The Bullet we missed

The NYT has a piece on ex Senator Phil “I love a billionaire” Gramm, whose career in the Senate is an epic of corrupt practices and a vile ideology, which all resulted in the economy we know and love today. They even, as a sidenote, print the emails that the ever irrepressible Enron people were sending each other as Gramm was passing the Enron provision in the bill barring the regulators of commodity futures from even thinking about derivatives – a provision that allowed Enron to spiral into a gigantic fraud whose clawmarks can still be spotted in California. How Beautiful! And they print his remarks on the wonders and charms of subprime mortgages, which, in the grand forgettery of the rightwing spin machine, have been tossed aside for insane fantasies about Barney Frank. Gramm is the man who was within a whisker of being the secretary of the treasury.

LI has long considered Gramm among the vilest of the vile. Here’s what we wrote in 2001:

Friday, January 04, 2002
Dope

Some further comments on Senator Torricelli's Houdini like escape from prosecution seem called for.
The question on the mind of the spectator must be: why would the Repugs go along on this deal? After all, damn Senator T with the black spot and Senator Lott will once more be the majority leader, talked to, even, by tv reporters and such.

Well, let's speculate a little bit, children. When one of D.C.'s pirates is caught with his hand in the till, very often a delicate situation arises. Because so many other pirates on the ship have been quietly amassing as much loot as their natural greed allows them. It is a tradition that goes back to the Roman senate. So if Senator T.'s skin is graciously unflayed, one looks around for who else could be outrageously vulnerable to charges of pilfering. And the eye alights on a certain Texas senator, Phil Gramm. Phil and his wonderful and rich wife, Wendy, have made quite a killing in the past decade from their association with Enron corporation, of blessed memory. There's a Public Citizen release that counts the ways Enron loved the Gramms, and the Gramms loved Enron. Consider that Wendy, high spirited free marketer that she is, was appointed by Bushie the elder to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. This is a sad sack commission ostensibly armed to police the derivatives market -- but armed like a boyscout with a peashooter facing down the Nazi Wehrmacht. Even so, you never know when some nasty regulation will actually enforce transparency on futures or options trading, the biz Enron was massively in. So our heroine, Wendy, came to Enron's rescue by exempting trading in futures contracts by Enron, in 1993. It was one of her last acts as a truly altruistic public personality, because she then resigned her chairmanship and, five weeks later, took on an entrepeneurial role on the Enron board of directors. Now, reader, you are thinking that this is merely a coincidence; and besides, boards of directors are notoriously composed of crash test dummies, rubberstamping the decisions of the CEO. But our dear Wendy also served on the Enron Audit committee (this part of her story should be scored to that all time popular hit, "Three blind mice'). So double hitting for that innovator in spot prices in power for you and me, she made off with around a million five. Hey, I'm sure that Phil was uninfluenced by that chunk of change, but you know how a loving, christian couple, in the depth of the night, abed, sometimes talks about the meaning of it all, and our redeemer's beautiful life story, and wouldn't it be nice if some properly motivated senator snuck a provision onto some bill de-regulating the power commodity markets. Probably these sweet whispers were in vain, given Phil adamantine integrity, but maybe something, well, unconscious kicked in, cause golly, Phil did muscle in the bill Enron wanted. For good Laissez Faire reasons, no doubt.

Yes, the money rolls in, but Phil's ambitions no longer play out on the national level, and his mind has turned to contemplating the blank verse of The Prelude or something -- those sweet retirement thoughts. But still, with Enron falling apart this year with a speed and desperation much like that of the East German government in 1989, the Gramms probably also had some heart to hearts about those pesky laws constraining politicians from accepting bribes in too public and outrageous a fashion -- laws which, as we all know, are stronger in the spirit than the letter, but still... Maybe it is time to fold your tent and creep home, with the couple millions of Enron bucks under your belt or in your portfolio to watch over you in the golden years. This will no doubt be used by invidious nabobs of negativism to explain why Phil gave a press conference on September 2 announcing his retirement from the Senate, even though he had amassed a 4 million dollar reelection warchest.

Warms your heart, doesn't it, reader? And so maybe Senator T gets traded for Senator G. in the game. We are not of course suggesting anything so cynical went down in D.C. in reality. In reality, all Senatorial transactions are motivated by the unwavering patriotism of the members of that hallowed chamber. All Limited Inc is doing is, well, muddying the waters. Spewing negativism. Speculating, as is our wont, in an idle and destructive manner.


Here’s what we wrote in 2002:

Monday, October 07, 2002
Remora

Isn't this sweet? Outgoing senator Phil Gramm -- that's what all the news releases say -- is set to join UBS Warburg:



ABC News announces it in the easy tones that embody the flow of senatorial personage to business personage and back:

"Senator Phil Gramm will soon become vice chairman of UBS Warburg, the investment banking arm of Switzerland's biggest bank, UBS Warburg said on Monday.Gramm, who will take up the private sector post when his Senate term ends later this year, follows a well trodden path of key legislators who join top Wall Street firms. Gramm has been in Congress for 24 years, and co-authored far reaching legislation in 1999 that repealed a prohibition on companies offering banking, brokerage and insurance operations under one roof."

Curiously, nobody connects a few dots. So Limited Inc will take up the pencil. How about this?

1. Wendy Gramm serves on the board of Enron. Preceding this nice little sinecure, she sits on the Commodities and Futures Commission and gives Enron a nice little waiver to embark upon its energy trading business without any pesky federal regulation. After eight years and about 600 thousand dollars, Wendy, on the Accounting committee of the Enron board no less, is shocked, shocked to learn that the company has been looted as thoroughly as the Russian looted Berlin, circa 1945.

2. But as that looting is drawing near its close, certain high up personages in Enron have not wholly given up the idea that, in the last moment, they can lick the spoons. Greg Whalley, among this seedy crew, is operating, supposedly, as Enron's President. It is his decision to reach in the piggy bank and award compensatory amounts up to a million dollars a piece for the people who are sitting at Enron's energy trading desk -- which, you'll remember, was made possible by Wendy Gramm's fortuitous waiver. He justifies these awards by going on about necessary personel, and the need to keep them from jumping ship. Of course, he doesn't allude to the vulgar fact that the energy trading desk has been losing money hand over fist. Or that the compensation comes directly out of the hide of the older workers in the gas pipes division -- yokels all.

"A top Enron executive wrongfully allowed employees who stayed with the company to cash deferred-compensation claims worth at least $32 million, while denying similar payments to former employees, legal experts say. And the experts said one-time Enron Chief Operating Officer Greg Whalley may well be personally liable for the payments distributed in October and November. A lawyer for Whalley recently told the Chronicle that his client had allowed dozens of company executives to cash out their deferred-compensation plans because they were still "providing value" to Enron. But retirees and other ex-employees who sought to cash out at the same time, or earlier, did not get approval."

3. Well, what is a hardworking president to do? Got to keep the energy section going until you can sell it, and yourself with it, to some lucky company. And guess who that company is, sweethearts? Why it is UBS Warburg: here's the announcement, dated February of this year, in Computerworld.

"A wholly owned subsidiary of London-based UBS Warburg, which is itself the investment banking subsidiary of Swiss bank UBS AG, the re-formed energy exchange has acquired Enron's gas and power trading IT infrastructure, its intellectual property and 625 of its former employees (see story).

"When the sale was finalized [Feb. 8], those people became UBSWenergy employees," said company spokeswoman Jennifer Walker. Most notable in the group is former Enron President and Chief Operating Officer Greg Whalley, who rose to that position in August after former Enron President Jeff Skillings left unexpectedly."

4. And so now Senator Gramm, the honorable Senator Gramm, who seems to have slipped through this awful mess that must have, just must have been caused by government regulation (ask the guys who write the editorials for the Wall Street Journal) with his wonderful wife Wendy by his side, unbowed by her experience and comforted, perhaps, by that half a mil she earned for two weeks work a year, is headed, by coincidence, for the refuge of the high end final Enron looters. Quelle coincidence! Not that we are accusing anybody of striking a deal, especially not good old dirty fingered, corrupt, cheating, lying, stealing, black hearted, selfish, conniving, worthless Phil Gramm -- as we like to call him, jokingly, in Texas. We simply think that it is, indeed, a small world after all, and one in which Phil simply keeps running into people he's helped out, and who want to help him out in turn.

The Modern way to commit Suicide

“In 1718, at Chateau-Gontier, a young pregnant girl having poisoned herself, the cadaver, from the time of the beginning of the trial, was exhumed and imprisoned in a jail”. Then it was dragged, head down, through the streets of the village, hung by its feet, and at last “placed on a bonfire and reduced to ashes.” I don’t know of another case where the penalty of burning was applied. The sentence of Chateau-Gontier specified that the ashes would be thrown to the wind and the child would be, before this, extracted from the cadaver to be buried with the stillborns.

The is even examples of condemnation in cases of suicide attempts. In 1777, the Journal of Paris told the story of a man who, having tried to hang himself, was condemned to the galleys for life and was only acquitted on appeal. Voltaire, in the Philosophical Dictionary, speaks of a man who, having “made several light cuts on himself with a knife, like the charlatans, in order to obtain some recompense”, was condemned to be hung by a decree of Parliament.”

Bayet, Le Suicide et le morale, 632.

LI has been reading Georges Minois’ History of Suicide with mixed feelings. Minois is very good at gathering together sources. But his comments are very flatheaded. I’m using it mostly to poke around in the references. But the information in the Minois book does pose some puzzles if you are interested in suicide as the manifestation of something deeper going on in a culture. For instance, Minois uses the work of Guy Barreau on suicides in Brittany during the 18th century. Barreau maintains that the records show that women account for five times more suicides than men. That is truly unusual – men almost always outnumber women as suicides, usually by a considerable amount. Another striking statistical fact comes via a survey of suicides in England between 1541 and 1799. Children under 14 account for the highest percentage of suicides, an amazing 30 percent. Minois’ notion is that, at least in the eighteenth century, this might reflect the truly horrendous conditions of apprentices and working children. Even in the list of Breton suicides, many of them are young, and are described like this:

29 November 1769. A young girl of fifteen, Francoise Royer, drowned herself at Fougeres. She had for some tie been abused by her mother, who sent her out to beg, gave her hardly enough to eat, threw her out into the street in the middle of the night calling her a whore, and beat her with a stick. The mother showed no sorrow at her daughter’s death: It’s the devil who broke her neck, but she’s over seven, she isn’t under my care anymore… There she is, the great she-devil, she was looking for trouble and she found it… She’s a wretch, she told me so. It’s the evil spirit that whipped her.”

Blake’s Little Black boy among the snow/crying weep weep in notes of woe came from the very heart of the people.
…
It is suicide and love that unweave the net woven by reason and sympathy. The net in which we are caught.

…

Look at how Durkheim sorts his suicides. One sees, in the categories, glimmers of Tocqueville, particularly the analysis of American society. This is the egoist suicide:

“The more the groups to which he belongs are enfeebled, the less he depends on them, the more, in consequence, he stands on his own two feet in order not to recognize other rules of behavior than those which are founded on his own private interest. If, thus, one agrees to call egoism this state where the individual I affirms itself with excess in the face of the social I and at the expense of the latter, we can give the name egoi8st to the particular type of suicide that results from unlimited individuation.” Book ii, 69

Contrasted to Altruistic suicide:

“Thus, in all these cases [of warriors and widows sacrificing themselves], if a man kills himself it is not because he has seized that right for himself, but, which is very different, because he has a duty to do it. If he fails this obligation, he is punished by dishonor, and also, most often, by religious chastisements.” [77]

In Durkheim’s quadrivium of suicides (anomy, egoism, altruism, fatalism), it is obvious that the modern suicides fall under the anomy and egoism side, and the pre-moderns under the altruism and fatalism side. Yet, his statistics irritatingly refuse to give us a neat pattern, in which the modern simply succeeds the premodern. Instead, it lurks within the modern structures. Its dread name is woman – for women, in Durkheim’s statistics, stubbornly refuse to commit suicide for reasons of anomy and egotism, and commit suicide, after being all too integrated into the social, for reasons of altruism and fatalism. To explain this, Durkheim even has to allude to biology – not a very Durkheimian gesture. Women must have more primitive brains then men. That must be it.

However, Durkheim did not have good stats on suicide attempts. I wonder what he would have made of them? Esquirol was one of the first to distinguish suicides from suicide attempters, and estimated the suicide attempters as forty percent of the suicide total. In actuality, or at least in contemporary actuality, there are about three times as many attempters as successful suicides, and the majority of attempters are women.

Durkheim’s quadrivium of suicides is suggestive in another way, too – it ties into the imperial perspective. For the altruistic/fatalistic suicides are primitive, and when we find them, we can be sure the society is unhealthily laggard. From the suttee to the kamikaze pilot to the suicide bomber, this perspective still holds. The other/enemy still horrifies by being so imprisoned in the chains of feudalism, from which we have long ago liberated ourselves. Meanwhile, in the shadows cast by this structure, the altruistic/fatalistic type lurks. Every SAC bomber crew in the Cold War was expected, if the call came, to attack even knowing that the chance of survival was minimal – close to what the truck bomber might expect. Yet we never called this our suicide squadron. In fact, during the Cold War, it was often recognized, as a metaphor, that the missile policies of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were thinly disguised suicide threats. It was, in fact, writ large, the cutter’s fantasy, the bulemic’s fantasy.

…
One other note. According to Minois, the suicide letter was a mainly eighteenth century invention. Of course, this is partly due to the spread of literacy. But, Minois thinks, it is also due to the spread of secularization – more and more, the afterlife was not thought of in terms of heaven and hell. It was a vaguely pleasant place where one met one’s loved ones again (the idea that there was no giving or taking of wives and husband in the Kingdom of God – that radically anti-family idea from the radically anti-family Jesus – had long bit the dust), but just in case, one wanted to get in a word or two posthumously.

August 12, 1771 (2)

After the conversation between Albert and Werther takes a turn towards considering whether suicide could be excusable or not, Werther takes a recent case of a girl – a Mädchen – who had recently drowned herself in the nearby river. Remembering that Werther’s falling in love was ritualized in three circles, it is surprising and interesting that Werther describes the girl’s falling in love in terms of circles, too.

“ I reminded him of a girl who, some time before, had been discovered dead in the water, and repeated to him her history: a good young creature, who had grown up in the narrow circle of domestic affairs and definite weekly tasks; and in addition, who knew no prospect of satisfaction than, for instance, on Sundays, to stroll around in the city dressed up in her piecework finery with similar girls, perhaps stopping to dance once at all the festivals…”

The first circle – which should remind us of the first circle in which Werther saw Charlotte for the first time, surrounded by her brothers and sisters.

But then things change. She gets bored until a “man arrives to whom an unknown feeling irresistibly draws her, on whom she now throws all her hopes and forgets about the world around her (rings um sich), hears nothing, sees nothing, feels nothing but him.” The second circle of love – unlike Werther’s love for Charlotte, a love that the girl can more easily enact – is a rather frightening circle. Already, it discloses the structure of suicide, in that the world around her is forgotten. The circle, that form in which distribution and substitution are the elements, takes on a form in which the substituted elements disappear, and the distribution of affection has no resource to draw from except that of the girl’s naked self.

Here is how the story ends: with the girl “sticking her arms out to embrace all her wishes – and her lover abandons her. Petrified, without sense, she stands before an abyss. Everything is darkness around her, no prospect, comfort, sensation: he has left her, in whom alone she feels her existence. She doesn’t see the broad world, which lies at her feet, nor the many, who could supply her loss [den Verlust ersetzen koennten], she feels alone, abandoned by all the world.”

… and blindly pressed upon by the narrowness of the horrible pain in her heart, she throws herself in, in order to drown all her pain in an all encompassing [rings umfangenden] death.” [70, 71]

Death is the fourth circle, so to speak, after the world, in which the many exist who could supply her loss – the many who emerge, with infinite lightness, in Cosi fan tutte to show that substitution is freedom – and who here exist as a sort of mockery, the abandoned who abandon her.

Why a circle and not, for instance, a line? Because a line would negate the game with its infinity. In the line, there would be no vantage point outside it to tell who stayed and who left. The circle has both closure and infinity – and, most importantly, from within the circle, one can survey the work of substitution.

August 12, 1771

... But before I can go further, I need to go back to the very important conversation between Werther and Albert on August 12 – a day that changes the entire tone of the novel.

On August 12, Werther records an important conversation with Albert. Albert is Charlotte’s betrothed. In fact, Werther has been making Albert his doppelganger. They both love Charlotte, and – while Werther has said nothing about this to Albert – one can guess that Albert has guessed. I won’t dwell on how much this situation reminds me of certain adulterous passages from my own past – because that would be tedious and embarrassing. Suffice it to say that I found Werther’s behavior here almost unbearably familiar.

So, on August 12th, Albert and Werther have a conversation. The starting point is Albert’s pocket pistols, which Werther wants to borrow. This leads to a discussion of the etiquette of pistols – once, Albert’s servant was cleaning the pistols and showing off to tease another servant, a likely girl, and accidentally shot her. Since then, Albert has made sure that the pistols aren’t loaded.

Werther’s immediate commentary on this story is not only gorgeous, but gives us in a very brief space the aesthetic credo of modernism.

“ My dear, what after all is foresight? Nothing can ever really teach us about danger. Really – “ Now you know [you being Werther’s silent friend, to whom he is writing this letter] that I have the warmest feelings for the man, up to his ‘really’. Because isn’t it self-evident, that every general rule suffers some exceptions? But the man will insist so much on being in the right! That when he believes to have said something hurried, general, half true - - so he begins to limit, to modify, to hem and haw endlessly, until there is nothing left of the thing at all. And on this occasion he plunged deeper into the text – I finally stopped listening to him, fell to moping, and with an irritable gesture I pressed the mouth of the pistol over my right eye, on the forehead. What are you doing!? as he grabbed the pistol away from me. It isn’t loaded, I said. Even so, he said impatiently. I can’t imagine how a man could be so foolish as to shoot himself. The simple thought goes against my grain.

You people, I cried out, in order to speak about a thing, have to say the same thing: that is foolish, that is clever, that is good, that it is bad! And what does all that amount to? Have you thereby plumbed the inner relationships of an action? Do you know with certainty how the causes develop, why they happen, why they have to happen? If you only had, then you wouldn’t be so quick with your judgments.

You will have to concede, said Albert, that certain actions remain vicious, whatever the grounds from which they spring.

I shrugged my shoulders and conceded it…”

Stop here for a second. It is August 12, 1771. And in this passage, a revolution has happened. You can look around the 18th century where you will, but nothing like this conversation, this attitude, that shrug, that outcry – not even in Rousseau. Nobody had written this kind of thing before. That is, since Shakespeare and Montaigne. Sure, you will find bawdy in the 18th century, you will find glimpses of Rabelais, and there was always Cyrano, and there was the conversations in Gullivers Travels in the fourth book – but all of that remained under the stamp of classical forms. This, this is new, this is Satanic – to use the word as Michelet used it, talking about how the saying of the Lord’s prayer backwards was a decisive blow against the totality and the total oppression of the Church. August 12, 1771. That bold idea – to profane the sacred not by denial, but by reversal, by inversion – that forms a domain of revolt that emerges in this conversation as clearly as the fact that Albert’s gun isn’t loaded – that is, it is fraught with obsession. It all comes together here – the pistol, Werther’s moment of bitter absent mindedness, the irritable gesture, Albert’s irrefutable reasonableness – out of this comes Kleist’s end, and the fever dreams of Stepan Verkhovensky and the girl that Stavrogin might have raped, and who certainly hung herself, Munch painted this, Godard filmed this, the Sex Pistols sung this – and a million exegetes have tried to sweep it into one ideology or another, God help us. It is central to, and hidden by, the turn in happiness culture – that moment in which, after the liberation from the old feudal structure of the passions, from the old superstitions, from the old fears of pleasure, from the old primitive cosmos of pain and pleasure doled out by a mastertroping deity, the imagination turns to look at its creation and is struck … with the horror of it all. For it all ends up in Albert’s voice, in his reasonableness, in his being just the kind of man who will make Charlotte the best of husbands.

And I too will take the energy of this, and I will flatten it out, I will seek the larger view, the gross generalization, I will put this in some machine or other. See if I don’t.

To be continued next post…

substitutes and suicide

Durkheim’s book on suicide has generated a long history of controversy regarding its statistics, Durkheim’s attack on Tarde’s imitation model of suicide, his interpretation of the data according to sex, etc. Using Bertillion’s statistics, Durkheim was able to overthrow some myths – that, for instance, the English were prone to the English malady – it turned out that they had less of a rate of suicide than the Germans – or that married men were more prone to suicide than bachelors. The latter was a very deft statistical routine, since the misconception – statistically – rested on including, in the set of bachelors, boys below the marriageable age. When adjusted for men over eighteen, it turned out that married men were significantly less likely to kill themselves than bachelors, although the ratio was closer for married men in their twenties. As for women, well, women are less likely to kill themselves period – a fact born out since Durkheim. What Durkheim did not have the statistics on then is suicide attempts – and that, it turns out, is startling, since women are much more likely to attempt suicide.

Durkheim’s famous quadrangle of suicide categories, which he discerned beneath the statistics, classified suicides by two binaries: egoist vs. altruist, and anomie vs. fatalism. These divisions in turn rested on Durkheim’s perception of one large social fact – the degree of social integration.

There are a number of attacks on Durkheim’s thesis as vague, or Durkheim’s numbers as wrong. Jack Douglas, an early symbolic interactionist, for instance, disputed the numbers since, in Douglas’ view, suicide is undercounted, and disputed the anomie thesis, since in his view Durkheim was not giving enough weight to the social situation of the suicide case. He was mashing them all together. Other’s have attempted to revive Tarde’s notion of the imitation suicide – and indeed, there are indications that this happens. However, nobody really thinks that imitation is at the center of suicide, at least as Tarde conceived it.

The statistics on suicide and suicide attempts points to a rather fascinating social phenomenon, presaged in folk beliefs about suicide. According to Irina Pappano’s Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia, there was a Slavic folk belief in the wandering dead, the zalozhnye pokoiniki,, who “are not fully dead: disembodied, they continue to serve the terms of their earthly existence. Anthropologists connect such beliefs, which are common to many cultures, to the mythological view of death as a transition between two worlds. Suicides are forever suspended in the liminal realm, belonging neither to the world of the dead nor to the world of the living.” (54) This belief may be more modern, more contemporary, than we are willing to admit. The “to be or not to be’ is defied by the attempted suicide. That it seems to be a category of its own, apart from suicide, is indicated by the fact that some 85 percent of attempters don’t, in fact, succeed in killing themselves – they die of other ‘natural’ causes. Thus, “not to be” is made a more ambiguous thing, a suspended thing, a metaphor. Death is drawn into the order of life to play many roles: intensifier, cleanser, transcender, etc. I am not certain what to make of this, given Durkheim’s categories.

I want to apply some of Durkheim’s theory of suicide to The Sorrows of the Young Werther – in particular, to the part played by the circles I have drawn your attention to in the last post. That is, the way Werther’s falling in love seems to be mediated by three circles, having two elements: the distribution of something – bread, dancers, numbers/slaps – and the substitution relation. Now, I have long been nosing around the idea of substitution without fully explaining it, and some may have smelt the Marxist mouse in the house. My concern with substitution and love is a timid attempt to forge a link with one of the great social inventions of the proto-capitalist era, abstract labor – to wit, the notion that laborers in the industrial system are infinitely substitutable. The blacksmith becomes a car mechanic who becomes a worker on a computer assembly line, all under the benign gaze of the economist who sees in this the triumph of the freed up labor system. It doesn’t matter what you do, it matters that you make money. Dissolving the traditional slavery of the apprentice, the artificial barriers erected by the guild, we free up the laborer to be, in essence, an adventurer in the realm of substitution. The jack of all trades, the Casanova of skills, or, less prettily, the reserve army of the unemployed – it all results from and confirms a certain view of the tie between subject and his or her routines.

It isn’t that I want to push for a perfect similarity of substitution as it functions in the economic and erotic domain. However, that substitution in both is both a liberation and a threat seems indisputable. More disputeable, but a thesis I’m going to support anyway, is that the precarious balance between liberation and threat was felt throughout the social body in the 18th century, constituting the vibe of the dying order. And thus it is that I am interested in the substitutions in The sorrows of young Werther and Cosi fan Tutti.

But before I can go further, I need to go back to the very important conversation between Werther and Albert on August 12 – a day that changes the entire tone of the novel.

Zona Komiks!

“People are grieving,” said Ms. Goldsmith, a semiretired psychotherapist who counsels fellow residents of the Gleneagles Country Club, a gated community here. “There was a death. Their money died.”

The zona is proving to be quite the beast. Even LI, in whose head wheels of fire turn, and who could stick out his hand anytime to Jonah, Isaiah or Jeremiah and say, cousin, is surprised by the claws on this thing. Our own, perhaps naïve thought was that all the money in the world wasn’t going to help – that in fact, sooner or later, about 65 trillion dollars in derivatives would be nullified. A haircut! Think of the surprise lines drawn around a cartoon character whose been stunned by some sudden news – think of those surprise lines as a trillion each. Nothing, right? But lo and behold, looks like this magic money got comingled with real money. Magic money is, of course, the chief concern of all right thinking people, which is why AIG gets a nice little 30 billion dollar snack yesterday, and today the Bushies are for vetoing any aid to GM. GM evokes a lot of anger from the GOP crowd, because they realize that GM hired thousands and thousands of Union workers – the horror! Not like those wondrous AIG people, people you can recognize, people you might want to have a drink with, or go pussy-hunting with after a long hot day fleecing the rubes – in contrast with those greedhead workers, always trying to get health insurance and pensions. Imagine! It makes a person sick, it really does. Howwegonnastaycompetitive, as the economists always say. After they explain that trade deficits are nuthintoworryabout. That might seem contradictory, until you realize that the world in which innovative financial instruments lead to utopia is in a different column than laborflexibilitycreativedestructioncompetitiveadvantage and other words of that ilk, assuring us that maximizing inequality, stabilizing incomes and invest invest invest is the best thing in the whole world, though it does sometimes lead to crackup, the end of the atmosphere, endless war, and the stupidest sitting with riding crops poised on top of your neck and you watch your life turn into a senseless and pointless debttrap.

But, though it might break the bank and your heart, still, the zona has its charming side. It is funny! Surely this is the funniest depression ever. LI is serious – the best thing I’ve read about the ‘bubble’ so far is this fantastic article by Michael Lewis, of Liar Poker fame, in Portfolio. I read it last night, and I couldn’t stop laughing.

Recently, I read a buncha comments in various blogs mourning the passing of Michael Crichton. Those remarks puzzled me, because all of them would announce that Crichton was a lousy writer who seems to have been addictive. But why? And the plots that he apparently worked out seem, well, to have been either done before and better – Jurassic park, meet the lost world – or not worth doing. Contrast this with fi fiction – or faction, which is what Michael Lewis does. For one thing, he can write – he is definitely not clunky. He has the prose style of the Moviegoer - unsurprisingly, coming from Walker Percy's town. And for another thing, the characters he writes about, who inhabit Wall Street, are monsters ten times scarier than a band of people with star influenza, or who, I don’t know, conspire to trick the world into thinking global warming is a fact. But they are also, as supreme egotists with no culture, extremely funny. The things Lewis' characters do to ruin companies, the lives of individuals, and anybody who gets in their orbit merely to make the next million bucks have just that horror movie note of the unstoppable evil force. At the same time, it is wildly funny. The way they package instruments they don’t understand and sell them to each other is funny. The way they got America, where it is morning and Reagan is the sun, on the hook, the one that is dragging us under. This is what comedy is about. What’s not to love about these characters? Plus, they are real.

The hero of Lewis’ piece is a hedge funder named Steve Eisman. Eisman, like a Michael Crichton character, is set down in the midst of suspicious and whacky doings - Wall Street, 2003. As in Jurassic Park, there seemed to be something genetically suspicious going on – animals were getting bigger and bigger on resources that were lean enough to support merely a crop of mice. In what, to me, is the key to the whole fascinatin mystery, Eisman and his crew at FrontPoint, his fund, learn this:

At the end of 2004, Eisman, Moses, and Daniel shared a sense that unhealthy things were going on in the U.S. housing market: Lots of firms were lending money to people who shouldn’t have been borrowing it. They thought Alan Greenspan’s decision after the internet bust to lower interest rates to 1 percent was a travesty that would lead to some terrible day of reckoning. Neither of these insights was entirely original. Ivy Zelman, at the time the housing-market analyst at Credit Suisse, had seen the bubble forming very early on. There’s a simple measure of sanity in housing prices: the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, it runs around 3 to 1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally to 4 to 1. “All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries,” Zelman says. “But the problem wasn’t just that it was 4 to 1. In Los Angeles, it was 10 to 1, and in Miami, 8.5 to 1. And then you coupled that with the buyers. They weren’t real buyers. They were speculators.” Zelman alienated clients with her pessimism, but she couldn’t pretend everything was good. “It wasn’t that hard in hindsight to see it,” she says. “It was very hard to know when it would stop.” Zelman spoke occasionally with Eisman and always left these conversations feeling better about her views and worse about the world. “You needed the occasional assurance that you weren’t nuts,” she says. She wasn’t nuts. The world was.

By the spring of 2005, FrontPoint was fairly convinced that something was very screwed up not merely in a handful of companies but in the financial underpinnings of the entire U.S. mortgage market. In 2000, there had been $130 billion in subprime mortgage lending, with $55 billion of that repackaged as mortgage bonds. But in 2005, there was $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. Eisman couldn’t understand who was making all these loans or why. He had a from-the-ground-up understanding of both the U.S. housing market and Wall Street. But he’d spent his life in the stock market, and it was clear that the stock market was, in this story, largely irrelevant. “What most people don’t realize is that the fixed-income world dwarfs the equity world,” he says. “The equity world is like a fucking zit compared with the bond market.” He shorted companies that originated subprime loans, like New Century and Indy Mac, and companies that built the houses bought with the loans, such as Toll Brothers. Smart as these trades proved to be, they weren’t entirely satisfying. These companies paid high dividends, and their shares were often expensive to borrow; selling them short was a costly proposition.”

What is the meaning of the shift from 3 to 1 to 4 to 1? Well, we will hear, we are hearing, our ears are deaf with hearing, that we brought this on ourselves, us selfish pigs, overspending, never saving, bad bad bad people. Of course, this is a pile of shit. What this means is that housing prices were going up while the benefits of increased productivity went solely to the investor class. In actuality, people, selfish greedy pigpeople, were operating under the rational assumption that they were going to make more money as time went along. That is because they had four decades of experience in which, as time went along, they made more money: the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. What was different under the Great Fly’s years? They hit a wall. The wealth was spread among the wealthiest, while the little people – greedy fucks! – finally got shut out. After all, as suave economists like those who write for Freakonomics point out, the poor are really the lucky duckies – look at how prices for plastic tat from China have plunged! Why, Walmart is proof positive that the hillbillies are engrossing the benefits of free trade, free markets, and our wonderful health care system! While the rich (sob!) have to be content with taking the profits from the system for themselves. This makes the Freakonomic guys emotional, it really does.

Anyway, to get back to our pump and dump saga, Lewis shows Eisman and associates going to various new housing developments, talking to dealers in CDOs, and getting a feel for the New World. It is pod people time.

For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.

But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.

As an investor, Eisman was allowed on the quarterly conference calls held by Moody’s but not allowed to ask questions. The people at Moody’s were polite about their brush-off, however. The C.E.O. even invited Eisman and his team to his office for a visit in June 2007. By then, Eisman was so certain that the world had been turned upside down that he just assumed this guy must know it too. “But we’re sitting there,” Daniel recalls, “and he says to us, like he actually means it, ‘I truly believe that our rating will prove accurate.’ And Steve shoots up in his chair and asks, ‘What did you just say?’ as if the guy had just uttered the most preposterous statement in the history of finance. He repeated it. And Eisman just laughed at him.”

“With all due respect, sir,” Daniel told the C.E.O. deferentially as they left the meeting, “you’re delusional.”

I’d continue this story, but I’d rather just whet your appetite for it. Go and read the terrific Portfolio piece. Have a laugh! Then figure out how you are going to eat for the next coupla years.

On 2666

Here’s a small factoid. “Hyle”, the Greek for matter, is also the Greek for wood. It should be translated into Latin as materia. However, Calcidius, whose translation of Plato into Latin was what the medievals read when they read Plato, translated hyle as “sylva” – woods, or forest. So that if, say, Thomas Acquinas wanted to read the Timaeus, every time Plato uses the word matter, Acquinas would have read the word “forest”. Imagine the metaphysics of that.

Translation matters. It also forests – as every translator knows, the words in the text in one language branch out and root differently in another language. I’m pleased that the New York Times, with its dogged, lagging sense of fashion, recognized that Bolano is cult and cool, and hired Jonathan Lethem to review Natasha Wimmer’s translation of 2666. However, the review, while glowing, glowed around no central fire – for it wasn’t the burning novel to which the reader’s attention was drawn so much as the unceasing flurry of names in Contemporary World Literature. And, frankly, I felt the acknowledgment of Wimmer “(by Natasha Wimmer, the indefatigable translator of “The Savage Detectives”)” was unworthy.

Slate’s Adam Kirsch produced a more thoughtful review, and the gracenote about the translation is not such a toss-off: “That is one reason why the book is so hard to summarize—and why Natasha Wimmer's lucid, versatile translation is so triumphant.” The versatile is reviewer speak – as the reviewer of at least 1500 books, I have the intonations grooved into my brain. If you begin with one adjective, like lucid, you have to throw in another one – and if you are feeling particularly puff-y, you throw in a third. Still, I don't want to dismiss the versatile, here, entirely. It means something. Wimmer had to come to grips with very difficult matters, here. A lesser translator could easily have gotten lost in the woods.

In fact, the two Bolano novels are a translator’s triumph. Wimmer (I say this through gritted teeth, and with envy aforethought - why couldn't it have been me, God?) is the only person I know, personally, who I am confident will be read in one hundred years. I have read a number of her translations – for instance, her translation of Vargas Llosa’s Gauguin novel, of which I can only say, read Somerset Maugham’s Gauguin novel. I’ve read her translation of Rodrigo Fresan’s Kensington Gardens. Both were more than competent (and really, we Americans are living in the age not only of a scandalous lack of translations, but translation scandals as well – Orhan Pamuk’s novels seem to have been translated by the first person the publisher met who could speak Turkish and a sort of English, for instance), but the Bolano novels are brilliant. She has shapeshifted those novels into English. I think the best comparison for this feat is Ralph Mannheim’s translations of Celine.

I think Lethem goes astray with his references, but he is certainly on the right track about Bolano as a very writerly writer. By this, I don’t mean an avant garde writer, or a writer whose technical inventions should be studied by other writers – I mean a man who has a burning belief in literature in the world. Bolano had an overwhelming and overwhelmed sense of how literature has failed the world, which can only be held by someone whose belief in literature is bonedeep. This cosmic failure is his starting point: he is the anti-Paul, for whom lack of the letter killeth. Hell is the degree zero of literature – its disappearance from the world. Hell, in fact is depicted in the fourth book of 2666. It is a factory for raping, torturing, killing and dumping women. It is the city of Santa Theresa.

2666 does not remind me of any contemporary writer’s work – rather, it reminds me of the Chroniclers of the wars of religion. Or of their closest modern spiritual kin, the writer Johann Hebel (1760-1826), whose stories, put out as Kalendargeschichte in almanacs and collected in the “Little Treasure Chest of the Rhenish Family Friend”, were admired by Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch, among others. Benjamin and Bloch singled out the “Unexpected (Unverhoffte – Unhoped for) Meeting” as one of the greatest of short stories. It is a story about a woman whose husband to be, a miner in Falun, Sweden, dies in an accident before they get married. And it contains this famous passage, which I’ll translate:

“He never came back out of the mine, and she vainly hemmed a red border on his black neck-cloth for him that very morning for the wedding, be as he never came, she laid it away, and cried for him and never forgot him. In the mean time the city of Lisbon in Portugal was destroyed through an earthquake, and the seven years war went by, and King Franz the first died, and the Jesuit order was dissolved and Poland was divided, and the Empress Maria Theresia died, and Count Struensee was executed, America became independent, and the united power of France and Spain could not conquer Gibraltar. The Turks bottled up General Stein at Verteraner Cave in Hungary, and Emperor Joseph also died. King Gustav of Sweden conquered Russian Finland, and the French Revolution and the long war began, and Emperor Leopold the second also went down into his grave. Napoleon conquered Prussia, and the English bombed Kopenhagen, and the peasants sowed and reaped. The miller milled, and the smith hammered, and the miners dug for veins of metal in their underground workshop. But as the miners in Falun in the year 1809 somewhat before or after St. John’s day between two battles attempted to open another tunnel, a good three hundred ells deep under the ground, they uncovered out of the rubble and sulfuric acid the corpse of a youth, who was completely saturated in copperas, but otherwise undecayed and unchanged. Thus, one could see his facial features and his age completely, as if he had just died an hour ago, or was taking a little nap, at work.”

The interweaving of public and private time here partakes of both the Chronicler’s vision – a vision fed by the Bible’s histories, where kings could be brought down by the commonest of sins – coveting a man’s vineyard, or a man’s wife – and prophets could arise seemingly randomly out of the population – and by the ironic modern sense that, on the one hand, political organization should not be like this, should be radically changed, and on the other hand, that no change abolishes the central, sweeping inevitabilities – work, desire, death, mourning.

Bolano, like the Chroniclers, and like Hebel (witness to the Napoleonic wars), lived in an age marked by massacres and internecine struggles animated by what were essentially mysteries – the mystery of socialism, the mystery of the drug wars, the mystery of the universal, media drenched numbness. The 4th book contains accounts of what seems to be about three hundred murders. But the 4th book also contains the entangled stories of an American freelance detective, of a Geman man named Haas, imprisoned for all the murders (and obviously not guilty of most of them, or perhaps all), a television prophet, etc., etc. Here’s a bit from the 4th section. Tell me if this doesn’t remind you of Hebel:

"In the middle of November, Andrea Pacheco Martinez, thirteen, was kidnapped on her way out of Vocational School 16. Although the street was far from deserted, there were no witnesses, except for two of Andrea’s classmates who saw her head toward a black car, probably a Peregrino or a Spirit, where a person in sunglasses was waiting for her. There may have been other people in the car, but Andrea’s classmates didn’t get a look at them, partly because the car windows were tinted. That afternoon Andrea didn’t come home and her parents filed a police report a few hours later, after they had called some of her friends. The city police and the judicial police took charge of the case. When she was found two days later, her body showed unmistakable signs of strangulation, with a fracture of the hyoid bone. She had been anally and vaginally raped. There was tumefaction of the wrists, as if they had been bound. Both ankles presented lacerations, by which it was deduced that her feet had also been tied. A Salvadorean immigrant found the body behind the Fracisco I School, on Madero, near Colonia Alamos. It was fully dressed, and the clothes, except for the shirt, which was missing several buttons, were intact. The Salvadorean was accused of the homicide and spent two weeks in the cells of Polcie Precinct #3, at the end of which he was released. When he got out he was a broken man. A little later he crossed the border with a pollero. In Arizona he got lost in the desert and after walking for three days, he made it to Patagonia, badly dehydrated, where a rancher beat him up for vomiting on his land. He was picked up by the sheriff and spent a day in jail and then he was sent to the hospital, where the only thing left for him was die in peace, which he did."

on not needing a weatherman...

I'll be the man with the broom
if you'll be the dust in the room

Under the “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” department, this story in the NYT about a town where everybody is below average – that is, 90 percent of the owners of houses in the town owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth – the story of Gerry Martinez leaps out. The town is one of those jumped up suburbs of the Bay area, built because the Bay area is way too expensive. The Martinezes don’t proclaim their income in the article – but one guesses it is South of 100 thou a year. Here’s the infarction graf:

“The Martinezes bought their house in early 2005 for $630,000. It is now worth about $420,000. They have an interest-only mortgage, a popular loan during the boom that allows owners to forgo principal payments for a time.
But these loans eventually become unmanageable. In 2015, Mr. Martinez said, his monthly payments will be $12,000 a month. He laughed and shook his head at the absurdity of it.”

12,000 per month Not in lira. Not in yen. Not in penguin dung. They are called dollars. That was the hook he and his wife evidently thought they would be spared – the fish would sell the hook to the other fish. And thus, everybody would get to dine on big, sloppy fat worms. It would be the ownership society. Paradise, man!
It would be interesting to see how many people in this country are hooked into the same kind of deal, and don’t know it.

That economists were still generally talking, this spring, about a turnaround in the fourth quarter should tell you all you need to know about the priesthood. Like all priesthoods, its goal is to weave stories around the wealthy to make them appear mythically heroic. Besides that, they have no function. Their predictions are shit. Mr. Martinez is a much better indicator of what our near future is gonna be like, economy-wise. It is going to be ugly.

fantasy politics and the new deal

LI has enjoyed the round-the-blogs discussion about the New Deal, which started with Eric Rauchway’s takedown of Amity Schlaes country club revisionism regarding Roosevelt (here and here and here ) and the Marginal Revolution’s Alex Tabbarok’s attack on Rauchway (here)

LI’s notion is that Rauchway is, obviously, right about the success of the New Deal – if one judges success as ‘did this get entrenched into the economy’ – in the same way that neo-liberalism succeeded after Reagan. In the thirties, the depression in the U.S. was prolonged not because Roosevelt was too radical, but because he was too timid. Oddly, although the Great Depression was an international slump, nobody has expanded the frame of the argument to compare the U.S. performance to other economies – which would tell us, trivially, that the 1937-1938 period was a slump elsewhere as well, but would also give us a larger picture about the Great Transformation of the Great Transformation. Among the developed countries, the U.S., during the twenties, was rather unique in producing a recognizable social welfare net – even the Conservatives in the U.K., however viciously they squelched the General Strike, did not even try to go back to classical liberalism. And this turned out to be their ace in the hole. In fact, in parts of England, there was actually a consumer boom in the thirties. Why? Well, partly because of the Conservative Party’s break with free trade doctrine. Instead, Chamberlain’s government came in on a promise to raise tariffs – which, in the U.S., we’ve all been taught is the devil’s instrument. This contributed to the relative healthiness of the British economy – although the tariff policy has to be viewed in the context of Britain’s special place at the center of a worldwide empire, the Imperial Preference policy, which was knocked down at the end of WWII by the Americans at Bretton Woods, who treated Britain as a defeated country. The import restrictions, as a matter of fact, acted as a stimulus to domestic industry, which had lagged in the twenties, and – in the end – Britain actually imported more goods, even with the tariffs in place. This doesn’t mean Britain escaped the Slump unscathed - the North of England, Scotland and Wales suffered enormously – but that the libertarian fantasy of responding a la Mellon by liquidating everything – letting markets clear – was adopted by nobody, on the sound principle that it was insane.

And, of course, it is now an historic relic, which is why the argument against the country clubbers has a musty smell. The Republican party has long relied on combining one of the responses to the Depression – military keynesianism, perfected by Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany and with us ever since – with the entrenched social welfare net for the middle class (the attitude towards which is best exemplified in the Bush Pill Bill – basically, adding more to the pile) – while retaining a Hooverite rhetoric about small government. From one view, this is a chaotic amalgam of differing ideological positions – from another view, that of class analysis, this is a perfectly coherent program to reward the wealthiest, which has always involved using the Government – the largest holder of money, after all – for largescale peculation, while talking against it in order to lower upper tax rates. Pragmatically, this has positioned borrowing at the center of conservative politics, and slowly that has exerted such a gravitational pull on conservative policy that it has shaped a freerider ethos.

Long ago – in November, 2001 – LI wrote an article for the Statesman about big government conservatism, in which we predicted that Bush would bury the Clinton mantra that the era of big government was over. I should dig that thing up one of these days. There’s nothing sweeter or more elementary schoolish than a good I told ya so.

News we will immediately forget

My friend, M., was so busy watching the results on November 4th that she didn’t notice her whole building shaking. Then her niece called up, crying. The lights were out in the condo she lives in, close to Los Pinos. Was the building on fire?

It turned out that the fire was burning down the street. M. reports that the parade of firetrucks speeding through Polanco was astonishing. But all the President’s horses and all the president’s men couldn’t put the interior secretary back again. In the U.S., few noticed what had happened, and all took the Government’s line: Calderon’s right hand man in the drug war and his best friend, Juan Camilo Mouriño, along with the chief manager of the war on organized crime, José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, had been killed in a tragic accident. The pilot lost control of the plane, that is the official story. And who believes it in Mexico, where the police chiefs of major cities, like Acapulco, have been beheaded by the narcos men, and where Calderon, prodded by the Americans, has staked the legitimacy of the government on a military confrontation with Mexico’s most successful private businessmen, who just happen to deal in the transit of cocaine and narcotics to the world’s hungriest market for such goodies, the United States. Success, of course, is relative: on the one hand, the ostrich boots and the hacienda and the week long parties, on the other hand, the feuds, the children shot down, the flights and territorial wars, the whole meat machinery in which he who does not butcher will be butchered, and none shall be the last butcher standing - there is no power on earth to cover your back long enough. M. reports, in a nice touch that Garcia Marquez would appreciate, that Camilo Mourino’s last sight might have been the monument to Pemex, the bastion of legitimate enterprise in Mexico, state owned, that he and Calderon have been working for years to privatize.

Read Alma Guillermoprieto’s essay on the current misrule and massacre in Mexico. Ask yourself what it means that 4,000 people have died in Mexico this year, due to the narco war. Ask yourself what the fuck, what the fuck the U.S. was doing during the Bush years, concentrated on Iraq. Ask yourself if we have a nation so cocooned in trivia that we think Mexico going into the abyss means nothing to us. Ask who made up those narcotic laws. Ask where the market is. Ask yourself if anything can stop the now 40 years of drug madness, the entrenchment on all sides of a money/punishment engine that serves every low, vile, peculiar political and economic interest. Ask yourself how anybody in Sinaloa with brains and a peasant mom and dad is going to get ahead, except through licking those ostrich boots and trying to shatter a few mere human lives himself – lives that are discounted, every day, in the mad, mad media, in the Moloch of the worldfuck, where an hour or two of nod, or enough of a dose to get through the shift at the third job before you get home and shake the newborn when it cries and take another dose, is what you can expect tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Love/circles

In my head, I often string together themes and topics that seem disconnected on the surface, inherently unrelated flotsam. And then I nag at them. So, lately, it has been running through my head that Ruwen Ogien’s idea about the synthetic nature of informal moral sanctions; the de-Christianization of Europe in the 18th century; the elevation of love as a life-defining sentiment during the latter half of the same period; and the Enlightenment war against superstition all form a pattern, fall under the empire of the happiness culture I’ve been tracking.

Let’s sort things out a bit. Ogien’s notion of the synthesis between a sanction and a sentiment should give us a sense of the interactional space within which lovers operate. The goal, of course, is to achieve that synthesis – to make it the case that the remark, “I love you’, gears up the sentiment, “I love you” in the person to whom it is addressed. Given the way the interactional space is constituted, its being governed by diffuse sanctions, we can use Ogien’s notion to have some grasp of the material degree of election exercised here – the freedom to love – by looking at the constraints on that election. For instance, do the lovers even know each other? In a society of arranged marriages, they may not until the moment of the marriage. Are they mature? What are the habits they take up with regard to each other and to other possible lovers after they are married? Obviously, a world in which arranged marriages were the norm would display a control over the lovers in terms of hardening the sanctions which made ‘I love you’ binding; yet it is also possible that the arranged norm allows for other love arrangements with other people after the marriage is sealed.

As we all know, the sentimental novel stamped its image, in the latter half of the 18th century, on the lover’s discourse. In the course of doing so, it downgraded ritual in favor of feeling. The legacy of the traditional world of arranged marriages, the rituals centered around marriage, the economics of it, the parental interference with it, became a collateral casualty of the attack on the loveless love bond. Although I should probably say, became a long range collateral casualty – but in any case, one recognizes, here, the kinship between the fashion for sentimentalism in the latter part of the 18th century and the attack on superstition that was mounted in the first half of it, by the first wave of philosophes. If superstition is defined as a rite or act which is performed under the false assumption that it will cause an event, an arranged marriage could easily fall victim to this same critique.

Well, this brings us to the Sorrows of Young Werther and my trying to puzzle out the three circles of his initiation into love.

...

In 1774, Goethe became a European wide star with the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther. In two years, there were two French translations. There were 8 English editions by 1800. Chinese porcelain manufacturers produced dishes with scenes from Werther drawn on them. Goethe himself became a tourist site, an oracle that travelers would go to visit. This, of course, was before Goethe went to Weimar and became a court councilor.

All of this was a puzzle and a vexation to the older generation of German Enlightenment figures, like Lessing and Lichtenberg. Lessing knew K.W. Jerusalem, whose suicide provided Goethe with an all important trouvaille for his book. But it wasn’t just Lessing’s outrage at what he regarded as the misuse of private sorrow – he did not like the ‘sentimentalism’: Do you imagine a roman or a Greek youth would have taken his life in that way and for that reason? They had a quite different protection from the folly [Schwarmerei – enthusiasm] of love. And in Socrates time one would have hardly excused such a ex ‘erotos katoke which spontaneously ti tolman para phusin in a girl. To bring forth such minutely gigantic, comtmptibly admiable, ‘original’ beings was a privilege reserved to Christian education, which is so beautifully able to transform a physiological need into a spiritual perfection.” [Quoted in Boyle, 187 – translation modified].

The last sentence is the true coin of the Voltairian, or materialist, phase of the Enlightenment. It is just the kind of thing one can imagine being said by Prince Andrei’s father, Count Bolkonsky.

…

Lessing looked at the novel through the suicide that Werther finally commits. LI is reading the novel looking at the scene in which Werther falls in love. In a previous post on Cosi Fan Tutte, I remarked on the way in which substitution among the lovers – an old, fairy tale test – becomes playful, a cause of a certain kind of delight, a tempering of love. It is a test of true love, and its result is that love is resistant to the lure of the truth.

In The Sorrows of Young Werther, the chapter in which Werther falls in love is curiously mediated by three circles.

Circle no. 1 is outside of Werther. He sees it as a “charming play” that appears to him when he enters Lotte’s house:

“ In the front anteroom, all six children from eleven to two milled about a girl with a beautiful form, of middle height, who wore a simple white dress, with pink bows on the sleeves and breast. She held a loaf of black bread and cut the small ones in the ring about her each a piece according to the proportion appropriate to their age and appetite, and gave it to each with such friendliness, and each call out so naturally thanks, while reaching upwards with their small hands, before it was cut, and now satisfied with their evening bread, either sprang back or after his quiet character were allowed to go to the gate, in order to see the strangers and the coach that was to carry Lotte away.” Here are the elements of the scene: a circle, a distribution, substitution. The children form the circle, Lotte at the center distributes bread, the slices fall into the hands of the children by a rule of thumb having to do with age and appetite, which rule of thumb governs the substitutions that can be made.

In circle no. 2, Werther is part of the circle. Then there is the circle of the ball itself. It is in dancing with Lotte that Werther both falls in love and receives the warning – a repetition of a warning he has forgotten – that she is engaged. The dance has no central distributor, but Werther’s feeling, aroused by this time, makes of Lotte’s position as his partner, or her dancing with someone else, the sign that Lotte still distributes. The rule is that partner switch – they substitute among each other. But Werther remarks that if he were Lotte’s husband, he wouldn’t stand for this rule – in other words, substitution has become, for him, the enemy of love.

It is circle no. 3 that is the oddest of the circles in this initiation to obsession. In order to divert the guests at the ball from the lightning storm that has broken outside – the hostess invites the guests to a room upstairs, where Charlotte quickly has everyone arrange their chairs into a circle:

“We will play counting,” she said. Now, pay attention. I will go in a circle from right to left, and you also will count out in a ring, each one saying the number, that comes next, and it has to go like a wildfire, and whoever stops, or makes a mistake, will earn a slap [an earpulling] and so on up to one thousand. And now it was comic to watch. She went with an extended arm about the circle. One the first began, the neighbor, two, three the following person and so on. Then she began to move faster, always faster. Then it happened, pow, a slap to the ear, and over the laughter, the following one also, pow, and always faster. I myself earned two slaps on the mouth, and believed, with inner satisfaction, that they were stronger than those doled out to the others. A general laughter and enthusiasm ended the game before one thousand had been counted out.” [GW 1899 19 35-36]

Substitution in its purest form is the number system. But as a pure form, it is also rather boring and childish, strikingly so. In fact, the game is conducted as a sort of return to infancy – the numbers are spoken so quickly that they lose their verbal distinctness, and the slaps that are distributed by Charlotte are like the slaps one gives a child: that is, they penetrate the adult space in such a way as to make the receiver like a child. At the same time, Charlotte, who made up the childish game, is seen as a child herself, whirling around the circle of seated adults. And what is one to make of Werther’s inner satisfaction? He is, consciously, like the child with the larger appetite, getting the bigger portion.

NOT SUMMERS

Let’s throw out a few names for the Secretary of the Treasury.

LI was startled that Larry Summers is even being considered. Obama owes his election to women, and it is not a good idea to repay this debt by making Summers his first appointment. The other mention is Timothy F. Geithner, who has been the strongman in the current financial crisis. The names floated immediately to the top in the Post – and I think I can be confident that Summer’s friends had something to do with that.

But how about some more unorthodox candidates:

For instance, how about Esther Duflo, MIT prof and head of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab? Admittedly, there might be a nationality problem. I’m not sure if she is still French or not – and she is below forty. However, she was named among the top one hundred public intellectuals in the world by Foreign Policy mag. Here’s a q and a with her. Now, perhaps she would be better as the head of the World Bank. But I like her expertise in poverty reduction, and her commitment to testing models against applications – which would be common sense anywhere else but in economics.

How about the economist who is supposedly Obama’s advisor on trade issues, Laura D’Andrea Tyson? She is infinitely preferable in terms of her acquaintance with healthcare economics – which is going to be a big issue for the Obama administration. Tyson is actually on the short list, and she seems to be a much more liberal – in the sense of Galbraithian liberal - economist than such as Summers.


How about Teresa Ghilarducci? The New School economist has written a book about what is wrong with 401(k)s that has already driven conservatives insane – her testimony in October spawned an outbreak of ideological rash, for instance, here. They are, of course, right to be worried – the entanglement of the working class with our investor overlords is the very heart of conservative politics. Taking back retirement would revolutionize the politics of this country.

And finally – on this roll call of what you will notice are all progressive women economists and hotshots – Jane D’Arista of the Financial Markets Center and an expert on the regulation of said markets, former chief economists for the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who was recently celebrated here.

I wouldn't stop there...

All the revolutionaries of the 20th century are rusty, and what can we learn from them? Sure, I have a soft spot in my heart for Lenin, who died way too soon, and who, I think, could have led the Soviet Union into the path of being a normal socialist country And Gandhi’s success is undoubted, even if it is picked to pieces, now, by rightwing Hindu nationalists.

Still, we have the longer perspective. We can see their beginnings and their ends. Their time has waned.

Except for one man: Martin Luther King, Jr. Last night I got to bed at three, and I am tired as I write this, having had five hours sleep, so perhaps I am sentimental. Obama’s campaign, either consciously or unconsciously, took its cues from King. The same long patience. The same attention to the goal. The same shaking off of abuse, of the frivolity of hatred, which, even if it kills, can never be anything but frivolous, in bad faith, repulsive to the hater himself.

Last night was a reminder that King changed the U.S. – that you certainly don’t have to be a president to change this country.

If yesterday’s list of Youtube items was a dirge; today’s link is to this. I was ten when MLK was murdered.

I was ten…


"And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.
And I don't mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I'm happy, tonight.
I'm not worried about anything.
I'm not fearing any man!
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!!"

obama day!

For Obama day, some music links:

Invasion so succexy – Metric

Did you ever think about suicide? – Hanin Elias, War

This is a message to persons unknown
Persons in hiding. Persons unknown
Survival in silence
Isn't good enough no more
Keeping your mouth shut head in the sand
Terrorists and saboteurs
Each and every one of us
Hiding in shadows persons unknown – Poison Girls

I got a letter from the government the other day – Tricky, Black Steel

Monsieur le president/ou est mon argent? – Vive la fete,

Je suis un ouvrier/ expulsez moi – Tetes raides

Monsieur le president – il faut que je vous dira - Le deserteur, Joan Baez


We had a communist in the family/ I had to wear a mask – Forest Families, the Knife

I swear to god I want to slit my wrists and end this bullshit – Suicidal Thoughts, Biggie Smalls

Ağladıkça – Ahmet Kaya

Keskin Biçak - Sezen Aksu

News from the Zona

An excellent article in the NYT on the little worldwide web woven within the Greenspan system that is now going down a stitch here, down a stitch there – you in the corner can’t have your retirement, and you in the other corner can’t have your education. The vast game of tag in which you, my friends, my friends, are It – now, try to run for cover!

The article takes up a move by a Wisconsin school district to take advantage of what it was assured was easy money in the highflying world of international finance:

“Mr. Noack told the Whitefish Bay board that investing in the global economy carried few risks, according to the tape.

“What’s the best investment? It’s called a collateralized debt obligation,” or a C.D.O., Mr. Noack said. He described it as a collection of bonds from 105 of the most reputable companies that would pay the school board a small return every quarter.

“We’re being very conservative,” Mr. Noack told the board, composed of lawyers, salesmen and a homemaker who lived in the affluent Milwaukee suburb.

Soon, Whitefish Bay and the four other districts borrowed $165 million from Depfa and contributed $35 million of their own money to purchase three C.D.O.’s sold by the Royal Bank of Canada, which had a relationship with Mr. Noack’s company.
But Mr. Noack’s explanation of a C.D.O. was very wrong. Mr. Noack, who through his lawyer declined to comment, had attended only a two-hour training session on C.D.O.’s, he told a friend.”

It is a lovely story, full of the pathos that will tug at your heartstrings or at least make you violently ill. It is a story that will replace our celebrity breakdown stories in the next year, assuredly. The word, lately – amongst all the financial columnists – has been “bottom”. A Melvillian word, a word from the infantile word, a word from sex games – bottom bottom bottom. Has the stock market bottomed? Is the bottom coming up? It turns out that a little word like that can land like a giant flyswatter in the country that elected the Giant Fly as Pres, oh so many years ago it seems, and much crushing will be involved.
Well, last word I’ll leave to the article:

“In Mrs. Velvikis’s classroom at Grewenow Elementary in Kenosha, students have recently completed a lesson in which each first grader contributed a vegetable to a common vat of “stone soup.” The project — based on a children’s book — teaches the benefits of working together. The schools have learned that when everyone works together, they can also all starve.”

PS - And I should link to myself, right? This is my review of a recent book on Iran. Many will jump down my throat about it.

Writing the Book of Love in Red Ink

“It took the Devil, that ancient ally of woman, her confidant from Paradise, it took the sorceress, this monster who does everything backwards, inversing the sacred world, to be occupied with woman, to crush under her feet their [the church’s] practices, and to care for her in spite of herself. The poor creature thought so little of herself! … She recoiled, blushed, meant to say nothing. The sorceress, adroit and malign, guessed and penetrated. At last she figured out how to make her speak, pulled her little secret out, vanquished her refusal, her hesitations of modesty and humility. Rather than submit to such a thing, she would have liked better almost to die. The barbarous sorceress made her live.”



Marguerite Duras once expressed, in an interview, her admiration for Michelet’s The Sorceress:

“Do you know the thesis by Michelet about witches? It's admirable. (By the way, I think, and many people
think, on the basis of letters and journals, that Michelet did not have a normal sex life-which is certainly in his favor.) He says that in the Middle Ages, when the lords went off to war or on the Crusades, when the women stayed alone for months at a time on the farms, in the middle of the fields, hungry and lonely, then
they simply started talking. To whatever was around them: trees, animals, forests, rivers. . . . Perhaps to break the boredom, to forget the hunger and the loneliness. The men burned them. That's how witches came into being. Men said, "They're in collusion with nature," and they burned them. That's how the reign of
witches began. I add, personally, that what they did, in effect, was punish those women because they turned a little away from them and became less available to them.”

LI is thinking about Michelet today because, as we are about to plunge into the topic of love, Michelet is a name which comes up – after all, Michelet wrote the book of Love (which has never been as popular as Stendhal’s) as part of his vast, Hugolian effort to combine human and natural history. For Michelet, the key link was woman –which, to feminists of another stripe than Duras, might not exactly be a thesis in his favor. Still, as opposed to Goethe’s eternal feminine, Michelet presented an image that was, at the base, quite startling – for Michelet, woman is supremely cyclical, just as history is, and just as nature is. In part, of course, Michelet meant cyclical in an abstract way – but in part, he was referring to menstruation. In a fascinating article, “Blood on: Michelet and Female blood”, Therese Moreau tried to show that there is a thin thread of menstrual blood running all through Michelet’s work. LI will discuss this in the next post.

coming attractions

LI is finished, for the moment, with the Nemesis thread. We are planning on a love and suicide thread next, starting with the Sorrows of Young Werther.

...

We’ve been slowly preparing an index of the posts that constitute our Human Limit thematalooza. When I finish it, I think I’ll download it to my geocities site and put a link to it – for those interested in the Great Work. Going back to 2006, I can see how certain threads silently converged, enter into the thing itself, spirits called out to, spirits that came, spirits that didn’t. It is back then that I stumbled upon what is still my methodological principle, my version of dialectical materialism, my very own Wicca Marxism: “Comment y arriva-t-on. Sans doute par l’effet si simple du grand principe satanique que tout doit se faire à rebours, exactement à l’envers de ce que fait le monde sacré.” From Michelet’s mouth to my ear. There are two great elaborations of this principle – one, Jehovah’s version, is that we see now as in a glass, darkly – and we know its avatars, up to Bloy and Kraus; the other is Lucifer’s version, or Little Red Riding Hood’s – for that was the wisdom she collected in the woods, that if you go down the path of pins, you will come back by the path of needles. Negative identity, don’t ya know. The satanic history of happiness begins with the inspiration that back and forth are hints that the path is not the same – and not because it is some fuckin’ river you can’t cross twice, but because twiceness is its disease, its spell. My abracadabra against the irresistible motion of history.

All the money in the world

Bubbles are not, contrary to the new CW in the zona, all bad. Law’s system, some think, actually liquidated the immense debts left by Louis XIV and gave a massive impetus to the restructuring of French agriculture and artisanal industry.

But the Greenspan system seems to have expanded so fast and gotten to such size that it might well engulf all the gains made along the way and then some. A sign of this: the sinking of AIG. Here is a company that is burning its way through 120 billion dollars in 3 weeks time. In three weeks time, he repeated, trying to sound like the George Segal character in To Die For. From today’s story in the NYT:

“These accounting questions [that is, how much of a hole AIG was in because of its position as a counterparty] are of interest not only because taxpayers are footing the bill at A.I.G. but also because the post-mortems may point to a fundamental flaw in the Fed bailout: the money is buoying an insurer — and its trading partners — whose cash needs could easily exceed the existing government backstop if the housing sector continues to deteriorate.

Edward M. Liddy, the insurance executive brought in by the government to restructure A.I.G., has already said that although he does not want to seek more money from the Fed, he may have to do so.”

As I said in my vulture of doom post about the bailout, there is not enough money in all the world to successfully bail out the system. The managers of the great Popping sound (the sound of 100,000 hedge funder penises exploding all at once) have established a nice rhythm for the deathfuck: they come up with a solution and for a month, a relative calm prevails, and then another shoe drops. From last week to this week, the new idea is that the worst is behind us. So the markets go happily upward. But do we have any reason whatsoever to think that counterparties are now protected from the almost sure consequence of housing prices dipping another ten percent? I don’t think so. The write downs have been so many stabs in the dark. Meanwhile, every developed nation has put its government money on the line – a unique event! – to stop the oncoming tide of losing bets. All the money in the world, in other words, is on the line, because more than all the money in the world has been bet. Eventually, many of those bets will simply have to be canceled. Sorry charlie! And as the players don't even know they made the bets - charming megachurch x in San Diego, the school system in Xville, Minnesota, the Icelandic Tuna Fisherman's pension fund, and so on - this will not be happy. As every fan of cheap sadomasochistic entertainment knows, surrender is a long process, but game by game one gets to that final, liquid moment of mutual pain and cumming. It isn’t Wall Street, among the cheesy films of the eighties, that describes the current situation. It is 9 ½ weeks.

“Through spring and summer, the company said it was still gathering information about the swaps and tucked references of widening losses into the footnotes of its financial statements: $11.4 billion at the end of 2007, $20.6 billion at the end of March, $26 billion at the end of June. The company stressed that the losses were theoretical: no cash had actually gone out the door.

“If these aren’t cash losses, why are you having to put up collateral to the counterparties?” Mr. Vickrey asked in a recent interview. The fact that the insurer had to post collateral suggests that the counterparties thought A.I.G.’s swaps losses were greater than disclosed, he said. By midyear, the insurer had been forced to post collateral of $16.5 billion on the swaps.

Though the company has not disclosed how much collateral it has posted since then, its $447 billion portfolio of credit-default swaps could require far more if the economy continues to weaken. More federal assistance would then essentially flow through A.I.G. to counterparties.”

Answers to All Your Election Questions

LI has found the leftist reaction (for instance, here ) to Obama this election season a little… puzzling.

LI has no qualms about wanting Obama to be president than John McCain. If I made a checklist that included Iraq, Iran, unemployment benefits, dealing with the recession, health care, the environment, Obama would score a 100 against McCain. Hell, if I made the same checklist and contrasted Palin and McCain, Palin would score well above her erstwhile partner. Palin’s lack of experience – that is, her non-processing by the DC factory of conventional wisdom, is a point in her favor. Right, she does wear hick resentment like a uniform, but when she is on her own, making a choice, often her common sense wins out over her talking points. For instance, there’s the cute mistake she made a week ago, in denouncing Obama’s stated policy to talk with Iran without preconditions, when she explained herself by confusing “preconditions’ with “preparations” – coming out solidly against meeting Ahmadinejad without the latter. This was just used to laugh at her ignorance; but I laugh that she naturally locates herself in the Obama camp.

So, the uninteresting political question at the moment is who to vote for. The more interesting question is asking: how can one operate on the conditions of reality at the moment when reality takes a left turn?

Here, it is revealing to contrast the scene that will await Obama’s presidency with that which awaited Clinton’s. Clinton, too, was elected during a recession. But, in distinction from the recession of 2008-, the recession of 1991-1993 did not fundamentally alter the structure of neo-liberal hegemony. Quite the contrary. Stage two of that hegemony was launching at that very moment – the true explosion of the financial sector. Plus, there was the tech bubble – which came about due to the convergence of two things: the socialistic largesse that had allowed a generation of Americans to get relatively cheap secondary schooling at public colleges and universities in the seventies and, partly, in the eighties – and the Reagonomics that had made the U.S. the primary target for foreign investment among the nations of the world.

Given these two factors, Clinton, during the course of his administration, came to think that there was a space for a “left” Reagonomics, a progressive neo-liberalism.

I don’t think that is the situation at present. I am guessing that neo-liberalism has no more cards up its sleeves. And that means that the very structure of it is under assault at the moment.

As I pointed out in my mangle of equality post, neo-liberalism became the dominant policy paradigm in tandem with the expansion of the financial services sector because the latter allowed it political viability.

If I were to pinpoint the launch point for neo-liberalism, it would be 1974. Duncan Campbell-Smith’s review of a book on the history of mutual funds says it well:

The massive switch from defined-benefit pensions to defined-contribution pensions based on private plans, fully launched by 1974, helped turn mutuals into a household word: they accounted by 2006 for about half of all assets in individual retirement accounts.

This is a shift that should loom symbolically large in any account of the shift from the Keynesian golden years to the years of Reagan and Thatcher. There is a sad little myth that floats around lefty circles that explains the rightward tendency of voters who are working and middle class to be all about cultural, as opposed to economic, values. It is all, we are told, a trick of GOP smoke and mirrors, and if these folks knew their real interests (which are, absurdly, supposed to be separate from their cultural interests), they would never have voted for the nasty Republicans. As we said in the mangle of equality post, this explanation doesn’t hold water. There, we emphasized the free rider aspect of Republican voting. If I vote for x, who wants to lower taxes and gut medicare, I can be pretty sure that lowering taxes will happen, and gutting medicare won’t. Thus, I get to luxuriate in a symbolic vote against big government while continuing to enjoy the benefits of big government. And I get a tax break. However, free riding isn’t the whole story.

The whole story begins with the familiar basics – the crushing of labor’s bargaining power, the decline of household incomes, the extrusion of a second earner into the labor pool, etc. But into this story comes the financial sector, in two ways: first, of course, is the extension of credit as it has never been extended before. But the other part of the story is a story of investment. And here, there is a slight paradox. Let’s say x company does its best to curb the benefits going to its workforce: truckers, middle managers, secretaries, whatever. And let’s say this increases its return on investment, sending its stock price higher. Now, it is possible that the workforce so effected, being pretty much forced to invest and – as is usually the case – settling for investing in the company, benefit from that increase in stock price. Think of it as a sort of mad bet on your own impoverishment. If the bet is such that the margin you gain from the bet exceeds the margin of your immiseration, you’ve gained from the bet.

The system of such bets was, in fact, what made coddling investors a politically advantageous position. It made households accept a world in which, relative to the wealthy, they were falling behind.

The crazy logic of this – borrowing on the one hand, investing on the other – has been dealt a double blow by the zona. One should never bet that the neo-liberal order doesn’t have another trick up its sleeve, but LI is going to boldly suppose that it doesn’t. What does that mean?

We see two options. Either, households will have to rely on that rustiest of tools – organized labor bargaining power – to wrest a fairer share of productivity gains from the investors – or they are going to have to cheapen their living costs. The first option, although it dances like a sugarplum dressed like Vladimir Lenin in my head, is I think a no-go. The second option, however, would entail unimaginable social democratic gestures by the government, from taking over health care costs to lowering the costs of secondary education to getting involved in improving American infrastructure.

This, then, is how I see the conditions for liberal politics at the moment.

The Less-than-Perfect Shame Machine

LI has been meditating on Ruwen Ogien’s article on “diffuse sanctions” for the past couple days. We have seen more and more in this article. Perhaps we should translate the entire thing. Maybe we should write to Ogien. Maybe he has been translated.

Ruwen’s comments on the “informal moral sphere”, which he uses interchangeably with the “domain of interaction”, helps us a great deal in thinking about one of the great puzzles of happiness – how did happiness ever become a collective passion? How did it happen that, in the eighteenth century, men and women started to dream of the happy community? And how could they ignore a social fact that stared them in the face every day – that often, the happiness of one person is the direct cause of the unhappiness of another person?

To get back to Ogien – Ogien begins with Durkheim’s notion that “sanctions” form a continuum. Whether the sanction is informal, such as being laughed at, or formal, such as being imprisoned, what (negative) sanctions necessarily entail is punishment. This isn’t to say that every legal breach is punished – only that, in theory, the state has to punish criminals. That is involved in the very notion of crime. A crime that encoded no punishment would not be a crime. A criminal could, on the other hand, be pardoned – but the pardon wouldn’t separate crime from punishment in general, but would plead some special instance. In other words, there is a necessary bond between crime and punishment.

Ogien, rather brilliantly, suggests that this is where Durkheim went wrong. Because the legal sanction includes this necessary relation, Durkheim assumes – as he must, if sanctions are simply a continuum – that informal moral sanctions also contain this necessary tie.

Ogien contends that they don’t. Rather, informal moral sanctions are synthetic. If the victim of some shamemaking gesture does not feel shame, does not manufacture within him or herself the appropriate sentiment, the informal sanction fails. Notice, this isn’t true of a crime – the punishment of the crime does not depend on the manufacture of any particular sentiment on the part of the criminal. There is an informal dimension to punishment – the notion that the criminal should repent. But this is separate from the punishment inherent in being judged a criminal.

Ogien casts a wider net for sanctions, which can include positive sanctions in the domain of interaction – praise, for instance.

Now, this is the thing about the informal moral sphere – the sanctions are always synthetic, and thus depend on a certain sentimental education. And that education can go awry – in fact, as nineteenth century psychology and twentieth century psychoanalysis teaches, possibly, it always goes awry. It is more than possible that praise, for instance, can bring up shame in the person so praised. Dostoevsky might have called this whim, Freud neurosis. And Herder would see, here, the ambiguous passage of Nemesis.

Ogien extends his point with an image: the difference between the state’s punishment machines and shame machines. I’ll end here, with an extensive quote from Ogien:

The blamer can count on the fact that this sarcasm will impose itself, but he will never be entirely certain of that. And this incertitude is not a matter of his lack of imagination, nor of the feebleness of the means he possesses. The best organized of police can’t ever guarantee the execution of a punishment if that punishment is shame. And the most satanic pedagogue would have a great deal of trouble to invent a machine to make shame or a dispositif capable of producing it with certainty.

Of course, we can’t say we are lacking in fertile imaginations that have conjured up modes (dispositifs) of diabolical punishments. Lichtenberg, Kafka, Foucault (among others) have given us frightening illustrations of our capacity for imagining the worst for our neighbors: but one shouldn’t think that this is a question of anything other than some horrible utopias. None of these modes could guarantee the effect produced, and this is rather happy.

It is precisely this incertitude in the relation between blame and punishment which gives diffuse sanctions their non-necessary character – synthetic, or casual. Between blame and diffuse punishment (all together: sarcastic remarks, laughs of the audience, shame of the victim, for instance), the relationship is only probable.

However, nothing forbids us from going further in the dissociation, and affirming that the relation between blame and diffuse punishment escapes all regularity and by the same way all possibility of causal analysis. If one wants to be convinced of this, it is sufficient to return to what Kant says of laughter and the difficulty of discovering means to excite it among rational men: “Voltaire said that heaven has given us two means to counterbalance the multiple pains of life: hope and sleep. He might have added laughter, if the means to excite it among reasonable people were easy to discover.”

The enigma of the causality of laughter is as deep as that of the causality of shame (or of every other form of moral sentiment – humiliation, indignation). And it is as difficult, it seems to me, to conceive of a good shame-making machine as one that is efficiently laugh-making. (600)