The october surprise came early this year. Did you notice it? Well, it began when it became apparent that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac might go belly up. In a sense, we can mark that as the end of the era of Cheney. It was at that moment that the money men, via the Treasury secretary, pulled the plug on the vanity next-war-in-the-making: Iran.
LI tries to remove himself from the painful spectacle of election year politics because, well, everything about it hurts. This year, in particular, we’ve watched the Dems watch the price of oil skyrocket. We’ve watched the press speculate endlessly about the cause of this, in one section of the paper, and report, in another section of the paper, about this or that statement or action implying that Israel or the U.S. is about to attack Iran. We’ve watched the crime in action, and we've watch the feebs that represent the opposition sit on their hands and seal their eyes. Did the Dems make a peep? Did they use this as a case study of the virulent blowback from pursuing a vain, egregiously stupid, manically male foreign policy in the Middle East, in contravention to the collective wisdom of the past eighty, gloriously oil fed years? Nope.
About three weeks ago, Bush changed course. There were no headlines – but the oil futures market could read what was happening. The signal was clearly sent – no war with Iran – and the security premium that had been inflating oil prices collapsed. Since then, the GOP seems to have started attracting, once more, its exurban constituency, the ones especially hit by the gas price jump. The exurbanites are also the ones that especially hate the environment – they are bred up to hate environmentalists, any limit to waste, and all the feminine frilliness that would keep them from growing fat in the ass and plunking that ass in an SUV. On the other hand, such is the ambient cretinousness that these same people are lovers of camping, hunting, and the great outdoors. Welcome to the moronic inferno of the 21st century. So, like the mouse people listening to Josephine the singer, they all swayed in unison when another stupid GOP-er, McCain, proposed destroying property values from coast to coast with pointless drilling – never mind the environmental havoc.
Of course, the opposition to the moronic inferno is caught up, still, in fantasies of unmotivated evil of its own kind. For them, preceding from the sound principle that the war class goes to war, they go to the unsound conclusion that the war class is a vast, planning organism that is going to bomb Iran tomorrow – in spite of our knowledge that such a thing would have the most evil effect on the moneymen who float the whole operation. As the planning for the occupation of Iraq shows, the new warmonger is not happy about war per se, but likes the vast corruption attendant upon pretend war. Plus of course the spectator value of being pretend warriors, exhibiting pretend bravery and pretend moral outrage all the way to the bank. That Iraq turned out not to be Panama is a bummer, dudes.
So the GOP did what it had to do – broke the back of the oil inflation monster. Since that is the most visible symbol of our economic shambles, who knows whether it will be enough to keep the exurban cretins in line. In one sense, that would be nice – let the fucks vote in ever more vile gangsters to pick their pockets and leave them out on the roadside, bleeding. But my more lamb-y, love side is against the rush of immediate gratification which this idea brings.
Put your raygun to my head - and please, press the trigger. Put me out of this misery.
Friday, August 08, 2008
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Gundling, saint and martyr of all tenure track positions
On her blog, IT has often complained about the how academic departments are sliced, diced, roasted and toasted until all inspiration and genius are squeezed out of them and a tepid mediocrity, suitable for children and all future consumers, can be safely served up in Intro class dollops.
On the way back from Chicago, we were reading The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, and we came upon the story of Jacob Paul von Gundling. Gundling should surely be the patron saint of all oppressed assistant professors, lecturers and grad students, as he died for y'all's sins. So here is his story.
Gundling had worked himself up to a pretty sweet position as the official historiographer for Frederick I, a man who loved nothing more than French ceremony. Alas, when Frederick died, he was succeeded by his son, the surely half mad Frederick William I, Frederick the Great’s Pa, who hated culture and all its accoutrements. Gundling scrambled, being in debt there in Berlin, and Frederick William soon had him working on economic policy. But he also decided that Gundling, being a prof, made an ideal court buffoon. Which entailed things like:
Having to deliver a lecture on the existence of ghosts while being forced to take regular draughts of strong drink – and as Gundling got too drunk to stand, he was frogmarched back to his room where he shrieked in drunken terror as one of the court retinue visited him in a white sheet;
Confinement in a chamber with a number of young bears, while fireworks were rained down upon his head;
Being forced to dress in a caricature of Louis XIV’s court fashion, including wearing a towering wig that used to belong to Frederick I;
Being force fed laxatives and locked in a cell;
And finally – “Gundling was forced to tolerate the presence in his bedchamber of a coffin in the form of a varnished wine barrel with a mocking verse:
Here there lies within his skin
Half pig, half man, a wondrous thing
Clever in his youth, in old age not so bright
Full of wit in morning, full of drink at night
Let the voice of Bacchus sing
This, my child, is Gundling...” (82)
When the poor Gundling died, he was propped in the barrel dressed in a wig hanging down to his thighs, and turned into a spectacle, briefly, that people could pay to look at. The funeral address was given by one of his bullies at the court.
So, consider Gundling, all ye who suffer from tenure anxieties, toil and spin in departmental meetings, and are heavy burdened with academic ennuie, and remember that it could be worse!
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Es sind nicht alle frei, die ihrer Ketten spotten.- Lessing
Mirror in the bathroom
Lichtenberg again.
From the history of culture jamming, here is an amusing sidenote. At midnight on January 6, 1777, Lichtenberg, with the help of his posse, consisting of a few amused officials and a bookstore owner named Dietrich, who later wrote an account of it, plastered Gottingen with posters that were supposedly written by a showman/magician, Philadelphus Philadelphia. Philadelphia had been raising money by subscription for his act – and claimed that he would unveil marvels if he could get 100 people to pitch in a Louis D’or a-piece.
(Amazingly, wikipedia actually has a translation into English of Lichtenberg’s “avertissement” – I don’t have to translate it!) You will notice that this is the kind of action which forms the basis of
“The Trolls among us”, an article in last week’s Sunday NYT magazine which article shows zero knowledge of popular acts of “wild justice” – which range from practical jokes to charivaris to pograms – which have existed throughout recorded history.
I broke off in a post last week before I could get to Lichtenberg’s Samples of Curious Superstitions. But monomania never stops, people! And thus I come back to the subject – which is discussed by Tadeusz Zatorski here. Zatorski’s article emphasizes the contrast between Lichtenberg as an enlightener and Lichtenberg as a man whose own private life was riddled by obsessive searches for signs, omens, and irrational but significant patterns. Zatorski has collected a number of Lichtenberg’s own reflections about this: God almighty ... I have always preached against superstitions, and have always been the greatest reader of signs for myself. As N... lay on his deathbed, I allowed the outcome to depend on the flights of cranes as a way to comfort myself.” “One of the most remarkable features in my character is certainly the odd superstition by which I pull premonitions out of everything, and in a day make a hundred things into an oracle. Every creeping of an insect serves to answer questions about my fate. Isn’t this a curious thing in a professor of physics?"
Zatorski quotes an interesting literature over the question of Lichtenberg and superstition – including the opinion of Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche’s friend, that Lichtenberg understood the fundamental absurdity of accounting for being: L lets the absurd count as absurd, refraining from finding reasons for it [verzichtet auf seine Begründung] and thus strictly limits its domain.” This would make Lichtenberg a predecessor of the school of therapeutic nihilism – and indeed, the Vienna Circle was attracted to Lichtenberg, as to Schopenhauer.
Zatorski’s point is that Lichtenberg’s self-observations led to a psychology of superstition. Or a social psychology. Not that the enlightenment philosophes did not possess a social psychological explanation of superstion: ultimately, they derived from fear. It was Justus Möser, in his articles directed against the French Revolution in the 1790s, who cast doubt on this explanation for a whole set of traditional practices. But Lichtenberg, too, didn’t see fear – and the inevitable chain of references leading to the chained and the unchained – as the one cause of superstition. Rather, he saw that (to put it in contemporary terms) the division between erudite and popular culture was neither absolute nor unchanging. I’ll end with these two paragraphs from Zatorski:
Lichtenberg again.
From the history of culture jamming, here is an amusing sidenote. At midnight on January 6, 1777, Lichtenberg, with the help of his posse, consisting of a few amused officials and a bookstore owner named Dietrich, who later wrote an account of it, plastered Gottingen with posters that were supposedly written by a showman/magician, Philadelphus Philadelphia. Philadelphia had been raising money by subscription for his act – and claimed that he would unveil marvels if he could get 100 people to pitch in a Louis D’or a-piece.
(Amazingly, wikipedia actually has a translation into English of Lichtenberg’s “avertissement” – I don’t have to translate it!) You will notice that this is the kind of action which forms the basis of
“The Trolls among us”, an article in last week’s Sunday NYT magazine which article shows zero knowledge of popular acts of “wild justice” – which range from practical jokes to charivaris to pograms – which have existed throughout recorded history.
I broke off in a post last week before I could get to Lichtenberg’s Samples of Curious Superstitions. But monomania never stops, people! And thus I come back to the subject – which is discussed by Tadeusz Zatorski here. Zatorski’s article emphasizes the contrast between Lichtenberg as an enlightener and Lichtenberg as a man whose own private life was riddled by obsessive searches for signs, omens, and irrational but significant patterns. Zatorski has collected a number of Lichtenberg’s own reflections about this: God almighty ... I have always preached against superstitions, and have always been the greatest reader of signs for myself. As N... lay on his deathbed, I allowed the outcome to depend on the flights of cranes as a way to comfort myself.” “One of the most remarkable features in my character is certainly the odd superstition by which I pull premonitions out of everything, and in a day make a hundred things into an oracle. Every creeping of an insect serves to answer questions about my fate. Isn’t this a curious thing in a professor of physics?"
Zatorski quotes an interesting literature over the question of Lichtenberg and superstition – including the opinion of Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche’s friend, that Lichtenberg understood the fundamental absurdity of accounting for being: L lets the absurd count as absurd, refraining from finding reasons for it [verzichtet auf seine Begründung] and thus strictly limits its domain.” This would make Lichtenberg a predecessor of the school of therapeutic nihilism – and indeed, the Vienna Circle was attracted to Lichtenberg, as to Schopenhauer.
Zatorski’s point is that Lichtenberg’s self-observations led to a psychology of superstition. Or a social psychology. Not that the enlightenment philosophes did not possess a social psychological explanation of superstion: ultimately, they derived from fear. It was Justus Möser, in his articles directed against the French Revolution in the 1790s, who cast doubt on this explanation for a whole set of traditional practices. But Lichtenberg, too, didn’t see fear – and the inevitable chain of references leading to the chained and the unchained – as the one cause of superstition. Rather, he saw that (to put it in contemporary terms) the division between erudite and popular culture was neither absolute nor unchanging. I’ll end with these two paragraphs from Zatorski:
Even the relationship between superstition and science can, in Lichtenberg’s opinion, not so easily be brought under the rule of an unambiguous and simple formula, as it seemed to contemporary advocates of the enlightenment, who wanted to see in superstitions simply the continual “classical” opposite pole to reason. Really, superstition can be tied to diabolical evil, and even promote the emergence of infamies – Lichtenberg points her to the sad history of witch trials. But this doesn’t change the fact that, looked at more closely, especially when we see knowledge as a continually evolving whole, the borders between superstition and reason prove to be flowing and flexible on both sides: “The philosophy of the common man is the mother of ours, out of his superstitions we make our religion, just as we make our medicine out of his home remedies.” Even the concept “science” itself is observed to be highly unclear: “Where in the past one found the borders of science, we now find its middle.”
This demands a high degree of judgmental forsight. A quantum of distrust is evidently indispensable, but this means, at the same time, a certain distrust against dogmatic laws of reason. One would rather “neither deny nor believe.” For even the offerings of “rational” philosophy is nothing other than a treaty of peace that has come to stand “in the “counsels of men” – “superstition is itself a local philosophy, it also gives in its voice.” For this reason, even reason must remain continually conscious of the relative and time conditioned character of knowledge. Thus it would be adviseable to be very careful in labeling certain beliefs as superstitions, because what counts as such today can be transformed tomorrow into a serious theory: “There is thus a great difference between believing something “still” and believing it “again.” To still believe that the moon effects plants betrays stupidity and superstition, but to believe it again shows philosophy and reflection.” A researcher thus needn’t be ashamed of his interest in supernatural phenomena, so long as he observes these phenomena as like all others, requiring a completely natural explanation, even when one is not yet apparent at the moment: “Your letters on premonitions”, he wrote to the Hanover City official Wolff, “I have read with great satisfaction. I am not against these things, only I think, that one must not assume them, as long as there is space for the shadow of another explanation.” For even the doubt of everything, which seems to spring from the frame of a flat rationalism, must never be taken to a point beyond a certain un-preconceived vigilance, otherwise it can itself, in certain circumstances, degenerate into a kind of superstition. “By most people, disbelief in one thing is grounded in blind belief in another.” Then one is running the risk of tossing the baby out with the bathwater – out of fear of being laughed at as superstitious, phenomena are explained as non-existent, that still deserve to be fundamentally taken seriously and investigated by any science worthy of the name – an otherwise wholly understandable attitude in the case of a physics professor, whose greatest discovery, the “Lichtenberg Figures,” he could only describe, but not explain.”
Solzhenitsyn
LI bought the NYT in Ohare yesterday, and the first thing we thought about Solzhenitsyn’s death is – no headline? Truly, we survivors of the Cold War are slowly being forgotten.
Of course, I figured the obituary would be cast in the usual triumphal anti-communist speak. For liberals, Solzhenitsyn posed problems that weren’t apparent at the time the Gulag Archipelago came out. Liberals expect that the exposers of systems, the revealers of mass murder, will be liberals. For a liberal like myself, the Medvedev brothers were the perfect dissidents. Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, was obviously a reactionary of a certain type – as Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a socialist legislator in France, impoliticly pointed out. But no one is made to be a hero for all occasions. Solzhenitsyn, supporter of the U.S. in the Vietnam war, supporter of Pinochet and nuclear missiles, was politically a disaster. But this doesn’t discredit what he did. That the Soviet government of the Brezhnev era felt that their regime in its entirety was discredited by the Gulag was a sign of their senility and coming fall. However wild Khruschev was, he was right that the only way forward was to thoroughly air out the crimes of the Stalin era. Of course, no country likes to do this. Rightwingers will come up with the most absurd justifications for slavery and apartheid – the British have never reckoned with the crimes of Queen Victoria’s reign, although the terror famines in India are surely the template for Stalin’s policies in the 1930s, just as the concentration camps in the Soviet Union started out in imitation of the French and British penal systems - if one wants to find the roots of mass murder in the Soviet Union, it is pretty easy to find them in the imperialist and penal systems developed by the Europeans and the Americans in the 19th century. Solzhenitsyn's notion that it all sprang from the French revolution is sadly deluded.
Still, one can’t measure the moral import of the denunciation by the moral character of the denouncer – the best denunciation of the British policy of letting Irish die in the potato famine was written by John Mitchel, who valiantly tried to overthrow British rule and was sent to Australia as a political prisoner. But later in his life, Mitchel, escaping to the U.S., became an ardent racist and defender of the Confederacy.
What does get me about the obits is the obligatory comparison to Tolstoy. Solzhenitsyn was never more the Stalinist bred than his notion that to be a great writer, he had to imitate Tolstoy – a notion he shared with Sholakov. In reality, Solzhenitsyn’s politics were nothing like Tolstoy’s – imagine the defender of the Doukhbors and the Chicago anarchists making a defense of the U.S. in the Vietnam war! Solzhenitsyn’s politics were much closer to those of the Holy Synod, who excommunicated Tolstoy in 1901.
Perhaps I should read the proverbially unreadable Red Wheel for my investigation into alienated reactionaries. The Gulag by pure coincidence, sounded in parts like Celine getting in a lather. There is an image in it of being shoved into a pipe, the interior of which is lined with sharp hooks that was so close to Celine... hmm, let’s see if I can find that on the Net...
“The exceptional character which written and oral legend nowadays assigns to the year 1937 is seen in the creation of fabricated charges and tortures. But this is untrue, wrong. Throughout the years and decades, interrogations under Article 58 were almost never undertaken to elicit the truth, but were simply an exercise in an inevitably filthy procedure: someone who had been free only a little while before, who was sometimes proud and always unprepared, was to be bend and pushed through a narrow pipe where his sides would be torn by iron hooks and where he could not breathe, so that he would finally pray to get to the other end. And at the other end, he would be shoved out, an already processed native of the Archipelago, already in the promised land. (The fool would keep on resisting! He even thought there was a way back out of the pipe).”
I don’t know if it is my imagination, but it seems like the cheering even on the right about Solzhenitsyn is muted. Perhaps it is the embrace of Putin – how funny! They loved him when he praised Pinochet, but Putin – because America needs a new cold war, god damn it – has cast old Solzhenitsyn out of the club. But Putin and Solzhenitsyn were bound to converge - the ex KGB chief and the chief denouncer of the KGB.
Of course, I figured the obituary would be cast in the usual triumphal anti-communist speak. For liberals, Solzhenitsyn posed problems that weren’t apparent at the time the Gulag Archipelago came out. Liberals expect that the exposers of systems, the revealers of mass murder, will be liberals. For a liberal like myself, the Medvedev brothers were the perfect dissidents. Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, was obviously a reactionary of a certain type – as Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a socialist legislator in France, impoliticly pointed out. But no one is made to be a hero for all occasions. Solzhenitsyn, supporter of the U.S. in the Vietnam war, supporter of Pinochet and nuclear missiles, was politically a disaster. But this doesn’t discredit what he did. That the Soviet government of the Brezhnev era felt that their regime in its entirety was discredited by the Gulag was a sign of their senility and coming fall. However wild Khruschev was, he was right that the only way forward was to thoroughly air out the crimes of the Stalin era. Of course, no country likes to do this. Rightwingers will come up with the most absurd justifications for slavery and apartheid – the British have never reckoned with the crimes of Queen Victoria’s reign, although the terror famines in India are surely the template for Stalin’s policies in the 1930s, just as the concentration camps in the Soviet Union started out in imitation of the French and British penal systems - if one wants to find the roots of mass murder in the Soviet Union, it is pretty easy to find them in the imperialist and penal systems developed by the Europeans and the Americans in the 19th century. Solzhenitsyn's notion that it all sprang from the French revolution is sadly deluded.
Still, one can’t measure the moral import of the denunciation by the moral character of the denouncer – the best denunciation of the British policy of letting Irish die in the potato famine was written by John Mitchel, who valiantly tried to overthrow British rule and was sent to Australia as a political prisoner. But later in his life, Mitchel, escaping to the U.S., became an ardent racist and defender of the Confederacy.
What does get me about the obits is the obligatory comparison to Tolstoy. Solzhenitsyn was never more the Stalinist bred than his notion that to be a great writer, he had to imitate Tolstoy – a notion he shared with Sholakov. In reality, Solzhenitsyn’s politics were nothing like Tolstoy’s – imagine the defender of the Doukhbors and the Chicago anarchists making a defense of the U.S. in the Vietnam war! Solzhenitsyn’s politics were much closer to those of the Holy Synod, who excommunicated Tolstoy in 1901.
Perhaps I should read the proverbially unreadable Red Wheel for my investigation into alienated reactionaries. The Gulag by pure coincidence, sounded in parts like Celine getting in a lather. There is an image in it of being shoved into a pipe, the interior of which is lined with sharp hooks that was so close to Celine... hmm, let’s see if I can find that on the Net...
“The exceptional character which written and oral legend nowadays assigns to the year 1937 is seen in the creation of fabricated charges and tortures. But this is untrue, wrong. Throughout the years and decades, interrogations under Article 58 were almost never undertaken to elicit the truth, but were simply an exercise in an inevitably filthy procedure: someone who had been free only a little while before, who was sometimes proud and always unprepared, was to be bend and pushed through a narrow pipe where his sides would be torn by iron hooks and where he could not breathe, so that he would finally pray to get to the other end. And at the other end, he would be shoved out, an already processed native of the Archipelago, already in the promised land. (The fool would keep on resisting! He even thought there was a way back out of the pipe).”
I don’t know if it is my imagination, but it seems like the cheering even on the right about Solzhenitsyn is muted. Perhaps it is the embrace of Putin – how funny! They loved him when he praised Pinochet, but Putin – because America needs a new cold war, god damn it – has cast old Solzhenitsyn out of the club. But Putin and Solzhenitsyn were bound to converge - the ex KGB chief and the chief denouncer of the KGB.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
the return!
I’m back (said he, having dealt with a private matter in a dark corner).
LI’s first encounter with Chicago was a hit and miss affair, punctuated by mucho traffic, communications breakdowns between all the bossier members of my family, a fiesta of pink satin dresses, tan shoulders, blondness, tuxedos and priests at the wedding of my nephew, and my famous Puck dance at the reception – which consists of an attempt to fly to the bodacious rhythm of “Magic Stick”. The highlights of the trip were: the astonishing Field Museum, which puts the American Museum of Natural History to shame – my two astonishing nephews, with whom I renewed acquaintance – my afternoon with my friend Janet, a perfect rendez vous, ending, as all such things do, in wine and seafood – and the Indiana Dunes, where my bros, on my insistence, shot a photo of me climbing up one of the dunes on my belly, because I thought it would look like a classic New Yorker cartoon and make LI’s readers laugh. See how I think of y’all? This I will post later.
LI’s first encounter with Chicago was a hit and miss affair, punctuated by mucho traffic, communications breakdowns between all the bossier members of my family, a fiesta of pink satin dresses, tan shoulders, blondness, tuxedos and priests at the wedding of my nephew, and my famous Puck dance at the reception – which consists of an attempt to fly to the bodacious rhythm of “Magic Stick”. The highlights of the trip were: the astonishing Field Museum, which puts the American Museum of Natural History to shame – my two astonishing nephews, with whom I renewed acquaintance – my afternoon with my friend Janet, a perfect rendez vous, ending, as all such things do, in wine and seafood – and the Indiana Dunes, where my bros, on my insistence, shot a photo of me climbing up one of the dunes on my belly, because I thought it would look like a classic New Yorker cartoon and make LI’s readers laugh. See how I think of y’all? This I will post later.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
au revoir arrivaderci chow
Well, that’s it. I’ve done all the editing and reviewing I can stand. So now, off to Chicago for four days with the family. A wedding, see my old friend Janet, try to find the very spot where Nelson Algren hoisted Simone de Beauvoir up so she could peer through the bars of one of Chicago’s jails – what could go wrong? Although I have this premonition of doom. Of course, I have a premonition of doom when I buy breakfast cereal...
In the meantime, some more linkies for y’all.
First, Zoe’s tout va bien, a song that is all about LI – the problem with happiness! as per this instructive video, it leads inevitably to slaughtering your neighbors, your parents and your dog.
Then, a nice piece about Penelope Fitzgerald by Julian Barnes. Barnes makes a play with the phrase “amateur writer.” I first heard that phrase years ago, having dinner with Alfredo Bryce Echinique – a name which, alas, means nothing to Americans, but take my word for it, Bryce is the Peruvian novelist you should read, not Vargas Llosa.
And then, there is this, from At Swim Two Birds – the new Everyman Flann O’Brien will be at my side in the several bars and restaurants in the several airports that I will honor with my presence (while they pay no attention, silly fools!) on the way up to Chicago:
“It was stated that while the novel and the play were both pleasing intellectual exercises, the novel was inferior to the play inasmuch as it lacked the outward accidents of illusion, frequently inducing the reader to be outwitted in a shabby fashion and caused to experience a real concern for the fortunes of illusory characters. The play was consumed in wholesome fashion by large masses in places of public resort; the novel was self-administered in private. The novel, in the hands of an unscrupulous writer, could be despotic. In reply to an inquiry, it was explained that a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity. It was undemocratic to compel characters to be uniformly good or bad or poor or rich. Each should be allowed a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living. This would make for self-respect, contentment and better service. It would be incorrect to say that it would lead to chaos. Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet. The modern novel should be largely a work of reference. Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before—usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would effectively preclude mountebanks, upstarts, thimbleriggers and persons of inferior education from an understanding of contemporary literature.”
In the meantime, some more linkies for y’all.
First, Zoe’s tout va bien, a song that is all about LI – the problem with happiness! as per this instructive video, it leads inevitably to slaughtering your neighbors, your parents and your dog.
Then, a nice piece about Penelope Fitzgerald by Julian Barnes. Barnes makes a play with the phrase “amateur writer.” I first heard that phrase years ago, having dinner with Alfredo Bryce Echinique – a name which, alas, means nothing to Americans, but take my word for it, Bryce is the Peruvian novelist you should read, not Vargas Llosa.
And then, there is this, from At Swim Two Birds – the new Everyman Flann O’Brien will be at my side in the several bars and restaurants in the several airports that I will honor with my presence (while they pay no attention, silly fools!) on the way up to Chicago:
“It was stated that while the novel and the play were both pleasing intellectual exercises, the novel was inferior to the play inasmuch as it lacked the outward accidents of illusion, frequently inducing the reader to be outwitted in a shabby fashion and caused to experience a real concern for the fortunes of illusory characters. The play was consumed in wholesome fashion by large masses in places of public resort; the novel was self-administered in private. The novel, in the hands of an unscrupulous writer, could be despotic. In reply to an inquiry, it was explained that a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity. It was undemocratic to compel characters to be uniformly good or bad or poor or rich. Each should be allowed a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living. This would make for self-respect, contentment and better service. It would be incorrect to say that it would lead to chaos. Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet. The modern novel should be largely a work of reference. Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before—usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would effectively preclude mountebanks, upstarts, thimbleriggers and persons of inferior education from an understanding of contemporary literature.”
Monday, July 28, 2008
links and a plea
Deviens ma proie
Libertine
As per my last post, LI is not going to be posting too much this week. However, I would like to point our readers to the Wax works video mentioned by the mysterious Azazel616 in a comment to the Insects post. I love this sequence of vids.
Further, for those of you yearning and burning for the latest in French folky goth music with that saving touch of Peau d'Âne, you should hurry to see Claire Ditzeri’s Tableau de Chasse. It is the eternal story of man, woman, and huntin’, which ends with the lights out and Cupid turning back into the primal essence.
And hey, those of my readers who know or live in Chicago, could you help a guy out with opinions re the finer bars and diners? You know what I mean - the kind of places where a man can get his head knocked in for emitting incautious opinions about the, uh, political incompetence of Pilsudski.
Libertine
As per my last post, LI is not going to be posting too much this week. However, I would like to point our readers to the Wax works video mentioned by the mysterious Azazel616 in a comment to the Insects post. I love this sequence of vids.
Further, for those of you yearning and burning for the latest in French folky goth music with that saving touch of Peau d'Âne, you should hurry to see Claire Ditzeri’s Tableau de Chasse. It is the eternal story of man, woman, and huntin’, which ends with the lights out and Cupid turning back into the primal essence.
And hey, those of my readers who know or live in Chicago, could you help a guy out with opinions re the finer bars and diners? You know what I mean - the kind of places where a man can get his head knocked in for emitting incautious opinions about the, uh, political incompetence of Pilsudski.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
hypochondria of the deskbound
All the neighborhood dogs/lickin at her feet
“Benvenuto Cellini made the brilliant observation: wounds do not make us clever, because new ones always announce themselves under a different form. This I know well from my own experience.”
Lichtenberg’s experience – his orientation, if you will – derived, as everybody likes to point out, from the childhood accident that crippled him – bent his spine, that is (although the Lichtenberg society has demystified this beautiful story with a more plausible one about rickets – no matter! the myth probably arises from Lichtenberg’s own understanding of his wound ). It left him with a lifetime’s share of hypochondria – in one letter after another, his whole life long, Lichtenberg was dying. He felt bad about the fact that, feeling bad all the time, he didn’t know if he was feeling bad or good at any one particular time. The hypochondriac’s dilemma, as he well knew, was that hypochondria, in which one always suspects something bad, might disguise the advent of something worse.
Lichtenberg was an enlightenment savant, the professor of “universal philosophy” in Göttingen, an astronomer, mathematician, and general spreader of light. Ah, these savants in their cities – Smith in Glasgow, Montesquieu in Bordeaux, Kant in Konigsberg, and Lichtenberg in Göttingen. Like any enlightenment savant, he liked sex – and this part of Lichtenberg’s life, since Gert Hoffman’s novel, has now become the most famous part of his life. This would not really surprise Lichtenberg, with his satiric sense of the unexpected reputation, the perversity of fame, that checkers history.
Like all the German savants, Lichtenberg was an inveterate contributor to or founder of journals. For a long time, he contributed little essays to the Göttingen Tachenkalender. In 1783, he contributed Specimens of curious superstitions. I don’t believe this essay has been translated into English. Lichtenberg is, in general, not very translated into English. NYRB books published a translation of the Waste Books for which he is most known, by the most successful translator of Nietzsche, R.J. Hollingdale. I must say, I find Hollingdale’s preface pretty bad, since it isn’t true that Lichtenberg’s other writings are terrible. True, the Hogarthian essay is, uh, tedious ... but it was preparatory to the great anti-physiological writings. Lichtenberg’s epigrammatic style is evident in these writings – for instance, his mock learned work on the physiognomy of dog’s tails and what they tell us about the character of dogs. There is something very Twain like about that essay.
Well, LI is pressed by business right now, and we have to go to Chicago for a wedding on Wednesday – we will be back on Monday, August 4. So our readers might not fill themselves with the usual cornucopia of trivial fact and bombastic speculation that we try to give them each and every day. Damn! So our plan to translate Lichtenberg in bits, then the remarks about superstition by Goethe in his essay on Justus Moser, then the bit about astrology in Goethe’s letter to Schiller - these will all have to be put off.
“Benvenuto Cellini made the brilliant observation: wounds do not make us clever, because new ones always announce themselves under a different form. This I know well from my own experience.”
Lichtenberg’s experience – his orientation, if you will – derived, as everybody likes to point out, from the childhood accident that crippled him – bent his spine, that is (although the Lichtenberg society has demystified this beautiful story with a more plausible one about rickets – no matter! the myth probably arises from Lichtenberg’s own understanding of his wound ). It left him with a lifetime’s share of hypochondria – in one letter after another, his whole life long, Lichtenberg was dying. He felt bad about the fact that, feeling bad all the time, he didn’t know if he was feeling bad or good at any one particular time. The hypochondriac’s dilemma, as he well knew, was that hypochondria, in which one always suspects something bad, might disguise the advent of something worse.
Lichtenberg was an enlightenment savant, the professor of “universal philosophy” in Göttingen, an astronomer, mathematician, and general spreader of light. Ah, these savants in their cities – Smith in Glasgow, Montesquieu in Bordeaux, Kant in Konigsberg, and Lichtenberg in Göttingen. Like any enlightenment savant, he liked sex – and this part of Lichtenberg’s life, since Gert Hoffman’s novel, has now become the most famous part of his life. This would not really surprise Lichtenberg, with his satiric sense of the unexpected reputation, the perversity of fame, that checkers history.
Like all the German savants, Lichtenberg was an inveterate contributor to or founder of journals. For a long time, he contributed little essays to the Göttingen Tachenkalender. In 1783, he contributed Specimens of curious superstitions. I don’t believe this essay has been translated into English. Lichtenberg is, in general, not very translated into English. NYRB books published a translation of the Waste Books for which he is most known, by the most successful translator of Nietzsche, R.J. Hollingdale. I must say, I find Hollingdale’s preface pretty bad, since it isn’t true that Lichtenberg’s other writings are terrible. True, the Hogarthian essay is, uh, tedious ... but it was preparatory to the great anti-physiological writings. Lichtenberg’s epigrammatic style is evident in these writings – for instance, his mock learned work on the physiognomy of dog’s tails and what they tell us about the character of dogs. There is something very Twain like about that essay.
Well, LI is pressed by business right now, and we have to go to Chicago for a wedding on Wednesday – we will be back on Monday, August 4. So our readers might not fill themselves with the usual cornucopia of trivial fact and bombastic speculation that we try to give them each and every day. Damn! So our plan to translate Lichtenberg in bits, then the remarks about superstition by Goethe in his essay on Justus Moser, then the bit about astrology in Goethe’s letter to Schiller - these will all have to be put off.
Friday, July 25, 2008
the advocate for the insects
My thesis of the human limit seems, at first glance, to be countered by Lüthi’s persuasive notion that folktale heros and folktale objects possess a depthlessness that can’t be attributed to some stylistic primitiveness. That depthlessness is a narrative choice, as one can see by looking at the legends that circulate at the same time, and within the same circles. If a character displays no astonishment about the world in which “wishes matter”, then perhaps this is a sign of the fact that fundamentally, pre-modern European societies saw the world in the same way as early modern and modern societies – that the world is essentially made for man. In fact, the positivist version of history would say exactly this. Isn’t God simply Man, suitably arrayed in a cosmic fatsuit? Doesn’t Red Riding Hood’s wolf speak French? Aren’t the stars above us tuned to the flushes and faints of the microcosmic Adam? Isn’t the stamp of man on the World since the world was conceived in the minds of men? And, to reverse my narrative line, isn’t it just in modernity that we discover the “indifference” of the world, to use Camus’ phrase?
The positivist narrative, which plots the advance of the human understand from belief in God to belief in humanity (whether that humanity is represented by the self interested individual, the proletariat or the scientist) generated a counter-narrative that became popular in the sixties, in which the “West” is identified with greed and technology, and we are given an easy to use list of villains, like Descartes, capitalism, rationality, etc., etc. In this counter-narrative, the founding book, Genesis, lays out the environmental disasters to come, as God gives man dominion over nature. In fact, the positivists and their opponents generally share a view of the unfolding of history, but assign different values to it. And, of course, ultimately both views seem to agree on the desirability of promoting happiness as the supreme emotional value.
Take, for example, the judicial relationship between man and beast. Or man and caterpillar.
“In 1586, extraordinary rains caused a great quantity of caterpillars to be born, which devastated Dauphiné. The grand vicar of the diocese of Valence cited them to appear before him and appointed for them a curator of defender. After solemn debates, the caterpillars were condemned to empty the premices of the diocese immediately; but they failed to hasten to obey, and, in place of anathemas and excommunications, it was agreed, after the advice of two theologians and two professors of law, to have recourse to abjurations, prayers, and aspersions of holy water. In spite of all, the caterpillars only disappeared a long time afterwards. This singular sixteenth century trial is remarkable inasmuch as this was the age of a great intellectual movement imprinted on minds and that the teaching of Roaldes, Cujus and Salinger threw a lively flame on the university of Valence.” (Bulletin d'archéologie et de statistique de la Drôme, 1875:452-3)
What happened in Valence was not an unusual occurence. The philosophes of the eighteenth century had great fun with the idea of an “advocate for the insects”. However, LI is fascinated by the very possibility that the insects have a legal side that should be listened to, debated, especially since we know that the asperging of holy water has given way to the asperging of insecticide without the insects having any advocate left.
The positivist could say, however, that the advocate of the insects is only advocating for them from the human point of view – that is, God is using them to avenge some human fault.
Well, this will lead us to a little essay by Lichtenberg. And the, by these byways, we will get back to Schiller, Goethe and astrology.
The positivist narrative, which plots the advance of the human understand from belief in God to belief in humanity (whether that humanity is represented by the self interested individual, the proletariat or the scientist) generated a counter-narrative that became popular in the sixties, in which the “West” is identified with greed and technology, and we are given an easy to use list of villains, like Descartes, capitalism, rationality, etc., etc. In this counter-narrative, the founding book, Genesis, lays out the environmental disasters to come, as God gives man dominion over nature. In fact, the positivists and their opponents generally share a view of the unfolding of history, but assign different values to it. And, of course, ultimately both views seem to agree on the desirability of promoting happiness as the supreme emotional value.
Take, for example, the judicial relationship between man and beast. Or man and caterpillar.
“In 1586, extraordinary rains caused a great quantity of caterpillars to be born, which devastated Dauphiné. The grand vicar of the diocese of Valence cited them to appear before him and appointed for them a curator of defender. After solemn debates, the caterpillars were condemned to empty the premices of the diocese immediately; but they failed to hasten to obey, and, in place of anathemas and excommunications, it was agreed, after the advice of two theologians and two professors of law, to have recourse to abjurations, prayers, and aspersions of holy water. In spite of all, the caterpillars only disappeared a long time afterwards. This singular sixteenth century trial is remarkable inasmuch as this was the age of a great intellectual movement imprinted on minds and that the teaching of Roaldes, Cujus and Salinger threw a lively flame on the university of Valence.” (Bulletin d'archéologie et de statistique de la Drôme, 1875:452-3)
What happened in Valence was not an unusual occurence. The philosophes of the eighteenth century had great fun with the idea of an “advocate for the insects”. However, LI is fascinated by the very possibility that the insects have a legal side that should be listened to, debated, especially since we know that the asperging of holy water has given way to the asperging of insecticide without the insects having any advocate left.
The positivist could say, however, that the advocate of the insects is only advocating for them from the human point of view – that is, God is using them to avenge some human fault.
Well, this will lead us to a little essay by Lichtenberg. And the, by these byways, we will get back to Schiller, Goethe and astrology.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
lest that thy heart's blood run cold...
Max Lüthi, in his The European Folktale: Form and Nature, systematically contrasts the folktale (Märchen) with the legend (Sagen). Legend, for Lüthi, is something like the Saint’s tale, or the Arthurian tales, which – he claims – endow characters and objects with a “greater three-dimensionality” than folktales. According to Lüthi, folktales are characterized, stylistically, by depthlessness – the other world, the Aber-world, of the supernatural is accepted by the folk tale hero without a blink.
“In the Grimms’ folktale of the Seven Ravens, we are told of the little sister who arrives at the glass mountain: ‘What was she to do now? She wanted to save her brothers and had no key to the glass mountain. The good little sister took a knife, cut off one of her little fingers, pit it into the gate, and thus managed to open it. Once she had made her way in, a little dwarf came to meet her” – and so on, without the slightest indication of physical or psychological distress.” (13)
Lüthi’s examples can be infinitely multiplied. Red Riding Hood shows no surprise that the wolf talks to her; Rosanie accepts Ricdin-Ricdon’s magic wand without any question about how it works, or why, if it possesses the magical qualities Ricdin-Ricdon claims, he hasn’t made better use of it. In Dumb Hans, a hunchback who impregnates a princess simply by wishing is also able, by wishing, to build her a castle and cast off his hump – why, then, did he spend his youth being mocked and tormented for being an ugly hunchback? The superimposition of a violent, sexually active, hierarchical world over a “once upon a time, when wishes were still of use” does not take the questions that arise in that hierarchical world and apply them to the new, hybrid world – instead, there is a sort of automatic assumption that the rules have changed, now. But have changed capriciously, as it were, by themselves.
That general attitude of depthlessness, in the world of folktales, seems to translate an aspect of the culture which, according to an increasingly powerful consensus among the elite in the seventeenth century, was riddled by superstition. The struggle against superstition does not begin in the seventeenth century – Plutarch wrote against superstition. It became one of the commonplaces of Christian preaching. In On Godly Fear, a sermon by Jeremy Taylor, the great Anglican preacher, superstition is analyzed as a misplaced fear, and put among the pagan and Romish practices. It is at the base of idolatry.
“The Latins, according to their custom, imitating the Greeks in all their learned notices of things, had also the same concepiton of this, and by their word superstitio understood “the worship of demons,” or separate spirits; by which they meant, either their minores deos, or else their zoas apotheothentas, “their braver personages, whose souls were suppose to live after death;” the fault of this was the object of their religion; they gave a worship or a fear to whom it was not due: for whenever they worshipped the great God of heaven and earth, they never called that superstition in an evil sense, except the Adeoi, “they that believed there was no God at all.” Hence came the etymology of superstition: it was the worshipping or fearing the spirits of their dead heroes, “quos superstites credebant,” “whom they thought to be alive” after their apotheiosis, or deification, “quos superstantes credebant”, “standing in places and thrones above us;” and it alludes to that admirable description of old age, which Solomon made beyond all the rhetoric of the Greeks and Romans; “Also they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way;” intimating the weakness of old persons, who, if ever they have been religious, are apt to be abused into superstition; they are “afraid of that which is high;” that is, of spirits, and separate souls of those excellent beings, which dwell in the regions above us...” (Sermons, 1874:66)
This long notion of a misplaced fear, a double of the expected and demanded fear before those who are actually on high, migrates from the Stoics to the Church fathers to the natural scientists. It still constitutes the critical attitude that is taken to superstition and the understanding of folk practices. Yet, there’s an odd break between the ability to go between this world and the other world in the folktales and this picture of the culture of superstition. As always, when folktales pose a hermeneutic problem, they usually produce a folktale about that problem. So, the problem of the wish generates the folktale of the Fisherman’s wife that is about the very nature of wishing; and the problem of fear and its lack becomes “A Tale About the Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was.”
To which we will return... Our point, however, is that the struggle against superstition was defined differently at the end of the seventeenth century than at the beginning – that is, for the elite culture. The court position of the astrologer is a good marker of this change. Jean Baptiste Morin, whose book on French astrology (an apparently endless book, having a million volumes, which were employed to build the great wall of France – a little known structure which can be seen from one of our moons) has been partly translated by the American federation of astrologers, was still able to write horoscopes for King Louis XIII and give astrological advice to Richelieu, but even then, he was engaged in a bitter rearguard battle with Gassendi about the truth of astrology. Hervé Drévillon in Lire et ecrire l’avenir notes that the laws against astrology changed during the seventeenth century. In 1628, decrees were made against prophecies that predicted the fates of individuals, princes and states – “It was a matter then of containing astrology in certain limits, without contesting a certain legitimacy and pertinence belonging to it.” However, in “1682, the strategy of monarchic power in regard to astrology changed. From this time forth, it was no longer a matter of containing a discourse in the limits of what was judged politically tolerable, but of eradicating a belief whose effects were considered pernicious for the morality and order of the public.” [226] The members of the erudite elite who were willing to defend astrology dwindled. Perrault, Drévillon notes, in his death notice of the blind military strategist, Blaise de Pagan, attributed Pagan’s book on natural astrology to his “faiblesse.”
Franchising the column
LI owes Scott McLemee, who writes a column at Inside Higher Education, a note of thanks for having publicized our column on academic books (appearing every two months now!) at the Austin American Statesman. We did an interview with him in January, which, rather surprisingly, was quoted in a speech by the president of the Association of American University Presses at their convention. For the first and last time in history, I actually had a tiny tiny effect on the world:
I am planning - lazily - to franchise this column, that is, sell it to other newspapers, which could publish it a week after I write it for the Austin American Statesman. My plan is to go to newspapers in university towns - Athens Ga, Madison Wi, Eugene Oregon. The problem with the plan is, of course, exactly what Scott points out in the article - the ethos of newspaper publishing has eroded.
Newspapers are much mythologized beasts - they have by and large contributed to the "softening" of manners that is the mark of liberal society, but they have done so unconsciously, as it were - from Pulitzer to the Chandlers to the Hearsts, media owners have commonly shared the political bent of Murdoch, yet they have depended on writers to provide their materials. Writers are a feu follet breed - normally, their cultural capital is in gross disproportion to the return they make on it. Hence, they are inclined to think of themselves as badly appreciated, which plants the seed of dissatisfaction with social arrangements as they are. And of course they pass through social circles in which the bourgeois norms are bent in any number of interesting ways. This doesn't necessarily result in liberalism per se - it can easily result in extreme reaction - but it shows itself around the edges even in the day to day work of creating establishment supporting narratives.
“Last month, during his speech at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses, outgoing president Sandy Thatcher quoted from my interview with Roger Gathman, who writes “The Academic Presses” for the Austin paper. “The people making decisions,” Gathman had said, “have to realize that it is in their interest to encourage reading. They have to start thinking about the need to generate an audience. At that level, it makes no sense for all of your cultural coverage to point to activities that don’t involve reading.” Thatcher, who is also the director of Penn State University Press, indicated that his recent venture in editing the review section of a local newspaper, the Centre Daily Times, was inspired in part by that column.
At the time, I pointed out that Gathman’s comment about reading would seem profoundly sensible to anyone who gave it two minutes of thought – but who could spare that much time when (as it seems at newspapers nowadays) the sky is falling?”
I am planning - lazily - to franchise this column, that is, sell it to other newspapers, which could publish it a week after I write it for the Austin American Statesman. My plan is to go to newspapers in university towns - Athens Ga, Madison Wi, Eugene Oregon. The problem with the plan is, of course, exactly what Scott points out in the article - the ethos of newspaper publishing has eroded.
Newspapers are much mythologized beasts - they have by and large contributed to the "softening" of manners that is the mark of liberal society, but they have done so unconsciously, as it were - from Pulitzer to the Chandlers to the Hearsts, media owners have commonly shared the political bent of Murdoch, yet they have depended on writers to provide their materials. Writers are a feu follet breed - normally, their cultural capital is in gross disproportion to the return they make on it. Hence, they are inclined to think of themselves as badly appreciated, which plants the seed of dissatisfaction with social arrangements as they are. And of course they pass through social circles in which the bourgeois norms are bent in any number of interesting ways. This doesn't necessarily result in liberalism per se - it can easily result in extreme reaction - but it shows itself around the edges even in the day to day work of creating establishment supporting narratives.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
lies, damn lies, and the conventional wisdom
LI likes to read the econ blogs when times get all roller-coastery. One thing that the blogs share with the thumbsuckers in the papers is that Americans will generally have to get used to lowering their standard of living. This has become the truism du jour, and it goes along with the other truism, which is that Americans have been living way past their standards of living.
Of course, that is all nonsense and lies. There is one and only one cause of our present discontents, which is that Americans – by which I mean the bottom 80 percent – have been horribly underpaid for the last thirty years. It is always and everywhere good to remember that wealth comes only from the bottom. Wealth creation simply doesn’t happen at the top – licitly. Of course, we’ve watched wealth creation happen at the top for years, but a close look at it shows that it is merely the piling of one fiction on top of the other. What the top does, at the limit, is administer and manage. For this function, it has succeeded in rewarding itself with the lion share of the wealth created over the past thirty years – by the bottom 80 percent. When one reads stories, such as the much commented upon story in the NYT about the Diane McCleod, the woman with two jobs, earning 45, 000 per year, who had accumulated debts of around $280,000, including her home, an asset that is probably worth around $160,000 in today’s market, the first thing I thought is that she should probably be making 80 to 90 thousand a year working those jobs. She would be, if wages had risen as they rose in the seventies. But here’s what happened: to arrest the falling profit margins, the political and business establishment decided to smash that rise in the wage rate. They did so under the cover of a story that is universally repeated, and so now, simply assumed. That story is that wealth comes from the top. It is a fairy tale for babies, but it has nicely succeeded in blunting the progressive tendency in taxation as well as arousing the general public’s support for programs designed to cut the general public’s throat. Of course, the guilt machine turns on automatically to make the whole thing go down like sugar. Turns out McCleod liked purses, and purchased many expensive purses on her credit cards. Is that shameful or what? She actually wanted something she considered beautiful in her life. How disgusting.
Or... no. This is what is shameful:
“GE Money Bank, which levied a 27 percent rate on Ms. McLeod’s debt and is part of the GE Capital Corporation, generated profits of $4.3 billion in 2007, more than double the $2.1 billion it earned in 2003.”
In 1979, a 27 percent rate would be illegal.
The U.S. is experimenting with a unique blend of robber baron capitalism and consumerism. The barons depend on the consumer, while at the same time, they chisel down the amount the consumer takes home until, of course, relative to the robber baron the consumer’s income sinks below the horizon. To make up for the logical gap here, the robber baron extends credit at 27 percent to the consumer. To make it, the consumer takes two jobs, thus robbing the day of any moment in which to be simply human. The consumer responds in the classically mammalian way when the lab environment turns hostile, by rushing to the bowl for sweets. In the labs, the rats die and they jack out the kidneys to examine the stress effects. In the suburbs and traffic jams, the consumer’s humanity turns to a peculiar mixture of glucose and methane, while the wallets are jacked out for other charges as they may apply. Outside the window, the world is upside down and the Whore of Babylon has lofted a bright, shiny sword.
Of course, that is all nonsense and lies. There is one and only one cause of our present discontents, which is that Americans – by which I mean the bottom 80 percent – have been horribly underpaid for the last thirty years. It is always and everywhere good to remember that wealth comes only from the bottom. Wealth creation simply doesn’t happen at the top – licitly. Of course, we’ve watched wealth creation happen at the top for years, but a close look at it shows that it is merely the piling of one fiction on top of the other. What the top does, at the limit, is administer and manage. For this function, it has succeeded in rewarding itself with the lion share of the wealth created over the past thirty years – by the bottom 80 percent. When one reads stories, such as the much commented upon story in the NYT about the Diane McCleod, the woman with two jobs, earning 45, 000 per year, who had accumulated debts of around $280,000, including her home, an asset that is probably worth around $160,000 in today’s market, the first thing I thought is that she should probably be making 80 to 90 thousand a year working those jobs. She would be, if wages had risen as they rose in the seventies. But here’s what happened: to arrest the falling profit margins, the political and business establishment decided to smash that rise in the wage rate. They did so under the cover of a story that is universally repeated, and so now, simply assumed. That story is that wealth comes from the top. It is a fairy tale for babies, but it has nicely succeeded in blunting the progressive tendency in taxation as well as arousing the general public’s support for programs designed to cut the general public’s throat. Of course, the guilt machine turns on automatically to make the whole thing go down like sugar. Turns out McCleod liked purses, and purchased many expensive purses on her credit cards. Is that shameful or what? She actually wanted something she considered beautiful in her life. How disgusting.
Or... no. This is what is shameful:
“GE Money Bank, which levied a 27 percent rate on Ms. McLeod’s debt and is part of the GE Capital Corporation, generated profits of $4.3 billion in 2007, more than double the $2.1 billion it earned in 2003.”
In 1979, a 27 percent rate would be illegal.
The U.S. is experimenting with a unique blend of robber baron capitalism and consumerism. The barons depend on the consumer, while at the same time, they chisel down the amount the consumer takes home until, of course, relative to the robber baron the consumer’s income sinks below the horizon. To make up for the logical gap here, the robber baron extends credit at 27 percent to the consumer. To make it, the consumer takes two jobs, thus robbing the day of any moment in which to be simply human. The consumer responds in the classically mammalian way when the lab environment turns hostile, by rushing to the bowl for sweets. In the labs, the rats die and they jack out the kidneys to examine the stress effects. In the suburbs and traffic jams, the consumer’s humanity turns to a peculiar mixture of glucose and methane, while the wallets are jacked out for other charges as they may apply. Outside the window, the world is upside down and the Whore of Babylon has lofted a bright, shiny sword.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
what does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?
Kant’s little writings are all too little known, except for the all too known What is Enlightenment. One of his most entertaining papers is entitled “What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking.” It was written to interfere in a dispute between Mendelssohn and Jacobi over the limits of reason and the rights of genius. Mendelssohn, in the course of this dispute, talks about being “oriented” by common sense, or healthy reason, and opts for a religious purified of enthusiasm, worshipping a rational God. Kant, with that driest of dry wits (the wit of the praying mantis as she devours her mate) likes the word orientation (and of course there is a little subdued play here with Mendelssohn as a man from the orient – a Jew).
This is how Kant explains it:
Kant always had a deep appreciation of the time reversable world of Newtonian physics. The notion of the sky played backwards or the earth going backwards is a gorgeous mindfall – one can go a long way down, thinking of that. Is there a bottom? This is a subjective claim indeed, but not one often raised in philosophy. Partly because philosophers spend too little time marveling over left and right. Kant, in this essay, uses the term subjective to mean something oddly material – inhabiting a body in space and time. But, as Kant knows, that body is built, partly, of directions that seem to have nothing to do with space and time as we commonly think of them, requiring an imaginary dimension in which we can transfer from left to right and right to left. This is the issue at the heart of the dispute between Leibniz and Newton about absolute vs. relative space. Which I’m not going into, except to note how Kant is building his notions
His next move is to expand this idea – which, incidentally, involves introducing the first practical joke (if we put aside Descartes evil demon) in philosophy (and all the praying mantises go doo, da doo da doot da doot doo da doo da doo doot da doot):
Am I the only one, reading this, who thinks:
I won’t translate all of Kant’s essay. I want to drive us to this passage – and, I assure you, I am still thinking about Wallenstein and superstition. A moment, ladies and gentlemen. Let me compose myself. I haven’t been feeling well lately. Isn’t it hot in here? Let me get out my handkerchief. Actually, touch of an old tropical distemper, plus of course the damned clap. Vixen was well worth it! The worms have the best of it. They dine off the best bits... Was this the face that launched a thousand ships...
Oh.
Time for a quick one...
This is how Kant explains it:
To orient oneself means, properly: out of a given world region (in the four of which we divide the horizon) to find the other, namely, the place of rising (sunrise). If I look at the son in the heaven at this instant and know that it is noon, so I know how to find the south, west, north and east. But I need in support of this throughout the feeling of a difference in my own subject, namely, my right and left hands. I name it a feeling; because these two side show externally to the intuition [Anschauung – inner view] no marked difference. Without this capacity: in the description of a circle, without requiring any distinction of objects in it, to still distinguish the movement of the left to the right from the opposed direction, and through this to determine a difference in the position of the objects a priori, would not be something I knew how to do, if I did not set the West to the right or the left of the south point of the horizon, and so thus should complete the circle with the north and the east until I was again at the south. Thus I orient myself geographically by all objective data on the heavens, but only through a subjective base of difference (Unterschiedungsgrund); and if, in a day through some miracle all the constellations otherwise retaining the same shape and position relative to each other only took a different direction, that is, instead of eastwardly, going now westwardly, in the next starbright night no human eye would perceive the least change, and even the astronomer, if he simply relied on what he saw and not at the same time on what he felt, would be unavoidably disoriented.
Kant always had a deep appreciation of the time reversable world of Newtonian physics. The notion of the sky played backwards or the earth going backwards is a gorgeous mindfall – one can go a long way down, thinking of that. Is there a bottom? This is a subjective claim indeed, but not one often raised in philosophy. Partly because philosophers spend too little time marveling over left and right. Kant, in this essay, uses the term subjective to mean something oddly material – inhabiting a body in space and time. But, as Kant knows, that body is built, partly, of directions that seem to have nothing to do with space and time as we commonly think of them, requiring an imaginary dimension in which we can transfer from left to right and right to left. This is the issue at the heart of the dispute between Leibniz and Newton about absolute vs. relative space. Which I’m not going into, except to note how Kant is building his notions
His next move is to expand this idea – which, incidentally, involves introducing the first practical joke (if we put aside Descartes evil demon) in philosophy (and all the praying mantises go doo, da doo da doot da doot doo da doo da doo doot da doot):
This geographic concept of the process of orientation I can now expand, understanding it thusly: in a given space in general, thus purely mathematically, to orient oneself. In darkness I orient myself in a well known room when I get hold of only a few objects, whose place I have registered in my memory. But here I am obviously helped in nothing by the specific affordances (Bestimmungsvermogen) of the place according to a subjective ground of distinction: then the objects, whose places I should have to find, I don’t see at all; and if someone, playing a joke on me, had put all the same objects in the same order one with another, but to the left where all had previously been to the right, so I would in a room where otherwise the walls were all the same, not be able to find myself. But so I orient myself now through the simple feeling of a difference between my two sides, the right and the left. Just that happens, when I in the nighttime on street otherwise familiar to me, in which I can now not distinguish between houses, go and appropriately wend my way.
Am I the only one, reading this, who thinks:
“He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.”
I won’t translate all of Kant’s essay. I want to drive us to this passage – and, I assure you, I am still thinking about Wallenstein and superstition. A moment, ladies and gentlemen. Let me compose myself. I haven’t been feeling well lately. Isn’t it hot in here? Let me get out my handkerchief. Actually, touch of an old tropical distemper, plus of course the damned clap. Vixen was well worth it! The worms have the best of it. They dine off the best bits... Was this the face that launched a thousand ships...
Oh.
“The course of things is approximately this. First, genius disports itself by making its bold flights, since it has dropped the thread that otherwise links it to reason. It soon entrances others through mighty speeches and great expectations, and seems to have set itself on a throne, which slow, heavy reason barely graces; whereby it still leads with the language of the same. The at that point assumed maxim of unworthiness of a too highly placed, lawgiving reason we common men call enthusiasm [Schwarmarei] these sports of benificent nature call it illumination. Because in the meantime there must arise a confusion of speech among them because, while reason can assume the dignity to command every man, here now this one, now that one follows his inspirations: thus must finally arise, out of inner inspirations through the testimonies of externally observed facts, out of traditions, that were in the beginning themselves kinds of preferences, with time becoming intrusive oracles [Urkunde], with a word the whole subjection of reason under the fact, i.e. superstition - because this at least carries with it the form of law and thus a point of rest.”
Time for a quick one...
Sunday, July 20, 2008
“The double sense of life accuses me...”
In 1797 and 98, Schiller was working on his Wallenstein cycle of plays. Wallenstein, a Bohemian warlord who figured in the thirty years war, was not at first glance an ideal figure for create, in the German language, theater in the Shakespearian vein. In her history of the thirty years war, C.V. Wedgewood pens this portrait:
Kepler, who worked for the Bohemian court, had drawn up his horoscope. Although astrologers were employed by all the royal houses in the early 17th century (Campanella, the author of City of the Son, had drawn up Louis XIV’s horoscope), Schiller decided to make astrology as central to Wallenstein’s Death as witchcraft was to MacBeth. Wallenstein did have his own astronomer, “Sini”. Voltaire, in the Philosophical Dictionary, under the entry Astronomy, made some typical acerbic comments about this:
"You should still less be astonished that so many men, who were, besides, elevated above the vulgar, so many princes, so many popes, who one could not fool about the least of their interests, were so ridiculously seduced by that impertinence of astrology. They were very proud and very ignorant. The stars were only for them: the rest of the universe was scum in whose affairs the stars didn’t meddle at all. They were like that prince who trembled at a comet, and who responded gravely to those who didn’t fear it at all: you can talk – you aren’t a prince.
The famous Duke of Wallenstein was one of the most infatuated by this chimera. He called himself a prince, and consequently thought that the zodiac was formed expressly for him. He never besieged a city, he never began a battle, then after having held council with the heavens. But as this great man was extremely ignorant, he had established for the chief of his council an Italian rogue named Jean Baptiste Seni, on whom he bestowed a six horse carriage and a stipend of twenty thousand livres. Jean-Baptiste Seni could not predict, however, that Wallstein would be assassinated by the orders of his gracious lord, Ferdinand II, and that he, Seni, would be returning to Italy on foot.
It is plain that one can know nothing of the future but by conjectures. These conjectures can be so strong that they approach certitude. You see a whale swallow a small boy: you can bet 10,000 to 1 that he will be eaten. However, you can’t be absolutely sure, after the adventures of Hercules, of Jonah and of Roland the fool, who remained so long in the belly of a fish.”
Hmm, I wonder if this entry gives us the seed of the story of Pinocchio? Anyway, in LI’s daunting pursuit of whatever, we will be using Schiller’s Wallenstein and Goethe’s more “instinctive” sense of astrology –as one commentator puts it – to discuss superstition.
“He was not a popular man: tall, thin, forbidding, his face in the unexpressive portraits which have survived is not prepossessing. No great master painted him and the limners who attempted his saturnine features agree only in a few particulars. The irregular features, the high cheek bones and prominent nose, the heavy jowl, the thick, out jutting underlip...
Already Wallenstein had a reputation for pretensions beyond his station. A Czech by birth, speaking the language fluently and allied to many of the leading families, dispossessed and otherwise, Wallenstein was influential if not popular in many sections of society...
Meanwhile, before the end of 1623 Wallenstein had contracted a second marriage, with Isabella von Harrach, a lady who regarded him with the nearest approximation to love which we may suppose it was ever his fate to inspire...”
Kepler, who worked for the Bohemian court, had drawn up his horoscope. Although astrologers were employed by all the royal houses in the early 17th century (Campanella, the author of City of the Son, had drawn up Louis XIV’s horoscope), Schiller decided to make astrology as central to Wallenstein’s Death as witchcraft was to MacBeth. Wallenstein did have his own astronomer, “Sini”. Voltaire, in the Philosophical Dictionary, under the entry Astronomy, made some typical acerbic comments about this:
"You should still less be astonished that so many men, who were, besides, elevated above the vulgar, so many princes, so many popes, who one could not fool about the least of their interests, were so ridiculously seduced by that impertinence of astrology. They were very proud and very ignorant. The stars were only for them: the rest of the universe was scum in whose affairs the stars didn’t meddle at all. They were like that prince who trembled at a comet, and who responded gravely to those who didn’t fear it at all: you can talk – you aren’t a prince.
The famous Duke of Wallenstein was one of the most infatuated by this chimera. He called himself a prince, and consequently thought that the zodiac was formed expressly for him. He never besieged a city, he never began a battle, then after having held council with the heavens. But as this great man was extremely ignorant, he had established for the chief of his council an Italian rogue named Jean Baptiste Seni, on whom he bestowed a six horse carriage and a stipend of twenty thousand livres. Jean-Baptiste Seni could not predict, however, that Wallstein would be assassinated by the orders of his gracious lord, Ferdinand II, and that he, Seni, would be returning to Italy on foot.
It is plain that one can know nothing of the future but by conjectures. These conjectures can be so strong that they approach certitude. You see a whale swallow a small boy: you can bet 10,000 to 1 that he will be eaten. However, you can’t be absolutely sure, after the adventures of Hercules, of Jonah and of Roland the fool, who remained so long in the belly of a fish.”
Hmm, I wonder if this entry gives us the seed of the story of Pinocchio? Anyway, in LI’s daunting pursuit of whatever, we will be using Schiller’s Wallenstein and Goethe’s more “instinctive” sense of astrology –as one commentator puts it – to discuss superstition.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
homo sominex
One of those facts that makes the drinking man doubt the observant side of the human animal is the strange lag in the discovery that every healthy male sports an erection about every 90 minutes during the sleep cycle. And for y’all ladies out there, well, the vagina goes through a 90 minute cycle as well, tied to REM sleep, of dilation and moistening. Put your hands in the air like you just don’t care! While there are cave paintings of sleeping men with erections and there’s an Egyptian tomb painting of the same fascinating subject, science with a capital S only stumbled onto it in 1944, when it was reported by German doctors. This is all according to Paul Martin’s book on Sleep. That scientists were so late to the game is depressing news – where were the giants of Natural Philosophy back in the 17th century? Martin, hating Freud, hastens to say that the erections and vaginal dilation aren’t sexual in nature. He also says he’d like to buy a bridge in Brooklyn, if any of his readers happen to own one.
That the Nazis were studying sleepers in 1944 seems to surprise Martin, but those of us who’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow realize that WWII was more than a war, it was the world we come from, it was the egg opening, it was the hatching of our common psychotic global humanity, a synergy of endorphins. Our erections were wagging as the bombs were dropping. So of course, humans were guinea pigged on all levels, for all purposes, because this is how control happens, honey. Now, let me strap you back into your cot...
However, I am starting up this subject to link to the review of a book, Insomniac, by Gayle Greene that I received and didn’t review. I feel guilty about that. But when I told my editor I wanted to review two books on sleep problems, he looked at me as if I were nuts. And when I told him Sleepers Civil Rights were the next big next big thing (I get carried away, I foam at the mouth, I start sounding like Maldoror off his meds!), he changed the topic. I obviously had briefly lost that contact with reality. The synaptic distance had lengthened.
Well, the sleepless are truly in a different world from the slugabeds, the ones without the wired brain tap tap tapping Nevermore at the vital center somewhere back there in the brain. I have always loved IT for owning up to the insomnia that keeps her up (If your tired unblinking head/rivet the dark with linear sight...) especially as insomnia is one of those things it is difficult to be in solidarity with – for what does insomnia do but make you cranky, and what makes you crankier than somebody bitching about insomnia? Which is why the sleepless do not form a class. Oh, they might compare remedies, but only to diss each other’s favorites. Sleepless anonymous would be a (waking) nightmare.
Myself, as middle age has crept upon, I’ve encountered the old restless legs/cramped muscles problem that so many have solved simply by putting a bullet in their heads. Actually, it is the cramps that is the worst. The pain scares me – I’ve never been a fan of pain. Especially when my foot will suddenly cramp up. It will happen and then, for nights afterwards, the ghost of that cramp will hover over my foot. I’ll stare at the ghost. The ghost will stare at me. It is a hard thing in life when a man is afraid of his own foot.
I’ve been advised that the best thing is calcium (hence, got some calcium horsepills) and phosphorus (hence, I’m eating ever more bananas). So the nightly routine is sleeping pill, aspirin (on principle) horsepill of calcium. Last week I ran out of sleeping pills, and insouciantly decided to show the world and my foot that I could do without. So for four days I knew four a.m. intimately. And I developed a new syndrome, which I am sure is related to kanashibari, except that instead of feeling a being sitting on my chest, I would get this ghostly feeling. The hairs would rise on my body, like I was scared. And I would feel scared, briefly. Perhaps it was the ghost of my sleep that was visiting me, but really, that’s double dipping and no fair. So I went back to the pills.
This is from D.T. Max’s review of Insomniac:
Insomniac is, along the way, an alarming, uncomfortable portrayal of how researchers in the field fail the sufferers they are supposed to treat. Desperate for funds, bent over by insurance companies, whiplashed by the National Institutes of Health, researchers do not treat insomnia as it is actually experienced. If you cannot cure me, Greene seems to be saying, at least hear me. Don’t tell me how insomnia ought to be, but let me tell you how it really is. “What is missing from everything I read about insomnia is—the insomniacs,” she writes. And earlier she confides, “No doctor I ever saw showed the slightest curiosity about the cocktail of hormones, estrogen, progesterone, thyroid, that I ingest daily.” “This is a somewhat cranky book,” she writes. Indeed it is.
And with reason, as Greene makes clear. Certainly insomnia came early to her and has stayed for a long time. Greene was born wide awake. “There is no sleep in that baby,” her mother wrote to her father in 1944, in a I’ve tried (nearly) everything anyone has ever told me worked for them,” she writes, “and it’s taken me some strange ways: lathering myself in sesame oil, brewing a Chinese herbal tea so foul that my dog fled the kitchen when it steeped, concocting a magnesium supplement that hissed and spat like something out of Harry Potter.” On the pharmaceutical front she’s been equally active, sampling “valerian, kava kava, chamomile, skullcap, passionflower, homeopathic concoctions, L-tryptophan, 5-HTP, GABA, melatonin, Elavil, Zoloft, trazodone, tricyclics.” Add to this the benzodiazepines, “Librium, Valium, Xanax, Dalmane, Klonopin, Restoril, Halcion, and more Ativan than I care to remember or probably can remember, since the drug erodes memory.” Throw in Ambien and Sonata, and “in the bad old days” sedatives such as Nembutal, Seconal, and Miltown. Plus the over-the-counter remedies: Sominex, Nytol, Sleep-Eze. Not to mention other treatments, including meditation, acupuncture, and biofeedback. And on and on, poor soul. Nothing ever quieted her chattering brain.”
Bad old days? What the fuck? Oh please, what I’d not do for a Seconal. I have my own theory about the chattering brain, which is that if you wire it to chatter, it won’t turn off. If I had learned not to read in bed, if I could avoid the computer screen, if I wasn’t continually scribble scribble scribble, if at some point these had been my choices, I believe I’d sleep like my brothers tell me they do. But I took the road less traveled by – because I’m a complete idiot. Although, in fact, I’m not as cranky as Gayle Greene, who has a much deeper condition than I do. The pills work for me. By two, usually, I’m out like a baby.
Friday, July 18, 2008
what hell, what terror!
In our archives, somewhere, are buried the remains of a large essay we were planning on writing about John Law once upon a time. My, how a decade flies when you are having fun!
Antoine Murphy (a wonderfully Beckett sounding name) is your man for all things Law-ful. In his book on Law, he grasps the very central point of what Law called the systéme. Law had seen that the national economies of his day were held back by specie money. Specie money, like gold or silver coin, is, as it were, a self-valueing asset. Its weight and metallic content are, ideally, equal to the value on its face. Thus, the man who carries a gold coin carries a coin literally worth its weight in gold. When a kingdom needed to debase its money, it did so by stinting on the weight and composition of its coinage. Swift’s wrath against the brummagen coinage issued by William Wood, under license from the crown, and with the blessing of the assayer of the mint, Isaac Newton, was directed at the drain of real value that would occur when gold coins at a false weight were exchanged for true. Asset money was always a constraint on a kingdom since it depended on there being in circulation enough gold and silver to allow for the consistent issuance of money. Law correctly saw that this system would forever restrain commerce. Thus, as Murphy explains, Law introduced credit money. The worth of credit money depends on its position in the whole financial system. It is worth nothing in itself except the promise it carries on its face. With credit money, as Murphy points out, an “array of new monetary products (liabilities) ... can be created [from the credit-money system] and the range of loan products (assets) that can be produced.” (108)
When the regent took power after the death of Louis XIV, he was staring at a kingdom that had long been bankrupted to pay for Louis’ wars and projects. Law, a gambler and an outlaw from England (where he’d escaped imprisonment for murder at Newgate), had long been proposing a credit-money scheme to various kingdoms, including Scotland. The Regent, desperate for any expedient to lift the monarchy from ruin, agreed at last to Law’s schemes. I won’t bother with the details of the stages by which Law moved from running a bank to running a monopoly on trade – the Compagnie de l’orient, popularly known as the Mississippi company – to finally running a bank combined with a trade and tax monopoly (the collection of taxes were farmed out in France) with royal backing. And indeed, pumping credit money into France got the country going again. Instead of edging up against the artificial constraint of too little specie money, a stream of credit money re-inflated France’s commerce and reinvigorated the agricultural sector. Law calculated that France could stand a total of 3 billion livres in coinage – a calculation he based on its potential for trade, and its comparative size against England, which was estimated to have 1 billion livres in circulation.
Finally, Law tied credit money to an asset – land. Land had the advantage of not being portable, for one thing – unlike gold. And for another thing, land was, Law thought, the basis of wealth. Having been ceded the land of the Mississippi, Law’s company divided it up – in a sense. That is, one could buy shares of it. And those shares could be exchanged for his bank’s billet, which were supported by the tax farms, which paid off the King’s debt, which had been paid by a loan from the bank.
There are two obvious problems: one is, how do we control the issuing of credit money? it seems like there is a built in incentive to create, as Montesquieu claimed, imaginary money – or at least it was easier to debauch credit money. And the second problem was asset money. People could refuse to exchange credit money and demand asset money. And this would automatically make credit money of less value.
In 1719 and 1720, the Mississippi company “boomed” – meaning that credit money circulated and shares in the Mississippi company rose spectacularly in value. The company’s brokerage house on Quincampoix street became a famous scene of a sort of continual avarice riot. All classes thronged it, trading, going broke, becoming rich. But it was a very fragile structure, a bubble, and at the first sign of trouble, when the shares went down, there was a flight to asset money that devalued the credit money. Law attributed this to the plague that struck Marseilles in 1720 – the same plague Artaud wrote about in Theater and its Double. Artaud wrote about the social structure liquifying in the face of the plague, which was true in one sense. But that liquification was an old fashioned chaos. What was really liquifying the social structure was credit money, and here, the plague created a very conservative reaction. Doctors wanted asset money. So did the butcher, the baker, and the candlestickmaker. Which is when Law persuaded the Regent (who, along with his friends, had become extremely wealthy via Law’s system) to issue a decree banning, in effect, specie money. This was the beginning of the end – the use of force shook confidence in Law, and his enemies used this decree to spread rumors about the true purpose of the system.
Law was forced from his position as France’s Controller General – the position that Colbert held – and had to flee France in a carriage loaned to him by Mme de Prie, a woman who valued her favors. This one was meant to get rid of Law with the least possible difficulty. Mme de Prie had made a mint in the bubble, and in time became Louis XV’s mistress, where she used her influence to keep Law from being recalled to France.
I wonder if, as the carriage crossed the French border, where Law was stripped of his passport and pocket change, whether one could hear, on the wind, the words: “mes gages, mes gages, mes gages.” Or was it something altogether more grandiloquent that ushers in the culture of happiness?
Chi l'anima mi lacera?
Chi m'agita le viscere?
Che strazio, ohimè, che smania!
Che inferno, che terror!
Antoine Murphy (a wonderfully Beckett sounding name) is your man for all things Law-ful. In his book on Law, he grasps the very central point of what Law called the systéme. Law had seen that the national economies of his day were held back by specie money. Specie money, like gold or silver coin, is, as it were, a self-valueing asset. Its weight and metallic content are, ideally, equal to the value on its face. Thus, the man who carries a gold coin carries a coin literally worth its weight in gold. When a kingdom needed to debase its money, it did so by stinting on the weight and composition of its coinage. Swift’s wrath against the brummagen coinage issued by William Wood, under license from the crown, and with the blessing of the assayer of the mint, Isaac Newton, was directed at the drain of real value that would occur when gold coins at a false weight were exchanged for true. Asset money was always a constraint on a kingdom since it depended on there being in circulation enough gold and silver to allow for the consistent issuance of money. Law correctly saw that this system would forever restrain commerce. Thus, as Murphy explains, Law introduced credit money. The worth of credit money depends on its position in the whole financial system. It is worth nothing in itself except the promise it carries on its face. With credit money, as Murphy points out, an “array of new monetary products (liabilities) ... can be created [from the credit-money system] and the range of loan products (assets) that can be produced.” (108)
When the regent took power after the death of Louis XIV, he was staring at a kingdom that had long been bankrupted to pay for Louis’ wars and projects. Law, a gambler and an outlaw from England (where he’d escaped imprisonment for murder at Newgate), had long been proposing a credit-money scheme to various kingdoms, including Scotland. The Regent, desperate for any expedient to lift the monarchy from ruin, agreed at last to Law’s schemes. I won’t bother with the details of the stages by which Law moved from running a bank to running a monopoly on trade – the Compagnie de l’orient, popularly known as the Mississippi company – to finally running a bank combined with a trade and tax monopoly (the collection of taxes were farmed out in France) with royal backing. And indeed, pumping credit money into France got the country going again. Instead of edging up against the artificial constraint of too little specie money, a stream of credit money re-inflated France’s commerce and reinvigorated the agricultural sector. Law calculated that France could stand a total of 3 billion livres in coinage – a calculation he based on its potential for trade, and its comparative size against England, which was estimated to have 1 billion livres in circulation.
Finally, Law tied credit money to an asset – land. Land had the advantage of not being portable, for one thing – unlike gold. And for another thing, land was, Law thought, the basis of wealth. Having been ceded the land of the Mississippi, Law’s company divided it up – in a sense. That is, one could buy shares of it. And those shares could be exchanged for his bank’s billet, which were supported by the tax farms, which paid off the King’s debt, which had been paid by a loan from the bank.
There are two obvious problems: one is, how do we control the issuing of credit money? it seems like there is a built in incentive to create, as Montesquieu claimed, imaginary money – or at least it was easier to debauch credit money. And the second problem was asset money. People could refuse to exchange credit money and demand asset money. And this would automatically make credit money of less value.
In 1719 and 1720, the Mississippi company “boomed” – meaning that credit money circulated and shares in the Mississippi company rose spectacularly in value. The company’s brokerage house on Quincampoix street became a famous scene of a sort of continual avarice riot. All classes thronged it, trading, going broke, becoming rich. But it was a very fragile structure, a bubble, and at the first sign of trouble, when the shares went down, there was a flight to asset money that devalued the credit money. Law attributed this to the plague that struck Marseilles in 1720 – the same plague Artaud wrote about in Theater and its Double. Artaud wrote about the social structure liquifying in the face of the plague, which was true in one sense. But that liquification was an old fashioned chaos. What was really liquifying the social structure was credit money, and here, the plague created a very conservative reaction. Doctors wanted asset money. So did the butcher, the baker, and the candlestickmaker. Which is when Law persuaded the Regent (who, along with his friends, had become extremely wealthy via Law’s system) to issue a decree banning, in effect, specie money. This was the beginning of the end – the use of force shook confidence in Law, and his enemies used this decree to spread rumors about the true purpose of the system.
Law was forced from his position as France’s Controller General – the position that Colbert held – and had to flee France in a carriage loaned to him by Mme de Prie, a woman who valued her favors. This one was meant to get rid of Law with the least possible difficulty. Mme de Prie had made a mint in the bubble, and in time became Louis XV’s mistress, where she used her influence to keep Law from being recalled to France.
I wonder if, as the carriage crossed the French border, where Law was stripped of his passport and pocket change, whether one could hear, on the wind, the words: “mes gages, mes gages, mes gages.” Or was it something altogether more grandiloquent that ushers in the culture of happiness?
Chi l'anima mi lacera?
Chi m'agita le viscere?
Che strazio, ohimè, che smania!
Che inferno, che terror!
Thursday, July 17, 2008
virtuous gamblers, virtuous atheists
The case is plain, you must put on a Sword, Kill a Beau or two, get into Newgate, be condemned to be hanged, break Prison, IF YOU CAN – remember that by the way – get over to some Strange Country, turn Stock-Jobber, set up a Mississippi Stock, bubble a Nation, and you may soon be a great man; if you would have but great good luck, according to an old English Maxim:
Dare once to be a Rogue upon record
And you may quickly hope to be a Lord. [Defoe 1869,
189 in: Daniel Defoe his Life and recently discovered writings, I]
“...as that may be, I have not read anywhere, since the fable of King Midas, still less seen, that anyone has the talent for converting to gold all that he touches; I don’t believe, as well, that M. Law is endowed with this virtue, but I think all his knowledge is but a shrewd game, a new and skillful move in the shell game, which puts the goods of Pierr in the pocket of Jean, and only enriches the one from despoiling the other; that sooner or later this will stop, the game will be seen through, an infinite number of gentlemen will be ruined, and I foresee all the difficulty, even the impossibility, of restitutions of that gain, and even more, who to restore gains of that sort; that I abhorred the goods of others, and I wouldn’t charge myself with it, even equivocally.” – Saint-Simon, Journal xvii
When Montesquieu came to Venice in the summer of 1728, he was on a long fact finding tour through Europe. He was 38. He was a celebrity for the Persian Letters, which he’d written at thirty; one of those letters, 142, http://www.wm.edu/history/rbsche/plp/letter142.htm had attacked John Law’s “system,” pretty much following the same line of thought as Saint Simon. It must have been written at some point close to February 1720, when Law made one of the boldest move in European economic history by having a decree published which practically prohibited specie currency – that is, gold coins. About which, we will write in another post. Montesquieu was a virtuoso – a dabbler in natural history – as well as a philosopher. As he toured Europe, he kept notes not only on the people and the gossip he heard, but on the mines he toured, the factories he was ushered into. Coming into Venice, for instance, he noted the number of estimated whores, 10,000, as a pertinent economic fact, as much as he later noted famous mirror works. Whores and disgraced men who had fled their native lands were, in Montesquieu’s opinion, the key symbols of the Venice of his time: not the doge, not the lions of St. Mark. In Montesquieu’s account, Venice was definitely going through dog years. No one came to the carnivals anymore, or attended the opera, which once drew foreigners to the city – at least, according to Montesquieu. He paints a picture of a city in full decay – a place in which the cathedrals smelled of the fats of the corrupting corpses in the catafalques.
Of the disgraced men that Montesquieu came to see, one of them was John Law, born of “Aeolus, the god of the winds”, and a “Caledonian nymph”, and come to the gambler’s paradise to die, the only person he loved, his wife/mistress, left behind in France and making due as the mistress of a nobleman. Montesquieu notes that he interviewed Law on the 29 August, 1728, but he doesn’t say where. One thinks of a palazzo, rented of course, moldy, cluttered with old bric a brac, the household overseen by a sinister looking valet wearing a shabby fez. Obviously, Montesquieu was looking for the inside story to the mystery of how, exactly, the “system” had been put into operation. Montesquieu’s interview has been used ever since as a crib to the scandals surrounding the Bubble but, as Law’s biographer, Antoin E. Murphy, notes, Montesquieu didn’t seem to understand what Law was trying to tell him about the system. Instead, he noted a lot of figures – and Law’s figures were amazing, a million here, a billion there, which were almost demonic numbers in the Europe of the time – while Law’s deeper explanation of what he was trying to do seemed to go over our philosophe’s head. I was thinking that this meeting would make a nice contrast with Sganarelle and Dom Juan’s talk in the forest, but that’s a prettier idea than the historic reality it is built on.
So: what is the convergence here between Law’s system and Bayle’s society of atheists? It has to do with the difference between general belief and particular belief. The belief about the meaning of the cosmos – a belief that gives us a variety of Gods – was, you remember, discounted by Bayle as a factor in particular human behaviors. At the same time, Bayle was bothered by, and wrote against, superstition. Tolerance and the war against superstition go hand in hand – not only in Bayle, but in Locke, and in the Enlightenment tradition. Similarly, Law tried to institute a sort of economic atheism. This creed disbelieved in gold and silver. That is, disbelieved that gold was special. Briefly, Law got the unbelievable chance to enforce his beliefs on the primary nation in Europe. There are those who think France actually recovered from the lugubrious Louis XIV and his endless, bankrupting wars because of Law. But in the popular culture, Law’s system became a byword for a mass delusion.
Well, I’ll go from there when I have time.
"I drive a Rolls Royce
Cause it's good for my voice..."
Dare once to be a Rogue upon record
And you may quickly hope to be a Lord. [Defoe 1869,
189 in: Daniel Defoe his Life and recently discovered writings, I]
“...as that may be, I have not read anywhere, since the fable of King Midas, still less seen, that anyone has the talent for converting to gold all that he touches; I don’t believe, as well, that M. Law is endowed with this virtue, but I think all his knowledge is but a shrewd game, a new and skillful move in the shell game, which puts the goods of Pierr in the pocket of Jean, and only enriches the one from despoiling the other; that sooner or later this will stop, the game will be seen through, an infinite number of gentlemen will be ruined, and I foresee all the difficulty, even the impossibility, of restitutions of that gain, and even more, who to restore gains of that sort; that I abhorred the goods of others, and I wouldn’t charge myself with it, even equivocally.” – Saint-Simon, Journal xvii
When Montesquieu came to Venice in the summer of 1728, he was on a long fact finding tour through Europe. He was 38. He was a celebrity for the Persian Letters, which he’d written at thirty; one of those letters, 142, http://www.wm.edu/history/rbsche/plp/letter142.htm had attacked John Law’s “system,” pretty much following the same line of thought as Saint Simon. It must have been written at some point close to February 1720, when Law made one of the boldest move in European economic history by having a decree published which practically prohibited specie currency – that is, gold coins. About which, we will write in another post. Montesquieu was a virtuoso – a dabbler in natural history – as well as a philosopher. As he toured Europe, he kept notes not only on the people and the gossip he heard, but on the mines he toured, the factories he was ushered into. Coming into Venice, for instance, he noted the number of estimated whores, 10,000, as a pertinent economic fact, as much as he later noted famous mirror works. Whores and disgraced men who had fled their native lands were, in Montesquieu’s opinion, the key symbols of the Venice of his time: not the doge, not the lions of St. Mark. In Montesquieu’s account, Venice was definitely going through dog years. No one came to the carnivals anymore, or attended the opera, which once drew foreigners to the city – at least, according to Montesquieu. He paints a picture of a city in full decay – a place in which the cathedrals smelled of the fats of the corrupting corpses in the catafalques.
Of the disgraced men that Montesquieu came to see, one of them was John Law, born of “Aeolus, the god of the winds”, and a “Caledonian nymph”, and come to the gambler’s paradise to die, the only person he loved, his wife/mistress, left behind in France and making due as the mistress of a nobleman. Montesquieu notes that he interviewed Law on the 29 August, 1728, but he doesn’t say where. One thinks of a palazzo, rented of course, moldy, cluttered with old bric a brac, the household overseen by a sinister looking valet wearing a shabby fez. Obviously, Montesquieu was looking for the inside story to the mystery of how, exactly, the “system” had been put into operation. Montesquieu’s interview has been used ever since as a crib to the scandals surrounding the Bubble but, as Law’s biographer, Antoin E. Murphy, notes, Montesquieu didn’t seem to understand what Law was trying to tell him about the system. Instead, he noted a lot of figures – and Law’s figures were amazing, a million here, a billion there, which were almost demonic numbers in the Europe of the time – while Law’s deeper explanation of what he was trying to do seemed to go over our philosophe’s head. I was thinking that this meeting would make a nice contrast with Sganarelle and Dom Juan’s talk in the forest, but that’s a prettier idea than the historic reality it is built on.
So: what is the convergence here between Law’s system and Bayle’s society of atheists? It has to do with the difference between general belief and particular belief. The belief about the meaning of the cosmos – a belief that gives us a variety of Gods – was, you remember, discounted by Bayle as a factor in particular human behaviors. At the same time, Bayle was bothered by, and wrote against, superstition. Tolerance and the war against superstition go hand in hand – not only in Bayle, but in Locke, and in the Enlightenment tradition. Similarly, Law tried to institute a sort of economic atheism. This creed disbelieved in gold and silver. That is, disbelieved that gold was special. Briefly, Law got the unbelievable chance to enforce his beliefs on the primary nation in Europe. There are those who think France actually recovered from the lugubrious Louis XIV and his endless, bankrupting wars because of Law. But in the popular culture, Law’s system became a byword for a mass delusion.
Well, I’ll go from there when I have time.
"I drive a Rolls Royce
Cause it's good for my voice..."
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
the society of atheists
In terms of science, the comets of 1680 was perhaps the most important ever to appear in the skies. The orbit of it was illustrated in Newton’s Principia of 1687. It was made the object of extensive observation by Royal Society astronomers, like Halley. And it gave rise to various and sundry reports of supernatural phenomena, from hens laying comet shaped eggs to rumors that the world was ending. Sara Schechner’s description of the comets (from Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology) is still impressively scary:
“In early November of 1680, a comet appeared before sunrise and was sighted heading toward the sun until the end of the month. In mid-December, another comet appeared in the evening sky, heading away from the sun. Its tail was immense, growing to be over seventy degrees long.”
In Mexico city, there were rumors about the resurrection of the dead and processions. Sigüenza y Góngora, the great Mexican humanist and official Cosmographer to New Spain, wrote a book, The Philosophical Manifesto Against Comets, Stripped of their Dominion over the Fearful, to counter-act popular fears about the comet (and three hundred seventeen years later, my friend Miruna Achim wrote her Ph.D dissertation on Sigüenza – and, as she might point out, that Schechner’s book shows no awareness of Sigüenza whatsoever hints at the provincial Eurocentrism that bedevils the history of science).
Pierre Bayle also wrote about the comet. Bayle, like Sigüenza, is writing against superstition as much as he is writing in a scientific manner about celestial phenomena. Thus, Bayle’s Diverse Thoughts on the Comet is more of a philosophical than an astronomical treatise. In it, Bayle devoted a long section on the morals and behavior which might be found in a society of atheists and produced a “paradox” that proved to be important in the history of the liberal tradition. Bayle choses to combat the common idea that an atheist moves from disbelief in God to lewdness, drunkenness and murder. In fact, Bayle thinks it is a mistake to think that atheists would be more prone to murder one another, or less prone to pride themselves on their honor, than Christians. In fact, Bayle claims, the difference between a society of atheists and a society of Christians would be of the same type, with the same variations, as the difference between two societies of Christians. Local customs would make for some differences, but in both, the norms would be as we would expect: a moral code would be followed, as well as a code of honor. His Christian interlocutor might say, “ it is a strange thing that an atheist might live virtuously, he would be a monster who surpassed the forces of nature” – But Bayle points to two pieces of evidence that show that the Christian has misunderstood the atheist. First, there are ancient virtuous sages who were atheists, or, like Epicure, conceived that God did not interfere in the course of the world, while at the same time there are plenty of Christian criminals, of whom the courts are full to overflowing. And second Bayle claims, from the accounts of travelers, that there really are societies of atheists, for instance in Brazil, who were no worse than societies of Christians. In fact, a good deal better.
Why is this? Bayle has several answers. For instance, voluptuaries, who are considered great deniers of God, are misunderstood, according to Bayle. You don’t run after blonds and brunettes, get drunk as often as possible, and seek to kill time with every kind of debauch and at the same time concern yourself with knowing if Descartes were right or wrong in his metaphysical proofs of God. Similarly, the atheists Bayle knows are as lean as Crassius, and spend their time studying, all the better to refute the proofs of the divinity. Beyond this admittedly comic fact lies a more serious one: man does not regulate his conduct by his opinions.
“I conceive that it is a very strange thing that a man may live morally who believes neither in paradise nor hell. But I always return to the fact that man is a certain creature who, with all his reason, does not always act in consequence of his beliefs. Christians have furnished us enough proofs of this.”
Others have too. Stoics act unstoically when they are in pain. Turks, who have a famous belief in fatality, flee danger. “They use their lights and their prudence much as we do.” There are Christians who believe in predestination, and those who don’t: “But in spite of this difference, they govern themselves, one another, in the same fashion, as for what concerns morals. If they differ in some way, this derives from the genius of the nation, and not the genius of the sect.” [427]
The great explanation, however, lies in the nature of opinion itself. General opinions, according to Bayle, don’t determine behavior. It is particular opinion – and, in particular, self interest – that does.
Vico, in his New Science, notes shrewdly that Bayle has been mislead by his travelers’ tales: those Brazilian Indians, for instance, did have a religion. Vico claims, in fact, that religion is a universal characteristic of human societies, and thus tells us something about the social bond itself. Of course, Vico has turned out to be right, insofar as explorers and priests simply refused to recognize the rituals and narratives of the peoples they encountered as religious. Although that discovery has made it clear that the whole notion that religion depends on an act of belief, as it seems to do in Christianity, or to a lesser extent in Judaism, is not universal to all religions.
But as interesting, to me, is Bayle’s notion that an atheist belief system might even be better, insofar as it would be a general belief in nothing. Thus, the general belief, which Bayle thinks doesn’t have an effect on human behavior in particular, would be supplemented. For, in actuality, Bayle’s belief about the indifference of the general belief system is not completely descriptive. By the very fact that he is writing against superstition, one can conclude that it is Bayle’s logical conclusion that human beings should not be determined in their behaviors by their general beliefs. Unfortunately, in reality, they seem to be.
This is, once again, one of those universals to be in which the seventeenth century is so rich. I think, however, Bayle’s idea is not only important in as much as it makes the case for tolerance of a sort, but also for advancing a notion of human beings as being both individual and vacant – except insofar as particular motives move them – which plays an important role in theorizing the capitalist market.
More about that later.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
nostalgia to karma - scattered notes
Nostalgia, that longing for a past that longing has created, is a trap that is hidden in the path of that philosophical critic – like LI – upon whom the contemporary lies like a nightmare on the brain of the living. A revenant, in fact. For such a critic, this nightmarish condition is recognized, justly, as the result of multiple framing conditions constructed over the course of the past. The contemporary is a synthesis, and it is the critic’s job to dissolve it into it composite parts, each the result of decision after decision, systematic shifts in production and attitude, a social psychology that represses its lost opportunities, and even individuals, singularities, karma. And once the critic has done his job, he thinks he’s found the key, the story, the narrative. But, in fact, he’s still entangled in the synthesis he has supposedly dissolve, he’s still unconsciously seeing the contemporary as the destination to which the past tends. Which is how it becomes easy to slip into the language of heroes versus villains. And, if the critic is a dreamer, as LI is, he approaches his task with the sigh, “if only,” on his lips. “If only” is the prologue to the utopian dream.
So it goes with the strange story I am putting together, that story of the happiness of the people, the happiness of the individual, the happiness of the system. In Milan, in 1796, the occupation government set up by Napoleon’s soldiers launched a contest for the best essay on the topic, “which form of free government is most conducive to the happiness of Italy?” I can see that this is a beautiful question. The beauty of it is buried, of course, under centuries of trivializing the terms, but – it is definitely a beautiful question.
... I’ve been following the adventurer because it is under the form of adventure that an individual could range the positional social structure in the early modern period. And because, unlike the artist or the politician, other creations of the early modern period, the adventurer never ceased to be a character type and only a character type. It never became a vocation. However, as a character type, it loaned itself to both artist and politician.
And at certain extraordinary moments, the adventurer became universal. In a sense, that is what a revolution is: the interval in which everyone, whether they want to be or not, is an adventurer.
....
I came across a wonderful description of a Neapolitan poet, Eleonora Fonseca Pimental, who supported the French when the French army took Naples and proclaimed a Republic in 1799. The French were extremely unpopular with the peasants, the aristocracy, and the lazzaroni. Pimental was aware of this, but believed that education was the answer – the people must be enlightened. Unfortunately for her, the counter-revolution, led by priests, retook Naples for the King. It was a bloodbath for the Jacobins and Republicans. According to Christopher Duggan’s history of Italy, The Force of Destiny, many of the intellectuals, the radicals, were rounded up and hung or decapitated. About Pimental he writes: She went to the scaffold on 20 August, her brown skirt tucked modestly around her legs, and uttering the words of Virgil: Forsam et haec olim meminisse juvabit – “Perhaps one day even these things will bring pleasure.” Oblivious to such erudition, the crowd cheered loudly as she hanged.” (23)
Karma is a royal family. Pimental was hung due largely to the actions of the King Ferdinand’s Queen, Caroline. Queen Caroline had, at one time, been a patron of culture, and of all things French, at the Court, to display opposition to her enemy, the King of Spain. Everything changed, changed utterly for her on October 16, 1793. That was the date of the death of her sister. Queen Caroline’s sister was a woman named Marie Antoinette.
So it goes with the strange story I am putting together, that story of the happiness of the people, the happiness of the individual, the happiness of the system. In Milan, in 1796, the occupation government set up by Napoleon’s soldiers launched a contest for the best essay on the topic, “which form of free government is most conducive to the happiness of Italy?” I can see that this is a beautiful question. The beauty of it is buried, of course, under centuries of trivializing the terms, but – it is definitely a beautiful question.
... I’ve been following the adventurer because it is under the form of adventure that an individual could range the positional social structure in the early modern period. And because, unlike the artist or the politician, other creations of the early modern period, the adventurer never ceased to be a character type and only a character type. It never became a vocation. However, as a character type, it loaned itself to both artist and politician.
And at certain extraordinary moments, the adventurer became universal. In a sense, that is what a revolution is: the interval in which everyone, whether they want to be or not, is an adventurer.
....
I came across a wonderful description of a Neapolitan poet, Eleonora Fonseca Pimental, who supported the French when the French army took Naples and proclaimed a Republic in 1799. The French were extremely unpopular with the peasants, the aristocracy, and the lazzaroni. Pimental was aware of this, but believed that education was the answer – the people must be enlightened. Unfortunately for her, the counter-revolution, led by priests, retook Naples for the King. It was a bloodbath for the Jacobins and Republicans. According to Christopher Duggan’s history of Italy, The Force of Destiny, many of the intellectuals, the radicals, were rounded up and hung or decapitated. About Pimental he writes: She went to the scaffold on 20 August, her brown skirt tucked modestly around her legs, and uttering the words of Virgil: Forsam et haec olim meminisse juvabit – “Perhaps one day even these things will bring pleasure.” Oblivious to such erudition, the crowd cheered loudly as she hanged.” (23)
Karma is a royal family. Pimental was hung due largely to the actions of the King Ferdinand’s Queen, Caroline. Queen Caroline had, at one time, been a patron of culture, and of all things French, at the Court, to display opposition to her enemy, the King of Spain. Everything changed, changed utterly for her on October 16, 1793. That was the date of the death of her sister. Queen Caroline’s sister was a woman named Marie Antoinette.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
the economy of loaves and fishes
Kevin Phillips, as a populist, always gets under the skin of professional economists. And, of course, when a professional economist is put in a corner, he responds with professional jargon. Like Sganarelle in The Doctor in Spite of Himself, mixing up medical and rhetorical effects, economists will immediately revert to model talk when pressed, disregarding the fact that their enemy, the populist, is criticizing the very idea that those models represent economic reality. The economist will then defend himself with some reference to other sciences in which models are used, like physics. Thus, Tyler Cowen, the man who wants you to believe that there is no difference between trading between Austin and Dallas and trading between Austin and Bangalore, gave Phillips book the thumbs down in his review of it, which ends by saying: The author should spend a week locked in a room with the Solow model. Of course, as I have pointed out in my own post on trading the residual, the Solow model is very much about national economies. Since Cowen apparently believes the nation has no status as a unit of analysis in economics, it is hard to see what he thinks that model is going to do for him, since it presupposes that the nation is a unit of analysis. In any case, the model reference is almost always meant to impress the reader with the “science” of economics, and the science is supposed to be proven by the fact that the models can be built, just like in physics. Of course, there’s no reason to think that physical forces and economics forces are alike. If anything, the model should be behavioral, the reference should be to biology, and the reification of models should simply stop. The counter-revolution in economics, the overthrow of the post-World War II order (as the inevitable cracks showed up in capitalism – the declining rate of profit, as per Marx’s prediction, which was all over the seventies) was a return to the ‘foundation’ of economics as a science. Robert Lucas, when he wrote that equilibrium is the “condition of intelligibility” of economic thought, put the doctrine nicely. This is the great rule. Institutional economists, and the Keynes who has not been modified and smoothed into professional presentability, exist on the outskirts precisely because they dispute this idea.
However, this isn’t to say that Phillips doesn’t carry certain old superstitions into his attacks on the establishment, including one of the oldest, which is that the State should – for magical reasons – always try to balance its budget. This populist theme puzzles me. It turns the state into an abstraction – which is, of course, a large step in the direction of neo-classical economics. If the state could be seen as an intrusion on the efficient market sphere – instead of simply another aspect of the total economy, one having to do with the economy’s primary task of distributing wealth – then we dissipate the cloud of unknowing that settles over the economic system whenever economists pull the discussion of it into a discussion of “efficiency.”
That said, in this Harpers article, Phillips is right to point out that the picture of our economy painted by the government over time has been increasingly distorted by the desire of administrations, Democrat and Republican, to massage the numbers. And to put a gloss on the ideologies they are selling. The most startling of those distortions is the odd way in which the government treats housing.
“In 1983, under the Reagan Administration, inflation was further finagled when the Bureau of Labor Statistics decided that housing, too, was overstating the Consumer Price Index; the BLS substituted an entirely different “Owner Equivalent Rent” measurement, based on what a homeowner might get for renting his or her house. This methodology, controversial at the time but still in place today, simply sidestepped what was happening in the real world of homeowner costs. Because low inflation encourages low interest rates, which in turn make it much easier to borrow money, the BLS’s decision no doubt encouraged, during the late 1980s, the large and often speculative expansion in private debt—much of which involved real estate, and some of which went spectacularly bad between 1989 and 1992 in the savings-and-loan, real estate, and junk-bond scandals.”
Later on, Phillips writes:
“Nothing, however, can match the tortured evolution of the third key number, the somewhat misnamed Consumer Price Index. Government economists themselves admit that the revisions during the Clinton years worked to reduce the current inflation figures by more than a percentage point, but the overall distortion has been considerably more severe. Just the 1983 manipulation, which substituted “owner equivalent rent” for home-ownership costs, served to understate or reduce inflation during the recent housing boom by 3 to 4 percentage points.”
If you think about that for a minute, you will have a key to the odd behavior of the Fed – which is aligned with the odd behavior of the Bush administration. If housing prices had been fairly assessed, the Fed would have faced a big jump in inflation around 2004-2006. And it would have had to respond, at least by traditional rules, by raising interest rates to meet that inflation. Now, the Fed did raise interest rates over this period, but the addition of 3 to 4 percentage points to the inflation numbers would have caused a much bigger raise. At the same time, the Bush administration should have used the peak period to raise taxes – the state should have taken money out of an incipient inflationary spiral. What would have been the effect of that? If would, for one thing, have busted the housing bubble earlier. And for another thing, it would have strengthened the dollar. A stronger dollar, of course, would have significantly lowered the inflation in the price of a barrel of oil. Such being the case, the Fed would then have lowered the interest rate for a whole other reason over the last two years – with housing prices falling as they are. And presumably the price of oil, even with the rise due to the mad, bad aggression of the Bush people, would not have risen to over one hundred dollars a barrel. Instead, we have a typical third world misalignment between, on the one hand, deflation of the most significant asset most Americans are invested in, the house, and on the other hand, inflation of the one product that Americans depend upon most to maintain their lifestyles, oil.
Of course, the odd adjustments to the cost of living index explain other things too. If housing prices were really going down, by way of hedonic adjustments, when they seemed to be going up, then it would make sense that the number of buyers would be going up – there are more buyers for lower priced goods. Indeed, that happened. Unfortunately, it also happened that the majority of those buyers were using mortgages they couldn’t pay for. Somehow, they couldn’t hedonically adjust the mortgage terms so that they could pay it.
In a sense, what Phillips is pointing to is the separation between accounting, on the one hand, and economics assessments, on the other. Accounting, which should move policy, should simply be about the costs in the real living environment. Economists, however, are right that, from an absolute standpoint, Americans are living in a more prosperous world than, say, when they had to spend a third of their take home income on food. But they are dead wrong that anybody is living in an absolute standpoint. We all live in the relative. In accounting, if a company makes a better quality product, x, for the same cost it made the alpha line of x, and sells it for the same price, the company doesn’t thus lose money. No accountant in the world would put the company in the red for such a deal. What counts is simply the cash flow.
Now, of course, it is too late. What the Fed can or can’t do doesn’t matter so much at the moment. If the Government doesn’t understand where to cut unnecessary expenses – the Iraq war – and where to increase expenditures – unemployment benefits, health care, and a vast program for addressing the twin problems of de-industrialization and the environment - then this is going to be another period of severe recession for most Americans, followed by a silent recession for most Americans. It isn’t a good prospect.
On the other hand, if the U.S. is not going to do what it should to address the huge environmental problems its very prosperity has caused, a set of problems that the U.S., with its massive socialistic investments in higher education, is perfectly positioned to take on, maybe the cure is just a long, long slump.
However, this isn’t to say that Phillips doesn’t carry certain old superstitions into his attacks on the establishment, including one of the oldest, which is that the State should – for magical reasons – always try to balance its budget. This populist theme puzzles me. It turns the state into an abstraction – which is, of course, a large step in the direction of neo-classical economics. If the state could be seen as an intrusion on the efficient market sphere – instead of simply another aspect of the total economy, one having to do with the economy’s primary task of distributing wealth – then we dissipate the cloud of unknowing that settles over the economic system whenever economists pull the discussion of it into a discussion of “efficiency.”
That said, in this Harpers article, Phillips is right to point out that the picture of our economy painted by the government over time has been increasingly distorted by the desire of administrations, Democrat and Republican, to massage the numbers. And to put a gloss on the ideologies they are selling. The most startling of those distortions is the odd way in which the government treats housing.
“In 1983, under the Reagan Administration, inflation was further finagled when the Bureau of Labor Statistics decided that housing, too, was overstating the Consumer Price Index; the BLS substituted an entirely different “Owner Equivalent Rent” measurement, based on what a homeowner might get for renting his or her house. This methodology, controversial at the time but still in place today, simply sidestepped what was happening in the real world of homeowner costs. Because low inflation encourages low interest rates, which in turn make it much easier to borrow money, the BLS’s decision no doubt encouraged, during the late 1980s, the large and often speculative expansion in private debt—much of which involved real estate, and some of which went spectacularly bad between 1989 and 1992 in the savings-and-loan, real estate, and junk-bond scandals.”
Later on, Phillips writes:
“Nothing, however, can match the tortured evolution of the third key number, the somewhat misnamed Consumer Price Index. Government economists themselves admit that the revisions during the Clinton years worked to reduce the current inflation figures by more than a percentage point, but the overall distortion has been considerably more severe. Just the 1983 manipulation, which substituted “owner equivalent rent” for home-ownership costs, served to understate or reduce inflation during the recent housing boom by 3 to 4 percentage points.”
If you think about that for a minute, you will have a key to the odd behavior of the Fed – which is aligned with the odd behavior of the Bush administration. If housing prices had been fairly assessed, the Fed would have faced a big jump in inflation around 2004-2006. And it would have had to respond, at least by traditional rules, by raising interest rates to meet that inflation. Now, the Fed did raise interest rates over this period, but the addition of 3 to 4 percentage points to the inflation numbers would have caused a much bigger raise. At the same time, the Bush administration should have used the peak period to raise taxes – the state should have taken money out of an incipient inflationary spiral. What would have been the effect of that? If would, for one thing, have busted the housing bubble earlier. And for another thing, it would have strengthened the dollar. A stronger dollar, of course, would have significantly lowered the inflation in the price of a barrel of oil. Such being the case, the Fed would then have lowered the interest rate for a whole other reason over the last two years – with housing prices falling as they are. And presumably the price of oil, even with the rise due to the mad, bad aggression of the Bush people, would not have risen to over one hundred dollars a barrel. Instead, we have a typical third world misalignment between, on the one hand, deflation of the most significant asset most Americans are invested in, the house, and on the other hand, inflation of the one product that Americans depend upon most to maintain their lifestyles, oil.
Of course, the odd adjustments to the cost of living index explain other things too. If housing prices were really going down, by way of hedonic adjustments, when they seemed to be going up, then it would make sense that the number of buyers would be going up – there are more buyers for lower priced goods. Indeed, that happened. Unfortunately, it also happened that the majority of those buyers were using mortgages they couldn’t pay for. Somehow, they couldn’t hedonically adjust the mortgage terms so that they could pay it.
In a sense, what Phillips is pointing to is the separation between accounting, on the one hand, and economics assessments, on the other. Accounting, which should move policy, should simply be about the costs in the real living environment. Economists, however, are right that, from an absolute standpoint, Americans are living in a more prosperous world than, say, when they had to spend a third of their take home income on food. But they are dead wrong that anybody is living in an absolute standpoint. We all live in the relative. In accounting, if a company makes a better quality product, x, for the same cost it made the alpha line of x, and sells it for the same price, the company doesn’t thus lose money. No accountant in the world would put the company in the red for such a deal. What counts is simply the cash flow.
Now, of course, it is too late. What the Fed can or can’t do doesn’t matter so much at the moment. If the Government doesn’t understand where to cut unnecessary expenses – the Iraq war – and where to increase expenditures – unemployment benefits, health care, and a vast program for addressing the twin problems of de-industrialization and the environment - then this is going to be another period of severe recession for most Americans, followed by a silent recession for most Americans. It isn’t a good prospect.
On the other hand, if the U.S. is not going to do what it should to address the huge environmental problems its very prosperity has caused, a set of problems that the U.S., with its massive socialistic investments in higher education, is perfectly positioned to take on, maybe the cure is just a long, long slump.
Friday, July 11, 2008
the human limit/l’expérience-limite
Before I had ever read the phrase “l’expérience-limite”, I had felt it. In the rather peculiar way one gropes around a hole in the dark, gaining a hand understanding which is, of course, difficult to put into words that belong to the world of light. The feeling, which was especially strong in me in the eighties, was that the norms of success, success as I had imbibed it in the burbs where I grew up, encoded, at a deep level, a ghastly defeat. The term of success were simply the terms of a dishonorable surrender, a betrayal of the forces one’s ego could muster, just so as to retire to a lifetime of being able to purchase enough stupifiants to help one forget the treason, that failed slave revolt. This is, of course, a child’s view of that artificial paradise, our life now. On the other hand, our criteria are determined by our situation – I have no overall vision of this time in which to judge it absolutely.
So, when I encountered the phrase in Blanchot, who I read after reading Bataille (and Bataille has always been closer to my heart) – I was magically caught up in it. In fact, in the early nineties, under the banner of l’expérience-limite, I fucked up in a number of ways that I’m not going to go into – some of them I am still paying for.
Since, at the moment, I am using the “human limit” to help me define that way of being in the world which was eclipsed by the happiness culture, I thought I’d go back and see what Foucault said about l’expérience-limite – he whose life was, according to his biographer, James Miller, so enthralled by that notion. Actually, Foucault doesn’t say much about it directly. But he does make one of his flashing, gnostic remarks in an interview with Duccio Trombadori in 1978:
“ The phenomenologist's experience is basically a way of organizing
the conscious perception (_regard reflexif_) of any aspect of daily,
lived experience in its transitory form, in order to grasp its meaning.
Nietzsche, Bataille, and Blanchot, on the contrary, try through
experience to reach that point of life which lies as close as possible to
the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or extreme. They
attempt to gather the maximum amount of intensity and impossibility at
the same time. The work of the phenomenologist, however, essentially
consists of unfolding the entire field of possibilities connected to
daily experience.
Moreover, phenomenology tries to grasp the significance of daily
experience in order to reaffirm the fundamental chracter of the subject,
of the self, of its transcendental functions. On the contrary,
experience according to Nietzsche, Blanchot, and Bataille has rather the
task of "tearing" the subject from itself in such a way that it is no
longer the subject as such, or that it is completely "other" than itself
so that it may arrive at its annihilation, its dissociation.
It is this de-subjectifying undertaking, the idea of a "limit-experience"
that tears the subject from itself, which is the fundamental lesson that
I've learned from these authors. And no matter how boring and erudite my
resulting books have been, this lesson has always allowed me to conceive
them as direct experiences to "tear" me from myself, to prevent me from
always being the same."
This way of looking at the experience limit has, unfortunately, only been applied to Foucault’s own biography. I think, however, it contains the seed of an experience of reading and writing, of the third life, which brings together the adventurer and the book. The book, the use of which becomes the sign that separates the savage from the civilized, would, it seems, not have a savage use – useless to the savage who can’t read it, and transforming the savage who does read it – into the civilized. Perhaps, however, there is a savage literacy, a way of taking the book too seriously, of being driven mad by it, or of going through it – writing it and reading it – as an experience of de-subjectification.
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