where does wealth come from?

My commenter Chuckie D. is none too happy with George Foster’s phrase, “"cognitive orientation" - as he says, what does that even mean? Myself, I obviously have a different take – which is why I introduced Kant’s essay on orientation as a fundamental indication of the subject’s effect in the world – for Kant, the way human’s orient themselves can’t be explained by the Lockean/Newtonian sensualists of the time. Foster spends some time on the question of the meaning of cognitive orientation, all of which is theoretically interesting – but not too much. Foster is not important for his work in theorizing attitudes, but, rather, for his description of a particular set of attitudes that are related to peasant life.

As I have been saying for the past year, it is impossible to understand the emergence of a happiness norm that governs not only one’s personal affective life, but that is, somehow, a collective social ideal and justification for political and economic arrangements without looking at the structure of the early modern political economy in Europe. My crude position was that the class immobility that had been the political ideal began to fragment in the 17th century. But why? Certainly the industrial system had not been put in place, nor do we see the hallmark of capitalism, which is a labor force mobilized by capital. Yet something is happening in the ‘classical age.’ It is something that changed Europe massively, yet has been weirdly underplayed among historians of Europe's intellectual history. It was called the discovery of the New World. Discovery, colonization, exploitation - these, I think, opened up the rigid hierarchies in the European economies. I think one of the factors that come into play, here, has to do with what Foster calls the limited good. Foster does not invoke Malthus, but surely the notion that goods are limited, so that to have a good requires that someone else not have that good – the zero sum sense of wealth – would be a rational response to a society in which the Malthusian limits were tight and visible – a society, for instance, in which famine was an ever present possibility.

I find the connection that Foster makes between the limit good, luck, and a certain image of wealth – wealth as treasure – to be highly suggestive. Foster came to his theory through his field work in Tzintzuntzan. He found it interesting that the peasants in this Mexican village divorced wealth from labor – wealth came from the outside, in the form of treasure. According to Foster, the idea of economic growth that underlines the capitalist ethos just doesn’t penetrate this world: “In fact, it seems accurate to say that the average peasant sees little or no : relationship between work and production techniques on the one hand, and: the acquisition of wealth on the other. Rather, wealth is seen by villagers in the same light as land: present, circumscribed by absolute limits, and having no relationship to work. One works to eat, but not to create wealth.”

It is at this point that the attack on superstition gains its salience. The attack on superstition is an attempt to change the behaviors that group around the limited good. Without changing those behaviors, the project of modernization - the mobilisation of labor, the industrial system, the genesis of this myth called the market - wouldn't have occurred.

Foster points out that the limited good system changes if it opens up – a very important point for anyone trying to assess the affect of the colonization of the Americas and the East Indian trade on Europe:

“I have said that in a society ruled by the Image of Limited Good there 'is no way, save at the expense of others, that an individual can get ahead. This is true in a closed system, which peasant communities approximate. But even a traditional peasant village, in another sense, has access to other systems, and an individual can achieve economic success by tapping sources of wealth that are recognized to exist outside the village system. Such success, though envjed, is not seen as a direct threat to community stability, for no one within the community has lost anything. Still, such success must be explained. In today's transitional peasant communities, seasonal emigration for wage labor is the most available way in which one can tap outside wealth. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican peasants have come to the United States as braceros in recent years and many, through their earnings, have pumped significant amounts of capital into their communities. Braceros generally are not criticized or attacked for acquisition of this wealth; it is clear that their good fortune is not at the direct expense of others within the village. Fuller finds a similar realistic appraisal of the wealth situation in a Lebanese community: "they [the peasants] realize . . . that the only method of increasing their incomes on a large scale is to absent themselves from the village for an extended period of time and to find work in more lucrative areas" (1961:72).

These examples, however, are but modern variants of a much older pattern in which luck and fate—points of contact with an open systen—are viewed as the only socially acceptable ways in which an individual can acquire more "good" than he previously has had. In traditional (not transitional) peasant communities an otherwise inexplicable increase in wealth is often seen as due to the discovery of treasure which may be the result of fate or of such positive action as making a pact with the Devil. Recently I have analyzed treasure tales in Tzintzuntzan and have found without exception they are attached to named individuals who, within living memory, have suddenly begun to live beyond their means. The usual evidence is that they suddenly opened stores, in spite of their known previous poverty (Foster 1964a). Erasmus has recorded this interpretation among Sonora villagers (1961:251), Wagley finds it in an Amazon small town (1964:128), and Friedmann reports it in southern Italy (1958:21). Clearly, the role of treasure tales in communities like these is to account for wealth that can be explained in no other manner.”

the malthusian afterlife

He came home from the war with a party in his head

One day, in December 1704, Margaretha Schütterin, the wife of a stonemason in Schwaikheim, saw a ghost. The ghost asked her to help him and 16 other souls (who also, apparently, appeared to her) who had been walking for 240 years by finding a treasure they had deposited in Schütterin’s house, hiding it from rampaging soldiers. They were monks in life, and needed the release in the afterlife which would follow upon Schütterin uncovering the treasure and using it, in part, for charitable works.

One of the monks explained that she had been chosen to do this because she had the same horoscope as Christ. Schütterin did what she could, which was to gather money from her friends and family to comply with the various tasks that would free the ghosts and lead to the treasure. This included paying for masses to be read, buying candles, and giving alms. By these means she extracted 912 Gulden out of a local baker, David Fischer.

“When he doubted her assertions, she made him believe that there was a competition between potential creditors. Margaretha Schütterin managed to establish a sort of `investment trust’ of treasure-hunters by promising them profits of up to 100,000 Gulden. The use she allegedly made of the money given to her, i.e. to donate it to pious causes in Catholic churches, could not easily be checked by the creditors. She finally left her husband whom she probably managed to deceive with her ghost story, too, and fled with the money. When Fischer denounced Margaretha SchuÈ tterin after her flight, he was sentenced to a fine of 14 Gulden for unlicensed treasurehunting, although he maintained that she had assured him that the treasure hunt had been permitted by the duke.”

This story is reported in a fascinating article on Treasure Hunting in Wurtemburg by Johannes Dillinger and Petra Feld, Treasure-Hunting: A Magical Motif in Law, Folklore, and Mentality, Württemberg, 1606 –1770 in German History (20:2). Following my theme of superstition as the jagged edge where a proto-capitalist mentality met a pre-capitalist mentality – or, to put it less schematically, where a weak notion of the human limit meets a strong notion of the human limit - I fell in love with Dillinger and Feld’s footwork among the legal archives. It turns out that the kind of magician Lichtenberg laughed out of Gottingen often made side money helping out in hunts for treasure. Dillinger and Feld turn here, to explain the obsession with treasure, to George Foster’s work on the limited good – or the zero sum economic attitudes of Mexican peasants. Luckily for us, George Foster’s major article is up on the web: Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good*. This article, published in 1968, is, I am starting to recognize, crucial to my Polanyi-ish leanings, which I am following as I uncover the roots of the happiness culture.

I have to quote this bit from the Foster’s article, about which I am so overwhelmed with things I could say that I will just... not, for the nonce:

In this paper I am concerned with the nature of the cognitive orientation of peasants, and with interpreting and relating peasant behavior as described by anthropologists to this orientation. I am also concerned with the implications of this orientation-and related behavior to the problem of the peasant's participation in the economic growth of the country to which he may belong. Specifically, I will outline what I believe to be the dominant theme in the cognitive orientation of classic peasant societies,* show how characteristic peasant behavior seems to flow from this orientation, and attempt to show that this behavior—however incompatible with national economic growth—is not only highly rational in the context of the cognition that determines it, but that for the maintenance of peasant society in its classic form, it is indispensable.4 The kinds of behavior that have been suggested as adversely influencing economic growth are, among many, the "luck" syndrome, a "fatalistic" outlook, inter- and intra-familial quarrels, difficulties in cooperation, extraordinary ritual expenses by poor people and the problems these expenses pose for capital accumulation, and the apparent lack of what the psychologist McClelland (1961) has called "need for Achievement." I will suggest that peasant participation in national development can be hastened not by stimulating a psychological process, the need for achievement, but by creating economic and other opportunities that will encourage the peasant to abandon his traditional and increasingly unrealistic cognitive orientation for a new one that reflects the realities of the modern world.

2. The model of cognitive orientation that seems to me best to account for peasant behavior is the "Image of Limited Good." By "Image of Limited Good" I mean that broad areas of peasant behavior are patterned in such fashion as to suggest that peasants view their social, economic, and natural universes—their total environment—as one in which all of the desired things in life such as land, wealth, health, friendship and love, manliness and honor, respect and status, power and influence, security and safety, exist in finite quantity and are always in short supply, as far as the peasant is concerned. Not only do these and all other "good things" exist in finite and limited quantities, but in addition there is no way directly within peasant power to increase the available quantities. It is as if the obvious fact of land shortage in a densely populated area applied to all other desired things: not enough to go around. "Good," like land, is seen as inherent in nature, there to be divided and re-divided, if necessary, but not to be augmented.

Family pictures

What are finer – or more boring to strangers – than pics from a family get together?

As LI was recently in Chicago with my family, and as my family obsessively photographs everything, I thought I’d post some pics.

So first, here we are, or here we are excluding my sister Jenny's side of the family - hmm, we never did take a complete picture, now that I think of it - all dressed up to go to the reception. My older sister, on the left, is very proud of the shawl she purchased in Ecuador. I don’t know how I ended up in the back, looking quizzical... too bad. I purchased a very rocking suit from Goodwill for this occasion. My niece Megan lends a little color to our drab grays and blacks.



Then a Lake Michigan pic, with my two brothers, Dan and Doug, and my about-to-go-to college nephew, Whit.



And finally, a failed theatrical pic of me crawling on a dune. This shot was supposed to be remind us all of the classic New Yorker cartoon showing a guy crawling in the desert. I failed, however, to look like a guy crawling through the desert. If I had only taken a pair of scissors to my clothes and shredded them, I think this pic would have worked. Well, next time.

Destructive destruction

Let others debate whether that movie about a guy in a mask and a cape is the greatest political event since October, 1918 or merely the second greatest political event. Alas, I have a feeling it will go onto the roll of films that LI will never see, which includes almost all of the Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones films, 300, Titanic, the rest of the Batman films, etc., etc. I can only fill my eyes with so much shit, and then I get so tired. As one of my avatars said, restin’ her dogs, 'I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking.”

Myself, this has been my year of Sergei Parajanov.
About which, here’s a sad story.

Economists love the phrase creative destruction. They love it so much that they have labeled all the sick shit that ever happens in the capitalist world creative destruction. But however much we are told to rub up against the word “creative” and purr, the modifier doesn’t do much to clothe the dark goddess it consorts with. Destruction is destruction. And thus it is with my little pipeline to Sergei Parajanov.

Which was a small video store, Waterloo videos. It was an excellent store for me, since it was directly on my route to Whole Foods. The Whole Foods on Fifth street in Austin is maybe a mile from my apartment. I can bike there without breaking a sweat – well, not in the summer, but most other times of the year. And the route back is sixth street. Fifth street, at present, is a bubble casualty – up the length of 5th street they are putting in high price condos. It is evident, to me, that these condos make no economic sense – they are way too expensive for the Austin market, in which the median house costs 190 thou. Compare that to condos starting at 300. It would be different if there was some kind of land shortage around Austin, or if Austin’s downtown was a big employment magnet. Just the opposite is the case. The people who can afford these condos will, presumably, be working in Austin’s high end industry, which is tech – but the tech industry headquarters are fifteen miles from downtown. Which means that, absurdly enough, space for (as the mayor of Austin has put it) 25,000 high income people is being prepared in an area in which they will have to navigate traffic back up to the peripheries of the city. And of course navigate that same traffic back home. In return for which, they get zero land and striking views of ... other condos.

My brother has told me, often enough, that I take sour views of opportunities, and of course I am no urbanist, but I fail to see the rational design here. I see a daisy chain.

Of course, whenever the papers interview the owners of the condo projects, they are assured that sales rates are tremendous. Myself, though, with my evil eye, have wondered why, if these are sales to residents (rather than speculators), the traffic on 5th seems to be generated by construction vehicles; why there is no burst of overflow businesses – restaurants, for instance – to take care of urbanites who, presumably, are paying premium prices for an urban vibe. All of which brings me to the death of Waterloo videos.

Two months ago, I overheard two clerks talking about how the store was going out of business. I was astonished. But the clerks told me all about it. Except for the part they didn’t know – the reason.

Independent video stores are becoming rarer and rarer around the country. Here’s a story about my old stomping ground, New Haven – where the Tommy K videos are going under.Tommy K, in the spirit of creative destruction, is aiming at the new tanning market.

“Kelleher says he's not sure how long his remaining three Tommy K's stores will remain open, but predicts they will close within a couple of years. He is expanding the Tommy's Tanning chain, which he operates along with his brother Ed. The 12th Tommy's Tanning outlet is set to open in Vernon this month.”

Ah, tanning – now there’s a contribution to our general health and welfare!

So, why the collapse in the video store business?

“Independent video stores and major chain video stores are closing all around the country as more people watch movies via cable TV pay-per-view, computer downloading and online delivery services such as Netflix. Other factors cited include competition from video games and other types of online entertainment, the downturn in the economy, and the generally poor quality of movie releases in recent years.

"We're closing because our product has been commoditized," explains Kelleher, pointing out the wide availability of DVDs in retail stores and grocery store kiosks. "The profit has been squeezed out of it."

That’s an interesting pot shot of a list. Myself, I think the closing of video stores feeds into the increasing ignorance of the video consumer – this is destruction destruction. When studios build movies that cost about as much to make as it costs to run a small city for a year, they require those movies to dominate. However, as we all know, most other movies really depend on vid sales and rents to turn a profit. The vast majority aren’t batmans. However, as batmanian discourse drives out talk of other movies – which is what it is meant to do – it infects the vid business with the same monocultural tendency as the movie release business. Everybody wants to buy the batman vid, and nobody wants to take a header on the Parajanov vids.

Getting me back to Waterloo videos. I have three sources of information about movies I trust: Amie, our frequent commenter on LI; Masha, a Russian film prof I work with occasionally; and what I see at Waterloo. As it happens, Waterloo had what I thought was an insufficient section devoted to foreign films. But now that Waterloo is gone, I realize that its selection was monumental compared to even the one local vid store left, Vulcan video.

As I now know. I bicycled up to the Vulcan on South Congress yesterday, entered the store, and was immediately depressed. The shelving and display was not clean and well lit, like Waterloo – rather, the lighting, old crammed shelves, and smell in the air reminded me of adult vid stores I visited when I was in my horny twenties. I had to get used to a different classification system – and such is the conservatism of my first impressions that it struck me as not so hot. On the plus side, there was more Asian films, and on the minus side, there was such a paucity of German films as to fill me with grief and anguish.

However, I imagine I’ll get used to Vulcan eventually. But what happened to Waterloo video, which arose as a result of capitalism, was not a triumph of capitalism. It was a pure downer. A mercantile space is not just an arrangement of goods into which the consumer, a blank thing with a stock of blank appetites, enters to retrieve a commodity and leave a bit of dough behind. It is a primate’s nest, like any other. The clerks at Waterloo whose judgments I learned to trust, the contest (which consisted of a free video if you could guess from which movie came the phrase chalked up on the white board – I scored five free vids!), the milling of a certain clientele and their interactions, the way the classification system would navigate me to new things I didn’t know, all of these are not things that can be substituted for. In economics, there are only variables – there are no constants. In the real world, there are only constants.

We are ruled by the variable world. And every time it rips you apart, it shouts: creative destruction.

...
Okay, enough gloom. This is Sunday, which is LI’s day to do the weekend wrap on what is really important, what transcends even Batman – I’m talking, of course, about Britney Spears. The big news here, as we all know, is that Tarantino wants Spears to play in his remake of a Russ Meyer film. A remake of a Russ Meyer film... Of course, the anti-Spears press is announcing this like this is some big privilege for our Brit – it will “revive her career.” Well, we can just say Fuck you, media! to that. The career in need of revival here is that legacy of the nineties moment, Tarantino. That he desperately needs the vibe coming off the uber-popular Brit is something that Britney herself knows well – she sees them all come begging around, joking, like they are doing her a big favor. The MTV awards show (which is guaranteed shit ratings if they don’t make Brit a headliner), the washed up director. Her mother, god bless her.

“A source said: "Quentin is convinced Britney will be brilliant. She's delighted. She thinks it could turn her career around.
"It is perfect Tarantino material. He wanted to get Britney first. She's playing the most important character."
Spears had her first starring role in the 2002 film Crossroads, portraying a high school graduate on a road-trip to find her mother. But despite grossing $60 million worldwide the movie, and Britney's performance, was panned and she received Razzie Awards for Worst Actress and for Worst Original Song.”

"A source said" – how cheesy and disgusting.

Five theses on the state of the art in inequality

1. Inequality isn’t the result of contingent trajectories driven by an indifferent marketplace. Like everything else, inequality is a moneymaking proposition.
2. There’s a polite fiction, maintained across the political spectrum, that all of us are concerned about inequality and conservatives and liberals both want to lessen it. This is, of course, the ripest bullshit.
3. The rich will always use part of their wealth to maintain their socio-economic position. Strategies for doing this are various. For instance, there is the creation of various barriers to entry to block social mobility (which operate in many dimensions – for instance, denying dental care to the children of the poor and the lower middle class is an excellent way to mark them, physically, with a burden that will be hard to lift as they try to advance in life). For surprisingly cheap sums, the wealthy can buy a contingent of scholars whose careers are dedicated to defending the current position of the wealthy – and this attitude, suitably disseminated in the media, brings an amazing payoff. But of course the greatest weapon in the arsenal of maintaining inequality is the state. So far, the behavior of the wealthy here is as utterly predictable as it is utterly invisible.
4. The great majority of the goods and services produced in the U.S. is, of course, generated by the non-wealthy. The wealthy depend upon this. So here’s the question, from the point of view of the wealthy – is it better to employ a long term or a short term strategy to manage the share of the national wealth going to the non-wealthy? A long term strategy might depend on wages and salaries rising in tandem with rises in productivity based upon the notion that this gives us a solid consumer base, and in the long term this is of benefit to the wealthy, too. In the short term, though, what if you could have your consumer spending and crimp the rise in wages and salaries? in other words, what if you arrested wage increases and increased credit limits? Take a man who made 45,000 dollars per in 1995, say. Would it be better for his compensation to rise as it has traditionally done (at least in the postwar years), so that in 2005 he made 75000 per – or would it be better for the wealthy that his compensation rise by only 5,000 dollars, while his credit limit expanded as though he were making $75,000 dollars? The short term answer is obvious. Not only do the wealthy accrue a greater margin on the productivity of our 40,000 dollar man, but the indebtedness necessary for this man to lead a $75,000 dollar lifestyle in 2005 is almost pure gold for the wealthiest, frolicking at the other end of the 6 percent interest rate. This, then, is the most beautiful way to make money, and it has become the American way in the age of the Great Fly. Of course, if it were baldly put that economic policy was about slowing the compensation and expanding the endebtedness of the majority of Americans, and that both are golden revenue streams for the wealthy, this policy might not be so popular. This is why you will never read that this is the policy course we have followed for the past twenty years, and the central economic fact to which we all must respond. This is why, when the conversation turns to inequality, the first rule in the discourse is the pretense that inequality yields no benefits. The return on producing obfuscation on this crucial point has been impressive, and can, apparently, continue indefinitely.
5. However, although I hate to harsh the Great Fly mellow, there is a flaw in this beautiful story of fleecing the mass of little piggies who make the stuff and watch tv to tell them how to be good little piggies. It turns out that there is a cost to supporting a $75,000 lifestyle on $50,000. Our 50,000 man, homo stupeficus, has to find ever more desperate expedients to keep going, and eventually he breaks: with his fog, his amphetimine, and his pearls. Who’d have guessed? This can rapidly dry up the revenue stream to the wealthy. Not only that, but there is even, it turns out, a downside to the obfuscation and promoting a debased, slavish, vile and utterly corrupt picture of humanity – in the name, of course, of free enterprise. John Q. Public might start operating with the same dirty, disgusting, vile and sick means that the wealthy operate with. As Felix Salmon recently pointed out, when the Delay and Lieberman Congress gaily passed the debt slavery act, aka the Bankruptcy bill, making it nigh impossible to get rid of credit card debt, they produced a little trap for their big fat piggish selves. Because that bill makes it more economically rational to screw the larger debt of the mortgage via jingle mail than to quit paying Visa. Greed wrongfooted greed! As we are toted up, piggies all, in the debtmonger’s bag, it turns out the little piggies can shit with impunity on the banks in this area! Funny, eh? The piggies kicked! It is almost a revolution.

Take the skin and peel it back/
Doesn't it make you feel better?

the october surprise in august

The october surprise came early this year. Did you notice it? Well, it began when it became apparent that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac might go belly up. In a sense, we can mark that as the end of the era of Cheney. It was at that moment that the money men, via the Treasury secretary, pulled the plug on the vanity next-war-in-the-making: Iran.

LI tries to remove himself from the painful spectacle of election year politics because, well, everything about it hurts. This year, in particular, we’ve watched the Dems watch the price of oil skyrocket. We’ve watched the press speculate endlessly about the cause of this, in one section of the paper, and report, in another section of the paper, about this or that statement or action implying that Israel or the U.S. is about to attack Iran. We’ve watched the crime in action, and we've watch the feebs that represent the opposition sit on their hands and seal their eyes. Did the Dems make a peep? Did they use this as a case study of the virulent blowback from pursuing a vain, egregiously stupid, manically male foreign policy in the Middle East, in contravention to the collective wisdom of the past eighty, gloriously oil fed years? Nope.

About three weeks ago, Bush changed course. There were no headlines – but the oil futures market could read what was happening. The signal was clearly sent – no war with Iran – and the security premium that had been inflating oil prices collapsed. Since then, the GOP seems to have started attracting, once more, its exurban constituency, the ones especially hit by the gas price jump. The exurbanites are also the ones that especially hate the environment – they are bred up to hate environmentalists, any limit to waste, and all the feminine frilliness that would keep them from growing fat in the ass and plunking that ass in an SUV. On the other hand, such is the ambient cretinousness that these same people are lovers of camping, hunting, and the great outdoors. Welcome to the moronic inferno of the 21st century. So, like the mouse people listening to Josephine the singer, they all swayed in unison when another stupid GOP-er, McCain, proposed destroying property values from coast to coast with pointless drilling – never mind the environmental havoc.

Of course, the opposition to the moronic inferno is caught up, still, in fantasies of unmotivated evil of its own kind. For them, preceding from the sound principle that the war class goes to war, they go to the unsound conclusion that the war class is a vast, planning organism that is going to bomb Iran tomorrow – in spite of our knowledge that such a thing would have the most evil effect on the moneymen who float the whole operation. As the planning for the occupation of Iraq shows, the new warmonger is not happy about war per se, but likes the vast corruption attendant upon pretend war. Plus of course the spectator value of being pretend warriors, exhibiting pretend bravery and pretend moral outrage all the way to the bank. That Iraq turned out not to be Panama is a bummer, dudes.

So the GOP did what it had to do – broke the back of the oil inflation monster. Since that is the most visible symbol of our economic shambles, who knows whether it will be enough to keep the exurban cretins in line. In one sense, that would be nice – let the fucks vote in ever more vile gangsters to pick their pockets and leave them out on the roadside, bleeding. But my more lamb-y, love side is against the rush of immediate gratification which this idea brings.

Put your raygun to my head - and please, press the trigger. Put me out of this misery.

Gundling, saint and martyr of all tenure track positions

On her blog, IT has often complained about the how academic departments are sliced, diced, roasted and toasted until all inspiration and genius are squeezed out of them and a tepid mediocrity, suitable for children and all future consumers, can be safely served up in Intro class dollops.

On the way back from Chicago, we were reading The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, and we came upon the story of Jacob Paul von Gundling. Gundling should surely be the patron saint of all oppressed assistant professors, lecturers and grad students, as he died for y'all's sins. So here is his story.

Gundling had worked himself up to a pretty sweet position as the official historiographer for Frederick I, a man who loved nothing more than French ceremony. Alas, when Frederick died, he was succeeded by his son, the surely half mad Frederick William I, Frederick the Great’s Pa, who hated culture and all its accoutrements. Gundling scrambled, being in debt there in Berlin, and Frederick William soon had him working on economic policy. But he also decided that Gundling, being a prof, made an ideal court buffoon. Which entailed things like:

Having to deliver a lecture on the existence of ghosts while being forced to take regular draughts of strong drink – and as Gundling got too drunk to stand, he was frogmarched back to his room where he shrieked in drunken terror as one of the court retinue visited him in a white sheet;

Confinement in a chamber with a number of young bears, while fireworks were rained down upon his head;

Being forced to dress in a caricature of Louis XIV’s court fashion, including wearing a towering wig that used to belong to Frederick I;

Being force fed laxatives and locked in a cell;

And finally – “Gundling was forced to tolerate the presence in his bedchamber of a coffin in the form of a varnished wine barrel with a mocking verse:

Here there lies within his skin
Half pig, half man, a wondrous thing
Clever in his youth, in old age not so bright
Full of wit in morning, full of drink at night
Let the voice of Bacchus sing
This, my child, is Gundling...” (82)

When the poor Gundling died, he was propped in the barrel dressed in a wig hanging down to his thighs, and turned into a spectacle, briefly, that people could pay to look at. The funeral address was given by one of his bullies at the court.

So, consider Gundling, all ye who suffer from tenure anxieties, toil and spin in departmental meetings, and are heavy burdened with academic ennuie, and remember that it could be worse!

Es sind nicht alle frei, die ihrer Ketten spotten.- Lessing

Mirror in the bathroom

Lichtenberg again.

From the history of culture jamming, here is an amusing sidenote. At midnight on January 6, 1777, Lichtenberg, with the help of his posse, consisting of a few amused officials and a bookstore owner named Dietrich, who later wrote an account of it, plastered Gottingen with posters that were supposedly written by a showman/magician, Philadelphus Philadelphia. Philadelphia had been raising money by subscription for his act – and claimed that he would unveil marvels if he could get 100 people to pitch in a Louis D’or a-piece.

(Amazingly, wikipedia actually has a translation into English of Lichtenberg’s “avertissement” – I don’t have to translate it!) You will notice that this is the kind of action which forms the basis of
“The Trolls among us”, an article in last week’s Sunday NYT magazine which article shows zero knowledge of popular acts of “wild justice” – which range from practical jokes to charivaris to pograms – which have existed throughout recorded history.

I broke off in a post last week before I could get to Lichtenberg’s Samples of Curious Superstitions. But monomania never stops, people! And thus I come back to the subject – which is discussed by Tadeusz Zatorski here. Zatorski’s article emphasizes the contrast between Lichtenberg as an enlightener and Lichtenberg as a man whose own private life was riddled by obsessive searches for signs, omens, and irrational but significant patterns. Zatorski has collected a number of Lichtenberg’s own reflections about this: God almighty ... I have always preached against superstitions, and have always been the greatest reader of signs for myself. As N... lay on his deathbed, I allowed the outcome to depend on the flights of cranes as a way to comfort myself.” “One of the most remarkable features in my character is certainly the odd superstition by which I pull premonitions out of everything, and in a day make a hundred things into an oracle. Every creeping of an insect serves to answer questions about my fate. Isn’t this a curious thing in a professor of physics?"

Zatorski quotes an interesting literature over the question of Lichtenberg and superstition – including the opinion of Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche’s friend, that Lichtenberg understood the fundamental absurdity of accounting for being: L lets the absurd count as absurd, refraining from finding reasons for it [verzichtet auf seine Begründung] and thus strictly limits its domain.” This would make Lichtenberg a predecessor of the school of therapeutic nihilism – and indeed, the Vienna Circle was attracted to Lichtenberg, as to Schopenhauer.

Zatorski’s point is that Lichtenberg’s self-observations led to a psychology of superstition. Or a social psychology. Not that the enlightenment philosophes did not possess a social psychological explanation of superstion: ultimately, they derived from fear. It was Justus Möser, in his articles directed against the French Revolution in the 1790s, who cast doubt on this explanation for a whole set of traditional practices. But Lichtenberg, too, didn’t see fear – and the inevitable chain of references leading to the chained and the unchained – as the one cause of superstition. Rather, he saw that (to put it in contemporary terms) the division between erudite and popular culture was neither absolute nor unchanging. I’ll end with these two paragraphs from Zatorski:

Even the relationship between superstition and science can, in Lichtenberg’s opinion, not so easily be brought under the rule of an unambiguous and simple formula, as it seemed to contemporary advocates of the enlightenment, who wanted to see in superstitions simply the continual “classical” opposite pole to reason. Really, superstition can be tied to diabolical evil, and even promote the emergence of infamies – Lichtenberg points her to the sad history of witch trials. But this doesn’t change the fact that, looked at more closely, especially when we see knowledge as a continually evolving whole, the borders between superstition and reason prove to be flowing and flexible on both sides: “The philosophy of the common man is the mother of ours, out of his superstitions we make our religion, just as we make our medicine out of his home remedies.” Even the concept “science” itself is observed to be highly unclear: “Where in the past one found the borders of science, we now find its middle.”
This demands a high degree of judgmental forsight. A quantum of distrust is evidently indispensable, but this means, at the same time, a certain distrust against dogmatic laws of reason. One would rather “neither deny nor believe.” For even the offerings of “rational” philosophy is nothing other than a treaty of peace that has come to stand “in the “counsels of men” – “superstition is itself a local philosophy, it also gives in its voice.” For this reason, even reason must remain continually conscious of the relative and time conditioned character of knowledge. Thus it would be adviseable to be very careful in labeling certain beliefs as superstitions, because what counts as such today can be transformed tomorrow into a serious theory: “There is thus a great difference between believing something “still” and believing it “again.” To still believe that the moon effects plants betrays stupidity and superstition, but to believe it again shows philosophy and reflection.” A researcher thus needn’t be ashamed of his interest in supernatural phenomena, so long as he observes these phenomena as like all others, requiring a completely natural explanation, even when one is not yet apparent at the moment: “Your letters on premonitions”, he wrote to the Hanover City official Wolff, “I have read with great satisfaction. I am not against these things, only I think, that one must not assume them, as long as there is space for the shadow of another explanation.” For even the doubt of everything, which seems to spring from the frame of a flat rationalism, must never be taken to a point beyond a certain un-preconceived vigilance, otherwise it can itself, in certain circumstances, degenerate into a kind of superstition. “By most people, disbelief in one thing is grounded in blind belief in another.” Then one is running the risk of tossing the baby out with the bathwater – out of fear of being laughed at as superstitious, phenomena are explained as non-existent, that still deserve to be fundamentally taken seriously and investigated by any science worthy of the name – an otherwise wholly understandable attitude in the case of a physics professor, whose greatest discovery, the “Lichtenberg Figures,” he could only describe, but not explain.”

Solzhenitsyn

LI bought the NYT in Ohare yesterday, and the first thing we thought about Solzhenitsyn’s death is – no headline? Truly, we survivors of the Cold War are slowly being forgotten.

Of course, I figured the obituary would be cast in the usual triumphal anti-communist speak. For liberals, Solzhenitsyn posed problems that weren’t apparent at the time the Gulag Archipelago came out. Liberals expect that the exposers of systems, the revealers of mass murder, will be liberals. For a liberal like myself, the Medvedev brothers were the perfect dissidents. Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, was obviously a reactionary of a certain type – as Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a socialist legislator in France, impoliticly pointed out. But no one is made to be a hero for all occasions. Solzhenitsyn, supporter of the U.S. in the Vietnam war, supporter of Pinochet and nuclear missiles, was politically a disaster. But this doesn’t discredit what he did. That the Soviet government of the Brezhnev era felt that their regime in its entirety was discredited by the Gulag was a sign of their senility and coming fall. However wild Khruschev was, he was right that the only way forward was to thoroughly air out the crimes of the Stalin era. Of course, no country likes to do this. Rightwingers will come up with the most absurd justifications for slavery and apartheid – the British have never reckoned with the crimes of Queen Victoria’s reign, although the terror famines in India are surely the template for Stalin’s policies in the 1930s, just as the concentration camps in the Soviet Union started out in imitation of the French and British penal systems - if one wants to find the roots of mass murder in the Soviet Union, it is pretty easy to find them in the imperialist and penal systems developed by the Europeans and the Americans in the 19th century. Solzhenitsyn's notion that it all sprang from the French revolution is sadly deluded.

Still, one can’t measure the moral import of the denunciation by the moral character of the denouncer – the best denunciation of the British policy of letting Irish die in the potato famine was written by John Mitchel, who valiantly tried to overthrow British rule and was sent to Australia as a political prisoner. But later in his life, Mitchel, escaping to the U.S., became an ardent racist and defender of the Confederacy.

What does get me about the obits is the obligatory comparison to Tolstoy. Solzhenitsyn was never more the Stalinist bred than his notion that to be a great writer, he had to imitate Tolstoy – a notion he shared with Sholakov. In reality, Solzhenitsyn’s politics were nothing like Tolstoy’s – imagine the defender of the Doukhbors and the Chicago anarchists making a defense of the U.S. in the Vietnam war! Solzhenitsyn’s politics were much closer to those of the Holy Synod, who excommunicated Tolstoy in 1901.

Perhaps I should read the proverbially unreadable Red Wheel for my investigation into alienated reactionaries. The Gulag by pure coincidence, sounded in parts like Celine getting in a lather. There is an image in it of being shoved into a pipe, the interior of which is lined with sharp hooks that was so close to Celine... hmm, let’s see if I can find that on the Net...

“The exceptional character which written and oral legend nowadays assigns to the year 1937 is seen in the creation of fabricated charges and tortures. But this is untrue, wrong. Throughout the years and decades, interrogations under Article 58 were almost never undertaken to elicit the truth, but were simply an exercise in an inevitably filthy procedure: someone who had been free only a little while before, who was sometimes proud and always unprepared, was to be bend and pushed through a narrow pipe where his sides would be torn by iron hooks and where he could not breathe, so that he would finally pray to get to the other end. And at the other end, he would be shoved out, an already processed native of the Archipelago, already in the promised land. (The fool would keep on resisting! He even thought there was a way back out of the pipe).”

I don’t know if it is my imagination, but it seems like the cheering even on the right about Solzhenitsyn is muted. Perhaps it is the embrace of Putin – how funny! They loved him when he praised Pinochet, but Putin – because America needs a new cold war, god damn it – has cast old Solzhenitsyn out of the club. But Putin and Solzhenitsyn were bound to converge - the ex KGB chief and the chief denouncer of the KGB.

the return!

I’m back (said he, having dealt with a private matter in a dark corner).

LI’s first encounter with Chicago was a hit and miss affair, punctuated by mucho traffic, communications breakdowns between all the bossier members of my family, a fiesta of pink satin dresses, tan shoulders, blondness, tuxedos and priests at the wedding of my nephew, and my famous Puck dance at the reception – which consists of an attempt to fly to the bodacious rhythm of “Magic Stick”. The highlights of the trip were: the astonishing Field Museum, which puts the American Museum of Natural History to shame – my two astonishing nephews, with whom I renewed acquaintance – my afternoon with my friend Janet, a perfect rendez vous, ending, as all such things do, in wine and seafood – and the Indiana Dunes, where my bros, on my insistence, shot a photo of me climbing up one of the dunes on my belly, because I thought it would look like a classic New Yorker cartoon and make LI’s readers laugh. See how I think of y’all? This I will post later.

au revoir arrivaderci chow

Well, that’s it. I’ve done all the editing and reviewing I can stand. So now, off to Chicago for four days with the family. A wedding, see my old friend Janet, try to find the very spot where Nelson Algren hoisted Simone de Beauvoir up so she could peer through the bars of one of Chicago’s jails – what could go wrong? Although I have this premonition of doom. Of course, I have a premonition of doom when I buy breakfast cereal...

In the meantime, some more linkies for y’all.

First, Zoe’s tout va bien, a song that is all about LI – the problem with happiness! as per this instructive video, it leads inevitably to slaughtering your neighbors, your parents and your dog.

Then, a nice piece about Penelope Fitzgerald by Julian Barnes. Barnes makes a play with the phrase “amateur writer.” I first heard that phrase years ago, having dinner with Alfredo Bryce Echinique – a name which, alas, means nothing to Americans, but take my word for it, Bryce is the Peruvian novelist you should read, not Vargas Llosa.

And then, there is this, from At Swim Two Birds – the new Everyman Flann O’Brien will be at my side in the several bars and restaurants in the several airports that I will honor with my presence (while they pay no attention, silly fools!) on the way up to Chicago:

“It was stated that while the novel and the play were both pleasing intellectual exercises, the novel was inferior to the play inasmuch as it lacked the outward accidents of illusion, frequently inducing the reader to be outwitted in a shabby fashion and caused to experience a real concern for the fortunes of illusory characters. The play was consumed in wholesome fashion by large masses in places of public resort; the novel was self-administered in private. The novel, in the hands of an unscrupulous writer, could be despotic. In reply to an inquiry, it was explained that a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity. It was undemocratic to compel characters to be uniformly good or bad or poor or rich. Each should be allowed a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living. This would make for self-respect, contentment and better service. It would be incorrect to say that it would lead to chaos. Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet. The modern novel should be largely a work of reference. Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before—usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would effectively preclude mountebanks, upstarts, thimbleriggers and persons of inferior education from an understanding of contemporary literature.”

links and a plea

Deviens ma proie
Libertine

As per my last post, LI is not going to be posting too much this week. However, I would like to point our readers to the Wax works video mentioned by the mysterious Azazel616 in a comment to the Insects post. I love this sequence of vids.

Further, for those of you yearning and burning for the latest in French folky goth music with that saving touch of Peau d'Âne, you should hurry to see Claire Ditzeri’s Tableau de Chasse. It is the eternal story of man, woman, and huntin’, which ends with the lights out and Cupid turning back into the primal essence.

And hey, those of my readers who know or live in Chicago, could you help a guy out with opinions re the finer bars and diners? You know what I mean - the kind of places where a man can get his head knocked in for emitting incautious opinions about the, uh, political incompetence of Pilsudski.

hypochondria of the deskbound

All the neighborhood dogs/lickin at her feet

“Benvenuto Cellini made the brilliant observation: wounds do not make us clever, because new ones always announce themselves under a different form. This I know well from my own experience.”

Lichtenberg’s experience – his orientation, if you will – derived, as everybody likes to point out, from the childhood accident that crippled him – bent his spine, that is (although the Lichtenberg society has demystified this beautiful story with a more plausible one about rickets – no matter! the myth probably arises from Lichtenberg’s own understanding of his wound ). It left him with a lifetime’s share of hypochondria – in one letter after another, his whole life long, Lichtenberg was dying. He felt bad about the fact that, feeling bad all the time, he didn’t know if he was feeling bad or good at any one particular time. The hypochondriac’s dilemma, as he well knew, was that hypochondria, in which one always suspects something bad, might disguise the advent of something worse.

Lichtenberg was an enlightenment savant, the professor of “universal philosophy” in Göttingen, an astronomer, mathematician, and general spreader of light. Ah, these savants in their cities – Smith in Glasgow, Montesquieu in Bordeaux, Kant in Konigsberg, and Lichtenberg in Göttingen. Like any enlightenment savant, he liked sex – and this part of Lichtenberg’s life, since Gert Hoffman’s novel, has now become the most famous part of his life. This would not really surprise Lichtenberg, with his satiric sense of the unexpected reputation, the perversity of fame, that checkers history.

Like all the German savants, Lichtenberg was an inveterate contributor to or founder of journals. For a long time, he contributed little essays to the Göttingen Tachenkalender. In 1783, he contributed Specimens of curious superstitions. I don’t believe this essay has been translated into English. Lichtenberg is, in general, not very translated into English. NYRB books published a translation of the Waste Books for which he is most known, by the most successful translator of Nietzsche, R.J. Hollingdale. I must say, I find Hollingdale’s preface pretty bad, since it isn’t true that Lichtenberg’s other writings are terrible. True, the Hogarthian essay is, uh, tedious ... but it was preparatory to the great anti-physiological writings. Lichtenberg’s epigrammatic style is evident in these writings – for instance, his mock learned work on the physiognomy of dog’s tails and what they tell us about the character of dogs. There is something very Twain like about that essay.
Well, LI is pressed by business right now, and we have to go to Chicago for a wedding on Wednesday – we will be back on Monday, August 4. So our readers might not fill themselves with the usual cornucopia of trivial fact and bombastic speculation that we try to give them each and every day. Damn! So our plan to translate Lichtenberg in bits, then the remarks about superstition by Goethe in his essay on Justus Moser, then the bit about astrology in Goethe’s letter to Schiller - these will all have to be put off.

the advocate for the insects

My thesis of the human limit seems, at first glance, to be countered by Lüthi’s persuasive notion that folktale heros and folktale objects possess a depthlessness that can’t be attributed to some stylistic primitiveness. That depthlessness is a narrative choice, as one can see by looking at the legends that circulate at the same time, and within the same circles. If a character displays no astonishment about the world in which “wishes matter”, then perhaps this is a sign of the fact that fundamentally, pre-modern European societies saw the world in the same way as early modern and modern societies – that the world is essentially made for man. In fact, the positivist version of history would say exactly this. Isn’t God simply Man, suitably arrayed in a cosmic fatsuit? Doesn’t Red Riding Hood’s wolf speak French? Aren’t the stars above us tuned to the flushes and faints of the microcosmic Adam? Isn’t the stamp of man on the World since the world was conceived in the minds of men? And, to reverse my narrative line, isn’t it just in modernity that we discover the “indifference” of the world, to use Camus’ phrase?

The positivist narrative, which plots the advance of the human understand from belief in God to belief in humanity (whether that humanity is represented by the self interested individual, the proletariat or the scientist) generated a counter-narrative that became popular in the sixties, in which the “West” is identified with greed and technology, and we are given an easy to use list of villains, like Descartes, capitalism, rationality, etc., etc. In this counter-narrative, the founding book, Genesis, lays out the environmental disasters to come, as God gives man dominion over nature. In fact, the positivists and their opponents generally share a view of the unfolding of history, but assign different values to it. And, of course, ultimately both views seem to agree on the desirability of promoting happiness as the supreme emotional value.

Take, for example, the judicial relationship between man and beast. Or man and caterpillar.

“In 1586, extraordinary rains caused a great quantity of caterpillars to be born, which devastated Dauphiné. The grand vicar of the diocese of Valence cited them to appear before him and appointed for them a curator of defender. After solemn debates, the caterpillars were condemned to empty the premices of the diocese immediately; but they failed to hasten to obey, and, in place of anathemas and excommunications, it was agreed, after the advice of two theologians and two professors of law, to have recourse to abjurations, prayers, and aspersions of holy water. In spite of all, the caterpillars only disappeared a long time afterwards. This singular sixteenth century trial is remarkable inasmuch as this was the age of a great intellectual movement imprinted on minds and that the teaching of Roaldes, Cujus and Salinger threw a lively flame on the university of Valence.” (Bulletin d'archéologie et de statistique de la Drôme, 1875:452-3)

What happened in Valence was not an unusual occurence. The philosophes of the eighteenth century had great fun with the idea of an “advocate for the insects”. However, LI is fascinated by the very possibility that the insects have a legal side that should be listened to, debated, especially since we know that the asperging of holy water has given way to the asperging of insecticide without the insects having any advocate left.

The positivist could say, however, that the advocate of the insects is only advocating for them from the human point of view – that is, God is using them to avenge some human fault.

Well, this will lead us to a little essay by Lichtenberg. And the, by these byways, we will get back to Schiller, Goethe and astrology.

lest that thy heart's blood run cold...

Max Lüthi, in his The European Folktale: Form and Nature, systematically contrasts the folktale (Märchen) with the legend (Sagen). Legend, for Lüthi, is something like the Saint’s tale, or the Arthurian tales, which – he claims – endow characters and objects with a “greater three-dimensionality” than folktales. According to Lüthi, folktales are characterized, stylistically, by depthlessness – the other world, the Aber-world, of the supernatural is accepted by the folk tale hero without a blink.

“In the Grimms’ folktale of the Seven Ravens, we are told of the little sister who arrives at the glass mountain: ‘What was she to do now? She wanted to save her brothers and had no key to the glass mountain. The good little sister took a knife, cut off one of her little fingers, pit it into the gate, and thus managed to open it. Once she had made her way in, a little dwarf came to meet her” – and so on, without the slightest indication of physical or psychological distress.” (13)

Lüthi’s examples can be infinitely multiplied. Red Riding Hood shows no surprise that the wolf talks to her; Rosanie accepts Ricdin-Ricdon’s magic wand without any question about how it works, or why, if it possesses the magical qualities Ricdin-Ricdon claims, he hasn’t made better use of it. In Dumb Hans, a hunchback who impregnates a princess simply by wishing is also able, by wishing, to build her a castle and cast off his hump – why, then, did he spend his youth being mocked and tormented for being an ugly hunchback? The superimposition of a violent, sexually active, hierarchical world over a “once upon a time, when wishes were still of use” does not take the questions that arise in that hierarchical world and apply them to the new, hybrid world – instead, there is a sort of automatic assumption that the rules have changed, now. But have changed capriciously, as it were, by themselves.

That general attitude of depthlessness, in the world of folktales, seems to translate an aspect of the culture which, according to an increasingly powerful consensus among the elite in the seventeenth century, was riddled by superstition. The struggle against superstition does not begin in the seventeenth century – Plutarch wrote against superstition. It became one of the commonplaces of Christian preaching. In On Godly Fear, a sermon by Jeremy Taylor, the great Anglican preacher, superstition is analyzed as a misplaced fear, and put among the pagan and Romish practices. It is at the base of idolatry.

“The Latins, according to their custom, imitating the Greeks in all their learned notices of things, had also the same concepiton of this, and by their word superstitio understood “the worship of demons,” or separate spirits; by which they meant, either their minores deos, or else their zoas apotheothentas, “their braver personages, whose souls were suppose to live after death;” the fault of this was the object of their religion; they gave a worship or a fear to whom it was not due: for whenever they worshipped the great God of heaven and earth, they never called that superstition in an evil sense, except the Adeoi, “they that believed there was no God at all.” Hence came the etymology of superstition: it was the worshipping or fearing the spirits of their dead heroes, “quos superstites credebant,” “whom they thought to be alive” after their apotheiosis, or deification, “quos superstantes credebant”, “standing in places and thrones above us;” and it alludes to that admirable description of old age, which Solomon made beyond all the rhetoric of the Greeks and Romans; “Also they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way;” intimating the weakness of old persons, who, if ever they have been religious, are apt to be abused into superstition; they are “afraid of that which is high;” that is, of spirits, and separate souls of those excellent beings, which dwell in the regions above us...” (Sermons, 1874:66)

This long notion of a misplaced fear, a double of the expected and demanded fear before those who are actually on high, migrates from the Stoics to the Church fathers to the natural scientists. It still constitutes the critical attitude that is taken to superstition and the understanding of folk practices. Yet, there’s an odd break between the ability to go between this world and the other world in the folktales and this picture of the culture of superstition. As always, when folktales pose a hermeneutic problem, they usually produce a folktale about that problem. So, the problem of the wish generates the folktale of the Fisherman’s wife that is about the very nature of wishing; and the problem of fear and its lack becomes “A Tale About the Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was.”

To which we will return... Our point, however, is that the struggle against superstition was defined differently at the end of the seventeenth century than at the beginning – that is, for the elite culture. The court position of the astrologer is a good marker of this change. Jean Baptiste Morin, whose book on French astrology (an apparently endless book, having a million volumes, which were employed to build the great wall of France – a little known structure which can be seen from one of our moons) has been partly translated by the American federation of astrologers, was still able to write horoscopes for King Louis XIII and give astrological advice to Richelieu, but even then, he was engaged in a bitter rearguard battle with Gassendi about the truth of astrology. Hervé Drévillon in Lire et ecrire l’avenir notes that the laws against astrology changed during the seventeenth century. In 1628, decrees were made against prophecies that predicted the fates of individuals, princes and states – “It was a matter then of containing astrology in certain limits, without contesting a certain legitimacy and pertinence belonging to it.” However, in “1682, the strategy of monarchic power in regard to astrology changed. From this time forth, it was no longer a matter of containing a discourse in the limits of what was judged politically tolerable, but of eradicating a belief whose effects were considered pernicious for the morality and order of the public.” [226] The members of the erudite elite who were willing to defend astrology dwindled. Perrault, Drévillon notes, in his death notice of the blind military strategist, Blaise de Pagan, attributed Pagan’s book on natural astrology to his “faiblesse.”

Franchising the column

LI owes Scott McLemee, who writes a column at Inside Higher Education, a note of thanks for having publicized our column on academic books (appearing every two months now!) at the Austin American Statesman. We did an interview with him in January, which, rather surprisingly, was quoted in a speech by the president of the Association of American University Presses at their convention. For the first and last time in history, I actually had a tiny tiny effect on the world:

“Last month, during his speech at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses, outgoing president Sandy Thatcher quoted from my interview with Roger Gathman, who writes “The Academic Presses” for the Austin paper. “The people making decisions,” Gathman had said, “have to realize that it is in their interest to encourage reading. They have to start thinking about the need to generate an audience. At that level, it makes no sense for all of your cultural coverage to point to activities that don’t involve reading.” Thatcher, who is also the director of Penn State University Press, indicated that his recent venture in editing the review section of a local newspaper, the Centre Daily Times, was inspired in part by that column.

At the time, I pointed out that Gathman’s comment about reading would seem profoundly sensible to anyone who gave it two minutes of thought – but who could spare that much time when (as it seems at newspapers nowadays) the sky is falling?”

I am planning - lazily - to franchise this column, that is, sell it to other newspapers, which could publish it a week after I write it for the Austin American Statesman. My plan is to go to newspapers in university towns - Athens Ga, Madison Wi, Eugene Oregon. The problem with the plan is, of course, exactly what Scott points out in the article - the ethos of newspaper publishing has eroded.

Newspapers are much mythologized beasts - they have by and large contributed to the "softening" of manners that is the mark of liberal society, but they have done so unconsciously, as it were - from Pulitzer to the Chandlers to the Hearsts, media owners have commonly shared the political bent of Murdoch, yet they have depended on writers to provide their materials. Writers are a feu follet breed - normally, their cultural capital is in gross disproportion to the return they make on it. Hence, they are inclined to think of themselves as badly appreciated, which plants the seed of dissatisfaction with social arrangements as they are. And of course they pass through social circles in which the bourgeois norms are bent in any number of interesting ways. This doesn't necessarily result in liberalism per se - it can easily result in extreme reaction - but it shows itself around the edges even in the day to day work of creating establishment supporting narratives.

lies, damn lies, and the conventional wisdom

LI likes to read the econ blogs when times get all roller-coastery. One thing that the blogs share with the thumbsuckers in the papers is that Americans will generally have to get used to lowering their standard of living. This has become the truism du jour, and it goes along with the other truism, which is that Americans have been living way past their standards of living.

Of course, that is all nonsense and lies. There is one and only one cause of our present discontents, which is that Americans – by which I mean the bottom 80 percent – have been horribly underpaid for the last thirty years. It is always and everywhere good to remember that wealth comes only from the bottom. Wealth creation simply doesn’t happen at the top – licitly. Of course, we’ve watched wealth creation happen at the top for years, but a close look at it shows that it is merely the piling of one fiction on top of the other. What the top does, at the limit, is administer and manage. For this function, it has succeeded in rewarding itself with the lion share of the wealth created over the past thirty years – by the bottom 80 percent. When one reads stories, such as the much commented upon story in the NYT about the Diane McCleod, the woman with two jobs, earning 45, 000 per year, who had accumulated debts of around $280,000, including her home, an asset that is probably worth around $160,000 in today’s market, the first thing I thought is that she should probably be making 80 to 90 thousand a year working those jobs. She would be, if wages had risen as they rose in the seventies. But here’s what happened: to arrest the falling profit margins, the political and business establishment decided to smash that rise in the wage rate. They did so under the cover of a story that is universally repeated, and so now, simply assumed. That story is that wealth comes from the top. It is a fairy tale for babies, but it has nicely succeeded in blunting the progressive tendency in taxation as well as arousing the general public’s support for programs designed to cut the general public’s throat. Of course, the guilt machine turns on automatically to make the whole thing go down like sugar. Turns out McCleod liked purses, and purchased many expensive purses on her credit cards. Is that shameful or what? She actually wanted something she considered beautiful in her life. How disgusting.

Or... no. This is what is shameful:

“GE Money Bank, which levied a 27 percent rate on Ms. McLeod’s debt and is part of the GE Capital Corporation, generated profits of $4.3 billion in 2007, more than double the $2.1 billion it earned in 2003.”

In 1979, a 27 percent rate would be illegal.

The U.S. is experimenting with a unique blend of robber baron capitalism and consumerism. The barons depend on the consumer, while at the same time, they chisel down the amount the consumer takes home until, of course, relative to the robber baron the consumer’s income sinks below the horizon. To make up for the logical gap here, the robber baron extends credit at 27 percent to the consumer. To make it, the consumer takes two jobs, thus robbing the day of any moment in which to be simply human. The consumer responds in the classically mammalian way when the lab environment turns hostile, by rushing to the bowl for sweets. In the labs, the rats die and they jack out the kidneys to examine the stress effects. In the suburbs and traffic jams, the consumer’s humanity turns to a peculiar mixture of glucose and methane, while the wallets are jacked out for other charges as they may apply. Outside the window, the world is upside down and the Whore of Babylon has lofted a bright, shiny sword.

what does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?

Kant’s little writings are all too little known, except for the all too known What is Enlightenment. One of his most entertaining papers is entitled “What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking.” It was written to interfere in a dispute between Mendelssohn and Jacobi over the limits of reason and the rights of genius. Mendelssohn, in the course of this dispute, talks about being “oriented” by common sense, or healthy reason, and opts for a religious purified of enthusiasm, worshipping a rational God. Kant, with that driest of dry wits (the wit of the praying mantis as she devours her mate) likes the word orientation (and of course there is a little subdued play here with Mendelssohn as a man from the orient – a Jew).

This is how Kant explains it:

To orient oneself means, properly: out of a given world region (in the four of which we divide the horizon) to find the other, namely, the place of rising (sunrise). If I look at the son in the heaven at this instant and know that it is noon, so I know how to find the south, west, north and east. But I need in support of this throughout the feeling of a difference in my own subject, namely, my right and left hands. I name it a feeling; because these two side show externally to the intuition [Anschauung – inner view] no marked difference. Without this capacity: in the description of a circle, without requiring any distinction of objects in it, to still distinguish the movement of the left to the right from the opposed direction, and through this to determine a difference in the position of the objects a priori, would not be something I knew how to do, if I did not set the West to the right or the left of the south point of the horizon, and so thus should complete the circle with the north and the east until I was again at the south. Thus I orient myself geographically by all objective data on the heavens, but only through a subjective base of difference (Unterschiedungsgrund); and if, in a day through some miracle all the constellations otherwise retaining the same shape and position relative to each other only took a different direction, that is, instead of eastwardly, going now westwardly, in the next starbright night no human eye would perceive the least change, and even the astronomer, if he simply relied on what he saw and not at the same time on what he felt, would be unavoidably disoriented.

Kant always had a deep appreciation of the time reversable world of Newtonian physics. The notion of the sky played backwards or the earth going backwards is a gorgeous mindfall – one can go a long way down, thinking of that. Is there a bottom? This is a subjective claim indeed, but not one often raised in philosophy. Partly because philosophers spend too little time marveling over left and right. Kant, in this essay, uses the term subjective to mean something oddly material – inhabiting a body in space and time. But, as Kant knows, that body is built, partly, of directions that seem to have nothing to do with space and time as we commonly think of them, requiring an imaginary dimension in which we can transfer from left to right and right to left. This is the issue at the heart of the dispute between Leibniz and Newton about absolute vs. relative space. Which I’m not going into, except to note how Kant is building his notions

His next move is to expand this idea – which, incidentally, involves introducing the first practical joke (if we put aside Descartes evil demon) in philosophy (and all the praying mantises go doo, da doo da doot da doot doo da doo da doo doot da doot):

This geographic concept of the process of orientation I can now expand, understanding it thusly: in a given space in general, thus purely mathematically, to orient oneself. In darkness I orient myself in a well known room when I get hold of only a few objects, whose place I have registered in my memory. But here I am obviously helped in nothing by the specific affordances (Bestimmungsvermogen) of the place according to a subjective ground of distinction: then the objects, whose places I should have to find, I don’t see at all; and if someone, playing a joke on me, had put all the same objects in the same order one with another, but to the left where all had previously been to the right, so I would in a room where otherwise the walls were all the same, not be able to find myself. But so I orient myself now through the simple feeling of a difference between my two sides, the right and the left. Just that happens, when I in the nighttime on street otherwise familiar to me, in which I can now not distinguish between houses, go and appropriately wend my way.

Am I the only one, reading this, who thinks:

“He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.”

I won’t translate all of Kant’s essay. I want to drive us to this passage – and, I assure you, I am still thinking about Wallenstein and superstition. A moment, ladies and gentlemen. Let me compose myself. I haven’t been feeling well lately. Isn’t it hot in here? Let me get out my handkerchief. Actually, touch of an old tropical distemper, plus of course the damned clap. Vixen was well worth it! The worms have the best of it. They dine off the best bits... Was this the face that launched a thousand ships...

Oh.

“The course of things is approximately this. First, genius disports itself by making its bold flights, since it has dropped the thread that otherwise links it to reason. It soon entrances others through mighty speeches and great expectations, and seems to have set itself on a throne, which slow, heavy reason barely graces; whereby it still leads with the language of the same. The at that point assumed maxim of unworthiness of a too highly placed, lawgiving reason we common men call enthusiasm [Schwarmarei] these sports of benificent nature call it illumination. Because in the meantime there must arise a confusion of speech among them because, while reason can assume the dignity to command every man, here now this one, now that one follows his inspirations: thus must finally arise, out of inner inspirations through the testimonies of externally observed facts, out of traditions, that were in the beginning themselves kinds of preferences, with time becoming intrusive oracles [Urkunde], with a word the whole subjection of reason under the fact, i.e. superstition - because this at least carries with it the form of law and thus a point of rest.”

Time for a quick one...

“The double sense of life accuses me...”

In 1797 and 98, Schiller was working on his Wallenstein cycle of plays. Wallenstein, a Bohemian warlord who figured in the thirty years war, was not at first glance an ideal figure for create, in the German language, theater in the Shakespearian vein. In her history of the thirty years war, C.V. Wedgewood pens this portrait:

“He was not a popular man: tall, thin, forbidding, his face in the unexpressive portraits which have survived is not prepossessing. No great master painted him and the limners who attempted his saturnine features agree only in a few particulars. The irregular features, the high cheek bones and prominent nose, the heavy jowl, the thick, out jutting underlip...

Already Wallenstein had a reputation for pretensions beyond his station. A Czech by birth, speaking the language fluently and allied to many of the leading families, dispossessed and otherwise, Wallenstein was influential if not popular in many sections of society...

Meanwhile, before the end of 1623 Wallenstein had contracted a second marriage, with Isabella von Harrach, a lady who regarded him with the nearest approximation to love which we may suppose it was ever his fate to inspire...”

Kepler, who worked for the Bohemian court, had drawn up his horoscope. Although astrologers were employed by all the royal houses in the early 17th century (Campanella, the author of City of the Son, had drawn up Louis XIV’s horoscope), Schiller decided to make astrology as central to Wallenstein’s Death as witchcraft was to MacBeth. Wallenstein did have his own astronomer, “Sini”. Voltaire, in the Philosophical Dictionary, under the entry Astronomy, made some typical acerbic comments about this:

"You should still less be astonished that so many men, who were, besides, elevated above the vulgar, so many princes, so many popes, who one could not fool about the least of their interests, were so ridiculously seduced by that impertinence of astrology. They were very proud and very ignorant. The stars were only for them: the rest of the universe was scum in whose affairs the stars didn’t meddle at all. They were like that prince who trembled at a comet, and who responded gravely to those who didn’t fear it at all: you can talk – you aren’t a prince.

The famous Duke of Wallenstein was one of the most infatuated by this chimera. He called himself a prince, and consequently thought that the zodiac was formed expressly for him. He never besieged a city, he never began a battle, then after having held council with the heavens. But as this great man was extremely ignorant, he had established for the chief of his council an Italian rogue named Jean Baptiste Seni, on whom he bestowed a six horse carriage and a stipend of twenty thousand livres. Jean-Baptiste Seni could not predict, however, that Wallstein would be assassinated by the orders of his gracious lord, Ferdinand II, and that he, Seni, would be returning to Italy on foot.

It is plain that one can know nothing of the future but by conjectures. These conjectures can be so strong that they approach certitude. You see a whale swallow a small boy: you can bet 10,000 to 1 that he will be eaten. However, you can’t be absolutely sure, after the adventures of Hercules, of Jonah and of Roland the fool, who remained so long in the belly of a fish.”

Hmm, I wonder if this entry gives us the seed of the story of Pinocchio? Anyway, in LI’s daunting pursuit of whatever, we will be using Schiller’s Wallenstein and Goethe’s more “instinctive” sense of astrology –as one commentator puts it – to discuss superstition.

homo sominex

One of those facts that makes the drinking man doubt the observant side of the human animal is the strange lag in the discovery that every healthy male sports an erection about every 90 minutes during the sleep cycle. And for y’all ladies out there, well, the vagina goes through a 90 minute cycle as well, tied to REM sleep, of dilation and moistening. Put your hands in the air like you just don’t care! While there are cave paintings of sleeping men with erections and there’s an Egyptian tomb painting of the same fascinating subject, science with a capital S only stumbled onto it in 1944, when it was reported by German doctors. This is all according to Paul Martin’s book on Sleep. That scientists were so late to the game is depressing news – where were the giants of Natural Philosophy back in the 17th century? Martin, hating Freud, hastens to say that the erections and vaginal dilation aren’t sexual in nature. He also says he’d like to buy a bridge in Brooklyn, if any of his readers happen to own one.

That the Nazis were studying sleepers in 1944 seems to surprise Martin, but those of us who’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow realize that WWII was more than a war, it was the world we come from, it was the egg opening, it was the hatching of our common psychotic global humanity, a synergy of endorphins. Our erections were wagging as the bombs were dropping. So of course, humans were guinea pigged on all levels, for all purposes, because this is how control happens, honey. Now, let me strap you back into your cot...

However, I am starting up this subject to link to the review of a book, Insomniac, by Gayle Greene that I received and didn’t review. I feel guilty about that. But when I told my editor I wanted to review two books on sleep problems, he looked at me as if I were nuts. And when I told him Sleepers Civil Rights were the next big next big thing (I get carried away, I foam at the mouth, I start sounding like Maldoror off his meds!), he changed the topic. I obviously had briefly lost that contact with reality. The synaptic distance had lengthened.

Well, the sleepless are truly in a different world from the slugabeds, the ones without the wired brain tap tap tapping Nevermore at the vital center somewhere back there in the brain. I have always loved IT for owning up to the insomnia that keeps her up (If your tired unblinking head/rivet the dark with linear sight...) especially as insomnia is one of those things it is difficult to be in solidarity with – for what does insomnia do but make you cranky, and what makes you crankier than somebody bitching about insomnia? Which is why the sleepless do not form a class. Oh, they might compare remedies, but only to diss each other’s favorites. Sleepless anonymous would be a (waking) nightmare.

Myself, as middle age has crept upon, I’ve encountered the old restless legs/cramped muscles problem that so many have solved simply by putting a bullet in their heads. Actually, it is the cramps that is the worst. The pain scares me – I’ve never been a fan of pain. Especially when my foot will suddenly cramp up. It will happen and then, for nights afterwards, the ghost of that cramp will hover over my foot. I’ll stare at the ghost. The ghost will stare at me. It is a hard thing in life when a man is afraid of his own foot.

I’ve been advised that the best thing is calcium (hence, got some calcium horsepills) and phosphorus (hence, I’m eating ever more bananas). So the nightly routine is sleeping pill, aspirin (on principle) horsepill of calcium. Last week I ran out of sleeping pills, and insouciantly decided to show the world and my foot that I could do without. So for four days I knew four a.m. intimately. And I developed a new syndrome, which I am sure is related to kanashibari, except that instead of feeling a being sitting on my chest, I would get this ghostly feeling. The hairs would rise on my body, like I was scared. And I would feel scared, briefly. Perhaps it was the ghost of my sleep that was visiting me, but really, that’s double dipping and no fair. So I went back to the pills.

This is from D.T. Max’s review of Insomniac:

Insomniac is, along the way, an alarming, uncomfortable portrayal of how researchers in the field fail the sufferers they are supposed to treat. Desperate for funds, bent over by insurance companies, whiplashed by the National Institutes of Health, researchers do not treat insomnia as it is actually experienced. If you cannot cure me, Greene seems to be saying, at least hear me. Don’t tell me how insomnia ought to be, but let me tell you how it really is. “What is missing from everything I read about insomnia is—the insomniacs,” she writes. And earlier she confides, “No doctor I ever saw showed the slightest curiosity about the cocktail of hormones, estrogen, progesterone, thyroid, that I ingest daily.” “This is a somewhat cranky book,” she writes. Indeed it is.
And with reason, as Greene makes clear. Certainly insomnia came early to her and has stayed for a long time. Greene was born wide awake. “There is no sleep in that baby,” her mother wrote to her father in 1944, in a I’ve tried (nearly) everything anyone has ever told me worked for them,” she writes, “and it’s taken me some strange ways: lathering myself in sesame oil, brewing a Chinese herbal tea so foul that my dog fled the kitchen when it steeped, concocting a magnesium supplement that hissed and spat like something out of Harry Potter.” On the pharmaceutical front she’s been equally active, sampling “valerian, kava kava, chamomile, skullcap, passionflower, homeopathic concoctions, L-tryptophan, 5-HTP, GABA, melatonin, Elavil, Zoloft, trazodone, tricyclics.” Add to this the benzodiazepines, “Librium, Valium, Xanax, Dalmane, Klonopin, Restoril, Halcion, and more Ativan than I care to remember or probably can remember, since the drug erodes memory.” Throw in Ambien and Sonata, and “in the bad old days” sedatives such as Nembutal, Seconal, and Miltown. Plus the over-the-counter remedies: Sominex, Nytol, Sleep-Eze. Not to mention other treatments, including meditation, acupuncture, and biofeedback. And on and on, poor soul. Nothing ever quieted her chattering brain.”
Bad old days? What the fuck? Oh please, what I’d not do for a Seconal. I have my own theory about the chattering brain, which is that if you wire it to chatter, it won’t turn off. If I had learned not to read in bed, if I could avoid the computer screen, if I wasn’t continually scribble scribble scribble, if at some point these had been my choices, I believe I’d sleep like my brothers tell me they do. But I took the road less traveled by – because I’m a complete idiot. Although, in fact, I’m not as cranky as Gayle Greene, who has a much deeper condition than I do. The pills work for me. By two, usually, I’m out like a baby.