Two divas

LI has lagged the Brit news. And what news! First, the trumped up charges against her for driving without a license, taken to a jury trial – I’ll say it again, a jury trial – by an out of control LA D.A.’s office were eviscerated by the common sense of ten jurors, who, alas, couldn’t persuade the ringer. And then, quite rightly, there was the triumph of Ms. Spears for her Piece of Me video at the MTV awards – the scene of her moment of authenticity last year, when she decided to wander around and make the lipsynching plain, shed the burden of the Mickey Mouse club, of a decade of numbers that she could no longer tolerate – shades of Brecht in her mind - all of which initiated the crazy Brit meme in the press, the panic in the industry. So her return is good news for us Britneyologists, right? Well, the rule of thumb here is to remember that we see now as in a glass darkly. Years from now, Spears is going to look back at this “crazy” interval as her most creative year. As for her return…

Well, Womanizer. It is a return of sorts. Her controllers obviously scotched the more interesting song to her moron ex, childsnatcher, which I would have loved to see and which would have been fabulous Spears. Fuck. Britney begins naked, which made the news. Britney naked is a regular news standby. She does some good clothes and wigs, the trademark hair whipping, the song has a great beat and the chorus repeats womanizer enough to burn it lightly into the brain cells after repeated viewings.

It made me go back into the Spears video archive to try to figure out if they have ever let her have a voice. One of the excellent things about Piece of Me is that Spears voice, briefly, emerges. It even does in Gimme More. More naked than Brit in the sauna in Womanizer is the voice of Brit going It’s Britney, bitch. Without any adjustment! As her driver’s license tells us, this is a gal from Louisiana. A place I happen to have lived in. Northern Louisiana. Spears long ago lost that voice in the place you go to to you’re your voice – California – but, hopelessly, the true Britophile waits to hear just a hint of the real voice. My stint listening to Britney Spear’s hits past, I understood that … that her voice has become a very Aristotelian vacuum, which nature fears, and those paragons of anti-nature, music producers, love. Because it has no quality that would interfere with the voice that they want to create. Into the vacuum of her voice in Womanizer, they have layered and edited and created a voice that is even, at points, vaguely and jarringly British.

There is something magnetic, however, about Britney Spears acceptance of this kind of thing – she is so infinitely malleable that I think she might be prophetic, interplanetary, a figure from the future. Her voice has as smoothly slipped the bonds of biology and history as her face, hair and body did. There are no norms for Britney Spears.

… And on the other side of the Atlantic, Ysa Ferrer. Ysa’s new video, Faire l’amour, is taken from the imaginaire pur album, which I believe has now launched. And LI’s lucky French readers can catch her on tour, at the Nouvelle Eve on November 7 and 8. After Obama is elected!

Also, like Britney, Ysa is doing some nude stuff for this album – if you want to see YSA FERRER NUDE (always good for a few hits, that), check this out. I admit Ysa’s lovarium idea of a parallel universe is like a bad Arsan novel, but what can I say? it is also as irresistible as she is. Similarly, I can’t knock an album with Bi or Not to Bi, but I think it is unfortunate that Ysa chose on fait l’amour as the ‘bullet” for her tour. Frankly, it is not worthy of Ysa. Great beat, but the lyrics make me cringe. And the video – unlike the live videos released for To bi or not to bi – lack that charming mixture of silliness and cabaret. Compare this to this , (the handmotions to Made in Japan kill me. They just kill me). Plus, the Ysa of my dreams is always sloping into the arms of her athletically gay dancers, or being lifted up by them, or standing on them. As is proper for a manga girl. Now, I’m not going to knock the sequence with the makeup girl who powders her bosom, and who she later blurrily ‘makes love” to. But I’m a little disappointed in the tour's turnout vid.

Diffuse Sanctions

Jeanne Becu, known to history as Madame du Barry, was presented to Louis XV’s court on April 23, 1769. The king was sixty. His old mistress, Madame de Pompadour, was dead. Long before she died, she had become his procurer, along with his valet, finding an endless stream of girls for his majesty to have sex with. Oddly enough, given this history, Louis seemed to be enchanted and surprised by Jeanne’s sexual prowess. Who'd have thought the innocent with the girlish voice would know so many bed tricks? Jeanne herself was a former servant and window dresser. She’d caught the eye of a certain Jean du Barry, a minor nobleman and a major pimp. She was his ticket, the best thing he’d ever bet on.

The King’s highest official, Duc de Choiseul, cordially detested Jeanne – or rather, uncordially. That she was a peasant and that her mother was a servant made it impossible for him to like having to tolerate her presence at Versailles. More than that, though, he detested her pimp. Choiseul had met Jeanne before the king had encountered her. She’d come to his office to beg, on behalf of Jean du Barry, for the contracts supplying the government in its pacification of Corsica, a major source of graft. Choiseul, after the disaster of the Seven Years War, had been trying to stamp out graft, which, he correctly saw, was destroying the monarchy.

Given Choiseul’s disgust, his strategy was clear. Paris began to fill with anonymous pamphlets about Jeanne Becu. Choiseul had access to the police file on Jeanne, which was ample. A obscene song about her went the rounds, and was even sung at Versailles.

Choiseul overreached. The King was infatuated. Eventually, Jeanne won the tug of war. The Duc de Choiseul was exiled to his estate near Toulouse. Jeanne and her corrupt cronies had the ear of the King. Louis’ popularity plummeted even further. Du Barry prefigured Marie Antoinette - although the later couldn't stand the former, and had her put in a nunnery after the King her lover died.

Now, here’s the question. From the sociological point of view: what was the meaning of those libels, that song?

This question may seem at some distant disjuncture from our current thread about Nemesis. Bear with us.

In an excellent essay (Sanctions diffuses. Sarcasmes, rires, mépris)
in the Revue française de sociologie, (1990, Volume 31: 4), Ruwen Ogien goes back to a distinction between diffuse and organized social sanctions made by Durkheim in the Rules of Sociological Method, and goes forward to Goffman’s interactionism, to help us understand laughter as a social phenomenon.

Durkheim’s example of a diffuse sanction is, indeed, the laugh. “If, in dressing myself, I paid no attention to the usages followed in my country and class, the laughter that I would provoke, the distance at which I would be held, produces, even if in an attenuated manner, the same effects as a penalty (peine).

Ogien thinks that Durkheim’s notion is good, even if he doesn’t make enough of it himself. There is an informal moral economy, which Ogien thinks has some commonality with Goffman’s domain of interactions. In Durkheim’s view, the laugh and the prison are two degrees on the same continuum of the sanction. The diffuse sanction is applied without “the mediation of a constituted and defined body.” The organized one is applied by such bodies.

Ruwen writes:

“Thus, Durkheim’s diffuse sanctions circumscribe a system of rights and responsibilities distinct from the Law and Morality and permitting us to identify a quite specific name that we only have to name.”

Because we can make predictions about the informal moral sphere, we can operate on it. In fact, this is what Choiseul’s strategy depended on. Court societies – and fragments of court societies, such as the social circles described by Proust - are factories of the diffuse sanction. It is when the interaction becomes dense, heavy with hints and rules, that we see our three familiar figures, the adventurer, the politician, and the writer begin to merge.

Nemesis has a home outside the breast. It has a footing.

More on this in a later post.

Social Darwinist Rats Leave Ship - Dog bits Man

We have probably expressed the opinion in the past – LI is nothing if not copiously opinionated – that James Buchan is the best writer on money who we have ever read. Not the best theorist, mind – he doesn’t try to compete in the heavy lifting department - but the best essayist. We missed his review of Neill Ferguson’s new book in praise of lucre, when it came out last week. That was a mistake.

Now, the truth is we have a sneaking liking for Ferguson, bloody imperialist and Thatcherite that he is. His history of the British Empire, which makes a stout attempt to defend that worldwide pillage on the premise that it was made on behalf of civilization – with the pillagers blindly creating a better world as they thought they were creating their own fortunes - makes the best case for colonialism that can currently be made. In the end, of course, it suffers from that foundational problem which Jesus, a carpenter and thus eminently familiar with construction specs, once pointed: a house built on sand cannot stand. Similarly, while the benefit to the UK of destroying the Indian textile industry, dispossessing the Amerindian nations, selling massive amounts of opium to the Chinese, exporting 6 million Africans into slavery and all the rest of it might be argued for, it is difficult to see why three cheers should emanate from the victims. Victims are stubborn like that.

Buchan notices that Ferguson’s new book, The Ascent of Money, is not very good until it reaches the nineteenth century… ah, but such a swift summary makes a sober porridge of Buchan’s acerbic prose, which has to be quoted for itself:

“Ferguson's reputation is so high that if he were a stock one would short him. The very title of his book, The Ascent of Money, is a screaming sell signal, like the shoe-shine boys trading stock tips at the door to Grand Central Station in New York in 1929. In fairness, Ferguson recognises that and his pages are hot with proof-stage tyre-marks, as he goes into violent reverse to escape from under collapsing arguments. None the less, his book is very readable indeed and the television series for which it is a sort of trailer, will, I am sure, be even better.

Ferguson believes money was invented to record and discharge debts, and he passes rather quickly on to the rise of banking in the Middle Ages, the issue by governments of annuities and other bonds, the origins of insurance and the establishment of joint-stock companies. As with all economist-historians, Ferguson's soul is at war with itself. History tells him there is such a thing as history. Economics tells him there is none, for everything is always and ever subject to unvarying laws (which just happened not to be discovered till the other day).

The result is that the book is not very interesting until it approaches our times. No philologer, Ferguson assumes pecunia means money in the sense that money means money. His account of the rococo Scottish financier John Law and his Banque Royale of 1719-20, based on no source older than 1969 and none in French, shows absolutely no feeling whatever for the character of his great countryman or the manners and laws of the French regency.

Yet Ferguson really understands the Rothschilds, and the 19th century in general, and he writes a long and marvellous chapter on the growth of house ownership as a civic right and the rise of mortgage finance. It was the depression itself that created the home-owning ideology and the credit institutions to pay for it, such as the Federal National Mortgage Association or Fanny Mae (which has just had to be rescued).”

As Buchan drily notes, Ferguson, in one of those sentences in which (as often happens with him) the historian is ambushed by the pundit, assures the reader that : "The only species that is now close to extinction in the developed world is the state-owned bank." This, of course, is “the precise reverse of observable reality.”

Which, of course, is where Ferguson ends up, much of the time. In a funny, violent tyre reversing in today's Guardian interview with him, he has just backed out of his support for the invasion of Iraq. And even gives the heave ho to John McCain, who he was advising this spring. However, since Ferguson believes ardently in the Social Darwinist gospel of the struggle for existence, it is perhaps not unexpected that he'd put a knife today in the positions he espoused yesterday. He is not going down, if he can help it, on anybody's ship.

Irrevocability: hope of mankind (Nemesis again)

LI has been considering Chamfort in the light of Herder’s Nemesis not simply because Chamfort is another late Enlightenment writer, but because both Herder and Chamfort would seem, by their intellectual silhouettes, to be the kind who would go easily into the anti-revolutionary column. Herder with his doubts about the enlightenment “man”; Chamfort with his ferocious pessimism.

Yet neither were reactionaries. Herder never renounced the revolution, but retired from all comment upon it after the Terror. And Chamfort…

Well, Chamfort threw himself, body and soul, into the revolution. He impoverished himself, he wrote speeches for Mirabeau and Tallyrand, he, it is said, suggested the title for Sieyes critical pamphlet (Qu' est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? Tout. Qu'a-t-il? Rien) which neatly summarizes what, actually, all modern political revolutions are about – the struggle between what is really All – the working class – and its false political position – what does it have? Nothing.

A title that is echoed in one of Chamfort’s maxims:

“Me, all; the rest, none: thus it is with despotism, aristocracy, and their partisans. Me, this is an other; an other, this is me: thus it is with the popular regime and its partisans. After this, decide yourself.”

That Chamfort the pessimist, Chamfort the executioner of the Enlightenment smile of reason, was also Chamfort the revolutionary, Chamfort the anti-monarchist, this became the paradox that stuck in the throats of the reactionary writers in the 19th century, up to and including Nietzsche. They took comfort in the lineaments of a monstrous Chamfort conjured up by his sotie, his double, the charming salon reactionary Antoine de Rivarol, who, before the revolution, ran in the same circles as Chamfort, wrote for the same journals, cultivated the same leisurely cynicism. Afterwards, in exile, he became Chamfort’s most bitter critic, and it is from his pen that flowed the rumors and scandals about Chamfort that created his reputation in the 19th century as a sell out of the philosophes, a nihilists, a revanchist who, not content with the epigram, picked up the guillotine at the first opportunity. But Rivarol was not the only one of Chamfort's companions to be shocked: Chamfort seemed to especially burn the anti-revolutionary crowd, who saw in him one of themselves. He was the philosophe who went ultra. Into the bushes. Unlike Tallyrand, whose motives seemed transparent – greed – Chamfort seemed to have reached his conclusions coherently; he seemed to have thought they unfolded from his dethronement of God and his corrosive view of man. There was, in the reactionary view, a pit even under cynicism, and Chamfort was its guardian devil. Thus, among the conspiracy minded among them (and the exiles from the French revolution were massively inclined to theories of conspiracy – De Quincey rightly compared their visions to that of an opium smokers) Chamfort must be accounted for as a kind of intellectual criminal master mind. After all, it was Chamfort who came up with the slogan that smelled of blood and jacquerie: War on the castles! Peace to the huts! (Guerre aux chateaux! Paix aux chaumieres!) under which, in effect, the countryside of France seemed to be reorganized. In 1810, Marmontel, an old litterateur, publishes his memoirs and includes an anecdote about Chamfort – long dead, of course, by 1810, another victim of the Terror. I’ll quote from Pellison’s biography:

‘The passage is curious – we have to cite it. When Marmontel objected to Chamfort’s reform projects, [saying] that the better part of the nation will not let any attack be carried through on the laws of the country and the fundamental principles of monarchy, he (Chamfort) agreed that, in its foyes, in its counting houses, in its workshops, a good part of the stay at hom citizens would find perhaps that the projects bold enough to trouble their repose and their enjoyments. But, if they disapprove, that will not, he said, be but timidly and quietly, and one has in had to impose upon them that determined class which has nothing to lose in the change and believes it sees much to gain. In order to organize them into a mob, one has the most powerful motives, famine, hunger, money, alarms and terrors, and the delirium to blaze a path and the rage by which one will strike upon all minds. You have not heard among the bourgeois but the eloquent speakers. Know that all your tribune orators are nothing in comparison with Demosthenes at a quid per head who, in the cabarets, in the public places, on the quais announce the ravages, the arsons, the sacked villages, flooded with blood, the plots to starve Paris. I call those gentlement the eloquent ones. Money principally and the hope of pillage are omnipotent among the people. We are going to make a test of Faubourg Saint-Antoine. And you won’t believe how little it costs the Duc D’Orleans [The rival of King Louis XVI] to have the manufactury of honest Reveillon sacked, which was the living of one hundred families. Mirabeau has gaily upheld the idea that with a thousand Louis D’or one can create quite a pretty insurrection.”

Thus spake Chamfort, the Goldfinger of his time. Evil keeps a book, and ticks off in it just what he will do: destroy the living of a hundred innocents, spread rumors, dethrone culture. Did Chamfort really put the fear of God into Marmontel? The conversation is recorded years after one of the major participants committed a very bloody suicide, so we don’t know what Chamfort did. We don’t know whether this was mockery. The note about the Duc D’Orleans sounds, at least, significantly false, the sort of crackpot notion that all the reactionaries loved. But the more fundamental falsity at the bottom of this is Marmontel's sense that Chamfort is betraying a pact. The pact, unspoken, unwritten, was that those who “came from the people”, the intellectuals, and adhered to the aristocracy even while savaging the superstitions that held back the nation, could never go back to the people. Hence, the place of the Duc D'Orleans -surely Chamfort must be operating on behalf of some powerful figure. The reactionaries had a hard time accepting that a revolution is not a fronde. As Chamfort wrote:

“All who emerge from the class of the people are armed against it to oppress it, from the militia man, the mercant become the secretary to the king, the preacher who comes from a village to preach submission to arbitrary authority, the historian son of a bourgeois, etc. These are Cadmus’ soldiers: the first armed turn against their brother and jump on them.”

Chamfort is one of Cadmus’s soldiers who, to the surprise of all, turns not against his brothers, but strikes at Cadmus the King. There was a part of him that did accept the bitterest consequences of the revolution:

“In the moment that God created the world, the movement of chaos must have made one find the chaos more disorganized than when he rested in the midst of it in its peaceful state. Likewise, among us, the the embarrasment of a society reorganizing itself having to appear as an excess of disorder.”

This is what makes Chamfort stand apart – his notion of the irrevocable is not a nostalgia for what is lost, not a view of the present as an obstacle in our way, but expresses instead the hope that the irrevocable will bury the past, expressed in a language that brings the revolution and Genesis together.

IN THE CROSSFIRE OF THE FASHION SYSTEM

“And now, being received as a member of the amiable family whose portraits we have sketched in the foregoing pages, it became naturally Rebecca's duty to make herself, as she said, agreeable to her benefactors, and to gain their confidence to the utmost of her power. Who can but admire this quality of gratitude in an unprotected orphan; and, if there entered some degree of selfishness into her calculations, who can say but that her prudence was perfectly justifiable? "I am alone in the world," said the friendless girl. "I have nothing to look for but what my own labour can bring me; and while that little pink-faced chit Amelia, with not half my sense, has ten thousand pounds and an establishment secure, poor Rebecca (and my figure is far better than hers) has only herself and her own wits to trust to. Well, let us see if my wits cannot provide me with an honourable maintenance, and if some day or the other I cannot show Miss Amelia my real superiority over her. Not that I dislike poor Amelia: who can dislike such a harmless, good-natured creature?--only it will be a fine day when I can take my place above her in the world, as why, indeed, should I not?" Thus it was that our little romantic friend formed visions of the future for herself.”

LI does not find it shocking that Sarah Palin’s handlers bought her a campaign wardrobe worth $150,000. Becky Sharp was aware from the moment she set foot in Vanity Fair, or rather, in the household of old Pitt Crawley, that the rules were made for her, here. She began under several disadvantages, and if they had had it back in 1812, she would have come in second in the Miss Alaska contest, too. But Becky knew she had a good figure and the wits to know who to please, who to tease and who to crush.

“With Mr. Crawley Miss Sharp was respectful and obedient. She used to consult him on passages of French which she could not understand, though her mother was a Frenchwoman, and which he would construe to her satisfaction: and, besides giving her his aid in profane literature, he was kind enough to select for her books of a more serious tendency, and address to her much of his conversation. She admired, beyond measure, his speech at the Quashimaboo-Aid Society; took an interest in his pamphlet on malt: was often affected, even to tears, by his discourses of an evening, and would say--"Oh, thank you, sir," with a sigh, and a look up to heaven, that made him occasionally condescend to shake hands with her.”

The newspapers and Slate are just fascinated with the wardrobe. For one thing, it gives newspaper people a chance to play the the bluntnosed working journalist, Walter Matthau in the Front Page, as though they were down to a few undershirts in the apartments they rent - so of the people! So we have Marc Fisher of the WAPO writing:

“I've never been to any of the stores listed in Sarah Palin's shopping spree, so the idea that it's possible to spend $5,000 on a dress, $75,000 at Neiman Marcus and $4,716 on hair and makeup is kind of mind-boggling, especially by someone who who portrays herself as being "just like you." But I'm also startled to read about the $1,500 that Barack Obama spent on a suit and the $528 that John McCain spent on his Ferragamo shoes. I don't expect these folks to shop at Payless, but these extravagances are so far at the other end of the scale as to represent nothing but disdain for the people they claim to understand and represent.”

The idea that Marc Fisher has never been to Neiman Marcus is something I find equally as mindboggling. Or Saks. Has the guy been to NYC? Underneath that astonishment that you can spend $5,000 on a dress, we spy Tartuffe, in the aw shucks, captain American mode.

Becky’s foothold in Vanity Fair comes from a vain old man. Becky knows how to follow a rule with vain old men: feed the amour-propre.

Instead of Marc Fisher, we’d urge LI readers to turn to Roland Barthes. In an article in Annales, vol. 12, 1957, Barthes sketched out a theory of the system of clothing that later served as the basis for his book on the fashion system. We’ve been interested in fashion since having worked, this summer, copyediting captions for the Autumn fashion issue of Texas Monthly. That was merely sticking our petit orteil into the vast ocean of la mode, so to speak, but we are not immune to the frisson of retifism, the poetry of the silhouette, and the scented non-sense of the barkers of hip. We understand the divide here: for fashion is all about a certain aura in which the dollar operates as paraphilia, while to those outside the aura, the dollar is, depressingly, only a dollar, a cipher that accumulates to create another cipher.

Barthes’ idea was that he could use the classic Saussurian pattern – parole, or speech act, vs. langage, or the language system – to analyse clothing choice, or habillement, vs. fashion, or coutume.

“The oppositiong costume/habillement can besides only serve the sociological point of view: in strongly characterizing costume as an institution and in spearated that institution from the concrete and individual acts by which, so to speak, it is realized, we are lead to research and to disengage the social components of costume: age groups, sex, class, degree of culture, locales, as much as clothing remains an empirical fact, essentially submitted to a phenomenological approach: the degree of disorder or dirtiness of a vestment being worn, for example, is a fact of clothing, and has not sociological value, save if the disorder and the dirtiness function as intentional signs … and inversely, a fact which takes up apparently less space, like the differential mark of the vestment of married women and young girls in such and such a socity, is a fact of costume: it has a strong social value.

The fact of clothing is constitued by the personal mode that the wearer adopts (or badly adopts)…
The fact of costume is the proper object of sociological or historical research…

Facts of costume and facts of clothing can seem sometimes to coincide, but it isn’t difficult in each case to re-establish the distinction. The squareness of the shoulders, for example, is a fact of clothing when it corresponds exactly to the anatomy of the wearer, but it is a fact of costume when its dimension is prescribed by the group in the name of facsion. It is evident that there is, between clothing and costume, an incessant movement, a dialectical exchange that one could define a propos langue and parole as a true praxis.”

“Your India muslin and your pink silk, dearest Amelia, are said to become me very well. They are a good deal worn now; but, you know, we poor girls can't afford des fraiches toilettes. Happy, happy you! who have but to drive to St. James's Street, and a dear mother who will give you any thing you ask. Farewell, dearest girl,
Your affectionate Rebecca.

P.S.--I wish you could have seen the faces of the Miss Blackbrooks (Admiral Blackbrook's daughters, my dear), fine young ladies, with dresses from London, when Captain Rawdon selected poor me for a partner!”


Taking Barthes division as a starting point, we can immediately see that the 150,000 dollars is a hotpoint because it crosses the wires, so to speak – habillement, which is “proper” to the hockey mom, is crossed with coutume, which costs a bundle and comes from the female mysteries that are beyond Marc Jacob’s ken. To LI, though, the comedy here begins with the notion that the hocky mom is only clothed in clothes. There is a comic soundtrack, made no doubt by a flute, playing whenever Sarah Palin is around – clothing and costume gets all confused. For, before ideology or party, Palin stands for becoming suddenly famous – for celebrity in its purest state is sudden. It is in this way that I understand her frequent lapses into incoherence – they don’t denote a mind that doesn’t think, but one that is thinking all the time of being famous. And there is nothing more trivial, to celebrity, than meaning.

“And so--guiltless very likely--she was writhing and pushing onward towards what they call "a position in society," and the servants were pointing at her as lost and ruined. So you see Molly, the housemaid, of a morning, watching a spider in the doorpost lay his thread and laboriously crawl up it, until, tired of the sport, she raises her broom and sweeps away the thread and the artificer.”

It is not so much Sarah Palin who is the comedian here, but the “C” level press corps, writing the script. Sarah Palin didn’t direct the buying of the clothes, any more than Cate Blanchett would supervise the design of clothing for some movie she was starring in. In Palin’s case, the movie was high concept. It was hockey mom. Nobody, of course, knows what that means. That is the genius of it. Like Dog Detective. Like any mutt that results from crossing one film with another – Gone with the Wind meeting the Exorcist, perhaps. Of all the money the McCain campaign has wasted, they got good value, at least, for the Palin costume. She wears them well – the reds! The boots! To which she has contributed the signature glasses.
So, Sarah Palin has been cast to play Sarah Palin in the role of a hockey mom, with clothes from Nieman Marcus. If only this were all the movie. But, like many a high concept production, the film has only one gimmick to milk over and over again. The gimmick overshadows logic, motivation, and sense. Logic crumbles before FX, but the FX look used, second hand. The McCain campaign movie is a straight to video product. What I wonder is: what Palin will get out of it. I’m bettin’ on her.

Election thoughts

I have quoted this passage from Merezhovsky on Gogol before – but the current election season makes this seem all too relevant:

“Everyone can perceive evil in great violations of the moral law, in rare and unusual misdeeds, in the staggering climaxes of tragedies. Gogl was the first to detect invisible evil, most terrible and enduring, not in tragegy, but in the absence of everything tragic; not in power, but in impotence; not in insane extremes, but in all-too-sensible moderation; not in acuity and profundity, but in inanity and planarity, in the banality of all human feelings and thoughts; not in the gratest things, but in the smallest.” –58

This, of course, describes the American election year to a t.

When, in the holy years of democracy, the revolutionary period from 1776-1793, the election in its modern form was created, the inventors had high hopes. The election was to be the poetry of the people, the highest expression of their choice. And what was their choice? Their choice was to be of their rulers, who would be chosen not as choice was made among court factions – where bribery, family blood lines, and charisma held sway, and the choice was made by the sovereign – but rather, as the will of the people would dictate.

The people’s will is foe to the reactionary and the conservative – who took a long time to understand that the election, far from being the beast unleashed, operated institutionally to skew the popular will righwards. That is, to skew the popular will to the most banal choice. Elections, it turned out, would not be about “ideas” or policies, but about what was and was not out of bounds. What was taboo, or what could be made taboo. The all-too-sensible moderation of the pundits and the devil would preside as the judge of all that was electable. And woe betide the candidate who did not make the first move, which consists of being scandalized by his or her opponent. Rival scandals are what is at issue. And other issues are drowned, or given the once over by an establishment which lives off of denying tragedy – all the unconscious buffoons of the platitudinous.

LI early this spring scoped out this election. What was obvious by March was that the economy was going to fall on its face in the fall – although even LI, ever the dupe of street corner apocalypses, didn’t imagine the zona would blow so hard. This counted out the GOP candidate – or at least made his victory unlikely. Of the Democratic candidates, it was obvious that Hilary Clinton would benefit most from a bleak economy. Since Hilary Clinton has been a consistent warmonger, this was not good news for LI. Luckily, Barak Obama ran a genius campaign – we live close enough to his upset of Clinton not to fully appreciate it. And, LI thought, Obama is essentially a peacemaker. It is how he rose, it is who he is. He would garner fewer votes than Hilary, but he would win.

Well, we still think that Obama is a campaign genius, and we still think he will win, but the election has been disheartening.

Our issue, more than anything else, has been peace. Fuck the idea that middle class Americans are running up against their credit card limits – we are much more interested in the idea that the U.S. won’t be pimping mass murder in Iraq. And, earlier this year, when Obama went to Afghanistan and Iraq, we thought he got it. He got, that is, that the Dems can no longer allow the Republicans to own our foreign policy.

For a long time, the Democratic strategy has been to play possum on foreign policy. A craven me-too-ism, with some progressive dressikng thrown in, has been at the center of Democratic foreign policy views. The D.C.-centric, Truman-esque wing of the party, which has no support among the grassroots, but a powerful army of pundit platitudinists, is the very pivot of foreign policy thinking. The platitudinists, with their usual inability to distinguish cause and effect, moan that the American people distrust the Dems because they are too soft. Of course, the root of the distrust of the Dems on foreign policy is the Vietnam war, which Johnson conducted partly because he didn’t want the Republicans to think he was soft.

Myself, I thought, in spring, that Obama was tempted, oh so tempted, to lay down a few truths. This was when he visited Iraq and Afghanistan. This was when his timetable was accepted by Maliki and swallowed, with grumbling, by the Bush administration.

The truths, of course, are outside the bounds of the sayable. For instance, one of the truths is that the U.S. has been far from the central actor in its own occupation of Iraq. Rather, in the first stage of the war, the Saudis made their move, financing the Sunni insurgency and supplying the bulk of the foreign jihadis. What were the Saudis fighting against? It was a step in the cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia – just as Pakistan’s nuclear capacity was a step in the cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, with the Saudi’s paying for the nuclear weapon research. During the second stage of the fight, what the Saudi’s were fighting against came to pass: the hardline Iranian Shi’ite party came to power. The Da’wa party, which has come out on top of the coalition, was forged under Khomeini, and made its mark as Hezbollah’s consistent ally – Hezbollah even conducted a kidnapping campaign in Beirut in the eighties with the goal of freeing the Da’wa thirty, captured in Kuwait. It was on account of that kidnapping campaign that the Reagan administration opened a surreptitious channel to Iran.

These facts are as plain as day to anybody who actually lives in the Middle East, and are the most remote exotica to Americans, who have been systematically buffered from reality by the platitudinarians – although this might well give that later group too much credit for rationality. In truth, the D.C. centered elites really do think they are running the world.

Now, a foreign policy that is in complete disconnect from reality is much like a neurosis – it needs a talking cure. And I thought Obama was just the doctor to deliver one. But no – he calculated, evidently, that this would cost him too much, and entangle him with the cherished delusions of the elite. Instead, Obama has brilliantly campaigned on being scandalized – he has turned a campaign that McCain hoped would concentrate on Obama’s various transgressions into a campaign about the campaign. Liberals are all in an uproar about McCain’s rallies, and Palin’s rhetoric. In other words, this is another election about nothing. Or, rather, an election about inanity and planarity. The devil has won the round.

Nevertheless, we are going to vote tomorrow for Obama. And we are happy to do so.

the executioner's melancholy

“… writing, on the contrary, is always rooted in a beyond of language, it develops like a seed and not like a line, it manifests an essence and threatens with a secret, it is a counter-communication, it intimidates. We will find in all writing the ambiguity of an object which is at the same time language and coercitation: there is, at the bottom of writing, a “circumstance” that is foreign to language, there is something like the glance of an intention that is already no longer that of langauge. This glance can very well be a passion for language, as in literary writing; it can also be the threat of a penality, as in political writing: writing is then charged to join in a single dash the reality of acts and the ideality of ends.” – Barthes, The Degree Zero of Writing

(…l'écriture, au contraire, est toujours enracinée dans un au-delà du langage, elle se développe comme un germe et non comme une ligne, elle manifeste une essence et menace d'un secret, elle est une contre-communication, elle intimide. On trouvera donc dans toute écriture l'ambiguïté d'un objet qui est à la fois langage et coercition : il y a, au fond de l'écriture, une « circonstance » étrangère au langage, il y a comme le regard d'une intention qui n'est déjà plus celle du langage. Ce regard peut très bien être une passion du langage, comme dans l'écriture littéraire; il peut être aussi la menace d'une pénalité, comme dans les écritures politiques : l'écriture est alors chargée de joindre d'un seul trait la réalité des actes et l'idéalité des fins)



The common approach to Chamfort’s ‘maxims’ and “anecdotes” has been to consider them as a philosophy – and to eventually dismiss them as a philosophy. Pellison, his nineteenth century biographer, remarks on the similarity of temperaments that seems to exist between Chamfort and Schopenhauer. But Chamfort was, Pellison concedes, not a systematic thinker.

The notion that a philosopher must work within a ‘system’, which figured largely in the 19th century, still has an influence on the definition of philosophy – in fact, the teaching of philosophy often comes down to a puppetshow of conflicting systems – if you claim x, you are a critical realist, and if you claim y, you are a nominalist. Etc.

Barthes was concerned with another system – the system of ecriture. This has a lot more relevance to Chamfort. Chamfort wrote his “Products” out of a reaction to, a consciousness of, the writerly function. That function – which, as with all middleman positions, has an unearthly relation to the basic one of pandering – is both under attack in the Maxims – from the beginning, the very idea of the maxim is ridiculed as the idea of a mediocre mind – and, inevitably, chosen as Chamfort’s instrument. What other instrument is there? But the notion of maxim, of a rule, if only a rule of thumb in the Repulic of Thumbs, puts us on the track of Chamfort’s sense that his writing was political. It is to this that the reflection tends; political scandal is the whole point of the anecdotes he carefully amassed. When his listeners at Mme Helvetius came away from his conversation with the sad sense of being present at an execution, it was no accident.

So, what was this politics?

Because Chamfort was intentionally freeing up his writing from the literary – and thus the systematic – it is easy to quote him, but hard to point to one passage or another that would provide the key to him. It is this very freedom that “intimidates”, to use Barthes term. But to threaten politically implies an order that can be violated, a standard from which one can judge. And there are many passages from the Maxims that hint at this order – that, as it were, give us the mythic foundation for the series of sacrifices, of executions, that space themselves in both the Maxims and the Anecdotes.

This passage from the first section of the Maxims, for instance.

‘I have often noticed in my reading that the first movement of those who have performed some heroic action, who have surrendered to some generous impression, who have saved the unfortunate, run some great risk and procured some great advantage – be it for the public or for some particulars – I have, I say, noted that the first movement has been to refuse the compensation one offered them. This sentiment is discovered in the heart of the most vile men and the last class of people. What is this moral instinct that teaches men without education that the compensation for these actions is in the heart of he who has done them? It seems that in paying ourselves for them, they have taken this from us. [Il semble qu’en nous les payant on nous les ote]” OC 1812, 2:28

The insistence of the writen, here, is caught in that repetition of “I have often remarked” – its way of pointing to the superfluity of the oral, the way, in the economy of speaking, repetition serves to organize a series that is continually disappearing, going beyond the attention of the listener, which is strictly not needed in writing (for after all, the reader has merely to glance back) and that appears there nevertheless to ‘glance beyond’ the written object, to connote the theater of conversation. But the major economic instance, here, is of course the gift – or the sacrifice. The gift – the heroic act, the generous impulse - initiates an internal circuit in which the outward gift (the true gift) is compensated by an inward gift (which is marked, already, as a compensation). But it is a circuit that is taken from us when we impose upon it another economy – that of payment.

This is, of course, a very Rousseau-like stance. However, it joins Rousseau to a moralist theme – of self satisfaction. Or at least of self compensation. As in Rousseau, nature is identified with a primary process – with spontaneity. The secondary process is that of payment. Chamfort does not, here, reflect on the connecting link of compensation – that there must be compensation of some kind is assumed.

The executioner’s melancholy arises from the perception that the rupture between the regimes of compensation has corrupted us in such a way that there is no going back. It is an irrevocable movement.

“Society is not, as is commonly believed, the development of nature, but rather its decomposition and entire remaking. It is a second edifice, built with the ruins of the first. We rediscover the debris with a pleasure mixed with surprise. It is this which occasions the naïve expression of a natural sentiment which escapes in society. It even happens that it pleases more, if the person from whom it escapes is a rank more elevated, that is to say, farther from nature. It charms in a king, because a king is in the opposed extremity. It is a fragment of ancient doric or corinthian architecture in a crude and modern edifice.”

Scrounger’s Ball day 2

PATRONS OF LI

LI got a few contributions yesterday, but we are far from our goal. This is our week to pick the pockets of our readers: please contribute via the paypal button!

chamfort

Chamfort was not his real last name. In fact, it is still not certain whether his name was really Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, son of a Clermont grocer, or whether he was the bastard child of a Clermont canon. Sébastien-Roch-Nicolas Chamfort, like many another Enlightenment demi-sage, came up through the ranks from a seemingly engulfing provincial obscurity by inventing himself in a different milieu.

His success as a writer falls in the period of the 1770s. He earned money from a hit play; he wrote for enlightened journals; he found an aristocratic patron. And he enjoyed eating, drinking, talking and fucking. He mingled with some of the big names, wrote a catty little verse about Candide, received a letter of praise from Rousseau. His life, although he didn’t know it then, was falling into a pattern of anecdotes. For instance, on the subject of making love, his biographer Pellison recounts that a woman told him, once, “this curious thing. I don’t love smart men in love – they are watching themselves parade on by.” [impossible to capture the phrase, ils se regardent passer- ‘they are people watching themselves’ might be a better translation]. A remark that sticks with Chamfort, and that he records, later.

He was a good looking young man. Another biographer, Arnaud, records that he was the lover of an actress, Mlle. Guimard, “famous for the perfection of her bosom and who did her makeup each day before the portrait that Fragonard had painted of her.” [xiii]

But already, at twenty five, Chamfort’s life had changed much for the worse. Famously. As Remy Gormount wrote: “Chamfort’s secret, why use periphrases that don’t trick anybody, is in the syphilis that tormented him for a period of thirty years, during the time first of his greatest genital activity, and the second, and then in the third, the more discrete but more conscientious and refined period.” His looks fell away. He recovered, but with a disfigured face. Much like Mirabeau – to whom he has a strange, doppelganger relationship – Chamfort had experienced the down side of the libertine moeurs in his body, and he didn’t like it. An anecdote – how they trail our man, how they dog him like devils – from Abbé Morellet, a habitue of the Madam Helvetius’ salon, where Chamfort was a faithful attendee:


“I saw him, he said, in the society of Saurin and Mme Helvetius… this happened to me twenty times at Auteuil that, after having heard him for two hours in the morning recounting anecdote after anecdote and making epigram after epigram with an inexhaustible talent, I would leave with my soul as saddened as if I was leaving the spectacle of an execution. And Mme. Helvetius, who had much more indulgence than I do for that kind of wit, after having amused herself for hours listening to his malignity, after having smiled at each ‘hit’, told me, after he had parted: Father, have you ever seen anything as tiring as the conversation of Chamfort? Do you know that it makes me blue for the entire day? And this is true.”

For between 1780 and 1788 – the decade in which Herder is inspired by his discovery of Nemesis – Chamfort ‘retires’ from the circles of the intellectuals and the long stays as a house guest at the estates of the nobility. He was in his forties. It is now that he leaves behind poetry and the theater and begins writing down his epigrams and anecdotes. He has a sense that this will make a book, and calls the project – in one of those flashes of mordant wit that depressed Mme Helvetius – Produits de la civilisation perfectionnée.

This is one of Chamfort’s maxims:

“Hope is only a charlatan who ceaselessly tricks us. And, for me, only after I’ve lost it does happiness begin. I would gladly place over the gate of paradise the verse that Dante put over that of hell: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.

a scrounger's plea

Patrons of LI!

I was so hoping to avoid my usual scrounger’s week this year – the week in which I beg for contributions to maintain LI as a viable blog. But, after floating through this year in a shimmer of good luck, Nemesis, the Devil and little baby Jesus all spotted me crawling about on the earth whistling a happy tune, and intervened to throw a little shit into my life, financially speaking. Last Thursday, my decade old computer gave up the ghost. I went to have it repaired at a computer shop stocked with used computers, and under the suave ministrations of the pirate at the counter, was pursuaded to purchase a better computer from that golden year, 2004. Mistake! It turns out I was dealing with the computer shop of horrors, a veritable den of lemons. Things have changed in ten years. Computer shops used to be run by computer geeks – a band of mostly young men obsessed with the ins and outs of the machine. A band who had switched off their Oedipal affection for the mother and switched on their Oedipal affection for the motherboard. No longer, alas. Computers have sunk to the level of automobiles, and computer shops are now run by the kind of people who used to wear the gray grease stained work suits and the gimme caps, the people who used to say, looks like the transmission. That’s gonna cost ya!

The upshot of which is that I had many adventures with the lemon that I, in all innocence, purchased, all of them of the bad medecine kind – and finally, late Saturday afternoon, I extracted a workable computer from the shop of horrors and hightailed for home with it.

Thus, my plea: Please contribute to LI – via the handy Pay Pal button – if you have ten plus buckos and are feeling in the generous mood. I’ll beg and plead some more this week, and hopefully round up enough to pay for LI's computer. And you, lucky reader, will benefit too, from the infinite verbiage that will pour off the keyboards. Thanks!

Nemesis and the pursuit of happiness

I want somethin different, I want somethin
special

Oh no, honey, not for ten dollars…


In Herder’s essay, the beauty of Nemesis is an aspect of her indifference –or is it that here indifference is an aspect of her beauty?

It was, of course, one of the less discussed problems with founding a society on happiness, or the pursuit of happiness. It isn’t self-evident that everyone is happy about the happiness of others. The chthonic Nemesis, the frightening Nemesis, is always in pursuit of the happiness of others. The evil eye is buried beneath the tolerant society, the society in which all interests busily converge, drawn by invisible threads. The chthonic Nemesis can be pictured with one foot on the neck of some iconic image of Superbia. For the exceeding happiness of one pulls at the others. The threads fray. In a Borges short story which is in the form of a report about some jungle community, the explorer remarks that the inhabitants all cover their mouths when eating, since to be seen eating is immodest. Immodesty, nakedness, is a continually reinvented thing in this world, with many aspects, many codes – and where nakedness exists, Nemesis exists. The older aspect of the goddess, the ugly aspect, must be appeased somehow. Often, this takes the form of crushing the happiness of children. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, there was a fashion for doing just that in Victorian England. And the happiness of children still has the power to evoke a peculiar social anger. But that anger is directed at other instances of happiness, too: the happiness of foreigners, strangers, other races, the happiness of women. It is a blithe and altogether too hasty assumption that happiness is socially reconciling, a binding force.

Which brings us to the beautiful and indifferent Nemesis, the judge. For here, Herder correctly sees, is a great triumph of civilization. In that indifference, there melts away the desire to crush the happiness of others. But it holds back, too, from sweet fusion with the mass, that other form of social cohesion. It coldly dislikes the even temporary erasure of the line separating the self from others in such fusion.

Herder’s two aspects of Nemesis preside over the castles and dungeons of Sade. It is always a question of Nemesis for Sade’s fuckers, all of them born under the sign of superbia.

Notes on the Zona 1

LI, as we hope we have made clear, has been disgusted with Nader and the Green party for years. Yet, in 2000, we voted for Nader, under the delusion that the Green party was something more than a vanity movement that existed to keep Nader’s name in the papers. But we’ve never regretted that vote. We regretted that Gore ran a suck campaign and then, insanely, didn’t contest all Florida precincts immediately, demanding a recount.

Well, ho ho ho, it turns out that all the things Nader and the anti-corporation crowd were railing at – the failure to regulate the derivatives market, the failure to reign in corporate abuses, the use of lobbyists to stifle regulatory agencies that were warning about things like the abuse of accounting rules –well, they were all correct. It is like the 100 percent correct record. That’s nice. Meanwhile, the bipartisan oohing and ahhing over Maestro Greenspan has now started to settle in the national stomach a little badly, like a cannibal stew. Such, of course is the zona.

Read the WAPO account of the attempt by Brooksley E. Born to stop the oncoming train wreck.

"The meeting of the President's Working Group on Financial Markets on an April day in 1998 brought together Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr. -- all Wall Street legends, all opponents to varying degrees of tighter regulation of the financial system that had earned them wealth and power.

Their adversary, although also a member of the Working Group, did not belong to their club. Brooksley E. Born, the 57-year-old head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, had earned a reputation as a steely, formidable litigator at a high-powered Washington law firm. She had grown used to being the only woman in a room full of men. She didn't like to be pushed around.

Now, in the Treasury Department's stately, wood-paneled conference room, she was being pushed hard."

Remember the days of yore, when economics would be pulled out of politics, and the private sector would chug along and do all the good things for the good little boys and girls? Sure you do. Uncle Thomas Friedman wrote a book about it. LI, in a prescient little review for the Austin Chronicle, reviewed said book.

The Spirit of the Ultimate Game

Come on pretty boy
Can't you show me nothing but surrender

Economists call it the Ultimate Game. James Surowiecki gives a good description of it:

“Take two people. Give them a hundred dollars to split. One person (the proposer) decides, on his own, what the split should be (fifty-fifty, seventy-thirty, or whatever) and makes the other person a take-it-or-leave-it offer. If he accepts the deal, both players get their share of the money. If he rejects it, both players walk away empty-handed.

The rational thing for the second person to do is to accept the offer, whatever it is, since even one dollar is better than nothing. But in practice this rarely happens. Instead, lowball offers are almost always rejected. Apparently, people would rather throw away money than let someone else walk away with too much. Other experiments illustrate the same idea. Essentially, people are willing to pay to punish those they think are free-riding or acting unfairly, even when doing so brings them no material benefits.”

The Ultimate Game has been known since the beginning of civilization. Among other things, the Iliad might be considered to be a poem about the Ultimate Game. Naturally, it is presided over by a divinity, in this case, the goddess Nemesis.

LI finds it curiously stirring that Herder turned to Nemesis in 1787, two years before the French Revolution (of which he was, to begin with, an ardent supporter – and even after the Terror, he never lost his sense that ultimately, the Revolution was a good thing), at the very peak of the culture of enlightened hedonism.

Classicists today still find Nemesis a puzzling figure. She was a double goddess, or a goddess with two aspects. Herder’s essay on Nemesis is an attempt to understand this mystery – and to understand it on behalf of bright Nemesis, the fair goddess, mother of Helen.

The psycho-social heart of his essay is about happiness and indifference. He tries to understand how one deals with another’s happiness and unhappiness. In particular, why is it that “we sympathize more immediately and strongly with the unhappy than the happy”?

“And so the lightest kind of Nemesis was born, that is actually not envy, not jealousy, but a kind of indifference, that allows us no pleasing fusion with another. By raw spirits this breaks out in cold repulsion [Unwillen]; and the more the other shows off his happiness, the less he understands how to put a pleasing disguise over his advantages, the more he arouses, when not envy, yet repulsion against himself. For even those who would grant him his happiness, become indignant over the fact that he doesn’t enjoy it more wisely and know how to be measured in his enjoyment. This Nemesis lies in all hearts; it was even, as the Greek idioms show, the first that the language and mythology observed. It is, when it wildly breaks out, a daughter of the night, the companion of quarrels, hatred and schadenfreude; in brief, the Nemesis, who Hesiod describes in his Theogony as an evil Goddess. In noble spirits on the other hand, just this cold observation of the ethos of others in their happier hours preserves its pure essnce, and since it mixes neither with pain [Leide] or with pity [Mitleiden], it thus becomes the sharpest point in their scale of judgment. This is the good Nemesis, that looks on, cold and indifferent; but it also must be assuaged or reconciled, then it is an incorruptible judge of virtue and truth.

And how does one most honorable reconcile it? No otherwise than that one makes oneself the observer of one’s happiness and ethos; look there, the goddess with the measuring rod and bridle, who drives away black envy. She drives it away since she hats all passionate presumption and binds the presumptions of men with her bridle; and in this way alone does the good Nemesis defeat the evil one.” [141]

His biographer, Haym, writing in the 1880s, calls this essay an “archaeology of antiquity”. As LI has already pointed out, the appearance of an essay on Nemesis in the time period that saw the first fine extension of happiness from a mere passing feeling to both a norm concerning one’s total life and a norm concerning the political and economic arrangements of the social life already signals a certain dissent. This is Haym’s judgment:

“There is nothing so distinctive as the fact that just at this time, in the 80s, Herder was mightily grasped by this symbol. It is the symbol for the beautiful equilibrium into which with his being he committed his activity and art as a writer. This symbol could not have been predicted by the writing of his earlier period. After the thrusting and enthusiasm, the numerous incidents that lacked measure and that stepped over the line, in which his views, his appearance, his ambitious striving, his unbridled hate and love itself, his style, the whole way of being and art in which he moved, he was now at the point of recognizing the mean, adherence to noble forms, submission to necessity, to decorum, like Goethe, and expressed this with the appropriate words, as Goethe did with other words. He had to pay homage to Nemesis after his Sturm und Drang period had passed as Goethe had already, after traveling through Switzerland in 1779, wanted to erect an altar to Fortuna, Genius and Terminus.” (329)

the smell of cognitive dissonance in the morning

The Republican re-election plan, such as it is, has been to blame GSEs- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – for the subprime crisis. Meanwhile, the Republican administration’s new plan is – to make every bank a GSE! LI loves the smell of cognitive dissonance in the morning!

So, basically, the developed countries (save for China, the new home of the free market) have put their treasuries on the line. This will be an interesting game. As we pointed out before, the shrinking that is going to come will wipe out a lot, as in hundreds of trillions, of value, namely as the 550 trillion dollar pool of derivatives comes back to earth. Since nothing on earth – including the combined treasuries of all the richest nations – has that much money, the decision that is coming up is how to let it go. LI advises readers to check out the popping of John Law’s system for pointers. Or ... the Grimm’s tale about the Fisherman’s wife who wished to be God.

Nemesis and the Zona

- When Pompey was finally defeated, his head was cut off and sent to Julius Caesar in Egypt. Caesar buried the head in a spot of ground especially dedicated to Nemesis.

- Events keep fucking with LI’s general strategy. I should be writing about the varieties of eighteenth century hedonism. But I am watching the money culture blow up before my eyes, like a dream. Things I have written on this blog long ago about inequality and its effects, or the meltdown in pensions, etc., have leaped into the coldblooded half reality of the headline world.

- My brother Doug likes to say that I think I know all the answers. This is true. The prophetic vocation is in my bones. However, so far in my life, none of the answers have matched any of the questions anybody is asking. The answers were all torn from literature, a thing that has long been laid aside in that place where the dead bury the dead. These are tv washed days in the land of Cockagne, the artificial Paradise, and he not busy doing crack is busy lining his footsteps to the grave with asset based securities. I have watched the best minds of my generation discover that the mind is a ludicrous entity that the system could synthesize for itself, just as it could manufacture its own imagination from zeros and ones, its own virtual emotions (better than any felt by DNA based creatures), and its own cyber others to hate. Fuck off and die is written on my forehead, and yes, I’ve been looking forward to the latter part of that admonition. But I suddenly feel all relevant.

- All of which means that my bittersweet topic, the Human Limit, is now all the more pressing. It is just the time for sowing doubts about the entire direction of this here civilization.

- What are the roots that clutch?

- So: Herder’s essay on Nemesis, written in the 1780s, has been on my list of references for a while. Now that the Zona is blowing, it is time to address Nemesis – that limit to happiness itself. To start with, here is a quote about Nemesis from Mathew Grumpert’s book, Grafting Helen:

“

Aristotle asks at 5.5.17-20: what is it that holds the city together? and answers: the equitable exchange of disparate goods. That means, in essence, setting up equivalences between them: “all things that are exchanged must be somehow comparable. It is for this end that money had been introduced and... becomes... an intermediate[meson]; for it meaures all things. ... money “has become by convention a sort of representative of demand; and this is why it has the name money [nomisma] – because it exists not bey nature but by law [nomos]” E. Laroche, in “Histoire de la racine nem- en grec ancien” notes that in the earlest instances of nemesis, conventionally defined as blame, the term is always used to make a “value judgment” (1949:93), in both an ethical and economic sense. Both are central to the act of assessment at the walls of Troy, as the elders gaze upon the face of Helen (3.156) ou nemesis Troas (surely there is no blame if Trojans...). Helen is, indeed, a form of nomos, a powerful generator of equivalences, but ruthlessly pursued – like money – as a possession in her own right.

Helen as nemesis suggests the financial abuses described by Aristotle in the Politics: she provokes an economy fueled entirely by desire, as opposed to demand. And the face of Helen is, to use Aristotle’s definition of nomos, a “representative’ of desire, as opposed to demand.” (2001:61)

The Mangle of Inequality

Marx, that old mole under the boards, must be laughing. Under the detritus of the non-speak in the papers, this is clearly a business “correction” that points to the inherent crisis-prone strain in capitalism. Marx, of course, wasn’t the first to see that the tendency of the margin of profit of a commercial enterprise is to decline, but he had the larger vision of how that decline was embedded in society.

Apparently, however, nobody quotes Marx or alludes to Marx on TV. On TV, the recession just fell out of the sky. Such was LI’s conclusion, lying in a gigantic hotel room in Sarasota Springs, NY, the past couple of days, channel jumping the wasteland, looking for reports on the Zona. We’d traveled North to attend the wedding of our friend, S. The leaves were red, and the Yankees we met were kind, boisterous, full of family histories and drink. And those accents...I actually experienced that traditional ecodisaster, the pre-wedding limo party. I was a hit for suggesting we find some poor people and run over them (my best material always comes from Baudelaire, God Bless Him). S., of course, shimmered in her wedding gown on the day (and the crosshatched lace action of the back of the gown was, uh, quite phenomenal). Her husband, M., a professional massage therapist and part time punk rocker, assembled part of his band for the reception, and I hopped up and down to the music like a shaved ape escaped from some Pharma concentration camp where they were researching dopamine.

But in the late night off hours, I pondered the pisspoor state of political reporting (that political reporters are surprised that the campaign in October is about the state of the economy means that they really are braindead – did they read nothing about what was happening starting in January?) and watched the group fumble on the news stations to explain what was unfolding.

The place to start, of course, is the seventies. Suddenly, after thirty years, we are starting to recognize the shift that began to occur then. Let me remind you – the shift consisted of 1., the crushing of the bargaining power of labor; 2., the de-manufacturing of America – which was partly connected to the fact that manufacturing workers were the most militant, and partly the inevitable effect of the ability of capital to find other, cheaper regions in which to place factories; and 3, the dissolving of traditional constraints on credit.

These events occurred in response to the most serious crisis in capitalism since 1945. Galbraith’s New Industrial state, the liberal Keynesian economy, had created structures that were supposed to resolve such crises. These included the management of aggregate demand by the state, the moderation of labors’ older, utopian demands for a slice of the power in return for a steadily rising paycheck, and management’s movement away from optimizing profits in exchange for lessened volatility. The Keynesian moment unwound for a number of reasons – labour, with increasingly less interest in the political dimension that originally animated unions, became much more vulnerable; the government management of aggregate demand, combined with the government dependence on War, had finally unleashed inflation; and the ROI of the Fortune 500 corporations was finally causing an investor revolt. However, of the three factors I am listing in the shift to the new, Reagonomic paradigm, one and three seem oddly disjoint. How is it possible to diminish the bargaining power of labor – which results in the stagnation of wages – and at the same time dissolve traditional constraints on consumer and other credit?

Of course, from the neo-classical point of view, that makes a lot of sense. Instead of the government actively managing aggregate demand, the private sector, with a freer credit market, can take over. And in fact, even if wages stagnate, household incomes rise. The house itself as an asset appreciates, for one thing; more investment vehicles are made available to the public, for another thing; and finally, there is the great entry of women into the labor market.

Credit, then, is the keystone. It is from this moment on that the financial services sector, which had been relatively unimportant in the Keynesian regime, returns in force. It is what I would call the mangle of inequality – playing on Andrew Pickering’s term, mangle of practice. Contemporary capitalism in America has to effect a straddle – the economy depends on consumption, and yet, the majority of the consumers engross less and less of the productivity gains accrued by the system. Freeing the financial markets had two effects – one was to re-vamp the consumer’s financial horizon. Instead of worrying about making a wage sufficient to live the good life, the consumer worries about making a wage sufficient to have a good credit history – which is the magical key to the world of cars, plasma screen tvs, houses, and all the rest. The other was to make the consumer a shareholder in the system. For simplicity’s sake, call this the 401k world – that stands at the symbolic center of a system by which the ordinary person was hooked into the market. And the market could, consequently, use vast flows of capital to keep easing credit. A virtuous feedback, so to speak.

It had another, symbolically resonant significance. The triumph of the state in the 20th century was in providing for retirement. The state successfully created, within a capitalist economy, a mass ability to finish one’s life without poverty or utter family dependence. It was the template for the structural goods that the state, in a mixed economy, could provide – when the demands of distributive justice could not be aligned with the price creating market in a good or service. Consequently, social security has earned a special hatred from the right. The American system of encouraging private investment was meant, on the surface, to complement social security, but the ultimate aim was always to replace it.

The mangle of inequality, then, was not – as in Marx’s time – a head to head confrontation between classes. It is a more complex machine, in which class interests are blent so that head to head confrontation is systematically differed. The political triumph of the system is that the blending disenfranchised populism, since it became unclear who would really benefit from populist practice.

These are the roots that clutch. Fast forward to yesterday’s NYT article about Alan Greenspan, and notice the graph about the derivatives market. Notice that, supposedly, the world added 400 trillion dollars worth of value in the last six years. At least in the derivatives market.

This is, of course, entirely spurious. But the logic of the mangle of inequality has driven that financial bubble, and its effects are going to be real. We should not be comparing our situation to the Great Depression. This Zona goes back to John Law’s system. And just as Law’s system produced numbers incompatible with the real world, so, too, has Greenspan’s system. It is about to fall. We are about to see the melting away of 400 trillion dollars, give or take a penny.

The mangle tells us something about what comes next. In the past, recession has been economic sector oriented, which often means region oriented. We’ve seen in with industry and agriculture. The most malign effect of this recession, however, will be concentrated on an age demographic: the over 60s. Their entire world was built on the credit system I have outlined. Ironically, the elites, chattering away about “reforming” social security, never noticed that the real weakness in the retirement system is in the private “complements” to social security. Pensions are already underwater, and have been for some time. Having hooked the generation that was thirty to forty during the Reagan years into the financial system, the policymakers, economists, rightwing think tankers, and the vast sales forces of the financial system brought in the kind of capital that allowed for the speculative bubble. The bubble bursting, that money won’t be there any more. And the over 60s aren’t going to like it.

As for Marx, well, who is that knocking at the door?

Don Giovanni, a cenar teco
M'invitasti e son venuto!

the zona

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.

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:

“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.

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.”

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!

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!

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.

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.