite a different thing.
LI also recommends Thomas Powers article in the current NYRB, also greeted with complete silence, about Iran.
Alas, it is not MY candidate, Barack Obama, who has somehow floated into the hands of the D.C. consultant class over the last couple of weeks. I don’t see in Obama an ultra-liberal, but I did see in him a man who had figured out that our foreign policy was as dysfunctional as the Manson family, with much more bloody consequences. Alas, he seems to be trying to placate an establishment that has been seriously weakened by its contradictions, failures, and pathology. The current meme: things are goin’ right in Iraq, because the surge was so awesome, is the latest bs being tossed out by that establishment. To which Obama’s reply should be, the surge was not awesome at all, but was simply a compound of misbegotten policies sinking us ever deeper into a country from which justice and self interest both demand we withdraw. The Obama that exploited Hilary Clinton’s weakness for U.S. directed blood baths was the Obama who won. Unfortunately, that guy is absent at the moment. Where is he? Obama, come back.
In the meantime, put a knife in my heart and turn it – the person who does get it is Bob Barr. Bob Barr! The libertarian idiot from Cobb County, Georgia. He gets it so much that he joined the It’s Time to Talk to Iran conference sponsored by a grassroots group, along with Barbara Lee, the sensible Dem representative from California.
The Diplomatic Courier’s reporter clutters up the story a bit – I don’t think the Barr part makes sense as it is reported – but these two grafs tell the story:
“As part of a larger grassroots diplomatic initiative entitled “It’s Time to Talk to Iran,” the discussions were preceded by a press conference whereby politicians and activists advocated “a diplomatic surge for peace and reconciliation.” Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA), her usually calm features tensed with determination, thundered, “It is time to put an end to [an American-Iranian policy marked by threats and fear-mongering]… The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said that ‘we must learn to live together as brothers or we will surely perish together as fools.’ It is time to talk to Iran. All it takes to begin is one ‘Hello.’” Others seconded Rep. Lee’s sentiments, alternately describing diplomatic engagement with Iran as a “mission of mercy” to unfortunate Iranian citizens.
Underlying these passionate statements was the premise that engaging Iran militarily would represent a devastating political, economic, and humanitarian loss for the United States preceded by a “tragic series of lost opportunities.” According to former Georgia representative and current Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr, American “strategic and tactical interests” in the Middle East could not bear the loss of benefits from a better relationship with Iran. However, two questions lingered: what kind of “strategic and tactical” significance did Iran actually have and what could grassroots diplomacy do in an escalating conflict of hard rhetoric?”
Perhaps what Barr said is that the beneficiaries of the current policy would suffer a serious blow if detente with Iran were put in place. Which, of course, is true.
What puzzles, though, is why this truth isn’t discussed at all in a period when, it would seem, its time has come. The GOP has come up with an answer – a spurious, fraudulent answer – to the cost of gasoline. The answer is to destroy our coastlines. The Dems could easily, very easily, countercharge by a proposal that would lower the cost of gas immediately: lets have detente with Iran. Let’s have a peacetalker in the White House. Let’s give up publicly, once and for all, the American government’s often hinted at desire to overthrow the regime in Teheran. The Dems should be publicizing the effect of Bush’s increased sanctions on taking oil off the market right now. They should be burning into the American mind the fact that we are now paying about a dollar more per gallon for the Middle East policy of colonialism and aggression.
They aren’t. It is a no go zone. Silence. There are many reasons. One of them is the tie between rightwing Americans and rightwing Israelis. The Courier article floats the completely bogus story that Iran micromanaged the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. That of course is simply and completely a lie, from beginning to end. However, it is a comforting lie from the point of view of Israel’s leadership, since it blames another power for what was evident in that war: Israeli overstretch. The Israeli ambition to be the Middle Eastern superpower which deals with the U.S in the Middle East, sort of lead dog as the U.S. colonizes the area, met an obstacle: reality.
But the tie between rightwing parties is a result of the military industrial/petro complex, not, of course, the cause of it. Israel no more pulls the strings in our foreign policy than Saudi Arabia does. Stringpulling is the wrong metaphor. There are no puppets here. There is collusion between interested parties, quite a different thing.
LI also recommends Thomas Powers article in the current NYRB, also greeted with complete silence, about Iran.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Rashid
LI noticed, with resignation, that the press largely ignored Ahmen Rashid’s book on the war in Afghanistan. It came out last month, and we reviewed it in the Statesman. There must be other reviews around somewhere, but I haven’t seen them. This is because s Rashid handily dispatches the media woven legends of the war, and shows how appallingly the Bush administration conducted the war in 2001 – 2002, guaranteeing its continuance and expansion. The latter point is never, ever expressed with any energy in these here States. Over the years, I have developed a sort of instinct about the lines that separate the serious from the never spoken in this country that arises from the comments sections in political blogs. One thing that leads to complete lack of response – to silence – is to mention what happened in Afghanistan in 2001-2002. Luckily, campers, LI does have notes – on this very blog! – recording the deadly propaganda offensive. Our fave piece of thumbsucking vis-a-vis Afghanistan came from Jack Shafer at Slate. On the eve of the Iraq war (March 27, 2003) Shafer, a gung ho journalist who would really, really have liked to have been there, bullets whizzing by his head, but, sadly, had instead to take up the burden of informing us folks at home of our superduper victories, criticized the late Johnny Apple, a NYT reporter who had apparently worried that we were getting into a quagmire in Afghanistan, with a contrarian bolletino that was stuffed with the narrative the press stuck to for years:
“Apple's fear that dropping bombs on civilians wouldn't "win Afghan 'hearts and minds' " and that the country would prove ungovernable even if the United States won turned out to be unfounded. Two weeks after his comparison of Afghanistan to Vietnam, the allies liberated Kabul, and 16 months later the place is at least as governable as San Francisco.”
Now, that Shafer thinks that if American bombed him, eviscerating his wife, burning the skin off his children, destroying his property, and perhaps incapacitating him for life, that he'd cheer them on, is a view that radiates from an inability to imagine that is so deep, has been nourished so long by a predatory lifestyle, that it can well be called a form of moral autism. To put Shafer’s screed in the proper perspective of evil, hubris, and warmongering, this is from the Slate of June 17,2008:
What is going on in Afghanistan?
In the past week, Taliban fighters staged a prison raid and freed at least 1,000 of their brethren. Soon after, they mounted offensives on seven villages and are moving in on the southern stronghold of Kandahar. One of the fiercest Taliban leaders, Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, a major U.S. ally during the days of resistance to Soviet occupiers, is bringing in foreign jihadists from all over the region to help his cause.
Meanwhile, Taliban attacks are up considerably from last year despite increases in NATO and Afghan troop levels. Gen. Dan McNeill, who recently finished a 16-month tour as NATO commander in Afghanistan, said last week that we need 400,000 troops to control the country. There are now just 110,000 (including 58,000 from the still-green Afghan National Army) and few prospects for recruiting many more—none for remotely approaching McNeill's desired head count.
Shafer wasn’t mislead by the subtle Bushies, but, instead, was one of the misleaders. He wrote well after the failure at Tora Bora, after the failures of the Anaconda campaign, after Kunduz. Kunduz? Rashid has a passage about the Kunduz airlift in his book. I’d bet 99.9 percent of the American population has no idea what that is. I’ll quote my review:
“The trouble began in the early phase of the war the press celebrated, back in 2001. Osama bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora has been well documented; Rachid notes that "Pakistani officers ... were amazed that Rumsfeld would not even put 1,000 U.S. soldiers into battle," and concluded that America was not serious about the war. This reaffirmed Musharraf's belief that the Americans would grow tired of Afghanistan and allow it once again to fall to forces more pliable to Pakistani ministrations, namely, the Taliban.
Less noted was another great escape. In Kunduz, in the northeastern part of Afghanistan, the U.S. surrounded 8,000 Taliban, Arab and Pakistani forces in November 2001. The Pakistanis were ISI, Pakistan's secret service, who were fighting with their Taliban allies against the Americans. At Musharraf's request, the Americans allowed Pakistan to send in two planes and airlift its people out. It's unclear who, precisely, was evacuated, but according to Rashid's sources, "Hundreds of ISI officers, Taliban commanders and foot soldiers belonging to the IMU (an Uzbekistan guerilla group) and al-Qaeda personnel boarded the planes."
So, I was pleased that someone was dispatched from the Olympian heights of the NYT to interview the guy.
It is still a bit of a kid glove interview. It doesn’t deal with what Rashid shows of Rumsfeld’s dealing, for instance, with Afghanistan, for which he should certainly be on trial right now. But it actually acknowledges he exists. Amazing!
“Apple's fear that dropping bombs on civilians wouldn't "win Afghan 'hearts and minds' " and that the country would prove ungovernable even if the United States won turned out to be unfounded. Two weeks after his comparison of Afghanistan to Vietnam, the allies liberated Kabul, and 16 months later the place is at least as governable as San Francisco.”
Now, that Shafer thinks that if American bombed him, eviscerating his wife, burning the skin off his children, destroying his property, and perhaps incapacitating him for life, that he'd cheer them on, is a view that radiates from an inability to imagine that is so deep, has been nourished so long by a predatory lifestyle, that it can well be called a form of moral autism. To put Shafer’s screed in the proper perspective of evil, hubris, and warmongering, this is from the Slate of June 17,2008:
What is going on in Afghanistan?
In the past week, Taliban fighters staged a prison raid and freed at least 1,000 of their brethren. Soon after, they mounted offensives on seven villages and are moving in on the southern stronghold of Kandahar. One of the fiercest Taliban leaders, Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, a major U.S. ally during the days of resistance to Soviet occupiers, is bringing in foreign jihadists from all over the region to help his cause.
Meanwhile, Taliban attacks are up considerably from last year despite increases in NATO and Afghan troop levels. Gen. Dan McNeill, who recently finished a 16-month tour as NATO commander in Afghanistan, said last week that we need 400,000 troops to control the country. There are now just 110,000 (including 58,000 from the still-green Afghan National Army) and few prospects for recruiting many more—none for remotely approaching McNeill's desired head count.
Shafer wasn’t mislead by the subtle Bushies, but, instead, was one of the misleaders. He wrote well after the failure at Tora Bora, after the failures of the Anaconda campaign, after Kunduz. Kunduz? Rashid has a passage about the Kunduz airlift in his book. I’d bet 99.9 percent of the American population has no idea what that is. I’ll quote my review:
“The trouble began in the early phase of the war the press celebrated, back in 2001. Osama bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora has been well documented; Rachid notes that "Pakistani officers ... were amazed that Rumsfeld would not even put 1,000 U.S. soldiers into battle," and concluded that America was not serious about the war. This reaffirmed Musharraf's belief that the Americans would grow tired of Afghanistan and allow it once again to fall to forces more pliable to Pakistani ministrations, namely, the Taliban.
Less noted was another great escape. In Kunduz, in the northeastern part of Afghanistan, the U.S. surrounded 8,000 Taliban, Arab and Pakistani forces in November 2001. The Pakistanis were ISI, Pakistan's secret service, who were fighting with their Taliban allies against the Americans. At Musharraf's request, the Americans allowed Pakistan to send in two planes and airlift its people out. It's unclear who, precisely, was evacuated, but according to Rashid's sources, "Hundreds of ISI officers, Taliban commanders and foot soldiers belonging to the IMU (an Uzbekistan guerilla group) and al-Qaeda personnel boarded the planes."
So, I was pleased that someone was dispatched from the Olympian heights of the NYT to interview the guy.
It is still a bit of a kid glove interview. It doesn’t deal with what Rashid shows of Rumsfeld’s dealing, for instance, with Afghanistan, for which he should certainly be on trial right now. But it actually acknowledges he exists. Amazing!
Friday, July 04, 2008
Antiquitas saeculi, juventus mundi
Man möchte sagen: Dieser und dieser Vorgang hat stattgefunden; lach', wenn Du kannst.
-Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough
Amie, in her comment on a post a couple of days ago, wanted another post on Ricdin-Ricdon. Her wish is my command. Although... well, we will see about wishes.
M
algré le séjour du village et les faibles lumières de mon éducation, je me trouvai des sentiments et des inclinations beaucoup au-dessus de ma naissance, dont la bassesse me désespérait. Les traits de mon visage seuls étaient capables de m'en consoler; ils me donnèrent de bonne heure de flatteuses espérances pour ma fortune; et je n'avais pas encore douze ans que déjà je ne trouvais point de fontaine ni de ruisseau par qui je n'aimasse à me faire redire que je ne resterais pas assurément sous une chaumière.
“In spite of village life and the feeble rays of my education, I found in myself sentiments and inclinations that were above my birth. The features of my face alone were capable of consoling me; they gave me a pleasant hour of flattering hopes for my fortune; and already, by the time I was twelve years old, I never passed by a fountain or a stream without loving to retell myself that assuredly, I would not remain under a thatched roof.”
Such is Rosanie’s story, told to a strange man she finds on the path in the park of the queen she served as a “spinner,” Queen Laborious. This being, this “unknown man”, as Rosanie calls him, is a character out of Jean Baptiste Della Porta’s Natural Magic – which compendium contains everything from instructions for engines to how a woman can “narrow her matrix” after giving birth, and so please her husband. He holds a wonderworking “baguette”, made out of some unknown wood, with an unknown jewel set in it. This wand, he claims, can spin the finest cloth and even make tapistries at a touch, without the mistress of the wand having to make the slightest effort. The deal is this:
Je vous prêterai, poursuivit-il, cette merveilleuse baguette pour trois mois, pourvu que vous demeuriez d'accord de ce que je vais vous dire. Si d'aujourd'hui en trois mois, jour pour jour, lorsque je reviendrai quérir ma baguette, vous me dites, en me la rendant: "Tenez, Ricdin-Ricdon, voilà votre baguette", je reprendrai ma baguette sans que vous soyez engagée à nulle obligation envers moi ; mais si, au jour marqué, vous ne pouvez retrouver mon nom, et que vous me disiez simplement: "Tenez, voilà votre baguette", je serai maître de votre destinée: je vous mènerai partout où il me plaira, et vous serez obligée de me suivre.
“I will loan you, he continued, this marvellous wand for three months, as long as you agree to what I am going to say. If three months from today, to the day, when I return to retrieve my wand, you tell me, in giving it to me: Here Ricdin-Ricdon, here is your wand” – I’ll take the wand back without you being engaged to me in any fashion. But if, on the day so marked, you cannot rediscover my name, and you say simply: Here is your wand, I will be the master of your destiny. I will lead you wherever I please, and you will be obliged to follow me.”
- We will get back to this, the moment on which the entire plot turns, in a second. Wishes are the contract at the heart of the fairy tale – wish making and wish granting. LI would like the wish to be distinguished from desire qua desire – wishes being one form of desire with the major formal characteristic, in fairy tales, that it can be granted – that there are wish granters. But that wishes and wish granters exist, meet, contract, points to another feature of the fairy tale world in its relation to the real social world – that the social world is not closed. There are moments, coincidences, intersignes, encounters, which the social world does not govern, and these are the moments in which magic has a chance – in which the wish and the granting of the wish can occur. These are moments in which hierarchy is, apparently, suspended. ...
- But here, LI wants to drive us to a coincidence, an encounter, an intersigne between the fairy tale and the modern. The meeting, obviously, is in Perrault, the most ardent and loquacious defender of the modern, while at the same time the most famous writer of fairy tales.
We claim this was no coincidence. We claim that this was quite a coincidence.
What is this coincidence about?
When Perrault was writing his defense of the modern, the works of Bacon were circulating in France, and even quoted by partisans on either side of the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. Bacon produced the trope that became the guiding metaphor of the moderns. And – surprisingly/unsurprisingly (in the woods, we encounter the wolf with shock, but without surprise) the trope involves the rhetoric of ilinx. This is what he wrote in the New Organon:
“As for antiquity, the opinion touching it which men entertain is quite a negligent one and scarcely consonant with the word itself. For the old age of the world is to be accounted the true antiquity; and this is the attribute of our own times, not of that earlier age of the world in which the ancients lived, and which, though in respect of us it was the elder, yet in respect of the world it was the younger. And truly as we look for greater knowledge of human things and a riper judgment in the old man than in the young, because of his experience and of the number and variety of the things which he has seen and heard and thought of, so in like manner from our age, if it but knew its own strength and chose to essay and exert it, much more might fairly be expected than from the ancient times, inasmuch as it is a more advanced age of the world, and stored and stocked with infinite experiments and observations.”
The moment of ilinx, of course, occurs because the usual way of thinking of the relationship between antiquity and modernity is here reversed. Rather than antiquity connoting all the old graybeards, all the sages, the lawgivers, the Moseses and the Solons, around whose work we, their children, crawl – they become the children, their laws and speculations become a work of child’s play, and we become the men of riper judgment. We are older than they are. The paradox of the modern is not simply an inversion of perspective – it takes the whole social order, founded on the ancient pedigree of blood, and turns it upside down. And while this might be a collateral and accidental effect of a scholarly imbroglio, that it can happen, that the possibility exists for it to happen – that the moment opens up, the hierarchies are suspended, the wind dies in the forest, we see, as though in slow motion or a freeze frame, the drop of slobber fall from the wolf’s muzzle and we look slowly upwards and our gaze takes in the wolf’s eyes, what big and incalculable eyes, staring at us – is parallel to the moment in which the wish can happen.
For how do wishes happen? There is a Grimm’s tale that, in a way, is a fairy tale about the limits of the fairy tale. Of The Fisherman and his Wife was sent to the Brothers G. by the romantic painter, Phillip Otto Runge, who also contributed the Juniper Tree – which contains my favorite song in all the Maerchen:
M
y mother, she killed me,
My father, he ate me,
My sister Marlene,
Gathered all my bones,
Tied them in a silken scarf,
Laid them beneath the juniper tree,
Tweet, tweet, what a beautiful bird am I.
Although in Runge’s dialect German, it is actually “My Mother she butchered me”.
In this story, a flounder – a Butte – is caught by a fisherman. It turns out the fish can talk. It claims to be an enchanted prince, and begs for its life. The fisherman tells it that it needn’t beg for its life. It is a talking fish, for God’s sake. Do you think the fisherman goes around killing the talking? The story comes out of Pommeria – out of Gunter Grass’s homeland. It is only when the fisherman goes home that his wife points out that the fisherman had chanced into a moment in which he could wish, and the wish could be granted. How did she know? What was the intersigne? Well, because the fish talked. Yet if the fish could really grant wishes, why would it be in the vulnerable position, in the first place, of being an enchanted prince, a prince in fish form, caught by a fisherman? Yet this is how it is in the wish moment. The wish granter, far from being powerful, is at his or her most vulnerable.
The story is, in a sense, about the difference between desire and the wish. The woman, the wife, is filled with desires. The desire for a better hut, and then a palace, and then a kingship, then an emperorship, then a popeship, and finally the desire to be god. Each time, the fisherman (our good male) goes out and sings a song to the sea, to the flounder. He goes out and takes revenge on his wife in a little song. The song goes: »Manntje, Manntje, Timpe Te/ Buttje, Buttje in der See/myne Fru, de Ilsebill/will nich so, as ik wol will.« “... my wife Elsebill/ doesn’t want what I will”. (And so there is complicity between the fish and the man. There is something they share. A little joke. A little joke about the old woman. The insatiable little woman. The little woman who married a fisherman and lives in the stink and dirt of a pot. And the song, as though the fisherman were serenading the fish. The enchanted prince/fish grants the wish, but the wishing then goes on. The greed of women. Their insatiability. The little joke in the song. And the sky changes. And the sea. The sky changes and the sea becomes choppy as the wishes mount up. There came a wind over the land, and the clouds fled before it, it became as dark as evening, the leaves blew from the trees and the water foamed as though it were boiling and struck the shore, and farther out he saw ships giving distress signals, dancing and jumping on the waves. The elbows of the woman in the fisherman’s side. Her voice at night in the dark, both of them in bed. The little songs of the little fisherman. A friendship between them, at least on the fisherman’s side, but in the end, the fish is an enchanted prince, and the fisherman is a putz, a nobody. The fisherman is a man who had an opportunity, but it was too big for him. That kind of guy. Forever.)
According to Paul Sebillot, there is a version told in Languedoc in which the fish is a sardine. The fish left a little line of blood behind it when the man let it go the first time. And then of course there’s the last wish, the wish to be God almighty, and the fisherman and his wife return to their first state. In the Languedoc version, it is the fisherman’s fault. Rich from all that unearned capital, he insults a beggar. The beggar is the sardine-fée.
The story touches on what can be wished for, as opposed to what can be simply desired – and the limits of the wish – wish granting contract. There are always limits. They inhere in the contract, but they are mysterious at the same time. Such, at least, is the mystery in the contract – the potential debt – of Rosanie and Ricdin-Ricdon.
LI started out with the proposition that, to understand the happiness culture, we have to understand how the relatively frozen positional economy, which left little room for upward movement save by war, was opened up by commerce, and then, finally, by the market based industrial system. Obviously this all too broad thesis, even if true, gives us the conditions for the shift in passional customs, and doesn’t explain the particular pattern of them. In particular, we’ve not said much about women. However, in the fairy tales, we do have, in the wish-wish granting contract, information about the positional economy as it was viewed at least by some in the seventeenth century. And we notice that there is, for every move up to a new position, something taken from nature, some power used and depleted.
One of the great bourgeois discoveries was how untrue, how deeply untrue this is.
A coincidence is just a coincidence.
There are no coincidences.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
GOOD NEWS: INGRID BETANCOURT HAS BEEN RESCUED
Amazing news! Ingrid Betancourt has been rescued! I happen to know her niece, so I guess I’ve been watching this story more than most Americans.
This is big. Hooray!
This is big. Hooray!
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
... the pins that lay in the house that Adam built
We’ve tried to use fairy tales, so far, to make visible a dimension of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations that has ... well, never been made visible, or mentioned at all, even to be dismissed. And the reason for that lack of mention is easy to understand: like any science, economics demands, first of all, to be taken seriously. What is serious and what isn’t remains in the domain of those presuppositions that are both unexamined and as powerful as household gods. The ludicrous and the serious is that domain into which the old taboos migrated in modernity. Wittgenstein, in whom seriousness took the form of a crippling, lifelong neurosis, asked seriously, once, whether it wouldn’t be possible to express philosophy in terms of a series of jokes. I don’t know of an economist who has pondered that possibility for his or her science.
But LI, rank ponderer and an ardent practitioner of the suicidal practical joke (look at my career, ladies and germs!), is more than willing to free our mind to ludicrous possibilities. Here’s one: that Smith’s catalog of the way pins are made, which, according to Jean Louis Peaucelle’s article, “Adam Smith’s use of multiple references
for his pin making example”, owes its content to numerous French sources (Deleyre’s article on l’épingle in the Encyclopedie, Duhamel du Monceau’s L’art de l’épinglier, etc), owes its oneiric fascination to This is the House that Jack Built.
Here, again, is Smith’s description:
“One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.”
What makes this a peculiar business is that all of this detail goes into all this tininess – and this tininess proves to be a compound, a matter of this AND this AND this, until the pin is done. The difference between the Enlightenment prose of Smith and the 17th century prose of the King James Bible is that Smith omits the ands, using commas instead to speed up the rhythm of the sentence.
The Mother Goose version of the House that Jack built goes like this:
Ruskin, in Fors Clavigera, notes that this nursery rhyme depicts the slaying of the Minotaur in the labyrinth in Minos. In one of the more wonderful passages of English prose, in Letter xxiii, Ruskin attempts to show how we are still under the rule of that “great Athenian squire, Theseus”, although the liberal historians who, like John Stuart Mill, see in the marble statue of Theseus in the British museum only “utility fixed and embodied in a material object” doubt such a squire existed. “Not even a disembodied utility – not even a ghost – if he never lived. An idea only; yet one that has ruled all minds of men to this hour, from the hour of its first being born, a dream, into this practical and solid world.
Ruled, and still rules, in a thousand ways, which you know nomore than the paths by which the winds have come that blow in your face. But you never pass a day without being brought, somehow, under the power of Theseus.”
Which is the power of Athens, as Ruskin goes on to show, although it is a power brought about by Daedelus – the master Jack of the Greeks. And, to tell the truth, we are not so much in the power of Theseus as we are in Jack’s house, which is the house in which Ruskin pounds on the bars and howls at the moon. The house in which Ruskin lost his mind.
Evidence for his connections, here, comes from odd bits of bric a brac in the European attic. For instance, a symbol on the porch of the cathedral at Luca, where Ruskin found a slightly traced piece of sculpture and a six hundred year old inscription which, translated from Latin to English, read:
“This is the labyrinth which the Cretan Dedalus built,
Out of which nobody could get who was inside,
Excep[t Theseus; nor could he have done it, unless he had been helped with a thread by Adriane, all for love.”
Adriane, Ariane. The “maiden all forlorn” – and what happens to maidens all forlorn when they are shut up and shut in is that they deal with thread, with spinning. No, LI has not forgotten Ricdin Ricdon, and our promise to deal with that tale by Perrault’s niece, Mlle L’Heritier – a heritage here indeed. We are not, of course, advocating Ruskin’s peculiar history here – although a history that goes back from the British Museum to Chaucer – who tells a version of the tale of the maiden all forlorn, and the cow with the crumpled horn – to St. George and the Dragon, to Minos, hangs together in a dreamlike way.
Here’s a bit more of Ruskin’s explanation:
“Theseus, being a pious hero, and the first Athenian knigh who cut his hair short in front, may not inaptly be represented by the priest all shaven and shorn; the cock that crew in the morn is the proper Athenian symbol of a pugnacious mind; and the malt that lay in the ouse fortunately indicates the connection of Theseus and the Athenian power with the mysteries of Eleusis, where corn first, it is said, grew in Greece. And by the way, I am more and more struck every day, by the singular Grecism in Shakespeare’s mind, contrary in many respects to the rest of his nature; yet compelling him to associate English fairyland with the great Duke of Athens, and ot use the most familiar of all English words, “acre”, in the Greek or Eleusinian sense, not the English one!
“Between the acres of the rye,
These pretty country-folks do lie”
Ruskin aptly remarks that the very lines of The house that Jack built go in a labyrinthian way. Myself, I would analyze that labyrinth as the magical product of the “and” – it is the connective that gives us the world, a thing in which all order is simply what the “and” can do. With the “and”, we enter the era of technology.
But LI, rank ponderer and an ardent practitioner of the suicidal practical joke (look at my career, ladies and germs!), is more than willing to free our mind to ludicrous possibilities. Here’s one: that Smith’s catalog of the way pins are made, which, according to Jean Louis Peaucelle’s article, “Adam Smith’s use of multiple references
for his pin making example”, owes its content to numerous French sources (Deleyre’s article on l’épingle in the Encyclopedie, Duhamel du Monceau’s L’art de l’épinglier, etc), owes its oneiric fascination to This is the House that Jack Built.
Here, again, is Smith’s description:
“One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.”
What makes this a peculiar business is that all of this detail goes into all this tininess – and this tininess proves to be a compound, a matter of this AND this AND this, until the pin is done. The difference between the Enlightenment prose of Smith and the 17th century prose of the King James Bible is that Smith omits the ands, using commas instead to speed up the rhythm of the sentence.
The Mother Goose version of the House that Jack built goes like this:
This is the house that Jack built.
This is the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the man all tattered and torn,
That kissed the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the priest all shaven and shorn,
That married the man all tattered and torn,
That kissed the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the cock that crowed in the morn,
That waked the priest all shaven and shorn,
That married the man all tattered and torn,
That kissed the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the farmer sowing his corn,
That kept the cock that crowed in the morn,
That waked the priest all shaven and shorn,
That married the man all tattered and torn,
That kissed the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
Ruskin, in Fors Clavigera, notes that this nursery rhyme depicts the slaying of the Minotaur in the labyrinth in Minos. In one of the more wonderful passages of English prose, in Letter xxiii, Ruskin attempts to show how we are still under the rule of that “great Athenian squire, Theseus”, although the liberal historians who, like John Stuart Mill, see in the marble statue of Theseus in the British museum only “utility fixed and embodied in a material object” doubt such a squire existed. “Not even a disembodied utility – not even a ghost – if he never lived. An idea only; yet one that has ruled all minds of men to this hour, from the hour of its first being born, a dream, into this practical and solid world.
Ruled, and still rules, in a thousand ways, which you know nomore than the paths by which the winds have come that blow in your face. But you never pass a day without being brought, somehow, under the power of Theseus.”
Which is the power of Athens, as Ruskin goes on to show, although it is a power brought about by Daedelus – the master Jack of the Greeks. And, to tell the truth, we are not so much in the power of Theseus as we are in Jack’s house, which is the house in which Ruskin pounds on the bars and howls at the moon. The house in which Ruskin lost his mind.
Evidence for his connections, here, comes from odd bits of bric a brac in the European attic. For instance, a symbol on the porch of the cathedral at Luca, where Ruskin found a slightly traced piece of sculpture and a six hundred year old inscription which, translated from Latin to English, read:
“This is the labyrinth which the Cretan Dedalus built,
Out of which nobody could get who was inside,
Excep[t Theseus; nor could he have done it, unless he had been helped with a thread by Adriane, all for love.”
Adriane, Ariane. The “maiden all forlorn” – and what happens to maidens all forlorn when they are shut up and shut in is that they deal with thread, with spinning. No, LI has not forgotten Ricdin Ricdon, and our promise to deal with that tale by Perrault’s niece, Mlle L’Heritier – a heritage here indeed. We are not, of course, advocating Ruskin’s peculiar history here – although a history that goes back from the British Museum to Chaucer – who tells a version of the tale of the maiden all forlorn, and the cow with the crumpled horn – to St. George and the Dragon, to Minos, hangs together in a dreamlike way.
Here’s a bit more of Ruskin’s explanation:
“Theseus, being a pious hero, and the first Athenian knigh who cut his hair short in front, may not inaptly be represented by the priest all shaven and shorn; the cock that crew in the morn is the proper Athenian symbol of a pugnacious mind; and the malt that lay in the ouse fortunately indicates the connection of Theseus and the Athenian power with the mysteries of Eleusis, where corn first, it is said, grew in Greece. And by the way, I am more and more struck every day, by the singular Grecism in Shakespeare’s mind, contrary in many respects to the rest of his nature; yet compelling him to associate English fairyland with the great Duke of Athens, and ot use the most familiar of all English words, “acre”, in the Greek or Eleusinian sense, not the English one!
“Between the acres of the rye,
These pretty country-folks do lie”
Ruskin aptly remarks that the very lines of The house that Jack built go in a labyrinthian way. Myself, I would analyze that labyrinth as the magical product of the “and” – it is the connective that gives us the world, a thing in which all order is simply what the “and” can do. With the “and”, we enter the era of technology.
the key to the myths has a small spot of blood on it
Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier (1664-1734) was Charles Perrault’s niece. According to the reliable Joan DeJean, she was one of a group of women writers in the late 17th century who were uncommonly common writers of the French fiction of the time – in a list of French novelists of the late 17th century published by Maurice Lever, women constitute about 33 percent of the names. They were, of course, attacked as women by such upholders of the standards as Boileau. The Journal de Scavans published an Eloge de Mademoiselle L'Héritier – a sort of obituary – from which LI culls these facts
- Her father was an “amateur of the sciences” and a ‘historiograph” at the court. Her father’s family was an ancient and noble one, from Normandy, while her mother was a Le Clerc, another connected family. She was educated by her father, developing a precocious interest in history and fable. Her father, meanwhile, was translating Grotius and aligning himself with Cardinal Mazarin, who gave him a pension. Surely he must have known Gabriel Naude, Mazarin’s secretary. When her father died, she started writing poetry – and she must have done some singing, too, as it is noted that her voice was beautiful. She wrote a defense of Madame Houlieres – about whom we wrote a post a while back. Houlieres was an epicurean, and had been attacked as a blue stocking in a satire to which L'Héritier indignantly replied.
- She gained the protection, at the court, of the Duchesse de Nemours. After her death, she edited her memoirs.
- Her lasting work is the Shadowy Tower, which contains the tale of Ricden-Ricdon. This work is supposedly translated from English – the English of King Richard the Lion Hearted.
- She gathered about her a small salon. Never married. A ‘malady’ is mentioned. Never complained.
Interesting, her obituary doesn’t mention Perrault. It does ring the chimes on her distinguished moral qualities, which are the flowers that fade first – no one would say the same thing about Ninon Lenclos. In fact, Perrault was close to the age’s premier transvestite, Francois Timoleon de Choisy, who was close to Louis’ brother, Monsieur, who was a royal sodomite not shy of asserting his royal perogatives, and duly noted in Saint Simon’s memoirs. In such a society, moral qualities have to be, at the very least, accomodating.
Some recent writers on the fairy tale have claimed that Perrault’s tales survived while his female fairy tale competitors, like L'Héritier, fell into oblivion through sheer sexism. LI thinks that this is a great underestimation of Perrault. It is easy to see why Perrault survived – he had a great sense for what can be cut. He explains – in his morals – what has happened, and the explanations are at such a lower level than the tale that they pose the question of whether Perrault understood his own stories – and that, of course, has led to the endless search for their real, oral sources. L'Héritier’s stories obviously influenced Perrault’s, but she liked her explanations – which, of course, are not for children. Children might ask questions about the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, but they are all questions about how dangerous he is, and whether he might be hiding under the bed, and whether Daddy could kill him. They do not ask about the lamentable events that may have impressed him with the wrong lessons about character and fate. L'Héritier is more interested in the latter.
Here’s a story about Perrault. He was, as my readers might not know, one of the designers of buildings and parks under Louis XIV. He adviced Colbert on public works. It is said that Colbert, at one point, had decided to close Tuileries to the public, after Lenotre had replanted the garden. Perrault proposed that they go for a stroll along the walks. While walking, Perrault observed: You wouldn’t believe, monsieur, the respect everyone has for this garden, down to the tiniest bourgeois – not only women and children never take it upon themselves to pluck any of the flowers, but even to touch them. They all walk about like reasonable people, as the gardeners can testify. It would be a public affliction not to be able to promenade here. – They are all slackers (faineants) who come here, brusquely interrupted the minister. – There comes here, Perrault began again, invalids who need to take a little air; one comes here to talk of business affairs, of marriages, of all kinds of things that are spoken of more agreeably in a garden than in a church, where it will be necessary in the future to meet. I am firmly of the belief that royal gardens are so grand and so spacious only in order that all their children can walk there.” Colbert was struck by this last reflection, and went out of the Tuileries without ordering the gates to close, which remained open as before.”
That some things should be spoken of in gardens and others in churches is one of those ideas which, in our day, have been hammered into theoretical dullness via Habermas’ notion of the public conversational space. But Perrault’s consciousness of the coming and going of people and his “town” attitude carries over into his preservation of certain oral nuances in his tales that he wasn’t always fully in control of. In Barbe-bleu, the wife of Barbe-Bleu cannot wipe off the blood on the key that she has used to open the bloody chamber because, Perrault says, the key is fee - it is fairy, it is charmed. A charmed key is the key to the mythologies, no? The messages in Perrault’s tale are in a sense like the people in the garden – they are not, in their individuality, in their entrances, exits, thoughts, words, things planned by the gardener, and yet the plan of the garden accepts them as part of it. They pass through.
... Well, LI is way behind on all projects, and has not even advanced an iota on Adam Smith/Ricdin-Ricdon and the peculiarly nursery rhyme like construction of a pin. What can we say? We suck.
- Her father was an “amateur of the sciences” and a ‘historiograph” at the court. Her father’s family was an ancient and noble one, from Normandy, while her mother was a Le Clerc, another connected family. She was educated by her father, developing a precocious interest in history and fable. Her father, meanwhile, was translating Grotius and aligning himself with Cardinal Mazarin, who gave him a pension. Surely he must have known Gabriel Naude, Mazarin’s secretary. When her father died, she started writing poetry – and she must have done some singing, too, as it is noted that her voice was beautiful. She wrote a defense of Madame Houlieres – about whom we wrote a post a while back. Houlieres was an epicurean, and had been attacked as a blue stocking in a satire to which L'Héritier indignantly replied.
- She gained the protection, at the court, of the Duchesse de Nemours. After her death, she edited her memoirs.
- Her lasting work is the Shadowy Tower, which contains the tale of Ricden-Ricdon. This work is supposedly translated from English – the English of King Richard the Lion Hearted.
- She gathered about her a small salon. Never married. A ‘malady’ is mentioned. Never complained.
Interesting, her obituary doesn’t mention Perrault. It does ring the chimes on her distinguished moral qualities, which are the flowers that fade first – no one would say the same thing about Ninon Lenclos. In fact, Perrault was close to the age’s premier transvestite, Francois Timoleon de Choisy, who was close to Louis’ brother, Monsieur, who was a royal sodomite not shy of asserting his royal perogatives, and duly noted in Saint Simon’s memoirs. In such a society, moral qualities have to be, at the very least, accomodating.
Some recent writers on the fairy tale have claimed that Perrault’s tales survived while his female fairy tale competitors, like L'Héritier, fell into oblivion through sheer sexism. LI thinks that this is a great underestimation of Perrault. It is easy to see why Perrault survived – he had a great sense for what can be cut. He explains – in his morals – what has happened, and the explanations are at such a lower level than the tale that they pose the question of whether Perrault understood his own stories – and that, of course, has led to the endless search for their real, oral sources. L'Héritier’s stories obviously influenced Perrault’s, but she liked her explanations – which, of course, are not for children. Children might ask questions about the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, but they are all questions about how dangerous he is, and whether he might be hiding under the bed, and whether Daddy could kill him. They do not ask about the lamentable events that may have impressed him with the wrong lessons about character and fate. L'Héritier is more interested in the latter.
Here’s a story about Perrault. He was, as my readers might not know, one of the designers of buildings and parks under Louis XIV. He adviced Colbert on public works. It is said that Colbert, at one point, had decided to close Tuileries to the public, after Lenotre had replanted the garden. Perrault proposed that they go for a stroll along the walks. While walking, Perrault observed: You wouldn’t believe, monsieur, the respect everyone has for this garden, down to the tiniest bourgeois – not only women and children never take it upon themselves to pluck any of the flowers, but even to touch them. They all walk about like reasonable people, as the gardeners can testify. It would be a public affliction not to be able to promenade here. – They are all slackers (faineants) who come here, brusquely interrupted the minister. – There comes here, Perrault began again, invalids who need to take a little air; one comes here to talk of business affairs, of marriages, of all kinds of things that are spoken of more agreeably in a garden than in a church, where it will be necessary in the future to meet. I am firmly of the belief that royal gardens are so grand and so spacious only in order that all their children can walk there.” Colbert was struck by this last reflection, and went out of the Tuileries without ordering the gates to close, which remained open as before.”
That some things should be spoken of in gardens and others in churches is one of those ideas which, in our day, have been hammered into theoretical dullness via Habermas’ notion of the public conversational space. But Perrault’s consciousness of the coming and going of people and his “town” attitude carries over into his preservation of certain oral nuances in his tales that he wasn’t always fully in control of. In Barbe-bleu, the wife of Barbe-Bleu cannot wipe off the blood on the key that she has used to open the bloody chamber because, Perrault says, the key is fee - it is fairy, it is charmed. A charmed key is the key to the mythologies, no? The messages in Perrault’s tale are in a sense like the people in the garden – they are not, in their individuality, in their entrances, exits, thoughts, words, things planned by the gardener, and yet the plan of the garden accepts them as part of it. They pass through.
... Well, LI is way behind on all projects, and has not even advanced an iota on Adam Smith/Ricdin-Ricdon and the peculiarly nursery rhyme like construction of a pin. What can we say? We suck.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
science of britney week
On Sundays, Doctor Watson would sit around and read the Times, while Holmes repressed slight shudders of craving for cocaine and prepared to have Watson read him some juicy police report upon which his mind, like a hungry spider, could feast. On Sundays, your faithful LI crewe, on the other hands, surveys the papers cyberspacically, on the q.v. for what happened this week in the exciting field of Britneyology.
This week saw major events. MTV, realizing that, without Britney, four people in a nursing home in Nome who were too disabled to get up and change the channel would be about the sum total watching their pissy awards show, threw out grandiose hints that they would allow... allow – La Brit to perform for them. Beg, MTV, is what we say. I want them down on their knees, weepin’. Meanwhile, the court, in its infinitely patriarchal wisdom, is tormenting Brit by entertaining her ex’s absurd contention that he should be the physical caretaker of the boys – or, in other words, the ex’s desire to be forever on the other end of the Spears’ money pipeline. Brit fired one lawyer and rehired another one, which is probably a good move. In my experience of divorce lawyers, the suck factor is high among even the best of them. In a gesture of magnanimity, the court allowed f... I’m not going to disgrace this blog by spelling out the name of Brit’s least favorite mistake ... to send the kids over via his bodyguards... via his bodyguards... so that they could stay with their much more interesting mother for a day. Via his bodyguards. The man doesn’t even have the guts to deliver the boys himself. Or perhaps he was too busy perfecting his paternal skills with his nose pressed up against a fine white powder line on some ass in the backroom of a Las Vegas club.
Well, this week, too, there was a thread at Crooked Timber about babysitting, playing off a post by Megan McArdle about babysitting, that explains a bit of the court’s attitude. On the one hand, parenting is so valued in this country of ours, where this little light of mine is gonna shine shine shine, that a mother is a radical haircut away from losing her kids forever – in the gated community, every hallmark moment in which an ass is wiped, an angel smiles. On the other hand, childcare itself is shit – it isn’t really work, it requires no skill, and the babysitters or bodyguards you have do it should be royally fucked in the ass as far as like compensation is concerned. In other words, schizophrenia reigns! As it has for the last five thousand years. Notice the high correlation between gender of commentors (male) and parties indignant that housework and childcare could ever, ever be considered work, on par with what these goobers do, day to day, to make the world a little more of a hellish sty to live in.
So, this week, we suggest that Brit’s best plan is to be rescued by Berbers, via this French faux group!
This week saw major events. MTV, realizing that, without Britney, four people in a nursing home in Nome who were too disabled to get up and change the channel would be about the sum total watching their pissy awards show, threw out grandiose hints that they would allow... allow – La Brit to perform for them. Beg, MTV, is what we say. I want them down on their knees, weepin’. Meanwhile, the court, in its infinitely patriarchal wisdom, is tormenting Brit by entertaining her ex’s absurd contention that he should be the physical caretaker of the boys – or, in other words, the ex’s desire to be forever on the other end of the Spears’ money pipeline. Brit fired one lawyer and rehired another one, which is probably a good move. In my experience of divorce lawyers, the suck factor is high among even the best of them. In a gesture of magnanimity, the court allowed f... I’m not going to disgrace this blog by spelling out the name of Brit’s least favorite mistake ... to send the kids over via his bodyguards... via his bodyguards... so that they could stay with their much more interesting mother for a day. Via his bodyguards. The man doesn’t even have the guts to deliver the boys himself. Or perhaps he was too busy perfecting his paternal skills with his nose pressed up against a fine white powder line on some ass in the backroom of a Las Vegas club.
Well, this week, too, there was a thread at Crooked Timber about babysitting, playing off a post by Megan McArdle about babysitting, that explains a bit of the court’s attitude. On the one hand, parenting is so valued in this country of ours, where this little light of mine is gonna shine shine shine, that a mother is a radical haircut away from losing her kids forever – in the gated community, every hallmark moment in which an ass is wiped, an angel smiles. On the other hand, childcare itself is shit – it isn’t really work, it requires no skill, and the babysitters or bodyguards you have do it should be royally fucked in the ass as far as like compensation is concerned. In other words, schizophrenia reigns! As it has for the last five thousand years. Notice the high correlation between gender of commentors (male) and parties indignant that housework and childcare could ever, ever be considered work, on par with what these goobers do, day to day, to make the world a little more of a hellish sty to live in.
So, this week, we suggest that Brit’s best plan is to be rescued by Berbers, via this French faux group!
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Fairy tales in the pin factory
This has been the spring for the Gothic strain of specters that Derrida stirred up in Marx in the bloggysphere; yet, so far, nobody has mentioned the name, Jack Zipes. Zipes is famous in the folklore field, or rather, literary folklore field, for applying a Marxist analysis to his study of the Grimm Brother’s Märchen. Zipes, who has also translated and written about Ernst Bloch, seems to have taken Bloch’s sympathy for grassroots peasant radicalism and applied it in a field where, usually, research tends towards a Freudian or Jungian end. Well, archetypes r us has a large American market – and perhaps I shouldn’t laugh. The softening of the American imago – stoic, a loner, a killer – owes a lot to an earnest search for a spirituality that isn’t so persistently shadowed by the cross – and don’t we all want a less wifebeater friendly, a less “God is a bullet” national culture? Sometimes, crawling in this mire of shit and sperm through the valley of the shadow of death that I laughingly call my life, I sure the fuck do. At the same time, let’s not pretend there aren’t losses, vast losses – of, for instance, that improvisational scrambling with which the escaping prisoner is supernaturally gifted. I take the escaping prisoner traversing the terrified countryside – Huck and Jim, before the hounds - to be as much an emblem of our psyche as the leatherstocking scouts that were the object of D.H. Lawrence’s remark.
Which gets us back to the violence and hope captured in fairy tales, à la Zipes. LI has been insinuating that as we entered a pin factory at the beginning of the Wealth of Nations, which inaugurates the science of economics, we are entering a fairy tale haunted place. The path of pins leads to Grandmother’s house. But pins are also an integral part of the economy of spinning, as Zipes makes clear in his analysis of Rumpelstiltskin in Fairy Tale as Myth. As he also makes clear, the patriarchal readings of Rumpelstiltskin – a tale classified under the motif of Helper’s Name in the Aarne-Thompson index – are, to say the least, misleading. Helper is the wrong name for Rumpelstiltskin – “he is obviously a blackmailer and an oppressor,” according to Zipes. Well, “obviously” is a strong word to use about any character in a fairy tale: he could be seen, as obviously, as the accursed share, rejected by the ennobled Miller’s Daughter who is seeking, above all else, to elevate her child above the status she was raised in, all the while keeping that status system intact to gain the benefits of it. Much like the American CEO, usually the product of student loans and state funded colleges, seeking to ensure the radical diminishment of public investment so that others are much more burdened down by student loans in less funded universities competing with the Ivies where the CEOs send their own children.
Still, Zipes is right to draw attention to the woman in the story. The Grimm Brother’s version of the tale is something of a disappointment in comparison to the version published by Madame L’heritier in the Cabinet des fees, Ricdin-Ricdon, since the character of the Miller’s daughter is not very developed in the former, while this character, Rosanie, the daughter of a peasant in L’heritier, is an acute psychological portrait of upward social ambition.
Zipes claims that the spinning motif in the Grimm Brother’s tales is, in a sense, a valedictory to the enormous injury done to women in the 18th and 19th century as their cottage industry of spinning and weaving was wrested from them and centralized in male managed factories.
I think Zipes is correct to front the spinning in this tale as at least equivalent to the story of the name of the “helper” – but to make this a tale of spinning as an affectionately perceived craft is a bit of a distortion. He writes: “Throughout the entire tale, spinning and female creativity remain the central concern and are upheld as societal values that need support, especially male support.” This is a reading that fails to capture the irony in Rosanie’s story – to say the least. In L’Héritier’s tale, Rosanie has one abiding characteristic: a total abhorrence of spinning. When she is first spotted by Prince Prud’homme (and surely these bourgeois names for the royals – Prud’homme and Queen Laborieuse – are meant to ironically), she is being dragged around the back yard by her evil hag of a mother, who demands that her daughter spin more. In a crafty move that reproduces the comic gesture from Moliere’s Medecin malgre lui, when the hag is interrupted by Prince Prud’homme – who is taken by Rosanie’s looks and wants to know why she is being mistreated by the hag –she tells him a lie, a neat inversion of the truth – that she is punishing her daughter for spinning too much. Thus, under false pretences, Prince P. takes Rosanie back to the court, where his mother is delighted to receive a top flight spinner. Rosanie, horrified by what her mother has done but unable to face being expelled from the court if she confesses the truth, is going through the park to cast herself off a pavilion set on a cliff and end her life – so much does she hate spinning - when she meets the strange man – a big man, in the tale, with a dark face, but oddly amused face – to whom she tells her tale.
About which, more later.
Which gets us back to the violence and hope captured in fairy tales, à la Zipes. LI has been insinuating that as we entered a pin factory at the beginning of the Wealth of Nations, which inaugurates the science of economics, we are entering a fairy tale haunted place. The path of pins leads to Grandmother’s house. But pins are also an integral part of the economy of spinning, as Zipes makes clear in his analysis of Rumpelstiltskin in Fairy Tale as Myth. As he also makes clear, the patriarchal readings of Rumpelstiltskin – a tale classified under the motif of Helper’s Name in the Aarne-Thompson index – are, to say the least, misleading. Helper is the wrong name for Rumpelstiltskin – “he is obviously a blackmailer and an oppressor,” according to Zipes. Well, “obviously” is a strong word to use about any character in a fairy tale: he could be seen, as obviously, as the accursed share, rejected by the ennobled Miller’s Daughter who is seeking, above all else, to elevate her child above the status she was raised in, all the while keeping that status system intact to gain the benefits of it. Much like the American CEO, usually the product of student loans and state funded colleges, seeking to ensure the radical diminishment of public investment so that others are much more burdened down by student loans in less funded universities competing with the Ivies where the CEOs send their own children.
Still, Zipes is right to draw attention to the woman in the story. The Grimm Brother’s version of the tale is something of a disappointment in comparison to the version published by Madame L’heritier in the Cabinet des fees, Ricdin-Ricdon, since the character of the Miller’s daughter is not very developed in the former, while this character, Rosanie, the daughter of a peasant in L’heritier, is an acute psychological portrait of upward social ambition.
Zipes claims that the spinning motif in the Grimm Brother’s tales is, in a sense, a valedictory to the enormous injury done to women in the 18th and 19th century as their cottage industry of spinning and weaving was wrested from them and centralized in male managed factories.
The very first literary form of Rumpelstiltskin, Mademoiselle L’Heritier’s Ricdin-Ricdon, demonstrates that spinning was cherished by the aristocracy at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century. The queen is most eager to employ Rosanie as a spinner and cherishes all the articles that Rosanie magically produces. We know that numerous French courts had constructed spinning rooms for women to produce much needed cloth, and there was a great demand for gifted spinners at the time that Mademoiselle L’heritier wrote her tale. Interestingly, her model spinner, Rosanie, takes possession of the devil’s magic want (i.e., phallus) to create an image that satisfies if not exceeds society’s expectations. She does not spin straw into gold but rather flax into yarn and thread. ...(67)
I think Zipes is correct to front the spinning in this tale as at least equivalent to the story of the name of the “helper” – but to make this a tale of spinning as an affectionately perceived craft is a bit of a distortion. He writes: “Throughout the entire tale, spinning and female creativity remain the central concern and are upheld as societal values that need support, especially male support.” This is a reading that fails to capture the irony in Rosanie’s story – to say the least. In L’Héritier’s tale, Rosanie has one abiding characteristic: a total abhorrence of spinning. When she is first spotted by Prince Prud’homme (and surely these bourgeois names for the royals – Prud’homme and Queen Laborieuse – are meant to ironically), she is being dragged around the back yard by her evil hag of a mother, who demands that her daughter spin more. In a crafty move that reproduces the comic gesture from Moliere’s Medecin malgre lui, when the hag is interrupted by Prince Prud’homme – who is taken by Rosanie’s looks and wants to know why she is being mistreated by the hag –she tells him a lie, a neat inversion of the truth – that she is punishing her daughter for spinning too much. Thus, under false pretences, Prince P. takes Rosanie back to the court, where his mother is delighted to receive a top flight spinner. Rosanie, horrified by what her mother has done but unable to face being expelled from the court if she confesses the truth, is going through the park to cast herself off a pavilion set on a cliff and end her life – so much does she hate spinning - when she meets the strange man – a big man, in the tale, with a dark face, but oddly amused face – to whom she tells her tale.
About which, more later.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
eating the flesh that she herself has bred...
By the way – re the price of oil – as I wrote a week ago, the main driver of the oil price spike recently has been insecurity. The threats against Iran by Israel, and the futile campaign, led by the U.S., to stop the Iranians from engaging in the uranium enrichment program that they are entitled to at least as much as India (where the U.S. has loaned technically illegal support) and Pakistan, have a cost. The cost can be computed at about 50 cents to a dollar a gallon. Here, for further proof of a series of events that the press, in its neocon wisdom, has simply taken off the table for consideration, is a Financial Times article about the effect of the sanctions in slowing down the development of one of the prime oil fields in the world – in Iran. Of course, if this was Venezuala taking a field out of commission, there’d be the usual dyspeptic drumbeat. But stories like this about Iran aren’t meant for the morons or the children – they might start doubting the wisdom of our establishment! That would be so sad.
“As energy prices surge, the world is wondering where it will all end. Where will supplies come from in the future? Iran, sitting on the world’s second largest reserves of gas – in addition to huge quantities of oil – is tomorrow’s apparent answer.
Iran should in theory be a magnet for international oil companies, which are cash-rich and searching for ways to replenish their diminishing reserves. But the geopolitical environment, in which Iran is being marginalised because of a refusal to suspend work on its nuclear programme, means this is not the case.
South Pars, the world’s largest gas field, is shared between Iran and Qatar but development from the Iranian side has ground almost to a halt, thanks to the US-led crackdown on business links with Iran. This week the European Union ratcheted up the pressure, agreeing tougher financial measures against Tehran.
...
This delicate balancing act is exemplified by the decision of Royal Dutch Shell and Repsol last month to withdraw from the development of what is known as phase 13 of South Pars. The lack of new investment from the oil majors means Iran is left to deal with relatively inexperienced minnows that are desperate for the business – companies from the likes of Austria, Croatia and Poland.”
I will go out on a limb and make a prediction: this will not become an issue in the Presidential or even be mentioned by the NYT and the Washington Post. It would, after all, point to a small paradox: the U.S. is pursuing a foreign policy that has become immediately injurious to the economic power of the average American household. It is pursuing this policy solely from vanity and the interest of the defense industry-petro club to churn up wars and perpetual hostility. Those with memories - that brave band! - might recall that the newspapers touted Bush's European tour, which ended with increasing sanctions on Iran, as a triumph. At the same time, the business pages recorded another spike in the future's market for oil. It was like these stories had nothing to do with each other.
On the other hand - maybe we should laugh at all the morons dying on the gas grapevine. They wanted it. Now let them eat it to the last little morsel.
Poor and rich, laborer and boss - let them all eat their fill of the dainty pie, in which so many sweet and tender Iraqis have been well and truly baked.
Oh corrupt and heartless generation... you will eat your heart, several times over, before this is done.
“As energy prices surge, the world is wondering where it will all end. Where will supplies come from in the future? Iran, sitting on the world’s second largest reserves of gas – in addition to huge quantities of oil – is tomorrow’s apparent answer.
Iran should in theory be a magnet for international oil companies, which are cash-rich and searching for ways to replenish their diminishing reserves. But the geopolitical environment, in which Iran is being marginalised because of a refusal to suspend work on its nuclear programme, means this is not the case.
South Pars, the world’s largest gas field, is shared between Iran and Qatar but development from the Iranian side has ground almost to a halt, thanks to the US-led crackdown on business links with Iran. This week the European Union ratcheted up the pressure, agreeing tougher financial measures against Tehran.
...
This delicate balancing act is exemplified by the decision of Royal Dutch Shell and Repsol last month to withdraw from the development of what is known as phase 13 of South Pars. The lack of new investment from the oil majors means Iran is left to deal with relatively inexperienced minnows that are desperate for the business – companies from the likes of Austria, Croatia and Poland.”
I will go out on a limb and make a prediction: this will not become an issue in the Presidential or even be mentioned by the NYT and the Washington Post. It would, after all, point to a small paradox: the U.S. is pursuing a foreign policy that has become immediately injurious to the economic power of the average American household. It is pursuing this policy solely from vanity and the interest of the defense industry-petro club to churn up wars and perpetual hostility. Those with memories - that brave band! - might recall that the newspapers touted Bush's European tour, which ended with increasing sanctions on Iran, as a triumph. At the same time, the business pages recorded another spike in the future's market for oil. It was like these stories had nothing to do with each other.
On the other hand - maybe we should laugh at all the morons dying on the gas grapevine. They wanted it. Now let them eat it to the last little morsel.
Poor and rich, laborer and boss - let them all eat their fill of the dainty pie, in which so many sweet and tender Iraqis have been well and truly baked.
Oh corrupt and heartless generation... you will eat your heart, several times over, before this is done.
precarious beasts
Well, Mr. Praxis, at least, liked yesterday’s post (sniff, sniff). (I've even lost North, who usually comes in to stronghand me when I emanate self-pity - and by the way, I hope you see that I am emanating self-pity about my self-pity! Trust LI to go Meta!)
To take up yesterday’s thread – we last watched the wolf, or werewolf, merrily hop down the path of pins, and end up, via a Loony Tunes loop traversing space, time and genre, at the pin factory at the beginning of the Wealth of Nations. Of course, the question is – what kind of pin factory is this? It seems to be one that physically exists, one that Smith, our genial author, has seen, according to his own written word. Yet no such factory visit seems to have been recorded elsewhere. Plus, textual cues seem to point to the factory being, in actuality, in France – in the pages of the entry on pin, épingle, in the Encyclopedie. And that pin factory seems to have been in L'aigle, in Normandy. About which we have information that is, oddly enough, never to my knowledge been compared to the account in the Wealth of Nations. Odd, because certainly the model of the pin factory was not just about the efficiency, the marvel, of dividing tasks among laborers, but had an underlying message about labor itself.
Wolves were things of the past in Scotland when Smith made his (non) outing to the pin factory. How far past is another affair wrapped up in some controversy. According to some accounts, the last wolf in Scotland was shot by a hunter named McQueen, who tracked the beast to his lair in Findhorn after the beast had attacked and eaten a woman and a child crossing a nearby moor. Shapeshifting, as would be expected by those who know something of the path of pins, has infected every part of this story. Did the wolf really attack the pair and eat them? The last wolf? What was the sex of it? The size? Or was the last wolf slain by Sir Ewen Cameron in 1680? Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, in 1904, devoted an article to the last wolf in Scotland. According to the writer, many Scottish districts lay claim to the be scene of the shooting of the last wolf. However, Blackwood’s goes with the shooting in the “wild valley of Findhorn” in 1743, since there are detailed accounts. The area was the home of the last wild pack. Here’s the Blackwood’s story:
“The most active carnach in their destruction was MacQueen of Pall a’ chrocain, an immense duine uasail who stood 6 feet 7 inches in his brogues. To this worthy, one winter day in 1743, came word from MacIntosh that a great black beast had come down to the low country and carried off a couple of children near Cawdor, and that a tainchel or hunting-drive was to meet a Figiuthas, where MacQeen was summoned to attend according to an act of Parliament.
Next morning in the cold dawn the hunters were assembled: but where was MacQueen? He was not wont to be ‘langsome’ on such an occasion, and his hounds, nto to mention himself, were almost indispensable to the chase. MacIntosh watied impatiently as the day wore on, and when at last MacQueen was seen coming liesurely along, the chief spoke sharply to him, rebuking him for wasting the best hours for hunting.
“Ciod e a’ chabhag?” (What’s the hurry?”) was the cool reply, which sent an indignant murmur through the shivering sportsmen. MacIntosh uttered an angry threat.
“Sin e dhiabh! (“There you are then!”) said MacQueen, and throwing back his plaid, flung the grey head of the wolf upon the heather. The company had lost thier sport, but they forgave Pall-a’-chrocain, whose renown stood higher than ever as a hunter, and Macintosh “gave him the land called Sean-achan for meat to his dogs.”
Surely LI is showing his own bent for irrelevance and the scaring of all rational like beasties, going so langsome into the thickets of Smith’s prose with a cock n bull hunting tale about a fairy wolf, for Jesus’ sake! Man, where’s your models, your references to the fine theorists, and all that train! But as the disappearance of the wolf seems, to us, magically connected with the appearance of the pin factory, we thought it might be a fine thing, worthy of a carnach from Cawdor (you remember the Thane of Cawdor?), to clear the area so that we could travel across it all safe and sound and snug. And in our search for pin factories, we might just find that, in spite of Smith’s celebration of the division of labor – upon which rock is built so much – that in fact, the celebrated pin factory in L’aigle, Normandy, from which – although it is murky – the encyclopedists might have drawn their information about the pin industry, was still governed by a mass of laws concerning master pinners, and who was allowed to work on pins, and problems with the weight of pins in each envelop of pins, so that the social function of pinmaker, and the needs of the state, and regulation from the state, might have had as much to do with the division of labor as the fabulous productivity of the pin factory, which can only be exampled by ... well, by Rapunzel of course, spinning straw into gold.
MacQueen told more of the story of the hunt than was reprised in Blackwoods. Here’s how he told the tale:
As I came through the slochk (i.e., ravine) I foregathered wi' the beast. My long dog there turned him. I buckled wi' him, and dirkit him, and syne whuttled his craig (i.e., cut his throat), and brought awa' his countenance for fear he might come alive again, for they are very precarious creatures.
Very precarious creatures indeed.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
and the wolf shall lead us...
Half a pound of heroin
half a pound of treacle
that's the way the story goes
out comes the evil...
LI has been contemplating one of the great lines of English verse over the course of the last couple of days, to wit, Rochester’s “And with my prick I'll govern all the land....” from the play, Sodom. But I’ve contemplated myself temporarily blind, vis a vis my Dom Juan thesis, so I’ll do Rochester at another time. Instead, today’s lesson from the book of LI (written by the archangels in seraphic blood) is about pins. As in how many economists dance upon the head of a pin? You know the answer – all of them.
Ho ho. In the 1760s, there was a controversy in Britain about a supposed Scots epic, Ossian, which had been “found” by a poet and published. Ossian was a forgery. Meanwhile, the real Scots epic was a-forging – that is, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Smith provided the Homeric theology to this thing we be callin’ capitalism. So, unsurprisingly, small academic industries have grown up around his famous images. The invisible hand is the most famous of these; a small group has worked on the famous pin factory.
The Wealth of Nations begins like this:
Few books give you the main course right away like this. Smith was rightly proud of the phrase, division of labor. In one stroke, it divided an old way of looking at labor as a particular social function from looking as labor as one abstract thing. It was the discovery of a universal, accompanying the universal-to-be of the capitalist system itself.
Such a vast discovery, such a trifling object. Smith taught rhetoric, and knew all the magic tricks. It is as if Columbus had set sail with the Owl and the Pussycat in a pea green boat. The pin! The very emblem of smallness, a sort of atom of social matter – associated, too, with frivolity. Jesus had already used the needle as a (miraculous) stick with which to beat the wealthy – and here the wealthy fire back with pins. Then of course there is Little Red Riding Hood – I’ve done a previous post on this, so let me quote here from Teasley and Chase:
“As the original tale opens, a dominant concern is the path to be chosen:
Once a little girl was told by her mother to bring some bread and milk to her grandmother As the girl was walking through the forest, a wolf came up to her and asked where she was going. "To grandmother's house," she replied. "Which path are you taking, the path of the pins or the path of the needles?" "The path of the needles." So the wolf took the path of the pins and arrived first at the house.
Although Darnton usually investigated the meaning behind puzzling elements, he has dismissed the reference to the paths of the pins and the needles as nonsense. Yet, here is the first example of a symmetry that provides a clue to the tale's meaning.[6]
Each character's selection of one of the paths reveals a destiny. Red Riding Hood's choice of the path of the needles is synonymous with her decision to become a prostitute. The meaning of the line is revealed in an obscure nineteenth-century history that explains that among "women of doubtful virtue . . . bargains were struck on the basis of a package of bodkins or lace-needles, or aiguillettes, which they normally carried as a distinctive badge upon the shoulder, a custom surviving to Rabelais' day."[7]
The meaning of the wolf's choice of the path of the pins is found in the term bzou, which was used interchangeably with loup in the original French version. Although loup is the common French word for wolf, the definition of bzou is more obscure. Paul Delarue, the editor who has compiled thirty-five versions of the folktale, found that bzou was always used in the story for brou or garou, which in the Nivernais was loup-brou or loup-garou. All these are variations on the French word for werewolf, a supernatural being associated with witchcraft. Early modern Europeans held that Satan had the power to take the form of a wolf.[8]
Sixteenth-century French society believed that the presence of a devil's mark on a witch's body proved her allegiance to Satan. Since the mark was a blemish on the skin that was insensitive, the discovery of the mark through the use of pin pricks became a standard feature of witch hunting. Just as Red Riding Hood revealed her true identity through her selection of the path of the needles, so the wolf revealed his identity as a witch by choosing the path of the pins.”
Indeed, the shapeshifting wolf was knocking at the door in 1776.
Economists, however, get the shivers when fairy tales are mentioned, being the wolf’s dumbest children for the most part. A true disappointment to the Loup-Garou, that’s for sure. While the wind howls outside and the stormclouds gather, they soothe themselves with more technical and standard questions. Which are addressed by Jean Louis Peaucelle in an article in the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought entitled, Adam Smith’s use of multiple references for his pin making example. I will post about that next.
...
Those interested in the Derrida/Marx controversies of late, hosted here and at the Colonel’s site, should check out the current post at Rough Theory.
half a pound of treacle
that's the way the story goes
out comes the evil...
LI has been contemplating one of the great lines of English verse over the course of the last couple of days, to wit, Rochester’s “And with my prick I'll govern all the land....” from the play, Sodom. But I’ve contemplated myself temporarily blind, vis a vis my Dom Juan thesis, so I’ll do Rochester at another time. Instead, today’s lesson from the book of LI (written by the archangels in seraphic blood) is about pins. As in how many economists dance upon the head of a pin? You know the answer – all of them.
Ho ho. In the 1760s, there was a controversy in Britain about a supposed Scots epic, Ossian, which had been “found” by a poet and published. Ossian was a forgery. Meanwhile, the real Scots epic was a-forging – that is, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Smith provided the Homeric theology to this thing we be callin’ capitalism. So, unsurprisingly, small academic industries have grown up around his famous images. The invisible hand is the most famous of these; a small group has worked on the famous pin factory.
The Wealth of Nations begins like this:
“The greatest improvement*17 in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.
The effects of the division of labour, in the general business of society, will be more easily understood, by considering in what manner it operates in some particular manufactures. It is commonly supposed to be carried furthest in some very trifling ones; not perhaps that it really is carried further in them than in others of more importance: but in those trifling manufactures which are destined to supply the small wants of but a small number of people, the whole number of workmen must necessarily be small; and those employed in every different branch of the work can often be collected into the same workhouse, and placed at once under the view of the spectator. In those great manufactures, on the contrary, which are destined to supply the great wants of the great body of the people, every different branch of the work employs so great a number of workmen, that it is impossible to collect them all into the same workhouse. We can seldom see more, at one time, than those employed in one single branch. Though in such manufactures,*18 therefore, the work may really be divided into a much greater number of parts, than in those of a more trifling nature, the division is not near so obvious, and has accordingly been much less observed.
To take an example, therefore,*19 from a very trifling manufacture; but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade),*20 nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.*21 I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations.”
Few books give you the main course right away like this. Smith was rightly proud of the phrase, division of labor. In one stroke, it divided an old way of looking at labor as a particular social function from looking as labor as one abstract thing. It was the discovery of a universal, accompanying the universal-to-be of the capitalist system itself.
Such a vast discovery, such a trifling object. Smith taught rhetoric, and knew all the magic tricks. It is as if Columbus had set sail with the Owl and the Pussycat in a pea green boat. The pin! The very emblem of smallness, a sort of atom of social matter – associated, too, with frivolity. Jesus had already used the needle as a (miraculous) stick with which to beat the wealthy – and here the wealthy fire back with pins. Then of course there is Little Red Riding Hood – I’ve done a previous post on this, so let me quote here from Teasley and Chase:
“As the original tale opens, a dominant concern is the path to be chosen:
Once a little girl was told by her mother to bring some bread and milk to her grandmother As the girl was walking through the forest, a wolf came up to her and asked where she was going. "To grandmother's house," she replied. "Which path are you taking, the path of the pins or the path of the needles?" "The path of the needles." So the wolf took the path of the pins and arrived first at the house.
Although Darnton usually investigated the meaning behind puzzling elements, he has dismissed the reference to the paths of the pins and the needles as nonsense. Yet, here is the first example of a symmetry that provides a clue to the tale's meaning.[6]
Each character's selection of one of the paths reveals a destiny. Red Riding Hood's choice of the path of the needles is synonymous with her decision to become a prostitute. The meaning of the line is revealed in an obscure nineteenth-century history that explains that among "women of doubtful virtue . . . bargains were struck on the basis of a package of bodkins or lace-needles, or aiguillettes, which they normally carried as a distinctive badge upon the shoulder, a custom surviving to Rabelais' day."[7]
The meaning of the wolf's choice of the path of the pins is found in the term bzou, which was used interchangeably with loup in the original French version. Although loup is the common French word for wolf, the definition of bzou is more obscure. Paul Delarue, the editor who has compiled thirty-five versions of the folktale, found that bzou was always used in the story for brou or garou, which in the Nivernais was loup-brou or loup-garou. All these are variations on the French word for werewolf, a supernatural being associated with witchcraft. Early modern Europeans held that Satan had the power to take the form of a wolf.[8]
Sixteenth-century French society believed that the presence of a devil's mark on a witch's body proved her allegiance to Satan. Since the mark was a blemish on the skin that was insensitive, the discovery of the mark through the use of pin pricks became a standard feature of witch hunting. Just as Red Riding Hood revealed her true identity through her selection of the path of the needles, so the wolf revealed his identity as a witch by choosing the path of the pins.”
Indeed, the shapeshifting wolf was knocking at the door in 1776.
Economists, however, get the shivers when fairy tales are mentioned, being the wolf’s dumbest children for the most part. A true disappointment to the Loup-Garou, that’s for sure. While the wind howls outside and the stormclouds gather, they soothe themselves with more technical and standard questions. Which are addressed by Jean Louis Peaucelle in an article in the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought entitled, Adam Smith’s use of multiple references for his pin making example. I will post about that next.
...
Those interested in the Derrida/Marx controversies of late, hosted here and at the Colonel’s site, should check out the current post at Rough Theory.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Ysa Ferrer!
Sundays are the days when we in the LI office lounge around, order out for margaritas, and have long, intense conversations with Brit on our cellphone. For a Britneyphile, this has been a crammed week – but aren’t they all? The baby. The disturbing advice from Mel (if we’ve told her once, we’ve told her a million times – check anything he tells you in the Kabbalah first!). And of course her Mom’s book. This Sunday, though, we mainly chatted about the whether Tracy Feith’s rather busy print dresses were for her, although of course, such conversation is tres confidential.
Instead of our Britney Sunday, we will address another subject. Most people come to LI for one reason and one reason only: nude pics of Lady Bitch Ray! That there are no nude pics of Lady Bitch Ray on this site hasn’t seemed to discouraged the hordes of horny lemmings, who apparently can’t live another day without seeing LBR’s pussy.
Oh don’t ask why!
Oh, don’t ask why!
Now the singer we’d really like to promote in the States is Ysa Ferrer. It is a puzzle to me that To bi or not to bi is not playing from the grocery store sound systems near you (as I just heard Santogold’s LES Artistes). It is that inveterate American problem with languages other than English, perhaps. But I’ve been pleased to see Ysa’s fans in France now sing along with her when she gets into the song – or maybe pleased isn’t exactly the word. But it is sucha catchy jingle that LI has decided to help it along in the states by translating the lyrics, which in French go
Si je choisis je perds
La moitié de mes repères
Le sens de l'équilibre
L'impression d'être libre
C'est une partie de moi-même
Attirée par les extrêmes
Par ce monde invisible
Où tout semble possible
Laisse-moi vivre ma vie
Aimer qui j'ai envie
Je suis comme je suis
Libre de corps et d'esprit
To bi or not to bi
Pas besoin d'alibi
J'aimais Ken et Barbie
Je me sens aussi
Bien avec elle qu'avec lui
To bi or not to bi
Un peu d'il un peu d'elle
Enfin je me sens belle
Si l'amour est intense
Le sexe n'a plus d'importance
La meilleure façon de marcher
Ma tenue de soirée
Mon plus beau théorème
Pour te dire que je t'aime
Laisse moi vivre ma vie
Aimer qui j'ai envie
Je suis comme je suis
Libre de corps et d'esprit
To bi or not to bi
Pas besoin d'alibi
J'aimais Ken et Barbie
Je me sens aussi
Bien avec elle qu'avec lui
To bi or not to bi
Ysa has never claimed to be Georges Brassens, so this isn’t exactly what you’d call a deep song. But fuck it – for a woman who is half manga, it is deep enough. Anyway, here’s the translation:
If I chose I lose
half my M.O. goes
my equilibrium
and my freedom
Attracted by extremes
part of me it seems
by a world invisible
where everything is possible
Just let me live my way
I am I anyway
My body and my mind are free
To bi or not to bi
No need for alibis
I loved Ken and Barbie
Feeling good don’t you see
with him or her or her or me
To bi or not to bi
A little of he a little of she
At last I feel pretty [I changed the french to make sense of this line]
if the love is intense
sex has no importance
I’m walking like I know how
My clubbing dress it says wow
This is my best proof
to tell you that I love you
Etc. I sorta bent a few lines to get to the rhymes, or most of them, which will disturb you purists out there – that is, if anybody really, really feels intensely about Ysa Ferrer’s lyrics.
And – extra for the Lady Bitch Ray nude crowd – if you really comb Dailymotion, Ysa just made her own nude vid! Exciting, eh? But you will have to find it yourself. Ha ha ha.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
What has caused the spike in the price of oil
LI has been immensely irritated with the thumbsucking pieces in the papers about the runup in the cost of oil. The conventional wisdom, in a gesture of blind self-protection, has so molded the issue so that its setpoints are: either the price reflects speculation, or it reflects demand. This is a very convenient way to ignore the drivers of the recent spike in oil prices. What are they? There are two of them. One was the infusion of credit into the financial institutions managed by the Fed for six months now – which, not coincidentally, is the period of the biggest spike in oil prices. Fed policy, as well, trashed the value of the dollar. So, as consumer credit tightened and the largest sector of the credit boom dried up - securitized mortgage instruments - money, understandably, sought a new outlet. Thus, the futures boom in the commodities. However, the underlying structural reason for the price rises has been security. It was due to the tight tie between oil production and security that LI concluded, in 2005, that the Bush regime, however criminal it was, was not going to attack Iran. So far we’ve been right. The reason is entirely due to oil prices.
However, there are two other variables at play: Israel’s increasingly threatening policy, and the U.S. strategy in Iraq that is directed, seemingly, at finding excuses to attack Iran and maintaining bases to make that threat a long term project.
The amazing Yves Smith, at nakedcapitalism, a site we’ve been going to daily, finally pierces the CW wall with a post about Iraq oil. We have been drumming on this drum in comments here and there across the web (since we decided to make LI a mostly non-political blog – it seems sorta silly to get on a soapbox when obviously we are never going to have an audience that numbers more than one hundred souls, and we do so now, as in this post, because sometimes our loquaciousness overwhelms our sense of futility), namely, that the underperformance of the Iraqi oil fields, to say the least, over the last five years effectively cut out the potentially third largest oil supplier out of the supply line even as demand was increasing exponentially. It is another cost of having invaded Iraq. If, in 2001, the U.S. had pursued a rational policy – dropped sanctions against Iran, recognized the government, poured aid money into Northern Iraq, thus creating conditions that would make the long range survival of Saddam’s regime impossible – oil’s price would now be around 60 to 80 dollars per barrel. The future’s market is a bet that, in the future, political forces – say, the bombing of Iran by Israel – will have an effect not only on Iran, but also on every oil producer in the region, since this would madden the populations of Saudi Arabia, Libya, etc. to a degree that the tyrants in charge could not afford to ignore. To say nothing of its effect in Iraq.
Yet, week after week, the thumbsuckers ignore this. Why? Because this chain of events casts into doubt the entirety of the establishment view of foreign policy. Not only is the foreign policy we are pursuing immoral, but – simply in terms of material benefit – it has been highly injurious to the average American. Conversely, it has been highly beneficial to the average petro company, defense company, or the huge host of government contractors – which, not coincidentally, are the circles in which the media punditocracy runs. It’s the oligarchy of the filthiest. And, to be a little more nuanced, the filthy circle does employ a huge number of people. This is the high end engineering sector. This is where the most money is poured into R and D (absurdly enough – the R and D devoted to green technologies, to energy efficiencies, to alternative power – it is comparatively non-existent). This is the heart of Bushdom, the real supporters. And they are determined to keep their talon like hold on the power of the American state. The result of which is the production of a discourse in which there is no egress to any of the issues that are, actually, shaping our current economic circumstances.
There are good signs, though, too. For instance, establishment media is taking tremendous economic hits as subscriptions go down and down – which I view as a sort of instinctive reaction by the public to being massively lied to. Even if, on the conscious level, that public wants “good news” and seemingly revels in great moronic fetes celebrating mendacity, torture, and short term greed, instinctively the animal inside stiffens and tugs when being pulled towards the abattoir. It is on the unconscious level that the populace knows that we are seriously fucked, while on the discursive level, the very words in their mouths have been carefully and systematically shit upon by the gatekeepers. It is that dying fecal taste in the mouth that has made the past seven years so unforgettable. Only in our dreams do we retain the language of freedom, words that smell of fresh bread, of sperm, of spring, of earth.
However, there are two other variables at play: Israel’s increasingly threatening policy, and the U.S. strategy in Iraq that is directed, seemingly, at finding excuses to attack Iran and maintaining bases to make that threat a long term project.
The amazing Yves Smith, at nakedcapitalism, a site we’ve been going to daily, finally pierces the CW wall with a post about Iraq oil. We have been drumming on this drum in comments here and there across the web (since we decided to make LI a mostly non-political blog – it seems sorta silly to get on a soapbox when obviously we are never going to have an audience that numbers more than one hundred souls, and we do so now, as in this post, because sometimes our loquaciousness overwhelms our sense of futility), namely, that the underperformance of the Iraqi oil fields, to say the least, over the last five years effectively cut out the potentially third largest oil supplier out of the supply line even as demand was increasing exponentially. It is another cost of having invaded Iraq. If, in 2001, the U.S. had pursued a rational policy – dropped sanctions against Iran, recognized the government, poured aid money into Northern Iraq, thus creating conditions that would make the long range survival of Saddam’s regime impossible – oil’s price would now be around 60 to 80 dollars per barrel. The future’s market is a bet that, in the future, political forces – say, the bombing of Iran by Israel – will have an effect not only on Iran, but also on every oil producer in the region, since this would madden the populations of Saudi Arabia, Libya, etc. to a degree that the tyrants in charge could not afford to ignore. To say nothing of its effect in Iraq.
Yet, week after week, the thumbsuckers ignore this. Why? Because this chain of events casts into doubt the entirety of the establishment view of foreign policy. Not only is the foreign policy we are pursuing immoral, but – simply in terms of material benefit – it has been highly injurious to the average American. Conversely, it has been highly beneficial to the average petro company, defense company, or the huge host of government contractors – which, not coincidentally, are the circles in which the media punditocracy runs. It’s the oligarchy of the filthiest. And, to be a little more nuanced, the filthy circle does employ a huge number of people. This is the high end engineering sector. This is where the most money is poured into R and D (absurdly enough – the R and D devoted to green technologies, to energy efficiencies, to alternative power – it is comparatively non-existent). This is the heart of Bushdom, the real supporters. And they are determined to keep their talon like hold on the power of the American state. The result of which is the production of a discourse in which there is no egress to any of the issues that are, actually, shaping our current economic circumstances.
There are good signs, though, too. For instance, establishment media is taking tremendous economic hits as subscriptions go down and down – which I view as a sort of instinctive reaction by the public to being massively lied to. Even if, on the conscious level, that public wants “good news” and seemingly revels in great moronic fetes celebrating mendacity, torture, and short term greed, instinctively the animal inside stiffens and tugs when being pulled towards the abattoir. It is on the unconscious level that the populace knows that we are seriously fucked, while on the discursive level, the very words in their mouths have been carefully and systematically shit upon by the gatekeepers. It is that dying fecal taste in the mouth that has made the past seven years so unforgettable. Only in our dreams do we retain the language of freedom, words that smell of fresh bread, of sperm, of spring, of earth.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Trees dreaming: La Bruyère/Carpenter Shih
We looked at the oak tree in the Chuang Tzu (which was assembled from various parts around 100 A.D.) whose spirit preached the great sermon on uselessness in the dream of Carpenter Shih. There’s a quite different tree in La Bruyère’s Characters, which was published anonymously for the first time in 1687, undergoing, afterwards, numerous revisions which critics have read in the light of their idea of La Bruyère’s intention. It is in the section, Des biens de Fortune, which could be translated in various ways: On the good things of the rich, or, on the goods of fortune. Fortuna, here, is the foundation of wealth – which touches on the deep structure of La Bruyere’s Characters, the contrast between social sets – the Town and the Court, for instance. Men and Women.
“How many men resemble those trees, already strong and advanced in age, which one transplants into gardens, where they surprise the eyes of those who see them placed in the pretty spots where they had never seen them grow, and who know neither their commencements nor their progress.”
Barthes wrote that La Bruyère sketched a “cosmogony of classical society” – by which he meant that La Bruyère was after those rules that would allow him to classify types and social groupings. In a sense, Barthes was seeing his own image in La Bruyère – or at least the Barthes of Mythologies. The central sections of the Characters discuss the fortunate, or the rich, the Town and the Court. This is, as it happens, approximately the trajectory of La Bruyère’s own life. He was born in Paris to a member of the financial bourgeoisie, the controller of the rents of Paris; he became treasurer of Caen, which produced a comfortable sinecure without mandating that he would actually have to, well, live in Caen (the French system is still very lenient about where Government officials live, as opposed to the regions or towns that they are supposed to represent, since so many prefer to live in Paris). And then, by way of Bossuet, who introduced him to the Grande Condé, one of the most powerful of the French aristocrats, he took a position as tutor to the Duc de Bourbon, which is how it came about that he mingled with the crowd at Versailles.
The treasurer’s habits linger in The Characters – one has a sense of entries, of debits and credits. This is what Barthes says:
...the regions out of which La Bruyère composes his world are quite analogous to logical classes: every individual (in logic, we would say every x), i.e., every “character”, is defined first of all by a relation of membership in some class or other, the tulip fancier in the class Fashion, the coquette in the class Women, the absent-minded Ménalque in the class Men, etc.; but this is not enough, for the chacters must be distinguished among themselves within one and the same class; La Bruyère therefore performs certain operations of intersection from one class to the next; cross the class of Merit with that of Celibacy and you get a reflection on the stifling function of marriage (Du Merit, no. 25); join Tryphon’s former virtue and his present fortune” the simply coincidence of these two classes affords the image of a certain hypocrisyh (Des biens de fortune, no. 50). Thus the diversity of the regions, which are sometimes social, sometimes psychological, in no way testifies to a rich disorder: confronting the world, La Bruyère does not enumerate absolutely varied elements like the surveyor writers of the next century...”[224 – Howard’s translation]
Keeping Barthes reflection in mind – and it is easy to see this sort of pre-Linnean, Port Royal classicatory system in La Bruyère – one notices two things about La Bruyère’s tree. First, it is a piece of nature of a special type – trees being those things that transform the earth itself into the texture and growth of their being. And second, simply by being transplanted, it becomes a piece of artifice. Like the new man – one of La Bruyère’s coinages for the upstart, the man of fortune – literally, of the fortune of interest taking, of gambling, of marrying wealth – it is a new tree, since the spectator can remember neither its beginning nor its progress. Yet the new tree is not just any tree – it is striking, majestic, it has attained in its natural soil a certain respectable dimension. Like La Bruyère himself, transplanted to the soil of Versailles.
Of these new men like old trees, some could be called adventurers. In the section on the society of the Court, La Bruyère writes about a type that could be more aptly be compared to mushrooms:
Every once in a while there appears in the courts adventurous and bold men, of a free and familiar character, who produce themselves (se produisent eux-memes), protesting that they have in their art the talent that others lack, and who are taken at their word. Nevertheless, they profit from the public error, or the love men have for novelty – they pierce through the crowd and go forward all the way up to the ear of the prince, to whom courtiers see them talking, while the one talking is just happy to be so seen. They have this advantage for the grandees, that they can be suffered without consequence, and dismissed likewise. Thus they disappear simultaneously rich and discredited, while they world that they have just deceived is ready to be deceived by another.”
What is the crowd that the adventurer pierces? It is composed not just of individuals, but of customs – it is the whole coagulated weight of tradition, of old means of making fortunes, of family, of land. La Bruyère is, of course, as a moralist, opposed to these men of a free and familiar character. But the credit and the debit of them are hard to sum up. In his discourse before the Academy, La Bruyère made it clear that he belonged to the party of the ancients instead of the moderns – the latter being led by Perrault and Fontenelle. The adventurer is certainly a modern – his character embodies the modern in its lack of standing, its familiarity, the hazard in which it stands.
This is why the adventurer’s underground bond to the libertine is so strong. The transplanted tree is not an adventurer – La Bruyère’s description of the tree emphasizes its original majesty, and it is not the trees fault if it is transplanted, as it stayed still the whole time. It was a passenger. The adventurer, according to La Bruyère, does not stand still, but starts forward and doesn’t stop until he reaches the prince’s ear. However, we believe the allegorical qualities of the tree exceed La Bruyère’s meaning, especially if we consider that the adventurer might move and yet be immobile. And it is from that spot that the adventurer looks out and sees – that nature is not ancient. Nature is modern. It is the most modern of phenomena.
Here, of course, we are pushing the text. But let’s go with our thought. What is modern about nature? What is modern is that God is so hidden now that he might not exist. And that leaves nature as the only limit left on the human. That, briefly, was the modernity of the natural. It flares up, we think, in the libertine moment – and never as a wholly unified scheme, never as, finally, a hypercognizable passionate structure spread across the social structure – but as a set of hints. Collectively, this is what the “sweetness” of the ancien regime was about. It was the moment after God, but before Man. It failed finally to arrange itself with a social whole undergoing drastic and irremediable changes. Those changes, the great transformation of the market based industrial system, found their legitimacy in the notion that there was no human limit. This was the revolution of happiness. It was at this moment that nature lost its standing, and there commenced a competition for a certain metaphysical position of priority between God (who no longer represented a human limit, but rather a sacralized cosmic human all too human wish fulfillment) and Man. And thus, the human limit went down the amnesia hole.
So, our question is this: what would the spirit of Carpenter Shih useless oak tree converse about if it were dreamt by La Bruyère’s transplanted tree?
“How many men resemble those trees, already strong and advanced in age, which one transplants into gardens, where they surprise the eyes of those who see them placed in the pretty spots where they had never seen them grow, and who know neither their commencements nor their progress.”
Barthes wrote that La Bruyère sketched a “cosmogony of classical society” – by which he meant that La Bruyère was after those rules that would allow him to classify types and social groupings. In a sense, Barthes was seeing his own image in La Bruyère – or at least the Barthes of Mythologies. The central sections of the Characters discuss the fortunate, or the rich, the Town and the Court. This is, as it happens, approximately the trajectory of La Bruyère’s own life. He was born in Paris to a member of the financial bourgeoisie, the controller of the rents of Paris; he became treasurer of Caen, which produced a comfortable sinecure without mandating that he would actually have to, well, live in Caen (the French system is still very lenient about where Government officials live, as opposed to the regions or towns that they are supposed to represent, since so many prefer to live in Paris). And then, by way of Bossuet, who introduced him to the Grande Condé, one of the most powerful of the French aristocrats, he took a position as tutor to the Duc de Bourbon, which is how it came about that he mingled with the crowd at Versailles.
The treasurer’s habits linger in The Characters – one has a sense of entries, of debits and credits. This is what Barthes says:
...the regions out of which La Bruyère composes his world are quite analogous to logical classes: every individual (in logic, we would say every x), i.e., every “character”, is defined first of all by a relation of membership in some class or other, the tulip fancier in the class Fashion, the coquette in the class Women, the absent-minded Ménalque in the class Men, etc.; but this is not enough, for the chacters must be distinguished among themselves within one and the same class; La Bruyère therefore performs certain operations of intersection from one class to the next; cross the class of Merit with that of Celibacy and you get a reflection on the stifling function of marriage (Du Merit, no. 25); join Tryphon’s former virtue and his present fortune” the simply coincidence of these two classes affords the image of a certain hypocrisyh (Des biens de fortune, no. 50). Thus the diversity of the regions, which are sometimes social, sometimes psychological, in no way testifies to a rich disorder: confronting the world, La Bruyère does not enumerate absolutely varied elements like the surveyor writers of the next century...”[224 – Howard’s translation]
Keeping Barthes reflection in mind – and it is easy to see this sort of pre-Linnean, Port Royal classicatory system in La Bruyère – one notices two things about La Bruyère’s tree. First, it is a piece of nature of a special type – trees being those things that transform the earth itself into the texture and growth of their being. And second, simply by being transplanted, it becomes a piece of artifice. Like the new man – one of La Bruyère’s coinages for the upstart, the man of fortune – literally, of the fortune of interest taking, of gambling, of marrying wealth – it is a new tree, since the spectator can remember neither its beginning nor its progress. Yet the new tree is not just any tree – it is striking, majestic, it has attained in its natural soil a certain respectable dimension. Like La Bruyère himself, transplanted to the soil of Versailles.
Of these new men like old trees, some could be called adventurers. In the section on the society of the Court, La Bruyère writes about a type that could be more aptly be compared to mushrooms:
Every once in a while there appears in the courts adventurous and bold men, of a free and familiar character, who produce themselves (se produisent eux-memes), protesting that they have in their art the talent that others lack, and who are taken at their word. Nevertheless, they profit from the public error, or the love men have for novelty – they pierce through the crowd and go forward all the way up to the ear of the prince, to whom courtiers see them talking, while the one talking is just happy to be so seen. They have this advantage for the grandees, that they can be suffered without consequence, and dismissed likewise. Thus they disappear simultaneously rich and discredited, while they world that they have just deceived is ready to be deceived by another.”
What is the crowd that the adventurer pierces? It is composed not just of individuals, but of customs – it is the whole coagulated weight of tradition, of old means of making fortunes, of family, of land. La Bruyère is, of course, as a moralist, opposed to these men of a free and familiar character. But the credit and the debit of them are hard to sum up. In his discourse before the Academy, La Bruyère made it clear that he belonged to the party of the ancients instead of the moderns – the latter being led by Perrault and Fontenelle. The adventurer is certainly a modern – his character embodies the modern in its lack of standing, its familiarity, the hazard in which it stands.
This is why the adventurer’s underground bond to the libertine is so strong. The transplanted tree is not an adventurer – La Bruyère’s description of the tree emphasizes its original majesty, and it is not the trees fault if it is transplanted, as it stayed still the whole time. It was a passenger. The adventurer, according to La Bruyère, does not stand still, but starts forward and doesn’t stop until he reaches the prince’s ear. However, we believe the allegorical qualities of the tree exceed La Bruyère’s meaning, especially if we consider that the adventurer might move and yet be immobile. And it is from that spot that the adventurer looks out and sees – that nature is not ancient. Nature is modern. It is the most modern of phenomena.
Here, of course, we are pushing the text. But let’s go with our thought. What is modern about nature? What is modern is that God is so hidden now that he might not exist. And that leaves nature as the only limit left on the human. That, briefly, was the modernity of the natural. It flares up, we think, in the libertine moment – and never as a wholly unified scheme, never as, finally, a hypercognizable passionate structure spread across the social structure – but as a set of hints. Collectively, this is what the “sweetness” of the ancien regime was about. It was the moment after God, but before Man. It failed finally to arrange itself with a social whole undergoing drastic and irremediable changes. Those changes, the great transformation of the market based industrial system, found their legitimacy in the notion that there was no human limit. This was the revolution of happiness. It was at this moment that nature lost its standing, and there commenced a competition for a certain metaphysical position of priority between God (who no longer represented a human limit, but rather a sacralized cosmic human all too human wish fulfillment) and Man. And thus, the human limit went down the amnesia hole.
So, our question is this: what would the spirit of Carpenter Shih useless oak tree converse about if it were dreamt by La Bruyère’s transplanted tree?
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