on markets and choicemaking

I'm rerunning this post, with some changes, from 2005. I want to pick up Heilbroner's critique of the idea of choice by reviewing the controversy between the young Macaulay and James Mill concerning utilitarianism, which, on the surface, pitted Macaulay's conservatism against Mill's radicalism. The subject of Macaulay and utilitarianism is a confused one, as the older Macaulay used Bentham as a template for undertaking the production, ex nihilo, of a code of laws for the British Raj. A topic around which swirls much scholarly conflict.

But on to this post.

I stayed for a couple days in Malinalco in 2004 as the guest of a friend of my friend, M. One day, M. wanted to get some tomatoes and some underpants for her little boy. We walked around the cobbled streets. It was late afternoon. M. wanted to complete our task before the sun went down, because after dark, the pedestrian in Malinalco is prone to attack from the packs of dogs that suddenly seem to materialize out of the shadows. Residents have gates to shut after dark, so they can avoid unwanted canine intrusion.

To get the underwear, we went to a few shops. None of them had the kind M. was looking for. To get the tomatoes, we didn’t go to a shop. We went to the market.

Like every Mexican village, there are some streets in the center of town upon which, every day, venders pitch their stands. Some markets are elaborate, with vendors of Barbie dolls, sunglasses, hats, and computer games pitched next to vendors of cucumbers, watermelons, corn, and tacos. Some are less elaborate. An economist, looking at these structures, might well see materialization of the purest form of market – the one to one relationship between vendor and consumer is such that prices actually reflect real dickering, supply and demand in action.

However, since Karl Polyani’s day, economists have seen something else.
In the Summer, 2004 Social Research, dedicated to Robert Heilbroner, the economist who died last week, there were two articles concerned with Polyani and Heilbroner’s notions of the market. In one of the articles, “Heilbroner and Polanyi, a shared vision”, Robert Dimand notices that the two writers both felt that the key to economic history is not given to us by the neo-classical notion of the natural market. Rather, like Karl Polyani, the market as we know it on the larger, global scale – capitalisme, quoi - can only be understood in the context of its managed overthrow of pre-capitalist exchange systems.

Here are the opening grafs of Dimand’s article:

IN THE OPENING PARAGRAPH OF HIS INTRODUCTION TO A COLLECTION OF debates among Marxist historians and economists over The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism that were initiated by Dobb (1946), Rodney Hilton (1976: 9) recalled that Karl Polanyi (1948) "thought that Dobb had retained from Marx what was bad (the labour theory of value) whilst discarding what he, Polanyi, thought was Marx's "fundamental insight into the historically limited nature of market organisation.'" Beyond condescending praise of Polanyi's review for "a serious attitude to the problems of a Marxist analysis" and passing mention in the next paragraph that R. H. Tawney's review of Dobb "did not raise any of the general theoretical problems which Polanyi hinted at," Hilton (and the other contributors reprinted in the volume) proceeded to ignore Polanyi's challenge as thoroughly as any mainstream neoclassical economist could have done.

In contrast, Robert Heilbroner shared the fundamental insight that Polanyi derived from Marx, and brought it to the attention of millions of readers. Over four decades and in 11 editions of The Making of Economic Society, Heilbroner examined the replacement of socially embedded provisioning by the market as a means of organizing society and production during the Industrial Revolution, while in seven editions of The World Philosophers that spanned nearly half a century he explored the accompanying changes in how economists thought about the economy. In his vision both of how the economy had changed and how economic thought had interacted with these changes, Heilbroner stood shoulder to shoulder with Polanyi.”

One of the things philosophers have learned from Freud and Heidegger is that forgetting is a manufactured act – although the manufacturers may not quite understand their own intentions or the process that went into them. There were two, overlapping forgettings that constituted the ideological foundation of the Cold War in the American sphere. One was the forgetting of how this “replacement of socially embedded provisioning by the market as a means of organizing society and production during the Industrial Revolution” took place. This forgetting foreclosed on both the ravages of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America, and the cost of producing free market economies in the colonial sphere. The terror famines that occurred in Ireland and India under British rule, for instance, were dropped as a subject of discussion, or – in the case of Ireland – sentimentalized. It took Mike Davis’ book, The Victorian Holocaust, to revive interest in a series of famines that, at the turn of the century (circa 1900) in England, were well known to any educated English socialist.

The other great forgetting was about the wars that bubbled up in the capitalist world, finally ending in World War I. In fact, the whole history of the Russian Revolution was systematically distorted by cutting out the crucial facts of the war on the Eastern front – the senseless slaughter of up to two million Russians. Given the shadow of that fact, the bitter Civil War between the Red and White forces could no longer be told as a morality tale in which bad Reds killed wonderfully royalist Whites. Nor could one construct the nice myth of Lenin as the father of the Gulag with quite the straightforward indignation required, if one asks about the capitalist forces in Britain and Germany and France that authored a war that decimated 8 million people. That this slaughter was crowned, in hindsight, as a war in defense of democracy -- when, of course, it was a war in defense of a particular power arrangement among capitalist states, the governing classes of which were agreed on the necessity of perpetuating white power -- was a grim joke.

Polyani and Heilbroner, however, were exceptions to the Cold War rule. They would notice, about those markets, the use of public space, the margins of profit that were not derived from the rational bickering between seller and consumer but often on quite seemingly irrational prejudices on both sides of the buyer/seller divide, indicating different regimes of values. They both questioned the gauge of efficiency in the role of these markets – something M. and I discovered in our odyssey in search of underwear, here.

These issues were Heilbroner’s specialty. In the same issue of Social Research there is an exemplary Heilbroner piece, Economics as Universal Science, which quietly mocks those who, like Gary Becker or certain members of the Chicago School, claim that economics can act as the master-science for studying human behavior (plus, of course, a thrilling dose of sociobiology).

Heilbroner starts off by asking where we locate economies, if they have such modeling force in telling us about human behavior. His own premise goes like this:

“I shall undertake this task by starting from the premise that the continuity of society requires structured ways of assuring social order. These ways range from the routines and habits of daily life to formal institutions of law and order. In referring to this spectrum I shall use the term "sociological" as a portmanteau term that covers the order-bestowing influences of private life, of which incomparably the most important are the pressures of socialization exerted by parents on their offspring--pressures that teach children how to fulfill the roles expected of them in adult life. The second term, "political," I use in the conventional sense of the institutional means by which some group or class within society can enforce its will over other groups or classes. The definition of these terms is less important than my intention to describe a protective canopy of behavior-shaping arrangements, part informal and private, part formal and public, that protects the community from actions that would threaten its continued existence.

“Both the sociological and political elements in this canopy are fundamentally concerned with an aspect of social order and coherence that is usually referred to only obliquely. This aspect is the general state of obedience or acquiescence without which the armature of rights and privileges that defines any social order could be retained only by force and overt repression. With his customary candor, Adam Smith called this necessary aspect of society "subordination": "Civil government," he wrote, "suppose[s] a certain subordination." We shall return many times to this theme, but the challenge it raises should now be clear. It is the disconcerting idea that economics is socialization or
subordination in disguise.”

Heilbroner sees, however, that the ‘imperial” economist, as he calls him, can give two responses to the placement of the socius at the center of society. One is that the socius is actually a network of decisions, and hence of choices. Economics is the science that is going to rationalize that hodge-podge of choices by gauging it according to an optimal model that follows a simple rule: all choices are motivated by the perception of an advantage. It doesn’t matter if the perception is wrong, or distorted, or ignores long term advantages, etc. What matters is the logic of advantage.

The other answer, Heilbroner thinks, is to make economics the study of the division of labor that lies at the heart of the social order. Thus, subordination can again be wrapped into economics.

Heilbroner’s consideration of these options in the light of what Polyani calls the Great Transformation – the emergence of an international, hegemonic capitalist system in the last two hundred some years – is more insightful than the guff one usually gets from economists. Here are two more grafs to chew on:

"Economics thereby takes the economic system to be the living model of capitalism, containing within its categories and conceptions everything that is essential for its comprehension. It is here that economics betrays its fatal limitations as a universal science, and its knavish consequences as an imperial doctrine.

"The first such consequence is that economics itself appears as a neutral rather than a charged explanation system for capitalism. This becomes apparent in many ways. A term of great importance such as "efficiency," for example, is regarded as a quasi-engineering criterion, rather than one whose unspoken purpose is to maximize production as a profit-making--not a purely engineering--endeavor. Similar unnoticed sociopolitical meanings cling to other such terms, including "production" itself, which is counted in the national income accounts only insofar as it results in commodities, not use-values. In much the same fashion, the fundamental unit of the economic system is taken to be the rational maximizing "individual." The economic system is thus conceived as a society of hermits, not as an order of groups and classes.

"This concealment of a social order is most clearly evidenced when we notice the manner in which economics rationalizes functional income distribution. Marx wrote scathingly of Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, each entitled to receive a reward for the contributions each has made to the social product, but modern economics has forgotten the fetishisms that Marx exposed. Of even greater importance, it has no explanation for, or interest in, the curious fact that the reward paid as net profit, which goes only to owners of capital, gives them only a "residual" claim on output, after all factors, including capital, have been paid their marginal products. In view of the repeated demonstrations of economics that the tendency of the market system is to eliminate such residuals as mere transient imperfections of the system, one must be a sociologist or political theorist to explain why owners of capital seem so eager to protect these dubious claims. Thus the manner in which the market supports the class structure of capitalism is a matter before which economics is silent--indeed, a matter of which it is, in some sense, unaware."

treasure hunting - the archaic economy of tomorrow!

Remark, here, on the double aspect of this transaction, at once modern and archaic. The modern aspect is found in the whole question of value: Pons and his fellow experts in bricabracology are commodifying, instead of monumentalizing, the past. About this aspect, I want to say a lot in this essay. I’m more interested, here, in the archaic aspect – that “merchandise of chance” - implicit in the very activity of treasure seeking in what the economists would call a secondary market. What is premodern here – and what, in fact, was never liquidated in modernity – is a way of thinking about treasure, about gifts, about bargaining, and about value.

I know about treasure from childhood, and from some vague memories of my grandmother, who was, during part of her life at least, very much the antique collector. In fact, one of my strongest childhood memories is reading in a rattan chair from the Philippines that erected itself, like a queen in shabby exile, on her back porch, during hot summer days. Surely I read Treasure Island sitting there.

In childhood, wealth is treasure, from the money saved in piggy banks to digging for imaginary pirate’s loot. I went on expeditions into the ‘woods’ around our neighborhood in suburban Atlanta with my friend Mark, tracing back streams into land that was already surveyed for the next wave of housing, looking for likely caches of Confederate gold.

The connection between the hidden and wealth reveals a mode of thinking about wealth from the point of view not of earning it – not of labor – but of finding it, of cutting the all too mortal tie of work. Yet the utopian, land of cockaigne aspect of things is only one determinant of the treasure myth. Treasures are guarded. Treasures are wealth in their most guarded form from the evil eye of the other. Treasures are about the powerful notion of wealth that has prevailed in agricultural based economies before the world of economic growth – before the world, that is, in which economic growth was expected, even assumed. This was a world ruled over by Nemesis – in which all the things of the world were scarce.

As Balzac explains, the pleasure that Pons took in his objets d’art, or the pleasure taken by the real collectors of Balzac’s acquaintance, or, I daresay, the pleasure taken by my grandmother, was greatly increased by the disparity between the price he (and them) acquired the piece for and its ‘value’. That value, like the value of any commodity, is realized in the market place. But the pleasure is realized in the finding of the treasure, which is materialized in the history of the bargain. Here, the forces engaged have to do with something like the hau of the Maoris, the spirit of the thing mentioned in Mauss’ Essay on the Gift. That spirit is engaged in the contests of ‘prestation’ – of giftgiving – that are at the center of Mauss’ essay. It is also engaged in the fan given to Presidente Marville, a fan bearing a signature by Watteau affirming its authenticity.
Anthropologically, these forces, these exchanges, are not captured within the framework of capitalist rationality.
In “ Treasure-Hunting: A Magical Motif in Law, Folklore, and Mentality, Württemberg, 1606 –1770”, by Johannes Dillinger and Petra Feld, there are a number of accounts of treasure hunting in Europe in the early modern era. One begins with a certain Margaretha Schütterin, the wife of a stonemason in Schwaikheim, who saw a ghost on day in the Winter of 1704. The ghost asked her to help him and 16 other souls (who also, apparently, appeared to her) who had been walking for 240 years by finding a treasure they had deposited in Schütterin’s house, hiding it from rampaging soldiers. They were monks in life, and needed the release in the afterlife which would follow upon Schütterin uncovering the treasure and using it, in part, for charitable works.

One of the monks explained that she had been chosen to do this because she had the same horoscope as Christ. Schütterin did what she could, which was to gather money from her friends and family to comply with the various tasks that would free the ghosts and lead to the treasure. This included paying for masses to be read, buying candles, and giving alms. By these means she extracted 912 Gulden out of a local baker, David Fischer.
“When he doubted her assertions, she made him believe that there was a competition between potential creditors. Margaretha Schütterin managed to establish a sort of `investment trust’ of treasure-hunters by promising them profits of up to 100,000 Gulden. The use she allegedly made of the money given to her, i.e. to donate it to pious causes in Catholic churches, could not easily be checked by the creditors. She finally left her husband whom she probably managed to deceive with her ghost story, too, and fled with the money. When Fischer denounced Margaretha SchuÈ tterin after her flight, he was sentenced to a fine of 14 Gulden for unlicensed treasurehunting, although he maintained that she had assured him that the treasure hunt had been permitted by the duke.”


Dillinger and Feld turn here, to explain the obsession with treasure, to George Foster’s work on the limited good – or the zero sum economic attitudes of Mexican peasants. Foster’s paper is a famous and disputed foray into the peasant mentalite. Clearly, he is working in the same vein as Mauss and – though Foster might never have read him – George Bataille, who developed a metaphysics of the abject and the sovereign built on the kind of generosity and madness inscribed in the society of the limited good. This is Foster’s explanation of it.
In this paper I am concerned with the nature of the cognitive orientation of peasants, and with interpreting and relating peasant behavior as described by anthropologists to this orientation. I am also concerned with the implications of this orientation-and related behavior to the problem of the peasant's participation in the economic growth of the country to which he may belong. Specifically, I will outline what I believe to be the dominant theme in the cognitive orientation of classic peasant societies,* show how characteristic peasant behavior seems to flow from this orientation, and attempt to show that this behavior—however incompatible with national economic growth—is not only highly rational in the context of the cognition that determines it, but that for the maintenance of peasant society in its classic form, it is indispensable.4 The kinds of behavior that have been suggested as adversely influencing economic growth are, among many, the "luck" syndrome, a "fatalistic" outlook, inter- and intra-familial quarrels, difficulties in cooperation, extraordinary ritual expenses by poor people and the problems these expenses pose for capital accumulation, and the apparent lack of what the psychologist McClelland (1961) has called "need for Achievement." I will suggest that peasant participation in national development can be hastened not by stimulating a psychological process, the need for achievement, but by creating economic and other opportunities that will encourage the peasant to abandon his traditional and increasingly unrealistic cognitive orientation for a new one that reflects the realities of the modern world.

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

the modern and the archaic in a sale

Continuing the post I put up yesterday. Get used to this, scattered and few readers of LI!

…

Sylvaine Pons, the ‘poor cousin’ in Balzac’s Cousin Pons, is first seen as an incredibly ugly, elderly man hurrying one afternoon through the streets of Paris, holding a package that evidently contains something fragile. He is dressed in the style of the 1810s and 20s, in the Paris of the 1840s – a fact that leads Balzac to treat him, and in fact the whole Parisian scene, as something ‘archaeologic’. It is a term that resonates throughout the novel, foriIf Pons is a relic, he is also the man with the passion for relics. He is a treasure hunter. His tragedy unfolds within a triangle of wants: 1.) the want of sex, denied to Pons when he was young on account of his ugliness and his lack of prospects; 2. the want of bibelots, objets d’art, in the pursuit of which Pons has become an expert, chasing down the stray treasures of the ancien regime for almost forty years; and 3) the want of the stomach, the one desire that brings our man down. Pons, as a musician, enjoyed enough of a vogue in the 1820s that he could dine out. And just as his desire for beautiful objects is a compensation for his lack of sexual satisfaction, his desire for good food is fed by a stomach and tongue – organs that Balzac, in the course of the book, treats almost as independent systems of intelligence, another kind of sex – so too he becomes an epicure in his way. It is this that leads him to become, little by little as his vogue wanes, a man who has to plan his way into the houses and to the tables of those rich people who are his ‘cousins’.

After treating us to the archaeological spectacle of Pons, that afternoon, in the Paris street – digging outward towards his deeper history, and that of the world in which he collects his objects, a world in which there exist real people like Sauvageot (an actual figure, a poor musician “like Pons, without a great fortune as well, [who] proceded in the same manner by the same means with the same love of art, with the same hatred against the illustrious rich who have cabinets made for themselves in competition with the merchants”) – Balzac takes us down to earth, or rather to the real-time moment in which Pons arrives at his destination – his cousin Camusot’s house (now the President Marville) – and presents the woman of the house, the Presidente Marville, with his find: a fan painted by Watteau. Let’s underline the fact that the fan is presented as a gift. And it is an aspect of Marville’s vulgarity that she not only does not recognize the name Watteau, but that she orders Pons’ meal, in his hearing, as a counter-gift – violating the rule that spaces out giftgiving, and making it seem like a return, an exchange.

I am fascinated by the complex economics of the scene. Here is Pons, trying to explain to the inexpressibly stupid Presidente Marville what he has done for her in finding the fan in a place on Rue de Lappe, at a brocanteur’s – which, according to a 1786 dictionary of official terms (Dictionnaire universal de police) is he who traffics in diverse and chance merchandise (“marchandise de hazard”)”:

“"I know all those sharpers," continued Pons, "so I asked him, 'Anything fresh to-day, Daddy Monistrol?'—(for he always lets me look over his lots before the big buyers come)—and at that he began to tell me how Lienard, that did such beautiful work for the Government in the Chapelle de Dreux, had been at the Aulnay sale and rescued the carved panels out of the clutches of the Paris dealers, while their heads were running on china and inlaid furniture.—'I did not do much myself,' he went on, 'but I may make my traveling expenses out of this,' and he showed me a what-not; a marvel! Boucher's designs executed in marquetry, and with such art!—One could have gone down on one's knees before it.—'Look, sir,' he said, 'I have just found this fan in a little drawer; it was locked, I had to force it open. You might tell me where I can sell it'—and with that he brings out this little carved cherry-wood box.—'See,' says he, 'it is the kind of Pompadour that looks like decorated Gothic.'—'Yes,' I told him, 'the box is pretty; the box might suit me; but as for the fan, Monistrol, I have no Mme. Pons to give the old trinket to, and they make very pretty new ones nowadays; you can buy miracles of painting on vellum cheaply enough. There are two thousand painters in Paris, you know.'—And I opened out the fan carelessly, keeping down my admiration, looked indifferently at those two exquisite little pictures, touched off with an ease fit to send you into raptures. I held Mme. de Pompadour's fan in my hand! Watteau had done his utmost for this.—'What do you want for the what-not?'—'Oh! a thousand francs; I have had a bid already.'—I offered him a price for the fan corresponding with the probable expenses of the journey. We looked each other in the eyes, and I saw that I had my man. I put the fan back into the box lest my Auvergnat should begin to look at it, and went into ecstasies over the box; indeed, it is a jewel.—'If I take it,' said I, 'it is for the sake of the box; the box tempts me. As for the what-not, you will get more than a thousand francs for that. Just see how the brass is wrought; it is a model. There is business in it. . . . It has never been copied; it is a unique specimen, made solely for Mme. de Pompadour'—and so on, till my man, all on fire for his what-not, forgets the fan, and lets me have it for a mere trifle, because I have pointed out the beauties of his piece of Riesener's furniture. So here it is; but it needs a great deal of experience to make such a bargain as that. It is a duel, eye to eye; and who has such eyes as a Jew or an Auvergnat?"
The old artist's wonderful pantomime, his vivid, eager way of telling the story of the triumph of his shrewdness over the dealer's ignorance, would have made a subject for a Dutch painter; but it was all thrown away upon the audience. Mother and daughter exchanged cold, contemptuous glances.—"What an oddity!" they seemed to say.
"So it amuses you?" remarked Mme. de Marville. The question sent a cold chill through Pons; he felt a strong desire to slap the Presidente.”
And who among Balzac’s readers, at this point, does not?
Remark, here, on the double aspect of this transaction, at once modern and archaic. The modern aspect is found in the whole question of value: Pons and his fellow experts in bricabracology are commodifying, instead of monumentalizing, the past. About this aspect, I want to say a lot – but let me do this later. I’m more interested, here, in the archaic aspect – that “merchandise of chance” - implicit in the very activity of treasure seeking in what the economists would call a secondary market. What is a treasure?

a more personal beginning

I've been worrying that the style in which I'm trying to write my Bio of H.E. is too scholastic, and not gnostic or eccentric or personal enough. So I am thinking of beginnning something more like this.

...

I was in my second year of college, in the town of S., a long time ago, hen I first came down with what I know now is a sort of disease: the want of a desire to want. I was living in a furnished apartment above a garage full of old photographs. The garage was attached to a mansion inhabited by an eccentric and presumably wealthy couple, although I only had any relations with the wife, Mrs. M., a former CIA agent and photograph enthusiast (hence, the piles of old darkroom equipment and boxes of photographs in the garage, along with a very old and never driven Bentley

I was happy with the furnishings, and especially with Mrs. M.’s choice of firehouse red as the predominant color in the kitchen (stove, table, chairs, and even tea kettle). Then my father came by one day – they lived twenty miles outside of S. – and gave me a television.

Up until this point, I’d had no trouble with television. One of my first purchases, from my first job as a teenager, had been a small portable tv. This allowed me to watch tv in my bedroom, my own shows rather than those of my parents or brothers and sisters when they had dibs on the big tv in the downstairs room which was all set up for it – the couch and the chairs turned towards it even when they were empty and the set was off, as if the room was somehow asleep. But as I tried to find a place for the tv my father gave me, I suddenly felt that I didn’t really want it.

Up until that point, it hadn’t occurred to me not to want the wantable things that America is so full of. Looking back, this rather trivial moment was like the first symptom, the first black buboe that signifies that you have the plague. Because, as my life unfolded, I discovered I didn’t want almost any of the major wantable things. I didn’t want a car. I didn’t want a home. I didn’t want a boat, or a stereo system, or a credit card, or a closet full of clothes. I didn’t even want a couch. It wasn’t even that I was infected with a hippie Puritanism that meant that I wanted other people not to want these things; it was simply that I never, well, felt the urge to go out and buy them.

The significance of the PC and the Internet for me was that, in the nineties, I finally wanted something. But I didn’t want the latest things, even there: I was quite content with, say, Windows95 long after that software had been rendered obsolete. I only gradually and grudgingly have been pulled along by the trendy currents of personal computing design. Plus, my job, as a free lancer, depends on the computer.

I would not have a problem with the want of wanting if I didn’t have pretensions far above my station – for even when I was perched in my firehouse red kitchen in the town of S., I planned on being a writer. I planned on writing novels, in fact. I didn’t plan on poor thin narratives, but thick ones, fat cultural steaks full of the greases and hamburger of the America I saw around me, all its idiocies and splendeurs in my – and its - ephemeral moment. The most fabulously wealthy country of all time! My idea of the novel was on the lines of those of Balzac, whose Human Comedy – if considered as one novel, on the order of, say, In Search of Lost Time – is at the top of my list of great novels. Balzac not only wrote of people wanting lots in the restoration France of his time, but he himself was a tremendous and unmanageable wanter, which is how he went through fortunes as a sort of industrial plant of best sellers and still managed, most years, to remain well in debt. He wanted houses, he wanted art, he wanted excellent food and wine, he wanted women, he wanted clothes. In the letters to his future wife, Madame Hanska, who was as beautiful as a portrait and, more to the point, beautifully wealthy, plus being geographically distant on her Ukranian estates – where she couldn’t poke her nose too much into Balzac’s Parisian business - Balzac would heap up in great lists the things he wanted – the houses that they would both live in, jewels, objects of art - in a sort of fireworks of mad accounting and mad connoisseurship, while at the same time he would keep her advised of his schemes for liquidating his debts, which by 1844 amounted to, on his account, about 150,000 francs.

“I went out for the first time the day before yesterday. I bought a clock for our salon of an unheard of magnificence, and two pale blue garnet vases that are not less magnificent. All this for almost nothing. Great news! Rothschild wants my Florentine marbles. He is doubtless going to come to see them. I want fourteen thousand francs for them. Another piece of news! The Girardon Christ, bought for one hundred fifty francs, is estimated at five thousand francs, and twenty thousand francs with the frame [by Bustolone]. And you scold me, o louloup, for my dealings in the kingdom of Bricabrac-erie!” [ - my translation Lettres a l’etrangere, vol. 2, 446]

Balzac abundantly satisfied his love of bricabrac-erie in his novels, in which characters are always setting up apartments or houses with lavishly described furnishings – and it finally achieves its metaphysical form in Cousin Pons. Balzac’s reveling in such things as frames by Bustolone or boudoir figurines turned out by 18th century craftsmen had, as he well knew, a political sense: Balzac not only turned his negative capacity into a shopping catalogue, but he had a very high sense of the history behind the object and a genius for understanding how they were all connected. In the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the storehouse of goods that had been accumulated for centuries in noble estates and monarchial palaces, in churches and bourgeois hôtels, were swept away in the deluge (the deluge to which Louis XV had so famously referred), to reappear in the pawn shop, the cart of the dealer in curios at the foire, among dealers in old furniture located in shadowy side streets, or mysteriously present on the fireplace mantel of the provincial peasant who had enriched himself buying seized church lands.

diderot - nature and folly

In a letter to Sophie Volland on September 2, 1769, Diderot wrote:

I believe that I told you that I made a dialogue between D’Alembert and me. In re-reading it, I was taken with the fantasy of making a second and it was made. The interlocutors are D’Alembert who dreams, Bordeu and the friend of D’Alember, Mlle de l’Epinasse. It is entitled the Dream of D’Alembert. It isn’t possible to be more profound and more crazy [plus profound et plus fou]. [Diderot, OC 1875, II, 101. My translation.]

In the 18th century, depth and folly were normally dissociated. Yet Diderot, who viewed himself as, above all, a combatant on the philosophe side, saw them as allies. In the letter to Sophie Volland we quoted about the two Enlightenments, Diderot had already contemplated the idea that the world was a ‘stupidity’ – a ‘beautiful stupidity’. If this were so, then a problem, or rather a cognitive abyss, opens up before reason, and the rational man, going through that door, falls into it. The pit is this world.

Another name for the world is ‘nature’. In the seventeenth century, Boyle had already made the first foray against using the term nature vulgarly as a cause. I’ve already written a post about this, so let me quote it here:

“In 1686, Robert Boyle published the “Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv’d Notion of Nature”. Michael Hunter and Edward Davis make the claim that this is one of the essential texts of the Scientific Revolution. In their essay on the making of the text, Hunter and Davis quote one of Boyle’s “protégés”, Scottish physician David Abercromby, who wrote: I therefore look upon this work as the new system of a new philosophy which fundamentally overthrows the foundation – namely, Nature – of all views hitherto held in philosophical matters.” [219] Others, of course, have cast doubt on the very idea that there was a Scientific Revolution. Myself, I prefer the term New Learning. Certainly there was an institutional revolution – no longer were the virtuosi independent players, like wandering minstrels and alchemists. The Universities were still stacked with Aristotelians and bloodletters, and the real action shifted to the Royal Society, or the semi Royal academies in France (although in France, this was supplemented by a correspondence culture which formally associated savants which doesn’t have a parallel in England).

We can go all the way back to the Cratylus to find distinctions being made between speakers of the same language. Among the humanists, the distinction between learned speech and vulgar speech was simply a reality – learning was published in Latin – or it referred to an occult jargon that supposedly could be attributed to traditions that went back to antiquity. Antiquity was the truthmaker, to use a fashionable term from contemporary analytic philosophy. But as the New Learning was about casting off the shackles of antique learning, this distinction would no longer do (although, of course, I am working with clear cut lines that were, in actuality, less clear cut than one could tell from the bravado of New Learning’s sages. Respect for the ancients was not so easily overcome as all that).

So when Boyle writes his enquiry, we are faced with a new set of coordinates for separating ordinary speech from “philosophical” speech. Since Boyle was, on his odd days, a corpuscularian, and a round promoter of the Royal society, one might think that he had a sneaking affection for Gassendi’s re-discovery of atomism. In fact, it is the use of ‘nature’ in the Epicurean sense – the vulgar chatter of the esprits forts – against which Boyle shoots many of his arrows.”

The arrow is tipped, feathered and shot from the first paragraphs of Boyle’s work:

“But farther whilst men indulge themselves so general and easy a way of solving difficulties as to attribute them to nature; shame will not reduce them to a more industrious search after the reasons of things, nor curiosity itself greatly move them to it. Thus the cause of the ascent of water in pumps and other phenomena of that kind had never been known if the moderns had acquiesced in that imaginary one that the world was gover’d by a watchful Being call’d nature, who abhors a Vacuum and consequently is always ready to do whatever is necessary to prevent it.”

But though Boyle and his colleagues of the Royal Society drove nature out of the language of natural philosophy, Nature, as is the way of all obsolete gods, made his way back to the surface of consciousness as a sort of daemonic instance, a guilty last resort.

And so it is that Diderot’s three dialogues with D’Alembert procede with a demonic glee to reveal profound things. It was the glee, the tone, as well as the indiscretion, that angered D’Alembert’s mistress, Mlle de L’Epinasse, who demanded the suppression of the dialogue.

“It is the highest extravagance, and at the same time the deepest philosophy. There is some cunning [addresse] in having put my ideas in the mouth of a man who dreams – it is often necessary to give to wisdom the air of folly, in order to procure for it its entries, that I would rather that they says, “but this isn’t as crazy as everyone believes, rather then, “listen to me, here are some very wise things.”

As is so often the case with Diderot, the work is caught up in a network of sacrifice – of smoke. I wish Derrida had referred to these these dialogues in his Given Time, where the question of the commodity of tobacco – that exemplary gift/gift – is intermixed with the question of smoke and dispersion, of non-return. Diderot claimed, and perhaps thought, that he had acceded to D’Alembert’s protest (driven by de L’Epinasse) and burnt them.

“The pleasure to have rendered an account to oneself for one’s opinions have produced them; the indiscretion of some persons had pulled them from obscurity; alarmed love desired their sacrifice; tyrannic friendship demanded it; and a too easy friendship consented: they were lacerated. You wanted me to gather up the fragments; I did so.”
TBC

the tableau method and historical consciousness

I’m not sure I want to explore this in my homo economicus book. But it fascinates me.

In Schumpeter’s history of economic analysis, he devotes a section to the excellencies of the tableau as a tool.

1. “First of all, the tableau method achieves a tremendous simplification. Actually the economic life of a nonsocialist society consists of millions of relations or flows between individual firms and households. We can establish certain theorems about them, but we can never observe all of them. But if we replace them by relations between classes or by flows of class (or other) aggregates, the unmanageable number of variables in the economic problem suddenly reduces to a few which are easy to handle and follow up.”
2. “Second, the simplification of the analytic pattern achieved by the tableau method opens up great possibilities for numerical theory. Quesnay was more alive to these possibilities than had been Cantillon and, in this particular respect, he carried the latter's work much further. He troubled himself about statistical data and actually tried to estimate the values of annual output and other aggregates.”
3. “Third and most important, the Cantillon-Quesnay tableau was the first method ever devised in order to convey an explicit conception of the nature of economic equilibrium… Now Cantillon and Quesnay had this conception of the general interdependence of all sectors and all elements of the economic process in which—so Dupont actually put it—nothing stands alone and all things hang together. And their distinctive merit—shared, to some extent, by Boisguillebert—was that, without realizing the possibilities of the method later on adumbrated by Isnard, they made that conception explicit in a way of their own, namely, by the tableau method: while the idea of representing the pure logic of the economic process by a system of simultaneous equations was quite outside their range of vision, they represented it by a picture. In a sense, this method was primitive and lacking in rigor—which is, in fact, why it fell out of the running and why analysis historically developed on the other line. But in one respect it was superior to the logically more satisfactory method; it visualized the (stationary) economic process as a circuit flow that in each period returns upon itself. This is not only a method of conveying the fact that the economic process is logically self-contained, a distinct thing that is complete in itself, but it is also a method of conveying features of it—definite sequences in particular—that do not stand out equally well in a system of simultaneous equations.”

Indeed, on Schumpeter’s account, class consciousness finds its privileged tool in the tableau method.

The opening up of a whole new textual space might have come about – I’d speculate furiously - from two separate lines of descent. The first line, as one might expect, is double entry book-keeping. The second line is more complex, and slithers through the visual arts. Kosseleck, in the first chapter of Future’s Past, uses a historical painting by Albrecht Altdorfer, Alexanderschlacht, as an iconic correlate to his thesis concerning the construction of historical time in different epochs. Altdorfer’s 1528 painting depicts the Battle of Issus – in which Alexander defeated the Persians. As is well known in philosophy, the battle is a model event – the stoics used it as such, the Bhagavad-gita uses it as such, novelists (Stendhal, Tolstoy) depict the confusing there-ness and non-there-ness of the battle, Deleuze remarks upon it in Logique du Sens – and Altdorfer is no different.

“Careful examination of the painting enables us to reconstruct the entire course of the battle. For Altdorfer had in this image delineated a history, in the way that Historie at that time could mean both image and narrative (Geschichte). To be as accurate as possible, the artist, or rather the court historiographer
advising him, had consulted Curtius Rufus so as to ascertain the (supposedly) exact number of combatants, the dead and those taken prisoner. These figures can be found inscribed upon the banners of the relevant
armies, including the number of dead, who remain in the painting among the living, perhaps even bearing the banner under which they are about to fall, mortally wounded. Altdorfer made conscious use of anachronism so that he could faithfully represent the course of the completed battle.”

Altdorfer’s ability to “portray” the diachronic axis – not the battle at some one instant, but the battle as a continuous event across its entire temporal length – is due to the synthesis of a late medieval representational style – which would temporalize the pictorial space according to some rule that would, for instance, put foreground figures in an earlier ‘moment’ than background figures – and the rules of perspective. The tableau is, in a sense, the heir of this synthesis. Marx made the tableau method dialectical in the same way that the perspectivally supplied artist was able to unfold an event in terms of a panorama. I wonder if the tableau is not the tool hidden behind Hegel’s Phenomenology and the Logic. Rather than the panorama of a battle scene that enfolds the entire event in a fictitious there-ness, the tableau allowed the physiocrats to enfold the entire economy in a fictitious thereness that, as Schumpeter saw, bears a name – a name we could inscribe on a banner: equilibrium. That impossible moment of the event in the event.

the bourgeois economists and the equilibrium

The figure of the homo economicus is first used in economics as a model for building a truly mathematized ‘social physics’ in the 1890s, which is also the decade in which Freud laid the foundation of psychoanalysis. These may seem like coincident moments in the intellectual history of two disciplines, but I wonder…

The marginalist ‘advance’ towards an economics that imitated the models of physics – that is, the breakthrough to the kind of ‘social physics’dreamt of by Bagehot - divorced value from production in order to grasp what, from the marginalist point of view, was the outstanding feature of the modern economy – the price system. It is a well known story: in economics, it is the age in which the insights of the classical economists were finally systematized as a science by leaving aside the labour theory of value. The theory, not being able to provide a direct explanation of prices, was, according to Jevons, Walras and Menger, incoherent. In its place, the marginalists advanced the idea of demand as the great mover of the system. Demand, however, or tastes, a subjective quality, could be appropriated by the mathematician in terms of units of utility – which would no longer be tied to the old 18th century psychology of pleasure and pain, laid out discretely like Newton’s corpuscles. Instead, one would use Newtonian calculus, the mathematics of limits, to produce a description of demand as a curve tending towards indifference.

At the same time, Freud was producing an image of the consciousness led by the demands of the libido – in a code that did not possess an endogenous no.

Let me leave the coincidence there to fester a bit. What we also see, in this era – the era of the great depression for the workers, and the gilded age for the rich, from the 1880s-1890s – is a further advance in the remove from production – that is, the creation of ever more links populated by circulation agents – and, at the same time, the technological spread of the aesthetic domain through gramophones, photographs, and the beginning of moving pictures.

These are the circumstances into which homo economicus was formally born.

These are also the circumstances in which the idea of the equilibrium is seized as the entry point for understanding the economy, what Schumpeter called the “Magna Carta of economic theory as an autonomous science.” To find the conditions, or equations, of equilibrium is to find the ideal moment in which the economy reveals itself as a totality. In Schumpeter’s words, it is the moment in which the static and the dynamic dimensions of the economy interlock – which is to economics what the synchronic and diachronic are to Saussurian linguistics.

Equilibrium gets us over a fundamental antinomy in bourgeois economics: the antinomy between the individual, who is theoretically the foundation to which all social practices reduce, and the aggregate, which is what, in actuality, economics always studies. Though the economic agent’s tastes are subjective, the formal elements in which those tastes are expressed are objective – they have a systematic form. That form comes out using Walras’s method, which pares away blocking contingencies to get to the structure of the ideal equilibrium between those tastes and the supply of goods and services – an equilibrium that is continually displaced. As Pareto puts it in the Course on Political Economics: “The principle object of our study is economic equilibrium. We will soon see that this equilibrium results from the opposition which exists between the tastes of men and the obstacles to their satisfaction. Our study thus comprehends thee distinct parts: the study of tastes; the study of the obstacle; and the study of the way in which these two elements combine in order to arrive at an equilibrium.”

the enlightenment of strategy vs. the enlightenment of the Absolute

In 1822, Stendhal’s master, Destutt de Tracy, published Condorcet’s notes on the 29th book of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. Condorcet’s objections to Montesquieu voice the protest emitted by the revolutionaries at the end of the Enlightenment period against the first Enlightenment generation. Within intellectual history, the French revolution was mounted not simply against what the revolutionaries called ‘feudalism’, but also against the first Enlightenment generation, those who were celebrated, later, in Michelet’s history of the Regency. The revolutionary generation was already thinking in terms of the universalism for which the codex was The Phenomenology of the Spirit. The force of Condorcet’s objections are summed up in the comment on Chapter IV, The laws which shock the views of the legislator: “How is it that in The Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu never speaks of the justice or injustice of the laws that he cites, but only of the motives that he attributes to these laws? Whiy doesn’t he establish any principle for distinguishing, among the laws emitted by a legitimate power, those which are unjust and those which are in conformity to justice? Why, in the spirit of the laws, is there never any question of the nature of the right to property, of its consequences, its extension, its limits?” (281 – my translation)

What Condorcet is complaining about is what I would call the Enlightenment of strategy – for the relativism of the Enlightenment thinkers (Condorcet goes on to blast the conclusions Montesquieu draws from the history of a ‘few Greek villages”) is a strategist’s relativism. In one sense, one can draw a line (unexpectedly enough) from Montesquieu to Foucault, and gather the same type of criticism of the latter as the former – where are the absolutes? Where are the universals?

Where does this strategic thought come from? In Montesquieu’s case, one wants to say, obviously Machiavelli. But I have an idea that, more broadly, the analysis of law as strategy is connected to the Leibnizian idea of the best of all possible worlds.

The image in the Theodicee is striking. In a letter to Sophie Volland in which Diderot describes an evening he spent with Grimm and the Abbe Galiani (the repartee of which he describes in the letter – “dear friend, I think that our babbling besides the fireplace is something that always amuses you, and so I followed it”), the three began to speak of original sin and whether man merits the pain he suffers in the world.

“On these occasions, what is the party of good sense? This, my friend, which we took. Whatever the optimists say, if the world could not exist without sensible beings, nor the sensible beings without pain, it had only to remain at rest. It could have gone on an eternity without committing that stupidity.

The world, a stupidity? Oh, my friend, a beautiful stupidity nonetheless! It is, according to the inhabitants of Malabar, one of the seventy four comedies that the Eternal amuses itself with.

Leibniz, the founder of optimism, also as great as a poet as he was deep as a philosopher, recounts somewhere that there was in a temple in Memphis a high pyramid made of globes stacked one on the other; and that a preacher, questioned by a traveler about this pyramid and the globes, responded that this was all the worlds possible, and that the most perfect was at the summit. And that the traveler, curious to see up close the most perfect of worlds, mounted to the height of the pyramid, and that the first thing that struck his eyes, glued to the top globe, was Tarquin raping Lucretia.” (my translation, 271)

In the perfect world of the strategic Enlightenment, there was, cosmically, no Pareto optimum outcome. Perfection was entirely a principle of construction. The wedding of optimism and horror – repulsive to the romantics – was, for the Enlightenment strategists, the principle that Condorcet failed to see in Montesquieu – with the latter’s penchant for anthropological anecdotes.

on the image of revolution

In the introduction to the history of the Regent’s reign that forms the 14th volume of his History of France, Michelet writes:

“The regency is a whole century in eight years. It lead to three things at once: a revelation, a revolution, a creation.
I. It is the sudden revelation of a world arranged and masked for fifty years. The death of the King [Louis XIV] is a coup de théâtre. What was underneath becomes what is on top. The roofs are lifted up, and one sees everything. There never was a society so open to the light of day. A rare good fortune for the curious observer of human nature.
II. And it is not only the light that returns; it is movement. The regency is an economic and social revolution, the greatest that we had before 1789.
III. It seems to have aborted, and not less did it remain enormously fecund. The regency is the creation of a thousand things (the great roads, the circulation from province to province, free education, the bank account, etc.). The charming arts were born, all those which make for the easiness and agreement of private life. But, this was even more great, a new spirit began, against the barbarous spirit, the bigoted inquisition of the preceeding reign, a large spirit, soft and humane.”

The trope of the ‘roofs being lifted up’ is used in another, individualistic sense by Emerson in his essay, Experience:

“Every roof is agreeable to the eye, until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands, and deluges of lethe, and the men ask, `What's the news?' as if the old were so bad. How many individuals can we count in society? how many actions? how many opinions? So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours.”

There is something sensational – revolutionary, apocalyptic – that is crystallized in the image of the roof being lifted off the house. It is a disaster, a blind strike by nature that crushes all human intentionality - and yet it has the exhilarating scope of an escape, of the dissolution of the congealed, dead labor of intention that bears down on the living like a nightmare. Louis XIV’s masked world of bigotry and Emerson’s reference to the world of narrowed experience that results from the routine irresistibly enforced by respectability and endless labor, under the system of moneymaking – both are eminently roofed worlds. The mask complements the roof to the extent that both disguise the naked human, face or body. Both conceal secrets. But the roof, unlike the mask, thrusts us back to the forest floor from whence we came, the treetop canopies that sheltered our monkeyness, and in this it seems the most useful of things. The mask is made to be removable – the roof, not.

When both are removed, we see the misery of the world. The deluges of lethe, the slow, grinding torture of the court.

Still, for all the exhilaration when the roof is lifted off, when man becomes earthquake to man, we realize that we can’t live in that moment. We must have roofs. The revolution cannot be permanent. The problem for the revolutionary imagination is that if the revolution finds a stop – if an equilibrium is established around which a new order assembles – if the roofs are generally nailed on again – we necessarily re-establish the conditions that lead, at the very least, to deluge of lethe, to the class system of claustrophobia.

But something changes.

In Michelet’s preface, the change that is brought about by the temporary rooflessness is that France, for the first time, consciously joins the global system. Michelet, like many French historians, conflates France and Europe, ignoring, for instance, the Spanish and Portugese experience. Yet he does point to a social fact – the new sense of the global order that we see in the first wave of the enlightenment. This social fact is, as well, a new sense of the domestic order. The economic experiments of the Regency also penetrate the household of the peasant, Michelet claims.

In a wonderful passage about the ruin of Law’s system, he writes:

“In this misfortune, yet note one thing: the old bankruptcies, the violent reduction of Mazarin or Colbert or Desmarets’ rents was without any consolation, a dead and sterile series of facts. But Law’s catastrophe was of a wholly other type of import. It had the singular effects of a sudden illumination. France knew itself.
Massew who had been immobile and ignorant up to this point, like the bottom of the Ocean, having never known tempests, the class that was not moved by either the Fronde or the Revocation, lifted up their heads this time, inquiring about the public treasure – and thus of the state and the kingdom, of war, of peace, of neighboring kingdoms, of Europe.
The distant enterprises of Law, his colonializations, the razzias that were made for the Mississippi, obliged the coldest among them to dream of the other hemisphere, of unknown lands, as one said, of the isles. In the cafes which opened by the thousands, the talk was only of the Two Indies. The seventeenth century saw Versaille. The eighteenth saw the Earth.”

Michelet is writing after Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto, and he might even have known that paen to the world economy.

This is, of course, the other side of the melancholy of the clerks. Do not think that the ichor in the veins of homo economicus is absolutely cursed – he, too, is a dialectical figure.

Marx and the two removes

Last year, I did a rather hasty reading of the chapter on circulation work in Capital, Chapter six. In thinking about homo economicus, I’ve returned to chapters five through seven and thought more seriously about Marx’s analysis – his counter-magic - here. For Marx, in writing these chapters, is taking aim at an idea that took root in Mill and has now blossomed, abundantly, in every apology for the insane incomes of CEOs that one finds strewn across the pages of the mainstream economists today. Marx, in one of those dense/light passages in which he specialized (in which the heavy machinery of his concepts seems, at the same time, to be making the moves like Fred Astaire showboating), wrote, in Chapter 5:

The circulation time [Umlaufszeit – orbital time] of Capital thus puts limits overall on its production time, and thus its valorization process. And actually it puts these limits on the latter in relation to its own duration. [-R:that is, the duration of circulation time] This can vary a lot, either increasing or decreasing, and thus limit in very different degrees the production time of capital. But what the political economy sees is that which appears, namely the effect of the circulation time on the valorization process of capital in general. It grasps this negative affect as positive, because its consequences are positive. It insists even more on this semblence as it seems to deliver the proof that capital possess a independent mystical source of self-valorization apart from the exploitation of labor, that flows to it out of the circulation process. We will later see how even the scientific economists can be deluded by this semblence. It is, as will be shown, strengthened through various phenomena: a. the capitalistic mode of calculating profits, wherein the negative ground figures as positive, since for capitals in different spheres of investment, where the circulation time only functions differently, as longer circulation times serve as the ground of the elevation of prices, in short, as one of the grounds for the equalization of profits; 2. the circulation time constitutes only one moment in the circulation time, as the lateer includes the production time or reproduction time. What is due to the latter, seems due to the circulation time. 3. The conversion of commodities into variable capital (workers wages) is conditioned through its previous metamorphosis into money. By capital accumulation the conversion into additional variable capital occurs in the circulation sphere, or during the circulation time. The accumulation thus resulting seems to be owing to the latter.”

My translation, I should say.

As always, in Marx, the moment of demystification is the moment in which the images in the camera obscura of ideology are reversed – this is Marx’s deep connection to Michelet’s witch, who reverses the sacred verses in order to find the material truth about society.

Marx’s distinction between the two spheres starts an analytic process by which a new definition of value, or a new way of seeing value, is slyly introduced. In Chapter 6, as we will see, there is a fleeting reference to the difference between value for – or from the perspective of – society and value for the capitalist. The circulation worker, as Marx will make clear, is formally exploited like the production worker – her time is exploited – but not in terms of the surplus value she produces. She produces an instrumental value in terms of the sphere of circulation, but – as circulation produces no value – she cannot produce surplus value.

I will go more into that in another post. But let me hastily draw some large conclusions. I think we can find, here, the basis for a model of modernization that moves forward in “two removes” – the remove from nature and the remove from production. When Peter Drucker, in the sixties, began to popularize the idea that capitalist economy had entered a new phase with the domination of the ‘knowledge worker’, there was a core of truth in his idea, even if it was the realization of conditions that had long been the case: in modernization, the sphere of production is not only the sphere in which value is produced, but it is also marked down for shrinkage – like agriculture – as it becomes occluded by the sphere of circulation. The importance of clerk literature – Gogol’s discovery of the banal – comes about as the sociological and existential consequence of the fact that the supposed duality between culture and nature is really a threefold matter, which the circulation worker feels in his or her bones – not only does ‘culture’ block nature, but so does production. The sense that the movement of paper – or bytes – is removed from value sinks, of course, to the bottom of the collective consciousness – it is a much repressed truth – and yet it continually returns. It is in these sociological and existential conditions that homo economicus is introjected into the developed economies, and, in as much as they represent the iron and inalterable path in which all parts of the world market are moving, the destiny for the populations of all developed countries, who are not only on the treadmill of production, but that of circulation as well.

the interstices

In a letter to a friend that serves as the preface to Francois Laye’s French translation of Book of Disquiet, Pessoa writes that “life bothers me almost noiselessly, in little sips, by the interstices.”

Pessoa’s heteronym, Bernardo Soares, whose reflexions constitute the Book of Disquiet, is, like Pessoa, a clerk and a poet. I’ve already broached the juxtaposition of commerce and poetry in my previous post. The literature of the clerk is created in the interstices of the system of world trade. The Daoist element in modernism consists in looking, with a poet’s consciousness, upon the clerk’s routine.

‘I know very well that the day when I am named the chief accountant of the firm Vasques and Company will be one of the great days of my existence. I know it with a bitter and ironic anticipation, but also with that intellectual advantage of a certitude.”

In contrast to this note of the deepest resignation – the resignation of Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith, whose life is consciously devoted to an all embracing lack of faith – there is the note entitled Absurd Axioms, which begins:

To become the sphinx, even the fake sphinx, to the point of no longer knowing who we are. For, in fact, we are nothing other than the fake sphinx, and we really are ignorant of who we are. The only way to find ourselves in accord with life is to be in disaccord with ourselves. Absurdity is the divine.

To found theories by a patient and honest reflection for the sole purpose of combating them afterwards - to act and justify our actions by theories which condemn them – to trace a path in our lives for acting, consequently, in the inverse direction of the path. To effectuate all the acts, to assume all the attitudes of something that we are not, that we do not claim to be, and that we, further, don’t wish others to imagine that we are.”

This is the credo of the circulation worker on the brink of the alienation that defines his place in the system. I am indifferent to whether the circulation worker is working in the post office for the government or the marketing department for a software manufacturer. These axioms are taken from one form of the real, which was discovered by Gogol (in the sense that Columbus discovered America – Gogol simply bumped into the already-there) as the eternal banal.

Literary reflexions that I want to put in relation with another genre of discourse – that of economic rationality.

I have misused the notion of the exchange matrix as proposed by Robert Clower in a famous 1967 paper about the efficiency of money as a mediator of exchange. There is an excellent discussion of this in Philip Mirowski’s The Reconstruction of economic theory. Clower’s images still adhere to the grand principle of neo-classical economics, which is that it is prices all the way down – the seismograph takes over the earthquake machine, and we assume equilibrium where there is none because otherwise, we don’t have a theory. The assumption of neo-classical economics cleans the ‘price’ of its dialectical character – not accidentally. Instead, all are given ‘endowments’ exogenously, and enter into the system – there is no room here for Pessoa’s realization that his life is caught in the interstices.

Still, the form of the exchange matrix is excellent. I view it as a kind of spread sheet – indeed, it is a spread sheet. It is one we all carry with us. The values by which we calculate change according to the frame we are operating in. And here, borrowing from Bataille, I would say that the economist’s view of rationality is really ‘limited’ rationality – the rationality that applies to a certain common form of the spread sheet, which applies to one level of social practices, in which the capitalist element is strongest. However, limited rationality does not define all rationality. The mistake economists make when, in dismay, they confront the discoveries of behavior psychologists - that, for instance, preferences aren’t transitive or invariant, and that rational choice makes a highly select use of real individual behavior – is to think they are witnessing ‘irrationality’. What they are witnessing is the rationality that comes with changing the options of the spread sheet – for instance, the preference tool. This is possible because the spead sheet consists of affordances. Rationality is defined in terms of the options that are checked – and in this sense, that is, in the sense that there are an indeterminate number of matrixes of exchange, we are dealing with ‘general rationality.’

I prefer not to

I was talking with A. last night about what I call clerk literature – or wastepaper basket literature. I hope she likes this post.

There is a lineage that goes from Lichtenberg’s Scribble book through Lamb, Baudelaire’s Fusées, Rozanov, Pessoa, and – supremely – Kafka, whose request to Brod to burn his papers was, as it were, a request from this history itself, over and above Kafka’s personality. The principle holding this literature together was enunciated by Bartleby – I prefer not to. This is, in the universe of the clerk, equivalent to Lucifer’s non serviam – it ties together the two elements of the scribble and the institution. If we can speak of an institutional consciousness, it is always a consciousness of the system. Jack Goody, in The Domestication of the Savage Mind, notices the importance of the list in all early writing that has been found in the Mesopotamia. Goody divides lists into three types: the list that is a catalogue of names, events and offices, which he calls a ‘retrospective’ list, and which can be thought of as a representation of work-flow; the ‘shopping’ list, or the list that includes expectations and items for future projects; and the lexical list – the proto-dictionary, the list that lists the elements of listing – sounds, letters, numbers. A very important list, according to Goody, in Mesopotamia. All three of these lists are dealt with and syncretized in the clerk’s office – viewing the clerk very broadly as one of the central types of ‘circulation’ worker, as Marx named them. The accountant’s task, for instance, is – for all of its spreadsheet cleverness – directly related to the functions invented in the Mesopotamian bureaucracies.

The clerk’s literature is a form of Western Dao – Bartleby’s phrase operates in this invisible tradition much as certain phrases from the Chuang Tzu operate to bind together the concept of the Dao. “Therefore a man who has wisdom enough to fill one office effectively, good conduct enough to impress one community, virtue enough to please one ruler, or talent enough to be called into service in one state, has the same kind of self-pride as these little creatures [the cicada and the quail who mock the giant flights of monster birds, etc.] Sung Jung-tzu would certainly burst out laughing at such a man. The whole world could praise Sung Jung-tzu and it wouldn’t make him exert himself; the whole would could condemn him and it wouldn’t make him mope.”

Sung Jung-tzu’s laughter, to be sure, is different from Bartleby’s inexpressiveness. But in the line of texts that extend from Lichtenberg to Kafka (and into the pit of which, I think, literature in the age of its de-institutionalization is being inexorably lead), there is a laughter that comes out when, for instance, Kafka read his stories out to his friends. Or in a letter to Felice, when Kafka told his fiancé that he was famous in his office for his laughter [Ich bin sogar als grosser Lacher bekannt] and gave the example of his inability to stop laughing when, one day, the president of the Insurance company made a speech bemoaning the accidents of workers and the trouble this causes for insurance companies. In fact, Kafka coulndn’t help laughing, nor could he even look away and disguise his face when the President made his speech.

Therefore (the phang ascended to) the height of 90,000 lî, and there was such a mass of wind beneath it; thenceforth the accumulation of wind was sufficient. As it seemed to bear the blue sky on its back, and there was nothing to obstruct or arrest its course, it could pursue its way to the South.
A cicada and a little dove laughed at it, saying, 'We make an effort and fly towards an elm or sapanwood tree; and sometimes before we reach it, we can do no more but drop to the ground. Of what use is it for this (creature) to rise 90,000 lî, and make for the South?'

Perspectivism, rational choice theory, and Blake

Lately, LI has been thinking about how to put together two theses in the Homo Economicus book. One thesis is that there is a multiplicity of matrixes of exchange even within modernity – and that the seeming hegemony of the money matrix, to the extent that it even defines the economic as opposed to the non-economic, is a phenomena that has certainly penetrated other matrixes – such as the complex gift and barter relationships of family, friendship and alliance – without fundamentally ‘commoditizing’ them. In one sense, my whole thesis is that there is a dialectic structure that governs the degree to which the hegemony of money, as reflected in the character of homo economicus, can actually dispense with other matrixes, since its survival is threatened by its monopoly of all spaces of exchange.

The other thesis is that rationality, as the economists define it, is linked to a realism that denies perspectives as anything other than representatives of ‘parts of reality’. Myself, I am a perspectivist of the ‘hard; variety – that is, I see no reason to put up with the idea that the parts of reality make up one reality. Reality, here, becomes a substitute for the God’s eye perspective – that point at which we can see the whole universe. Perspectivism denies that perspective can be constructed. It does not deny, it should be said, that certain processes might be shared among perspectives – say, a process for correlating statement and fact. Or even a process for ordering preferences. It simply denies that this formal characteristic has any substance. In other words, rationality within a perspective refers to the norms of the perspective, not to processes that transcend perspectives. Hard perspectivism contends that there is information in a given perspective – something that can be defined by simple axioms – that does not exist in other perspectives. In the clash of perspectives – which is the dynamic by which perspectives are made – this information can be completely lost – the way a passenger pigeon saw an oak tree no longer exists, for instance. I would not go so far as to say that different matrixes of exchange form completely different perspectives, but something similar might well hold – that is, that there is information in a barter exchange that can’t be transformed or translated into the money exchange. Etc.

In other words, I want to build a theory about economics based on this phrase of Blake’s:
How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?


Now, onto some reading notes.

“A body of data and theory has been developing within psychology which should be of
interest to economists. Taken at face value the data are simply inconsistent with preference
theory and have broad implications about research priorities within economics. The
inconsistency is deeper than the mere lack of transitivity or even stochastic transitivity. It
suggests that no optimization principles of any sort lie behind even the simplest of human
choices and that the uniformities in human choice behavior which lie behind market
behavior may result from principles which are of a completely different sort from those
generally accepted. This paper reports the results of a series of experiments designed to
discredit the psychologists' works as applied to economics.” – Grether, Plott

So begins a rather puzzling paper on the phenomenon of ‘preference reversal’, “Economic Theory of Choice and the Preference Reversal Phenomenon” (1979). It is puzzling because, as has been pointed out by Daniel Hausman, the two economists who introduce, in sweeping terms, an examination of a series of experiments that seemingly contradict the central tenant of the neo-classical theory of choice end the paper by retreating almost totally from their introduction:

“The fact that preference theory and related theories of optimization are subject to exception
does not mean that they should be discarded. No alternative theory currently available appears to be capable of covering the same extremely broad range of phenomena. In a sense the exception is an important discovery, as it stands as an answer to those who would charge that preference theory is
circular and/or without empirical content. It also stands as a challenge to theorists who
may attempt to modify the theory to account for this exception without simultaneously
making the theory vacuous.”

As Hausman puts it, “It is almost as if they conclude, “Since these awful data cannot be discredited, economists should ignore them, although not without first congratulating themselves for possessing such a splendidly non-vacuous theory.” (207)

Plott and Grether’s paper concerns an experiment in betting.

“Individuals under suitable laboratory conditions are asked if they prefer lottery A to lottery B as shown in Figure 1. In lottery A a random dart is thrown
to the interior of the circle. If it hits the line, the subject is paid $0 and if it hits anywhere
else, the subject is paid $4. Notice that there is a very high probability of winning so this
lottery is called the P bet, standing for probability bet. If lottery B is chosen, a random
dart is thrown to the interior of the circle and the subject receives either $16 or $0 depending upon where the dart hits. Lottery B is called the $ bet since there is a very high maximum reward. After indicating a preference between the two lotteries, subjects are asked to place a monetary value on each of the lotteries.”

Now, according to standard theory, if Lottery A is preferred to Lottery B, then Lottery A should receive a higher monetary value than Lottery B. That is, revealed preference should be coordinate with true preference.

What happened was quite different. The majority of respondents preferred the lottery with the lower risk and lower payoff, but put a higher price on the lottery with the higher risk and the higher payoff.

Lott and Grether’s paper builds on an early paper by two psychologists, Lichtenstein and Slovic (1971), who have continued to work on the psychology of preference to build, with Tversky and Kahnmann, prospect theory. Lott and Grether varied elements from the earlier experiment – for instance, the set of subjects was selected from the economics rather than the psychology department – but the results were consistent with the kind of preference ‘reversal’ revealed by the psychologists.

“Needless to say the results we obtained were not those expected when we initiated this
study. Our design controlled for all the economic-theoretic explanations of the phenomenon
which we could find. The preference reversal phenomenon which is inconsistent with the traditional statement of preference theory remains. It is rather curious that this inconsistency between the theory and certain human choices should be discovered at a time when the theory is being successfully extended to explain choices of nonhumans.”

Since these papers were published, a lot of experimental work has been done on the way people form preferences, and most of it is incongruous with the way that economists say that people form preferences. It is found that people’s preferences can vary widely over time; that the independence condition – seemingly irrelevant circumstances that are added to binary choices – can change the choices; that the order of preferences can be intransitive, so that we can’t even predict, from a choice, what the optimal preference is – and so on.

The decline of confidence in the foundational axioms of rational choice theory and its descendents has led to the current interest in behavioral economics and prospect theory. I’d like to put this work in relation to a fascinating paper by Avrin Offer on the survival of the Gift Economy in modernity: “Between the Gift and the Market: The Economy of Regard”.

TBC

the liberal myth of the economy as a board game

“Only through the forgetting of this primitive metaphor-world, only through the hardening and rigidifying of the primitive capacities of human fantasy that flowed out originally in a hot stream of images, only through the unbeatable belief, this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in brief only through the fact that man forgets himself as a subject and really as an artfully creative subject, does he live with some rest, certainty and consequence. If he for one moment could escape out of the prison walls of this belief, immediately his self consciousness would be over and done with. Already it costs him some effort to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives a whole other world than humans, and that the question, which of both world perceptions is more correct is a completely senseless one, since here we have to measure with the standard of the correct perception, that is, a standard that is not at hand.”

(Nur durch das Vergessen jener primitiven Metapherwelt, nur durch das Hart- und Starr-Werden einer ursprünglichen in hitziger Flüssigkeit aus dem Urvermögen menschlicher Phantasie hervorströmenden Bildermasse, nur durch den unbesiegbaren Glauben, diese Sonne, dieses Fenster, dieser Tisch sei eine Wahrheit an sich, kurz nur dadurch, dass der Mensch sich als Subjekt und zwar als künstlerisch schaffendes Subjekt vergisst, lebt er mit einiger Ruhe, Sicherheit und Consequenz; wenn er einen Augenblick nur aus den Gefängnisswänden dieses Glaubens heraus könnte, so wäre es sofort mit seinem "Selbstbewusstsein" vorbei. Schon dies kostet ihm Mühe, sich einzugestehen, wie das Insekt oder der Vogel eine ganz andere Welt percipiren als der Mensch, und dass die Frage, welche von beiden Weltperceptionen richtiger ist, eine ganz sinnlose ist, da hierzu bereits mit dem Maassstabe der richtigen Perception d. h. mit einem nicht vorhandenen Maassstabe gemessen werden müsste. – Nietzsche.)

The metaphor-world of economics is never more entangled in its antinomies – like a crippled spider in its own web – than when it comes up against the odd question of the distribution of wealth. The neo-classic mainstream exists, in fact, in a world that it only recognizes as an irritant on the way to the utopian moment when the market absorbs all its children in a heavenly rapture – but if it were entirely blind to the fact that the state, that enemy of the good honest corporation and firm, plays a major role in economics, it would face the danger of being merely comic. The liberal solution to the endless differing of market heaven is that the state exists to create a “level playing field”. Mark Thoma, who runs the excellent blog, Economist’s View, just published an article on income inequality that contains a canonical version of this notion:

“I’ve never favored redistributive policies, except to correct distortions in the distribution of income resulting from market failure, political power, bequests and other impediments to fair competition and equal opportunity. I’ve always believed that the best approach is to level the playing field so that everyone has an equal chance. If we can do that – an ideal we are far from presently – then we should accept the outcome as fair. Furthermore, under this approach, people are rewarded according to their contributions, and economic growth is likely to be highest.
But increasingly I am of the view that even if we could level the domestic playing field, it still won’t solve our wage stagnation and inequality problems. Redistribution of income appears to be the only answer.”

I wrote a little response to this paragraph on Mark’s site.

“I've never understood the popularity of this belief in America. It seems a contradiction in terms. How can you "level" the playing field, and at the same time allow any unequal outcome? These are in direct contradiction with one another. Any 'playing field' in which one of the players gains a significant advantage will be vulnerable to that player using some part of his power or wealth to 'unlevel' the playing field to his advantage. There is no rule of any type, there is no power that will prevent this. The problem is thinking of the playing field as a sort of board game. You play monopoly and you accept the outcome as 'fair'. The problem of course is that in life, unlike monopoly, you don't fold up the board after the game is over and begin it all again - in other words, the economy isn't a series of discrete games that are iterated at zero.
Thus, the whole "equality of opportunity" ideology has never made sense. If it succeeds, it will dissolve itself as those who succeed most make sure that we do not go back to zero, and that our idolized 'competition' is limited to those in the lower ranks - for among the wealthiest or the most powerful, the competition is, precisely, to stifle and obstruct competition in as much as it injures wealth or power.
To not understand the latter fact is to understand nothing about the incentive for acquiring wealth or power. It is as if economists truly believe that billionaires are searching for the next billion to spend it on candy, instead of seeing them as political players building a very traditional structure of status that will allow them the greatest possible scope for exercizing power, including helping their allies and family and injuring their enemies.”

I am not satisfied that I have spelled out the structural dilemma here. In trying to build an economy with a non-interfering state that only guarantees that the ‘playing field’ is levied, you are building, in reality, a massively interfering state. There is no point at which equality of opportunity will, as it wear, work by itself. This is because the economy does not exist as a chain of discrete states – rather, what happens in time t influences what happens in time t1. The board game metaphor, however, exerts an uncanny influence over thought here. From Rousseau to Rawls, the idea of an original position has, unconsciously, created the idea that society is like a board game. That is, it has beginnings and ends; a whole and continuous game came be played on it; that game will reward people according to their contributions. And so on. Here, classical liberalism still has a grasp on the liberalism that broke with it to develop the social welfare state. Both liberalisms, for instance, can accept that the price of an apple is not ‘earned’ by the apple, but both bridle at thinking the price of a man – his compensation – is not ‘earned’ by the man. It must have some deeper moral implication.
As we have discovered, the liberal hope, in the sixties, that the social welfare system would so arrange the board game of society that equal opportunity is extended to all, and so dissolve – was based on the false premise that the players all recognize a sort of rule in which they would not use their success in making moves to change the rules of the game. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the incentive in this ‘board game’ – success consists precisely in changing the rules in your favor. It does not consist in getting rewarded for one’s contribution to the aggregate welfare of the players of the game. The billionaire is of a different kind than the saint. And each, to use Spinoza’s phrase, must continue in their being in order to be at all.
The anti-liberalism of the last thirty or forty years is rooted in this liberal blindspot. On the one hand, the liberal allows his rhetoric to be taken hostage by a pro-forma anti-statism – surely we don’t want the corrupt state to reward the lazy and unscrupulous! Thus, social welfare is presented with a wholly utilitarian justification – it exists solely to help the industrious and the respectable. So the liberal concedes that the protector state is a second best arrangement – and slides easily into bemoaning middle class ‘entitlements’, as if surely the middle class should stand on its own. On the other hand, the state engineered by the liberals does keep growing – it keeps growing because the middle class desperately needs it to maintain their life styles, and it keeps growing because the wealthy use it as a reliable annex to acquire various monopoly powers and as a cheap insurance plan.

What the liberal seemingly can’t acknowledge is that a democratic republic, can only afford the ‘board game’ of private enterprise if the state uses its powers not simply to redistribute or to produce, but to limit – that is, to hedge in and countervail the vested influence of the wealthiest. Thus, the democratic state taxes not only to provide income to the state, or to redistribute money to the less ‘worthy’ – it also does so to materially weaken the wealthiest. Otherwise, the wealthiest will rather quickly take over the state and make a mockery of democracy.
Taxation is the guillotine by other means. Joseph de Maistre once wrote that the compact between god and the state is sealed by the blood shed by the hangman. Wrong about god, de Maistre was certainly right that all social contracts are sealed in blood. No democracy can survive if it forgets this fact.

personal myth and character

I have written before about the concept of the personal myth – the use of a ‘well-knit’ self generated autobiography as a screen developed against inconsistencies, neuroses, traumas, or the everyday thorns and pricks – that was developed in a paper by Ernst Kris in the fifties. This is what I said about it in an earlier post:
myths
Ernst Kris was a Viennese art collector, historian, and psychoanalyst who taught Freud to the great Ernst Gombrich. When he died in 1957, he left behind a large reputation. Even in the seventies, when his papers came out, a review came out in the New Republic. One of his papers, from 1956, left a phrase that has been lifted, since, by many - especially Jungian analysts: the personal myth.

“Kris found that certain patients when routinely probed about their pasts were able to respond with detailed, fluent, and highly consistent autobiographies embracing all their past history. Now this is somewhat unusual because most people do not usually have ready access to a well worked out autobiography in which themes of different lifetime periods are highly consistent with one another and smoothly extend across the lifespan. During the process of analysis, Kris determined that these personal myth autobiographies were in fact being employed as part of the process of repression to keep from consciousness other traumatic autobiographical knowledge. For example, in one of his cases he eventually discovered that the myth, which included the patient leaving home when 16 years old, was in fact incorrect and the patient had actually left home when 18 years of age. The missing two years, it later transpired, referred to a period in which a sequence of events had repeated (repressed traumatic events from earlier in childhood and the myth, by editing out the memories of the repeated events, was able to maintain the repression.

Kris proposed that personal myths constitute a central part of the self but that in the nonpathological individual the myths are constantly changed and updated. (Collins, Theories of Memory, 113)

Of course, in the late eighties, this whole matter of repressed memories of trauma led to mythmaking in the moral panic mode. LI has no patience for that. Leaving aside the dubious claims of the repressed memories crowd, Kris’ notion does seem intuitively right: there are individuals who have the story of themselves down, and there are those who seem oddly unprepared for their own history, as if consisted of information that they hadn’t studied. As a writer, I hugely prefer the former type of person, and have always found the latter puzzling. Of course, as a quasi-pathological type of individual myself, I am ever ready to believe my own lies – but the interesting twist in Collins summary of Kris is that the non-pathological constant changing and updating of myth leads to – well, to those puzzling, inconsistent myths with which we are greeted whenever we look seriously into Greek or Indian or Egyptian or any kind of rich mythological data base. Or, for that matter, even into something as simple as the facts in Jesus’ case, which are shuffled differently in the different gospels.

A recent book by Sophia Heller, The Absence of Myth” takes a self consciously ‘deconstructive’ approach to personal myth:

“Personal myth represents a particular response to the collective loss of myth and religious meaning. Though it may profess otherwise, the personal myth approach does not and cannot seek to remedy this absence because it utterly depends on it. Its philosophy basically says that what the collective has lost, the individual can and should reclaim. And how one reclaims myth and meaning is through knowing and telling one’s personal story. However, what separates a personal myth from a mere autobiography, biography or memoirs is the underlying belief or hope that if a personal story is contextualized within myth, it carries an archetypal and numinous significance and, as such, is elevated and geared to replace the metaphysical void created by the departure and death of the gods.” – Sophie Heller, The Absence of Myth

For Heller, myth is myth – she is unwilling to countenance the metaphorical transfer of myth to a world view that depends on truth claims. “What makes a myth a myth is, in part, the fact that it is absolutely true because it is real.”

…
If we provisionally take it that Heller is right, and that personal myth is a sign of the breakdown of myth, then we have a different angle from which to look at what Engels called the uprooting of a population from ‘apathy’.”
Now that I am thinking about the myth of the homo economicus, I am wondering whether these notions of myth apply – whether, in the same way that the personal myth papers over a repressed memory, the myth of the homo economicus is a way of creating a tight-knit structure that conceals an ancient act of repression.

Kris’ 50s paper was simply one in a series going back to Kris’ days in Vienna as a psychoanalyst and art historian. In particular, the idea that a personal myth takes the place of – substitutes for – memory seems forshadowed in a paper Kris wrote about biography, that was published in Imago in 1935. In this paper, Kris sought a way of penetrating into the idealized picture of a life produced by a biographer by using ‘philology’ – that is, by having a statistical sense of the way certain formula are used by biographers in different biographies. These biographical formulas emerge again and again – and one is tempted to say that they are borrowed, or that there is a sort of fund of formulas to which the biographer returns to fill out his picture of the subject, for “In fact the criticism of sources has long proved that such typical reports – I will call them simply the formulas of the biographer – in ancient times were also put in places when the biographer was not aware of anything about the life of the hero, and couldn’t know anything”:

“Out of this supposition I can effortlessly derive the principle of the investigative method that I am suggesting to you. It deals with the interpretation of biographical formulas without reference to their truth content, although even in this perspective the formulas are instructive; they strive after greater proximity to life and always have the effect of ‘credibility’; one can speak of their ‘plausibility’. As our introductory finding, however, what is solely important for us is the question of their consistent application by the biography.” (1935)

Of course, I am moving, here, from personal to public myth, and from autobiography to biography. This step may seem trivial or neutral, but in fact it is conditioned by a phenomenon Freud writes about in an 1898 paper, On Screen Memories – Ueber Deckerinnerungen – which I’m going to write about next.