From Bush era Testing to Trump era AI: your child's education in the hands of elite shitheads

 A teacher named Dorothy de Zouche, in the winter of 1944-5, wrote an article urging the obsolescence and harm of grading that, to my mind, grows ever more unanswerable as AI puts grading into doubt: "The Wound Is Mortal": Marks, Honors, Unsound Activities

De Zouche urges the end of grading for a number of reasons: its irrationality, the wound it inflicts on “inferior” students (those who get inferior grades), the wiliness and disconnect with quality it encourages in “bright” students, etc.

But de Zouche is after the whole competitive rationale that underlines grading as well.

“If we should spend even one tenth of the time teaching people to cooperate that we spend teaching them to compete, we should have a happier and more decent world. From the time a child enters first grade until the time he finishes college we pit him against his fellow classmen. For grades may not be meant to be comparative, but they are comparative. Some of us may not give them upon a comparative basis, but children accept them that way. Alice who made an M in algebra is hardly ever dissatisfied until the moment she discovers that Marguerite-across-the-aisle, who is no smarter than she, made an S. If as adults we could come to realize that the real and permanent satisfactions in life are the satisfactions that come from doing things for the sake of the things themselves, and not for the reward tacked on, we might be able to sell our young people on the same idea, and we should have a less ugly, jealous, vicious world.”

De Zouche, I hear you! What the now famous New York article about AI so clearly and painfully shows is that the grading system, which has long been an archaic and misleading method of teaching children, adolescents and young adults things, has finally been superceded by an instrument that binds together the substance and the mark without any mediation.

In 2016, Counterpoints published an issue entitled: De-Testing and De-Grading Schools: Authentic Alternatives to Accountability and Standardization. The issue brings together the critique of what has happened in public education in the U.S. – the U.S. system being the main object of the authors – as it fell prey to what Lawrence Bains and Rhonda Goolsby -Smith aptly named America’s Obsessive – Assessment Disorder.

“As testing has become pervasive, the daily routines of schools have become little more than an endless cycle of test preparation sessions. Of course, the compulsion to repeatedly assess often causes distress in children, but testing also disrupts a fundamental, recently neglected purpose of schooling, namely, learning.”

I think that there is an elementary dialectical relationship between the era of intensified testing, which was the whole Bush educational philosophy, and our present era of AI “cheating”. Both are based on a fundamentally perverse idea of learning – which is that all learning boils down to rote learning, and rote learning is the best learning because it can be tested. The test, here, precedes the subject to be tested. It is one of those typical late capitalist inversions that we all swallow with the morning news and our dose of Instagram photos. But swallowing shit over a period of time causes a certain, shall we say, poisoning?

Cooperation, learning, un-grading – something that has been suggested again and again by progressive, Dewey-influenced teachers, and something that is rejected again and again by Milton Friedman-influenced administrators: this is the one way forward as I see it.

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Comment as Roger Gathman

Lighting out for the territories

 
There are certain phrases that ring my chimes, and have wrung em since childhood.

Among which I place Huckleberry Finn’s “lighting out for the territories”. 

This is how I used to think of the Great American space: an expanse of escape routes, a vast hide n seek imperium, a second chance, third chance fourth chance quick change theatre, a down river up river gamble. 

And this was how, in adolescence, I used to think of bohemia – artland, fuckland, poemland, desperateland – too. Always, of course, in opposition to where I was, which was subdivision land. By its very sound it is judged: to live in allotments, in suburban houses on suburban lawns, seemed to me to be a very low estate indeed. Instead of guitars and rock n roll, this was a place where the angels wings were clipped, and Blake died. Died for all our sins.

As Emerson observed in Circles, more or less: what goes around comes around. Here we are, living in an apartment in Paris, and my son’s image of heaven on earth is to live in a subdivision in Lawrenceville Georgia, with all the fixings: a state of the art entertainment system, a big tv, and food piped in from the nearest McDonald’s.
My notion of the territories, those ambiguously legal appendages to the State – where no one is a slave and the mind forged manacles are parked at the sod house door – was consistent with the things I read as a teenager about the amazing garrets of Paris and New York City, where you died young for beauty itself, or some semblance of it. Though age has drained most of my teen day dreams, I’m still one with that awkward manboy in having an enormous nostalgia for the bohemias of the past. I realize that much of the writing of the twenties was financed by trust fund babies, who have now moved in and taken over the bohemian dream vide the NYT style section. It is sad to think of that ratty utopia fallen into nepo hands, but there are much sadder things, of course. Sad for me.
Still, I think social media is bohemia’s distant heir. When I read the bitching about it, as a general proposition, I have to laugh: isn’t this what all of education is for? Isn’t the dream of every teacher in the past one in which the students actually want to write things? Whose message from the homework assignment is: hey, this is flying? Yes, they mansplain away, they whitesplain away, they say the dumbest things imaginable, but underneath the enormous cretinism, just as underneath the streets of Paris in 1968, there’s the beach. Or in my case, the territories.
Lighting out for the territories is still an ethic and aesthetic that generally presides over all my dumb opinions since I stumbled upon the Adventures of Huck Finn.
 

The ludicrous: now more than ever!

 

Marx, in the Holzdiebstahl articles, allows himself to speak of the “poorer” class - ärmere Klasse – which, for those of us who’ve done our time on the Marx job, followed the old man’s routines, read the letters, tapped the secondary literature, written our reports, know the drill – is an indication that we are in the early stages of the career here. The Marx of 1860 knows that the class of the poor misconceives class – which describes levels within the system of production, not something as contingent as income. The class of workers may be poor, but their class status is defined by what they do. Meanwhile, as the classical and neoclassical economists know with all their bourgeois hearts, the poor remain fixed as a primary economic unit in their schemes and dreams, in crude opposition to the ‘rich’. For class has dissolved as an organizing property among the economists, and economic units are determined outside of their place in the system of production – outside of their productive function, which enters in terms of a labor market. The labor market is a marvelous thing, beautiful, a beast as fabulous as any reported by Pliny. The labor market, of course, then gives us a throwback sociology, which gives us these things – the poor, the rich – as a sort of hybrid of magic and statistics. In the neo-classical world, the rich face the poor, in the first instance, without mediation, and then, in the second instance, in an interface mediated by the state, that ‘redistributes’ money from the rich to the poor. This is the fairy tale, this is the leitmotif, this is how it is told on all holiday occasions. And thus, so much is allowed to the second of Polanyi’s double movement – that is, the movement that pulls against and curbs the social excesses of the pure market system. The state, here, functions solely to take care of the welfare of the poor. On the other hand, the first movement is ignored – in which the state redistributes, indeed, makes possible, the welfare of the rich. The state is the dead machine that creates its live doctor Frankenstein – that is, private property itself. A process that accompanies capitalism down to the present day, where private property can now be had in the genes of a virus; we cut up the planet’s atmosphere and apportion it out. And so property emerges where no property was – and so accustomed are we to this phenomenon that we do not even think about or see it.

 

Thus, even at this point in his life, Marx – without his essential tools of class and the system of commodities – understood that this ‘side’ of the economy is, as it were, being twisted out of shape by the application of categories that do not reflect the dynamic axis of the economic system – in fact, seem as though they were designed to obscure it. The law is no longer written on stone tablets, but jimmied into place by those who control the legislative activity. All of which rather disturbs the high abstractions of the philosophy of law taught to Marx in Berlin. And – as the articles on wood theft show - the greatest of these misprisioning category-makers and voluntary blindspots turns out to be the divide between the private and the public spheres, which is ideally true, and practically a sham.

 

Yet, as I’ve pointed out, at this point in his career Marx is still working with these categories, still looking at socialism with the eyes of a lawyer – or rather, a philosopher of law. There is an old and oft told tale about how all of that works out, which skips over the Rheinisher Landtag and puts Marx in a capsule with Hegel, where they struggle for dominance. And who am I to object? The tale is all well and good and philosophisch like a hardon – but we should remember that Marx isn’t, actually, in a capsule, nor is he simple a figure in the history of philosophy, with its Mount Rushmore like heads. Neither the law nor justice jumped out of Hegel’s encyclopedia. The law was something any peasant, any Josef K., could bump into in the midst of life, in a wood. The legal approach to property, Marx will find out, is one-sided – insufficient. It is only when this insufficience gets too big for its britches and goes around presenting itself as the totality that we fall into mystification.

 

Marx already touches on parts of that mystification in these articles – but I feel irresistibly impelled, by every imp in my bloodstream, to sample some Gogol here (there’s a head to head for ya)  who had a knack, a supernatural knack, for dramatizing muddle. In the 9th chapter of Dead Souls, as we watch two women devise, between them, a story about Chichikov’s plan to elope with the governor’s daughter for which they haven’t a shred of evidence or even a thought that proceeded their confab – as this beautiful error is hatched in their gossip, and the two women become more and more descriptions of themselves – the agreeable lady and the lady who is agreeable in all aspects – Gogol pops his head out to make a rather astonishing case that this is the equivalent of what happens when the historian – shall we even say, the universal historian? – conjectures a story into the world:

 

“That both ladies finally believed beyond any doubt something which had originally been pure conjecture is not in the least unusual. We, intelligent people though we call ourselves, behave in an almost identical fashion, as witness our scholarly deliberations. At first the scholar proceeds in the most furtive manner, beginning cautiously, with the most diffident of questions: ‘Is it not perhaps from there? Could not such-and-such a country perhaps derive its name from that remote spot?” Or: Does this document perhaps not belong to another, later period?” Or: “When we say this nation, do we not perhaps mean that nation there?” He promptly cites various writers of antiquity and the moment he detects any hint of something – or imagines such a hint – he breaks into a trot and, growing bolder by the minute, now discouses as an equal with the writers of antiquity, asking them questions, and even answering on their behalf, entirely forgetting that he began with a timid hypothesis; it already seems to him that he can see it, the truth, that it is perfectly clear--- and his deliberation is concluded with the words: “So that’s how it was, that is how such-and-such a nation should be understood, that’s the angle from which this should be viewed!”

 

To so radically equate gossip with historical philosophy leads us, surely, to Marx – if only because Gogol, too, is responding to the ‘historical school’ that derives from Herder, Schiller and Schelling; and because Marx, like Gogol, has an eye for the principle of the ludicrous.

The ludicrous, latter encrypted in dialectical materialism – its secret sharer. There are two ludicrous themes in the wood theft articles. One consists in how, exactly, law is re-creating the status of the private property holder in the face of his history – “for no legislation abrogates the legal privileges of property, but it only strips it of its adventurous character and imparts to it a bourgeois character”. There is certainly an undertone in this description, which makes the normalization of feudal law into a cynical play, a game of dress down and dress up, of stripping the adventurer and imparting to him the burger’s placid certainties, that reminds us of Gogol’s Inspector General – and may have been meant by Marx to refer to Beaumarchais. No undertone of comedy is ever insignificant in Marx. Our second ludicrous theme consists in the parallel Marx draws between the modal status of the windfallen wood and of the poor. The wood that by custom is gathered in the forest – wood that is scattered, strewn - is cut off from the organic tree, and thus becomes philosophically unnecessary and organically dead. Meanwhile the gleaners, the poor are also cut off, in as much as their customary rights are contingent [zufaellige] concessions, and thus their very existence, insofar as it is based on these customs, is outside of justice [Recht] – which puts it in Robin Hood’s realm, apart, accidental. In fact, in a beautiful phrase, Marx claims that the custom [Gewohnheit] or usages of the poor are the “anticipation of a legal right.” The spirit of Benjamin, the angel of history Benjamin so fiercely invoked, floats over this idea that the little tradition, the shared usages of the peasants, anticipates the moment of their legal recognition in the future. That anticipation is, of course, the revolution.

On the Great Pattern: Children are put to bed and woken up by their parents

We know, from our childhoods, the Great Pattern: Children are put to bed and woken up by their parents.

Yet, we also know, from our childhoods, the lacuna in the Great Pattern: the adults nap while the children are awake.

In Chekhov’s The Steppe, a boy, Yegorushka, is travelling in a cart across the Russian steppe with his Uncle, Kuzmichov, a merchant, and his Uncle’s partner, a priest, Father Khristofor. Yegorushka is going to school, and enters the story in tears, as he is going to be parted from his mother. But the ride in the brischka – “one of those antediluvian carriages in which only merchants’ clerks, cattle dealers and impecunious priests travel in Russia these days” – soon folds in Yegorushka’s attention. A ride like this is an event for the boy, in a way that it is not for the men or the driver, for whom the routine is under the sign of functionality. The ride is a “between”, a means: while for the boy it is a sort of living thing, its own thing.

They come, in the afternoon, to a place where there are a few trees, a spring, and a pond. They have the coachman, Deniska – who is really a teen – stop, spread out rugs, eat, and tell stories. And then, magically, it is time to nap.

“Silence fell. All that could be heard was the snorting and champing of the horses and the snores of the sleepers. Some way off a solitary lapwing wailed and there was an occasional squeak from the three snipe that had flown up to see if the uninvited guests had left. The stream softly lisped and gurgled, but none of these sounds broke the silence or stirred the lifeless air – on the contrary, they made nature still drowsier.”

Here we are briefly plunged in the lacuna. Here Yegorushka is the one awake, the one on guard, so to speak, the one who is solitary.

The Steppe is not structured so as to clobber the reader with symbols. It is structured around a certain animism that takes in humans, horses, water and the “ride”. The nap of the adults is, as well, a living thing quite apart from the contingent property of the adult travelers.

Myself, when I was a child in a house full of children and two adults – the house I grew up in in Metro Atlanta – I was quite familiar with adult nap time. I can look back on the my old man in the living room – which is sometimes where, say on a summer Saturday afternoon, he might have stretched himself on the rug – and recognize a few facts. Facts that I see now, as a man myself, one older than my Dad taking a few zzzs as the sunlight and the little circle of a road around which which our house and lawn clustered with other little suburban houses and laws did its thing. Heat, a blue sky with white billowing clouds crossing it, the cars in the driveways, and the contrast with the temperature control in this room, in all the rooms, and the heat which we kids knew from our feet, even, when we would go out barefoot and hop on the asphalt of the road and which made one of the ecological differences between the metro Atlanta of the Jim Crow/Dixie times of porches and heat and the Dekalb County of draped windows and the A/C humming away, with the unit usually in the back yard in that epoch of the South joining modern times.

I can’t remember what the rug looked like in toto, but I do remember its feel, a bit itchy, on my face as I lay down on it too. My Mom, Dad, and us kids – although what we were really there to do is not nap as much as bug my parents. Eventually, we would tire of this and do something else. There was pingpong to play in the basement, or darts, or there was swimming to do at the neighborhood pool (hence the bare feet on the hot pavement, or flip flops or sneakers without the socks), and like Yegorushka we had a vaguely animistic feeling about the whole surround. The street was alive, the cars were alive, the games were alive, in some way.

My parents are both dead now. And I, as a father, can appreciate much more than I did back then that life was exhausting. Five kids, with five incessant needs – for food, clothes, shelter, birthday and Christmas presents, school supplies, and all the intangibles: love and affection, attention, the need to talk, laugh, argue, push, pull, throw, compete… And the two adults having a nap time in a living room that symbolized, in the America of 1969, that life was getting better. All that structure! On affordable mortgage payments!

Of course, now that structure would be regarded, in America, as intolerably small. Houses have grown much bigger, the price of houses has gone through the roof of said houses, the cars cost as much, now, as the houses did back then, and the ability to raise five kids on a median income is a rare magic trick. The house where I grew up in the neighborhood where I grew up all downscaled drastically. The last time I drove by it, the house, which had evidently been rented by a meth dealer, was a blackened ruin. There were no ghosts napping in the living room, as the living room didn’t exist anymore, save as a charcoaled stub. And my boyhood animism is, if not gone, a very attenuated thing – although sometimes, sometimes walking down the street with my boy, sometimes I feel it out there, around me, saving me from a numbness that I fear could get me in its grasp, could take the ridiculousness out of me.

And what is more ridiculous than a ridiculous man without ridiculousness? It is a common type, and the curse of our times.

 

the forgettery

 The forgettery

1

The first time I thought of the forgettery – thought of forgetting as an active organ in my body and experience – I was on a bus in Austin Texas. What I was thinking of before, what I did afterwards, what my stop was, what my day’s purpose was – these I don’t know. These have been blanked out, and I only know they existed by inference, with myself, my living self, as the inferable remnant. But I do remember thinking: forgettery!

I remember that I thought I’d have to remember that name.

We do have amnesia. Yet amnesia is a medical name, a name for a disorder. The forgettery is not a disorder, any more than the shadow you cast is a disorder.

Having thought of this term, having in one moment connected the forgettery to the memory as an indissoluble bond, I rather forgot about it. At intervals, though, I would remember it. When the internet came alive, and the meme became something other than a Dawkins neologism, I sometimes thought: I need to meme forgettery. When I die, maybe I could be remembered by a grateful posterity for meming forgettery.

But my delusions of grandeur on this account would stumble over my sense of the ridiculousness of my delusions of grandeur, and so it happened that the forgettery has fallen, a still birth meme, on the ungrateful world.

2.

In my experience, memory has two directions. That is, when I remember, the direction memory seems to take is either straight, direct, or lateral. In the former case, I am like a fisherman casting a line – I cast my mind back and hook my object, that thing or event in the past. Or I don’t. When I don’t, it means I have either forgotten it or it didn’t exist. Psychologists have shown that it is a rather simple matter to create fake memories, in which case what was never there is remembered anyway. But regardless of whether the object is absent, non-existant, or forged, the direction of memory, here, is direct. It is analogous to double book accounting, where the column with the object and the column with the memory are on one plane, side by side. Lateral memory, however, is a different thing. It is about connotations and associations. Memory here is something that emerges without, at times, my having made any effort to remember. I will, instead, suddenly remember. This suddenness has something of the character of waking up – it speaks of two very different states of consciousness. And yet, just as I can wake up feebly, and fall back to sleep, so too I can suddenly recall a thing and then it will slip away. I will forget what I just remembered, or rather, the memory that was forced upon me. If it was something that I wanted to note down, or something that I remember in the moment of remembering that I was supposed to remember, I’ll mentally rummage around. The direct method here fails me, because though I can directly remember the event of suddenly remembering, the object here, the event, is wrapped around something I’ve forgotten. To find that content, I often resort to association – to trying to construct what I was doing when the sudden memory hit me. Or, having a sense of what the content of this sudden memory was – having it on the tip of my tongue – I’ll try to find associates with it – I’ll play a sort of guessing game.

For instance: let’s say I am trying to recall the sum total of my experiences with Leonard Cohen’s The Stranger song. I’d have to recall putting the album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, on the bulky fake wood stereo my parents bought at some fortunate point when I was twelve or thirteen, a purchase that informed my entire musical life. I would have to take a memory glimpse at that stereo, which had sliding panel doors underneath the record player – needle combination to provide an album height space in which I stored my albums, it being the case then that music on an album was optimally preserved by putting the album upright although now that I think of it why an album would lose its definition if it was stacked on its side is beyond my knowledge of vinyl. In any case, I would have to think about the storing of albums, how they lean thinly one against the other, how they might be sorted by name or something. I would have to think of album art, which at one time had an importance that is now entirely fabulous, since it has no popular existence. It exists now as a small icon on a screen. I would have to remember the album, where I purchased it – without doubt some pre-Walmart emporium on Memorial Drive, one of which was actually named Treasure Island – and the way Leonard looked not at all pop on the album, with no rock n roll glamor, but rather pleasingly like some poet in some fabulous coffeehouse I could only dream about, not knowing that in thirty years there would be franchise coffeehouses in every hick burg.

And I’d have to remember that I did, over time, get by heart the words of that long long song. Then, the first time I saw McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which begins with the Warren Beatty character, in a bearskin coat, riding on a horse through the wilderness – a vision and a sound that shot through me and gave me, and still gives me, the sense of an expanded existence in the wilds of America, a sense that has always remained with me and makes me, in spite of the old tired racisms and idiocies that issue from that country continually, know the country in terms of a crush I will probably never get over. I would have to think about how I instantly recognize the guitar fingerings that introduce that song, which I believe was the first song on the second side – unless that was the Master Song. I’d have to remember the distinct small scratch of putting the needle on the groove that starts that song, that static which after a while becomes part of the song itself. This is of course a teen memory, the teen slowly dying over the years until it is a mere whisp, like a dead warrior in the Greek afterlife, a summonable being. And then the memory would have to take on my singing of that song, which I have done frequently, especially when driving a car or riding a bicycle – which to me are occasions for singing to myself. More than a shower, a shower is a more pensive adding up things I have to do experience. And this singing would bring up travels – for instance, driving from Atlanta to Santa Fe. And so on.

This kind of lateral memory structures, if given its full power, the memory dream with its suddenness and its frustrations as to the exact details of the remembered and its narrative pulls and pushes. The memory dream is like that thing which, I feel, is fading in our over-media mediated lives, the daydream. The daydream requires an inwardness that is too quickly made into an outwardness on Instagram and tik tok. The usual academic way of saying this is that it is “commodified”, which touches on one facet of it, but not on other facets – for instance, the loss, over the boundaries of the commodified item, of a certain childhood hope. The death of utopia on the screen, so to speak.

3.

To return to the forgettery – it is most present as an actual faculty when one is engaged in the memory dream. Like a magician pulling item after improbable item from his top hat. Here’s the stereo in the living room in Clarkston Georgia, here’s the album reappearing in my brother Dan’s collection of albums in one of his apartments in the metro Georgia area, here’s the day I rode in the rain on a ratty bike up the slope of Mount Bonnell in Austin Georgia, singing the song in my most self-pitying voice as I wondered how my life had led to this moment, and so on. I can’t, honestly, place that bike – where did I get it? Was this the bike that the editor of the Austin Chronicle book page gave me after he had been enlightened by a peyote vision in Northern Mexico? Or was that after?

4.

Oh, the forgettery. Some day you will have my all.

On the oracles - Karen Chamisso

 

The oracle is bored, finally, of the future

Ablution in the cold water of the spring

Autopsy of the victim, the signature

In the disposition of the organs, fate’s writing.

 

The wisecracks from all the golden codgers on the wall

The epsilon, the laurel wand,

moving down the hall

to the chamber where you get your meds and electroshock.

 

So little and so much makes a poet

to whom the gods have decided to souffle their lies.  

Just as the city’s sack is found where nobody knows it

In the spilled guts of the sacrificed ram.

 

Oh Popeye when you play upon your guitar

Do you play the things that will be or that are?

She sees ambiguity shaped by ambiguity

and that wisdom is hidden in a children’s joke

 

or in some stray, scrawled obscenity

in a jakes, or toted in a poke.

To pose riddles and not ever guess her own

Has turned her voice into a frog’s voice,

                                                                                her heart into a stone.

It is hard to keep a secret

 Marcel Schwob’s preface to his Vies imaginaires makes a plea for the vita as art, instead of history. History, Schwob writes, aims at the general, and puts the stress in the meaning of human lives in their connection with greater events. For history, “all individuals have value only because they have modified events or made them deviate.” Art, on the other hand, “doesn’t classify; it de-classifies.”

The preface carries out the argument, such as it is, with brio. But the imaginary lives do not all carry out that de-classifying imperative. The life of Herostratus, for instance, distinctly lacks a certain detail – or rather, Schwob lacks a certain wonder at this detail.
Herostratus was famous, or infamous, for having torched the temple of Artemis in Epheseus. Schwob does an interesting, proleptic thing about Herostratus by describing him from the beginning in terms of the tortures to which he was subjected after his act. This proleptic magic act is nice. I applaud it. But then, when we read the end of the life, we get this:
“The twelve cities of Ionia forbad, on penalty of death, the announcing of Herostratus name to future ages. But the murmur has come just as far as us. The night when Herostratus torched the temple of Epheseus, Alexander, kind of Macedonia, was born.”
For those of us more historian than artist – or who reject Schwob’s division – there is much lost in that “murmur.” How is it that, somehow, the agent of this particular fait divers was able to avoid a suppression that seems, given the time, the lack of news save by messenger and singer, and the penalty, to have more appropriately submerged that pyromaniac fameseeker?
How do secrets get passed along?
Pessoa wrote an essay on Erostratus in English, which was discovered, like much of Pessoa’s work, after his death. The English is a bit brushed up and too too British, but Pessoa makes a deep remark about Erostratus’s, so to speak, existential figuration.
“His act may be compared, in a way, to that terrible element of the initiation of the Templars, who, being first proven absolute believers in Christ – both as Christians, and in the general tradition of the Church, and as occult Gnostics and therefore in the great particular tradition of Christianity, had to spit upon the Crucifix in their initiation. The act may seem no more than humanly revolting from a modern standpoint, for we are not believers, and, when, since the romantics, we defy God and hell, defy things which for us are dead and thus send challenges to corpses. But no human courage, in any field or sea where men are brave with mere daring, can compare with the horror of that initiation. The God they spat upon was the holy substance of Redemption. They looked into hell when their mouths watered with the necessary blasphemy.”
Pessoa no doubt read Schwob. The Templar story was, of course, a legend transmitted by way of the trials of the Templars, who were overthrown in a power struggle that sought justification, as so many do, in a courtroom padded with lies and crooked lawyers. But secret calls to secret – the initiation of the Templars was a secret kept within the group, and yet it forced itself out – a necessary blasphemy – to future generations.
It is hard to keep a secret. And it is hard to say why it is hard to keep a secret.

The atmosphere of fascism

“Are you a fascist, signore?”

“Not at all. On the contrary.”

“Don’t be offended. We are all, a little”

“Do you really believe that?” replied Laurana, amused and irritated at the same time.

-          To each his own, Leopoldo Sciascia.

Sciascia’s use of investigative fiction – from the crime novel to the detective-like essay – was a response to the problem of fascism. Fascism is founded on impunity. Now, impunity is a large thing – it can be the result of chance, or mercy. But when it is politically directed to exempt a person or persons from the rule that noone is above the law, we are in the atmosphere of fascism. An atmosphere that precedes fascism, of course; myself, I think of Louis Napoleon as an exemplar of proto-fascism in Europe, and the whole system of slavery in the U.S. and its criminal descendent in the ordinary expression of the legal system in America are other examples of the fascist atmosphere.

The dialogue I have clipped out, above, is between a man named Benito – after Benito Juarez, not Mussolini – and one of Sciascia’s investigators, the rather sad bachelor, professor Laurana. Benito is considered a bit lunatic by the people around him, for instance his maid, and acknowledges this reputation to Laurana before making the case that Peppino Testaquadra, a Communist politician with an anti-fascist past, imprisoned by Mussolini, is a fascist. “He is one of my friends, I repeat, an old friend. However, I can’t prevaricate, he’s a fascist: A man who finally is elevated into a little niche, even an uncomfortable niche, and begins to distinguish between the interest of the state and that of the citizen, between the rights of his elector and that of the citizen, between efficacity and justice. Don’t you think that one could ask him why the devil, then, in these conditions, he suffered from imprisonment and home arrest?”

It is that little bit of fascism that one sees, especially, in the culture, a culture that cultivates the superhero as saviour and thinks it is being ironic and hip when it elevates the bank robber and the hit man.

Sciascia was extraordinarily sensitive to this moment, and repeats it time after time in his narratives. There is, in his Sicily, always a bit of Nemesis – of that popular justice named “envy”, and of that struggles with Nemesis named “justice” in the organizational sense – that is, the just detective or policeman or judge – the judge being in Italy and France entrusted with the power to order an investigation.

In a plutocracy, of course, nothing is more banned, more condemned than Nemesis – that is, a sense that disproportionate gain is itself criminal. That there are limits to use, to exploitation, to wealth, even to happiness and the “positive” emotions. Envy is always marked with the black spot, while greed is always treated cautiously, a sort of tooth fairy.

From the tooth fairy to the Aryan prison gang boss whose reign shows, as the New York Times likes to put it, a “rightward shift” in American politics – it has all been prepared for decades. And now we are enjoying the feast.

Sorites and the mean - not for the fainthearted

It is said that Chryssipus the Stoic held that there were, for all problems, true solutions. But he also held that at times, we can’t see them – and those times called for a morally disciplined silence. It is in this spirit he approached the paradox of the heap – the sorites. The paradox is as follows: if we construct a heap from seeds, say, we can, by adding seeds successively, reach a point where we might say that we have a heap, and identify that with the number of seeds we have used – say, 200. And yet, when we subtract one seed, we are disinclined to say that we no longer have a heap. Given that fact, we might play the game by claiming that we haven’t reached a heap no matter how many seeds we use in order to avoid identifying the heap with a certain number of seeds – but then, paradoxically, we will never achieve a heap. In fact, we don’t really seem to be able to quantify a thing like a heap; neither do we want to say that the heap is a quality when clearly it can be analyzed into its separate parts. To borrow a term from contemporary logic, there is no “heapmaker” – so how can there be a heap? Chryssipus, according to Sextus Empiricus, recommended that “when the Sorites is being propounded one should, while the argument is proceeding, stop and suspend judgement to avoid falling into absurdity.” Analytic philosophers, such as Mario Magnucci, who wrote a seminal paper on the stoic response to the sorites, have attempted to incorporate Chryssipus’s response into standard Western logic. To me, the stoic response is closer to the notion of Mu in Rinzai Zen. The famous Mu Koan goes like this: a disciple of Zhaozhou, a Chinese zen master, asked him if a dog has the Buddha nature. Zhaouzhou answered Wu – Mu in Japanese – which means no, empty, vacant, and – it is said – applies in different ways to the question: that there is no dog, that there is no Buddha nature, that the dog does not have Buddha nature, and so on. In other words, the answer is meant to break the mental habit of thinking that the way of assembly – where distinct parts are put together – and the way of disassembly, where distinct parts are separated, are grounded in the real. Indetermination is neither a fact of the real nor not a fact of the real.

My friend Owen Goldin has pointed out that the Aristotelian response to events like the heap - events that seem to defy any natural division into parts – is to postulate threshholds. In Eubulides, Aristotle and the Sorites, Jon Moline claims that Eubulides first developed the sorites paradox. Eubulides was taught by a pupil of Socrates and disputed (successfully) with Aristotle. According to Moline, the ancient tradition put the sorites in opposition to the Aristotelian concept of the mean. Moline quotes a second century figure, Aspasius:

“For it is no different with any other sensible thing from which they arrive at Sorites. For at what point is a man wealthy? When he has deposited ten talents, they inquire? And if one should take away a drachma, is he no longer wealthy? And if two? For there is no one of such things, since it is a sensible thing, which it is possible to define accurately, whether a poor man or a rich. And concerning the bald man they ask whether by one hair one can become bald, or by two, or three? Whence the arguments said that bald men were also Sorites. For concerning a heap (soros) they ask the same thing, whether by one grain of wheat the heap is made smaller, and then whether by two, and so on according to the pattern; and it is not possible to say where first there is no longer a heap because no sensible thing can be understood accurately, but only broadly and in outline. Thus this holds even of actions and of feelings. For it is not possible to say by how much anger one attains a mean in anger or surpasses it or fails to come up to it because of deviation towards too much or too little. Wherefore there is need of practical wisdom for discovering the mean in feelings and in actions.”

Moline constructs a plausible version of a Eubulidian argument regarding, say, generosity, which uses the heap method to show that what is generous can be reduced to what is extremely mean if we do not grant an autonomy to the quality in regards to the quality.

“For suppose the man of practical wisdom in my circumstances would give n drachmas. Giving just so much as the man of practical wisdom would give and would declare to be the mean is, you would say, generous. But it is not. For suppose I give just one obol less. Is my gift not generous ? Surely you must concede that giving just one obol less than the generous amount is generous, for an obol is a trifle. Yet if we apply the principle you concede a sufficient number of times, it follows that it is generous to give nothing. But this, clearly, is not generosity, but the extreme of meanness. And suppose that I give one obol more than the mean as specified by the man of practical wisdom. I am giving one obol more than the generous amount, but surely my gift is still generous, for again, an obol is a trifle. But if we apply a sufficient number of times the principle that giving one obol more than what is generous is generous, it follows that it is generous to give not n obols, but one's entire fortune. And this is not generosity, but the extreme of prodigality.”

It in this way that the Stoics attempted to drive a wedge between what Vico would call geometric knowledge and discursive knowledge.

Myself, I think this has particular pertinence to a pattern in historiography: the rise and fall arc. Too often, disputes among historians about the rise or decline of some historical property fail to acknowledge that rise and fall are sorites. Hence, arguments become very vicious about what the risemakers or the fall-makers are, and when they occur. Accepting that historical narratives have a sorites paradox at their center helps us clarify the half-fictitious nature of the business. Even if one doesn’t stop and fall silent, like Chryssipus, one has to accept the possibility that finally, withdrawal is the correct response.

Joseph Roth and the dialectic of nationalism

 As Stephane Pensel has pointed out, Joseph Roth seems to be a writer absolutely opposite to W.G. Sebald. Sebald wound his writing around his reading – books came to life in his demi-fiction, much as lines came to life in Paul Klee’s painting. As Klee said, an active line”, a freely drawn line, goes out for a walk. Sebald’s fiction is about taking the author, with a universe in his head, out for a walk. Roth, by contrast, often spoke about the virtues of reading little: “Please understand”, he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I don’t read. I hold with the good words of a man I otherwise don’t value, Karl Kraus, who wrote: A poet who reads is like a bartender who drinks.”

Yet there is a relation between Roth and Sebald that comes out in Sebald’s essay on the former. Sebald deals sympathetically with Roth’s notorious nostalgia for the Habsburg empire. I think Sebald, also an exile of a kind, understood the political gesture under that nostalgia. It was aimed at the onslaught of ethnic nationalism that came after the Empire’s breakup. Roth rejected both Naziism and Zionism for the same reason: the claim that the nation is founded on a privileged people. Ethnos taking the place of ethos was, to Roth, the great danger we face. Sebald gets this right, I think. Of Roth’s image of Austria – the Austro-Hungarian empire – Sebald writes:

It is an image of something that lacks any will to power, any imperialist drive, I think. This is the motive of Roth’s Austrian model, which was one of the clearly lost opportunities of history. Perhaps, as the old Herr von Maerker opines at the end of the Stummen Propheten, the opportunity had been really present in his time, “out of ... the Monarchy to make a home for all. It would have been the small prototype of a larger future world. The emphasis lies, here, not on the larger future world – for this Roth had long given up on – but rather on the „small prototype“, illuminated by the radiance of the past.”

Roth died about 85 years ago. He suffered, in his life and in his work, from the terrible virus of nationalism that was codified in Woodrow Wilson’s white supremacist doctrine of the “self-determination” of peoples, which was the guise under which the American liberal contested the American isolationist. We are presently at a dialectical inflection point in that long struggle – a president as racist as Wilson, and contrary to Wilson an advocate of autarcky, who is searching to resurrect an international of white states.

I think Roth would understand exactly how this moment, bookmarked between the mass murder in Gaza and the mass murder in Ukraine, became the station we have stopped at.

Lucky Charms

 I wrote an account of opening a cereal box – what is known, in the industry, as a billboard box – in 2022. Three years later, as the racist band of malcontents, led by Trump, Mr. Measles, and Mr. Bucket Shop, have decided to break America’s spirit and the world order, this account seems hopelessly nostalgic, a point to which we will only return in some phantasmal next stage of our neoliberal breakdown, our global shakes.

This is the account, a little edited by my grim future knowledge.

Breakfast cereal is an emblem of the industrialized food system. If the system had a totem, surely the faces of Captain Crunch, Tony the Tiger, and Snap, Crackle and Pop would be displayed on it. Or the Leprechaun on my son’s favorite cereal, Lucky Charms. Which, incidentally, you can’t find in Paris – or rather, you have to search for among those stores that sell American goods to the expat community, which have recently become fewer. The cereal box that lies open mouthed in our cupboard is precisely the Lucky Charms with a pitiful moraine of marshmellows and triangular shaped cereal bits at the bottom of it, less than a bowl of cereal. The picture on the front cover shows a Leprechaun with big eyes and a big smile, a green hat on his head and, of course, a green fourleafed shamrock stuck to the band, juggling a rainbow of marshmallow bits, which are helpfully color coded on the back of the box in English and Spanish. A veritable diversity initiative. The Leprechaun looks a bit crazier on the back cover, and his arms are stuck on him in a funny way at the side of the box, his mouth gaping in a smile that emphasizes his teeth, a uniform curve of white, no distinction between one and the other. Liena Tu Mundo De Magia, it says under him. The dietary information is printed on the side of the box – from which we learn that the cereal has “140 calories”. I imagine this refers to one serving or “cup”. In France, instead of Spanish, one often finds the printout of “ingredients” and ”nutritional facts” in English and Arabic. For instance, Honey Crisps are somewhat vaguely routed or controlled by the Kellogg’s office in Casablanca. Our Quaker Oats come to us via a Pepsi distributor hq-ed in France. And so on.

This box is a marvel as well as, given the ecological tragedy of agribusiness, a horror. Marvels and horrors are the familiars of my ordinary life – and no doubt yours, reader. We flip between them with every app and every birdless sky.

The world of commerce, the system of global production and circulation which brought that box to my kitchen (with a little help from my friend Tom, who actually brought it over from NYC) seems, sometimes, to fill the world. It depends, however, on the act of giving. I give the cereal to my boy. My friend gave his time and money to go out and get the box and put it in his bag and bring it to us across the Ocean.

Time and labor that are not registered in any Excel sheet. My definition of neoliberalism is that cultural regime which attempts to completely embed the social in the economic (defined narrowly as capitalism, a market based system of goods and services controlled by capital); however, it is always limited by the fact that it depends, fundamentally, on what Georges Bataille called the “general economy” – the economy of unexchanged energy, generosity, and giftgiving. The further neoliberalism digs into the general economy, the more it undermines itself. In this contradiction, myth is generated.

At least this is one way to locate myth. I cannot decoding a cereal box or an advertisement for cereal without falling, somewhat, under the spell of Roland Barthes mythologies, those essays on the quotidian that assemble various decodings of certain bourgeois patterns of recognition, or styles of representation, all themselves under the pulses of the mythic . Barthes wrote them in the fifties, when he was still using an impressionistic technique. He didn’t quite have together what he meant by myth. His latter essay on myth is confusing, I think, because he retrospectively tries to cast what he was doing in the armature of a more fully developed semiotics. Still, each of those essays has an exhilarating air, as though he were an alien among these ads, sports events, strip shows and automobiles.

Myself, I can sit pretty, given such predecessors as Barthes and a thousand others. Yet I still don’t have the categories to quite understand, for instance, the glue, or – I suspect – starch based adhesive that gives the box its use and mystery. The top of the cereal box is a familiar rectangle divided into two rough triangles traced out by impressed creases. One of the triangles slots under the other. However, to get to that organized state – which we will call the OPENED cereal box – I have to make it so – because the box is eminently closed this morning. It comes closed. It is closed when it finishes its transit of the assembly line. The box is lightly sealed because the contents of the box have to be protected from spills and damage. The cereal, in other words, is very much conditioned not just by the fact that its end use is to be digested, but also by its circulation – its storage, transportation, and distribution on top of shelves in a store. Due to the necessity imposed by the truck, the store manager, and the stock person, I am confronted by a sealed box top. A helpful site named “allpack china” provides a picture of the machine that does the box sealing, from which I quote:

“This is also known as a bag-in-box machine and it packs different pouches inside the box or cartons. This instrument is the first choice of manufacturer for boxed cereal packaging. It also packs cereals directly inside the boxes that are lined with plastic or paper liners. Top load and End load cartoners are used in cereal packaging.

Working Principle

First cardboard is placed in the bag magazine from where the grippers pick the cardboard, one piece at a time. Via gripper, it is transported to the folding and gluing area. At this station, the left and right edges of the carton are folded while the glue application applies adhesives at the bottom and sides of the carton to firmly close it. Then, this folded carton is covered with a liner, and cereal flakes are introduced inside the lined box. Finally, after a precise filling top seam is sealed using glue.”

I and millions of consumers am up against this machine at least one morning a week.

The potentially separable triangles that make up that box top are glued to two interior cardboard flaps. As an American bred and born in the 20th century, know just what to do: I must deflower this box top. But from long experience I also know that I can make a mess of it. Too much pressure and you tear the thing, destroying the ideal symmetry that would insert the slot snugly under the mouth of the other triangle. If I exert the right pressure, I can break the adhesive bond and the box top will tent perfectly over the contents, which are, as well, protected by being stored in a little wax paper embryo inside. That wax paper, too, I will have to force open – and for that, scissors is your best friend. That is, if they are at hand. Of course, scissors are all too often an afterthought, as I grip the two sides of the bag and pull on them to burst the seal. Comedy can ensue, has ensued, with too much pulling – cereal everywhere! The same elements conspire against me with the box top triangles, for my experience is that the sealant is a little too tight to make it easy to unseal, manually, these tabs. They will rip, and instead of tenting the contents, they will raise up, irregularly torn, revealing the grayish paper under the beautiful red die. Every time, then, I open the cabinet and take out the cereal box, its ruinous state will reproach me. This reproach will attach, like fine starch adhesive, to my thoughts about the cereal – I will be inclined to want to hurry up its consumption, and might well toss the box before it is completely void of honey smack pleasure, in the way one hides things one is ashamed of.

This is doubly bad, since not only will the box and the wax paper embryo eventually be tossed into the garbage can, from when they will go to further litter the earth and foul the water, but at the same time I will be wasting food, organic matter, which is even worse.

Thus, much depends on my successfully applying a degree of force: my shame, my eco-citizenship, and my sense of being a good housekeeper.

The need to seal and break a seal – that is, to have adhesives that both adhere and break apart proportionate to the human force brought upon them – is an old old story, going back to myths of seals of wax that lock away vital messages – as for instance in the case of Bellerophon, who was entrusted with a message that, under its seal, instructed the receiver to kill the messenger. That is one mythic facet – the other facet is that of the trap. The cereal box is, among other things, a trap – a devise that closes on an animal and allows the trapper to open it and capture the animal. Traps are part of a technology that goes far back in human pre-history, like fire and writing.

So much depends on that starch based adhesive.

My son opened the Lucky Charms about a week ago. He is already a breaker of seals, a bearer of messages. But living in France, he is not as utterly at home with this kind of box as I am, as I remember cabinets of cereal plenty when I was a kid with four brothers and sisters. Four cereals at least, one of which would almost always be Rice Krispies. A family favorite. Lucky Charms was always an eccentric cereal – one that, with those marshmallows, was not meant for everyday, everyweek, everymonth use. The kind of cereal that can become a favorite only as an unusual cake frosting – say strawberry – can become a favorite, in as much as it is the less frequent frosting or with Lucky Charms and Captain Crunch a less frequent cereal against the rice pops and cornflakes. This is the syntax of boxes that I have dealt with all my life.

Habit makes the habitus. The cereal box is a monument, among other things, to packaging waste. I know this. Yet it is also a nostalgia object, deeply embedded in my childhood and the childhoods of all the kids I knew, the ones who survived into adulthood, the ones who as parents, inevitably, took on the burden of feeding their kids in the morning. Our civilizing task.

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6Eleanor Courtemanche, Eduardo Gonzalez and 4 others

Does a market economy generate a market culture?

 

Does a market economy necessarily generate a market culture?  Frank Cunningham wrote an interesting article on this topic that appeared in the Journal of Social Philosophy in 2005. Clearly, Cunningham was a student of Karl Polanyi He quotes a pertinent passage from one of Polanyi’s essays:

“This institutional gadget, which became the dominant force in the economy—now justly described as a market economy—then gave rise to yet another, even more extreme development, namely as a whole society embedded in the mechanism of its own economy—a market society.”


This may seem like an esoteric theme, but, in actuality, it is the central problem of our time. If the one always leads to the other, not only is liberalism sunk, but the ability to meet the enormous environmental challenges that are even now building in the oceans and the heavens is doomed to failure. That will then doom to failure whole swathes of the planet. For instance, the melting of the glacial system in the Himalayas will essential drain the source of water for around 400 to 500 million Indians and Chinese. Although the libertarians, Randians, Trumpians and other fine purveyors of superstition probably don’t know this, without water, people die. The Randians, et al., would probably answer that at least they would die in freedom, able to freely exchange their whole life savings for a couple of cups of water before expiring. And think of the enormous flexibility this would put into the labor market!

But these people are crazy. Unfortunately, at the moment they govern the planet, write the newspapers, and release the bombs. To use the word in the proper sense, they are the terrorist class.

This is my hook to Cunningham’s thesis.

Terror, or fear, is, according to Cunningham, one of the great connectors between a market economy and a market society. Cunningham makes the case that what is commonly viewed as greed – that insatiable avarice for more money driving the ideal type capitalist (he quotes John D. Rockefeller’s response to the question, how much do you need, by saying – “just a little more”) is actually driven by the fear that is promoted by one of the mechanisms of the market – its efficiency. That efficiency depends, in good old capitalist fashion, on removing ‘unnatural’ restraints to the pricing of commodities.

“Still, market economies are characterized by expansion of the market into all domains. Part of the explanation for this is greed for profits, but I suggest that at a more primordial level expansion derives from insecurity or, more precisely, fear.

Competition among producers and retailers promotes efficiency by prompting them to make and distribute things that people want and by keeping the costs of those things down—this is the key premise of free market economic theory. But at the same time, competitors must fear each other. Employment of wage labor with the omnipresent threat of dismissal keeps wages down, thus reducing this cost of production or distribution. Privatization of publicly needed goods provides captive markets. From the side of working people and consumers, market economies are also fearful places. Wage laborers must fear dismissal. Market transactions may signal consumer preferences, but they do not guarantee that goods produced in response to those preferences will be affordable.”


Cunningham’s point is that fear is what turns the relation of the economic and social around – in Polanyi’s terms, what makes it the case that, in capitalism, the economy is no longer embedded in social relationships, but social relationships are embedded in the economy.

And how we see how fear and panic are used to drive even the craziest and most marginal capitalist ideas.

To dispel fear itself – that is the center of Rooseveltian liberalism. We have to get back to that.

The 21st century "left"

 A little thought experiment-y thing occured to me as I walked to Le Progres, my little neighborhood cafe. If Churches were abolished, I thought, if there were no churches, neither Catholic nor Protestant, would there be Christians?

I think there would be. In my counterfactual, the wiping out of churches would occur after they had existed, and after Christianity had spread.

But the Christian who still existed would have apol dilemma, in that their identity would be only quasi-institutional. It would be an identity of belief without a corresponding instutional object in which to perform that belief.

This, I think, is how I think of the "Left". The fall of communism, everywhere, has left the Left with a belief system but no institutional object in which to perform its identity.

As a lefty myself, I often run up against the fact that my political performance is within an almost comically distorted image of the left, which is the moderate left parties. And those parties, everywhere in the world, are not only divorced from any organized global labor movement - the international - they are one and all opposed to such a thing. The thing that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, defined the "Left".