Zona and the Ponzi scheme

  
-New Masses.                                                                                                              I have a tendency to relapse into simple minded Marxist explanations, a habit that has served me well as the Great Recession mangles on. One of Marx's contentions was that capitalism tends to immiserate the proles. This is an often laughed at contention - what ho, all the prosperity generated in the freemarket West lo these many years! And in fact much prosperity was generated when there was a strong union factor able to swing the government - naturally, the ally of the rich - into using its countervailing power. But as we look at the facts and figures that stream in about the Great Moderation over the last coupla decades, one thing is striking: the average household in America owes as much as it owns. Or in other words - in practical accounting terms, Marx scores! The great moderation is so called because the condition under which the regime in which credit substitutes for wage increases had to be moderate - a matter of slowly, deliberately constructing a system of pinches from the outside, no single one of which hurt that much. Oh, a little more unpaid overtime. Oh, a little higher insurance premium. Oh, a little change in the credit laws to the disadvantage of the borrower. And then of course we got the bump, and our pluto-presidents, Bush and Obama, made sure  that the gigantic capitalists were helped, and basically pissed on the majority of Americans. So we are now on the downslope of the Great Moderation. And if Marx is right, the immiserative machinery is going to get a little more fierce. In spite of having had a bad night debating, really, Obama looks set to be re-elected, barring utter disaster, the GOP will still own the House, the Dems the senate, and we will play this game one more time.
But in the longer view -  Karl has been right on the money. The neo-liberal dream, with its fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of capitalism, has been, on the other hand, absolutely wrong. That is, the sincere third way people - not the Tom Friedmans. The third way - which dominates the Dems and Labour - can be simmered down to this core principle: the guarantor state that arose in the thirties and provided social insurance for the populace can be replaced by a private sector version of the guarantor state, where the work of social  insurance is performed by investment. The wage worker invests in capital and reaps the fruit of capital's growth and profitability. Of course, we overlook the fact that this profitability comes about by freezing the wage worker's wages and eventually shipping his job to someplace where it can be done more cheaply. The idea, here, has a utopian roots in various socialist schemes of the 1830s, which also wanted to put the prole on both sides of the table. The problem is that this ignores the fact that the money that is made on one side of the table - capital's profit - comes from the surplus labor that comes from the other side of the table. What the third way, or neo-liberalism is, is ... a Ponzi scheme. And that Ponzi scheme is the major determinant of our politics at the present time.

On the death of character

On June 18, 1944, a detachment of prisoners from Auschwitz were unloaded at Kaufering, five kilometers from Landsberg  Germany, and collected into a concentration camp there. The prisoners were set to work building large underground bunkers that were intended to protect an airplane parts factory. According to a secret account kept by one of the prisoners, a priest, Jules Jost, about 28,838 Jewish prisoners were kept there, including 4200 women and 850 children.

At the same time, an army doctor named Gottfried Benn was stationed in Landsberg. Benn is of course one of Germany’s most famous twentieth century poets. In 1933, he had sided with Hitler, and written a famous letter addressed to emigrés writers – and really to Klaus Mann – in which he wrote that their complaints were besides the point. When they called Hitlerism “barbaric”, Benn wrote, they were betraying their own intellectual inadequacy and obsolescence: “… this is my counter-question, how do you imagine history moves itself? Do you think it is particularly active in French spa resorts? How do you imagine the 12^th century, the transition from the Romanesque to the Gothic feeling: do you think that this was discussed? Do you think, in the North of the land from the South of which you now write to me, someone dreamed up a new architectural style? That we voted for domes or towers? That one debated over Apsides, round or polygon?”

The emphasized words were all connected to the weak mode of politics that Thomas Mann, in the Observations of a Non-political man, had connected  to the complex made up of civilization and the intellectual (associated with France) as opposed to culture and the bürgerlich (associated with Germany). But Benn had moved on from the conservatism of Mann – like Ernst Junger, he had moved towards a politics of masculine decision, in which things like debate, discussion, dreaming would be crushed. Crushing –this was what history did. It smashed. It crushed. And it shaped the way nature shaped.

Of course, Benn had left his enthusiasm for Hitler behind him by 1944, but he had not entirely left this idea that history and nature were one inhuman thing. And this ideology – with its proximity to the real crushing of human material going on in a concentration camp five kilometers from Landsberg – was part of the sweep of the Novel of the Phenotype he wrote, with its subtitle, Landsberg Fragments. In the first fragment he poses the aesthetic question in terms that resonate with his notion of a sort of anonymous collective history deciding on domes or towers, when he considers the notion of narrative itself: “Why knead together thoughts in someone, in a figure, in shapes, when there are no more shapes? Invent persons, names, relations, when they are simply futile?” In a sense, Benn is writing about the post concentration camp world –the world in which persons, names and relations truly are futile. And still, one has to ask whether we are not simply being asked, once more, to see an aesthetic category crushed by history; and whether “history” hasn’t been given virtues it does not have, causal powers that are, in truth, tautological: whether we aren’t being sold history as, in fact, the scheme of causes, which would mean that it naturally causes events. Cause, in other words, causes events.

Yet if we take a more generous interpretive approach, we see, in Benn’s notes, indications of a way of thinking about character that preceded the concentration camp. This way of thinking began to emerge in the modernism of the 1914 generation as a response to mechanization, to the artificial paradise of chemistry and consumerism, to newspapers and films, as much as to war.  In the post-war period, the same reasoning under different styles – structuralist, post-structuralist, Marxist – came to the same conclusion: that the bourgeois realism of the character was obsolete. Roland Barthes, in the first cool,scientific phase of his career treats the figure, the personage, in the realist tradition as one that is wholly constructed within the text’s discourse, radically dividing it from its off-the-page correlates: from the critical point of view, it is thus as false to suppress the personage as it would be to make it jump off the paper [faire sortir du papier] in order to make it a psychological personage (endowed with possible motives)…” (SZ) The paper that intrudes here and does such decisive ontological work allows us to understand on the personage on the paper functions in that universe – but in the same gesture it invalidates the ethos in which both sides, paper and off-the-paper, are joined in one social whole.

In Barthes second, hedonistic phase there is a retreat from this high modern ascetism. The text becomes, again, an object of pleasure – an off-the-page pleasure that is satisfied somehow on the page. The text becomes porous, readable, fragmentable, and paper becomes a more enigmatic matter altogether. This retreat does not erase the high modern moment but quotes it – delivering it to the maximum ambivalence in which all liminal creatures, zombies, vampires, leaders, characters, reside.  

myths of american capitalism

Myths of American Capitalism

Inspired by Joseph Stiglitz discovery that the American Dream is a “myth” – which would seem tautological to me, but I’m not an economist – I have been thinking about current myths in American capitalism. It seems to me that the top one, at the moment, has to do with upper management. It goes like this: upper management in American companies are paid top dollar because, like athletes, they have certain irreplaceable skills that make them worth it.

This idea is hauled out every time a company has a good couple of years. GE makes fifty billion dollars in profit over four or five years, and Jack Welch is hosannahed as a genius.

There are two parts to this myth. The first part is that upper management and professional athletes are in the same category.

The best answer to this is: nobody ever bought a gadget from Microsoft because they had seen Steve Jobs manage the product from R and D to the market. 

Athletes and movie stars aren’t paid for their skills – they are paid because there is a demand for their skills. These skills are theatrical and visible. If basketball was played in secret, the wages of the players would soon diminish to zero, or around that amount. There is a great deal of marketing that goes into making sure that the players are seen. That is the point. Unfortunately, nobody was bringing up this point in the 1980s, when Harvard Business Journal, among others, was floating the idea that upper management needed to be paid vastly more. The figures are stark – CEOs, who were once paid 20 times the median wage of workers in their companies, were soon taking home one hundred times, two hundred times, four hundred times their median employee. Because athletes and stars are public figures with very public salaries, and because these salaries were going up, the CEO propagandist set – including most mainstream economists – latched onto the easy comparison. In fact, though, the comparison is completely bogus. Salaries in entertainment and salaries in fortune five hundred executive suites are moved for very different reasons.

However, there is a second part of the myth. In this part of the myth, what the firm does is conflated with the upper management. If a clerk at a store processes twenty more people on a good day, we don’t conflate the clerk and the store’s increased revenue. But somehow, we are supposed to conflate the management and the business phenotype.

A good way to get a handle on this is to look at two things: the company’s record in relation to other companies in its sector, and the company’s record over time.

Now, the indexes  for a  company’s record differ. Is it profit, or is it stock prices? In the eighties, there was a definite turn to the company’s stock price as the ultimate index of company merit. Now, this seems, to me, to be reductive and wrong, but even so, it was often trotted out as the alpha and omega of company mightiness. In the stock boom that occurred from 1981 to 2000, this was a very favorable record for the upper management.

Notice, however, that one average, the stocks of Fortune five hundred companies stagnated for ten years – from 2000 to 2010. In fact, they went down enormously from 2008-2010. Notice, too, that this had no effect on the salaries of management. They did not slip down from being 200 times the median wage to, say, 10 times the median wage.

Notice, too, that outliers would, sooner or later, converge with their sector. GE is a great example. Jack Welch pumped up profits at GE by creating a very exaggerated financial unit. In 1997, Fortune magazine published one of those “let’s drool over a CEO” article about the great and transcendent genius of Welch, “scaring  the hell” out of competitors, entitled: GE CAPITAL: JACK WELCH'S SECRET WEAPON. Here’s a graf:

“Capital, as it's known inside GE, is less a business than an energy source, radiating growth through a mature--some might say lackluster--conglomerate. You can see it in GE's third-quarter results, where Capital comfortably outgrew its parent. But not until you break down GE's performance in recent years are you struck by the glow of its nuclear core. Nicholas Heymann, an analyst at Prudential Securities, calculates that from 1991 to 1996, GE's revenues would have increased just 4% a year were it not for Capital, which more than doubled the growth rate to 9.1%. And its 27 businesses, ranging from credit cards to computer programming to satellite leasing, now generate 39% of GE's earnings, up from 29% in 1990. As some analysts see it, Wall Street's confidence in Capital is the main reason GE stock is rising at a rate that makes the overall market advance look modest, up 123% in two years, vs. 63% for the S&P 500.”

 Running the tape forward, we get to 2009. Here’s the Business Insider headline: The Man who destroyed GE

  And here’s a graf:

As GE's stock struggles to hold $7 $6, a level at which it is still arguably expensive (17X cash flow), shareholders are calling for CEO Jeff Immelt's head.
And it's true: Jeff has had 7 years to reduce GE's dependence on the business that is sinking the ship--GE Capital--and he has chosen not to do so.  Until last fall.  When it was too late.
But let's not forget who built GE Capital in the first place: GE's legendary CEO, Jack Welch.”
Incidently, who rescued GE Capital?
I said the Fed/
I kept them from bleeding and bleeding the red/
until they were good and stone cold and dead.
Here’s a story from Bloomberg:

“General Electric Co. sold about $16 billion of commercial paper through a Federal Reserve program to unlock credit markets frozen in September 2008, making up 2 percent of the central bank’s total purchases.

GE, whose GE Capital unit was the biggest U.S. issuer of commercial paper in 2008, said in October of that year that it planned to use the Commercial Paper Funding Facility to support the Fed’s efforts to make credit available at the height of the crisis. The program purchased a total of $738.3 billion, according to documents that the Fed released today.

Under the plan’s rules, GE could have issued as much as $98 billion, according to the company’s regulatory filing for 2008. The $16 billion was repaid as it came due in January and February 2009, the Fairfield, Connecticut-based company said. GE’s finance unit remained profitable throughout the crisis, helped in part by tax credits.”

Notice the words of this announcement are nicely phrased to make one think that GE is simply ‘supporting’  the Fed. This is like a drowning swimmer supporting the lifeguard. Warren Buffett loaned General Electric money at this time on a ten percent interest schedule. Uncle Sam, well, he charged 1 percent or below. However, we pretend that this unfortunate episode didn't happen. We built it, as all the white boys from Bain shout. This, of course, is also part of American Capitalist mythology, but more on that at another time.

So the question is why upper management was so successful in going on a peculative run that tilted the very composition of wealth. This is where myth – also known as economic models – intersects with certain odd facts about the labor market.

As the CEOs were becoming world dominating plutocrats, an odd thing was happening in the world of education: business schools were becoming dominant at universities. What this means is that there was more talent pouring into the management labor pool. But hark! Notice that in this supply and demand story, salaries went up instead of down. Lands sakes, it is as if the labor market is… another myth.

What happened in the 80s was simply good old fashion guilding. Guilds now stretch across thirty percent of the American work force. These are the invisible barriers to entry that prevent, say, myself from setting up a business as a doctor. The state comes down like a ton of bricks to support the doctor’s monopoly, and would put me in jail, thus spitting on free markets and the right of people to decide for themselves. The same thing would happen if I set myself up in many a licenced position. These are, of course, guilds. On the one side, they operate to protect the public. On the other hand, the public pays for that protection. It is the other hand that gets erased, of course, in the stories guilds tell about themselves. Upper management monopolies, however, while having a guild like structure, don’t represent the convergence of the state and private power. This actually makes the actors in the upper management guilds very nervous. What they have, instead, is a rigged up power involving doubledealing by the representatives of the investors. In form, upper management is more like the mafia than like doctors or lawyers. And having the power to shut off the kind of bargaining moves that would send their compensation packages down, they use it.

Imagine, for a moment, a world in which we actually used the technology we have not just to get robots to make parts of cars on assembly lines, but also to manage companies. Impossible? All that tacit knowledge?  If we look at the way companies converge in their sectors over time, we see something that at least theoretically cries out for formalization. And in fact we have the systems: we have expert systems that could, for instance, have pretty much advised GE on how to invest and manage the company as a whole. The top level of management, far from being creative decision makers, are mostly dealers in what computers do best: algorithms. ROI algorithms. If GE had computerized most of its upper management functions back in the 90s, and reduced Jack Welch’s salary to around 150 – that is, 150,000 per year – they would not only have saved the perhaps billion he cost  them over ten years, but they would have ended up pretty much converging with their sector -  which, of course, they did. GE’s common stock price when Welch left in 2000 was 60 dollars and fifty cents, while in 2010 it had declined by almost forty dollars. Was this because Welch was a better CEO than Immelt?

Well, he may have been. On the other hand, he was pretty much the same old same old when compared to his predecessor, Reg Jones.

“John Francis Welch (i.e., Jack) took the reins at GE in 1981, following a long, exhaustive, and competitive succession process overseen by his predecessor, Reg Jones. But, contrary to the notion that Welch inherited a moribund company, things were going pretty well already. Over the course of Jones's stint at the top, which began in 1972, revenue had grown at an average annual rate of 12 percent, and earnings had grown at 16 percent. The spin offered by Robert Slater, author of The New GE: How Jack Welch Revived an American Institution (as well as three other Welch volumes), is that Welch "did not want to wait until General Electric was in trouble.... To keep those figures from declining, Welch knew he had to push the company to become more competitive." Janet Lowe, author of Jack Welch Speaks and the recent biography Welch: An American Icon, echoes this line: "The challenge for Welch was to spot trouble before it occurred, to take preventative measures, and to make the most of GE's tremendous momentum."
Fine. And in fact GE has averaged a solid 12 percent annual earnings growth throughout Welch's time at the top, and about 15 percent over the last eight years. But if no trouble had yet "occurred" when he took over, and GE already boasted "tremendous momentum," why credit Welch with a revival rather than with maintaining a past record of excellence? The truth is that while CEO biographers need a larger-than-life hero, GE did not. Indeed, as James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras explain in their celebrated and insightful 1994 book Built to Last, the firm has enjoyed success under a series of innovative chief executives stretching back to the early 1900s.” http://www.robwalker.net/contents/mm_welch.html
So, how much did Reg Jones make, as compared to Jack Welch?

“In 1975, the most widely acclaimed CEO in the United States was Reginald Jones, the chief executive at General Electric. Reginald Jones took home $500,000 in 1975, a sum that equaled 36 times the income of that year’s typical American family.

In 2000, the most widely acclaimed CEO in the United States was Jack Welch, who also happened to be the chief executive at General Electric. Welsh took home $144.5 million in the year 2000, a sum that equaled 3,500 times the income of that year’s typical American family.”

 

Life without resistance

Watching Hollande move to Sarkozy-lite policies, and his economics minister, Moscovici, respond to a question about Keynesian politics as though Keynes were the new devil (poor Marx, downgraded to second devil status!), one … lurches between disbelief and the sense that this was all pre-ordained. Both the Left and the Right in Europe accepted the neo-liberal straight-jacket long ago. It has worked out well – for the upper tier of bureaucrats in both the public and private sectors. The social distance between this tier and the man I came upon, yesterday, sleeping in the street before the post office on the Rue des Archives, yawns as wide as ever the distance between the 18^th century aristocracy and the peasantry. Chamfort, one of my favorite dark writers, tells an anecdote in his Maxims and Portraits about one of the daughters of one of the Princesses, that is, one of the granddaughters of  Louis XV. She was playing with one of the maid servants and she looked at the maid’s hand, and then she looked at her own. And she asked why the maid had as many fingers as she did. A perfect anecdote. Of course, our leaders know that we all have the same number of fingers, and you can even make it up the bling bling ladder if you serve the appetites of the rich in some way, but in most ways, the gulf is wide and the interests are disparate between those at the top and the rest.

In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, Robert Heilbroner, the guy any non-economics major has to love for having provided the most well written short guide to economics (The Worldly Philosophers), wrote an essay for the New Yorker on how much the triumph of capitalism invalidated the predictions not only of the Marxists, but of the founding fathers of capitalism itself – Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, etc. Their central model always involved declining return to investment – and, society wide, this would mean either decline or – in Mill’s case – the famous stationary state. None of them, in other words, bought the story of growth as the new and necessary horizon of the future. Marx, ironically, seemed much closer to that view, but he disentangled growth from the capitalist engine of growth,  private enterprise. It was the latter which would eventually fail, while the horizon of growth it had driven would split away from it.

Heilbroner thought that capitalist had outlasted the predictions of the prophets for a number of reasons: one was that they thought of growth in too narrow a sense. The substitution of commodity for commodity, for instance, turns out not to be, as it would be in logic, a matter that leaves an economic state of affairs alone, but instead creates new opportunity niches that produce more growth in directions that were unseen before. Heilbroner puts it like this: … the special province of capitalism has always been finding ways of expanding its commodity frontiers by moving activities from the sphere of personallifeinto that of profitable business. Particularly in modern times, every generation has extricated itself from satiety by reinventing its own standard of living. Even Marx,who was keenly alive to capitalism’s capacity for generating outlets of expansion, would have been nonplussed by the extent to which such once wholly noneconomic pursuits as family entertainment, meal preparation, housework and exercise have been ‘commoditized’ by TV, precooked foods, detergents and running shoes.” All of which, I would point out, are technologies that produced new spheres of substitution, which is a necessary element of the dialectic that creates technological change. The latter is considered by mainstream economists as something “exogenous” to the economy – hence, the myth that the economy changes through technological shocks, and their ain’t anything planners can do about it. This is the pulling the rabbit out of the hat point of view about technology, or, more simply, magical thinking. Unfortunately, it is the magical thinking that has governed the plan de-industrialization of much of the developed countries, which was in full bore as Heilbroner was writing in 1989.

But a more important marker that one finds in this essay, and that will help us measure how we have arrived at our present paradoxes, is Heibroner’s important sense that capitalism is a regime. Underneath the separation of politics and economics that characterizes it (that is, the officially political institutions do not produce, devolving that function to the private sphere), capitalism resists internal and external revolts in the same way any regime does – by creating a sort of ideal spokes-class for the entire society. That class is the businessman. It is a class that is protected by infinite amounts of footwork in the media world. Within that class, however, things have shifted from 1989. It has become more financialized, more self-reflective about what it is doing and how to take advantage of areas for profit, and – from the outside -  more greedy. Greed, however, doesn’t really describe the rich – it is rather an attempt to use an archaic ethical vocabulary to describe a shift in ethics – in ethos, in character, in self-identification. In a sense, the businessman class has become ever more sensitive to resistance. Money operates, at the highest level, to produce a smooth world. It is a smooth world legally – if you are a Russian oligarch with a seedy past and might have abetted a few murders on the way to wealth, you can still easily get residence in the UK, for instance – whereas if you are a Somali fleeing famine, tough luck. Money crashes down line-time – the queuing time that determines the shape of access for everything from medical care to groceries for most people. I could list the number of areas in which resistance is liquidated for the wealthy, but we have all seen the standard amount of Hollywood films, so we know this already. Hollywood in fact imagined the resistless life in such a way that the businessman – not usually talented in imagining lifestyles – has accepted it as fact.

It is the businessman’s sense of the resistless world which is really at play in such things as taxes. Why would a man with one hundred million dollars worry if the tax bill cuts into a portion of that wealth that has zero marginal utility for him? Because that wealth is him. The wealthy identify with their wealth. Taxes are, in this sense, pure resistance. And resistance is intolerable.

One is often astonished at the things that CEOs negotiate. Jack Welch, for instance, negotiated a contract with GE in which GE basically bought and gave Welch all the commodities that are usually associated with domestic  life: a place to say, transportation, food. Welch earned millions, and buying these things would have meant little to him. But the symbolic power of having everything bought for him – of overcoming the resistance of the cash nexus itself –was the aphrodisiac.  

Heibroner, picking up from Schumpeter, did have a sense that the businessman who represents the capitalist regime might be the Achilles heal of the regime:  “Capitalists, in whose name the system is organized, no longer possess the basic powers that accrue to persons of similar importance under earlier systems; unlike the most minor feudal lords, for instance, they cannot try, imprison, or forcibly muster “their” workforces, or enjoy the privileges of a legal code different from that applicable to other groups..”

This gap is perceived by the capitalist, in the present state of our regime, as  resistance; the policymaking elite that has grown up since 1989 finds it increasingly intolerable that such resistance exists. Hence, the policies that have been adopted since the crisis are characterized by two things: massive immunity for the financial elite that crashed the system; and massive, punitive economic policies for the wage class. The immunity is, on the one hand, a small thing – but it looms large symbolically. That the banks could simply defraud Libor and remain comparatively unpunished for it – punished as though they had jaywalked – speaks to a larger issue: the inability of states to resist socializing the debts of banks, while at the same time refusing to nationalize them. This is of the essence of the current plutocratic system. And that it has not emerged as an issue in any of the democracies that have held elections since the crash – in the UK, France, Spain, Greece, and now the U.S. – is a definite sign that we have moved further into a regime in which the capitalist is closing that gap, liquidating that resistance.

Romney and Locke

Romney’s video – which is now as famous as Paris Hilton’s sex video, and like P.H.’s, shows what the rich do when they are naked – actually plays on the strings of national memory, going all the way back to our beloved John Locke. Locke, as we all know, was very important to the founders. In his own life, actually, he was very concerned with America, for he was, as Robin Blackburn points out in his history of New World slavery, a member of the Board of Trade, which dealt with matters from the colony. Incidentally, one of those matters was  slave conspiracy. Locke had an excellent opportunity, whilst attending such meetings, to put into policy terms his notion that slavery was a natural consequence of the state of war between “a lawful Conquerer and a Captive.” As Blackburn notes, during Locke’s time on the Board, it vetted many documents coming from the colonies, including the Act for Suppressing of Outlying Slaves, in which we read this:

“WHEREAS many times negroes, mulattoes, and other slaves unlawfully absent themselves from their masters and mistresses service, and lie hid and lurk in obscure places killing hoggs and committing other injuries to the inhabitants of this dominion, for remedy whereof for the future, Be it enacted by their majesties lieutenant governour, councell and burgesses of this present general assembly, and the authoritie thereof, and it is hereby enacted, that in all such cases upon intelligence of any such negroes, mulattoes, or other slaves lying out, two of their majesties justices of the peace of that county, whereof one to be of the quorum, where such negroes, mulattoes or other slave shall be, shall be impowered and commanded, and are hereby impowered and commanded to issue out their warrants directed to the sherrife of the same county to apprehend such negroes, mulattoes, and other slaves, which said sherriffe is hereby likewise required upon all such occasions to raise such and soe many forces from time to time as he shall think convenient and necessary for the effectual apprehending such negroes, mulattoes and other slaves, and in case any negroes, mulattoes or other slaves or slaves lying out as aforesaid shall resist, runaway, or refuse to deliver and surrender him or themselves to any person or persons that shall be by lawfull authority employed to apprehend and take such negroes, mulattoes or other slaves that in such cases it shall and may be lawfull for such person and persons to kill and distroy such negroes, mulattoes, and other slave or slaves by gunn or any otherwaise whatsoever.”
Or as us Continental Philosophe types say: Martin Heidegger, eat your heart out.
But besides countenancing genocide, Locke was also on the cutting edge of freedom. Freedom, in the Anglosphere tradition, takes a rather bizarre turn from its old theological and philosophical uses. It becomes attached more and more to property. The freedom to own becomes, in this tradition, the very soul of freedom, its breath, its majesty. Tacitly, the more you own, the free-er you are – which is of course reflected in a legal system tilted massively against the poor and towards the wealthy, which we keep like a beloved pet barracuda to this very day in our mock democracies.
Still, if property is the root of freedom, those who have no property are an embarrassment in a free state. They represent, well, non-freedom. Naturally, their superpowers of non-freedomness involve them in sucking the property from those who have them – or, in other words, quantitatively lessening their freedom. The image of the poor as parasites was not an invention of Locke’s – it was certainly part of a larger fear of the masses that one finds in all over Europe at the time –but what was different was attaching this fear of the poor to the idea that they were, in a sense, the antithesis of freedom. Thus, by a rather bizarre alchemy, those people who benefited least from the system, who, by any practical view of the system, had the least power, posed the gravest threat. This inversion of social reality has had a long and glorious career in the Anglosphere: most recently, the right has been drooling over its theory that the financial crisis arose cause black and Hispanic poor people, prodded by the government, tricked poor honest bankers  into subprime loans and couldn’t pay them, thus causing the downfall of the true and onlie system of Operation Freedom, under our beloved Bush.
Locke would have recognized the truth in this story. Locke, in his pamphlet to the Board of Trade on the Poor Laws, which responds to the appalling rise in the charge for keeping the poor (a diminishment of freedom if there ever was one), cast about for ways to repair the situation. He came up with solutions that Romney himself might consider. There were the working schools, where poor children from three (when idleness starts cropping out like a disease) to fourteen could be maintained in blessed industry; then there is the revival of Elizabethan laws against beggars, where Locke proposes seizing them and taking no shit from them, but hustling them off to seaports, finding places for them on ships, and treating them like galley slaves for three years time – which should be sufficient to do them in; and the maimed, of course – who have an excuse for begging – should be stuffed into a house of correction.

If I were Romney, I’d be reading my Locke. He’s your man for regaining the Freedoms We Have Lost to the rascally 47 percent.  

hide and seek from a metaphysical point of view

The essence of childhood is playing. For me, the essence of that essence was not War, not Red Rover Red Rover, not baseball, kickball, badmitten, solitaire, smear the queer, acorn fight, not Battleship, Monopoly, Chinese Checkers, Life, Operation, not dress-up, swinging on the door, birds, spying – no, the sum and mirror of childhood and, I think now, life was hide and seek. I look back over the vast and forbidding snowfall of years, I look back over the forbidding terrain of physical growth, short term memory loss, and the painful and constant realization of the drain of a million trivialities that has utterly wasted 99 percent of my spiritual energy, I look back  on myself pintsized (a vision that substitutes a photo of myself for a tactile and living image – I cannot imagine being three feet high, it is beyond the limits of my imagination), and hide and seek looms up  as the emblem of the labyrinth into which I had fallen from another labyrinth, that which extends on the negative  side of the zero hour of birth and touches nothingness – labyrinth to labyrinth. Hide and seek involved the elemental spirits: an It, a countdown, hiding places, a base, and tagging. I still remember certain successful hiding places: the clothes hamper in the Colonial, a large cardboard box – a mover’s box in which to hang clothes – in Dad’s part workshop, the prickly vacancy between the pittus porum and the house on Nielsen Court, the upper branches of a pine tree in the bit of woods three blocks away, bellydown among the dust under a bed somewhere… Of course, finding a hiding place was only the first order of business, since the point was to creep out of it at the right moment and make a dash for the base without being tagged by It. The game involved an uneasy détente between the senses – the visible (hidden/not hidden) and the tactile (tagged/not tagged). We could easily come up with the semiotic wiring of the game through the putting into play of such oppositions.

We could do that. But I want to think about It. In a way, It was the most interesting figure in the whole drama. That It was called It may still be the most tremendously poetic event of my life; it is an unending source of wonder. I have read philosophers speak of the beginning of their vocation as a wonder about how things were made – how, to be more general, there was something instead of nothing – but my vocation started with the wonder of It. It seemed distilled from the adult metaphysics that papered over all the mysteries with farreaching linguistic assumptions. It rains, it happens, it is what it is, how is it out there, how is it going – that it is the old mole for true. It, in other words, is a premonition in ordinary life of what Nietzsche called the Ubermensch, and I’d really like to know if the young Fritz played hide and seek, and if the German version of the game calls the counter It.

However, It is not just about the more-than-human. It is about the transmission of negative power. It is about being the King of the Golden Bough. With one touch, an It conveys its succession. This is the origin of politics,

I think – politics begins and ends in hide and seek. 

And it also speaks to touch, that especially uncanny sense, which we have a tendency to make the hands responsible for, although of course our feet touch, our sphincter touches,  our lips touch, our noses touch, and we touch where we have the skin for it. We touch things outside of us. Living in this interface is no joke, and  confusing enough that we need, quickly, to sublimate some touches and highlight  others and come up with rules.

From these rules, the flowers of anxiety spring.

One of the great things about hide and seek is it casts that anxiety into the 

form of art. This is something we can do. The music of hide and seek pitches 

numbers (in the form of a countdown) against giggles. Giggling was always part 

of the rivalry between the hiders and It. Hiders sometimes were discovered 

because they giggled – but on the other hand, giggles tease the hunting It. 

“Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer.” The It, like Mallarme’s faun, both

loves and regrets the tipping point moment when the nymphs recede – 

when the hiders reveal themselves – not only because the It can then 

transmit Itness to some lagging hider, but also because, opening his 

eyes at the end of the countdown, he has in a sense reversed the world. 

That is the point of counting backwards – backwards is the witchy direction, 

the anti-dialectical motion, it is the motion of the Sabbat, reflected in 

saying the lord’s prayer backwards, or in general in all backwards rituals

 – and thus the world in which the It’s eyes are opened is not the world 

of waking, but the world backwards, the world entered by a back door 

(Kleist, in On the Marionnette theater, has his dramaturge speak of our loss 

of Paradise in this way - "But Paradise is locked and bolted, and the cherubim

stands behind us. We have to go on and make the journey round the world to

see if it is perhaps open somewhere at the back." This is a precise description

 of hide and seek). That is of course the world of dream, which in so far as 

it is identical with itself, is simply the world.  At the same time, it isn’t,

 that is the dream world is a play world, since the dream is solitary, and 

It –whose solitude is so extreme that it is an It – is about to cast off his

solitude and his It-ness in an act of contact. He couldn’t do so if the very

ground of the possibility to do so wasn’t encoded in hide and seek. Hence, 

the giggles, which are – as any Kantian could see – transcendental. And this

is the proper way to take transcendental moments – they are funny.

It is the funniest thing in the world, being It, being a hider, playing hide

 and seek. My intellectual development is arrested, or just arrested enough, 

to see the glimmer of the messages here – but I have spent my whole life 

trying to decode them.  

 

the myth of the modern reader

This happens.

I decide that I need to understand Heraclitus’ famous fragment, ethos anthropos daimon. It is on my to do list. So I go to some journal articles. I look up Bruno Snell. I look up some books. I am trying to get a handle on daimon. I look up T.M. Robertson’s translation and explanation that daimon can me fate and can mean divinity. I look up Richard Geldard’s book on Heraclitus. And it is in Geldard’s book that I come across one of those assumptions that litter academic books – an assumption about how “we moderns” view things – that makes me doubt the sociological bones of Geldard:

“The problem with “Character is fate as the translation is that in both denotation and connotation no sense of the word daimon as spirit orsome power either within or without is even implied, unless one wishes to burden the word “fate” with excessive determinism. Moern readers, however, feeling free of ruling ruling forces (except the power of DNA, perhaps) understand such translation to say that as human beings we hold our destiny in our hands soley by virtue of our character.”

Modern readers? I have no idea what modernity Geldard lives in. The country he is writing in, the United States, contains, for the most part, readers who consistently affirm that they believe man was created by God. Another lively section of the modern readers cohort affirms a hodgepodge of new age beliefs, which seem to center around various ideas about reincarnation and past life experiences. Geldard has obviously never visited the “philosophy” section of a mall book store (if there are any left), where the shelves are crammed with “metaphysical” books in which self-help and a certain cosmology are nicely blended – for modern readers.

I am not blaming Geldard alone – phrases like this drip casually from many an academic pen. Having swallowed some notion of “modern” which comes entirely from a small part of their own lives, that passed in a classroom, they casually set forth this heuristic fiction as sociological fact.

I was raised in fairly modern circs. Air conditioning, vaccines, cars, computers, jets. All the accoutrements. And I have rarely met anyone who did not feel that outside forces were operating in their lives. One of the phrases one hears regularly, when one listens to people’s life stories, is that there was a “reason” for things. The reason one, for instance, had bad relationships x, y, and z, is so one could have good relationship “a”.  The reason Smith had a car accident is so Smith could learn to be kinder to his children. The reason Jones had to go through bankruptcy is so Jones could learn the true value of worldly goods. These heuristics proliferate not under the surface, but on it. Go to a crowded restaurant at noon and listen to what the people at the other tables are talking about, and you will likely hear a “reason” story, or a variant.  This notion of a reason operating in one’s life is as widespread in the United States as the idea of a daimon, or of a fate, in Greece, as far as I can tell.

My irritation with Geldard has to do with my encountering, all too often, casual remarks about “moderns” which seem to have no footing in anything besides the mind-forged image academics have created of each other, all believers in the most up to date modern science and masters of their rational self-interest. The creation of this fictitious image  has other consequences – for instance, the creation of a fictitious teleology, with the modern looking back on the past as something that “leads up to” us. In a sense, this is the intellectual “reason” story. It confuses a fact about the seriality of the time line with a stronger sense of ‘leading’ that, well, seems daimonic.

Once one grows sensitive to it, one begins to find the “modern readers” trope and the way it functions in academic writing fascinating. For one thing, modern readers are always better readers. Or, if they have lost some connection to the past – the past that is too sentimental, too racist, too crude – the writer is  there to do the proper brokering work. So intent is the academic on this brokering work  that he or she rarely looks up at the world of narratives in which the “modern reader”  moves, which includes a superhero with spiderlike qualities, whole cable stations devoted to dramatizing romance novels in the most sentimental way possible, other “reality” tv shows about discovering the ghosts in haunted houses, etc., etc. The video game and most crude division between good guys and bad guys are standards of modern narration, as are effectless murders’, childish FX, and periodic moral panics involving such things as widespread satanic abuse in a vernacular that is lifted almost verbatim from the witch panics of the 15^th century.

So this use of the “modern reader” gives me the heebee jeebees. I want to say: The modern reader, boss – he dead.  

Michael Gordon, warmonger, up to his old tricks

Michael Gordon, the gross warmonger reporter at the NYT, has a headline story today in which big tears are shed over the fact that the U.S. didn't even get a nice little military base in Iraq - oh, the grief! I always like to think of Gordon in terms of his various triumphs in reporting about Iraq. Who can forget his eagerness to relay fake information about Iraq's nuclear weapons before the war? This is typical Gordon, lying through his teeth, helping to bring on hundreds of thousands of deaths:

“WASHINGTON, Sept. 7, 2002 -- More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.
In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to

enrich uranium. American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped.
The diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq's nuclear program, officials said, and that the latest attempt to ship the material had taken place in recent months.
The attempted purchases are not the only signs of a renewed Iraqi interest in acquiring nuclear arms. President Hussein has met repeatedly in recent months with Iraq's top nuclear scientists and, according to American intelligence, praised their efforts as part of his campaign against the West."
It is sweet that the NYT has a policy of retaining reporters who relay absolute falsehoods - as long as they are in good with the Pentagon! Makes me feel all comfy inside.

The GOP wants to raise your taxes

I find the GOP strategy of alienating the 47 percent who pay no federal income tax rather puzzling. A family of four, husband/wife/two kids, now pays about a 5.6 percent efficient rate in income tax. This means that well over 47 percent pay from 0 to 5 percent. The number is surely well over 50 percent of the American electorate. In essence, the conservative paranoia that we now face a world of “takers” has already happened. It is not in the interest of those who pay 5.6 percent to have their taxes raised and their benefits cut. This is precisely the GOP policy. In fact, it is the end of a long GOP strategy on taxes that has worked well. The GOP has campaigned against taxes, and the medium household has been happy to vote for them on that principle. The GOP, that household has noticed, never really cuts ‘entitlements’ – not to the medium household. They are prevented by the Dems, to an extent, and by their own hypocrisy. But finally ideology is overcoming strategy, and the GOP is actually running on a plank to lower the taxes of the rich and to raise the efficient tax rate of middle income households. The Democrats, who are looking up their butt at a mirage deficit, seem to be lagging behind events. Romney’s video tape might wake them up. The GOP wants to raise your taxes. That should be the Dem mantra.

Individual and character

Is individualism a philosophy? Is it a code about the way people think in modernity, or are thought for, thought for that is by institutions and organizations and the people who put up signs and the people who say, fill out this form? Does it describe a society centered around markets? Or is it a theory that helps us understand societies that center around markets, if there are any?

This is a question that confronts us as we try to assemble the lines of descent that went into the making of character in the late seventeenth century. There is a theory, put forward by Jacques Bos, that the character writing of the seventeenth century can be seen as a stage in the making of individualism – the character that the character writers are concerned with is all external show and symptom, “a representation of a certain category of human beings…” Our task is to discover how, from this literary stylization of the person, we get to the twentieth century, where “there is an almost self-evident connection between the words ‘character’, ‘individuality’, and ‘inwardness”.   

Bos’s notion of the the problem fits in with a broader sense of the way the ‘civilizing process’ in the West has gone. The individual and individualism are contrasted with an earlier communalism, out of which, for good and ill, the Western Paleface has broken.

But I’d like to harry  the idea that the individual and individualism are what we are all about in the twentieth and twenty first century, as well as this rather Hegelian sweep towards the inward. It is not that these are illusions; rather, I think character is something more than their factotum, and that its assembly and spread – across fiction and fact, through the spheres of representation, is a movement containing other movements.

To start off, then, one needs a sense of where individualism came from – that is, as a sociological category – and a sense of how it has been used by historians.

The analytic story goes back to the two decades between 1830 and 1850.

In Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime and the Revolution, which he published in 1856), there is this paragraph about individualism:

“Our fathers did not have the word individualism, which we have forged for our use, because, in their times, there was not, in fact, an individual who did not belong to a group and who could consider himself absolutely alone; but each of the thousand little groups that composed French society only thought of themselves. Thus it was, if I may so express myself, a sort of collective individualism, which prepared souls for the true individualism which which we are acquainted.

And what is the most strange is that all of these men who hold themselves so apart one from another became so similar to each other that it was enough to make them change places to no longer recognize them.”

Tocqueville is no random witness to individualism, since he was perhaps the first to use the term in a sociologically sophisticated way in Democracy in America. The United States even then had the reputation of being an individualistic country.

Tocqueville’s notion of distance, of being apart,  of being alone seems, then, to be part of what individualism is. The beat, here, falls upon the individual apart from his social ties. Yet there are a number of paradoxes here. In the United States, one of the commonest severe punishment that one can inflict on a prisoner is solitary. In solitary, the individual fills his cell in complete solitude. The individual is all- and that all is his punishment. This should help us see that individualism, with its logical stress on the private and the lone person, is, at the same time, not solitudinarianism – the individual is not primarily conceived under invidualism as solitary. This semantic fact is often washed away when we try to grasp invidualism from a quantitative point of view, as though it were about individual atoms. If the individual and the solitary were synonymous, this would be an uncontroversial move. But one has to merely dip into the rich semantic flow of ordinary language to see that the solitary is the negative projection of the individual. “He is a loner” is not a compliment in American speech. “He is a self-made man” is a compliment in American speech. The path of solitude and the path of the individual are not the same path; yet they can be confused due to the conjoined meanings of alone and lonely – the individual, like Robinson Crusoe, is envisioned as ultimately acting alone, even if we project him into corporate headquarters.  But he is not envisioned as being alone – because then he could never get into corporate headquarters. He wouldn’t want to.

Tocqueville was writing at a time when individualism was also being discussed in socialist circles. Steven Lukes points out that individualism became the target against which early socialists, like Blanqui and Cabet, spoke out. In Germany, Karl Marx in the German Ideology – written in the 1840s as well - spent much of his time hashing out what the individual was from a social perspective. It is with Marx that we start getting a sense of the individual as something linked not to the soul, or even to social distance, but to production – to the economic system”

“The difference between the personal individual and the contingent individual is not a conceptual difference, but instead a historical fact. This difference has, in different times, different meanings – for instance, rank as something contingent to the individual in the 18^th century, plus ou moins even the family. It is a difference that we must not make for every epoch, but that instead every epoch, under the different elements that it finds itself in, makes for itself, forced, actually, not by concepts, but through material collisions of life. What appears contingent to later times as its opposite to earlier, and also among the elements of the earlier that are passed down, is a form of commerce, which corresponds to a specific development of the forces of production. The relationship of the forces of production to the form of commerce is the relationship of the form of commerce to the occupation or activity of individuals.”

This strongly anti-conceptual approach to the individual – who emerges first as a social fact within the forces of production that embody the collisions of life – gives Marx a sort of history of individualism. Individualism  waits on the emergence of the individual, rather than individualism arising in the educated class and bringing into existence the individual. Marx’s story, then, leads us firmly away from the solitary – who emerges in life’s collisions too, but within another set of conditions – and sets up his attack on Stirner, who in Marx’s view is engaged in rescuing an archaic social category and conflating it with the individual in a massive act of bourgeois self-mystification. Whether Stirner’s notion of egotism and the “Own”  is really bourgeois self-mystification or the expression of a nausea with a modernity that set the teeth of the children of the bourgeoisie on edge – I will leave to later. In any case, Marx’s targets shifted in the 1850s to the political economists, and here I think he was able to put to better use his sense of parody and bafflement. The  Robinsonades of the economists really do play a strong, self-mystifying role in building up the codex of capitalism.

Marx set the terms for economic historians looking at the sociology of capitalism, and its origins. Those origins would be linked to the individual as a creature of economics. We should look, in the medieval period, not for what the saints wrote in their summas, but for what the smallholders wrote in their wills. If pre-capitalist society went as it was supposed to go according to Marx, we would find that the properties of the small holders were bound by laws and customs that would disallow or strongly hedge about the market. The same of course would be true for the large landholders. Given the largely agricultural nature of Europe, this meant that any sort of trade would be shaped by the larger system of production that based the producer on the family, on bloodties.

It was just this thesis that was challenged by Alan Macfarlane in the 1970s. Macfarlane went through the records of a small area of Essex, Earls Colne, and he found that in the midst of the feudal night (or if you will, the humane society of peasant England), smallholders seemed to be selling their lands left and right, and disinheriting their children, and in general pursuing their individual interests like the money mad characers in Balzac’s novels.

For Macfarlane, the market in land in the sixteenth century discredits the theories – like Karl Polanyi’s – that periodizes the creation of the system of “fictitious commodities”, such as land and labor, at a much latter date. Similarly, it destroys Marx’s thesis about the origins of agricultural capitalism, which does not start with the large landholders squeezing their tenants, but with the smallholders creating an active, non-family centered market in land under the nose of the large landholders.

Macfarlane’s interpretation of his data has, however, been subject to a number of shocks since he published his thesis in 1978, in The Origins of English Individualism.  Notably, Govind Sreenivasan has studied the same corner of the English world and found much greater family continuity in small landholdings than are accounted for by Macfarlane. Sreenivasan, whose expertise is in German peasant society of the early modern period, went over the records for Earls Colne and found that the land-family bond was much stronger, statistically, than it was represented by Macfarlane. He drew up an indictment in his article on the matter that went after three aspects of Macfarlane’s thesis:

“First, the depiction of the weakness of the land-family bond is exaggerated. Secondly, the description of the causes of the turnover of property is incomplete and therefore misleading. Thirdly, the reconstructed concepts of kinship and property are directly contradicted by the sources.”

Pulling back, what we see here is that the dispute about land tenure is set in the terms Marx lays out in the German Ideology. It is a materialist approach to individualism. Which, in a neat U-turn, comes back into an infuses the system of production that makes possible materialist approaches. But in following this turn, we tend to lose sight of, and normalize, the idea of the individual, or the easy notion that we live  in a liberal order that promotes individualism. Because if the individual is taken in the Stirner sense – if its materiality is not its place in the system, but its place as an organism born and bred and having a brain that does certain things all the time – then we are also talking about a cosmic vision of the world – how the world is put together, what the limits are on human beings, and how they live within those limits. These are not reducible, point by point, to their horizon of possibility – the system of production. This is, I think, what makes Marx’s notion of alienation so important, and so intrinsic to revolution – for revolution is the other horizon of possibility from which the capitalist system can be analyzed.

I am taking my cues from this tension in Marx.  From Marx to surveys of smallholder sales in the 16^th century, we can run the individual into the space he – always he in the history, a significant and overlooked warp – inhabits and infer the creation of individualism as a matter of habit and a mental tool – but we must also not overlook the fact that the individual in the market is a phenomenon that points to a larger thing – a murderable forked thing, something that casts a shadow inside himself, a non-planetary shadow, a thinking shade.

Earl Colne may seem a long way from Theophrastus, but as in fact the history of “character’ in the seventeenth century is about the way a term and concept in learned culture sinks into ordinary culture, which makes it important to have a broad sense of ordinary culture and the forces – the conflicts - that shape it. And I think it is also important to have a sense that the learned culture is not a progressive culture. Its learning does not represent the forward flight of the absolute spirit.

The 47 percent

Romney’s 47 percent remark reminds me of something I wrote before the great crash of 2008, in September, 2007, to be precise, about the lifestyles of the high and low as a great cultural fact. I wrote this in Austin, never dreaming that my future was so close to the radical changes I have undergone. But it does witness to something larger than my own little scrambly destiny.

“I read the papers. Everybody reads the papers. So the papers say retail sales are sluggish. They say that retailers have predicted lower sales for fall. And they say, the stock market went up again. They say the stock market went up because of the news about retail sales. Out of the bad news, the market honed in on a report from Walmart predicting better sales this fall. And that was enough to send the market up 65 points.

American capitalism is infinitely interesting – not as interesting as the way of a man with a maid, but as interesting as the mating dance of the great horned grebe. In the last fifteen years, the economy has done something that it isn’t supposed to do, according to past history. In the past, the business cycle has given us numerous examples of bubbles that blew up at a certain point. After the bust, there was always an overreaction and a downturn. After the collapse of the market in 1929, for example, there was a tremendous collapse of consumer spending in 1930. There are also long term overreactions. The implosion of the South Sea Bubble in the 1720s set back the stock market in England for fifty years.

Economic history seems to have taken a turn in the 1970s, however. At least since the last big recession in 1991, the Bubbles are now being succeeded by other bubbles. This is made possible by changes in government policy, the increase, by several orders of magnitude, of the cash on hand commanded by the wealthiest five percent, the elevated purchasing power of the consumer, and the interregnum in which the internal American consumer market has been allowed to quietly go on, churning up purchases and debt. So the stock market crash of 2001-2002 is succeeded not by an overreaction, but by the quietest loss of two trillion dollars in history, succeeded by a bubble in the housing market, a targeted bubble, so to speak, which is crashing now just as a bubble in the stock market, which we can fairly date to the intervention of the Fed this summer, takes off. Is this genius or a confidence game?

In the beginning, economics was tugged between Smith’s optimism and Ricardo’s pessimism – between the notion that the market would take the place of the monarchs and prime ministers in that neat little history of the progress of mankind, worked out by the Edinburgh philosophes, on the one hand, and the worry that the winner take all nature of the market, plus Malthusian constraints of our restricted supply of natural resources, would doom us to an increasingly immiserated working class, a pampered and overcompensated upper class, and a world of busts. As Marx saw, quite accurately, the same internal dynamic that drove capitalism to produce affluence drove it to periodically collapse in the midst of its products, helpless to utilize them. Unless this system were overturned, we were inevitably headed to the world of Wells’ Time Traveler, where “the queer little ape-like figures” of the working class Morlocks kept up the world of the haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty like Bloomsbury eternalized – the Eloi, the elect.

Of course that didn’t happen, or hasn’t yet. One could say that the Morlocks have just been moved out of the gated community countries into the ghettoized, but that would still not be quite right – besides which, it would transform Marx’s precise notion of the relations between the working class and the bourgeoisie into almost any two-fold conflict. No, life more abundant was wrung out of the capitalist system by the workers through unionization and, not least, the threat of communism, and it took a long time, and involved the full use of the countervailing powers of the state, which was put in the unaccustomed position of actually operating, seemingly, against the interests of the corporations. This short interval has long closed, but the corporations find it useful to keep up the pretense that the state and private enterprise are matched in deadly combat, with all the other nonsense about our pious preference for a smaller scale of the state. But the long march to abundance took enough time that the system not only assimilated the greater purchasing power of the working class but learned to exploit it. And then, of course, inevitably, manufacturing began, in the U.S., to follow agriculture in the train of obsolete sectors. Or, more precisely, just as the Great depression was about the shrinking of the agricultural dependent population and the final displacement of rural America, the Reagan years – which we still live in – are about the shrinking of the manufacturing sector and the final displacement of Rust belt America.

That leaves us with symbol pusher America. And with a nagging feeling…

The usual case against a bubble is that there is nothing tangible that it attaches to. The land being sold by John Law’s company near the wonderful Mississippi river was a dream; the electric combination of Samuel Insull’s was a fraud. The Enron guys were beyond fraudulent, taking their profits on future sales in 2009 in 1999 and the like. Bubbles are about spreads, rather than tangibility. The conservative in us shrinks back at the edge of the world of spreads, for here there seems to be a great abyss, filled with numbers, with not a product to back them. Thus we get the hoary economic chestnuts, like the one about the Fed ‘taking away the punch bowl’ after a too vigorous elevation of equity prices, and the like. And of course after a bubble, we are supposed to feel some pain. Economists generally will criticize deliberately nurturing a bubble – although of course, to explicitly deliberately nurture a bubble is a contradiction in terms. One has to do it while pretending not to do it. Because there is a residual moralism here warning us against building our dwellings on sand. It is as if the alternative – to let the business cycle do its work, to let the invisible hand smite the evildoers – is favored precisely because we need some hygienic punishment after the orgy. Kraus once said that Germans confounded God with his stagecraft – with thunder. Take away the lightning and you take away God. Some related emotion is involved in treating bubble to bubble economic policy as bound to fail. For if it doesn’t, there is no God. Especially one who laid down the iron laws of economics.

All of which doesn’t mean, by the way, that bubble to bubble economic policy isn’t bound to fail. I can’t help but think this cycle of stock market expansion is not going to go on long, since it seems to utterly discount the signals that we are headed for an economic downturn of some kind. However, spread is king, and the question is: do those economic signals matter? For the wealthiest themselves exist behind one of the greatest bubbles ever. If we think of the tegument of the bubble as consisting of the difference between the wealth commanded by the top five percent and the rest of us, it has now assumed a monumental thickness never seen before. And inside that bubble, the difference between the top one percent and the rest of the wealthy has created a similar bubble. It is hard to believe that any hard times, ever, will poke through that mass. Though surely there is some limit that no bubble pumping by the state can violate, I don’t know theman that can say lo, it is here, or lo, it is there.

…So much for the balance of doom and gloom against the lack of a long run. I’m more interested, frankly, in the social and cultural effects of the age of the spread than whether it is sustainable. In former bubble periods, there have always been those who suspected that this was all a dream. I don’t feel that about this period: people are acclimated to the No Choice, Never a Choice dominant of our time.

As a writer, it used to bug me that I am in such a poor position to see this moment of Americana. I am, after all, mired in the lowest strata of the American economy, the bottom 20 percent. Fuck the money, the problem for me as a writer is that I seem to be deprived of the tacit knowledge of how the vast majority of my fellow yahoos live their days. I can bike past the cars, I can imagine the restaurants, the clubbing, the life of consumer products, the day to day in offices, the laptop computers on which one does – something. But that vital displacement which is the writer’s life, daydreaming about other people – I used to think that I had blown it by becoming such a scag. Can I even imagine going home to my McMansion and watching the wall sized tv’s high def pictures of whatever? No.

However, my choices and failures don’t bug me so much any more. First, of course, that lifestyle bores the shit out of me. It bores me the way Emma Bovary’s life bored Flaubert – only in the writing of it could Flaubert find the almost imperceptible nuances that made it a real life for him, and only then could he have mercy. Mercy is the final stage in writing, it is what one blindly tends towards. Second, in the age of the spread, there is a real advantage to living, as the poor necessarily live, among tangibilities. The McMansion and the wall sized tv pale in comparison with the tangibility of, say, the strategic buying of dairy products, waiting for five cent shifts in prices. While I suspect that the demon of intangibility really does haunt the days and days and days of the average householder, who have built their McMansions on spread, the real demon of climate haunts us Morlocks – there is no way to avoid the cold when it is cold if you are walking, or riding a bike. Or hot when it is hot, or rain when it is raining. That this isn’t omitted from life puts one in an oddly advantageous place. Hardy remarks of Tess Durbeyville that she was a Victorian lass, educated by the State, while her mother was still a Jacobin – that in one generation, a two hundred year gap had grown up between them. A clever observation. So what if Tess’ mother had written the book? I can write sci fi just observing what goes on about me, because it goes on in the future – the future being defined by income strata in the U.S.

Now, this isn’t to say that the heroes of nineteenth century novels are unacquainted with spreads. On the contrary, their heroism rises out of the struggle with the spread – Emma with her lenders and Dmitri Karamazov with his; Pip with his benefactor, Nana engulfing the mortgaged estates of syphilitic Second Empire syncophants. When, in the Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes checks his bank account and finds he has 2,000 or so bucks in it, he is declaring his independence from this old, nineteenth century crew. The heroes will now always have money in their bank accounts – Rabbit gets rich, and even crazy Herzog builds a house for himself. However, Rabbit is as dead as Buffalo Bill. Except, of course, for the thirty percent on the bottom. But this may be where the richest stuff is, the phantoms in the street, walking in plain daylight. Phantoms of tangibility.

writing: 3 a.m.

It is after we get a little bit bigger and stop playing with LEGOS and building blocks that we accept as a fact that you can’t build a house out of doors and windows. Such a house is an absurdity! Even the least little hovel, even a tent with a mere flap for a door, should have an enclosed space beyond that flap; the whole point of the flap or door is to lead into the enclosed space. The whole point of a window is to break the monotonous grip of a room, its fist around you. But the room doesn’t exist for the window! That would be carrying the revolution too far.

And yet, even though this is the wisdom we absorb as surely as the hair starts to sprout on various parts of our bodies after we are children, still, when we start building an article, a story, a poem, a thesis, a dissertation, a novel, etc., how often do we find that the rule of doors and houses is damn difficult to follow. Indeed, there is a certain type of critic since Aristotle which likes to judge the house exclusively by the back door – does it open out onto good fortune and a marriage? Or does it open onto suicide, the daughter hanging by the rope in the tomb, the self-blinded, exiled king? Yes, that back door, the gentlemen of the press – and the producers in Hollywood – tend to hang around it.

As for me – oh, I’ve written for decades now. I’ve written since I was sixteen. True, the juvenilia is long trashed; the writing of the 80s is mostly lost, as is that of most of the nineties – my breadcrumbs, in which I had Hansel’s confidence that I could follow them back to all the projects I left behind me, have been eaten by indifference, lost boxes, weather, moves, and broken computers. Oh the world’s indifference – and my own! And yet, when I gather up the work that’s left, that I can get my hands on, what does it amount to?

Doors and windows.

In the writer’s world, this is the thing that drives one to suicide. Oh, besides the contingent things – sickness, poverty, a broken heart, the dimming of one’s wits. But I am speaking of suicide from vocational reasons – or perhaps I should say, suicide from within a vocation. Despair is what happens when one understands, fully, that the door is for the house, and the window is for the room – and yet one feels all too intensely the boredom of the room, of putting up the walls, of the work of kitchens and bedrooms. Yes, even if it is a burrow, the tedium of this jigsawed, continuous space.

That space can make me sick. And soon, very soon, after  I embark upon a project, I have to fight the urge to put in another door or window. Glorious ingress, glorious egress, glorious panes of glass.

Yes, to punch out a space for a window that is high enough, commandingly high, so that I can jump out of it into the arms of a cremating eternity. 

the symbolic and the utilitarian

There is a dimension of the alienation from the happiness culture which seeks, in the mythic, to re-discover the human limit. At first, this might seem an entirely reactionary program. Yet it turns out not to be so simple.

The symbolic definitely does battle with the utilitarian. The two arise in a shared cultural space. And the fatal tendency of the utilitarian to take its claim to the concrete, its grasp of pleasure and pain, and turn them into abstractions – the decisive step of which is turning them into units, as if, like a stream of light in Newton’s sense, we were talking about corpuscles – means that utilitarianism has a secret need of symbols. On the side of myth, however, the tendency is to look for the secret histories of the great tradition – surely there is a minotaur of some kind at the center of the encyclopedia. This brings us, by sure steps that have been repeated over and over again, to conspiracy and chance.To which the gnostic historian must dedicate, finally, his narrative, these being his tropes for cause.

Best murder of the summer

The best murder of the summer waited until the vacation was almost over. On September 5, an RAF cyclist, Brett Martin, was biking in the Haute-Savoie, near Lake Annecy, when he came upon a car and a cyclist who, he thought at first, had collided with each other. The cyclist was named Sylvain Mollier. He’d been shot with a 7.65mm pistol, as police later established. He was dead. The cyclist then looked in the car, and saw vaguely what the police later discovered in more depth – the three adults in the car had also been shot with the pistol, at point blank range. A girl lay sprawled outside the car, severely beaten. She survived. When the police finally opened the car completely, they discovered another survivor, a four year old girl who hid in the footwell at the foot of her mother’s corpse. The family, it turned out, were emigrés from Iraq to Britain, where they had citizenship. Saad al-Hilli, the driver, “computer-assisted design for the firm Su
rrey Satellites, which is owned by the large defence and engineering contractor EADS”, according to the Guardian. His mother in law, a Swede who also came from Iraq, was also shot.

A compelling story, with all the elements that would make any aficionado of true crime buy papers to read about ongoing developments. All those developments are about the al-Hillis. The papers are full of theories that naturally focus on the spectacular deaths in the car, while the bicyclist, evidently a witness, gets an also ran mention…

All of which has the detective novel gears in my brain turning. It is an interesting fact that the media has already decided, as though a reporter was on the spot, who was the target here. Surely the family of Iraqis, with the father in some funny business.

But why assume this? As Machiavelli and Raymond Chandler have taught us, one crime can cover another. Why do we assume that the cyclist was the on-looker – and not the family? Why do we assume that the focus on the al-Hilli’s, which has turned up the grotesque enigmas that arise whenever one turns a microscope on the private lives of ordinary citizens, is the correct focus? Did Sylvain Mollier have enemies? Was this his regular bicycling route? Simple questions that are utterly lost as the police, arbitrarily, chose to follow the trail of the other victims in this murder.

Myself, I am not fooled. But then again, I’ve always thought Lee Harvey Oswald held some mysterious grudge against Governor John Connolly, but – being a bad shot – actually hit the other guy, an obscure politician who happened to be president of the U.S., except for the miracle bullet. But of course, nobody asked John Connolly any questions in the aftermath.

Gullivered

I finally read James Meek's article in the LRB. The article has a terrible title, and begins with the least gripping lead in journalistic history- but after this worrisome tedium, it begins to rip along nicely. The account he gives of Free Market capitalism in the power market, set loose by Thatcher's ideologues who wanted to strip away the power of the state (at one point he quotes the mastermind behind privatizing the production and selling of electricity in England saying, about another government monopoly: what the post office needs is an imaginative asset stripper) and ended up with a national grid owned almost entirely by foreign companies, among which figures France's ... state owned energy monopoly, EDF. Meek, smartly, looks beyond the image of privatisation to see how the British version became such a disaster for the customer. It turns out that the Thatcherites were disgusted with the American way of privatizing energy. In the U.S., the regulation of private energy providers turns around limits on their profitability: Rate of return regulation meant that,in effect, in the U.S., local monopolies on energy were tolerated. In Britain, this was considered a horrible error, an intrusion of the state on the wonderous workings of the market - the Brits developed regulation based on prices. However, it turned out that this regulation never actually returned the lower costs due to 'efficiencies' to the customer. As the cost of electricity went down,, the profits went up, and all that money went to shareholders and management. So much for the justification that privatizing the power market would be good for the end user. As usual, the end user was screwed. More interestingly, competition in the British market led to vertical integration, as power makers bought power distributers, and then to takeovers of the industry by foreign companies - which, irony of ironies, then get bailed out by the government when they run into trouble, since the electricity has to keep flowing at all times. The image of Britain that comes through in Meek's article is of a Gulliver that carefully weaves the lilliputian web that imprisons it. Swift would have loved the utter ridiculousness of the Thatcherites and their New Labour heirs: like Houyhnhnms, they nasally, Oxbridgianly screw the country and reward themselves, or, if they are true believers, make up incredibly silly stories about the wonders of free trade and comparative advantage. The tory that came up with the privatisation scheme, a man named Littlewood, is interviewed by Meek, and he tells him (incredibly!) that takeover of the British electricity market is a good thing, cause britain could then move resources into where it had a competitive advantage, financial services. Yep, those power plant engineers were just hungering to create multi-tranche CDOs, and they finally got a chance to do so.

Although this point in history does seem troubling from many points of view, it does reliably provide farce on a grand scale.