Doing intellectual history: the Great and Little Tradition

Is intellectual history about intellectuals? Or is it about the intellectual spirit of a given epoch and culture, the mix of ideas and assumptions? Is it, in other words, about what James Scott has called the Great Tradition and the Little Tradition?

Recall what Scott says about the two traditions in his seminal essays about peasant revolts from the seventies: the Great Tradition, which is usually developed in the urban setting by ‘high culture’ intellectuals, then spreads out into the rural setting, where it encounters the set of beliefs and symbols held by peasants, or the Little Tradition. The process of dissemination, however, is full of slippages:

“My contention … will be that there is something systematic about this slippage between religious and political ideas as understood and practiced in the city and their little tradition variants in the countryside. This slippage, I argue, is scarcely random or accidental - quite simply because the social characteristics of an idea's great tradition adherents differ in clear and identifiable ways from the social characteristics of its little tradition ad-herents. The former, taken broadly, live in large differentiated cities where much of their life is governed by impersonal legal norms, are generally middle or upper class, and are masters of a written tradition. The latter, also taken broadly, live in small, relatively homogeneous villages where much of their life is governed by local custom, are generally lower-class subsistence-oriented producers, and are part of an oral tradition. To the extent that this gross characterization has any validity, it alerts us to the fact that religious and political ideas may each be transformed in comparable ways as they reach the peasantry. If folk Catholicism is to the New Testament and St. Peter as folk communism is to Das Kapital and Lenin, we may then be able to say something meaningful about folk variants of great tradition ideas and practices in general.”

Scott’s contention originally conceives of the Great Tradition in terms of the systematic possibilities afforded by the text – with its rules of relevance, truth, consistency, etc. – and the Little Tradition in terms of the possibilities of the oral – with the veridical weight it puts on the relationship between speaker and speech, its subordination of coherence to a host of exceptions, etc. This looks much like an old division between those with and those without the book, or writing. However, if the framework here is creaky, I think it is useful to have these two traditions in mind when trying to understand the past from an anthropologically informed perspective. I would, however, add to the dialectic between them that the Great Tradition continually distances itself from a past that it casts as ‘superstitious’ or outmoded – that it describes in Little Tradition terms – and that this perception is not completely false. The little tradition is not completely un-textualizable. On the contrary, it thrives on what Bakhtin called the “word” – on the maxim, proverb, verse, fable, figure, divination – which in turn operates as a sort of doxic disturbance within the Great Tradition.

In order to represent the intellectual landscape of, say, French culture in the seventeenth century, it is best to keep in mind the existence of both of these traditions. An intellectual history that takes up, say, Descartes, Gassendi, Pascal, etc., may miss important things about French intellectual culture. For instance, we know that in the 17th century, both the Nahua in Mexico and the French in the countryside, and in churches and parlements, believed human beings could change themselves into other animals. The French belief in this fact was confirmed over and over in many witch trials. The difference between the Nahua and the French was, in fact, not so much a difference in belief as in governance, which allowed certain figures in the Great Tradition the discursive possibility of examining the human body and, in the end, doubting that it could change into the body of other animals. This condition was the result of certain unique features of social control in France that were not generated by the Nahua – the policing of belief, for example.

Of course, members of the “high culture” could very well use witchcraft beliefs – even if they didn’t share them – tactically.

Take the sad tale of Baron and Baronne Beausoleil. This tale is less known than it should be – feminist historians, take note! Baronne Beausoleil, born Martine de Bertereau, came from a noble French family in Touraine or Berry. Her husband, Jean du Châtelet, Baron de Beausoleil and D’Auffembach, was a 17th century virtuoso. His nephew was a well known surgeon and Cartesian. Beausoleil was a geologist and alchemist, who became well enough known for his work on mineralogy to attract the attention of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph, and his successor, who made him commissioner general of the mines of Hungary. He was enticed back to France by officials of the court of Henry IV. The French state was alarmed by the disarray in which they found the French mining industry. Thus, Beausoleil – who worked with his wife, Martine – was given broad powers to restart the mining sector in the provinces.

In doing so, they established a base at Morlaix. It was there that their first misadventure befell them: a priest, a Prevot Provincial she names, charmingly, Touche-Grippé, ransacked their chateau while they were away on some survey of mines in the area. He justified his search by alluding to his suspicion that they were dabbling in magic. After all, how could they succeed in their task if they were not using magic? One has to remember, too, that in the early 1600s, magic could be a synonym for science – it is used with this signification in Porta and Bacon.

Rather remarkably, Martine seems to have been entrusted with the task of public relations for the pair – which is how we know of this first, and as it turns out, premonitory dustup with the priest. For a while, the couple left France, but they were enticed back under Louis XIII. It was then they made the mistake of using their own fortune to explore for and open mines – thinking, evidently, that they would be reimbursed by the state.

Such were the circumstances when she published her pamphlet, La Restitution de Pluton. In it, she tackles the subject of her sex:

But how about what is said by others about a women who undertakes to dig holes in and pierce mountains: this is too bold, and surpasses the forces and industry of this sex, and perhaps, there is more empty words and vanity in such promises (vices for which flighty persons are often remarked) than the appearance of truth. I would refer this disbeliever, and all those who arm themselves with such and other like arguments, to profane histories, where they will find that, in the past, there have been women who were not only bellicose and skilled in arms, but even more, expert in arts and speculative sciences, professed so much by the Greeks as by the Romans.”

And here, after alluding to some classical instances, she gives her bonafides in the “occult art”: having descended myself in the shafts and caverns of mines (although they are frighteningly deep), as those of gold and silver in Potosi, in the Kingdom of Peru…In those of Neusoln, Cremitz, and Schemnitz, in the Kingdom of Hungary…”

Which has given rise to the report that she actually went across the ocean on some expedition to visit Peru. One wonders if this claim is exaggerated – it would certainly be interesting. And it is politically possible that the Beausoleils, who worked for the Habsburgs, could have gotten such passage. Of course, right after this claim comes another – about what is met with in the mines of Hungary and Germany: .. where one often meets small dwarves, of about three or four palms in height, old, and clothed like those who work in the mines, to wit with an old short jacket, and a leather vest, which hangs down over most their body, with a white cape with a hood, a lamp, and a stick in their hand, horrible specters to those who have not long had experience in the descent into the mine.”

The Restitution of Pluto is a rather strange title for a mining manual – for Pluto to receive restitution, one would think, something was called for on the order of returning ore – a sort of antimining. But the restitution that Baronne Beausoleil has in mind is the restitution of the fortune she and her husband spent on exploring mines for the French government. In addition, she complains of having had the household maps and documents concerning mining pilfered by Touche-Grippé. In the course of her pamphlet, she also undertakes to show how astrology and the ‘wand’ used by miners were employed in renewing old and worn out mines.

Perhaps this was the excuse that provided the base for her downfall. The case of baron and baronne Beausoleil is curious, in that we have no record of their trial, no documentation to tell us why they were separated and imprisoned, Martine de Bertereau in Vincennes, her husband, Jean du Châtelet, Baron de Beausoleil and D’Auffembach, in the Bastille. Martine was imprisoned with her daughter. The last indication we have of Martine, the woman who may have plunged into the fearsome mines of Potosi, and certainly did go down into many Hungarian and German mines, is contained in the letters of the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, who was imprisoned in Vincennes as a Jansenist priest. According to Saint-Cyran, Martine was ‘assez mal en ordre’ - she wore threadbare clothes. He was able to procure some better clothes for both of them. He also wrote to a friend as a favor for Martine, requesting him to inquire about the couple’s daughter, Anne du Châtelet, who had been left in the care of one of their friends. Anne had been taught Latin in order to “render her capable of the science of mining, which is hereditary in the family”. In another letter, Saint-Cyran defends Châtelet from the accusation of necromancy. His interest in astrology, Saint-Cyran assures his correspondent, was entirely scientific – the kind of divination that Saint Thomas approved of.

The Great Tradition is built on many bones, and some of the bones it grinds are of unfortunates who are caught in out of joint moments, and purged from our collective memory.

logic and strategy

The other day, a friend told me about a class she is teaching. The students had to make presentations, and two of them presented about South Africa. Oddly, she said, these student seemed barely aware that once upon a time, South Africa had a racist, apartheid regime. I said (falling into my old codger routine) that I remembered the day I protested the University of Texas' investment in South Africa, along with hundreds of other students. And then I said, I now think that was a mistake.

And then I thought about it and said, no, it wasn’t a mistake. It was right to protest. It was wrong for U.T. to have that investment. But it was, at the same time, good that U.T. had an investment we couldd protest.

My reactions led me to reflect on the difference between strategy and logic.

To illustrate that difference, take the 'human rights' game. Say that there is a country - call it, a U.S.-like country, that is, one that doesn't torture and invade countries illegally, but that is nevertheless wealthy and has an interest in promoting human rights. And take a human rights violator, like, say, Iran. It would be better, in my opinion, for the U.S.-like country to recognize Iran and make investments in that country. At the same time, it would also be better for people to protest those investments and demand that the U.S.-like country boycott Iran.

Logically, these positions are incompatible. One comes to a decision fork – A or Not-A. Logically, one can’t embrace both.

Strategically, however, both may be preferable. It is preferable that Iran have an internal interest that is vulnerable to protest. And it is preferable that protest exists to make the threat of loss credible.

This is the kind of thing that Deleuze and Guattari are talking about when they speak of affirming both sides of a disjunction. One leaps, here, from logic to strategy.

Of course, there is a problem. In order for the protests to be credible, the protestors must sincerely believe in disinvesting in Iran. And in order for the investments to be credible, the investors must act credibly like investors, defending with all their might and main investment in Iran.

So – where is the strategist, given this field of beliefs? The strategist is in the position of a sort of Maxwell’s demon – or a Chinese sage. She has anchored herself to the ‘uncanny’ position within the social field. She does have a strategic goal – the strategy is meant to move Iran to another regime point. But she can’t really reveal her goal for the strategy to succeed. And she must be on both sides of the decision branch.

It is a tough life for Fortuna, the game theorist. But she must be pitiless – even with herself.



the exchange matrix

The other day, my friend M. sent me a copy of a letter that was written by an editor of a press to another person, in which the editor solicited a small essay for a line of books that would contain small, one hundred page essays on a variety of topics. M. suggested that this was definitely up my alley – and I have to agree.
So I have been thinking of carving out a small bit from my human limit project for a book to be tentatively entitled, Homo Oeconomicus: the biography of a myth. Much of what I’ve been writing lately (about the origin of the equilibrium idea in economics) would flow very easily into a book about the rise of the idea of the homo oeconomicus – the rational actor whose ectoplasmic calculations are at the center of mainstream economics. To paraphrase Paul Veyne’s book, “Did the Greeks believe their myths”, I think an essay about whether the economists believe theirs – and more importantly, how their belief has helped form the political and economic order of modernity – is worth a nice one hundred pages.

This essay would have to begin in Rouen. I’d like to start with Pascal, Boisguilbert and Fontenelle and go forward until, in the 20th and 21st century, I bump into Robert Lucas, the Ownership society and the Browne report. The essay would really be the development of a phrase of Fontenelle, who, in his Eloge de Montmort, wrote that the scientific spirit will in the end bring about the belief “that the political world as well as physics is ruled by weight, number and measurement.” The great transformation of the economic and political arrangements under capitalism, outlined by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto and Karl Polanyi in the Great Transformation, took place not only in the vast recombination and recreation of everyday routines, but also in the thoughts entertained by the clerks, the policymaking intellectuals, the poets, the dissenters, the political arithmeticians, the pamphleteers and scientists, and in general the entire crowd of Burke’s “theorists”. Such is the ‘spirit’ of capitalism.

Historians have long been convinced that Adam Smith’s conjectural history is basically right Smith puts “commercial society”, or a society based on the cash nexus, at the endpoint of history. Myself, I want to dispute one of the premises of this idea, which is that we have gone from a society in which the dominant form in which the matrix of exchange occurs is barter to one in which the dominant form is money. I think this claim is made, to an extent, by engaging in a definitional tour de passe-passe, in which a system of exchanges is mysteriously expelled from economics, and is then, as mysteriously, crunched into a system of rational choice, a method by which mountains regularly give birth to mice, and all is dissolved in the triviality of a decisional form without, of course, explaining decisions at all. I take the term “exchange matrix” from Robert Cowen, who was very concerned with the fact that, in the Walrasian and neo-Walrasian schemas which are at the heart of neo-classical economics, the stripping away of the “veil of money”, which is meant to help us understand the self-regulating nature of money, is the equivalent of the claim that, in essence, money simply is a refined form of barter. D. Dillard, in The Barter Illusion, helps us to see what Cowen tries to show formally in matrix form – namely, that the idea that money is barter undergirds a completely fictitious view of firms, which premise that they exist solely for the sake of consumption. As Dillard – echoing Marx – points out, a firm’s output is ‘reconstituted as money capital” for the very good reason that firms do not exist – except on the most abstract level – to increase consumption. “What is real from the point of view of the objective of the firm is money.” As Dillard points out, “A corollary of the barter illusion is that money is neutral with regard to output and unemployment.”

All of which is one part of the illusion of the pure exchange system – that is, that barter and money are essentially the same. So the first part of understanding the myth of homo oeconomicus is to remove the illusion of the equivalence of money and barter, and the corollary illusion that, on the one hand, there is a pure barter system, and, on the other hand, that there is an equilibrium towards which markets tend.

Homo Oeconomicus, that eternal calculator of profit, operates within these larger mythical frameworks. My proposal is, firstly, to go from the mixed matrixes of the late medieval European economies up through the genesis of political arithmetic in the early modern period by looking at some plays – I’m thinking of Everyman, King Lear, the Alchemist, L’avare; secondly, to look at some analogies of the wheel – the wheel of Fortune or Nemesis, the circulation of the blood, and the circulation of money; thirdly, to examine Pascal’s meditations on the difference between reasoning and authority, against the background of Pascal’s development of a theory of probabilities based on the example of the game; fourthly, to examine the Enlightenment development of man the machine as man the calculating machine; fifthly, to go from Smith’s pin-factory to Marx’s theory of alienation, with its deep reach into how he conceives the economic sphere; sixthly, to discuss Polanyi’s double movement – that fold in the development of Capitalist culture in which the state intervenes as a guarantor (of social welfare, of banks, of farming culture, etc.); and finally, to discuss the social coordinates of individualism.

This may be too ambitious. Hey, commentors, tell me what you think!

Pascal's modernity

Ernst Coumel, in an essay on Pascal’s contribution to the theory of probability (La théorie du hasard est-elle née par hasard ? 1970), cites a Jesuit opponent of Pascal’s, one Abbe de Villars, who, in responding to Pascal’s devastating attack on casuists in Lettres écrites à un provincial, asked a very good question about Pascal’s interest in and contribution to the theory of gaming: But I had heard that you were a very great enemy of permissive Casuists: from whence, then, does it come that you not only do not condemn gambling, but that you make religion and divinity depend on a game of heads or tails?”

Coumel, in his essay, is at pains to point out that Pascal’s interest in the theory of games must have deeper reasons than that, by chance, he was the friend of Chevalier de Méré. Coumel is combating the opinion of Cournet, who wrote that it was simply by historical chance that the problems of chance in games – for instance, the problem of dividing the stakes of a game that had been interrupted – had not fallen under the purview of some ancient Alexandrian geometer. On the contrary, Coumel writes, the growth of game theory up to Von Neumann and Morgenstern characterizes a very modern development.

Modern – the word must be underlined. Surely, on the one side, there is the fact that historical circumstances were pressing in. In the seventeenth century, the de-monetized, medieval economy, with its system of in-kind exchanges – barter – was giving way to a monetized economy. As Sasan Fayazmenesh has shown in Money and Exchange, this fact can’t be interpreted as simply the substitution of a more efficient form of barter for a diffuse form – the Walrasian interpretation of money as the representative of a barter exchange fails to comprehend the multiple affordances of money. Fayazmenesh refers to Robert Clower’s analysis of money and barter as modeled by a ‘exchange matrix’, in which their functional differences come out. Clower assumes the universal exchangeability of goods for goods in the barter economy – which is a convenient assumption when mathematizing barter, but has the disadvantage of not being the case. In the whig view of the economists, of course, the monetary system is superior because it is a universal solvent in which any and all exchanges can take place. This, too, conveniently overlooks the vast number of barter exchanges and their multiple restrictions that undergird our daily lives. If I do a favor for my mother, for instance, I can’t, under normal conditions, monetize and sell my perception that I expect her eventually to do a favor for me, even if I can predict that she will, in fact, do a favor for me in the future. Our real life – with friends, co-workers, family members, lovers – is tangled in nets of in-kind and monetary exchanges, which are simply grandly overlooked by the economist.

However, it is also the case that Pascal’s France was monetizing a great number of exchanges. Colbert’s system, with its vast number of taxes, speeded up the process. And it is at this point that speculative questions arise that had no space in an in-kind economy.

Such, then, is one approach to the modernity of Pascal’s situation. But there is another sense of the modern, which Pascal himself diagnosed in the fragmentary preface to the treatise on the Vacuum.

Which I will get to in my next post.

sun, king, and heart: circulation of the blood 2

Part two

William Harvey was acquainted with Francis Bacon – of course. Harvey was, after all, a physician at James I’s court. He remarked to John Aubrey that Bacon “wrote philosophy like a Lord Chancellor.” This remark has been taken to mean that Bacon was, in Harvey’s eyes, no philosopher. And yet, it is not simply a disparagement – a meaningless quip. For what does it mean to write philosophy like a Lord Chancellor? Could it mean that Bacon’s administrative rationality – or his sense of stratagems – prevented him from understanding nature (which is presumably what Harvey is getting at – as Harvey was not interested in larger metaphysical issues)? And yet, were not Harvey and Bacon part of the same ‘team’, the team that turned upon a culture of reading – in which the sacred book emblematized the value of books – in favor of seeing, using instruments, measuring?

Harvey, as Walter Pagel has pointed out, did not derive his conclusions about blood circulating in a the closed system from experiment – that is, he did not ‘discover’ the circulation of the blood, in the sense that ‘discovery’ is an event that is not predetermined but thrust upon the observer by the facts as they are. “On such a view,” Pagel writes, “discovery should normally be the result of a sum total of observations and suitably designed experiments, and such a process should be discernible in Harvey’s own account of his discovery as the immediate conclusion from observations and experiments – as Willis’ ‘standard’ translation has it: ‘When I surveyed my mass of evidence.’” However – Pagels points out – Willis’ nineteenth century translation slips into Havey’s text a sentence – that sentence – which does not exist in the text. So much did Willis desire to believe in a certain image of Harvey, the experimentalist, that he overwrites what Harvey wrote, which was that “I often and seriously considered with myself what great abundance there was (sc. of blood)”. (3)

Pagel emphasizes that Willis’ Harvey, who operates like a Newtonian scientist, is not the Harvey who presents himself as a Cartesian scientist – whose idea that the blood circulates was due to a meditation, which depended, in turn, on a confidence that nature never acted without purpose. From that meditation, Harvey moved to create evidence – “to become science it required the chain of brilliantly conceived and executed experiments and observations…”

In this nuanced shuffle between scientific models, where is the Baconian?

It is here that Christopher Hill’s essay on Harvey intervenes. In 1966, Hill, who was writing his book on the English Revolution, pointed out that Harvey’s first book on the circulation of the blood was prefaced with an address to the King. This address combined two analogies: one to the absolute place of the monarch in the body politics, and one to Copernicus’ discovery of the heliocentric system.

"The heart of creatures is the foundation of life, the prime of all, the sun of their microcosm, on which all vegetation does depend, from whence all vigour and strength does flow. Likewise the King is the foundation of his kingdoms, and the sun of his microcosm, the heart of his commonwealth, from whence all power and mercy proceeds"

And, just so that we don’t think that this is a matter of dedications alone, see how Harvey defends the claim that his dissection of animals has import on the constitution of the human body:

“Since the intimate connexion of the heart with the lungs, which is apparent in the human subject, has been the probable cause of the errors that have been committed on this point, they plainly do amiss who, pretending to speak of the parts of animals generally, as anatomists for the most part do, confine their researches to the human body alone, and that when it is dead. They obviously do not act otherwise than he who, having studied the forms of a single commonwealth, should set about the composition of a general system of polity; or who, having taken cognizance of the nature of a single field, should imagine that he had mastered the science of agriculture; or who, upon the ground of one particular proposition, should proceed to draw general conclusions.”

One notices, in passing, that the connection of the animal to the human is purely physical, not a fact indicating a common interiority – to push Descola’s thesis. But the absolute distinction between nature and culture was in the making – and what one notices, as well, is the tendency of the natural philosophers to push a new sense of universality. What Harvey writes here about the homology between the animal and the human body participates in the same logic that makes Newton put the domain of physics on a unified footing, dissolving the line between the sublunar and the celestial.

This is done, by Harvey, with reference, as well, to political terms – to the Lord Chancellor’s rhetoric. And, as Hill notices, this reference to the commonwealth is also entangled with the analogy to the sun. In the crucial chapter in which Harvey announces that blood flows in a circle in the body, he writes:

“The heart, consequently, is the beginning of life; the sun of the microcosm, even as the sun in his turn might well be designated the heart of the world; for it is the heart by whose virtue and pulse the blood is moved, perfected, and made nutrient, and is preserved from corruption and coagulation; it is the household divinity which, discharging its function, nourishes, cherishes, quickens the whole body, and is indeed the foundation of life, the source of all action. But of these things we shall speak more opportunely when we come to speculate upon the final cause of this motion of the heart.”

These analogies may, of course, simply be the lateral poetry that opens the scientific imagination. And yet, Hill is right to point out the background noise, here – the ceaseless cataract of history. For Harvey’s claim that the heart is central, like a sun, or a monarch, changes when he comes to write his treatise on the circulation of the blood of 1649, and on the generation of animals of 1651 – changes in accord with the beheading of King Charles. Whether or not these changes are evidence of Harvey’s republicanism – Hill’s claim – they are changes in the analogy holding between the human body, the monarch, and the solar system. Even as the human is bound to the animal kingdom, kingdoms and cosmological centers seem to fall out of the realm of essences. Or out of the realm of those analogies that give us a clue about the circulation of the blood and the function of the heart.

“In I649, moreover, Harvey went out of his way to repudiate the astronomical analogy which he had used in I628. "The knowledge we have of the heavenly bodies" is "uncertain and conjectural"; its example "is not here to be followed".'1 An astronomical allusion in the De Generationec onfirms this point, since Harvey no longer draws a parallel between the heart and the sun but between the blood and "the superior orbs, (but especially the sun and moon)", which "do by their continual motions quicken and preserve the inferior world".12 (That inveterate obscurantist, Alexander Ross, was quick to spot the dangers of Harvey's new position. In a book published in I65I, which also attacked Bacon and Comenius, he particularly insisted on the sovereignty, the prerogative, of the heart, and on the hierarchical order in the human body: the testicles are "ignobler than the heart and brain".)”

Dethroning the heart: 1

“He did delight to be in the darke, and told me he could then best contemplate.” (John Aubrey, Life of William Harvey)

Barthes, in his Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes wrote that of the tropes, the one that most aroused his suspicion was analogy: “Saussure’s bete noire was the arbitrary (of the sign). His is analogy. The analogical arts (cinema, photography), analogical methods (academic critique, for example) are discredited. Why? Because analogy implies an effort of Nature: it constitutes the natural as the source of truth; and what adds to the cursed state of analogy is that it is irrepressible: as soon as we see a form, it is necessary that it resembles something. Humanity seems condemned to the analogy.

…
Outside of these transgressions, the beneficial opposite to the perfidy of Analogy is simple structural correspondance: homology, which reduces the appeal to the first object to a proportional allusion (etymologically, that is to say, in the happier times of language, analogy meant proportion).
(The bull sees red when its lure strikes it on the muzzle: the two reds coincide, that of anger and that of the cape: the bull is in full analogy, this is to say is fully in the imaginary. When I resist analogy, it is in fact to the imaginary that I put up my resistance: to wit, the coalescence of the sign, the similitude of the signifier to the signified, the homeomorphism of images, the mirror, the captivating lures. All scientific explanations that have recourse to analogy – and they are legion – participate in the lure, they form the imaginary of science). “

If we take Barthes at his word, it is not only humanity that is condemned to analogy, but especially the human sciences. The escape through homology – the escape through mathematics – is affected, in the human sciences, under the sign of analogy – analogy to the positive sciences.

But the positive sciences are not, themselves, as free of lures as all that. So it is with the history of the discovery of the circulation of the blood. When I talk about my Human Limit project with A., I often say that I do not want to write a talking heads history – and the way to break through that sort of history (and inhabit, a la Nietzsche, all the names of history) is to understand the interactions of images and analogies that circulate, themselves, in the socius. And one must even understand the dominance of homologies, that ultimate iconoclasm – that is, the construction of a mind set that sees the world in terms of placeholders, in which substitution is always the rule and the goal.

“He was wont to say that man was but a great mischievous baboon.”

One of the symbols of breaking out of the prison of analogy is a reference to the analogy between the reading of a book and the reading of the ‘fabric of nature’. Reading the book of nature relies on our sense of reading – an activity that, after the development of the printing press, multiplied both in the number of its practitioners and the number of the things they could read. The scientists of the early modern era – the natural philosophers, the virtuosos – were both products of this reading culture and in revolt against it. The revolt took the form of a mutation in the way in which one argued for a ‘fact’. Harvey is famous for having rejected reading – the works of Galen and even Aristotle, among others – for dissection. There is an anecdote that he dissected an animal in a class led by one of his opponents, Caspar Hoffman, to demonstrate the circulation of the blood. He literally showed how the heart works, to the satisfaction of all present – but Hoffman was unconvinced. Harvey laid down his dissecting knife in disgust. Galileo experienced a similar resistance – the resistance of the reading eye to the seeing eye – when astronomers refused to look through his telescope. In a letter to Kepler, he wrote: “what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? Shall we laugh or shall we cry?” The eye that reads, the eye that sees, the eye that cries. It seems like a paradox that the culture of reading leads to a rejection of reading as a method for understanding nature. Reading, it seems, liberates the eye to look up – and to see, or weep.

…

Which brings us to Christopher Hill’s political reading of William Harvey.

Descola on Nature and culture

When Nicolas Coeffeteau, in the Tableau of the Human Passions (1631), wants to demonstrate that all creatures are endowed naturally with what we would call the fight or flight response, he uses an example that sets him immediately outside of our modernity:

“For we see, with other corruptible creatures, that they have not only an inclination and a power to search out things that are agreeable to them, and to flee those which can do them harm; but in addition to this they have another for resisting and combating that which gets in the way of their actions, or destroys their being. As, for example, first is not only endowed with lightness for lifting itself higher, but it has similarly received from the nature heat, by means of which it resists and combats all that is contrary to its action.”

This comparison seems to violate a deep categorical borderline between the living and the non-living – as well as other borderlines that divide the living according to properties that we ascribe to humans and refuse to ascribe to non-humans.

In Beyond Nature and Culture (2005), Philippe Descola shows how the divide between nature and culture – the indispensable categories of modernity – does not, in fact, universally govern all cultures. In a rather beautiful passage, he contrasts the monistic, or animistic, view of the world and the modern occidental view, which he calls naturalism:

“In characterizing naturalism in previous work as the simple belief in the evidence of nature, I only followed a positive definition that goes back to the Greeks, according to which certain things owe their existence and development to a principle that is foreign to chance as much as it is to the will of human beings, a principle that our philosophical tradition has successively qualified by the terms phusis and natura, then by their different derivations in the European languages. This concept reduced to the attestation of a fact remained thus prisoner of a conceptual geneology internal to the occidental cosmology, losing by this fact the benefit of the usage of contrastive traits less fixed to the historical situation that a comparison with animism can furnish. Thus, in commenting on my up to that point incomplete comparison of naturalism and animism, Viveiros de Castro was right to underline that the fundamental opposition between these two modes of identification reposed essentially on a symmetric inversion: animism is multinaturalist, according to him, since it is founded on the corporal heterogeneity of classes of existents that are nevertheless endowed with a identical spirit and culture, while naturalism is multi-cultural in that it backs up the postulate of the unicity of nature with the recognition of the diversity of manifestations of individual and collective subjectivity. One might discuss the term multinaturalism in such a context, the multiple natures of animism not possessing the same attributes as the unified nature of naturalism: the former evokes, rather, the ancient Aristotelian sense of a principle of individualization of beings, while the second, in its singular aspect, makes direct reference to the mute and impersonal ontological domain of which the contours were traced definitively with the mechanistic revolution. …”

To put Descola’s point simply: the naturalist ontology can admit a diversity of subjective types, on the human side, which coexists with a physical continuum of forms of life. Since Darwin, biology has even postulated that we humans are fully part of this physical continuum, and the smallest molecular actions can, in a sense, ‘move’ us. Still, scientists are reluctant to make the leap to saying that science consists of molecules talking and writing about molecules – they tend to get realistic about math, for instance. They retain subjectivity even when reducing it. What naturalism doesn’t admit is a subjective continuum that would treat fire as having an interiority that is different in degree, but not kind, from the human. On the other hand, for the animist ontology, the discontinuity of physical forms – the fire, rock, plant, animal, human – is inhabited by a continuum of interiorities – ‘souls.’ It might even be inhabited by a soul that moves out of one physical form into another – shapeshifters.

This story is, of course, as Descola acknowledges, a little too neat. The material in Descola’s book itself points to the neatness. On the one side, animism is represented by entire cultures – what, for instance, the Achubar, the Amazonian tribe with whom he did his fieldwork, believes – and on the Occidental side, we run into names – Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Darwin, etc. It is as if intellectual history has predetermined the names it will run through, the rosary, in spite of the massive evidence presented not only by the numerous books left to us by lesser figures, but by things like the historical work using such things as the archives of the Inquisition, or of the Paris police, etc., which often give us glimpses of folk beliefs that are systematized and very different from what we would expect from the history of the talking heads. We speak of Montaigne or Spinoza – and we don’t speak of, for instance, Menocchio, the Italian miller whose trial for heresy was dug up by Carlo Ginzburg in The Cheese and the Worms. Or of the peasant healer Gasparutto in Friuli, who testified, in 1575, that there existed a group, the benandanti, who,during the night, use fennel stalks to battle evil doers, who use sorghum stalks, and that the benandanti got together by, for instance, traveling in spirit astride hares, cats, and so on – a group Ginzburg studied in The Night Battles. Menocchio and Gasparutto left only testimonies, transcribed by inquisitors – but they both were of the type that Gramsci called the organic intellectual. That is, they had a bent towards understanding the world in terms of some system or another. And we must constantly remember that ‘high culture’ is entirely permeable, as a practice, to ‘low culture’ – its assumptions and images are often imported into from low culture. The equilibrium of which the economists are so proud is one of these imports – it governs as a myth, but a modern myth – one that emits an array of models.

The origin of laissez faire in nature itself or Fortuna and the circulation of the blood.

As Jean-Louis Billoret has noted, the modern paradigm for wealth, in the 1690s, was captured by the old analogy between the body and the social body. He does not note – but I do – that the notion of circulation is connected, connotatively, with the wheel of the goddess of fortune. Which is in turn related to the paradigm of humors – in which we cycle from deficiency to excess. This system of denotation and connotation – this semiotic – is what is in question when, changing the way in which the anatomy of the body was understood from the point of view of Gabriel Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, we begin to understand what circulates in the state by anology. Hobbes, who always worked in the shifting space between the most modern paradigms, made the analogy between human and social bodies a way of explaining the whole function of money, bringing ‘nutrition’ to each part of the body.

“By concoction I understand the reducing of all commodities which are not presently consumed But reserved for nourishment in time to come to something of equal value and withal so portable as not to hinder the motion of men from place to place to the end a man may have in what place soever such nourishment as the place affordeth And this is nothing else but gold and silver and money For gold and silver being as it happens almost in all countries of the world highly valued is a commodious measure of the value of all things else between nations and money of what matter soever coined by the sovereign of a commonwealth is a sufficient measure of the value of all things else between the subjects of that commonwealth By the means of which measures all commodities moveable and immoveable are made to accompany a man to all places of his resort within and without the place of his ordinary residence and the same passeth from man to man within the commonwealth and goes round about nourishing as it passeth every part thereof in so much as this concoction is as it were the sanguification of the commonwealth for natural blood is in like manner made of the fruits of the earth and circulating nourisheth by the way every member of the body of man.”

As Billoret notices, Boisguilbert counters this popular image with one in which the circuit of wealth is divided up between the circuit of what functions as the representative of commodities – money – and the circuit of real goods and services. While still remaining within the parameters of the circulation paradigm, Boisguilbert avoids the worship of money – the according of a primary role to money in the economy – since he has firmly established, as Marx puts it, the double aspect of the commodity, as use value and exchange value. In this economy, consumption – use – is always the horizon defining the economy, while the economy is the image of the divine order. In a wonderful passage in the Factum de France, Boisguilbert goes back to Abel and Cain for his paradigmatic economic case of the origin of civil society, which is reenacted in every exchange. It is in this light that we should regard money:

“The two primary needs are food and clothing – thus, the growing of crops and the raising of herds. “In their example, those who followed were for a long time masters and valets, and the self constructors of their needs; sale was only barter or exchange, which was made from hand to hand, without any ministry of money, which was not known until a long time afterwards. But, since, corruption, violence and volupte being put into the affair, after the necessities, one wanted the pleasurable and the superfluous, which multiplied métiers, of the two that there were in the beginning, degree by degree, into the more than two hundred that there are today in France. Thus, this immediate exchange no longer subsists. The seller of a commodity hardly ever traffics with a subject who is the possessor of that which he has the design of procuring himself in discarding the things of his own, and cannot even recover them than after a long trajectory and an infinity of sales and resales, by the means of two hundred hands or professions which today compose the harmony of polished and magnificent states, there was needed a guarantee and a sort of procuration, so to speak, of that first purchaser, that the intention of the seller would be effectuated by the recovering of the commodity that he wished to have in dispossessing himself of his own. It is in this way that the ministry of money has become necessary, by a convention and a general consent of all men –that n whatever land one may be in, irrespective of whatever great distance, or of whatever violence that may disarrange things, he who carries money is assured to procure himself of as many commodities as he has a wish for relative to his sum of it, that he allows his possessions to be taken away, and certain that the object of his desire will be delivered to him with as much diligence and exactitude as if the exchange or the barter had been made immediately and from hand to hand, as at the beginning of the world.”

From which Boisguilbert concludes: “One should pay attention, from what we have said above, to the fact that money, in spite of the corruption which makes it an idol, cannot furnish any of the needs of life begin reduced to coin, but is only the guarantee that the seller of a commodity will not lose it, and that that of which he has need in bartering his own will be delivered to him, not being found with his buyer. It is necessary here to make a reflection, to wit, that this function is not uniquely that of money, whatever ideas reign to the contrary, that it does not even make up the tenth part or even the fiftieth in the times of opulence, which is nothing other than times of a great consumption, that is to say of great wealth. – The paper, parchement and even the word make up, again, more than fifty times more than money: thus one is gravely wrong, in occasions of misery, to put the cause of disorders on its account, and to allege piteously that the greater part of it has passed into foreign countries. Why don’t we say that paper and parchment have equally gone into them, and that it is the fault of matter that traffic has ceased, and that we no longer buy and sell?”

In this way, Boisguilbert disengages his model from that in which blood equals money – and in fact departs from the individualistic consequences that ensue from a metaphor that sees life interiorized in one body. Boisguilbert’s geneology goes back to two – to Cain and Abel – and not to one – some Adamic giant in whom we still partake. He, in other words, makes money purely functional – in effect, founding the classical view of money, which makes it a substitute for barter and, in itself, only a sort of factotum, a thing with no being of its own.

However, if money represents commodities, always viewed as the fruit of labor, it also incorporates, formally, equilibrium. Wealth has two aspects – use value and ‘proportion’ – that is, the harmony of exchange value: It is the proportions which make up all wealth, because it is by their sole means that the exchanges, and by consequence commerce, can be done.” (279 – my translations throughout)

What is this harmony? Boisguilbert explains this in a wonderful passage, positing, on the one hand, hierarchy as a violence, and, on the other hand, nature as a sort of guarantor state:

“Yet, by the horrible corruption of the heart, there I no individual, even though he can expect his happiness only by means of the maintenance of this harmony, who does not work from morning to evening in order to do everything he can to ruin it. There is no worker who doesn’t try, with all his force, to sell his merchandise for three times more than it is worth, and to have that of his neighbors for three times less than it costs to make it. It is only at the point of the sword that justice is maintained in these encounters and this is just what Providence and nature charges itself with. And, just as it has managed the dwellings and means of weak animals in order that they not all become the prey of those which, being born stronger, those born in some manner armed, live on carnage, in the same way, in the commerce of life, it has instilled such order that, if only one lets it have its way, there is no power so powerful, in buying the commodities of the poor man, that can prevent that sale from procuring the latter with his subsistence, which maintains opulence; to this one as well as the other owes the subsistence he has, proportioned to his estate. We have said, if only we let nature have its way, [pour vu que on laisse faire la nature] that is to say, give it its liberty, and no one meddles with this commerce than for extending protection to all, and impeding violence.”

It should be noted that this, perhaps the first use of laissez faire, takes as its subject nature – not commerce. Not the market. Nature works through the market. One can see, here, the lineaments of Smith’s notion, except that the values are reversed – it is not simply greed to accumulate that is in question, but rather, the desire to take one’s neighbor’s property – the fundamental corruption linking theft, adultery, and all forms of hatred - which is put in play, here. Nature cannot disallow corruption – we know how the story of Cain and Abel worked out – but it produces a tool to limit corruption – real bearers of swords. The warrior class of the state.

How unhappiness comes to serve happiness in the best of all possible worlds

When Nemesis perched on the city walls, the signs were evident, and the causes were clear. The monarch had offended the gods with his pride, the people had offended with their neglect of the sacrifices and usages. They had defied the rules concerning food, for instance. They had indulged in forbidden luxuries. The balance between the divine and the human had been broken, or somehow violated.

In Rouen, in the 1690s, Nemesis was evidently sitting on the city walls. One had merely to look to the countryside. One had merely to tally up the decline in trade with the Berbers, or the British. But this time, the prophet who descried the shadow of Nemesis had a different interpretation of the balances in question – an interpretation that eventually became the hermeneutic through which the scholars and officials both interpreted and implemented the Great Transformation. In this hermeneutic, the categories of sacrifice and of luxury were up-ended. Yes, the monarch offends the balance with his pride, but in the new dispensation, the monarch is – logically, sotto voce – reduced to a form, an enforcer of the order of contract, at best the commandatore’s statue. And the natural balance – or as it was called by the prophet of Rouen, the “equilibrium” – was inherent in the economy itself. The economy – like nature – naturally gravitated towards a self-regulating balance, and anything that got in the way of this natural process was to be condemned.
Nemesis was divested of her ancient attributes, and put on a strictly mathematical footing. L’esprit geometrique was let loose upon the face of the globe for real.
The prophet was a magistrate named Pierre Le Pesant de Boisguilbert. As LI pointed out in our series of posts on Fontenelle, the nest of gentlefolk in Rouen who, in the period between 1680-1730, figured on the modern side in the battle between the ancients and the moderns is extremely impressive – and especially considering their ties to one another. As it happens, a Le Pesant married a Corneille, and as the Corneille family was related to Fontenelle, so too was Boisguilbert. A descendent of that family was Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Marat.
In the Critique of the Political Economy, Marx attributed much to the founders of the English and French schools of classical economy – as he saw it – William Petty and Boisguilbert. Marx writes: The analysis of commodities as labor in a double form, of use value derived from real labor of purposeful productive activity, and of exchange value derived from labor time or equal to social labor, is the critical end product of more than a half a century’s classical political economic research that begins in England with William Petty and in France with Boisguilbert, and ends in England with Ricardo and in France with Sismondi.”
There is an anecdote about him, told in Sainte-Simon’s memoirs.
“He [Vauban] was well advanced when there appeared diverse small books by sieur de Boisguillebert, lieutenant general at the seat of Rouen, a man of much intellect, detail and industry, brother of a counselor to the parlement of Normandy who, after much preparation, touched with the same views as Vauban, worked on them for a long time. He had already made some progress before the chancellor left the financial office. He came expressly to find him, and, as his lively spirit had something singular in it, he demanded of him to listen with patience; and though, as he said, he would take him at first for a fool, afterwards, he would see that he merited attention, and that at the end, he would be happy with his system. Pontchartrain, disgusted by so many givers of advise who had passed through his hands, and who was all saltpeter, began to laugh, brusquely responded that he took him for the first thing, and turned his back on him. Boisguillebert, returned to Rouen, was not at all put off by the bad outcome of his trip. He only worked the more indefatigably on his project, which was pretty close to that of Vauban’s, without either knowing the other. From this labor was born a book, one that was wise and profound on the matter, of which the system went to an exact dividing up of aid to the people, with all the expenses that they supported and the many tarrifs, which were direct expropriations into the king’s purse, and consequently ruinous to the existence of tradesmen, to the power of intendants, to the sovereign domain of ministers of finance. Thus, he displeased all the former as much as he was applauded by all those who did not share the former’s interests. Chamillart, who had succeeded Pontchartrain, examined the book. He conceived a liking for it; he requested the presence of Boiguillebert two or three times at l’Etang, and worked there with him on many occasions, as a minister whose probity only tried to do good.”

Berkeley's floating world

Berkeley was a pre-classical economist – not that he knew it. Our captions exist outside of our frames, scribbled in by who knows who, the hand that writes and having writ - continues mindlessly to write endlessly more. But of those of his commentors who have taken the trouble to reflect on Berkeley’s political economy, especially as it is presented – or undermined – in that oddest of Irish bulls, The Querist – it is certain that, as Patrick Kelly puts it in his essay for the Cambridge companion to Berkeley, “Given the absence of any conception of the achievement of equilibrium through hidden harmony or the design of nature, a pivotal responsibility was accorded to the state in bringing about the necessary conditions to promote what Berkeley asserted to be the public objective of full employment.” One might think that ‘equilibrium’ – that frame upon which economics has woven its mythology since it got its science pants on – was, alas, not articulated in Berkeley’s time – but this is not exactly true, as B. Tieben, in his exhaustive study of the history of equilibrium as an economic concept has shown: Sir Dudley North and Pierre de Boisguilbert had already employed the concept, ‘treating the economy as a relatively self-regulating system…”

Berkeley, in the Querist, violates several principles of that self-regulating model. He expresses the horrifying idea in a work published four years before the great famine of 1741 wiped out about 200-400 thousand Irishmen that perhaps Ireland’s unstinting export of foodstuffs like beef and mutton to England, in return for which a certain class of landowner received the means to by English luxury goods, was not such a good deal for Ireland. This kind of thinking pops up around famine time, and is always soundly trounced by economists, who deal with aggregates and have well and truly summed up, in their accounting books, the pleasures of these luxury goods against the piddling souls of the barely employed and are extremely satisfied that the self-regulating system is the best of all worlds.

“142. Whether it be not certain that from the single town of Cork were exported, in one year, no less than one hundred and seven thousand one hundred and sixty-one barrels of beef; seven
thousand three hundred and seventy-nine barrels of pork; thirteen thousand four hundred and sixty-one casks, and eighty-five thousand seven hundred and twenty-seven firkins of butter? And what hands were employed in this manufacture?
143 Whether a foreigner could imagine that one half of the people were starving, in a country which sent out such plenty of provisions?
144 Whether an Irish lady, set out with French silks and Flanders lace, may not be said to consume more beef and butter than a hundred of our labouring peasants?
145 Whether nine-tenths of our foreign trade be not carried on singly to support the article of vanity?”

And in fact, taking and transforming an image from Locke, Berkeley imagines the following:

“134. Whether, if there was a wall of brass a thousand cubits high round this kingdom, our natives might not nevertheless live cleanly and comfortably, till the land, and reap the fruits of
it?
135 What should hinder us from exerting ourselves, using our hands and brains, doing something or other, man, woman, and child, like the other inhabitants of God's earth?
136 Be the restraining our trade well or ill advised in our neighbours, with respect to their own interest, yet whether it be not plainly ours to accommodate ourselves to it?
137 Whether it be not vain to think of persuading other people to see their interest, while we continue blind to our own? “

Yet, for all this, Berkeley was not a mere throwback to a hard money autochthonous economics. Oddly, he mixed a doubt about the unmitigated benefits of foreign trade with another doubt that put him on the very lines of the avant garde for his time: his doubt that gold or silver has any intrinsic value. Indeed, the Querist quietly pursues a purpose quite different from that of Swift, in the Drapier Letters, who propounded a theory of money that was classically metallic. Berkeley views money quite as he views vision – as a great system of signs. Under the signs, one finds the tangible value – industry, or labor.

“5. Whether money be not only so far useful, as it stirreth up industry, enabling men mutually to participate the fruits of each other's labour?”

and: “23 Whether money is to be considered as having an intrinsic value, or as being a commodity, a standard, a measure, or a pledge, as is variously suggested by writers? And whether the true idea of money, as such, be not altogether that of a ticket or counter?”

In this sense, Berkeley’s proposals aren’t that far from John Law’s, especially as he suggests a national, government run bank to issue these ‘tickets’. It is the stirring up of industry that Berkeley has in mind – and his mind darts immediately to what one might call the paradox of disequilibrium – that the system of industry requires the production of want: “20 Whether the creating of wants be not the likeliest way to produce industry in a people? And whether, if our peasants were accustomed to eat beef and wear shoes, they would not be more industrious?
21 Whether other things being given, as climate, soil, etc., the wealth be not proportioned to the industry, and this to the circulation of credit, be the credit circulated or transferred by what marks or tokens soever?”

This part of Berkeley’s work has served as a point of controversy between those who, like T.W. Hutchinson, glommed onto such statements as evidence that Berkeley had a pre-Keynesian sense that the state should be in the business of managing aggregate demand, and those who, like Ian Ward, emphasized Berkeley’s concern with the categories of voluntary and involuntary employment – which led Berkeley, in some of his Queries, to endorse slavery or servitude for the voluntary beggar. Hutchinson, in responding to Ward, makes the invaluable point that the voluntary vs. involuntary employment categories make no sense in the early modern economy, where the continuity of employment was not the recognized and legally hedged around social process that it is in the twentieth century.

Constantine George Caffentzis has noted that Berkeley’s solution to economic problems is very much aligned with the surface skepticism of a philosophy that has its deepest roots in the tangible, the real wisdom and common sense of all mankind. In other words, Berkeley does not view the economy as a puzzle to be solved, but as a puzzle that continually generates puzzles – and this is reflected in the very form of his suggestions, which press upon us with the utmost passivity of the question form. Just as a thing is really the to be perceived, in the heart of the proposition is the to be asked.

“The Querist’s Bank was not a machine, it was not a self-regulatiing homeostatic device, nor was it a storehouse of values, consequently when the Querist came to the solution of his problematic – a new definition of money and the project of a National Bank – there was no declarative sentence. The Bank was a questionable as its money. In fact, it was the very recognition of its questionability that made it a reasonable institution.”

Man lives in a floating world, and his institutions must either notice this fact or be crushed.

carlo ginzburg

Yesterday, I saw a fascinating talk with Carlo Ginzburg. The format was that his translator, Martin Rueff, would ask him questions. Actually, Rueff read a small essay on his work, and occasionally intervened to let Ginzburg riff about what he wanted to.

Because this session was connected with the publication of a new book of Ginzburg’s essays, le fil et les traces, the discussion tended to sound some old controversies, including that between Ginzburg and the ‘postmodern’ skeptics, notably Hayden White. Which is how one of the ‘threads” in this conversation was about proofs and the truth. Another thread, though, was about Ginzburg’s relationship with the documents he used to trace his histories – notably, the records of Inquisitorial interrogation. And there Ginzburg brought up the anthropological distinction between etic and emic, which, he modestly said, has really only been utilized by one historian – himself.

These themes fascinated me, and I was tempted to try the temper of the salle with my French as I asked a question that seems obvious from this triangle of themes or obsessions.

I would have liked to ask a question something like this. The idea that there is a rigid separation between the etic view, that of the observer, and the emic view, that of the observed, seems to be to ignore the arrow of desire that brings those two together – in situations such as that of the Inquisition. But it is a good starting place.

But isn’t there a movement, here?
And isn’t the movement, as you have shown in the Night Battles, not towards truth, but towards an agreement as to what the truth should be?

Rhetorical questions – the type a bad questioner asks. So I didn’t ask. But the question of the movement that mobilizes the inquisition is, nevertheless, on my mind. I think that the idea of narrative induction, proposed by an ethnographer, Charlotte Linde, defined “as the process by which people come to take on an existing set of stories as their own story…”

Linde’s field work was done in an insurance company, not a tribe. The idea that there is a process of taking on an existing set of stories seems to work in a number of institutional situations, although the variables of the process – its actual implementation – isn’t fixed in one mode or another. Still, a common mode is just the question and response format. One of the great liberal myths is that the question is always a power for liberation. But this is to elevate a romantic idea of questions over its pragmatics. In fact, one of the remarkable things about the Night Battles is the way that the Benedetti take on an existing story about themselves from the Inquisition. Their story begins, Ginzburg shows, with a story in which they are on the side of God, battling against witches. But this is not the story the Inquisition (an institution that is actually named – at least in popular history - for a grammatical feature of Western languages – as though there could be an institution called the Statement or the Exclamation) the Inquisition could accept. And so, through an intervention that depended on the question and response format, the Benedetti were gradually induced into identifying with another story – the story that they were actually on the side of the devil.

Linde, I think, was thinking of other forms of narrative induction – such as pep talks and inter-office communications that made insurance adjusters identify with a narrative we, that of the insurance company and its ‘point of view’. But a narrative induction does not have to be positive in that sense – it can also be the narrative that a given institutional power wants the people it regulates, or even outlaws, to identify with. I identify myself as mad or neurotic with the psychologist, or as delinquent with the police officer, etc. We are not the stories we tell ourselves – we are a compound of the stories we accept about ourselves.

And this, of course, is the source of the anxiety that gives rise to postmodernism. It is the anxiety proper to the post-colonial epoch. The imperial narrative, which succeeded for hundreds of years, was challenged. Challenged synchronically, it cast into doubt the diachronic narratives that helped establish the places assigned to, among others, the savage, the barbarian, the civilized.

Or at least that is a sympathetic reading of the moment – I find the word postmodern rather repulsive, and think of it as a sort of conceptual dust collector.

the tactile privilege

Riddle me this:

Berkeley returns to Great Britain from Italy in 1721, and publishes a pamphlet, An Essay towards preventing the ruin of Great Britain, which aims to moralize the collapse of the South Sea Bubble. Berkeley is not simply distressed by the economic collapse of the speculation, one of those annexes to John Law’s system, but is incensed at what he takes to be the symptoms of irreligion and moral decay:

“Industry is the natural sure way to wealth. This is so true that it is impossible an industrious free people should want the necessaries and comforts of life, or an idle enjoy them under any form of government. Money is so far useful to the public as it promoteth industry, and credit
having the same effect is of the same value with money ; but money or credit circulating through a nation from hand to hand, without producing labour and industry in
the inhabitants, is direct gaming.

It is not impossible for cunning men to make such plausible schemes as may draw those who are less skilful into their own and the public ruin. But surely there is no man of sense and honesty but must see and own, whether he understands the game or not, that it is an
evident folly for any people, instead of prosecuting the old honest methods of industry and frugality, to sit down to a public gaming-table, and play off their money one
to another.

The more methods there are in a state for acquiring riches without industry or merit, the less there will be of either in that state…”

Yet here is the puzzle. In some ways, one would have thought, speculation , which frees money from some supposed natural value, corresponds to Berkeley’s own idealism. Just as the value of money is no longer the value of a metal, but a social value, so, too, matter is no longer outside of the mind, as its support, but inside the mind, as its ‘game’. Why, then, does Berkeley denouce speculation in these traditional moralistic terms?

However, a careful reading of the pamphlet shows Berkeley is not denouncing any Laws-ian system per se. Rather, it is the opportunity for unearned wealth, available to all, that is Berkeley’s target. Speculation as conditioned by a lack of socially useful industry – the foundation of wealth – and a tilt towards luxury – social splendor – is, for Berkeley, much like one of those language games that metaphysicians engage in to create fictional entities, like matter, than it is a true comparison of ideas.

Later, Berkeley considers money more seriously in one of his avant garde texts, the Querist. Which I will go to next – but I want to revisit an argument in my last post. As I’ve implied, Berkeley’s notion of the equivalence between reality and the to-be-perceived gives us, or can be conceived to give us, a deeply human world. If the perceivers are, supremely, human, and if we don’t think that there are perceivers swarming in the world – rather like monads – but that there are specific perceivers, who are human like, then the world is deeply human – we really are the species designated, in Genesis, as the guardians of the world.

But of course, we are ourselves, on the deepest level, perceived – and the whole of the system depends on one great perceiver, God. And this God, as Berkeley mentions in the Principles of Human Understanding (quoting his Theory of Vision), privileges touch. We should resist the automatic way we link up of perception and sight – sight being the Occidental sense of choice. This assumption leads us in the wrong direction not only with Berkeley, but with a whole line of Enlightenment philosophers who similarly assume that touch is the deepest sense. In an odd way, Berkeley participates in this materialism. It is touch, God’s touch, which we find everywhere in Berkeley’s vision of the world. Vision is on the side of the sign, and touch on the side of the real.

Of course, the tactile privilege that runs through 18th century sensualism and materialism is not just derived from Berkeley or Newton – although many of the vibrational ontologies of the time explicitly reference Newton. This is, as well, a folk metaphysic.

More on Berkeley and money later.

what kind of idealism is this? Berkeley and modernity

Last night, after reading my post about Berkeley and the spider, A. asked me about the point I was trying to make. I had to respond that honestly, I’m not sure. In one sense, it simply fascinates me that three philosophers who each took a stance against l’esprit geometrique are found in Southern Italy in the early eighteenth century. Vico turns to the ingenium, and Shaftesbury to common sense, as the intellectual force that resists the mechanization of the spirit - Berkeley, by contrast, traces the path of the skeptic and radicalizes l’esprit geometrique, in a way heralded by Pascal and Bayle – who also applied skepticism in the service of faith – but that goes far beyond them in its ontological conclusions. Yet, Berkeley’s response to Locke’s milktoast metaphysics contains an ambiguity, a pull between the ancients and the moderns, a re-constitution of the terms in which l’esprit geometrique is understood, that can be read as according, in the absence of the divine DJ, everything to the moderns.

Or to start again: metaphysics – I think I am trying to say – is anchored in life. When , in the 1790s, Cuoco criticizes the revolutionaries of Naples for favoring abstraction over the concrete interests of the people, he is in a sense echoing a theme we find in Berkeley’s A treatise concerning Human Knowledge, which contrasts abstraction – that fantastic product of the schools – to the mental processes of the great mass of men:

“To be plain, I own my self able to abstract in one Sense, as when I consider some particular Parts or Qualities separated from others, with which though they are united in some Object, yet, it is possible they may really Exist without them. But I deny that I can abstract one from another, or conceive separately, those Qualities which it is impossible should Exist so separated; or that I can frame a General Notion by abstracting from Particulars in the manner aforesaid. Which two last are the proper Acceptations of Abstraction. And there are Grounds to think most Men will acknowledge themselves to be in my Case. The Generality of Men which are Simple and Illiterate never pretend to abstract Notions. It is said they are difficult and not to be attained without Pains and Study. We may therefore reasonably conclude that, if such there be, they are confined only to the Learned.”

Plain speech, and plain people. This is the Berkeley who could share a dish of beans with a group of squatting peasants in a field. He is unafraid of popular contact – and that is one of the fundamental living impulses of democracy.

Berkeley’s preliminary work in countering the absurdities thrust upon us by abstraction – which is a process that never really occurs in any mind whatsoever, has no root in our biological life (ie is never found to occur among children who are acquiring language skills) is meant to prepare us for his self-evident truth:

“Some Truths there are so near and obvious to the Mind, that a Man need only open
his Eyes to see them. Such I take this Important one to be, to wit, that all the Choir of Heaven and Furniture of the Earth, in a word all those Bodies which compose the mighty Frame of the World, have not any Subsistence without a Mind, that their Being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my Mind or that of any other created Spirit, they must either have no Existence at all, or else subsist in the Mind of some eternal Spirit: It being perfectly unintelligible and involving all the Absurdity of Abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an Existence independent of a Spirit. To be convinced of which, the Reader need only reflect and try to separate in his own Thoughts the being of a sensible thing from its being perceived.”

This is a tightly reasoned paragraph, and yet within it the innocent reader feels that somehow, what is happening here is a feint, or an out of bounds punch. A first reading – and one that became common in the 18th century – was that this was a plea for pure solipsism. Diderot, in the Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, remarks: “The bishop of Cloyne said: if I ascend to the heights of the mountains, or descend into the valleys, it is never anything but me that I apperceive: thus, it is possible that these don’t exist without me. And Berkeley still awaits an answer.” Diderot is a shrewd reader, but we – who can ascend to the heights of Berkeley commentators, or perhaps descend into the valley of their obsessions – have learned to read this paragraph differently, with an emphasis not on the moi – an emphasis that Diderot takes, unconsciously, from the whole French moraliste position – but rather on the tricky passive construction, “that their Being is to be perceived or known,” which leads us not to the imperial subject but to a fact about the choir of heaven that can only be expressed in the passive tense in English: that their very being is not ever to be separated from their being knowable or perceivable. Far from being accidents to which sovereign being submits – as a sort of royal sacrifice – being is essentially knowable or perceivable – the sovereign power is essentially a matter of election and, ultimately, of pressure. Berkeley’s is a world of pressures ultimately emanating, literally, from the hand of God. The combination of pressure and passivity finds its political correlate, perhaps, in the passive obedience Berkeley promoted in an early political pamphlet.

Still, Berkeley goes a long way to divest reality of any magic. The tarantula, its bite, the belief in the tarantalla, the doubts of the country doctor, are all real. “I do not argue against the Existence of any one thing that we can apprehend, either by Sense or Reflexion. That the things I see with mine Eyes and touch with my Hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least Question. The only thing whose Existence we deny, is that which Philosophers call Matter or corporeal Substance. And in doing of this, there is no Damage done to the rest of Mankind, who, I dare say, will never miss it.” Again, one wonders whether this is a feint or an argument – for, with the most beneficient of smiles, here Berkeley slips matter, so much metaphysical waste, into the trashcan. This is not something mankind will miss – it is not part of our common property.

What is the end result of this logic? “But, say you, it sounds very harsh to say we eat and drink Ideas, and are clothed with Ideas. I acknowledge it does so, the word Idea not being used in common Discourse to signify the several Combinations of sensible Qualities, which are called Things: and it is certain that any Expression which varies from the familiar Use of Language, will seem harsh and ridiculous. But this doth not concern the Truth of the Proposition, which in other Words is no more than to say, we are fed and clothed with those Things which we perceive immediately by our Senses. The Hardness or Softness, the Colour, Taste, Warmth, Figure, and such like Qualities, which combined together constitute the several sorts of Victuals and
Apparel, have been shewn to exist only in the Mind that perceives them; and this is all that is meant by calling them Ideas.”

In this way, Berkeley’s thought radically humanizes the world – which is the distinct twist of the emergence of Western, vs. Eastern, idealism. For ideas don’t lead us to illusions – illusions, rather, are easily comprehended within the schema of ideas. The world that Berkeley, at trifling expense (we hardly miss the old terms), reconstitutes is literally the one handed to us – in keeping with the privilege accorded to touch in his system. ”The Ideas of Sight and Touch make two Species, intirely distinct and heterogeneous. The former are Marks and Prognostics of the latter. That the proper Objects of Sight neither exist without the Mind, nor are the Images of external Things, was shewn even in that Treatise. Though throughout the same, the contrary be supposed true of tangible Objects: Not that to suppose that vulgar Error, was necessary for establishing the Notion therein laid down; but because it was beside my Purpose to examine and refute it in a Discourse concerning Vision. So that in strict Truth the Ideas of Sight, when we apprehend by them Distance and Things placed at a Distance, do not suggest or mark out to us Things actually existing
at a Distance, but only admonish us what Ideas of Touch will be imprinted in our Minds at such and such distances of Time, and in consequence of such or such Actions. It is, I say, evident from what has been said in the foregoing Parts of this Treatise, and in Sect. 147, and elsewhere of the Essay concerning Vision, that visible Ideas are the Language whereby the governing Spirit, on whom we depend, informs us what tangible Ideas he is about to imprint upon us, in case we excite this or that Motion in our own Bodies.”

It is this sense in which Berkeley’s idealism, which seems to move us to Diderot’s misrepresentation of it, actually situates us under the new dispensation of the moderns. It does so even while seeming to take the idealistic path of a wholly non-European tradition. Vico and Shaftesbury’s humanism, on the other hand, opens a front that challenges the totality of modernity – a totality that modernity, that epoch of universal-making, can’t do without.

Berkeley and a spider

It is interesting to contemplate the fact that in the period between 1712-1717, Vico, Shaftesbury and Berkeley were all either living in or visiting Naples. Schaftesbury, who was raised, in a manner of speaking, by Locke, and rejected his tutor unequivocally – Berkeley, who grew to detest Shaftesbury’s philosophy as the very antithesis of religion and a much more poisonous skepticism than that he was accused of promoting; and Vico, whose sense of doing battle with the moderns has much in common with Shaftesbury’s sense that raillery and wit were marks of true intellectual freedom, and conversation the method of wisdom – which is another aspect of Vico’s defense of topoi against mere logic. All, in turn, knew Paolo Doria, into whose salon each man, at various times, ventured.

I wonder if Berkeley spoke to Doria of the tarantella. I wonder if there is any meaning in the fact that this idealist metaphysician – to label him in the classroom way – was so fascinated with both the tarantula and the stories of the effect of its bite. Surely as a clergyman, Berkeley was enrolled, forcibly, in the struggle against popular superstition. But Berkeley did not have Shaftesbury’s Tory contempt for the people - his Italian journal is full of incidents that show Berkeley as something more like an anthropologist than judge, recording the dirtiness of cleanliness of towns, the agricultural prospects of the countryside, the speech of the peasants with a certain tone of equanimity and fairness that surely was his tone, and one of the reasons he could get on with Swift.

But to the theme of this post: the future bishop and the spider.

The first mention of the tarantella in the journal is about a doctor who is met with on the road as Berkeley is going into Calabria. The doctor has cheerful contempt fo the peasant superstition of the tarantella, and attributes it to the peasants almost sexual love for drama. seems fascinate
After this, Berkeley records what a certain “Consul” in Tarentum told him about it:

“Tarantato that we saw dance here, no lookingglass or sword ; stamped, screeched, seemed to smile sometimes; danced in a circle like the others. The Consul,
&c. inform us that all spiders except the long-legged ones bite, causing the usual symptoms, though not so violent as the large ones in the country. He tells me the
tarantula causes pain and blackness to a great space round the bite; thinks there can be no deceit, the dancing is so laborious ; tells me they are feverish mad, and sometimes after dancing throw themselves into the sea, and would drown if not prevented ; that in case the tarantula be killed on biting, the patient dances but one year ; otherwise to the death of the tarantula.”

The next day, passing through a small Italian town, Berkeley talks with an Albanian priest about the spider: “The priest told us the arm, e. g. being bitten by the tarantula swelled, confirmed, as indeed everybody, that common notion of the tarantula's death curing the bite. His house very neat. Everywhere great respect for a knowledge of the English, owing to our commerce, fleets, and armies.” In a stop at Gavina, evidently to his enquiries, Berkeley learns this: “Tarantula not in this country ; he hath seen several bitten with a black swoln mark as large as half-a-crown ; they knew not they were bitten till dancing ; tarantula bites only in the hot months ; a peasant at Canosa laughed at their biting, and said he had often taken them in his hands.” In Ascola, or in the environs of the town, Berkeley and his companion eat beans with some peasants in a field: “They boast of a saint's finger kept in a church of a convent on a hill overlooking the town, which, so far as the church is visible, prevents the bite of the tarantula.” Approaching Vesuvius, Berkeley notes: “Taurasi and La Torella. Fricento belongs to the Principe della Torella ; 25,000 souls [2500. M.J ; July and J August without fires. An image on Monte Virgine protects the country about as far as visible from tarantulas, which, say they, are here likewise.Two bears slain last year in a neighbouring wood.” Berkeley wrote a letter about Vesuvius to John Arbuthnot – one of Berkeley’s set, along with Pope and Swift- in which he recounts its eruption and the horrible noise it makes – a letter that makes one wonder if Swift slyly poked at it in Gulliver’s Travels. He would have known of it not only because letters were passed around in the set, but also because the letter was published by the Royal Society. It was one of the odder gothic habits of 18th century intellectuals – like Wincklemann, in the 1760s – to climb Vesuvius and marvel at the lava flows. Wincklemann and his companions, the rather louche Baron d’Hancarville, tossed down a few bottles of wine on the summit. Berkeley doesn’t mention drinking anything.

After arriving at Naples, Berkeley seems to lose interest in the tarantula, and takes up another custom: the nasty habit of murder that has sprung up among the inhabitants of Southern Italy. In a letter to Pope about the island of Ischia, he writes: “and were they but as much strangers to revenge as they are to avarice and ambition, they
might in fact answer the poetical notions of the golden age. But they have got, as an alloy to their happiness, an ill habit of murdering one another on slight offences. We had an instance of this the second night after our arrival, a youth of eighteen being shot dead by our door : and yet by the sole secret of minding our own business, we found a means of living securely among those dangerous people.”

So: what is one to make of the practices of these people, their mental, or physical, reaction to the bite of the certainly real tarantula? In other words, what is the meaning of the appearance of a certain mentalist imperialism during a period when England is undergoing the tremors of the Great Transformation?

sage-imposter vs. fool-imposter

“But to imagine a plan for a republican constitution and to found a republic are two very different things. In a government where the public will, or the law, has not and ought not to have any other support, other guarantee, other ministry than the particular will, one cannot establish liberty but in making free men. Before elevating the edifice of liberty in Naples, there was in the ancient constitutions, in the customs, in the inveterate prejudices of the people, and in the interests of the moment, a thousand obstacles that it was urgent to know and indispensable to remove.”

Thus Cuoco, pointing to the republican dilemma when a foreign army, the French, took the city and most of the kingdom.

A story.

Four Corsicans are caught in Apulia when the French army took Naples. One is a former servant, Cesare, and one is a former artillery officer and deserter, Boccheciampe. Their other two companions are, by all accounts, unemployed vagabonds. According to Cuoco, the four were fleeing to Brindisi when the came to Monteasi, a small village, and took lodgings with an old woman, to whom they told the story that they were actually fleeing nobles – Boccheciampe was the brother of the king, and Cesare (this is not in the Cuoco account, but in Pietro Colleta’s History) for the duke of Saxony. Actually, the old woman was related to the royal intendant in the village, one Girunda. According to Colleta, Girunda was taken into the secret – according to Cuoco, Girunda went to the old woman’s house, knelt before Boccheciampe, and swore his allegiance. When the four got to Brindisi, they began to issue orders and raised an army of insurgents – Boccheciampe invested the province of Leuca, and Cesare marched on Barri. The men under their command, according to Cuoco, were ‘baron’s men’, criminals, and miscreants who had escaped from one prison or another. According to Colletta, the four Corsicans were soon busy firing and hiring magistrates and emptying the treasuries of various towns and villages, while imposing fines on the “rebels” to the King.

Not only did the people rejoice in this pillage of the “patriots” – they were encouraged by the clergy, who, knowing the men were imposters, nevertheless seized the chance to proclaim them legitimate in order to set going a countryside insurgency. Even the Bourbon nobility, well aware that the King’s brother was not a rude artilleryman with a Corse accent, played along with the imposters.

And so the revolt in the countryside begins not in support of the patriots who have overthrown the barbaric remnants of feudalism in Naples, when the Republic was proclaimed, but is conducted by the people for the feudal regime, under the banner of four imposters, against Republicanism, as it is understood, itself.

…

Since Naples was the home of Vico and Bruno, there is much here for the Gnostic historian, avid for intersignes, to contemplate, especially as the glosses are supplied by an intelligence like Cuoco’s, whose form of enlightenment materialism (for instance, he attributes the heterogeneity of customs and tempers in the Kingdom of Naples to the heterogeneity of the property arrangements instituted by feodalism: “… and the feudal system, which, in the centuries which followed barbarism and preceded civilization, always varied according to places and circumstances, rendering property diverse throughout; and that diversity necessarily passed into the moeurs, which are always analogous to the nature of property and the means of subsistence”) is lit up, as well, by the darker torches held aloft by Machiavelli and Vico.

The problem of “removing” these impediments to create a new connection between the state and the people – that organic connection of happiness – seems, in the chaos of 1799, to have reached a moment of dream tension in which parts of the fabric of legitimacy – as if will later be called – peel off to reveal the form of the variable that takes the sovereign position. I want to intervene in this dream to recall a typology I explored years ago, at the beginning of the Human Limit project: that of the sage and the fool.

For underneath Cuoco’s distinction between a revolution from above – a revolution for abstractions, imposed upon the public, which receives it passively – and a revolution from below – a revolution of the people, struggling to achieve their interests, actively – is something like the trace of the odd necessity that yoked the fool and the sage together.

Oh that counter-enlightenment crewe! From Vico onward – and actually, from the witch onward, from the tales in the forest onward – there is a program, or at least a programmatic stance, even if there is no system, or even if the systems are crackpot, deviant, ad hoc – which consists in the rejection of the power of the will to truth. One finds (inevitably?) that the opposition between sage and philosopher that structures Francois Jullien’s argument in A Sage is Without Ideas eventually crystalizes about this matter, our matter, the will to truth. The sage, in Jullien’s account, does not develop a neurosis about the truth – and thus a whole intellectual culture slips the bonds and knots of a certain mastering cognitive passion, orienting itself instead with relation to the road, or way.

Jullien does not ask if the Dao is the path of pins or the path of needles – little red riding hood does not figure in his story. More curiously, neither does the fool. Unless – and here one feels Jullien’s grasp of the theme loosen a bit – that role is taken by the Daoist.

I have emphasized the role of the adventurer in the Great Transformation – and surely it is in the wake of the adventurer that the fool and the sage, a couple we saw come apart in Le Neveau de Rameau, recommence their adventures.

The question I am posing here is this: how does the sage-imposter differ from the fool-imposter?

wrestling vs. boxing

I was reading an essay by Eco about Barthes’ Mythologies when I was struck by a citation from the essay on ‘Catch”, or wrestling. In fact, floating past the citation, I had the same feeling course down my spine that must be activated in the trout when confronted with a bright fly pierced by a hook. I had to swallow it.
I had to swallow it because it turns out that what Barthes writes about wrestling applies with an almost diabolical pertinence to politics in the age of mock democracy.

Mock democracy is defined as an electoral system in which both parties are concerned with aid and comfort of the minority of the wealthy, to the exclusion of anything else. This is a fact known to the electorate. It is known to the commentariat. All issues are shaped exclusively for the wealthiest, by their instruments, who have, in turn, got wealthy in the business of message management. This reality –which is easily confirmed simply by going through the bills passed by Congress and signed by the President for the past thirty years – is turned upside down during the elections, when the promises of both parties are directed at the concerns (economic and cultural) of an electorate that will be totally ignored after the election. Larry Bartels has a rather nice paper concerning whose concerns count with congress here.

From Bartels: “For incidental reasons of data availability, my research focuses on representation by U.S. senators in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Using both summary measures of senators’ voting patterns and specific roll call votes on the minimum wage, civil rights, government spending, and abortion, I find that senators in this period were vastly more responsive to the views of affluent constituents than to constituents of modest means. Indeed, my analyses suggest that the views of constituents in the upper third of the income distribution received about 50% more weight than those in the middle third (with even larger disparities on specific salient roll call votes), while the views of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution received no weight at all in the voting decisions of their senators.”

Given this situation, the election becomes a more interesting event. Why does the electorate participate in it?

The clue, I think, is given in Barthes analysis of wrestling, which, he is quick to say, is not a sport, but a spectacle. And a spectacle of a particular type:

Le public se moque complètement de savoir si le combat est truqué ou non, et il a raison; il se confie à la première vertu du spectacle, qui est d’abolir tout mobile et toute conséquence: ce qui lui importe, ce n’est pas ce qu’il croit, c’est ce qu’il voit.
(The public could completely care less about knowing if the combat is faked or not, and it is right; it trusts in the first virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish every motive and every consequence: what matters to it is not what it believes, but what it sees.)

One of the great commonplaces is that seeing is believing. But in the world of commonplaces, I go with St. Paul: we see now as in a mirror, darkly. The inverse is really the sublunar true: believing is seeing. What we believe, we will see.
Of course, we have been saturated for years with advertisements that mock seeing and believing. In the culture of the mock democracy, it has become a sort of official dogma that what occurs and what is believed – or at least what is believed about the belief of the ‘public’ – exist on separate continuums. The cynical manipulation of the latent violence of the public feeds the educated stance of permanent irony, peppered of course with fetishistic and bizarre attachments to random phenomena in popular culture. Where once one could be assured that the Marxist you know was going to tell you about the inevitable victory of the working class, now he or she is more likely to tell you of the subversive potential of Lady Gaga.
Thus, the election has shifted as it becomes meaningful only for the upper class. The upper class, of course, well knows how to monetize nuances. The Democratic Party candidate (usually an upper class type with good intentions) will differ radically with the Republican Party type on the margins. But both are content with, for instance, the thirty year slump in medium incomes. In fact, both have simply stopped imaging the bottom thirty percent – and have only a dim, Hollywood lit sense of the very middle. Of course, the Hollywood scenario endows the 50 000 dollar household with the accoutrements of the 500 000 dollar one, and never notices – because once you are inside the Gated City, noticing becomes too hard. In the hinterlands, the Yahoos aspire themselves – in the vacant moment - to the image of their lifestyle as presented by the media message benders, but in the end they can’t really think about. They have no power to change anything even if they wanted to. Unlike, say, the French or Italan peasant at the end of the feudal period, they are pathetically docile. What castle would they burn even if they could find it?
Thus, the odd asymmetry that governs this thing called an election. On the one hand, it is taken seriously by those who know they will gain or lose on the result. On the other hand, it has to be taken as a passion play by those who will lose no matter what the result. Thus, the latter have come increasingly to seek catharsis and madness – qualities proper to wrestling, as well.
This disparity is also mirrored in Barthes’ essay, when he compares boxing and wrestling. For my comparison’s sake, the interest taken by the upper class in the election parallels, boxing, while for the loser classes, it is wrestling all the way.

“This public know very well how to distinguish wrestling from boxing. It knows that boxing is a jansenist sport, founded on the demonstration of an excellence; one can bet on the issue of a boxing combat: with wrestling, that has no sense.The boxing match is a history that is constructed under the eyes of the spectator; in wrestling, it is very much the contrary, it is each moment which is intelligible, not the whole duration. The spectator doesn’t interest himself in the mounting of a fortune, he waits the live image of certain passions. Wrestling demands thus an immediate reading of the juxtaposed senses, without it being necessary to connect them. The rational future of combat doesn’t interest the amateur of wrestling, while on the contrary, a boxing match always implies a science of the future.”
I will end this with a passage from the NYT story about the election campaign of Patrick Murphey, a Democratic representative running for re-election in Pennsylvania. He is a quintessential Obama Democrat – moderate, well intentioned, a man who wants to do what is right – as long as this is politically possible.

"Marge Reed, 75, opened her screen door and before he could complete a sentence said, “You know what, Mr. Murphy, I don’t believe anything anybody tells me anymore.” She apologized for her frankness but said it was to be expected because of her Irish heritage. “I’m Irish, too,” Mr. Murphy said, as if she might not know that. “So is your opponent,” she said, and they both laughed. She told Mr. Murphy that she planned to vote for him, then continued giving him a piece of her mind.
Little of the anger Mr. Murphy encountered was aimed directly at him or even at President Obama. Mr. Murphy never once mentioned the president’s name, and, oddly, over the course of three hours, neither did any of the Levittown residents. People just did not like their situation or the general drift of the country, and seemed to hold everyone in a position of power — locally and in Washington — responsible.
I called Marge Reed the next day. She had worked for the Spiegel catalog company at a store in Levittown where people picked up their orders. She said she had lost much of her retirement nest egg in the stock market and was living on $13,750 a year and having a hard time paying for her prescriptions. Her husband died in 1993. “I don’t feel like anybody cares about people like me,” she said. “I remember President Obama talking about how he worried about his mother paying her health bills when she had cancer. Well, I’m somebody’s mother, too.”

active and passive revolution 2

The revolution for happiness, by 1799, had memorized the shape of its own ashy shadow. After 1793, the Italian intellectuals of the era must have thought, never such innocence.

But innocence is an ever renewed political quality. It never ceases to flow.

The importance of Cuoco’s meditations about the passive and active revolution derive from their relation to two revolutions: the French and the Neapolitan. The Neapolitan intelligentsia had seemingly understood the French, and recognized its errors. Or so such people as Mario Pagano thought. In his memoirs, Count Orlov, a sympathetic observer, wrote: “ The scond edition of his Saggi Politici (Essais Politiques) appeared during that fatal period [1790] and made a sensation in a city where one almost didn’t read, where meditation is a form of fatigue. The system that he developed there, I will confess, discovered many contradictors, and had few partisans. One reproached him, with some reason, to have given himself up too much to his imagination, to have taken his authorities in inconclusive passages from ancient authors. ‘In quest’opera,’ one of his friends wrote me, ‘la fantasia supera il Giudizio.’

To bleed the trace of fantasia from politics is, perhaps, the greatest fantasy of all.

There is no reason to think that Orlov’s correspondent is Vincenzo Cuoco. But certainly the balance between fantasia and judgment is a theme that obsessed him – that followed him like the sounds of the waterfall in the glenn followed Wordsworth - in his observations on the revolution in action, which, he understood, was also the reaction, too, in action. In Chapter 7 of his essay on the revolution in Naples, he stops the plot after having portrayed the royal court, in the sway of the Bourbon queen Maria-Caroline and her sinister advisors, exerting itself to extinguish ‘revolutionary’ forces in Naples in a prevision of the white terror to come. The fact, Cuoco says, is that the revolutionary forces existed as mere salon opinion, or the casual remarks of the young bucks down at the race track. What was once merely the skeptical banter of 18th century rococo suddenly found itself transformed into deep politics.

In this chapter, Cuoco asks why the French revolution crystallized reaction in Europe, for, as he rightly points out, it is surely not the first time a kingdom has been shaken by an internal revolution in Europe. The reaction of the European kingdoms must itself be seen as different – that is, there were two distinctly novel phenomenon that emerged in the 1790s – the revolution and the reaction.