auden's New Year's Poem part two: trans- and the palimpsest subject

 last bit on Auden's New Year's Letter

In the beginning was the letter.

And the letter was a sorter, a lister, a control.

In the beginning was the letter. And the letter here was an element in a postal system, however named or organized. The alphabetical letter and the epistolary form called a letter, and finally literature as “letters” are layered on top of each other – this is the modernist insight. And the modernist subject is a palimpsest – a layering. While the lyrical subject might have two souls in its breast, the palimpsest subject has layers it is unaware of, tracing a destiny in letters that moves at different levels of history and myth.

Tiresias in the Wasteland, Bloom in Ulysses – these palimpsest subjects opened up a way in which the poetic form could absorb the collagist techniques of the tabloid, the daily, in which headlines and stories hang together in a community of contemporaneity. One learns to scan the newspaper and segregate topics. On January 1, 1940, The front page of the New York Times had five headlines. The headline with the largest font read: FINNS SMASH A RED DIVISION; HALT MOVE TO CUT COUNTRY;NAZI DRIVE ON BRITAIN SEEN. Next to it, on the left, is BOARD SANCTIONS SALE BY U.S. LINES OF EIGHT VESSELS, then LABOR HEADS WARN WAR ‘PROSPERITY’ WILL NOT END ILLS, then in smaller font 1940 Bornin Wild Revelry; Good Year for Nation Seen, and then, finally, REPUBLICAN FIGHT ON NEW DEAL LOOMS IN CONGRESS. The educated reader does not see this as a chaos, a confetti of wildly different topics. Down to the size of the font, this reader can follow the various stories, even as the headlines sometimes dissolve into telegraphy.

So, too, can the reader of the New Year’s Letter trace through its various stanzas a certain newspaper like flow of topic. According to Edward Mendelson’s Late Auden, the three parts were “mechanically” devoted to Kierkegaard’s divisions: the aesthetic, the religious and the ethical. But Mendelson doesn’t believe this is the deep structuring principle of the poem – rather, as a New Year’s resolution, it is a way of saying the poet’s way to acting and writing under a certain structure of belief – the belief being in the future. Talking himself into believing this belief – within the framework of a letter to Elizabeth May, who Mendelson portrays as “mother” figure to Auden.

“A German refugee” living with her psychiatrist husband on Long Island, who Auden was introduced to by Benjamin Britten.

But this isn’t a testimonial poem even if it encompasses the current news and the whole Decline of the West. It isn’t Muriel Rukeyser. It is distinctly a letter poem, subordinating the topical structure to the conversational, meditative flow of the epistle. As in Pope’s Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot, or Donne’s verse letters. Donne’s letter to Henry Wotton lights up when contrasted with Auden’s New Year’s letter, and vice versa. So I pick from Donne this:

“For in best understandings sin began;

Angels sinned first, then devils, and then man.

Only perchance beasts sin not; wretched we

Are beasts in all but white integrity.

I think if men, which in these places live,

Durst look in themselves, and themselves retrieve,

They would like strangers greet themselves, seeing then

Utopian youth grown old Italian.”

Utopian youth – that’s a phrase for Auden, coming off the decade of the thirties!

The ultimate letters for a man turned Christian are, of course, Paul’s. Utopian youth here – the Jesus romance of the Gospels – is followed by didactic letter from one whose knowledge of what Jesus actually said and meant was, naturally, a little shaky, a little oral, a kind of gossip. Yet as Paul was convinced he had seen Jesus, had been physically blinded and then by further miracle given back his sight by Jesus, and so he winged it – choosing the letter form to mix news and doctrinal improvisation.

This is what the rhymes in Auden’s New Year’s Letter do – they make the doctrinal seem improv, and thus put it to another cadence.

If I am right about the palimpsest subject, than that subject naturally tends to the trans – trans-sexual, trans-historic, trans-Atlantic, trans-class – the latter being the privileged position of the clerks in the system of circulation. The trans figure is everywhere – Tiresias in the Wasteland, Bloom in Nighttown, the characters in Djuna Barnes Paris nightlife oratorio, Nightwood – with its shout out to Thelma Wood. And one might think that this is where Auden will end up.

He doesn’t, though, and one of the tales in the many tellings in the New Year’s Letter is a renunciation of this kind of modernist self, this kind of styling of the self’s transformative powers. He takes, instead, an Augustan turn – but unlike a Queer writer like Firbank, who also adored mixing an eighteenth century tone with cocktails, Auden ends up firmly on the side of identity, against the devil’s confusions of Meum and Tuum.

However, as Auden plays with the philosophical poem, his vocabulary and the music of the couplet rather lose an energy that Pope could summon in the eighteenth century. The second and third sections are exercises in the diminishing returns of an epistle poem that wants, as well, to be a conceptual summary. Auden seems to want to stand radically for some not at all radical blend of social responsibility and hedonism: the Cold War creed, in fact, elevated to abstractions that not only lose us, but weaken the muscle tone of the jaunty hard-boiled tone of the first section:

“Hell is the being of the lie

That we become if we deny

The laws of consciousness and claim

Becoming and Being are the same,

Being in time, and man discrete

In will, yet free and self-complete;

Its fire the pain to which we go

If we refuse to suffer, though

The one unnecessary grief

Is the vain craving for relief…”

This is a version of Hell that seems sprung more from late English utilitarianism, from the kind of philosophy undergraduate scene that begins Forster’s The Longest Journey, than from the peasant knowledge of torture: the shrinking from fire, the pain of knives and bullets and cudgels, the pain of starvation, the pain of being utterly unable to protect one’s nearest from the vilest violence. And in none of those hells, these bodily enacted horrors, do we shrink from Becoming and Being being the same. Neither the torturer nor the tortured would either understand that business or think it was somehow enacted in the theatre of concentration camp vioence.

There are moments in the movement from Utopian youth to Anglican casuistry that do make me think of the caricature of Auden and Isherwood in Put out more Flags as Parsnip and Pimpernell. Or like the college boys in The Longest Journey:

“The cow is there,” said Ansell, lighting a match and holding it out over the carpet. No one spoke. He waited till the end of the match fell off. Then he said again, “She is there, the cow. There, now.”

“You have not proved it,” said a voice.

“I have proved it to myself.”

“I have proved to myself that she isn’t,” said the voice. “The cow is not there.” Ansell frowned and lit another match.”

The poem is not damned by these weaker moments; within it there is a New Year’s message for this New Year, 2025, weird as I find that date, weird as I living in this century that has brought me, personally, much love, but in my perception of the community to which I once felt I belonged, just shame on shame, year after year. So much wealth and all of it just shit, just adding to disaster and the lifestyle of desperation from which no party, no movement promises a rescue.

Blah blah blah. That’s what the politics says.

“Whatever nonsense we believe,

”Whomever we can still deceive,

Whatever language angers us,

Whoever seems the poisonous

Old dragon to be killed if men

Are ever to be rich again,

We know no fuss or pain or lying

Can stop the moribund from dying,

That all the special tasks begun

By the Renaissance have been done.”

This is the Anglican turn with a vengeance, a tempting quietism that sits down by the Waters of Babylon and … dithers. Too broad a view can incorrigibly blur the particulars; an epistle poem must have the touch of the letter, of someone on the other end receiving it, to justify its form.

Still: this poem distils sentiments that will come into intellectual life only after the war. The Cold War liberal with his Popperian aversion to utopia and its misleading apostles, from Plato to Rousseau, sounds out in this poem from 1940 – and it would be easy to draw the line, here, from Auden to Hayek. In this sense, we are coming to a period when “the special tasks begun/by the New Deal have been done.”

auden's new years poem: part one

 

1.

“Auden and Isherwood arrived in New York on 26 January 1939. Ice blocks floating on the Hudson greeted them. The afternoon of their arrival brought news that Barcelona had fallen to Franco; two days later, news reached them that Yeats had died in the south of France. Taken together these two events resulted – as Richard Davenport-Hines says in his biography - in Auden' s mood being a mixture of apprehension and zest.” – Michael Murphy, Neoclassicism, Late Modernism, and W. H. Auden's 'New Year Letter'

I was prepared, as well as a human unit could be, for the worst this January. Living in Paris rather cushions me from the American shocks, but since I was born and bred a redneck, another Calibanish creole from the states, the shocks nevertheless tingle.

I decided to do a dry January. It was a surprisingly easy thing to do, and on the plus side, we have thrown out much fewer bottles this month. On the minus side, there is really something boring and platitudinous about no wine and no beer, the welcome guests who enter at evening and restore one’s faith in, well, whatever fuckery one has been engaged in during day.

I also decided to think of the onset, once again, of Trump in the U.S. – and the continuing decay in France, under the odious Macron – in conjunction with Auden’s New Year’s Letter, which was his sort of great spell to dispel the low, dirty decade of the 30s.

Apprehension and zest. Exactly.

2.

I have often tried to put my finger what I find disturbing about Auden’s poetry; I think it is the preach-y side of it. Inside the clever enjambments and post-Jazz age cocktails, there is a homily wanting to get out. Since a sermon is essay-adjacent, I should be more appreciative, I suppose. Yet the homily always seems to return us to wooly Anglican half-truths, etiolated since the age of piracy and territorial seizures, since the time that the English appetite took huge chunks out of the world, into a bunch of teatime truths, Fabian socialism.

Unfair. I know.

At the root of the evil, I think, is Auden’s growing conviction that poetry does nothing. Which is derived from the late romantic divide between art and life, one of those puzzles Auden shared with Yeats. But far from doing nothing, poetry in the largest sense – the newspapers, the movies, the radio, etc. etc. – moved the masses as never before. Poetry had moved out of the village, and out of the salon, via steam and electricity and Mr. Edison’s inventions.

Yeats was not being just a romantic when he wrote:

“Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?
Did words of mine put too great strain
On that woman's reeling brain?
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?”

In the New Year’s Letter, Auden is still arguing this point.

“Art is not life and cannot be

A midwife to society,

For art is a. fait accompli.

What they should do, or how or when

Life-order comes to living men

It cannot say, for it presents

Already lived experience

Through a convention that creates

Autonomous completed states.”

In this, he is anticipating a Cold War order in which art – poetry, for instance – finds its place outside of politics, and can only be corrupted if it gets stuck in such small partisan doings. This division, on which the pathos of the poem depends, strikes me as simply wrong. But to an extent, I don’t care. That is, I think it is an incorrect map of the world that is necessary for the poem to work; and the poem does work.

3.

Looking at the small bore authoritarianism which is drifting out of D.C. – the authoritarianism of post-viagra Trump pitted against the nudgery of the technocratically smug Democrats – the New Year’s Letter has a certain timely vibe:

“Twelve months ago in Brussels, I

Heard the same wishful-thinking sigh

As round me, trembling on their beds,

Or taut with apprehensive dreads,

The sleepless guests of Europe lay

Wishing the centuries away,

And the low mutter of their vows

Went echoing through her haunted house,

As on the verge of happening

There crouched the presence of The Thing.

All formulas were tried to still

The scratching on the window-sill,

All bolts of custom made secure

Against the pressure on the door,

But up the staircase of events

Carrying his special instruments,

To every bedside all the same

The dreadful figure swiftly came.”

I love this, and I love that Auden’s filters authoritarianism through the stylistics of the Who dunnit, of the special English variety he loved: Agatha Christie at the Parsonage.  This should diminish our sense of the boot coming down – but instead, by domesticating horror, we see how horror has grown in the domestic space.  That it comes to our bedsides in bedsits; that exiles are our future.

4.

 

In Michael Murphey’s essay on the poem, there is, as one would expect, first a bit of situating. Is Auden late modernist? Post-modernist? Murphey quotes from Randall Jarrell’s review of the poem, which is already busy doing situation work:

“In April 1941, in a characteristically spirited review of Auden's recently published The Double Man, Randall Jarrell began by declaring: In 1931 Pope's ghost said to me, 'Ten years from now the leading young poet of the time will publish ... a didactic epistle of about nine hundred tetrameter couplets.' I answered absently, 'You are a fool'; and who on earth would have thought him anything else. But he was right: the decline and fall of modernist poetry . . . were nearer than anyone could have believed.”

I find that a rather vexing proposition: “the decline and fall of modernist poetry” was inscribed in the themes of modernist poetry, with its re-appropriation of the conversational – literally in some of Apollinaire’s poems and some bits of the Wasteland – and its strong citational bent make Auden’s poems, to my eyes, ultra modernist – which, thematically, means the kind of poetry that takes its reference points from World Literature, like good little Goethians, rather than from a narrow Anglophone, or at best cross-Channel, tradition. Auden, writing a poem that is dosed with the parsonage murder motif from New York City, about the world wide coming of fascism, has, contrary to Jarrell, put on his hundred mile modernist boots and gone a-walkin’. Or at least that is my reading.

5.

I’m one of those sad souls who expect, on the highest level, prophecy from the poem.

Prediction is science’s domain. The model smooths out the exceptions, operates on the theoretically largest scale – a million light years here, a million light years there. As Keynes said, and as all science agrees: in the long run we are all dead.

The prophetic poem has no model, but sees the future in the lurid light of a dream. And in the long run and the short, we all dream. We can’t help it, it is the REM feature in our neurology.

So, here I am, thinking about Auden’s New Year’s letter, and the New Year, 1940, and I read through the first couplets of the second part, and I think immediately, as anybody trained as I was in the University in the 1980s, about Walter Benjamin:

Tonight a scrambling decade ends,

And strangers, enemies and friends

Stand once more puzzled underneath

The signpost on the barren heath

Where the rough mountain track divides

To silent valleys on all sides,

Endeavouring to decipher what

Is written on it but cannot,

Nor guess in what direction lies

The overhanging precipice.

Of course, this route for Walter Benjamin, still alive in 1940, was to come, in September of that year, the 23rd: from Banyuls, France, taking the path through Pyrenees passes down to Spain. Lisa Fittko, the guide for his party, has published a memoir of that trip – the translation into French of part of it is published on the En attendant Nadeau site.

« Benjamin arrived that day from Marseille, where he had made a first unlucky attempt to escape by hiding on a cargo ship, disguised as a French sailer … An improbable gesture of despair. »

Auden, like many English leftists – including the Kim Philby – had enrolled in networks to help refugees from the Nazi menace. When Auden and Isherwood came to New York City in 1939, they were met by two high profile refugees – Erika and Klaus Mann. And they quickly connected with the refugee community in New York City. It was this year that he wrote Refugee blues:

“The consul banged the table and said,

"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":

But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.”

In the New Year’s Letter, the muse underneath it all is a Jewish woman – one without her own name – Lot’s wife.

“And now and then a nature turns

To look where her whole system burns

And with a last defiant groan

Shudders her future into stone.”

Interestingly, in Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, the lynching of a Jewish couple in the beginning of the book – unplaced, a pogram that could have happened in 1905 in Galicia or could have happened in 1938 in the Austrian countryside – also reaches for Lot.

“Lot refused to surrender the angels who were his guests. Lot stood on the threshold, and the mob seized him by the arm, trying to pull him out into the street to be punished for the hospitality he extended, wanting to have at least him to strike at, spit on, trample and abuse; but the angels took hold of his other arm from inside the house with their angelic hands, and they were strong, they smote his attackers with blindness, pulled Lot back into the house, shut the door between him and the people, and those outside could no longer see one another, could no longer even see the door to Lot’s house, they groped their way along the walls and had no choice but to withdraw. Make no tarrying o my God. She doesn’t have the strength of angels, she doesn’t succeed in puller her husband up to where she is…”

Does the New Year’s Letter become more poignant as we place it next to this year, when the refugee is the target of orchestrated televisual/social media rage? Or does all poetry that works renew itself on the blood, for there is always blood, of the present?

 

 

 

 

Bloody thoughts: Take out some people

MOTHERLESS CHILD TAKE UP YOUR GUN 

Once, in my late twenties, I had a off and on again job as a hand in a construction crew (back then, I was a general Jack of all Unemployments). So we made this porch in North Austin, and this dock, cause the place was out on a lake. And we talked, hammered, measured, the usual shit. And I, who was taking what I thought was a year off from my graduate program at U.T., talked the usual routine of an Academic Marxist. Quite happily chirping along.

One afternoon, the contractor – a man of all trades, a peppery guy from New Orleans – gave me a ride home. We chirped along, and when he stopped, to let me out of the car, he said: so, don’t you think we should get some guns.

I said, whaaaat?

He said, take some shots, take out some people.

I wanted to keep the gig and I like the contractor, so I didn’t tell him don’t be ridiculous, I told him that I was definitely not the guy to take out some people with a gun. He helpfully offered to take me to a range where I could learn to adjust my opinion to practice, but I declined again.

Being then in the stage of academic Marxism where my idea of the class struggle was being perpetually sarcastic, I found the whole scenario howlingly funny.

Now, being an older gent who thinks it howlingly funny to call people “leftists” who have no connection to a unionized working class but are left in their head only, I am more than ever sure that I am not going to solve anything by practicing at the range.

Yet I also know that letting paramilitary ultra rightists out of jail, which Trump has done, means that surely some people are gonna get hurt. And I know that direct action, such as was allegedly the case with Luigi Mangione, might be thrust upon us by circs.

Take some shots, take out some people. I’m reconsidering that proposition.

Houdin: the old white magic and the new

 

Robert-Houdin is known to most Americans simply because Eric Weiss stole part of his name and added an ‘i’: Houdini. And even those who know that rarely know that Eric Weiss, that strange neurotic,  wrote a book in which he supposedly “unmasked” his idol as a pilferer of other people’s tricks. Robert-Houdin has become one of those quiet sites of American-French rivalry – as the French know, Robert-Houdin’s house was lit by incandescent lightbulbs with a filament he invented decades before the Wizard of Menlo Park got around to experimenting on how much of an electrical charge the human hair follicle could take.

His memoirs were once popular, and still are popular among magicians. They are also popularly debunked. As is, for example, the story of how Houdin got into the magic biz in the first place.

Here it is. Houdin was a young man, away from home, an apprentice watchmaker, and son of a watchmaker. One day he got a bad case of food poisoning. He’d nearly collapsed by the side of the road, trying to reach home, when a traveling magic show passed by. The magician was a once famous conjurer named Torrini now in the dumps, accompanied, of course, by a faithful servant, Antonio. Torrini and his servant took the delirious Houdin in, and nursed him back to health. Torrini was so affection because, it transpired, Houdin looked like Torrini’s son. A son about which there was some obvious dark cloud of mystery, since every time Torrini mentioned him, he’d burst into tears. While Houdin learned the mysteries of the craft, he did not learn the mysteries of Torrini until one night he gradually wormed it out of the old man.

Seems like Torrini hadn’t always been just a sawdust floor wizard – at one time, he was a conjuror to princes and popes. He was born into the nobility, you see. But as the years went on, his card tricks began to bore his audiences, and so he searched around for something more… shall we say, more s-sensational.

At this time, Torrini was married and had a boy. His son assisted him, especially in an act Torrini had entitled, Son of William Tell. Torrini claimed to have invented it – like all stage showman, he had a weakness for bogus originality. It was quite simple, really. The boy bit into an apple, and held it there in front of his mouth, and his father shot at him. The bullet, especially marked, lodged in the apple.

Here’s how the bullet catch trick is done. “The bullet was molded of hollow wax, mixed with soot to give it a dark, metallic look. The wax bullet was crushed in the barrel of the pistol and the magician was careful to stand a great distance away.”

It is an old trick. According to James Randi, it was first described by Reverend Thomas Beard in Threats of God’s Judgment in 1631. Anyway, here is how Torrini lost his mind: he kept these wax bullets in a box. All very simple. And yet somehow a leaden bullet was insensibly mixed into this box, and one night the leaden bullet was selected, the boy stood with his apple, and his father took aim and slew him.

And you wondered where William Burroughs got the idea…

After six months in jail and his wife’s desertion, Torrini then wandered the byways of Europe, playing to gawping plebes, out of his head. And then, just as Saul was cured of his Godrogenic madness by David, Torrini met Robert-Houdin.

Jim Steinmeyer, in his biography of Chung Sing Loo, writes that Torrini never existed. Or nobody has ever found a record of him. But it is an excellent story.

Incidentally, Houdini was famously advised never to do the bullet catch himself, and never did. It is a simple trick, but usually it involves a momentary loss of control of the instrument. Rather than the magician shooting, the magician usually selects someone from the audience to shoot at him.

When Hobbes wrote about nature blood in tooth and claw, he was referring, allegorically, to the audience at magic acts. The first magician who brought the bullet catch trick to America turned around, and in that moment the spectator who held the gun filled it with tacks – and must have had the tacks on hand, too. Anyway, of course, the magician was pelleted. Chung Sing Loo died of the bullet catch act too.
…
Now – interlude for some History channel overview re magick – magic in the sixteenth century, whether performed by the savage or the sage woman, was the same kind of stuff, derived from the devil. But by the eighteenth century, there was a fold. At that point the belief in magic, for the governing class of European, fell by the wayside. And so the native magician became ignorant, and the peasant became a tool of some more powerful personage playing on his credulity. Magic as a means of taking and keeping power produced a variation on the reading of the chief, the shaman, the ‘medicine man’, the figure flinger, but of course these figures were now to be found outside the “West” – that mythical region which consisted of urban elites who gradually inducted the peasant masses into their geography in Europe, and the white colonies outside of Europe. Political magic of a high order.

Bringing us on the wings of white magic angels to the nineteenth century, and Robert-Houdin, born in 1805 to a watchmaker. It is emblematic that nineteenth century magie blanche should arise from the same cadre that produced steam engines and cotton gins. At the beginning of his memoirs, Houdin breaks out into a nice bit of poetry that tells us a good deal about the 19th century:

“How often, in my infantile dreams, did a benevolent fairy open before me the door of a mysterious El Dorado, where tools of every description were piled up. The delight which these dreams produced on me were the same as any other child feels when his fancy summons up before him a fantastic country where the houses are made of chocolate, the stones of sugar-candy, and the men of gingerbread. It is difficult to understand this fever for tools; the mechanic, the artist, adores them, and would ruin himself to obtain them. Tools, in fact, are to him what a ms. is to the archaeologist, a coin to the antiquary, or a pack of cards to a gambler: in a word, they are the implements by which a ruling passion is fed.”

My brothers have the same unconquerable passion for the El Dorado of tools. Of course, nowadays, we can drive to it. It is called Home Depot.

Houdin’s memoirs are full of these Stendhal like touches. Perhaps this is why Henri Bergson read him. There is a passage in Energie spirituelle by Bergson – the biography of whom, by Emily Herring, is on my to be read list for this year.

“In one of the curious pages of his Confidences, Robert Houdin explains how he proceeded to develop an intuitive and instantaneous memory in his young son. He began by showing the child a domino, the 5/4, asking him the sum total of the points without letting him count them. To this domino he added another, the 4/3, demanding once again an immediate response. He stopped his first lesson there. The next day, he succeeded in adding in the blink of an eye three and four dominos, the next day after five: in adding each day some new progress to that of yesterday’s, he ended up by obtaining instantly the some of the points of a dozen dominoes. “This result acquired, we busied ourselves with a task that was difficult in another way, to which we devoted ourselves for more than a month. We passed, my son and I, rapidly enough before a children’s toy shop, or some other shop which was furnished with various merchandise, and we plunged an attentive look into it. Some steps latter, we drew from our pockets a pencil and piece of paper, and we each competed separately to see who could describe the greatest number of objects that we grasped in passing… It often happened that my son listed fourteen objects…” The purpose of this special education was to get the child to grasp with a glance, in the seating area of the theater, all the objects carried into it by all the assistants, which meant that, a strip of cloth tied over his eyes, he could simulate second sight … “

Things my old man never did for me… Behind Houdin’s plan stands Rousseau – spacing the secondary intelligence of culture after the primary intelligence of the senses, with memory that strange human faculty straddling the divide between them, a rodeo rough rider subject to falls. And I should say: this is an excellent education for writing. Robert-Houdin's memoir's are supposedly ghostwritten -- but like Torrini, the Ghostwriter has apparently been the victim of one of Robert-Houdin's vanishing acts. Nobody has a name for him, or a record of him.

2.

As a footnote both to Houdini and the imperialist magic act of making a territory disappear and reappear under another name: Robert-Houdin, like Berlioz and Georges Sand, led his life as though it were a sold out engagement for a 19th century French audience – so it was natural that he would gravitate towards the memoir.

 

In 1856, acceding to the demands of Colonel Neveu of the Political office, Houdin went to tour Algeria. The tour was not simply about showing French magic in the colonies to a bunch of poilus – it was about using that magic for political ends. Specifically, Houdin was the point man for the battle of white magic against black.

 

“It is known that the majority of revolts which have to be suppressed in Algeria are excited by intriguers, who say they are inspired by the Prophet, and are regarded by the Arabs as envoys of God on earth to deliver them from the oppression of the Roumi (Christians).

 

These false prophets and holy Marabouts, who are no more sorcerers than I am, and indeed even less so, still contrive to influence the fanaticism of their co-religionists by tricks as primitive as are the spectators before whom they are performed.”

 

The government sent Houdin around both to de-mystify and to mystify – although Houdin would, of course, dispute the latter description of what his mission was about:

 

“The governments was, therefore, anxious to destroy their pernicious influence, and reckoned on me to do so. They hoped, with reason, by the aid of my experiments, to prove to the Arabs that the tricks of their Marabouts were mere child’s play, and owing to their simplicity could not be done by an envoy from Heaven, which also led us very naturally to show them that we are their superiors in everything, and, as for sorcerers, there are none like the French.”

IT'S THE MORAL ECONOMY, STUPID!

 

There is now a cottage industry of analyses of the election of 2024. Harris’s defeat to a real life felon, Donald Trump, seems on some level, for the neoliberal liberal and centrist, an impossibility. All the more so as the defeat of Clinton, in 2016, was an electoral college defeat – she handily won the popular vote.

I am a cottager of the social media like any other. I’ve taken my crack at explaining Trump’s victory. But I am no campaign industry dude, nor op ed columnist. So I have the luxury of leaning back and asking a more general question, which is this: why did the liberal cohort during the election pour such scorn on the possibility that people were supporting Trump because of the economy?

Some part of that scorn was due to a number of economists saying that the economy, by the numbers, was just great. Part of that scorn was due to the fact that the most outspoken scorners were, by every measure, comfortable – professionals, administrators, rentiers and the cadre in the higher reaches of education, by which I mean: not kindergarten teachers.

So, let’s release a phrase, here, as a way of measuring a social distance evidenced by this scorn. The phrase is: “the moral economy.”

My thesis is simple. The heterogenous groups that is the strongest supporter of technocratic “solutions” to economic problems have almost entirely lost contact with the notion of a moral economy. Even as, by any ordinary standard, the moral economy of the post-World War II period, that compromise between capitalism and the guarantor state, was shredded, the beneficiaries of that shredding did not see this as a bad thing. In fact, it seemed like a great thing, to be tactically tweeked when it encountered resistance.

And when the resistance continued, this was unambiguously attributed to racism. The weirdness of this explanation is that racism, as a structural phenomenon, seems to have benefitted the technocratic class the most. It was that class that promoted the great imprisonments, heavily impacting minority communities, in the 1990s. It was that community that saved itself in the great Bank loan solution in the 10s. It was that community that overlooked, as a statistical blip, the critical state of black household wealth in the 00s through the 10s. And, on a community level, it was that community that used its opportunity to “opt out” to send its kids to charter or private schools, thus putting in play a structural racism for the next generation.

This, to anyone out of that community, was obvious. But one of the peculiarities of that community is that it only imperfectly understands that it can be seen.

One of the great essays in studying the moral economy was written by E.P. Thompson, in 1971: “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” In this essay, whose elements were used later by James Scott to analyse the peasant-driven political economy of Vietnam, Thompson sees the compound between legitimacy and order not only in politics, but in everyday economic life.

“It is possible to detect in almost every eighteenth-century crowd action some legitimizing notion. By the notion of legitimation I mean that the men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs; and, in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community. On occasion this popular consensus was endorsed by some measure of licence afforded by the authorities. More commonly, the consensus was so strong that it overrode motives of fear or deference.”

Thompson does not connect voting to riot. In fact, an election is supposed to take care of the need to riot by changing the ruling order. But this primitive democratic motive, which had support in the eighteenth century, was complicated as elections turned out to be not at all total in reorganizing the structure of governance. Thus, riots persisted, and sometimes, the motive to riot was subsumed into voting itself.

This is my justification for thinking of the election of 2024 as in some way structurally like the food riots in England in the 18th century:

“The food riot in eighteenth-century England was a highly-complex form of direct popular action, disciplined and with clear objectives. How far these objectives were achieved - that is, how far the food riot was a "successful" form of action - is too intricate a question to tackle within the limits of an article; but the question can at least be posed (rather than, as is customary, being dismissed unexamined with a negative), and this cannot be done until the crowd's own objectives are identified. It is of course true that riots were triggered off by soaring prices, by malpractices among dealers, or by hunger. But these grievances operated within a popular consensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, etc. This in its turn was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community, which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor. An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was the usual occasion for direct action.”

Sometimes, side events, faits divers, can help to clarify a larger social phenomenon. After Trump was elected, the first side event that seemed to rivet people’s attention was the killing of Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare CEO. When it turned out that the assassin was a young man who found Peter Thiel an intellectual stimulant, the politics of the moment seemed confounded. And I think this is confounding to those in the technocratic class who feel that racism and bigotry motivates the “yahoos”. But what if what motivates the technocratic class – for instance, the ever improving margins of profit for rentseeking companies producing cryptocurrency, AI, or social media platforms, and the “efficiencies” brought to the market by allowing, with no regulatory intervention, private equity firms gobble up real estate, hospitals, senior residential facilities and so on – and the yahoos up to and including scions of some of the wealthy were all connected to the suspension of even a semblance of a moral economy?

2.

I am not going to explain or monday quarterback KH's defeat. I think that even if she had generated her own team, the short amount of time given her doomed her to probable failure. However, from the moral economic viewpoint, I think there is theme that is sounded too often purely in terms of numbers: the theme of cheap. When the architects of globalisation - on both sides of the aisle in the U.S. -opened up the country to competition by cheap labor in other countries, and notably China, the inevitable de-industrialization and lack of an industrial policy was covered by the ideology of cheap. A good reference for the popular propagandizing of cheap is the collected columns of Dubner and Levitt, Freakonomics, carried in the NYT and made into a book. This was a hit with the social science rational choice set as well - there was a whole "festshrift" on it during the OOs hosted by Crooked Timber. Even during the great meltdown, from 2009 to 2014, the gospel of cheap was sold as the legitimizing feature of Neoliberalism - perhaps your wages were pretty frozen, perhaps your debts were monstrous, perhaps your education wasn't giving you the benefits it gave your parents, perhaps the insurance cancelled your policy when your doctor discovered the cancer - but your food was cheap and your interest was low. The aftermath of Covid thoroughly destroyed this legitimating feature. When technocrats all shook hands in 2023 that inflation was down, what they ignored was that the level of prices facing the ordinary person had been astonishingly and speedily elevated, wiping out a decade’s worth of cheap. The last shred of the neoliberal image of a moral economy was in ruins, and nobody in the technocratic group - which I'll define as roughly those people who nodded over every Paul Krugman column - noticed. It was.... something.

Defining moments are usually moments of recognition – the defining work had been going on in the background, under the buzz of media and social media, under the slogans and outside of the applause or boo cues for selected audiences, for a long, long time. All the defining moments that defined nothing in this lousy century are finally accumulating a definite something. Some beast slouching down the dusty road. Yeats, that mad fascist, was also a poet prophet.

And here we are in the beast’s arms.

For Ticktock: state of unfreedom of speech, 2025

 Dylan still knows how to make his old fans happy.

Like going on Tik Tok. Just as it is about to be ripped away from the American user.

Tik Tok has been banned, much to the satisfaction of Lincoln project Republicans and Biden Democrats. Apparently, you can shut down a platform for the free speech of 178 million Americans because fuck them, and we hate China, which is spyin’ on us.

Always China.

The McCarthy era, of course, didn’t end with McCarthy. It is a good time to bring up a trial that happened in 1959, which also involved Communist China. And a little thing called the Korean War.

It all started in 1956, when the U.S. Attorney General, under Eisenhower, accused the editors and writers of the China Monthly Bulletin of sedition. They were seditious because, during the Korean war (which the judge in the case ruled was a war even though it was not declared a war through the constitutional process – showing how, in a Security State, the constitution that legitimated the Security State was actually written on silly putty), they published the outrageous statement that the Americans were suffering “staggering casualties” and the accusation that the U.S. used biological warfare in Korea.

The editors and writers of this small journal consisted of John W. Powell, his wife Sylvia, and Julius Schulman, a writer and assistant.

They were called before Congress, of course, one of the usual witchhunting committees, and then in 1956 the Eisenhower Justice department charged them with sedition.

Let’s repeat this: they were charged in 1956 and tried in 1959 for publishing stories that said the U.S. was suffering staggering casualties and that the U.S. was using bioweapons.

The case was tried in San Francisco. The Judge was a certain Louis E. Goodman. The defendents lawyer, Charles Garry, dominated the news stories the first day with his strategy, which was to concentrate on the bioweapons charge by saying that, actually, it was true.

The trial went on for four days. On the second day the Judge made a curious statement: that the defendents should have been charged with treason, which has a broader meaning under the statutes, then with sedition. The Judge said that much of the Attorney General’s case was bent on proving treason, and alas, that had to be tossed out.

On the fourth day the Judge declared a mistrial, on account of the fact that his comments had been “exaggerated’ in the press and blown out of proportion.

It was all an oddness. Thomas Powell, who has written about the bioweapons in the 90s and 00s, as the controversy about them continued, maintains that the government did not want to have the bioweapon issue brought into court, where they would have to lie.

The prosecutors did indeed submit a case for treason latter, but it was so badly formed (out of the accusation that the Chinese Monthly News had a “depressing effect” on the drafted soldiers) that the U.S. commissioner threw it out in June, 1959.

Of course, this trial was followed by one of those long satyr plays common in the U.S. security state system, where various rightwing types have spent quality time “proving” that the biowarfare charge is lyin’ Communist propaganda. That charge always finds newspaper space, especially with the NYT and the Washington Post – the latter a notoriously friendly place for the whole Spitzel establishment – many of its finest alumni having worked at one time or another for the Company.

In the late 90s, at the height of anti-communist triumphalism, ten documents supposedly from the Soviet archives (nobody yet has said precisely where and from what archive) supposedly showed that the Russkies, Stalin’s henchmen (even though Stalin at this point was dead) were convinced that the biowarfare thing was a hoax, and thus they planned on ways to perpetuate the fraud. This was all worked up by a man named Milton Leitenberg, who tends to pop up any time the issue is raised. To my mind, the hoax accusation is refuted and confuted by an analysis penned by Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman – but while Leitenberg’s charges were heralded in a Washington Post story, oddly, the Endicott and Hagerman refutation remained, well, unheadlined.

As a footnote, in the seventies, when the Senate was actually seeking to take back some American freedom by questioning the CIA about their activities, the then director, William Colby, was asked about biowar and the CIA. He acknowledged that the CIA contracted in 1952 – that Korean war harried year! – to develop BW material at the U.S. Army Bacteriological Warfare Laboratory at Fort Dietrich, Mayrland. Due to a “paucity of written records, some of which were destroyed in 1973, he could not rule out that BW materials had been used for aggressive operations.” Ah, the non-denial non-denial – a rare species of Bureau-speak!

In the 70s, America developed a sudden case of being sensitive to our freedoms being ripped away from us. But in the 2020s, we are totally used to it. Down with it. Watch TikTok being banned and make with the jokes.

Joke joke joke, taking us right into the farce of King Bunkem, starging January 21st.

What a world – I like to sigh. My old man’s sigh.

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The Positional economy

 I’m the doddering child of French theory. From Derrida to Deleuze and back, those were my peeps when I was in grad school. I even gave shout outs back then to Francois Laruelle, even as back then and still today I don’t understand what he is fucking on about. I trust him, though.

But I drew the line at Bourdieu. I had a class back then centered around Distinction, and I kept thinking, isn’t this just Vance Packard with some Marx thrown into it?

Now I appreciate Bourdieu’s politics, his testimony as the French elite embraced neoliberalism on their way to embracing Le Penism, but I think that I’ll still stick with Thorstein Veblen and his disciples on the issue of status contests.

Among those disciples – Veblen’s, not Bourdieu’s – in the seventies was a man named Fred Hirsch. Who, I regret to say, I discovered long after my college salad days. He wrote a tract reflecting the decade and its mores entitled The Social Limits to Growth.

Now the thing to do, in the Reagan years and after, is to a, say limiting growth is a lunkish and reactionary stance, and b., point to China and India. And my hat is off to China and India. But Growth is a big term, and though undoubtedly we are blessed its many wonders to behold, the last word about growth can’t be “good”. It has to be when, how, and where. Because, of course, since the seventies we laid claim to another piece of the earth, the atmosphere, to go with our fine collection of the Americas, the oceans, and the all the fresh water and we are seeing some bad shit now and in the future coming out of that decision. Bye bye Aral Sea, bye-bye Ogallala Acquifer, bye-bye Bangladesh, bye-bye Los Angeles, etc., etc.

Oh, and did I mention the growth of cryptocurrency and crypto-culture, the latter disguised as that multiple thing, AI?

Hirsch’s idea of positional goods. It is an idea that has its ancestry in institutional economics and Veblen, but Hirsch was a post-World War II economist, a quantifier, and he wanted a more specific way to talk about a certain kind of social good and service.

He posed what he considered three interrelated problems in the developed economies: the paradox of affluence (made famous by Galbraith – the diminishing satisfaction as affluence is reached), the distributional compulsion (the rejection of the socialist notion of seizing the means of production for the distribution of a part of the surplus of production) and reluctant collectivism (the assumption, by the state, of the final agent of welfare, both for capital and for labor).

To describe how these things intersect, Hirsch distinguishes two economies: a Material Economy, producing goods and services (“as output amenable to continued increase in productivity per unit of labor input: it is Harrod’s democratic wealth. The material economy embraces production of physical goods as well as such services as are receptive to mechanization or technological innovation without deterioration in quality as it appears to the consumer) and a positional economy, which is just as important, but hides in plain sight. This is not a matter of some innate instinct for status composition – it is inherent in the material economy as a global incentive. “The structural characteristic in question is that as the level of average consumption rises, an increasing portion of consumption takes on a social as well as an individual aspect. That is to say, the satisfaction that individuals derive from goods and services depends in increasing measure not only on their own consumption but on consumption by others as well.”

This seems an almost platitudinous statement, and yet, in an economics founded on the “sovereign consumer”, this is total heresy.

“The range of private consumption that contains a social element in the sense described is much wider than is generally recognized. In textbooks on economics, public goods are discussed in the context of goods and facilities that can be provided only, or most economically, on a collective basis, open to all and financed by all. City parks and streets and national defense are prominent examples. In addition, elements of public goods are recognized in side effects of private transactions such as pollution and congestion… But a more general public goods element can be attributed to a wide range of private expenditures. … The satisfaction derived from an auto or a country cottage depends on the conditions in which they can be used, which will be strongly influenced by how many other people are using them. This factor, which is social in origin, may be a more important influence on my satisfaction than the characteristics of these items as "private" goods (on the speed of the auto, the spaciousness of the cottage, and so forth).

The material economy is that one familiar to neo-classicals and Marxists. it is deined On the other hand, you have Harrod’s “oligarchic wealth”: it “relates to all aspects of goods, services, work positions and other social relationships that are either (1) scarce in some absolute or socially imposed sense or (2) subject to congestion or crowding through extensive use.” The question posed by Hirsch is: “What happens when the material pie grows while the positional economy remains confined to a fixed state?”

In a sense, this problem is all around us now. The fact that so many questions seem to resolve into fights about social media – which, from a more distant point of view, seems a trivial issue – shows the real importance of struggles over positional goods. Hirsch had the foresight to see that the economy in the developed world was tending towards positional competition. On the one hand, unless there was robust economic growth, there would be increasing privation. On the other hand, the concomitant to growth would be increasing inequality, which would re-define the terms of affluence. To give one of a number of examples: take a social good such as education. On the one hand, for a democratic, capitalist society to continue, it must invest in human capital – it must educate. On the other hand, positional competition imposes on that education its logic – in order to be rewarded within the educational system, it isn’t enough that a person actually be educated, but it is also important that others be less certified – that others be excluded from certain institutions of education and the like, what Hirsch calls a “competition by people for place, rather than competition for performance.” Hirsch discusses a number of sectors – real estate, education, jobs – and then makes a fine, although dense, summary:

‘… material growth intensifies what may be termed positional competition. By positional competition is meant competition that is fundamentally for a higher place within some explicit or implicit hierarchy and that thereby yields gains for some only by dint of losses for others. Positional competition, in the language of game theory, is a zero-sum game: what winners win, losers lose. The contrast is with competition that improves performance or enjoyment all round, so that winners gain more than losers lose, and all may come out winners – the positive sum game.”

And – an important point – positional competition is about scarcity: "… competition in the positional sector serves as a general filtering device through which excessive demand has to be matched to available supply. This aspect – which I seek to isolate by the term positional competition – at best yields no net benefit and usually involves additional resource costs, so that positional competition itself is liable to be a negative sum game. Competition in the positional sector, however, may still yield net benefits if its contributions to individual efficiency and allocation of resources outweigh additions to resource costs and misallocation. But this cannot be judged from the conventional measures of economic output, since these measures gloss over the negative or deadweight elements of positional competition.”

Now, here’s a leap for you – one that I would defend at 500 page length, but I’ll never live that long. So, I’ll shrink it into a paragraph…

If you take the positional economy as the lens through which you view the history of the early modern era, Foucault’s L’age classique, one possible interpretation leaps to mind – or to a mind ready to catch the larger leapers. In the early modern era, the great bourgeois project was to liberate the positional market, as it were. Much of the work of the enlightened philosophers was to that end. At the same time, by one of those fateful pieces of dialectical luck, their identity as philosophers was undermined by their success at this task. In other words, the philosopher as a type was tied to a certain kind of positional market – a highly rigid one. Far into the 18th century, the philosopher as a type really had a strong influence on the real philosopher, be he Locke or Condorcet. This figure was a sage. As a sage, he was bound to the ascetic ethos that developed a sort of hole in the rigid positional economy – proposed a way out of it. Renounced it. And here’s where the dialectical luck comes in – the culminating point for the liberation of the positional market was encoded in Jefferson’s phrase, the pursuit of happiness.

It turns out that pursuit has a shadow side. This is Hirsch’s topic, these are the internal structural drivers of growth, undermined by their situationally negative or deadweight aspects. One sees the glimmer, here, of the coming billionaire-celebrity complex, as it crashes through all our defences and the fragile system built around them - the destruction of justice and even the impulse to seek justice, our sense that self-expression is what education, culture and the God of our praying fathers were seeking for us all, our aesthetic sphere of sensory satisfaction, our larger sense of solidarity (awe, fear, ecstasy) with the earth and its creatures and forces, are all to be sacrificed for… for nothing. For nobody’s happiness, save for the grim happiness of revenge, enacted over and over.