McTaggart and Borges

If you are a man of a certain age, according to all the wisdom literature I know, and it is a peaceful Saturday morning, and the adventures that have been the wind in your back or the life you have sloughed have come to a standstill, for one moment, then you turn your reflections to time and its possibility, or even its possible non-existence, a non-existence that would annul the fact that you are a man of a certain age, that it is Saturday, that adventure could have ever happened to you, and that you have a moment to reflect.

But reflect on time one must, because we are not watches. Watches toil not, neither do they sow – even though our language has given them hands and a face. Instead, they infinitely visit the same neighborhood of numbers. One can imagine watches different –one can imagine a little computer that you could strap to your wrist and that would just record the seconds, like a timepiece on a bomb, and thus give you a finegrained sense of your slice and dice advance towards death – or why stop there? Buried with such a thing, it could go on slicing and dicing your decay, your dust, your evaporation from this world. But at no point in its slicing and dicing would there be a moment, an aberrant moment, in which it wondered if it was really going anywhere, or measuring anything.

My two favorite essays on time are McTaggart’s The Unreality of Time and Borges’ A new refutatation of Time. Borges, in the introduction to his essay, acknowledges the awkwardness of refuting time one more time again – and concedes that it may be that the evident solecism of the title may represent the hidden solecism that skews every sentence, so drenched is language in time, or at least, so much do our assumptions about time live in our language. It is through Borges I first heard about McTaggart. Borges’ essay is all low violin sounds, all elegy and fugue – McTaggart’s, on the other hand, is that curious thing, English idealism, in which the brisk dispatch of a philosophical problem seems in stylistic contradiction with its import. Indeed, it is a question that is little asked why idealism took so long to take any root in Europe, and why, when it did, it chose the most material of cultures to do so, Britain. One expects the true idealist to be scrawny, nearly naked, and with a beggar’s bowl before him – not peruked, buttoned up, and with snuff and ale within easy reach. But I would guess that the introduction of idealism in Europe through Britain has something to do with the British tradition of the ludicrous. English literature loves the ludicrous – it loves the Liliputians for their own sake. It loves a certain kind of children’s literature, it loves limericks, it loves to add that one extra and unnecessary feature that is not at all the effect of the real, but the effect of the unreal in the real – hence, Dicken’s penchant for describing the tics of his characters. If we think of idealism as the quintessence of the ludicrous, then I think we get close to why idealism first found a place in Britain – and why it is so different there than in, say, the philosophical systems of India, even if there exists some similarity of arguments.

John Ellis McTaggart came, of course, at the end of the great British idealist tradition. And he was overshadowed by Russell and Whitehead. In Arthur Quinn’s The Confidence of British Philosophers, there is a story that I would like to juxtapose to my ludicrous theory. When McTaggart died, he had only one disciple left, it seems: C.D. Broad. Broad edited the second edition fo McTaggart’s The Nature of Existence (1928), which fell still born from the press – and unlike Hume’s Treatise, which had a similar fate, never experienced any resuscitation by the next generation of philosophers. Broad was disgusted by the reception of his master’s masterpiece, and wrote a three volume exposition of the work, which ran to 1200 pages. And in this exhaustive work, according to Quinn, Broad praised McTaggart’s arguments for their clarity, and showed that “McTaggart’s most important proofs were virtually all fallacious...” From the deeper idealistic level, Broad could not have done McTaggart a greater favor. Truth is one of the superstitions one must remove from one’s mind in order to truly de-provincialize it – for after all, holding onto the truth is only a means of separating oneself from God, or Nothingness.

With this caution, I’ll move on to McTaggart’s paper.

McTaggart begins with a premise that subsequently became famous.

"Positions in time, as time appears to us prima facie, are distinguished in two ways. Each position is Earlier than some, and Later than some, of the other positions. And each position is either Past, Present, or Future. The distinctions of the former class are permanent, while those of the latter are not. If M is ever earlier than N, it is always earlier. But an event, which is now present, was future and will be past."

McTaggart calls the series of earlier and later the B series, and the Past Present Future series the A series. In the B series, given an event (for McTaggart, the fundamental elements of the two series), its description, with relation to another event, will always be described as earlier or later. Broad always follows McTaggart, down the library-ridden years to the final conflagration. But in the A series, oddly enough, all three descriptions will apply. Broad planned to write his book, the book, appeared, the book is now history. At one point an event will be present, at another point it will be future, and at one point it will be past.

McTaggart throws in another characteristic of time -- he connects it to change. And it is here that the two series designated under one concept – time – does its work for McTaggart:

It would, I suppose, be universally admitted that time involves change. A particular thing, indeed, may exist unchanged through any amount of time. But when we ask what we mean by saying that there were different moments of time, or a certain duration of time, through which the thing was the same, we find that we mean that it remained the same while other things were changing. A universe in which nothing whatever changed (including the thoughts of the conscious beings in it) would be a timeless universe.
      If, then, a B series without an A series can constitute time, change must be possible without an A series. Let us suppose that the distinction of past, present and future does not apply to reality. Can change apply to reality? What is it that changes?
      Could we say that, in a time which formed a B series but not an A series, the change consisted in the fact that an event ceased to be an event, while another event began to be an event? If this were the case, we should certainly have got a change.
      But this is impossible. An event can never cease to be an event. It can never get out of any time series in which it once is. If N is ever earlier than O and later than M, it will always be, and has always been, earlier than O and later than M, since the relations of earlier and later are permanent. And as, by our present hypothesis, time is constituted by a B series alone, N will always have a position in a time series, and has always had one.{1} That is, it will always be, and has always been, an event, and cannot begin or cease to be an event.”
McTaggart has cleverly entangled time in its own net, here. If series B is all that really changes, and if series A never changes – which is how we know that series B changes –then, fundamentally, there is no change. There is only and always series B, the logic of which refers to series A, which confutes the reality of series B.
McTaggart writes: “But it does not follow that, if we subtract the determinations of the A series from time, we shall have no series left at all. There is a series -- a series of the permanent relations to one another of those realities which in time are events -- and it is the combination of this series with the A determinations which gives time. But this other series -- let us call it the C series -- is not temporal, for it involves no change, but only an order. Events have an order. They are, let us say, in the order M, N, O, P. And they are therefore not in the order M, O, N, P, or O, N, M, P, or in any other possible order. But that they have this order no more implies that there is any change than the order of the letters of the alphabet, or of the Peers on the Parliament Roll, implies any change. And thus those realities which appear to us as events might form such a series without being entitled to the name of events, since that name is only given to realities which are in a time series. It is only when change and time come in that the relations of this C series become relations of earlier and later, and so it becomes a B series.”
It is at this point, as the series under the great daemon Chronos threaten to get out of hand, that we can turn to Borges, who of course adored this idea, as it popped the whole world into a short story that reflects on the order of its own events  - like a watch that stops to ponder whether it will go from one o’clock to one o one, or if, instead, it will go from one clock to the corner liquor store to buy a bottle of cheap Irish whiskey and sit in the shade under a tree near a slow street and ponder its doings.
Borges takes up the refutation of space and matter, which he claims ensue from Berkeley and Hume’s arguments, and asks, reasonably enough, why they retain the idea of continuity in time. And he then – (this then figures in a logical simulacrum of time, a sort of fixed set of relations, like series A) -- writes:

“Once the idealist argument is admitted, I see that it is possible -- perhaps inevitable --

to go further. For Berkeley, time is "the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly, and is participated by all beings" (Principles of Human Knowledge, 98); for Hume, "a succession of indivisible moments" (Treatise of Human Nature, I, 2, 2). However, once matter

and spirit -- which are continuities -- are negated, once space too is negated, I do not know

with what right we retain that continuity which is time. Outside each perception (real or

conjectural) matter does not exist; outside each mental state spirit does not exist; neither

does time exist outside each present moment. Let us take a moment of maximum simplicity:

for example, that of Chuang Tzu's dream (Herbert Allen Giles: Chuang Tzu, 1889). Chuang

Tzu, some twenty-four centuries ago, dreamt he was a butterfly and did not know, when he

awoke, if he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreamt he

was a man. Let us not consider the awakening; let us consider the moment of the dream

itself, or one of its moments. "I dreamt I was a butterfly flying through the air and knowing

nothing of Chuang Tzu," reads the ancient text. We shall never know if Chuang Tzu saw a

garden over which he seemed to fly or a moving yellow triangle which no doubt was he, but

we do know that the image was subjective, though furnished by his memory. The doctrine

of psycho-physical parallelism would judge that the image must have been accompanied by

some change in the dreamer's nervous system; according to Berkeley, the body of Chuang

Tzu did not exist at that moment, save as a perception in the mind of God. Hume simplifies

even more what happened. According to him, the spirit of Chuang Tzu did not exist at that

moment; only the colors of the dream and the certainty of being a butterfly existed. They

existed as a momentary term in the "bundle or collection of perceptions" which, some four

centuries before Christ, was the mind of Chuang Tzu; they existed as a term n in an infinite

temporal series, between n-1 and n+1. There is no other reality, for idealism, than that of

mental processes; adding an objective butterfly to the butterfly which is perceived seems a

vain duplication; adding a self to these processes seems no less exorbitant. Idealism judges

that there was a dreaming, a perceiving, but not a dreamer or even a dream; it judges that

speaking of objects and subjects is pure mythology. Now if each psychic state is selfsufficient,

if linking it to a circumstance or to a self is an illicit and idle addition, with what

right shall we then ascribe to it a place in time? Chuang Tzu dreamt that he was a butterfly

and during that dream he was not Chuang Tzu, but a butterfly. How, with space and self

abolished, shall we link those moments to his waking moments and to the feudal period of

Chinese history? This does not mean that we shall never know, even in an approximate

fashion, the date of that dream; it means that the chronological fixing of an event, of an

event in the universe, is alien and external to it.”

Borges does not mention McTaggart in his essay – in the end, after going through Berkeley, Hume, and Schopenhauer, he turns to the very root of idealistic thinking, in India. Near the end of the essay, he quotes this very beautiful passage that I am going to end this little essay on, and which it will always end on, having been unfolded in my mind and on this screen, and which it will not ever end on at the same time, having refuted itself in every sentence and thus having no “it” to unfold:

A Buddhist treatise of the fifth

century, the Visuddhimagga (Road to Purity), illustrates the same doctrine… "Strictly speaking, the duration of the life of a living being is exceedingly brief,

lasting only while a thought lasts. Just as a chariot wheel in rolling rolls only at one point of

the tire, and in resting rests only at one point; in exactly the same way the life of a living

being lasts only for the period of one thought"

Take any event -- the death of Queen Anne, for example -- and consider what change can take place in its characteristics. That it is a death, that it is the death of Anne Stuart, that it has such causes, that it has such effects -- every characteristic of this sort never changes. "Before the stars saw one another plain" the event in question was a death of an English Queen. At the last moment of time -- if time has a last moment -- the event in question will still be a death of an English Queen. And in every respect but one it is equally devoid of change. But in one respect it does change. It began by being a future event. It became every moment an event in the nearer future. At last it was present. Then it became past, and will always remain so, though every moment it becomes further and further past. Thus we seen forced to the conclusion that all change is only a change of the characteristics imparted to events by their presence in the A series, whether those characteristics are qualities or relations.

the book of the world

The sign, the text and the title formed a devise so powerful that its counterpart, in the end, seemed to be the world itself. At first the physical world and the heavens, for the cuneiform cultures, were defined by the boundaries marked out by the gods – there was a world for the humans and a world for the gods, which the latter ruing the former. But both worlds came into focus as the counterparts of the text. From a very early point in the history of writing, written signs were compared to the world’s objects: the stars in the sky to the words on a writing surface, for instance.

So when we speak of the book of the world, we are speaking of the text’s relation to an object that is defined in relation to some magical first text. In Genesis 1:14, the relation between the world and the text is, as it were, sealed in the very act of creation: “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.” What is created to be a sign is already on the way to being the book of the world. There is a long scholarly tradition in Germany, going from Curtius to Hans Blumenberg,  which has excavated the metaphor of this book, showing how it arose in the various worlds of the Mediterranean.  The metaphor has not only a great and irresistible charm for the scribes  – who copy and scribble - but possesses the baroque virtue that it inscribes itself within itself – for the book of the world holds the book in which the metaphor does its transformative work, which in turn holds the world, or at least the point of view that we, the scribes, have dubbed the world.  

The signs are there, as well, in the early modern era, where there is a question of the type of sign: is the book of the world composed of an alphabet (Francis Bacon’s favorite metaphor), or of hieroglyphs (John Dee’s preference) or of mathematical symbols (Galileo’s choice)? Galileo makes perhaps the most interesting use of the book of the world metaphor, incorporating it into the weave of natural philosophy just as the signs were incorporated into the creation story in Genesis, but with a certain twist: “I truly believe the book of philosophy to be that which stands perpetually open before our eyes, though since it is written in characters different from those of our alphabit it cannot be read by everyone; and the characters of such a book are triangles, squares, circles, spheres, cones, pyramids and other mathematical figures, most apt for such reading.”

Most apt indeed – so much so that the problem of why mathematics gives us such a model of the universe took a long time to present itself in the physics community. Eugen Wigner in 1960 finally gave definitive form to the problem of why mathematics is “most apt for such reading” in the physics community. Perhaps a lesser noted problem is the role that this metaphor played in making possible the presentation of the logic of substitution, which is unthinkable in a world that wasn’t considered “readable”.

some small bank reform suggestions

An article by Thomas Phillipson is summarized here:

“I find that the unit cost of intermediation has increased since the mid-1970s and is now significantly higher than it was at the turn of the twentieth century. In other words, the finance industry that sustained the expansion of railroads, steel and chemical industries, and later the electricity and automobile revolutions seems to have been more efficient than the current finance industry.”

He further finds “that this (annual) unit cost is around 2% and relatively stable over time. In other words, I estimate that it costs two cents per year to create and maintain one dollar of intermediated financial asset.”

The bottom-line of Philippon’s findings is that bankers’ compensation is increasing, contributing to a static unit cost, even though technology is automating:

“The income share grows from 2% to 6% from 1870 to 1930. It shrinks to less than 4% in 1950, grows slowly to 5% in 1980, and then increases rapidly to more than 8% in 2010. Surprisingly, the tremendous improvements in information technologies of the past 30 years have not led to a decrease in the average cost of intermediation, or at least not yet.”

And this is the industry we just hugely subsidized. When the state could take advantage of the information technologies, set up a bank in post offices, and pretty much supply commercial banking at a fraction of the price to mainstream America. In my view, banking should be divided up into commercial banking, investment banking, which lends to real companies, and casino banking. The latter includes all derivates and whatnot. It should simply be merged with casinos, and taken out of the financial system entirely. This would allow the gamblers to gamble to their heart's delight without affecting anything outside their sphere. If pension funds were hooked up with the poker prowess of some superbowl poker player, I think it would violate the rules in place. But pension funds are hooked up with other more dangerous poker players. Cut that thread, and we could get back to the real economy of real wealth that is basically unthreatened, at the moment, by a crisis.

christine lagarde puts on the cloak of distance, but it has a hole in it

If I could become rich simply by wishing the death of Chinese mandarin on the other side of the world, would I do it? This is a question that comes up in a famous passage in Pere Goriot, expressing the moral seduction of Rastignac by Vautrin. Rastignac asks a friend of his, Bianchon, if he remembers a passage somewhere in Rousseau “in which he asks the reader what he would do if he could become wealthy by killing an old Chinese mandarin, without leaving Paris, just by an act of will?” Carlos Ginzburg, in his essay, the Killing of A Chinese Mandarin, has traced the way Rastignac’s inexact memory of Rousseau (the passage seems rather to come from Diderot and Chateaubriand) articulates a long tradition, in moral philosophy, concerning distance and the good. Ginzburg points out that distance, in the way Aristotle considered it – where it plays approximately the same role as Gyges rings, a manner of hiding oneself -  becomes, necessarily, different when distance itself becomes different. “… the emergence of a worldwide economic system had already turned the possibility of a financialgain,  involving much longer distances than Aristotle had imagined even in his wildest flights of phantasy,into reality.”

Distance is, in Ginzburg’s take, not portable; it is not something one can wrap around oneself. It is relational and spatial or temporal. However, if we consider it a kind of hiding, it does seem portable. When the airplane pilot drops bombs, the distance is not only relational, a matter of weakening the tie of sympathy that would make the pilot save someone near and not even that dear – but the distance is also portable. It is carried by the pilot into the scene of the bombing; it operates as a cloak.

As a cloak, distance can also be imported into the near. We have seen this happen extensively in the last thirty years. When complaints are made, in the U.S., that free trade is, for instance, destroying the middle class, it is not uncommon for neo-classical economists to take the near – the U.S. worker – as self-indulgent, and the far – the poor third world worker – as the true worthy moral subject. This seems like a rhetorical trick too far… who could possible buy this story? And yet this variation of the distance story is rather popular among economists, who, perhaps to compensate for being rich themselves and advocating policies for the rich, need to validate their own moral bones – hence, where the unfeeling U.S. worker has been killing Chinese mandarins on his way to a living wage, the free trader comes in to avenge the mandarins by denuding the worker.  In this way, the old truism, charity begins at home, is turned upside down.

There is, of course, a problem with the idea that the economist is really helping the Chinese worker – since of course this is a byproduct of helping the Chinese businessman, and the same ruthless logic applies to those Chinese workers, who, garnering a slim, slim part of the social productivity that is based on them, should never demand too much. Still, in moments of “compassion trolling”, the traditional notion of distance is reversed – or rather, the economist wears a cloak of distance that puts him or her at a distance from what is near.

Perhaps this helps us understand Christine Lagarde’s counterproductive comments about Greece. When, in her by now infamous interview with the Guardian, Lagarde was asked about the Greek meltdown, this is how it went:

“So when she studies the Greek balance sheet and demands measures she knows may mean women won't have access to a midwife when they give birth, and patients won't get life-saving drugs, and the elderly will die alone for lack of care – does she block all of that out and just look at the sums?
"No, I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens." She breaks off for a pointedly meaningful pause, before leaning forward.
"Do you know what? As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax."
I say this is counterproductive – because even though this does represent the true heartlessness of the predator class, even that predator class has to prey. By putting the terms of the deal so harshly, Lagarde upset the effort of the EU to entice the Greeks to take the loans that will really simply circulate back to banks and hedgefunders in the EU and the U.S. Once Greece is taken out of the picture, the plutocrats will just have to get the funding directly from the EU states – and this is going to upset people. Moreover, it is French banks and German ones that will follow the Greeks down.
So what was the compulsion there that caused this blip, this moment of truth, in which the claws came out? Perhaps it was the comfort with the cloak of distance. The millionaire to billionaire class has grown very comfortable with morality at a distance. Even if, as we know, the IMF would not lift a finger if all the little villages in Niger were thrown into the sea if if meant that Niger or Nigeria or any other place upset the system of exploitation in place, still, the image of that distant suffering has a very strong symbolic value – a strong shaming value. It can shame the near. Interestingly, the plutocrats have effortlessly poached an old left trope, which rubbed the face of the West’s prosperity in the detritus of the enslaved and the exploited, the colonized and the robbed. The plutocrats borrowed the form, not the content. And as the left has died, the right has played this game to their hearts content. Lagarde was just pushing some old buttons. She must have forgotten that you have to put on your cloak of distance properly. Just as she forgot that it was easy to discover that, as a matter of fact, she herself pays no taxes on her salary.

the scribe and the title

Almost all the titles are lost. That is, almost all the titles of the ancient Egyptian texts that we now possess are lost. “The title of the book, a summary of its contents, or the opening words, were at times written on the reverse side or at the outside of the scroll’s beginning, with the name of the author (“made by”) immediately after it. As scrolls generally lost their edges first, few titles have comedown to us. Fewer authors were identified..Sometimes, however, lists of titltes were written on the walls of temples or pyramids,though the books themselves have not survived. Small deeds and other documents at times were provided with titles. Onne book of the dead was entitled “Book of the Coming into the Day of Osiris Gathesehen, daughter of Mekheperre.” Long texts were sometimes divided by the chapter numbers, marked by ht, “house”.” (Leila Avrin, 91)

It has been a long time since Jacques Derrida published the chapters of On Grammatology concerning Rousseau and writing in Critique. Since that time, the phonocentric, logocentric paradigm in anthropology and archaeology has definitely shifted. The latest researchers on ancient Mesopotamia refer to a “cuneiform culture”, in which, contrary to the older school that saw writing as a tool captured by a scribal elite, literacy spread. Or a form of literacy, for  literacy as a uniform thing, a single kind of learned capacity, has been well and truly debunked, as archaeologists have made sense of the data they possess that show multiple forms of script and signs within script ‘domains’; they have also come to terms with such discoveries as that of Nippur and Isin, where the majority of houses so far excavated have turned up texts. Furthermore, archaeologists are now more interested in the evolution of  script types that went along with the evolution of materials on which the script could be impressed, scratched or painted, as cursive, a select number of syllobograms, and lighter materials that were easier to correct led to the invention of the personal  and business letter.

In the sixties and seventies, the Mesopotamian evidence suggested to some researchers, like Walter Ong and Jack Goody, that the invention of writing operated to change the very cognitive style of human beings. Goody’s essay on the list is The Domestication of the Savage Mind is still a tour de force survey of the effects of the text, although as he admits, his earlier notion of the text was too tied into the phonetic alphabet, which is seen as “easier” and more flexible to use, thus leading to the ability to “write down one’s thoughts.” This may actually be a property of the material one writes them down on and what one writes with – at least, the archaeologists coming after Goody have found that qualities he attributes to alphabetical writing are certainly present in pictographic or logographic systems.  

Here is the central claim, I think, Goody makes about lists:

“My concern here is to show that these written forms were not simply by-products of the interaction between writing and, say, the economy, filling some hitherto hidden “need”, but that they represented a significant change not only in the nature of transactions, but also in the ‘modes  of thought’ that accompanied them, at least if we interpret ‘modes of thought’in terms of the formal, cognitive and linguistic operations which this new technology of the intellect opened up.”

The idea, here, is not that writing itself changes modes of thought, but that writing devises do – hence, the importance of the list, or the written number. Marc Bloch, the most prominent opponent of Goody’s, has used his fieldwork in Madagascar to construct a case in which literacy, and in particular listing texts (for instance, genealogies) do not organize cultural “modes of thought”, but exist as regions within a largely oral culture. Bloch, in turn, has been attacked for the way he has elevated certain observations into generalities – that is, the way he has evolved what Clifford Geertz calls the “deep text.”

The title, I think, has not yet been enough looked at in this context – or Babel, depending on how you come down on the importance of ecriture. Certainly in oral contexts there are titles, but they seem, at least in my experience, to be very loose things. A typical titling episode would be x telling y to “tell that story about x” – with the title here being the “story about”. And in as much as this stimulus does hook onto a story, it does one of the works of calling a name – you call a name and the named thing comes. So too does the story. Interestingly, though, the “story about”, while it can tend towards a stereotypic norm (the story about the priest, the story about Mavis X, etc.) often varies in its composition. Similarly, titles can occur in oral speech that announce what is coming – not what has already been circulated. So, for instance, a person can be called into the office of his or her superior and the latter can say, I’ve called you in to talk about your tardiness (an example taken from my own life!). The monologue or dialogue that ensues has, vaguely, the title, “about X’s inability to get to work on time”. 

All of which is merely to say that oral speech does have self-labeling moments. Thus, when texts get titled, we are not speaking of a completely different communicative form from that which occurs in the oral quotidian. But I want to argue that the title is “freed” by the text, by ecriture. While it fulfills certain labeling functions, it also proceeds towards something as new, something resembling the name of a person, rather than the label of a person. When John Stuart Mill claimed that the proper name was a description, he was conflating label and name. And there is some warrant for that in names: the smith gets name Smith. But what Mill ignores, as a philosopher, is what is obvious to the sociologist: the name is enmeshed in what it means to be familiar with, to know, to love, to hate, etc. The name is not just used to label. Before children learn to use pronominal shifters, they often self-label – or so I have been assured by numerous mothers. Robert says, that chocolate is Robert’s, rather than that chocolate is mine,  because “Robert” is taken by the child to be an extension of himself in a way that “mine” – that code that refers to its message, to the tie between the individual word and the language system in which it is located – is not. “Mine” seems to be a communal dish which anyone can grab between their fingers and bite into  – “Robert’s” is a special snack reserved for Robert.

Textual devises don’t seem to have that same self-reflexivity. They seem to be labeling all the way down, so to speak. And yet if this is so, the title would simply be a label.

We know that this isn’t so. I would call this, the (en)titling instance, the moment in which the scribe enters into literature, in the broadest sense (visual, aural, scripted). The tradition that ascribes to the scribe a monopoly of power over the written meets, in this moment arising thieflike from within the devise itself, an inner movement that structurally breaks the monopoly.

musical chairs in the EU

Marcel Mauss tells a story, in his essay about the techniques of the body, about an incident he observed in WWI.  “In a gesture of collaboration, a British regiment, the Worcester, received permission to incorporate some French drummers and buglers in order to match the French military march. The result, according to Mauss, was a disaster: During almost six months, in the streets of Bailleul, long after the battle of l'Aisne [where the regiment had achieved some success], I often saw the ,following  spectacle: the regiment had conserved its English march and rhythmed it to the French. It even had at its head a small group of French infantrymen who knew how to work the clarions and who sounded the marches better than their men. The unhappy regiment of tall Englishmen could not form. All was discordant in their marching. When they tried to march in time, the music didn’t properly mark their marching. To the point where the Worcester regiment was obliged to suppress the French marching music.”

This moment of unscoring, so to speak, is the collapse of a background experience that, as Heidegger once pointed out, has some epistemological use: for the moment of collapse reveals the intricacy of the background. Heidegger, here, is merely catching up with one of the great kids’ games, musical chairs, in which collapse is an opportunity for a happy scramble, and the consecutive exclusion of the unwary players, until only one player is left.

The European economy is not – yet – World War I, but the law of scoring still applies. There is no one tune to which the nations should all march. That doesn’t mean that one can’t share instruments, but it does mean that sharing instruments does not mean dictating the music. Unfortunately, Germany, which suffered a pretty ragged 90s and an astonishing lack of growth in the last decade up to around 2006, doesn’t understand what any child should know. The German establishment did not grow because it imposed austerity; it grew because it imposed one of the commonest devises of the class war, known as squeezing the “cost” of labor – or excluding labor from the gains of productivity, however you want to put it. What this means is that the German economy is out of step with the rest of Europe. Labor costs there are going up – the working class has had it with the program of mini-jobs and a lack of any raise in wages for ten years. This means, inevitably, that there will be wage driven inflation in Germany, and that Germany will respond by the usual central bank monkeyshines: squeezing credit.

However, this policy is absolute poison for those more healthy EU nations that did not sacrifice their working classes in the 2000s. Luckily for them, in normal circumstances, the German wage  inflation should lead to higher prices in Germany, more competitive prices in Italy, and thus exports into Germany. At the same time, of course, the wage catchup should insure that German goods are not crowded out domestically.

But this isn’t happening. Keynes, supposedly, once asked one of the British bureaucrats who helped build the successful blockade of Germany in WWI why the blockade continued after the German army had laid down its arms. He was told that the bureaucrats and the Navy were so proud of having succeeded in creating the blockade that they just couldn’t bear to see it disappear simply because peace broke out. Change the characters a bit and you have the story of any bureaucracy formed to coerce a social group into agreeing to a certain arrangement.

  

The new spoils system

Mark Thoma, on Economist’s View, has posed the question, one he often refers to: why are politicians (American politicians) so indifferent to the employment problem? Meanwhile, Mark Stoller, on Naked Capitalism, has a postabout the present good fortunes of ex President Clinton and our current spoilssystem – which differs from the old spoils system in that the spoils aren’t enjoyed concurrently with one’s stint in office, but afterwards.

 

I think the Stoller post supplies some answer to the Thoma post.

If you have a return to the pre-1929 distribution of industry, and you add to that the shrinking of the unionized part of the labor force to 1910 levels, then you get lack of concern about unemployment.
A good question might be: why should politicians be concerned about unemployment?
The unemployed, I think it is safe to say, don't have the resources to lobby much, or to make available rentseeking opportunities for politicians in the case they are voted out of office, or their families while in office.
In the nineteeth century, the cheapness of the legal/political sector in America was known to every robber baron, and to the population at large. Chapters of Erie, the book by Charles and Henry Adams, has many comic illustrations of the Vanderbilt or the Gould parties buying state legislators and judges as part of the cost of business.
In the twentieth century, countervailing forces created, for a while a set of tacit norms and enforced rules that made this harder. Watergate, for instance, was driven by the fact that CREEP, the committee to re-elect Nixon, had violated these rules and needed to hide it. This would be unthinkable now. Because Creep was so innocent. A vanity candidacy financed solely by a billionaire is now just part of the view out of the window - nobody is shocked.
The two parties exist, for the most part, to raise the price on bribery. They do a very good job for their elites. The journalists, who can have their faces rubbed into a fact and will still not see it, report on this as though the whole system was driven by campaign financing. This is a pretty fiction. It is really driven by massive elite peculation. Sure, to a certain extent, to position yourself for the big money from lobbying or being absorbed into some corporate borg, you do have to get elected. And certain vain or lazy people may even limit their ambition to political office. But, in the main, elected office only gives one a force that can be sold in any number of ways to enrich one's family and friends, and that is what politics is about. Politics reflects the state of the society, and in this society, being wealthy is everything, and the rest are, at best, consumers, and at worst, losers. It is hard, at the millionaire level, to make petty distinctions between the employed and the unemployed loser. And unlike the 19th century, where the face to face dimension of politics spread bribes and actually activated certain figures to fight for an ideal (a hopelessly hokey idea today), we now have a facebook-to-facebook dimension, which has no organized power and distrusts anyone who tries to organize it - after all, that could mean jail or being accused of being a "terrorist" in the press.
Unemployment, as a political issue, is now among the dodos, like the issue of overcapitalized stock and the like. Nobody cares.

Fortune and the market 1

On November 17, 1400,a Florentine merchant named Ardingo de’ Ricci wrote a letter to some associates in Catalonia, assessing his current business activity, and concluding: “For these reasons we have not decided to traffic in these regions… and we have taken the part of navigating in the Levant, in order if possible not to diminish our resources until fortune finishes its course.” Christian Bec, from whose study I extract this long lost instance of the woes of a middleman, has ventured out from the usual pool of well known literary texts into the lesser known and ordinary texts of merchants to fix the significance and meaning of Fortuna and its courses in the early Renaissance; he found that merchants allude to fortune in a number of ways: to signify a storm at sea, an unexpected turn of events in a war, or, as with Ricci, a general commercial state.

What interests me in the latter is that clearly, a Ricci writing a letter to his investors today would use, without thinking, another word for fortune: market.

The referential range of “market” and “fortune” are, of course, not identical. In the current vogue for “markets in everything”, we still don’t see market used as a synonym for hurricane, or for the events of battle. Nor were the courses of fortune specified in terms of the supply and demand of commodities. The meeting of our terms is oblique, but not, I would claim,  insignificant. In Aby Warburg’s  seminal essay, the Last Will and Testament of Francesco Sassetti (1907), Warburg mentions that a commonality shared by lineage of writers on Fortuna in the ‘antique world’ of the Romans (from Cicero to Boethius) and the world of 14^th and 15^th century Italy (including Ficino) was the set of definitions of fortune in Latin and Italian, which included not only “”accident” and “property”, but also “windstorm”. For the see-venturing businessm, these three divided concepts designated much more only three divided properties of a Storm Fortuna, whose uncanny, unfathomable capacity for transformation from the demon of annihilation to the generously bountiful goddess of wealth evoked the elementary restitution of its originally unified mythic personality under the influence of an old, inherited anthropomorphic pattern of thought.” Americo Castro, in an essay on Don Quixote, spoke of the “unit of consciousness” in which coexist “the spritual and the physical, the abstract and the concrete” – and in this sense, Fortuna signals that kind of concept-in-practice, one that can be divided up for study among different ‘disciplines’ but that, in practice, brings together apparently discrete conceptual moments.

Understanding the overdetermined elements of fortune in the early modern period helps us get clearer about the Fortuna’s wheel – which provided as powerful an image by which to analyse the life of production and trade in the early modern era as the image of equilibrium has done to analyse the life of production and consumption in the modern era. The the wheel of fortune lost its poetic power at some point in the late 17^th century, when the first prophets of a new order – William Petty, Pierre Le Pesant de Boisguilbert, and Bernard Mandeville, among others – devised different images, organized around circulation. But the history of units of consciousness is not a history of unilateral continuities and ruptures, any more than the history of a person is the history of his waking life. 

More socialist revolutionary propaganda - free!

The giant corporation and the state owned enterprise are cut from the same cloth. Victor Berger, the Milwaukee politician who was the first Socialist representative ever elected to the House, tried to get the Sherman Anti-Trust law overthrown in 1912. The reason was simple: according to the logic of the dominant socialist economic policy of the time, the more a corporation became a monopoly, the more it carved out a form that could be used when the state took it over. There was a natural evolution between monopoly and state ownership.

This logic was not only a powerful argument in socialist circles. John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the great radical liberals in twentieth century America, also believed that the  monopoly form of the corporation rid itself of the pernicious, profit-seeking behaviors that made capitalism a bain to the common man, and promoted scientific progress and peace between labor and capital.

I understand the logic, but I believe Victor Berger and Galbraith were wrong.

This may seem irrelevant to this week’s news about the Facebook IPO, but I think events that transpired in 1911 and 1912 have a strong bearing on the 21^st century’s corporate mindset.

The facebook IPO was a public relations triumph for billionaires, certainly. While Trayvon Martin, as every rightwing commentator knows, was righteously killed because he wore a hoodie, the hoodie of Mark Zuckerman, the son of a rich dentist who has become a Forbes Magazine icon, is just an adorable sign of the clean American whiz kid. Don’t we all I-Love  him?

But the IPO was also your typical political economic disaster. The price of the stock was put at an incredible 105 times earnings. The New Economy of the nineties names, really, a ratio – that is, the rise in the ratio between price and earnings. In an early era – in the Progressive era – this had another name: overcapitalization. And instead of celebrating an economic mechanism whereby speculators are allowed and encouraged to treat themselves to stunning windfalls, the Progessives justly saw overcapitalization as waste and fraud.

Lawrence Mitchell, in The Speculation Economy, has, I think correctly, seen the first two decades of the 20^th century in America as the period in which the limits of American progressive politics – and by extension, the limits of anti-corporationism in the West – were drawn and hardened. By 1920, the attempt to reform the stock market from the root had failed.

The high point of the reform effort came in 1911. In that year, the House of Representatives passed a bill a bill that was narrowly turned down in the Senate, S. 232. S. 232 would not only have required federal incorporation of all interstate businesses. Here’s Mitchell’s description of it:

“It would have replaced traditional state corporate finance law by preventing companies from issuing “new stock” for more than the cash value of their assets, addressing both traditional antitrust concerns and newer worries about the stability of the stock market by preventing overcapitalization. But it would have done much more.

S. 232 was designed to restore industry to its primary role in American business, subjugating finance to its service. It would have directed the proceeds of securities issues to industrial progress by preventing corporations from issuing stock except “for the purpose of enlarging or extending the business of such corporation or for improvements or betterments”, and only with the permission of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor. Corporations would only be permitted to issue stock to finance revenue-generating industrial activities rather than finance the ambitions of sellers and promoters. … S. 232 would have restored the industrial business model to American corporate capitalism and prevented the spread of the finance combination from continuing it dominance of American industry.” (137)

Martin Sklar, in The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, summarized the spirit of the drafts prepared during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration that stood in the background of the bill’s eventual configuration  in this way: ‘whenever the amount of outstanding stock should exceed the value of assets, the secretary would require the corporation to call in all stock and issue new stock in lieu thereof in an amount not exceeding the value of assets, and each stockholder would be required to surrender the old stock and receive the new issue in an amount proportionate to the old holdings.”

I’ve already manifested my manifesto for a new Soviet version of 21^st century capitalism – one that destroys the corporate form and replaces  it with hundreds of thousands of small scale enterprises in flexible cooperative structures. It does not overturn capitalism, but it does radically turn capitalism around. The limitation of both the corporation and the state is a kind of capitalism with a human face – which is much more radical than where ‘socialism’ is at the moment. For this kind of harmony of opposites, of cooperation and competition, to really work, the speculative economy would have to be radically subordinated to production. The pleasure palace of the oligarchs, the four hundred trillion dollar derivatives structure that burdens the earth (even as it actually does not exist – truly, an extreme case of economic neuroses), will have to be burnt to the ground.

The Facebook IPO is a monument to the folly of our contemporary economic arrangements. These arrangements are undergoing a systematic change that will produce an environment in which the middle class, that compromise formation of 20^th century capitalism, has a dodo’s chance of survival. Revolution from the middle class in the 20^th century usually resulted in fascism. In the 21^st century, however, the speculative and rent-seeking echelon, by steadily increasing the divide between it and everyone else, is creating a new fusion between the middle class and its erstwhile enemies, marginals  of every type, as well as the working class. We will see what comes of it all.

Donna is dead

 

“At first, God gave the judgement of death upon man, when he should transgresse, absolutely, Morte morieris, Thou shalt surely dye: The woman in her Dialogue with the Serpent, she mollifies it, Ne fortè moriamur, perchance, if we eate, we may die; and then the Devill is as peremptory on the other side, Nequaquam moriemini, do what you will, surely you shall not die; And now God in this Text comes to his reply, Quis est homo, shall they not die? Give me but one instance, but one exception to this rule, What man is hee that liveth, and shall not see death? Let no man, no woman, no devill offer a Ne fortè, (perchance we may dye) much lesse a Nequaquam, (surely we shall not dye) except he be provided of an answer to this question, except he can give an instance against this generall, except he can produce that mans name, and history, that hath lived, and shall not see death. Wee are all conceived in close Prison; in our Mothers wombes, we are close Prisoners all; when we are borne, we are borne but to the liberty of the house; Prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of Execution, to death.”

And so Donna Summer has not gone out to the place of Execution, trailing behind her my early twenties in Shreveport, Louisiana. But I’m going to take the serpent’s side of the argument, here. Whatever it was we ate (or sniffed, or smoked) back then, it made more sense to think Nequaquam moriemini than to think God would strike us down for discovering the toy store of our own bodies, since it was the demiurge that had stocked it. And this was a discovery that required a certain toy music. It was a delicate kind of thing, this music, as certainly really good toy’s are: containing just that small bit of unheimlichkeit which inhabits the doll, the clown, and the windup figure, reminiscent of that infantile moment when the line is blurred between what is living and what isn’t, when the categories aren’t fixed and the dreams aren’t quite captured and pent by the circle made by sleep. The Giorgio Moroder thump and the old Phil Spector echo effect made a space for a certain kind of voice, one that varied the diva aspiration to filling the song: this voice emptied it.

At the time, I had begun living in one of those classic small Southern towns where the old Dixie hierarchies still gamely held, and in holding distorted themselves into all kind of grotesqueness. Shreveport was like a weird combination of a Walker Percy novel and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It was a perfect outpost, actually, to watch the American system warp. And the perfect outpost within that outpost was the Florentine club, until it was finally blown up. Or so I heard. It was a combination disco and gay bar, and gay bars in the backwater South tend to be under attack, especially in 1979.

I don’t think any American craze has been hated quite as much as disco, for it combined all the unpleasant reminders that the old American verities (which went all the way baaaack  baaack baaack to … 1945) were disconnected from reality: blue collar masculinity was a joke (prefigured by YMCA, and instantiated in the 80s by a leveraged buyout culture and a political leadership that had the knives out for the unions); heterosexuality was a joke; and not only had the doors of perception been kicked open by drugs, but we had all been unceremoniously hustled through them by an increasingly ominipotent media and ‘information economy’ (that produces anything but information that you, well, actually need), so that by this time it was already apparent that a rose was not a rose and not a rose – at best, it was a prop to be photographed for an advertisement to get you to buy a rose. As for American might – disco seemed not so much to criticize it, like the New Left in the 60s, as to ignore it, as though it didn’t exist at all. And if America wasn’t mighty, what was it?

Well, one answer was that it was place to get high on whatever was at hand, dance, and fuck, as much as possible. Hot stuff baby this evening.

Myself, I’ve always been more the bold boy in my head than out of it. I confined myself mostly to dancing. I was first taken to the Florentine by Dean, one of the first people who befriended me at the college I began attending in Shreveport. Dean had a major crush on me – which was not as flattering as it seems, since Dean eventually had a major crush on every straight guy that he met. But I owe him the trip to the Florentine, because after Dean, I began to go there, almost every night, with Cathy. We were both touched by some faint 70s version of the St.Vitus mania, and it played itself out under Rick James’ Superfreak, the Sugar Hill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight, and every word that fell from the mouth of La Donna S.

This account rather compresses the dance years in one way: it was actually Dyretta who taught me, in as much as I am teachable in this department, to dance. Dyretta, much to her regret, could not drain that thing in me that irresistibly went to the freak – as Dyretta said, the white boy’s dance. The old Adam, here, try as he would, could not change for the New Eve. But she did her best to introduce me to what was up, and I responded in kind: she turned me on to the Sugar Hill gang, and I gave her, for her birthday, the Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot. A wholly satisfactory exchange.

The dance years finally came to an end when I went for a year to France, to study in Montpellier. They were succeeded, in the 80s, by the much different Talking Heads years, and New Orleans. And Donna Summer’s voice is not one I listen to very much anymore. But I am sad, sad, sad that she is dead. She crowned a better decade.

reputation poker: Dimon the mad banker of Wall Street

GHARIB: As you know, there is a lot of anxiety out there that the financial crisis is not over, that there is another shoe to drop. What is the next big thing you are worried about in terms of credit quality?

DIMON: We go through this every five or six years and you can just go back in history. They are always a little bit different. But there are a lot of commonalities: Fear, specter of recession, credit assets, re-price, spreads re-price, etcetera. You`ve seen sub-prime, SIV, CDOs, CLOs (ph) and now it is monolines, municipals, wraps. But at the end of the day, those things will resolve and our system has resolved a lot of them. A lot has been de-leveraged. A lot has been paid off. A lot of problems have popped up are now gone. It`s not over yet, but you know, I would be surprised if the financial part of this isn`t over by the end of the year.

- February 14, 2008

In Matthew Josephson’s amusing history, The Robber Barons, there is a nice story about the young J.P. Morgan. After having done what any man on the move would do in 1861 – paying  a substitute to fight for him in the Union army – Young Morgan looked about him for opportunities. One of the knocked on his door, in the person of Simon Stevens. Stevens had stumbled onto a deal, by which he could buy 5,000 Hall carbines and sell them to the Union Army of the West, with which he had a contract. The beauty of the deal was that the carbines had been rejected by the government in Washington on account of the fact that they were defective – when used, they tended to explode, taking the thumb of the shooting soldier with them. “The quartermaster at Washington sold them for $3.50 apiece. “The government had sold one day for $17,486 arms which it had agreed the day before to purchase for $109,912,” comments the historian Gustavus Myers. That young Morgan knew of this situation is plain from the fact that after repudiation of the consignment of guns by General Fremont’s division, he bluntly presented his claim not for the money he had advanced, but for all of $58,175, half of the shipment having been already paid for in good faith.” 

Thus began the Morgan tradition of advancing money for products that tend to blow up in the users hands. Evolution and human kindness being what it is, the products are now called credit swaps. But the object is always the same: a quick buck, made with the poker face of propriety, and the compliance of a corrupt government.

Matthew Josephson and, for that matter, Gustavus Meyers, are dead. And so is critical business journalism. In the shitstorm about Morgan’s 3 billion dollars and counting losses from the desk of its London Whale, the NYT business page has been an exemplary mix of rather shocking news (once again, a big bank decides to make the big bucks by doing socially negative betting, gets dick handed to it on plate) and asskissing – since it seems to be obligatory that every story tell us that Jamie Dimon is some financial wizard, a brilliant CEO who led Morgan unscathed through the financial collapse.

The story is, of course, a crock. According to Table 8 (Borrowing Aggregated by Parent Company and Includes Sponsored ABCP Conduits) of the GAO report on the Federal Reserve’s Emergency Loan Program (a series of programs that lent  money at 1 percent or below), JP Morgan borrowed 391 billion dollars, making it the twelfth largest borrower. Now admittedly, in today’s dazzling new world of free funds for the wealthy, 391 billion dollars is peanuts. A quick and dirty guestimate of what that means? If in that climate Morgan had borrowed that much money at 6 percent, the interest would have come to 21 600 000 000. At 1 percent, the interest came to 3 600 000 000. Granted, these were loans that had very brief time periods – which meant, essentially, the Fed was giving the bank billions to play with, but pretending that the loan was not for a year, but for a day, a week, etc. Still, I don’t think making money when the government essentially hands you 18 billion dollars is that difficult. I think even I could do it. I’d like at least to try. Please Uncle Sam?

But here’s the fix: you will never, ever read a  report in the NYT that quotes the GAO report. The 16 trillion dollar loan jamboree held for the richest by the richest is a non-event in American journalism. Whereas certain events – such as Kim Kardashian’s weight and sexual life – are known in microscopic detail, down to the last tooth on the zipper of her K-Dash skirt – other events in America are too shocking for the eyes of the public. The continual and vast state support for the richest are super secret.

Thus, Roger Loewenstein, who used to be a good journalist, wrote a sycophantic piece about Dimon in the NYT two years ago that included grafs like this:

“The popular animus has come as a shock to Dimon. Recently, while entertaining a roomful of corporate clients over a tenderloin dinner, he felt the need to assert his and his industry’s worthiness. “I am not embarrassed to be a banker,” he noted. “I am not embarrassed to be in business.” In truth, Dimon has plenty not to be embarrassed about. He fulfilled a banker’s first obligation: he made sure his bank survived. This was thanks to his strategy of maintaining a healthy cushion of capital for a rainy day. When markets melted down and the economy plunged into recession, J. P. Morgan remained not only solvent but profitable every quarter. When other banks were refusing to lend, Dimon’s continued to offer credit to customers ranging from homeowners to Pfizer to the State of California. And when the United States needed a strong institution to bail out a failing bank, it turned — twice — to JPMorgan Chase.
Dimon sees himself as a patriotic citizen who helped his country in a time of crisis. Now the most visible face of Wall Street, he thinks banks and bankers have a role not only in rebuilding the economy but in coming up with remedies for the financial system. Critics say that, as a part — even a solvent part — of a failed system, he should be grateful for the government’s assistance rather than stridently critical, as he has been, of some of its reforms. Dimon, they note, took advantage of the crisis to acquire Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, and J. P. Morgan emerged from the crisis as a vastly larger institution. That is a cause for alarm to 33 U.S. senators, who voted this spring for an amendment that would have forced big banks to dismantle. The country is deeply divided over the proper role, and the size, of banks, and nothing epitomizes these tensions quite like the narrative of Jamie Dimon.”
I especially like describing the takeover of WashMu as a patriotic act, instead of an act of typical elite gouging, in the spirit of those Hall Carbines of the Civil War era. JP’s spirit was doubtless pleased. Love of one’s country never felt so good.
So: read the news, and remember that there is nothing more tinpot than a reputation on Wall Street – except perhaps one on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Erecting a monument to tasering in Seattle

Ah, the blood pressure read of the day is the article about the pregnant women tasered for refusing to sign her traffic ticket. A beautiful story of moral idiocy, state power overreach, and what happens when you fill the courts with idiot judges.

Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/us/police-taser-use-on-pregnant-woman-goes-before-supreme-court.html?hp

This article is a regular mine for the satirist who lives away from the home of the free. There's the idea that tasering is a “a useful pain technique,” rather than a useless one - both of which are beloved by our boys in blue!

There's the quote from the 10th district judgem Alex Kozinski, a real prize from the Reagan era, who said, of the three cops who tasered a pregant woman for not signing her traffic ticket for going 12 miles above the speed limit in a school zone: “They deserve our praise, not the opprobrium of being declared constitutional violators. The City of Seattle should award them commendations for grace under fire.”

Of course, the clever satirist can not only delight in Judge Kozinki faschisty-moronic sense of who the City of Seattle should honor and what 'under fire' means, but can dig deeper into his recent history and - strike gold! Here's what our Kozinski does in his spare time (Wiki quote):

"In 2008, according to The Los Angeles Times, Kozinski "maintained a publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos."[5] In response, Kozinski called for an ethics investigation of himself.[6] In July 2009, Kozinski was admonished by a panel headed by Judge Anthony Scirica.[7][8]"

Surely Scirica could have asked for some pain control in this case.

Another judge, however, deserves a pitying look - pitying because obviously, competing with Kozinski for the moron accolade is difficult:

Another dissenter, Judge Barry G. Silverman, said “tasing was a humane way to force Brooks out of her car.”

“There are only so many ways a person can be extracted from a vehicle against her will, and none of them is pretty,” he explained. “Fists, batons, chokeholds, tear gas and chemical spray all carry their own risks to suspects and officers alike.”

This woman had to go to the bathroom. One of the ways of extracting said person would be to wait fifteen minutes. Of course, you could also explain why she needed to sign the ticket, and even encouraged, as one helpful NYT commentor observed, to write, My signature to this ticket in no way acknowledges my guilt. But why do that? She 's black, she's pregnant, she's taserable.Times a wastin'. And there's this controlled pain technique that the cops are just itching to use on a pregant women. It will be, well, scientific good fun! Meanwhile, the elderly judges, like some grotesque George Grosz tableau, will clap their bony hands together, or get bony in other parts of the body (after which, of course, they will investigate themselves), at the creamy dreamy thought of the boys in blue bein'... boys.

A good case for the current Supreme Court to extend the "fan club for police" ideas that have had a long, long tradition there, since the days when the drug war demanded that we toss aside any of those frivolous protections to our privacy, property, and dignity in order to allow the state to claim your endocrine system as its property. Tasing, keeping prisoners in solitary for forty years, and the general torture machine of the American penitentiary system have long been kept going by the creepy people who inhabit the upper reaches of the judiciary.

Which is why I, a lefty, was totally down with Newt Gingrich's suggestion that the Supreme Court be subordinated to Congress. In fact, I think the Supreme Court should simply be abolished. I don't see the need for it.

Back to zero

Back to the zero

The golden age of psychometrics extended from the first measurements of current in the nerves, effected by Helmholtz, and the first attempt to measure the time of sensation, which was performed by Helmholtz’s student, Sigmund Exner, up to the Pavlovian era of the conditioned reflex in the 20s. It was a mad scramble of different instruments all employed to make psychology a science of the smallest interval – the measure of the thought, the nerve impulse, the present of seeing, hearing, and touching. He who says science says measurement – such was the law and the prophets in the 19^th century – and under this law, psychology seemed, by its very object, to be excluded – since psychological states seem preeminently qualitative. But instrument by instrument (the myrograph! the Weber compass! The kymograph!), a physiological route to psychological states was carved out. If the object of psychology was not the qualitative state, but the quantitative reflex arc, then psychology could finally be legitimated as something more than a mishmash of post-humoral speculations, for it would have found its total material correlate.

By the 1860s, some advances had been made in the instrumentation and measurement of current in the nerves in relation to stimulus. Helmholtz had determined, through the use of a galvonometer, calculating the distance between the nerve end to be stimulated and the muscular contraction that was observed, the time measuring the traversal of the nerve current. He found that the impulse took between 0.0014 and 0.0020 seconds, which meant that the speed of the conduction was between 25 and 43 meters per second. As in frogs, so in man. If shock were collision, if stimulus could be reduced to mechanical motion, then we could set up our speeds for the present.

But was shock collision?

It was at this point that we can locate as an event in both science and literature an essay written by a Russian physiologist, Ivan Sechenov, entitled Reflex Actions of the Brain (1863). It was an essay that drew conclusions from clinical and laboratory work to evoke a certain paradigm for working with the mental.  They key was the reflex:

“Thus all the exterior manifestations of cerebral activity are reduced to muscular movements. This very much simplifies the question. In fact, an almost infinite multitude of phenomena are reduced to the combined play of some tens of muscles… Furthermore, the reader may immediately perceive that all qualities appertaining to exterior manifestations of cerebral activity: animation, passion, mockery, sadness, joy, etc. are of a mechanical origin. The most rigid spiritualist is obliged to agree. Besides, could it be otherwise when we know that the stone comes to life under the hand of the sculptor and that that of the musician pulls out from an inert instrument sounds that are full of life and passion? Thus the hand of these artists being only apt to produce purely mechanical movements, how could it in turn introduce in the sounds and forms a passionate expression, if it were not in its turn a purely mechanical act? After what we have said, do you not feel, dear reader, that a moment must come when we can analyse the exterior manifestations of cerebral activity as easily as the physician today analyses a musical accord or the phenomena given by a falling body?” [My translation of the French translation]

It was this address to the reader that strained the Russian censor’s tolerance. The essay in which Sechenev was not originally meant to be published in a medical journal. It was meant to be published in a literary one, The Contemporary, edited by one of the famous names in Russia’s politico-literary history: Chernyshevsky. 

By the time The Contemporary was banned, Chernyshevsky was already in prison. It was in prison that Chernyshevsky wrote What is to be Done, featuring a materialist physiologist based on Sechenov. And in one of those reflex arcs that are called “response” or “influence” in literary criticism and intellectual history, Chernyshevsky’s book called forth another book, Dostoevsky’s Notes from a Mousehole.

It is hard to read Sechenov’s essay without seeing the shadow retrospectively cast across it by Dostoevsky. For instance, this is how Sechenov makes the point that what we call habit is a matter of muscular movement:

“Fearing to multiply examples, I will limit myself to asking my readers: is there anything in the world that is so repugnant, so horrible, that man cannot get used to it? Each will doubtlessly respond that there isn’t. And yet each knows that, in order to get used to many things, one needs to make long and painful efforts. To get used to odious or repugnant things isn’t about supporting them without effort (to claim this would be absurd), it is about directing one’s effort skillfully.” (19)

Yet, this flash of the real vileness of life has a scientific purpose. Sechenov was, if not the sole discoverer, the great purveyor of the idea of inhibition. In this sense, Sechenov closes out a period in which shock, whether as something vital or as mechanical motion, had a simple relationship to the body electric of man.

“Twenty years ago, physiologists still believed that the excitation of every nerve attached to a muscle led infallibly to a contraction of the latter. And then Eduard Weber demonstrated, by the aid of irrefutable experiments, that the excitation of the nerve wave which, by certain of its ramifications, arrives at the heart not only does not augment the activity of the latter organ, but even paralyzes it.”

After listing other discoveries in this vein, Sechenov writes a sentence that is heavy with the future: “In the presence of these facts, the idea has gained, little by little, credit with  contemporary physiologists that nervous influences can exist in the animal body having for result to moderate or even arrest involuntary movements.”

In other words, there exists inhibition. The shadow side of shock, numbness, has a physiological correlate. And it is from numbness, from inhibition, that we can build out, precariously, the spiritual world beyond the muscle:

“Knowing all these facts, can contemporary physiologists refuse to admit in the human body –and notably in the brain, since the will only operates by the intermediary of that organ –the existence of mechanisms that arrest reflex movement?” (22)

The complexity added by inhibition to the reflex picture is then compounded with another feature of animal life: the natural exaggeration to which the animal is carried by sudden circumstances, emergencies, fears. Sechenov lists them, including stories of the sudden incredible strength of the weak in emergencies, the fleetfootedness of asthmatics in panic, and various Plinian stories of animal feats. All of which does not bring us outside the mechanical – one can devise machines that also perform non-linearly. However, it does bring us outside the predictable. To find a place for inhibition and exaggeration in our animal life, Sechenov considers that there is such a thing as unconscious reflex action.  

“Thus, the operations which produce an accumulation of the final energy of reflex action take place in the cerebral hemispheres. There is two ways to explain the fact: the mechanism in question could itself be organized on the plan of the reflector, and thus its central partmust serve as a point of junction between sensitive and motor nerves; or one could consider it as an appendix to the reflector, producing unconscious reflex actions. This second conjecture is infinitely more probable than the first…”

Shock leads us here, to a point where numbness, inhibition, and the unconscious meet. The experimental data for this will come not simply from the beheaded frogs and trepanned cats of the laboratory, but from men and women – in train wrecks, entangled in factory machinery, under bombardment. The shocks produced by the industrial experience will carry the unconscious reflex action into the court room, make it a matter for insurance adjustors as well as doctors, lawyers as well as researchers, and create a massive trace that will be felt by the agents of circulation as well as the working class.  

Benjamin's shock

“The intentional correlate of living experience has not remained the same. In the nineteenth century it as “the adventure”.In our days it appears as Fate. In fate is hidden the concept of the ‘total living experience’ that is completely mortal. War is its unsurpassed prefiguration. (That I was born German, then I must die for it – the trauma of birth contains already the shock that is mortal. This coincidence defines Fate.”

“That which is “always the same thing” is not the event, but what is new in it, the shock that pertains to it.”

“Empathy comes about through a declic, a kind of gear shift. With it, the interior life erects a pendent to the shock of sense perception. (Empathy is alignment in the intimate sense).” [My own translations]

I take these three comments about shock from Benjamin’s Arcades book. Like so many of Benjamin’s sentences and phrases, they carry a systematic hint, although the system into which they would fit was never constructed. To that extent, they also carry a certain glamour, the glamour of fragments that indicate some fuller but lost revelation. Like the fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers, one wants to remove the eclipse, find the complete transcript, read the denser text out of which they were seemingly scooped. But in Benjamin’s case, the fragment reproves the desire that everything can be told, that there be some total confession that correlates to the total systems that were in play as he wrote, that the denser text is anything other than an excuse fit for conformists by which is lulled to sleep our sense of an ongoing emergency. As we know, one of those total systems drove him to suicide. Which is another way of eternalizing the fragment.

The Arcades work does not develop the notion of shock the way it develops other themes, such as fashion. Yet, in a sense, it was at the center of these themes, for at the center of the project was Baudelaire, who, Benjamin claimed, based his aesthetic practice on shock. Or based his modernity, his modernism, on shock, and in so doing incorporated it into the genetic structure of modernism. That, as we have pointed out, shock comes up in different disciplines, and constitutes an image in different ways in modernity was to an extent oddly neglected in the Arcades work, which otherwise has a very shrewd dialectical-materialist take on lighting, clothing, urban planning, etc., all passages to the burrow, or rather, passages that make up the burrow of the poetry. 

In as much as Benjamin’s view of shock encodes an inability to decide between mechanical movement and animal stimulus, it bears the impress of a certain pre-modern disposition. That is, it bears the element of the invasion of haptic space by the first mass medias. It reflects the Productivist regime of the first half of the 19th, when life crossed with electricity and the crowd was the physical infrastructure of industry and the revolution. But if we take our cue from Tarde, shock, in the second half of the nineteenth century, is a second degree phenomenon. The crowd becomes merely one extension of the larger public (it is remembered as a sort of phantom limb), and that public receives its shock through the ever more penetrating environment of the visual and press medias. Shock emerges from mechanical collision into the regime of stimulus, which is the way it forms the modern moment, or present.  Shock was not only a poetic tool, but a tabloid style. The speed graphic camera of the 1930s, the blinding flare of which became an icon for the sensational story, the shocking event, is an exteriorization of the kind of shock that joined together the animal crowd and the sensation ‘seeking’ public (which is actually sought out, rather than seeking – this is the trick of the media), haptic space and the wired in multitude:

 “The flash does far more than merely aid in exposing the negative. Intruding into the cover provided by night or darkness, its scorching light transforms both the space and figures trapped in its glare. Subject matter is vignetted and figures and ground are flattened and abstracted. While flashed compositions have the stark look of a woodcut, it is the faces of the photographer’s subjects that are most affected by the bulb’s blaze. With skin flashed to white as if powdered, mouths locked into grimaces and eyes both black as troughs and glinting like glass, subjects suffer a loss of humanity: faces freeze into crystal masks and individuals metamorphose into freakish ghouls.” [Hauptman, 1998]

Weegee’s flashbulb is the equivalent of the rapid sketching, or caricature, in which Baudelaire saw the lineaments of heroism in modern life. Speed frozen – such is the temporal coordinate towards which the simultaneity of life under capitalism directed itself.