Ah, there is nothing so fine as comments sections. The NYT and the Washington Post have been filling up with indignant comments since Paulsen’s Wall Street Cargo Cult plan – (buy holy objects, wait until spirit appears, sell again) – shocked the complacent American householder. And, surprisingly, from shore to shore, they’ve been hardworkin’ savin’, scrimpin’ and so squeakily virtuous that heaven looks down in envy! Who would have guessed? All the time I thought it was the householders that elected Bush twice, looked on with bloodlust and shiteating grins as we invaded Iraq, took out 800 billion dollars in home loan equity, and watched with greed and no inclination to question as housing prices became the little guy’s stockmarket – bound to go up! Are these the same people who resided in a country most known, for the last eight years, for its trade deficits and its charming deal with China – buy our T-notes and we will buy your bloodspeckled plastic toys! I musta been livin’ in the wrong country.
And now, of course, the bills for the fun filled political vacation come due. When Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California, the first thing he did was Charge IT! – to a round of cheers from those scrimpin and savin’ burgermen, working all day, thinking of Jesus Christ all night. After all, why pay for the structures you need every day when – as Mr. Magician said in that beautiful Christmas Classic, It’s a Wonderful Reagan-y Kinda Life, – the magic of the marketplace makes lower taxes bring in more revenue! We owe it to ourselves! We can’t surrender to terrorists! We can’t return to the days of tax and spend! Class warfare! As the man says:
Quelli che son dentro la merda fin qui, oh yeah
Quelli che con una bella dormita passa tutto anche il cancro, oh yeah
Quelli che, quelli che non possono crederci anche adesso che la terra e’ rotonda, oh yeah, oh yeah
Quelli che hanno paura del aeroplano, oh yeah
Quelli che non hanno mai avuto un incidente mortale, oh yeah
Quelli che non ci sentiamo
Quelli che a un certo punto della vita ci vorrebbe una arma segreta, ostia, oh yeah
I’m sure there are whole sections of Abu Ghraib that are on lockdown, so intense is the sympathetic weeping for those who trying to sell their McHummers, those calling in about the “minorities” getting special deals from the government and hasn’t this brought the whole fuckin’ thing down, those who have to eat out less, those who have to tell their kids, we’ll go to the dentist next year... oh yeah!
You can tell LI is deeply, deeply moved. I like the timing of the California plea (dear Santa, send us Eight billion dollars and we promise to be good all year!) as the Cargo Cult bill is signed by the Great Fly himself, going out of office in high drama – tough and weathered, a cowboy who has brought us Victory with a V, not white flags with a W, in Iraq – and don’t you feel so much freer? Constipation gone? Song in your heart? Perhaps you are triphoping down HangSaddam Avenue this very afternoon! I know I am.
This is the Zona. The “ghost wind.” The Fore have a long history with the Zona. When it blows, the victims of kuru tremble. Others pile up leaves, dirt and excrement and carefully store it in their huts, thinking that it will turn into metal. The Zona is in control here, people. I am merely its scruffy little pissant prophet.
Friday, October 03, 2008
Thursday, October 02, 2008
I, the substitute 2
“All planned out human sacrifice ceremonies betray the God to which they are consecrated: they subordinate him to the primacy of human goals, dissolve his power, and this deception of him is seamlessly transposed into that which the unbelieving priest performs on the believing congregation. Cunning arises in the cult. Odysseus himself functions as both the victim and the priest. Through calculation of his own obedience he effects a negation of the power to which the obedience is pledged. So he redeems his fallen live. But in no way do deceit, cunning and rationality stand in simple opposition to the archaic element of sacrifice. It is only that through Odysseus, the moment of the deception in sacrifice, the most inner ground perhaps for the pseudocharacter of myth, is lifted into consciousness. It must be a primeval experience that the communication with the gods through sacrifice is not real. The sacrifice of the substitute, glorified by new fashioned irrationalists, isn’t to be separated from the divination of the sacrificed, the deceit of the priestly rationalisation of murder through the apotheosis of the chosen. Something of such a deceit, which still lifts the picked person to the bearer of divine substance, can be traced from then in the I, that has itself to thank for the sacrifice of the moment to the future. Its substantiality is an appearance like the immortality of the slaughtered. It isn’t surprising that Odysseus seemed a divinity to many.” – Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of the Enlightenment (my translation)
Calasso makes a sweeping thematic statement in The Ruin of Karsch, a book that was written in the shadow of the horrors of the seventies:
Calasso is writing to tease out the infinite subtleties in the system of war which, in his view, is the real name of modernity. The economic system, whether managed by the private sphere or commanded by the state, exists in the void left by a mechanical and blind system of human sacrifice that no longer has any belief in any invisible power that could explain the compulsive bloodletting. Although this seems to be miles away from the rise of the happiness culture, the two develop in tandem, one with the other.
The substitute in the sacrifice, as Adorno and Horkheimer point out, is both a trick of human rationality, played on the invisible power, and the first step in the long undermining of the need for sacrifice.
Now, it might seem, at first glance, that nothing could be as repugnant to a society organized around the image of the limited good as sacrifice. Sacrifice would seem to violate the assumption that resources are so distributed that the acquisition of them is a zero-sum game. What I have, you don’t have. And this is the genius of sacrifice, its tie to power and wealth and essentially predatory and contingent qualities. As we pointed out in a number of posts, wealth as treasure is wealth as accident – wealth as a thing that comes purely from the exterior, a sign and symbol of it. And that exteriority marks treasure as a part of power, which is that into which all exteriority is merged. If Adorno and Horkheimer are right, then the logic of sacrifice is shaped by these social assumptions. Sacrifice is the symbol of predation, and the predatory portion that goes back to the predator. The predator’s claim is, essential, to ownership of everything, and that claim is the basis of the invisible order of things. The portion sacrificed is the substitute for that all, against the impossible realization of the predatory power’s claim – which would be the end of the world. Death is of course the predator’s triumph, and it is this which the sacrifice wards off for a little while.
Bataille’s idea is that sacrifice defines the sacred and the accursed. The social correlate, here, is treasure and waste. Between the two there is a strong bond. The substitution of waste for treasure, or the magic that makes waste into treasure, or the secret power of waste – these are all deep fairy tale motifs. The substitution of treasure for waste, on the other hand, this was the great Christian paradox of God’s sacrifice of his son. It is such a mad gesture that the first become last in its aftermath, and the world is turned upside down. Theologians, of course, spend centuries turning the world back upright, but the idea of treasure substituted for waste still emits a powerful revolutionary frequency below the official discourse.
LI’s notion, then, is that the substitute has different meanings in the two regimes sketched out by Calasso’s sweeping gesture – the regime in which sacrifice has a meaning, and the regime in which sacrifice turns into futile superstition. Thus, the moment that the substitute is no longer a marker in the intricate transactions by which pure exteriority is appeased with its share, it is, in a sense, freed. First as a character, then as a personality, first as an autonomous subject, then as a sociological object. In the atmosphere of liberty, the substitute seems to disappear entirely – for what is liberty but the absolute uniqueness of the individual? But in that ephemeral moment, the stress of the purposelessness of the unique individual on the system forces the return of the substitute as the subject –its transit through the tropic of liberty returns it to the system freed, more practically, from the mark of the sacred, and ready to get to work. The lack of that substitute within disturbs what Tolstoy calls the animal personality, and there has to be a substitute for the missing substitute – there must be, for instance, self-interest – or there looms the menace of social rejection, various deaths in the madhouse. These are the stakes of transgression, and why, for Bataille, it bears the impress of that unbearable moment when the substitute, in the triumph of rationality over all exteriority, all invisible powers, disappears.
Calasso makes a sweeping thematic statement in The Ruin of Karsch, a book that was written in the shadow of the horrors of the seventies:
“History is summed up in the fact that for a long time men killed other beings and dedicated them to an invisible power, but after a certain point they killed without dedicating the victims to anyone. Did they forget? Did they consider that act of homage futile? Did they condemn it as repugnant? All these reasons had some sort of bearing on the matter. Afterwards, nothing remained but pure killing... (135)
Calasso is writing to tease out the infinite subtleties in the system of war which, in his view, is the real name of modernity. The economic system, whether managed by the private sphere or commanded by the state, exists in the void left by a mechanical and blind system of human sacrifice that no longer has any belief in any invisible power that could explain the compulsive bloodletting. Although this seems to be miles away from the rise of the happiness culture, the two develop in tandem, one with the other.
The substitute in the sacrifice, as Adorno and Horkheimer point out, is both a trick of human rationality, played on the invisible power, and the first step in the long undermining of the need for sacrifice.
Now, it might seem, at first glance, that nothing could be as repugnant to a society organized around the image of the limited good as sacrifice. Sacrifice would seem to violate the assumption that resources are so distributed that the acquisition of them is a zero-sum game. What I have, you don’t have. And this is the genius of sacrifice, its tie to power and wealth and essentially predatory and contingent qualities. As we pointed out in a number of posts, wealth as treasure is wealth as accident – wealth as a thing that comes purely from the exterior, a sign and symbol of it. And that exteriority marks treasure as a part of power, which is that into which all exteriority is merged. If Adorno and Horkheimer are right, then the logic of sacrifice is shaped by these social assumptions. Sacrifice is the symbol of predation, and the predatory portion that goes back to the predator. The predator’s claim is, essential, to ownership of everything, and that claim is the basis of the invisible order of things. The portion sacrificed is the substitute for that all, against the impossible realization of the predatory power’s claim – which would be the end of the world. Death is of course the predator’s triumph, and it is this which the sacrifice wards off for a little while.
Bataille’s idea is that sacrifice defines the sacred and the accursed. The social correlate, here, is treasure and waste. Between the two there is a strong bond. The substitution of waste for treasure, or the magic that makes waste into treasure, or the secret power of waste – these are all deep fairy tale motifs. The substitution of treasure for waste, on the other hand, this was the great Christian paradox of God’s sacrifice of his son. It is such a mad gesture that the first become last in its aftermath, and the world is turned upside down. Theologians, of course, spend centuries turning the world back upright, but the idea of treasure substituted for waste still emits a powerful revolutionary frequency below the official discourse.
LI’s notion, then, is that the substitute has different meanings in the two regimes sketched out by Calasso’s sweeping gesture – the regime in which sacrifice has a meaning, and the regime in which sacrifice turns into futile superstition. Thus, the moment that the substitute is no longer a marker in the intricate transactions by which pure exteriority is appeased with its share, it is, in a sense, freed. First as a character, then as a personality, first as an autonomous subject, then as a sociological object. In the atmosphere of liberty, the substitute seems to disappear entirely – for what is liberty but the absolute uniqueness of the individual? But in that ephemeral moment, the stress of the purposelessness of the unique individual on the system forces the return of the substitute as the subject –its transit through the tropic of liberty returns it to the system freed, more practically, from the mark of the sacred, and ready to get to work. The lack of that substitute within disturbs what Tolstoy calls the animal personality, and there has to be a substitute for the missing substitute – there must be, for instance, self-interest – or there looms the menace of social rejection, various deaths in the madhouse. These are the stakes of transgression, and why, for Bataille, it bears the impress of that unbearable moment when the substitute, in the triumph of rationality over all exteriority, all invisible powers, disappears.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
the golden rule
In Wittgenstein’s notes on Frazer’s The Golden Branch, he writes:
“Already the idea of wanting to explain the practice – for instance, the killing of the priest king – seems to me to miss the mark. All that Frazer does is make it plausible to men who think as he does. It is very remarkable that all these practices are finally so to speak portrayed as stupidities.
But it will never be plausible that people did all this out of stupidity.
When he explains to us that the King must be killed in his blood, because after the ideas of the savages, otherwise his soul will not be fresh, one can only say: where this practice and this idea go together, the practice does not spring from the idea, but they are both simply there. “
I view this as a sort of golden rule of social explanation. This is why I’ve always found the idea, so popular since the Bush election, that – as my commentor Abb1 puts it – the people are just gullible one that simply says, all people would think like the people in my circle if they were simply not dumb.
But what if there are different kinds of intelligence views of what is advantageous in different circles? Surely liberal circles, which are charmed by the long term, seem intolerably ... constraining to those who dream of quick bucks. Different time frames, different institutional biases. What seems to be the rightwing habit of claiming a and not-a at the same time has often driven me mad with frustration, or the thought that there was some kind of cultural mindfuck going on, some degradation of the native powers, some dimming of vision, some common damage to the frontal lobes out there in the prairies and the pine forests. Some return to infancy. But it is easy to see that this explanation has the advantage of lifting myself up to a self-evident point of superiority.
The popular rage about the failure of the kind of capitalism that, merely a year ago, was held up by these very same people, or their tv heroes, as the very model and acme of what the years of the Great Moderation were all about – the neo-liberal principle untrammeled by any traditional ties or chains – has led to all kinds of explanations that walk around the central fact of that failure, sniffing out traditional demons. And, of course, in this case the traditional object of American anxieties: the black man. Who happens, thank you very much, to be heading closer and closer to the presidency.
Wittgenstein says, further: “No opinion furnishes the ground for a religious symbol. And error only corresponds to opinion. One would like to say: this and this event happens. Laugh if you can.”
“Already the idea of wanting to explain the practice – for instance, the killing of the priest king – seems to me to miss the mark. All that Frazer does is make it plausible to men who think as he does. It is very remarkable that all these practices are finally so to speak portrayed as stupidities.
But it will never be plausible that people did all this out of stupidity.
When he explains to us that the King must be killed in his blood, because after the ideas of the savages, otherwise his soul will not be fresh, one can only say: where this practice and this idea go together, the practice does not spring from the idea, but they are both simply there. “
I view this as a sort of golden rule of social explanation. This is why I’ve always found the idea, so popular since the Bush election, that – as my commentor Abb1 puts it – the people are just gullible one that simply says, all people would think like the people in my circle if they were simply not dumb.
But what if there are different kinds of intelligence views of what is advantageous in different circles? Surely liberal circles, which are charmed by the long term, seem intolerably ... constraining to those who dream of quick bucks. Different time frames, different institutional biases. What seems to be the rightwing habit of claiming a and not-a at the same time has often driven me mad with frustration, or the thought that there was some kind of cultural mindfuck going on, some degradation of the native powers, some dimming of vision, some common damage to the frontal lobes out there in the prairies and the pine forests. Some return to infancy. But it is easy to see that this explanation has the advantage of lifting myself up to a self-evident point of superiority.
The popular rage about the failure of the kind of capitalism that, merely a year ago, was held up by these very same people, or their tv heroes, as the very model and acme of what the years of the Great Moderation were all about – the neo-liberal principle untrammeled by any traditional ties or chains – has led to all kinds of explanations that walk around the central fact of that failure, sniffing out traditional demons. And, of course, in this case the traditional object of American anxieties: the black man. Who happens, thank you very much, to be heading closer and closer to the presidency.
Wittgenstein says, further: “No opinion furnishes the ground for a religious symbol. And error only corresponds to opinion. One would like to say: this and this event happens. Laugh if you can.”
spin the pistol
Well, there will be another round of Russian Roulette tomorrow. The protest against the insane bailout, one might have noticed, has been a young affair. The crowd that just lost their 401 k shit are an older bunch. Finally, we've reached a red state level where the gain/loss equation is clearly on the side of doing anything to keep the pain away.
Since I am poor as shit and have nothing at stake, here, I can just watch this for the sheer drama of it. The bailout bill was given such an ominous aura that it multiplied the effect that would happen once it was knocked down. I can't imagine that the markets will calm down in Asia, or in the U.S. tomorrow. Which is why I think there might be an extraordinary executive order coming.
... And in other news, I sent IT a find on You Tube which I knew would go straight to her heart - a pig in a 1908 interjecting himself into a softcore tease, or at least the hidden version of Mallarme's L'apres-midi d'un faune that begins: "Le Cochon:
Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer."
Well, our favorite Wiltshire goth philosopher proceeds to perpetuer a few archetypes herself. Check it out!
Since I am poor as shit and have nothing at stake, here, I can just watch this for the sheer drama of it. The bailout bill was given such an ominous aura that it multiplied the effect that would happen once it was knocked down. I can't imagine that the markets will calm down in Asia, or in the U.S. tomorrow. Which is why I think there might be an extraordinary executive order coming.
... And in other news, I sent IT a find on You Tube which I knew would go straight to her heart - a pig in a 1908 interjecting himself into a softcore tease, or at least the hidden version of Mallarme's L'apres-midi d'un faune that begins: "Le Cochon:
Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer."
Well, our favorite Wiltshire goth philosopher proceeds to perpetuer a few archetypes herself. Check it out!
Monday, September 29, 2008
Click click
Bush couldn't persuade the Republican party to pull the trigger. The bailout is dead - at least for today. If the GOP had pulled the trigger, that would be the end of the party in the Red States. The reps understand this. The Bush bubble has finally become impervious even to the faux reality it has spun for itself.
These fucker, these fuckers, go ahead Nicky. It's gonna be all right. Put an empty chamber in that gun. Shoot Nicky, shoot shoot!
These fucker, these fuckers, go ahead Nicky. It's gonna be all right. Put an empty chamber in that gun. Shoot Nicky, shoot shoot!
Sunday, September 28, 2008
I, the substitute
“In einer höheren Phase der kommunistischen Gesellschaft, nachdem die knechtende Unterordnung der Individuen unter die Teilung der Arbeit, damit auch der Gegensatz geistiger und körperlicher Arbeit verschwunden ist; nachdem die Arbeit nicht nur Mittel zum Leben, sondern selbst das erste Lebensbedürfnis geworden; nachdem mit der allseitigen Entwicklung der Individuen auch ihre Produktivkräfte {8} gewachsen und alle Springquellen des genossenschaftlichen Reichtums voller fließen - erst dann kann der enge bürgerliche Rechtshorizont ganz überschritten werden und die Gesellschaft auf ihre Fahne schreiben: Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!”
In a higher phrase of communist society, after the slavish subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and thus, also, to the opposition of mental and physical labor has disappeared; after labor has become not only a means to life, but even the first of need of life [sondern selbst das erste Lebensbedürfnis geworden]. after the productivity of the individual has grown along with his all around development, and all the springs of social wealth flow fully – only than can we surpass the narrow horizon of bourgeois rights and society can write on its banner: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”
Marx took this irresistible phrase from Louis Blanc. In the History of the Revolution of 1848, Blanc, a Saint-Simonian, wrote:
Weakness is the creditor of force; ignorance, of instruction. The more a man can do (peut), the more he ought to: and this is the sense of those beautiful worlds of the Gospel: that the first among you must be the servant of the others. From whence, the axiom: from each, according to his capabilities (facultés). This is the obligation.
But, with the capabilites, man has received needs from nature: intellectual needs, moral and physical ones; needs of the heart, of intelligence, of sense, of imagination. Thus, by what means may each fill the function in which nature created him, if social institutions which weigh on him make a barrier to the complete development of his being, in refusing him the satisfaction of needs inherent to his particular organization? From whence – in the limits of common resources, and in taking the word needs in the largest and most noble of acceptations – this axiom, which corresponds to the first and completes it: to each according to his needs. This is the right.” (148)
Droit and Recht, by the way, don’t translate well into English, which lexically distinguishes between the law and right in such a way that ‘rights’ doesn’t carry the load of connotations that the translator would like to imply.
Traditionally, this phrase has been analyzed from the distributive side. The “to each according to his needs” seems to give us a principle of fairness for our economic system – while from each according to his capabilities, or abilities – Fahigkeiten or facultés – sinks into the texture of everyday modern life, a revolutionary demand, perhaps, to make to a semi-feudal order that would condemn the child to follow the parent, but nowadays a commonplace, which we have no need to worry about.
Li does worry, though. For in sweeping away the traditional compulsions, the industrial-market system also sweeps away the craftsman’s attachment to the craft, the farmer’s attachment to the fields – putting in its place the demands of abstract labor. Whether in a market society or in a socialist command and control society, the bond between the person and the labor undergoes a weird dialectic – on the one hand, the person is freed to do what he or she wants, and on the other hand, the bond of affection to one’s chosen faculty becomes so dependent on either market forces or the planning of the state that, in effect, the laborer becomes interchangeable. That interchangeable entity has a name, now: human capital. The momentary intensification the individual, to use Marx’s word, the liberation from feudal bonds, passes quickly into the bonds of a collectivity that can, ideally, shuffle the individual from one situation to another – making this or that skill obsolete, shuttering an economic sector, mobilizing the masses to work on this or that task. It makes one wonder about the slogan on the banner.
I, the substitute – this could be written on the tombstone erected above the individual’s individual moment. To go from one slogan to another. LI wants to bring together the substitute and transgression – to go back to Foucault’s essay. Which we will, hopefully, do soon.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Takeo-chan at one
A year ago, more or less, a son, Takeo, was born to our far flung correspondent, Mr. T, and his lovely wife, Mrs. K., a renowned Gotham jewelrymaker. Takeo has done some amazing things since then. For instance, he has exponentially increased the number of his neural connections. Takeo made this decision as a sort of species friendly gesture towards all humanity. At two, which is the age of genius, he will decide that he’s gone too far, and start pruning the synapses. It is the age of tragedy, two – looking around, the child discovers that his species decision has landed him among a buncha dumb apes – adult humans, in short. With a sigh, the two year old begins the intense and lifelong process of becoming as shortwitted as the rest of us.
But there is that year of genius! And Takeo-chan is going to spend it perfecting his dance moves.
Friday, September 26, 2008
ding dong the witch is dead, the wicked witch
... the wicked witch
ding dong, the wicked witch is dead!
Thank god for Republicans.
They did what the Dems should have done in 2002. They told Bush to go fuck himself. Granted, the Republicans have delusional ideas about what is causing the implosion on Wall Street, but they aren’t so deluded that they can’t see that the investor class that benefited from the massive credit “market” dysfunctions that brought about the crash are proposing to solve it by – giving themselves a lot of money.
As I pointed out, the solution involves a lot of money going from the Red states to the Blue states, inverting what happened during the S and L crisis. Unsurprisingly, people in the Red states don’t like that. Unsurprisingly, big business, the mainstay of the Republican party, does like it.
The status quo ante is dead. Ho ho ho!
Floyd Norris's column this morning is an essential read for all you fans of the coming (r)(d)(ecession)(epression).
ps - it is a commonplace of liberal vituperation to compare Bush to Hitler, a stupid and pointless comparison. But there is one area where it seems to fit - just as Hitler, in his last days, decided to take Germany down with him in one sweeping Gotterdammerung, apparently Bush decided he'd do the same thing with the Republican Party. For of course, the Republican Party will be toast forever, with its own constituency, if it calmly passed this giveaway. Germany surrendered, and the GOP has decided to cut Bush and let him float alone. What this means is that the corporate party is now, out of sheer survival instinct, defying its patrons. I have no idea if that signals the breakup of the party into the Churchlady Party and the Carlyle Party - but it surfaces a strain that has always been there, which could only be closed over by electoral success. My guess is the Carlyle party will have to blink.
ding dong, the wicked witch is dead!
Thank god for Republicans.
They did what the Dems should have done in 2002. They told Bush to go fuck himself. Granted, the Republicans have delusional ideas about what is causing the implosion on Wall Street, but they aren’t so deluded that they can’t see that the investor class that benefited from the massive credit “market” dysfunctions that brought about the crash are proposing to solve it by – giving themselves a lot of money.
As I pointed out, the solution involves a lot of money going from the Red states to the Blue states, inverting what happened during the S and L crisis. Unsurprisingly, people in the Red states don’t like that. Unsurprisingly, big business, the mainstay of the Republican party, does like it.
The status quo ante is dead. Ho ho ho!
Floyd Norris's column this morning is an essential read for all you fans of the coming (r)(d)(ecession)(epression).
ps - it is a commonplace of liberal vituperation to compare Bush to Hitler, a stupid and pointless comparison. But there is one area where it seems to fit - just as Hitler, in his last days, decided to take Germany down with him in one sweeping Gotterdammerung, apparently Bush decided he'd do the same thing with the Republican Party. For of course, the Republican Party will be toast forever, with its own constituency, if it calmly passed this giveaway. Germany surrendered, and the GOP has decided to cut Bush and let him float alone. What this means is that the corporate party is now, out of sheer survival instinct, defying its patrons. I have no idea if that signals the breakup of the party into the Churchlady Party and the Carlyle Party - but it surfaces a strain that has always been there, which could only be closed over by electoral success. My guess is the Carlyle party will have to blink.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
My beyond
In A Preface to Transgression, Foucault’s 1963 essay on Bataille, Foucault discusses the at the time Utopian hopes vested in the seeming fall of sexual taboos. And he expresses something rather marvelous.
... sexuality is a fissure – not one that surrounds us as the basis of our isolation or individuality, but one that marks the limit within us and designates us a limit.
Perhaps we could say that it has become the only division possible in a world now emptied of objects, beings and spaces to desecrate. Not that it profers any new content for our age-old acts; rather, it permits a profanation without object, a profanation that is empty and turned inward upon itself and whose instruments are brought to bear on nothing but each other. Profanation in a world which no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred – is this not more or less what we may call transgression?” [Sorry, I could only find the English translation by Bouchard and Simon]
Li takes this, and indeed the whole essay, as a marker, from which we can measure our own dialectical leaps that, collectively, express our idea of the relationship of the happiness norm and the eclipse of the human limit; two moments that mutually condition one another. If at one time I, too, took, took transgression as the way to dissolve personal structures that stood in the way of what Bataille called Pure Happiness, I now see it from a different point of view, one that is much more skeptical of the entire project of happiness.
By chance, when I was in Mexico, I seemed to get into a lot of discussions about Foucault. R. was reading Veyne’s book on Foucault, and we had a long and rather clumsy argument about Foucault’s relativism (R. being against that interpretation, I being for it, but regretting the terms in which such arguments are usually cast). And then I met a professor who was conducting a seminar on Foucault, and we discussed what I consider to be Foucault’s arbitrary principle in Les Mots et Les Choses, which is that a period could be characterized by one episteme only – which I think is a Duchampian rule, something that exists in order for one to create a new kind of picture of an object, but cannot be defended outside of that realm). Finally, I talked a lot with my friend M. about the lack of any discussion of “discovery” as a mot du savoir in Foucault. To me, this is tied in to the treatment of Europe as a closed system from the baroque to the 19th century. To really look at discovery as the key to an episteme would be to see the tight tie between imperialism and knowing. All of my caveats, however, are not meant to jettison Foucault, but to get my bearings in relation to him, get a useful sense of the limits of someone who is looking at the same period I am, with some of the same assumptions.
“A world that no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred” – this came about in some way that we hear about only on the margins of the early work. Because Foucault wanted to emphasize discontinuity, because he wanted to free himself from the tiresome tropes of the dialectic, he chose this route. There was a price, however, and it is interesting that as he came back to sexuality as a continuing theme in the end. That the human limit is within us, wrenched from its sacred correlate, in a sense orphaned, without a vocabulary of its own, or a conceptual scheme – an impulse, an instinct that has to cloth itself in metaphors borrowed from a past that is in conflict with the history that validates its very position, its interiority, its integrity, this is the puzzle that I’ve been working on. The larger question that faces the critique of the happiness culture is: is it even possible to carry through this critique without recourse to the sacred, without infusing the conceptual structure one uses with borrowings, and thus debts, to the religious?
Now, of course, my utopian idea is that this is possible. The possibility is realized in the performance of the critique, but – my position, the positive possibility of a position, is definitely rooted in Bataille’s impossible. My own use of an ironically magical and hermetic vocabulary is a not wholly successful way to express my intuition.
This may be why I feel such a kinship to Foucault’s project, since I feel like the “lunar” starting point, the sense people had that Foucault was inhuman, has to do with an assumption that was rooted in impossibility. If, now, I end up on the other side of that impossibility, if I refuse the path to “pure happiness” – that last sentiment that Bataille could not give up – well, maybe that is because my impossible is beyond happiness – the only truly radical beyond, in my opinion. The Archimedean point for overturning the modern order. This conviction I will, of course, scrupulously disguise in my book to come – since I don’t want to be rejected so easily. I will smile, smile, and be a villain still.
Primer for the day
Let’s do a little primer.
Let’s bracket the idea, for a moment, that collateralizing securities and layering contractual bets on these securities – derivatives – only exist as rentseeking instruments, ie, have no productive economic use. What, then, is the justification for them? The only possible justification is that they ameliorated risk, so that lenders, who would otherwise not be able to afford more hazardous loans, are able to make them. And what is the signal for the lenders that the risk is well spread? The signal is prices. So, the only justification for the derivative market, and for the off the books market in collateralized securities, is that they can smooth out the price of risk.
Given this, ask yourself: why, then, does it turn out that nobody can price out these instruments?
The answer is that this is an institutional failure. Unlike the stock exchange, which transparently represents the price of stocks for all buyers and sellers to see, the pricing system for risk and “insurance” on risk, bizarrely, is institutionally dispersed, and thus systematically opaque.
If – as with a heavy heart, LI thinks will be the case – some type of bailout is attempted that doesn’t address the institutional failure, we will simply watch the greatest disappearing act ever performed, dwarfing Houdini’s legendary vanishing elephant routine.
So, congress should insist that any bailout bill carries with it mandatory institutional reforms. The two things can’t be disconnected. That the Treasury, absurdly, proposes to price the securities “by hand” tells us all we need to know about the ridiculousness of the current system. The OTC system is in ruins. There must be an open and instituted exchange through which all instruments must pass. There could even be more than one. But to pass this bill and continue the OTC system is utter folly. This “crisis” is much like the gold ring crisis of 1876, except that the corrupt officials in Grant’s administration were violating the law, while this bold faced robbery sticks up the nation and demands to be legalized. The least we can demand is that the pricing system be radically revamped.
Let’s bracket the idea, for a moment, that collateralizing securities and layering contractual bets on these securities – derivatives – only exist as rentseeking instruments, ie, have no productive economic use. What, then, is the justification for them? The only possible justification is that they ameliorated risk, so that lenders, who would otherwise not be able to afford more hazardous loans, are able to make them. And what is the signal for the lenders that the risk is well spread? The signal is prices. So, the only justification for the derivative market, and for the off the books market in collateralized securities, is that they can smooth out the price of risk.
Given this, ask yourself: why, then, does it turn out that nobody can price out these instruments?
The answer is that this is an institutional failure. Unlike the stock exchange, which transparently represents the price of stocks for all buyers and sellers to see, the pricing system for risk and “insurance” on risk, bizarrely, is institutionally dispersed, and thus systematically opaque.
If – as with a heavy heart, LI thinks will be the case – some type of bailout is attempted that doesn’t address the institutional failure, we will simply watch the greatest disappearing act ever performed, dwarfing Houdini’s legendary vanishing elephant routine.
So, congress should insist that any bailout bill carries with it mandatory institutional reforms. The two things can’t be disconnected. That the Treasury, absurdly, proposes to price the securities “by hand” tells us all we need to know about the ridiculousness of the current system. The OTC system is in ruins. There must be an open and instituted exchange through which all instruments must pass. There could even be more than one. But to pass this bill and continue the OTC system is utter folly. This “crisis” is much like the gold ring crisis of 1876, except that the corrupt officials in Grant’s administration were violating the law, while this bold faced robbery sticks up the nation and demands to be legalized. The least we can demand is that the pricing system be radically revamped.
The Cosmological significance of the Secretary of the Treasury
Back in 2004, LI wrote about the neo-liberal business cycle – which, since then, Naomi Klein has labeled shock therapy economics. An excellent label. We wrote in the context of Bush’s Chilean inspired social security “reform” package:
Right. What happened in Chile is what happens periodically in countries in the neo-liberal system that veer to the right. A period of bubble prosperity is succeeded by a period of deep ‘recession.’ During the recession, the people who did not prosper during the bubble, i.e., the majority of the population, has shifted onto its back the debts accumulated by the wealthy to hold their party. This is exactly what happened when, in 1982, the IMF, the huge partisan of privatization, suddenly turned around and demanded that the Chilean government take responsibility for the huge outstanding debts racked up by its new private sector. The government, of course, responded with its bracing rhetoric of individual responsibility. The IMF and World Bank responded by closing Chile’s credit lines. The government then responded by stuffing the individual responsibility crap, nationalizing the debt, which entailed nationalizing most of the economy, and agreeing to pay it off – in other words, the debt was spread over the people of Chile.
This is a pretty standard pattern. After Salinas oversaw the entirely dirty privatization of Mexican banks, the crooks that bought them rode them directly into bankruptcy – at which point their debts were nationalized. Same with Argentina, Russia, etc. Privatization always is a two part shuffle – one part enriches an irresponsible and often corrupt elite, the other part nationalizes that elite’s debts. After the debt situation is taken care of, the elite is then surprised and delighted by a second wave of “privatizations.” It is a beautiful machine, and the Bush gang obviously have studied it. That is the point of the privatization of social security – don’t worry, no administration will allow the private part of the public pension fund, after it bottoms out in some predictable recession, to go to zero – no, the debts there will be quietly nationalized, in the same way S&L debts were nationalized. Under capitalism, this is known as individual responsibility and free enterprise. It is called reform -- a wonderfully civic sounding word. We have wondered why bank robbers don't plead "reform" in court -- "Judge, I was just reforming the deposit structure of the bank!" On this site we are too ignorant to handle those words. We call it moral hazard and stealing.”
Those were innocent days, back in 2004. LI was like a blind man peering into an abyss – we didn’t know what we were seeing, being encased in our own private darkness. We now have a better sense of the depths. The great Ouroboros-like worm of American stupidity writhes at the very lowest level.
KING LEAR
Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so
That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone for ever!
I know when one is dead, and when one lives;
She's dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives.
KENT
Is this the promised end?
EDGAR
Or image of that horror?
ALBANY
Fall, and cease!
Right. What happened in Chile is what happens periodically in countries in the neo-liberal system that veer to the right. A period of bubble prosperity is succeeded by a period of deep ‘recession.’ During the recession, the people who did not prosper during the bubble, i.e., the majority of the population, has shifted onto its back the debts accumulated by the wealthy to hold their party. This is exactly what happened when, in 1982, the IMF, the huge partisan of privatization, suddenly turned around and demanded that the Chilean government take responsibility for the huge outstanding debts racked up by its new private sector. The government, of course, responded with its bracing rhetoric of individual responsibility. The IMF and World Bank responded by closing Chile’s credit lines. The government then responded by stuffing the individual responsibility crap, nationalizing the debt, which entailed nationalizing most of the economy, and agreeing to pay it off – in other words, the debt was spread over the people of Chile.
This is a pretty standard pattern. After Salinas oversaw the entirely dirty privatization of Mexican banks, the crooks that bought them rode them directly into bankruptcy – at which point their debts were nationalized. Same with Argentina, Russia, etc. Privatization always is a two part shuffle – one part enriches an irresponsible and often corrupt elite, the other part nationalizes that elite’s debts. After the debt situation is taken care of, the elite is then surprised and delighted by a second wave of “privatizations.” It is a beautiful machine, and the Bush gang obviously have studied it. That is the point of the privatization of social security – don’t worry, no administration will allow the private part of the public pension fund, after it bottoms out in some predictable recession, to go to zero – no, the debts there will be quietly nationalized, in the same way S&L debts were nationalized. Under capitalism, this is known as individual responsibility and free enterprise. It is called reform -- a wonderfully civic sounding word. We have wondered why bank robbers don't plead "reform" in court -- "Judge, I was just reforming the deposit structure of the bank!" On this site we are too ignorant to handle those words. We call it moral hazard and stealing.”
Those were innocent days, back in 2004. LI was like a blind man peering into an abyss – we didn’t know what we were seeing, being encased in our own private darkness. We now have a better sense of the depths. The great Ouroboros-like worm of American stupidity writhes at the very lowest level.
KING LEAR
Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so
That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone for ever!
I know when one is dead, and when one lives;
She's dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives.
KENT
Is this the promised end?
EDGAR
Or image of that horror?
ALBANY
Fall, and cease!
let them eat money
LI should pay no attention to politics. It simply fries my wiring. I have to get back to my project.
But I have to say this: I’ve never seen a president go on tv to take up special time to talk about the crisis in healthcare, with 40 million uninsured people and most insured people being whacked for substantial and horrific sums for medical emergencies. I have never seen a president go on tv and take special time to talk about the disaster hitting the manufacturing section, putting millions of people out of work, and zapping cities and towns, turning them into zombie zones. But this president got on tv to take up special time to urge that the U.S. turn over 700 billion dollars to Wall Street because a total of maybe 40,000 investors are going to be in severe financial straits if they don’t.
It is amazing, and if the elite didn’t run the alarmatoriums, the scandaloriums, and the Kindercare media modules, this would be known as a superbly let them eat cake moment. Even Marie Antoinette, in the end, cut down on buying jewels. The ancien regime really has to fall.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
blue states and red states
When, in 2004, Bush won the election, LI analyzed the results for the paradox in them – the Red states, we said, were electing a man who’s main task had been to pile money on the investor class, who are concentrated in the Blue states And we also said, fuck the Red states, stick the broom up their ass.
Well, the endgame, as far as the Great Fly is concerned, follows this logic off the cliff. We said then that the coming recession would target the red states. In the South and West, the easy money has always been in selling land. In the 80s, this led to the S and L bust. That turned out to be a net plus for the Red States, who were floated by tax money that came from the Northeast. It feels good to be a rent seeker, and George Bush personified the breed, so they flocked to the polls to elect him.
But the investor class had long learned its lessons from the S and L bust. The suckers, this time, were selling the land to each other, as always, while the real money was being made taking bets on the flea circus. And now America is preparing to strip itself of its economic power to please the investor class. This can’t be analyzed by party, although that is the dumb category clung to in the political blogosphere. This is about investors and debtors. The investor class just happens to be concentrated in heavily democratic states. Their reps are going to make damn sure that they get taken care of. Meanwhile, red state reps are torn between their usual kleptocratic impulses and the angry calls from the folks at home, who want the old days back, when they could coast on government insured programs, using credit limits that were the result of government fiscal policy, in order to buy and sell land at tell each other, gubmint ain’t the solution, its the problem. Its the battle of two rentseeking classes going down. Fun for the whole family.
I’m of two minds about the ongoing robbery. On the one hand, people I love are going to be hurt. On the other hand, this nation used its years of bogus prosperity to push two propositions: that we had a right to invade and massacre at will any place in the world; and that we had a right to fuck up the earth’s atmosphere until we were good and tired of it. Shouldn’t these days, these forerunners of grief, be considered condign punishment for this thoughtless nation?
The latter is probably the most deadly of the deadly American sins. Unfortunately, a nation that starts descending into the pits, economically, doesn’t shut off its emissions, although at the moment, there is less car driving and shit. Rather, it can’t afford the technology to clean up its power plants, businesses and households. Poverty, or relative poverty, will not equal a cleaner America.
There is a remark I hear over and over, and it makes me sick: I can’t understand economics. Economics is a model ruled social science. If you strip out the equations from a model, you get relations. Narrative relations. Models are stories. If you can understand a story, you can understand economics.
Now, I’d recommend, I do recommend, my essay on this topic in the preface to Silja Graupe’s The Basho of Economics. Alas, I know only two people who read that preface. And one said she couldn’t understand it. I realize that it is not written in the free and easy style I would use to write an email to a friend, but fuck, occasions call for different styles. Go read it. In it, you will find a description of the favorite story, down the years, of orthodox economics.
In American culture, there is only one group that holds to a more rigid narrative pattern than neo-classical economists. That is the Harlequin romance company. You can write off to Harlequin and get a sheet in which to fill in the variables to make a story. The inputs can differ a bit, but the output, the happy ending, is almost invariable. The difference is that in economics, the stories are invariable. They always come out with market clearing. That is the happy end around which the whole world of economics, as a science, revolves. But the story is refuted over and over by the world – and economists hate that. Thus, the attraction of thinking of the current crisis as a market clearing one – liquidity in the banks – instead of what it is, a symptom of the deep, corrupting inequality in wealth that have been allowed to overrun our economy. The economist has an instinctive reaction to market clearing problems, but is averse to the messiness of inequality, and would prefer to read that out of the model. Just as Harlequin can’t afford ambiguity in the heroine – she might be attracted or raped by the evil character, but she can’t traipse around and have several lovers, for instance – economists can’t afford to let in too much of the world into their story. If, for instance, economists had looked at the rise in oil prices earlier this year and had let in the part of the world that was about the threat of war against Iran, they would have had to “politicize” their analysis. That they could look back and find, regularly, stockpiling of commodities before a war escaped them entirely. They were content to make it a doable story of speculators versus supply and demand, and soon came home to the equilibrium that explains everything. They can’t help themselves.
Well, the endgame, as far as the Great Fly is concerned, follows this logic off the cliff. We said then that the coming recession would target the red states. In the South and West, the easy money has always been in selling land. In the 80s, this led to the S and L bust. That turned out to be a net plus for the Red States, who were floated by tax money that came from the Northeast. It feels good to be a rent seeker, and George Bush personified the breed, so they flocked to the polls to elect him.
But the investor class had long learned its lessons from the S and L bust. The suckers, this time, were selling the land to each other, as always, while the real money was being made taking bets on the flea circus. And now America is preparing to strip itself of its economic power to please the investor class. This can’t be analyzed by party, although that is the dumb category clung to in the political blogosphere. This is about investors and debtors. The investor class just happens to be concentrated in heavily democratic states. Their reps are going to make damn sure that they get taken care of. Meanwhile, red state reps are torn between their usual kleptocratic impulses and the angry calls from the folks at home, who want the old days back, when they could coast on government insured programs, using credit limits that were the result of government fiscal policy, in order to buy and sell land at tell each other, gubmint ain’t the solution, its the problem. Its the battle of two rentseeking classes going down. Fun for the whole family.
I’m of two minds about the ongoing robbery. On the one hand, people I love are going to be hurt. On the other hand, this nation used its years of bogus prosperity to push two propositions: that we had a right to invade and massacre at will any place in the world; and that we had a right to fuck up the earth’s atmosphere until we were good and tired of it. Shouldn’t these days, these forerunners of grief, be considered condign punishment for this thoughtless nation?
The latter is probably the most deadly of the deadly American sins. Unfortunately, a nation that starts descending into the pits, economically, doesn’t shut off its emissions, although at the moment, there is less car driving and shit. Rather, it can’t afford the technology to clean up its power plants, businesses and households. Poverty, or relative poverty, will not equal a cleaner America.
There is a remark I hear over and over, and it makes me sick: I can’t understand economics. Economics is a model ruled social science. If you strip out the equations from a model, you get relations. Narrative relations. Models are stories. If you can understand a story, you can understand economics.
Now, I’d recommend, I do recommend, my essay on this topic in the preface to Silja Graupe’s The Basho of Economics. Alas, I know only two people who read that preface. And one said she couldn’t understand it. I realize that it is not written in the free and easy style I would use to write an email to a friend, but fuck, occasions call for different styles. Go read it. In it, you will find a description of the favorite story, down the years, of orthodox economics.
In American culture, there is only one group that holds to a more rigid narrative pattern than neo-classical economists. That is the Harlequin romance company. You can write off to Harlequin and get a sheet in which to fill in the variables to make a story. The inputs can differ a bit, but the output, the happy ending, is almost invariable. The difference is that in economics, the stories are invariable. They always come out with market clearing. That is the happy end around which the whole world of economics, as a science, revolves. But the story is refuted over and over by the world – and economists hate that. Thus, the attraction of thinking of the current crisis as a market clearing one – liquidity in the banks – instead of what it is, a symptom of the deep, corrupting inequality in wealth that have been allowed to overrun our economy. The economist has an instinctive reaction to market clearing problems, but is averse to the messiness of inequality, and would prefer to read that out of the model. Just as Harlequin can’t afford ambiguity in the heroine – she might be attracted or raped by the evil character, but she can’t traipse around and have several lovers, for instance – economists can’t afford to let in too much of the world into their story. If, for instance, economists had looked at the rise in oil prices earlier this year and had let in the part of the world that was about the threat of war against Iran, they would have had to “politicize” their analysis. That they could look back and find, regularly, stockpiling of commodities before a war escaped them entirely. They were content to make it a doable story of speculators versus supply and demand, and soon came home to the equilibrium that explains everything. They can’t help themselves.
Fun facts. Fun to know and tell!
LI has been trying to find various easy ways to explain that the topdown solution of the bailout actually aggravates the bottom up problem. Here’s one: the bailout, as proposed, would take around 2,000 dollars from each American, which comes to about 8,000 dollars per household. So, we are proposing, in essence, that the people who owe the money on the credit cards and the mortgages transfer 8,000 dollars to the people who own the credit card companies and the banks, and that they do this without even the least diminution of the debt they already owe.
It is like demanding blood from a hemophiliac.
However, I have confidence in the inertia of things. Perhaps nobody will notice the radically diminished spending power of the average household over the long run – you know, that run of thirty years, which is the time period of the average loan. Maybe the banks will not see the obvious. Who knows?
I, personally, believe in Santa Claus.
It is like demanding blood from a hemophiliac.
However, I have confidence in the inertia of things. Perhaps nobody will notice the radically diminished spending power of the average household over the long run – you know, that run of thirty years, which is the time period of the average loan. Maybe the banks will not see the obvious. Who knows?
I, personally, believe in Santa Claus.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Double Indemnity
Yesterday, LI went to Whole Foods to get some coffee and write our review of the new Library of America edition of Katherine Anne Porter’s short stories and essays. Unfortunately, two older white guys decided to sit next to me at the table and swap Fox news stories about the current financial crisis. First, however, they started out by talking about some speculative house buying the one of them was in the midst of, while he could “still get money.” They then proceeded to exclaim against Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which they both said they had never heard of until two weeks ago. At which point my inner concentration on the artistry of Porter was entirely broken, since I thought, you are speculating in houses and have never heard of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae?
Apparently, in the Fox/Limbaugh circuit, the old standard about guvmint being incompetent is still fluttering above the tattered reactionary hordes, who have decided that those two agencies are wholly part of the guvmint, and wholly responsible, in some way, for the whole collapse.
I admit to being utterly baffled by people like this. They make me feel like the frantic liberal sons in Flannery O’Connor short stories, confronted with the divine mystery of their hick or genteel hick parents and grandparents. O’Connor, of course, was on God’s side – there was a numinous core in that ignorance, and her stories were of the fine comeuppance of the liberal. But this was only so when the ignorance proceeded from an intense, lifelong sense of crucifixion – and even then, O’Connor was too enmeshed in Southern verities to quite understand the scale of the injustice of Southern apartheid. The new Southern ignorance is Yankeefied enough to admit that crucifixion is for losers. Once that is out of the way, and Church has become another means of uplift as well as a wonderful way to connect sellers and buyers, we can proceed to the making of parasitic money off of a system that is underwritten and overfed by the guv’mint it disdains. The Southern Republican is a perfect semblance of the third world revolutionary so disdainfully limned by V.S. Naipaul in the 70s.
...
As to the crisis, well, my new name for it is the Double Indemnity crisis. It strikes me that all you really need to know about what the Financial system did to enrich itself over the last 30 years can be gathered from the James Cain novel, or, at the very least, the Barbara Stanwyck movie. This scene is really at the heart of what is going on now. The only difference is that the investment bank factotums rarely wore such fetching ankle bracelets.
Apparently, in the Fox/Limbaugh circuit, the old standard about guvmint being incompetent is still fluttering above the tattered reactionary hordes, who have decided that those two agencies are wholly part of the guvmint, and wholly responsible, in some way, for the whole collapse.
I admit to being utterly baffled by people like this. They make me feel like the frantic liberal sons in Flannery O’Connor short stories, confronted with the divine mystery of their hick or genteel hick parents and grandparents. O’Connor, of course, was on God’s side – there was a numinous core in that ignorance, and her stories were of the fine comeuppance of the liberal. But this was only so when the ignorance proceeded from an intense, lifelong sense of crucifixion – and even then, O’Connor was too enmeshed in Southern verities to quite understand the scale of the injustice of Southern apartheid. The new Southern ignorance is Yankeefied enough to admit that crucifixion is for losers. Once that is out of the way, and Church has become another means of uplift as well as a wonderful way to connect sellers and buyers, we can proceed to the making of parasitic money off of a system that is underwritten and overfed by the guv’mint it disdains. The Southern Republican is a perfect semblance of the third world revolutionary so disdainfully limned by V.S. Naipaul in the 70s.
...
As to the crisis, well, my new name for it is the Double Indemnity crisis. It strikes me that all you really need to know about what the Financial system did to enrich itself over the last 30 years can be gathered from the James Cain novel, or, at the very least, the Barbara Stanwyck movie. This scene is really at the heart of what is going on now. The only difference is that the investment bank factotums rarely wore such fetching ankle bracelets.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
the universal laws of bootlicking
The third chapter of the section on Propriety in The Theory of the Moral Sentiments is entitled:
“Of the corruption of our moral sentiments, which is occasioned by this disposition to admire the rich and the great, and to despise or neglect persons of poor and mean condition”
I believe that this chapter is about the most insightful thing Adam Smith ever wrote. It is certainly pertinent to the present crisis, one which is to be solved by a rushed, inverse bank robbery on the grand scale which is consistent through all of the Great Fly’s disasters. It is an astonishingly audacious step, proposed by a Treasury secretary who has failed, systematically, for a year to understand the crisis, and is thus being hailed by the establishment as a hero and our only hope – Tom Friedman, who has never failed us yet as an omen of the conventional ignorance swapped around country clubs and CEO chitchat fests, comes out in his column today with the gorgeous suggestion that Obama re-appoint Paulson if he gets elected. Apparently Friedman is tired of supporting the Iraq war, the last cretin’s cause he took up, and has been casting about for some other way to be massively wrong. Well, at least there is less bloodshed in this one, even if it does involve the further degradation of democracy as anything more than a con man’s fiddle. Friedman is a special case: the neo-liberal pablum he regularly dispenses comes straight from the various horses’ mouths: the CEO set loves him. And he in turn reflects their biases. This is why you can search his books over and you will never encounter the slightest hint that there is such a thing as a business cycle. Now that we have run into the trough of one, he is reaching for the universal solvent he saves for all difficult occasions: trust the rich.
Paulson’s success with the establishment, which is even greater than the reception accorded Rumsfeld in 2003, stems partly from the fact that he has the interests of that establishment firmly fixed in his mind. But even if he is the investor’s champion, he has produced an investor’s nightmare, and he seems determined to keep plugging at throwing good money after bad until we’ve exhausted all the money there is. The dirty secret is that the credit swap market is busted; the whole of the shadow financial system is meeting the question that it was designed to avoid: what are the derivatives it trades really worth? We have been assured for thirty years, ever since the neo-classicals regained dominance from the Keynesians and attempted to devise a private structure that would do what the state did before, that they insure, and thus extend, the capacity of lenders to lend. Thus, our economy will depend on the equilibrium provided by the private market rather than the heavy handed intervention of the state. We’d all live in the gingerbread house and get to eat it, too.
This was always a rather pinheaded dream, but the scheme was culturally assured by what Smith describes well – the unwarranted admiration that surrounds the wealthy. This is a truly American disease: it is amazing to hear Americans squeal about the wealthy, as though they were demi-gods – so smart! so successful!
A brief conspectus of the Great Fly’s terrible reign can be derived from this handy passage in Smith:
“Many a poor man places his glory in being thought rich, without considering that the duties (if one may call such follies by so very venerable a name) which that reputation imposes upon him, must soon reduce him to beggary, and render his situation still more unlike that of those whom he admires and imitates, than it had been originally.
To attain to this envied situation, the candidates for fortune too frequently abandon the paths of virtue; for unhappily, the road which leads to the one, and that which leads to the other, lie sometimes in very opposite directions. But the ambitious man flatters himself that, in the splendid situation to which he advances, he will have so many means of commanding the respect and admiration of mankind, and will be enabled to act with such superior propriety and grace, that the lustre of his future conduct will entirely cover, or efface, the foulness of the steps by which he arrived at that elevation. In many governments the candidates for the highest stations are above the law; and, if they can attain the object of their ambition, they have no fear of being called to account for the means by which they acquired it. They often endeavour, therefore, not only by fraud and falsehood, the ordinary and vulgar arts of intrigue and cabal; but sometimes by the perpetration of the most enormous crimes, by murder and assassination, by rebellion and civil war, to supplant and destroy those who oppose or stand in the way of their greatness. They more frequently miscarry than succeed; and commonly gain nothing but the disgraceful punishment which is due to their crimes. But, though they should be so lucky as to attain that wished-for greatness, they are always most miserably disappointed in the happiness which they expect to enjoy in it. It is not ease or pleasure, but always honour, of one kind or another, though frequently an honour very ill understood, that the ambitious man really pursues. But the honour of his exalted station appears, both in his own eyes and in those of other people, polluted and defiled by the baseness of the means through which he rose to it. Though by the profusion of every liberal expence; though by excessive indulgence in every profligate pleasure, the wretched, but usual, resource of ruined characters; though by the hurry of public business, or by the prouder and more dazzling tumult of war, he may endeavour to efface, both from his own memory and from that of other people, the remembrance of what he has done; that remembrance never fails to pursue him. He invokes in vain the dark and dismal powers of forgetfulness and oblivion.”
Long ago, LI invoked the powers of the chthonic goddess to punish a country that mindlessly ravished and killed Iraqis by the hundreds of thousands. But we never expected it to happen. Well, it is happening. And the dark and dismal powers that are rising up are not, it turns out, fabricated from oblivion: they are all about the debts that can’t be cashed out, the flesh debts. The return of the repressed on the horses of the riders of the Apocalypse are among us, children. Run and hide if you can.
“Of the corruption of our moral sentiments, which is occasioned by this disposition to admire the rich and the great, and to despise or neglect persons of poor and mean condition”
I believe that this chapter is about the most insightful thing Adam Smith ever wrote. It is certainly pertinent to the present crisis, one which is to be solved by a rushed, inverse bank robbery on the grand scale which is consistent through all of the Great Fly’s disasters. It is an astonishingly audacious step, proposed by a Treasury secretary who has failed, systematically, for a year to understand the crisis, and is thus being hailed by the establishment as a hero and our only hope – Tom Friedman, who has never failed us yet as an omen of the conventional ignorance swapped around country clubs and CEO chitchat fests, comes out in his column today with the gorgeous suggestion that Obama re-appoint Paulson if he gets elected. Apparently Friedman is tired of supporting the Iraq war, the last cretin’s cause he took up, and has been casting about for some other way to be massively wrong. Well, at least there is less bloodshed in this one, even if it does involve the further degradation of democracy as anything more than a con man’s fiddle. Friedman is a special case: the neo-liberal pablum he regularly dispenses comes straight from the various horses’ mouths: the CEO set loves him. And he in turn reflects their biases. This is why you can search his books over and you will never encounter the slightest hint that there is such a thing as a business cycle. Now that we have run into the trough of one, he is reaching for the universal solvent he saves for all difficult occasions: trust the rich.
Paulson’s success with the establishment, which is even greater than the reception accorded Rumsfeld in 2003, stems partly from the fact that he has the interests of that establishment firmly fixed in his mind. But even if he is the investor’s champion, he has produced an investor’s nightmare, and he seems determined to keep plugging at throwing good money after bad until we’ve exhausted all the money there is. The dirty secret is that the credit swap market is busted; the whole of the shadow financial system is meeting the question that it was designed to avoid: what are the derivatives it trades really worth? We have been assured for thirty years, ever since the neo-classicals regained dominance from the Keynesians and attempted to devise a private structure that would do what the state did before, that they insure, and thus extend, the capacity of lenders to lend. Thus, our economy will depend on the equilibrium provided by the private market rather than the heavy handed intervention of the state. We’d all live in the gingerbread house and get to eat it, too.
This was always a rather pinheaded dream, but the scheme was culturally assured by what Smith describes well – the unwarranted admiration that surrounds the wealthy. This is a truly American disease: it is amazing to hear Americans squeal about the wealthy, as though they were demi-gods – so smart! so successful!
A brief conspectus of the Great Fly’s terrible reign can be derived from this handy passage in Smith:
“Many a poor man places his glory in being thought rich, without considering that the duties (if one may call such follies by so very venerable a name) which that reputation imposes upon him, must soon reduce him to beggary, and render his situation still more unlike that of those whom he admires and imitates, than it had been originally.
To attain to this envied situation, the candidates for fortune too frequently abandon the paths of virtue; for unhappily, the road which leads to the one, and that which leads to the other, lie sometimes in very opposite directions. But the ambitious man flatters himself that, in the splendid situation to which he advances, he will have so many means of commanding the respect and admiration of mankind, and will be enabled to act with such superior propriety and grace, that the lustre of his future conduct will entirely cover, or efface, the foulness of the steps by which he arrived at that elevation. In many governments the candidates for the highest stations are above the law; and, if they can attain the object of their ambition, they have no fear of being called to account for the means by which they acquired it. They often endeavour, therefore, not only by fraud and falsehood, the ordinary and vulgar arts of intrigue and cabal; but sometimes by the perpetration of the most enormous crimes, by murder and assassination, by rebellion and civil war, to supplant and destroy those who oppose or stand in the way of their greatness. They more frequently miscarry than succeed; and commonly gain nothing but the disgraceful punishment which is due to their crimes. But, though they should be so lucky as to attain that wished-for greatness, they are always most miserably disappointed in the happiness which they expect to enjoy in it. It is not ease or pleasure, but always honour, of one kind or another, though frequently an honour very ill understood, that the ambitious man really pursues. But the honour of his exalted station appears, both in his own eyes and in those of other people, polluted and defiled by the baseness of the means through which he rose to it. Though by the profusion of every liberal expence; though by excessive indulgence in every profligate pleasure, the wretched, but usual, resource of ruined characters; though by the hurry of public business, or by the prouder and more dazzling tumult of war, he may endeavour to efface, both from his own memory and from that of other people, the remembrance of what he has done; that remembrance never fails to pursue him. He invokes in vain the dark and dismal powers of forgetfulness and oblivion.”
Long ago, LI invoked the powers of the chthonic goddess to punish a country that mindlessly ravished and killed Iraqis by the hundreds of thousands. But we never expected it to happen. Well, it is happening. And the dark and dismal powers that are rising up are not, it turns out, fabricated from oblivion: they are all about the debts that can’t be cashed out, the flesh debts. The return of the repressed on the horses of the riders of the Apocalypse are among us, children. Run and hide if you can.
LI GOES TO THE VOMITORIUM
It is nice to see that some of the bigfoots – Greider and Krugman, and even the Bushite pinhead, Sebastian Mallaby in the WAPO – are coming out of the shrubbery to denounce the Treasury department’s theft in the offing. The NYT, in contrast, has set Peter Baker to the task of licking up a monument of bubble gum and marble for those two superheroes of this Bushian time, Paulson and Bernanke. Baker is the man for the task: on the Washington Post, he strove mightily to apologize for mass murder and torture, covering President Backbone with the same objectivity that might be expected from one of Nero’s catamites, reviewing Nero’s acting abilities in the Coliseum. His description of the brain (Bernanke) and the man of action (Paulson) is like a Damien Hirst piece, if Hirst took to carving Pierrots out of his own shit: it is kitsch cast in excrement:
“The two men have been working early and working late, tracking Asian markets and fielding calls from their European counterparts, then reconnecting with each other by phone eight or nine times a day, talking so often that they speak in shorthand. Mr. Paulson has powered through the long days with a steady infusion of Diet Coke. Asked twice to testify by the Senate last week, he begged off.
“He told me he had like four hours of sleep,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking Committee. But there were limits to Mr. Dodd’s sympathy. “The public wants to know what’s going on,” he said he replied.
Mr. Bernanke (his drink: Diet Dr Pepper) has made a point of leaving the office by midnight to get at least some rest, but friends say the toll on him is clear as well. Alan S. Blinder, a longtime friend and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, recalled seeing Mr. Bernanke at a conference last month in Jackson Hole, Wyo. “He looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders,” Mr. Blinder said.
And that was before last week.”
Baker, whose effusions about the heroic, surge-right Bush in the NYT Magazine a couple of weeks ago did had a dramatic effect on LI (we wanted to vomit after the first couple of paragraphs) is in the fortunate position of the right sycophant at the right moment, and one can feel him wiggling with excitement. And he has that eye, doesn’t he: diet Dr. Pepper. Don’t you feel his maternal, servile ache as he longs to perhaps bring one of his action heros, a true Batmen out to free Gotham from its bad debts, another can. He understands, as does the NYT, that this huge crisis in the Bandit class can only be assuaged by an obsessive, massive theft that will make our successful and oh so smart masters feel, well, masculine again; one that will exist like a burning yearning brand on the hides of Americanus bovus, all of us lower downs: bought and sold at undermarket prices. But of course, we out here in the fields, we cant understands theft! So hard! Maybe the smarter peoples will figure it all out for us! Then we votes for them!
Of course, in the UK, the New Labourites have already figured this out and have translated it into the ineffable language of toadeating. This is one of the Blairites, explaining, oh so delicately, that we can’t, just can’t, return to cutting into the hides of the wealthy, who are generating our prosperity at a fearful rate. Such genius brains!
“But is an economy which promotes minority wealth and privilege and requires the state to tax the beneficiaries to support those it excludes really the only alternative to the current order? An agenda based on the redistribution of wealth rather than the redistribution of opportunity can only ever deliver justice as compensation; mitigating the worst effects once the damage is done. It is morally unambitious and likely to fail in the long run because by taxing the beneficiaries more heavily, the wealth-generating capacity of an already underemployed economy is further compromised.”
Oh my! Such butter and shit on the tongue, lodged firmly in the City asshole! We have to (sob) redistribute opportunity! We need Blair, with all his evangelical fervor, that wondrous Uriah Heep persona, to intone things like this. Far better to be read by Texas redneck conservatives than the taffee Tartufferie of the “Left” in the Anglosphere state that seems destined to sink the most in the next year.
“The two men have been working early and working late, tracking Asian markets and fielding calls from their European counterparts, then reconnecting with each other by phone eight or nine times a day, talking so often that they speak in shorthand. Mr. Paulson has powered through the long days with a steady infusion of Diet Coke. Asked twice to testify by the Senate last week, he begged off.
“He told me he had like four hours of sleep,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking Committee. But there were limits to Mr. Dodd’s sympathy. “The public wants to know what’s going on,” he said he replied.
Mr. Bernanke (his drink: Diet Dr Pepper) has made a point of leaving the office by midnight to get at least some rest, but friends say the toll on him is clear as well. Alan S. Blinder, a longtime friend and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, recalled seeing Mr. Bernanke at a conference last month in Jackson Hole, Wyo. “He looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders,” Mr. Blinder said.
And that was before last week.”
Baker, whose effusions about the heroic, surge-right Bush in the NYT Magazine a couple of weeks ago did had a dramatic effect on LI (we wanted to vomit after the first couple of paragraphs) is in the fortunate position of the right sycophant at the right moment, and one can feel him wiggling with excitement. And he has that eye, doesn’t he: diet Dr. Pepper. Don’t you feel his maternal, servile ache as he longs to perhaps bring one of his action heros, a true Batmen out to free Gotham from its bad debts, another can. He understands, as does the NYT, that this huge crisis in the Bandit class can only be assuaged by an obsessive, massive theft that will make our successful and oh so smart masters feel, well, masculine again; one that will exist like a burning yearning brand on the hides of Americanus bovus, all of us lower downs: bought and sold at undermarket prices. But of course, we out here in the fields, we cant understands theft! So hard! Maybe the smarter peoples will figure it all out for us! Then we votes for them!
Of course, in the UK, the New Labourites have already figured this out and have translated it into the ineffable language of toadeating. This is one of the Blairites, explaining, oh so delicately, that we can’t, just can’t, return to cutting into the hides of the wealthy, who are generating our prosperity at a fearful rate. Such genius brains!
“But is an economy which promotes minority wealth and privilege and requires the state to tax the beneficiaries to support those it excludes really the only alternative to the current order? An agenda based on the redistribution of wealth rather than the redistribution of opportunity can only ever deliver justice as compensation; mitigating the worst effects once the damage is done. It is morally unambitious and likely to fail in the long run because by taxing the beneficiaries more heavily, the wealth-generating capacity of an already underemployed economy is further compromised.”
Oh my! Such butter and shit on the tongue, lodged firmly in the City asshole! We have to (sob) redistribute opportunity! We need Blair, with all his evangelical fervor, that wondrous Uriah Heep persona, to intone things like this. Far better to be read by Texas redneck conservatives than the taffee Tartufferie of the “Left” in the Anglosphere state that seems destined to sink the most in the next year.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Juggling kleptocrats: the Bush years continue
I had lunch with a friend, yesterday, and I came up with a pretty good metaphor to describe the current financial crisis while talking about it with her. It is the dish stacking metaphor. At the root of this crisis is a shortfall in the amount of money that the average household can afford to pay on a house. That’s real simple. Stacked on top of that is the larger shortfalls of nested securities that depended on those bottom mortgages. The shape of the financial system is, from the plate stacking perspective, all wrong. Instead of smaller amounts of money depending on the larger amount at the bottom, the plates above the bottom plate get larger and larger, until you reach the great world of the derivatives plate.
The government has so far been trying to fix the problem from the top. But when a stack of plates starts to wobble, you can’t fix the problem from the top. The more you add to the top, the more the instability increases.
Which takes us to the latest and greatest news from our criminal oligarchy. In a coup d’etat move not unlike the patriot act, the Bush administration, prime architects of the disaster, are now proposing a bail out plan for the wealthy that, in its scope and audaciousness, dwarfs the tax cuts of 2001-2002.
I commented on this over at the Economist’s View. I’ll quote myself. Sorry.
When people say it is a solvency problem, what they really mean is that the effect of amplifying income inequality over the past thirty years and using all the resources of the government to stamp out "wage inflation", ie the just distribution of productivity gains to the producers, is that households are not increasing their incomes as they did in the pre-70s days. But policy makers are pretending like they are. The bailout plan still pretends that the bottom 80 percent of the population will buy and sell houses at prices that are greater than they can afford. Are the politicians still that stupid? The government can buy a 300 thousand dollar house in Phoenix and hold it all it wants to, the number of buyers who can really afford a 300 thousand dollar house simply aren't enough to make up a healthy market. It is that simple. If the government spent its 700 billion dollars giving every household in America a 20,000 a year raise, well, then they could afford those houses. Otherwise, no.
The housing bubble, the easy credit bubble, and stagnant wages form the Bermuda triangle of this economy, into which a trillion dollars is going to disappear. The United States of Denial strikes again.
ps - read Joe Nocera's column in the NYT. So funny, it will make the blood come out of your mouth. Now, onto a scintillating critique of the reactionary elements in Batman 4. Onward the Revolution!
Is a private ritual like a private language?
“And when you pray, you shall not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Truly I say to you, They have their reward.
But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
But when you pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.
Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.” – Matthew 6:5-7
I went into a bicycle shop the other day. I’d been delaying having my bike fixed, but I knew, from the hairraising sound that the brakes emitted every time I pressed them, that the pads were shot. I also knew that, ever penny wise and pound foolish, I’d waited too long to fix them. The clerk told me, at first, that they could change the pads without changing the cable, and then, when the guy in the back started fixing it, that it would require a cable change too. On top of that, it turned out I had a hole in the back tire, caused by the back brake pad.
The man who fixed the bike came out with it and put it up on a little rack. He talked to me while he fixed it. I watched him not watch his hands, which went here and there, testing the sprungness of the brake, adjusting the screws and the position. He looked at me or straight ahead. His hands were like marvelous, separate creatures, below the sea level of his apparent attention, although in fact his mind was really concentrated on the feelings in his fingertips, his sense of the pressure exerted by the screwdriver, the pull and resistance of the brake assembly. It was obvious that he not only did not need to see what he was doing, but that seeing would get in the way. I had ineffectually tried, myself, to adjust the brakes, peering through my reading glasses to see the whole assemblage, and of course I was awkward and put everything on wrong. I’ve seen my Dad and my brothers repair things in this hands first way too. It is an enviably elegant thing to do.
It is, supremely, a routine.
I mention this because Mauss, in his book on the ethnography of prayer, makes a valiant effort to distinguish rituals from routines. His ultimate purpose is to use prayer as a kind of discursive object in which the ritual and the belief converge. He is what he says about rituals (rites)
“It isn’t after the nature of acts and their real effects that it is possible to distinguish the two orders of fact. From this point of view, all that it is possible to say about rituals is that they cannot produce the results one attributes to them. According to this way of judging, one can’t distinguish rituals from erroneous practices. One knows, however, that an erroneous practice is not a ritual. Thus, it is not in considering the efficacity in itself, but the manner in which the efficacity is conceived that we can discover the specific difference. Thus, in the case of technique, the effect produced is supposed to arise entirely from the effective mechanical labor. And this besides has right on its side (a bon droit), for the effort of civilization has precisely consisted in reserving to industrial techniques and the science on which they repose that useful value that one attributed in the past to rituals and religious notions. On the contrary, in the case of a ritual practice, other causes completely are supposed to intervene, to which is wholly imputed the expected result. Between the movements that constitute the sacrifece of the construction dn the solidity of the house that it is supposed to insure, there is not even from the point of view of the sacrificer any mechanical link. The efficacity lent to the ritual has nothing in common with the efficacity proper to the acts which are materially accomplished. It is represented mentally as completely sui generis, for one consideres that it comes entirely from special forces that the ritual has the property of putting in play. Thus even if the effect actually produced would result in fact in executed movements, there would be a ritual if the believer attributed it to other causes. Thus the absorption of toxic substances produces physiologically a state of ecstacy, and yet it is a ritual for those who imput this state not to its true causes, but to special influences.”
If Mauss is right about this, and if he is right that prayer is a ritual, then there is something extremely puzzling about the famous saying in Matthew. Which I will get to in a further post.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
CHANNEL SURFING THROUGH THE REVOLUTION
Over the last eight years, LI has developed a pretty fierce hatred for the Left. We break out in hives whenever we hear some grave person intone about the Left should do this or the Left should do that. As if the Left were anything but a miserable con game, one hundred fifty years of murder and disaster under its belt, led by young romantic young men who turn into old horrors as soon as they get a chance to mismanage an organization. The convergence of Mao and Milton Friedman in China has been a beautiful symbol of what the “left” is all about. That former Leftists loved the invasion of Iraq is not only not a surprise, but the secret face of the Left all along.
But as the “Left” exploded, I was hoping, romantic to the end, that something would take its place. In 2000, I even stupidly thought that thing would be the anti-corporation movement, which crystallized at the time around Ralph Nader. Nader, of course, had a more than honorable career in the seventies. Unfortunately, the only thing politician-like about Nader is his blind, gargantuan ego. The anti-corporation movement seemed to dissolve when it was needed most – after 9/11 – and now consists of a painfully unfunny clown act that comes out every four years and runs for president.
The run up to the current disaster was predictable since last summer. The “Left” of course saw, heard and said nothing – which is par for the course. We are now entering perhaps the most revolutionary period in my lifetime. It is rather hilarious that the “Left” will hop, skip and jump through this period without even the slightest flicker of recognition. Naturally, however, they will be like white on rice over the next superhero movie. The subtexts of Iron Man2! Does that Batman movie have a subversive countertext underneath its reactionary overtext? I’m just on the edge of my seat...
In the UK, where the “left” became the third way, the destruction of the latest and the greatest scheme to enrich the upper class – our thirty year old system of financial fictions – is probably going to wash away the Labour party. Is this good or bad? After all, the Labour party labored, mostly, to convince people that it was a behemoth Maggie Thatcher with a human face. My theory has long been that the takeover of old blue chip corporations by LBOs was the model for what happened to the “left” parties – they were cheap, they were exhausted, and they were beautifully positioned to fulfill a corporationist agenda by providing faux opposition and real support for the system of massive inequality, the hollowing out of democracy, and the use of pr warmongering as a sort of bread and circuses, that the fat cats love.
The U.S. has no left. Perhaps this will be an advantage. So far, there hasn’t been a peep about the insane policy being announced in headline after headline, as the Fed systematically destroys the ability of the government to help the producers – the bottom 85 percent. But I – romantically – believe that the doggies aren’t going to eat this dogfood much longer. The doggies will bite.
But as the “Left” exploded, I was hoping, romantic to the end, that something would take its place. In 2000, I even stupidly thought that thing would be the anti-corporation movement, which crystallized at the time around Ralph Nader. Nader, of course, had a more than honorable career in the seventies. Unfortunately, the only thing politician-like about Nader is his blind, gargantuan ego. The anti-corporation movement seemed to dissolve when it was needed most – after 9/11 – and now consists of a painfully unfunny clown act that comes out every four years and runs for president.
The run up to the current disaster was predictable since last summer. The “Left” of course saw, heard and said nothing – which is par for the course. We are now entering perhaps the most revolutionary period in my lifetime. It is rather hilarious that the “Left” will hop, skip and jump through this period without even the slightest flicker of recognition. Naturally, however, they will be like white on rice over the next superhero movie. The subtexts of Iron Man2! Does that Batman movie have a subversive countertext underneath its reactionary overtext? I’m just on the edge of my seat...
In the UK, where the “left” became the third way, the destruction of the latest and the greatest scheme to enrich the upper class – our thirty year old system of financial fictions – is probably going to wash away the Labour party. Is this good or bad? After all, the Labour party labored, mostly, to convince people that it was a behemoth Maggie Thatcher with a human face. My theory has long been that the takeover of old blue chip corporations by LBOs was the model for what happened to the “left” parties – they were cheap, they were exhausted, and they were beautifully positioned to fulfill a corporationist agenda by providing faux opposition and real support for the system of massive inequality, the hollowing out of democracy, and the use of pr warmongering as a sort of bread and circuses, that the fat cats love.
The U.S. has no left. Perhaps this will be an advantage. So far, there hasn’t been a peep about the insane policy being announced in headline after headline, as the Fed systematically destroys the ability of the government to help the producers – the bottom 85 percent. But I – romantically – believe that the doggies aren’t going to eat this dogfood much longer. The doggies will bite.
the topdown solution to the crisis is AN UTTER CATASTROPHE
I hear the roar of big machines
Two worlds and in between
Love lost, fire at will
Dum-dum bullets and shoot to kill, I hear
Dive, bombers, and
Empire down
Empire down
The economists, pundits and our elite have patted themselves on the back for the past year about “handling” the “credit” crisis. They have handled it by pouring money into the pockets of the top earners, who are, not coincidentally, the people who run the financial sector. Manufacturers in this country – GE, GM – have, for a long time, gotten in on the racket by manufacturing financial centers themselves.
Was there a better way?
How about: bottom up financing?
A clever commentator over at Mark Thoma’s Economist’s view named James Kroeger has been pounding on this idea for a while. He put it very succinctly before, once again, the Fed took another step into the quagmire. I have to quote him:
This is an awesome suggestion. It will be completely ignored by all parties and all people in power. But LI suggests that readers intrude this idea into forums where the economy is being discussed at present – q and a on the Washington Post or the NYT, comments on any popular political site, etc. At the moment, the top down, top benefits most model is the only model on display. It is late. That model is a failure. And it may well lead to the complete failure of a perfectly good economic system. The naughties have been an experiment in how-stupid-can-we-be. It looks like we will drain the betise to the dregs. But we don’t have to. We have a choice.
Two worlds and in between
Love lost, fire at will
Dum-dum bullets and shoot to kill, I hear
Dive, bombers, and
Empire down
Empire down
The economists, pundits and our elite have patted themselves on the back for the past year about “handling” the “credit” crisis. They have handled it by pouring money into the pockets of the top earners, who are, not coincidentally, the people who run the financial sector. Manufacturers in this country – GE, GM – have, for a long time, gotten in on the racket by manufacturing financial centers themselves.
Was there a better way?
How about: bottom up financing?
A clever commentator over at Mark Thoma’s Economist’s view named James Kroeger has been pounding on this idea for a while. He put it very succinctly before, once again, the Fed took another step into the quagmire. I have to quote him:
Let's go through this a step at a time... How would the Average American be hurt by a complete collapse of the financial sector of the economy? The answer is that he/she would be hurting only if aggregate demand were drop as a consequence of banks lending less money and businesses spending less money. Without intervention by Congress, businesses that are too heavily leveraged would go out of business and many people would lose their jobs. But if the federal government were to increase its spending enough (by taxing the rich and spending that money on infrastructure & human capital) aggregate demand could not only be maintained, we could also easily increase AD if that is what we wanted to do.
To maintain aggregate demand at the levels we desire, it might be desirable for Congress to create taxpayer-owned banks that would buy up the assests of failed private banks at fire-sale prices, fully capitalize them with public funds, and then provide whatever loanable funds might be desired by borrowers. If loan demand is inadequate to maintain aggregate spending at the desired level, then Congress can simply spend more money on public investment.
So what's the problem? What's the horror? The evil geniuses who created our private financial markets would suffer massive losses because they did not prepare themselves for excessive risk. They would lose Big Time, as they should. Within a month of two after such institutions fail, the government could be replacing them with publicly owned entities that have no reservations whatsoever about lending to would-be borrowers.
It would all be over within 6 months and very few people would be unemployed while competing firms buy up the assets of failed firms. As long as demand is strong, everyone would be working and pumping money into the economy at the same time that the few remaining players in the privately-owned financial sector are finding new ways to make a living while competing with The Taxpayer's Bank (one that is not interested in maximizing profits while taking on risks that everyone else must pay for, but only in serving the public interest) and which writes the rules that they must abide by.
(If a reminder is necessary: the Great Depression continued on as long as it did for only one reason: the Federal Government did not spend enough money to eliminate unemployment until World War II began and then unemployment dried up almost over night. Roosevelt's Congress did not authorize enough spending because too many members of the opposition and of the banking community warned that the consequences of 'inflating' the economy would be disastrous. Too bad they listened. Millions of people suffered terribly for no good reason.)
This is an awesome suggestion. It will be completely ignored by all parties and all people in power. But LI suggests that readers intrude this idea into forums where the economy is being discussed at present – q and a on the Washington Post or the NYT, comments on any popular political site, etc. At the moment, the top down, top benefits most model is the only model on display. It is late. That model is a failure. And it may well lead to the complete failure of a perfectly good economic system. The naughties have been an experiment in how-stupid-can-we-be. It looks like we will drain the betise to the dregs. But we don’t have to. We have a choice.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
some will rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen
In the new Feudalism, we have to have a set of new euphemisms. So when a government agency simply abandons the law of the land – otherwise known as breaking the law – we have to find a gentle, doe eyed way of describing it. And who is better at the task than our faithful scribes and minions, the same people who transformed the Great Fly’s war of aggression in Iraq into a crusade for democracy? Who can put the human face on predator capitalism better than the NYT? Thus we get explanations like this one, about the use of taxpayer money to support private peculators:
“Until this week, it would have been unthinkable for the Federal Reserve to bail out an insurance company, and A.I.G.’s request for help from the Fed of just a few days ago was rebuffed.
But with the prospect of a giant bankruptcy looming — one with unpredictable consequences for the world financial system — the Fed abandoned precedent and agreed to let the money flow.”
Abandoned precedent. Let the money flow. Such beautiful terms! It makes for a whole new way of describing things. For instance, on one could say that on November 9, 1932, Clyde Barrow abandoned precedent in Lagrange, Texas, and let the money flow from the Carmen State Bank. Doesn’t that sound nice? Clyde prompted the money with the use of a pistol. We are more civilized now. Bernanke used a pen. We don’t use vulgar words of language.
Which reminds me of this Woody Guthrie song.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
orderliness
Since last August, economic policy in the U.S. has advanced under the banner of orderliness. The Fed, the Treasury, and all of the Great Fly’s horses and all of the Great Fly’s men are making sure that the unwinding is orderly. What does this mean? Well, it means that the New Deal is inversed. The old New Deal was about spending money to employ the unemployed. The New New Deal is about transferring money to plutocrats. Now, yesterday we had one outcome – an easily foreseen outcome – of what an “orderly” unwinding means: bankruptcies of the banks, freezing up of credit for consumers, inflation on all fronts, a steady increase in unemployment (which is, as we all know, grossly undercounted) – and money, massive amounts of money, for the rich. As you can see, that outcome is much to be preferred to a disorderly unwinding. The latter would involve bankruptcies of banks, freezing up of credit for consumers, inflation on all fronts, a steady increase in unemployment – and no extra money for the rich! That would be terrible.
What amazes LI is how inefficient the new feudalism is. I have a small but, I think, moneysaving suggestion to make to our masters in D.C.: we can cut the time and distance money has to travel between being collected by the IRS and landing in the pockets of bankers by setting up an office that directly assigns revenues to the wealthy. Thus, for instance, the Republican head of Merril Lynch, John A. Thain, who apparently earned a truly pitiable sum (25 million dollars) for presiding over the ruin of that bank for ten months, ould simply be assigned all the revenue collected from, say, Kentucky. Because we are a fiery Republic, Dedicated to Liberty and Opportunity, we should not knight him. No, we should scorn to ennoble him. Although our population is a spineless, servile, bullying, infantile, and media lobotomized bunch of hicks, still, we are too proud to allow our masters to assume titles like Earl of Hampton. But we can call them things like Super Entrepreneur of Hampton. This will warm our country hearts, and he could be interviewed on tv, or, as we like to say, reality land, dispensing wisdom that we can all sway to in our huts.
It looked, at one point, like the Dems – leaning towards their communistic roots – might have even suggested that instead of an orderly unwinding, we try the disorderly variety, in which you actually shove the Federal money at the masses. Imagine! The disorder of that would make our news storytellers on tv wring their toupees and bouffants. They would be so sad! It would be sheer demagogy! And against the free market and everything! Luckily, that moment has well passed, and we can all get behind the orderly unwinding. Of course, the Dems may be communists, but luckily they aren’t so communistic as to suggest that maybe, the government, instead of loaning banks 30 billion dollars here and 100 billion dollars there at 2 percent interest so that they can loan the money back to the U.S. at 2.5 percent interest, should just loan to the population at large at 2 percent interest, because, as we can easily see, that would be disorderly. We must be orderly. And at the end of this happy, happy time, there might be some money to, well, I don’t know, build another war or something. We do so love a war!
What amazes LI is how inefficient the new feudalism is. I have a small but, I think, moneysaving suggestion to make to our masters in D.C.: we can cut the time and distance money has to travel between being collected by the IRS and landing in the pockets of bankers by setting up an office that directly assigns revenues to the wealthy. Thus, for instance, the Republican head of Merril Lynch, John A. Thain, who apparently earned a truly pitiable sum (25 million dollars) for presiding over the ruin of that bank for ten months, ould simply be assigned all the revenue collected from, say, Kentucky. Because we are a fiery Republic, Dedicated to Liberty and Opportunity, we should not knight him. No, we should scorn to ennoble him. Although our population is a spineless, servile, bullying, infantile, and media lobotomized bunch of hicks, still, we are too proud to allow our masters to assume titles like Earl of Hampton. But we can call them things like Super Entrepreneur of Hampton. This will warm our country hearts, and he could be interviewed on tv, or, as we like to say, reality land, dispensing wisdom that we can all sway to in our huts.
It looked, at one point, like the Dems – leaning towards their communistic roots – might have even suggested that instead of an orderly unwinding, we try the disorderly variety, in which you actually shove the Federal money at the masses. Imagine! The disorder of that would make our news storytellers on tv wring their toupees and bouffants. They would be so sad! It would be sheer demagogy! And against the free market and everything! Luckily, that moment has well passed, and we can all get behind the orderly unwinding. Of course, the Dems may be communists, but luckily they aren’t so communistic as to suggest that maybe, the government, instead of loaning banks 30 billion dollars here and 100 billion dollars there at 2 percent interest so that they can loan the money back to the U.S. at 2.5 percent interest, should just loan to the population at large at 2 percent interest, because, as we can easily see, that would be disorderly. We must be orderly. And at the end of this happy, happy time, there might be some money to, well, I don’t know, build another war or something. We do so love a war!
through the implosion, tv set by tv set
LI is back. We come back minus one tooth (about which, more on another post) from a trip that consisted mostly of following my friend M. around Mexico City and playing circus with her daughter and protect the castle with her son – although protect the castle is a complicated game of which the rules change to the extent that it isn’t clear what the castle is, as J. decides which miniature bowling pin stands for the king or the queen, which pile of books, toys, and odds and ends makes up the battlements, and how to deal with the collateral damage that ensues when he dances around the room, jumps on the bed, yells yippee, and generally makes a ruckus when the silver ball I toss at the castle misses the king, the queen, and all nine knights. Let it not be said that we lacked for intellectual content, down there in DEF. Plus we read a lot of Proust and took notes, all for The Human Limit, which we so hope our few remaining readers have not totally forgotten. Oh, and in our own little person, we proved that the global war on terrorism is a hoax. Maybe that will be in another post too. Suffice it to say, we spent some time at the U.S. embassy to Mexico, being gaped at by various embassy employees.
And David Foster Wallace hung himself.
We came back through the implosion. We knew, even in D.E.F, that the implosion was coming last week, when we read in the NYT about Lehman’s flood of red ink. Although of course – and this is the beauty of a blog! – we have been writing off and on since the Fed first fatally sought to shore up, of all things, the equity markets back in August, that the implosion was coming closer, with tremendous strides, like some personified sin in Pigrim’s Progress. In the Mexico City airport, we picked up the Financial Times to get the score, so to speak, for the day’s gladiatorial contest. In Dallas, we watched CNN. CNN is like a video i.v. of pure gibberish. It is like mindmelding with an overflowing garbage can. The lies and factoids pouring out of the tv were rather astonishing. We especially liked it that – of all people – Alan Greenspan was reverently quoted for his opinion of the implosion. For in the CNN universe, the characters of the celebrities are unchanging archetypes, and Alan Greenspan is still the maestro, instead of the Ayn Rand's revenge on American capitalism.
There were also clips of Obama and McCain, and not one word about what this is. It isn’t a credit crisis. It isn’t a liquidity crisis. This is an inequality crisis. The massive increase in the inequality between the wealth of the working and middle class and the upper class is the sole perpetrator of today’s implosion, and of tomorrow’s implosion too. You can’t run a consumer economy on extended credit and frozen wages. You can’t trade the residual. You can’t make the financial sector, of all sectors, the engine of the economy – unless your economy is as small as Holland’s. As the government transfers appalling hundreds of billions to the plutocrats and assures the CNN viewing audience that it is for the good of all, the spectator must wonder if the servility of the general population, its inertia, its ignorance, its general incapacity to chew gum and walk, will allow this, too, to pass. So far, it does look like the hugest robbery in history will proceed without a hitch, and with no suspense, even. Why dress all in black and map out the sensors that guard the vault of Fort Knox when the treasury secretary gives you a key and your own gilded wheelbarrow?
And David Foster Wallace hung himself.
We came back through the implosion. We knew, even in D.E.F, that the implosion was coming last week, when we read in the NYT about Lehman’s flood of red ink. Although of course – and this is the beauty of a blog! – we have been writing off and on since the Fed first fatally sought to shore up, of all things, the equity markets back in August, that the implosion was coming closer, with tremendous strides, like some personified sin in Pigrim’s Progress. In the Mexico City airport, we picked up the Financial Times to get the score, so to speak, for the day’s gladiatorial contest. In Dallas, we watched CNN. CNN is like a video i.v. of pure gibberish. It is like mindmelding with an overflowing garbage can. The lies and factoids pouring out of the tv were rather astonishing. We especially liked it that – of all people – Alan Greenspan was reverently quoted for his opinion of the implosion. For in the CNN universe, the characters of the celebrities are unchanging archetypes, and Alan Greenspan is still the maestro, instead of the Ayn Rand's revenge on American capitalism.
There were also clips of Obama and McCain, and not one word about what this is. It isn’t a credit crisis. It isn’t a liquidity crisis. This is an inequality crisis. The massive increase in the inequality between the wealth of the working and middle class and the upper class is the sole perpetrator of today’s implosion, and of tomorrow’s implosion too. You can’t run a consumer economy on extended credit and frozen wages. You can’t trade the residual. You can’t make the financial sector, of all sectors, the engine of the economy – unless your economy is as small as Holland’s. As the government transfers appalling hundreds of billions to the plutocrats and assures the CNN viewing audience that it is for the good of all, the spectator must wonder if the servility of the general population, its inertia, its ignorance, its general incapacity to chew gum and walk, will allow this, too, to pass. So far, it does look like the hugest robbery in history will proceed without a hitch, and with no suspense, even. Why dress all in black and map out the sensors that guard the vault of Fort Knox when the treasury secretary gives you a key and your own gilded wheelbarrow?
Monday, September 01, 2008
the newest fade
Lenin claimed that the state would fade away in a society that achieved true communism. LI can’t say that we’ve achieved true communism, yet, but we are fading away – at least for a week or two. Fading to Mexico, through the storms we ride. So you will have to untie the intricate knots of the eighteenth century without me! My last posts, heavy with heaviness, like my Mozart posts, light with lightness, are the endpoints of the campaign. And I so wanted to get to external and internal voices, privacy, love, and the language of cats!
Well, you will just have to figure that out without me.
Lights out.
Well, you will just have to figure that out without me.
Lights out.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Weekend: the week in politics!
Of course, LI is getting tons of emails about our relative silence vis a vis the late breaking political developments. The convention. The crucial question of leadership and experience. The whole gender thing.
We are speaking, of course, of the PS conference at La Rochelle, and whether Ségolène Royal or the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, take over the spot of first secretary of the party. Our heart is with Delanoë. We like the idea of confrontation, of getting in the face of the reactionaries in power. We dislike Royal’s idea that the PS has to extend peace feelers to the MoDem, of all feeble front organizations for a toothfairy solution to social problems. The dream of the Third Way should, by this time, have revealed itself clearly as the same old nightmare from which we are all trying to wake up. On the other hand, I like Royal as the face of the party. She did resurrect the corpse, which was shot by Jospin and his Blairing around ways. So, at the moment, I think Delanoë’s confrontational strategy will work better in an election year than as a 24/7 offyear theme. In fact, what I’d like to see is an agreement between the two – Delanoë agreeing to serve as party secretary, in return for supporting Royal for one more try at the presidential. As for the perpetual bickering of the party elite – well, it is an old story, and for reasons that escape me, the journalists always cover it as though it were some kind of disaster.
“A trois semaines de la date-limite pour le dépôt des motions [at the congress of Rheims], qui départageront les prétendants à la succession de François Hollande, l'heure était aux grandes manoeuvres pour Ségolène Royal, Bertrand Delanoë, Martine Aubry ou Pierre Moscovici. Objectif: constituer une majorité dans un parti balkanisé. Au sortir de l'université d'été, la situation n'est pas plus claire. Aucun des prétendants ne paraît pour l'instant en mesure de réunir plus du quart du parti lors du vote sur les motions.
A ce petit jeu, Ségolène Royal se sera montrée la plus discrète. La finaliste de l'élection présidentielle de 2007, qui mise tout sur son aura parmi les militants, s'est contentée d'une apparition le premier jour, marquée par un appel quasi-mystique à "l'amour" entre socialistes et une rapide réunion de ses partisans. Samedi et dimanche, elle a préféré à La Rochelle la fête du Parti démocrate italien.”
Then, of course, there is the most popular socialist, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, with his pion, Moscovi. The French love to express their preference for the Colbert type in polls – not the comedian, the treasurer – but they vote for Louis xiv types.
Okay, so that is the roundup. Amie will no doubt have to correct me if this is a misanalysis. Oh, and ... I hear that something is happening in the U.S.A. too. I haven’t been paying attention. Who are the candidates again?
We are speaking, of course, of the PS conference at La Rochelle, and whether Ségolène Royal or the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, take over the spot of first secretary of the party. Our heart is with Delanoë. We like the idea of confrontation, of getting in the face of the reactionaries in power. We dislike Royal’s idea that the PS has to extend peace feelers to the MoDem, of all feeble front organizations for a toothfairy solution to social problems. The dream of the Third Way should, by this time, have revealed itself clearly as the same old nightmare from which we are all trying to wake up. On the other hand, I like Royal as the face of the party. She did resurrect the corpse, which was shot by Jospin and his Blairing around ways. So, at the moment, I think Delanoë’s confrontational strategy will work better in an election year than as a 24/7 offyear theme. In fact, what I’d like to see is an agreement between the two – Delanoë agreeing to serve as party secretary, in return for supporting Royal for one more try at the presidential. As for the perpetual bickering of the party elite – well, it is an old story, and for reasons that escape me, the journalists always cover it as though it were some kind of disaster.
“A trois semaines de la date-limite pour le dépôt des motions [at the congress of Rheims], qui départageront les prétendants à la succession de François Hollande, l'heure était aux grandes manoeuvres pour Ségolène Royal, Bertrand Delanoë, Martine Aubry ou Pierre Moscovici. Objectif: constituer une majorité dans un parti balkanisé. Au sortir de l'université d'été, la situation n'est pas plus claire. Aucun des prétendants ne paraît pour l'instant en mesure de réunir plus du quart du parti lors du vote sur les motions.
A ce petit jeu, Ségolène Royal se sera montrée la plus discrète. La finaliste de l'élection présidentielle de 2007, qui mise tout sur son aura parmi les militants, s'est contentée d'une apparition le premier jour, marquée par un appel quasi-mystique à "l'amour" entre socialistes et une rapide réunion de ses partisans. Samedi et dimanche, elle a préféré à La Rochelle la fête du Parti démocrate italien.”
Then, of course, there is the most popular socialist, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, with his pion, Moscovi. The French love to express their preference for the Colbert type in polls – not the comedian, the treasurer – but they vote for Louis xiv types.
Okay, so that is the roundup. Amie will no doubt have to correct me if this is a misanalysis. Oh, and ... I hear that something is happening in the U.S.A. too. I haven’t been paying attention. Who are the candidates again?
Saturday, August 30, 2008
the privilege of turn 3
I’ve already commented once on Ginzburg’s essay, Making it strange: the prehistory of a literary device. Ginzburg traces the connection between the Stoic practices recorded by Marcus Aurelius and, link by link, the formalist notion of “making strange”, that formula which was so important to Victor Shklovsky. Ginzburg does not mention Shaftesbury in his essay; yet his explanation of the Stoic method can easily be applied to Shaftesbury's Philosophical Regimen:
“Epictetus, the philosopher-slave whose ideas profoundly influenced Marcus Aurelius, maintained that this striking out or rearsure of imaginary representations was a necessary step in the quest for an exact perception of things. This is how Marcus Aurelius describes the successive stages:
“Wipe away the impress of imagination. Stay the impulse that is drawing you like a puppet. Define the time which is present. Recognize what is happening to yourself or another. Divide and separate the event into its causal and material aspects. Dwell in thought upon your last hour.”
Each of these injunctions required the adoption of a specific moral technique aimed at acquiring mastery over the passions...”
Shaftesbury’s method and madness converge on an operating table in which the writer is both surgeon and patient. One notices that the direction of the Stoic move – of wiping away impressions – is the opposite of the direction of the Lockean idea – which builds outwards from a presumed tabula rasa. For Shaftesbury, the Lockean notion that in our minds we build the world anew (an implication that finds its political expression in Tom Paine) can’t possibly be true. The world is the more certain fact, and its impingement upon the mind comes in the form of impressions that are distorting – rather than the sole hermeneutical resource with which we make our uncertain way through the world. In the PR, Shaftesbury’s exercises literally apply Marcus Aurelius’s suggestions, and reference the idea of viewing things “as from a height.” The aftershocks of the clash between Locke's experience (which, for Shaftesbury, is a false kind of innocence) and the Stoic dissection of experience can be felt in the question marks that swarm all over Shaftesbury’s text. They seem like so many jabs into the simulacra of the philosopher patient, the wax doll upon which he intends to operate in order to effect a ritual cleansing. Here’s a passage from the notes on “Deity”. It comes just after a passage comparing the Deists and the Epicureans – “Atoms and void. A plain negative to the Deity, fair and honest. To Deism, still no pretence. So the sceptic....
While we recognize both Marcus Aurelius's exercise and the grammatical echoes of the great Carolinean preachers - Donne, Taylor - the effect of this continually interrupted movement, this play of thought that tears at itself, over pages, is of a sort of self-cutting. One can’t help but wonder whether the voices at play, here, don’t include Locke's voice from the nursery. A voice which we know from Locke's work on education, which was confessedly based on his experience teaching the Shaftesbury children. This is Locke:
Wit and false colours. Which, of course, are just what is defended in Shaftesbury's Sensus Communis. One might wonder how one gets from the severities of the stoic operating table to the epigrams of the drawing room - this has puzzled Shaftesbury's commentators, at least. The key is to follow not the thread of that truth which is discovered by a process of corresponding idea to object, according to the narrow procedures of proof, but to take a broader, more social sense of proof into account. Wit is a trial. A trial is a different thing than the amassing of proofs, which is the sort of activity done by the police or prosecutor before a trial. Trials are about guilt and innocence, which is the context in which truth gains its social footing. Thus, trials are dramas about character and circumstances. Trials are part of the world as theater. And the world is a place of infinite and not so converging impressions. Here is the gap, the little peephole, into souls, and for souls, truth alone is not enough. Truth won't give us seriousness. Which is why we need other methods more appropriate to our theatrical world. Which is why we need wit. The test of opinion is in the struggle between the serious and the absurd. This is a point to which Shaftesbury returns time and again in defending wit as the kind of thing that is consistent with common sense: ridicule drives an opinion to the point at which it becomes ridiculous, or extravagant. It drives it outside the bounds of common sense. It makes it a scapegoat. It expels it.
Yet Shaftesbury is careful not to confuse absurdity with falsity. An opinion doesn’t have to be untrue to be absurd. In the infinitesimal separation, there lodges an infinite meaning, because it presents another dimension of reason, one in which the terms concern the serious and the absurd. It is in that dimension that LI sees the glimmer of what Durkheim called the sacred. The spirits at work in the festival of mockery are the spirits of the sacred and the profane, and the shock of mocking opinion, especially one’s own, is derived from the sense of profanation, of de-consecration.
The trial of opinion by wit is parallel to the trial of the mind by the body, as this is laid out in the Philosophical Regimen. “Nature has joined thee to such a body, such as it is. The supreme mind would have it that this should be the trial and exercis of inferior minds. It has given thee thine; not just at hand, or as when they say into one’s mouth; not just in the way so as to be stumbled on by good luck; not so easily either, but so as thou mayst reach it; so as within thy power, within command. See! Here are the incumbrances. This is the condition, the bargain, terms. Is the prize worth contending for? or what will become of me if I do not contend? How if the stream carries me down? how if wholly plunged in this gulf? What will be my condition then? what, when given up to body, when all body, and not a motion, not a thought, not one generous consideration or sentiment besides?” That gulf, as Shaftesbury points out at the beginning of the section on the body, is one composed of shit. The body is an excrement in potentia
“And as from the parts of the body, so also abstract it from the whole body itself, an excrement in seed, already half being, half putrefaction, half corruption. Thus be persuaded of this: that I (the real I) am not a certain figure, nor mass, nor hair, nor nails, nor flesh, nor limbs, nor body; but mind, thought, intellect, reason; what remains but that I should say to this body and all the pompous funeral, nuptial, festival (or whatever other) rites attending it, “This is body. These are the body only. The body gives life to them, exalts them, gives them their vigour, force, power and very being.”
The trial of the mind proposed here will follow a body’s logic, which is the logic of juxtapositions. Throughout the Regimen, the thought of the simultaneous and the all – that gaze down from the height – operates to create a world wide absurdity, a feeling of disgust, of a crowd of potential excrement increasing at every moment:
“Consider the number of animals that live and draw their breath, and to whom belongs that which we call life, for which we are so much concerned; beasts, insects, the swarm of mankind sticking to this earth, the number of males and females in copulation, the number of females in delivery, and the number of both sexes in this one and the same instant expiring and at their last gasp’ the shrieks, cries, voices of pleasure, shoutings, groans nd the mixed noise of all of these together. Think of the number of those tht died before thou wert or since; how many of those that came into the world at the same time and since; and of those now alive, what alteration. Consider the faces of those of thye acquaintance as thou sawest them some years since; how changed since then! how macerated and decayed! All is corruption and rottenness; nothing at a stay, but continued changes; and changes renew the face of the world.” (257)
And as always, Shaftesbury’s move is to put these notions in a scene, sketched rapidly.
Life is as those that live it. What are those? What are we? Nos numerus sumus et fruges consumere nati. Tolerable carrion; fit to be let live. Honest poor rascals not so bad as when they say “scarce worth the hanging.” Life-worthy persons, if a bare liveable life. But say, what are we? What do we make of ourselves? How esteem ourselves? Warm flesh, with feelings, aches, and appetites. The puppet – play of fancies. O the solemn, the grave, the ponderous business. – Complex ideas, dreams, hobby-horses, houses of cards, steeples and cupolas. – The serious play of life. – Shows, spectacles, rites, formalities, processions; children playing at bugbears, frighting one another through masks. The heard, priests, cryer. The trump of fame; the squeaking trumpet and cat-call; the gowns! habits! robes! How underneath? How in the nightcaps, between the curtains and sleeps? How anon in the family with wife, servants, children, o where even none of these must see? Private pleasures, other privacies? the closet and bed-chamber, parlours, dining-rooms, dressing-rooms, and other rooms. In sickness, the lazy hours, in wines, in lecher? taking in, letting out- O the august assembly; each of you, such as you are apart!” (258-259)
The wit of Sensus Communis and the reductions and division of the Philosophical Regimen are attempts not only to find a place for profanation, but – in as much as absurdity is a proxy for the profane – to come back to the serious as a form of the sacred. LI would love, at this point, to refer to Marcel Mauss’ book on Prayer – but we have no more time for this.
“Epictetus, the philosopher-slave whose ideas profoundly influenced Marcus Aurelius, maintained that this striking out or rearsure of imaginary representations was a necessary step in the quest for an exact perception of things. This is how Marcus Aurelius describes the successive stages:
“Wipe away the impress of imagination. Stay the impulse that is drawing you like a puppet. Define the time which is present. Recognize what is happening to yourself or another. Divide and separate the event into its causal and material aspects. Dwell in thought upon your last hour.”
Each of these injunctions required the adoption of a specific moral technique aimed at acquiring mastery over the passions...”
Shaftesbury’s method and madness converge on an operating table in which the writer is both surgeon and patient. One notices that the direction of the Stoic move – of wiping away impressions – is the opposite of the direction of the Lockean idea – which builds outwards from a presumed tabula rasa. For Shaftesbury, the Lockean notion that in our minds we build the world anew (an implication that finds its political expression in Tom Paine) can’t possibly be true. The world is the more certain fact, and its impingement upon the mind comes in the form of impressions that are distorting – rather than the sole hermeneutical resource with which we make our uncertain way through the world. In the PR, Shaftesbury’s exercises literally apply Marcus Aurelius’s suggestions, and reference the idea of viewing things “as from a height.” The aftershocks of the clash between Locke's experience (which, for Shaftesbury, is a false kind of innocence) and the Stoic dissection of experience can be felt in the question marks that swarm all over Shaftesbury’s text. They seem like so many jabs into the simulacra of the philosopher patient, the wax doll upon which he intends to operate in order to effect a ritual cleansing. Here’s a passage from the notes on “Deity”. It comes just after a passage comparing the Deists and the Epicureans – “Atoms and void. A plain negative to the Deity, fair and honest. To Deism, still no pretence. So the sceptic....
“From whence then this other pretence? Who are these Deists? How assume the name? By what title or pretence? The world, the world? say what? how? A modified lump? matter? motion? – What is all this? Substance what? Who knows? why these evasions? subterfuges with words? definitions of things never to be defined? structures or no foundations? Come to what is plain. Be plain. For the idea itself is plain; the question plain; and such as everyone has invariably some answer to which it is decisive. Mind? or not mind? If mind, a providence, the idea perfect: a God. If not mind, what in the place? For whatever it be, it cannot without absurdity be called God or Deity; nor the opinion without absurdity be called Deism.” (38-39)
While we recognize both Marcus Aurelius's exercise and the grammatical echoes of the great Carolinean preachers - Donne, Taylor - the effect of this continually interrupted movement, this play of thought that tears at itself, over pages, is of a sort of self-cutting. One can’t help but wonder whether the voices at play, here, don’t include Locke's voice from the nursery. A voice which we know from Locke's work on education, which was confessedly based on his experience teaching the Shaftesbury children. This is Locke:
“Familiarity of discourse, if it can become a father to his son, may much more be condescended to by a tutor to his pupil. All their time together should not be spent in reading of lectures, and magisterially dictating to him what he is to observe and follow. Hearing him in his turn, and using him to reason about what is propos’d, will make the rules go down the easier and sink the deeper, and will give him a liking to study and instruction: And he will then begin to value knowledge, when he sees that it enables him to discourse, and he finds the pleasure and credit of bearing a part in the conversation, and of having his reasons sometimes approv’d and hearken’d to; particularly in morality, prudence, and breeding, cases should be put to him, and his judgment ask’d. This opens the understanding better than maxims, how well soever explain’d, and settles the rules better in the memory for practice. This way lets things into the mind which stick there, and retain their evidence with them; whereas words at best are faint representations, being not so much as the true shadows of things, and are much sooner forgotten. He will better comprehend the foundations and measures of decency and justice, and have livelier, and more lasting impressions of what he ought to do, by giving his opinion on cases propos’d, and reasoning with his tutor on fit instances, than by giving a silent, negligent, sleepy audience to his tutor’s lectures; and much more than by captious logical disputes, or set declamations of his own, upon any question. The one sets the thoughts upon wit and false colours, and not upon truth; the other teaches fallacy, wrangling, and opiniatry; and they are both of them things that spoil the judgment, and put a man out of the way of right and fair reasoning; and therefore carefully to be avoided by one who would improve himself, and be acceptable to others.”
Wit and false colours. Which, of course, are just what is defended in Shaftesbury's Sensus Communis. One might wonder how one gets from the severities of the stoic operating table to the epigrams of the drawing room - this has puzzled Shaftesbury's commentators, at least. The key is to follow not the thread of that truth which is discovered by a process of corresponding idea to object, according to the narrow procedures of proof, but to take a broader, more social sense of proof into account. Wit is a trial. A trial is a different thing than the amassing of proofs, which is the sort of activity done by the police or prosecutor before a trial. Trials are about guilt and innocence, which is the context in which truth gains its social footing. Thus, trials are dramas about character and circumstances. Trials are part of the world as theater. And the world is a place of infinite and not so converging impressions. Here is the gap, the little peephole, into souls, and for souls, truth alone is not enough. Truth won't give us seriousness. Which is why we need other methods more appropriate to our theatrical world. Which is why we need wit. The test of opinion is in the struggle between the serious and the absurd. This is a point to which Shaftesbury returns time and again in defending wit as the kind of thing that is consistent with common sense: ridicule drives an opinion to the point at which it becomes ridiculous, or extravagant. It drives it outside the bounds of common sense. It makes it a scapegoat. It expels it.
Yet Shaftesbury is careful not to confuse absurdity with falsity. An opinion doesn’t have to be untrue to be absurd. In the infinitesimal separation, there lodges an infinite meaning, because it presents another dimension of reason, one in which the terms concern the serious and the absurd. It is in that dimension that LI sees the glimmer of what Durkheim called the sacred. The spirits at work in the festival of mockery are the spirits of the sacred and the profane, and the shock of mocking opinion, especially one’s own, is derived from the sense of profanation, of de-consecration.
The trial of opinion by wit is parallel to the trial of the mind by the body, as this is laid out in the Philosophical Regimen. “Nature has joined thee to such a body, such as it is. The supreme mind would have it that this should be the trial and exercis of inferior minds. It has given thee thine; not just at hand, or as when they say into one’s mouth; not just in the way so as to be stumbled on by good luck; not so easily either, but so as thou mayst reach it; so as within thy power, within command. See! Here are the incumbrances. This is the condition, the bargain, terms. Is the prize worth contending for? or what will become of me if I do not contend? How if the stream carries me down? how if wholly plunged in this gulf? What will be my condition then? what, when given up to body, when all body, and not a motion, not a thought, not one generous consideration or sentiment besides?” That gulf, as Shaftesbury points out at the beginning of the section on the body, is one composed of shit. The body is an excrement in potentia
“And as from the parts of the body, so also abstract it from the whole body itself, an excrement in seed, already half being, half putrefaction, half corruption. Thus be persuaded of this: that I (the real I) am not a certain figure, nor mass, nor hair, nor nails, nor flesh, nor limbs, nor body; but mind, thought, intellect, reason; what remains but that I should say to this body and all the pompous funeral, nuptial, festival (or whatever other) rites attending it, “This is body. These are the body only. The body gives life to them, exalts them, gives them their vigour, force, power and very being.”
The trial of the mind proposed here will follow a body’s logic, which is the logic of juxtapositions. Throughout the Regimen, the thought of the simultaneous and the all – that gaze down from the height – operates to create a world wide absurdity, a feeling of disgust, of a crowd of potential excrement increasing at every moment:
“Consider the number of animals that live and draw their breath, and to whom belongs that which we call life, for which we are so much concerned; beasts, insects, the swarm of mankind sticking to this earth, the number of males and females in copulation, the number of females in delivery, and the number of both sexes in this one and the same instant expiring and at their last gasp’ the shrieks, cries, voices of pleasure, shoutings, groans nd the mixed noise of all of these together. Think of the number of those tht died before thou wert or since; how many of those that came into the world at the same time and since; and of those now alive, what alteration. Consider the faces of those of thye acquaintance as thou sawest them some years since; how changed since then! how macerated and decayed! All is corruption and rottenness; nothing at a stay, but continued changes; and changes renew the face of the world.” (257)
And as always, Shaftesbury’s move is to put these notions in a scene, sketched rapidly.
Life is as those that live it. What are those? What are we? Nos numerus sumus et fruges consumere nati. Tolerable carrion; fit to be let live. Honest poor rascals not so bad as when they say “scarce worth the hanging.” Life-worthy persons, if a bare liveable life. But say, what are we? What do we make of ourselves? How esteem ourselves? Warm flesh, with feelings, aches, and appetites. The puppet – play of fancies. O the solemn, the grave, the ponderous business. – Complex ideas, dreams, hobby-horses, houses of cards, steeples and cupolas. – The serious play of life. – Shows, spectacles, rites, formalities, processions; children playing at bugbears, frighting one another through masks. The heard, priests, cryer. The trump of fame; the squeaking trumpet and cat-call; the gowns! habits! robes! How underneath? How in the nightcaps, between the curtains and sleeps? How anon in the family with wife, servants, children, o where even none of these must see? Private pleasures, other privacies? the closet and bed-chamber, parlours, dining-rooms, dressing-rooms, and other rooms. In sickness, the lazy hours, in wines, in lecher? taking in, letting out- O the august assembly; each of you, such as you are apart!” (258-259)
The wit of Sensus Communis and the reductions and division of the Philosophical Regimen are attempts not only to find a place for profanation, but – in as much as absurdity is a proxy for the profane – to come back to the serious as a form of the sacred. LI would love, at this point, to refer to Marcel Mauss’ book on Prayer – but we have no more time for this.
Friday, August 29, 2008
privilege of turn 2
Second Part
Shaftesbury’s Sensus Communis essay is, as he puts it, an earnest attempt to defend raillery. This is a very odd way to begin an essay on common sense, which is the kind of phrase that Shaftesbury’s tutor Locke was getting at with his notion that we receive our ideas from experience:
“But perhaps you may still be in the same humour of not believing me in earnest. You may continue to tell me, I affect to be paradoxical, in commending a Conversation as advantageous to Reason, which ended in such a total Uncertainty of what Reason had seemingly so well established.”
From the very beginning, then, Shaftesbury is presenting an explicit break between form and content. The form of the essay is, as Shaftesbury would know from Montaigne, the place of opinion, doxis, and is not a treatise. It deals with becoming – the characteristicks of men – rather than being – the universal forms. It is Shaftesbury’s piece of fun to defend mockery – his object – with a piece of reasoning. And that he labels this an essay on common sense calls attention to the difference between common sense and rationality. Shaftesbury is explicit enough about the nature of wit. It is paradoxical. It is extravagant. Moreover, it seems to affect a certain disconnect between the speaker and the opinion the speaker gives. In fact, at first glance, if we take common sense to be a secondary kind of rationality, it would seem that the freedom of wit and humor is a freedom from common sense in as much as common sense assigns beliefs to people, so that each self possesses a belief. On the other hand, it is a form of the commons, of shared possession. And there are many forms the commons takes – it isn’t all pasturing the village’s sheep. It is also the life of the common, in fairs, everyday talk, rituals. If we extend this sense of the common to common sense, then we are less shocked that wit, that thief who unlocks the chain binding a man to his opinion, should be part of the commons. On the other hand, as we know from Don Quixote, the impulse to unlock chains and free prisoners, while a noble one, can have dubious results.
Shaftesbury, puts the essay in terms of an argument with an unnamed friend who doesn’t see wit’s right to operate in the commons. Like the puritans casting out the punch and judy shows and the bear baitings, this friend can’t see the point of mockery, and can see, very well, the vice of it.
“I HAVE been considering (my Friend!) what your Fancy was, to express such a surprize as you did the other day, when I happen’d to speak to you in commendation of Raillery. Was it possible you shou’d suppose me so grave a Man, as to dislike all Conversation of[60] this kind? Or were you afraid I shou’d not stand the trial, if you put me to it, by making the experiment in my own Case?
I must confess, you had reason enough for your Caution; if you cou’d imagine me at the bottom so true a Zealot, as not to bear the least Raillery on my own Opinions. ’Tis the Case, I know, with many. Whatever they think grave or solemn, they suppose must never be treated out of a grave and solemn way: Tho what Another thinks so, they can be contented to treat otherwise; and are forward to try the Edge of Ridicule against any Opinions besides their own.
The Question is, Whether this be fair or no? and, Whether it be not just and reasonable, to make as free with our own Opinions, as with those of other People?”
I want to linger on this trial of opinion by wit. Which will be the subject of my next post.
Shaftesbury’s Sensus Communis essay is, as he puts it, an earnest attempt to defend raillery. This is a very odd way to begin an essay on common sense, which is the kind of phrase that Shaftesbury’s tutor Locke was getting at with his notion that we receive our ideas from experience:
“But perhaps you may still be in the same humour of not believing me in earnest. You may continue to tell me, I affect to be paradoxical, in commending a Conversation as advantageous to Reason, which ended in such a total Uncertainty of what Reason had seemingly so well established.”
From the very beginning, then, Shaftesbury is presenting an explicit break between form and content. The form of the essay is, as Shaftesbury would know from Montaigne, the place of opinion, doxis, and is not a treatise. It deals with becoming – the characteristicks of men – rather than being – the universal forms. It is Shaftesbury’s piece of fun to defend mockery – his object – with a piece of reasoning. And that he labels this an essay on common sense calls attention to the difference between common sense and rationality. Shaftesbury is explicit enough about the nature of wit. It is paradoxical. It is extravagant. Moreover, it seems to affect a certain disconnect between the speaker and the opinion the speaker gives. In fact, at first glance, if we take common sense to be a secondary kind of rationality, it would seem that the freedom of wit and humor is a freedom from common sense in as much as common sense assigns beliefs to people, so that each self possesses a belief. On the other hand, it is a form of the commons, of shared possession. And there are many forms the commons takes – it isn’t all pasturing the village’s sheep. It is also the life of the common, in fairs, everyday talk, rituals. If we extend this sense of the common to common sense, then we are less shocked that wit, that thief who unlocks the chain binding a man to his opinion, should be part of the commons. On the other hand, as we know from Don Quixote, the impulse to unlock chains and free prisoners, while a noble one, can have dubious results.
Shaftesbury, puts the essay in terms of an argument with an unnamed friend who doesn’t see wit’s right to operate in the commons. Like the puritans casting out the punch and judy shows and the bear baitings, this friend can’t see the point of mockery, and can see, very well, the vice of it.
“I HAVE been considering (my Friend!) what your Fancy was, to express such a surprize as you did the other day, when I happen’d to speak to you in commendation of Raillery. Was it possible you shou’d suppose me so grave a Man, as to dislike all Conversation of[60] this kind? Or were you afraid I shou’d not stand the trial, if you put me to it, by making the experiment in my own Case?
I must confess, you had reason enough for your Caution; if you cou’d imagine me at the bottom so true a Zealot, as not to bear the least Raillery on my own Opinions. ’Tis the Case, I know, with many. Whatever they think grave or solemn, they suppose must never be treated out of a grave and solemn way: Tho what Another thinks so, they can be contented to treat otherwise; and are forward to try the Edge of Ridicule against any Opinions besides their own.
The Question is, Whether this be fair or no? and, Whether it be not just and reasonable, to make as free with our own Opinions, as with those of other People?”
I want to linger on this trial of opinion by wit. Which will be the subject of my next post.
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